CRACK CAPITALISM

o,'dill:HY women and men, children and old people, that is,
,"b 'Is, non-conformists, misfits, dreamers', say the Zapatistas
i 11 t h 'i r mo t profound and difficult challenge of all.]
'I'h" rdinary people' in our list are very different from one
ol1oth 'LIt may seem strange to place the car worker who goes to
h is nil tment in the evening next to the young man who goes to
rhe jungle to devote his li fe to organising armed struggle against
'apital ism, And yet there is a continuity. What both have in
'ommon is that they share in a movement of refusal-and-otherrcation:
they are rebels, not victims; subjects, not objects. In
the case of the car worker, it is individual and just evenings and
weekends; in the case of the young man in the jungle, it is a very
perilous commitment to a life of rebellion. Very different and yet
with a line of affinity that it would be very wrong to overlook.
Nothing more simple. The sixteenth-century French theorist
La Boetie expressed the simplicity of revolution with great clarity
in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (154612002: 139-40):
You sow your crops in order that he [the lord] may ravage them, you
install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your
daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order
that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows-to be led
into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the servants of his
greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto
hard labour in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his
filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger
and the mightier to hold you in check. From all these indignities, such as
the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves
if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve
to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place
hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support
him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose
pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.
I':v 'rything that the tyrant has comes from us and from his
exploitation of us: we have only to stop working for him and
he will cease to be a tyrant because the material basis of his
lyr:11ll1y wi ll have disappeared. We make the tyrant; in order
I () Iw fr . ., we 111 ust stop making the tyrant. The key to our
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