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Asking Questions With The Zapatistas

Greek Activists Think About the Future of Politics and Civilization

Theodore Karyotis, Ioanna-Maria Maravelidi, and Yavor Tarinski. Asking Questions with the Zapatistas: Reflections from Greece on Our Civilizational Impasse. Athens, Greece: Transnational Institute for Social Ecology (TRISE), 2022.

Mexican culture is distinguished by an annual holiday: “The Day of the Dead.” In short, it remembers the dead and honors their lives. But it is more complex. Is Western civilization going through its death agony right now? It is unclear if the planet will survive much longer for humanity to reflect on its ancestors. The late Zapatista activist Ramona Dreamweaver is often remembered on this holiday. We might reconsider what this means for our sense of time, politics, and civilization.

Asking Questions with the Zapatistas, meditations on the future of politics and world civilization by three Greece-based activists begin with a summary; our time is marked by pandemics, ecological disasters, and economic crises. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than a new beginning.

Greece in the last decade has experienced anti-social reforms and restructuring that have placed provisions of food, healthcare, and housing in jeopardy for multitudes. At a global level, capital and state have used these social emergencies to discipline commoners to precarious expectations. Is there a way out of this impasse?

On Guard Against God’s Humanizing Agents and Redeemers

Before I begin engaging the book further, I must say the authors exemplify something rare. While petty chauvinisms and retreat from radical internationalism, even in supposed progressive circles, constantly spiral out of control; the authors endeavor to think comparatively, placing their own freedom movements in global conversations. Furthermore, they express no sense of guilt or privilege (as they should not) in conversation with the Zapatistas. The Zapatistas, like Rojava, are not God’s humanizing agents or redeemer people. They are fellow radicals in another sector of the world thinking about creating and sustaining dual power and counter-institutions. We should salute their disposition.

Greeks, despite their manipulated ancient history, do not speak from an imperial location. As much of southern and south-eastern Europe, they should not be thought from a “white” nation. Rather, they are from territories that in modern history have been conquered, which pushes them to rethink their own ethnically plural identity.

This volume cannot be evaluated as a history of the Zapatistas, or a study of their political thought. Rather, the authors begin with consensus propositions about who the Zapatistas are, and allow these to stimulate challenging questions about their present and future in Greece and Europe.

Perhaps the greatest burden posed by the book is how to build movements marked by direct democracy and workers’ self-management, and rupture with the welfare state of mind, in a historical moment often called neoliberalism. This is not the dilemma of three Greeks but challenges for a global search for a left-libertarian social revolution.

Searching for Answers in Everyday Life, not from Experts

After social distancing, and navigating alienation in response to the Covid-19 crisis, they inquire about the relationship between personal freedom and collectivism, fulfilling human needs without depleting the planet, and creating self-directed institutions for emancipating society by establishing new relations with the natural world. While searching for answers in everyday life not from experts, the authors offer timely meditations that began with dialogue with the Zapatista delegation to Europe.

This book asks us to place Zapatista experiences, in Mexico’s Lacandona jungle, in conversation with political contestation in urban settings in Greece and Europe. It reminds Zapatista organizing stimulates Left Libertarian theory and practice for generations of activists and collectives since their public appearance almost thirty years ago.

Thinking Comparatively with the Zapatistas and Greek Rebellion

In 1994, the Zapatistas arrived at a moment of global pessimism. I recall taking part in a federation. Some dedicated colleagues disseminated and translated their communiques.

The Cold War had just come to an end; Marxism had been delegitimized. Also, any movement desiring social transformation was discredited. Their struggle for indigenous rights surfaced just as capitalism and liberal markets celebrated a global triumph.

If the merits of the Zapatistas are that they never tried to fight for hegemony, never pursued centralized control through a fixed ideology, or presented themselves at home or abroad as a vanguard, they shared their experiences without the motive of accumulating power. Still, this obscures much.

The authors remind us Zapatista ideology was a mix of anarchism, Marxism, Catholicism, and indigeneity that never became a dogma. Moreover, perceived as projecting collective affirmation of life and resistance to injustice, Zapatismo seemed adaptable to different geographies and histories. The Zapatistas were flexible in their specific local conditions. I flag “resistance,” for the book actually encourages a critique of ambiguities of resistance reading further.

The founders of the Zapatistas, including Subcommandante Marcos, did make a strategic orientation, leaving more urban spaces, and sometimes university life, for rural indigenous homelands. Further, their supposed flexibility in ideas did not simply import fresh notions to new local conditions. Agile within dominant political ideas and ethnic and religious cultures of the region, each nation or region has radical traditions; the Zapatistas were familiar with the intellectual and political currents of their historical geography.

Globally, we tend to look upon personalities that struggle in other regions in a romantic light. For those not familiar with Latin American culture, every conceivable political tendency speaks with mythopoetic flare. This undoubtedly conveys charisma like the melodies of Caribbean voices. However, we should distinguish between revolutionaries, predators, and plunderers. I have no doubt that the Zapatistas have been a revolutionary force in the world. But to ask questions in conversation about their experience, we must leave some of their local charm and mystery behind.

What is Self-Criticism?

If the Zapatistas were a model of potent self-criticism among those trying to delink from calcified left parties, we must remember that “self-criticism” was a discourse of certain strands of Maoism and feminism, that in most cases reconciled itself with the left bloc of capital long ago. To say the Zapatistas provided powerful critiques of traditional Marxist movements is accurate. It also can obscure that generations before the founders of the Zapatistas decided to leave behind orthodoxy, other individuals and small groups did as well. The authors are inspired by some personalities from those earlier ruptures including Murray Bookchin, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Simone Weil.

Self-Criticism in many places did degenerate into self-help book philosophies that insisted we need to change ourselves to change the world. Affinity with rulers above society was actually sustained. Self-criticism, in imperial centers, encouraged people to speak bitterness about their alienation with no special commitment to collective projects. Mutual aid is not simply those who have been historically victimized finding their voice. Such people engaged in “self-criticism” can become the police chiefs and bosses of tomorrow.

Self-criticism is substantive when we admit that we are not held back merely by oppressive institutions. We place obstacles in our own path. Individual mistaken notions are usually not appropriate subjects of personal confessions. They are products of difficulties of material life that many must overcome. Not simply that humans are compromised by the threat of starvation, but pursuit of love and happiness in a cold and competitive world.

The authors’ Zapatistas strengthened anarchist currents that take seriously not simply decentralized personal liberation but building liberation organizations. For a current of anarchists, the Zapatistas overcame the aversion to institution-building and opened many eyes to the fact that laws and institutions could be emancipatory, products of collective deliberation and self-directed institutions. The Zapatistas are forerunners of Occupy and Square movements of 2010–2011 in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Spain, Greece, the UK, and the U.S.

Validating the Pace of the Snail

The authors’ Zapatistas validated the “pace of the snail” in contrast to expansionist administrative rationality that dominated the Global Left previously. The Zapatistas contribute to consensus that self-limitation as instituted by popular self-government, not a green authoritarian state plan, is the answer to the climate crisis.

The Zapatistas advanced decision-making based on consultation that constantly moves back and forth between partial propositions in search of a credible whole that ordinary people recognize and consent. Where there are no bureaucrats, bosses, or profit-seekers pressuring the pace of everyday life, an important distinction is made: popular councils do not make decisions like parliaments. Zapatista-led deliberations are not endless meetings with no purpose. Instead, a process of self-institution occurs. Establishing satisfactory norms, on the path to liberation, is gradually accepted.

Bottom-Up Decision-Making that Nurtures Participation?

The Zapatistas in Chiapas don’t simply make bottom-up decisions through self-created institutions but these have the mandate to nurture further participation. This is very different than government by experts where folks have no direct role in politics. Still, a society distinguished by direct democracy may have large numbers yet convinced to engage.

I wish there was another word for participate in this context. Participatory democracy and direct democracy are not the same. It would be peculiar if someone invited us to participate in our own self-directed institutions. Perhaps, here is an instance where the activity of mass movements and those of cadre are blurred unproductively but inevitably. We might clarify that institutions for popular self-government are needed alongside revival campaigns, restoration of historical capacities for self-directed liberating activity among the uninitiated.

The authors explain that through participatory processes within municipalities, exploited and marginalized people when they take matters into their own hands can create emancipatory spaces and become their own law-givers. This validly suggests a process (not a means of communication), an unfolding rupture with representative government toward direct democracy.

One case study highlighted how the women in the Zapatista territory came to pass a law that abolished the consumption of drugs and alcohol. Many had experienced domestic violence and saw a link between this consumption and the patriarchal violence they had known. Apparently, women were re-energized by this initiative and the practice changed their lives.

The Zapatistas tend to see law-making differently than urban European anarchist and anti-authoritarian movements who view the setting up of boundaries and rules as authoritarian. We must reconsider does domestic violence, like police brutality, become fueled by drunkenness or substance abuse? Or can sober people maintain perennial commitments to patriarchy and racism? This decision raises many questions including how social revolutions while promoting change and abhorring oppression, also must respect ordinary people can govern themselves while maintaining some of their limitations and blind spots. Liberation must be learned and is ever unfolding.

Is Making Our Own Laws Compatible with Anti-Authoritarianism?

Making our own laws can be compatible with anti-authoritarianism if we are part of the consensus building that creates, and we publicly discuss and advertise them clearly. Perhaps in small rural communities, it is easier to establish a new consensus, where new laws are framed and initiated, and all take part in the consensus they shall discipline themselves.

The authors’ Zapatistas contribute to a social emancipation perspective that exposes the limits of “economism.” They cite Castoriadis to suggest that economism demands constant growth. While this is true, it is better to think of the problems of economism as the welfare state of mind. That is, the state’s conception of aiding human development by providing and distributing necessities of life. Denied is that labor (even with technology, machinery, and even robots) produces and distributes all necessities of life. So economism, to this writer, is a troublesome affinity for states claiming a morality, while separating direct self-government of ordinary people from economic planning.

Dignity, Feminism, and the Welfare State of Mind

I am not sure that the Zapatistas’ emphasis on “dignity” is the key to their social emancipation perspective as the authors suggest. Surely Catholicism has reconciled dignity while sustaining feudal hierarchies in the modern world. For them, the rich and the homeless both have dignity. Still, Catholic intellectual history is vibrant, where rejecting the servile state and offering criticism of socialists and communists’ approach to labor that treats fugitive slaves like they must be returned to their owners.

Catholic ideas can be insightful into the human condition while sustaining a tradition of apologetics (not simply of faith in God) but regret that no matter brilliant insights, they will always work against social revolution. That of course is why the Catholic hierarchy has historically found a common cause with Hitler and Mussolini. But these are not dilemmas of one religion but of the multitudes of human beings until their next development in political thought. People are really faced with stark choices: autonomy or barbarism.

We will not assume the Zapatista conception of dignity only comes from indigenous cosmologies even as many Mexican and Latin American religious lives, as a result of historical colonialism, overlap with Catholicism. Indigenous cosmologies will be partially explored below.

It is unclear if the Zapatistas have surpassed, from aspects of their feminist perspective, the liberal oligarchies of the West. More importantly, why do the authors feel this should be the measure of success? As the poster above suggests (and we must be cautious for it mirrors one moment in time in what a historically fluid situation), Zapatista engagement with indigenous women on one level makes explicit what some modern regimes are retreating or evading in terms of reproductive freedom and economic rights, including primary attention to child care and development.

At the same time, these are revolutionary laws for women emerging from a feudal situation. It is a mistake to think that human beings who live in non-urban areas and lead religious lives are inherently more underdeveloped politically. Nevertheless, there can be a clash of sensibilities between urban-based citizenship and subjects of customary laws that tend to focus on singular ethnic origins or rites. Perhaps the threats of modern capitalism compel indigenous retreats from historical and cultural commitments to primary attention to children. And this must be renewed, where the welfare state of mind falls short of such transparent commitments.

Revolutionary Laws: How Many Contexts?

The first law on the poster above is remarkable. Women should be able to “participate in the revolutionary struggle” not just “regardless of their race and religion,” but also their political affiliation. I don’t think revolutionary organizations are recruiting women, for example, who exhibit an uncritical disposition toward patriarchy or imperialism. However, where the revolutionary struggle is defined as a deliberative process through workplace councils and popular assemblies, as in Chiapas, this raises many fascinating matters.

First, before we give ourselves laws, we need to distinguish between political organizations, coalitions, and place-based community formation. If organizations and communities have no membership requirements, maintaining common anti-authoritarian values and enforcing them as the basis of popular self-government is impossible.

Left libertarians need to distinguish between building their own revolutionary organizations and mass-democratic coalitions. Coalitions don’t just mean humans work together. Left libertarians must learn to initiate, and lead, not simply join coalitions. Coalitions are led — specifically to include or exclude the shining governments of the damned.

Separate from protest mobilization, one is either building a coalition to ask the hierarchical government to do something that directly or indirectly reinforces its legitimacy, or one is pursuing disobedience and direct action to take power away from such regimes, however incrementally. This has something to do with how “demands” are strategically made, and whether reforms are just illusions or really place more power in ordinary people’s hands.

How does Direct Democracy Function?

As we inquire with the Zapatistas and look at their rural-based popular assemblies that deliberate, we must reconsider how direct democracy is understood by many.

The forms and process of direct democracy are only valuable if they are able to meet a couple of requirements. And our Greece-based authors, through their urban movement experiences understand, that there can be a dynamic tension.

Are workplace councils and popular assemblies only for secular libertarians and leftists who are freethinkers leaning toward atheism? If not, what are such people doing to organize the grassroots to make the overwhelming majority in assemblies plural in ethnicity, gender, faith, and based among neighbors?

This raises two other challenges. Left libertarians need to fight for the program of direct democracy and workers’ self-management within these councils and assemblies, or inevitably the politics of hierarchy and domination will reconstitute themselves. Other political parties and the dominant socialization will make that happen. The global occupy and square movements revealed that direct democracy as a participatory- consensus-building process is not enough.

Modeling and Mentoring Ordinary People Placing Forward Programs and Perspectives of Their Own

People with elaborate worldviews, however compelling, cannot run roughshod over those learning politics. Perhaps in these councils and assemblies what experienced left-libertarian facilitators should be doing is something else besides ensuring everyone can speak for themselves.

We should help people, who don’t think exactly as ourselves, work out programs and perspectives of their own. They will know empowerment, not simply through talk, but by moving a proposal for practice toward consensus successfully. A community that lives by direct democracy has to plan and prepare proposals, not simply express consciousness streams.

Obviously, anti-fascists shouldn’t be helping fascists, and anarchists should not be helping better articulation of support for states and ruling classes. But this is where left-libertarians should be listening to rebellious instincts, perhaps not expressed through cultural matrixes that are native to their persons, and finding ways to expand community. This is more essential in an urban environment than in rural ones that have histories of being largely ethnic homelands. And clearly, the Zapatista cadre helped the indigenous not only find their own voices, but learn to frame their own laws and policies. Though we must keep in mind the indigenous collective memory has its own sensibilities on how to pursue this endeavor.

Protecting and Advancing the Minorities Among Us

The Global Left generally does a poor job of thinking about “minorities” beyond saying they abhor racism, advancing equal opportunity to enter the rules of hierarchy, and fighting white fascism. But this is to function only in a “white world.” In communities and countries where people of color are the overwhelming majority, oppressed minorities cannot be seen in this manner. They are part of larger ethnic and religious conflicts many think they can ignore in pursuing simplistic anti-imperialist frameworks. Who are the Zapatistas armed to protect themselves from? Rarely, is this clarified. Besides their conflicts with paramilitary forces of national and local states, where creole elites are present, they are in conflict with other Mexicans of indigenous, African, and mixed heritage.

Whoever is in the majority, in any neighborhood sector, whether it is in a forest or a city, should welcome, embrace, protect, and learn from the minority. In an ethnically plural society, whether in Iran or Guyana, not simply Greece or the U.S., this is true. During the Zapatista’s armed uprising, many local communities separated from their state and local governments. Imagine if anti-imperialists in Greece, Europe, or the United States were so rooted in neighborhoods with self-governing assemblies, that in response to foreign affairs, they expressed solidarity by seceding from the hierarchical regimes that claimed the authority to govern above?

Of course, there are many historical and contemporary atrocities and degradations that keep people apart and living in fear. Left libertarians, as the original Zapatistas did toward the indigenous (and they did not recruit all the indigenous!), can find common cause and community across borders, both official and unofficial, if they are persistent, even overcoming hindrances.

Dynamic Tension Between Feminism and Militarism?

The book delves further into the dynamic tension between feminism and militarism among the Zapatistas. If the Zapatistas constantly stress it is not the EZLN (their armed force) that drives the revolution, but the local communities through their grassroots democratic structures, it is unclear if these institutions are separate. And if they are separate, how direct is this community’s self-government in military and judicial affairs?

It is true, that in the past, military power and organization have been central to the Global Left’s revolutionary imagination. This was unproductive; it subordinated discourses on liberated zones to centralized high commands. In Greece, the fight against fascism and imperialism in the 1940s contributed to making heroes out of those who fought. Identifying with military discipline in Greek politics reasserted patriarchal and hierarchical values.

The authors seem to admit that the Zapatistas, like Rojava, have promoted women’s roles in their armed forces as symbols of resistance. The volume warns women in both places engage in councils, co-ops, and all aspects of these liberated zones; this implies an awareness that women in radical armed forces should not be made icons.

Taking Seriously a Plurality of Feminisms: Some Unfit for Liberty and Popular Self-Government

While I agree with the authors that macho imaginaries reinforce power, domination, and authority; they seem to quickly equate feminist projects with cooperation, participation, and solidarity. This is despite the fact that their movement experiences tell them this is not inherent to women or women’s liberation perspectives (of which there is a plurality).

Very often, many women’s liberation perspectives are banners of equal opportunity to rise to the top. There are also feminisms that identify with “equal pay for equal work,” which means those who clean hospital bed pans, and hotel bed linens ,and those who are police chiefs and corporate executives should get the same salary regardless of gender. This outlook doesn’t level hierarchy; it accepts social stratification and decorates it with identity politics.

The book sees the Zapatistas as challenging the Global Left to focus locally, minimizing grand projections. Peculiarly, we learned of the Zapatistas through their global projections beyond their local space. Early on, dense analysts over-determined the Zapatistas as a product of the Age of the Internet. Still, almost three decades later, it has never been easier to make and maintain global networks and projections. The question is, what are the quality of our ambitions and notions? And with all means of communication, have smartphones limited deep communication as a means of daily interpersonal accountability? If politics happens every day, communication can’t happen only for entertainment, workplaces, and occasional discussions that avoid collective responsibility. If politics is not happening every day in the new society, who will be carrying out economic plans, judicial decisions, and foreign affairs?

Radical Internationalism or Transnationalism? Unexamined Problems

The authors underscore radical internationalism often projects falsely “people-to-people” foreign policies. When in fact they are people-to-state, and state-to-state foreign policies. They are insightful; this needs rethinking. I am not sure that “transnational” means rejecting states and ruling classes. As the word “transcend,” it can mean going beyond while taking them with us. Left libertarians should be concerned. In African American discourse, “transcending the talented tenth” or the Black political class does not mean overthrowing, confronting, or making their lives miserable. I suspect what we understand as transnational obscures some ambiguities.

I have no reason to doubt these specific authors’ opposition to the state. But under the guise of transnationalism, certain activists retreat under the pretense of “libertarian municipalism” and do not defy local city-states or elite representatives at all. For us to accept that the Zapatistas have existed in the cracks of the system should not obscure, despite their skepticism, their very public dialogues with the state, even the highest offices of Mexico. It is not clear that this produced anything but allowed Mexican creole elites to sustain pernicious ideas that they too identify with indigenous heritage.

Enemies of the State, Discourses with the State?

The Zapatistas may have contributed the idea of creating alternative spaces to the state while accepting the state will not be defeated in their lifetimes. There is no special method or insight exhibited here. Where does anti-authoritarianism begin and historical materialism become renewed? This suggests people make history but only what doubters and depressed think possible.

The authors’ Zapatismo is kindred to the ideas of Cornelius Castoriadis, Murray Bookchin, degrowth, and the commons. Yet they don’t recognize, here, that the latter discourses often blur the lines between left libertarianism and welfare state social democracy. There is a difference between what the common people do, and the British House of Commons and similar elite representative bodies.

Commons for All: Distributed by the Commoners or the Welfare State?

If the Zapatistas are allied spirits to climate justice, land-based ecological movements and historical civil rights movements, and more recent movements against environmental racism based on “dignity,” this again conflates a progressive ruling class with those who organize impending confrontation.

We must make it very clear. The historical U.S. Civil Rights movement does not believe in the intrinsic equality of all people. It is a myth that has run its course. A rejection of white racial states, lynch law, and fascism does not mean belief in the equality of all people unless this means equal opportunity to rule above society and have property. Critics of environmental racism often rally around capitalist politicians or let them blabber uncontested.

The authors presciently recognize difficulties in translating Zapatista experiences of rural spaces to Greek urban spaces. One can be so far in the jungle, up in the mountains, or in maritime workspaces on the sea, where the state is for all practical purposes, not consistently present. That is not true for urban areas.

And increasingly, Greek urban spaces are marked by permanence of not simply cops, but helmeted riot police who are quick to throw tear gas and use their guns and clubs. Like pervasive general strikes in Europe, or Antifa, anarchist, and communist graffiti everywhere in Athens specifically, it is difficult to discern when these are significant historical events or mundane occurrences. Observing from the U.S. this can be difficult to grasp.

The authors say that when urban spaces interface with welfare state institutions, this is never satisfactorily resolved by Greek movements. This may be too kind. Left libertarians should not have a welfare state of mind. Further, the reason why we need to sustain workers’ self-management, with our search for neighborhood popular assemblies, is production and distribution must be taken from experts and professional administrators. Also, our vision of workplace councils and popular assemblies gathers everyday people not the main currents of the progressive or social democratic left.

In Greece, in contrast to the U.S. where the social democratic left is small in number, this can be a more difficult challenge. Greek politics have large numbers advocating for one-party states and welfare states; it may be difficult to separate folks from perspectives they are organically familiar with, if not loyal. However, social democracy should not be advanced as akin to creating dual power and counter-institutions. It repeatedly has expressed itself as imperialist with no criticism of professionals as the embodiment of culture and government.

Should Left Libertarians Divide their Analysis of the State Between Soft and Hard Power?

The book, at one juncture, analyzes Greece, and Europe, from a certain angle: the state is divided between “soft power” and “hard power.” Can this lead toward unproductive shared perspectives with factions of electoral politics we oppose?

It is solid diagnostics to view debates among ruling classes, that their factions desire to emphasize certain initiatives and plans in contrast to others. Still, it can evade leaving states behind, placing tasks of government in toilers’ hands.

Today, if the emphasis is on neoliberal austerity, such regimes always have money for armies and policing but not substantial safety nets for sufferers, we must be cautious not to define as “progressive” historical moments where the welfare state is expanding. That moment may return shortly in response to the ecological crisis.

These historical moments of the welfare state expanding can be read not as progress but as moments of counter-revolution, reconverting society to authoritarianism just as popular self-emancipation is emerging or getting the upper hand. For American labor history Roosevelt’s New Deal, given awareness that it failed to defend sharecroppers and domestic servants, and could not anticipate an ecological vision that only emerged in the early 1960s, was not otherwise a success.

A collaboration between trade unions, the state, and capital that strives to repress the self-directed liberating activity of toilers we should not relate. And the historical general strikes and wildcat strikes from 1934–1947 remind us of this fact. We cannot both identify with insurgency and the counter-revolution.

Just as Roosevelt’s New Deal surfaced to address the alienation of Americans during the Great Depression of 1929, Syriza (2004–2019) was a coalition of the labor hierarchy and the left bloc of capital in Greece that promised to combat the imposition of neo-liberal austerity. Though obviously a product of another historical moment, the welfare state retreating, it was still the maximum ideal offered. A party or movement can offer a welfare state perspective only to consolidate the grip of neo-liberalism through totalitarian representations. Totalitarianism is not merely a one-party state with a maximum personality. It is the substitution of new images and ideas reinforcing the same old disenfranchisement.

A regime calling itself socialist, working for black power, or expressing women’s autonomy is more devastating when it polices and represses. Ordinary people must find new ideas and identities to rally where the state insists that in fact, it embodies the popular will.

The popular will is rarely quick to adjust. Often it identifies with calcified ideas from another era instead of a proper analysis of the current mode of rule it is facing. We must innovate when the state captures our identity and claims to speak for the dispossessed. Syriza tried to do that, but where it could not think outside the boundaries of capital, it rallied people to reinscribe subservience. Syriza, like the Black Lives Matter leadership, also claimed to be trained Marxists. This should call the main currents of Marxist political economy into question.

Popular Self-Management in Contemporary Ethnically Plural Greece

Greece’s Thessaloniki citizen’s movement is fascinating. Opposing privatization, the city mobilized to defend water as commons, and made a projection of bottom-up self-management by the water and sewage workers. But it failed to come to fruition. The need to overcome human limitations and mistakes paves the way for new political practices. The authors record this event contributing to questions about the next liberation struggle.

Greek cities are marked also by squatters’ movements that have taken back urban space. Marginal toilers sustained homes, schools, and social spaces for years ignoring property relations and somewhat cutting against the grain of Greek cultural traditions that seeks property through extended family. How is this similar and different from Latin America’s indigenous?

Greece has also seen an explosion of alternative education projects promoting children’s autonomy, and new adult education based on the idea that Greece is an ethnically plural society.

“Greece” is also Iranians and Afghans, Nigerians and Ghanaians, Filipinos and Indians, Turks and Kurds, Bulgarians, Bangladeshi, Albanians, and Armenians, Mexicans, Chinese, and Japanese. It is not only Greek Orthodox or Catholic, but it is home to Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs. Both Greeks and Americans must guard against emerging ethnically plural police states, and elite patronage politics as they are vigilant against new hierarchies that must be smashed that arrive in the name of diversity and inclusion.

Resistance Versus Defense

Asking Questions, while placing the Zapatista experience in comparative perspective with contemporary Greece and European movements, recognizes there are circles today whose discourse of “resistance” is backward looking. It starts from a perspective of contemporary defeat while licking the wounds of past movements’ trauma in the collective memory. Among African-American women, particularly self-help book psycho-babblers, there is a shocking notion that “rest is resistance.”

An outlook that claims to inherit trauma from ancestors, those who have never organized to confront the state or capital (they usually happily work for both) have decided they need rest from the burdens of community organizing they have never actually pursued. Of course, wherever friends gather, who eat, pray, exercise, and mourn together, “communities of resistance” can be imagined. There is a modicum of truth in this but it is marked by widespread abuse.

In contrast, a perspective of civil defense starts from pride in autonomous institutions that actually make self-directed decisions on economic planning, judicial affairs, foreign relations, and ecology. Self-organized institutions do not overlap with the state and capital. The measure of their autonomy is that they are in conflict with, and trying to separate from, hierarchy and domination.

This is the political independence that must be defended. On occasion, under the banner of resistance, brutal police and fascists are fought. This is often constructive and there is no need to quibble about such valuable direct action that is restive. This is more than “resistance” when we start creating and governing liberated zones or neighborhoods, where official authorities know they are not welcome. A community defending itself often finds riot police gathering on its periphery. Those who are “resting” wish to avoid this sense of community.

The State as Material and Symbolic Presence

The book shares an outlook on the Zapatistas as exemplary of a movement that started as armed struggle and became a self-instituting movement. Comparatively speaking, the authors apparently doubt that an armed struggle could succeed in the urban spaces of Greece. However, “apparent” is a funny word that has two opposite meanings: self-evident and what is on the surface is doubtful. I sense a hint that prolonged armed struggles can’t succeed in Greek urban spaces; that is not the same as none at all. But what is required may be impending confrontations that strike back and retreat into sustaining functional liberated zones with workplace councils and neighborhood assemblies.

The authors recognize for most people that the state, in any modern society and urban space, has a certain legitimacy as the mediator of social problems. The state and its cultural apparatus begin conversations and set agendas. Those fighting for direct democracy and workers’ self-management have (or must) become adept at constantly reframing assumptions of those we dialogue with, so they may consider our proposed ways out of crises. Further, what a significant section of the populace does, whether in rebellion or retreat, also is a measure of social legitimacy.

This reality, the state as consensus mediator of dialogue, and legislator of laws, makes it difficult to finally smash the welfare state of mind. All republican mentalities need exposure, not simply “conservative” ones. Also, apparently benevolent regimes have a eugenics state of mind. These administrations insist everyday people cannot govern.

Underlining capacities for direct popular self-government makes aspiring progressive rational administrators go bonkers. We need to make progressives’ contempt for direct democracy well-known. Still, the authors recognize the welfare state has a way through elite brokerage, and ethnic and cultural patronage, of handing out gifts. This makes people formulate political loyalties in terms of what they receive, evading commitment to recasting society.

This volume reflects on the Zapatistas’ initial uprising (they call it an effervescence) over time slowly began focusing on institution-building for community formation. A similar process, these Greeks observe with their own risings of 2008 and the movement of the squares in 2011.

In Greece, our authors tell us following their risings, new horizontal trends and bottom-up decision-making came face to face with politics soaked in the logic of state and capital. The authors brilliantly convey that even in spaces that appear to exhibit popular self-management, imaginaries of national sovereignty, search for economic growth, a return to normalcy, and lack of desire to kick the state while it’s down are dominant trends. Yet, truly popular assemblies have diverse viewpoints and conflicting tendencies.

There are those who talk about dual power only as a prelude to their opportunity to seize state power above society. In contrast, such scenarios are opportunities to abolish state power and all hierarchical regimes. We should not object to authority. We seek to arrive at our own self-directed authority, not as a lifestyle or counter-culture but forging a social anarchism that dialogues, builds insurgent campaigns, coalitions of disobedience, and self-directed liberating institutions.

The Need for Roots

Very insightful when it thinks comparatively with the Zapatistas, who set up their society in conversation with pre-colonial Mayan cultures and local myths, with emphasis on the stories of the “corn people,” the reader should commend this meditation. Still, it is the future we must learn.

The authors’ Zapatistas “have assumed the identity of the indigenous,” and galvanized common ground for struggle alert to a past marked by centuries of exploitation. Nevertheless, Zapatista-inspired communities do not stay uncritically tied to the past. For they have created autonomous cultures based on “moving forward, by asking questions.” By this means, they apparently have sustained constant reflection on their social co-existence. Do most people of faith not constantly reflect on the world they live?

These authors argue against allowing ethnicity and religion to mask aspirations of authoritarian rulers — and this is a real danger. At the same time, perhaps the authors and the Zapatistas, are anxious that there is something troublesome about cosmological thinking. This can be made obscure by Zapatistas romantic mytho-poetics.

Do the indigenous Mayans view their stories as oral histories, creation myths, or cosmological experiences where the dead, the living, and the unborn are in dialogue? Though often conflated, these are not the same. In Mexico, the widespread holiday “The Day of the Dead” (Aztecs may celebrate differently than Mayans) welcome ancestral spirits into their lives; in reality, this is not simply one day but a way of life. For many, the spirits of the dead, living, and unborn are always present and in conversation.

Perhaps this is something like radical historians placing the past in dialogue with the present and future if this is not too much strain on the aspiring keepers of reason. As we see with the faithful around the Zapatistas, the spirit world is not a retreat from responsibility, but also can never be pure politics.

Strikingly, the authors speak of the generalized alienation of the Greek and European populations. An experience of widespread rootlessness, the maintenance of independent values and cultures disappear. There is a lack of social bonds, and the nation-state and its nationalism dominate all sense of community.

When one looks back on Greek antiquity, separate from the more modern life of the church, one still finds gatherings around ancient shrines and gods. Greece also has festivals dedicated to saints and informally cults, really smaller communities dedicated to cosmologies the orthodox find disturbing. Western civilization claims Greece as a fount of reason, not religion. Still, there are many mystic aspects to its antiquity cultures that the grassroots still revere.

From Simone Weil to Murray Bookchin

The authors validly project cultures of reasoning that are not veils for aspiring absolute truths; they desire a basis for a rooted community, that reflects on the past, and plans for the future. The authors offer impressive insight using Simone Weil’s ideas. Weil, the left-libertarian Catholic mystic, reminds rootedness is where people feel secure in the communities they live, where they participate actively and organically. We can push further.

Is human celebration of births and mourning of deaths, taking part in rites of passage as children learn from elders their traditions and responsibilities not organic? These need not clash with modern and secular conceptions of autonomy.

What then, are organic sources of dignity, grace, and faith? It is an affirmation of life, not simply wars for liberation, or designing a new society. Now I think moderns and the increasingly secular find peculiar, if not disturbing, why the affirmation of life is processed through singular religions and ethnicities, that the miracle of life is somehow related to our bloodlines. And our faiths suggest chosen peoples that necessarily imply terms for social subordination of others.

And yet women give birth to children nurtured in their wombs. Many go through a near-death experience in their pregnancies. Out of the mess of blood, bath water, and feces emerges life. Many validly are unsatisfied with the scientific explanation of how birth happens; perhaps, humans have the right to view it as a miracle.

Still, when we ask questions, we should ask the faithful how children will eat and their parents pay rent, under the empire of capital. Does this too need divine intervention? One can get carried away with all this. To be clear, the indigenous that the Zapatistas have found community have a far more enchanting view of “Mother Earth” than Emma Goldman’s. “No Gods, No Masters” is a terrible slogan where it equates people’s faith inherently with slavery and servility.

Faith, like reason, is a matter of discipline, how we question and wonder. The Zapatista assemblies, where animated by listening to the land, are a conversation with the divine for many of the indigenous, whether radical cadre prefers it that way or not.

None of this is to suggest that women are only baby factories and that men must have the gender roles of warriors and economic providers. We all, together, must nurture, provide, defend, and emancipate.

Indigenous Ecology as Mother Earth

Asking Questions focuses on how the Zapatistas have built community with the indigenous, their outlook on “Mother Earth,” their “simple” way of living, and their “listening” closely to nature. Following in the tradition of Bookchin, who desired to re-enchant humanity, these authors warn against the urban reception of the indigenous as occasions for inventing spirituality, esotericism, or any vehicle for supernatural escapism.

This escapism, sometimes expressed as anarcho-primitivism, can lead to blaming conquered humans for the ecological crises of our time. It can even view those dying of disease as part of natural selection. This discards science and reason for nonsense.

Nevertheless, we must be alert that the cultures and rituals of the indigenous and pre-colonial pastoralists, hunter-gatherers, peasant farmers, mechanics, mid-wives, market women, and artisan craftsmen are not without science. Further, the critique of superstition and magic can come very close to telling human beings their gods are false and have failed, their rituals are based on fetishes and false icons, and pretty soon what we step on is how some very good and sincere people access or unleash revelation. Have not left libertarians been told their values and institutions have failed as well?

The gulf between Bookchin’s social ecology and deep ecology may have been overstated. Do the indigenous have a community with animals and sometimes see them as their sister and brother? Don’t radical historians place the dead, the living, and the unborn (the future) in conversation with the goal of advancing creativity and self-government? Isn’t Mother Earth the mediated (and perhaps imprecise or false) name for the indigenous sense of their creator? Those that know indigenous languages may be able to tell us; if we are ready to receive their offering. Re-enchantment cannot finally be reduced to various rituals not worthy of mention; this was one of the great Murray Bookchin’s limitations as a theorist.

Will We Enchant Our Humanity? Can We Better Converse with Humanity Already Enchanted?

We become organically familiar with diverse rituals when we have genuine fellowship with those inviting us to celebrate their love and happiness, receive their births, and mourn their deaths — separate from politics. Simultaneously, we must be alert to those who hide behind “beliefs” and “necessity” offering no genuine contribution to liberation.

It is difficult to tell what the Zapatistas have learned from the indigenous for political practice, where they have taken on their identity, besides there is always more to learn. “Enchant” means not a sense of reason or politics but wonder about our world. Yes, we can be captivated by questions we enjoy or are compelled to ask by arduous circumstances. Still, more is required.

In our left-libertarian response to the challenges of re-enchantment, we should have a sense of what the Surrealists called the marvelous, and also the awesome responsibilities of building a self-directed liberating society. Awesome does not just mean overwhelming. It means we have reverence for our limitations. Nobody prays to and worships limitations (those that pray ask for strength and revelation). We find our limitations striking, awakening, and revitalizing. Why ask questions if there is nothing left to discover?

We should anticipate that some co-workers and neighbors, when we discuss convincingly the self-directed liberating society, will find this a revelation. Unfortunately, some people of faith and others atheistic will never be convinced. Beyond us finding it strategic, we should do them the kindness of honoring, in some way, the cycle of life, the dead, the living, the unborn (the future), and the matrix of creative forces that we are part. Not a false philosophical conception of time, it is consistent with terms of limited economy, left-libertarianism, and social reproduction. I have never known most global anarchists to celebrate the “Day of the Dead.” Perhaps some might reconsider. Some may be surprised to know that it is also celebrated in Greece.

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