The Zapatista Experience: Rebellion, Resistance, and Autonomy

An exploration of the Zapatista project, from its conception to the present.

On the thirtieth anniversary of the Mayan Indigenous uprising in Chiapas, The Zapatista Experience reconstructs the trajectory of the Zapatista struggle over the last three decades, both in its concrete achievements and in its contributions to the renewal of critical and antisystemic thinking. The Zapatista rebellion has become a reference and source of inspiration for many struggles around the world due to its major contribution in reformulating a credible and desirable path to emancipation, a path that broke with previously dominant conceptions: state-centric, productivist, Eurocentric, modernist, and patriarchal. Baschet demonstrates how the Zapatistas have succeeded in materializing, on a massive scale, the concrete experience of another way of living, a forerunner of possible emerging worlds.

The autonomous rebel territories of Chiapas are among the most developed and radical of the ＂real utopias＂ that exist in the world today, exceptional in their experiments in self-governance and anti-State political form, argues Jérôme Baschet. The Zapatista Experience orients readers in the profusion of Zapatista writings concerning, for example, the elaboration of a different understanding of politics, the Zapatistas’ planetary conjunctural analysis of capitalism as a total war against humanity, their conception of Indigeneity that breaks with both modernist individualism and identity politics, and their notion of time and history. All this in clear opposition to neoliberal capitalism.

Jérôme Baschet is a historian teaching at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the Universidad Autonoma de Chiapas in San Cristóbal de las Casas. In studying the Zapatista struggle he found a tangible example of a real utopia and a powerful source of inspiration both for rethinking his work as a historian and to reopen critical reflections on possible post-capitalist worlds. Baschet is the author of a dozen books. The Zapatista Experience is the first of his books to be translated into English.

Traductores Rebeldes Autónomos Cronopios (TRAC) is a group of US-based, radical translators.