The Working Class and the Mexican Revolution, c. 1900-1920
Like any major historical phenomenon, the Mexican Revolution can be viewed from a variety of angles. From one, arguably the most important, it was a rural phenomenon, rightly categorised by Eric Wolf as a 'peasant war', hence comparable to the Russian or Chinese Revolutions.1 From another it can be seen as a generalised social and political (some might like to call it a 'hegemonic') crisis, marking the end of the old oligarchic Porfirian order and characterised by mass political mobilisation; as such, it bears comparison with the crises experienced in Italy and Germany after the First World War; in Spain in the early i93os; in Brazil in the I96os or Chile in the I970s. But what it emphatically was not was a workers' revolution. No workers' party sought - let alone attained -political hegemony. No Soviets or workers' councils were established, as in Petrograd or Berlin. There were no attempts at workers' control of industry, as in Turin, Barcelona - or the gran mineria of Bolivia. Though the Mexican working class had to confront the realities of the revolution, and thus in turn contributed to its development, its contribution was limited and largely reflexive; it responded to events rather than initiating them. A study of the role of the working class in the revolution may help 1 Eric Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentienth Century (London, 1969). In the course of this paper, relatively few comparisons are drawn with other Latin American labour movements/working classes, though some are drawn (perhaps fancifully) with Europe. In part, this reflects the writer's ignorance; in part his belief that studies of the European working class (by Thompson, Barrington Moore, the Tillys and others) often ask more interesting questions and thus suggest more fruitful lines of comparison. The whole question of the introduction of the time and work discipline of capitalism, now a staple theme in European labour history, has only just begun to agitate Latin American research (e.g. Arnold Bauer, 'Rural Workers in Spanish America: Problems of Peonage and Oppression', Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. LIX (I979), pp. 34-63); as yet, it does not seem to have had much impact on studies of the urban workers which, with some notable exceptions, still tend to concentrate on the rather formalistic political and ideological gyrations of labour confederations and their leaderships: acronyms rule. 5 I