Reclaiming public ownership: Making space for economic democracy by Andrew Cumbers

Author:Andrew Cumbers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2012-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

Practising the commons

The most celebrated example of contemporary commons practice is the Zapatista movement in the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) was set up in opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 as a group dedicated to fighting the neoliberal agenda of NAFTA and the actions of the Mexican state in pursuing that agenda. In particular, the Zapatistas opposed the threat to traditional farming practices and the rural way of life that NAFTA posed by opening the Mexican economy up to cheap agricultural imports from the USA. A particular source of opposition in the NAFTA treaty was the repeal of Article 27 Section IV of the Mexican Revolution which guaranteed the ‘Ejido’ common land practices of indigenous Mexican communities in Chiapas and elsewhere (see Cunninghame 2008). Since 1994 the Zapatistas have attempted to establish their own autonomous communities in Chiapas that seek to retain indigenous control over local resources, especially land.

The Zapatistas are held up as exemplary in invoking the spirit of the global commons for a number of reasons. In the first instance, their establishment of Autonomous Communities, outside both the Mexican state and the rule of multinational capital, epitomizes the rejection of both the public (in the sense of a centralized state) and the private (processes of global accumulation) spheres that is key to contemporary commons discourses. Secondly, their insistence on the rights to selfmanagement and self-governance of their communities independent of external control is an important element of self-realization. Thirdly, the Zapatistas insist on horizontalist forms of power and participatory, democratic engagement, rejecting more hierarchical and representative forms of mainstream governance. Fourthly, the Zapatistas practise an egalitarian politics in contradistinction to some of the problematic gender and racial power relations of older pre-capitalist forms of commons, which leads Hardt and Negri, for example, to refer to them as ‘altermodernist’ as opposed to ‘antimodernist’ (Hardt and Negri 2009: 106). Fifthly, as noted earlier, the Zapatistas combine demands for local autonomy with a trans-local politics of solidarity against neoliberalism and global capitalism. Finally, they represent a fusion between revolutionary Marxist anti-capitalist ideals and support for pre-capitalist forms of social relations – in this case Mayan and indigenous traditions of collectivization and common ownership of land.

Outside the example of the Zapatistas, there has been a flourishing of what we might in a broader sense term movements for commons throughout the world. Latin America, as we saw in the last chapter, has witnessed a particular flourishing of social movements, from Ecuador to Bolivia to Mexico, that are both propagating the rights of indigenous groups in righting colonial injustices but also evoking different social values to global capitalism (see Bohm et al. 2010). We can also recognize commons in the operation of urban and (post-)industrial communities in Argentina, in the wake of the country’s financial crisis in 2001, that seek to develop alternative economic practices following the effective breakdown of the mainstream economy (ibid.). Farther

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