Zapatista movement

The Zapatista movement is presented as part of a global anti-capitalist resistance whose political force is visible both in collective struggle and in the challenge it poses to state power. The book treats it not as a fully described organization but as a strategic example: a movement associated with creating alternative spaces beyond the state, a course whose relation to revolutionary change remains unsettled.

Place in a Global Movement

The movement figures in the account of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire and Multitude, which the book describes as theoretical reflection embedded in an actual global movement of anti-capitalist resistance. The Zapatistas are named alongside the movement’s other concrete settings, making the books’ political argument answerable to struggles already taking place rather than to an imagined future alone. The account also stresses that the limits of Hardt and Negri’s theory are bound up with the limits of the movement it reflects.

Strategy Beyond State Power

The Zapatista strategy in Mexico serves as an example of resisting the existing power structure by constructing alternative spaces outside the state’s network. The book distinguishes this approach from the different revolutionary objective of dismantling the apparatuses of state power themselves, so that state power collapses. These possibilities should not be conflated: building spaces beyond the state may mean refusing or bypassing its structures, whereas dismantling them aims at their foundations. The text does not settle which meaning the strategy carries.

Political Significance and Unresolved Questions

This distinction shapes the book’s criticism of calls to abandon the traditional strategy of taking power. Such calls can reject the aim of replacing one group of rulers with another, but they can also leave unclear whether existing power is to be ignored, resisted from outside, or actively undone. Against that uncertainty, the Zapatista example gives the discussion a concrete political reference point without supplying a complete account of how alternative spaces become a new form of collective rule. The movement’s significance therefore lies both in the practice it exemplifies and in the unresolved question of how resistance beyond the state relates to transforming state power.