Suchergebnisse

In the early hours of 1994, a few hundred men and women of the Ejército Zapatista Liberación Nacional (EZLN) blocked the Pan American Highway between Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the state capital of Chiapas, and San Cristóbal de las Casas and the road to Ocosingo, declaring war on Mexico's ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). This move signaled to the world that indigenous populations intended to make themselves heard at home and abroad as Mexico restructures its economy according to the neoliberal model promoted by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. The rebels captured and briefly held the municipal buildings in San Cristóbal, Altamirano, Las Margaritas, and Ocosingo. Speaking for the rebels, Subcomandante Marcos declared that their war was "a final but justified measure": "We have nothing, absolutely nothing. Not a decent roof, nor work, nor land, nor health care, nor education."

Global integration heightens the cyclical crises of capitalism by incorporating the subsistence sectors of advanced and peripheral economies. World trends show a contraction in industrial production; the rise of unemployment, an increase in military spending and decline in social welfare, a reversal of capital flows from developing countries to developed economies, and a worldwide drop in real wages. The impact of these trends on communities in Mexico, Bolivia, and the United States where the author has done fieldwork is assessed in relation to current economic crises and the social movements that respond to them. The author shows that collective action to oppose the devastating effect on subsistence is more prevalent in marginal economies that are just beginning to experience the effect of capital penetration than in the industrial wastelands of developed countries. Theories of the crisis neglect those arenas where resistance and protest are most active: the urban barrios struggling for food and water, the rural laborers forced off of their land base, and the hunters and cultivators of the jungle. Luxemburg's thesis asserting the importance of the subsistence sector in capital accumulation acquires increasing significance at a time when those economies are threatened with extinction. Expanding the notion of subsistence production to include nonwage work allows us to theorize the significance of social reproduction in crisis conditions.

This article argues that a gender perspective enables us to better understand the emerging basis for collective organization in the world capitalist crisis. Since women and their children are most threatened by inroads on the subsistence economy, and since welfare provisions are the first budgetary cuts made by governments faced with increasing debt burdens, women are forced to engage in collective action to ensure survival. In Latin American countries, this new political arena is even more dynamic than the workplace as a site for engaging in struggle. This situation contrasts with core industrial countries, where the encounter with bureaucratic agencies in redressing human welfare issues tends to fragment individual actions rather than weld together collective consciousness.