Workers Solidarity Movement member Andrew Flood who attended as a delegate from the Irish Mexico Group reports on this conference. Perhaps the most significant feature of the gathering was that it took place. We live in a period where comparatively very few people still believe it is possible to radically change the world they live in. Mass unemployment, poverty and violence are seen as permanent features of our society rather than problems which can be solved. Where people do fight back, as we've seen in Ireland around the Anti-Water Charges campaigns , these struggles tend to be around single issues and do not easily generalise into a wider fight against the system.
Many people think that there is no alternative to capitalism.
The collapse of the Eastern European regimes, the rightward shift of the social democratic parties and the ending of national liberation struggles through various peace processes are incorrectly seen as meaning all alternatives to capitalism have failed. The 3,000 people who made the sometimes difficult journey to five centres in the mountains and jungle of the Mexican South-East, were by their presence refusing to accept this idea and helping to create a new alternative. So to an extent the most important feature of this gathering was that it could happen, that people engaged in struggles from some 43 countries on the globe, from 'wealthy' Sweden to 'poor' Zaire came together and saw their struggles as having a common purpose. The people holding the conference were a rebel army called the EZLN or Zapatistas who rose up on New Years Day 1994, seizing four towns in the region. They attracted attention in anarchist circles because their early statements said they were not interested in seizing power for themselves and made reference to various anarchists from Mexican history as sources of inspiration.