Lessons from the Zapatistas

From Armed Insurgency to People’s Autonomy

Lia Pinheiro Barbosa, Peter M. Rosset, Henry Veltmeyer, Peter M. Rosset

• Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Economics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781773637549
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Economics

Lessons from the Zapatistas is essential reading for anyone interested in liberation, democracy and radical social transformation. It tells the story of the Zapatista insurgency, including the contemporary breadth and depth of their territorial autonomy, tracing how an Indigenous uprising burst forth from southern Mexico’s Lacandon Jungle to stage the 21st century’s first and most electrifying example of autonomy in action. The book provides a succinct history of the Zapatistas while analyzing their unique political thought as an amalgam of influences from Mayan cosmovision and languages, the Mexican Revolution, Latin American revolutionary thought, Marxism and anarchism. The authors trace the movement from its clandestine origins to the 1994 uprising and failed negotiations with the Mexican government, through the development of their unique form of grassroots autonomy and self-government — all the while fending off the violence of the state. The book offers an original analysis of Zapatista political theory, attending to the prominent role of women, their practice of social autonomy and experiments in education, self-government and alternative economic development.

Table of contents

• Critical Development Studies Series
• Acronyms
• Introduction to the English Edition
• En Movimiento [In Movement] Series of Small Books from CLACSO
• Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle
• Historical Background of Zapatismo
• From Negotiation with the State to Radical Autonomy
• Without Women There Is No Revolution!
• Autonomy in the Construction of a Different World
• Zapatista Critical Theory
• Radical, Popular, Peoples’, Communitarian and Class Autonomy
• Postscript to the English Language Edition
• Bibliography
• Index