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Redalyc.Chiapas, Latin America and the Capitalist World-System

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Redalyc.Chiapas, Latin America and the Capitalist World-System Theomai ISSN: 1666-2830 [email protected] Red Internacional de Estudios sobre Sociedad, Naturaleza y Desarrollo Argentina Aguirre Rojas, Carlos Antonio Chiapas, Latin America and the Capitalist World-system Theomai, núm. 11, 2005 Red Internacional de Estudios sobre Sociedad, Naturaleza y Desarrollo Buenos Aires, Argentina Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=12420823011 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative Theomai ISSN Impreso: 1666-2830 ISSN Electrónico: 1515-6443 Número 11, Primer Semestre 2005 Estudios sobre Sociedad, Naturaleza y Desarrollo, Argentina. Chiapas, Latin America and the Capitalist World-system(1) Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas * * Researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. E-mail: [email protected] “… The Chiapas Indians who have been using such intelligent tactics in their long struggle with the Mexican government.” Immanuel Wallerstein, “Indigenous Peoples, Populist Colonels, and Globalization”. Comment number 33, on http://fbc.binghamton.edu, web site of the Fernand Braudel Center, February 1st of 2000. But today we say, enough! Today, more than eight years after its public appearance on the Mexican, Latin American and World scenario, it appears evident that the Neo – Zapatista indigenous movement that developed in the Mexican State of Chiapas, is clearly a new type of social movement, typical of what the antisystemic movements in opposition of the capitalist system shall be like that are going to be organized over the next thirty to fifty years of this chronological third millenium. This new type of social movement, that emerges in one of the poorest and most backward areas of Southern Mexico –an area potentially very rich in natural and economic resources, but very much behind in terms of its social structure and its political configuration(2)- has managed to stir up an interest and an echo of practically planetary proportions, precisely because it announces what the new anticapitalist social movements shall be like in the future. Viewing that from its first public irruption on the first of January of 1994, the Neo – Zapatista movement of the Mexican natives has not ceased to be each time more present in worldwide mass media, therefore also asserting its influence within the ‘collective imaginary’ of practically all of the resistance movements in the world, and becoming a necessary reference for all of those interested in the processes of social transformation that the capitalist system, as a whole, is currently experimenting. The worldwide impact and presence of the Neo – Zapatismo derived from what can be implied from its novelty as an antisystemic social movement, have not yet been sufficiently theorized nor analyzed by the contemporary social scientists, in Mexico and Latin America as well as in the rest of the world. However, in our opinion, the mentioned examination and study might possibly yield fundamental keys with which to try understanding which shall be the specific routes that shall be traveled by future organized struggles against the capitalist system. Theomai ISSN Impreso: 1666-2830 ISSN Electrónico: 1515-6443 Número 11, Primer Semestre 2005 Estudios sobre Sociedad, Naturaleza y Desarrollo, Argentina. Therefore, in the spirit of giving impulse to the multiplication of this still necessary analysis, the present essay shall try to analyze some of the main expressions of Neo – Zapatismo from the perspective of the “world-system analysis”. This perspective has been basically created and developed by Immanuel Wallerstein over the last twenty - five years. During this last quarter of a century, Wallerstein has been setting forth a series of thesis and interpretations that very notably coincide extraordinarily with the Neo – Zapatista thesis, anticipating them by several lustrums in some instances, and in others, reinforcing and allowing to re-dimension their most profound purpose and significance. Thus, while at the same time trying to review some of the central theoretic proposals of this perspective of the World-System Analysis, as well as to use them as an instrument for explaining the recent Neo – Zapatista phenomenon, what the present text pursues is the objective of indicating some “new leads” to continue re – thinking and explaining the social movement and the situation that currently exist and are developing in the State of Chiapas in Southern Mexico that today is a mandatory element of the possible essential geography of the world anticapitalist rebellion. Therefore, playing with the demonstration of the evident “elective affinities” that we believe to perceive within the recent events in Chiapas and the perspective of the world–system analysis, we may perhaps advance one step forward in the process of clarification of the nature of this Neo – Zapatista indigenous movement and in the illustration of the possible productiveness of this same analytic perspective. Planet Earth, mountains of the south east of Mexico One of the ideas that the world–system perspective has insisted upon most, and that many consider to be its most original and specific contribution, is that of the indispensable need to systematically and permanently go beyond the limited “national” or “state” point of view for the study and explanation of the main phenomena that take place within the capitalist world–system(3). Because according to Immanuel Wallerstein’s opinion, one recurrent fault incurred by the vast majority of contemporary social scientists consists in non – critically assuming the supposed legitimacy of the “national framework” as the “unit of analysis” that is pertinent for the study of the social developments of the last five centuries. Nevertheless, and stating for a fact that said unit of analysis is not and cannot be any other than the world-system itself considered as a whole, those who promote this world–system perspective are then going to defend the need to relocate the assembly of facts, phenomena and processes that have occupied and even today, still occupy the specialists in history as well as in the current situation of modern capitalism(4) from a more global and all – embracing vision. Thus, and establishing a critical distance from the traditional concepts of “State”, “Nation” and “Society” – which they propose to recover and redefine from and within the most complex notions of the of interstate system, world–economy and world–system-- and extending by its own route the radically globalizing vision inherited from Marx as well as from Fernand Braudel(5), the perspective of the world– system analysis insist upon the fact that a global world–system dynamics in fact really exists, and which Theomai ISSN Impreso: 1666-2830 ISSN Electrónico: 1515-6443 Número 11, Primer Semestre 2005 Estudios sobre Sociedad, Naturaleza y Desarrollo, Argentina. dynamics, if ignored by our analysis, is inevitably going to misrepresent the adequate explanation of the problems we are addressing. Therefore and in order to set forth only a possible illustration of this general thesis, Wallerstein will show us, for example, how, in the so – called “independence movements” of Latin America, early in the XIXth century, what is at stake at the level of world–system as a whole, is the worldwide process of market re - articulation where Great Britain asserts itself as the center of world–economy and Spain culminates the process of decadence, that began as far back as the XVIIth century, of its each time more diminished role within the concert of European nations. It is in this way, following the example of the “de – colonization of the United States”, and stemming from this situation in which no one is interested in having Latin America continue under the domination and control of Spain, that the multiplicity of movements of our “independences” are going to take place. In these movements, the sectors that include the masses and those most radical shall be systematically excluded, alienated or repressed and where the Spanish Colonial domination shall end up being substituted by a new chiefly European economic domination, following a line that shall reaffirm, finally and in spite of our “independences”, the historically chronic situation that continues to this day, regarding the condition of Latin America as a simple “peripheral” – area of the world-system(6). According to this perspective of the world–system analysis, our social and political processes of the early XIXth century cannot then be adequately understood, unless we are to consider this essential dimension of the global dynamics of the world–system at that moment. And this, not only for the purpose of “giving consideration to the so – called ‘external factors’” that would complement and perhaps round out or enhance somewhat more the explanation centered on the “internal factors”, but in the somewhat more profound and radical sense that the mentioned Latin American “independence processes” would have been impossible without the existence of that “worldwide situation” of the simultaneous Spanish decadence and British boom and without the historical pause that it creates. But also, and on the other hand, it is only the consideration of the chronically peripheral situation within the world–system that Latin America has suffered as a true ‘long duration’ profound structure throughout the entire history of capitalist modernity, that has allowed understanding of the limits as well as the ultimate results of the mentioned independences of our semicontinent(7). Thus, reinserting the explanation of these local Latin American processes within this global dynamics of the world–economy and of the world–system, Wallerstein reaffirms his thesis that the so – called “globalization” is not a phenomenon that dates as recently as the last three decades, nor is it a process that is characteristic of the last century, but rather a process initiated five centuries ago and inscribed as an essential stroke of the nature itself of the capitalist world–system.
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