As the COVID-19 pandemic has undermined healthcare systems and economies of even the most advanced nations, mutual networks and self-organizing efforts have sprung up across the world in a show of pandemic solidarity. With the police murder of George Floyd, the U.S. has seen further spread of self-organizing: from bond and mutual aid funds for protesters to citizen patrols in Minneapolis and a police-free autonomous zone in Seattle. As the first attempt to abolish police and replace it with community-based, transformative justice are underway in the U.S., we may want to look at the communities that have been experimenting with self-organization without recourse to the states that oppress or dispossess them, such as Rojava in North East Syria, Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi and Zapatistas in Chiapas. Zapatistas, in particular, have spent the last 26 years organizing their communities autonomously from the state across all spheres of life—from police and justice system to health care, economy and education. As we witness the limits of the imaginable being radically shifted, the Zapatista experience is more relevant than ever.
A student of new forms of direct democracy and stateless self-governance, I travelled to Chiapas last December to attend a month-long program, called “Celebration of Life,” that culminated in the celebration of 26th anniversary of the 1994 Zapatista uprising, when indigenous peasants of Chiapas rose up to defend their rights and land against the state and big landowners. Drawing on existing ethnographic research as well as my own interviews and conversations during the trip, I explore in this piece the most instructive features of Zapatistas’ social organization—bottom-up decision-making, autonomous justice, education and healthcare systems, and cooperative economy—in a hope that we can benefit from them when building our own “another world.”
It’s People Who Decide
In the 26 years after the initial uprising, Zapatistas have become a leading voice of Mexico’s indigenous peoples and built a de facto autonomous system of self-governance in noncontiguous territories of the state of Chiapas, inhabited by the movement’s supporters. A key principle underlying the Zapatista project, which ensures that autonomous institutions serve the people, is mandar obedeciendo, which means to lead by obeying. It implies that political leaders do not make decisions on behalf of their community as its representatives, but rather act as the community's delegates, implementing decisions made in local assemblies—a traditional decision-making mechanism. These exist on a village level and, in contrast to traditional assemblies of Mexico, include women, whose empowerment has been at the center of the Zapatista revolution. Assemblies elect delegates to a municipal council—the next level in the Zapatista administrative structure. Next, on the regional level, several autonomous municipalities are represented through delegates in Juntas of Buen Gobierno (JBG), or Councils of Good Government—called so in contrast to the “bad” Mexican government. JBG members serve for 3 years on a rotating basis in shifts as short as a few weeks. Such frequent rotation is intended to prevent the emergence of clientelistic networks.
