Preface

This paper seeks to draw some lessons at a global level from the ongoing "Other Campaign" (so-called in mock reference to the 2006 presidential electoral campaigns), catalysed by the Zapatistas with their call for a renewed anti-capitalist resistance movement "from below and to the left" against neoliberal capitalism in Mexico and internationally, in the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle (the Sixth) in July 2005.

The paper also focuses on how the organization and mobilization of the Other Campaign is evolving in the trans-border region of Chihuahua-Texas-New Mexico in Northern Mexico-Southern USA (where the author is based) around the attempted horizontal coordination of autonomists, anarchists, Zapatistas, socialists, indigenous and peasant movements, and the efforts to include independent trade unions and the more radical NGO campaigns against the femicide of some 450 working class women and girls in Ciudad Juarez since 1993, as well as other issues based around migration, the US-Mexico border, the hegemonic maquiladora (corporate assembly plant for export) hyper-exploitation model and the
social violence and urban degradation produced by “savage capitalism”. This “other” organizational paradigm, which includes the “Other on the other side” (of the border), will be also be connected with the May Day Latino boycott movement in the US against the criminalisation of undocumented migrants. The broader socio-political context is framed by the events surrounding the July 2006 presidential elections, which proved to be particularly “dirty” and fraudulent, despite the consensus among the three candidates of the main parties on the need to consolidate through “institutional reforms” the neoliberal model (constructed on the 1994 NAFTA agreement), which seeks to extend a deepened US economic hegemony over Latin America through the 2001 Puebla-Panama Plan, the 2005 Central Americas Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the recently shelved Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) proposal. The desperate, cynical capitulation of the “vertical” left (see footnote), both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary (including some ex-Zapatista supporters and much of the post-1968 New Left) to the populist, demagogic presidential campaign of the centre-left PRD candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), some on the basis of keeping the corrupt mafia-linked PRI and Christian right-ultra neoliberal PAN out of power, others in the hope of benefiting personally from future presidential largesse, mirrors a deeper crisis as a divided global anti-capitalism seeks to intensify resistance against an increasingly fragmented and degenerate “global war capitalism”. This helps to explain why the EZLN and its global network, under the title of the “Zezta Internazional”, are also organizing a third “Intergalactic Encuentro” in late 2006-early 2007, faced with the perceived neo-reformist inefficacy of the now verticalist controlled and Chavez-dependent World Social Forum (WSF).

The paper also examines the impact of the particularly brutal repression of the Atenco movement, the Oaxaca teachers’ strike and APPO
movement and AMLO’s orchestrated but massive anti-fraud movement on the Other, before reaching some conclusions on the present state of
anti-capitalism (autonomist, Zapatista and other/wise) in Mexico, and the implications for “the slow and laborious process of consolidating
the new Latin American revolutionary left” (Cuban Libertarian Movement/CLM 2005:1) and global anti-capitalist and alterglobalist movements.


footnote: By “vertical” Left I mean those organizational traditions within the historical Left that favour a centralist, hierarchical, organizational structure (a mirror image of the capitalist firm) and that practice dogmatic, vanguardist, statist and “top-down” politics, i.e. all their political initiatives either stem from or have to be approved by the leadership, while rigid discipline and obedience is enforced on the membership by threat of expulsion. Their political ideology is usually based on an orthodox “scientific socialist” interpretation of the Marxist- Leninist canon. Left political traditions considered to be “verticalist” would be social democrats, Leninists and Trotskyists, but in the context of alterglobalism would also include (ex-) national liberation movements like Sinn Fein. A Mexican example would be the Trotskyist PRT (Partido Revolucionario de los
Trabajadores/Workers Revolutionary Party), which split in the early 90s over entryism into the PRD, a path the majority chose to follow, while a minority became close allies of the EZLN and now edit the monthly magazine, Rebeldia, the main Zapatista publication. In fact, this is a simplification as there is a certain amount of “crossover” particularly between the leaderships of the two factions, which tends to muddy the waters of radical left politics in Mexico. An English example would be the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). In recent years the “verticalists” have increasingly clashed with the “horizontalists” (autonomists, anarchists, ecofeminists, environmentalists, independent social movements in general) over the control and future direction of the World and European Social Forums in particular and global anti-capitalism/alterglobalism
in general. For a discussion of verticalist-horizontalist politics, see Levidow (2004).

full text (PDF file):  http://www.commoner.org.uk/12cuninghame.pdf