Bridge of the World

In the 1920s, socialism had a large although nebulous influence. Many Revolutionary generals considered themselves socialists. The press was full with contradictory news concerning the Russian Revolution. Everyone knew Lenin’s and Trotsky’s writings. Socialist ideas permeated the agrarista movement and labor unions. In May 1918 the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (CROM, or Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers) was founded. The group managed to take control of organized labor for over 15 years. In 1921 the CGT was formed under strong anarchist and communist ascendancy. Strikes and land occupations multiplied. Artists such as Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, and Frida Kahlo; writers such as Pedro Henriquez Urefia and Carlos Pellicer; and anthropologists and teachers openly sympathized with socialist ideas.

The Partido Comunista Mexicano ( PCM, or Mexican Communist Party) was born into that environment in 1919. Even though it initially had only a few dozen members and in the years that followed suffered from splits and expulsions, the PCM played a key role in establishing the hegemony of Marxism-Leninism, the Communist International, and the international communist movement in Mexican socialism. The new party brought together labor and campesino leaders, intellectuals, foreign radicals exiled in Mexico, and representatives of the Communist International. It also inaugurated ideas and practices until then unknown in Mexico. The PCM established very close links with the communist movement and the Soviet Union, although these links were characterized by subordination to conflict as much as cooperation. Some party members had direct contact with Lenin, and others took part in the formation of the Communist International’s Latin American Bureau. Such prominent communists from abroad as Borodin, Manabendra Nat Roy, Sen Katayama, Stirner, E R. Philips, and José Antonio Mella were active in Mexico. By 1923 the International directly intervened in the new party’s political operations. The Executive Committee sent an open letter to Mexican communists ana lyzing the Mexican situation. The document drew the electoral, agrarian, and union policy that the “Mexican Section of the Third International” had to follow.

At the time, communists gave labor and campesino movements organizational ideas, practices, and formulas that helped them strengthen and broaden their action capabilities. PCM members also participated in the newspaper El Machete. The party included in its ranks union organizers, campesino leaders, intellectuals, and talented congressmen such as M. Díaz Ramírez, Rafael Carrillo, L. G. Monzón, Primo Tapia, R. Gómez Lorenzo, Ursulo Galván, R. Ramos Pedruesa, and Guadalupe Rodríguez. The PCM also promoted the formation of campesino, labor, and intellectual organizations that sought to unite these movements nationwide and promoted the formation of local socialist parties that formed in several states. In spite of its large influence, however, by the end of the 1920s the PCM still was a very small organization. As of 1925 it barely had 200 members. Although by 1929 it had grown somewhat, it still had fewer than 3,000 members in the entire country. The organization was a center of influence more than a gathering of grassroots leaders.

From 1906 on, the PLM program called for an armed rebellion against the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship. For nearly five years, the PLM was the only force to advocate armed revolution against the Díaz regime. Anarchists had ample authority and stimulated many movements and rebellions. Their weight became evident in the strikes of the Cananea, Sonora mines, and the Río Blanco, Veracruz, textile industry, as well as in other textile factories. They inspired peasant rebellions in Veracruz, as well as military actions in other regions. However, it was only in September 1911 after the downfall of the dictatorship that Ricardo Flores Magón conceived this rebellion as an anarchist and communist revolution, which had to abolish private property and the state, as well as all the institutions based on them. The revolution should aim at capitalism, the clergy, and the state in general. Ricardo Flores Magón’s ideas influenced many leaders who shared his objectives but who differed from his confrontational tactics. They ended up joining one or another faction in the fight for power. During the Revolution, anarchists influenced the Casa del Obrero Mundial (House of World Workers), the Zapatistas, and the drafting of the Constitution of 1917. Anarchists reappeared later in the Confederación General de Trabajadores (CGT, or General Confederation of Workers), the Ligas Agrarias (Agrarian Unions), and the Communist Party in its early stages. However, their radicalism isolated them and prevented them from playing an independent role in the Mexican Revolution.

Almost simultaneously, a more reformist type of socialism started to take shape. Already in 1905, after failing to get Ricardo Flores Magón to temper the tone of Regeneración, Camilo Arriaga and Santiago de la Vega split off from the PLM and began to collaborate with the moderate weekly Humanidad. After Díaz’s downfall a Magonista group rejected the tactics of openly calling for communist revolution during Francisco I. Madero’s presidential campaign They joined Madero, hoping to radicalize the movement from within its ranks. Alarmed by Flores Magón’s outspoken communist convictions, they published an alternative Regeneración in Mexico City. Moderate Magonistas, such as Juan Sarabia, Antonio Villarreal, and Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama took part in the formation of the Casa del Obrero Mundial in 1912. Later, part of the Casa’s leadership supported Álvaro Obregón and the Constitutionalist faction of the Mexican Revolution. Others opted for the Zapatistas.

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!).

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.

In the imagination of Liberals and Conservatives, socialism was part and parcel of anarchism and communism, although Conservatives and Liberals opposed socialism in quite different ways. By 1849 Conservatives already used the “socialist threat” to contest the publication and distribution of texts they considered seditious, assail Liberal Party representatives, attack mutual aid societies, and particularly challenge the idea of desamortización, the Liberals’ proposed disentailment of Catholic Church properties. Arguing that Mexico already was a prosperous country and did not need social change, Conservatives tagged the work of such reformists as Alfonso de Esquiros and Eugenio Sue as socialist, red-baited guilds as “sources of perils,” and painted the Liberals as “pale copies of French socialists.” The desamortizacón was considered worse than socialist: if socialism deprived the individual to benefit the community, the disentailment of church properties despoiled the community to enrich the government.

Liberals counterattacked by trying to distance themselves from socialist ideas —particularly since socialism had begun to attract many middle-class youths. Liberal ideologues such as Guillermo Prieto defended private freedom as the engine of wealth, progress, and civilization, linking communism with Indian communities and hence with backwardness. They also adamantly opposed the idea of guaranteed employment for all and even attacked socialism as an enemy of God, family, and the state. Nonetheless, a small number of Liberals such as Ignacio Ramírez embraced some socialist ideas, adopted an attitude of critical engagement with socialists, and admitted that the conditions of workers needed improvement.

The first movement to adopt a clearly socialist program was an armed peasant rebellion in the Chalco region, whose leader, Julio Chávez López, had participated in the Chalco socialist school. In a letter to the socialist theorist Zalacosta, Chávez López declared “I’m a socialist because I’m an enemy of governments and a Communist because my brothers want to work the land in common.” Probably going beyond the motivations of his followers, on April 29, 1869, Chávez López published a manifesto “to all the oppressed and poor of Mexico and the world.” “It is landlords and hacendados who take advantage of toilers’ weakness,” the manifesto declared. “The time has come for slaves to rise as one for their rights. Priests have lied to us, polluting the teachings of Jesus, whom we must vindicate.” The manifesto called for the establishment of socialism “as the most perfect form of social coexistence” and the creation of a “Universal Republic of Harmony,” a society free from all kinds of tyranny and based on fraternity and socialism. The rebellion eventually was crushed by Mexican troops.