“To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” Walter Benjamin

“Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers. Historical materialists know what that means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror.” Walter Benjamin

On more than one occasion the Zapatistas have been compelled to speak about the war they prepared for and entered into beginning January 1, 1994. In each instance, they remind us that they are and have always been reluctant combatants. Indeed, they insist they engaged war to end wars; they became soldiers so that soldiers would no longer be necessary. “And then I remembered that day when the dead like us began this war to speak. Yes, to speak. Why else would the dead wage war?” So remembered Subcomandante Pedro, as told by Subcomandante Marcos. (This is from a letter by Marcos to Fernando Benitez where he writes in the first person voice of SCI Pedro, p 58.) Yes, to wage war, but not to engage war as is typical of nation-states or organized forces with the ambitions of empire. Rather, the Zapatista engagement with war bears the complications of another war. In the Zapatista case it is the 4th World War that is at least three wars: a persistent counterinsurgency, longstanding war against subsistence, and war of oblivion. Thus, war is not a discreet affair of clearly determined combatants, set battle pieces, territory in dispute, and the strategies and tactics of bristling formations facing one another. It is a complex, on-going, or permanent, war. It is increasingly less formal and more everyday, no longer exclusively executed by a state as Rita Segato warns. In every instance it is inextricably intertwined with slavery, colonial occupation, capitalism, and patriarchal excess —the on-going war organized as racial patriarchal capitalism. The Zapatista refusal to quit the field of battle, so to speak, exposes the complexities of war and its imbrication organizing a complex relation of forces in these contexts of power, difference, violence, dehumanization, criminalization, dispossessions, and exploitation at times organized as open (traditional and non-traditional) war and at other times masked, according to Foucault, as simply politics.

Against counterinsurgency and the pedagogy of impunity it facilitates, the Zapatistas have been engaged in what the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy has been calling a Zapatista civic pedagogy, a political and cultural praxis that embraces the challenges and opportunities of “learning a new way of doing politics,” but a politics that puts the stress on action informed by learning, research, and listening. It asks, if we don’t know how we know what we know, how can we be autonomous? A civic pedagogy places learning, research, and listening at the center of a prefigurative politics, a commitment to organize ourselves politically for shared decision-making through collective learning and collaborative research —a way out of the dense thicket of environmental catastrophe, capitalist violence, racial and gender hierarchy, and the almost total collapse of any pretense of Western Democracy. As an alternative to the civilizational catastrophe we face, those of us animated by Zapatismo, as well as those unaware of the Zapatistas but exercising similar commitments, have been (re)learning a variety of arts, or “vernacular competencies,” including the arts of assembly, commoning, and other tools of community regeneration. A Zapatista civic pedagogy explores the possibilities of (re)claiming a range of convivial tools, like assembly and tsikbal, that have been cultivated for over five hundred years, and, in some cases, appropriating them with greater clarity during what we have named as the Zapatista conjuncture. It opens space for the emergence of new convivial tools, co-generated in the eye of the storm, as they say.

A Zapatista civic pedagogy in a very playful sense can suggest that the Zapatistas have created a space for us to learn, research, and listen to enact together this “new way of doing politics.” They have contributed to that space of learning by activating all of the elements of a “pedagogy,” namely a space of learning, curriculum, key concepts, research agenda, assessment tools, and a facilitation strategy. Extending the metaphor, we can claim our participation in an ongoing encuentro (made possible through the string of encuentros, marchas, consultas as well as later the escuelita, seminarios, and conversatorios) as an extended, distributed, continuous space of learning hosted by the Zapatistas. In this context, the space of encounter articulated through this elaborate infrastructure of listening and dialogue is not to organize activist market share or a network barely held together by social media, but to extend a social infrastructure of community that is rooted in specific locations. These spaces of encounter proliferate in the many convergences that mark our movement. We also have the Zapatista word promulgated in the declarations, communiques, interviews, and encuentros as a situated, emergent curriculum. Even the workbooks of the escuelitas and the unique collective ethnographies generated from the communities themselves contribute to the archive. This includes the collective palabra shared at the encuentros over several decades, since 1994. The many statements and analyses shared over the years form the basis for a Zapatista curriculum for an autonomous praxis. Strategic concepts, e.g. dignity, 4th world war, and mandar obedeciendo, to name just a few, bring autonomous praxis into greater clarity for further research and should be included in the co-generated curricula. Assessment is distributed and constant, that is, it is the obligation of participants to be more vigilant about our success upholding the seven principles of mandar obedeciendo (see below). A collective facilitator, or collective subject as facilitator, has served an on-going open space of inquiry in the form of the Zapatistas themselves, that is, Marcos/Galeano and the other Sub-Comandantes, the Comité Clandestino Revolucionario Indígena-Comandancia General (CCRI-CG), as well as other notables who have devoted themselves to advancing Zapatismo in and beyond Chiapas. Thus, engaging a Zapatista civic pedagogy as a praxis and a space of learning, as a kind of interlocking set of convivial tools, we have been able to advance our own struggles with learning at the center. We have been animated by a collective inquiry, that is a convivial research and insurgent learning as part of a collaborative search for and mastery of convivial tools that make it possible for us to minimize the contamination and destructive force of racial patriarchal capitalism.

While our narration of Zapatista civic pedagogy according to a number of strategic coordinates is indeed playful—we pay homage here to Durito, with a sword in the air and a tortoise beneath us— in a more serious way, a Zapatista civic pedagogy invites a focus on how we cultivate Zapatismo in areas where it would seem the seeds of autonomy might not have purchase. In the barren, rocky, hard soil of the “Global North,” a Zapatista civic pedagogy experiments with a range of convivial tools, ones that can be shared, that is, learned across struggles. Most importantly, as is true of any learning space, especially a non-hierarchal one where there are no teachers only learners, we must share our local research across struggles. The point is that this politics is necessarily a politics driven by insurgent learning, convivial research, and engaged listening. Our emphasis on conviviality as an alternative framework does not seek to supersede the necessary analysis of commodity intensive society. However, our investment in conviviality seeks to draw attention to researches of autonomous alternatives, in particular the self-organized efforts of (re)building a social infrastructure of community that includes practices, knowledges, grassroots institutions, and convivial tools.

The Zapatistas have been disciplined and conscientious learners and that this posture reflects an epistemological break especially with older forms of organizing that were more about teaching, that is leading, directing, informing, disabusing, essentially a commitment to a hierarchical meritocracy saturated with Western, bourgeois values of modernity, especially the peculiar form of American modernity and its spread since the 19c Bolívar Echeverría documented. A commitment to learning, discovery, and listening represents a break from old paradigms to refuse, as Ana Esther Ceceña explains, any political paternities. It’s an active refusal or disavowal of vanguard, solidarity, or representative politics. However, while this refusal has been recognized what is less well known and celebrated have been the overlapping process and goals of our reclaiming of tools for horizontal political formation.

As previously noted, a politics of learning in relation to the Zapatistas and the emergence of Zapatismo is no more evident than in relation to the question of war. The Zapatista preparation for and execution of war was marked by learning. While it is important to note the Zapatistas mastered the preparation for war, we must not be stuck in a state centric, Westphalian conception of warfare. The more provocative pedagogical moment in the realm of war is not the war of mobilized infantry and set battle pieces, troops directed at securing strategic locations, or the submission of an opposing army. Rather, it is the other wars that Zapatistas have been engaging, the war against oblivion and wars against subsistence. Here, Zapatista civic pedagogy, the commitment to learn, has been directed at exposing the pedagogies of cruelty and impunity that mark the on-going, permanent, increasingly informal war that is racial patriarchal capital. What the Zapatistas have been helping us learn is how to enter a war that refuses to appear as war, a multifaceted overlapping set of violences not as easily recognizable as what we typically think of formal, domesticated war. Elsewhere we have argued that W.E.B Du Bois named this war and provided a conceptual tool, democratic despotism, to expose how the formal wars that have been organized in the name of Western Democracy simply mask the longstanding plunder of “the darker nations of the world.”

As has been consistently the case, Zapatista success in the mountains, jungles, and highlands of Chiapas poses considerable challenges for us in urban contexts. Here again, we are reminded of Raul Zibechi’s alert about the richness of those “zones of non-being” even as these spaces struggle against multiple violences directed at them. The question is how to engage autonomy not as an academic question with an arcane etymological interrogation and bibliographic essay of the idea of autonomy but to walk with it in struggle. Similarly, Zapatista autonomy does us no good if we approach it by narrating the Zapatistas as either heroes or villains. In either case, we are objectifying them in an overtly paternalistic or condescending way. If we want to read the Zapatistas politically, as Harry Cleaver suggests for reading Marx’s Capital more generally, we must ask what tools they make available to advance struggle. Engaging autonomy and the specific example of Zapatista autonomy politically, that is as an archive of struggle, requires we be explicit about what we mean by Zapatista autonomy and what we mean by it in relation to what it does by way of disentangling us from what Moishe Postone defines as a social mediating system and the relation that reproduced it, that is capital.

We can observe their efforts to disentangle themselves from this system. In the first instance they made the war that is the imposition of capitalist discipline explicit by exposing what Mark Neocleous insists are the twin processes of the social war of capital: criminalization and pacification. They also drew our attention to the relentless war against subsistence, an aspect of the war that has recently animated debates about primitive accumulation. Equally important is the war of oblivion and the Zapatista poetics along with the archive it circulates reminding us of Walter Benjamin’s battle cry against capitalism more generally and fascism in particular: “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” Part of this reflection on Zapatismo asks if we can faithfully posit Zapatismo as something of an antidote to “criminalization” and “pathologization,” “pacification” and “conformism,” that is how certain forms of late 20c racial discourses converge to produce Blackness and Brownness as “pathological social subjects, and their bodies and the urban spaces they inhabit as signifiers of illegality.” (Ferreira da Silva) The spaces they occupy are readily accepted as spaces of violence where the violence is naturalized. Can we say Zapatismo attempts to disrupt the production of these zones of violence and illegality in the !Ya Basta! that they have invited us to declare with them; the preguntando caminando and mandar obedeciendo they asked us to engage? They elaborated the unfolding of this war through their unwavering resistance to it, confronting the counter insurgency directed at them, and further exposing neoliberalization in all its technological, criminal advances to redirect collective power. Beyond their confrontation and disruption, they created the space to develop an alternative relation, one of their making and one they invite us to better appreciate from outside of the rebel communities. 

The critical point to make here in reference to Zapatismo’s several refusals, i.e. opposition against dispossession, enclosure, privatization, commodification, criminalization, subjectivation, and abjection, is that Zapatismo as a cultural and political praxis is not pedagogical in the sense that it circulates a fixed, already established curriculum that is didactic, one that directs. The pedagogy that the Zapatistas have made a space for is a pedagogy that is noteworthy for its convivial dimensions, namely that its fundamental elements, a facilitation strategy, a curriculum, an assessment tool, a space of learning, and key concepts are all components that are co-generated in an autopoietic convergence, that is a shared space of complementarity where the contribution of each present is sharpened in dignified engagement to reproduce the community.

An approach to Zapatismo that takes seriously some of the many refusals advanced by the Zapatistas that avoids any privileged claims about Zapatismo as the one and only “theory” that can save us could be Raquel Gutierrez’s work towards a “practical comprehension” of a particular rupture. The benefits in gauging Zapatismo as a “theoretical strategy” as Gutierrez suggests for the autonomy unfolding in Bolivia rather than fall into the trap of claiming Zapatismo as one fixed theory makes it possible to highlight the epistemological dimensions of the Zapatista contribution to struggle and how Zapatismo is animated by a profound commitment to a shared process of discovery. 

The celebration of Zapatismo, to borrow Gustavo Esteva’s felicitous phrase, transcends the stronghold of the EZLN and the Chiapanecan communities committed to the seven principles of mandar obedeciendo. The question whether Zapatismo can move beyond the confines of rebel territory, still militarily protected by the EZLN, has been of special interest for the diverse and dispersed, both national and international, solidarity community. Zapatismo in this quarter has been understood in relation to the traditional challenges and obligations of solidarity for communities facing a low intensity war intended to eliminate them as a community. However, it has also been animated by serious debates and discussions about what it means to go beyond solidarity, and this at the insistence of the Zapatistas who have invited comrades to walk with them, preguntando caminando, as we, together, discover new ways and reclaim old ways to resist neoliberalism in our own locales.

Rather than narrate the virtues or sins of the Zapatistas as a guerrilla, Ana Esther Ceceña examines the Zapatista rebellion based on its success in reclaiming a historical knowledge of struggle, stressing how this historical knowledge is at the same time a praxis, inter-subjective, and a horizon with its base being territory where a history can be sown, harvested, and modified. Ceceña reminds us of Benjamin’s declaration: “Not man or men but the struggling oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge.” Thus, for Ceceña Zapatismo refuses unilateral thought where that unilateral thought, Foucault’s disciplinary science, denies history. It also attempts to erase the Zapatista utopia, a utopia that forgoes hierarchies and impositions that produce dispossession. Rather, it dreams of a world where all worlds fit. Here, the Zapatista revolutionary subject enacts “a silent everyday resistance” that is not “indebted to political paternities” but rather emerges from social depths of inter-subjectivity and a culture of otherness imposed on the Indigenous yet reclaimed by them in a subversive way. The insurgent dignity that the Zapatistas exercise not only disrupts the “so-called representative policy,” it also refuses the scripts once written for “proletarians” from the factory. It claims community power that is not imposed but collectively constructed.

Ceceña deliberately and successfully avoids objectifying the Zapatistas. Drawing on Foucault and making use of the concept of historical knowledges of struggle, she presents a lens to gauge the Zapatistas’ emergence. Thus, they become a point of reference for a number of insights about struggle in the current moment. Ultimately, we are able to de-code their resonance with other struggles through a political engagement where the emphasis is on struggle and not a social movement or community of struggle as an object of study. The obligations that animate that community and insure its reproduction have to be rooted in a shared historical knowledge of struggle. “The Zapatista demands,” Ceceña reminds us, “recall that reality is rooted in territory (serving as a link between past and future and between the different worlds invoked by the majority of original cultures) and that life acquires meaning in everyday events.”

Ceceña’s insights demonstrate a set of commitments we have been calling convivial research and insurgent learning. While she may not be making any specific claims about a particular approach to research least of all a convivial one, she achieves a convivial research and insurgent learning in at least two senses. First, she is able to listen to the Zapatistas and claim a concept that they themselves use, thus it is a tool that emerges from struggle and is in service of community regeneration. Given that it is a tool that the Zapatistas use themselves, when we claim it we avoid objectifying them. Rather, we are engaging them politically. We are able to focus on what we learn together through shared struggle. The historical knowledge of struggle is not a simple narrative that fits into already existing dominant narratives but attempts to identify multiple trajectories of struggle strategically mapping out successes and critical moments of opposition as for example when the Zapatistas narrate their own history of struggle in the Sixth Declaration. In this critical document, the Zapatistas name critical turning points that highlight what they learned about the Mexican military, national and international civil society, the Mexican political class, and the resilience and inventiveness of their own communities. Moreover, the tool, in this case historical knowledges of struggle, can be shared across struggles as a deliberate effort to circulate struggle.

Ceceña deploys a genealogy engaging the Zapatistas. She can do that in part because the Zapatistas themselves have engaged struggle genealogically in that they have quite deliberately and actively co-constructed a historical knowledge of struggles. A genealogical approach in this instance is warranted not simply on a theoretical level but is useful given the Zapatistas, especially but not only through the representative voice of SCI Marcos, are themselves genealogists. My assertion is that this gesture by the Zapatistas is not only genealogical but it is convivial in that the Zapatistas have refused to narrate themselves as heroic subjects, but rather have created a space to share tools, convivial tools, to advance struggle, that is, to further the historical knowledges of struggle.

The Zapatista word circulated in the many communiques and several declarations, the archive emerging through the interconnected encuentros, the curriculum co-generated in the escuelitas, conversatorios, and seminarios, the new, insurgent knowledges surfaced in the assertions of dignity and the engagements with war together help weave the historical knowledge of struggle for the Zapatistas and those others ready to be shared from other contexts outside of Chiapas. There are two key articulations that can help narrate the Zapatista struggle and the emergence of Zapatismo. The first is a commitment to a politics of encounter. Second, related to a politics of encounter are the several agreements necessary for such a space to work politically. Agreements, while often taken for granted by most, are quintessentially convivial tools. From agreements a whole host of additional convivial tools can emerge.

In this essay approaching Zapatismo as a theoretical strategy as suggested by Gutierrez we observe a number of convivial tools, or a new kind of toolkit that Illich introduced as part of his critique of the industrial mode of production in relation to conviviality. In claiming Zapatismo as a locus of convivial tools we also witness just how central learning, research, and listening are and have been to Zapatismo’s unfolding. We celebrate these efforts, and also ask if what we observe in these struggles is an exercise in conviviality, a praxis that we can make more observable by investigating modes of conviviality. These modes include a mode of convivial research and insurgent learning, a mode of tool making, and a mode of (re)subjectivization. Self-organized communities of struggle must distinguish between, as Ivan Illich suggests, industrial tools and convivial ones. It is a battle ground —a space where subjectivization, the subject production of capital as a social mediating system, is disrupted and a collective subject begins to stir. Without a doubt, it is also a space of “human strike;” it resists those biopolitical forces that seek to apportion vulnerabilities in the catastrophic storm that is the current conjuncture. It is above all an effort of conviviality against the modes of production, consumption, signification, and destruction articulated by democratic despotism. What we have taken to calling a Zapatista civic pedagogy is an approach to Zapatismo recognizing that it is an emergent formation animated by modes of conviviality. Not to be glib about discovery, the point is that Zapatismo’s dynamic qualities, that is, its political energy in many ways is animated by a commitment to convivial research and insurgent learning.