When Shifting Class Tensions Converge

This makes me think of Iran in a different way (or perhaps the current events in Iran are making me think of Mexico in a different way).

Important dividing lines coalesced in 1910:

a) Village resistance took on increasingly deep character, converging with other forms of peasant and working class struggles – this was partly due to growing contradiction b/t haciendas and indigenous communities still independent in central Mexico. Whereas Spanish Crown had (out of self-preservation) defended some aspects of independent indigenous communities, “the modern capitalist organization and individualist doctrines of the Restored Republic were hostile to any element of autonomous organization, any relation unmediated by money or unreceptive to direct or indirect market arms. The free villages…therefore had to be eliminated.”[41]

b) Gilly says the defensive struggles of the free villages would’ve eventually been liquidated by capital and the state except for they had a second dividing line on their side (in a sense) – the urban petty bourgeoisie, swollen by the development of capitalism, was beginning to be alienated by the “ossification of the Porifiriato” (meaning the state had foreclosed upward social mobility to the petty bourgeoisie) and was breaking its former silence and attraction to Porifirian “peace and progress”. Gilly says the u.p.b. was driven to attitudes of discontent and even rebellion.

c) This combined social pressure served to produce symptoms of crisis and division among the capitalist and landowning bourgeoisie in whose name Diaz and the científicos exercised power.

d) Important point that Gilly raises: “It was not local peasant risings…but great workers’ strikes that most directly concentrated the country-wide ferment in centers of economic importance.” [48] He argues that the resistance/rebellions of the industrial proletariat (1903, 1906, 1908) made it possible for peasant revolt to take on the scale and character it did and distinguish it from earlier periods of peasant revolt. Gilly writes, “capitalism provided the basis for the agrarian rebellion maturing in the countryside to culminate in a national-scale revolution rather than a mere peasant revolt.”