Introduction to "The Fourth World War Has Begun" by Subcomandante Marcos

I write this brief introduction to Marcos’s important statement on the logics of globalization, “The Fourth World War Has Begun,” as the two-week long “Zapatour” ends and the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) enters Mexico City to begin negotiations with the first Mexican government since the Revolution not led by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). It is clear that the Zapatista uprising of 1994, its advances and retreats, and especially its stubborn resistance, was crucial to the long, drawn-out delegitimation and eventual exhaustion of the PRI-in-government (I say “PRI-gobierno” because the apparatuses of the PRI-state remain). In this respect, the arrival in Mexico City of the EZLN is a relocation of great symbolic importance, significant enough, one hopes, to override the possibility of the Zapatista’s entanglement in a long and bureaucratized process of negotiation, a well-established weapon of the state.

That the PAN government of Vicente Fox is apparently now willing to contemplate discussing again the implementation of the Acuerdos de San Andrés (agreed to only to be promptly ignored by the previous, Zedillo government) is a major achievement—although it is clear that its provisions are not only opposed by the forces of the Center and Right, but have produced considerable debate among intellectuals of the Left, too. I am thinking, for example, of the reflections of Roger Bartra in his essay “Sangre y tinta del kitsch tropical” (1999). Bartra suggests that the multiculturalist agenda underpinning the demand for the self-rule of Indian communities, which the San Andrés accords seek to promote, not only may lead to separatism, and thus fragment national sovereignty and juridico-political right, but that such claims might do so through an unwitting rearticulation and strengthening of colonial and postcolonial—that is, racist—codification of Indian identities and customs. His view is that in this instance it is important, paradoxically, to start from “above,” rather than from “below,” because it is precisely the “head” (that is, sovereignty or the reason of state) that needs to be examined and radically transformed.¹

These are ongoing, dense political discussions and have to do with the reconfiguration of the nation-state from the inside. Marcos’s essay “The Fourth World War Has Begun,” meanwhile, looks at similar reconfigurations from a transnational perspective, focussing on the effects of capitalist globalization. It was written in mid-1997, a moment of political entrenchment marked by the break-off of negotiations with the Zedillo government in September, soon after the publication of the essay, and the massacre on 22 December of approximately forty-five people (mainly women and children) by paramilitary forces in the Indian village of Acteal. At this time, Marcos was looking—and writing—outward, consolidating EZLN support internationally, bypassing attempts to isolate the Zapatistas through the creative use of the Internet as well as more traditional print media—like Le monde diplomatique, where his essay was originally published.

“The Fourth World War Has Begun” is divided into three parts. The first describes the voracious and warlike—that is neo-imperial—logic of contemporary capitalism that has emerged with the demise of historical communism and the end of the Cold War. Subordinated to the demands of transnational capital accumulation, states have been reduced to managing populations and securing markets. Marcos refers to this new system of rule, in ways that echo Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000), as “megapolitics.” The second part has been compared by John Berger (1998–99) to Hieronymus Bosch’s painting Millennium Triptych, and describes a fragmented world (not without Marcos’s characteristic humor). It is a “world picture” broken into seven pieces that do not add up. It does, however, contain “pockets” of hope.² Marcos ends his essay with a short sentimental fable (again a characteristic, and often a formally conservative, feature of his now substantial output as a writer), a dialogue with the wise and modest Antonio that puts his own voice into critical perspective, relocating it back on the guerrilla frontline in Chiapas where the order of the...