«The Interrupted Revolution»: An Explication and Critique of Adolfo Gilly's Interpretation of the...

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«The Interrupted Revolution»: An Explication and Critique of Adolfo Gilly's Interpretation ofthe Mexican RevolutionAuthor(s): Richard RomanSource: Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revue canadienne desétudes latino-américaines et caraïbes, Vol. 9, No. 18 (1984), pp. 3-30Published by: University of Calgary Press on behalf of Canadian Association of Latin American andCaribbean StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41799549 .

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CJ LACS/RCELAC, IX (no 18, 1984), pp. 3-30.

«The Interrupted Revolution»:

An Explication and Critique

of Adolfo Gilly 's Interpretation

of the Mexican Revolution

Richard Roman Sociology Department and University College University of Toronto

Adolfo Gilly a contribué de façon significative à ouvrir de nouvelles perspectives surla nature de la Révolution mexicaine. Se basant sur Trotsky et sur son concept de « développement inégal et combiné », il a analysé la Révolution mexicaine comme une combinaison de deux révolutions oppo- sées : une révolution paysanne, radicale , incapable de triompher mais assez indépendante et militante pour empêcher la petite bourgeoisie et la bourgeoisie de l'emporter pleinement La révolution radicale fut interrompue mais non liquidée; les circonstances aidant , elle pourra donc reprendre son cours socialiste.

L ' article critique V analyse de Gilly pour ses concepts et certaines de ses caractérisations. Gilly voit à tort un lien nécessaire entre le développement inégal et combiné et la révolution permanente mais interrompue. Il néglige les médiations politiques et idéologiques de la lutte des classes ainsi que des alliances et applique une analyse de classe réductionniste. Le Mexique a développé de fait un régime et une hégémonie pleinement capitalistes suivant des lignes particulières qui ne reproduisent ni la voie anglaise ni la voie prussienne. L ' oeuvre de Gilly vaut néanmoins pour sa vocation heuris- tique et pour son influence sur V orientation des études concernant la Révo- lution mexicaine.

1. Introduction.

Adolfo Gilly' s interpretation of the Mexican Revolution, La Revolución Interrumpida 1 , has had a great influence on views of the Mexican Revo- lution in both academic and political circles. The book remains very popular and has gone through a number of editions in Mexico since it was first

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published in 1971. And an English-language translation has recently appeared. The continuing prominence of Gilly' s interpretation both in political-intellectual and academic circles is indicated by its inclusion as one of the five interpretations of the Mexican Revolution included in Inter- pretaciones de la Revolución Mexicana 2 , published in 1979, and the selection of Gilly to write the chapter on the Revolution of 1910-1920 for the four volume history of Mexico edited by the prominent economic historian, Enrique Semo, Mexico : un pueblo en la historia 3 . In these later discussions, Gilly has presented the same analysis as in La Revolución Interrumpida . We draw mainly from the book version for our presentation of Gilly's analysis.

The impact of Gilly's interpretation has to be understood in terms of the historical moment in which it was published as well as in terms of its intrin- sic character. Almost all of the interpretations before Gilly could be placed in one of three categories: 1) descriptive political history; 2) populist interpretations; 3) Marxist interpretations. The first two approaches neglected the role of class divisions within the revolution, the first by its neglect of economic, class and social factors in general, and the second by looking at social and economic factors but not class divisions within the people, within the Revolution. The prevalent Marxist approach differed from the first two approaches in that it sought to explain the different currents, the tensions and the dynamics of the Revolution in terms of class forces and, also, to relate the character of the Revolution and its tasks to the stage of development of the society. But, as in the other two currents, it did this within the concept of a single revolution. This kind of Marxist approach mechanically applied a stages approach to interpreting the revolution, albeit with slight modifications for the peripheral character of Mexican society. The character of the Revolution was derived from the needs to move from the (quasi-) feudal and foreign dominated stage to a national capitalist stage. And the roles of the class actors were seen within this common project - conflicts, alliances, betrayals within a revolution.

This view presumed that all societies had to pass from feudalism to capitalism and that the struggle for socialism woud begin only after a period of capitalist development. Mexico was seen as a feudal or semi- feudal and foreign-dominated society. Thus the struggle was to overthrow feudalism and foreign capitalist domination. The struggle was for a bourgeois democratic revolution. The Revolution is thus seen as a single revolution with the participation of different currents and class forces. Problems in the development of the Revolution are seen in terms of betrayals or contradictions within this common Revolution. This mechanistic Marxist approach which saw the Revolution as a kind of violent popular front shares much with the populist view but projects a future stage of development - after the full establishment of national capitalism - when the peoples front will come apart on class lines as workers and peasants struggle for socialism. Thus in some of the populist versions and in these Marxist versions, Cardenismo was seen as continuous with the Revolution of 1910- 1920 and the imagery of Cardenismo and/or of the Popular Front was projected back onto the Revolution. The bitter and violent struggles among

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revolutionary factions were explained in terms of personalistic factors, tactical factors, or programmatic differences within the revolution.

The distinctiveness of Gilly' s approach, like that of Trotsky, is that he rejects the stages approach to the character of the Revolution. While continuing to base his analysis on the role of class forces and class struggle, Gilly uses Trotsky's concept of «combined and uneven development»4 to break with the notion of a single revolution in Mexico. The «law» of combined and uneven development argues that the historical development of later developing nations cannot replicate the same stages as the earlier developed nations because of the uneven and combined way that development takes place, producing particular and new combinations. This approach of Trotsky allows Gilly to depart from the notion of a single revolution and to examine the forces in and dynamics of the Mexican Revolution in terms of how the two revolutions combined: the peasant revolution and the bourgeois revolution. The Revolution is no longer seen as a revolution with rival currents but as rival revolutions, one based on a class not able by itself to create a new society (the peasants) and one based on a weak capitalist class not capable of carrying its revolution through to full fruition. Trotsky, many years earlier, referred to this peculiar character of revolution in third world countries in general and in Mexico specifically. Gilly applied the concept of combined and uneven development to the rival revolutionary projects, the revolutionary process as a whole, as well as to understanding some of the key features of the different classes and actors. This will be discussed in detail in the body of this article.

The book was published at a time when the political and ideological climate was especially receptive to a reinterpretation of the Revolution. The contrast between the promise of the Revolution and the misery and repression of the present had already produced an intellectual disquiet. Against the official ideology that the Revolution was continuing, the idea was raised as to whether the Revolution was dead and, if so, when it had died. The dominant assumption in these discussions remained the idea that there was a single revolution that had or had not been betrayed. On top of this restlessness with the relation between the present reality and the promise of the Revolution came the Mexico City massacre of 1968, the widespread repression afterwards (in which Gilly himself was imprisoned), and the subsequent repressions of 1970. This created an intellectual climate of cynicism and/or puzzlement among many. The old models and explanations did not seem to hold. Perhaps revolution itself or the Mexican Revolution specifically had to be rejected. It was in this moment of intellectual malaise in Mexico, and while a prisoner in Lecumberri Prison, that Gilly wrote his sweeping reinterpretation of the Mexican Revolution. Though it was written before there was a significant monographic basis for a reinterpretation of the Mexican Revolution, it is, nevertheless, an imaginative and dynamic reinterpretation that presents many interesting propositions. The reinterpretation has at its core the notion of two revolutions, a popular, radical and almost socialist revolution, and a bourgeois revolution. To the cynicism and pessimism abounding in Mexico at the time, Gilly's defence of the popular, egalitarian, and radical character of

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the Mexican Revolution offered hope. Gilly offered a basis through which leftist intellectuals could reappropriate the revolutionary heritage. In fact, an important aspect of Gilly' s analysis is the notion that the popular revolution was never totally defeated but lives on in the traditions and some of the institutions of contemporary Mexico. He thus provided an affirmative link of present struggles for change with the heritage of the Revolution.

Gilly directed attention to the popular roots of the Revolution in their own terms and not simply as a basis for the bourgeois-democratic revolution. Attention was also directed to the revolutionary process as a struggle between rival Revolutions with antithetical interests. The story of the Revo- lution, as told by Gilly, also has an epic, heroic, and tragic quality. The peasants of North and South rose up heroically to make their own revolution, albeit incompletely formulated and understood. They approached victory but failed and had to fail because of several factors: they, the peasants as a class, have limitations that, by themselves, they cannot move beyond and which limited their ability to emancipate themselves, to make their own revolution. Secondly, the working class, their natural ally and leader in Gilly' s view, had not developed sufficiently to lead the peasantry in a workers-peasants socialist revolution. And, finally, there were petty- bourgeois and bourgeois movements that were seeking to make a different Revolution and to stop the peasant revolution. But while the peasants could not win neither could the bourgeoisie totally defeat them and build a solidly based capitalist regime. The bourgeoisie was too weak, the radical thrust of the peasant revolution too strong. Thus, Mexico produced a Bona- partism sui generis. But this new Mexican state and capitalist project embodied within its institutions and traditions the contradictions of the two revolutions. In his view, the development of a proletariat and the development of «socialist» states also dramatically enhances the prospects for a new socialist revolution. The popular, the radical revolution is not over! It has been interrupted but it continues to live in the traditions of the people and in some of their institutions - however much corrupted by the state and the bourgeoisie - and will rise again.

Gilly's book thus opened up new perspectives on the Mexican Revolution at a time of great receptivity among Mexican intellectuals. Gilly' s book was perhaps the most important attack on the mechanistic Marxist views and the single revolution premise. The historical impact of Gilly' s book, its continuing influence, the suggestiveness and imaginativeness of its approach, make it warrant a detailed and critical examination. And, if much of what follows is sharply critical of Gilly's interpretation, its heu- ristic value and continued suggestiveness should be acknowledged.

An Overview of Gilly's Interpretation.

The Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 was, in Gilly's view, a combined revolution (or 2 revolutions): one was a bourgeois/petty -bourgeois revolution against the old regime, the other an independent peasant revolution neither capable of completing its revolution nor able to be completely

6



defeated. This combined revolution took place against a basically bourgeois dictatorial regime based on the old bourgeoisie ( hacendados and export capital). The revolutionary fraction of the bourgeoisie is never clearly delineated in terms of its economic basis. The closest that Gilly come to delineating them is to describe them as hacendados who have become industrialists without giving up their ties to the land (the model seems to be the Madero family). Gilly neither makes clear their class/ economic identity nor how their interests are differentiated from the old bourgeoisie. He does, however, present a clear political identity for this revolutionary fraction of the bourgeoisie - they are the bourgeois base of the Madero and Carranza revolts, which Gilly sees as continuous in program, goals, and class base. The radical nationalist petty -bourgeoisie appears, in Gilly' s analysis, in all the camps as well as having its own clear political expression in the Obregonistas. They appear as political repre- sentatives and officials in the Zapatista camp, as the radical jacobin wing of the Carrancistas, and most importantly and independently as the Obre- gonistas. The peasant revolt is seen by Gilly as a national revolt of peasants for land which has its most advanced military expression in Villa's Army of the North and its most advanced political expression in the Commune of Morelos, the political-economic revolution carried out by the Zapatistas.

The peasant category of Gilly is really a broad peasant/rural proletarian category, or perhaps, could best be called the rural masses. As will be discussed below, he sees these different sectors of the rural masses unified in interests, organization, and even sometimes within the same people, occupying dual roles. The urban proletariat is seen as playing a secondary role, as being relatively weak in an objective sense as well as playing a secondary role politically. The proletariat is most significant in Gilly' s analysis in its absence, rather than its specific historical presence. As is clear from the above, Gilly' s key actors are whole classes or major class fractions rooted in fairly clear economic and political interests.

The relative simultaneity of the bourgeois and independent peasant revolution makes the struggle between bourgeois and petty-bourgeois sectors to end the revolution at the stage of political reforms and intact bourgeois state power on the one hand and of the peasants to make a social revolution, on the other hand, the central dynamic of the years after the demise of Diaz. The key differentiating characteristic for Gilly between the Mexican Revolution and other bourgeois revolutions that base themselves on the peasantry is the independent military and political organization of the peasantry. The military and political independence and intransigeance of the Zapatistas makes it impossible for the bourgeois revolution to consolidate itself on «classic» bourgeois grounds, on its own social bases, and gives encouragement to the peasants in revolt throughout the nation. The military independence of the Villista armies, seen as peasant armies with peasant leadership expressing peasant interests in an amorphous way, also made it impossible to consolidate the revolution within classic bourgeois bounds. The Zapatista revolt and the strength of the Villista armies are seen as reflections, as well as inspirations, to the nation-wide peasant revolution that is taking place in those years. Gilly attributes great signif-

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icance to the destruction of the old army and the occupation of Mexico City by the peasant armies of Villa and Zapata.

This peasant revolution was never defeated nor was it capable of defini- tively triumphing because of the absence of a revolutionary proletariat and the limits of peasant potential for self organization and consciousness as a revolutionary class. Attempts to totally defeat it and rebuild a solid bourgeois power base (reestablishing links between the «new bourgeoisie» - to be discussed further below - and the old bourgeoisie), such as those by Madero and Carranza later failed because of the persistence of the peasant revolt, and to a lesser degree, because of working class insurgency, albeit with limited goals. This stalemate between a peasantry not capable of completing its own revolution on a national scale and a bourgeoisie not capable of consolidating a social counter-revolution was the terrain for the emergence of Mexico's special Bonapartism. This Bonapartism, most exemplified in the political-military-social strategies of Obregon was not only based on this stalemate and on the peasantry, it also had its own class roots in the «new bourgeoisie» that emerged from the revolution and in sectors of the petty bourgeoisie. (The new bourgeoisie refers not to the oppositional sectors of the bourgeoisie that supported Madero and Carran- za, but to the stratum that moved into bourgeois wealth, property and status through manipulation of its political-military connections, a class formation so widely described in the literature on the Mexican Revolution). Though some of this new bourgeoisie fused with segments of the old bourgeoisie, it and its Bonapartist representative were opposed to any renewal of power of the former dominant class. This new bourgeoisie/Bonapartist regime based itself on mass organizations of the peasants and workers, mass organizations whose structure and goals it sought to control, contain and in the process deformed, but without which, it would not have been able to stand up to the combined counter-revolutionary pressures of the old bourgeoisie and U.S. imperialism. Thus the power base of this new regime both reflected the stalemate of the revolution and sought to perpetuate it.

However, in Gilly's view, the revolution was not defeated but interrupted with partial successes. Gilly shares the standard view that many of the ideas of the more radical losers (the Convention, the Zapatistas and Villis- tas) were incorporated in the program of the winners through the triumph of the Jacobin tendency of the Constitutional Congress and, later, through Cardenismo. This petty-bourgeois radical, nationalist currents were the political vehicles for the partial fulfillment of the tremendous and omni- present peasant revolution from below. Gilly's basis for seeing the revolution interrupted rather than completed with partial fulfillment, partial failure, is based on several key premises. The first is the idea that the regime is still not consolidated into a new class-state. This is based on the idea that the regime was not able to establish its own foudations but was compelled to rely on the existence and support of mass organizations of peasants and workers, a situation that was and is basically unstable, in his view. The notion that a stable capitalist regime has its own class bases underlies this premise. Secondly, the revolution is interrupted in that the goals of the peasants and workers, but especially the peasants, remain

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unfulfilled or only partially fulfilled, goals that Gilly sees in terms of his concept of «empirical anticapitalism,» i.e. having an inherent tendency to go beyond the bounds of capitalism and towards a workers revolution and socialist society. Finally, and closely connected to this latter premise, is the location of the Mexican Revolution at the world-historic stage between the decline of capitalism and rise of socialism and seeing it in a quite teleolog- ical manner as interrupted in its drive towards socialism just as the working class and peasantry of the world have been so interrupted.

But there is another important aspect of Gilly's case for the notion of an interrupted revolution that will be resumed rather than a revolution that has been consolidated (though with its own contradictions which will lead to a new revolution that will emerge at a later point). This aspect is based in the continuing living legacy of the revolution that persists in the present in Mexican society and has both institutional and ideological bases and ex- pressions. Gilly's emphasis is on the ideological expression, the revolutionary traditions of the Mexican people, the fact that the Mexican people see their goals as unfinished, distorted, denied, and see the continuation of the revolution as necessary and desirable. Even though the Mexican people continue to hold these views only in an empirically anti-capitalist way (rather that as an explicated anti-capitalist ideology), these traditions now exist in a new context, a new historical stage where there exists a number of workers' states (in Gilly's words and conception). Secondly, nationalized industries, mass trade unions and mass peasant organizations provide an ongoing institutional basis for the renewal of this interrupted revolution. These institutional legacies of the revolution, which, in Gilly's view, the regime can not destroy, will be the basis of the renewal of the revolution. The nationalized industries are apparently seen both as an enclave that can/will be expanded at the next revolutionary upsurge and as a step towards socialism (although he clearly points out the contradictory character of nationalization, as a manner of subsidizing the private sector under capitalism but also as a precedent or starting plateau for the spread of nationalization). The mass peasant organizations and mass workers organizations (unions), however deformed they are at present, are seen as legacies for the masses that have been temporarily appropriated from them by charros 5 and opportunists but will be recaptured and be the basis for the renewal of the interrupted revolution. There is a clear ancestral line in Gilly' s view from the peasant revolution of Villa/Zapata, to its partial fulfillment and partial distortion in the Constitution of 1917, to Obregonismo, and much more so to Cardenismo, and finally to its transformation into an explicitly socialist revolutionary perspective in the next stage of the revolution. He sees the potential for transformation in the emergent socialist, revolutionary potential of the working class and the formation by it of a revolutionary socialist workers party to lead the working class and the peasant masses. But, interestingly, he also derives it from the radical transformátory potential of the nationalist section of the petty -bourgeoisie, with its Mugica-Cardenista antecedents and its material base in the nationalized sector.

The above is an attempt at a very general overview of the major dyna-

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mies, outcomes, and forces, of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 as seen by Adolfo Gilly. It is necessary now to examine some aspects of this interpretation in more specific terms, and finally to critically examine his premises and analysis at a number of points. We will now examine more specifically some key aspects of his analysis.

The Character of the Old Regime and Its Vulnerability.

Gilly 's discussion of the old regime is very limited and does not provide a developed basis for understanding the basic cleavages and vulnerability of the regime and the manner in which Mexico's particular combined and uneven developed forged the classes and actors that would or could play a role in the Revolution. It is not in focus (quality aside) similar to Trotsky's chapter 1, «The Peculiarities of Russian Development», in The History of the Russian Revolution , that provides a macro-historical basis for understanding the presence or absence of different historical actors (classes) and, consequently, why certain revolutionary sequences were not possible (bourgeois-democratic revolution) and others necessary (permanent revolution).

Gilly does mention briefly the combined character of Mexican capitalist development, i.e. the combination of primitive accumulation and capitalist accumulation, processes separated in time in European development. And this combination produced, in his view, a peasant class that was doubly exploited and that combined characteristics of free labour and forced labour, of proletariat and traditional village peasantry. This is a very important aspect of combined development that is central in Gilly* s understanding of the peasant revolution in Mexico and, most especially, of the Zapatista movement, as we will examine later. But beyond this aspect, there is no serious discussion of the «peculiarities of Mexican development» (to use Trotsky's term).

There is no discussion of the character of the Mexican state during the Porfiriato (1876-1910) nor of the bourgeoisie or foreign capital. The oppositional bourgeoisie is described, almost in passing, as industrial with continued links to land. And the petty -bourgeoisie receives very little attention. A description of the objective classes is absent, and therefore of the presence or absence of different class forces that could have played a role in the revolution. And there is no development of the basis of class rule and state power beyond the implied ones of economic and political coer- cion. The cleavages between the different sections of the bourgeoisie are implicitly presented as economic cleavages, but why they lead to a fundamental conflict over power is not explained. The whole question of the ruling bloc and its vulnerability is left in the dark.

Thus there is really no treatment of the Diaz regime or the 1910 revolution at the political and ideological level, as either a crisis of succession and/or an organic crisis of the state, and/or a crisis of rival capitalist projects. Rather, what Gilly presents, is the class crisis (the workers and peasants versus the bourgeoisie and dictatorship) and the unexplained conflict between the two fractions of the bourgeoisie. But if these class-

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economic cleavages, the repressive character of the regime, and the anni- hilative assault on «damaged but intact»6 peasant communities, alone could explain the Mexican Revolution, then revolution throughout Latin America should have taken place. Gilly has described what may be the necessary conditions for revolution and a source of peasant strength in resistance but not what translated these oppressive conditions into a mass revolution in Mexico and nowhere else in Latin America.

There is no discussion at all of the role of ideological hegemony nor is there a serious discussion of intra-bourgeois cleavages. The complexity of these cleavages (as Marx discussed in his writings on France in 1848 and Molina Enriquez from a non-Marxist perspective on the Porfiriato and the Mexican Revolution) 7 is totally absent. And these cleavages, as discussed by Marx regarding 1848, are not simply reducible to economic fractional interests, rather, they also have an expression in the political realm in irreconcilable programmes for political rule. A description of the relationship between the economic interests, the political formulas for rule, (the hegemonic problem) is completely absent in Gilly. This is reflective of a more general problem in his work which will be discussed at greater length later, the problem of economic-class reductionism. Gilly sees the struggles as between conflicting or contradictory interests, between different economic classes, but without examining the complexity of the ideological expression of general class interests (involving hegemonic formulas at an ideological level, implied alliances, modes of legitimation, et cetera). Ideology is simply seen as legitimation for domination or as motivating or expressive force of underlying class interests. It is not treated as an organizing force itself, at least not in relation to the bourgeoisie and its different fractions. Further, the role of competing imperialist interests and projects which became confounded, with different fractional class interests and different projects of domination is totally omitted.

The above critique is not meant to imply that Gilly could have answered all these questions at the time of the writing of his book, while in prison, nor even at the time of his 1983-published writings on the Mexican Revolu- tion. The answer to these questions is very complex, difficult, and requires much more specific historical research upon which to build. The critique of Gilly is that he doesn't pose these questions, that he doesn't pose the questions that Trotsky sought to answer in his 1st chapter of The History of the Russian Revolution . «The Peculiarities of Russia's Development» provides us with a roster, a list of the players and a list of the absent players. That roster is explained in terms of the sweep of Russia's historical development. It allows us to see the potential role and combination of different actors. Gilly does not provide us with even a tentative roster, except in the most limited schematic way. Nor does he provide us with a sense of the ideological glue and alliance formations that characterized the old regime and that weakened or blew apart as a result of revolutionary explosions or whose disintegration opened the possibilities for revolutionary explosions.

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IV. The Struggle Within the Revolution: The Main Currents/Forces.

1. Zapatismo

The most important current in the Mexican Revolution for Gilly was Zapatismo. Gilly devotes two of the ten chapters of his book to Zapatismo and states in a number of places that it was the key to the revolution. He views the Zapatista revolt as the most concentrated and most politically advanced within the national peasant revolt but he does not view it as local exceptionalism. He feels that it contained many of the key dynamics and limitations of the revolt nationally as well as the seeds of an anti-capitalist, socialist revolution (including a worker-peasant alliance and a new form of state, i.e., of a workers' state). The importance of the Zapatista movement then lies in its dynamic character, its independence, the class alliance of which it was composed, its embryonic state form and social revolutionary content, all of which prevented the stabilization of the revolution as simply a change of bourgeois personnel. The Zapatista revolution drew strength, in Gilly* s view, from the national revolution as well as giving this national revolution inspiration and greater possibilities. The radical character of the Zapatista revolution came from the objective clash between the peasant needs for land and traditions of local democracy and the intransigeance of the various bourgeois regimes intent on destroying Zapatismo. We will now examine these various aspects in more detail.

Gilly's analysis of Zapatismo draws largely on the work of John Womack but, as Gilly says, some of the interpretations differ. Gilly sees the particular character of combined development in Morelos as having forged a relative homogeneity of interests between the rural workers of the haciendas and the free villagers. The assault of the capitalist haciendas on the villagers forced many of them to become part-time or full-time peons (hacienda labourers), while, however, still maintaining links to the villages. He mentions three sections of the rural masses: full-time peons (wage labourers), free villagers, and people who combine both roles (who we shall call mixed-types). The mixed-types and the peons not long from the status of free villagers provide unifying links within the rural masses. Further, in Gilly's view, the traditional village organization, «damaged but intact», provided the organizational basis for the revolution of the villagers and the peons. The village played this organizational role for the salaried hacienda workers because the absence of unions (prohibited and repressed in the Porfiriato) meant that it was the only available organizational center. But it was the existence of sugar mills and a sugar proletariat that was a crucially important influence on the Zapatista village-based movement in promoting centralization of the struggle and bringing in socialist ideas. Thus this coexistence or combination of modern capitalist sugar planta- tions and mills with residual peasant villages produced a special combination that Gilly views as the essence of the «Morelos Commune» (his term) or Zapatismo:

The revolution of the South was based on an original and unique combination, of the agricultural and industrial proletariat of the sugar mills

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with the peasant revolution based on the traditional social organization of the pueblos, coming from the ancient agrarian community. 8

Thus in Gilly's view, «at the scale of Morelos the alliance of workers and peasants was realized empirically, with a disproportionate weight of the peasants. » 9 This is a very provocative thesis: the relative homogeneity of interests and organization of the different rural sectors of Morelos in the revolution. Gilly only presents us with two bits of interesting but circum- stantial evidence. One is that a number of the Zapatista leaders were rural workers and secondly, that among the earliest demands of the Zapatistas was the demand for a minimum wage for the salaried workers on the haciendas. A more detailed study of the interior of the Zapatista movement is needed to comment further on the relations within the rural masses of Morelos in the revolution in its different phases and aspects.

Gilly spends a large amount of time discussing the radical character of the «Morelos Commune». He sees the radical impulse as coming from below, from the peasants themselves, and not from the petty -bourgeois strata of officials that came to be associated with the Zapatista apparatus. The radical character of the Morelos revolution was rooted in several things: a) the new state form that was established - an armed people and local democracy (this fulfills Gilly's key defining characteristic of revolution: the violent emergence of the masses into politics with their own demands); b) the intransigeant independence of the Zapatistas, the refusal to lay down arms and disband their armies until their basic demands were met; c) the fundamental demand for land. These demands, in Gilly* s view, contradicted any attempt to establish bourgeois order (Madero, Huerta, Carranza) and, therefore, the revolutionary war continued. He points out that these demands, these actions, these organizational structures, developed both from traditions (village democracy) and from the exigencies and dynamics of the struggle, and not from an ideological or programmatic conception of creating a new kind of society or state beyond capitalism and the capitalist state. However, according to Gilly, these dynamics and these exigencies propelled the movement in an empirically anti-capitalist and socialist direction, which had its most radical legal expression in the agrarian reform laws put forward by Palafox but which also had numerous expression in the practice of the people. However, Gilly feels that the Zapatistas, as any peasant revolutionary movement, could not generate a national revolutionary perspective themselves. Gilly cites Lenin in the traditional Marxist view that the peasant revolution must inevitably fall to the ideology of capitalism, or that of socialism, to the leadership of the proletariat or to that of the bourgeoisie or petty-bourgeoisie. The absence of a proletariat of significance and of a revolutionary party of the proletariat eliminated one of the two possibilities. But the radical independence of the Zapatistas and their empirical anti-capitalism made it difficult to arrive at the second alternative, however inevitable it may have been. As we will see after discussing the Villista movement, the failure of the peasant revolution is seen by Gilly as due to the inherent limits of the peasantry as a revolutionary class.

The relationship between the petty-bourgeois intellectual in the Zapata

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movement, the Zapata military-political leadership and the mass base warrants a brief comment. Gilly goes to some polemical lengths to insist that the radical thrust of the Zapatistas came from the peasants below and was best represented by Zapata himself. Whereas in his view, the petty- bourgeois intellectuals that served as Zapatista officials were, because of their class character, more unreliable, more vacillating, less revolutionary, though they themselves were divided into more radical and more concilia- tory currents. But Gilly does not demonstrate this; he asserts it and bases it on the congruity of the radical thrusts of Zapatismo with the (imputed) interests of the peasant class. The possible role of different petty -bourgeoisie intellectuals (school-teachers, etc.) as organic intellectuals of the peasants, as potentially radicalizing influences, is sharply dismissed.

Another area of Gilly 's analysis of Zapatismo worth further exploration is his proposition on the relative homogeneity and unity within the movement. Gilly's premise is basically the same as that of Womack, that there were no significant fractional or class divisions within the Zapatista movement. Perhaps. Or perhaps these divisions, if they existed, didn't have time to mature. But certainly, the class situation of the rural peon, the mixed-type, and the petty -bourgeois free villager are not the same. If these fractional or class divisions were over-ridden, the question is what were the ideological, programmatic, or social mechanisms through which they were overridden. And might not these issues, these potential or actual problems of unity and heterogeneity, express themselves differently at different moments (ascending, consolidating, descending) of the revolutionary period? Gilly talks about these different moments and makes some suggestive remarks about their effect on the petty-bourgeois leadership elements and, in general, on fighting capacity, but offers no discussion of their possibly differential influences within the Zapatista mass base. Again, here, the criticism is not that Gilly failed to answer questions for which a much more detailed historical base is necessary but that he didn't pose the questions or presumed the answers. In terms of the unity or divergence within the Zapatista base, Gilly, relying on Womack in part, makes a populist assumption: that the divisions were not significant, that it was the people (rural masses, campesinos) against the bourgeoisie and in some tension/conflict with petty -bourgeois elements.

2. Villismo

Gilly sees both the strengths and weaknesses of the Villista movement flowing from its class character. The Villista movement, in his view, was a movement of a peasantry in revolt throughout northern Mexico. This peasantry produced a genuine peasant army whose chief leader, Villa, was also a peasant. This land hungry peasantry carried out a fight for land but the limitations of the peasant class in developing their own consciousness and organization created limits to their struggle: the Villistas never came to formulate an explicit land reform program. Similarly, the militance of this peasant revolt is offered as the explanation for the military independence of the Villistas but the class limitations of the peasantry is proposed as the

14



explanation for their failure to develop political independence from the bourgeoisie. Gilly attributes this combination of military independence but lack of political independence from the bourgeoisie to a class need but a class need only felt in a confused manner. 10

The use of the notion of a confusedly felt class need by the peasantry to explain military independence and lack of political independence is a good example of Gilly' s resort to a kind of mystical class determinism without specifying, or even suggesting, the intervening mechanisms at a political, social, or military level through which this confusedly felt class need expressed and articulated itself as a practice of increasing military independence. And, conversely, why other sections of the peasantry (e.g., those that supported the Constitutionalists) did not feel this or did not have their feelings reach such an organizational expression.

The peasant character of the base and the leadership of the Villista army is emphasized by Gilly. Their lack of political independence from the bourgeoisie is not because bourgeois elements are in key positions but because of the class limitations of the peasantry and the absence of a proletarian alternative. Gilly' s view that the Zapatistas and the Villistas represented the peasant revolution, albeit in different ways, is summed up in this sentence:

The Division of the North was the military form of the power of the campesino masses as Zapatismo was above all its social form. 11 This intriguing sentence warrants some exploration in terms of Gilly's

conception of the political/social/military representation or mediation of class interests. He seems to be saying that the objective class interests of the peasants would best be served by, or perhaps have achieved their highest expression in, the military organization of the Villistas and the social programme of the Zapatistas. But why didn't the Villistas develop a social-economic program and the Zapatistas a different, more centralized form of military structure. Gilly explains the latter by the specific characteristics of the Zapatista forces, their ties to their local communities, their character as guerilla-farmers. Presumably, they were not able to supercede this because of the limitations of the class perspective of the peasantry. «The limitations of the peasantry as a class» is used to explain the absence of a program on the part of the Villistas and the absence of a more effective, centralized military organization on the part of the Zapatistas. But, as the Villistas did develop a centralized military structure and the Zapatistas did develop a social -economic program, (albeit not wholly adequate from a Marxist perspective), the class limitations of the peasantry is not a suffi- cient explanation. There are several possible ways out of this explanatory impasse. One way is to say that the class limitations made unlikely or difficult the achievement of either centralized military organization or socio-economic programme but that other intervening conditions or actors allowed these limitations to be at least partially overcome in some cases. This solution would then direct attention to the question of political leadership, either from within or outside the class, or to questions of intervening social/economic/political organization that had an important effect, or to differences in the specific character of the broadly defined peasant base of

15



the Villistas and Zapatistas. But Gilly does not pay careful attention to the specific characteristics of the Villista military, social, and political organization, though he does to that of the Zapatistas. More on this below. The other way out would be to consider that the Villistas were not simply, if at all, a peasant army (though many of the troops were peasants as were the troops of all the armies, including the Constitutionalists). But this would violate a fundamental and unsubstantiated premise of Gilly's whole interpretation, that of a national peasant revolution with different kinds of expression in different areas.

Another disturbing aspect of Gilly' s inattentiveness to organization, to the mediation between the class base in itself and its political and/or military expression in specific organization or program, is his treatment of Villa as the unifying factor of the Villista movement (given the absence of a program). This is an interesting proposition and Villa may certainly have played the kind of unifying, symbolic role that Gilly attributes to him. But we are given no exploration of the possible implications of this characteristic for understanding the class character and class dynamics of the Villis- ta movement. There is no discussion, no questions posed, of the relationship between the mass base of the Villista movement, various levels of leadership and Villa himself. It is as if Villa somehow represented, reflected, and gave coherence to this mass in revolt in an unmediated manner. Gilly should not be faulted for not answering these questions of organizational and political mediation of class-in-itself interests, for which the primary research has not been done,12 but for not even posing them. But it is not simply a matter of omission, but, rather of commission, or, at least, temptation to commission. For implicit in Gilly's discussion of Villa as the unifying force, as the embodiment of the movement, is a class mystical plebiscitarían model: there is this mass national revolt of the peasants that takes various forms but is taking place from below but given the limitations of this class in revolt and the absence of a working class leadership for it, the revolt becomes embodied, symbolized, unified in the peasant hero-leader. This leaves Gilly open to substitutionist notions, of a revolutionary class without forms of representation being represented by the hero-leader. Gilly makes it obvious that his ideal model of revolution invol- ves revolution from below and self-organization of the revolutionary masses, as in his great praise for the Morelos Commune. But the door is left open, it seems, for a deformed form of class «representation».

We will end our discussion of Villismo here and turn to the institution that seemed to promise to embody and give national form to the national peasant revolution, the Convention, and Gilly' s extremely interesting discussion of it.

3. The Convention

Gilly shares, up to a point, the standard view that the Convention became the representative of the left wing of the Revolution, of the peasant armies of Villa and Zapata, united around the Plan de Ayala. He further shares the view that while the peasant armies of Villa and Zapata lost, the

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Constitutionalists were forced to accept some of the ideas of the losers in order to gain mass support for their war against the Convention forces. And, his description of the events and maneuvering that led up to the Con- vention, its transference from Mexico City to Aguascalientes, is not controversial and we shall skip over it here, except for his interesting proposition on the class meaning of the calling of the Convention.

With this agreement, the whole of the Constitutionalist army, through the signers of the pact, came to openly express their role as «party» and as constituting political organ. The representation of the revolutionary masses, which until now the Carrancista leadership had attempted to invoke, in this pact was assumed by the collectivity of officials of the revolutionary armies of the North. Without ceasing to be a substitution which took advantage of the masses lacking their own organ to express themselves it is at the same time an imposition of the petty-bourgeois democratic military on the centralized and personal type of domination of the bourgeois leadership. It is the distant, very distant manner in which the army expresses the power of the revolution that was shaking the whole country. 13 Thus we had in Gilly's view, a multi-sided struggle of political maneu-

vers and military positioning take place that consisted of the following forces: 1) petty -bourgeois military democracy (the military leaders often referred to as the independents, i.e. Blanco, Obregon, others); 2) the centralized and personalistic bourgeois leadership of Carranza; 3) the peasant army of the North, the Villistas; 4) the peasant army of the South, the Zapatistas. Some of the independents (e.g. Obregon) split from the main body of the Convention and left the Convention with the Carrancistas to join forces with Carranza.

The original and provocative part of Gilly's treatment of the Convention is in his discussion of the relationship between the peasant armies «of» the Convention, (the Villistas and the Zapatistas) and the Convention itself as a type of dual power situation.

On the one hand, Gilly sees the Convention in its Aguascalientes phase (starting in Oct., 1914) as the union of the Villistas and Zapatistas under the banner of the Plan de Ayala. And he sees the high point of this union, the high point of peasant power, when the two peasant armies occupied Mexico City in December, 1914. But, on the other hand, he sees a great gap between the peasant armies that were the base of the Convention and the government of the Convention that emerged. And the gap that Gilly sees is a class gap, a class gap between the peasant revolutionary armies and the petty-bourgeois leadership to whom they gave formal political power. Though the peasant armies occupied Mexico City, they did not really take power. In Gilly's words:

In reality, there is a power vacuum... To exercise power requires a program. To apply a program requires a policy. To carry a policy requires a party. The peasants had none of these things nor could they. 14 The peasants were able to establish a government against the Carranza

government but not their own national power base in permanent form. The Convention government that was installed in the capital indicated that the

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dynamic of the revolution required an organism that expressed peasant political power and although the peasant struggle went beyond and rejected bourgeois limits, the peasants were incapable of creating their own state. Thus the capital itself was characterized by a divided power situation, dominated by two elements: one was the alliance of the peasant leaderships, the other the petty -bourgeois government put in power this alliance. But this petty-bourgeois government had no power base of its own and its authority was not accepted by the peasant armies. It was suspended in the air, a prisoner of the base that put it in nominal power, and with different class interests and perspectives than this base. But the peasant leaderships showed their incapacity to form their own government and policies. This programmatic/political void was symbolized by the famous conversation between Zapata and Villa at their first meeting, after taking Mexico City. They had no perspective for what to do with control of the capital and were more oriented to returning to their regional power bases. While they gave formal political authority to the petty -bourgeois leadership of the Convention, they never for a moment subordinated themselves to the Convention leadership, never gave it real political power and authority. While Gilly at one point refers to the duality of power in Mexico City at the time it is not clear if he really means a dual power situation in the classic sense. 15 It certainly was not a true dual power situation. This divided power situation prevailed within the capital: the peasant leaders and armies were in exclusive power throughout the major part of the country, which was under the control of the Villistas and Zapatistas; but in Mexico City, a nominal government without real power, really suspended in the air, sat as a legitimating facade, as a symbol. This divided power- nominal authority situation coupled with the absence of a program and, especially the absence of any orientation to the problems of the urban masses, led to a political paralysis. Neither the government of the Conven- tion nor the peasant armies took any policy initiatives that could win them popular support in Mexico City or elsewhere. Nor were any forms of popular power set up in this period of peasant power in the capital of Mexico.

This policy paralysis was not only rooted in the divided authority, as Gilly sees it. It was also rooted in the limits both of peasant consciousness and of petty-bourgeois consciousness. 16 While the Convention military forces were clearly in the ascendancy and had a growing momentum in Dec., 1914, their subsequent defeat and demise, especially that of the Vill- istas, was basically due to the disillusionment among the peasant masses in the face of the impotency of its leadership. The mistaken military decisions were also tremendously consequential and also were rooted in military-strategic limitations of the Villista peasant perspective. But the basic cause of the defeat was a change of mood in the masses, a demorali- zation, due to the absence of a program, of decisive policy initiatives. The Convention as a preconstituent or constituent assembly could not answer the two basic questions, where the country should go (programme) and who should lead it. The petty-bourgeois leadership was distrustful of its peasant army base at the same time that it was a prisoner of it. Thus, in the

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real duality of power that existed in the nation, i.e. the duality of power between the coalition of the peasant armies versus the Constitutionalists (a class based division), the petty -bourgeois leadership of the Convention was on the side of the bourgeoisie or petty -bourgeoisie in the Constitution- alist camp and would seek ways to ally with it and subvert its own base, by which it was imprisoned.

Gilly's analysis of the class dynamics of the Convention, of the relationship between peasant military power and petty-bourgeois government representation is impressive in its dialectical quality. It has a persuasive dynamic sweep and a plausible and tragic denouement. The peasant masses/class reach the pinnacle of power but by their inherent class limitations, they must fall, unwind, be defeated. But having reached that pinnacle, the fact of peasant armies taking Mexico City, they have left a living revolutionary legacy that can never be undone. And, further, some of the programmatic aspects of the Convention, some of the original demands of the peasants, had to be incorporated into their own program by the Constitutionalists; thus not only was a symbolic victory gained, but a very significant partial victory had been achieved.

There are, however, a number of fundamental problems with Gilly's analysis as well as questions that need further consideration. While some of the dynamics of the relationship between the armies of the peasantry and the Convention are indicated in a useful way, some of the underlying dynamics Gilly poses are more than dubious because of premises he makes about class forces and errors he makes about the Convention. We will skip over the very debatable issue as to whether, in fact, one can or should refer to the Villista forces as a peasant army (see our discussion of this on pp. 27-28 of the conclusion).

The first issue is the myth of programmatic agreement between the Vill- istas and the Zapatistas. This is a key premise in the standard notion that there was an effective alliance of peasant movements sharing the common goal of land. While the Villista forces gave lip service to the Plan of Ayala, or at least to some parts of this in order to forge an alliance with the Zapa- tistas, there was not programmatic agreement between the Villistas and the Zapatistas, even on the land question. 17 Gilly, in his most recent article on the Revolution, acknowledges that the Villistas had a moderate or even conservative wing at the Convention as well as that the Villistas were fairly heterogeneous but this does not lead him to qualify his basic analysis of them. Gilly gives the impression that the Zapatista delegates were peasants themselves. In fact, they tended to be petty -bourgeois intellectuals. 18

Gilly speaks of the peasantry as putting these petty -bourgeois elements in power. There are serious problems of interpretation in this proposition in addition to the class character of the Villistas and the fact that only nominal and not real power was given to the Convention leadership. Gilly again explains things by global class characteristics withoug developing the intervening processes or mechanisms. Thus the limits of the peasants as a class led them to give nominal power to these petty-bourgeois elements. But what we really need to know is exactly who, with what power

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and class base and for what reasons decided to give nominal power to these elements and to evaluate whether this outcome resulted in some direct or indirect way from the class political limitations of the peasantry or can be better explained from a different perspective or at a different level. Rather than a peasant class inability to govern themselves, the selection of the Convention leadership might be seen as a compromise, as a reflection not of programmatic unity but the inability of the Zapatistas and Villistas to unite because of programmatic differences, as well as limited perspectives. In this situation of programmatic differences, bitter policy debates, and lack of a national program, the selection of a leadership that did not represent either of the two major forces and was not alloted any real power might make a good deal of sense. This proposition is not meant to deny the limitations of the perspectives of the Villistas and the Zapatistas, but rather to suggest an alternate level of analysis. This restricted perspective and absence of a national programme limited the possibility of organic unity between the revolutionary forces while, at the same time, it perhaps made possible the achievement of a superficial, tenuous unity, which would have been blown apart by the programmatic differences that did exist within the Villistas and between them and the Zapatistas. Thus, while Gilly's analysis of the class-political dynamics of the Convention is impressive, some of its key premises and understandings are built on a model of class forces that does not fit the Mexican reality that it seeks to explain. But, again, a key problem is his failure to analyse the intervening political processes and to show that the political forces, are, in fact, rooted in the class bases he suggests.

4. The Constitutionalists

Gilly discusses three main currents among the Consitutionalist forces. One is the political tendency headed by Carranza which Gilly sees as continuous with Madero and whose project was the re-establishment of a solidly based bourgeois regime and the liquidation of the peasant revolution. The second is a petty -bourgeois radical nationalist tendency within the Carrancista ranks which is both in favor of significant social change and land reform and sees these reforms as necessary to win mass support. The third tendency is also a petty-bourgeois tendency, headed by Obregon. The distinctive characteristic of this third tendency was its frequent role as mediator between the first two tendencies and between the Constitu- tionalists and the masses. The radical nationalist petty -bourgeoisie, while often in conflict with Carranza over land reform and other social changes basically supported the Constitutionalist project but wanted to modify it. The persistent challenge from the Zapatistas and the radicalizing/mobi- lizing dynamic of the struggle with the Villistas strengthened the hand of the Jacobin wing to promote major popular reforms. Carranza, who had consistently opposed such reforms, had to acquiesce in them when the Constitutionalists were militarily and politically weak. Obregon carried out highly dramatic policies in Mexico City to aid the poor at the visible ex- pense of the rich and powerful and also forged an alliance with a section of

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the labour movement, alloweing them to organize in Constitutionalist terri- tories in exchange for military and political support from workers. The pressure from the peasant revolution thus strengthened the hand of the Ja- cobin tendency (left-wing within the Carrancistas) and the Obregonista-Bo- napartist tendency. This was demonstrated at the Constitutional Congress where the Jacobins, with support from the center, triumphed over the Carranza tendency and placed many important social reforms in the Cons- titution. Carranza, as the first post-Constitution President (and with Villa defeated) sought to re-establish a solid bourgeois basis for the regime by re-creating links with old sections of the bourgeoisie and carrying out very anti-labour and anti-peasant policies. He completely isolated himself - from peasants, workers, radical petty -bourgeoisie, military leaders, et cetera and was replaced in a coup, which was followed by the election of Obregón in 1920. Obregon set up what became the Mexican Bonapartist formula for rule. Much of the above account is consistent with a number of other analyses. The comments that we wish to make here are not to challenge the story line and roster of actors presented by Gilly in relation to the Constitutionalists but to raise some questions about the meanings he attributes to some of the actors.

The first question is the class basis of the three tendencies. Carranza is described as representing the bourgeois option and as being nationalist. But we are not presented with any clear picture of what bourgeois fraction Carranza represented or whether in some sense he represented the bourgeoisie as a whole. And when the Jacobins and the Obregonistas are discussed, they are discussed as petty -bourgeois in terms of the social composition of the leadership and/or programmatic positions they take. But what is their wider social base and the composition of their armies? At one point Gilly refers to Obregon' s army as also being peasant based. In fact, all of the armies are primarily peasant-based; the question therefore is, what defines some as peasant armies (Villa's) and others as representing the bourgeoisie/and petty -bourgeoisie? There seem to be two differentiating things, in Gilly view. One is that the Villista forces are said to be carrying out a land reform, in fact a peasant revolution, though without a program stating such. The other is that Villa and many of the other leaders are peasants.

Gilly' s interpretation of the Constitutional Congress is standard and draws in part on the interpretation of Frank Tannenbaum. This standard interpretation of the constituyente in our view exaggerates the radicalism of the Jacobins and underestimates the role of the Carrancistas, perhaps quite independent of Carranza, in forging what we have called elsewhere the project of nationalist corporate liberalism (the project for a state- guided capitalist development, a different political strategy for a modified path of capitalist development). 19

V. The Post-Revolutionary Regime.

Our concern in this paper has been with Gilly' s interpretation of the Mexican Revolution from 1910-1920. Gilly devotes the last two chapters of

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his book to the advent of Obregonismo and to Cardenismo. The Obregon regime and formula and then the Cárdenas regime and formula represent both the continuation of the revolution and its containment. The Obregon regime is a Bonapartist regime based in part on mass organizations of workers and peasants. The Obregon regime made concessions, co-opted and contained the revolution within bourgeois limits. These developments are considerably deepened and radicalized in the Cárdenas period. For Gilly sees Cárdenas' rise to power in 1934 as the rise to power of the Jacobin faction of the petty-bourgeoisie. Thus there is a line of continuity in his analysis from the petty -bourgeois radicals of the Carrancistas (Mugica) to the Constitutional Congress to the Obregon regime to the Cárdenas regime. There are frequent attempts to restore the bourgeois regime on its own bases, to dismantle the organizations and gains of the masses but these fail each time. It is beyond the scope of this article to develop at length Gilly's interesting discussion of the period from 1920 to 1940 presented in the last two chapters of his book. We plan to deal with that elsewhere in a discussion of Bonapartist and other conceptions of the (post)-revolutionary state in Mexico.

VI. Critique.

Gilly' s interpretation of the Mexican Revolution can be seen as a combination of the old populist interpretations with aspects of a Marxist, and specifically, of a Trotskyist approach. The struggle was between the people, mainly the relatively homogeneous peasantry, workers, and in a more ambiguous and vacillating way, the petty -bourgeoisie, against the bourgeoisie (who receive very little delineation). Gilly' s broad category of the peasantry is similar to that used by other writers on the Mexican Revolu- tion or the equivalent populist view of «Indians». Though Gilly does discuss, in passing, differentiation within the rural masses, it is basically in the context of affirming a fundamental unity of interests within this category. Gilly's interpretation is also within this old liberal-populist tradition in affirming that the ideas of the vanquished were partially triumphant in the program of the winners, and therefore the revolution was partially triumphant. Gilly also shares the standard populist view of the revolution as continuing forward and reaching a peak of fulfillment in the Cárdenas period.

While Gilly shares the above features with some of the old populist interpretations, and in fact seems heavily influenced by them, his interpretation is not simply a populist interpretation. For outside the vast category of the peasantry, Gilly does see different classes with different interests and projects struggling to control, contain, expand, define the revolution. And he presents the dynamics and contradictions of the revolution in terms of class struggle. He also makes a very strong case for the limitations of the possibility of a peasant revolution in the absence of working class leadership. Gilly inherits and transmits the old populist analysis and approach in his treatment of the peasant forces versus the bourgeoisie, whereas, in his treatment of societal-wide dynamics, he

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presents a Marxist schema. In fact, Gilly can be said to combine the old populist image of the Mexican Revolution (albeit critically in terms of the limits of a peasant revolution) with categories and actors derived from an abstract Marxist-Trotskyist image of the character of bourgeois and proletarian revolution. He presents a number of provocative hypotheses through this combining of two contrasting images. However, both images, while useful and provocative, have serious problems in their applicability to the concrete Mexican case.

We have already criticized some aspects of Gilly's interpretation of the Revolution. We will sum up some of our major criticisms here, reserving for later our critique of his most distinctive contribution, the notion of «the interrupted revolution». Briefly, here are some of our main criticisms: 1) The crisis of the old regime and of the different bourgeois fractions has to be specified in political and class terms not only to understand the collapse/overthrow of the old regime, but to understand who this bourgeoisie was that continued to play a leading role in the revolution (the base of Madero and Carranza, according to Gilly). 2) Greater attentiveness and specificity has to be given to the regionally varied agrarian class structures of Mexico. Gilly' s account of a national peasant revolution presumes a national land hungry peasantry. But, if, in fact, as we believe, Mexico had a great variety of agrarian class structures, then the actors, dynamics and meanings of the revolution might prove to be very heterogeneous and varied in general as well as in different phases of the revolution. This would apply more strongly to the Villista movement which seems to have had a much more heterogeneous base than the Zapatistas. 3) Based on this objective picture of point two above, an examination of the social origins of the officers and soldiers, the relations between them, and the practices and programmes of the different armies has to be carried out. Thus we would have to move away from Gilly's global characterization of the Villistas as a peasant army towards a more specific reconstruction of it - and other armies - in their homogeneity or heterogeneity at various levels. 4) A more developed picture of the social bases of the different petty-bourgeois tendencies. 5) A more developed picture of different groups of Mexicans - not simply as class - economic men, but also as citizens/subjects with notions of justice, nationalism, ethnicity, et cetera.

There are two key and interrelated defining characteristics of the continuing/ «interrupted» character of the Mexican Revolution for Gilly: one is the inability of the new regime, of the new bourgeoisie, to establish its own class bases of rule. The other characteristic follows from the first: the new regime must therefore lean on the ongoing mobilization and organization of the workers and peasants. Gilly sees this as a basically unstable situation, at least in the long run. Let us examine each of these two charac- tereristics.

Gilly repeatedly stresses the inability of the new rulers to establish a bourgeois regime on its own bases. He never elaborates this key concept of a bourgeois regime «con bases propias». There is, however, a clearly implied model and that is of a regime not needing to lean on mass, popular organizations. But where has this model existed? Perhaps in the first

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capitalist state in the world (Great Britain), where solid bourgeois hegemony not based on organization of the masses clearly existed in the nineteenth century. And perhaps it can also be seen in the capitalist states that developed in an authoritarian path, the relative late-comers, Germany and Japan of the late 19th century. But why should the model of a capitalist hegemony not based on the masses be viewed as the only fundamentally stable, organic form of capitalist domination? For, of course, the historical timing and world historical context, the so-called law of combined and uneven development, means that bourgeois revolution or the revolutionary rise of a new bourgeois fraction to power will combine in new ways in countries with different historical contexts and with different interior structures and history. Whether this new way of ruling is stable or unstable must be judged in terms of its own character and dynamics and not in terms of how it differs from a «classic» model of bourgeois rule «con bases propias». In fact, a strong argument can be made that all capitalist regimes that do not rely on dictatorship have increasingly moved towards the acceptance and containment of mass organizations as one basis of hegemony. This process was especially true in the crisis of the 1930's and Trotsky pointed this out clearly in his discussions of the incorporation of trade unions. The tremendous mobilization of the Mexican Revolution that Gilly discusses as well as other aspects of the situation meant that the new rulers, the new bourgeoisie, had to build their domination on a different basis than the more orderly unfolding of capitalist dominance in, e.g. Great Britain. But mass mobilization, radical rhetoric and «advanced» legislation do not add up to a non-consolidated regime. They may, and in our view they do, add up to a new mode of consolidation.

This serious flaw in Gilly' s analysis stems, in part at least, from the absence of ideology and hegemony in his discussion of the revolution and the failure to distinguish between organic (fundamental crises of authority) and conjunctural crises (which may involve bitter struggles and mass mobilizations but do not call the legitimacy of the regime into question). The failure to make these distinctions may lead one to see conjunctural crisis and mass mobilizations per se as revolutionary or incipiently so. The peculiar character of the Mexican Revolution and the Mexican regime has to be seen in terms of its specific class and political dynamics and not teleologically as a way station, perhaps a detour, to the socialist revolution. Gilly does see Mexican Bonapartism as a structure/situation sui generis but emphasizes its (imputed) instability. Implied also in his analysis is the notion that any Bonapartism is inherently unstable, transitory, and must resolve itself sooner or later into one or another form of direct class rule.

Gilly sees the situation as one of an unstable equilibrium, at least in the long run, and in this sense, I think he can see the revolutionary project as continuing. Gilly seems not able to see this as a type of «permanent», i.e. fully consolidated regime and type of class power.

But is it not exactly the combined character of the Mexican Revolution that led to this special and advanced form of mobilization/containment that needs to be seen as a peculiar bourgeois revolution rather than as an

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interrupted socialist revolution? Barrington Moore's argument that the French Revolution changed the path of capitalist development from a variant of the Prussian route to a variant of the democratic-bourgeois route20 could be applied to the Mexican case. In fact, Enrique Semo suggests that the Mexican Revolution did just that. 21 Both revolutions had mass intervention, Jacobin wings, the inability of the bourgeoisie to consolidate power on its own bases, and Bonapartism. But does this mean that the revolution continued but was interrupted? French development after the Great Revolution was punctuated with revolutionary uprisings (1830, 1848, 1870) after the original revolution. But, in the Mexican case, there were not major independent revolutionary uprisings; rather, there were massive, contained mobilizations which are quite different and are not a challenge to the hegemony of the bourgeois state but rather to the power and program of particular fractions of the bourgeoisie. Thus there is even less reason to think of the Mexican Revolution as interrupted/non- consolidated than there is to conceive of the Great French Revolution in that manner - other than the world/historical context in which each took place.

Gilly sees state ownership as a step towards socialism and the mass organizations (e.g. unions), however deformed, of the working class and peasantry as a basis for moving forward in the next phase of struggle. While Gilly recognizes the use of state owned industry to promote private capitalist development and of the ejidos to enrich a political elite through financial manipulations, he still sees these institution as also being bases from which the next phase of the revolution will go forward towards socialism. But, the question needs to be asked, how is the Mexican situation different from those situations of state ownership and mass organizations in a stable bourgeois class-dominated regime. The answer from Gilly, I think, would be that the difference lies in the revolutionary way in which these gains were made in Mexico, the revolutionary meanings and traditions surrounding these institutions to this day, and the potential resur- gence of these revolutionary aspects.

In summary, then, we have made a number of criticisms of Gilly* s approach and interpretation of the Mexican Revolution, and, in passing, suggested some alternate lines of interpretation. We have criticized a number of Gilly' s specific historical interpretations, e.g. the programmatic unity of the Zapatistas and Villistas in 1914. We have also questioned whether the Villa army can properly be thought of as a peasant army, and as the military expression of the peasant revolt. But we also have suggested some serious methodological problems in Gilly' s analysis which we will briefly sum up here: 1) a class reductionism which seeks to explain phonomenon at the political- military level by global class attibutes without paying attention to the political and ideological processes as formative causal factors on the manner and/or degree to which classes act as classes and in what specific ways. 2) a too limited and conservative use of Trotsky's concept of the «law of combined and uneven development.» While Gilly does use this concept to seek to explain certain features of Mexico's development, such as the

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unique character of Mexican Bonapartism, he does this while remaining rigidly within the trajectory of the proletarian revolution. 3) a too casual approach to the relationship between mass base and leadership which leaves the door open for anti-democratic plebiscitarían notions of class representation. 4) a too monolithic notion of capitalist domination, i.e. direct class rule as the only really stable form of domination, not allowing Gilly to apprehend the possibilities of hegemonic, stable domination through continuing but contained mobilizations.

VII. Towards an Alternative Interpretation.

The application of the concept of «combined and uneven development» can lead to different conclusions than those arrived at by Gilly. He closely links the concept of combined and uneven development to that of permanent revolution as Trotsky did for Russia. In the case of Russia, the «pecularities of Russia's development» produced a very weak bourgeoisie, a very strong and concentrated urban proletariat arid a very explosive peasantry. The connection in this case between the pattern of development and permanent revolution was clear. There was no bourgeoisie capable of carrying out a bourgeois-democratic revolution, and there was a working class capable of leading a revolution. But, in Trotsky's view, once this proletariat started a revolution, it would not stop at the stage of the bourgeois- democratic revolution. Therefore, the «peculiar» pattern of combined and uneven development of Tsarist Russia meant that the Russian Revolution would move rapidly and uninterruptedly from a bourgeois-democratic revolution to a proletarian revolution.

Gilly presumes that the effect of significant differences in the specific historical combination - at least for the combination of Mexico - does not alter the trajectory of development. Rather Gilly sees the trajectory of permanent revolution maintained but interrupted. It is interrupted because a vital link in its unfolding is missing: the proletariat as a significant force. As the proletariat becomes a strong class, the revolution will resume and be able to fulfill its socialist mission.

It is our contention that the particular character of Mexico's combined and uneven development set the stage for a different range of historic options than that of permanent revolution. The particular pattern of Mexican development and the type of bourgeois revolution against a bourgeois dictatorship produced a new and unique system of domination. The fact that this new ruling class rests its domination, in part, on deformed and controlled organizations of the masses (trade unions, peasant leagues, ejidos) and utilizes revolutionary rhetoric for legitimation does not mean that its rule is not consolidated. It is consolidated but it is a different type of capitalist class and capitalist rule than the patterns of the countries that developed through the capitalist democratic route (e.g. Great Britain) or the capitalist authoritarian route (e.g. Japan and Germany). The internal class structure, the type and level of industrial development, the inter- connection with world capitalism at that time, the Revolution itself, and

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other factors in Mexico's specific combination meant that Mexico would not and could not replicate either the pattern of capitalist development of the two earlier paths or their forms of class domination. The key to understanding the Mexican Revolution, in our view, lies in the emergence of an embryonic ruling class in the petty-bourgeois and bourgeois political leadership whose economic and hegemonic project required it to pioneer new patterns of class formation and class domination. This embryonic ruling class, especially the Sonoran fraction,22 developed as a class economically in conjunction with its political control of the state and can usefully be thought of as «political capitalists». Its hegemonic project and its economic projects developed in an intertwined manner. The specific characteristics of this new ruling class and the exigencies of the revolutionary mobilizations led them to develop their particular and special Mexican path of development and domination.

The Mexican regime that emerged as a result of the Revolution has been described with various labels. Its key ingredients are the following: 1) a relatively autonomous state under the control of a political elite that utilizes its political position to become or enhance its position as capitalists; 2) a vast apparatus of mass organizations and a mass party controlled by this political elite and sub-elites connected with it; 3) severe limitations on the possibility of autonomous organization on the part of workers and peasants, though a certain degree of autonomy is permitted; 4) an ideology that glorifies the Revolution and proclaims the state to be the arbiter of social conflicts and the defender of the nation against foreign economic or political domination. 23 This state/society relationship has been characterized as quasi corporatist, Bonapartist, state capitalist, et cetera. The unique character of the system has made it hard to label. The emergence of this system can be traced from the years of violent revolution through the Cárdenas period. There are old and new sections of the capitalist class that are not integrated into the politically dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie and desire a different mode of rule that would eclipse the power of the political elite and the political capitalists. However, these conflicts, especially after 1940, need to be seen as conflicts within a prevailing, consolidated regime. The post revolutionary regime has lasted over 65 years now without any successful challenges and 44 years since the turn to the right in 1940. This is fairly good evidence that we are dealing with a consolidated regime.

VIII. Conclusion.

Adolfo Gilly's interpretation of the Mexican Revolution remains a valua- ble contribution to our understanding of the Revolution. It had an important impact, especially among leftist intellectuals, in reopening fundamental questions about the character of the Revolution. It greatly increased the familiarity of scholars and intellectuals with Trotsky's approach to revolution in general and especially the concept of «combined and uneven development».

While we have made a number of major and minor criticisms of Gilly's

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interpretation both methodologically and in points of specific character- izations, the field of Mexican Revolution needs to be grateful for this imaginative work of synthesis and interpretation which still is and will continue to be widely read. We also need to admire the example of Gilly who undertook this difficult task of historical interpretation and writing while a political prisoner in Mexico's Lecumberri prison, which, curiously, is now the national archive of Mexico.

FOOTNOTES

1. Adolfo Gilly, La Revolución Interrumpida (Mexico, D. F. ¡Ediciones «El Caballito, »1972).

2. Adolfo Gilly et al., Interpretaciones de la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico y Editorial Nueva Imagen, 1979).

3. Enrique Semo (coordinator), Mexico: un pueblo en la historia (Mexico: Universidad Autonoma de Puebla y Editorial Nueva Imagen, 1983), Volume 2.

4. For some of Trotsky's discussions of combined and uneven development, see Leon Trot- sky, The History of the Russian Revolution (London: Victor Gollancz, 1965), Volume I, Chap- ter I, «The Peculiarities of Russia's Development, » and Appendix I, «To the Chapter Peculiar- ities of Russia's Development . » For a good explication of Trotsky's approach, see Baruch Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), Part I: «The Theory of the Permanent Revolution,» especially Chapter 3, «The Sociology of Backwardness: Combined Development. »

5. Charros literally means cowboys. However, in Mexico, it has come to be the term of opprobrium used to describe corrupt and/or autocratic trade union officials.

6. This is Barrington Moore's phrase. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Ch. 7, «Peasants and Revolution«.

Andrés Molina Enriquez, Esbozo de la Historia de los Primeros Diez Años de la Revolución Agraria de México (México: Talleres Gráficos Del Museo Nacional De Argueología, Historia y Etnografía, 1936).

8. La Revolución Interrumpida , p. 302. Translation mine - R.R.

9. Ibid., p. 305. Translation mine - R.R.

10. «Pero dentro de esta estructura, tuvo en las hechos una creciente independencia militar que era la manifestación de la necesidad de independencia política que subía confusamente de la base campesina de la División del Norte ». Ibid. , p. 87.

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1 1 . Ibid. , p. 100. Translation mine - R.R.

12. Friedrich Katz' research on the Villista movement will be the first major study of this movement based on archival sources. Katz discusses the Villista movement in his book, The Secret War in Mexico (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) and also in his paper, «Agrarian Changes in Northern Mexico in the Period of Villista Rule, 1913-1915 pp. 259-273 in James W. Wilkie, Michael C. Meyer and Edna Monzon de Wilkie (eds.), Contemporary Mexico: Papers of the IV International Congress of Mexican History (Berkeley and Mexico City: University of California Press and El Colegio de Mexico, 1976).

13. La Revolución Interrumpida, p. 108.

14. Ibid., p. 139.

15. Ibid., p. 157.

16. I.e., unless the petty -bourgeoisie were to go through a basic transformation and switch of class allegiance, which Gilly considers a possibility. See Ibid., p. 148 for Gilly 's discussion of this possibility.

17. First of all, while the Zapatistas had a relatively homogeneous base and common outlook, the Villistas were very heterogeneous in their base as well as in their ideological perspectives. My study of the debates at the Convention show substantial differences between the Villista delegates and the Zapatista delegates on a number of socio-economic and political issues (universal suffrage, the right to trade unions and the right to strike), with at least an important group of Villistas taking conservative or reactionary positions. While the delegates from each side may not have represented the full spectrum, nevertheless they at least represented a significant current of thought on each side. See Ch. II, «La Convención», in Richard Roman, Ideología y Clase en la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico: Sepsetentas, 1976) and Luis Fernando Amaya C., La Soberana Convención Revolucionaria 1914-1916 (Mexico: Editorial F. Trillas, 1966). Also, see Friedrich Katz' interesting discussion of the conservative positions of some of the Villistas at the Convention in The Secret War in Mexico pp. 278-9.

18. For Gilly, see La Revolución Interrumpida, p. 135. John Womack, Zapata and the Mexi- can Revolution (N.Y.: A.A. Knopf, 1969), pp. 215-216, points out that the Zapatistas did not send their peasant military leaders to the Convention but rather intellectuals who had joined their movement.

19. Richard Roman, Ideología y Clase en la Revolución Mexicana.

20. Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy , p. 109.

21. Enrique Semo, part 2, «Estudio sobre la lucha de clases», Ch. 4, «La revolución de 1910- 1920: algunos problemas de interpretación», and Ch. 6, «Las revoluciones en la historia de Mexico», in Historia Mexicana: Economia y lucha de clases (Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1978). 22. The petty-bourgeois leadership that became the hegemonic fraction the emergent political bourgeoisie developed in the peculiar frontier conditions of the state of Sonora. It is this Sonora fraction that is of decisive importance in developing the hegemonic strategy. This was a combative petty -bourgeoisie that had a history of fighting wars against the local Indians, of enterprise, of struggling against U.S. domination, of manipulating a combative population of mineworkers and of maneuvering between the discontent of the mine workers and the U.S. economic interests they did not wish to alienate. Thus the peculiar conditions of the Mexican Northwest produced a self-confident petty -bourgeoisie willing and able to utilize mass, armed mobilization for its purposes and operating with considerable flexibility and willingness to grant concessions at times to workers and peasants. See Héctor Aguilar Camin, Ch. 5, «The

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Relevant Tradition: Sonoran Leaders in the Revolution,» in D.A. Brading, ed., Caudillo and Peasant in the Mexican Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

23. Arnaldo Córdova, La Ideología de la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1973); Richard Roman, Ideología y Clase en la Revolución Mexicana.

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