In his fantastic, gripping, and haunting book, ’68 (Seven Stories Press), the writer and historian Paco Ignacio Taibo II (aka PIT) surveys the tumultuous upheaval of the ‘68 Movement in Mexico. It makes compelling reading today. He recounts the student solidarity demonstrations that gave birth to brigadismo – the mobile action groups that would incite rallies across Mexico City. There is the retelling of the occupation of schools and the creation of libertarian common spaces based on assemblies. Reference is made to the fragile workers’ committees that emerged in the sectors of electricity, oil refining, and railroads that then faded away. Then there was the shadow of the tanks moving in. The city that the students had roamed was lost in the aftermath of the government massacre of hundreds of students at Tlatelolco on 2 October 1968. Ghosts remain. There are the ghosts of the student dead and suicidal as well as the ghosts of traitors that fed the subsequent “dirty war” (La guerra sucia) in Mexico. The outcome, PIT argues, was a decaffeinated democratic transition in Mexico. How can Mexico’s neoliberal transition to democracy be understood?
Posts tagged: YoSoy132
Neoliberal Re-territorialisation and Peripheral Capitalist Space in Mexico and Turkey
This is the third contribution in the series Thesis Pieces featured on For the Desk Drawer written by my past and present doctoral students. This contribution from Ertan Erol focuses on Henri Lefebvre’s notion of autogestion, related to forms of struggle for spaces of difference, alongside the expansion of capitalist space in Mexico and Turkey.
In my recently completed PhD (2012), I focused on particular processes of neoliberal re-territorialisation and peripheral capitalist spatiality. Specifically, I analysed the intensification and expansion of capitalist space in Mexico and Turkey in the form of regional integration projects. In that sense, Mexico’s major regional integration project known as Plan Puebla Panamá/Proyecto Mesoamérica and Turkey’s major regional economic development efforts in the Black Sea and Trans Caucasus areas were located and analysed within the wider processes of neoliberal restructuring in the periphery. It is important to recognise, though, that these neoliberal re-territorialisations are complex and dialectical processes that unfold on different social scales and include various social actors resisting on different levels and across different socio-spatial forms. Hence, in a focus on the regional expansion of neoliberal re-territorialisation in the periphery attention must also be cast towards the main social responses and forms of resistance offering alternative projects to neoliberal restructuring.
EZLN: The Sound of Your World Collapsing
With a characteristic sense of timing, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN: Zapatista Army of National Liberation) marked the resurgence of its social struggle on 21 December 2012. With the beginning of a new Mayan cycle, this date marked the “silent march” of 40,000 members of the Zapatista’s ‘social bases’ across the towns of Palenque, Altamirano, Las Margaritas, Ocosingo and San Cristóbal de las Casas. Their message was one of struggle and resistance in the face of the returning rule of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). In the initial communiqué on 21 December [click here], the Zapatistas stated ‘Did you listen? It is the sound of your world collapsing. It is the sound of our world resurging’. Given the “silence” of the Zapatistas over the past eighteen months, the “silent march” and the subsequent series of communiqués raises new questions about the struggle for social justice in Mexico and internationally.
Mexico in the Global Political Economy: from “wake up” to “going up”?
In 2006, the Economist newspaper declared in a survey of Mexico that it was “time to wake up”, meaning that reforms in the energy sector (oil and electricity) must resume to set the economy free by making the most of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) [see November 18, 2006]. Further, as the old political model had died with the defeat of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) it was time for a new one to be born and time, also, for the real president in Felipe Calderón of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), to stand up. That was 2006. In 2012, the Economist offers us its latest survey of Mexico. Now the country is on the rise and “going up” in the world following the election of Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI with the agenda to be set by further economic restructuring in, yes, the energy sector [see November 24, 2012]. So what has changed and how can one assess the major transformations shaping Latin America’s second largest economy?
Spaces of Revolution
Recently, in a blog post entitled ‘Monumentalising Revolution’, my commentary argued that the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City stands as an ambiguous carrier of utopian promise, which links past and present generations of struggle. Specifically, my concluding point was that this architectural space stands as a possible symbol of ‘the effective participation of the present generation in shaping the utopian desires of the oppressed, linked to ongoing past and present social struggles’. Written in April, there was no anticipation in this piece of the events to come that have swirled around the student movement #YoSoy132 in contesting the presidential election process in Mexico.
International Intellectuals Call on the Turkish Government to Desist from its Repression of Popular Protest 
The River and the Rage: Dispossession and Resistance in the Narmada Valley 
The ‘Pure Force’ of the State in Turkey 
Aldous Huxley and the “brave new world” of pyramids or progress 
The Gezi Park Occupation: Confronting Authoritarian Neoliberalism
Recent Books
