The Most Important Years for the Labor Movement
After the War of Reform and the French Intervention, workers and artisans entered a period of intense activity influenced by such international events as the foundation of the First International in 1866 and the Paris Commune of 1871. In Mexico the 1870s were the most important years for the labor movement in the nineteenth century. Mexican socialists of the period were most influenced by the utopian socialism of such thinkers as Fourier and Owen and the anarchism of Proudhon, as well as the traditional agrarian communalism of the Mexican peasantry. Nonetheless, Mexican socialists also were influenced by other tendencies in socialist thought, and the international division between Marxists and anarchists had some repercussions in Mexico.
The newspaper El Socialista published its first issue on June 9, 1871, the first paper openly to defend the cause of workers, the International, and the Commune. After many efforts, workers formed the Gran Círculo del Obreros de México ( Great Labor Circle of Mexico), which eventually grew to include as many as 2,000 members in dozens of factories and workshops. The new organization was not socialist, however, but supported mutualism, strikers, and worker organization. The new organization soon fell under employer and government influence, and two years later openly was accepting subsidies and had opened its ranks to management. Eventually the socialists in the Gran Círculo left the group and formed another organization, La Social. Many other organization also were founded during the period; although many individual socialists participated, none of the groups took strong socialist positions.
On July 4, 1878, the Partido Socialista Mexicano ( PSM, or Mexican Socialist Party) and its paper La Revolución Social were founded in Puebla. The party never really managed to take root, but its constitution is worth mentioning. The document affirms that Mexican socialists, grouped in a party, must struggle to organize all sympathizers, aiming at conquering political power in the republic through legal means in order to establish the Law of the People. The Law of the People is one of the period’s most consistent and visionary pleas for agrarian reform. The party membership expected to enact this law either through the action of party members or because the federal government would feel the need to adopt it. Influenced by Marxism, the Socialist Party constitution explained that members called themselves Communists to distinguish themselves from those who rejected the formation of a proletariat class party. The founders of the group and the newspaper were Alberto Santa Fe, a wellknown participant in the fight against the Conservatives and the French, and Manuel Serdán, father of Aquiles Serdán, initiator of the 1910 Revolution in Puebla. However, toward the end of the 1880s most organizations and publications either had been repressed or had fallen to political disputes and electoral campaigns and maneuvers aimed at strengthening the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship. The socialist movement entered a state of decay that lasted for the rest of the nineteenth century. Socialists were repressed and isolated.