I know very little about the internal workings of their organization, but AFAIK they are comfined to the most backwater and isolated parts of Mexico’s rural periphery. But they are a military organization with someone who appears to be a visible and recognized leader, have taken actual, existing action and achieved tangible material gains. It’s only of very limited success, but that’s not really the point of what I was trying to imply.

I support organizations like EZLN unconditionally just as much as I support the Naxalite movement, the People’s Republic of China, FARC, or the Peruvian Communist Party. The vast majority of my ire in this issue is directed at the Western left, which is still utterly obsessed with “movementism” (as J Moufawad-Paul dubbed it in The Communist Necessity) that is wholly reliant on spontaneity and primarily influenced by anarchism. This results in liberal entryism, incoherence or outright lack of a program, lack of leadership, and fragmentary decentralization to the point of non-existence, or at least a total disappearance once the latest wave of spontaneous outrage has subsided. For god’s sake, even after the ruthless suppression of the Sanders insurgency by the Democratic Party leadership and countless clear and unmistakable signals that they do not want the left in their party and will never even cede an inch of ground to their demands, it is somehow still treated as a debate that we should continue working with, supporting, and “boring within” that party instead of breaking with them definitively and working towards destroying and consuming their position with a real working-class party.