Citation

Weinberg B. Working USA 2007; 10(4): 383-409.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1743-4580.2007.00172.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The 2006 uprising in southern Mexico's Oaxaca state involved a seizure of power from below by popular organizations in the capital city and many of the rural municipalities. Although this movement has lost ground following the November repression, the state remains politically divided. The grassroots organizations—uniting in the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO)—explicitly draw their model of local self-government from the indigenous past. While Marx saw the “traditions of dead generations hanging like a nightmare on the brain of the living,” the revolutionaries of Oaxaca see their indigenous traditions—which stretch back to pre-Columbian times—as a wellspring of their praxis. The project of building a post-Cold War “21st century socialism” may be gestating in its purest form in Oaxaca, precisely because it is rooted in something ancient.