Zapatista "Sixth Declaration": Petty-Bourgeois Populism

Army Out of Chiapas!

Down With Paramilitary Terror!

We print below excerpts from a January 2006 leaflet by the Grupo Espartaquista de México on the “Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle”—a document adopted by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in southern Mexico in June 2005. The declaration called for a series of democratic reforms and also announced that the EZLN would not support any of the candidates in the upcoming presidential elections. The EZLN subsequently launched its “other campaign,” an attempt to rally supporters throughout Mexico around its declaration during the presidential campaign.

In the context of the coming presidential elections and the evident popularity of the bourgeois PRD [Party of the Democratic Revolution], which leads the polls and has strengthened its support in the working class, the Zapatista Sixth Declaration and the “other campaign” have reawakened illusions in the Zapatistas among many left-minded youth. This is due to the campaign’s “radical” rhetoric and its criticisms of the electoral circus and the bourgeois parties—especially the PRD, which is discredited among many radicalized students in Mexico City.

This turn by the Zapatistas, after eleven years of placing confidence in the bourgeois PRD, is not surprising. The Zapatista rebellion started in 1994 in response to the implementation of NAFTA—a treaty for the imperialist plunder of the Mexican economy, which has sunk the peasantry even further into misery—and against age-old racist, anti-indigenous oppression. The timid nationalist politics of the PRD (which does not even oppose NAFTA) have disappointed the Zapatistas, and in fact PRD senators themselves approved the infamous 2001 anti-indigenous law. Further, as the EZLN itself has documented, the PRD has directly participated in murderous repression against the Zapatistas. The EZLN’s criticisms of the PRD are empirical—based on unfulfilled promises and on repression, not on an understanding of the PRD and the other bourgeois parties as instruments of capital, enemies of the workers and all the oppressed regardless of their current policies.

After decades of so-called “neoliberalism,” which has sunk the masses into the most complete misery, populism is on the ascendance throughout Latin America, with [Venezuela’s] Hugo Chávez as its most famous exponent, while in Mexico it is represented by the PRD. Populism is simply an alternative policy of capitalism, seeking only to renegotiate the terms of the Third World bourgeoisie’s subordination to imperialism. By means of its concessions to the workers and the oppressed and through its nationalist, “anti-neoliberal” rhetoric, populism strengthens the ties of the exploited to their exploiters and helps perpetuate this brutal regime.

The Zapatista program, reduced to bourgeois-democratic reforms in opposition to so-called “neoliberalism” but in no way opposed to the capitalist system itself, is in reality a petty-bourgeois variant of bourgeois-nationalist populism. In fact, [EZLN leader Subcomandante] Marcos himself made it clear that voting for the PRD or any other bourgeois party is not counterposed to Zapatismo, when he asserted that “electoral preferences or sympathies are in no way an impediment to belonging to the other campaign” (La Jornada, 19 January). The “other campaign” is a politically amorphous petty-bourgeois movement whose purpose is to pressure the nationalist bourgeoisie. It leads those breaking from the PRD to the left to remain within the limits of bourgeois politics.

We Spartacists solidarize with the struggle of the indigenous peasantry against their ancient oppression and misery and call on the workers to defend the EZLN against state and paramilitary repression. However, we embrace not Zapatismo but the program of revolutionary Marxism, which is a counterposed worldview. Marcos says, “This country’s problem is not a party, but the capitalist system” which “we must transform” (La Jornada, 15 January). But there is nothing in the Sixth Declaration attacking the basis of the capitalist system: the system of private property. The most prominent call in the Sixth Declaration is for a new constitution “that recognizes the rights and liberties of the people and defends the weak before the powerful,” which will be imposed by a “civilian, peaceful movement.”

It is utopian to think that capitalism can be reformed, by means of new legislation or otherwise, in order to put it at the service of the exploited and the oppressed. In any society, laws are only the superstructure resting on the property regime. Under capitalism, the whole economy serves the extraction of profit by a handful of capitalists who own the means of production. Additionally, the Third World bourgeoisies, such as the Mexican bourgeoisie, are inextricably tied to the imperialists and are incapable of breaking with them and achieving the gains obtained by the old bourgeois revolutions (for example, the French Revolution of 1789), such as the building of a strong economy (the basis for national emancipation) and the modernization of the countryside.

It is necessary to overthrow capitalism by means of a socialist revolution that abolishes the system of private property—i.e., that collectivizes the means of production and establishes a planned economy in order to satisfy the needs of the population. This revolution must be extended internationally to eliminate the imperialist counterrevolutionary threat and to put the immense resources and developed productive forces of capitalism at the service of the exploited and oppressed. This is the road to achieving socialism, which requires generalized abundance.

The working class, due to its relationship to the means of production, is the only class with the historic interests and the social power necessary to lead the oppressed masses to that end. Having only its own labor power to sell, the working class has no objective interest whatsoever in maintaining the regime of private property; on the contrary, its interests are in the collectivization of the means of production. Also, the proletarians produce the wealth of society collectively, which gives them enormous social power. Oil workers, telephone workers or electricians, for example, have the power to disrupt the entire economy and even to paralyze it altogether.

In contrast, the peasantry is a heterogeneous layer forming a part of the petty bourgeoisie, which also includes, for example, students and street vendors. Poor peasants, reduced to production for their own consumption, lack social power and long for their own plot of land; small peasants compete against each other to sell their produce on the market. The objective interests of the peasantry as a social stratum are in private ownership of the land. Due to these characteristics, the peasantry—and the entire petty bourgeoisie—is incapable by itself of advancing a revolutionary program: it always follows one of the two fundamental classes of capitalism, the proletariat or the bourgeoisie. In the absence of a revolutionary workers party openly contending for power, the peasantry today necessarily limits its struggle within the bounds of capitalism.

We seek to build a revolutionary alliance of the proletariat and the poor peasantry, but this is only possible under the leadership of the workers’ vanguard organized in a communist party. Thus, our purpose is to build a workers party like the Bolsheviks of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, one capable of leading the working class in this historic task. This is, in its general features, the perspective of permanent revolution developed by Trotsky and vindicated in practice by the Russian Revolution of October 1917.

After having in fact defeated the bourgeoisie [during the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920], the peasant armies of Villa and Zapata simply withdrew from Mexico City without even touching the foundations of the capitalist regime, illustrating the incapacity of the peasantry to reorganize society. What the exploited and oppressed need is not a peasant guerrilla movement more combative than the EZLN, but a Leninist-Trotskyist workers party that fights for socialist revolution, mobilizing behind itself not only the poor peasantry but also the immense mass of the pauperized urban petty-bourgeoisie.

Our purpose, as the Mexican section of the International Communist League, is to build a revolutionary workers party capable of leading a new October Revolution in this part of the world. Therefore, our task is to elevate the consciousness of the working class, bringing to the proletariat the understanding of its historic mission of universal emancipation, as the only class capable of leading all the oppressed toward their emancipation: peasants, indigenous people, women, impoverished urban petty-bourgeois masses. Right now, an important part of this struggle is to combat the illusions generated by petty-bourgeois Zapatista utopianism.