Adolfo Gilly: The Mexican Revolution, Verso, 1983, £6.95.
September 1910 seemed like a glorious high-noon for Mexico's President, General José de la Cruz Porfirio Diaz — better known as Don Porfirio. In an orgy of extravagant splendour and ostentation, Mexico was celebrating the 100th anniversary of its declaration of independence from Spain. Don Porfirio himself was celebrating almost a third of a century's uninterrupted presidential rule. A rule which had been carried out with despotic ruthlessness and which had served the interests of the old oligarchy whose wealth mainly came from the feudally-run haciendas.
But in reality this was no high-noon for either Don Porfirio or the landed bosses. Their days were drawing in fast and it was more like late afternoon whose ominous clouds portended the hours of a threatening darkness. By the December of that same year the power of the dictatorship was eroding as the peasants, intellectuals and sections of a new growing bourgeoisie started to demand their share of the wealth and power which had been reserved for Diaz and the oligarchy. In the north west Pascual Orozco was becoming the first of the revolution's guerilla leaders. Soon that area was to become the domain of Francisco 'Pancho' Villa, the bandit turned revolutionary. In the south, in the state of Morelos, the intransigent peasant revolutionary Emiliano Zapata and his army were taking armed action to expropriate the land of the big landowners. The opposition to Diaz drew in those members of the bourgeoisie who were turning from agriculture to industry, it attracted the new petty bourgeoisie and pulled towards itself the small but growing Mexican working class.
[The leader of these democratic forces] Madero wanted nothing more than an accommodation between the various factions of the ruling class but thought this could only be done through constitutional means. He came from a family of landowners and capitalists and owed his fame to having declared himself as a candidate in the 1909 election — Diaz had imprisoned him for his troubles.
At his best Madero desired change and justice but deeply ingrained in his consciousness was his class origins and his loyalty to his family which was tied to the old regime and the landed aristocracy from which he came. Yet the most extreme wing of the revolution gave its support to this timid bourgeois, because Zapata with an intuitive understanding recognised that only a national revolution as opposed to a peasant uprising could secure the land. Lacking a national programme himself Zapata could only follow those who had such a programme.
By May 1911 Diaz was signing away the presidency and Madero was on his way to becoming President. From the beginning he wanted nothing more than to stop the peasant uprising. Three short weeks after Madero became President, Zapata issued the Plan of Ayala. This alleged that Madero had deserted the revolution and declared that all land taken away from the peasantry should become immediately the property of the villages and citizens who held the deeds. It insisted such property should be resolutely defended by arms in hand. Rejecting bourgeois constitutionalism the Plan of Ayala stated that Hacendados, cientificos and local chieftains who directly or indirectly opposed the plan would have their property nationalised.
Zapata did not start out with the aim of destroying the capitalist system. He simply wanted to secure justice for the peasants. However to get that justice he was prepared to smash the resistance of the ruling class and there is no doubt that if the Plan of Ayala had ever been implemented it would have 'smashed the living roots of capitalism', as Gilly says. The Plan of Ayala rested on mass initiative and relied on the peasants taking the land which involved revolutionary war. On its own it could and did create dual power but it did not raise the perspective of another centralised state power based on the masses. That idea like it did in Russia had to come from the proletariat and could not arise out of a peasant movement. Thus the final solution of power always stayed with the bourgeoisie.
Madero was unable to satisfy anyone. His refusal to distribute the land exasperated the peasants. His timid brand of reformism was still unacceptable to the forces of the right and he was overturned and shot by the military junta of Victoriano Huerta — a fate that would almost certainly have befallen Keren[sky] [illegible] the confidence, expectation and combativity of the most oppressed. The [rebel] wing of the [illegible] capitalist class [could] only fight the military dictatorship by reliance on the audacious [illegible] and his armed peasants [were] tearing [illegible] every action that inspired mass confidence. [By] December 1914 [the] revolution had reached its [climax]. The [peasant] armies of Zapata and Villa had within their grasp state power — the capital was theirs, the factions of the na[tional] [illegible] bourgeoisie who acted as custodians for [these] political masters, the bourgeoisie.
Villa told Zapata: 'I don't want public posts, because I don't know how to deal with them. We'll see what these people are up to doing. We'll just appoint the ones who aren't going to make trouble.' From then on the revolution could only ebb. Both Zapata and Villa looked nostalgically at what they knew and understood. Their class origins stopped them going beyond their hatred of the ruling class and compassion for their own kind. Having no perspective for state power both retreated to their strongholds leaving the ground to the radical wings of the bourgeoisie.
In time Zapata was murdered. Villa won an amnesty only to be murdered later. The radical bourgeoisie, figures like Alvaro Obregon, used a 'left' social programme to win support in their war against the armies of the North and Zapata's revolutionary peasants of the South. The revolution never transcended bourgeois limits but it was not simply a bourgeois democratic revolution. It lay between the last of the bourgeois revolutions and the first working class revolution of the October 1917. As Gilly says it was 'an interrupted revolution'.
Of course today Mexico needs [another] revolution, but its traditions will not be separate from or alien to the revolution that destroyed Diaz and his successor Huerta. The overthrow of these tyrants was due above all else to the self-activity and courage of the oppressed masses. Much can and must be learned from the armies of Zapata and Villa — their example will always be an inspiration to revolutionaries.
Gilly's well-researched, well-written history of the Mexican revolution is a must for all those who want to understand the revolutionary process and who wish to grasp the theory of permanent revolution.
BOB PENNINGTON has been an active revolutionary for 30 years and is now a regular contributor to Socialist Action.