Join the Institute for Social Ecology for a reading group around The Zapatista Experience: Rebellion, Resistance, and Autonomy by Jerome Baschet. We will meet Wednesdays at 4pm Pacific/7pm Eastern for six weeks, beginning October 15.

ISE reading groups are open to all! No prior familiarity with social ecology is required. The book is available for purchase directly from the publisher in print and ebook format and at many independent bookstores.

Reading group schedule:

October 15: Preface, Introduction, and Historical Prologue

October 22: Chapter 1, "Autonomy is the People's Life Itself": The Construction of Autonomy

October 29: Chapter 2, "We Can Govern Ourselves": A Very Other Politics From Below

November 5: Chapter 3, "For Humanity and against Capitalism!" The Fourth World War, the Hydra, and the Storm to Come

November 12: Chapter 4, "We Want a World Where Many Worlds Fit": Indigenous Struggle and Planetary Resistance

November 19: Chapter 5, "Our Struggle is for History and against Oblivion": An Other Grammar of Historical Times

Book description:

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.

The Zapatista Experience reading group