Everything for Everyone

«Para todos todo» dicen nuestros muertos. Mientras no sea así, no habrá nada para nosotros.

– Second Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle

These words were written in the aftermath of the Chiapas Levantamiento to express a refusal to surrender to the Mexican government. The declaration is signed by the General Command of the EZLN. A deceptively simple signature: the EZLN is a guerrilla army whose ski masks first gave them a face, or, in other words, whose anonymity is the condition of their being-named. And while the communiqué is republished in a collection of Subcomandante Marcos’ works, the name Marcos is the pseudonym of a man who insists on the irrelevance of his identity:

“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 peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains.”

Para todos todo: everything for everyone. It is a phrase that echoes throughout history, and that seems endowed with a remarkable capacity to complicate signatures. Perhaps this should not surprise us: if proprietary authorship is the product of copyright law, those striving to end capitalism might come up with different ways of signing their texts. This is certainly the case for Luther Blissett, a pseudonym adopted by a group of Bologna activists in 1994 that has since been used by hundreds of artists and activists all over the world. In 1999, Luther Blissett published the novel Q about the revolutionary 16th century. On its first pages, an Anabaptist radical describes the defeat of Thomas Müntzer, leader of the 1525 German Peasants' War:

‘...A member of the troop who caught him told me he fought like a lion, getting him was difficult, the soldiers were intimidated by the look on his face and the words he was coming out with. While they were carrying him away on the cart you could still hear him shouting, “Omnia sunt communia!”’

‘And what the fuck does that mean?’

‘Everything belongs to everyone.’

In 2000, five members of Luther Blissett formed a collective called Wu Ming (which means both ‘five people’ and ‘anonymous’ in Chinese). In March 2001, this group of writers and activists would walk from Chiapas to Mexico City in the Zapatista March for Dignity. At some point, the Italian monos blancos were appointed bodyguards of the Zapatista General Command. They gave Marcos a copy of Q, weaving threads of solidarity between the ancestral para todos todo and Müntzer’s omnia sunt communia.

The phrase omnia sunt communia was not written behind a desk by someone plotting an insurrection; it was forged in the crucible of class struggle. The peasant revolt was violently suppressed, Müntzer was captured, and his words were transcribed by a functionary working for the princes against whom he had revolted. As is often the case, the voices of the persecuted only reach us through the filters of their persecutors. According to the record of his enhanced interrogation, Müntzer “wanted to establish this principle, ‘All property should be held in common’ (Omnia sunt communia) and should be distributed to each according to his need, as the occasion required.” Mere hours after saying this, he would be executed.

All property held in common and distributed to each according to his need. 350 years later, Karl Marx would echo these words when defining a future communist society in his Critique of the Gotha Programme: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” It is hardly surprising that Friedrich Engels saw in Müntzer a communist revolutionary, tragically born before conditions were ripe for revolution.

In March 1525, when Müntzer was still alive and his peasants were drafting their demands, the Spanish crown rewarded Hernán Cortes with a coat of arms for the conquest of the Aztec Empire. On the shield, we see a two-headed eagle representing the Spanish empire, a lion for Cortes’ bravery, three crowns for the three Aztec kings he defeated, and the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. Grouped around it are seven heads belonging to the seven indigenous lords he enslaved, bound together with a chain that leaves little room for ambiguity. In the following years, the Spanish would continue their journey to Chiapas and Guatemala.

History: that beautiful story of our rise from barbarism to civilization. The history taught in school is a history of progress, and it is progress that solidifies categories like class and struggle. But whose history is this? What stories does it tell, and what does it make invisible? Who is left behind by this relentless march forward? In the last text he wrote before fleeing to Spain – where, fearing capture by the Nazis, he would commit suicide in 1940 – Walter Benjamin describes a monoprint by Klee that was in his possession:

“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

Whenever I read this fragment, I imagine Klee’s helpless angel next to the statue on top of the Berlin Siegessäule, the victory column I passed on my bike every day for several years. The Siegessäule was built in 1873 to celebrate a series of German military victories. The statue shows Victoria, goddess of victory, sovereignly moving towards a glorious future for the German nation. Klee’s angel could not be more different: his eyes averted, his body fragmented, his wings caught in a wind that makes him stumble backwards while the victims of progress pile up in front of him.

Progress is the myth holding capitalism together, and even those seeking an alternative are often beholden to this myth. This includes much of Marxism: for Marx and Engels, the communist revolution would be heralded by the industrial proletariat of the advanced European nations, not by a peasantry that exists outside of history (a perspective that led Marx to justify colonialism as the means to free India from its backwardness and introduce it to technological modernity). Without this overarching narrative that presents capitalist modernity as the ultimate objective of all nations, the world becomes many worlds, and history opens onto many histories. As Anna Tsing wrote: “Indeterminacy is not the end of history but rather that node in which many beginnings lie in wait. To listen politically is to detect the traces of not-yet-articulated common agendas.”

The march of modernity looks forward, not backward, and while ecological crises and global inequality may unmask the goddess Victoria as a harbinger of death, she retains her grip on our ideologies and institutions. Peasants have always suspected progress – a suspicion that, as John Berger notes, is not altogether misplaced. The peasant’s self-sufficiency is an obstacle to the expanding market; when a peasantry is dispersed, markets grow. Where peasant time is cyclical, determined by the rhythms of photosynthesis, progress is a line forward. In one of Berger’s stories, a peasant father refuses to use the tractor his son bought to modernize the family farm: “Their job is to wipe us out,” he says about the tractor. While the conservatism is almost touching, these fears are not misplaced: modernity destroys worlds, reducing them to a single homogeneous space ultimately subdued to capital.

It is this same march of progress – blind, fossil-fuel-powered progress – that wiped out Samir Flores. On February 19, 2019, Samir – peasant, father of four, environmental activist – walked into a public forum where bureaucrats, businessmen and politicians would discuss the construction of a gas-fired power plant and pipeline built on collective land in Morelos, Mexico. There, face to face with those in power, Samir dared to ask whose progress this really is, and whose interests are promoted by this megaproject. Mere hours later he was shot in front of his house. His murderers still go unidentified.

As progress marches on, the pile of debris grows skyward. But underneath the rumble, the attendant listener may hear the echo of struggles in which the same refrain resounds: omnia sunt communia, para todos todo, everything for everyone. Here in Galicia, we countersign these words from the standpoint of a history marked by the memory of the Irmandiños, the peasants who burned down 130 castles between 1467 and 1469 shouting “no tengamos sobre nos señor ni fortaleza ninguna.” It is the history of resistance to an encroaching state that needed Galician wood to build the galleons that protected Spanish imperial interests, leading to peasant resistance throughout the 17th and 18th centuries (as in many countries, internal colonialism was a condition for colonialism abroad). It is a history of persistence, of rural communities defending their lands, thanks to which common lands make up 25% of Galicia’s land mass to this day.

In 1889, unable to quell local resistance against the arrival of a British mining prospector, the chief mining engineer for the districts of Ourense and Pontevedra complained that “the Indigenous people are able to foil the mandates of authority.” Note that the Spanish state describes the resisting Galician population as indígenas. Two years later, these same indigenous Galicians would set fire to the prospector’s house, initiating a campaign of harassment that only ended when they blew up his roof with dynamite in 1906. Illegal mining is still a problem in Galicia (addressed by groups like ContraMINAcción), whose regional government works hard to attract extractive corporations keen to bring progress by liberating rural Galicia from its indigenous forms of land stewardship. In the most recent encroachment of a capitalist state, the 2021 Plano Forestal recasts the Galician mancomunidades as companies and favors the privatization of common lands.

This ebb and flow of oppression and emancipation, enclosure and liberation – it runs through all our many histories. Sometimes barely audible, sometimes as loud as gunshots in the Mexican jungle or on the streets of Genoa, it is always with us, everywhere. These stories of indigenous resistance and of the defense of forms-of-life are incomparable just as much as they are all the same. The universal and the particular are not opposed: the universal inhabits precisely the most particular. Indigenous guerillas in Mexico inspired movements around the world, attracting Italian activists that brought with them a book about revolutionary upheaval in 16th century Europe. Omnia sunt communia: circumstances change, but the same cry resounds, in different lands, different eras, different languages.

It is in this sense that Samir has always lived, and will live forever. Listen to the dead, hear them whisper: everything belongs to everyone.