The Zapatista Experience

Rebellion, Resistance, and Autonomy

Jérôme Baschet, Traductores Rebeldes Autónomos Cronopios

• Publisher: AK Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781849355704
• eBook ISBN: 9781849355711
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

An exploration of the Zapatista project, from its conception to the present.

On the thirtieth anniversary of the Mayan Indigenous uprising in Chiapas, The Zapatista Experience  reconstructs the trajectory of the Zapatista struggle over the last three decades, both in its concrete achievements and in its contributions to the renewal of critical and antisystemic thinking.  The Zapatista rebellion has become a reference and source of inspiration for many struggles around the world due to its major contribution in reformulating a credible and desirable path to emancipation, a path that broke with previously dominant conceptions: state-centric, productivist, Eurocentric, modernist, and patriarchal. Baschet demonstrates how the Zapatistas have succeeded in materializing, on a  massive scale, the concrete experience of another way of living, a forerunner of possible emerging worlds. 

The autonomous rebel territories of Chiapas are among the most developed and radical of the "real utopias" that exist in the world today, exceptional in their experiments in self-governance and anti-State political form, argues    Jérôme Baschet.  The Zapatista Experience  orients readers in the profusion of Zapatista writings concerning, for example, the elaboration of a different understanding of politics, the Zapatistas' planetary conjunctural analysis of capitalism as a total war against humanity, their conception of Indigeneity that breaks with both modernist individualism and identity politics, and their notion of time and history. All this in clear opposition to neoliberal capitalism.

Table of contents

• Preface to the English Edition
• Translators’ Note
• Introduction
• Historical Prologue
• Chapter 1: “Autonomy Is the People’s Life Itself”
• Chapter 2: “We Can Govern Ourselves”
• Chapter 3: “For Humanity and against Capitalism!”
• Chapter 4: “We Want a World Where Many Worlds Fit”
• Chapter 5: “Our Struggle is for History and against Oblivion”
• Final Thoughts
• Bibliographic Notes
• Copyright