From: Montyneill <Montyneill-AT-aol.com>
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 19:19:14 EDT
Subject: AUT: reply to Reeves reply to montyneill


Below is a reply to Reeve's reply to me and to "Chrisjes" as well as to some
of the subsequent comments on the aut-op-sy list. Apologies for the delay but
I've been busy then hit with a cold which has slowed me down. 

First, I want to make very clear that two lines which Reeve apparently
"quoted" from me -- he put them in << >> kind of brackets -- are not quotes
from me, nor even feasible summaries of anything I have said. They are that I
accused Deneuve and Reeve of being people who ...
<<don't share their clothing with their neighbors >> (M) ...

I never said that and cannot imagine saying it. Either Reeve confuses me with
someone else, read something wrong, or made it up. I hope he will apologize --
I have tried to make a point of avoiding the all-too-common personalistic
remarks on this list -- and in any case I know nothing about Reeve or Deneuve,
what they do or do not share, their level of "material comfort," the political
work they do, etc. So I have made no comments on it. 

The other line was that I supposedly said the Zapatista revolt was  <<áone of
the most significant revolts against capitalist rule in human history>>. Well,
I do think their revolt is important, and have tried to explain why -- but I
donot believe and did not say what I am quoted as saying. 


In general, I am with Chris, who found little of substance in Reeve's reply.
When someone like Harald finds something of value, I will try to look again --
but I think Harald is stretching.
(I will use R to denote quotes taken from his reply to me and Chris.)

R. Nowadays, even aside from the Marcos literature, we still  know little
about how people live,
work, think and act in Chiapas.

M. But that did not stop them from strongly implying that Mayan
totalitarianism rules the villages. 

R. As I said before, this text has not been written to address the Chiapas
insurgents, but those who, from the outside, support the EZLN.

M. No doubt, but it is based on a set of claims about the EZLN -- ones which I
think and tried to show are unsupported -- and which R. did not respond to. 

R. I found very strange all the references to the Chiapas insurgents as
"indigenous people"

M. But they raised the issue of the supposed problem of indigenous
totalitarianism. In response, I challenged them to show how the current
indigenous were totalitarian. On this, R. remains silent.

R.  I understand that M is looking for some reading on
the Paris Commune ; I would suggest to add some more modern reading :
the Russian and German revolutions, the Spanish revolution  of 1936
(also for C), the Hungarian 56 revolution, the Chilean movement, the
Portuguese 74 revolution, the Polish Solidarnosc movement, and so on. It
could help. 

M. I was trying to get at something else, and think I was not at all clear. It
seems to me that the main events we like to point to as revolutionary high
points all were rather short-lived -- starting with the commune. Nor did most
of them attain and maintain for any substantial length of time revolutionary
working class power. Nor in that brief time did they eradicate capitalist
relations -- though of course they made powerful steps toward doing so before
being destroyed. Thus I raise questions: If one lasts long enough in a limited
time and space, will not one have to make deals with counter-revolutionary
forces? Or is what is truly revolutionary only that which either transforms
the whole world or dies? And if one makes deals, in the interest of survival,
etc., how do we interpret them, as in: 

R. some strong oponents of the December 1995 general strike (such as the
sociologist Alain Touraine, for whom the Zapatista movement shows that social-
democracy is the future even in Chiapas and that the old guerilla warfare is
over). and, 

R. In Europe at least, the EZLN has disqualified itself  showing many honest
militants
that it functions like any traditional left organisation, manipulating and
using the support networks according to its political needs. In France, for
exemple, after all the generosity and energy that lots of trotskyists,
anarchists, and other libertarians invest in support work,
the EZLN has turned to the old left parties (socialists and communists).
The same parties that are now runing the State, repressing the enraged
unemployed engaged in direct actions and deporting the undocumented
immigrants. For us there is, without doubt, a close relation between 
this oportunism and the EZLN vanguardists political principles. We leave
to the others the tactical explanations. Since schizophrenia seems to be
part of bourgeois politics and vanguardism.

M. AT the encuentro, I heard the anger against Touraine being there. Most
folks there, that I heard, had a stance that if the zapatistas accepted as
tactical allies folks like Touraine and D. Mitterand in order to help create
space, so be it -- and folks in France, etc., should continue to attack
Toraine. When I used the term "purist" it is to say I read in D&R and in R a
constant "all or nothing" approach. Have the Zapatista's repudiated their
anarchist, etc. supporters? Even R. does not say so. Do they say, since
Touraine is our supporter you should never attack him? No. And R. makes the
leap from the Zapas accepting support from T. all the way to becoming social
democrats because of that -- but, once again, no evidence is provided.

My particular ongoing arguement with many supporters of various "third world"
struggles is that they too readily sacrifice struggle "at home" in the name of
support. That is, to"win over" elements of the Democratic party, they soft
peddle class struggle. To me, that is self-defeating politics. Simultaneously,
if Democrats can be persuaded to act to stop warfare against rebellions, good
and if they do, where is a help to any level of struggle to attack the victims
of US (etc) warfare who decide it is tactically wise to do some negotiating.
If the European supporters of the Zapatistas do that, then they should be
criticized. And if the Zapatistas tell people in Europe not to engage in class
struggle because it will undermine support for the Zapatistas, then strong
criticism is deserved -- but is that what the Zapatista's do, or do they try
to use the European social dems to pressure the Mexican state and the US? They
are not, I think, the same things.

So, yes, I do think "tactics" is necessary. And if the "critics" are unable to
distinguish tactics from strategy, that is there problem. If  they conclude
that the tactics show the bankruptcy of the strategy, I'd suggest more
evidence than an assertion the tactic is wrong -- show how the tactic has
compromised the strategy and the goals. R. does not, and I think cannot, since
he (with D.) continues to fail to provide real evidence of any of his
assertions about the  zapatistas. 

Also, I challenged D&R to produce real evidence of their "Leninist vanguard"
claim, which in their original post was based on neither evidence nor reason.
R. did not reply. He continues to base much of his arguement on this unproven
assertion.

Both Louis Proyect and D&R assert without evidence that the zapatistas are
just like the Sandinistas, the GAP, etc. -- Louis to praise them, D&R to
criticize them. Again, Louis does not provide evidence (and it cannot be found
in his long summary of  "Basta!" by G. Collier). Where I do agree (about the
only thing) with Louis is when he suggests  (not clearly enough because he is
too busy simply insulting) that the stance of R is to blame the Sandinistas
(among others) for things over which they had no control -- such as US war
against them. The Sandinistas were/are hardly immune from criticism -- but I
do not think their underlying concepts were/are those of the Zapatistas; and
criticism of the Sandinistas should be based on some concrete analyses -- not
reflexive ideological positioning either from the D&R vantage or that of
Proyect.


R. We respect the revolt of the Chiapas proletarians, poor peasants, women,
and youth. We refuse the accusation that we "have contempt" for what people
are doing in Chiapas. We know
that their only choice to win dignity lies in their revolt. 

M. However, while claiming to support their revolt, at several points, R.
suggests that the zapatista leadership is setting the people up for massacre.
E.g.: " the process will bring about new forms of exploitation, at best,
general massacre of people, at worst" and "it will bring the revolt to a dead
end, for which the Chiapas insurgents will pay very heavily." (But if they
raise a struggle then make deals to survive, they are to be criticized as
being either leninists or social democrats.) 

He implies again what he directly asserted, (again without evidence) in the
main piece: that the EZLN leadership does not represent the people, is grafted
on to them, a manipulative leninist foreign object. I replied earlier that,
among other things, the declaration of war was by all accounts,
uncontrovertedly so, a popular public decision, taken rather openly, and
argued aganst by Marcos. Again, R does not counter this, but continues to base
his claims on this unsupported suppositon. 

R. Could we "offer them a coherent alternative" (C) other than helping to
think
about the contradictions and the consequences of what people are doing
themselves, about what we are doing ourselves when supporting them? It
seems to me quite pretentious to raise such a question. And what are those who
support the Z offering, if not reinforcing the EZLN line and practiceá?
 M. Is it pretentious, or really a reasonable question to ask when one says
what you are doing is a disaster. What should they have done different? If
they should have revolted, as R. agrees, given all the rather obvious points
about who had what resources, etc, then just how should they have conducted
the revolt differently? And if you have no idea, then why claim their actions
will lead to disaster (which, of course they know quite well -- they are the
ones who said they were already dead!). 

R. It is possible that, in this type of situation, organisations such as
the EZLN are the only ones able to express this type of revolt. That is,
in itself, a political question to be discussed and analysed. 

M. Good. Harald suggested something rather similar, when he said: 
Reeve and Deneuve may not have all the right answers, and 
neither do I think they believe so themselves, but they 
seem to have an ability to raise the right questions. Questions
which actually arise from the very logic of the form of 
struggle chosen by the EZLN. I also think these are questions
very much related to the one of class composition, and with no
easy answers immediately at hand. They, like the current 
situation, have to be created.

I obviously do not think most of  D&R's questions are of much significance,
and I think that rather than raise questions, they launched an attack based on
almost no information (which they now acknowlege, but R. refuses to draw an
inferences from the acknowledgement) and spurious reasoning -- an effort R.
now claims was meant to help the movment. I would say launching such an attack
is no way to help. They could have actually asked questions:

-- is the EZLN the same as the Sandinistas, etc.? have they learned? do they
propose anything different? (I think from the texts and their actions and
talking with people, the answers are no, yes, yes. D&R offer no evidence for
their apparent claims that the answers are yes, no and no -- and now say they
answered the "questions" without information!

-- what is the relationship between Marcos and the urban and the local people?
One may not want to have simply believed any initial statements from Marcos
about this -- but given no evidence, why make the string of unsupported claims
and non sequiturs that they made?

etc. No -- they did not ask questions, they attacked. 

As to the issue of the nature of organization based on the composition of the
class, that is a perspective I can agree to  in the abstract. I suggested that
if Chiapas is similar to various indigenous self-organization in Oaxaca (since
I used Oaxacan examples), then we have a complex organizational form to
examine. I am not in position to do this, and certainly agree it would be
interesting in any of the cases to study. But in R.'s raising of this point, I
wonder if it is another way to avoid addressing the actual criticisms of the
D&R piece. 

R. Since we think that not every sort of political activity can bring social
emancipation, and that there is a relation between the two, we feel free
to criticize the political principles of this kind of organisation.
Because we think that it will bring the revolt to a dead end, for which
the Chiapas insurgents will pay very heavily. 

M. But, again, they have no information about the kind of organization, only
suppositions. 

R. asks a set of questions about relations (social and productive and
political) inside the "autonomous" spaces. Those are good questions. R.
assumes nothing has changed. I have heard of some changes, particiularly
around the role of women, but these are also slow. Also, the assembly
structure, which is resolutely opposed by the state, does not work in the way
the PRI- boss operations work; but how fully democratic the assembly structure
is in the various Chiapanecan autonomous municipalities I do not know. My
inclination is to trust my Mexican comrades on this (more democratic than
before, more equal, etc.). I also think from what they say that more space has
been created for further internal struggle to change social relations, that it
is a process. 

R. Nevertheless, acording to M, "these folks are living aspects of post
capitalism"... One would like to have some concrete exemples ; since I refuse
to believe M is just talking about sharing clothing with neighbors... Let's be
serious : most of these people are not "developing sustainable
anticapitalism", they are caught more and more in a civil war situation,
having no control over their lives and ways of living, supporting the EZLN to
be protected from the military gangs and
Mexican army, and actually almost starving. All that under the holy protection
of one of the most reactionary parties on Earth , the Catholic church. That's
the real situation. It has nothing to do with the latino maoist longmarch some
people are dreaming of. 

M. R slides from a reasonable question to more unsupported diatribe. The
extended examples I provided were from Chiapas -- intended to raise issues
first about the possibilities of creating socio-polticial-economic spaces
outside of captialist relations. From what I am told, some of this happens in
the autonomous municipalities in Chiapas -- again, I do not know how much.
That the military repression might make this all impossible in Chiapas is all
too real, and some people are starving. No one any where has yet created
<<sustainable>> anti-capitalism -- primarily because of the attacks of the
capitalists -- including every case listed by R. as something I should read
about. Should the EZLN be held to some higher standard? Or should we try to
learn from what we know of what they propose and what they do? I suggest the
latter, and have on several occasions (as have other people) suggested ways of
thinking about them that could help us in our struggles against capitalism.  

It is also worth noting that Ruiz is rather an anomaly in the church. The EZLN
has an uneasy alliance with him; the bulk of the Mexican church (and the
Vatican, from what I can tell) is quite unhappy with Ruiz. If he is not
assassinated, he retires in two years -- and probably will be replaced by
someone sufficiently reactionary. R. again overstates based on lack of  real
information or  an analysis of actual struggles. And just who is looking for a
maoist long march? 


R. What relation exists (or doesn't exist) today between the EZLN and the
social movements ? M, who raises the question, concedes that the EZLN
support is mostly middle-class, and that it has ½áno organizational
presence in the factories and little in the barrios.á . Therefore what
is the meaning of  ½áinfluenceá  (M)á? The social situation of Mexico is
in a virtual stage of explosion. Struggles such as the northern
railworkersÆ strike express an high level of class violence as well as
State and union bureaucracy repression (as Dan La BotzÆs reports show).
One would like also to know more about the MULP practices and
experiences in the barrios. If M could write a little more about this
and a little less about the autonomy of ½ indigenous communitiesá , we
would probably know better what is going on there... 

M. Having posed the question of the indigenous, now R. says I should not right
about them, but right about something. My knowledge is limited, I am trying to
offer some insights and suggestions, while looking for other info. Earlier, I
posted a website that might have some info on MULP -- but I have only info
based on a couple-hour translated discussion. 

BTW, Dan LaBotz, whom R. cites favorable, in Mexican Labor News (reposted
regularly on aut- op-sy), argues that the EZLN has had a real impact across
Mexico, sparking directly and indirectly the wave of struggles that may now be
moving across Mexico. But to read MLN is to see that the labor struggles are
not at all at this point, even in groups such as FAT, posing a revolutionary
alternative to capitalism -- certainly they do so less than does the EZLN. Of
course the struggle could move beyond that -- as clearly the EZLN wants but
has not found a way to do. Why they have not deserves more analysis. Aside
from R's unsurprisingly selective reading of MLN, he has this to say about it:

R. The question that C wrongly asks us, takes a real political dimension
when applied to the EZLN. What is the "coherent alternative" it offers
to social movements in Mexicoá? And it seems clear that the EZLN offers
none. Out of Chiapas, the EZLN has no originality. Because it is founded
on bourgeois principles of organisation the EZLN has nothing new to say
on the union question, on the barrios' organisation, on the
insurrectional strikes. In fact, its absence in these struggles shows
its political limits. Whatever M and C may think about its "planetary
anticapitalist"  role, the EZLN has difficulties to play one outside of
Chiapas. Suddenly worried, M rediscovers the old solution : "a little
more leadership might be helpful". Is that a critique of Marcosá?
That's not nice, you are thinking like a purist now! No doubt, in a
symbolic way, the spirit of deep revolt expressed in the Chiapas
struggle, the fight for dignity, had an impact on "the upsurge of
struggle in Mexico"(M). But if one thinks that self-organisation is the
the central question in the development of a popular self-emancipation
alternative, the fact that the EZLN has nothing to say on it, says a lot!

M. Now the EZLN is "founded on bourgois principles of organization" --
apparently R. cannot restrain himself from making these statements based on
nothing. Ironically, the EZLN is proposing precisely the self-organization of
the class -- but R. is incapable of seeing or hearing. 

His diatribe against me is based on pulling phrases out of context and
stringing them together. The planetary aspect has to do with the encuentros --
a novel development in world class struggle, also apparently invisible to R.

I posed the issue of the FZLN not to say that "Marcos" should have exertd more
leadership -- I did not say that re: Marcos, that remains R's continuing
unsubstantiated vision of the EZLN as run by the white Leninist manipuilating
the indigenous -- but that, contrary to a story circulated in some sectors in
Mexico, the EZLN did not exert leadership over the proceedings. I am not sure
that really is a solution, I was being a bit ironical. But then I also think
there are times when good leadership is invaluable -- the tricks are what is
good and when it should exist. (As far as I know, in all that nice list R.
gave of struggles I should read about, there were indeed leaders -- of variuos
kinds and qualities, indeed. Would those revolutions have succeeded if they
had all gone away?)

R. Today, only these revolts in the big urban centers and the development of
radical strike movements can prevent the Chiapas people from being victim of
the terrible massacre the State is
preparing (and which is to some extent already under way).  

M. Well, now there is an insight. Did R. get if from reading the EZLN 4 years
ago when they called for Mexican society to rise up -- while saying they were
not the vanguard, others would have to organize themselves? Do you really
think anyone knows better than they do how important that is? Or are they
responsible for the disunity of the Mexican left and the still quite minimal
capacity of industrial workers to organize autonomously (the clear conclusion
from reading MLN, but the way, tho the level of struggle and decomonposition
of old controls are both accelerating) and the splits among the groups
representing the barrio dwellers, the re-emergence of electoralism on the
left, etc?  

And I would say the capacity of the Zapatistas to survive and therefore for
their struggle to develop is also dependent on the capacity of people in N.
America and Europe to help give them space. That, too, has been known since
the start by the EZLN. Perhaps given their dependence on both Mexican and
world-wide support, they should never have revolted -- but they have explained
why they did, and R. says he supports them -- despite all evidence to the
contrary

R. To focus solidarity work on the activity of EZLN alone is a waste of energy
since it doesn't help to break the isolation of the revolt of Chiapas
proletarian people, paesants, woman and young people. Venceremos, but not like
that...

M. Now it would seem that since he is referring to solidarity work, R. might
feel it is not too presumptuous to make a concrete suggestion -- I do not find
it.

Finally, R. offers a steady complaint to the effect that those of  us who do
not find his critique accurate, who find it smacks of  harmful and self-
indulgent arrogance based on ideological presuppositions instead of  real
evidence and reason -- we apparently are incapable of engaging in necessary
criticism (see his text following his question, ."And what's the meaning of a
'constructive criticism'"), we are historical amnesiacs, etc.

Well, for myself, I found Katarina's piece (now printed, BTW, in Common Sense)
thoughtful, though limited in some important ways, and I (with others) offered
a brief critique in Towards the New Commons." But that piece, I thought, was
quite different in substance and approach than D&R's piece.

Having found D&R so incessantly flawed, lacking in evidence (to which R offers
no defense) or reason (no defense), why should I give credence to the piece or
accept it as a useful criticism? I concur he finally asks -- though in a
backhanded way -- a few useful questions toward the end of his response, but
the initial piece is nothing more than an supported attack. 

What bothers me most, perhaps, is that people could take it seriously. Other
than Reeve himself, my critique of Reeve received no reply on the aut-op-sy
list. D&R's defenders apparently could not find anything to say? Well, since R
himself offers still no evidence on critical points, that is not surprising. 

Well, if there is something concrete provided around the basic claims D&R
make, then it is worth talking about again (same for Louis Proyect). Or
perhaps some serious questions hopefully rooted in some sense of the reality
of the struggles there, or questions flowing from the zapatista struggle of
relevance to struggles outside of Chiapas in order to better understand them
and the current situation. Otherwise, we will remain with "mere ideology" and
I'd rather attend to more substantive things.

Monty Neill
<montyneill-AT-aol.com>


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