Wages of Rebellion

by Chris Hedges

  The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, in his 1942 novella Chess Story, chronicles the arcane specializations that have created technocrats unable to question the systems they serve, as well as a society that foolishly reveres them. Mirko Czentovic, the world chess champion, represents the technocrat. His mental energy is invested solely in the sixty-four squares on a chessboard. Apart from the game, he is a dolt, a “momomaniac” like all monomaniacs, who “burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.” When Czentovic “senses an educated person he crawls into his shell. That way no one will ever be able to boast of having heard him say something stupid or of having plunged the depths of his seemingly boundless ignorance.”8

  An Austrian lawyer known as Dr. B, who had been held by the Gestapo for many months in solitary confinement, challenges Czentovic to a game of chess. During his confinement, the lawyer’s only reading material was a chess manual, which he memorized. He reconstructed games in his head. Forced in captivity to replicate the single-minded obsession of the technocrat Czentovic, Dr. B also became trapped inside a specialized world, but unlike Czentovic, he went insane focusing on a tiny, specialized piece of human activity. His insanity returns once he challenges the chess champion.

  Zweig, who mourned for the broad liberal culture of educated Europe swallowed up by fascism and modern bureaucracy, warns of the absurdity and danger of a world run by technocrats. For Zweig, the rise of the industrial age and the industrial man and woman is a terrifying metamorphosis in the relationship of human beings to the world. As specialists and bureaucrats, human beings become tools, able to make systems of exploitation and even terror function efficiently without the slightest sense of personal responsibility or understanding. They retreat into the arcane language of all specialists to mask what they are doing and give to their work a sanitized, clinical veneer.

  This is Hannah Arendt’s central point in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Technocratic human beings are spiritually dead. They are capable of anything, no matter how heinous, because they do not reflect upon or question the ultimate goal. “The longer one listened to him,” Arendt writes of Eichmann on trial, “the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”9

  Zweig, horrified by a world run by technocrats, committed suicide with his wife in 1942. He knew that, from then on, it was the Czentovics who would be exalted in the service of state and corporate monstrosities.

  Resistance, as Berkman points out, is first about learning to speak differently and abandoning the vocabulary of the “rational” technocrats who rule. Once we discover new words and ideas through which to perceive and explain reality, we free ourselves from neoliberalism, which functions, as Benjamin knew, like a state religion. This effort will take place outside the boundaries of popular culture and academia, where the deadening weight of the dominant ideology curtails creativity and independent thought.

  Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, the spokesman for the Zapatistas (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, or EZLN), announced in May 2014 that his rebel persona no longer existed. He had gone, he said, from being a “spokesman to a distraction.” His persona had fed an easy and cheap media narrative and turned a social revolution into a cartoon for the mass media, he explained. This persona had allowed the commercial press and the outside world to ignore traditional community leaders and indigenous commanders and wrap a movement around a fictitious personality. His persona, Marcos said, had trivialized a movement.

  “The entire system, but above all its media, plays the game of creating celebrities who it later destroys if they don’t yield to its designs,” Marcos declared.10

  The Zapatistas formed the most important resistance movement of the last two decades. They were a refreshing departure from the dreary, jargon-filled rhetoric of the Stalinist/Third Worldist sections of the old radical left. The Zapatistas recaptured the language of poetry, art, lyricism, and humor and became a visible counterweight to the despoiling of the planet and the subjugation of the poor by global capitalism. They repeatedly reinvented themselves—as Marcos did—to survive. The Zapatistas gave global resistance movements a new language, drawn in part from the indigenous communal Mayan culture, as well as from the writings of figures such as Eduardo Galeano and Gabriel García Márquez. Offering a new paradigm for action, they understood that corporate capitalism has launched a war against us. And they showed us how to fight back.

  “Neoliberalism, this doctrine that makes it possible for stupidity and cynicism to govern in diverse parts of the earth, does not allow for inclusion other than that of subjection to genocide,” Marcos wrote in an open letter in May 12, 1995.

  “Die as a social group, as a culture, and above all as a resistance. Then you can be part of modernity,” say the great capitalists, from the seats of government, to the indigenous campesinos. These indigenous people irritate the modernizing logic of neo-mercantilism. Their rebellion, their defiance, their resistance, irritates them. The anachronism of their existence within a project of globalization, an economic and political project that, soon, will decide that poor people, all the people in opposition, which is to say, the majority of the population, are obstacles. The armed character of “We are here!” of the Zapatista indigenous people does not matter much to them nor does it keep them awake (a little fire and lead will be enough to end such “imprudent” defiance). What matters to them, and bothers them, is that their very existence, in the moment that they [the indigenous Zapatistas] speak out and are heard, is converted into a reminder of an embarrassing omission of “neoliberal modernity”: “These Indians should not exist today, we should have put an end to them BEFORE. Now annihilating them will be more difficult, which is to say, more expensive.” This is the burden which weighs upon neoliberalism made government in Mexico.

  “Let’s resolve the causes of the uprising,” say the negotiators of the government (leftists of yesterday, the shamed of today) as if they were saying: “All of you should not exist, all of this is an unfortunate error of modern history.” … “Let’s resolve the causes” is the elegant synonym of “we will eliminate them.” For this system which concentrates wealth and power and distributes death and poverty, the campesinos, the indigenous, do not fit in the plans and projects. They have to be gotten rid of, just like the herons … and the eagles … have to be gotten rid of.11

  The Zapatistas began by using violence, but they soon abandoned it for the slow, laborious work of building thirty-two autonomous, self-governing municipalities. Local representatives from the Juntas de Buen Gobierno (Councils of Good Government), which is not recognized by the Mexican government, preside over these independent Zapatista communities. The councils oversee community programs that distribute food, set up clinics and schools, and collect taxes. Resources are for those who live in the communities, not for the corporations that come to exploit them. And in this the Zapatistas allow us to see the future—a future where we have a chance of surviving.

  “This figure was created, and now its creators, the Zapatistas, are destroying it,” Subcomandante Marcos said to roughly 1,000 people who turned out late in the evening of May 24, 2014, in the village of La Realidad for a memorial for a Zapatista teacher, José Luis Solís López, who had been murdered by Mexican paramilitary members. “And we saw that now, the full-size puppet, the character, the hologram, was no longer necessary. Time and time again we planned this, and time and time again we waited for the right moment—the right calendar and geography to show what we really are to those who truly are.”12

  The murder of the teacher—known by his nom de guerre as “Galeano”—three weeks earlier, on May 2, appears to have been part of a drive by a governmen
t-allied paramilitary group, CIOAC-H, to assassinate rural Zapatista leaders and destroy the self-governing Zapatista enclaves. The Fray Bartolome Human Rights Center said that fifteen unarmed Zapatista civilians were wounded on May 2. In other attacks that day, a Zapatista clinic was destroyed and a school and three vehicles were damaged.13

  The address was the first public appearance by Marcos since 2009. In a downpour, he spoke to the crowd into the early hours of May 25. He has been the public face of the Zapatistas since the group emerged as an insurrectionary force on January 1, 1994, in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico. Marcos, who is mestizo rather than Mayan, spoke about his rise as a media figure following the uprising and how the movement had catered to the demands for an identifiable leader by a press that distorts reality to fit into its familiar narratives.

  Just a few days later [after the uprising], with the blood of our fallen soldiers still fresh in the city streets, we realized that those from outside did not see us.

  Accustomed to looking at the indigenous from above, they did not raise their eyes to look at us.

  Accustomed to seeing us humiliated, their heart did not understand our dignified rebellion.

  Their eyes were fixed on the only mestizo they saw with a balaclava, that is to say, one they did not look at.

  Our bosses told us:

  “They only see their own smallness, let’s make someone as small as them, so they may see him and through him they may see us.”

  A complex maneuver of distraction began then, a terrible and marvelous magic trick, a malicious play of the indigenous heart that we are, the indigenous knowledge challenging modernity in one of its bastions: the media.

  The character called “Marcos” started then to be built.

  The clandestine movement began, like all rebellions, with a handful of idealists.14

  “When the first group arrived in 1983, 1984, we were in the densest part of the jungle,” Marcos said in Remembering Ten Years of Zapatismo, a documentary produced by the Chiapas Independent Media Center and Free Speech Radio News. “We are talking about a group of four or five, six people that repeated to themselves every day ‘this is the right thing to do,’ ‘the right thing to do.’ There was nothing in the world telling us this was the right thing to do. We were dreaming that someday all of this would be worth something.”15

  Early on January 1, 1994, armed rebels took over five major towns in Chiapas. It was the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect. The EZLN announced that it no longer recognized the legitimacy of the Mexican government. In denouncing NAFTA as a new vehicle to widen the inequality between the global poor and the rich, the EZLN showed an understanding of free trade agreements that many in the United States lacked. It said it had resorted to violence because peaceful means of protest had failed. The Mexican government, alarmed and surprised, sent several thousand members of the military and police to Chiapas to crush the uprising. The military handed out food to the impoverished peasants. It also detained scores of men. Many were tortured. Some were killed. In twelve days of heavy fighting, about two hundred people died. By February, the Zapatistas, who had hoped to ignite a nationwide revolution and who were reeling under the military assault, agreed to negotiate. Most had retreated into the surrounding jungle. The insurgency, Marcos said at the memorial for his assassinated comrade, had faced a fundamental existential choice at that point:

  Should we prepare those who come after us for the path of death?

  Should we develop more and better soldiers?

  Invest our efforts in improving our battered war machine?

  Simulate dialogues and a disposition toward peace while preparing new attacks?

  Kill or die as the only destiny?

  Or should we reconstruct the path of life, that which those from above had broken and continue breaking?

  … Should we have adorned with our blood the path that others have charted to Power, or should we have turned our heart and gazed toward who we are, toward those who are what we are—that is, the indigenous people, guardians of the earth and of memory?

  Nobody listened then, but in the first babblings that were our words we made note that our dilemma was not between negotiating and fighting, but between dying and living.

  … And we chose.

  And rather than dedicating ourselves to training guerrillas, soldiers, and squadrons, we developed education and health promoters, who went about building the foundations of autonomy that today amaze the world.

  Instead of constructing barracks, improving our weapons, and building walls and trenches, we built schools, hospitals and health centers; improving our living conditions.

  Instead of fighting for a place in the Parthenon of individualized deaths of those from below, we chose to construct life.

  All this in the midst of a war that was no less lethal because it was silent.16

  The movement’s shift from violence to nonviolent civil disobedience—a shift that also took place within the African National Congress (ANC)—was evidenced during the memorial. Zapatista leaders said they knew the identities of the vigilantes who had carried out the attacks. But those in the crowd were cautioned not to seek vengeance against the killers, who, they were told, had been manipulated to murder in the service of the state. The focus had to remain on dismantling the system of global capitalism itself.

  As happened with the ANC half a world away, the shift from violence to nonviolence was what gave the Zapatistas their resiliency and strength. Marcos stressed this point:

  Small justice looks so much like revenge. Small justice is what distributes impunity; as it punishes one, it absolves others.

  What we want, what we fight for, does not end with finding Galeano’s murderers and seeing that they receive their punishment (make no mistake this is what will happen).

  The patient and obstinate search seeks truth, not the relief of resignation.

  True justice has to do with the buried compañero Galeano.

  Because we ask ourselves not what do we do with his death, but what do we do with his life.17

  This transformation by the EZLN is one that is crucial to remember as we search for mechanisms to sever ourselves from the corporate state and build self-governing communities. The goal is not to destroy but to transform. And this is why violence is counterproductive. We too must work to create a radical shift in consciousness. We must, as the Zapatista slogan insisted, “Be a Zapatista wherever you are.” And this will take time, drawing larger and larger numbers of people into acts of civil disobedience. We too must work to make citizens aware of the mechanisms of power. An adherence to nonviolence will not save us from the violence of the state or from the state’s hired goons and vigilantes. But nonviolence makes conversion, even among our oppressors, possible. And it is conversion that is our goal. As Marcos said:

  Maybe it’s true. Maybe we were wrong in choosing to cultivate life instead of worshipping death.

  But we made the choice without listening to those on the outside. Without listening to those who always demand and insist on a fight to the death, as long as others will be the ones to do the dying.

  We made the choice while looking and listening inward, as the collective Votán that we are.

  We chose rebellion, that is to say, life.18

  It was a brisk February morning in Oxford, England, when I left the Macdonald Randolph Hotel, a stately Victorian Gothic building, on Beaumont Street. I walked along the narrow cobblestone streets, past the storied colleges with resplendent lawns and Gothic stone spires, to meet Avner Offer, an economic historian and Chichele Professor Emeritus of Economic History at Oxford University.

  Offer, author of The Challenge of Affluence: Self-control and Well-being in the United States and Britain Since 1950 (2006), has explored for twenty-five years the cavernous gap between our economic and social reality and our ruling economic ideology. According to Offer, our ideology of neoclassical economics—the belief that, as E. Roy Weintraub wrote, “p
eople have rational choices among outcomes” that can be identified and associated with values, that “individuals maximize utility and firms maximize profits,” and that “people act independently on the basis of full and relevant information”—is a “just-world” theory.19 “A just-world theory posits that the world is just. People get what they deserve. If you believe that the world is fair, you explain or rationalize away injustice, usually by blaming the victim.”

  But, he warned, if we continue down a path of mounting scarcities, along with economic stagnation and decline, this neoclassical model becomes ominous.

  “Major ways of thinking about the world constitute just-world theories,” he said. “The Catholic Church is a just-world theory. If the Inquisition burned heretics, they only got what they deserved. Bolshevism was a just-world theory. If Kulaks were starved and exiled, they got what they deserved. Fascism was a just-world theory. If Jews died in the concentration camps, they got what they deserved. The point is not that the good people get the good things, but the bad people get the bad things. Neoclassical economics, our principal source of policy norms, is a just-world theory.”

  Offer quoted the economist Milton Friedman: “The ethical principle that would directly justify the distribution of income in a free market society is, ‘To each according to what he and the instruments he owns produces.’ ”