Walter Benjamin wrote of memory and history as a “secret rendezvous between past generations and our own.”1 The secret is not something known but not told; rather, it is a reflection of its newness to us, as lived experience. Our history and memory are “secrets” kept from us. Many of the “new” practices we describe in these pages in fact have long histories, especially in Latin America. This does not mean that they copied Latin American movements, only that their needs and desires are similar. We see the new global movements since 2010 as a second wave of anti-representational movements, following the first wave of Latin American movements of the 1990s and early 2000s.
We can see this “secret rendezvous” in many of the concepts and terms the movements use to describe themselves. These include: territory, assembly, rupture, popular power, horizontalism, autogestión (“self-administration”), and protagonism. Examples of each term may be drawn from various Latin American communities of struggle, from the spreading of horizontalidad with the popular rebellion in Argentina, and the concept of “territory” having currency in Bolivia and Mexico, to the construction of “popular power” in the Consejos Comunales in Venezuela, and the vision of interconnected human diversity articulated in the call for “one world in which many worlds fit” by the indigenous Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico.
This linguistic rediscovery is a part of the process of the people finding their own voices in the new usages of direct democracy. As people recuperate the voices they did not have under representational forms of democracy, they also rediscover themselves. The movements recognize this new agency and protagonism, and name it. This claim to voice and language is part of the claim to real democracy. Today’s movements are finding or creating places where the new meets the old, offering spaces of encuentro—encounter and meeting—where new and emerging social relationships mix creatively with many hundreds, if not thousands, of years of collective experimentation with the various forms of relating, rebellion, and struggle.
Imagine this scene. Families sitting at home before their television sets, on an evening that began the way so many others had: what to watch, what to make for dinner, the regular nightly questions. Then a TV newscaster appears on every channel and announces that, from that moment on, all bank accounts are frozen. The economic crisis has fully arrived. People sit in silence, staring at the TV. They wait. Suddenly, outside the window: tac!—tac tac!—tac tac tac! Families run to their windows and balconies. The sound comes from people banging spoons and spatulas on pans—the sound of the cacerolazo.2 The sound becomes a wave, and the wave begins to flood the streets.
The government does not know what to do. It declares a state of emergency in the morning, falling back on what has always been done: law and order. But the people break with the past, no longer staying at home in fear but filling the streets with even more bodies and sounds. The tac tac tac turns into a song—one of both rejection and affirmation. ¡Que se vayan todos! (“They all must go!”). It is a rupture with obedience, with not being together, with not knowing one another. It is a rupture that cracks open history, whereupon vast new histories are created.
A rupture is a break that can come from many places, always shifting both the ways people organize, including power relationships, and the ways people see things. Sometimes the detonator is external, like an earthquake or economic collapse, which can inspire thousands, even hundreds of thousands, to come together and help one another—especially when formal institutions of power also collapse. At other times, the rupture is facilitated by movements, such as the Zapatistas or Occupy. Whichever is the case, people look to one another and begin to try and find solutions together, often doing so in ways that are more effective and definitely more empowering—affective—than if the rupture had come from an external source.
In the movements that we describe, which arose in 2010 and 2011, rupture came upon us seemingly as a surprise, though in many places around the world there was some organization in advance. This included the New York City General Assembly organizing throughout the summer in response to the Adbusters call, and ¡Democracia real ya! in Spain meeting and gathering others for the first assemblies, before the occupation of Puerta del Sol—yet not imagining that there would be such a lasting and massive occupation. Many movement participants around the world in 2012 used the same language to describe what took place with the Plaza and Park occupations—the same word, even, translated everywhere as “rupture.” From ruptura in Spanish (literally “rupture”) to kefaya (“enough”) in Arabic.
A bonfire is burning at the intersection of Corrientes and Federico Lacroze in the city of Buenos Aires. More than one hundred people of all ages are gathered around it, some still in work clothes, others in housecoats, T-shirts, and flip-flops. The noise of the city hums in the background, but around the bonfire it is quiet.
An older woman is discussing how to organize the upcoming weeks’ free medical service, which will be offered by a doctor from another neighborhood assembly. Where will the medical services take place, and how will they get the necessary supplies? The health of the neighborhood children is at stake.
People take turns speaking. Some talk over others, and the facilitator is often ignored. Yet all manage to speak and to be heard. This is the quiet insurgent noise of horizontalidad. Eventually the group reaches a consensus and the quiet is overtaken with song—the same song sung on the first days of the popular rebellion. Oh, que se vayan todos, que no quede ni uno solo (they all must go, not one should remain). This is horizontalidad in Argentina.
Participating in any of the assemblies taking place throughout the world generally involves standing or sitting in a circle, with a handful of facilitators, and speaking and listening in turn, observing general guidelines and principles of unity, and then discussing whatever issue has been raised until a consensus is reached. If one were to ask a participant about this process, they would most likely explain the need to listen to one another, feeling that in society they are excluded from meaningful participation, and perhaps they might use the language of direct or participatory democracy. In these conversations, some version of the horizontal often will arise, whether as the description or desired goal.
Horizontalidad, horizontality, and horizontalism are words that encapsulate the ideas upon which many of the social relationships in the new global movements are grounded. The idea that they express is based on affective and trust-based politics. It is a dynamic social relationship that represents a break with the logic of representation and vertical ways of organizing. This does not mean that structures do not emerge, as they do with mass assemblies and autonomous governance, but the structures that emerge are non-representational and non-hierarchical. (Spokescouncils, the Zapatista form of self-governance, and the communes in Venezuela are three examples of this.) But because social relationships are still deeply marked by capitalism and hierarchy—especially in terms of how people relate to one another over economic resources, gender, race, and access to information—horizontalidad has to be understood as an open-ended social process, a positive act of seeking, rather than a final end. It would be an illusion to think that a “happy island of horizontalism” could be created in the middle of the sea of capitalism.
The word horizontalidad was first heard in December 2001, in the days after the popular rebellion in Argentina. No one recalls where it came from or who might have used it first. It was a new word, and emerged from a new practice of people coming together and solving their problems without anyone being in charge or asserting power over one another. Significantly, the experience of horizontalidad has remained prevalent among the middle classes organized into neighborhood assemblies, the unemployed organizing in neighborhoods, and workers taking over their workplaces. Horizontalidad, with its rejection of hierarchy and political parties, became the norm. In 2012, the assumption that people often began with in organizing is that any new movement or struggle will be horizontal. This can be seen today in the hundreds of assemblies up and down the Andes fighting against international mining companies, and the thousands of bachilleratos—alternative high school diploma programs organized by former assembly participants, housed in recuperated workplaces.
But this process is not without challenges, as new movements aspiring to horizontal forms of organization have begun to discover. In Spain, Greece, the UK, and the United States, participants have noted that simply naming the practice is not enough to conjure the behavior; treating it as an identity—“I am horizontal” or “We are horizontal”—obfuscates the fact that horizontalidad is only made real in practice, and that any competition that develops between groups over who is more horizontal necessarily reproduces a hierarchical structure. But this is part of the learning process—we make the road by walking.
Sala de Batalla Alicia Benítez is the community center of the Eje de MACA commune under construction in the Greater Caracas area. The neighborhood is Petare, which is one of Latin America’s largest poor neighborhoods, and thirty communities organized in communal councils have united to create a commune; all decide from below, in their local assemblies, what to do in their neighborhoods. The barrios—the informal and marginalized neighborhoods—make up about 70 percent of Caracas. Infrastructure in the barrios is precarious; they lack basic services, there is little to no public space, and most of the dwellings are built into the hillside and connected to one another through unevenly built narrow staircases and walkways.
A government employee has arrived, offering to build a place to store and sell food at far below market price by eliminating intermediaries and speculation.
“Look,” says Petare resident Pablo, “one thing has to be clear, we decided in the community that we will administer this place.”3
Yusmeli also chimes in. “We also have to be able to sell other food, for example by connecting directly with producers.”4
The government official agrees. He will bring maps to discuss the construction with the community. The commune already has two enterprises of social communal property: a passenger transport system with six four-wheel-drive jeeps, and a center for the distribution of liquid gas for cooking. Most of the communal councils have small community enterprises such as bakeries, cobblers, and even small agricultural production. To set up the communal enterprises, first all the communal councils held assemblies and discussed what they needed most. Then they held workshops with a facilitator from the Ministry of Communes and discussed the project in detail, including the organizational and decision-making structure for the enterprises. The result was approved by the neighborhood assemblies of the communal councils.
Popular power is the capacity of the marginalized and oppressed to organize and coordinate structures to govern their own lives, parallel to capitalist or state-run institutions and services such as schools, hospitals, and decision-making bodies, but in ways that do not reflect the logic of capital. Unlike historical revolutionary socialist movements, these groups—first in Latin American and then beyond—see these autonomous structures, not as transitional phenomena on the way to the “takeover” of the state and the consolidation of the revolutionary party. Understood as both a path and a goal, popular power is the central element in building a new society in the shadow of the old structures.
The forms that popular power can take differ radically. Anything that enables the people to administer aspects of their lives on their own, and gives them the power to make their own decisions and improve their own autonomous processes for constructing new social relations, can be seen as part of popular power. It can be expressed through the creation of a community soup kitchen, the recuperation of a workplace, or the formation of a network of community-controlled radio stations. It can also been seen in new forms of local self-administration—a local assembly of people debating their own needs, or an assembly discussing public initiatives and taking a collective position on them.
In Venezuela, the Communal Councils are the most advanced mechanism of local self-organization and popular power. They are non-representative bodies with direct democratic participation, parallel to the elected representative institutions. In 2005, the Communal Councils began forming from below. In January 2006, President Chávez adopted the initiative and began to help it spread. A law of Communal Councils followed in April 2006. The Communal Councils encompass between 150 and 400 families in urban areas, twenty families in rural zones, and ten families in indigenous regions. In 2013 there were approximately 44,000 Communal Councils in Venezuela.
Given the exceptional situation in Venezuela, with a government partly engaged in supporting forms of popular power, popular organizations have a different and stronger relationship with the state than in most other countries. A central question is whether structures of popular power can maintain their own spaces for debate, decision, and construction, or whether they will become co-opted by the state and lose their own agency and agenda. This is an ongoing tension in the process of construction of a new society in Venezuela. The government and its institutions are simultaneously both supportive and an obstacle. And the relationship between institutions and self-organization is characterized by cooperation and conflict. Institutions tend to consolidate and expand their power; by institutional logic, the development and growth of parallel powers and structures is seen as a threat to their existence. In Venezuela this contradiction is especially sharp, with large segments of the institutions of power supporting the autonomous development of the movements, while other large sectors resist this development, even creating obstacles and trying to control them.
In today’s movements, the construction of popular power takes many forms. As of May 2012, there were forty-five neighborhood assemblies in Athens, each focusing on the needs of its local population (for instance, barter networks and direct exchanges with agricultural producers and consumers), as well as on broader issues such as refusal to pay a new housing tax charged together with the electricity bills. This refusal has become more coordinated citywide, partly through the weekly “assembly of assemblies,” in which all the neighborhoods participate, and as a result a number of municipalities have now declared a “hold” on the increase of this tax. This collective organization within and between neighborhoods—establishing what people need directly rather than asking for an external authority to take action—is a demonstration of popular power.
In 2007, in an autonomously controlled community, a Junta de Buen Gobierno (Good Government Junta) facilitated the first ever Zapatista Women’s Encuentro. The indigenous rebel women explained, among other things, the following:
We are going to speak, we women Zapatistas, with compañeras from Mexico and the world, and you will be able to ask questions about how we organize ourselves, the women Zapatistas, more directly with women. We are going to ask that the compañeros [men Zapatistas] help us with logistical questions. Compañeros from Mexico and the world may also come to hear us, but remain silent, the same as our compañeros.
This Third Encuentro, as it will be especially of the women Zapatistas, will be dedicated to Comandanta Ramona, and will take her name. Thus its name is this: Third Encuentro of the Zapatista Peoples with the Peoples of the World: Comandanta Ramona and the Women Zapatistas.5
And that is what it was—a gathering of women from around the world, with hundreds of women Zapatistas presenting and discussing what they had been creating together for fourteen years. The space was open and free, a true gathering and meeting of women from around the globe, talking about what had been impossible but was now possible.
An integral part of creating direct democracy and horizontalidad is the moments of gathering, of intentional coming together in such a way that all can speak and be heard, and so that decisions can be made. For autonomous movements in Latin America and the globalization movement, an assembly is a place where participants seek common ground. Consensus is sometimes the goal, but not always; the most fundamental thing is that agreement is sought in a directly democratic manner, meaning that attempts are made for all voices to be heard, using various tools for speaking, as well as active listening, to be as open and inclusive as possible.
This is often achieved through the use of facilitators who have been trained in whatever democratic form the group has chosen, though sometimes it is more of a collective effort, with the group taking responsibility for facilitation and participation. At other times, a group has a prior agreement for forms of participation, such as the establishment of a speaking order that alternates between male- and female-identified people speaking during assemblies. Occupy Wall Street used a modified speakers’ list (“stack”), in which the list of speakers changed so that those people more “historically marginalized” got moved up higher on the speakers’ list; in many other groups, a person can only speak once until all those who wish to speak have also spoken.
But even seeking consensus is a flexible process of decision-making that is modified in each location to reflect the needs of the people, sometimes referring to a synthesis of ideas based on all opinions shared during the gathering, and at other times arrived at through voting, as was the case in many of the neighborhood assemblies in Argentina.
Another term that originated in Latin America and in Spanish, and is now used around the world is encuentro. Though it also signals a coming together, generally with horizontal relational forms, it is unlike an assembly in being unconcerned with reaching a decision or consensus; the gathering, the process, is the end. The use of encuentro became more widespread following the Zapatistas’ First Intergalactic Encuentro for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, in 1996. During this encuentro, thousands of people met in liberated Zapatista territory to share their experiences and learn what the Zapatistas were doing, as well as to strengthen international solidarity with the autonomous communities.
The Zapatista concept of un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos (“one world in which many worlds fit”) has also been brought into the meaning of encuentro, so that, rather than being thought of as a place to make a single unifying program, a gathering is instead a place where all can come together in their diversity.
In some Latin American countries—especially Venezuela, but also Colombia, Bolivia, Argentina, Guatemala, and Peru—the term encuentro de saberes (“knowledge encounter”) is widely used for gatherings to exchange experience and knowledge without creating a hierarchy from the different forms of knowledge. For example, in an encuentro de saberes ancestrales indígenas y campesinos de agroecología (“ancestral indigenous and peasants’ knowledge encounter on organic farming”), indigenous people and peasants, as well as agronomists and ecologists, might take part and share their knowledge. In an encuentro de saberes pedagógicos (“pedagogical knowledge encounter”), teachers, academics, and employees of institutions in the field of education might discuss and share their knowledge with parents, students, and activists engaged in popular education.
Located on Avenue Callao, at the corner of Corrientes, in the center of Buenos Aires, the Hotel Bauen could not be more centrally located. It is a five-minute walk to the Congressional building, across from which is the school and bookstore for the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. Corrientes is one of the main avenues in Buenos Aires, known for all its shops and restaurants, and this section of Corrientes is also home to many bookstores, theaters, and art centers. It is a perfect central place for an occupation, and even better for a recuperation.
When the workers of Hotel Bauen took the plywood off the lobby window and entered the hotel, their intention was to have the entire hotel up and running within the year. Formerly a four-star hotel, the Hotel Bauen has more than 200 rooms, two swimming pools, a massive bronze-filled lobby that includes a grand piano, a full theater, two restaurants, two cafés, two bars, a small print shop, and countless offices and other facilities. The owners had laid off the remaining workers and shut the doors to the hotel in late December 2001 after months of staff downsizing, and almost immediately a few of the unemployed workers had met with workers from some of the other recuperated workplaces and the network of the National Movement for Recuperated Workplaces (MNER). Together they made the decision to take over their workplace and run it in common. They began meeting more regularly, and gathered a few dozen of the previous workers to join in the process. In March 2003 they took back their workplace, together with hundreds of supporters from other workplaces, recuperated and not, as well as neighborhood assemblies and the community at large. There are now more than 150 workers running the Hotel Bauen.
The night of the takeover was one filled with tension and fear, but at the same time incredibly joyful. People were ready to fight and resist, but they were simultaneously giddy. Many dozens of workers and neighbors stood and sat around, many chain-smoking, waiting to see if the scouts had any news of police movement. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Hours passed. At one point, a man sat at the piano and played a song. It was an unforgettable moment, the sort of event that can create chills even now, thinking back on it. Years later, on another trip to Argentina and the Hotel Bauen, there in the hotel music room we found the very same man who had played the piano for all of us in the occupied lobby. He had changed a little physically; his hair whiter—the result, he jokes, of “all the struggle in fighting for the hotel.” But his energy and passion were the same. That night, as we all sat waiting in the lobby, with no electricity except for the few lanterns people had brought with them, Guillermo sat at the piano and began to play a tune, which at that point was little-known. It was a song he had written—a song that is now known throughout the country:
We are the present and the future
To resist and occupy,
The factory will not be closed
We are going to raise it together
The factory will not be closed
We are going to raise it together.
To resist and resist and occupy
To resist and resist and produce.
The “new” global movements are known for occupying public space, but the idea is not just to take it over, but to make it useful.
In the 1980s, the Brazilian MST movement inaugurated the slogan “Occupy, Resist, Produce”; over the past decade, it has become the battle cry for movements recuperating workplaces across Latin America. Argentina now boasts more than 300 worker-recuperated workplaces (empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores), including traditional factories such as metal, ceramics, and print shops, alongside other workplaces such as grocery stores, medical clinics, daily newspapers, schools, bakeries, and hotels. The process of workplace recuperations in Argentina arose from economic necessity and a total lack of response from bosses, management, owners, and the state. Workers simply took the situation into their own hands.
Worker recuperations have been occurring throughout Latin America, with dozens in Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela, and a few in Colombia and Mexico. The organizational structure they adopt varies, from processes of worker control using directly democratic assemblies to ones that resemble more traditional cooperatives with less direct participation in day-to-day decisions. During recent years it could be seen how the practice of workplace recuperations made its unexpected appearance in other countries. In 2011, Chicago saw the recuperation of Republic Windows and Doors, which reopened as New Era Windows under workers’ control in early 2013. In the same year the factory for industrial cleaning products, Vio.Me, in the Greek city of Thessaloniki, began production as a recuperated factory under workers’ control. Only one year earlier, a number of our Greek interview subjects told us they could not imagine workplace recuperations taking place in Greece. Since then, further recuperations have happened or are under discussion among workers in Spain and Italy.
“Recuperation” has also been used in a broader sense, in relation to workplaces or geographic spaces. In Mexico and Venezuela, for example, movements speak of the recuperation of memory, history, knowledge, and dignity. Before the march of 1,111 unarmed Zapatistas to Mexico City in 1997, Subcomandante Marcos declared on behalf of the Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation: “We are going to recuperate national history for the ones from below. Today it is hijacked by the ones governing, to be killed and buried under the economic indices. We will shout out: Never again a Mexico without us!”6
But rather than being a nostalgic return to an idealized past, the recuperation of memory and history is a collective process meant to enrich the present and build a common future. In many places in Latin America, especially poor urban areas, the recuperation of the history of one’s own neighborhood has often been the starting point in the construction of community and collective consciousness.
I think the best lesson we, and especially the young people, have learned from the Water War in Cochabamba is that it is possible to change things without having to follow anyone, without depending on the political parties, without needing political parties to mediate. For eight days, every sign and even symbol of the state disappeared in Cochabamba. The army was barracked and the police asked the people for permission to leave the police station. There was no political party, there was not any leader telling anyone what to do. Nobody was telling people what they should do or had to do. That is where people really began to feel that they were the real protagonist in this collective action, one based on a collective horizon, but also built together, in common … and that we were doing everything among equals.7
The idea of protagonism, as it has been used by movements over the past two decades, is strongly related to social agency, and therefore to direct democracy and participation. In Venezuela, protagonism became more prominent over the course of the 1990s, when movements stopped asking political parties and institutions to solve the problems they faced and began struggling for direct participation and control in their neighborhoods.
People in the movements and neighborhood organizations speak regularly about the difference in their participation now, feeling that they were previously not involved in, or allowed access to, the processes and politics that affect their lives. They now call themselves protagonists because they fought and won their political agency; but this also means that people have to organize in order to make things happen. People’s self-identification as protagonists—especially those without any previous organizing experience—became widespread during the first years of the Chávez government, through government social programs called Missions, in which self-organization of the population was a central element. One example was the literacy campaign Yo Sí Puedo, organized with support from Cubans, who helped train volunteer facilitators. The literacy process took place in communities where people who desired basic literacy education organized to make it happen. Within the first two years, 1.5 million people achieved literacy. Overcoming marginalization through their own protagonism led people to organize themselves around other questions concerning their own lives and communities. Meanwhile, through the active participation of grassroots organizations, a new constitution was drafted in 1999 in which Venezuela was defined as a “participatory and protagonistic democracy,” to be distinguished from its liberal and representative form.
In Argentina, the terms “protagonism” and “social protagonism” took root after the popular rebellion of 2001. They refer to the newfound agency people felt in acting together to reject long-established patterns of representational politics. Cándido, a worker from a recuperated print shop in Buenos Aires, once explained in a conversation that he is not “political,” but rather a “protagonist.” Many in the autonomous movements in Argentina do not call themselves activists, but rather “protagonists.” It is an understanding based on the experience of various relationships, rather than an overarching theory. Through this collective protagonism also arises the need for new ways of speaking of the nosotros (“we/us”) and nuestro (“our”), as they relate to the yo (“I”). As each individual changes, that change has an effect on the group, thus changing the group, and as the group changes, this change is then reflected on the individuals, creating new ways of thinking about the individual self and collective selves.
When workers in the recuperated workplace movements in Argentina and Venezuela refer to the workplaces as “theirs,” they do not invoke the notion of private property, but a broader collective sense of ownership. The workers of Zanón in Argentina—now Factory Without a Boss (Fábrica Sin Patrón, or FaSinPat)—say, Zanón Es del Pueblo (“Zanon is of the people”), meaning that it is the community mobilized that makes Zanón exist, and that it exists for the people.
We can have really difficult discussions and disagree, but we all stay part of the organization. We try to love each other. It’s difficult. Imagine being in a neighborhood like La Matanza, which is full of really tough men, men who have lived, and still live, a violent, macho life, and we’re talking about new loving relationships. No, it isn’t easy, not even to talk about, let alone practice. This is part of our changing culture, and as we change, we notice how much we really need to.8
The current global movements are not only attempting to create the most horizontal and directly democratic spaces, but are also creating new subjectivities. A part of the grounding for these changing relationships is a base of trust and a growing feeling of care and mutual responsibility, with the goal of building a movement and society based in a relationship of mutual trust and concern for the other and for the collective.9
In Argentina, the movements began speaking of política afectiva (“affective politics”) as a way of discussing these new forms of relationships, which they saw as necessary to building a new society. This was not without challenges. Organizing a movement based in love met with some resistance from the many people who do not take the concept of love seriously in a movement, particularly in a macho society. Nevertheless, many participants saw affective politics as one of the most important foundations of what was being created in their movement, and this was especially true in the movements of the unemployed, where participants live in the same neighborhoods, know one another’s histories and families, and generally share similar life challenges, from a lack of basic resources to police repression.
This does not mean one needs to be friends with all of the people in the movement, or that politics is only engaged in with people for whom one has affection. However, in the recuperated workplaces or the unemployed movements in Argentina, it is certainly the case that those workplaces where people have the longest history of working together, and then reflect on their close relationships to one another, are also the ones that have seen the most militant resistance to the police, and to eviction attempts. Participants often reflect on how their basis of trust and affect is what helps to keep them going in difficult times of organizing and struggle.
Affect and emotion are too often relegated to the politics of gender and identity, and thus not seen as “serious” theory or as a potentially revolutionary part of politics. This argument denies the fact that responsibility for the other and solidarity are basic conditions of a future society not grounded in capitalist principles. In fact, relegating affective politics to the feminine realm simply reinforces gendered roles in patriarchal societies. Affective politics is not an expression of “maternal responsibility,” but asocial responsibility to build a new society based on cooperation and mutual aid rather than competition.
At the same time, we cannot write about affect-based politics without acknowledging the political role of anger, rage, and even hatred. It is not only the love or affect for one another and for society that drives organizing, but also an anger and hatred for those who make a free society impossible, and who create the conditions of total desperation and crisis for many millions around the world. So, while affect is our creative base, it is also tied to a rage against those who work to prevent our freedom.
San Luís Acatlan is one of ten municipalities formed by sixty-five communities that comprise the region controlled by the Policía Comunitaria (Community Police). It is also located in Guerrero, one of the poorest, most violent, and most repressive states in Mexico. Most of the communities are indigenous—Mixtec, Tlapanec, and Nahua—but there are also seven Mestizo communities that have joined together with the Community Police. Beginning in the early 1990s in response to government and police indifference to widespread assault and armed robbery, community members began organizing and coordinating for their own safety, and have policed themselves ever since.
For this reason, communities supporting the Community Police have been under constant attack by state authorities. The army has moved in several times to disarm the police, and community police officers have been arrested on false charges. Their goal was to put a halt to the communities’ self-organized police. But since the inception of the Community Police, the crime rate has decreased 95 percent in the region controlled by the community, which includes approximately 100,000 people. And this was achieved by just 600 women and men serving as police officers, armed only with small rifles and without any sophisticated technology, or even patrol cars. All police are accountable to the community—officers are elected by them directly, and are only able to serve for a limited time.
After the people began running their own police force, they then found the need to create their own justice system. They founded one based on re-socialization, and not on retribution and vengeance. In the case of minor offenses, if someone breaks the law they are judged by people in their region who have been elected in local assemblies. If it is a more serious offense, then there is a regional body that judges the accused person.
Those found guilty are imprisoned in a jail at night; during the day they work on community projects. After a few weeks, the imprisoned person is moved to another community. Each community writes reports about the person, which are then used by the assemblies to decide whether he or she should be released early. Up until now, most of the people from outside the region who have been apprehended by the Community Police have chosen to be judged by the community justice system, rather then handed over to state authorities. It is also quite common, after these individuals have served their time, for them to ask to remain in the communities and be assigned land in order to become local peasants.
Autogestión literally means “self-administration,” but more broadly refers to collective democratic self-management, especially within local communities, workplaces, cultural projects, and many other entities. Autogestión is usually mentioned in the context of workers running their workplaces—for example, the cooperatives and recuperated workplaces of Argentina and the surrounding region of South America. Some of these are simply self-administered workplaces, organized in whatever way makes the most sense, and without any organized resistance to the capitalist market; others seek to foster horizontal processes and subvert the boundaries of capitalist value-exchange, in order to create less alienated workplaces, and to barter and exchange with other workplaces based more on needs than on market dictates.
Guerrero can seem like a far-reaching example of autogestión, but similar autonomous institutions can be found in other parts of Mexico—for example, in the Zapatista communities in Chiapas and other indigenous communities in Oaxaca, Hidalgo, and Veracruz. In each case, to a differing extent, the community organizes itself in a variety of ways through the creation of autonomous collective institutions, ranging from food production and community radio to community governance. The Good Government Juntas in Chiapas are an example of this, as is the provision of medical care, education, and alternative adjudication and security processes.
The practice can be found throughout Central and South America. In the highlands of Colombia the Nasa communities have organized an “indigenous guard” through community-based assemblies, and the Regantes,10 in the areas around Cochabamba, Bolivia, have been organizing their own security forces and autonomous governance since the Water Wars of 2000. Perhaps one of the best-known cases is that of the Brazilian MST. With over 1 million participants, the MST takes over unused land, which they use collectively to cultivate crops, develop schools, and provide medical care. To support this process, they organize assemblies and administer alternative forms of adjudication and security that do not involve the police or other formal institutions of Brazil. Forms of local self-administration are also developing in Venezuela, with the emergence of Communal Councils and Communes.
Groups and collectives outside Latin America are practicing all kinds of self-administration, including social spaces in Europe, collectives and independent media projects and groups, and all sorts of alternative education practices, from Free Schools to alternative high school diploma projects (as in Argentina). The Occupy movements, as well as the movements in Turkey, Spain, Greece, and Egypt, have all used autogestión as a way of coordinating within the plazas. Within these spaces (as with all kinds of spaces), internal conflicts do arise, and the methods of dealing with them are imperfect, but the attempts do reflect a growing seriousness with which people are taking autogestión, one that begins to envision a more complete autonomy along with self-administration projects.
The state exists. It’s there, and it won’t leave even if you ignore it. It will come to look for you however much you wish that it didn’t exist. I believe that the assemblies and movements are beginning to notice that something important is being forgotten … We began to think of a strategy for constructing an alternative autonomous power, forgetting the state, but now we see it isn’t so simple.11
The language of autonomy is used in the Occupy movements, as well as by many of the movements in Latin America, from the recuperated workplaces and unemployed movements in Argentina to the Zapatista communities in Mexico, and many of the grassroots organizations in Venezuela. It refers to the capacity to make decisions about one’s own life without having to subordinate these decisions to external forces, the only real limit being a recognition of the autonomy of others. In this way, it reflects the politics of self-organization, autogestión, and direct participation—hence, these movements use the term “autonomy” to distinguish themselves from others movements, groups, or organizations subordinated to external interests, including the state, political parties, and other groups and institutions.
The idea of autonomy can be found animating many struggles in history. Following the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the autonomous movements in central and northern Europe in the 1980s, it was from the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Mexico that these ideas regained widespread currency. The Zapatistas invoked autonomy in an indigenous context—not as a concept of territorial separation, but as the right to decide and exercise their own forms of social, political, and economic organization. The Zapatistas set up their own form of self-government, which has evolved over time into the constitution of “autonomous municipalities.” They have set up their own primary schools, health system, and regional planning system for agricultural production, as well as a network of community-controlled radio stations that broadcast in the indigenous languages Chol, Tojolabal, Tzeltal, and Tzotzil. The new structures are based on the culture, experiences and collective decisions of the Zapatista communities. It is not a question of reviving folkloric habits, but of creating something new based on one’s own reality, needs, and wishes. In the Zapatista schools, for example, the classes are bilingual, so the children learn Spanish, but they also learn in their own language, and the learning materials are also based on the reality the people live and not state-imposed textbooks that refer to a different history, lifestyle, and culture.
But autonomy is not autarchy—a total independence from everything and everybody else. Rather, it simply means that decisions are not subordinated to other forces. This entails an increasingly complicated relationship to the state. The problem is that the capitalist state is based on territorial hegemony and homogenization. It sometimes allows parallel structures, but usually only if they do not challenge its absolute authority. As soon as autonomous self-organization threatens state power (implicitly or overtly), it becomes the object of repression, violence, and destruction.
Local autonomy in Venezuela is not being built in isolation from the state, or as a “counterweight” to it, but through a complicated network of self-administration. But even there, where the leftist government officially supports the movements and their self-organization, the movements constantly struggle against subordination to the state and its institutions. This struggle, like all such struggles for autonomy, is still to be determined.
Yes, Marcos is gay. Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristóbal, a Jew in Germany, a gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10 p.m., a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student—and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains.
Marcos is all the exploited, marginalized, oppressed minorities resisting and saying, “Enough!” He is every minority who is now beginning to speak, and every majority that must shut up and listen. He is every untolerated group searching for a way to speak. Everything that makes power and the good consciences of those in power uncomfortable—this is Marcos.12
“Todos somos …” means “We all are …” and is meant to express solidarity between struggles and movements in various situations. In the United States, it has been widely used in the formulations: “We are all Trayvon Martin,” “We are all Troy Davis,” and “We are all Bradley Manning.” Seeking to organize around values of acceptance and recognition, this phrase conveys a linking together of struggles, rather than their hierarchization. We recognize one another and our diversities, but we also see ourselves in the other, and the other in ourselves. This does not imply that there are not power differentials, or that all people experience life in the same way (for example, with oppression or without access to resources), but that only by recognizing all of these diversities and differentials, and not giving power-based priority to one over another, are we able to create a foundation from which to organize together.
Many guerilla movements have employed the slogan “Todos somos …” —adding the name of a fallen comrade. In Latin American human rights movements such as the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, many refer to those who were murdered by the dictatorship in the “we” form—a sort of collective identification with “our” children who were killed, or a way of saying that those who were killed are also us: El otro soy yo (“I am the other”). “Todos somos …” was picked up by movements around the world after the Zapatista uprising that began on January 1, 1994. Support for the indigenous rebellion was so strong in Mexico and internationally that the Mexican government did not risk using military force to crush the insurgent communities after the short period of combat had ended. Instead, the government developed a massive propaganda campaign against the Zapatistas, and in particular against their most charismatic spokesperson, Subcomandante Marcos, publicizing his alleged previous identity and attacking him in an attempt to damage his image. When this campaign began, throughout Mexico and then the world, people took up the slogan “Todos Somos Marcos.” In 1995 the Mexican press joined the government’s campaign to discredit the Zapatistas, and Marcos in particular, and accused him of being gay. The statement above was Marcos’s response.
Since there are no institutions, not even a club, a church, or anything, the assembly meets on any corner, and even in the street. When this new form of politics emerges it establishes a new territory, or spatiality … In the beginning, the assembly consisted of people from all walks of life, ranging from the housewife who declared, “I am not political,” to the typical party hack. But there was a certain sensibility. I don’t know what to call it, something affective … It’s as if we live in flux, moving at a certain speed, like little balls bouncing all about, and then suddenly, the assembly is our focus. Our intention is to establish a momentary pause in time and space, and to say, “Let us think about how to avoid being dragged and bounced about, and simultaneously attempt to build something new ourselves.”13
The growing commodification of territories has raised the need to claim territories for the construction of spaces with alternative values and practices. This has generated different, sometimes contradictory uses of the terms “territory” and “space” in different movements. Nevertheless, the meanings are quite similar, and are being articulated more and more around the globe.
The Zapatistas have made the autonomy of indigenous territories in Chiapas one of the central points of their struggle, and they have declared the territory in which the Zapatista construction of a different and democratically self-administered society takes place a territorio zapatista—words we see written on large roadside signs when we enter the regions of Chiapas, where the Zapatista communities are based. Sometimes they relate to other “rebel territories” in their process of construction, and sometimes to the whole territory of Mexico (meaning the people within the boundaries of Mexico), regardless of the level of conflict or cooperation with the governments in power. Over the last two decades, the “demarcation of indigenous territory” has become a core question of indigenous struggles around the globe. In these territories, claimed by dispossessed indigenous groups, they have begun processes of self-administration under their own rules, based on their own cultures.
The relationship of movements to territory has also been important in urban areas for the construction of alternative social relationships, as well as for the interruption of capitalist business-as-usual. The unemployed workers’ movements in Argentina began as a protest, demanding an unemployment subsidy from the state, but the movement transformed into something different. In the absence of a workplace within which to base the struggle, the protest took the form of a piquete—a blockade. Bridges and major intersections were transformed into spaces of struggle, with the intention of shutting down major transportation arteries. Along with blockades, horizontal assemblies were created, opening conversations about what to do next, but also facilitating an entire infrastructure of food, healthcare, media, and child care. This space came to be referred to as free territorio. From these new territories on the piquete, the same practices were expanded into the neighborhoods, often taking over land and building homes, growing crops and raising animals together, and generating a wide range of projects in areas, from clothes production to healthcare. These projects were always organized with horizontal assemblies, creating a new community and a new territory.
Finally, in the context of movements, territory and space are about the construction of autonomous community. And “community” is not a given “place,” but a set of social relations that has to be built actively. Trust, affect, care, and responsibility for the other are the base of this set of social relations, and the community also strengthens these values.
Whatever the differences between the various understandings of “territory,” each of them is a reaction against the ever-increasing commodification of spaces and social relations under capitalism. In each of these cases, participants look to reclaim territory in a way that builds social relations that are not subjected to commodification.
Many stories ago, when the first gods—those who made the world— were still circling through the night, there were these two other gods—Ik’al and Votán.
The two were only one. When one was turning himself around, the other would show himself, and when the other one was turning himself around, the first one would show himself. They were opposites. One was light like a May morning at the river. The other was dark like night of cold and cave.
They were the same thing. They were one, these two, because one made the other. But they would not walk themselves, staying there always, these two gods who were one without moving.
“What should we do then?” the two of them asked.
“Life is sad enough as it is,” they lamented, the two who were one in staying without moving.
“Night never passes,” said Ik’al.
“Day never passes,” said Votán.
“Let’s walk,” said the one who was two.
“How?” asked the other.
“Where?” asked the one.
And they saw that they had moved a little, first to ask how, then to ask where. The one who was two became very happy when the one saw that they were moving themselves a little. Both of them wanted to move at the same time, but they couldn’t do it themselves.
“How should we do it then?”
And one would come around first and then the other and they would move just a little bit more and they realized that they could move if one went first, then the other. So they came to an agreement that—in order to move—one had to move first, then the other. So they started walking and now no one remembers who started walking first because at the time they were so happy just to be moving …
And they were going to start walking when their answer to choose the long road brought another question—“Where does this road take us?” They took a long time to think about the answer and the two who were one got the bright idea that only by walking the long road were they going to know where the road took them. If they remained where they were, they were never going to know where the long road leads.14
The concept of walking and questioning, or making the road as one walks, has been used throughout history. Most recently, it was popularized by the Zapatistas through the story above, the “Story of Questions,” which has now been passed along, read, and performed at countless global gatherings and encuentros everywhere. It captures the spirit of questioning as we walk, our need for one another, and that only through constant discussion and debate can we define the meaning of emancipation.
The global movements, particularly since 2011, organize from a very similar spirit of walking and questioning, not trying to force everybody to sign up to the same program, or the same master plan on how to make the program a reality. Hence Occupy’s insistence against demands. The practice is rather to open democratic spaces for the convergence of ideas and practices. As for the Zapatistas, and many of the movements in Latin America over the last two decades, there has been a real break in particular forms of organizing—forms that are hierarchical and have the answers and the “program” predetermined.15Instead, what movements are creating is a multiplicity of paths toward an ever-changing end.
Nevertheless, these are very concrete paths, such as taking over hundreds of workplaces and pushing the boundaries of capitalist value-production in places such as Argentina and Brazil. The projects are concrete and militant; it is only that the “goal” is a multiplicity, and one discovered as people struggle and create together. Another example of the end as a process can be found in Venezuela. People in the communities and movements there refer to what is taking place as a “process.” While there is a stated “goal” of creating “Socialism of the 21st century,” it is not an ideology predetermining a certain structure or form. It is a search, a “work in progress,” based on a set of values that include solidarity, mutuality, community, equality, self-administration, democracy, freedom, and so on. The motor behind what is developed and constructed is meant to be the neighborhoods, communities and workplaces; thus the meaning of this twenty-first-century socialism is an ever-changing one, and one that is itself also the walk. This does not mean that there are not different and conflicting visions of what should be done or how, or that there are not people who have more power to impose themselves than others do. But the idea is to have an open process of creation, and to understand that even deep structural changes such as revolution are not acts but processes.
No one is able to tell where the various directly democratic and participatory movements for change around the globe will go on their walk. That remains to be determined. But they have, without a doubt, created, and continue to create, huge and exciting social laboratories, spaces of participation and creation of the new. Caminando preguntamos …
1 Walter Benjamin, “Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen,” in Walter Benjamin, Zur Kritik der Gewalt und andere Aufsätze (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965), p. 88.
2 Cacerola literally means “kitchen pan,” and the cacerolazo is the collective banging of pots and pans. This tactic has now spread to the student struggle in Quebec, as well as to New York and other cities around the world.
3 Pablo Arteaga, Comuna de MACA, interview with Dario Azzellini, Caracas, Venezuela, August 8, 2011.
4 Yusmeli Patiño, interview with Dario Azzellini, Caracas, Venezuela, August 8, 2011.
5 “Convocatoria al 3° Encuentro, por la Compañera Everilda, candidata al CCRI,” Zezta Internazional, August 8, 2007, zeztainternazional.ezln.org.
6 Communiqué, August 8, 1997.
7 Oscar Olivera, from the Coordinadora del Agua, interview with Marina Sitrin, Cochabamaba, Bolivia, 2007.
8 Toty Flores, from the Unemployed Workers Movement La Matanza, interview with Marina Sitrin, outside Buenos Aires, Argentina, January 2004.
9 This is not to be confused with creating intentional communities “outside of society,” such as alternative communes, or with creating relationships that are not linked to the idea of acting together for the transformation of society.
10 Literally the “irrigators”—the agricultural producers depending on and taking care of irrigation systems. These were parts of the communities that organized autonomously as a result of the Water Wars.
11 Ezequiel, from the assembly Cid Campeador, interview with Marina Sitrin, Buenos Aires, Argentina, April 2003.
12 Quoted in Naomi Klein, “Farewell to the End of History: Organization and Vision in Anti-Corporate Movements,” Socialist Register 2002 (London: Merlin Press), pp. 1–14.
13 Martin K., from the Assembly of Colegiales, interview with Marina Sitrin, Buenos Aires, Argentina, May 2003.
14 There are countless versions of this story. The one included here is the one most widespread in English, due mainly to Subcomandante Marcos’s retelling it and having it translated, first on the internet and then in Domitilia Dominguez, Antonio Ramirez, and Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, Questions and Swords: Folktales of the Zapatista Revolution (El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press, 2001).
15 In this context, it is important to underline that democracy and horizontalism do not mean that every single space and situation is organized following these principles, but that the process of horizontal democracy opens the conversation about what forms are most appropriate. And in certain cases it has been found that it is not always possible to maintain horizontal decisions. For example, the EZLN is a military structure that is generally subordinated to the democratic decisions of the supporting Zapatista base communities. But, as a military structure, it also needs a chain of command, and cannot submit every step and action to an assembly. The same can be said about certain production processes that might decide horizontally that they need a chain of command.