Socialism Influence
It was only during the first decade of the twentieth century that socialism developed defined ideological traits and managed to have a strong influence in the labor and campesino (peasant) movements, as well as a rather strong presence across the country. Its first steps are associated with the figures of the Partido Liberal Mexicano ( PLM, or Mexican Liberal Party): Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón, Librado Rivera, Camilo Arriaga, and Antonio Diaz Soto y Gama. The PLM was founded in Saint Louis, Missouri, were its organizers lived in exile. Most of them were progressive liberals, although the Flores Magón brothers and a few others soon expressed anarchist and socialist ideas in the open. The newspaper Regeneración, which began coming out in year 1900, became the group’s most influential medium. In September of that year, the paper’s circulation reached 20,000 copies.
During his political life, Ricardo Flores Magón developed his own version of anarchism, known as Magonismo, which had a long-lasting influence in Mexico. He perceived a large gap between Mexico’s technological and moral development, and he attributed the lag to the existence of property, which distorted man’s fraternal instinct and created antagonistic social classes. He thought that in the face of established injustice rebellion was not a careless behavior but a law of nature and history. The world of property and injustice first must be destroyed in order to build a new order. It would be insufficient to bring down a government, because under dictatorship as well as under democracy workers would continue to suffer from poverty. It was necessary to abolish the state itself. In Flores Magón’s rationale, capital was almost always linked to the very concept of landed property, which also should be abolished and replaced by communal production. He believed that the proof of the viability of communalism was the historic survival of the Indian community. Therefore the key slogan of Mexican anarchists was iTierra y Libertad! (Land and Freedom!).