by Elliott

My interest was already piqued when I picked up a copy of Beyond Resistance: Everything at the Iron Rail Book Collective in New Orleans. I’d read a post online about a new interview with Subcomantante Insurgente Marcos, the spokesperson for the Zapatistas, being published by a group in Durham. I was intrigued by the back-cover blurb from autonomist Marxists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Everything about the book said “read me.”

And I’m just as excited after reading the thing. It turns out, Beyond Resistance is actually a three-for-one deal. In 86 slim pages, you get: an interview with Marcos conducted just after the cessation of his tour on the Other Campaign, a supplemental copy of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, and an incisive introduction by El Kilombo Intergalactico.

El Kilombo isn’t just the collective that published the edition through their own micropress. It’s also a community space run by popular assembly in Durham, North Carolina, that put out the book as one of many community projects! Three El Kilombo folks recently swept through New York on a mini speaking tour (hitting the Brecht Forum, the 123 Community Space in Brooklyn, and Bluestockings bookstore) to share a bit about the Other Campaign and what’s popping in North Carolina.

That was exciting too. In Durham, the El Kilombo space brings together students, Latino folks and black folks in one collective project. It plays host to youth-led reading groups, English and Spanish language classes and Capoiera instruction–all in a horizontally-managed community center. (What are Kilombos, you ask? Quilombos were a term for liberated settlements held by escaped slaves in the Americas, operating in the interstices of colonialism much like Maroon encampments. The most famous quilombo was home to 30,000 inhabitants, and lasted nearly a century.)

El Kilombo’s project is so remarkable to me that, on some level, my favorite part of Beyond Resistance is their introduction. Sure, the Sixth Declaration is a good read a second time through. Hell yeah, the interview with Marcos is great, and hits on topics like global migration, the construction of identities, and the need to build new spaces of encounter and collective struggle. Oh, here’s a bit of what he has to say about that:

[If a] path of inconformity isn’t constructed, well everyone will go about constructing their own ways of manifesting it, but we will continue to lack the place of encounter. That is why we say, this isn’t about constructing a world rebellion. That already exists. It’s about constructing the space where this rebellion encounters itself, shows itself, begins to know itself. To those that say there isn’t discontent in the American Union, the thing is there is, but we can’t see it. Or we can’t see it because it doesn’t show itself. And it doesn’t show itself because it has no place to do so.

That’s profound stuff. But El Kilombo’s introduction also contributes penetrating analysis from a largely people of color group in the urban U.S. To me, that feels like a breath of fresh air. Here’s a cliff-notes version of some of El Kilombo’s writing, dealing with the globalization of conflict:

It is now the “downsized” state where any semblance of collective welfare is eliminated and replaced with the logic of individual safety, with the most repressive apparatuses of the State, the police and the Army, unleashed to enforce this logic. The state is in no way smaller in the daily lives of its subjects; rather, it is guaranteed that the power of this institution (collective spending) is directed purely toward new armaments and the increasing presence of the police in daily life.
…
Today, in the structural absence of [an exterior threat], the army is redirected to respond with violence to manage (and yet never solve) a series of never-ending local conflicts (Atenco, Oaxaca, New Orleans) that potentially threaten the overall stability of international markets.
…
What was previously national politics has been replaced with what the EZLN refers to as “megapolitics”–the readjustment of local policy to global financial interests. Thus the sites that once actually mediated among local actors are now additionally charged with the mission of creating the image that such mediation continues to take place. It is best to be careful then and not believe that the politicians and their parties (be they right wing or “progressive”) are of no use; rather, it is important to note that today their very purpose is the outright simulatino of social dialogue (that is, they are of no use TO US!)

I highly recommend it: pick up a copy of Beyond Resistance: Everything, peruse the library on the El Kilombo site, and check out another piece of astute analysis put out by the collective, called “Feliz Año Cabrones: On the Continued Centrality of the Zapatista Movement After 14 Years.”

Via Lines of Flight

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