When Subcomandante Marcos Reminds Us of the Urgent Need for Convergence of Struggles
For once, let’s start with a story from history. Not for the folklore, but because it nails exactly what we’re so badly missing right now. I mean the ability to turn our differences into collective strength instead of burning ourselves out on nonstop squabbling. Because honestly, while we tear each other apart over details and questions of priority, neofascism strolls right along. And that’s a luxury we can’t afford anymore.
How did Subcomandante Marcos turn a smear campaign into collective strength?
In 1994, the Zapatista uprising breaks out in Chiapas, Mexico, against neoliberal policies that directly threaten the survival of Indigenous farming communities. Subcomandante Marcos is the face of that rebellion, so the far-right government of the PRI, the party that had run Mexico without a break since 1929, sets out to discredit him. One attempt: spreading rumors about his sexual orientation, in a region where being gay reads as an unacceptable weakness, largely because Catholicism is everywhere. But Marcos doesn’t even bother denying it. For a defense, he answers with a text that became legendary:
“Yes, Marcos is gay. Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristóbal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains.”
In a few lines, Marcos turns a pathetic personal attack into a political manifesto. He doesn’t reject the label they’re trying to stick on him, he takes it flat out and stretches it until it covers every struggle there is. That’s a good concept to pick up, if you haven’t already.
Our struggles have to converge
Marcos reminds us of something spot on: progressive struggles aren’t separate. They’re not competing. The opposite, actually: they fit together perfectly into one coherent whole against a system built on oppression.
Take feminism, fighting a patriarchy that ranks bodies and forces rigid gender roles. LGBT rights fight those same norms, the ones that demand you fit into a predefined box. Antiracism fights the idea that you treat human beings differently based on where they come from. Ecology refuses an extractivism that mines the living world like it’s an infinite resource. Veganism rejects the exploitation of animals. Open source goes after capitalist intellectual property, which privatizes knowledge. Class struggle calls out the economic exploitation of workers. ETC…
All of them fight the same enemy: a way of running the world built on domination, exploitation, greed and hierarchy. Patriarchy and capitalism, two sides of the same coin. So walling these struggles off from each other weakens our collective ability to change anything at all. And trying to rank them puts us straight into the trap set by the people who profit from our divisions.
Why does progressive infighting weaken every struggle?
And yet, look at what’s happening today. While neofascism gains ground all over Europe and the United States, progressives are stuck in absurd turf wars.
Greens who wave off LGBT issues in the name of “more urgent priorities.” Antiracist activists who write off veganism because “that’s not a real fight.” Feminists who shut trans people out. Degrowth people who bristle at the open source crowd on the pretext that they use technology to fight. Anticapitalists who replay the worst of traditional politics between their own factions… And yet the only priority should be getting this: you can’t win on one front while you lose on all the others.
So let’s say it plainly: the progressive world can be unbelievably violent toward itself. Way too many oversized egos, constant judgment, a sick competition over who’s the most radical or the most spotless. And that hunt for an ideological purity that doesn’t exist, and never will, ends up scaring off quieter people who could bring a huge amount to all kinds of movements. Instead of welcoming sincere attempts at emancipation and walking alongside them, we’d rather throw someone out over one misstep or one clumsy phrase. Bottom line, needing to be right about everything, sometimes even in flat-out authoritarian ways, just drags noble causes through the mud.
Historical examples: when converging struggles become real
Converging struggles isn’t a theory pulled out of a sociology book. It’s a historical reality that has already proved its power several times over. A few examples:
The Black Panthers in the 60s and 70s figured out before most people that you can’t separate the antiracist fight from class struggle, feminism or LGBT rights. So they built alliances with movements that on paper had nothing to do with each other, and out of that came a fearsome collective force that terrified American power.
Seattle 1999 stuck in everyone’s memory. Labor unions, environmentalists, anarchists, farmers from the global South, all in the street together against the WTO. People who by dominant logic should never have spoken to each other made their anger and their hopes converge. The result: the WTO ministerial conference shut down completely, negotiations pushed back and a humiliation for the promoters of neoliberal globalization.
Occupy Wall Street and the Indignados in 2011-2012 filled public squares around the world with people scraping by, students, retirees and activists of every stripe. No single agenda, no leader, just shared anger at a financial system that crushes everybody.
Nuit Debout in France (2016), French for “Up All Night,” created something really rare: a real all-night forum, in actual life. For weeks, on the place de la République in Paris and in dozens of other French cities, people from every background talked to each other. Really talked. No filter, no hierarchy. Feminists, greens, people scraping by, union organizers, hackers, artists… all of them together, thinking through another possible world. But plenty of radical progressives knocked that spontaneous movement. Me, I mostly felt a huge moment of poetry and sharing. Something in those healthy exchanges with total strangers under a starry sky really did feed you. Sadly, for all kinds of reasons, it was over in two months. That’s a longer story, so I’ll probably come back to it in detail in another post.
Sure, none of these movements delivered the revolution. None of them brought down capitalism or patriarchy. But every one of them left something precious behind: proof that we can get past our differences and build spaces where struggles converge instead of getting set against each other. Those intense stretches of exchange trained generations of activists and created networks that still hold today. Beyond that, they showed that a different relationship to politics is possible. Far from the circus of parties and pyramid-shaped organizations.
Conclusion: learning to listen and talk to each other again
I often feel like we let our brains get poisoned by mainstream social media, where the smallest slip of language gets used to break, wound, exclude. Nobody’s perfect. We’re all clumsy at one point or another. But we carry an ideal much bigger than all of us put together: a better world built on listening and sharing. So, once more, the way Marcos put it thirty years ago: our differences are a strength and not a battlefield between people who want to go the same direction. That’s just my take. I’m putting it out there, do what you want with it. The only goal here is to widen what’s possible. And maybe also to start a real conversation. So let’s talk, on NovaFuture’s channels or anywhere else. Doesn’t matter, what counts is just trying to move forward together in our own respective fights.
If you think these struggles need to converge too, please share this post with the people around you to get the debate going. See you soon with some red-hot topics.
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