Bringing commodification and a touch of cultural imperialism to the Zapatistas?

Is there a touch of cultural imperialism and bringing of commodification in the project of 'Kiptik', a solidarity organisation who work with the Zapatistas?

There was a talk recently by people from Kiptik about their work with the Zapatistas (LARC 13.07.03). Kiptik claims not to be an NGO (though they do fundraise eg. by selling their merchandise) but, rather, a solidarity project, whose main areas of interest are water, health, media and art.

The project sound reasonable from the website. Their work installing drinking water systems seems to respect ‘bottom up’ approaches by using gravity to pipe water, and leaving a toolkit so people can repair it themselves.

The media aspect involves showing local people videos and films. Kiptik say the local people love TV. The art aspect involves getting more people to paint murals, and bringing over Banksy. In terms of health, they’re aware of the importance of people relearning traditional medicine, but combine this with a modern (Western) approach with healthcare/doctor provision. Kiptik also help encourage the growing of a wider diversity of crops to help alleviate malnutrition apparently resulting from an impoverished diet of staples corn and beans.

This sounds like a worthy to reasonable project, but there some aspects, particularly ones emerging from the talk they gave, which raised my alarm bells.

Their work seems to go beyond the project’s website remit. They stress that they don’t have an agenda and only respond to what the Zapatistas want. One of the projects they support is the setting up of schools. I’ll move on later to use Illich’s ideas to give a critical angle on schools. Here I want to draw attention to a knock-on effect of this schools development. Which is that teachers need paying, and that therefore the people want ways of earning cash to help pay for their children’s schooling.

The projects that Kiptik are involved in to help Zapatista people make some money include helping people set up a recording studio, a CD-making project, and helping people grow corn as a cash crop.

The people in the project seem to be more lefty than anarchist (just judging by their celebration of the use of Che Guevara as a reference for naming things/places, while making no mention, in the presentation, of the place named after Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magon; and also judging by their star logo showing a pickaxe and spanner instead of a hammer and sickle). But either way I’d expect them to be a little more aware of capitalism, the market and commodification and to at least question whether it was the right thing to help people draw themselves towards or into these areas (ie. through the CD production and sales and the cash cropping). But they vehemently defended this aspect of the project.

They also mentioned their desire to help people find ways of not working on the land – which raised the notion of becoming a worker rather than a campesino since the projects seemed to involve entering the market rather than community exchange. Marx was always scornful of people who worked on the land, preferring the modern ‘worker’. So this fits with a Marxist agenda. And, come to think of it, there’s a strand of uncritical Marxism which sees large-scale commodity production as OK as long as the ‘means of production’ are in the hands of the people. Which is not to say Kiptik are Marxists, just that there’s some correspondence of ideas.

Anyway, when challenged on the potential Westernising effect of bringing film and video showings to the area, Kiptik discounted any concerns about the impact of the media, simply claiming that people loved it.

I want to look now at their attitude towards SCHOOLS. Kiptik claimed that these schools were for teaching reading and writing and the history of the Zapatista movement and (presumably) the local people’s history. It seems difficult to see why children (or adults) would need a special building, specially paid teachers and school-style attendance for this, since all this could be met by community meetings and informal structures. For someone to learn to read and write just needs the presence and attention of another who can read and write; similarly one’s own history is better learnt through family and community. I also imagine that most school books would be written in Spanish rather than one of the myriad languages spoken by the people of the Chiapas, adding another element of downplaying indigenous diversity.

But, on a deeper level, schools are an important aspect of WESTERN DEVELOPMENT. Ivan Illich began to develop his critical ideas on the impact of school and development in Mexico. Though the Kiptik website mentions the notion of ‘human scale’ – a term which derives from the same area of thinking in which Illich was involved (ie. writers like Leopold Kohr and Kirkpatrick Sale), the Kiptik people appeared to know nothing of his ideas, or consciously rejected them.

Briefly, Illich saw development, including schools, hospitals, wage labour and transport as destroying what he called autonomous ‘vernacular’ culture. Illich saw that people had a natural capacity for skills at learning, healing, and subsistence. These self-reliant skills are expropriated and monopolised by large-scale Western institutions. For example, in Illich’s terms, school represents the mass production of education, an industrial commodity enterprise, replacing community and familial learning; transport replaces self-reliant mobility; hospitals monopolise and destroy healing practices. Illich emphasises the ‘dependency’ then created in the populace who, deprived of the means of fulfilling needs for themselves, become dependent on the commodity, the machine, the transport system, school and hospital.

It is ironic that Illich spent some years working in Mexico, where, in Cuernavaca, he co-founded the Centre for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC). One might think that Kiptik, with its fundraising, could use the money to bring Mexicans sympathetic to Illich’s ideas to the Chiapas to present people with another perspective on Western ideologies of development and ‘progress’.

Similar points to Illich’s have been made by Helena Norbert-Hodge, whose experience with people of the Ladakh in the Himalayas is that school ‘teaches’ children, formerly satisfied with their simple and small-scale lives, that their lives are impoverished and squalid. And there have been many studies of the impact of the media on the lives of people in poorer lands, who then perceive their lives to be inferior and wanting.

I’m aware that the people of the Chiapas have suffered oppression and disruption of indigenous ways of life for centuries. If there is malnourishment then the roots of that malnourishment need to be addressed. There must however be local Mexican knowledges and practices that could be relearnt to increase subsistence crop diversity and well-being, without the baggage and suppositions of Western development and technological ‘progress’.


Some of the attitudes of Kiptik speakers were contradictory. For example they acknowledged that the Zapatistas, when asked what they wanted by way of support for others, said they wanted people to fight their own patch. Yet Kiptik felt totally justified in bringing to them the so-called ‘benefits’ of Western technological ‘progress’, and commodities, in the form of media, Western-style murals, a fridge, schools, doctors. This was a chosen path instead of the idea of indigenous and autonomous inventions and techniques, and informal and community learning.

Kiptik made much of what local people wanted and requested. Yet they were aware of the power of ideologies, since they acknowledged that it was local people themselves who had been bought off and drawn to enter the local government administration.

Kiptik also emphasised cultural exchange as a means of glossing over their bringing in of commodities and technologies connected to media and CD production. There was little evidence that this cultural exchange was anything other than one way (West to Chiapas). Even an anecdote about dancing showed how our noble white men thought the local dance just a bit boring and thought they’d liven it up with some ska. It’s difficult to see them doing the local dance of the Chiapas in their Bristol clubs. So much for cultural exchange?

As for the meeting itself there was a little rigidity in the discussion from the organisers and Kiptik. Someone from the audience raised a point about the history of the Zapatista movement as originating from the moving in of Maoists from the north, and subsequent recruitment of indigenous people into the Zapatista army. One of the organisers chipped in suddenly at this, bringing up an unrelated point about middle class primitivist activists having romantic ideas about indigenous peoples. The Kiptik guy chipped in with ‘yes, they think they’re noble savages’. It seemed that the Maoist origins of the Zapatistas were not to be addressed.

Both the speakers seemed imbued with a (Marxist?) progressivist notion of history, a factor that was clear from their references to technological ‘progress’ and wanting to help people work off (not on) the land. When asked about this from a member of the ‘audience’, they immediately pigeonholed that person as ‘anti-technology’ and claimed to speak for all the Chiapas people as ‘not being against technology’. An anecdote about a man who sung a traditional song and then started up his chainsaw was recounted to support this. Obviously the chainsaw was nothing to do with Kiptik, and had been purchased by a local person to help him in his work. Chainsaws are for cutting up (or down) very large trees, such as grow in rainforests, so this is a little unnerving…

An interesting question that I’d never much considered before now is how far the Zapatista army has coopted a movement of peasants/campesinos. There’s no doubt the attentions of media-savvy Marcos have raised their media profile. But what are the hidden costs and recuperations? You can see how the demands of the people of the Chiapas have been put into the language of academics and Marxist intellectuals. For example their formal demands have been framed in terms of a demand for ‘civil society’: not a term that ordinary people, anarchists or campesinos use to ‘frame’ their visions of what they want.

Kiptik have shown that they’re aware that the Zapatistas want people to fight their own struggles, in their own corners of the world. This is in the spirit of autonomy. Is this autonomy compromised by the efforts of some solidarity organisations? Does taking film and TV showings to the people, and helping them set up recording studios and CD-producing projects, and sending out Banksy, have just a touch of cultural imperialism?