Autonomist Marxist Interpretations of the Zapatista Uprising: A Critique

The 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico suggested a rupture with Marxist orthodoxies and the possibility of a new radical anti-capitalist politics. Arguing that they should be viewed as transitional between the “old” hierarchical forms of the Leninist party and the “new” distributed network form of the multitude, Autonomist Marxist theorists Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, John Holloway, and Harry Cleaver have broadly influenced how both scholars and activists understand the Zapatistas. Their interpretations, however, neglect the critical function of centralized and disciplined organization within the networked forms considered emblematic of the Zapatistas, contributing to a distorted understanding of the genesis of their distinctive politics. Hardt and Negri's insight that forms of revolutionary organization parallel the organization of production suggests an alternative interpretation: that the hybrid distributed and hierarchical character of the Zapatista organization is better understood as keeping pace with the similarly hybrid logic of global capitalist production and accumulation.