Ian Schlom's List: Zapatismo

It's published in a journal called "American Ethnologist", so that's funny. So this would be a good paper to look at to get a picture of what the Ejido is.
Abstract: In this paper, data from a Mexican ejido are presented to show that there are significant intra-community differences in wealth and willingness to adopt new forms of behavior-two traits often reported as being homogeneous among peasants. Two empirical examples of the relationship between wealth and adoption of technology are presented and compared with previous theoretical models. While support is found for two variants of a "middle class conservatism" model, it is suggested that several different models of this relationship may emerge depending on the technology introduced and the socioeconomic constraints and incentives present. This point is illustrated with data on the economics of the two new types of technology.

This is about the reforms and changes to the Ejido. It was published in 1994, so...
Abstract: The evolving privatization of the ejido system in Mexico represents a challenge to standard economic models of common property regimes. These models tend to emphasize human interrelations while discounting the ecological conditions which form the environment for human interactions. A risk-spreading, safety-first model capturing interrelationships between nature and humans is developed to analyze the potential implications of Mexico's privatization efforts. Recognizing that the majority of ejido lands are communal, not parcelized, located primarily in arid areas, the model supports the prediction that privatization will occur and be most successful on irrigated, ejido lands with modern social and economic infrastructure.

So as it turns out, it may be biased towards the capitalists.

A large collection of writings of Subcomandante Marcos, poet Spokeperson for the EZLN.

a version of the fourth world war.

aNSTRACT: This article discusses some problems with participatory approaches in development thinking. It is argued that external interventions are always embedded within wider fields of power (force fields) and that discourses of "participation" and "grassroots initiatives" cannot change these established power relations. A study is presented of a Mexican government program that used a "bottom-up participatory approach" in order to stimulate ejidos to formulate their own internal ejido rules. It is shown that this program—in which "local organizing capacities" were said to be central elements—did not change the existing force field and only created more room for officials and intermediaries in their negotiations with peasants.

This is going to be a very valuable resource!
Abstract: Changes in 1992 to Article 27 of Mexico's Constitution permitted the privatization of former collectively owned lands (ejidos). In 1996 governmental officials arrived in Tecoripa, a small livestock ejido village in Sonora, to assist ejidatarios (ejido members) in deciding whether to privatize. The ejidatarios struggled with two problems simultaneously: whether to privatize and whether to increase the size of their individual parcels from ten to twentyseven hectares, thereby decreasing the amount of communally owned lands. A key motive force in the ejido's decision has been the ejidatarios' desire to increase individual cattle production. This would be accomplished by clearing the native forest and creating an artificial grassland by planting buffelgrass, an African exotic. Ejidatarios believe that by privatizing, expanding their individual holdings, and creating grassland, they will become more prosperous. In Tecoripa they have sought the twin goals of privatizing and expanding their parcels. Their confidence in gaining increased wealth through expanded cattle production is based on inadequate information, however. Ecological variables and economic forces pose grave threats to the long-term viability of their private initiative.

In Calibre and on Zotero
May 1966

Add this to Calibre and Zotero!

ASdd this to Calibre and Zotero!

Add this to Calibre and Zotero!

In Calibre. Add this to Zotero!

"Networks: The Ecology of Movements" from The Notes from Nowhere Collective, We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism (London: Verso, 2003)

The article mentions the success of ants in horizontal self-organisation. In order to explain why the ants are so effective in their ability to organise themselves, the author points to the fact that whenever an ant passes by another, they "talk" to one another and exchange information. This is of course a parable for the information technologies that are progressing today, internet, mobile phones, &c.
The author provides four lessons of the ants for movement building and movement function: "More is different: A few ants roaming across your kitchen floor might find the bread crumb hiding under the table; a lone affinity group might find the breach in the fence around the summit; a few independent researchers might manage to find the link between the Enron scandal and their local council.

But increase their numbers and interconnect them and you’ll have something which behaves quite differently – you’ll get systematic change – a movement that can cause an entire summit to be canceled, or the entire corporate accounting system to come crumbling down. Many interacting smaller pieces create the exponential magic of emergence: swarm logic.

Our movements are multiplying at an incredible rate. Every day new connections are developing both face to face and virtually as the Internet grows to connect more sentient beings than any other technology before it. New web pages, email lists, and Indymedia centers are springing up like grass after a downpour, leading to more networking, more coordination, and more actions. The crowd has always terrified those in authority, but a crowd where each individual is able to think and act autonomously, a crowd where everyone is connected to everyone else, will cause more than a shiver down their spine, because it behaves in ways that no one will ever be able to predict.

Stay small: The greatest feature of the ant colony is the simplicity of each ant; if one ant began to somehow assess the overall state of the whole colony, the sophisticated behavior would stop trickling up from below, and swarm logic would collapse. Emergence teaches us that not to know everything is a strength, and that local knowledge is sovereign. The magic is in densely interconnected systems made up of small simple elements.

As soon as our groups become too big, communication tends to break down and hierarchies develop. We must learn to divide like cells before this happens; big is unwieldy, small and connected is what we should aim for. A network of a million small interconnected groups cannot be stopped by any of the world’s police agencies, no leaders can be singled out for assassination or corruption, no single headquarters raided, no central party committee infiltrated. But that doesn’t mean our movement is small – for we are all networked into a whole that is larger than anyone can possibly imagine.

Encourage randomness: Haphazard encounters are key to network-building – they are where creativity lies. Without the lone ant exploring new territory, no one would find new sources of food or develop ways to adapt to environmental conditions.

Decentralized systems thrive on the creativity of random encounters. How often have you been in a huge swirling crowd on the streets during a festival or an action and bumped into exactly the right person, or found out a key piece of information you were seeking? How often have you received a seemingly randomly forwarded email from someone that happens to point you to someone else who will enable your new project to get off the ground?

Some may think that with perfect unity the revolution begins, but without randomness, evolution ends. While some toe the party line, others are drifting and dancing into new ways of changing the world. What may look like chaos to some is actually brimming with creativity.

Listen to your neighbors: “Local” turns out to be the key term in understanding swarm logic. Emergent behavior happens because the ants are paying attention to their neighbors, rather than waiting for orders from a distant authority. The more ants do so, the more quickly their colony will solve problems. Local information leads to global wisdom: this is the secret of the intelligent swarm.

The ants teach us that by working locally and continually sharing our local stories globally, by connecting everything and creating a plethora of feedback loops, we don’t need to – indeed cannot – “organize” the global network, it will regulate itself, swarm-like, lifelike, if we develop the right structures and conditions."
The last part of this article has an epigraph of Mikhail Bakunin. I read it before, and I think it was either while I was experiencing Paris for the first time, or in the 1848 revolutions in Bohemia. (Reading further, it explains that the quote was taken from the context of the '48 revolution in Paris! Thanks EH Carr and leisure reading!)
The author describes the activity of the ants and the quote of Bakunin in revolutionary Paris ('48) as "emergence."
Reading this is reminiscent of reading Mutual Aid during Thanksgiving Break. Oh, lovely coincidences.

This article will allow me to evaluate the mainstream media’s interpretation of the Other Campaign. Expectedly, it is full of jokes and superfluity and lacking in legitimate analysis.
The NYT guy said that Marcos was vague about what the Other Campaign is about.
They say Marcos "even tried to undermine" the "popular leftist candidate," the one from the PRD, who would sell out the country.
"Precisely what Marcos hopes to accomplish with the meetings and with a planned national tour by a group of Zapatista representatives remains murky. He has not defined how he would change the Constitution."
They say that the EZLN hasn't launched another military offensive because they were pushed back into the jungle by the military in 1995.
in article: Still others say Marcos's call for a broad movement reflects a widespread disappointment with left-leaning politicians throughout Latin America, who have become enmeshed in the sort of corruption scandals they once criticized.

"What they are saying represents a trend in Latin America, which is that people have lost faith in political parties," said Peter M. Rosset, an expert in agricultural policy who attended the meeting on Sunday. "The basic feeling is that the political class is all the same."

That sentiment was expressed over and over here in San Miguel, a former 15,000-acre ranch that the Zapatistas seized in 1994 and divided among former Indian ranch hands.

"This movement, for me, its historic," said Arturo Guzmán González, a 29-year-old singer who did a version a cappella of his protest song, "Manifestarse." "It has a moral base, this movement. They seek the words of everyone."

This is a book that Margaret suggested to me when studying the Other Campaign and non-electoral strategies to changing the country.
Notes on Burning Post