Let’s continue with the parallel worlds.
The same can happen with social pyramids. In one of the worlds the top part is occupied, let’s say, by white people, and at the bottom are those with dark skin. In another parallel world, it is the opposite: those at the top are dark-skinned and those at the bottom are white-skinned.
You can explore the options as you wish: top male, bottom female; caxlan (name that indigenous people give to outsider peoples) up, indigenous down; straight up, LGBTQI+ down: top rich, bottom poor; elite up, poor down, and vice versa. In this way you will be able to arrange the different alternatives of theoretical analysis approaches and policy proposals.
Now, if a person from one of the worlds looks into the other parallel (and contradictory opposite, I add), he or she will conclude that in that world the pyramid is inverted. In that other world the indigenous people are at the top and the caxlanes at the bottom; women dominate men; “beaners” discriminate against Anglos; Latinos conquer and subjugate Europeans; LGBTQI+ people mock, attack and murder heteros; workers exploit employers; politicians keep their promises (ok, ok, ok, ok, I doubt that world exists); criminals are punished and the innocent are free; etcetera.
For many theories or “social sciences” the pyramid of their world can be ‘natural’ and “human.” “It is natural that there are people who have wealth and people who do not have wealth”; “it is natural that those who have knowledge command and the ignorant obey”; “it is natural that the army with better weapons defeats the weaker army”; “it is natural that the beautiful people command and the ugly obey”; “it is natural that men dominate women”; “it is natural that hetero people violate non-binary people”; “it is natural that caxlanes discriminate against people of other races.” Sure, you can give examples that contradict that “naturalness,” but I am being simplistic.
Around this “naturalness” is built not only a political system. Also a set of “evidence” that is observed in the whole of a society: in the family, school, work, wealth, poverty, delinquency, abnormality, language, mode, communication, relationship with the other and with nature, … and social activism.
In this way, something like the “algorithm” of society is constructed. A series of beliefs and referents for the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the masculine and the feminine, and so on. “Evidence” reinforced by the media and social interaction in networks and spaces of study, work, transportation, politics, activism, rest and leisure.
In short, life, death… and disappearance. Because the system has created a new state of existence of people: there are alive, there are dead and there are disappeared (neither alive nor dead). Thus, without the need for Schrödinger and his cat.
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The inverted pyramid is the basis of the innovative proposals, transformations, evolutions and revolutions. In the standard pyramid, at the top there are few people and at the bottom there are many, but those at the top have a lot of wealth, and those at the bottom do not. The proposal is to “flip” the pyramid: that those who have no wealth and are at the bottom, move to the top of the pyramid, displacing those who have wealth downwards.
At first glance, the inversion of the pyramid, turning it upside down, sounds good. Those who have always been at the bottom will have their chance to be at the top. And those at the top will have to suffer the conditions at the bottom.
The issue is that, as there are many at the bottom, it will be difficult for decisions to be made, then representation arises, and that is what the vanguard, the political party, is for. It will happen that the pyramid is not “turned upside down,” but reproduced with another nomenclature: bureaucracies made into good, bad or worse political parties.
Besides, of course, the “alternate” powers (Capital and Organized Crime), maintain their position, renewing their agreements and relations with the “new” top of the pyramid.
The political proposals of the different vanguards have in common the same offer: since those at the top have and those at the bottom do not, then what must be done is to turn the pyramid upside down.
For this “inversion” -in reality it is the expertise of the bosses-, the hologram of the “Nation State” is necessary. If justice, security, honesty and capacity are absent, then there is the national sports team that, wrapped in the official flag, throws itself to the precipice of reality. But the “public” no longer applauds or boos, they now make memes.
In these attempts to “democratize” cynicism and awkwardness, political proposals resort to the creation of virtual enemies. They pit the dark skin against the white skin, the liberal against the conservative, the middle against the bottom and the top, the periphery against the center, the native against the mestizo, the woman against the man, the other against the hetero, the young against the adult, the adult against the old, the Latino against the Anglo, the one nation against the other, the one from any part of the world against the gringo, the resident against the migrant. And vice versa.
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Zapatismo grants that the system has sufficient capacity for destruction to end a planet, a world, by replacing one social organization with another. In fact, capitalism is born out of revolution. It is not the revolutions that concerns it, but making sure that they follow the same pyramidal logic: there are those who rule and there are those who obey.
Now, in its current phase, the system is undergoing a transformation. But it does not mean that it is going to disappear. Rather, it is a readjustment, an adaptation to the new conditions of what some call the “world system”.
If capitalism is just becoming aware of the irreversible destruction it has provoked, it is beside the point, or something else, depending. But, in the face of this, it rehearses or tries out different ways.
One is to go back to the past.
We are not only referring to the process of original accumulation, where the system is born, grows and consolidates itself by means of dispossession through wars (something that theorists and historians tend to forget). But to a sort of impossible leap backwards, that which means trying to rebuild the so-called “Benefactor State” or “Welfare State” (a Keynesian Welfare revival). That is to say, a State just as repressive and reactionary, but with tints of social justice or, if you will, of social programs that attenuate the burden of the bottom floor of the pyramid, of its base. But the damned reality does not abandon its reactionary position and, sooner or later, breaks the walls of that pyramid. Thus, the “Regeneration” becomes a fourth-rate recycling.
There is also the attempt to “swell” (or “fatten”) the middle classes which, as its name indicates, would be between the top of the pyramid and the base. These “middle” parts survive with the determination to climb more steps in the pyramid, and with the terror that the base can no longer support or cannot control its bursting, and it rebels and reveals itself. For one thing or another, they resort to the vanguard party. To control, slow down or flatly extinguish the rebellions; and to climb, by means of positions and advantages, in the social scale. Yesterday’s ultras are today’s “realist” officials.
That is why their spokesmen are so panic-stricken when faced with broken windows, strikes, blockades, marches, strikes, takeovers, shouts, actions, and those ugly things that the dirty, ugly and bad people of history do -which will not appear in the books of basic education-. Their readiness to be “moved” by “distant” wars? Well, it is because they believe that this only happens in other pyramids.
But, contrary to journalistic evidence, opinion articles and brainy geopolitical analysis, big capital has not been national for a long time. That is to say, it does not refer to a geography. Rather, it has to do with its place in the world economy. Big capital, the Boss, therefore, does not ask itself what to do in the Middle East, in Eastern Europe, or in the different flags, official shields, anthems and sports teams. No, big capital wonders what to do and how, but all over the planet.
Big capital does not yet agree, but its thinking minds foresee that what is coming is already irremediable and that it is necessary to plunder as much as possible. And for this, international organizations, laws… and nations do not matter.
The different right-wingers, including progressivism, vie for the favors of big capital. Like two brothers, they fight for the pets from of the Boss. And they use what they can. Each one accuses the other with hysterical cries: some warn of the coming of communism; the contrary, of the resurrection of fascism. Both sides offer to keep the base of the pyramid under control. Some with blows. The others as well.
But some boast, while the others make a face of “that is a remnant of a past that will not return” and, not without gestures of disgust, throw charity at the base of the pyramid. Charity that is transferred to Organized Crime by extortion from the same authorities that control the social programs and administer them in exchange for votes.
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Meanwhile, a word that synthesizes many things that should put the top of the pyramid to shame, reiterates its vocation to live free: Palestine. Today Palestine defines the true objective of the pyramid, the casket foretold for the peoples of the world.
There are quiet words that walk earthquakes, that sail storms, that fly hurricanes. They are only heard at dawn, when everything hurts while half asleep. Then they arrive and their murmur tears the skin of memory. A scar, still bleeding, is what remains. “Gaza” is one of those words, one that enrages, that rebels, that reveals.
From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast.
The Capitan
July 2025.
Original text published at Enlace Zapatista on July 10th, 2025.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.