Abstract
This chapter, the last of our volume, is a double theoretical challenge. On the one hand, it attempts to question the implications of the ‘abstract time’ of capital and its consequences on the dynamics for socialization. On the other hand, it will try to show how the experiences of both the ‘EZLN’ (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) and the ‘Councils of Good Governments’ have had to invent a horizontal time in their anti-capitalist struggle, and that horizontal time implies a critique of the abstract temporality of the politics of the value-form and the state form.
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Notes
- 1.
This case, and the ones specified in the document, is a personal translation from Spanish into English (T.N.).
- 2.
The Cuban case deserves a special consideration which, to some extent, leaves it out of the generalization we just made.
- 3.
Regarding the state as a form of the social relations of capitalism, see Holloway (2002).
- 4.
The centrality of the political organization of the struggles is emphatically explained by Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés. Regarding this, see EZLN (2015).
- 5.
In fact, time as a time of collective self-determination was never a key matter for the revolutionary avant-gardes: the classic model which supposed that the identity of the state with the people gained by the takeover of power would allow a time managed rationally, where the antagonistic contradictions would not continue to be of importance in the social dynamics.
- 6.
In that sense, it can be said that our experience in social change is limited, though there certainly were some moments of splendor. From this comes the idea that the criticism of what already exists must not be restricted by those limits, fetishizing them as if they were the ultimate historical direction, but it must open the horizon of a greater change instead.
- 7.
On the category of form as a fixation of the social flow, see Holloway (2002).
- 8.
Regarding this, see H-Zinn (1999).
- 9.
For a systematic study of the categories of time in Marx’s Capital, see Tombazos (2014).
- 10.
Regarding this, F. Jameson writes: ‘I gloss here a fundamental notion of Adorno’s, namely, that what we think of as individuality in the West, and what seems to us somehow to trace the outlines of an essential human nature, is little more than the marks and scars, the violent compressions, resulting from the interiorization by so-called civilized human beings of that instinct for self-preservation without which, in this fallen society or history, we would all be destroyed as surely as those unfortunates who are born without a tactile warning sense of hot and cold, or pain and pleasure, in their secondary nervous systems’ (Jameson 2000: 92).
- 11.
When the laborer is forced to sell his work force by the objective conditions (possession, dispossession of the production media) of his existence, he is already inscribed within labor as a social totality. The laborer does not sell work but workforce, that is to say, ‘living labour’ or ‘purely subjective existence of labour’ (Marx 1971). Objectifying this ‘living labour’ is already part of labor as an exploitation and dominio category, of labor in its dual character. In such a way that objectified labor is presented as an alienated and opposed to the laborer, as an antithesis between objectified labor and living labor (Marx 1971: 261–262). It is to this to what we refer when we talk about concept of living abstraction.
- 12.
To analyze capitalist accumulation as a compression of time and social spaces, see Harvey (1998).
- 13.
Homogeneity is due to the tearing of the subject and the object (Adorno 1975).
- 14.
Doubtlessly, theoretical exposition of this matter and its defense is found in the brilliant essays of Georg Lukács (1969) History and class-consciousness.
- 15.
We based this in Bolivar Echeverrías’s translation (2007) of Benjamin.
- 16.
We consider that the image of progress as a storm that leaves debris after debris exposed by Benjamin (2007: 29) in the Thesis IX on the Angel of History is perfectly applicable to the revolutions of the twentieth century, made in the name of progress. The image of the debris/ruin is fundamental to understand this process and its historical results.
- 17.
Among the publications on autonomy, we can highlight the one coordinated by B. Baronnet, M. Mora Bayo and R. Stahler-Sholk (2011).
- 18.
In Gunn’s (2015) argumentation, ‘mutual recognition’ is Hegel’s most radical concept in Phenomenology of the spirit, and it implies the dissolution of the relations which imply the denial of the other. This is, in the manner of ‘mutual recognition’ we can read communism.
- 19.
‘Two decades ago, the EZLN was organization, referent and authority in the indigenous communities. Today it is them who govern us and we are the ones who obey. Before we used to govern and order them, now our job is to find a way to support their decisions. Before we used to go in front, directing the way and destiny. Today we go at the back of our peoples, sometimes running behind them trying to follow their pace’ (Subcomandante insurgente Galeano 2017).
- 20.
On the subject, see the testimonies of Zapatista women in EZLN (2015).
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Tischler, S. (2020). Zapatista Autonomy: The Invention of Time as a Discontinuity and Untotaling Category. In: Oliva, A., Oliva, Á., Novara, I. (eds) Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39954-2_18
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