Among tactics developed by European activists to resist [sic] formalization processes, we find the use of personal bank accounts or means of transportation, partial undeclared payments and sales, the circulation of money in cash, the use of personal connections to avoid bureaucracy, hidden storage spaces, and the attempt to develop projects of self-certification and artisanal roasting. The organic certification process has generated endless debates both within the autonomous cooperatives and European networks, as official international labels are considered neocolonial devices. In Chiapas, producers don’t believe in Western agencies determining whether their product deserves to be considered organic, but they allow it out of necessity in order to export. This is a particularly delicate subject for a struggle built around peasant and indigenous rights for self-determination [sic]. While similar dilemmas have been discussed in the U.S. context regarding Fair Trade certification (Naylor 2019), European networks engage with these mechanisms in distinct ways. Only a portion of the coffee exported to Europe bears the official Fair Trade label, as many collectives explicitly reject it, and Zapatista producers themselves clearly differentiate their experience from that of non-Zapatista cooperatives. In this context, Fair Trade and organic certifications operate as separate and differently mobilized devices, and the coffees distributed across Europe under diverse “rebel” labels are explicitly marked as political products, openly positioned as part of a broader and collective anticapitalist struggle.
(accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-025-09802-x)
For more on the difference between resistance and defence (especially the role of diversity in the latter), see Kristin Ross (2024), The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life (London: Verso, pp. 50-56).
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 