Making Social Movement: The reproductive labour of organizing from Chiapas to Chicago and beyond

This is a dissertation about acting on inspiration. The Chicago-based Autonomous University of Social Movements (AUSM) coordinates one of the most long-standing, intensive engagements with the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, through its study abroad programs fomenting such inspiration among university students from across North America. Yet my research into the ensuing political activity of alumni of this program exposes a dilemma: despite the Zapatistas’ success in building autonomy on the land they reclaimed during their 1994 uprising, the great majority of alumni do not invoke them or replicate their organizing structures within their organizations back home. Rather than exposing a break in the chain of inspiration between the Zapatistas, AUSM, and its alumni, the continuity between the three lies in their common organizing activity.

What does the activity of the Zapatistas, AUSM, and its alumni teach us about the collaborative practices that comprise “organizing”? I contribute to Social Reproduction Theory in finding organizing to be reproductive labour: collaborative activity producing use values in an effort to transform the distribution of abundance and scarcity across society, as to reproduce people with more life and less exhaustion. Secondly, I contribute to the practice of organizing by highlighting common activities across the organizing of the Zapatistas, AUSM and its alumni, including maintaining initiative, confronting “messes” by strengthening collaborative arrangements, practicing care on ever-broader levels, and building subjectivities of self-determination. Third, I contribute to Marxist theories by linking the everyday practice of organizing with an enriched understanding of “social movement,” as struggle to transform the relations shaping flows of health and wealth across society. This shows that inspiration continues, inasmuch as it feeds organizers’ initiative to do the difficult work of strengthening militant ways of being-with.