Other essays in this issue outline the main characteristics of postmodernist "discourse." For present purposes, it will be enough to cite a particularly compelling example to illustrate how this discourse is now being applied to what used to be called the "Third World." That example is found in the work of Gayatri Spivak, who once remarked that "Class is the purest form of signifier," implying that class is a "pure" linguistic symbol in the sense that it has no concrete referent in the material world.(1) From the vantage point of the sort of linguistic theory on which so many postmodernist discourse analysts draw, the quality of the referent is less important than the location of concepts like class in relation to other "signifiers." So Spivak is able to say, for instance, that "socialism" has "no historically adequate referent" in India, by which she means that Indian socialism did not originate in a truly indigenous tradition of socialist discourse. Aijaz Ahmad has recently commented on this observation in a way that nicely captures the postmodernist notion of "history." To be told that socialism has no "historically adequate referent" in India, he remarks, would come as a big surprise to all those millions of Indians who, for reasons having to do with their own experience of their own domestic capitalism and their own situation in its class divisions, regularly vote Communist. The "historical referent" for Indian socialism, in other words, is not some disembodied imperial "discourse" but Indian capitalism and a political practice "undertaken within India by Indian political subjects."(2)
That is one way of summing up the difference between postmodernism and Marxism. It isn't that Marxism is uninterested in language, discourse, or meaning, and the best historical-materialist work deals precisely with the many different concrete referents that words like "class" or "work" can have in specific historical conditions. But here I simply want to underline that Marxism can understand the practices through which meanings are produced in relation to the actions of people on and in the world and not just in relation to other meanings. Practices are undertaken in particular places at particular times by particular subjects in particular conditions, and these have to be studied historically.
Say, for instance, we want to analyze Mexican society, whether viewed through the prism of the Mexican revolution of 1910, or the neo-Zapatista revolution in Chiapas starting on January 1, 1994, or the crisis of the state and the ruling party in recent months. A starting point would be to recognize that Mexico has long been a "postcolonial society." Mexico has moved along temporally - if not developmentally - from an earlier colonial condition for almost two centuries. Yet one of the most striking features of the ways in which political power is organized socially and experienced subjectively throughout Mexico - whether in the "advanced" northern state of Chihuahua or the "backward" southeastern state of Chiapas - is that it is and remains a profoundly colonial or, in a pinch, neocolonial rather than unequivocally postcolonial form of power. Neither the Wars of Independence and the Wars of the Reform during the nineteenth century, nor the revolution of 1910 and the "re forms" of Salinastroika in the period 1988-1994 during the twentieth century, signalled irreversible, radical breaks with the past. Rather, they are moments in a sustained process of transformation. That series of political transformations was associated with a series of economic transformations that established the specific form of Mexican capitalism. The language of "pre" and "post," which pretends to be about historical change, actually disguises these processes of transformation by carving up history into discontinuous and disconnected units.
Nevertheless, the lure of intellectual fashion is so great that scholars who two decades ago worked with peasants in Mexico, and wrote about social movements, rural class formation, and the permanent character of the primitive accumulation of capital in dependent, peripheral states, now author postmodernist essays and books with titles (e.g., Hybrid Cultures) and themes (the metaphor of a salamander to organize reflections on Mexican history) that have more in common with magical realist literature than with historical materialist analysis. This is not to suggest that magical realism - say, the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende - has nothing to tell us, and that only historical materialism can reveal the Truth. It is only to underline the radical differences between literary and historical ways of relating to social reality.
Perhaps it should come as little surprise that some postmodern/postcolonial critics seem, or pretend, not to know that the arenas of discourse in which their work circulates are at several removes from the social reality they purport to represent. The privileges now enjoyed by intellectuals in the North have been so reduced that many seem to be compensating by providing to themselves an inflated sense of their own importance and the significance of purely intellectual or "discursive" practices. Nonetheless, the distinction between what is being talked about and how it is being talked about remains important. As Gabriel Garcia Marquez is reported to have said to Carlos Fuentes while discussing the turn taken by internecine struggles within the ruling party in Mexico in the early months of 1995, "We are going to have to throw our books into the sea. We've been totally defeated by reality."(3) If a litterateur can get the point, why can't a literary theorist?
Yet postmodern concepts and assumptions, even casual turns of phrase, have a real seductive power over many intellectuals; and the freewheeling adoption of a postmodern vocabulary is having especially insidious effects on the study of current historical developments. This is particularly evident in the boatloads of material published about the EZLN uprising in Chiapas, the rebellion of the damned in the South that woke up the world on the morning of January 1, 1994. In the rush to issue accounts of this seemingly unprecedented and original popular uprising, the expression "postmodern" fell quite easily from the pens and mouths of many commentators. More than a year after the EZLN challenged the power of the Mexican state, meanwhile, we read on the New York Times Op-Ed page that "the Mexican Meltdown of 1995 is the first postmodern economic crisis."(4)
Beside an unending stream of English-language publications providing profiles of the EZLN or its spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos, several computer networks devoted solely to distributing information about the EZLN have appeared as well. It's as though the circulation of information, the communication and production of commentaries in the English-language book and electronic media, is mirroring the production by impoverished Chiapan peasants-become-artisans of "Marcos" and "Ramona" dolls, the small wooden figures clothed not in traditional Mayan garb but in the outfits of the EZLN, complete with miniature ski masks and wooden rifles.
It is perfectly in keeping with the postmodernist worldview that a major theme in accounts of the Chiapan rebels has to do with the media of communication through which "we" in the North learn about, and relate to, the EZLN. "In Marcos' prose," writes one specialist, "one senses an expertise and familiarity with computer-based text, if not directly with e-mail."(5) putting things this way (which assumes that guerrillas are freely able to tap into electric power lines in a state in which, though it generates half the hydroelectric power in all of Mexico, most towns are not wired for electricity) diverts attention and analysis from an explicit consideration of the actual goals and accomplishments of the neo-Zapatistas and their connection to other currents within Mexican, Latin American, and North American society. It shifts attention instead toward the postmodern world of digital simultaneity. In being asked to assess "what effect the e-mail activity [h as] had on actual events," we are presented with the image of "new icons of romantic rebellion" "bursting through ... TV screens" and the powerful effect of "the Zapatista presence on the Internet."
Asserting that the multiple messages resonating "within the nocturnal hacker community" have a palpable historical effect fits perfectly the notion that neo-Zapatismo is indeed a "postmodern political movement."(6) Focusing on, even celebrating, the EZLN's use of modems, fax machines, and e-mail suggests that their most distinctive feature as a political movement is to have shifted the object of struggle from control of the means of production to control of the means of communication; revolutionary ideals are to be advanced by the free exchange of rebel-friendly software and communications packages. But this way of thinking about the rebellion tends to block out the years of organizing that preceded January 1, 1994. To assert the fundamental "postmodernity" of the EZLN is not really to analyze "actual events" in Chiapas. It is more a way of allowing some intellectuals to appropriate these events, to situate these complex historica l developments on their own (intellectual) terrain, to assimilate them to a discourse that permits computer-literate academics to feel good about themselves.
A Postmodern Political Movement?
Particularly disconcerting is the manner in which claims regarding the postmodernity of the EZLN are repeated by people on the left. An example that springs to mind is Roger Burbach's essay on the "Roots of the Postmodern Rebellion in Chiapas" published in the New Left Review last summer, where the EZLN is described as "a postmodern political movement" that attempts "to move beyond the politics of modernity."(7)
Once past these introductory remarks, Burbach presents a compelling, competent, and concise description of the neocolonial background to the 1994 uprising. Drawing on recent research by anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists familiar with the region, Burbach presents an analysis that is not particularly "postmodern" in either form or structure. He demonstrates that the rebellion occurred in Chiapas when it did because a particular form of capitalism has been adopted in this region of the world. Outlining the ways labor migration is related to the alienation of the peasantry from the land, how commercial agriculture, especially of coffee production, is buffetted by fluctuations in international commodity prices, and how strategic relocations of squatters are engineered by the Mexican state while large landowners and ranchers continue to rely on hired gun thugs (the guardias blancas), Burbach gives some substantive content to the notion of "combined and uneven development.& quot;
Nevertheless, in its opening and closing paragraphs, where the assertion of the fundamental "postmodernity" of the EZLN is repeated time and again, the essay is symptomatic of what can happen when northern intellectuals, even those on the left, become enchanted by a sort of postmodernist identity politics. This adoption of postmodern vocabulary and categories of analysis winds up revealing more about academic politics in the North than it does about the situations these analyses are meant to explain. I think it is worth closely examining some of these passages in Burbach's article in order to appreciate fully the absurdities to which such analyses can lead.
The opening paragraph begins thus:
The Indian uprising in Chiapas that burst upon the world scene in
January is a postmodern political movement. The rebellion is an
attempt to move beyond the politics of modernity ....
It is difficult to see how a rebel army of peasants, aware of itself as the product of five hundred years of struggle, that quotes from the Mexican constitution to legitimate its demand that the president of Mexico immediately leave office, that additionally demands work, land, housing, food, health, education, independence, liberty, democracy, justice, and peace for the people of Mexico, can be called a "postmodern political movement." How can the EZLN move beyond the politics of modernity when their vocabulary is so patently modernist and their practical organization so emphatically pre-modern? Their democratic command structure is a slow-moving form of organization - requiring as it does direct consultation and discussion with the base communities in five or six different languages - which is difficult to reconcile with postmodernist digital simultaneity. Do their demands include a modem and VCR in every jacale or adobe hut in Mexico? No. Is their chosen name "The Post modern Army of Multinational Emancipation" or "Cyberwarriors of the South"? No. They are the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Emiliano Zapata (not a free-floating signifier" but a specific historical subject), who led the peasants of Morelos from 1911 until his assassination in 1919 in recovering control of the land and driving out the caciques /foreign political bosses, is a very unlikely postmodern hero.
Here is the conclusion of the opening paragraph: "Even more fundamentally, [the rebellion] seeks to end the victimization of Indians by centuries of western modernization." Again, there is little particularly "postmodern" about struggling to that end (quite apart from the fact that pre-modern forms of exploitation are alive and well and continue to be major targets of struggle). Here it becomes increasingly difficult to get a grip on what is supposed to be postmodern. What is the "modernization" which the neo-Zapatistas are resisting? Does it have something to do with capitalism? Would any anticapitalist struggle be postmodern? For that matter, since one of the major conceits of postmodern discourse is that capitalism doesn't exist, at least as a systematic totality, it hardly makes sense to talk about a postmodern anticapitalism. And since it is unclear what historical conditions are being opposed by a postmodern politics, we are left with the impression that the neo-Zapat ista program is a kind of historical utopianism, a pipedream of virtual reality, rather than a pragmatic response to real historical conditions.
Nor is our understanding of postmodernity or of the EZLN much
advanced by the following:
The uprising led by the EZLN ... comes in the wake of the collapse of
the "modern" bipolar world of the post-Second World War era and the
ideological exhaustion of most national liberation movements....
Burbach here appears to be assuming that the collapse of the "Communist world" signalled the end of modernism. But it is not at all clear what is supposed to be postmodern about that extremely tentative great leap forward of neoliberal ideology, the market, and policies oriented toward capitalist economic restructuration; in some important respects it may represent a triumph of "modernism." And from an altogether different point of view, it is possible to view the triumph of modernism in an optimistic light. As Marshall Berman has written:
1989 was not only a great year, but a great modernist year. First, because millions of people learned that history was not over, that they had the capacity to make their own history - though not, alas, in circumstances chosen by themselves. Second, because in the midst of their motions, those men and women identified with each other: even in different languages and idioms, even thousands of miles apart, they saw how their stories were one story, how they were all trying to make the modern world their own. I fear that vision has faded from our public life.(8)
One thing demonstrated by Chiapas 1994 is that the vision to which Berman refers, almost nostalgically, has once again been drawn into focus by the appearance of neo-Zapatismo, the forthright clarity of the communiques from the CCRI-CG (Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee-General Command), and the writings of Subcomandante Marcos. At the same time, and particularly in Chiapas, there still remain bipolar axes of difference - women and men, capital and labor, North and South, Indian and white - through which peoples lives are organized, and disorganized, and made miserable. In a sense, then, the " modern' bipolar world of the post-Second World War era" is stronger - and more vicious, more destructive, more retrenched - than ever. The most serious problem facing "most national liberation movements" - including the EZLN - may not be ideological exhaustion but rather the threat of physical extermination.
In any case, it is difficult to determine the ideological resources available to participants in such movements when their own voices are muted and their own practices obscured by the superimposed discourses of northern academics. If such movements derive their meaning only from the terms 6f academic discourses, how different is the conservative claim that the EZLN is led by "outside agitators" from the supposedly radical claim that the EZLN is a postmodern political movement"?
Maybe what really identifies the EZLN as a postmodern movement for Burbach is this: "What distinguishes the EZLN from its predecessors is that it is not bent on taking power in Mexico City, nor is it calling for state socialism."
But in addition to being a curious reason for regarding the movement as postmodern, this is straightforwardly and simply wrong: wrong about the EZLN, and wrong about its predecessors. First, in their declaration of war in late1993, the first order from the General Command of the EZLN to its military forces was to "Advance to the capital of the country, defeat the Mexican Federal Army... and permit the liberated peoples to elect, freely and democratically, their own administrative authorities."(9) Second, from the time of the conquest and even before, Mexican history has been wracked by largescale popular uprisings and rebellions by peasants and Indians. A key feature of these mobilizations is that most were, precisely, not "bent on taking power in Mexico City." Perhaps that's why the peasants and Indians invariably lost, why each rural revolt has ended with the victory of the dominant class.
Whatever the extent of violence exercised during earlier popular uprisings, there has often been a strong antimilitaristic streak running through them, and an even stronger repudiation of the power of the state, whether colonial or neocolonial, patrimonial or capitalist. Two obvious examples that spring to mind are the popular armies led by Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa between 1911 and 1920. But neither Villismo and Zapatismo [Mark I] were "bent on taking power in Mexico City"; nor were either of them calling for "state socialism." To try to forge a new basis for social life in a way that is grounded in the experience and responds to the demands - or the requirements for living - of los de abajo, of the misnamed marginados (who are in fact not the least bit "marginal" to the continuing reproduction of specific forms of exploitation) is hardly to call for state socialism. In any event, "state monopoly capitalism" is a more accurate term for the sort of socia l system Burbach correctly insists the neo-Zapatistas are repudiating.
At any rate, throughout the world peasant movements have tended to regard the state as alien and distant, and typically their revolts have been directed not at the seizure of state power but at the replacement of an alien form of rule by a different social order. Hence it could be argued that the failure to aim for state power is rather more pre- than postmodern. If Burbach is right about the neo-Zapatistas' relation to the state, then the EZLN is typically pre-modern; but if he is wrong, than it is more modern than "postmodern."
The other side of this coin is Burbach's claim that the EZLN's objective "is to spark a broad-based movement of civil society in Chiapas and the rest of Mexico that will transform the country from the bottom up."
It is undeniable that the EZLN is distinguishable from other popular social movements in Mexico in the last sixty years in its success at not only precipitating "a broad-based political and ideological dialogue" but also in actively mobilizing large groups of people. It is no less certain that the current effort is not without precedents outside the conventional circuits of power that flow to and from the state and the ruling party, the PRI. Many Mexican activists and popular organizations - some more visible and predictable than others - share the objective of generating a broad-based movement to transform society from the bottom up. Alongside human fights organizations, peasant coordinadoras, and the popular organizations that sprang out of the rubble of the earthquakes in Mexico City in 1985, are the unofficial and independent trade unions, the millions of people who voted for Cuauhtemoc Cardenas in 1988, and movements such as the peasant mobilizations in the northern state of Chihuahua in the 1980s that linked up with peasant mobilizations in Chiapas, just as others had a century earlier. What distinguishes the EZLN, then, is not its objective, but the genuinely unprecedented success with which its initiative has been embraced and taken seriously by many currents in Mexican society.
Yet however unprecedented the EZLN's apparent success up to now (in April 1995), it is still hard to see what this has to do with its postmodernity. Broad-based movements in Mexican society have both "modern" and "pre-modern" antecedents, and organization in "civil society" has long been a staple of popular mobilizations. When in his concluding section Burbach again insists that the EZLN's postmodernist perspective" is demonstrated by "the demand for authentic democracy, and transforming society from the bottom up," one can't help wondering why good old Marxist socialism, with its commitment to securing human emancipation and a thorough democratization of society beginning with freely associated direct producers" would not be the epitome of postmodernity.
The attempt to pin the postmodern label on the EZLN is shot through with contradictions, which are nicely summed up in the following observation:
Another central factor facilitating this revolt's postmodernity is that it is not a rebellion against a typical autocrat or dictator like Batista or Somoza, but a movement that traces its lineage back to the early twentieth-century Mexican revolution.
To begin with, it is unclear exactly what Batista or Somoza are supposed to typify. But the main thing is that the rebels - communicating in languages understood only by themselves and a handful of anthropologists, linguists, missionaries, and former Maoists - yet again appear pretty pre-modern and the enemy they have identified manifestly modem. What distinguishes the EZLN, even by this account, is not their postmodern redefinition of temporality, space, and experience itself, but, on the contrary, their sense of palpable connection with a tradition. Burbach's observation that "The struggle of the EZLN ... [is] over how to mobilize the population to recapture the country's revolutionary ideals" certainly captures something important about what the neo-Zapatistas are trying to accomplish and how they are self-consciously building upon past struggles of historical peasantries in Mexico. But that observation neatly and decisively subverts his claims for the EZLN as a "postmodern political movement."
So where does this leave us? The language of postmodernity has added nothing to our understanding of Chiapas. If anything, it has obscured and detracted from what is valuable in Burbach's account. It is especially depressing to observe this effect in an otherwise illuminating and politically sympathetic study, and it is a measure of the price we have to pay for this surrender to fashion. Instead of bringing us closer to an understanding of a complex social movement, it simply serves to underline the profound distance between postmodern intellectuals and the activists or supporters of the EZLN.
Why not interject some remarks of a Chihuahuan peasant, asked whether people in northern Mexico, followers of Francisco Villa, had joined the revolution in 1910 to recover control of their land? "Put it that we now have land," replied Cruz Chavez in 1986, but that was a fight. And justice? And freedom? When will we get that? Can you tell me? Look, we're gonna die of old age without seeing them, because the more time that passes, justice and freedom only get worse in our country.(10)
Now I can imagine at least two different ways of connecting these remarks to what is happening in Chiapas today. We could simply take Cruz Chavez's words with those of Subcomandante Marcos and measure them both against some abstr-act repertoire of signifiers to find out, for example, whether they are pre- or postmodern discourses. Alternatively, we could consider these discourses historically, comparing the ways in which words like "freedom" and "justice" figure in their respective vocabularies, and how they relate to their concrete and changing historical referents, their material and social conditions, their political practices and struggles. We could consider as well how the labor process in Mexican agriculture has or has not changed since 1910, how political democracy has or has not advanced. And we could explore the ways in which the EZLN is trying in practice to answer the questions posed by Cruz Chavez in a different region of Mexico, under different historica l conditions, and building differently on a long history-including the 1910 revolution-of political struggle.
In the first case, it is hard to see how our objective as intellectuals could be anything else than to appropriate those discourses, to claim them as our own. In the second, we would simply be trying to understand and explain. The latter objective is in some ways more modest. At least it is less likely to exaggerate the power of intellectuals, because it acknowledges that we are talking about social and political practices undertaken by specific people other than ourselves, instead of claiming that our own discourse is the only real practice, our academic discourse the only real politics.
Derek Sayer has suggested that "we might want to consider the possibility that the status of organic intellectual' of anything other than a ruling class might just be a contradiction in terms."" However difficult it may be to accept, this suggestion does have the virtue of acknowledging both the limits and the grounding of intellectual activity. Something approximating, however remotely, the determinative power that postmodernist intellectuals claim for their own discursive practices-the power to create reality itself-is, in the real world, possible only for servants of a ruling class, with the power of the state underwriting their discourses. The rest of us should be content to see our intellectual activity function as a critical instrument, as a challenge to ruling ideologies, maybe as a guide to political action when possible, but above all as a way of enhancing or broadcasting, but not replacing, the voices of those who oppose oppression.
(1.) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, to a seminar at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Brown University, March 1988. (2.) Aijaz Ahmad, "The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality," Race & Cass 36, 3, (1995), p. 5. (3.) New York Times, March, 1995, p. Al. (4.) Thomas Friedman, New Mexico,' New York Times March 15, 1995, p. A17. (5.) Deedee Halleck, "Zapatistas On-Line," NACLA Report on the Americas 28, no. 2, (September/october 1994), p. 30. (6.) Quotations above from Halleck, Zapatistas On-line, pp. 31-32. (7.) Roger Burbach, "Roots of the Postmodern Rebellion in Chiapas", New Left Review 205, 1994, pp. 113-124. (8.) Marshall Berman, "Why Modernism Still Matters," in Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman, eds., Modernity and Identity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992). (9.) Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiques of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1995), p.53, translated by Frank Bardacke and Leslie Lopez. (10.) Interview with Cruz Chavez Gutierrez in El Tascate, Namiquipa, Chihuahua, July 1986. This man was the grandson of an earlier Cruz Chavez, who led the town of Tomochic, Chihuahua, in a briefly successful and still influential armed uprising against the Mexican state in the early 1890s. (11.) "Some Dissident Remarks on Hegemony" in G. Joseph and D. Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formmation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 373.
Monthly Review, July-August 1995 v47 n3 Full Text COPYRIGHT 1995 Monthly Review