X ~ Marx / + Kropotkin (mutual aid) / Las Zapatistas

[X1, 1]

“In his interviews with Gloria Muñoz Ramírez, Subcomandante Marcos described how the urban guerrillas of the FLN had to escape into the mountains of Chiapas in the 1980s. They then lived in Indigenous communities. The ideas of Marxist revolution, social change, and liberation the guerrillas arrived with were challenged by the communities, and through long interactions, these very ideas were defeated. Marcos shares “as a product of that defeat, the EZLN started to grow exponentially and to become ‘very otherly.’” This encounter of different worlds, and the defeat of the Marxist guerrillas ideological positions derived from elsewhere, created a radical rupture with past methods of revolutionary action.” What becomes clear here from the Zapatistas statements is that in order for a new university, an ‘other’ university, to flouriush, the current incarnations must first accept ‘defeat’. This is the one part of the story that often gets left out when we talk about the Zapatistas – that they not only accepted indigenous wisdom, but also accepted the ‘defeat’ of their Marxist analysis of labor and change. (Anuj Vaidya, 2020) [X1, 1]