OTHERNESS AND POLITICS

The political project of the Zapatistas seems to rest on an ethical principle: the recognising, acknowledgement of the other, the different, as equal. Lenin said that there is no revolutionary party without revolutionary moral, but history has shown that the revolutionary moral practiced in the ex USSR , and not only there, transformed itself into a "moral" coined for a narrow circle of leaders, sometimes only one, for the detriment of the other. "The other", in this case, has been a great portion of the people, included the members of the party annihilated because of contradicting the totalitarian and excluding vision of the ones that they were conducting. Ethics was lost in the alleys of the Judaeo-Christian moral, that "insondable vulgarity" for Nietzsche. "Ethics" and "moral" both come from Greek and Latin words that mean the same: custom. But it is necessary to understand that an ethics is the result of a notion of good and of evil, and the moral -always a moral of an historical time- a reduction of the law to the norm, the "establishing rules" ("regulating by rules") of an ethics according to the axis of the dominant culture of the moment. A new ethics transgress the dominant moral, that pursues the continuity of the established order and justifies itself by itself. "Long live Poland, because if there were no Poland, there will be no Polish people", Alfred Jarry exclaimed through the lips of his Ubu the King. The moral constructs churches -the Catholic, the communist,... the ethics of otherness breaks them. The church creates sectarians, the ethics of otherness, believers. The church excommunicates, the ethics of otherness congregates. The church expels the different, the ethics of otherness shelters him or her. We do not need to look so far away, to the ex-USSR, to see how the practice of the revolutionary moral has trimmed the foundational revolutionary ethics and ended up in true atrocities. Enough to see the path of certain "montoneros" (peronist guerillas) that have changed from carrying arms against injustice to fight for a desk inside the power's offices. The Zapatistas seem to have extracted the teachings of the LatinAmerican guerrillas of the seventies, in which many leaders started with a revolutionary ethics, and bureaucratised it. The Zapatistas think another things: that they do not want to monopolize the vanguard and do not aspire to power; that the armed path that the Zapatista Army

choose is not the only one, not even the only desirable, that is the task of the social forces of different signs to contribute, on the way that they will prefer, to the creation of a democratic space of confrontation of ideas surrounded by three basic principles: freedom, justice and democracy. The Zapatismo understands then, the diversity of the other, the plurality that the other installs, when it proposes, in spite of an onecolour-power, a model of democracy very distant from the totalitarian democracies that we often suffer, bloodily fighting for make uniform and make a thing of the citizen through a thousand means, bloodily fighting for deny the other, the otherness of the other. It is surprising the names with which some intellectuals give to the Zapatistas' project: fossil, arcaic, a geological soil deep into the past. On the other hand, it seems that from the most put back and retarded communities, according with the occidental rules, very modern ideas can be born. The protest from below that procures justice for all confronts the illusion of the State that imparts justice for all. The ethics as politics suffers a grave risk: to deform its truth by moving it to a ground that, by nature, is one of no-truth. Hegel distinguishes between subjective moral (Moralist) and objective moral (Sittlichkeit). The first consists in the fulfilling of the due by an act of the will, the second is the obedience to the moral law fixed by norms, customs and laws of the society. The sole subjective moral is not enough; for it to became concrete must integrate itself in the objective, that reveals itself as Sittlichkeit, and that also is not a mechanical moral act: it is the rationality of the concrete universal moral that infuses a content in the subjective moral or "moral consciousness", says the German philosopher. The certain thing is that, without struggle for justice, there is no justice. No one knows certainly which realities will the Zapatista project give birth. One thing is clear, though: from its coming into light, LatinAmerica is not the same. Juan Gelman Translated with effort, respect and gratitude by Augusto Al Q'adi Alcalde