The Zapatistas and the end of Necro-Capitalism

Muerte, capital, vida

Everything here is for sale except for indigenous dignity.

Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional

Seattle, WA. The Zapatistas of southcentral Mexico's zona lacandona, the canyonesque highlands of southeastern Chiapas, are often described as the first post-modern revolutionary movement.

The upland Maya peoples who are the core of indigenous Zapatistas - while rooted in five hundred years of resistance to colonialism, actually started the self-defense form of their organization in the early 1980s in response to the centuries-old practice among the landed gentry, state governors, and various other assorted political thugs to hire and maintain private armies, the mercenary death squads that have long been used to assassinate native farmers, forest dwellers, plantation workers, and itinerant labor organizers.

Neoliberal death

This form of structural violence has long been accompanied by the Mexican state's policy of transmigration that brought huge numbers of outsiders, mainly impoverished and displaced mestizo workers, to la selva. These workers were employed, exploited would be more accurate, in the burgeoning industrial capitalist markets for chiapaneco water, minerals (including oil), timber, coffee, tropical fruits, livestock, and other "resources" including rare and endemic butterflies collected by those who covet the objectified living organisms of the trade in "exotic" biodiversity.

These interloping workers and speculators were recruits of the free trade in ethnocide/ecocide: Slash-and-burn destruction was unleashed by all sorts of "operators" who hired the itinerant workers to toil in the uplands to extend the reach of the landed political gentry. Displacing and starving the Zapatista communities to death by destroying their crops and right livelihoods in their common, is a strategy that serves the ruthless bloody enclosures and the commodification of all life. We arrive at neoliberalism's free trade nirvana, and find nothing but death.

Of course, the history of what I think we should call necro-capitalism is filled with countless such episodes of structural violence unleashed by what Karl Marx called the "primitive accumulation" - the forced separation of the native from her land and her means of autonomous existence. I recall, for example, Kit Carson leading the US Army attack on the Dine peach and apricot orchards at Canyon de Chelly in Arizona before the Navajo were marched across the desert to a concentration camp at Bosque Redondo; or the Dutch Boers destroying the Khoikhoi orchards and row crops fields to establish the roots of apartheid in South Africa; or, well.....ad nauseum.

I am stating that death is an ubiquitous presence at the birth of capitalist enclosure and original accumulation; anywhere; every place.

Karen Capuder, a Mohawk woman and graduate student, reminds us that debates about "over-population" and free markets assume, with calm disregard for westernized hyperconsumerism, that little brown people in the so-called third world, in their abject poverty, are the greatest threat to the environment. What such arguments fail to note is that western capitalist colonizers decimated indigenous populations that are only now starting to recuperate to levels not seen in five hundred years. Western capitalist development is our impoverishment; our death. Indigenous people talk about this a lot. We do it in the old and new wampum belts, medicine bundles, and talking sticks; our "secrets" are embedded in these unfolding stories.

Necro-Capitalism

But back to Chiapas. The slash-and-burn armies of death were not alone. Narco-trafficant networks, some tied to military units and the very same Death Squads employed by the gentry, added to the misery of the Lacandon Maya peoples and their highland forest ecosystem, which by the way ranks among the most significant biodiversity hot spots in Mexico and indeed the world; for example, some eighty (80) percent of all North American butterflies are endemic to la selva lacandona, hence the illegal trade in rare specimens.

The Zapatista revolt, La guerra del nuevo año, launched 1 January 1994, is an amazing accomplishment as an insurgency against the Death Squads of what I call necro-capitalism - a form of exploitation explained best by the Zapatista dicho: "Here everything is for sale except for indigenous dignity."

I have been thinking a lot about death and the "commodity form" of late. About how death comes in the form of the development banker as well as the eco-tourist officer, both promoting "development" of indigenous worlds and hence displacement of natives from their inhabited wilderness (as self-willing land) to make room for coffee plantations or biosphere reserves; or the narco-trafficker and evangelical interloper selling poison and, well, more poison. Death comes in the tracks of death squads and the transformation of the ecology of place whenever/wherever capitalists seek to "develop" or "extract" value from the sovereign "natural resources" in native territories.

If political ecology has something to contribute to all this, a better understanding of necro-capitalism, then perhaps we would do well first to recall that ecology may be the study of life but anthropology haunts the halls of death studies.

How we bring these two "subversive sciences" together is the key. Traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) and the other forms of place-based knowledge (e.g., self-governance) are the door that this key opens for us. A door that leads to a "bridge." A bridge to nowhere? A bridge between what the Zapatistas call "basement" and "penthouse" Mexico? Or, perhaps a bridge to indigenous autonomy and alterNative place-based democracy?

Free markets in the fear of death

Now, life/death is a tricky binary for sure. This seems especially the case in Western epistemologies that champion the subject position of the atavistic individual; the individual is the only rights-holder and no communities are allowed here in the realm of "freedom" in trade nirvana.

This artifactual Westernized entity - the Hobbesian individual reductio absurdium - is the political project of original accumulators and is said to be the sole analog for the practice of rationality. The free trading individual, dancing with prices, is the sole heir of a "naturalized" framework of the "rational self," and this self-interested rational individual is posited as the key to a world with the widest distribution of civil and profitable social good.

Fear of death, especially the mass spectacle sort of death etched in the minds of most Americans post 9/11, seems to be a major driver of the capitalist production of an endless stream of commodities related to security against "terrorist death" (e.g., Blackwater mercenary adjuncts of necro-capitalism), avoidance of illness leading to death (the commodification of biomedicine), or the purchase of death-defying consumption at the expense of others, and this last one is mainly attained through our ability to take advantage of disparate risk that allows us to externalize violence against the environment, labor, and other "subaltern" or "marginalized" populations to enjoy our "consumer choice freedom." This is an epistemology that privileges what van Hayek calls "dances with prices." Makes one yearn for "dances with wolves." That is a pretty ugly epistemology if you think about it.

Are the ecological, social, legal, and economic impacts of our individual consumer right to have limitless access to global commodity chains the root of necro-capitalism? Is it therefore appropriate or useful to conceptualize capitalism as a "death machine"?

But it seems that Americans, who spend a lot of money on various forms of denial of death (risk reduction included), are also into denial about the ability of the privileged to put some distance between themselves as consumers living in urbane comfort, and the violence to environmental space in local places that lies at the root of the commodity chains feeding our ravenous appetites. Does the tin in your laptop come from pit mines in forests stripped bare by the local military thug in Congo after he murdered the forest dwellers and burned their crops?

When the Zapatistas rebelled in opposition to NAFTA, they did so by declaring the US-Mexico-Canada trade pact, "A Death Warrant for Indigenous People."

What would lead a swidden and milpa upland forest-dwelling culture to become the most advanced activists and intellectuals in the frontlines of reiterative place-based communities of resistance organizing a massive movement against globalization and neoliberalism, necro-capitalism? What do the Zapatistas mean by Death and Life? Hint: It is not a binary.