Adolfo Gilly

‘What Exists Cannot Be True’

How would you describe your background and political formation?

I was born in Buenos Aires in 1928. My father was a lawyer, though he had been a lieutenant in the navy before that; my mother was a housewife. My paternal grandfather was an Italian immigrant, with the surname Malvagni. Gilly was my mother’s maiden name, possibly of French origin; I later adopted it as my nom de plume, since in Argentina your mother’s name doesn’t appear on your passport. My first political activity came in 1943, when I joined the local Comité de Gaulle, without really knowing what it was, out of sympathy with the Free French. France always had a large cultural influence on Argentina, and de Gaulle of all the leaders had not surrendered to the invaders. The first political demonstration I went to was to celebrate the liberation of Paris in August 1944, at the age of sixteen. The following year, there was a general strike in Buenos Aires, with mass mobilizations of workers in October that forced the military government to call elections, which the Junta’s Labour minister, Juan Domingo Perón, won in February 1946.

This was a decisive moment in what I would call my ‘sentimental education’. That year I joined the Juventud Socialista, the youth wing of the Socialist Party, and then the Socialist party itself. Together with some other school students, I worked on a party newspaper called Rebeldía (Rebellion), but we had only put out four issues before the leadership closed us down. I left the Socialists in 1947, and joined an organization called the Movimiento Obrero Revolucionario. By the time I turned twenty, I had quit my law studies and got a job as a proof corrector at a publishing house. This was a very particular milieu, because the proofreaders always saw themselves as intellectuals, but underprivileged ones. It was around this time, 1948–49, that I began to live the workers’ movement. In Argentina, this was a movement with a strong socialist and anarchist tradition—largely because of Italian and Spanish immigration into the country, which coincided with the initial wave of worker organization in the 1880s and 1890s. This, by the way, is a feature common to Brazil and Uruguay as well, where anarchists also had a significant presence. These Mediterranean immigrants brought with them a culture that had an anarchist tradition—anarchist and Catholic. Later, I discovered that many features of Peronism, such as the proposal for a general strike in 1945, came from the world of anarchism or anarcho-syndicalism, rather than that of communism or social democracy.

I was increasingly drawn to Trotskyism, and in 1949, two of us in the MOR—Guillermo Almeyra and myself—decided to join the Fourth International. At this point, we had to choose which of three currents within the FI to support. There was one strand which saw Perón as an agent of British imperialism. Braden, the US Ambassador at the time, had made public statements against Perón during the campaign; so posters appeared everywhere saying ‘Braden or Perón’, posing the election in nationalist terms, as a choice between the two. It seems absurd now, but one current in the FI thought that the British were behind all of this. A second strand argued that Perón’s support base was composed of backward masses of newly proletarianized workers. They were like an avalanche that buried the previously existing proletariat, over which the Socialist Party had had an influence in the 1930s. According to this interpretation, these ‘backward masses’ were now following a leader—as if Perón were some sort of snake charmer with a flute.

The third current, which was led by Homero Cristalli—better known under his pseudonym, Juan Posadas—maintained that Perón was a representative of the Argentine industrial bourgeoisie, engaged in a struggle for political power with the old landowning oligarchy, but that his base was a genuine nationalist mass movement.1 The rapid growth of industry during the Second World War had brought large numbers of peasants and artisans into the capital from the interior, effectively creating a new proletariat. This was not the traditional peasantry of a colonial country—they were peasant workers, in a countryside where capitalist relations dominated the large meat- and wheat-exporting haciendas, and small producers descended from European immigrants. When they moved to the city and became industrial workers, they created unions with an impressive mass base. Perón’s popularity rested on a series of laws on holidays, severance pay, pensions, guaranteed rights of organization, holiday resorts. It’s important to have holidays, of course, although it may not seem like a radical change in anyone’s life. But for the Argentine working class that developed during the Second World War, fifteen days’ holiday a year was a real gain; something comparable happened in France in 1936 under the Popular Front. This third current was saying that the workers may have been following a charismatic leader, but they did so for their own reasons. Peronism was the specific form that the organization of the working class took in our country, and we had to understand it.

I joined this third current within the Argentine organizations affiliated to the FI—the one led by Posadas. The world of the Fourth International might now seem like another planet. There were always two elements within it, one focused on revolution in Europe, the other on the colonial world. Both dreams were Trotsky’s, and they cohabited in the FI, but there was always a tension between them. Ernest Mandel and Michel Pablo represented the two visions.2 Mandel, who had been formed in the world of manufacturing and mining in Belgium, was convinced the vector of revolution would be the industrial proletariat. Pablo, whose real name was Michalis Raptis, was born in Alexandria and grew up in Greece, a country with a long history of struggle for national independence; in the 1950s and 1960s he saw the huge upsurge of movements for independence in the colonial world. Ernest would become animated when talking about the German Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg and so on, while Pablo would come alive when telling heroic stories of the Algerian revolution or the war of liberation in Greece; in that sense, he was something of a Balkan conspirator. There were many disagreements between them, because they had such different dreams. But they had warm personal relations all the same. In 1995 I was in Greece to do an interview with Pablo, who called me one afternoon to tell me Mandel had died; he then recorded some very emotional recollections of Ernest, with whom he had argued time and again. This kind of warmth is something social-democratic parties lack, because they are in a sense too secular: they lack devotion to the idea of revolutionary Marxism. Though that phrase has always struck me as a pleonasm—for me it was always a given that any Marxism would have to be revolutionary.

What would you say were the main intellectual influences on you early on?

I came of age in a country that was not in the First World, but was not a peasant country either, which gave it a very particular form. My initial commitment to the revolutionary movement came first—books came afterwards. What I read seemed rather to confirm what my experience and intuition had already been telling me. In fact, I think this is generally the case: one is led towards rebellion by sentiments, not by thoughts. At the end of his statement to the Dewey Commission, Trotsky described being drawn to the workers’ quarters in Nikolayev at the age of eighteen by his ‘faith in reason, in truth, in human solidarity’, not by Marxism. But perhaps the most crucial sentiment is that of justice—the realization that you are not in agreement with this world. There is a story that Ernst Bloch was asked by his supervisor, Georg Simmel, to provide a one-page summary of his thesis before Simmel would agree to work on it. A week later, Bloch obliged with one sentence: ‘What exists cannot be true.’ The thesis later became The Principle of Hope.3 It was this kind of ethical moment that was crucial for me—the discovery that there was a necessary connection between justice and truth.

I remember reading Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed when I was eighteen, but what really brought me to Trotskyism were two articles of his on Lázaro Cárdenas that analysed the post-Revolutionary Mexican government’s continual oscillations between subordination to imperialism and forwarding workers’ interests.4 According to Trotsky, this variation was due to the weakness of the national bourgeoisie, and to the relative power of the proletariat. In his view, cardenismo was a sui generis form of Bonapartism, attempting to raise itself ‘above classes’, and making concessions to the workers in order to secure some room for manoeuvre against foreign capital. I was very struck by the force of Trotsky’s arguments.

If I had to choose a handful of books that made a particular impression, there would be André Breton’s L’amour fou, which I read in 1949, and C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, which I read in French on a train to Bolivia in the late 1950s, as well as his study of Melville, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways. Curiously, when reading Moby Dick some fifteen years earlier I had been struck by the very same sentence from which James took his title. Melville and James are marked by the same refusal of injustice I mentioned earlier. I also found it in José María Arguedas, a Peruvian who wrote an extraordinary autobiographical novel called Los ríos profundos, and in the poetry of another Peruvian, César Vallejo. And of course it’s present in Frantz Fanon. I recall buying Les damnés de la terre in Rome, in a bookshop on the via Veneto on 4 December 1961—I remember the day exactly because I read the book in one sitting, and it made a big impact on me. I discovered Gramsci around the same time, during a stay in Italy. I also read the work of Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti and the group around Quaderni rossi, and of course the writings of Rossana Rossanda, Pietro Ingrao and the leftist tendencies inside the Italian Communist Party.5 I became familiar with Subaltern Studies and the work of Ranajit Guha and Partha Chatterjee in the late 1980s. I only really read Edward Thompson in the 1990s. His Making of the English Working Class and Customs in Common lay a lot of emphasis on the category of experience, which in my view is extremely important to Marxist thought.

Taken together, all of these works have in common a concern with the preoccupations of the people, based on the impulse to understand their world and what motivates them. The reasons why people rise up in revolution are not incidental, they are substantive. In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky writes that the masses didn’t rise up because they were thinking of the future, but because what they were experiencing in the present was intolerable. Walter Benjamin expresses a similar thought in his theses on history. When Guha writes of the ‘autonomous domain’ of the subaltern, and of ways of conducting politics ‘below’ official politics, it comes from his experience as a communist militant in India. In a way, when I wrote on the Mexican Revolution I was concerned with the same phenomena of social life as in Guha’s work, though mine took a more elemental form. Many look at the support for Perón or Cárdenas and say they were Peronists, or Cardenistas. But the parties in question were just the epiphenomenal form taken by the desires of all these people. Parties often think they are the ones organizing and instructing the people on how to mobilize, but that’s not the case—they were the best institutional form for securing particular ends, and the impulse comes from elsewhere, from long years of suffering, from an intolerable reality.

You left Argentina for Bolivia in 1956 at the age of twenty-eight. Could you tell us more about the situation in Bolivia, and the political work you did there?

I went as a member of the FI. I was initially supposed to be there for six months, but ended up staying for four years. I arrived just in time for the April anniversary of the 1952 revolution, and saw the miners’ militias parading through La Paz with their rifles. I was deeply affected by this. Of course, the military was busily rearming itself at the time, but still, the very fact that the miners had kept their weapons meant that the monopoly of legitimate violence had been broken. This made a substantial difference to the balance of forces for some time, creating what was effectively a miners’ territory in the country.

I went to work with a Bolivian Trotskyist group, the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR). It was one of two parties of that name formed by a split in the original Trotskyist core in 1954, over the meaning of mass support for the MNR and its Nationalist union leaders. The division was similar to the Left’s debates over Peronism in Argentina. One of the PORs was led by Hugo González Moscoso and put out a paper called Lucha obrera; it was strong in the mines, among the peasantry and workers in some sectors in La Paz, and sought to understand why the organization of the masses in Bolivia had taken a nationalist political form. The other POR, led by Guillermo Lora, had its base in the mines at Catavi-Siglo xx, and its paper was called Masas. Lora was very critical of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR), and concentrated more on attacking the nationalist leadership. There were also some Trotskyists who held that the masses themselves were nationalist in character, and peeled off to join the MNR—among them such figures as Erwin Moller and Lidia Gueiler, who eventually became Interim President of Bolivia for eight months.

During my stay in Bolivia I started writing for the Uruguayan weekly Marcha, edited by Carlos Quijano.6 I was based in La Paz to begin with, and then in the mining town of Oruro. Both of them were very different places from what I had known in Buenos Aires, but I was still living in a world of workers that was familiar to me. Bolivian miners, though, were not industrial workers as in Argentina or the US—they were still tied to the land in many ways, almost a kind of industrial peasantry. In that sense they were like the figure of the worker in Gramsci, in whom north and south Italy combine. The time I spent in Bolivia was marked by constant attempts by the Nationalist government to assert control over the miners and peasants. The MNR openly took the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) as its model, hoping to replicate its success in setting up a nationalist state out of the revolution. The miners, meanwhile, maintained their militias, and in the mid-fifties began to set up their own radio stations, which helped to coordinate struggles among mines that were large distances apart.

What would you say are the specificities of Bolivia, compared to other Latin American countries?

The weight of the mines in that society is one important difference. Another is that, historically, the dominant class in Bolivia was much poorer and smaller than elsewhere, and its domination was based on a form of colonial racism against the vast indigenous majority, both peasant and urban. There is an excellent historical study of this social and racial domination: Revolutionary Horizons, a book by Sinclair Thomson and Forrest Hylton. The present movement in Bolivia is first and foremost an insurrection against it. By contrast, colonial Peru had the pomp of the viceregal court in Lima, and a coastal oligarchy that lived on after independence; Mexico had the court and culture of New Spain. Bolivia was locked away in the altiplano, cut off from the sea, and for a long time seemed to be a mining enclave that had to ask its neighbours’ permission to get its products to the coast and out into the world’s markets. On a personal level, I was struck by a difference in the sense of time. To begin with I put it down to poor timekeeping, or lack of discipline, or the habits of peasant life. But then I realized it was just another way of dealing with time. When I went to Europe in 1960, someone asked me what the difference was between Amsterdam and La Paz, and I replied: ‘Here all the public clocks show the same time, whereas over there each shows whatever time it likes.’

What were your impressions of the European Left in the early sixties, and of the intellectual scene?

I spent the years from 1960 to 1962 in Europe, working as a Latin American member of the Secretariat of the Fourth International. I met Mandel in Brussels in the spring of 1960, when he was just finishing his Traité d’économie marxiste. I went to see him about getting travel documents for some Algerian comrades, and remember being very struck by his old house and his enormous number of Bach records. It was around this time that the break between Mandel and Pablo was unfolding, which I imagine was very painful for both of them. Pablo was at that time in prison in Holland for his activities in support of the Algerian Revolution. Moscow characterized the Algerian War of Independence as a bourgeois nationalist movement which deserved no backing, while the Socialists were part of the French government that was fighting the Algerians with torture, blood and fire. The Algerians had to organize their own networks and even set up a secret arms factory in Morocco, where some Trotskyist metalworkers—Argentines and Greeks—had gone to work. But the Algerian Revolution brought to the fore the differences between Mandel and Pablo I mentioned earlier. The first focused his hopes on proletarian revolution, the second on national and anti-colonial movements. Though neither of them posed it in that way, these different visions led to different priorities and forms of struggle. When Pablo pressed to put the Fourth International fully behind the Algerian Revolution, Mandel resisted it. The rupture was complex and confused, but from then on Mandel took over from Pablo as leading figure in the organization.

That same year I also spent time in Italy. There I found the Trotskyists to be more focused on political questions—what line should be taken—rather than on the very real changes that had been taking place in the factories. Automation had brought about significant shifts in the labour process, and it seemed to me that there had also been a shift in the mode of domination, which needed to be understood in order to develop different forms of labour organization. When I was there, I witnessed the beginnings of the autonomia movement and workers’ councils. In my view these were similar to the internal commissions set up in factories in Argentina in the 1940s, and which had been misunderstood by much of the Left. The rebirth of these councils in many ways prepared the way for the hot autumn of 1969. The current that seemed to me closer to these preoccupations was the Quaderni rossi group, which developed the form of the ‘worker’s enquiry’. It struck me that the enquiries were focused on the same question that always interested me—what do these people want?

You then spent time in Cuba. What was your experience of the place, in the wake of the revolution?

I was in Cuba from 1962–63, as a writer and a journalist. The Cuban hierarchy knew I was a Trotskyist, but as long as I didn’t openly do any political organizing, my presence was not a problem—that is, until 1963, when I was put on a plane to Italy. I remember the atmosphere during the Missile Crisis, when I was very impressed by the people’s readiness to defend the Revolution. There were signs saying ‘To Arms!’ all over Havana, and members of the popular militias doing their exercises in the rain. There was no sign of alarm or terror, only a refusal to bow before the atomic threat. It was this non-acceptance, which everyone to this day remembers, that saved Cuba and the revolution, and was a real moment of glory. I wrote a long reportage chronicling the October Days of the Missile Crisis, which was published as a special edition of Monthly Review, ‘Inside the Cuban Revolution’, in 1964.

In the mid-sixties you were active in Guatemala, supporting leftist guerrillas there against the Peralta dictatorship. What was distinctive about the Movimiento Revolucionario 13 de Noviembre (MR-13) as a political formation?

The origins of MR-13 lay in a military revolt by young nationalist lieutenants in November 1960. The senior leader, Lieutenant Colonel Augusto Vicente Loarca, was older than the others, at forty-eight; Lieutenants Marco Antonio Yon Sosa and Luis Augusto Turcios Lima, the actual leaders in the field, were in their late twenties or early thirties. They rebelled both on anti-imperialist grounds, against the use of Guatemala as a base for US attacks on Cuba, and for the completion of the agrarian reform that had begun under Jacobo Árbenz, but had been aborted after the CIA-sponsored coup that toppled him in 1954. The MR-13 grouping formed part of a long line of military nationalists in Latin America. In Bolivia, it starts with Germán Busch in 1937–39, and continues with Gualberto Villarroel in 1943–46 and Juan José Torres in 1970. In Mexico there was Lázaro Cárdenas, and in Peru, Juan Velasco Alvarado. You could say Hugo Chávez belongs to this same tradition, as a nationalist soldier confronting imperialism with the support of a mass movement.

In Guatemala the nationalist, anti-imperialist movement begins with Árbenz and continues with the young officers of MR-13. There is a clear continuity—Loarca had even served with Árbenz. But MR-13 marked a distinctive programmatic development. Part of the movement was allied with the local Communist Party, the PGT, which wanted to subordinate the soldiers to its own political line; this hinged on a ‘stageist’ approach—first the bourgeois democratic revolution, then the struggle for socialism. But many in MR-13 had already experienced the bourgeois revolution, with Árbenz; they had seen a mild agrarian reform but no change in social relations. It seemed logical to them that the revolution had to be socialist. So the MR-13 adopted socialist revolution as its platform—the first Latin American guerrilla movement to do so, making explicit what had been implicit in Cuba. This was an important step, and was immediately seen as such: it was emulated by the MIR in Peru, a section of the FALN in Venezuela, and by groups in Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil.7 It also prefigured Che Guevara’s celebrated statement, ‘Either a socialist revolution or a caricature of revolution.’

The Guatemalans arrived at this decision themselves, but there were two important outside influences. Firstly, the example of Vietnam, which was in everyone’s minds in the mid-sixties. The guerrillas knew all about the Vietnamese villages that had organized themselves in resistance, they read the reports of Wilfred Burchett. Second, there were the Mexican Trotskyists of the POR, with whom MR-13 had entered into contact, seeking support. The Mexicans debated and discussed with them, but far more importantly they sent militants to help MR-13 and smuggled arms across the border, breaking the Guatemalan Communists’ control over the weaponry the movement received. I was in Guatemala for part of 1964 and all of 1965, and travelled with the guerrillas in the central highlands of the Sierra de las Minas. I wrote a report about it, published as a book at the time, which circulated a great deal in Latin America.8 Régis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution?, which came out two years later, is in part a polemic—though Debray does not name it directly—against the current I was describing, and against the platform that was agreed at the MR-13’s conference in December 1964. I remember having a theoretical discussion there with Yon Sosa about the programme. He insisted that the movement proclaim an ‘agrarian and socialist revolution’, while I told him that the second term necessarily included the first. He agreed, but said people would not understand, so it had to remain in the programme. And he was right. The urban and industrial labour force had been the base for proletarian revolutions in Europe and parts of Latin America in the past. But this had left out the immense mass of humanity—the peasantry, the rural population, the indigenous, and the vast colonial world. As I see it now, it is the revolt of the colonial world that gives the twentieth century its meaning.

In 1966, you were arrested in Mexico on your way back to Guatemala, and then spent six years in Lecumberri Prison. What was the prison regime like?

Of course, it was unjust that I was there at all, but the regime was almost like a monastery. It was good to be insulated from all the turbulence of political praxis—which deputy voted how, getting leaflets out, and so on. I had time to read a lot of literature, and read all of Capital again. As an experiment, I read the eleven or twelve volumes of the Marx–Engels correspondence chronologically, from cover to cover, in order to follow the course of the two men’s thought as they were writing to each other. I read Hegel, and reread Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. In a sense, prison also saved my life: one of the Mexican police agents who beat me once or twice told me I should be thankful, since the Guatemalans were ‘real sons of bitches’; and it’s true that all my comrades there were killed by the Guatemalan security services.

You were in prison in Mexico during the events of 1968. What was their resonance in Lecumberri?

We kept close track of world events on Tv and in the newspapers, and each group in prison was in contact with its comrades outside. The number of prisoners swelled by about 250 after the Tlatelolco massacre and the crackdown that followed, but then shrank down to seventy or so. I remember watching the Olympics on Tv—the broadcast was accompanied by the Orwellian slogan ‘everything is possible in peace’—and seeing the Black Power salutes of the US athletes as well as the Czech gymnast holding her arm across her chest, head bowed, when the Soviet anthem was played. At the time, not many people would have thought we were living through a major historical change, though they might have felt it at some level. But it wasn’t so much France that influenced us as Vietnam, which was where 1968 really began, with the resistance to the war in the US itself.

It was in Lecumberri that you wrote La revolución interrumpida, the first serious history of the Mexican Revolution written from the Left. You trace the arc of the revolution across the decade 1910–20, from the disintegration of the ancien régime of Porfirio Díaz through its successive phases: the triumph of the liberal wing of the bourgeoisie under Francisco Madero in 1911; his two-year presidency, marked by its failure to suppress the peasant insurgency of Emiliano Zapata in the south, and ending in his ouster and assassination by General Huerta in 1913; the defeat of Huerta in 1914 by bourgeois Constitutionalist forces; and, finally, what you describe as a ‘long, grim downturn’ from 1914 to 1920, as the Constitutionalist armies pushed back the peasant armies of Zapata and Pancho Villa, eventually quelling their resistance. What prompted you to begin this project, and what inspired your interpretation of these events?

An old Trotskyist teacher, Nicolás Molina Flores, who visited me and brought me books while I was in jail—and himself ended up imprisoned in Lecumberri in 1968, during the great Mexican student movement of that year—said to me one day that I should write a book about the Mexican Revolution. To begin with I dismissed the idea. Of course, I had long been aware of it: until Cuba, the Mexican Revolution was the revolution for Latin Americans, and it had a mythical significance for my generation. For example, the second issue of Rebeldía, the student paper I worked on, carried an Orozco painting on its cover, and a reproduction of Rivera’s mural from Bellas Artes as its centrefold. But my interest in the idea of writing on the Mexican Revolution grew after reading more of the existing books on it. In Jesús Silva Herzog’s official history from 1958, written from the left wing of the PRI, everyone was a good guy, and it was totally unclear why they all ended up killing each other. The Communist Party books on the subject were boring and badly written.

The key, as I saw it, was to find the inner impetus behind the movements of the masses—not who won which battle, but what the hell all these people wanted. The idea for the architecture of the book came from Trotsky’s prologue to his History of the Russian Revolution, where he describes the curve of the revolution. My idea was to try to establish the equivalent shape for the Mexican Revolution. In my account, the culmination came not with the signing of the Constitution of 1917 in Querétaro, as in official accounts, but with the occupation of Mexico City by Villa’s and Zapata’s armies in December 1914. Villa’s División del Norte had inflicted a crushing defeat on government troops at Zacatecas in the summer of 1914, and at the Aguascalientes Convention that October he and Zapata joined forces to insist on a programme of land redistribution. The country was at boiling point. But after they marched into the capital in December, the two peasant leaders did not know what to do with it. The person who did know what to do was Álvaro Obregón, who was able to exploit the political weakness of Villismo, and eventually break it apart. From that point on, the revolution traces a long, descending curve. In fact, it was only when things had calmed down sufficiently that the Constitution was signed in 1917. In the first version of the book I explained Villa’s and Zapata’s failure by the lack of a proletarian leadership. This was teleological and silly; I took it out of the English translation, and then adjusted the Spanish editions.9 When I finished the book, I sent it from prison to several publishers, but none of them took it on. It was thanks to Rafael Galván, the former leader of the electricians’ union and a sympathizer of Trotsky’s, that it got published. Galván, a Cardenista who later became a PRI senator, rang El Caballito publishers and urged them to do it. The book came out in 1971 and went through four editions in the space of a few months. It has since been through forty successive editions, and is on history reading lists in Mexico’s high schools and universities.

What happened after your release?

I was released in 1972, and deported to France. I spent the next four years in Europe, mainly in France and Italy. In Paris I joined the local Posadist section of the Fourth International and took part in its meetings. But I found I didn’t understand anything; the atmosphere was conspiratorial, sectarian and rigid. I had felt much freer in prison. In any case, a sect of whatever kind is a prison for thought. After a year and a half, I left. This marked my definitive break with what had been the party of Posadas. In hindsight, the break had been in preparation while I was in prison. A Mexican friend who read La revolución interrumpida had told me I would be thrown out before long—that the book was written by a person who was clearly on a different path from the party of which he was a member. I returned to Mexico in 1976, and secured a teaching job at UNAM; I’ve been based there ever since. I’ve been a Mexican citizen since 1982.

You wrote a great deal on the Central American guerrilla movements of the late 1970s and early 1980s—notably in the books La nueva Nicaragua (1980) and Guerra y política en El Salvador (1981). What connections do you see between these and the earlier Guatemalan experience, and the reasons for their failure?

I’m not sure one can speak of failure. They were defeated, rather than simply failing. And in each case, the experience remained. As for the relations between them, this is a subject that would require a long discussion. For me, MR-13 represents a continuation of Árbenz’s nationalist movement. Other Latin American guerrillas, whether led by communists or Castroists, were something different. In Nicaragua, for example, the Sandinistas came from the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie, and though their struggle was also agrarian, they were linked to Cuba, whereas MR-13 was not. In Guatemala, both types were actually present, and there were disputes between them. The case of Guatemala is particularly terrible because there were two waves: the first was defeated in 1967; the second began in 1972. This second wave was very different from MR-13: it no longer had the socialist programme, for example.

What about the indigenous component of these movements?

This only began to come to the fore, or rather reappear, in Guatemala in the 1970s. Of course, the indigenous themselves were present beforehand—all the peasants are indigenous, and a peasant revolution is an indigenous one—but the revolution was defined in other terms: nationalist, socialist, agrarian. In Guatemala’s second wave, the indigenous component gained enormous salience. There were massacres of the indigenous, and Rigoberta Menchú became a real symbol in this period. But perhaps the real novelty came with the Zapatistas in Mexico, which on 1 January 1994 seized four towns by force. This was a purely indigenous movement, putting forward indigenous demands, speaking indigenous languages. Its success has strongly influenced indigenous movements in the rest of Latin America, which had never ceased to exist, but now re-emerged. In each place, they acted in accordance with their own genealogies of rebellion: in Bolivia, the Aymaras and Quechuas have traditions of revolt dating back to Túpac Katari’s uprising of 1781. The Peruvians and Guatemalans have their own genealogies too.

It’s these genealogies that I constantly look for—the continuities between earlier nationalist upsurges and the anti-imperialist rebellions of the 1960s, or those of the indigenous movements. I insist very stubbornly on drawing a distinction between genealogies and politics—not in order to oppose one to the other, but to find genealogies that in many cases explain the political choices. Tactics and strategy can normally be traced to a particular economic situation, the influence of a mass movement or the position of a given state. But the genealogy of the movement which is manifested in that situation is something different. The predecessors of the Bolsheviks were the Russian Populists, the Paris Commune’s antecedents lie in the French Revolution and 1848. Each space has a different formation, giving rise to a different genealogy.

In 1994 you published a book on Cárdenas, with the subtitle A Mexican Utopia, in which the nationalization of Mexico’s oil in 1938 serves as the focal point for an exploration of the character and trajectory of Cardenismo as a whole.10 How do you see the relation between this and your earlier work?

I see Cárdenas as the continuation and conclusion of the Revolution. What had been interrupted—hence the Spanish title of the earlier volume—was finished there. Communists tended to ignore or patronize Cárdenas, and all but two Trotskyist currents considered him a national-bourgeois. The exceptions were Trotsky himself and Posadas’s section, which saw Cárdenas as a petty bourgeois soldier supported by the workers’ and peasants’ movements. He was much more radical than Perón—Cárdenas did all he could for the Spanish Republic, and distributed twenty million hectares of land to the peasants. I am now planning a third volume on the Mexican Revolution, completing a sort of trilogy. It will focus on the División del Norte, led by Pancho Villa and Felipe Ángeles. The destruction of the army of the old regime in formal battle by peasants, miners, railwaymen and cowherds profoundly altered power relations in Mexico.

Apart from your historical work, you’ve also played an active part in Mexican political struggles.

Yes. For example, I took part in the university strike at UNAM in 1986–88, as one of a minority of professors supporting the students’ protests against the introduction of tuition fees. Many things were at stake, but the main point was whether public education remained free—whether it remained a right, rather than a service. It was about defending a certain form of republic. That time we won, but by the time of the next strike, in 1999–2000, an extreme version of neo-liberalism had been pushed through under Salinas and Zedillo; the students were poorer and angrier, and the government was much further to the right. A much smaller minority of professors backed the movement this time around. I was not on the front line, but wrote numerous articles in support of the students. Although police broke up the campus occupation, the campaign was at least successful in once again preventing tuition fees from being introduced.

In 1987, a powerful mass political and electoral movement—democratic, nationalist and anti-imperialist—emerged in Mexico, led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of Lázaro Cárdenas. Many social organizations of the Mexican Left converged within it. A group of leaders and militants who came out of the university movement of 1986–88—myself included—were among the first on the Left to support this new Cardenista movement, in the presidential election of 1988. Cárdenas won that election, but his victory was not recognized by the PRI government, which instead installed its own candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari. It was from this movement that the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) emerged. I took part in its foundation in 1989 and in its first leadership; and in 1997 I was part of Cárdenas’s government of Mexico City: the first elected government the city had had. Afterwards I distanced myself. As it gained control of local governments and increased its number of parliamentary representatives, the PRD gradually moved towards the centre, becoming an organization solely dedicated to electoral politics and the unprincipled alliances this entails.

I have also been politically active in support of the Zapatista rebellion. As I mentioned, the EzLN is an indigenous movement, joined by some radical elements from the middle class, such as Marcos himself; I respect them tremendously. I met the Zapatistas for the first time in May 1994, in their territory. Later I had an exchange with Marcos about Carlo Ginzburg’s celebrated essay on ‘Clues’, which I had sent him; Marcos wrote me a long letter by way of response, saying he hadn’t seen what the point of the essay was, and I replied in comradely fashion, pointing out where Marcos had misread or misunderstood Ginzburg.11 In 1998 I wrote a study of the Zapatista movement, ‘Chiapas and the Rebellion of the Enchanted World’.12 We have our differences, and I expressed some of these at the Zapatistas’ ‘Festival of Dignified Rage’ in Chiapas in January 2009. But I continue to support their struggle and their resistance. Since the 2009 Festival they have closed themselves off, and maintained virtual silence. For the moment they are dug in, keeping their people organized in resistance, in a sort of unstable equilibrium. But the government hasn’t been able to suppress them.

Viewed from outside, the Mexican Left seems to be in disarray, and yet there are still many signs of a living left culture, not least in a paper like La Jornada.13 How do you explain this disparity?

I think one has to draw a distinction between the established left parties and the broader Left. The PRD, after all, is at best an anti-neo-liberal nationalist party which originated in the PRI, whereas La Jornada is fed by a much broader left culture. But at present, in Mexico as elsewhere, the space for a classical revolutionary organization of the Left, along twentieth-century lines, is small or non-existent. This is because of the form that capitalism takes today, rather than being the fault of any particular individuals. The place formerly occupied by unions, workers’ and peasants’ organizations and their political reflections has shrunk, and politics has become the exclusive domain of capital and its negotiators. Yet the masters of the world are having to pay a price for this: an expansion of the space occupied by rage and fury. In Mexico, the anger has grown as a result of a series of disasters in the past twenty years: the electoral fraud of 1988; the assassinations of hundreds of PRD activists under Salinas; the violation of the San Andrés Accords by the Zedillo government; the new electoral fraud in 2006; the repression in Oaxaca and Atenco; not to mention the stream of deaths in Ciudad Juárez and elsewhere—there are now scores of people being killed every day on the streets, many of them tortured before being killed.

Almost ten years ago, when the government refused to make good on its formal commitments to legalize the indigenous movement and organization, along with indigenous autonomy, Subcomandante Marcos said: ‘You are opening the gates of hell.’ The turbulent and fragmented Mexico of today shows he was right. There is much more rage now than before. In circumstances like these, rage and anger will be essential components in the organization of any new mass revolutionary movement. But through its genealogy, it will also receive the intangible legacy of the experience accumulated by the oppressed and dispossessed during the tragic twentieth century, a century of wars and revolutions. To articulate the past historically, says Walter Benjamin, means ‘to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’. The twentieth century was not the century of enlightenment, nor of progress. It was the century of that lightning flash, the memory and experience of which we will need to recover in order to illuminate the present moment of danger.