The Time of the Snail: Castoriadis,Zapatista Autonomy and the Radical Imaginary Today

Introduction: Reactivation and Expansion of the Radical Temporal Imaginary

The difficulty of imagining political alternatives has become a mark of our time. The future seems closed to us as the capitalist imaginary comes to occupy, without apparent fissures, the horizon of the thinkable and the possible. In such a context, a reactivation of the project of autonomy and its democratic politics of self-institution requires, in the words of Cornelius Castoriadis (2005b: 245), a ‘veritable earthquake’ of our political imagination. Although often unacknowledged, this includes our temporal political imaginaries of possibility, that is, our understanding of the relation between past, present and future, as well as its temporal rhythms and institutional contents. For this reason, revisiting and critically expanding the temporal dimension of the radical imaginary of autonomy provides a vantage point to examine the current possibilities for its reactivation today.

The present work explores how the radical imaginary of autonomy, along the lines defined by Castoriadis 50 years ago, is today revitalized and expanded by the Zapatista practice of autonomy and its temporal imaginary. To better understand the extent and implications of such a reactivation, I propose looking at the original Zapatista institution of what I call the ‘time of the snail’. The article aims to shed light on how, through concrete practices and institutions that evoke the slow pace and spiral shell of the snail, Zapatista autonomy brings about a political temporality that offers emancipatory resources to renew, expand and radicalize our political horizon of possibilities.

Castoriadis’s work on the imaginary institution of society and the socio-historical provides the theoretical framework for my discussion. The first two sections build upon his distinction between autonomous and heteronomous societies to analyze and compare the two times that emerge as competing in our present historical moment: the time of autonomy and the ‘non-time’ of neoliberal capitalism. The approach suggested here rests on an often overlooked and undertheorized element of the Castoriadean radical imaginary of autonomy, which is the institution of a ‘public time’ that reconfigures the relations between past, present and future in terms of a democratic, self-reflective temporality. This autonomous time contrasts with what Castoriadis defined as the capitalist temporal imaginary of heteronomy, homogenization and repetition, which, in today’s neoliberal form, appears to take a pervasive expression of a ‘non-time’ where the past is erased and the future, without any alternative, closed on itself. Against this backdrop, section three discusses the Zapatista institution of the ‘time of the snail’ as an alternative to revise and expand the radical imaginary of autonomy through new practices and institutions. The time of the snail, as instituted by Zapatistas, not only challenges the social and temporal imaginary of neoliberal capitalism in a direct and explicit way, but also infuses the project of autonomy with a radical democratic and indigenous imaginary that goes beyond what Castoriadis theorized it to be.

Revisiting Castoriadis today, as this special issue calls for, demands that we undertake a critical examination of his work. By reconsidering the radical imaginary in the context of the Zapatista practice of autonomy and its distinctive institution of the time of the snail, a novel perspective on his theory emerges. This approach not only extends Castoriadis’s analysis by broadening the scope of the project of autonomy beyond its theorization as a Greco-Western creation, but also infuses his theory of autonomy with a radical temporality that challenges prevailing assumptions about time, institutions and revolution. This critical update, however, is not a one-way process. An analysis of Zapatista temporality in terms of Castoriadis’s idea of autonomous time, as a ‘public time’ that actively institutes a self-reflective relation to past and future, can illuminate and lead to a better understanding of the Zapatista project of autonomy and its radical democratic aspiration of ‘another world is possible’. Lastly, although there is a well-established interpretive connection between Castoriadis and Zapatismo, particularly in Latin America, ¹ the temporal dimension of this association remains underdeveloped. The present effort aims to make a contribution in that direction as well. ²

The Time of Autonomy

A fundamental idea driving Castoriadis’s political philosophy is that all societies institute their own time. ³ That is to say, all societies are, by definition, historical. The two elements, the social and the historical, cannot be separated or understood independently of each other. The social, Castoriadis (1987: 215) notes, ‘makes itself and can only make itself as history, [. . .] as temporality; and it makes itself in every instance as a specific mode of actual temporality’. The social-historical therefore comes into existence as a figure of time, a historical temporality that must, by this very logic, be instituted. The institution of time becomes, in this sense, an essential component of society’s self-institution. How they institute their time, however, changes from one society to another.

Seen from this perspective, the difference between what Castoriadis called heteronomous and autonomous societies is primarily one regarding the institution of their social imaginary time. ⁴ Both heteronomous and autonomous societies share in the reality of their self-institution as social-historical; whether they admit to this reality or deny it is what ultimately sets them apart. Whereas in heteronomous societies the institution of time is based on the denial of their own historicity, externalizing their institution to an extra-social source (god, nature, reason or historical laws), autonomous society knowingly institutes its own time as it explicitly recognizes itself as author of its own history and institutions by means of their instituting capacity. Insofar as each society institutes their imaginary time, based on this denial or acknowledgement, they give way to two sharply different ‘modes of historicity’, that is, different ways of understanding and representing the temporal relations, rhythms and contents of their past, present and future (Castoriadis, 1987: 185).

Castoriadis’s broader theoretical considerations on the institution of social-historical time find a concrete political elaboration in his analysis of the project of autonomy. Autonomy, as the instituting praxis, takes for him a concrete political and historical form of collective deliberation, self-reflectivity and unlimited interrogation which was first deployed in Ancient Athens and continued in Western Europe. The Greek ‘invention’ of democracy – along with politics and philosophy – stands for him as the first traceable moment in human history when the instituting praxis opened a breach in the heteronomous configuration of the world. What will be most important of the Greek invention of democracy, according to Castoriadis (1991a: 105), is its historical instituting process as such, that is, as ‘the activity and struggle around the change of the institutions, the explicit (even if partial) self-institution of the polis as a permanent process’.

The Greek rupture with the existing institutions and social representations entailed a radical reconfiguration of its own temporal imaginary. By recognizing themselves as the authors of their own self-institution, the Greeks instituted a political time that, in its most essential element, was recognized as open to their own making. But what does it mean to be politically ‘open’ to time? And how does this qualify the time of the radical democratic project of autonomy? Castoriadis does not provide us with a straightforward answer to these questions. In fact, the idea of a distinctive ‘autonomous time’ is not systematically developed and must be reconstructed from a number of disperse references. In what follows, I point out some distinctive traits that make up the imaginary time of the project of autonomy as such.

From a general standpoint, the time of autonomy is one that, in accordance with its radical imaginary, must explicitly and self-reflectively allow for creation as otherness-alteration. For Castoriadis, the emergence of other figures that are not determined in advance is what true temporality is about. Time, he notes, ‘can only exist if there is an emergence of what is other, of what is in no way given with what is. Time is the emergence of other figures’ (Castoriadis, 1987: 193). This other time, which in Castoriadis (1987: 201) appears at the core of what makes societies exist as historical societies, is a time of ‘bursting, emerging, creating’. At the social-historical level, this time of rupture and creation emerges ‘each time instituting society irrupts within instituted society, each time society as instituted is self-destructed by society as instituting’ (Castoriadis, 1987: 201; emphasis added). So, while heteronomous societies institute a time that either negates or occludes this radical temporality of the instituting, autonomous societies operate along its effective recognition and openness to it.

Moreover, given his unwavering revolutionary conviction, it is not by chance that Castoriadis frequently associates the time of revolution precisely with this other time of creation and rupture. The moment of revolution, Castoriadis (1987: 215; 2005a: 180) says, is evidenced in those ‘dense’ and ‘rapid’ periods of ‘intense collective activity’ and creativity, that is, the moments of explicit and lucid calling into question of the instituted with the aim of its radical transformation. While he was careful to clarify that a politics of autonomy is not reducible to these ‘paroxysmic’ revolutionary moments, given the political need to ‘prolong’ these moments into more durable forms of collective self-government, he did find the agitated and frenzied time of revolution to be a unique manifestation of the aim of autonomy in modernity.

A second distinctive character of such an autonomous time can be discerned in Castoriadis’s description of autonomy as a germ, from which two competing meanings can be inferred, one more useful than the other. In its most general sense, the notion of germ infuses the time of autonomy with a particular historicity that locates the moment of creation of a new type of society in a concrete time and place. In this first meaning, the idea of a ‘Greek germ’, conceived not as a model but as a source, as Castoriadis is always careful to clarify, does not deny its deployment within a specific heritage that belongs to the West and that Castoriadis will come to explicitly recognize as such. As Castoriadis (1991a: 84) explains it: ‘Greece is the social-historical locus where democracy and philosophy are created, thus, of course, it is our own origin’. This democratic and emancipatory ‘stream’, starting in Greece, would be later ‘reborn’ in Western Europe at the end of the Middle Ages.

Read in this first sense, then, the structure of the germ presupposes a genealogical link between Ancient Greece and Western modernity that ultimately implies both rootedness and development, despite the fact that their historical actualization as ‘creations’ places them within the non-determinist and non-teleological terrain of the creativity of history as defined by Castoriadis. But it is perhaps the exclusion embedded in the affirmation of that origin and tradition of the project of autonomy as ‘ours’ which raises a more substantial question for its reactivation today. For who is included in the ‘ours’ that Castoriadis (2005a) names to be part of the democratic heritage and revolutionary tradition? Are Western and European societies the only inheritors of the project of autonomy? Or can such a project be relaunched from a place and a time other than European modernity?

Despite this crucial limitation that the notion of the germ contains, and that needs to be problematized if we want to explore its possibilities today, a second, more productive meaning emerges in Castoriadis’s writings as well. Unlike what tradition represents in the imaginary of heteronomous societies, as a past which conditions and determines the continuity of society’s representations in time, the meaning of ‘germ’ is also closely associated with an open praxis of self-reflectiveness. In its extended meaning given by Castoriadis (1991a: 163), the germ of autonomy denotes an explicit deployment as an ongoing project, yet one that requires further collective creation and questioning, given that its socio-historical form (eidos) is self-reflectiveness. As a project of explicit and unlimited interrogation, the time of autonomy is therefore the time of collective and individual self-reflective praxis, understood as a ‘conscious activity that remains lucid about itself’ (Castoriadis, 1987: 62). In this second sense, we can understand that neither the forms this project may take nor its emergence in other times and places is conditioned beforehand, since any pre-determination is internally undermined by the very practice of self-reflectivity.

It is in relation to this second meaning of germ as a self-reflective praxis that Castoriadis’s most clear and explicit reference to a distinctive time of autonomy takes form. At the collective level, self-reflectivity institutes a ‘public time’ that Castoriadis (1991a: 113–14) defines as ‘the emergence of a dimension where the collectivity can inspect its own past as the result of its own actions, and where an indeterminate future opens up as a domain for its activities’. This public time re-creates our relation to the past and the future in a significant and self-critical way. On the one hand, inspecting our own past means ‘that we revive the past as our own and as independent of us; it entails being able to discuss with it as well as to let ourselves be questioned by it’ (Castoriadis, 2005a: 192). The past becomes in this sense a germ, not as a ‘model’ but as an ‘index of actualized possibilities’ as we recognize in it ‘an inexhaustible source of proximate alterity, a surface of rebound for our endeavors and a line of resistance to our always imminent folly’ (Castoriadis, 2005a: 192). On the other hand, an openness to an indeterminate future, that is, ‘a future which is, perpetually, to be made and to be done’ (Castoriadis, 1991a: 154), entails that our actions are neither guided by progress nor by messianism, but oriented towards radical alterity and possibility.

With respect to both past and future, the self-reflective instituting activity grants the time of autonomy with an added quality of self-limitation and collective responsibility. In the same measure that the past is self-reflectively recognized as a result of one’s own actions, the future is of one’s own making as well, and that entails a collective responsibility. It also entails risk. Democracy, Castoriadis (1991a: 115) reminds us, ‘is the regime of self-limitation; therefore, is also the regime of historical risk – another way of saying that it is the regime of freedom – and a tragic regime’. Here once again, the relation of the past and future is reimagined in an interconnected, multi-directional way. For just as the future opens itself as ‘uncertain and risky’, the past can be a line of resistance to our ‘always imminent folly’ (Castoriadis, 1991a: 170).

The time of the project of autonomy is a democratic time that not only recognizes its self-institution as a ‘public time’ but extends collective reflexivity and responsibility towards past and future to recreate, revise and reimagine alternatives in the present. ⁵ It is a time that, in its public institution, opens to the radical alterity and otherness of the instituting practice of creation, understood not as a one-time event, but as an ongoing activity whose results cannot be known or determined in advance. The project of autonomy can give itself a variety of forms and institutions, many of which will be entirely new to invent. This is why, as Liliana Ponce (2015: 90) notes, in autonomous societies, history becomes a continuous praxis of ‘opening to the creation of new possibilities’. Here, the present and what is possible now is not inscribed in a given past that works as a ground of ‘closed possibilities’ but is opened towards the ‘to-be’ (Ponce, 2015: 91).

The Non-Time of Neoliberal Capitalism

That the currently dominant imaginary does not belong to the project of autonomy but to that of capitalism is something that Castoriadis was very much aware of, and that continuously motivated his philosophical and political work. In fact, one of Castoriadis’s most pressing diagnoses of our present historical and political moment was the growing predominance of the capitalist imaginary over the imaginary of autonomy and democracy. As the ‘central imaginary of the age’, Castoriadis (2005b: 226) observed, capitalism’s unlimited expansion of the economy through technological, productive and financial innovation has come to co-opt and colonize the radical imaginary of the project of autonomy and its temporal horizon of possibility. In the context of neoliberal capitalism, this diagnosis takes on an even more dire expression of a ‘non-time’ where the future, without any alternative, is closed on itself.

According to Castoriadis (1987: 207), capitalism’s temporal imaginary is essentially represented as ‘a time of indefinite progress, unlimited growth, accumulation’. It is, by force, a time that must appear as measurable and calculable, so that it can be coherently signified under capitalism’s central imaginary of rationalization and technical mastery. Time is in this way almost completely reduced, in a first instance, to the ‘homogeneous, uniform and wholly arithmetizable flux’ of abstract calendar and clock-time (Castoriadis, 1987: 207). ⁶

This capitalist reduction of time is, however, never total, but qualified or embedded with a number of imaginary significations. The quality of capitalist time is in this sense first and foremost expressed, in its modern Western manifestation, through an ‘imaginary of progress’ that conceives human history as linearly marching towards more ‘freedom’, ‘truth’ or ‘happiness’, which in reality is just more rational omnipotence and technical control over nature (Castoriadis, 2005b: 244–5). Consequently, one way of qualifying the temporal imaginary predominant in heteronomous capitalist society, following Castoriadis’s terms, is through its representation from within a determinist logic of causality that pertains not only to the marking of time as measurable, but to its qualification as a time that can be given form and direction through technical-rational control. The social imaginary time instituted by capitalism creates in this way a ‘rationalized’ temporal horizon of possibility, rendering any alternative outside this ‘rationality’ and ‘technical mastery’ unthinkable and thus bounding political imagination to a homogeneous time of ‘accumulation, of universal linearization, of digestion-assimilation’ (Castoriadis, 1987: 207).

This carries important significations with respect to the temporal relations, rhythms and contents of past, present and future under the capitalist imaginary. Despite the heterogenous temporalities that make up the social world, historical time under capitalism is abstracted into a homogeneous, secular, empty time of continual incremental growth. The mode of historicity instituted by capitalism thus normalizes and colonizes the past – along with the memories, gods, and local histories of subaltern subjects (Chakrabarty, 1997) – as well as foreclosing the future, rendering both harmonious with capital’s own abstract sense and directionality of progress.

With respect to its rhythm, the temporality that drives the capitalist imaginary comes to reflect in an almost direct way the pulses and paces of the economy and its technological transformations. This seems to take a qualitative leap in today’s neoliberal and financial forms of late capitalism, where the commodification of time, expressed in the motto ‘time is money’, is driven by the accelerated rhythms and high-speed pace imposed by information technology and new digital media at a global scale (Crary, 2013; Hassan, 2009; Işsevenler, 2023; Rosa and Scheuerman, 2008).

In light of the considerable expansion and intensification of these trends in the current moment, it comes as no surprise that the future and its possibilities appear closed off to us. As David Graeber (2011: 382) observes, ‘along with producing the illusion of an endless capitalist future [. . .] [f]inance capital became the buying and selling of chunks of that future’. In the context of financial capitalism, the commodification of the future takes the form of unlimited credit, to the point that the global economy is running ‘on a mortgaged future’ (Baschet, 2022: 188). The horizon of possibilities in today’s neoliberal financial capitalism becomes, in Maurizio Lazzarato’s (2012: 44) words, ruled by a ‘temporality of debt’. Debt, he notes, ‘neutralizes time, time as the creation of new possibilities, that is to say, the raw material of all political, social, or aesthetic change. Debt harnesses and exercises the power of destruction/creation’ (Lazzarato, 2012: 49).

The present-day crisis of political imagination appears to be fundamentally linked to neoliberal capitalism’s temporal horizon. Under neoliberal capitalist time, the horizon of possibilities for political action is constricted, as our sensation of living in a time without foreseeable rupture takes over our political imagination. As Graeber (2011: 381–3) forcefully noted, we seem to have ‘hit the wall in terms of our collective imagination’, finding ourselves in the situation ‘of not being able to even imagine any other way that things might be arranged. About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe’. It is, in this sense, a temporal imaginary of impossibility. Claire Sagan (2019) proposes the concept of ‘uchronia’ to describe this contradictory, yet hegemonic, capitalist temporality of impossibility: a ‘non-time’ given its untenability and unsustainability yet presented as the only possible and desirable (thus fetishized) time. As Sagan (2019: 149) puts it, ‘[i]t is indeed characterized by impossibility, yet it claims the status of the only possible or desirable time there has been, is and will be’.

The words of Subcomandante Marcos (2002: 188), Zapatista spokesperson, encapsulate this sense with remarkable clarity and insight:

The future can be nothing more than a lengthening of the present [. . .]. In order to defeat history, the past is denied a horizon that goes beyond the neoliberal ‘here and now.’ There is no ‘before’ or ‘after’ today. The search for eternity is finally satisfied: the world of money is not only the best of all possible worlds, it is the only one necessary.

In light of this critical observation, the present political conjuncture can be understood as symptomatic, or even constitutive, of the very temporal imaginary and horizon that defines our present historical moment. Our crisis of political and democratic imagination is, therefore, also a crisis of our political time. It is, in this more fundamental sense, a crisis of the horizon of possibility for democratic praxis in the present and radical transformation of the future.

As a mode of opening to new reflections and other radical imaginaries of possibility, I turn now to what, in today’s hegemonic time of neoliberal capitalism, has emerged as a political alternative in the Zapatista practice of autonomy. The Zapatista struggle for autonomy has not only become one of the most exceptional ‘reactivations’ of the project that Castoriadis advocated but has also infused it with a radical democratic and indigenous imaginary that directly challenges and opposes the neoliberal capitalist imaginary and its abstract time of progress, accumulation and homogenization. The Zapatista tenet that ‘another world is possible’, opposed to the ‘only one necessary’ of neoliberal capitalism, is today expressed in their everyday practice of autonomy and the creation of new forms (eidos) of community life, including the institution of a time that is other, the time of the snail.

The Time of the Snail

On the morning of 1 January 1994 – the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect – the Zapatista uprising in the southeastern state of Chiapas publicly emerged to oppose the neoliberal policies of the Mexican government and demand indigenous rights, land reform and autonomous self-government. In their view, the free trade agreement and the neoliberal reforms that accompanied it represented a direct threat to the already impoverished and excluded indigenous communities, particularly the market liberalization of the land that jeopardized the communal ejidal property. Over time, the rebellion transitioned from armed conflict to the construction of autonomous territories of self-government and collective access to land. Today, Zapatista communities operate under their own governing bodies that provide public services, such as education and healthcare, to thousands of indigenous people and bases of supporters. They largely follow a collectivized and participatory economic model based on autonomous cooperatives for agricultural and handicraft production for local consumption, as well as some commercial activity in fair-trade national and international markets.

With the institution of autonomy that privileges a horizontal practice of power ‘from below’, Zapatistas seek to resist the neoliberal imaginary of accumulation, dispossession, and homogenization. The creation of autonomous rebel territories in the initial phases of the rebellion, originally known as Aguascalientes, represented a first significant rupture with the Mexican State and its neoliberal project of privatization and ‘modernization’. While they emerged as spaces of deliberation, learning and encounter with the exterior world (national and international civil society and ONGs) in their daily operation, they slowly became spaces where an incipient structure of self-governance began to take form (Mora, 2017: 29). In this way, the Aguascalientes represented a crucial moment of rupture and transition that allowed Zapatistas to set the bases for their political project of rebellion and autonomy against, and apart from, the neoliberal state and its temporal capitalist imaginary. While they were, indeed, delimited physical spaces, they represented the opening as well of a new yet indeterminate temporality of an alternative way of doing politics (Avalos-Peláez, 2022: 10).

In 2001, when the Mexican Congress failed to ratify the constitutional reforms that had been signed in 1996 in the San Andrés Accords, the Zapatistas decided to end all negotiations with the state and focus exclusively on the internal development of their project of autonomy within their occupied territories. The result of this long and enclosed process of self-reflection and collective deliberation finally came to light in 2003, when the Zapatistas announced the disappearance of the Aguascalientes and the creation of the Caracoles (Snails) as a new territorial and institutional structure of self-government. ⁷ In the following decades, the Zapatistas would continue to actively work in the construction of autonomy by expanding their territorial presence and creating new Caracoles and rebel municipalities. Unlike the Aguascalientes, the Caracoles sought to operate as fully autonomous spaces of self-government where different aspects of life converge: collective assemblies, schools, health clinics, points of commerce for local goods and cultural activities (Avalos-Peláez, 2022: 12–13). More recently, in November 2023, the autonomous organization has undergone yet another major transformation, in an attempt to address the hierarchization and crystallization that the previous institutional arrangement had experienced over time (Subcomandante Moisés, 2023a, 2023b). ⁸

The Zapatista persistent and unremitting experiment with time and institutions over the past 30 years takes the full sense of what Castoriadis calls ‘ontological creation’ in the field of history (Adams, 2011). It exemplifies how the practice of autonomy and the radical imaginary operate on the ground in the ongoing creation – and destruction – of institutional forms (eidos) and temporalities through collective self-institution, reflectivity and questioning.

The Zapatista institution of time arises directly out of this ongoing and dynamic self-instituting praxis of autonomy. It is an imaginary time that may be significantly represented by their chosen symbol of the snail, el caracol. The symbol of the snail and its spiral shell conveys a myriad of meanings within Zapatistas that date back to the ancient Maya past and continue in the present. As Subcomandante Marcos (2003) explains, the indigenous ancestors held the snail in great esteem, for it represented a symbol of knowledge and life. They also used the conch shell ‘to summon the community’ and create agreements, and as an ‘aid to hear the most distant words’.

Today, the symbol of the snail is once more retrieved to name a new way of creating community through time. Just like the snail, a little animal that moves slowly but continuously, the Zapatistas see themselves as ‘walking slowly forward’ towards a direction that is not known in advance but that is of their own making. The snail’s spiral shell complicates Western conceptions of time as linear or progressive forward movement, as it symbolizes a multilinear and dynamic temporality that moves back and forth. ⁹ The complexity of the temporality of the snail, one that is slowly moving forward yet also looking backwards, is captured in Subcomandante Moisés’ (2023b) recent words regarding the new structure of autonomy:

It took us 10 years to think about it, and of those 10 years, 3 to prepare it for its practice. [. . .] That is why it is necessary to change your channel of understanding. Only by looking far away, backwards and forwards, can the present step be understood. We hope you understand that [. . .] we are just learning and that it will take a while to get going well. (emphasis added)

With its slow-paced movement, the Zapatista time of the snail also challenges the social and temporal imaginary of neoliberal financial capitalism which, as seen before, becomes more and more dependent on the high-speed pace of information technology and the economy of debt. Against the accelerated rhythms of capital, driven by ‘efficiency’ and the idea that ‘time is money’, the snail-pace of the Zapatista practice of autonomy evokes a different temporality. The Zapatista time as ‘the slow, unfolding time of the spiral and the journey of the snail’ establishes a new anti-capitalist temporality that, as Rebecca Solnit (2008) puts it, ‘spirals outward and backward, away from some of the colossal mistakes of capitalism’s savage alienation, industrialism’s regimentation, and toward old ways and small things; it also spirals inward via new words and new thoughts’.

In this way, the time of the snail instituted by Zapatistas not only operates as a symbolic institution of time but is also materialized in many Zapatista practices and political institutions. One example of this spiraling dynamic and ‘slow-pace’ temporality is found in the central political principle of mandar obedeciendo (‘to lead by obeying’). As Dinerstein (2013) observes, the principle requires that decision-making processes in all three levels of government – community, municipality and Caracol – be based on collective deliberations that move backward and forward across levels, in a direct evocation of the snail’s spiral shell. Until its more recent reorganization, this circulation implied that, after the deliberation of any issue in the Caracol assembly, the provisional agreements travelled down to the municipal and community assemblies, in order to confirm the decision or make adjustments. After this process, the decision once again ‘spiraled’ back to the upper levels of government to be implemented.

This process of back-and-forth deliberation, which today aims to be continued and deepened with the new institutional structure, though in a much more horizontal and dynamic way, requires patience and takes time. Community assemblies not only take place on a regular basis but can take hours and sometimes even days to reach a decision. Unlike Western models of decision-making, which today echo the speed of capital to the point of sacrificing democratic procedures, here democratic politics’ rhythm is established by the priority of reaching agreements through deliberation, sharing different points of view and reciprocal learning of other ways of being together (Tomba, 2019: 198–9).

Just like the deliberative and decision-making practices described above, past and future travel both ways on the spiral in the production of an autonomous Zapatista temporality. Zapatista time is rooted in past oral traditions that pass knowledge from generation to generation and in the indigenous centuries-old struggle against colonial oppression and dispossession. The opening lines of the Zapatistas’ 1994 First Declaration, ‘we are a product of 500 years of struggle’, highlights the centuries-old anti-colonial struggle that identifies the movement. But this past is in the same way inwardly inspected as ‘tradition’ is actively put into question and revised. The Zapatista Women’s Revolutionary Law, instituted the same year after a long grassroots consultation process, is a direct result of this critical revision of tradition that Castoriadis deemed central to the public time of autonomy.

The Women’s Revolutionary Law was aimed at questioning and changing inherited practices like machismo and at creating more equal gender relations within the community. ¹⁰ Indigenous dissident women, explain Speed et al., ‘abandoned the roles assigned to them by their culture – not to renounce their identity but rather to reinvent new traditions and reject “bad customs”’ (Speed et al., 2006: 43). The law gave rise to a wider discussion and questioning of the usos y costumbres that constituted ‘tradition’, breaking with any uncritical celebration of past conventions. It helped women affirm their cultural practices and their collective self-determination as indigenous peoples – from indigenous language and traditional dress, to knowledge of traditional medicine, juridical systems, forms of communal life and spiritual practices or relationships with nature – at the same time that it helped them ‘reaffirm that indigenous cultures are lived traditions that change’ (Blackwell, 2006: 121; emphasis added).

In this conception of time, the past and the future are ‘bridged’ together (Baschet, 2022). ‘In the struggle for dignity’, Subcomandante Marcos (2001) says, ‘we take a turn to the past, but the final horizon is the future [. . .] we read the future that was sown yesterday, that we cultivate today, and that will be harvested tomorrow if we fight.’ The Zapatista institution of time is thus characterized by a back-and-forth movement of ‘turning to the past to move forward’. Within this framework, the present, otherwise foreclosed under the neoliberal ‘eternal now’, is reopened to become the necessary bridge between past and future. Such a bridge, however, is not confined to a predetermined, unilinear direction of historical time, but rather encompasses the everyday time of indigenous autonomy and communal life. ¹¹ Through everyday politics and practices, the time of the snail creates, in Baschet’s (2022: 202) words, ‘an open future that is uncertain but possible and that assumes the novelty while seeking points of support and sources of creative impulse in the past’. It institutes a different temporality in which the interweaving of past, present and future, Tomba (2019: 208) relatedly observes, ‘makes it possible to imagine and practice a time in which everyday life blends with the time of rupture and tradition, giving rise to anticipations in the present of new forms of life’. As Zapatistas, they say:

our memory also looks for what is to come. It signals times and places. If there exists no geographic location for that tomorrow, [. . .] we begin constructing an islet, [. . .] planted in the middle of tomorrow [. . .]. And if there is no hour, day, week, month, or year on the calendar that we recognize, well we begin to gather the fractions of seconds, barely minutes, and filter them through the cracks that we open in the wall of history. (Subcomandante Galeano, 2015)

In sum, the time of the snail instituted by Zapatistas discloses an alternative temporality that is anti-capitalist and radically democratic. The slow-time pace of the Zapatista autonomy curbs the capitalist temporality of speed and accumulation, while its spiral movement breaks away from the neoliberal ‘eternal present’ by giving both past and future a new temporal dynamic that critically views the past and projects itself into the future. As a ‘struggle for the collective reappropriation of time’ (Tischler, 2022: 11), it represents a radically democratic, self-reflective and collective process of deliberation, shared responsibility and institution-making that is both public and ongoing.

This last point raises the important question on the potential that the time of the snail can have to constructively resist and mitigate the dominant capitalist temporality. The concrete political import of such a politics of slowness, I believe, is to be found in the politicization of everyday life that the Zapatista project of autonomy ultimately entails. Against the neoliberal commodification of time (either through endless debt or digital media acceleration) and the deepening colonization of life and its rhythms this constant commodification implies, Zapatistas institute what Mariana Mora calls a kuxlejal politics. This is an everyday politics focused altogether on social reproduction, material forms of subsistence, and collective forms of life, from education to culture to political institutions of self-government. The project of autonomy thus becomes ingrained with daily practices that ‘assert control over material and immaterial conditions – land, territory, individual and collective bodies, local knowledge of health and care’ (Mora, 2017: 161). In the Zapatista autonomy, Mora (2017: 155) explains, ‘economic, cultural, and social affairs become inseparable from life itself’. The time of the snail disrupts, in this way, the unity of capital’s time under the logics of the economy, making manifest the heterogeneity of temporalities and rhythms that, as Chakrabarty (1997) once observed, lie at the core of our social and local lifeworlds.

This time, we may add, infuses the idea of the radical imaginary with a post-capitalist horizon, fragments of which have already been made tangible in the Zapatista experience of the last 30 years (Baschet, 2015). In it, production is entangled with both life and creation, giving place to a radical sense of creative production of new forms (eidos) of community life and new knowledges – something that Castoriadis insistingly placed at the core of the radical imaginary. This view radically differs from the current exclusive association that production holds with accumulation, credit and profit under capitalism, and the way politics is put at the service of such an economy – even if this entails the destruction of life, both human and non-human.

Although the time of the snail offers an alternative temporal imaginary embedded in concrete practices and forms, it does not offer a magical formula. The Zapatistas always emphasize that they are not seeking to provide a model or blueprint. Their politics of slowness may in this way be difficult to replicate in other places or activities, where new digital forms of capitalist colonization of quotidian life by 24/7 demands of consumerism and communication, increasingly operated by algorithmic mechanisms, are radically changing our sense of temporality (Crary, 2013; Işsevenler, 2023). Yet, in the search for other collective struggles for time, different forms of autonomous organization and temporal imagination may still emerge. Here we can point to recent initiatives that seek to institute alternative forms of non-capitalist time. These initiatives range from the creation of ‘timebanks’, where people exchange services based on time rather than money (Sørensen and Wiksell, 2019), to more radical proposals, such as canceling debt altogether, which would allow one to ‘mark a break [. . .] and start again’ (Graeber, 2011: 391). Much like the Zapatista time of the snail, there is a more recent appeal to ‘slow down’ the economy as proposed by degrowth movements. With this latter proposal, Zapatismo may find significant points of convergence. As proposed by Marxist thinker Saitō Kōhei (2024), the ‘scaling down and slowing down of the economy’ is conceived as part of a broader radical democratization of communal life, including production, labor and care work. These initiatives challenge the neoliberal capitalist time in different ways, and in that sense, can be seen as taking part in the project of autonomy. This project, as evidence by the Zapatista everyday construction of autonomy, is necessarily made up of a multiplicity of temporalities that create ‘a world in which many worlds (and times) fit.’

Conclusion

The current crisis of political and democratic imagination under neoliberal capitalism’s closed temporal horizon makes not only necessary, but urgent, the recovery of what Castoriadis defined as the radical political imaginary of the project of autonomy. However, mobilizing the radical imaginary in the direction he proposed demands that we also go beyond his theorization. The Zapatista political praxis of autonomy can help us with this task of revision and critique, as it extends and problematizes the radical imaginary in a number of ways. To conclude, I point to three possible directions this critical effort can take.

First, Zapatista temporality delocates and expands the project of autonomy beyond the historical trajectory of the West, retracing it backward and forward to other times that emerge in indigenous and non-Western political practices. Its ‘origin’ lies elsewhere than in the ‘Greek germ’ that originally nurtured Castoriadis’s reflections. It traces back to a different history, genealogy and political tradition which is rich with communal forms of organization and self-government. However, rather than debilitating the project of autonomy as conceived by Castoriadis, this dislocation reinforces it. The two emancipatory projects converge in their unwavering commitment to the idea that, despite its current difficulty and fragility, such a political endeavor can only be realized by the autonomous activity of the people (Castoriadis, 2017). In this way, the Zapatista experience becomes one of those ‘islands of resistance’ that, in his later years, Castoriadis believed could still be found everywhere, working towards the revival and awakening of the radical imaginary, albeit under new forms and times to those found in the West.

Second, the time of the snail complicates the politico-temporal categories that permeate Western political theory and especially radical democratic thought. One of these is the much-discussed opposition between rupture and institution, which in the Zapatista experience is problematized and refashioned into different meanings that are not necessarily excluding or antagonistic. The institutions that the Zapatistas have created are both non-momentary ruptures yet temporary institutions. They embody a form of fluid duration in time that is irreducible to pure events or permanent instituted forms. In the same way, tradition and the past emerge as temporal figures of rupture that can instigate political action in the present, rather than as unalterable sources of convention and continuity.

Finally, the time of the snail infuses the idea of revolution that drives the aim of autonomy with a new temporality. While Zapatismo inserts itself within a non-determinist and non-teleological view of revolution, a view that Castoriadis amply developed in his critique of Marxism, it has also embarked on a process ‘to reinvent time and revolution’ itself (Tischler, 2020: 355). In the Zapatista practice of autonomy, the time of revolution is no longer limited to a ‘bout of fever, enthusiasm and rage’ that Castoriadis (1997: 54–5) once, somewhat defeatedly, admitted being the antinomical character of modern political imagination. Revolution in Zapatismo takes a different speed, rhythm and even durability that translates into an everyday practice of self-government that is not less committed to a radical transformation of existing conditions. ¹²

Recovering and re-examining the radical temporal imaginary of the project of autonomy can help escape the limitations that the neoliberal temporal horizon poses to our political imagination today. As the analysis of the time of autonomy and the Zapatista time of the snail has shown, this entails a reactivation of a public, democratic time of possibility, responsibility, collective creation and self-reflectivity. The radical project of democracy that Castoriadis’s work outlined, and that Zapatistas are actualizing and expanding in critical ways through their everyday praxis of autonomy, can provide us with an alternative horizon of possibility and a time other to begin such a task.