To Lead by Obeying

Abstract

This book develops the main political lessons that the Mexican Neozapatismo movement brings us, in its almost 30 years of public life. Thus, beginning by defining the singular concept of Autonomy that the Neozapatista movement proposes, different from legal, anthropological or political definitions, and conceived as real global autonomy. Then the content of the Neozapatista oxymoron ‘Mandar Obedeciendo’, ‘To Lead by Obeying’ is explained as identical to the idea of popular self-government. A new concept of autonomy is linked necessarily with the idea of ‘Other Politics’ and ‘Other Democracy’. The book also presents how Neozapatismo embodies a project of modernity that, having been constructed as a modernity of resistance for five centuries to the dominant modernity imposed by the Spaniards in Mexico, has now been transformed into a project of a real alternative modernity to capitalism.