The most defining moment of the Zapatista insurrection in January 1994 was the capture of the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas —located in a mountain valley 2,000 meters above sea level— by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN). Groups of Indigenous guerrillas moved in and took control of the most strategic points: they set up blockades at all the roads entering the city, disarmed the police, occupied all gas stations, controlled the main avenues, and took over the municipal palace in the historic center of town. On the Plaza de Armas, Subcomandante Marcos addressed a stunned crowd of journalists, residents, and tourists. A tourist guide asked him whether his bus with European tourists could continue their trip to the ruins of Palenque. Marcos replied: “The road to Palenque is closed. Sorry for the inconvenience, but this is a revolution.” The next day, the Zapatista fighters withdrew from San Cristóbal and disappeared in the forested lowlands where they had come from. Mexico and the world were in shock. After 12 days of clashes and hundreds of dead, a ceasefire was called and peace negotiations began. In an interview he gave to La Jornada a few days later, Marcos made clear he was proud of the EZLN’s tactics and described their operation to capture San Cristóbal as “a poem” (Tello Díaz 1995, 18).[1] In comparing the rebellion to poetry, he was reminding us that organizing for revolution is an art, a skill that demands tactical and strategic creativity, not unlike the art of war but more challenging because it fights not a circumstantial enemy but elites it seeks to overthrow to create something new.
Tellingly, witnesses to the 1917 October Revolution also evoked a work of art when describing the tactics through which the Bolshevik Party took over Petrograd (today’s Saint Petersburg) practically without resistance. Nikolai Sukahnov, who experienced the revolution first-hand and became one of its most respected chroniclers, wrote about the Bolsheviks’ well-organized tactical efficacy: “The October Revolution was carried through like a piece of music played from notes” (cited by Trotsky 2007, 833). The Zapatista insurrection and the Russian Revolution are certainly very different events, representing opposite models of radical change. The Russian Revolution inspired in the rest of the world communist revolutions based on the Leninist model of taking over the state. Barely three years after the collapse of Soviet communism, the Zapatistas appeared from a remote area of Latin America to offer an alternative model of rebellion: as a grassroots, territorial process based on the struggle for autonomy from the state, blending the Indigenous communal values of the EZLN’s rank and file, the Marxists tradition of Latin American guerrillas, and the anarchist sentiments gaining traction since 1968. Mariano Pacheco writes that for the social movements in Argentina of which he was part in the late 1990s, “Zapatismo was our October Revolution” (Pacheco 2019, 19). He was expressing how the EZLN inspired the dreams of new generations, even if, in the strict sense, the events in Chiapas were a localized insurrection that created resilient territories in rebellion rather than a large-scale revolution that overthrew the existing order. In this essay, I reflect not on what sets the Zapatista insurrection and the October Revolution apart but, rather, on what they share: that they were both compared to pieces of art (a poem, music) because they mobilized skills based on intuition, creativity, and attentiveness to terrain and timing; in short, they teach us from different angles about “the art of revolution” and its affective, temporal, and spatial dimensions.
In his analysis of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, Engels wrote that “insurrection is an art quite as much as war or any other, and subject to certain rules of proceeding, which, when neglected, will produce the ruin of the party neglecting them.” First, “never play with insurrection unless you are fully prepared to face the consequences of your play.” Second, “act with the greatest determination, and on the offensive.” Engels cites the French Revolutionary Georges Danton, “the greatest master of revolutionary policy yet known, de l’audace, de l’audace, encore de l’audace”—audacity, audacity, and more audacity (1967, 227-228).
Like the capture of San Cristóbal by the EZLN in 1994, the seizure of Petrograd by the Bolsheviks in 1917 was an audacious act that operated temporally through their sense of opportunity and territorially through their control of strategic nodes of terrain. In February 1917, the insurrection that toppled the Czar had been spontaneous and leaderless and had caught the Bolshevik Party off guard, allowing Kerensky’s reformist Provisional Government to take power. The insurrection in October, in contrast, was the result of careful planning amid the growing radicalization of the masses—especially workers, soldiers, and sailors angered at Kerensky’s continuation of the deeply unpopular war with Germany. As the momentum and effervescence of the masses were reaching boiling point, Lenin wrote in an internal party document that “insurrection must be treated as an art” (Lenin 1972, 22). According to Trotsky, Lenin insisted on this point when he said to the rest of the Bolshevik leadership: “We must relate ourselves to insurrection like an art.” This posed the question: “How to find a bridge from the politics to the technique of insurrection? And how to lead the masses across that bridge?” (Trotsky 2007, 734). The first key question was timing. When to take power? Trotsky notes that one of Lenin’s remarkable skills as a leader was his intuition and his capacity to read “the mood” of the masses. Lenin “had studied the correlation of forces closely,” paying careful attention “to extra-parliamentary forms of struggle,” and concluded: “We cannot hope for more favorable conditions. The hour of action is at hand. The crisis is ripe” (Trotsky 2007, 706, 712; Lenin 1972). The Bolshevik leadership initially feared it was premature to launch an insurrection. But Lenin convinced them that any delay would be “fatal” (Trotsky 2007, 825).
Leon Trotsky’s extraordinary description of the Bolshevik seizure of Petrograd in his History of the Russian Revolution begins with a chapter entitled “The Art of Insurrection,” which describes how the revolutionary forces implemented Lenin’s ideas. Trotsky writes: “Insurrection is an art, and like all arts it has its laws … In order to take the power, the proletariat needs more than spontaneous insurrection. It needs a suitable organization; it needs a plan … This is the Leninist view of the question.” Trotsky added: “To overthrow the old power is one thing; to take power in one’s hand is another.” And the art of taking power required “an organization accommodated to this task,” the Bolshevik Party, whose leadership needed to have “a flexible orientation in changing conditions, a thought-out plan of attack, cautiousness in technical preparation, and a daring blow” (Trotsky 2007, 741).
Lenin laid out the general “plan of attack” to seize Russia’s capital. As President of the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky organized the details of the operation from the Smolny Institute, which became the headquarters of the revolution and the “red” counterpoint to the Winter Palace. On the night of October 24th, Red Guards (workers’ militias) and revolutionary soldiers and sailors occupied all strategic and infrastructural nodes in Petrograd: bridges, telephone and telegraph offices, train stations, banks, and all factories and regiments, with instructions to not let state forces reach the center of the city (Trotsky 2007, 714). They encountered little to no opposition. In the bourgeois districts, almost nobody dared go to the streets. The revolution, Trotsky writes, is “taking all it can without a battle. It is advancing its positions without firing, integrating and reinforcing its army on the march.” Trotsky called this a “tactic of peaceful penetration,” “to break the bones of the enemy legally and hypnotically and paralyze the remnants of his will” (2007, 703). “The city is quiet. … Can this be an insurrection? Is an insurrection like this?” (2007, 791). By October 25th, Red Guards and rebel soldiers controlled all strategic points in Petrograd. The Winter Palace, the government palace from which Kerensky promptly fled, was cut off from the rest of Russia. By the time the Winter Palace was finally stormed on October 26th, the provisional government had already collapsed. The streets of Petrograd were quiet and largely deserted. In a notable line, Trotsky describes the atmosphere at the moment of their victory: “The bourgeois classes had expected barricades, flaming conflagrations, looting, rivers of blood. In reality, a silence reigned more terrible than all the thunders of the world” (2007, 788). Trotsky’s tactically smooth takeover of Petrograd during the October Revolution—executed “like a piece of music”—had accomplished what Sun Tzu (1963, 84) identified as the supreme art of war: “to subdue the enemy without fighting” by breaking their confidence and will to fight. But in October, the counterrevolutionary forces had been overwhelmed but not fully defeated; they would soon reorganize with military support from Western empires and begin a civil war that would devastate Russia until 1922, when they were defeated by Trotsky’s Red Army.
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, written 2,500 years ago in China, has long been a source of inspiration among revolutionaries, especially in Asia (Mao studied it closely). The following quote is particularly relevant for the art of revolution: “Know the enemy, know yourself; your victory will never be endangered. Know the ground, know the weather; your victory will then be total” (Sun Tzu 1963, 83). This line encapsulates that succeeding in revolutionary situations against a more powerful enemy demands, first, a situational awareness of the balance of forces and of the prevailing moods involving the adversary and one’s own forces (“know the enemy, know yourself”) and of the right moment to strike. Second, this line reminds us that revolutions (like war) are also territorial processes whereby knowledge of terrain (“know the ground, know the weather”) plays a crucial role. In Petrograd, this involved knowledge of the urban terrain and its most strategic nodes of infrastructure and communication, which, under the control of Red Guards and revolutionary soldiers and sailors, became weapons of the revolution.
Knowledge of terrain has long been of crucial importance in guerrilla warfare worldwide (Gordillo 2018). In Latin America, Ernesto “Che” Guevara (2006) highlighted the importance of terrain in his distinction between the “favorable terrain” of forests and mountains for guerrilla forces and the “unfavorable terrain” of cities, where the power of the state is strongest (see Gordillo 2025). In January 1994, the tactical brilliance of the EZLN was that it left the “favorable terrain” of the forests and struck and briefly held “the unfavorable terrain” of San Cristóbal and other cities in Chiapas—showing a detailed knowledge of the city and their strategic points—only to promptly retreat to the safety of their own territories. The goal was not to permanently seize the city but to maximize the impact of the rebellion. The timing of the operation (right after midnight of the new year) sought to maximize their tactical surprise as well as the symbolic and affective impact of the uprising, given that this was also the moment when NAFTA took effect. The EZLN also showed that their tactics were less militaristic than those of previous Latin American guerrillas. As Subcomandante Marcos said in that interview to La Jornada, they saw armed struggle not as “the only path” or “the all-powerful truth around which everything else revolves,” but as one among many forms of struggle that change as circumstances change.[2] Marcos’ apology “for the inconvenience” of the uprising also anticipated the playful, ironic tone that would define his public image.
The Zapatista insurrection opened an anti-systemic crack in the texture of Mexico and of the capitalist global order at a time when the Mexican and global elites had decreed the end of revolutionary dreams. It was carried out by poorly armed but well-organized and media-savvy Indigenous collectives that subsequently embraced an array of non-violent tactics and political interventions, inspiring millions of people across Latin America and globally. In his essay “The New Anarchists” from 2002, David Graeber argued that in the 1990s “anarchism reappeared just where it had been at the end of the nineteenth century, as an international movement at the very centre of the revolutionary left” (Graeber 2002). And he saw the Zapatistas as the first large-scale confirmation in this shift away from Leninism, also celebrated by John Holloway (2002) as an example of “how to change the world without taking power.”
I have long been captivated by the Zapatista insurrection and by the persistence of their territories in rebellion. In December 2017, I fulfilled an old dream when I visited the Zapatista community of Oventik, not far from San Cristóbal. I was received by the local Junta de Buen Gobierno (Council of Good Government), whose members answered from behind their masks my questions about their views on autonomy and self-organization and the challenges they faced recreating them under adverse conditions. In January 2026, the EZLN celebrated the 32nd anniversary of the uprising with massive and enthusiastic gatherings that confirmed their endurance. But their territories of autonomy have been threatened by criminal organizations and they have been forced to adapt their forms of self-government to a context of encroachment (Baschet 2024). Similar experiments in revolutionary autonomy like Rojava in the Syrian Kurdistan face serious threats, given recent attacks by the Turkish and Syrian militaries. In short, the localized cracks created by the Zapatista and Kurdish collectives have been inspiring to rethink radical politics in the 21st century but were not powerful enough to spread more widely and undermine the global order.
As the climate breakdown worsens and fascism and imperialism are on the rise, it is becoming clear that giving up on taking power means that states will continue to be controlled by those taking the world toward a climate and ecological catastrophe. Some have called for embracing a “Climate Leninism” based on a disciplined vanguard party (Malm 2018; Heron and Dean 2022) and for an offensive “war of maneuver” against the infrastructures of fossil capitalism (Malm 2021; Malm and Carton 2024). Even Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, old critics of Leninism known for celebrating the Zapatistas, recognized in their book Assembly that the failure of leaderless insurrections, such as the Arab Spring, means that those seeking radical change do need to take power, “but, crucially, to take power differently” (Hardt and Negri 2017, xx). They rediscovered something that Trotsky had warned about in his chapter “The Art of Insurrection,” based on the Russian experience: that a spontaneous and leaderless insurrection lacking plans, organization, and a vision is not enough to advance real change.
The question of “how to take power differently” and to what extent this is possible goes beyond the scope of this essay, but it raises the additional and challenging question of how to learn from the undoubted efficacy of “the art of insurrection” cultivated by Lenin and Trotsky in 1917 without reproducing the top-down vanguardism that led to Soviet totalitarianism. It has long been known that the model of revolution based on “the storming of the Winter Palace” is no longer viable. Yet the commonalities shared by the Russian Revolution and the Zapatista insurrection remind us that “the art of revolution” requires general skills and intuitions that are crucial to cultivate to effectively challenge the status quo. Even when mobilizing electoral politics and mass protests rather than armed rebellion, these skills involve the need to organize, plan, and prepare; the ability to read the mood of the masses and assess the balance of forces and be flexible enough to adapt and improvise; to be attentive to temporality and to the most favorable moments to act; and to attune defensive and offensive tactics to knowledge of terrain, which for rebels all over the world has long been the ultimate weapon of the weak.