The Mexican anarchist movement was the product of several contributing elements : (a) the influx of outside anarchist immigrants, such as Rhodakanaty, Ferrés, Moncaleano, Tudó, and others who were largely from Spain; (b) the wide circulation of literature that propagated the ideology of Proudhon, Bakunin, Lorenzo, Kropotkin, and their Mexican counterparts; (c) governmental corruption and sociopolitical instability, which gave revolutionaries the opportunity to organize; (d) generally insufferable socioeconomic conditions endured by the Mexican laboring classes, both urban and rural, which created the extreme degree of societal alienation necessary for a mass of humanity to support revolutionary ideals; (e) the social mores of the increasingly landless Mexican peasantry, which, in its resistance to the metropoli and the intrusion of alien culture, already supported social banditry, and whose values were already identical to those expressed by the agrarian anarchism espoused by Rhodakanaty, Zalacosta, Santa Fe, and Díaz Soto y Gama; and (f) the process of industrialization in Mexico, which intensified preexisting social imbalances that had created support for urban crowds and tumultos in the preindustrial era.
Industrialization meant larger urban slums and threatened the artisan class with proletariatization. The artisans, with their Spanish guild traditions, reacted in self-defense by organizing for radical social change. In the mid-1870’s tailors and hat makers, under assault from the rapidly growing textile industry, were the most militant artisan group. During the 1910 revolutionary era the tipógrafos and canteros were suffering from the overwhelming impact of the Linotype machine and modern cement industry, and they joined the hat makers and tailors in militancy. The artisans, although always in the minority, provided the anarchists and the urban working class with necessary leadership.
It is only natural for the artisan, a man steeped in individualism, to advocate a political ideal which demanded protection for him from the encroachments of an increasingly more powerful government, a government controlled by others and readily influenced by capitalist doctrines. The artisans identified with an ideal which sought to preserve the small workshop and handmade product and demanded better working conditions in the factories into which they were being forced by the modernized production techniques with which they could not compete. Cooperativism reflected these needs. It was an understandable response to the threat of the factory system from men who had always worked with their hands and prided themselves on their craftsmanship and independence. Anarchosyndicalism reflected their later reaction to the established and still growing factory production system.
It was to be expected that the government would react negatively to anarchosyndicalism and the more extreme forms of cooperativism, which were in reality attempts to create a society based upon worker-controlled productivity free of government and “capitalist exploitation.” Government intervention by force and by strict regulations during the Porfiriato, the later stages of the revolution, and after the revolution first prevented the cooperatives from becoming a system of independent collectives and then prevented the anarchosyndicalists from gaining control of national industry. The artisans and anarchists were defeated in both phases. During the later stages of the nineteenth century the cooperatives were little more than mere artisan shops, the members of which enjoyed such typical mutual aid benefits as disability payments. In the postrevolutionary era the CROM and its successor, the Confederation of Mexican Workers (Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos), established government political control over the organized urban working class within a capitalist economy.
But the anarchists brought important changes to the Mexican working classes during the period 1860–1931. While not successful in their program, their goals—as expressed by the platforms of La Social, La Internacional, the Casa del Obrero Mundial, and the CGT—politicized the Mexican working class to a considerable extent. They called for the establishment of a “universal socialist republic, one and indivisible.” Initial steps toward these ends were taken; the Congreso affiliated with the anarchist international, and, later, during the revolution, the Casa del Obrero was a self-described “regional” labor confederation. The Congreso, Casa, and CGT all supported the notion of an international open trade system after the workers had seized power. The CGT called itself communist-anarchist, and its national congress voted to seize the textile industry of Mexico City, Puebla, and Orizaba during the 1920’s. Both the Casa and CGT were capable of limited but crippling general strikes. Between 1860 and 1931 hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers spanning three generations formally joined the Congreso, Casa, and CGT—organizations allied with an international movement based in Europe and dedicated to the ultimate overthrow of government and capitalism.
The Mexican anarchist movement demanded the long-range abolition of the salary system. In the meantime, raises in agricultural and industrial wages were to be procured by means of the strike. Short-run victories were achieved in a few cases, especially during the revolution when conditions were unusually favorable. Working-class tactics significantly changed during the period 1860–1926. Several long and torturous strikes were carried out during the nineteenth century, and at the end of the century Mexico’s first general strike took place in Puebla. Mexican workers demonstrated, through their use of this weapon during and after the revolution, that they had come to regard the general strike as their most powerful tool against the employers. It was a dramatic step toward self-respect and confidence for the Mexican working classes because these strikes represented the declaration of a newly assumed right to question the authority of the previously all-powerful
patrón. The anarchists cannot claim sole credit for the conduct of these strikes, but their role in them, as the principal urban-labor organizers and agitators, was a prominent one.
One endeavor in which the anarchists enjoyed an open victory was in the field of female workers’ rights. The success enjoyed by Rhodakanaty and La Social in 1876, when Carmen Huerta was originally seated in the national Congreso over the objections of Juan de Mata Rivera, was a singular victory. There was no previous episode in Mexican working-class history in which a woman was permitted to play such an important role. Following that occasion, Mexican women played a significant part in the urban-labor movement, and large numbers of them employed in the textile mills were organized. Huerta even occupied the national chairmanship of the Congreso. Ironically, labor gains made during the revolution and 1920’s made the employment of women less attractive to the factory operators, and the female presence in the plants greatly diminished thereafter.
The anarchists hoped to achieve an equalitarian, classless society organized into voluntary associations for the urban workers at the factory level and for the campesinos at the level of the municipio libre. The need for government, an institution which they saw as a vehicle by which the ruling class exercised its power over the people, would be negated by the nonexploitative nature of their new classless society. Thus, they called for the “neutralization of the exploitive power enjoyed by capital over labor” and the gradual leveling and redistribution of private property.
They wanted to reorganize society around industrial and agrarian falanges, the latter to be formed in conjunction with territorial banks which would regulate labor and the sale of products. This was to be in conjunction with the “liquidation of urban [capitalist] interests” in the countryside under the aegis of an agrarian law which would provide for the measuring and demarcation of lands in order to redistribute them. The military was to be replaced by working-class militia, the autonomous municipalities would become sovereign over the entire program in their own localities, and, ultimately, the national government would be dissolved.
The reasons for their failure during the early Díaz period are complex but clear. The Díaz regime consolidated a strong hold on the country and provided it with political tranquility and rapid economic growth for the first time. Antagonistic provincial elites and urban and rural working-class dissenters were dealt with by force. The revolutionary working-class movement was vulnerable because the industrialization process was not sufficiently advanced to create a massive urban labor force. The number of factory workers remained relatively small in contrast to the overall population, and those workers who were organized into the Círculo after 1870, and later into the affiliates of the Congreso, lacked organizational experience. They suffered chronic disunity. Their divisions and relatively small numbers reduced them to a point of weakness in the face of the armed might of the government.
The nineteenth-century cooperatives were failures due to lack of organizational experience and their economic isolation. The number of supporters that could expect to utilize them was far too limited to provide continued growth. The reason for their scarcity of number is found in the fact that Mexico was still a preindustrial, underdeveloped country. The immaturity of the Mexican economy and the lack of preparedness of the anarchist movement were all too obvious to such leaders as Rhodakanaty, Velatti, González, and Muñuzuri. They lamented the continued omnipresence of mutualist societies, the weakness of the cooperatives, and the development of government-dominated unions administered by “charros.”
The tradition of government management of the labor movement began with Romero and Cano in the 1860’s and early 1870’s. It continued with Carlos Olaguibel in the late 1870’s and 1880’s. In the twentieth century, Mendoza of the GCOL, Luis Morones, and some contemporary union leaders are representative of this tendency. Charrismo was yet another factor in a milieu that left most of the Mexican masses disorganized and incapable of decisive action. Villanueva, Ferrés, López Dónez, Quintero, and the CGT-CSL leadership complained of the same problem.
The agrarian movement was forcibly beaten back during the reign of Juárez, when it first gained momentum, and later even more severely by the Díaz-led repression of the later nineteenth century. Scattered over the countryside, the agrarians suffered the fatal malady of disunity. Poorly equipped, they were unable to adequately defend themselves following their uncoordinated uprisings and land seizures. These conditions would also plague and defeat Zapata.
In the early twentieth century much of the disorganized structure of the nineteenth-century anarchist urban labor associations, and even their political strategy, was corrected by the formation of the Casa del Obrero Mundial and by the program of the Magonistas. The Díaz regime, because of its early successes, acted something like a filter against the direct transmission of the Mexican anarchist tradition.
1 As a result, the twentieth-century Mexican anarchists turned, not to their nineteenth-century predecessors, but to Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin. The movement was once again stimulated by the presence of Spanish anarchists.
2 The first powerful anarchist organization developed around the Liberal party led by the Flores Magón brothers. Ricardo Flores Magón first read Kropotkin at an early age and testified to the strong impression that he had received. Later, as a student in Mexico City, he again read the Russian’s work. He began to openly espouse anarchist political doctrine in 1906. Between 1900 and 1910, Magón and the Liberal party were the only serious challenge to the Díaz regime and they became a symbol of resistance. The first divergence of the twentieth-century anarchist movement from its nineteenth-century antecedent was a national revolutionary political force which advocated the overthrow and dismantling of the national government, the decentralization of political power, the collectivist organization of the urban economy, and the establishment of agrarian communes. The Liberal party led a series of unsuccessful agrarian village seizures and raids near the northern frontier. Magonista organizers entered Cananea and helped to lead the famous and violent rebellion there that revealed seething working-class unrest that surfaced again soon afterward at Río Blanco. Those rebellions rang the death knell of the government.
The Casa del Obrero Mundial developed during the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution. In the industrial areas the local branch of the Casa del Obrero represented a refuge where newly arrived former campesinos could communicate with fellow workers who had already united in common interest. Like their nineteenth-century precursors, these former agrarian workers found themselves alienated and alone in a new, hostile, urban environment which attacked their strong sense of community and destroyed tradition. The anarchist ideology of individual freedom, coupled with syndicalist social promises, was undoubtedly a strong inducement to the still-peasant mentality which had traditionally held these values inviolate in the agrarian comunidad.
As it gained strength, anarchosyndicalism unleashed a powerful force which the Obregón-Carranza Constitutionalists used to advantage against Villa and Zapata during the revolution. In one of those ironies of war, the Red Battalions of the Casa del Obrero were sent into battle more than once against the ideological heirs of Chávez López, the revolutionaries led by Zapata. Ideological differences on both sides were frequently vague, and, despite Zapata’s peasant anarchistlike program, most members of the Casa del Obrero felt that he was limited to a too-narrow agrarian perspective. Also, their anti-clericalism was enraged by the deep religious convictions shown by Zapata’s
campesino followers.
3The Casa del Obrero was enticed into an alliance with Obregón and Carranza with the promise that it would be the only union in Mexico, free to organize as it pleased in return for its continued support for the Constitutionalists.
4 The sincerity of this bargain must be doubted on both sides in view of the Casa del Obrero’s revolutionary syndicalist objectives and the immediate suppression by the government during the general strike of 1916 after Zapata and Villa were no longer a strategic threat. The armed workers of the Casa del Obrero were subdued at the height of the general strike of July 30 to August 2, 1916, by isolated actions in town after town by the army, which made it a practice to initiate its attacks with surprise raids on the anarchist union’s meeting halls and armories. Recognition of the union was officially withdrawn by the government and many of its leaders were arrested.
5The Casa was formally dissolved and many of its disillusioned members then entered the government-supported Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana. The CROM had few anarchist tendencies and was dominated by the governments of Obregón and Calles. In 1928 the largest anarchist publication in Latin America,
La Protesta of Buenos Aires, announced that the CROM, because of its collaboration with the Mexican government, could not be considered
“anarquista.”6 Many of the disgruntled former members of the Casa del Obrero joined the rival to the CROM, the CGT, which affiliated with the anarchist AIT.
7 The CGT survived the 1920’s despite the continued success and government support of the CROM, but it was plagued by a lack of funds and internal divisions. After the passage of the Ley del Trabajo in 1931, it ceased to be a serious force.
Revitalized, during the decline of the Díaz regime, Mexican anarchism came into open conflict with the government during and after the revolution. In the years since that confrontation, the active reformism of the Obregón, Calles, and Lázaro Cárdenas regimes has relegated Mexican anarchism to a historical legacy, and the largest agrarian and urban labor organizations are controlled by the national government. In spite of increased national productivity, the Mexican working classes continue to experience a legacy of mass poverty. Their past struggles and present conditions indicate future unrest.