This issue of Midnight Notes does some of the work of defining the elements of the new political chemistry of the planetary working class... What the Zapatista movement means for the U.S. anti-globalization movement is still an open question more than six years since the dawning.

One might say that the whole problem of twentieth century anti-capitalism is to be found in the enigma of the hammer and the sickle, and that the Zapatistas have tried to answer it in a new way... [t]he Zapatistas have had to remind us [that] the land is the source of tremendous revolutionary power and those who wield the sickle are often the instigators of revolutionary change -- even in the stratosphere of high-tech production -- because they have the power to subsist without capitalist mediation... [T]he contemporary wielders of hammers [made either of real steel, silicon chips or DNA chains] must learn a few things from the most humble of this earth...

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Hammer and … or the Sickle: From the Zapatista Uprising to the Battle of Seattle

Midnight Notes Collective

Part I Auroras of the Zapatistas

1 Indigenous Autonomy in Oaxaca, Mexico

Gustavo Esteva

2 Mexican Civil Society and the EZLN: Interviews with Adriana Lopez Monjardin, Carlo Manzo and Julio Moguel

Ana Esther Cecena

3 Encounters in Chiapas

Monty Neill

4 The Traditions of People of Reason and the Reasons of People of Tradition: A Report on the Second Intercontinental Encuentro

Gustavo Esteva

5 Canada and Zapatismo

Chris Vance

6 Zapata in Europe: Interviews with Adelina Bottero, Luciano Salza, Friederike Habermann, Marc Tomsin, Massimo de Angelis and Ulrich Brand

Ana Esther Cecena

7 People's Global Action: Dreaming Up the Old Ghost

Olivier de Marcellus

8 Rethinking Class Composition Analysis in Light of the Zapatistas

Monty Neill

9 Questions for Ramona: Zapatismo and Feminism

Claudia von Werlhof

10 Making La Ciudad: David Riker on Politics and Filmmaking

Part II Other Essays

11 Victory over a Life of Living Death

Shankar Guha Niyogi, introduced by John Roosa

12 The NATO-Yugoslavia War: On Whom the Bombs Fall?

Massimo de Angelis and Silvia Federici

13 From Capitalist Crisis to Proletarian Slavery: Introduction to the Class Struggle in the U.S., 1973-1998

George Caffentzis

14 Eulogy for Rod Thurton (1938-2000)

Silvia Federici

15 Eulogy for Fernando Lopez Isunza (1973-2000)

David Riker

16 Revolutionary Tygers in the Night

Peter Linebaugh

Acknowledgments