Complexity and Social Movements: Multitudes at the Edge of Chaos ...

110 Beyond resistance to global nexus
many, acknowledging itself to be equal in its desire to listen and be listened to,
recognizing itself as diverse in the tones and levels of voices forming it.
(Closing Remarks to the First Intercontinental
Encuentro for Humanity and against Neoliberalism,
Subcommandante Marcos 2001: 122)
Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of
recognition but of a fundamental encounter.
(Deleuze 1994: 139)
The Zapatistas engaged in a double articulation defending a place-based
model of the cultural and natural, whilst expressing that defence as a contributory
action to a network of global resistance. They sought to catalyse
self-recognition amongst movement actors of the field of potential, the
immanent global civil society (GCS) that they defined militantly as an
antagonistic force for social change. In Latin America, the concept of civil
society had come to stand for strategies ‘based on the autonomous organization
of society and the reconstruction of social ties outside the authoritarian
state’ (Arato 1995: 19). The Zapatistas’ definition and broadening of
the concept to the global emerges in this context, and as such describes
something different from the dominant concept of civil society as the associational
space mediating between family and state. Instead, the immanent
GCS that the Zapatistas sought to actualise is conceived as a networked,
self-organised and reflexive project of inter-linked experiments in autonomy
and co-operation. A project to affirm the possibility of ‘dignity’ that
‘already exists in the form of being denied’ (Holloway 2002: 213) where
repression is negated by the diffusion of power and movements strive for
dissolution rather than capture of state apparatus. The struggle of the
Zapatistas therefore counterpoises means against ends, advocating a form
of a radically democratic praxis towards the emergence of a public sphere,
constituted by and from struggle:
And its result will not be the victory of a party, an organisation, or an
alliance of triumphant organisations with their own specific social
proposal, but rather a democratic space for resolving the confrontation
of various political proposals.
(Zapatista Communiqué, 20 January 1994)
This conceptualisation prefigures the emergence of the Social Forum
movement and it suggests a process model of a participatory and deliberative
space that the Zapatistas reasoned might act as a break upon neoliberal
globalisation. The Zapatistas’ successes in utilising the interventions
of this ill-defined sector as a defence against military aggression provided a
rationale for this strategy. Once defined, this GCS was invited to Chiapas,
to the Zapatista ‘reality’ in a place of that name – La Realidad. Here, in the
‘First Intercontinental Encuentro for Humanity and Against Neo-liberalism’