by Clifton Ross
After my disappointments with Cuba, I found the Zapatista approach to politics refreshing, inspiring, and profoundly different. Their counter-manipulation of the press, their trickster approach to politics and their eclectic left-indigenous perspective were appealing to a whole new generation of people, like myself, who had lived and worked for a more just and humane world in the shadows of the Cold War, rejecting both the growing capitalist national security state and the Leninist nomenklatura of totalitarian communism.
I was particularly taken by the fact that the Zapatistas rejected the role of the vanguard and proposed an alternative to all that had come before them. In December 1996 when I was visiting La Realidad, the Zapatista community in the jungles of Chiapas, I met a Mexican woman who was active in the Zapatista National Liberation Front (FZLN), the organization that formed out of calls for solidarity the EZLN made when it was under fierce siege after their uprising in early 1994.
Teresa, who was visiting from her home in Mexico City, explained first the nature and conception of the EZLN leadership. She said that leadership among indigenous people in Chiapas is “based on the idea of the cargado, the responsibility to the community, that the one given the responsibility (encargado) must mandar obediciendo or ‘rule obeying.’ No matter how the media portrays Marcos he does nothing on his own.” She went on to tell me that the EZLN “is primarily an indigenous movement. In a real sense it has more in common with the Civil Rights Movement of Martin Luther King than with the guerrilla movements in Central America in the 1980s. The uprising was about equal rights for the indigenous peasants, to say ‘we’re Mexicans too.’ That’s why you see the Mexican flag everywhere. It wasn’t about ‘taking power’ because it isn’t a vanguardist movement, in fact, it’s anti-vanguardist. And it’s more like a political force than a political party.”
And as a “political force” the EZLN and its supporters are neither traditional indigenists, nor anarchists, nor socialists, nor communists. Not only had they taken on the name of a local Mexican hero of the Revolution, but they also paid homage to Ricardo Flores Magón, Lucio Cabañas, and many other lesser-known Mexicans. At the same time, the Zapatistas not only presented themselves as an “anti-vanguard,” but they seemed to want to stand the very idea of “heroes” on its head by masking themselves and maintaining a strict anonymity, especially around a “main character” in their emerging drama, Subcomandante Marcos. In a touch that exposed the racism endemic to the Americas, the one obvious white guy was, notably, “sub” commander and the real “commanders” were all anonymous Indians! The mind-fucks, ironies, and parodies perpetrated on a spell-bound public seemed endless as it engaged with the “hologram” (as Marcos later referred to himself) that constantly underwent psychic shape shifts and eventually, many years later, died and resurrected (notably, without increasing rank) as Subcomandante Galeano.
The Zapatistas had begun their revolt at the moment NAFTA went into effect to protest, in advance, the destruction of the Mexican subsistence farmers. They had been driven to the rebellion because, in their words, “our people continue to die from hunger and curable diseases”—at a rate of fifteen thousand per year, the highest mortality rate from curable diseases in all of Mexico. As Marcos wrote, “Fifty four percent of the Chiapan population suffers from malnutrition; in the highlands and the jungle this figure increases to eighty percent.”1 Their struggle, then, was clearly regional, but the Zapatistas were anything but provincial. In fact, their internationalist sophistication was stunning, as was Marcos’s talent for demonstrating parallels with, and linking to, other causes in the Americas and the world.
On the first day of the insurrection a reporter interviewed Marcos in the plaza of San Cristóbal de las Casas and asked him the reasons for the ski masks. “First, the main reason,” Marcos responded,” is that we have to guard against stardom, that is, to make sure no one is promoted over others... so we don’t become corrupted. We know that our leadership is collective and that we have to submit to it. Now you’re listening to me because I’m here but elsewhere there are other people like me talking with ski masks on. They call this ski mask ‘Marcos’ today and tomorrow they’ll call it ‘Pedro’ in Margaritas, or ‘Joshua’ in Ocosingo...”2 This was as close as a guerrilla army was going to get to good old down home American anarchism. At last, it seemed, a new wind was blowing through left politics, and it lifted up a fledgling movement of activists who would eventually find itself on the front lines in the battle against a globalizing neoliberal capitalism.
By contrast with the Zapatistas, the IWW seemed to be a weak and largely anachronistic network. My impression of the “One Big Union” was that it was in fact one very small association of fewer than a thousand, made up of aging lefties like me, the most vocal (or prolix) of whom apparently thought it more important to bring “charges” against one or another member or members than to organize workplaces; punk anarchists drawn to the historic “tool of struggle of the working class” but in many cases underemployed or unemployed, squatters, or otherwise marginal characters who preferred to remain marginal, which was why they gravitated to the union; those called “members of the IWW historical society,” inactivists nostalgic for the good old days before, or immediately after, the Palmer Raids3 when the union actually organized masses of workers; an odd assortment of anarcho-somethings, who seemed to fit in nowhere else but who found a welcomed embrace in the IWW, whose world headquarters were newly, and as it turned out, temporarily, relocated to San Francisco.
This odd collection of people was also overwhelmingly composed of men, and white men at that, but there were also a few great women, most notably, Melissa Roberts. She worked in the office for a while and did a great job of organizing the files, the databases, and anything else that needed organizing, and all with a brilliant and delightful sense of humor. She was, and is, one of the most delightful and talented people I’ve known, and she added an enormous amount of creativity to the union when it was briefly located in San Francisco. Melissa also came to work at New Earth Press toward the very end where I had the pleasure of getting to know her better.
I don’t want to give the impression that the IWW was composed of nothing but cranks, weirdos, and oddballs, but it did seem to be a magnet for such characters. While I might have been just another one of the “cranks,” and I felt very comfortable with the weirdos and oddballs, I couldn’t help thinking most of the time how marginal we all were. Melissa was a creative artist in our midst, as was Jess Grant and others, so the union drew from a wide swath of the margins, but even as margins went, we were a select bunch.
My partner at New Earth Press, Dave Karoly, at his young age of twenty-four had astounded me for his independence of intellect, and his quiet, humble demeanor. At the same time, he demonstrated that he had no problem defying a whole group when it came down to a matter of principle. I saw him turn his punk ridicule on rock stars and big-shot artist-types and bring them down to the size of the regular Joes they were behind the costumes they wore. I also saw him defy a whole assembly as an individual standing on principle, and it amazed and inspired me.
The latter happened during the IWW convention in San Francisco in 1994 when Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney showed up to make a plea for money to pay legal fees in their case against the FBI and Oakland Police Department, both of whom had colluded to frame the two IWW/Earth First! activists on terrorism charges. It was an emotional plea and those present called a vote to give Judi and Darryl money from the union treasury. Everyone, except one, was in favor. Dave raised his hand, objecting that this was a decision that couldn’t be made in the convention, according to the IWW charter, and making such a decision would be a grave error with consequences.
I had voted with the majority, but thanks to Dave I got a view on how public plebiscite democracy works, and how problematic it is. There was no private vote; it was done by a show of hands. And woe to those who didn’t vote for our two aggrieved members! Only Dave held out, on principle, having dutif
ully studied the constitution of the union, unlike the rest of us. Voting in assembly, even an assembly of anarchists, cranks etc., invites groupthink, discourages open debate and critical thinking, and invites the violation of the “rules of the game” that the same group had agreed upon. And that’s how the motion passed that would later bring on a new series of charges and countercharges and cause significant problems in the union.
Jess Grant, who once ran for the position of Sheriff of San Francisco (and lost), had become General Secretary-Treasurer (GST) and brought the headquarters out to San Francisco, had a more positive take on those years in the IWW. He said that “generation of Wobblies helped redefine/update the union for a modern audience.” Those who thought of the IWW as a union for “manly men who worked in heavy industries” were taken aback by the work with Earth First! and organizing with “hippies or hookers,” but, as he put it “We fought these trends by doing what we thought needed doing: organizing the unorganized wherever and whenever we could.” He added that he believed in the Spanish saying that “‘El mundo cambia con tu ejemplo, no con tu opinion (The world changes with your example, not with your opinion).’”
Dave and I certainly tried to be an example in our work and our shop that a few people could make a difference in their community. New Earth Press, in addition to being an IWW worker-owned and managed cooperative business that used soy ink and recycled paper, gave discount prices to political and community projects, and for a while we published a dozen or so books: New Earth Publications actually preceded New Earth Press by a year or so.
But it was a business, and “business” of any kind is a rather controversial activity in many sectors of the Left, especially the revolutionary Left where I spent most of my time in those years. As John Curl put it in the interview he did for my film, “worker cooperatives are basically small businesses,” and most are, in fact, nothing more or less than business partnerships, like what Dave and I had: a few people who found it more congenial to work together rather than to “go it alone” or work for a boss.4 However, unlike business partnerships and small businesses and corporations like New Earth Press (we were a “C” corporation), “worker cooperatives”are also susceptible to the other extreme of idealization.5 In the IWW, we found, both the demonizing and idealizing of worker cooperatives and collectives were ongoing.
Some in the IWW criticized us for working in the safe refuge of a cooperative when we should have been engaging in the “class struggle” outside. From this perspective, we were “petit bourgeois” who had withdrawn from the real struggle of revolutionaries to engage in the “class war.” This is undoubtedly a valid criticism and it has been borne out by studies of “cooperators” working at Mondragon.6
Nevertheless, such critics ignored the Wobbly proposal to “build the new society in the shell of the old,” which was what Dave and I saw as the objective for collectively run businesses. We believed that worker cooperatives could be a model for the future, the “seeds of the new society.” Nevertheless, I’m not convinced that worker-cooperatives are the cure for capitalism. Rather, they are themselves capitalist businesses that produce commodities for sale on the market at a profit, just like any other capitalist business and, as such, they don’t constitute a “socialist” alternative to the capitalist system. This is a point worth stressing, because there is so much mystification of the “limited utopias” of worker-cooperatives, especially in the years since the collapse of communism.
The best example of that mystification is found in Raúl Zibechi’s book, Territories in Resistance. There he argues that in recuperated factories and cooperative businesses labor can be “de-alienated in different ways: either by rotating tasks or because producers control the entire work process.” Using the example of a local worker-run bakery, Zibechi says these “free producers” (contrasted with “workers as appendages of machines”), “although they sell what they produce, they do not produce commodities” (italics his). What is the magic that transforms, let’s say, a cupcake that is a commodity, into one that is not? According to Raúl, the “non-commodity” cupcake is sold to someone known to, or friends of, the bakers, while the cupcake which is a “commodity” is “sold on the market.” In this process, Zibechi believes, “hierarchies” are somehow eliminated. He goes on to tell us that in such businesses as the exemplary bakery “selling requires building social relations in the neighborhood” and that “political economy is not applicable to these kinds of enterprises.” Finally, he asks “And what is produced?” and he replies, “what is produced is non-capitalist social relations, or non-capitalism.”7
These few pages in an otherwise brilliant book are an infuriating tangle of verbal mystification, confounding, rather than clarifying, a process occurring within the capitalist market. The passage is reminiscent of theological arguments for transubstantiation, when the touch of the priest’s magic fingers are presumed to transform a horrible-tasting cracker into the Divine Body of Jesus. In the same way Raúl would have us believe that the cupcake made by the fingers of a “free producer” at the worker-run bakery has thus been transformed into a “non-commodity” that exists outside of the time and space of a “market”—because it was sold to a friend?!
Worker-owned businesses operate according to identical restrictions as those imposed by the market on capitalist businesses: they must compete to get business; they must make a profit; they must pay themselves wages; and they do all that by using capital to produce commodities and sell them in the market. Worker-owned businesses’ production and marketing processes must be as efficient as any other capitalist enterprise so they can be competitive. Efficiency at this level increasingly requires a specialization of functions in production since the janitor managing the business while the manager cleans the bathroom—or the manager programing the computer while the programmer manages the business—in a “rotation of tasks” is inefficient and probably not satisfying to anyone. They certainly aren’t “free producers” even if it could be argued that they feel a sense of freedom (note the caveat and the qualification) when some tasks are rotated or made more flexible. In all likelihood the business that engages in such “task rotation” in an attempt to “break down” specialization or class structure in the workplace in extreme, or even significant, ways would only succeed in making itself vulnerable or uncompetitive in the marketplace. Certainly some flexibility and job rotation is possible, and some might be preferable, but how does that make workers “free producers” or “de-alienate” the work or eliminate hierarchies? And in what sense would they not “produce commodities”? What then, if not commodities, would they produce? Is not the cupcake, a thing made to be sold on the market, not the very definition of a “commodity”?
Both the traditional capitalist business and the worker-owned business sell their commodities by “building social relations in the neighborhood” since that’s simply good business. The capitalist also may sell cupcakes to his friend, at a discount, even, but that sale has taken place within the market, and the cupcake was sold at a profit (even if at a reduced profit for a friend) and, as we noted above, is therefore a “commodity.”
Raul’s argument raises far more questions than it answers. For starters: what does he mean by “non-capitalist social relations”? What does he mean by “non-commodities”? And what does “non-capitalism” mean? Were the “non-commodities” produced by “non-capital,” that is, without ovens or flour and money to buy the raw materials? As “non-commodities” do they therefore have no physical form?
All mystification and mythification aside, while there are certainly a number of options available to workers to make their workplace more flexible, democratic and less oppressive, at the top of my list would be the life of the petty bourgeois artisan, working alone or in the company of other small artisans. I’m willing to join James Scott in offering “two cheers” to the petty (small) bourgeoisie, which is why I still would advocate for worker-owned and controlled cooperatives/collectives.8 The flexibility
and control over one’s own work process and work schedule; the care and concern that one is able to put into one’s craft; the sense of responsibility one develops for all one’s own acts; the fact that profit, or loss, accrues to none other than the worker him or herself; the sense of self-worth and dignity that comes from mastering a craft: all these gains are possible, though not guaranteed, working as an independent petty bourgeois worker or in the company of other workers in a worker cooperative. To this list must be added the sense of camaraderie and solidarity, and sometimes even friendship, which can emerge in a worker cooperative.
But I think it’s worth repeating that worker cooperatives are capitalist businesses, even if some would consider them the ideal form of capitalist businesses. In a sense they replicate some aspects of the earliest model of capitalism as it organized itself when it emerged from feudalism around the “bourgs” or small towns that grew up in the shadows of the medieval castles (hence, the word, “bourgeois” or “one who lives in the bourg”).9 Free artisans and small merchants often found cooperative enterprises and mutual aid necessary for reasons of safety and convenience to carry on their work of crafting, buying, selling, and trading their wares.
This small “craft capitalism” is the sort of thing, I suspect, that many on the Left would hate to lose, and would, and do, defend before the onslaught of corporate capitalism as it seeks to take over the world down to the last corner of thought in the last consumer’s brain. The small “mom and pop” family business, the “Mary-Joe-Jill-and Moe” worker cooperative (aka the local “small business partnership”) is much of the Left’s “secret pleasure” as they talk about a socialism that can’t be smelled, tasted, or touched because there isn’t yet a model for it. And so it becomes very tempting to propose these endangered small capitalist businesses as models, or part of a model, for socialism, despite the fact that Marxism has so stigmatized the term “petty bourgeois.”10