Resistance is, after all, a futile, symbolic act unless it leads to material change. The frequent appearance of the black bloc, a tactic in which activists don black masks to engage in ritualistic property destruction, alienating the larger mass of protestors in the process, epitomizes the new spirit. The irony is that, whatever their faults, the FLN cadre from the cities that traveled to the Lacandon Jungle took care to understand their surroundings and the local population. Yet many of those whom they’ve inspired have formed elitist cliques, engaging in the paramilitary nihilism of the black bloc, fetishizing physical confrontation with the police, preferring personal acts of rebellion in the here and now over the unglamorous job of organizing a conscious class movement. “Educate, Agitate, Organize” has faded into “Agitate, Agitate, Agitate!” (The more palatable and “constructive” anarchists—the food co-ops and urban gardens-type—are benign but utterly ineffectual.)
— Why We Loved the Zapatistas, by Bhaskar Sunkara
