From the late 1990s through 2007, I founded then edited a magazine called LiP: Informed Revolt, and though it drove me very nearly to various forms of ruin and disgust, it was also one of the more rewarding experiences of my life. As editor, I wanted to publish a magazine that explored radical (root/fundamental) aspects of the world and its power relations that could reach beyond the choir and be compelling for a wide readership.
In this, there were failures and successes, but one of the best things about working on LiP was working with those people who retained big vision hope, who grounded their politics in real-world, pragmatic experience, and who didn’t sacrifice their intellectual honesty to any particular god of ideology. You know, people who got out of their subcultural bubble and saw lots of different things before they presumed to tell other people what to believe or how they should live their lives.
Jeff Conant was one of these people, and LiP was incredibly lucky to have his contributions over the latter years of the magazine’s life. He wrote for us about water policy, the enclosure of the commons, malaria, pesticide poisoning, poetry, and many other things, never drawing a cent for any of his hard work, as far as I can recall. His work was always knowledgeable, grounded, incisive and poetic, which is a hard set of things to pull off in political writing. He made — and continues to make — his living working on issues of international development, helping communities build clean water systems, avoid poisoning themselves and their children with toxic pesticides, and a host of other things that are more important than any blog post or article in a magazine could ever be. [He wrote an eminently useful handbook about much of this: A Community Guide to Environmental Health, available for free and translated into many different languages--even Mongolian, which Google doesn't even translate for yet. He also co-wrote a fat and interesting book of useful things entitled Wind in the Blood: Mayan Healing and Chinese Medicine.]
For several years around the turn of the last century, Conant spent time in Chiapas, Mexico, doing solidarity work with the Zapatistas. Beginning in 1994, the Zapatistas waged an innovative armed (though primarily peaceful and defensive) indigenous struggle against neoliberal exploitation and inequity in southern Mexico while managing the tricky feat of fighting a global media war against the Mexican government using poetry, humor, art and then-shocking amounts of savvy that captured the hearts and imaginations of people all over the world.
Conant’s solidarity efforts in Mexico got him expelled from the country. Several years after this expulsion, he and I were talking, and he mentioned that he’d been working on a fairly involved project exploring the public relations, propaganda and “branding” strategies of the Zapatistas.
This interested me. In the Bay Area where I lived at that time, there were lots of people hero-worshipping the Zapatistas, wearing hats with the trademark EZLN red star and whatnot, and there was a definite revolutionary chic fetishism afoot in the land that often seemed to have only a vague relationship to the revolutionary substance and intent of the Zapatistas. But wearing a red star-emblazoned hat didn’t make you any more aware or revolutionary than wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt does, and it seems to me that anyone holding real revolutionary purpose in their heart would be wise not to commodify their dissent or broadcast their revolutionary intent through apparel choices. It did, however, show how successful one aspect of Zapatista “marketing” was.
But Jeff had done something useful with his Zapatista solidarity. He’d written a book exploring how an outnumbered and out-gunned armed indigenous poor people’s movement based in the isolated hinterlands of southern Mexico had, for a long while, outmaneuvered Goliath and used great intelligence and creativity to win the attention and support of global civil society. Without the international attention and support the Zapatistas engendered through their public relations efforts, there’s little doubt that they’d have been snuffed out or exterminated in short order.
And he couldn’t find anyone to publish it. (City Lights passed it up, for example.)
I asked him if LiP could adapt and excerpt a portion of it for our “Propaganda and Public Relations” issue, the cover of which appears above, [PDF of the article | PDF of the whole issue], because it was finally something new and useful we might publish about Zapatismo, and because I hoped that by publishing part of it, a book publisher might see its value and consider asking Jeff to do a book about it.
Well. My hope was not in vain. In July 2010, AK Press published A Poetics of Resistance: The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency: “Combining narrative history, literary criticism, ethnography, and media analysis, [the book] provides a refreshing take on Mexico’s Zapatista movement by examining the means, meanings, and mythos behind the Zapatista image.”
Though I am presently in China and will have to wait a bit to get my own copy, I have no doubt whatsoever, based on what I saw years ago, this excerpt from the AK Press blog ["Branding Popular Resistance"], and the fact that Conant’s had several years to refine and hone the book, that it is provocative, informed, well-written and useful.
It also has a really great cover, though you might expect me to say that since I had the honor of designing it.
