Networked alternatives against the state: zapatista autonomy and informality as resistance

Abstract Since their 1994 uprising, Zapatista communities have built social, political, and economic alternatives within autonomous territories, setting an example for multiple Transformation Initiatives and social movements globally. Focusing on economic solidarity through coffee distribution, this article investigates how the boundaries between being inside, beyond, or against the state and the market are relationally conceived and performed by autonomous peasants and European activist networks. The study is based on multiple fieldworks between Europe and Chiapas and years of engaged research. Beyond dual rationalizations between silent and loud resistance, I argue that anticapitalist worlds surrounding Zapatismo connect everyday forms of struggle with broader, structural hopes for change through transnational alliances. It is the existence of an organized infrastructure that allows this form of trade to reproduce its own antagonism, in constant tension against the state, reified as the ultimate perpetrator of the neoliberal order. Revisiting informality through the lenses of anti-systemic movements allows us to decentralize resistance, encompassing non-hegemonic processes from below (and to the left) that cannot be reduced to Western categories nor trivialized as the sole weapons in the hands of voiceless and powerless societies. Articulating Marxist anthropology with decolonial thought through the framework of Zapatista autonomy suggests that it is not enough to categorize resistance as visible or invisible, formal or informal. The study of economic solidarity surrounding the Zapatista experience provides an understanding of the complex realities of anticapitalist resistances today, where collective organization is as much about survival as it is about reimagining power and economy.