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back, the Army Zapatista of National Liberation (EZLN) called the hotbed “Of pyramids, of stories, of loves and, of course, heartbreaks”, to be held between December 26 and 30 at the Indigenous Comprehensive Training Center (Cideci), San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. The call clarifies that it is about addressing the pyramids not only in the capitalist system, but also in “resistance movements, the left and progressivism, human rights, the feminist struggle and the arts” (https://goo.su/UB0vYT).
This new call seems extremely important to me, like the previous ones, because in the movements rigorous and deep debate is almost non-existent, an issue that contrasts with the EZLN’s determination to reflect while resisting, and while creating new worlds that are no longer capitalist. Rigorous is not synonymous with academic or incomprehensible to the organized common people who resist. This is a central aspect: it is not reflected and analyzed to obtain certificates or promotions, but to strengthen resistance, to make them more lucid and responsible.
A notable aspect of the call consists not only of discussing the pyramids from above (although they do not use this term), but “our” ones, those that are being created in the organizations that resist the system. There is a lot of talk about the former; about the latter, nothing. Only Zapatismo has the will and courage to put them up for discussion. In critical thinking and revolutionary movements, errors and horrors are usually attributed to people (like Stalin in the Soviet Union), but structures such as pyramids, which inspire both parties and unions, but often also those of us who fight against the system, are not called into question.
If we only talk about the pyramids of capitalism (the State, the police forces and justice, etc.), we leave out our deviations and errors, which would be too comfortable and not very useful. The truth is that all revolutions have built pyramids that, as Immanuel Wallerstein said, were suitable for overthrowing the ruling classes, but soon became obstacles to creating new worlds. “The fundamental error of the anti-systemic forces in the previous era was to believe that the structure was more effective the more unified” ( After liberalismp. 247).
For some time we have known that new post-revolutionary dominant classes have been rebuilt from the tops of the pyramids, which prevented the construction of non-capitalist worlds and established authoritarian regimes that strengthened nation-states.
A major merit of the EZLN consists of grounding these debates in its own experience, in what happened during two decades in autonomous spaces such as the good government boards, an issue that they already raised clearly and openly in the month of August at the meeting “Some parts of the whole”, in the hotbed from Morelia. At that time I wrote that a public self-criticism made from below was “an absolutely new fact among the movements that fight to change the world” and that in this way the Zapatistas show us “paths that no movement had ever taken before, in the whole world, in all of history” (https://goo.su/devW7XR).
Today it is not only worth reaffirming that perception, but also verifying that the Zapatistas pose a new challenge, which is to address the pyramids that we created below. It is not something minor, since it means looking in the mirror to discover the oppressive ways that we create when trying to change the world.
The challenge is as important as it is complex. I don’t think it’s about pointing the finger at those who build pyramids, but about reasoning and explaining the problems they entail, based on a historical experience of more than a century since the Russian Revolution and a century and a half since the Paris Commune. It was after its defeat that the revolutionary movement began to build centralized and hierarchical political apparatuses: political parties. Until that moment, the struggle was sustained in a galaxy of somewhat pyramidal organizations, certainly somewhat chaotic, but no less combative for that reason.
We have reached a point where only bureaucratic and hierarchical apparatuses are considered true organizations, that is, institutions that are inspired by state pyramids to reproduce them symmetrically. Now we see that these devices are completely useless in these times of systemic chaos and that they only serve as ladders for those who have no other ambition than to ascend to the top of state power.
The debate that Zapatismo calls us to promises to be luminous in the midst of darkness. They propose to navigate against the current of comfortable thought of the left and the academies, trapped in the logic of capitalism. It is exactly what we need to shake off the drowsiness, criticize ourselves and free ourselves from old ideas/prisons to continue walking through the storm.
