understanding anti-systemic social movements, social revolutions and related forms of contentious politics. I then argue that without an understanding of communism as Marx understood it, and the broader theoretical framework such an understanding enables, that most of the scholarship on contentious politics will, the best intentions of sympathetic scholars notwithstanding, continue to be of marginal value to the movements themselves. A number of theories of contentious politics recognize the critical role that cultures of resistance and processes of cognitive liberation play in the formation of social movement actors as political subjects. In their definition of protest movements, Piven and Cloward describe the process of cognitive liberation: The emergence of protest movements entails a transformation both of consciousness and of behavior. The change in consciousness has at least three distinct aspects. First, “the system” – or those aspects of the system that people experience and perceive – loses legitimacy. Large numbers of men and women who ordinarily accept the authority of their rulers and the legitimacy of institutional arrangements come to believe in some measure that these rulers and these arrangements are unjust and wrong. Second, people who are ordinarily fatalistic, who believe that existing arrangements are inevitable, begin to assert “rights” that imply demands for change. Third, there is a new sense of efficacy; people who ordinarily consider themselves helpless come to believe that they have some capacity to alter their lot. (Piven and Cloward 1978:3–4) They continue with a description of the change in behavior, noting first the element of defiance, and secondly its collective character, even in instances that appear to be individual in character, “when those involved perceive themselves to be acting as members of a group, and when they share a common set of protest beliefs.” This emphasis on the central importance of the transformation of consciousness in the emergence of social movements was a challenge not only to theories of collective behavior which cast the motivations of movement participants as irrational, but also to theories of resource mobilization that emphasized the conscious intentions of formalized social movement
scheduled for 2006. The first phase of La Otra consisted primarily of a sort of reconnaissance tour of the country by Marcos, now renamed Delegate Zero on a motorcycle, accompanied by a “penguin” (actually a chicken) and various allies. La Sexta discursively, and La Otra in practice, marked a shift in the EZLN’s political orientation. Pérez Ruíz (Pérez Ruíz 2005) has argued that la Sexta was a return to the EZLN’s pre-1994 “radical project.” While that characterization oversimplifies the process of political development involved, it is certainly the case that la Sexta marked a break with the Zapatistas focus on the questions of indigenous rights and autonomy and a re-articulation of a vision of a broad extra-electoral and anti-capitalist Mexican left reminiscent of the themes of the First Declaration. In practice La Otra sought, and continues to pursue with mixed results, the linking together of heterogeneous nodes of resistance in order to reconstitute that left. In short, with the founding of the EZLN in 1983 and its subsequent embrace by a large fraction of the indigenous-campesino movement, Zapatismo emerged as a distinct political current within that movement in Chiapas. When the 1994 Zapatista uprising and the rapid initiation of talks with the government compelled the Zapatistas to experiment politically, they were able to draw on the unusual conceptual wealth of both the indigenous-campesino movement, and its indigenous and non-indigenous antecedents, to articulate a very creative response to the new political terrain carved out by neo-liberal globalization, a response that in turn captured the imaginations of the generation of young radical activists who would initiate the alter-globalization movement. The influence of Zapatismo, or rather a particular reading (or as I will argue on certain points, a misreading) of Zapatismo, on the alter-globalization movement and consequently on other movements with roots in the alter-globalization movement suggests the value of a serious historical sociological investigation into the origins and development of the