Some time ago, the will to fight was enough to achieve results, both to defeat those above us and to prevent them from destroying us. Today, will alone is not enough; “something more” is needed to avoid being swallowed up by the capitalist storm. As far as I know, only the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) has been preparing for this eventuality for more than a decade, when they held the meeting Critical Thinking in the Face of the Capitalist Hydra.
The wars of dispossession and extermination waged by those at the top cannot be confronted directly because that would ensure our annihilation, as is happening to the Palestinian people. On the contrary, in Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba, and so many other places, it was possible to confront and defeat the representatives of the system. But the old political culture no longer works, although it is necessary to rescue ethical values from it, such as militant commitment, the willingness to sacrifice (Benjamin), organization, and putting one’s body on the line, without limits but with due care.
Nation states that confront more powerful states head-on will be swept away by the gale, as we have seen in recent years, at enormous cost to their populations. This is not to say that we should not fight, but rather that we should bear in mind that the goal of capitalism today is the annihilation of entire peoples. Once we understand this, everything begins to make sense.
Rafael Poch put it plainly a few days ago: “What we are witnessing around Iran, Ukraine, and Venezuela is, in general terms, one and the same war. Its objective is to militarily prevent the fall of American-Western hegemony in the world, threatened mainly by China’s rise” (Ctxt, February 23, 2026).
It would be naive to believe that this is only a war between states. Although the mainstream media presents it as a confrontation between powers fighting for global or regional hegemony, if we look at the background, we will see that in all cases the raw materials essential for domination are at stake, from gas in Gaza to oil in Iran and Venezuela. In order to appropriate these common goods, it is necessary to carry out ethnic and social cleansing, as we are seeing throughout the world and, very clearly, in Latin America.
To paraphrase Rafael Poch, we can say that we are facing a single war: that of the haves against the have-nots. In Latin America, it is a ruthless war against indigenous peoples and Black people, against peasants and residents of urban peripheries. A colonial war that deepens five centuries of “conquest” and violence. This reality is very clear if we allow ourselves to see where the resistance lies, precisely among the peoples mentioned above, and no longer among the old subjects that the left continues to invoke.
These subjects, and particularly the indigenous peoples, are practicing a new political culture that is not found in any book, but is inspired by centuries of resistance and uprisings, by ways of living and relating to life, by traditions, but also by the incorporation of new learning.
A first issue to highlight relates to pyramids. We see that whenever empires attack, the first thing they seek to do is decapitate pyramids. Anthropologist Pierre Clastres observed that lowland peoples resisted conquest better than those who formed large empires with high dignitaries.
The debate proposed by the Zapatistas on pyramids, the broad and profound reorganization of their autonomy, I believe is related both to resistance to the storm and to the certainty that they reproduce oppression, as they staged in the Morelia seedbed last August. If we do not build pyramids, they cannot decapitate us. That is the other lesson we need to learn.
A second issue is how to confront those who want to destroy us. In the old political culture, the approach was to respond to every attack from above, to confront the war of the powerful with revolutionary war, in a symmetry that showed its limitations. It is not that we do not want to fight, but that we are going to do so in other ways, in a manner that ensures the survival of the peoples.
In this logic, there are no victories or defeats, no triumphant entries into the palaces of power, but something else: continuing to be who we are, for which we need to resist by building our worlds, which is one of the ways to channel the rebellion that inspires us.
There is much to learn about how to resist. A few days ago, we celebrated the tremendous victory of 14 Amazonian peoples against the privatization of three major rivers, resisting the multinational Cargill and the government in Brasilia. The question we should ask ourselves is: are we willing to learn from the peoples, or do we continue to believe that the vanguards and left-wing parties are the only alternatives?
Original text published by Raúl Zibechi in La Jornada on March 6th, 2026.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.