On august 10, 1914, Landauer published this update on the Mexican Revolution in Der Sozialist. He continues to sympathize with the Mexican Liberal Party and stresses the importance of the land question. His analysis of the “anarchist” Liberal Party’s role helps clarify his understanding of anarchism and provides a very tangible example for his reflections in Die Revolution.
THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT THE REVOLUTION IN MEXICO — AS it has been explained in this journal before1 – persists for so long only because it is based in a social revolution and is not reduced to a political one. This is the only reason why no political careerists have so far been able to establish authority with the help of the monopolist classes. A social revolution does not accept “peace and order” before it reaches its conclusion. In order to find followers, political careerists have to strengthen the country’s “disorder” – then it is easy for them, even if their personalities are not particularly compelling and their connections to the privileged classes not particularly strong.
It seems that there are numerous claims that this revolution is about political power, and that guerilla war and expropriation are its main means. However, the true meaning of the revolution is economic transformation, is the fight against property and monopoly. This alone makes it so durable.
Sometimes we may get the impression that the so-called Mexican Liberal Party of the Magón brothers,2 in reality an anarchist organization, only exists in Southern California, that it has exaggerated the social significance of the revolution, that it has romanticized its ambitions, and that it has described for fact what is but wishful thinking. However, we now know for certain that Zapata and his followers have written the motto Land and Freedom on their banners, and that they act accordingly; the same goes for the peasants and the land laborers (mostly Indians and half-castes, so-called peons3 ) who have united with them.
The Zapatistas, about ten thousand armed men, operate in the north of the country. Their activities have recently been described by the predictably outraged correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung.4 They demand the partitioning of all big estates and have begun to execute this in the states they occupy. According to Regeneración , the journal of the Mexican Liberal Party,5 these are Morelos, Southern Puebla, Michoacán, Guerrero, Veracruz, Northern Tamaulipas, Durango, Sonora, Sinaloa, Jalisco, Chihuahua, Oaxaca, Yucatán, and Quintana Roo.
The Frankfurter Zeitung describes the Zapatistas’ actions thus: they burn all archives and try to destroy any memory of the old regime. The article adds that the program of these northern rebels is full of “socialist phrases.” However, the Zapatistas’ politics seem hardly limited to “phrases.” As the correspondent confirms, the Zapatistas have confiscated all of the private property of the rich, and their provisional government now administers mines, breweries, and factories. Since our country’s bourgeois press is enraged, it is probably true when Regeneración writes that “the bourgeois press in Mexico has to admit that the workers have themselves taken possession of the land; that they have not waited for some patronizing government to do it for them...”
If this is true, we need not be surprised about the impression shared by an American writer, John Kenneth Turner,6 in the June issue of the respected journal The New Review7 under the headline “Why I Am For Zapata”: “Unlettered as they are, the mass of Mexicans who are fighting with guns know better what they want than any equal number of ‘superior’ Americans going to the ballet-box know what they want – and they know better how to get it.”8
In the face of this reality, we need not be surprised if both the U.S. President and the American land monopolists slowly come to realize that Mexican land belongs to the Mexican people, i.e., the people who actually work it. The importance of the issue will not surprise those who remember the ruthless exploitation and slavery-like conditions under which workers on the country’s Mexican and American-owned latifundios9 were kept (see the articles in Der Sozialist from 1911). It was hence only logical that President Huerta10 tried to save his rule a few weeks before he was forced to resign due to pressure from all sides by proposing a far-reaching agrarian reform. The mouthpiece of the Californian exploiters, the Los Angeles Times , denounced Huerta’s proposition as “the greatest plan of confiscation ever proposed by a government.”11
We can see clearly now that the Mexican Revolution not only builds on the land question, but that the revolutionaries also actively reclaim land, and that they have had respectable success, not least in the way their actions have been embraced by the public, as well as by certain politicians. We can also see clearly now that the Mexican Liberal Party does not only produce forceful revolutionary manifestos, full of wonderful Spanish expressiveness and emotion, but that it also constitutes a real social force. The party might call itself “liberal,” but it declares its anarchist leanings openly. Such an organization being the strongest faction within this great revolution must not be underestimated. Characteristically, this “Liberal Party” now turns to the International Anarchist Congress12 with a precise and proud declaration that demands the recognition of the Mexican Revolution as “not just a war of capitalists, politicians, and bandits,” but as a venture where the repossession of land by the working people is seen as “the first step to secure bread and economic freedom.” The Mexican Liberal Party further demands that the actions of the Mexican revolutionaries are acknowledged as exemplary for all peoples.
These are two different things, however. The first has to be accepted without reservation: once the revolution – we must not forget: for political reasons13 – had broken out, the Mexican peons acted in ways that suited their thinly populated country where land is still plenty: they took what they needed from the monopolists and the land trusts. As far as the question of providing a model is concerned, however, there is no denying that the conditions in our countries14 are significantly different, and that we, as anarchists in these countries, still have many things to do before we can emulate the example of the Mexican peasants. This means that it will take us a long time to get what they are close to getting now. However, it also means that we will not encounter the same problems that they are close to encountering now.
Let us be clear: whatever land the Mexican people have already conquered, and whatever land they will conquer in the near future (although they will have to be quick!), will most probably remain theirs.15 This is an enormous success that all of humanity will benefit from and that deserves to be celebrated. At the same time, we will see how this success will soon be compromised; namely, by its bureaucratic administration at the hands of the new political entity that will inevitably emerge from the revolution, whether it will be called the North American Union or the Mexican Republic.
As certain as social and economic realization marks the height of this revolution, new forms of political power will mark its end – and hence a return to its beginnings. True anarchy will not be established, nor will true society, true freedom, or true justice. On the basis of the significant improvements that will remain, there will be new violence, new monopolies, new exploitation – and there will be new struggles. History has not spared a single people. What we must wish for is that in Mexico, and anywhere else, the intermediate times, the times of peace, will be used for the preparation and creation of socialism.
We have used the term “anarchist” in connection with the revolutionary Mexican Liberal Party. This is far from typical for us. Anarchism and party politics are contradictions. In this case, however, we are truly dealing with an anarchist party – which explains both its current success and its inevitable future defeat.
There are three major kinds of anarchist activity. All deserve the name. First, because it has been used by their practitioners; and second, because they all share the rejection of the state and the desire for freedom and voluntary union as the basis of their beliefs. One kind of anarchist activity is individual struggle in times when the masses content themselves with speeches. This kind, marked by the so-called propaganda by the deed and by insurrection, belongs to history. A second kind is the radical interference in political revolutions that have gathered mass support. The third kind is the preparation and the creation of the spiritual and economic foundations of a stateless society of societies.
The Mexican anarchists became active in a revolution whose eruption they had hardly influenced. This means that they can only engage in the second kind of anarchist activity; for the third, the fundamental one, it is too late. This means that their anarchy can never do more than help to reclaim land for the dispossessed by violent means. The Mexican Liberals will not be able to prevent the institutionalization of new authoritarian violence once the revolution ebbs away, nor will they be able to stop this authoritarian violence from serving the privileged classes and curtailing the working people.
A social revolution cannot be made. The Mexican Liberals have not made one either. They were only able to serve as tools for political revolutionaries – and to use these politicians as their own tools for socialist expropriation. Revolutions as decisive interruptions of history will probably play a part in the great social transformation that will bestow new forms of society and spirit upon us; but the social transformation as a whole can never be reduced to such interruptions.
It cannot be our task to emulate a great revolutionary episode in a thinly populated and barely industrialized country. Our only task can be the third kind of anarchist activity named above. In our situation, this must be the absolute priority. Once again, the objective is the preparation and creation of spiritual and economic foundations for a stateless society of societies.
We do believe in true an-archy. We believe that capitalist exploitation will one day be brought to an end, just like feudalism was brought to an end. Then no new form of economic privilege will arise, but communities and alliances – a humanity – that will create institutions of fair exchange. We believe – in fact, we can clearly see! – that hate and violence, and all their terrible consequences, will turn into a mad and evil dream as soon as the foundations, forms, and the smooth functioning of a society without exploitation have been secured.
This is why we have to take a different approach than Mexico’s anarchist-revolutionary “party”: we have to allow the spirit – a spirit that has always known the right thing to do – to materialize; we have to create humanity; we have to prevent every great historical interruption and its success from being compromised by law and arbitrariness.
We salute the brave revolutionaries of Mexico! And we invite them to go beyond the thrilling and tempestuous revolutionary work against society’s rottenness and decay and to join us in the even more important, yet slow and gradual work of freeing and creating spirit, thereby allowing humanity’s peoples to establish economic cooperatives, communities, and alliances.
