Why the Mexican Revolution? Why Now?

***This was an assignment for a professor on my thesis committee, answering the question, "What is my problem?" I've been rethinking some of how it's framed here but this gives the general idea of what my thesis will be.***

All the world today lives in the shadow of capitalist state power. Tenuous though it always was, this power has been shaken to its very foundations in recent months by an onslaught of economic and social crises. Capitalism, a global system that was supposedly triumphant, inevitable and permanent following the fall of the Soviet Union, has betrayed its own fundamental weaknesses, leaving capitalist powers scrambling to re-secure their material and ideological hegemony over the global working classes. At no time in the previous seven decades has it been so imperative for students of history to re-examine capitalism and the popular, revolutionary challenges which have indelibly shaped and contested its supremacy.

Few places provide greater lessons regarding such revolutionary challenges than Mexico. To this day it is experiencing vibrant social movements and rebellions (the Zapatista rebellion since 1994, the Oaxaca rebellion in 2006) that are evidence of a “dialectic of defeat” – the idea that in revolutions, “Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.”[1] The ideology, strategies and demands of Mexico’s newest movements are shaped by the current generation, but the way in which they reflect struggles within the Mexican Revolution is neither coincidence nor historical repetition. The connection between the two can best be understood as the dialectical continuity of liberatory impulses and tendencies that were defeated within the Mexican Revolution.

This continuity presents a dilemma for scholars considering the significance and impact of the Mexican Revolution: who and what were these liberatory forces that were defeated within the Mexican Revolution? What was the character of the forces that were victorious over them? Did the Revolution fulfill its potential in spite of their defeat? Or was its potential “interrupted” or “unfulfilled”?[2] Was this contradiction between what was aspired to and what was achieved the result of historical necessity or inevitability? Or is there an alternative way in which to view the course the revolution took?

Our current period affirms the necessity of developing a theoretical methodology with which to answer such questions; a methodology which approaches history not as the story of inevitabilities but rather as the outcome of contending forces, moved by the agency of human actors rather than the formulas of political systems or the laws of economics. More specifically, there is a need for a methodology which assists the endeavor to discover why popular movements in past revolutions were “interrupted” or “unfulfilled.” While the study of revolutions has been greatly advanced by the work of scholars who have emphasized rising expectations, the role of states, global economic and political relations, crises in ruling class hegemony, and the influence of specific revolutionary leaders, these elements can only explain the external factors affecting why popular democratic forces are defeated in revolutionary periods.

The necessary methodology must be centered upon the role of the internal contradictions and development of the popular democratic forces. Murray Bookchin’s Third Revolution framework presents us with such a methodology. Applying Bookchin’s Third Revolution thesis, this research intends to answer the following: What liberatory directions could the Mexican Revolution have followed, had certain specific events not altered its course profoundly? In what ways and with what goals did the popular movements affect these revolutions? Why were these popular movements eventually unable to complete their revolution from below?

This project will survey two specific tendencies within the Revolution: the revolutionary working class, through such organs as the Partido Liberal Mexicano and the Casa del Obrero Mundial in Mexico City, and the revolutionary peasantry, through such organs as “Pancho” Villa’s Northern Division and Emiliano Zapata’s peasant rebel forces. It will focus primarily on the period between 1913 and 1920, when these popular tendencies came into sharpest conflict with the new radical forces assuming state power.

In focusing on the popular forces within one period of revolutionary upheaval, the goal is to examine the meaning and process of revolution and the possibilities of change via this route. This concerns the outcomes of revolution, rather than its causes per se. Because revolutions raise many key issues within the discipline of politics, the study of revolution is ultimately a study of politics and how societies change. There are both theoretical and political reasons that such research is necessary today. On a theoretical level, Bookchin’s methodology is a valuable tool in understanding revolution, but one that has remained underdeveloped. Bookchin was on more than one occasion accused of Eurocentrism because he chose only to analyze revolutions that took place in Europe and the United States. He did not deny the claim, justifying his preferential historical treatment on the basis that, “To the extent that revolutions in the ‘Third World’ had certain universal features and sought or professed to establish a radically new social dispensation for humanity as a whole, they emulated the great European revolutions.”[3]

Emulated? How could the Mexican Revolution of 1910 have emulated the great revolutions that the world had not yet experienced, such as the 1917 Russian Revolution, the revolutionary fervor that swept Germany before the Second World War, or the Spanish Civil War? A strong argument could be made that Bookchin’s oversight was not Eurocentric but actually related to his political upbringing in Marxism, which may have left deep impressions that revolutionary potentialities were limited in the “Third World” due to the relatively underdeveloped character of capitalism in those countries. The historical record contradicts this – the Russian Revolution being perhaps the most obvious contradiction – and demonstrates that it is not conditions of development which produce revolutionary defeat, but instead the competition between different political forces. Such impressions often go so far as to perceive socialist or libertarian possibilities only in “First World” countries and contribute to lowered expectations for the outcomes of “Third World” revolutions. For instance, the consolidation of the Mexican state under Lázaro Cárdenas has been lauded by some scholars as the Revolution “fulfilled,” even though it was achieved through the demobilization and often violent repression of popular grassroots forces.[4]

Is it historically accurate to say that popular democratic forces within the Mexican Revolution merely emulated their European predecessors? Is Bookchin’s framework only applicable in advanced capitalist societies? If so, what does that say about the potential for revolution on a global scale today? Applying the Third Revolution to Mexico will serve not only to better understand the Mexican case, but to generalize broader conclusions concerning the phenomenon of revolution on a global scale, the similarities and differences it exhibits between highly developed and underdeveloped capitalist countries, and the unique contributions that underdeveloped countries have made to libertarian revolutionary traditions.

The significance of this research is even greater on a political level. At the outset I must state that I do not intend for this to be only a work of academic scholarship. Rather it is my wish to write an accessible account of the popular democratic tendencies within Mexico for those students of revolution today who seek to reanimate such traditions. This research will hopefully provide ammunition for those advocates who oppose the “inevitability” of capitalism and state power and are in need of political tools with which to accompany that dissent with a positive vision rooted in historical experience. By challenging the inevitability of the outcome of the Mexican Revolution (and revolution in general), there is greater evidence that alternative visions for society have been (and still are) relevant and possible.

Because of time constraints and because of this desire, it will be outside the scope of this research to provide a detailed account of the entire Revolutionary process. I will be unable to examine, for instance, the “first revolution” in Mexico which witnessed an alliance of forces to overthrow the regime of Porfirio Diaz in 1910. In addition, each of the organizations I hope to study is deserving of a book-length analysis in their own right, but a shorter synthesis will hopefully suffice for my purposes. Further, other authors have demonstrated the importance of analyzing the Revolution on a regionalized and localized basis, complicating any overly-simplistic approach that views Mexico as having one monolithic revolution.[5] I view my research not as antagonistic but rather complementary to the specificity of such studies, despite the fact that I will be limited to a survey of participants so as to draw some basic conclusions about their contribution to Mexico’s Third Revolution. Finally, to fully understand the outcome of the Mexican Revolution it is necessary to investigate the period of state consolidation that occurred under presidents Álvaro Obregón and Lázaro Cárdenas. The absence of a full exposition on that history in my investigation should not be interpreted as undervaluing its magnitude.

[1] David Scott, “The Dialectic of Defeat: An Interview with Rupert Lewis,” Small Axe 10 (Sept 2001), 85.
[2] This is terminology has been used in the work of Marxist authors such as Adolfo Gilly. From Luis F. Ruiz, “Where Have All the Marxists Gone? Marxism and the Historiography of the Mexican Revolution,” A Contracorriente 5:2 (Winter 2008), 196.
[3] Murray Bookchin, The Third Revolution: Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era, Vol. 1 (New York: Cassell, 1996), 18.
[4] As Luis F. Ruiz notes in his review of The Mexican Revolution, Adolfo Gilly “argued that Cárdenas fulfilled the ideals of the Revolution because his regime finally redistributed the land to the peasantry, organized the labor movement, nationalized the oil and railroad industries, and developed a socialist education program.” In “From Marxism to Social History: Adolfo Gilly’s Revision of The Mexican Revolution,” A Contracorriente 4:2 (Winter 2007), 246.
[5] For examples of localized/particularized accounts, see John Lear, Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens: The Revolution in Mexico City (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2001); Andrew Grant Wood, Revolution in the Street: Women, Workers, and Urban Protest in Veracruz, 1870-1927 (Wilmington, DE: SR Books., 2001); or Stephanie Mitchell and Patience A. Schell, eds., The Women’s Revolution in Mexico, 1910-1953 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007).