Grassroots Politics: Democratic Movements as Complex Systems

Scott Henkel

Abstract: The term “grassroots politics” should be reinterpreted as a synonym for radical democracy, as opposed to its traditional definition as as form of populist, hierarchical politics. This new interpretation of grassroots politics suggests that democratic movements can be understood as complex systems—nonlinear, nonhierarchical, self-organizing groups like crowds of people or swarms of ants. In order to justify this reinterpretation, this paper builds upon theoretical work by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and gives an example through a reading of B. Traven’s Jungle Novels. Key Words: Grassroots politics, democracy, swarm, complexity, hierarchy, pyramid, political movements, B. Traven, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari.

***** 1. Introduction

The term grassroots politics—as it is used in the literatures of the

Americas, in scholarship, in the pages of the New York Times, or other sources—is meant to imply a division between people “at the grassroots” and people in institutional positions of power.1 This interpretation suggests that, at best, there is a hierarchy between these types of people, and, at worst, that people “at the grassroots” are powerless compared to the people “above” them. This traditional understanding, I believe, has sufficient flaws to merit a reinterpretation. Because to be concerned with the root or the roots is to be radical, I argue that grassroots politics should be reinterpreted as a synonym for radical democracy.

In this paper, I critique the way grassroots politics has traditionally been interpreted and justify my reinterpretation, using evidence from complex systems theory and examples from an extended reading of B. Traven’s Jungle Novels. As opposed to the singularity of trees, I will advocate the multiplicity of grassroots; as opposed to the hierarchy of pyramids, I will advocate the complexity of the swarm. 2. A Reinterpretation of Grassroots Politics

In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze applies an

understanding of Nietzsche’s methodology to Nietzsche’s own body of work,

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reinterpreting some of Nietzsche’s concepts. For example, what Nietzsche called “master morality” and “slave morality,” Deleuze calls “active” and “reactive” and he proceeds to mobilize those terms.2 The key to this methodological move, as Deleuze explicitly states,3 is not to assume that meanings of concepts are fixed, and not to assume that interpretation is an effort to claim established territory.4 Rather, interpretation is reinterpretation: it is, in their view and my own, an effort to produce new ideas through interpretation, or new understandings of familiar terms. I make this same methodological move to reinterpret the term “grassroots politics.”

As it is traditionally used, grassroots politics refers to a type of people who are placed in a particular hierarchy of power. A topical example first: in response to one of her Facebook posts about efforts to reform health care laws in the United States, one of Sarah Palin’s friends responded by writing “[t]here’s a huge difference between Democrats on the ground and the Marxists who currently control the Party. Those in control won’t need or want to listen until the grassroots throws them out.”5 The “grassroots” people “on the ground” are positioned here against others “in control.”

Such uses of the term can be found in a broad range of literary and scholarly sources. In Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men, Governor Willie Stark, the benevolent dictator of Louisiana politics, addresses his audience from the courthouse steps, while his audience is “on the grassroots.”6 The divide is pronounced: Stark is a one-man political machine and holds enormous institutional power. Therefore, he stands on the concrete symbol of juridical and institutional power, while he looks down upon and speaks to the country folk who are standing “on the grassroots.”

Michael Kazin uses the phrase repeatedly in The Populist Persuasion: An American History, referring to “grassroots activists,”7 “grassroots reformers,”8 “grassroots dissidents,”9 the “grassroots idiom,”10 and to “African-Americans at the grassroots.”11 Kazin’s use of “grassroots” as an adjective modifying “activists,” “reformers,” “dissidents,” and “African-Americans” makes it clear that he is referring to a type of people when he uses the phrase. As these examples suggest, “grassroots politics” usually refers to the demos- part of democracy, focusing on questions of who participates, rather than how they participate. This demos is usually defined loosely, but most often meant to signify “common people” and to exclude people in positions of institutional power like elected officials, corporate officers, or the Marxists who control the Democratic party.12

There are two problems with the traditional use of the term. First, it suggests a rather simplistic and essentialist understanding of identity even though, grammatically speaking, “grassroots” is an adjective that modifies a noun, “politics.” The term, then, should refer to a type of political praxis, not to a type of person.

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The second reason why it is necessary to reinterpret this traditional definition of grassroots politics is because it reinforces a hierarchy. If we define a group of people “at the grassroots level,” we logically have to assume that there will be people who are “above” them. The traditional definition reinforces a profound misconception: that the people “at the grassroots” need people “above” them to speak for them. Kazin’s Introduction to The Populist Persuasion, for example, is subtitled “Speaking for the People.”13 He writes that his book is about “images of conflict between the powerful and the powerless.”14 Indeed, Kazin’s definition of populist language is a language that is used by “those who claim to speak for the vast majority of Americans who work hard and love their country.”15 These two ideas, of course, are intertwined: if we assume that there are people who are “powerless,” then the “powerful” will need to speak for them, operating somewhere between noblesse oblige and political paternalism.16

This logic forms a pyramid of power in which the people at or near the top have a high degree of agency and those “at the grassroots” have little or none. I do not want to lend legitimacy to his hierarchy or to concede that it is necessary. So, to restate: I think that the traditional definition of grassroots politics is sufficiently flawed to merit a reinterpretation.

Several thinkers, such as Marx, in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,17 and Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color,18 remind us that, etymologically, to be concerned with the root or the roots is to be radical. I argue, therefore, that grassroots politics should be reinterpreted as a synonym for a radical democracy. Grassroots are rhizomatic, multiple, networked; they grow horizontally as well as vertically. They are growing green spaces in urban landscapes, and overlapping, intersecting in the wild. Their symbolism suggests complexity, not hierarchy, and therefore they avoid the relation of power in which Kazin suggested that certain people would need to speak for others. Grassroots politics is, rather, a conception of democracy that is more direct, and therefore more meaningful to more people. This grassroots politics is not limited beneath capitol domes or by capital’s control over economic relations, but is instead the democracy of the swarm, as common and diverse as leaves of grass. 3. The Complexity and Representation of Swarms

While examples of institutions that are hierarchically organized are abundant—and we will see particularly vicious examples in Traven’s novels—the alternatives to such organization are more rare. I will spend the balance of the essay adding substance to the reinterpretation of grassroots politics by examining it as a complex system and by showing how this

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complexity has been represented in literary texts. As a way of orienting the debate, I offer two metaphors: trees and grassroots. I should note that I like trees as much as the next person, but I do not care for a particular aspect of their symbolism.

In their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari contrast a tree and its singular root structure to grass and its multiple root structure. “We’re tired of trees,” Deleuze and Guattari write. “Grass is the only way out.”19 We can think of both trees and grass “from the top down” or “from the bottom up,” but the crucial difference is this: trees are singular, grass is multiple. A tree can exist by itself, in a field or in an urban lot; it makes no sense to think of “a grass”—grass is always plural, always collective. Trees, like pyramids, are hierarchical, whereas grass, like a swarm, is complex.

When I mention singularity as opposed to complexity, I am referring to the theoretical body of work on complex systems, which are nonlinear, non-hierarchical, self-organizing groups such as swarms of ants, crowds of people, or social networks. “Complexity” in this sense is not a synonym for difficulty; it is, rather, a synonym for multiplicity, and the ideas and patterns that emerge from that multiplicity.20

In this technical sense, complexity is the patterns and ideas that emerge out of local decision-making. Ant colonies are among the best examples that nature has to offer. In biological terms, ants are among the earth’s most successful species.21 When considered individually, the work that ants do may seem to be at cross purposes, but when considered collectively, they are able to complete very difficult tasks. The question is, how do they do this? Deborah Gordon, a professor of biology at Stanford University, writes,

The basic mystery about ant colonies is that there is no management. A functioning organization with no one in charge is so unlike the way humans operate as to be virtually inconceivable. There is no central control. No insect issues commands to another or instructs it to do things in a certain way. No individual is aware of what must be done to complete any colony task. […] Somehow these small events create a pattern that drives the coordinated behavior of colonies.22

One of the difficulties we have in understanding this complexity is in the language we use to describe the swarm. We give a particular royal name to one type of ant (a queen), and a good class-conscious name to another—workers. This implies a pyramid structure, a powerful directing role for the queen, and a less powerful, directed role to the workers. The very language of

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these names suggests hierarchy, but ant behavior itself suggests complexity. As Gordon writes, “Although ‘queen’ is a term that reminds us of human political systems, the queen is not an authority figure. She lays eggs and is fed and cared for by the workers. She does not decide which worker does what.”23 The key here, and the problem to figure out, is that ant swarms depend on the aggregation of lots of individual, local decisions. The patterns that emerge out of the aggregation of all those decisions is called complexity. Two common misconceptions are often raised against the idea that this same principle could apply to human behavior as well. The first that there there must be a strict binary between individualism and group behavior, i.e., that an individual must stand apart from the group or else subsume that individuality in an effort to join with others. Complexity suggest a different story, namely, that when lots of individuals cooperate, ideas and patterns emerge that would absent if individual behavior would be considered alone. The second is the idea that without someone in charge, work itself—of any kind—would cease. As Steven Johnson suggests in Emergence: the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, when we see organization, we frequently think in terms of rules and laws, and also in terms of rulers and lawmakers—“pacemakers,” in Johnson’s terms.24 But as Johnson argues, the “movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication is what we call emergence. […] The intelligence of ant colonies may be the animal kingdom’s most compelling argument for the power of the collective, and you can think of ‘local knowledge’ as another way of talking about grassroots struggle.”25

Like the language of queens and workers, writers have often used the language of complexity to talk about human behavior and human organization, both in positive and negative terms. In Aesop’s fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” ants are shown to be industrious and forward thinking—they stockpile food for the winter and distribute resources equitably, as opposed to the grasshopper, who only thinks of leisure.26

On the other hand, ants in a swarm are often represented as particularly dangerous. In Homer’s Illiad, Achiles’ soldiers are vicious, loyal, and unthinking, and are called Myrmidons because, according to Ovidian mythology, their metamorphosis came when they changed from ants into humans.27 Although the usage of the term has faded, the Oxford English Dictionary documents that the term “myrmidon” was considered an insult, a way to describe someone as both unthinking and brutal—loosely akin to the way we might now call someone a “robot.” Today, we use the same root word to name the study of ants: myrmecology, and myrmeciinae is the scientific name for a subfamily of red ant.

As is the case with Achilles’ soldiers, we often see the language of complexity—swarms in particular—used as in insult. Especially in the later

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Western tradition, atomistic individuals seem to have a monopoly on intelligence; when characters assemble without a clear leader, they are routinely portrayed as irrational, hostile swarms.

One of the best examples of a writer using swarm imagery to denigrate grassroots politics is Thomas Carlyle’s 1867 essay “Shooting Niagara; And After?” Carlyle criticizes the various democratic movements of his day, and his dominant theme is that the people who make up such movements are rashly disregarding the rule of their superiors, the people whom Carlyle calls “heroes.”28 Carlyle is hostile to even the most tentative form of representative democracy, to be sure, but his real object of scorn is what he called “the swarm”: those people who were “cutting asunder [the] straps and ties… of old regulations, fetters, and restrictions.”29

“Bring in more voting,” Carlyle writes, “that will clear away the universal rottenness, and quagmire of mendacities, in which poor England is drowning; let England only vote sufficiently, and all is clean and sweet again. A very singular swarmery this of the Reform movement, I must say.”30 Carlyle refers to the movements for electoral reform and two other types of “swarmery”: the labor union campaign for an eight hour workday31 and the recently completed American Civil War.32 Carlyle calls the Civil War “by far the notablest case of Swarmery, in these times.”33 In doing so, Carlyle illustrates the term’s use as a racial epithet. Swarm imagery is often meant as an insult, and to represent a threat posed by racial minorities or the poor. Robert Leigh Davis writes that, for Carlyle,

Swarmery threatens to wrest political control from Britain’s “Real-Superiors.” […] True emancipation, Carlyle believed, comes from finding and fulfilling one’s place in a social hierarchy and paying honorable allegiance to the cultural elite best suited by birth, training, precedent, and disposition to fulfil humankind’s “instinctive desire of Guidance.” Without that guidance, human society devolves into brutal and beastlike forms of existence, no better than cattle, beavers, and bees.34

The problem in Carlyle’s thinking is that this “social hierarchy” is a thinly veiled code for hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Carlyle looks at the activism of emancipated slaves, workers, and women and sees disorder and chaos. His mistake is to assume that a different social order means disorder.35 4. Rebel Swarms as Grassroots Politics

Carlyle gave the swarm a negative connotation that has lingered into the twentieth century; B. Traven’s Jungle Novels offer an alternative. Most

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people know B. Traven as the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,36 which was made into a film directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart.37 Traven’s biography is largely unknown, but he was quite prolific, writing books like The Death Ship,38 which according to popular legend, was the book Albert Einstein would have taken to a desert island, and what are called his “Jungle Novels.”

Traven’s six “Jungle Novels”—Government,39 The Carreta,40 March to the Montería,41 Trozas,42 The Rebellion of the Hanged,43 and General from the Jungle44—were published between 1931 and 1940, and are works of historical fiction which track the slow but escalating buildup of oppression and resistance that culminated in the 1910-1917 Mexican Revolution. Traven’s novels take their collective title from their setting: the jungles of Chiapas, Mexico. These jungles were home to the monterías, debt slavery plantations that produced tons of dark, rich mahogany. Over the course of the novels, the monterías also produce a revolutionary consciousness: like the rough mahogany that is made into beautiful furniture, the raw material of disorganized discontent is shaped into organized rebellion. Over the course of the novels, each character, often operating individually, finds that she or he is nearly powerless in the face of institutional structures of power. They discover that a radical form of democracy—grassroots politics as I use that term—is the key to their liberation. After the characters awaken to this idea, they explicitly begin to think about themselves as a swarm. At that moment, we can begin to examine their organization as a complex system.

The authorities in the Jungle Novels believe that organization requires hierarchy, and they justify their rule as being in the best interests of the nation. The dictator Porfirio Diaz, the Federal Army General, and the montería owners, for example, see themselves on the top of a hierarchy that they believe is beneficial to all involved. Furthermore, they believe that they have found themselves in their lofty positions because of what they see as innately superior characteristics: light skin, Spanish heritage, wealth, male gender, or military cunning. They see this society as worth defending, a profitable and prosperous order that is fundamentally good. This is an echo of Carlyle’s argument. The jefes in the Jungle Novels believe that the governance of organizations as multifaceted as nations, corporations, or communities must be left to those who have the intelligence and technical skill for such tasks. Thus, hierarchy based on authority is believed to be in the best interests of the community.

This order requires a high degree of paternalism—a noblesse oblige that requires the authorities to direct the lives of those beneath them. This paternalism is of a piece with the race, class, and gender hierarchies in the novels. Paternal domination leads to degradation of the peasants and deprives them of their liberty. This situation of mental, physical, and economic

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poverty becomes another reason the authorities use to justify their paternalism. Thus the peasants find themselves in a vicious cycle.45 The dictator in the Jungle Novels appeals to hierarchy explicitly: “the dictator thought himself the best Mexican alive and the only Mexican whose life was of consequence.”46 The General of the Federal troops holds a similar idea: through his “training he was gradually set apart from the common race of men and had climbed a fair number of steps nearer to the gods.”47 The General suggests that if the revolutionaries “had been reasoning men they would never have rebelled. Uprisings, mutinies, revolutions, are always irrational in themselves, because they come to disturb the agreeable somnolence that goes by the names of peace and order.”48 These “louse-infested, filthy Indians,” the Federal General reasons, “could not think for themselves, and that was why they needed dictators and tyrants to relieve them of the burden of thinking.”49 The general’s language belies the extent to which he will go to reinforce “peace and order”—a goal in the name of which he would unleash near total destruction. Even violent paternalism, then, is justified by a seeming care for the best interests of those “below” him.

The owners of the monterías, the debt slavery mahogany plantations, express this idea most clearly:

It is all so clear, so simple, so logical, so reasonable, that one has only to wonder why the proletariat won’t understand it when they are dictated to. Once they understand for the first time and fully accept that everything done is done only for their good, that no dictator, no shareholder, thinks or has ever thought of impinging on the value of the worker or making him into a beast of burden, once they begin to see that people only want their good, even their best, then the time will at last be ripe when they may be counted among the reasonable, and every single proletarian will have the prospect of actually becoming a factory manager and chairman of the board of directors.50

Therefore, we see how hierarchy and authority are conflated with rationality and “peace and order.”51 The assumption made by these authorities is that any deviation from this system is a sign of irrationality and chaos. They hope to persuade the peasants to work to climb the ladder of hierarchy rather than seeking to dismantle it. But like Carlyle, these authorities mistake a different order for disorder.

As we will see shortly, this fiction about a climbable social ladder is told in order to conceal exactly how rigid hierarchies were in pre-Revolutionary Mexico. Traven’s narrator presents a mix of racial, class, and

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gender domination, but the thread that unites all these systems is the idea of hierarchy itself. Carlyle’s epigones in the Jungle Novels like to think of themselves as benevolent fathers, not as masters, but these “fathers [would be] transformed into monsters as soon as their paternal domination and the authority that went with it were threatened.”52 Any challenge to authority, no matter how small, is treated as a capital offense. Traven’s narrator writes that “the death penalty is inflicted on anyone endangering the life of any person representing authority. That includes not only El Caudillo [the dictator], but all officers, soldiers, and police forces. Even an attempt on the life of a man in authority, be it no more than a threat, is punishable with shooting or hanging.”53 The notion of hierarchy itself is jeopardized when authority is resisted, and this is why punishment is so severe. This is also why the rebel swarm emerges as an alternative to these hierarchical forms of organization.54

These arguments justifying hierarchical rule are a thin veneer, however. In painstaking detail over the course of more than a thousand pages, the Jungle Novels narrate the conditions that agitate the Mexican Revolution—the domination of a dictator, pervasive debt slavery, military repression of strikes, rigid racial, gender, and class hierarchies—and the subsequent revolt. In the Mexico that Traven describes, elections were held, but the outcome was certain;55 business flourished, but conditions for workers were reprehensible;56 slavery was outlawed, but a system of debt slavery cropped up in its place.57 A democratic façade to the dictatorship is helpful, Traven’s narrator suggests, to those who prospered under Porfirio Diaz; to the rest, it is horrifying. As Traven’s narrator points out, “[w]here there is a dictator at the top of the ladder, you find nothing but dictators on every other rung. The only difference is that some are higher up and others lower down.”58 A dictator ruled the government, in collusion with business owners, intellectuals like Díaz’s científicos, and foreign backers, but there is no simple chain of command.59 These systems are diffuse and overlapping, but they all share the idea that hierarchy is natural and proper.

The narrator suggests that the rebels do not fully grasp the systems that dominate them, but they certainly know that they want to dismantle them. Because the hierarchical systems in the Jungle Novels are so overlapping, it is worth quoting Traven at length to get a sense of them:

The power which determined the fate of [the peasants] was invisible and intangible. It was impossible for them to comprehend that their fate was determined not by the agents or the contratistas of the monterías but by the dictator, whose actions, in turn, were influenced by the idea that the welfare of the Republic was guaranteed only if native and foreign capital was granted unlimited freedom and if the peon had no other object in this world than to

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obey and to believe that which he was ordered to believe by the authorities of the State and Church. […] This anonymous power was intrinsically interwoven with all other powers in existence. The import-export companies in New York were not sovereign in their might or influence. Their power, in turn, depended upon the good will of the hardwood import companies in London, in Liverpool, in Le Havre, in Hamburg, in Rotterdam, in Genoa, in Barcelona, in Amsterdam and in Copenhagen. And the power of all these companies again depended upon the good will of the thousands of hardwood-consuming companies and individuals which in their ramifications and branches could, in hundreds of instances, be followed to village carpenters in the smallest countries. […] [F]undamental power was so dispersed, so ramified, so branched out and so interlaced with all the activities of human production and human consumption.60

Therefore, these systems of domination take on a mystical quality. If a person is taken out of any given hierarchy, people just shift positions, and little change is made in the pyramid itself. In this way, resistance to such tyranny is seen to be useless.

From the start, Traven’s narrator attempts to convey the multifaceted nature of the systems of domination, how diffuse and pervasive they are, and the many ways that they impact the peasants. The first paragraph of Government, the first of the six novels, sets the scene and describes one way in which the dictatorship entices its local proxies, and extends ideas of hierarchical organization down to local communities:

The government was represented in the eastern district by Don Casimiro Azcona. Like every other jefe politico, Don Casimiro thought first of his own interests. He served his country not for his country’s good, but in order to profit at its expense. He worked better on those terms and, above all, he lived better. If a man can earn no more as a servant of the State than he can by running a snack bar, there is no reason whatever why he should aspire to devote his energies to his country’s service.61

The dictatorship does not discourage, but rather promotes these activities. Nor is this practice isolated to any one jefe politico: a “dictatorship that has existed for more than thirty years had suckled too many good-for-nothings ready to defend not only the dictatorship but their bellies as well,” Traven

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writes. “And when it’s a question of defending bellies, the going is a good deal tougher than when only a superannuated dictator is trying to stick to his throne.”62 These beneficiaries of government largess defend the dictatorship because in doing so, they also defend their interests. Thus, over time, these systems of economic and political domination become interwoven.

Like the local government proxies, the Mexican business owners are also mindful of their place in these hierarchical systems. The amount of money at stake in the monterías is a powerful motivation to keep their workers in their places and to trump any concern those owners might have for the peasants who work in those monterías:

Mahogany, when landed at New York, sold for seventy to a hundred dollars a ton, depending on the market. At such a price it was impossible to take the so-called rights of Indians literally, or any of those phrases about comradeship and respect for humanity. In the proper conduct of any business that is to show a profit there is no time for dealing with phrases and ideas of world betterment. […] You cannot have cheap mahogany and at the same time save all those innocent Indians who perish by the thousands in the jungle to get it for you. It must be either one or the other. Either cheap mahogany or respect for the humanity of the Indian. The civilization of the present day cannot run to both, because competition, the idol of our civilization, cannot tolerate it. Pity? Yes—with joyfulness and a Christian heart. But the dollar must not be imperilled.63

In this competition between profit and concern for the workers, profit easily wins. The montería owners find reasons to justify their atrocities, and these reasons are directly linked to the ways that the dictatorship operates in order to maintain its power. “It was […] a highly patriotic activity to supply the coffee plantations and the monterías with labor and to keep the supply constant; it was just as important as dying gloriously and miserably for the honor of your country.”64 Whenever the montería owners were questioned about the reasons for their domination, they “had only one line of defense—patriotism: nothing they did was done for business reasons, still less from greed, but simply from genuine and unalloyed patriotism.”65 This patriotism has a strong allure, and it suggests that deception and pathetic manipulation contribute to the attempts to dominate the peasants and to maintain positions of power.

The narrator hints at how far the dictator and the montería owners will go to dominate the public. When people would rebel or strike, the dictator, in collusion with the montería owners, would not hesitate to send in

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federal troops or the Rurales to put the strike down. The Rurales “were the instrument of terror, by which [the dictator] mercilessly and ruthlessly repressed the slightest resistance or criticism of his authority.”66 In the Jungle Novels, the Rurales are a spectre, always present in the minds of the peasants, and always ready to be called up by the dictator. Traven’s narrator tells the story of one such episode:

When, as happened in several of the textile workers’ strikes, the officers of the army refused to undertake—after the suppression of the strike—a bestial slaughter of the now humbled and conquered men and women workers, as ordered by El Caudillo, [the dictator,] a troop of Rurales was marched at top speed to the region. And there what the army officers had refused to do the Rurales carried out with such brutality that in the general massacre no one was spared who had the misfortune to find himself in that quarter of the workers’ town which had been cordoned off by the Rurales. Workers and non-workers, women, children, old people, the sick—no distinction was made between them. And that happened, not during a strike, but days, often weeks, after the strike had ended, when the workers had returned to the factories and the whole district was entirely quiet. It was the law of retribution and vengeance which the dictator invoked as a warning to all those who disagreed with him as to the benefits of the glorious, golden age which he, El Caudillo, had brought to his people.67

Juan Méndez, the montería worker who would become the rebel general, confirms this, saying that when he was a sergeant in the federal army he “saw [the Rurales] take part in suppressing strikes and punishing runaway peons.”68 This violence is ominous, looming throughout the novels. The narrator writes that anyone “who had other ideas concerning human rights was whipped or otherwise tortured until he changed his opinion, or was, with the blessing of the Church, shot if he spread such ideas.”69 Such violence is not only shown in whispers of past events. The Jungle Novels are filled with vivid scenes of torture, such as the hanging of montería workers. The workers are not hanged by their necks, but rather by their limbs, and sometimes by their ears and noses. Kenneth Payne, one of the few scholars who has written on Traven’s fiction, comments on this moment. In his essay “The Rebellion of the Hanged: B. Traven’s Anti-Fascist Novel of the Mexican Revolution” Payne writes that

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The worker found “guilty” of not reaching his quota [of four tons of mahogany per day] is taken out into the forest at night and hung from a tree by his four limbs. This is the [montería owners’] own “new invention,” says one of the cutters, Santiago, and another of the men explains how the victim’s nostrils and ears are smeared with fat in order to attract insects—a refinement introduced to ensure that an uncooperative victim will cooperate fully in his own punishment on future occasions.70

When hanged and smeared in fat, ants crawl over the peasants, driving them to the brink of madness. This torture is designed to coerce the workers into submission, but it is also designed in such a way that it would not do permanent damage to the workers. “These hangings were all the more terrifying and destructive of any resistance” Traven’s narrator writes, “because they were not deadly. Had they caused death they would have been less impressive. The coyotes never hanged anyone with the intention of killing them. A dead man would not have brought them any money. Only the live brought returns.”71 This domination is very effective, but even this method of coercion, extreme though it may be, has its limitations.

Santiago, one of the montería workers, says that “human beings can become like oxen or donkeys and remain impassive when they’re beaten or goaded, but only if they’ve succeeded in suppressing all their natural instinct to rebel.”72 This “natural instinct to rebel” is not suppressed completely. As we will see, when these peasants cooperate to rebel, they find that, as Santiago says in The Rebellion of the Hanged, “[t]he day will come when we too will be hanging and unhanging. And when we approach them it will be not to accept blows, but to give them.”73 When hanged and smeared with fat, the peasants fight against the ants. When the peasants become rebels, the insects will switch sides.

In response to hierarchical domination, the peasants in the Jungle Novels slowly work themselves into being rebels. The hierarchy that they resist, as we have seen, has an ideological framework that justifies itself as being natural, normal, and beneficial. It is maintained by systems of material force: by an economic form best described as debt slavery, and by military repression. It is no wonder, then, that once the peasants turn into rebels, they explicitly model themselves on a form that is non-hierarchical.

5. The Emergence of the Swarm in The Jungle Novels

“Laws for the common good are all very well,” B. Traven’s narrator writes in Government, the first of the Jungle Novels, “[b]ut there must always

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be officials strong enough in their own sphere to go beyond or to alter or to tighten up the laws just as they see fit. Otherwise there would be no sense in a dictatorship and you might just as well have a democracy.”74 In contrast to the hierarchies they hope to abolish, a group of escaped slaves, campesinos, military deserters, and one blacklisted college professor begins to form in the novels, and when it does, Traven explicitly represents this group as a swarm. Rather than Achilles’ unthinking follower-ants, when Traven’s rebels attack a finca, a large farm that holds their fellow peasants in a form of brutal servitude, the narrator writes that “[l]ike ants, the muchachos swarmed through the rooms in the buildings.”75 Likewise, when they began their assault on Achlumal, the town that holds their debt records, “the muchachos were swarming […] from all directions.”76 Other characters in the novels also describe the rebels as a swarm, as when Gabino Villalava remarks about the “bandit gangs that are swarming about here reducing all the finqueros to desperation.”77 In each of these instances, the sympathies of Traven’s narrator are with the swarm.

The rebels describe their organization as having “no chiefs or officers,”78 much in the same way that Deborah Gordon describes actual ants.79 It would be a stretch to call the organization of actual ants democratic, but Traven’s rebel ants operate as a direct democracy. They have individuals who fulfil particular roles—they have, for example, a general—but their decision making is collective, and this rebel swarm is shown to be a distinct alternative to the pyramids of power the rebels seek to dismantle.

Martín Trinidad, the rebel named “Professor,” who had been driven from several positions for teaching and agitating against the dictatorship, states that individuals who rebel are simply drowned in blood, but

when we work together in a mass, things are different. Then a thousand heads and two thousand vigorous arms make up a superior force. That is why I’ve been telling you that freedom can evade us easily if we don’t form a large mass and if we don’t all arrive at the same time. The strongest lion is helpless in the face of ten thousand ants, who can force him to abandon his prey. We are the ants, and the owners are the lions.80

The early Jungle Novels illustrate a dystopian society, where resistance is present, but limited. Traven’s narrator writes that, near the story’s start, “whatever the men undertook or thought of undertaking was done individually, everyone for himself and everyone in his own personal way. […] There was no link of comradeship or any inclination for mutual assistance.”81 As is shown in several examples, like single ants against a lion, individual resistance is weak when compared to the power and resources of

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the montería owners or the dictator. These “link[s] of comradeship” and “inclination[s] for mutual aid” are learned slowly throughout the Jungle Novels, but when these lessons are finally learned, the rebels discover that they possess a remarkable degree of power and intelligence.

The authority figures in the Jungle Novels laugh at the idea that they should take these tiny ants seriously.82 They believe that this swarm is disordered and unable to pose a threat to the hierarchically organized Mexican Federal army. Lieutenant Bailleres, a spy for the army, says that “how [Juan Mendez] can be their general, I can’t understand. […] No one respects him. They all address him as an equal. Eats like the rest of the gang with his fingers. Sleeps on a mat like the other swine. We can finish off that collection of animals in three hours.”83 Bailleres’ hubris is amply underscored by the many scenes in the novels of the Rurales and the Federal army repressing strikes and mutinies, and doling out severe retribution for even small acts of resistance to the authorities.

But the rebel Professor advocates adopting the identity of the swarm because he knows something that Deleuze and Guattari also know: “You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed.”84 The rebels’ ultimate victory over the Federal army is not without ambiguity, but the Jungle Novels show that Professor is right: “a thousand heads and two thousand vigorous arms make up a superior force.”85

Readers may be drawn to the conflicts of force that play out across the novels, and focus on the “two thousand vigorous arms,” thereby missing the complicated suggestion that Traven’s Professor makes about this swarm’s “thousand heads.”86 In addition to being strong, the swarm is also smart. The narrator writes, “No one had taught [the rebels] self-discipline, how to work without being told and supervised. […] No one had taught them how to organize their work, in order to be able to form themselves into a cooperative society.”87 The rebels organize themselves and complete tasks that require high levels of cooperation—not the least of which is the defeat of the better-trained, better-equipped Federal troops. The swarm in the Jungle Novels is made of “common people”88 who “had been so long whipped and hanged, so long humiliated and robbed of free speech,”89 yet they form an organization of impressive complexity. The rebels explicitly argue that they “have no chiefs or officers,”90 and that “no one any longer is superior or inferior.”91 The narrator shows that individual actors inside the swarm are smart—the rebel General, for example, “had been, without knowing it himself, born with the gifts and talents of a great general”92—but the evidence we find in the Jungle Novels suggests that a swarm is not only libratory, but that collective intelligence also emerges from this form of organization.

What can we know about the swarm’s “thousand heads”? What ideas and patterns emerge from the rebel swarm’s complexity? The answer,

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in part, is in how Traven’s narrator uses the swarm imagery over the course of the novels. If intelligence equates to military success, then the swarm clearly possesses some intelligence. But strength is not evidence of higher-level intelligence, however, so we are left to ask if there are other characteristics of the swarm that make it smart.

On the one hand, just as there is strength in numbers, the same idea might hold for intelligence: multiple brains are better than a single brain, just like “two thousand vigorous arms” make up a superior force. But this idea leads to a dead end—in the Federal Army, too, there are multiple brains. The difference is how intelligence is aggregated in different groups. In more hierarchical organizations, where decision-making power resides at the top, the judgment of a relative few experts almost always has opportunities for expression, and the lower one goes, those opportunities become more seldom. This is a generalization, of course, but it is a generalization for which we can find ample evidence in the Jungle Novels. We may even say that the Federal General’s unwillingness to incorporate the intelligence of his soldiers causes his defeat.

Whereas the rebel General is portrayed as contemplative and empathetic,93 and the rebel swarm is shown deliberating decisions together, the Federal General consistently refuses to accept advice. In “an example of the atrophied powers of thought of all those who occupy a public office or a position of responsibility under a dictatorship,”94 the Federal General is approached by one of his sergeants, who, after first asking permission to speak, offers the most tepid of comments: “I think, sir, that there’s something not quite right in this whole affair, if I may put it like that, sir.”95 The Federal General compliments the Sergeant, but dismisses him, saying that the rebels “are yellow cowards, and they all behave just as one would expect of such riffraff.”96 The sergeant is unsatisfied by the General’s response, but

as a dutiful and experienced soldier who, moreover, knew that his promotion to officer depended on always conceding one’s superiors to be in the right, always being tactful toward higher-ups, and not concerning oneself with matters not expressly entrusted to one, he carefully avoided even mentioning any doubts that still lingered in his mind after his commanding officer had expounded his opinion.97

Hubris, sycophancy, and submission to authority are the weaknesses of the Federal army, and they lead to its defeat. Traven’s narrator writes that “[m]uddled thinking becomes a virtue under a dictatorship, but in a democracy it is simply regarded as laziness.”98 In short, the weakness of hierarchical organizations is that they stifle free-thinking. A swarm, with its emphasis on lots of local decision making, provides ways to unleash the

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intelligence of its members and to aggregate their intelligence in ways that makes the organization itself smart—clearly this is the virtue of Traven’s rebel swarm, and it is one of the major factors in its victory.

What I ultimately would like to suggest is that Traven’s novels do not show what might be called “the law of larger numbers,” wherein the army with the most soldiers has the greater degree of force. These novels make a statement about the collective intelligence of complexity, about how patterns and ideas can emerge out of lots of local decisions. Collective decision-making gives the rebel swarm the opportunity to see ideas, plans, forms of cooperation that a hierarchical military, one with decision-making control exclusively held by the authorities at the top of the pyramid, simply cannot. What the novels show, I believe, is the value of acting like a swarm in certain types of circumstances, especially for political movements seeking to challenge some of the same problems that Traven’s rebels face, such as hierarchies of race, class, or gender. If the problem is to challenge a particular hierarchy, it makes little sense to replace that hierarchy with another. It is in this sense, then, that I suggest that grassroots politics, like we see it in Traven’s rebel swarm, ought to be understood as complex system, as a synonym for radical democracy, rather than as a hierarchy between people “at the grassroots” and others who are “above” them.

Like Thomas Carlyle, looking at the political movements of his day, the Federal General in the Jungle Novels looks at the rebel swarm and sees disorder, when he could have seen an alternative form of organization. The Jungle Novels illustrate the democracy of the swarm, grassroots politics as I have reinterpreted it. What the Jungle Novels also show is that the Carlyles of the world are right to be worried about such swarms. This is a realization that both provides insight into why a reinterpretation of grassroots politics is needed and how characters like those we find in the Jungle Novels might continue “cutting asunder [the] straps and ties… of old regulations, fetters, and restrictions.”99

Notes 1 In addition to the sources listed below, see Creswell, “Mortgage Fraud Is Up, but Not in Their Backyards.” 2 G. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, Columbia University Press, New York, 2006, p. 40. 3 ibid., p. 81-2. 4 Deleuze writes, “Rousseau reproached Hobbes for having produced a portrait of man in the state of nature which presupposed society. In a very different spirit an analogous reproach is found in Nietzsche: the whole conception of the will to power, from Hobbes to Hegel, presupposes the

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existence of established values that wills seek only to have attributed to themselves. What seems symptomatic in this philosophy of the will is conformism, absolute misrecognition of the will to power as creation of new values. […] Against this fettering of the will Nietzsche announces that willing liberates; against the suffering of the will Nietzsche announces that the will is joyful. Against the image of a will which dreams of having established values attributed to it Nietzsche announces that to will is to create new values” p. 81-2, 85. 5 Left Palate, “Adventures in Crazy” <http://www.leftpalate.com/>. 6 R. P. Warren, All the King’s Men, Harvest Press, San Diego, 1996, pg. 11. 7 M. Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, pg. 20, 54. 8 ibid., pg. 31, 38, 81, 223. 9 ibid., pg. 72. 10 ibid., pg. 228. 11 ibid., pg. 200. 12 For other traditional uses of the phrase, see Tom Adams, Grassroots: How Ordinary People are Changing America; Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism; Charles David Kleymeyer, ed. Cultural Expression and Grassroots Development: Cases from Latin America and the Caribbean; Michael Kaufman and Haroldo Dilla Alfonso, Community Power and Grassroots Democracy: The Transformation of Social Life; Linda Stout, Bridging the Class Divide and Other Lessons for Grassroots Organizing; and Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism.

As Temma Kaplan writes in Crazy for Democracy: Women in Grassroots Movements, “[t]hough widely used, the term grassroots does not have a commonly recognized meaning.” The phrase suggests, she continues, “being outside the control of any state, church, union, or political party, […] being responsible to no authority except [one’s] own group” pg. 1-2. Kaplan is largely right, and I want to build upon her analysis. 13 M. Kazin, Populist, pg. 1, emphasis mine. 14 ibid., pg. 1. 15 ibid., pg. 1, emphasis mine. 16 This is the logic that allows Plato to tell “noble lies” in The Republic (412a-415d), and the counterargument used against women’s suffrage in the United States: that men should or could “take care of” women—politically, economically—and therefore speak for them in electoral politics. On the paternal argument opposing women’s suffrage in the United States, see, for example, Christine Stansell, “A Forgotten Fight for Suffrage.”

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17 K. Marx, Early Writings, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 64. Marx writes, “The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter.” 18 C. Moraga and G. Anzaldúa, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color. Persephone Press, Watertown, MA, 1981, pg. xxiii-xxiv. Moraga and Anzaldúa write, “We named this anthology ‘radical’ for we were interested in the writings of women of color who want nothing short of a revolution in the hands of women—who agree that that is the goal, no matter how we might disagree about the getting there or the possibility of seeing it in our own lifetimes. We use the term in its original form—stemming from the word ‘root’—for our feminist politic emerges from the roots of both of our cultural oppression and heritage.” 19 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987, pg. 15, 19. 20 For more information on complex systems, see Kay Summer and Harry Halpin, “The Crazy Before the New,” in What Would it Mean to Win?; Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity; Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour; and Elinor Ostrom, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice; and Understanding Institutional Diversity. 21 For information on several species of ants, complete with award winning photography, see Mark Moffett, Adventures Among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Millions, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2010. 22 D. Gordon, Ants at Work: How an Insect Society is Organized, Free Press, New York, 1999, pg. vii. 23 ibid., pg. 117-8. 24 S. Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. Scribner, New York, 2001, pg. 14-5. 25 ibid., pg. 18, 224. 26 The Bible also represents the ant as both leaderless and industrious: “Look to the ant, thou sluggard; / Consider her ways and be wise: / Which, having no chief, overseer, or ruler, / Provides her meat in the summer, / And gathers her food in the harvest” (Proverbs 6:6). 27 See Thomas Bulfinch, Bulfinch’s Mythology, pg. 97-8, 219. 28 For Carlyle’s views on the topic, see his book On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History.

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29 T. Carlyle, “Shooting Niagara,” Chapman and Hall, London, 1968, pg. 9. 30 ibid., pg. 10. 31 ibid., pg. 35-6. 32 ibid., pg. 5. 33 ibid., pg. 5. 34 R. L. Davis, “Democratic Vistas” in A Companion to Walt Whitman, Blackwell, New York, 2006, pg. 541. 35 I paraphrase here from Marcus Rediker, Villians of All Nations: Atlantic Piracy in the Golden Age, Beacon, Boston, 2004, pg. 61. Rediker writes, “[c]ontemporaries who claimed that pirates had ‘no regular command among them’ mistook a different social order—differing from the ordering of merchant, naval and privateering vessels—for disorder.” 36 B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, New York, 2010. 37 J. Houston, dir. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Warner Brothers, Hollywood, 1948. 38 B. Traven, The Death Ship, Lawrence Hill, Chicago, 1991. 39 B. Traven, Government, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1993. 40 B. Traven, The Carreta, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1994. 41 B. Traven, March to the Montería, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1994. 42 B. Traven, Trozas, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1994. 43 B. Traven, Rebellion of the Hanged, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1994. 44 B. Traven, General from the Jungle, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago,1995. 45 The characters that eventually form the swarm are variously referred to as peasants, peons, workers, proletarians, agriculturists, and other names over the course of the novels. Most come from the various Mayan communities—Tzotzil, Tseltal, Bachajontec, Huasteca, and Chol are ones Traven mentions specifically—in Chiapas and neighboring states. For the sake of consistency, I use the word “peasant” to describe these characters previous to the emergence of the swarm and “rebels” to describe them afterwards. 46 B. Traven, Government, pg. 27. 47 ibid., pg. 210. 48 B. Traven, Rebellion, pg. 213. 49 B. Traven, General, pg. 47. 50 B. Traven, Trozas, pg. 37. 51 B. Traven, Rebellion, pg. 213. 52 B. Traven, General, pg. 107. 53 ibid. pg. 208. 54 When I critique the governing powers, I am concerned with what Antonio Negri calls “constituted power,” which “defines the fixed order of the constitution and the stability of its social structure” A. Negri, Insurgencies,

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pg. vii-viii. In the essay’s final section, in which I interpret the actions of Traven’s rebel swarm, my concern is with what Negri calls “constituent power,” or the “locus of social creativity, political innovation, and historical movement, […] the “motor or cardinal expression of democratic revolution,” A. Negri, Insurgencies, pg. viii, 11. An open question remains about how complex systems theory could be applied to constituted power, but one promising area of investigation is the idea of sortitionist democracy, which has the potential to check the type of authoritarian abuses so prevalent in Traven’s novels. For a “qualified argument” for sortitionist democracy, see Paul Lucardie’s essay in this volume. 55 B. Traven, The Carreta, pg. 150. 56 B. Traven, General, pg. 142. 57 B. Traven, Government, pg. 126-7. 58 ibid., pg. 12. 59 As their name implies, the “científicos” brought their special talents and expertise to the “science” of government in Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship. As Frank McLynn writes that “[d]uring the Porfiriato, Díaz’s most influential advisers were the so-called científicos or Mexican positivists, who believed in capitalism, industrialism, and modern technology; the despised Mexico’s colonial past and Indian heritage. Most of the Mexican elite—politicians, bankers, editors, businessmen, generals—subscribed to científico ideals” F. McLynn, Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution, Carroll and Graff, New York, 2000, pg. 10. 60 B. Traven, March, pg. 159, 160-61. 61 B. Traven, Government, pg. 1. 62 B. Traven, General, pg. 79. 63 B. Traven, Government, pg. 228-9. 64 ibid., pg. 128. 65 ibid., pg. 133. 66 B. Traven, General, pg. 5. The Rurales in the Jungle Novels are terror personified. Historians have taken a more nuanced view, however. The Rurales were brutal in their repression of strikes and mutinies, but they were also highly symbolic with their new weapons and sharp uniforms. They were also frequently less than an efficient fighting force—Frank McLynn calls the Rurales “corrupt and incompetent,” and as such, they “were a fitting symbol of a lazy, corrupt and unpopular regime” Villa and Zapata, Carroll and Graff, New York, 2001, pg. 22, 23. 67 B. Traven, General, pg. 5-6. 68 B. Traven, Rebellion, pg. 195. One of these “textile workers’ strikes” is probably the conflict at Rio Blanco near Veracruz in January 1909 which, in his book Barbarous Mexico, John Kenneth Turner calls “the bloodiest strike

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in the labor history of Mexico” pg. 167. After the strikers had lost, they dejectedly appealed to the mill’s company story to advance them food until their next pay came. When they were refused, the starving workers burned the company store to the ground. Fighting erupted between the workers and the army, and by the end of the conflict, as John Mason Hart writes in Revolutionary Mexico: the Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution, “the army killed almost two hundred workers, and the number of wounded defies estimate. Four hundred workers were taken prisoner. Armed workers killed approximately twenty-five soldiers in just over twenty-four hours of fighting. They wounded between thirty and forty soldiers” pg. 71. The stories of the conflict spread quickly—as well as into Traven’s novel—and they fomented both worker revolt and revolutionary ideas. 69 B. Traven, March, pg. 159. 70 K. Payne, “The Rebellion of the Hanged: B. Traven's Anti-Fascist Novel of the Mexican Revolution,” International Fiction Review, vol. 18 no. 2, 1991, pp. 96-107. 71 B. Traven, March, pg. 72-3. 72 B. Traven, Rebellion, pg. 64-5. 73 ibid., pg. 72. 74 B. Traven, Government, pg. 16. 75 B. Traven, General, pg. 64. 76 ibid., pg. 147. 77 ibid., pg. 275. 78 B. Traven, Rebellion, pg. 171. 79 Gordon, Ants, pg. vii. 80 B. Traven, Rebellion, pg. 231. 81 B. Traven, March, pg. 109, 111. 82 B. Traven, General, pg. 217. 83 ibid., pg. 182-3. 84 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Plateaus, pg. 9. 85 B. Traven, Rebellion, pg. 231. 86 ibid., pg. 231. 87 B. Traven, General, pg. 19. 88 ibid., pg. 7. 89 ibid., pg. 20. 90 B. Traven, Rebellion, pg. 171. 91 B. Traven, General, pg. 59. 92 ibid., pg. 85. 93 ibid., pg. 42. 94 ibid., pg. 208. 95 ibid., pg. 207.

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96 ibid., pg. 208. 97 ibid., pg. 209. 98 ibid., pg. 214. 99 Carlyle, “Shooting,” pg. 9.

Bibliography Adams, T. Grassroots: How Ordinary People are Changing America. Citadel, New York, 1991. Baumgardner, J. and Richards, A. Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 2005. Bulfinch, T. Bulfinch’s Mythology, Gramercy, New York, 2005. Carlyle, T. On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993. Carlyle, T. “Shooting Niagara: And After?” Chapman and Hall, London, 1868. Creswell, J. “Mortgage Fraud Is Up, but Not in Their Backyards.” New York Times. 21 May 2007. 17 July 2007. <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/business/21fraud.html?ex=1184904000&en=dd9732b34869a019&ei=5070>. Davis, R. L. “Democratic Vistas” in Kummings, D., ed. A Companion to Walt Whitman, Blackwell, New York, 2006. DeLanda, M. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. Continuum, London, 2006. Esteva, G, and Prakash, M. Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures. Zed, London, 1998. Gordon, D. Ants at Work: How an Insect Society is Organized. Free Press, New York, 1999. Hart, J. M. Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1987.

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Huston, J., dir. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Warner Brothers. Hollywood, 1948. Johnson, S. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. Scribner, New York, 2001. Kaplan, T. Crazy for Democracy: Women in Grassroots Movements. Routledge, New York, 1997. Kaufman, M., and Alfonso, H. Community Power and Grassroots Democracy: The Transformation of Social Life. Zed, London, 1997. Kazin, M. The Populist Persuasion: An American History. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1995. Kleymeyer, Charles David, ed. Cultural Expression and Grassroots Development: Cases from Latin America and the Caribbean. Lynne Rienner, Boulder, 1994. Marx, K. Karl Marx: Early Political Writings. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994. McLynn, F. Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution, Carroll and Graff, New York, 2000. Mitchell, M. Complexity: A Guided Tour. Oxford University Press, New York, 2009. Moffett, M. Adventures Among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2010. Moraga, C. and Anzaldua, G., eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color. Persephone Press, Watertown, MA, 1981. Negri, A. Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1999. Ostrum, E. Understanding Institutional Diversity, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005.

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---. Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007. Payne, K. “The Rebellion of the Hanged: B. Traven's Anti-Fascist Novel of the Mexican Revolution,” International Fiction Review, vol. 18, no. 2, 1991, pp. 96-107. Rediker, M. Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Piracy in the Golden Age, Beacon, Boston, 2004. Stansell, C. “A Forgotten Fight for Suffrage.” New York Times 24 August 2010. Stout, L. Bridging the Class Divide and Other Lessons for Grassroots Organizing. Beacon, Boston, 1996. Summer, K. and Halpin, H. “The Crazy Before the New,” in What Would it Mean to Win?, PM Press, Oakland, 2010. Traven, B. The Carreta. Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1994. ---. General from the Jungle. Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1995. ---. Government. Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1993. ---. March to the Montería. Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1994. ---. The Rebellion of the Hanged. Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1994. ---. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, New York, 2010. ---. Trozas. Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1994. Turner, J. K. Barbarous Mexico, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1969. Scott Henkel is an Assistant Professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton. His research is on the intersection of literary study and the study of political movements, and he has published in Workplace: a Journal of Academic Labor, John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath: A Reconsideration, and in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review.