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

Beyond resistance to global nexus 111
activists from around the world – trade unionists; environmentalists;
campaigners from various NGOs; sympathetic writers and intellectuals,
gathered to hear of and respond to the particular situation the Zapatistas
had helped create. In Marcos’ words:
Some of the best rebels from the five continents arrived in the mountains
of the Mexican Southeast. All of them brought their ideas, their hearts,
their worlds. They came to La Realidad to find themselves in others’
ideas, in others’ reasons, in others’ worlds.
(Marcos 2001: 121)
This encounter consolidated links that had already begun to emerge
through websites, list-servers and other CMC establishing a new set of
weak links born from reciprocal affectivities derived from the participatory,
pedagogic and risk-taking inclinations of those in attendance. The
Encuentro thus acted as a ‘mirror and a lens’ in the idiom of the Zapatistas,
it allowed for recognition of common themes and experiences and sought a
collective focus upon whom and what could be described as the ‘enemy’.
The Zapatistas’ combination of paradoxical lyricism and participatory
structures caught the mood of southern activists engaged in collective
struggles against the damaging economic and delocalising effects of neoliberalism
and fired the imaginations of northern activists seeking to rearticulate
a political project in the era of TINA (there is no alternative). In this
encounter they discovered their targets were essentially the same, the
‘hylomorphic’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 407–409) architecture of
globalised capitalism. The IMF, WB and WTO, as well as the proxy governance
through multi-national corporations facilitated by Free Trade
Agreements (FTAs), Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) and the
rapacious conduct of the corporations themselves, the only difference was
in the form and type of resistances. Although resistance was occurring
globally, there was little attempt to co-ordinate and communicate between
movements in a cohesive or comprehensive way. In the early 1990s, sweatshop
workers were rioting in Manila, Indian farmers were dismantling
Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets and land was being reclaimed across Brazil
by Movimento Sem Terra (Notes from Nowhere 2003). The First
Encuentro was an attempt to name these struggles as one, to offer space for
connections to be made, to construct an inclusive framework and to
announce a space for thinking alternatives, albeit these alternatives should
in the Zapatistas’ words seek ‘everything for everybody and nothing for
ourselves.’
By promoting a process of encounter and mutual recognition of grassroots
movements, in their sophisticated crafting and use of symbolic repertoires
of struggle and in their articulation of an immanent GCS, the Zapatistas
framed resistance as process – ‘preguntando caminamos’ (Asking we walk).
This framing of solidarity within a terrain of uncertainty and possibility