Friday, May 26, 2006
Capitalist Activists
Perhaps activism’s most lethal vice is the capitalist-style thinking that one’s role in a movement is akin to a McDonald’s franchise. Those who fall to that weakness traditionally panic if they see any similar operation, which they view as a Burger King, setting up shop across the street. It typically culminates in each outfit pointing the finger and accusing the other of selling junk food.
Similar vices had been practiced notoriously by some non-governmental human rights and alternative media organizations in the orbit of the first twelve years of Zapatismo. In efforts to protect the turf or franchise that some activists or organizations seemed to think they owned, it was a regular occurrence that rank-and-file supporters of the movement would have to endure indignities and obstacles at the hands of the aspiring gate-keepers.
And on the left, where personal disputes and franchise-wars often fall prey to the disqualification of other individuals or organizations, where smear campaigns play into the hands of still more malevolent counter-insurgency tactics (because speaking ill or falsely in public about compañeros is, by definition, an act of counter-insurgency), the Zapatistas had a key challenge of both clearing away the bureaucratic brush and making room for everybody, large or small, to find and keep a place in the Other Campaign.
Similar vices had been practiced notoriously by some non-governmental human rights and alternative media organizations in the orbit of the first twelve years of Zapatismo. In efforts to protect the turf or franchise that some activists or organizations seemed to think they owned, it was a regular occurrence that rank-and-file supporters of the movement would have to endure indignities and obstacles at the hands of the aspiring gate-keepers.
And on the left, where personal disputes and franchise-wars often fall prey to the disqualification of other individuals or organizations, where smear campaigns play into the hands of still more malevolent counter-insurgency tactics (because speaking ill or falsely in public about compañeros is, by definition, an act of counter-insurgency), the Zapatistas had a key challenge of both clearing away the bureaucratic brush and making room for everybody, large or small, to find and keep a place in the Other Campaign.
