The Dynamics of Social Change and Mexico's EZLN

Abstract

The wave of democratization that swept across Latin America in the 1980s revived a waning interest in the study of social movements in the region.' By many accounts, this interest has not been dampened by an apparent difficulty in locating and defining, let alone explaining, these movements. There are several dimensions to this difficulty, which some see as a state of confusion, others as a theoretical impasse, and still others as a conscious retreat by many intellectuals from the realities that these movements exhibit. First, in certain academic circles there is a widespread refusal or failure to confront as a theoretical object the social movements that have formed in the region under conditions generated by the implementation everywhere of neoliberal economic policies. This is evident in the widespread tendency to analyze social movements in the region in purely descriptive terms and to do so usually with reference to but a single movement in a particular country, with no attempt at comparative analysis. Munck (1997), for one, identifies this tendency as a characteristic feature of most academic studies in this area. In part, it reflects the growth of a postmodernist sensibility among scholars. The postmodernist and poststructuralist/Marxist emphasis on subjectivity, heterogeneity, and difference and concern to move beyond the [traditional] centrality of class have reinforced a tendency to particularize and describe rather than generalize and theorize social movements. One clear effect of this postmodernist perspective has been a trend toward decontextualizing social movements in terms of the specific objectively given or structural conditions generated by the workings of the prevailing capitalist system. Another has been discouragement of a comparative analysis that presupposes shared, that is, structural, conditions. A second characteristic of the study of Latin American social movements is a search for and focus on the specific conditions that gave rise to the social movements formed in the 1980s and, with particular reference to the Zapa-