LA MESA POPULAR

Rebel Dignity
Manuel Callahan

I
n the film All Power to the People, director Lee Lew Lee edits into the nar-
rative a quick cutaway of H. Rap Brown punctuating a speech before a large
lecture hall by loudly and emphatically declaring, “Black Power is dignity!”1
The idea of Black Power as an expression of dignity echoes in the seminal text
of that era—Black Power—whose authors, Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton,
argue that the project of Black self-determination revolves around the claim-
ing of dignity.2 Not too long ago, direct actions against suprastate institutions
such as the WTO and IMF, corporate giants such as Monsanto, and the corrupt
political formation of the United States and its client states also proclaimed dig-
nity as a rallying cry that animated the lockdowns, barricades, and convergence
spaces of the alterglobalization and emergent autonomous movements.3 More
recently, Eric Garner’s defiant cry—“I can’t breathe”—signaled a collective claim
to dignity that has been carried forth by Black Lives Matter and the larger police
accountability/antimilitarization movement confronting increasingly visible,
targeted, and militarized police repression.4
Probably the most resounding declaration and demonstration of dignity
reverberating from the “global south” has been the “¡Ya basta!” (Enough!) of
the Zapatistas.5 The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) as well
as the related Zapatista solidarity community has advanced dignity as a potent
political praxis that resonates through increasingly networked communities of
struggle.6 Dignity as articulated by the Zapatistas has been central to the arsenal
of anticapitalist opposition and to the toolkit for building autonomy. Although
the Zapatistas did not invent dignity and are not the only ones to claim it as a
“category of struggle,” as John Holloway puts it, they emphasize its political
import by placing it at the center of their autonomy project.7 Thus, the Zapatis-
tas have not only revived interest in dignity as a political provocation but also
invited us to consider it in other dimensions.

Manuel Callahan is an insurgent learner and convivial researcher with the Center for Convivial Re-
search and Autonomy. He also participates in the Universidad de la Tierra Califas when he is not
working for the Mexican American studies department at San Jose State University.

Kalfou, Volume 3, Issue 2 (Fall 2016). © 2016 by the Regents of the University of California. ISSN 2151-4712 (print). ISSN
2372-0751 (online). http://dx.doi.org/10.15367/kf.v3i2.106. All rights reserved.

ideas, art, and activism

260 | Manuel Callahan

In this essay I want to expand on Holloway’s assertion that the Zapatistas

have made dignity a critical and essential moment of struggle. I also want to
propose that in the Zapatistas’ hands we witness its transformation from a term
of solidarity into a strategic concept. As a theoretical tool it must be reclaimed
by excavating it from specific struggles, acknowledging its several components,
and engaging its practical application as a map for struggle. By highlighting the
theoretical coordinates that the Zapatistas have made evident in their political
praxis, my purpose here is to advance dignity as a convivial tool that promotes
autonomy. Indeed, my efforts with dignity parallel the task Ana Dinerstein sug-
gests for autonomy: “the art of organizing hope.”8
I am deploying strategic concept to identify a term that has special signifi-
cance as a related set of ideas that possess a strategic value based in struggle:
the kind of term that enjoys such wide circulation or has become so well used
that it might seem to have little meaning. In some cases such a widely shared
concept may become an epistemological obstacle.9 A strategic concept, however,
is a term that has been recuperated and associated with several related ideas
through struggle. The result is a conceptual tool that brings several components
into sharper focus in and through movement. In each instance where I claim a
strategic concept, I recognize that I am amplifying the insights generated by its
original authors or those who have made claims to it in specific contexts. Thus,
a strategic concept is a product of the conjuncture that provokes it and of those
searching for it, looking for a new weapon to wield. My goal is to highlight the
key elements made available when the concept was first developed and to link
it to new thinking sharpened through social antagonism. I call attention to its
moment of emergence because strategically I rely on a genealogical approach to
emphasize the play of forces at every turn. In other words, I want to amplify criti-
cal elements to connect them to a living theory, in an effort that exposes strategic
insights through struggle but refuses to impose a future. Moreover, the recupera-
tion, or amplification, is part of a “circulation of struggle,” a political process that
is never only in the present because we recognize what the past has earned and
achieved for a number of reasons that are critical in the current moment.10 We
mark the debt, even as we refashion it for new conflict on different fronts.
The Zapatista project invited new theorizations of dignity, expanding its
political uses from a “category of struggle” to a strategic concept with four criti-
cal elements: an analytical category, a political objective, a political praxis, and a
space of knowledge production. Approaching the term epistemologically, I build
on what Holloway suggests for dignity as a class concept and specify additional
elements that constitute a strategic concept. At least four critical elements of
a strategic concept resonate with how dignity has been reclaimed by the Za-
patistas. First and foremost, a strategic concept always works as a category of
analysis to acknowledge and celebrate oppositions. Second, strategic concepts
create space for the deliberation and exercise of efforts to change existing condi-

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 Rebel Dignity | 261

tions of inequality. Third, strategic concepts point to a praxis, a set of political

commitments and a related practice informed by the theoretical insights gener-
ated through reflection and action. Finally, strategic concepts that recognize
resistance as well as claim space(s) in order to engage a praxis produce new
knowledge about existing conditions and the multiple approaches and efforts
to change those conditions. Examining dignity in these four dimensions can
highlight how it operates in service of the emergence of a collective subject.

Dignity as a Category of Analysis

Dignity as a category of struggle draws our attention to moments of insurgency,
making it possible for us to discern distinct moments of rebellion and possi-
bility. Thus, as a category, dignity assists us in locating moments of struggle
that point to the ruptures in oppressive, exploitative, and disciplinary forces.
It also highlights the persistent exercise of autonomy, those moments when a
class “takes the initiative in struggle and acts ‘autonomously’ vis-à-vis capitalist
power.”11 As an analytical tool, it allows us to locate and recognize those spaces
where communities of struggle assert their dignity. Moreover, as a postcolonial
concept, it also serves as an analytical tool to locate moments of resistance that
do not necessarily fit into standard Western narratives of “revolution.” It claims
a multiplicity of struggles.
Several authors recognize how dignity has become, as Gustavo Esteva has
suggested for autonomy, “the focal point for a whole new semantic constella-
tion.”12 It refuses to be limited, contained, or easily defined, encompassing a vari-
ety of oppositions and multiple dimensions of struggle. Dignity, Holloway insists,
overflows. It might also be viewed as a “connector” concept. Walter Mignolo
explains that dignity had lost all meaning, becoming an “empty signifier” in its
claim to be universal. “The words are universally used,” he writes, “but they no
longer have a universal meaning.” The Zapatistas’ presence on the world stage,
however, points to a critical moment in which human dignity is being reclaimed,
not as an abstract universal notion that reinscribes the “coloniality of power”
but as “a connector of similar colonial experiences in different colonial histories,
whether in the rest of the Americas, in Asia, or in Africa.”13 Consequently, much
like its counterparts rebellion and revolution, dignity as a decolonial concept can
no longer be assumed to belong to any one person, group, or movement in par-
ticular; nor is there only one path to claim, exercise, or express it. In a similar way
to how the concept of “culture” has been transformed and recuperated, dignity
no longer fits in any narrow, one-dimensional framework.14 We must approach it
as situated—that is, as contingent, contested, and complex.
Without a doubt, Holloway has been the one who has most closely exam-
ined how the Zapatistas have reclaimed dignity as a category of struggle. In
“Dignity’s Revolt,” he defends the Zapatistas against charges of “armed reform-

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262 | Manuel Callahan

ism” and other criticisms that dismiss their political project as theoretically and
politically unsophisticated by taking up the question of dignity and its central
importance to the Zapatista mobilization. Holloway argues that the Zapatista
rebellion has successfully abandoned the earlier, limited vocabulary of “class”
and “class struggle” for a new language: dignity. According to the Zapatistas,
he explains, the old language was “so worn out that they [the old words] had
become harmful for those that used them.”15 For the Zapatistas, dignity works
as a reinvigorated class concept that implies the “struggle against subordina-
tion” and, Holloway insists, against the “social antagonism” that constitutes how
“human social practice is organized” in a capitalist context:

The social antagonism is thus not in the first place a conflict between
two groups of people: it is a conflict between creative social practice and
its negation, or, in other words, between humanity and its negation, be-
tween the transcending of limits (creation) and the imposition of limits
(definition). The conflict, in this interpretation, does not take place after
subordination has been established, after the fetishised forms of social
relations have been constituted: rather it is a conflict about the subordi-
nation of social practice, about the fetishisation of social relations. Class
struggle does not take place within the constituted forms of capitalist
social relations: rather the constitution of those forms is class struggle.16

An antidefinitional concept of dignity articulates a revolutionary subject that is

not confined to any dogmas, political parties, or platforms that impose a single
path to change. “The principal problem for a revolutionary movement,” explains
Holloway, “is not to elaborate a programme, to say what the revolutionary gov-
ernment will do (although the EZLN has its 16 demands as the basis for such a
programme). The principal problem is rather how to articulate dignities, how
to develop a form of struggle and a form of social organization based upon the
recognition of dignity.”17
Thus, dignity’s refusal of definition makes it an antistate category. As a po-
litical project, dignity initiates a moment to reject the state’s efforts “to define,
to classify, to limit”; instead, it proposes an alternative to state forms. “The prob-
lem of revolutionary politics,” explains Holloway, “is not to win power but to
develop forms of political articulation that would force those in office to obey
the people (so that, fully developed, the separation between state and society
would be overcome and the state effectively abolished).”18 “Moving from the
what to the how of politics,” revolution is no longer “some grand plan, in the
sense of a movement designed to bring about the Great Event which will change
the world.”19 Although the Zapatista struggle is an Indigenous struggle emerg-
ing from the very specific context of the Lacandon jungle and the highlands of
Chiapas, it is also a struggle “for all those ‘without a voice, without face, without

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 Rebel Dignity  |  263

tomorrow,’ a category that stretches far beyond the Indigenous peoples.”20 At

times it is draped in the language of a national liberation movement that does
not just focus on the Indigenous but rather includes everyone—la patria—as
part of a diverse community otherwise excluded by the state. I rehearse Hol-
loway’s exposition of the Zapatistas’ engagement with dignity to acknowledge
his critical insights, but also to highlight the strategic elements present in the
Zapatista linking of dignity with class struggle.

Dignity as a Political Objective

Not merely a category of struggle, dignity also works as a political objective. In
other words, the assertion of dignity ignites a shared effort to co-construct a
space to recognize the dignity that is being claimed and where, once claimed,
it can flourish. The Zapatistas’ exercise of dignity—their declaration of ¡Ya
basta!—has been an invitation to co-construct a space where others might join
the cry Enough! Beyond their own community, the Zapatistas have not exactly
organized but rather have convened. They have hosted a wide array of visitors
in a profound series of encuentros, or encounters, that have enabled a num-
ber of political relationships to emerge and strategic knowledges to be shared.21
The Zapatista use of encuentro began with the Democratic National Conven-
tion (CND) in August 1994 and continued with the establishment of the first
Aguascaliente (autonomous space for encounters between the EZLN and civil
society). That effort was followed by a series of Zapatista gatherings, hosting
specific constituencies in the newly carved-out space. The government’s brutal
attack on the first Aguascaliente in February 1995 prompted the construction of
five additional spaces. In 2006 the Zapatistas dismantled the five Aguascalientes
and introduced the caracoles, a dramatic innovation in their political strategy
of convening and hosting political gatherings as well as linking the autonomous
municipalities. Concerned with the growing tensions produced by solidarity
work on behalf of the Zapatistas and equally motivated to further support the
autonomy of the Zapatista municipios, the Zapatistas inaugurated five caracoles
for the EZLN and its base communities to engage civil society while also for-
mally advancing the effort towards autonomy. The caracoles make visible the
Zapatista success in building autonomy since they also serve as regional centers
for the productive interaction between Zapatistas and non-Zapatistas through
the Juntas de Buen Gobierno, the coordinating councils for each region.22
The success of the Aguascalientes as well as the more recent advance of the
caracoles has meant a persistent flow of visitors, delegations, and “Zapatours”:
groups who travel to Chiapas to serve as human rights activists, live in the com-
munities as peace observers, work in collective projects, dialogue with the Za-
patistas, and generally offer support. More importantly, the spaces of encounter
have been opportunities to claim a diverse and diffuse community of rebels and

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264 | Manuel Callahan

refuseniks who are able to recognize and celebrate a shared project. These spaces
have been critical in supporting, for example, the alterglobalization movement
as well as other networks of struggle.23 The combined efforts ensure increased
visibility for the EZLN and its base communities. In addition, these visits also
serve as opportunities for visitors to witness Zapatismo on the ground. Over the
years, activists and intellectuals have been able to observe firsthand the struggle
of rebel autonomous communities against a military siege and low-intensity
war—resistance through spaces of dialogue, assembly, consensus, and direct ac-
tion. Many travelers return to their own communities profoundly inspired and
ready to intensify their solidarity efforts, while at the same moment committed
to exploring new strategies for their local struggles: strategies that emphasize a
politics of listening.24
Probably the most important aspect of the Zapatistas’ open, ongoing spaces
of encounter is the multiplicity of proposals and positions to promote an emerg-
ing, decentralized, networked community of rebellion and resistance. “Perhaps,”
Subcomandante Marcos explains, “the new political morality is constructed in
a new space that is not the taking or retention of power, but serves as the coun-
terweight and opposition that contains it and obliges it to, for example, ‘lead by
obeying.’”25 Mobilizing the politics of space is an effort at encuentro, with the
possibilities of different political practices slowly taking root. “The audacity of
the Zapatistas,” according to the Midnight Notes Collective’s assessment of the
First Intercontinental Encuentro, “was to open a clearing in the forest heavily
patrolled by the Mexican Army and to allow others to come to speak to each
other about capitalism and revolution.”26 It is fundamentally a space that allows
for the possibility of individual and collective transformation into a community
with purpose—the “One no, many yeses!” battle cry that has been taken up by
many who are committed to an anticapitalist politics.27

Dignity as a Political Praxis

On a practical level, the assertion of dignity invites others to claim it. However,
the exercise of dignity cannot be such that one claim diminishes or extinguishes
another. Rather, dignity always entails a commitment to learn—to discover a
process to honor the many dignities present as well as to recognize the very
specific dignity being claimed and stake out ground for an alternative where all
dignities are acknowledged and take root. The politics of encuentro—as space,
gathering, and strategy—depends on the mutual recognition of and engagement
with the dignity of participants in order to imagine new horizons collectively.
Subcomandante Marcos writes:

The “other” and “different” are not looking for everyone to be like they
are. As if each one is saying that everyone has his own way or his own

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thing (I don’t know how that’s said now) and, in order for this to be possi-
ble, it is not enough to just be, you must also always respect the other. The
“everyone doing his own thing” is double: it is affirmation of difference,
and it is respect for the other difference. When we say we are fighting for
respect for our “different” and “other” selves, that includes fighting for
respect for those who are also “other” and “different,” who are not like
ourselves. And it is here where this entire resistance movement—called
“underground” or “subterranean,” because it takes place among those
below and underneath institutional movements—meets Zapatismo.28

“Dignity’s revolt,” to borrow Holloway’s apt phrase, does not take place in a vac-
uum. Rather, it is an exercise in a specific context where it brings into relief op-
pressive forces as well as those in solidarity. Zapatista rebels seeking statements
and, by extension, political and cultural practices alternative to the dogmas of
the more traditional hierarchical left encountered an art that many had taken
for granted: dialogue. What the Zapatistas termed civil society was increas-
ingly engaged in an emerging dialogue with itself. Now, the Zapatistas’ view of
dignity, hope, and care has been transmitted through the direct actions they ex-
ecuted. Dignity implies a recognition of others also in struggle and invites them
to share their word. Dialogue as a central objective, “a revolution that makes
revolution possible,” has been pursued through encuentro.29
In new political spaces, all voices and proposals emerging from specific con-
texts of struggle must be heard and responded to with respect. This active listen-
ing is precisely the challenge of the Zapatista articulation of political movement
sustained through encounters—the deliberate creation of political spaces to ar-
ticulate new affinities, declare shared commitments, validate strategic points of
reference, and create self-organized, autonomous collective subjects composed
in the struggle for new social relations based on acknowledging and valuing
difference.30 But the challenge posed by dignity is whether it can flourish; this
requires an effort to “go beyond solidarity.”31
Encuentro as a praxis and a space should not be confused with a political
rally, academic conference, or activist forum. The Zapatista approach to encuen-
tro does not rely on ideology, organizational affiliation, or even identity. Thus, an
encuentro is not a space to impose an already established political program in
order to conscientize or mobilize a constituency in service of a specific issue in
a traditional sense. It is not a chic or clever approach to capture activist market
shares. Rather, encuentros are spaces for a collective analysis and shared vision
to emerge while allowing for a multiplicity of efforts and projects.32

[An encuentro] is not an attempt to establish political and program-

matic agreements, nor to attempt a new version of the International. Nor
does it have to do with unifying theoretical concepts or standardizing

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266 | Manuel Callahan

conceptions, but with finding, and or building, common points of dis-

cussion. Something like constructing theoretical and practical images
which are seen and experienced from different places.33

The effort at encuentro affirms local struggles while being animated by larger
networks of opposition against neoliberalism that circulate struggle.34 It estab-
lishes a connection between the so-called First World and Third World without
relying on a liberal or even a radical tutelage. Thus, Zapatismo challenges civil
society to collectively nurture the space of encounter as “a commons of wealth
not yet lost.”35
A space for encounter, convened for dialogue, reflection, and action, tran-
scends a multicultural framework that promotes a liberal pluralist strategy of
diversity. The politics of encounter suggested here is militantly polycultural,
recognizing each participant as living in a pluriverse committed to respecting
difference—i.e., political proposals and cultural practices that emerge from a
variety of subject positions, histories, and political commitments within specific
contexts of struggle.36 The Zapatistas’ politics of encounter, a consistent strategy
of facilitating broad, inclusive political spaces for dialogue without directing
the outcomes and procedures for these engagements, encourages convivial pro-
cesses of active participation as it facilitates the emergence of a self-valorized,
autonomous, and collective subject. A situated, engaged politics of difference
resists the homogenization imposed, as Subcomandante Marcos suggests, by the
competing hegemonies of the twentieth century.37 Each participant in a space,
to invoke the biological way of knowing articulated by Humberto Maturana
and Francisco Varela, contributes so that “every act of knowing brings forth a
world.”38 Thus, a successful gathering is a space where, according to the Zapatis-
tas, “many worlds fit.”39
The Zapatista and Zapatista-inspired encuentros are designed to bring to-
gether various historically marginalized sectors (structurally and/or culturally
positioned formations and forces) and independent organizations. One commit-
ment is that individuals or representatives of organizations are not represent-
ing the interests of the state or the market. Another commitment is that all of
these formations have refused the logic of the status quo governed by national
and international capitalist relations, state power, and bourgeois culture. There-
fore they share a common refusal—a common “no!”—but may have various,
complementary, or disjunctive “yeses.”40 No single voice, organization, sector,
or force can be privileged as the defining agent of revolutionary or historical
transformation.
Dignity evokes an ethical dimension, and its claims to space bring a number
of political obligations. For Enrique Dussel, the new language promulgated by
the EZLN embodies a certain “ethical character” made available through the
EZLN’s strategic use of a distinctly Mayan idiom that establishes “three criteria

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 Rebel Dignity | 267

of ethical validity.” The first consists of the EZLN’s insistence “on calling our
attention to the dignity of the negated historical subject.” The second speaks to
“the need to fulfill the requirements for the reproduction of life.” The third ethi-
cal criterion addresses the fundamental aspects of community. Specifically, the
EZLN has presented a model of community that is “institutionalized through
social means conducive to consensus, agreement, and decision making.” The
driving force in the constitution of community, according to Dussel, is Mayan
democracy. For Dussel, the ethical dimension of the EZLN’s political project
challenges the very legitimacy of the nation-state by emphasizing that it is a
historical development brutally imposed on Indigenous peoples.41
Thus, dignity as a category of analysis and a political objective cannot be
understood outside the production and negotiation of its meaning, which is
part of an ongoing, plural, conflictive process that unfolds in specific contexts
of struggle. Perhaps best encapsulating the conceptualization embedded in a
theoretical practice of dignity, Marcos explains:

Revolution begins to be the possibility that human beings have a space

of dignity. Dignity begins to be a very strong word. It is not one of our
contributions, it is not a contribution of the urban element, the commu-
nities make that contribution. In such a way that revolution guarantees
that dignity is achieved, it is respected.42

The Zapatistas have put forward a living theory: that is, their engagement with
dignity draws attention to the dimensions of locally rooted struggle and pro-
poses to change those conditions without imposing predetermined or already
established solutions.

A Space of Knowledge Production

The political space dignity generates also opens a space of learning. When we
approach dignity as a strategic category of struggle that implies a political ob-
jective and a political praxis, we affirm that the space and praxis of dignity
constitute a moment of learning. An assertion of dignity draws attention to
the injustice that seeks to extinguish, diminish, or quell the very dignity being
claimed. More to the point, when dignity is declared and a new space is co-
constructed in its celebration, much can be learned in the effort to recognize the
effort underway and to ensure its success. The demands of dignity are such that a
transformation must take place in the space it creates, as a result of engagement
with the struggle being claimed. Thus an assertion of dignity always produces
new knowledge.
The link between learning and spaces of dignity is evident in how Zapatismo
has been animated by a commitment to insurgent learning and convivial re-

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268 | Manuel Callahan

search. The Zapatistas have emphasized the importance of learning, and their
commitment to it, as an essential part of their political project highlighting
critical moments of knowledge acquisition during their military preparation;
the initial encounter with Indigenous communities and, later, civil society; and
the emerging efforts towards autonomy. The first period, as the Zapatistas were
preparing for war, the moment of fire, was marked by acquiring new knowl-
edges. In that early period before 1994, they learned to manage security, analyze
the military-political situation, and master the use of arms as well as military
drill and formation. Beginning as far back as 1983, the Zapatistas also focused
their efforts on learning the Spanish language and Marxist theory, arguably the
necessary tasks for a guerrilla mobilization. In addition, the early cadre was
confronted by an Indigenous cosmovision as well as the question of gender—an
encounter that made it possible for the original guerrilleros to learn how to sur-
vive in the jungle, but also, crucially, how to learn.
In the second phase after January 1994, the Zapatistas’ encounter with civil
society illustrates another dimension of the importance of learning. As the Za-
patistas explain, their unfolding effort to present themselves and their project is
part of a larger effort to learn about the struggles of others. During this second
period, learning emerged through a variety of interventions and encounters that
the Zapatistas used strategically to discover more about the government and its
agenda, the impact of neoliberal structural adjustment on specific communities,
and the many oppositions emerging during the conjuncture as well as the role
that civil society intended to play in the political unfolding. A new way of doing
politics was collectively being discovered.
The third moment of the Zapatistas’ struggle has been marked by their com-
mitment to share what they have learned about autonomy. Since 2006, the Za-
patistas have been working through the practice of autonomy, managing the
theory afterwards. Their commitment to learning has established a context for
knowledge about autonomy to be affirmed and shared; among the new strategies
that they make available are radical approaches to health, education, and gover-
nance in the autonomous communities outside the orbit of capital and the state.
The Zapatista commitment to learning continues in the present. This is evi-
denced by the group’s success in finding new ways to minimize the role of the
Zapatista army in the decision making of the communities; establishing the base
communities as the center of Zapatismo; reclaiming traditional technologies
such as the sistema de tequio, sistema de cargo, and asamblea; discovering new
strategies of political organization in the form of the pueblo, MAREZ (Rebel
Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities), and caracoles; and critically examining
the role of women in new democratic processes and social formations.43 Most
importantly, they have also spent a great deal of effort reclaiming and incor-
porating new strategies of communication by reviving the lost art of the com-
muniqué and declaration, exploiting the numerous platforms available on and

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 Rebel Dignity | 269

through the Internet, and using the various encuentros to facilitate a number of
critical dialogues.44
Similarly, Zapatista convivial research has taken place over the years
through the encuentros they have hosted beginning with the CND in 1994 and
continuing with the Continental and Intercontinental Encuentros from 1996 to
1998, as well as the number of gatherings specific to the struggles of particular
sectors such as teachers, health workers, and Indigenous communities. In addi-
tion to the larger gatherings hosted by the Zapatistas, these encuentros include
the prominent consultas in 1995 and 2001 as well as the marchas, such as the
one that brought Comandante Ramona to D.F. (Mexico City) and later twenty-
one comandantes across Mexico during the March of People of the Color of
the Earth in 2001. This collective effort has enabled other strategic moments
of knowledge production, such as sending out 1,111 Zapatistas including Elias
Contreras as “researchers” across the land.
Probably the clearest articulation of their commitment to learning is the
Zapatista escuelita, inaugurated in 2013. Continuing the trajectory of encuen-
tros that the Zapatistas have convened, the escuelita makes it possible for people
around the world to gather as part of a larger convivial effort, to work collec-
tively as a community of struggle, and to pose shared questions in order to
find new tools of struggle that make sense in individual locales. In the escuelita
“classroom,” “students” engaged autonomy firsthand in communities attached
to one of the five caracoles (Oventic, Roberto Barrios, La Garucha, Morelia,
and La Realidad) and the Centro Indígena de Capacitación Integral (CIDECI),
a spectacular campus built entirely, from the ground up, by Indigenous com-
munities from the surrounding area. At the escuelita, students learned the im-
portance of work and the vital tasks of community regeneration at the level of
the family, pueblo, municipality, and region (caracol). Through these key sites,
people learn to engage all aspects of civic life of the community, participating
in assemblies, fulfilling cargos, and executing tequios.
Thus, the Zapatistas’ accomplishments are much more complicated than
simply inspiring serial protests or managing their image against the suprastate,
transnational institutions of late finance capitalism and the global mainstream
media in its service. Rather, they have introduced a political praxis, or civic
pedagogy, that recenters horizontal, insurgent learning and collective, convivial
research as critical dimensions of political formation and a participatory demo-
cratic praxis. The Zapatista effort at convivial research does not end with the
encuentro, but is present in the effort to organize political struggle by making
learning a fundamental part of a democratic praxis. Insurgent learning, for the
Zapatistas, begins in the actual construction of spaces, strategies, practices, and
relations of autonomy where they have been able to theorize their achievements
and share what they have learned. It is in this context that Zapatismo’s success in
circulating political technologies such as mandar obedeciendo (lead by obeying)

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270 | Manuel Callahan

and preguntar caminando (ask while walking) make it possible for group mem-
bers to negotiate the productive tension between elite and subjugated, tradi-
tional, or situated forms of knowledge production. The latter, in turn, forms part
of a broader effort by marginalized communities pursuing self-determination
to regenerate culture, reclaim commons, and facilitate intergenerational and
intercultural dialogues.45
Executed in part through the Juntas de Buen Gobierno, or JBGs, a Zapatista
civic pedagogy makes it possible for all members of the community to learn the
arts of governance as each rotates and takes his or her seat in the junta. The cara-
coles and JBGs present a permanent assembly that reestablishes a system of car-
gos, or collectively determined obligations—not defined by the state-sponsored
indigenismo but retooled for a Zapatista autonomy.46 The JBGs provide critical
spaces for community members to take positions of responsibility in order to
perform the necessary tasks of collectively managing the community’s inter-
ests internally and externally, facilitating its successful maintenance. They also
function pedagogically: as all members rotate through the process, each learns
the obligations, procedures, strategies, and tools of the overall structure. This
thereby establishes the stable reproduction of a collectively determined com-
munity that does not depend on any one leader or cabal.
It is in the actual construction of spaces, strategies, practices, and relations
of autonomy that the Zapatistas have been able to share what they learn and how
they have begun to theorize it. Much of what is learned is not easily translated
without a similar level of doing, an effort to explore the specific lessons of exer-
cising dignity, pursuing justice, and maintaining liberty in our own locales and
contexts. In this way, our research and our learning actually enact in the present
the democratic praxis we claim as a future. In the nexus of convivial research and
insurgent learning, the Zapatistas have taken up the challenges of a civic pedago-
gy that organizes investigation, learning, and action through prefigurative spaces
that make explicit their critical pedagogical elements (curriculum, facilitation,
space, assessment, theoretical framework, and research question). At the same
time, this work reconstructs a social infrastructure of community; through the
contributions of all members of a given local space, communities are regenerated
as participatory democracies. Zapatista civic pedagogy, a political approach em-
bodied in the Zapatistas’ creative investment in the politics of encounter, works
as a determined response to the US-dominated Fourth World War.

Toward a Collective Subject

The excitement generated by the wave of occupations sweeping the United States
in recent years—movements that extend the reach and impact of some of the
militant strategies and practices more common to the Global South—have re-
awakened interest in a collective subject.47 The elaboration of a Zapatista theoreti-

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 Rebel Dignity | 271

cal apparatus draws attention to the emergence of a collective subject organized

around, through, and for dignity. In opposition to the idea of a citizen exercising
specific rights in a representative democracy, the Zapatistas have fought for the
recognition of a collective subject. This effort to rewrite Mexico’s political forma-
tion recognizes Indigenous peoples as political actors with collective rights—a
radical, entirely new way of being included into the Mexican polity.48

We spoke with ourselves, we looked inside ourselves and we looked at

our history: we saw our most ancient father suffering and struggling, we
saw our grandfathers struggling, we saw our fathers with fury in their
hands, we saw that not everything had been taken away from us, that
we had the most valuable, that which made us live, that which made our
step rise above plants and animals, that which made the stone beneath
our feet, and we saw, brother, that all we had was DIGNITY, and we saw
how great was the shame of having forgotten it, and we saw that dignity
was good for men to be men again, and that dignity returned to live in
our hearts, and we were new again, and the dead, our dead, saw that we
were new again and they called us again, to dignity, to struggle.49

The Zapatista deployment of dignity offers an alternative framework to claim

a broad spectrum of rights not fully contained in the Western system of repre-
sentative government, while affirming local struggles and at the same moment
animating larger networks of struggle against neoliberalism.
Zapatismo creates a political opening that makes it possible to bridge the
gap between the First and Third Worlds without implying a radical or liberal
tutelage. It is not based on rigid party doctrines or dogmas of competing organi-
zations. Rather, it is “an international of hope.” The new international is defined
by dignity, “that nation without nationality, that rainbow that is also a bridge,
that murmur of the heart no matter what blood lives in it, that rebel irreverence
that mocks borders, customs and wars.”50
Since the revolutionary assurance of dignity and its spaces is created by
communities of struggle, dignity’s meaning as a political tool cannot be derived
from Western discourses. Placing dignity at the center of its political project, Za-
patismo continues to facilitate the emergence of a variety of collective practices
that transcend Western discourses such as human rights and political citizen-
ship. As articulated in the communiqués, dignity challenges narrow, vanguard-
ist notions of revolution by offering a theoretical and practical position that
rejects the revolutionary seizure of state power.51 It also refuses liberal reformist
strategies that seduce rebels into participating in party politics and the duplicity
of the electoral spectacle. Speaking to an emerging, rebellious, and autonomous
Global South, the Zapatistas have put dignity at the forefront of their praxis,
generating spaces for a creative political practice that refuse the narratives avail-

ideas, art, and activism

272 | Manuel Callahan

able to Indigenous and other groups marginalized by Western, capitalist dis-

courses. Such an approach, therefore, challenges the notion that theory is the
application of ideas derived from elites or from those outside struggle.
The Zapatistas’ political uses of dignity and their reclaiming of class struggle
intervene in the production of subalternity, much as Jose Rabasa has suggested
is necessary for a subaltern studies project. Rabasa argues that the task of such
studies must be to “hold a dialectical relation with movements of revolt that fall
out of the schema of historico-philosophical outlooks.” Rejecting the trap of
an epistemological conceit that would claim to have special access and insights
about subalterns, this project must refuse any complicity with epistemological
strategies that produce subalterns. “The problem,” according to Rabasa, “would
now reside in the production of the subaltern as an object of knowledge, rather
than in claiming that subaltern studies will produce a more accurate represen-
tation. Subaltern studies cannot continue to practice a Cartesian epistemology
where the subject refines his or her cognitive apparatuses to gain a more objective
perspective.” “We should,” Rabasa admonishes, “instead elaborate inventories
of forms of discourse/power that produce subalternity. In this regard, theories
of colonial discourse would provide a way to gain access to forms of writing
violence in colonialist discourses that informed and gained consolidation in the
modernist projects to subject the world to European powers.” Rather, a subaltern
studies discipline that grows “parallel to the emergent social actors and their
interventions in everyday life” would generate an inventory of discursive for-
mations, expose “rhetorics of counter-insurgency,” recuperate collective living
memories, and produce counter-archives.52 The Zapatistas have already produced
such an inventory, much of which can be observed in their politics of encounter
and also in the extensive archive of communiqués, declarations, and interviews
forged through struggle.
Zapatismo implies that in its possibilities of negotiation and transforma-
tion, notions of identity are always incomplete.53 It exposes the violence of po-
litical and cultural homogenization, embracing distinct communities of youth,
women, communities of color, and others as constituencies who craft diverse,
often less obvious strategies of resistance. The Zapatistas’ commitment to dif-
ference rather than identity, dialogue more than command, and autonomy in
opposition to state or market domination has advanced a praxis that does not
subordinate local struggles (issues in particular contexts), a variety of actions
(strategies of resistance), or alternative practices (strategies for living outside
state and market forces) to any specific political formation, program, or ideol-
ogy, including those linked to fixed identities.

What we have hoped for, and still hope for, is that civil society may
achieve something somewhat more complicated and as indefinable as
herself—a new world. The difference between now and then is that now

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 Rebel Dignity | 273

we want to participate along with her in the dream that may deliver us
from the nightmare. We do not seek to direct her, but neither to follow
her. We want to go with her, march by her side. Are we hopelessly naïve?
Maybe, but against “realist” cynicism, naïveté may produce, for exam-
ple, a January 1st, and just look at the heap of dreams brought about by
one January 1st. So, we have nothing to lose: Madame civil society and
the Zapatistas share the contempt the big politicians have for us, we
share an indefinable face and diffuse name; why not share a dream?54

Don Antonio tells us:

That’s why the gods gave the people of corn a mirror that is called dig-
nity. In it, men see themselves as equals, and they become rebels if they
are not equal. This is how the rebellion of our first grandparents began,
those who now die in us so we can live. The mirror of dignity serves to
defeat the demons that spread darkness. Seen in the mirror, the man of
darkness sees himself reflected as the void that forms him. As if he were
nothing, the man of darkness, the de-equalizer of the world, becomes
undone in front of the mirror of dignity.55

A collective subject is always organized through the acknowledgement of digni-

ty. It is when claims to dignity are unmediated by, for example, what Ivan Illich
identified as industrial tools that it can be the driving force of a space where all
dignities flourish.56 A collective subject that embodies an unmediated convivial-
ity is by definition in balance with its tools. Collectively invented tools for the
purpose of community regeneration must be agreed upon, invented, tested, and
successful at addressing local issues by accessing locally rooted wisdoms that
serve all members of the collective equally.57 Epistemology is a critical dimen-
sion of the emerging collective subject. Convivial tools are produced through a
shared process of learning.58
Dignity cannot be bestowed. It is claimed. Dignity is enacted through being
true to one’s word and actively participating in a community that acknowledges
difference. The political praxis it claims goes beyond a political framework of a
rational individual negotiating the marketplace and liberal public sphere. Hope
is the claim of a common humanity that can imagine and acknowledge alterna-
tives.
We have begun to learn how to use dignity as a political tool to imagine a
locally rooted, reflexive collective subject. At the center of dignity as a strategic
concept is the “circulation of struggle”—a recognition of other communities of
struggle and an attempt to link those efforts while maintaining locally rooted
ones. Understanding dignity in terms of its praxis, we not only locate moments
of opposition but also learn how dignity can be a political objective, and work

ideas, art, and activism

274 | Manuel Callahan

to create spaces where dignity can be claimed without extinguishing other ex-
ercises of dignity. Our own efforts to assert our dignity, especially inspired by
the success of others, convert dignity into a political objective—the space we
must construct to exercise our dignity. We claim dignity by constructing a space
for it to flourish. These spaces always produce new knowledge. The shift from
analysis to action takes place in the space of encounter: as the Zapatistas have
argued, this praxis is vital to a renewed radical democratic project. Thus, a criti-
cal dimension of Zapatismo has been building a space for the pursuit of dignity.
In a space of encounter, dignity flourishes through a shared commitment not to
diminish the dignity of others. If one dignity is marginalized, all dignities are
reduced. Zapatista dignity exposes the challenges of creating spaces that make
revolution possible. Reclaimed and revived, dignity has become a vibrant ele-
ment of our political vocabulary, transforming a tradition of resistance into a
project of liberation.59

NOTES
Acknowledgments: The author would like to thank the editorial team at Kalfou for their
thoughtful edits, as well as Gustavo Esteva, Harry Cleaver, and comrades from Acción Za-
patista and the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy for their critical insights.

1. Lee Lew Lee, All Power to the People (New York: Electronic News Group, 1996).
2. Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (New
York: Vintage Books, 1992).
3. See, for example, Eddie Yuen and Daniel Burton-Rose, Confronting Capitalism: Dis-
patches from a Global Movement (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2004).
4. For a useful discussion of police violence, see Robin D. G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black
Struggle,” Boston Review, March 7, 2016, http://bostonreview.net/forum/robin-d-g-kelley-
black-study-black-struggle; Jordan Camp and Christina Heatherton, eds., Policing the Planet:
Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (New York: Verso, 2016); George Lipsitz,
“From Plessy to Ferguson,” Culture Critique 90 (Spring 2015): 119–139; Robin D.  G. Kel-
ley, “Why We Won’t Wait,” Counterpunch, November 25, 2015, http://www.counterpunch.
org/2014/11/25/why-we-wont-wait/; Annie Paradise, “Militarized Policing and Resistance in
the Social Factory: The Battle for Community Safety in the Silicon Valley,” PhD diss., Cali-
fornia Institute of Integral Studies, 2015; Kristian Williams, “The Other Side of the COIN:
Counterinsurgency and Community Policing,” Interface 3, no. 1 (2011): 81–117; Joy James, ed.,
Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2007).
5. For analytical purposes, it is important to distinguish between the EZLN and the Za-
patista solidarity community. Zapatistas include both the EZLN and their supporters from
base communities throughout Chiapas. Zapatismo is a political strategy claimed by those who
share a set of political commitments and a political identity. Supporters beyond Chiapas com-
prise those who limit their activity to traditional solidarity efforts as well as those who link
their local struggles to an expanding global network with a renewed sense of urgency and
analytical coherence.
6. For an interesting recent review of the Zapatista struggle, see Leandro Vergara-Camus,
Land and Freedom: The MST, the Zapatistas and Peasant Alternatives to Neoliberalism (Lon-
don: Zed Books, 2014).
7. John Holloway, “Dignity’s Revolt,” in Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico, ed.
John Holloway and Eloína Peláez (London: Pluto Press, 1998), 159–198.

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8. Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organiz-
ing Hope (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). See also note 56 for a discussion of convivial
tools.
9. “Epistemological obstacle” refers to a term that many people might take for granted; in
some contexts, it becomes a site of conflict when individuals believe they have the same defini-
tion of the term as everyone else only to find that others bring a wide variety of experiences
and consequently different meanings for it. For a discussion of epistemological obstacles from a
popular education perspective, see Gustavo Castro Soto and Enrique Valencia Lomelí, Metodo-
logia de Analisis de Coyuntura, vols. 1–10 (Mexico City: Servicio Jesuita a Refugiados-México
y Servicio Informativos Procesados, A.C., 1995), especially vol. 3, Epistemological Barriers of
Coyuntural Analysis.
10. Harry Cleaver, “Circuits of Struggle?” Political Economy of Communication 4, no. 1
(2016): 3–34.
11. The quote comes from a PDF created by Harry Cleaver that archives the comments he
interjected in the text of a review article published by the British Marxist journal Aufheben, no.
11 (2003), http://libcom.org/library/operaismo-autonomist-marxism-aufheben-11. Cleaver’s
intervention, “From Operaismo to ‘Autonomist Marxism’: A Response,” is available at http://
www.la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/AufhebenResponse2.pdf.
12. Gustavo Esteva, “Meaning and Scope of the Struggle for Autonomy,” Latin American
Perspectives 28, no. 2 (2001): 120.
13. Walter Mignolo, “The Zapatista’s Theoretical Revolution: Its Historical, Ethical, and
Political Consequences,” Review 25, no. 3 (2002): 257, 246.
14. Ien Ang argues that culture “relates to the production and negotiation of meaning and
value, and this is an ongoing, plural, often conflictive process taking place in all dimensions of
social activity, be it at the workplace, in education, the media, in international relations, even
in the hairdresser’s salon. Culture is neither institutions nor texts nor behaviours, but the com-
plex interactions between all of these.” Ien Ang, “Who Needs Cultural Research?” in Cultural
Studies: From Theory to Action, ed. Pepi Leistyna (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 477.
15. Holloway, “Dignity’s Revolt,” 180.
16. Ibid., 183.
17. Ibid., 176.
18. Ibid., 175–176.
19. Ibid., 168.
20. Ibid., 167.
21. For a critical discussion of the politics of hosting, see Gustavo Esteva, “Hosting the
Otherness of the Other,” in Decolonizing Knowledge: From Development to Dialogue, ed. Frede-
rique Appfel-Marglin and Stephen Marglin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 249–278; Manuel
Callahan, “Why Not Share a Dream: Zapatismo as Political and Cultural Practice,” Humboldt
Journal of Social Relations 29, no. 1 (2005): 6–37.
22. Pablo González Casanova, “The Zapatista ‘Caracoles’: Networks of Resistance and
Autonomy,” Socialism and Democracy 19, no. 3 (2005): 79–92.
23. Harry Cleaver, “The Zapatista Effect: The Internet and the Rise of an Alternative Po-
litical Fabric,” 1997, http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/zapeffect.html; Harry Cleaver,
“Computer-Linked Social Movements and the Global Threat to Capitalism,” 1999, http://www.
eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/polnet.html.
24. For a discussion of Zapatismo that emphasizes a politics of encounter and a politics
of listening, see “Zapatismo as Political and Cultural Practice,” ed. Manuel Callahan, special
issue, Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 29, no. 1 (2005), especially Callahan, “Why Not
Share a Dream.”
25. Subcomandante Marcos, “De árboles, transgresores, y odontogía,” in EZLN, Documen-
tos y comunicados (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1997), 3:121.
26. Midnight Notes Collective, “The Hammer and . . . or the Sickle? From the Zapatista
Uprising to the Battle of Seattle,” in Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local and Global Struggles of
the Fourth World War (New York: Autonomedia, 2001), 10. On July 27, 1996, as an extension

ideas, art, and activism

276 | Manuel Callahan

of meetings that had taken place in April at the continental level, the Zapatistas hosted over
three thousand people from over forty countries at the First Intercontinental Encuentro for
Humanity and against Neoliberalism.
27. For an insightful analysis of global resistance making use of Gustavo Esteva’s phrase,
see Midnight Notes Collective, “One No, Many Yeses,” Midnight Notes 12 (December 1997).
28. Subcomandante Marcos, “From the Underground Culture to the Culture of Resis-
tance,” La Jornada, October 27, 1999.
29. Subcomandante Marcos, Conversations with Durito, ed. Acción Zapatista Editorial
Collective (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2005), 93.
30. Here I am making the distinction between difference and diversity.
31. For a discussion of “going beyond solidarity,” see Callahan, “Why Not Share a Dream.”
32. This overview by no means represents fully the framework, contradictions and suc-
cesses of the spaces the Zapatistas have convened. It omits, for instance, the number of organi-
zational and institutional links that sustain the encounter, such as the EZLN’s strategic use of
advisors as well as the development of earlier political formations such as the Frente Zapatista
Liberación Nacional and Enlace Civil.
33. Subcomandante Marcos, “The World: Seven Thoughts in May of 2003,” Cuestiones de
América 15 (August–November 2003): http://www.cuestiones.ws/revista/n15/ago03-mex-eng-
marcos.htm.
34. Cleaver, “Circuits of Struggle?”
35. Midnight Notes Collective, “The Hammer and . . . or the Sickle?” 9.
36. Vijay Prashad has argued for a polycultural approach that introduces “a broad antira-
cist platform that would not (like liberal multiculturalism) invest itself in the management of
difference, but it would (like a socialist polyculturalism) struggle to dismantle and redistribute
unequal resources and racist structures.” Prashad elaborates that “polyculturalism, as a politi-
cal philosophy, does not see difference ‘as evidence of some cognitive confusion or as a moral
anomaly’ (as liberal multiculturalism is wont to do), but it sees those features of difference
with which it disagrees as ‘the expression of a morality you despise, that is, as what your enemy
(not the universal enemy) says.’” Significantly, he notes that this type of analytical approach
stresses “an ethico-political agenda forged in struggle (not as some universal, ahistorical veri-
ties).” Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth
of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 69.
37. Subcomandante Marcos, “La entrevista insólita,” interview by Julio Scherer García,
Proceso 1271 (March 2001): 12–13.
38. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological
Roots of Human Understanding (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1992), 26.
39. Subcomandante Marcos, “The Seven Loose Pieces of the Global Jigsaw: Neoliberalism
as a Puzzle, the Useless Global Unity Which Fragments and Destroys Nations,” http://www.
elkilombo.org/documents/sevenpiecesmarcos.html, accessed July 27, 2016.
40. Midnight Notes Collective, “One No, Many Yeses.”
41. Enrique Dussel, “Ethical Sense of the 1994 Maya Rebellion in Chiapas,” Journal of
Hispanic/Latino Theology 2, no. 3 (1995): 42, 47.
42. Quoted in Yvon Le Bot, El sueño zapatista (Mexico City: Plaza and Janes, 1997), 146.
43. Cargo refers to a community-determined, entrusted obligation for community renew-
al. A tequio, on the other hand, refers to a community-defined work project. For a discussion
of cargo and tequio in the context of comunalidad, see Jaime Martínez Luna, “The Fourth
Principle,” in New World of Indigenous Resistance, ed. Lois Meyer and Benjamín Maldonado
Alvarado (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2010), 85–100.
44. Cleaver, “The Zapatista Effect.”
45. The notions of regenerating culture, reclaiming the commons, and facilitating inter-
generational and intercultural dialogues related to community renewal come from Gustavo
Esteva and his work with Universidad de la Tierra, Oaxaca.
46. González Casanova, “The Zapatista ‘Caracoles.’”

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47. Raul Zibechi, Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-state Forces (Oakland, CA:
AK Press, 2010); Raul Zibechi, Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Re-
sistance Movements (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012).
48. The negotiations of the San Andrés Accords revealed the Zapatistas’ commitment to
the idea of “nunca jamás un mundo sin nosotros” (never again a world without us) through their
support of legal recognition of autonomy for indigenous peoples including territory, new social
relations between indigenous people and the state, and the collective right to be different. See
Andres Aubry, “Autonomy in the San Andrés Accords,” in Mayan Lives, Mayan Utopias: The
Indigenous Peoples and the Zapatista rebellion, ed. Jan Rus, Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo,
and Shannon L. Mattiace (New York: Roman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 237.
49. EZLN, La palabra de los armados de verdad y fuego (Mexico City: Editorial Fuenteove-
juna, 1994/1995), 1:122, quoted in John Holloway, “Zapatismo and the Social Sciences,” Capital
and Class 78 (2002): 155.
50. EZLN, “Primera declaración de la realidad contra el neoliberalismo y por la humani-
dad,” in Documentos y comunicados (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1997), 3:126.
51. Subcomandante Marcos, Conversations with Durito: Stories of the Zapatistas and Neo-
liberalism (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2005).
52. José Rabasa, “Of Zapatismo: Reflections on the Folkloric and the Impossible in a Subal-
tern Insurrection,” in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, ed. Lisa Lowe and David
Lloyd (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 408, 406.
53. Stuart Hall has argued that identity is much like a bus, “not because it takes you to a
fixed destination, but because you can only get somewhere—anywhere—by climbing aboard.
The whole of you can never be represented by the ticket you carry, but you still have to buy
a ticket to get from here to there.” For Hall, identities are “points of suture,” temporary sites
where one negotiates who one is and who one is to become. Moreover, Hall suggests that iden-
tity is always a narrative, a fiction: “the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.” He addresses
the issue of politics within this framework of identity by noting that political collectivities
necessarily are imagined communities. “It is because they are imagined,” emphasizes Hall,
“because they are constructed between the real and desire—that such communities can act as a
mobilising political force.” Stuart Hall, “Fantasy, Identity, Politics,” in Cultural Remix: Theories
of Politics and the Popular, ed. Erica Carter (London: Lawrence and Wisehart, 1995), 65–66.
54. Subcomandante Marcos, “To Lady Civil Society,” in Conversations with Durito: Stories
of the Zapatistas and Neoliberalism (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2005), 167.
55. Subcomandante Marcos, “Story of Dreams,” in Conversations with Durito: Stories of
the Zapatistas and Neoliberalism (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2005), 150.
56. Ivan Illich made a distinction between “industrial” tools and “convivial” ones. Indus-
trial tools are those instruments of a capitalist society that are no longer in our control, such as
education. Convivial tools, by contrast, are those technologies that are essential to our renewal
as a community. Thus where education as a bureaucratic, privatized entity can be overwhelm-
ing as an industrial tool, practices that reclaim learning and that are in our service would be
convivial ones. See Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Marion Boyars, 1973).
57. Wendell Berry defines community as a deliberate effort to reclaim a commons that is
locally rooted and defined both by arrangements and constraints. “Since there obviously can be
no cultural relationship that is uniform between a nation and a continent, ‘community’ must
mean a people locally placed and a people, moreover, not too numerous to have a common
knowledge of themselves and their place.” He stresses that communities share situated knowl-
edge of what works locally between generations to fulfill collectively determined obligations
to one another. Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1993), 120, 168.
58. For a discussion of learning in relation to conviviality, see Illich, Tools for Conviviality.
59. Gustavo Esteva and Mahdu Suri Prakash, Grassroots Post-modernism: Re-making the
Soils of Culture (London: Zed Books, 1998), 76.

ideas, art, and activism