Part 1: The Roots of the Modern State

The Revolution is the touchstone of Mexican politics. The period saw the Mexican state begin its transformation from an oligarchical-landowners’ government to the one-party corporatist model which survived for so long. The Revolution is also crucial to understanding the peculiar social base from which the Mexican state is constructed, with its formal recuperation of worker and peasant organizations, and its need to regularly embark upon sprees of revolutionary rhetoric. The revolution was driven forward by the peasants’ attack on the latifundias, or large estates, the dominant mode of accumulation in Mexico at the time. Despite subsequent industrialization, the latifundias have persisted — even grown — and have remained a locus of class struggle ever since, most recently in Chiapas. To grasp the importance of land struggles in Mexico we need to understand how the latifundias operate, and how they plug into the cycles of national accumulation.[6]

The latifundias

The Porfiriato, the administration of Porfirio Diaz, ruled Mexico from 1876 to 1910. Its social base was the latifundistas, the large landowners, and it was their class interests that were transmitted through the government. The rapid industrialization that Mexico was undergoing at the turn of the twentieth century was confined to tiny areas of the country, and the industrial bourgeoisie as a class were too weak to make much political headway in the Porfiriato. The large estates originated from the fallout of the Reform War, which had ended in 1867. The victorious Liberal wing of the oligarchy intended to create a limited system of small landholdings that would be constructed mainly from confiscated Church property and the expropriated communal land of Indians. But almost as soon as these smallholdings came into existence they were aggressively acquired by a new breed of landowner (the latifundista), the smallholder generally being unable to exist solely on his land. These smallholders became either poorly-paid day-laborers (i.e. seasonally employed) or debt-peons, little more than slaves. In the southern and central areas of Mexico, the latifundistas further expanded their property by violently evicting peasants (campesinos) from their ejidos (communal production units). This process produced continual class conflict in the countryside. The expansion of the latifundia property-form penetrated the countryside only to the extent that the local populace could be suppressed. Faced with widespread resistance, the landowners organized the Guardias Blancas (White Guards, usually campesinos-turned-bandit, in turn recruited back to the Side of Order). The fact that these brutal paramilitary groups have been a constant part of rural life ever since indicates that the peasants have never admitted defeat in the land war, and the landowners know it.

The latifundias, which were usually centered on a lavish, European-style hacienda, were the wellspring of surplus extraction in the economy. Sugar, coffee, cotton, India rubber: exported abroad, as well as serving the needs of the internal market, these were the sources of wealth for the landowning classes. And if the international trade cycle contracted, the latifundia could easily withdraw into limited, or even subsistence, production. The cost of the reproduction of labor fell always on the villages outside the property and never on the hacienda. While the elasticity of this form of accumulation accounts for its longevity, it was in many ways backward. The commodification of labor-power and money relations had spread to an extent throughout the agricultural sector, but were by no means universal. On many haciendas the landowners paid their workers in produce, or forced them to purchase from an employer’s shop. Via this payment in kind campesinos usually ended up in debt, which tended to rise at a greater rate than the peasant was able to pay it off. As a result of this dependency, the campesino became a peon, tied forever to the hacienda. The fact that debts were passed on from father to son only helped to preserve this distorted form of value extraction. If a campesino attempted to escape, the Guardias Blancas would follow.

Zapatismo and the Ayala Plan

By 1911, revolt was breaking out in the north and center of Mexico, triggered by the corruption of the Porfiriato and the violence of the landowners. In the countryside, the peasant uprising took the form of land seizures. It is the scale of the attack on the latifundias that is the defining characteristic of the Mexican Revolution. With the absence of fully-developed wage-relations, exploitation was more immediate: the campesinos were able to personally identify their class enemies and exact violent revenge. The Zapatista movement was the highpoint of these years. The campesinos of Morelos and Puebla constructed not only a revolutionary army, they also produced, in the Ayala Plan, a coherent political program that asserted their needs against those of capital. The Ayala Plan spelled out in detail the Zapatista program of land redistribution: broadly, expropriation of private land for public utility, dispossessed individuals and communities, with a guarantee of protection for small landholdings. The Plan was both a codification of what was already happening and a fillip to further land takeovers. Landlords, Mexican and foreign, were fleeing in their thousands.

With the landowners chased out of Morelos, the Zapatistas attempted to place limits on the future possibility of petty-bourgeois accumulation. One example is the proposal for agricultural banks, a confused attempt, but an attempt nevertheless, to temper the power of money in favor of social needs. Of course, had the land redistribution project been allowed to thrive with the continuation of money relations as a whole, a new generation of landowners would eventually have developed from the ranks of the revolutionary peasants. In the Ayala Plan we find a communist tendency towards communal land; at the same time a very uncommunist tolerance of small farmers, perfectly in keeping with what Teodor Shanin calls the ‘different world’ of the peasantry,[7] and which we shall examine later.

The end of the Morelos Commune

If the Zapatistas had, at least in the short term, resolved the contradiction of their class position by favoring the communal over the incipient bourgeois, in shared land rather than private property, they were unable to resolve a further contradiction, and one which led ultimately to the smashing of their stronghold, the Morelos Commune, by the reconstituted power of the state. While the revolutionary campesino was (almost literally) everywhere, they were unable as a class to move beyond their localist perspective. The Ayala Plan was the most sophisticated attempt to intervene on a national level — yet it talked about the land and nothing else. Unlike the revolutionary proletariat, separated forever from the means of production, they did not see the need to transcend their class, and with it all classes. The revolutionary working class needs to talk about everything in its attempts to generalize its struggles; the peasantry believes it needs only to talk about the land. The campesinos of this period had struggled around their needs, had largely succeeded, and now found themselves unable to develop further.

The revolutionary peasants who in December 1914 occupied Mexico City were undoubtedly one of the highest expressions of class struggle in the world at that time. The workers of Europe were drowning in their own blood and the Russian Revolution was still three years away. By contrast, the whole of Mexico was at the peasants’ feet. The national power of the bourgeoisie was smashed and its survivors had retreated to the eastern port of Veracruz. Yet it was at precisely this moment that the traditional peasant deference, which is rooted in the contradictory nature of peasant existence and the cultural baggage that accompanies it, asserted itself. Refusing a political solution from within themselves, and trusting that military strength alone would prevail, they inadvertently left the door open to a weak but reconstituting state power. This inability to find a wider social perspective is at least something the present day Zapatistas, with all their limitations, have been obliged to overcome, while many of their campesino brothers and sisters in the west of Chiapas are still unable to make the jump from atomized deference to communal organization.

The preamble to the Ayala Plan had ruled out any compromises with the bourgeois leader Madero and other ‘dictatorial associates.’ Yet the Zapatistas were chronically unable to see beyond their own backyard. This blindness to the threat of the state was the highest contradiction of the exemplary peasant movement of the Mexican Revolution.

The working class

Individually, many miners, railwaymen and textile workers joined the peasant Northern Division, which had entered into a de facto alliance with the Zapatista Southern Liberation Army. As a class, however, and despite a huge strike wave in 1906 , they remained quiet until 1915.

The peasant armies which had occupied Mexico City had failed to inspire working class support, or indeed relate to them in any way. As a result, in exchange for union concessions from the revolutionary bourgeoisie, the reformist federation of unions, the Casa del Obrera Mundial (COM) agreed to form ‘Red Battalions’ to fight the Northern Division and the Zapatisatas. Although this decision did not go unopposed — the electricians’ union refused to abide by the pact — the Red Battalions fought alongside what were known as the Constitutionalist armies throughout 1915. Yet only a year later the working class was paying the price for this complicity. The new bourgeoisie, having beaten off the threat from the peasants, no longer needed the unions. COM headquarters was stormed by troops and unionists across the country arrested. The following year, 1916 , the first general strike in Mexican history was crushed. Despite this, however, the power of the organized working class remained formidable.

The 1917 Constitution

Just like the Revolution, the 1917 Constitution is a vital touchstone in Mexican life, a document that came into existence as a result of prolonged struggle, and is still held in high regard today by many sections of the working class and peasantry. The bourgeoisie clearly intended the new set of state rules to be a signal that the years of chaos and civil war were over and a new cycle of accumulation could begin.

Knowing the erosion of the gains of the Revolution would only be tolerated to a degree by the peasants and the working class, the new bourgeoisie institutionalized itself as the revolutionary party-state, marginalizing competing currents within its own class by mobilizing popular opinion. It is the evolution of this party-state that accounts for the lack of parliamentary democracy in Mexico, and explains the concentration of power in the hands of one man, the President. Despite many knocks this specific formation of the bourgeoisie has survived — just — the twentieth century.

In the advanced capitalist countries, the illusion of alternatives through democracy is at the center of the reproduction and expansion of the capitalist mode of production. Democracy mediates between competing interests within the ruling class, while at the same time countering tendencies towards corruption in the relation between state and capital. In Mexico, there is a hole where this mediation might exist — a hole that is instead plugged by the extraordinary way in which workers’ and peasants’ organizations have been formally co-opted by the state.