EZLN: Critical Thought in the Face of the Capitalist Hydra

I found the provocations raised in this “seedbed” of papers to be generative and energizing. I appreciated EZLN’s calls for critical thought and genealogy that do not rely on Western frameworks of theory or history, which have been overdetermined, colonizing, and oppressive. Rather than write a summary of the text and concepts here, I want to note a couple themes or questions that could perhaps be useful for class discussion.

“Neither theory without practice nor practice without theory” (181)

Can the necessary entanglement of theory (or critical thought) and practice in EZLN’s work be understood as a framework for activist scholarship and decolonizing methodologies? How can we as graduate students think about the intersection of activism and scholarship? While the text is “accessible” – as in it refrains from academic jargon, uses metaphoric descriptions and stories, and is produced for an indigenous activist audience – it is intellectually rigorous. EZLN draws on both indigenous and canonical (Greek mythology, Marxist theory) knowledges to develop a critical approach to capitalism, one that is both theoretical and practical in its mode of collective action.

I was compelled by the metaphor of the capitalist Hydra as a system that reproduces itself in the face of resistance to dominate, appropriate, and oppress. I was thinking of Gramsci’s hegemony throughout the text, as well as Audre Lorde’s insight that “the master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house.” By chipping away at the wall and ensuring the cracks do not close, the Zapatistas are collectively working to create new ways of challenging capitalism that do not reproduce new heads of power. As they state, “Our resistance is our YES to something else possible” (188). The future or ends are not yet defined; can EZLN’s activism, then, be understood as a mode of (or akin to) feminist speculation?

In these papers, EZLN is grappling with the question of how to (or whether we even should) draw on theories and concepts that have themselves been the tools of violence and oppression (such as political economy, capital, or labor). What does it mean for EZLN to draw on Marxist thought, which largely disregarded structures of colonialism that served as the foundation for capitalism? Which reduced the social order to an oversimplified binary of dominant and subjugated? Which defined value and labor in sexist terms? I’d be interested to discuss further in seminar how we can critically and ethically engage with theory, and how we incorporate it in practice (or, what we do with theory). As an anthropologist, I’ve been trained to understand good ethnography as that which lets the theory emerge from the local contexts of research, rather than being applied from outside. I see a potential relationship here between EZLN’s mode of critical thought and ethnographic research.

Loas Otroas: Gender and Alterity

Does EZLN challenge the gender binary through their use of a blended masculine/ feminine suffix (-oas)? As the front notes state, they use this suffix “in order to give a range of gender possibilities including male, female, transgender, and others.” I found this choice interesting and potentially radically inclusive. However, the text often relied on rigid and naturalized distinctions between men’s and women’s experiences, particularly in the sections “Our Struggle as Zapatista Women” and stories about the girl Defensa Zapatista. One particular statement that stood out to me was that men “cannot be feminists because you’ll never be able to put yourselves in our [women’s] position” (111), meaning in part that they do not have female reproductive capabilities, though also how they are anchored to particular types of labor (as the Endnotes article discusses). I therefore couldn’t help but read the –oas as referring to the Zapatistas as a mixed group of men and women, rather than a more radical index of multiple gender possibilities. How did other people read this?

I also wondered if the figure of the cat-dog might serve as a metaphor of loas otroas as a blended or radically alter figure, one whose gender or being is untranslatable into Western, secular language. It might be worth reflecting on the radical and critical possibilities of language in academic writing, as well as the question of how indigenous concepts are culturally translated and made intelligible in academic work.