In February 1918, Emiliano Zapata, one of the greatest of the popular leaders of the Mexican Revolution, wrote a letter in which he declared that “the cause of the Mexican Revolution and the cause of Russia are and represent the cause of humanity, the supreme interest of all oppressed peoples.” This year is not only the centenary of the Russian Revolution, but also of the contemporaneous Mexican Revolution. Of course the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917 whereas the Mexican people launched their assault in 1910, but the movement reached a high point in 1917 with the drafting of a new and revolutionary Constitution in February, one still in effect today, albeit with numerous conservative changes.
Russians and Mexicans once understood the similarities of their revolutions. Both were poor countries, largely rural and agricultural. Late 19th century globalization came to them via the railroad, transforming much of society, for the better for some, for the worse for many. In Mexico, railroads made new agricultural and industrial mining exports feasible, leading to a dispossession of the peasantry and concentration of landholdings in fewer hands. In Russia, the railroads facilitated the movement of peasants to rapidly growing cities, where backwards industrialization condemned them to poverty while radicalizing many in new and dangerous ways. Politically, both societies were rigid dictatorships, Czar Nicholas in Russia and General Porfirio Díaz in Mexico. Open political systems may have been able to absorb the social transformations induced by rapid industrialization, but dictatorship made revolution seem the only viable alternative.
In Russia, of course, the immediate cause of revolution was World War I, especially the massive loss of life at the front. The Russians went to war with the largest army in the world, but as early as August, 1914, began to suffer great losses, 80,000 dead or wounded and more than 90,000 troops captured by the Germans at the Battle of Tannenberg, after which things got worse. By and large common soldiers were peasants with uniforms, so Lenin and the Bolsheviks promoted an antiwar campaign suggesting the soldiers fight their local oppressors instead of fellow workers in different uniforms. In Mexico, the immediate cause of revolution was the stealing of the 1910 presidential elections.
In Russia, the old regime collapsed in February, 1917, but the new government was hesitant to solve the crisis that had brought on the collapse, allowing the Bolsheviks to seize power in October. Although they would have to fight a civil war to retain power, and then undergo a radical transformation as Stalin, following Lenin’s death, purged the party of his enemies and consolidated his rule, the Party itself would not cede power until the collapse of the Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall. From the beginning, the Bolsheviks believed themselves a workers’ party that would preside over an alliance of workers and peasants, and promoted a socialist program based on their interpretation and adaptation of Karl Marx. Despite its bureaucratic and vertical approach, the Soviet Union for a long time was able to offer significant advances to the lower classes in comparison with Czarist Russia.
The Mexican revolutionary process was quite a bit different. Late 19th century economic growth gave rise to a new elite in the North, one that felt excluded from centralized political power. One of them, wealthy landowner Francisco Madero, launched in 1909 an electoral challenge to Díaz, who had been in power since 1876. President Díaz jailed Madero after electoral fraud, but Madero escaped and pronounced revolution and on November 20, 1910, the fighting was on. A majority of Mexicans supported him. However, the revolutionary armies by and large were not wealthy landowners but poor rural Mexicans led by Emiliano Zapata in the south and Pancho Villa and Pascual Orozco in the north. They defeated the unprepared Federal Army and in May, 1911, Díaz fled the country with Madero becoming President in November.
Madero, who ran on a platform of clean elections – “Sufragio Efectivo, No Reelección” – believed the revolution over when he took office. He was determined not to affect the properties of the landed elite, to which he and his family belonged. The poor who actually did the fighting had other ideas. Zapata, the head of the revolution in the south, was born in the rural village of Anenecuilco in the state of Morelos, just south of Mexico City but across the mountains. It was then largely mestizo, with a still large Nahuatl-speaking population. The communities had recently lost their lands to the rapidly growing sugar haciendas, who exported their product to the United States. Zapata entered the revolution against Díaz in order to get communal lands returned to his people, and broke with Madero over this issue. For the Zapatistas, the revolution was not about elections but land, hence their motto: “La Tierra es de quien la trabaja” (land belongs to those who work it).
Meanwhile, the old Mexican elites and the U.S. government wanted nothing to do with revolution of any stripe, so following a meeting with the U.S. ambassador, the head of the old federal army, General Victoriano Huerta, assassinated Madero, February 1913. This brought three revolutionary armies together to fight the Huerta dictatorship. Zapata’s was the first. Venustiano Carranza, the ex Porfirian Governor of the State of Coahuila and friend of Madero’s and like him, a wealthy landowner, headed the second, with his able military leader from Sonora, Alvaro Obregón, and Pancho Villa, the third.
When the revolutionaries defeated Huerta, who fled the country in July 1914, they set to fighting among themselves: the more conservative Carranza and Obregón on one side, the more radical Villa and Zapata on the other, a conflict between wealthy new elites who wanted electoral democracy against the rural poor who wanted land and other social reforms. The civil war, 1914-1916, with armies recruited from the countryside, pulled everybody to the left, so when the winning Constitutionalists (the Carrancistas) drafted a Constitution, promulgated February 1917, it was far to the left of the Madero/Carranza program, especially its three most radical Articles, 3 (secular education), 27 (land reform/property rights), and 123 (workers’ rights).
The Bolsheviks were part of a wider European Marxist current where socialists’ workers’ parties proliferated. In Mexico, Marx was barely known. While Articles 3 and 27 corresponded to the civil war in the countryside, Article 123 seemed surprising. The Article provided for strong trade unions, the effective right to carry out and win strikes, the eight-hour day and mandated overtime pay, the legal minimum wage – “that considered sufficient… to satisfy the normal needs of the life of the workman, his education, and his lawful pleasures considering him as the head of the family” – a month paid leave to women workers when they gave birth, with a guarantee to return to their position, housing and comprehensive health benefits for working families, and, in 1917, equal pay for equal work among men and women. Of course these were rights and not practices, but they provided a powerful basis of support for working class struggles.
The working class origins of the Bolshevik program was obvious. Mexico, however, was not Russia but a typically Latin American rural and agricultural country with a significant indigenous presence. With a 1910 population of fifteen million, the three largest “industrial” sectors were mining, perhaps 90,000 workers, textiles, 34,000, and railroads, perhaps 40,000, insignificant numbers relative to the whole country. There was no Lenin or Trotsky in Mexico preaching to the working class, no Bolshevik Party, no dedicated band of proletarian revolutionaries staying up at night reading Hegel and Marx. When the Bolsheviks seized power, the declaration of a workers and peasant state was the logical next step. When the revolutionaries seized power in Mexico, land reform was obvious, but not labor. So where did Article 123 come from? As it turns out, the radical and labor activities of miners, railroad and textile workers before and during the revolution created enough institutional change to provide a basis for Article 123, along with the belief by new and aspiring elites that Mexican modernity required industrialization and that the labor reforms initially created by Mexico’s small but active working class were a model for that. The revolution also opened the door for change by destroying the Federal Army that had been used to repress labor strikes and protests. In this, way, the Mexican revolution became a workers revolution in February 1917, months before the Bolshevik’s October seizure of power.
Before their revolutions, Russia and Mexico were in many ways traditional societies disrupted by late 19th century globalization, which transformed them through the creation of new wealth and new poverty, and therefore new social tensions. In both countries, the revolutions gave rise to new regimes that presided over economic growth and gains in the standards of living for most people, though not enough to rival the west. Later, both revolutions collapsed from the inside while continuing to declare their ongoing vitality on the outside, but that is another and later story.
In Russia, the revolutionary collapse was masked by the Soviet victory in World War II and the subsequent extension of the Soviet system to China and Eastern Europe and then Cuba. The problem was that Stalinist society had little in common with the dreams of freedom harbored by Marx and the revolutionary Lenin and Trotsky, and as Stalinism tightened after World War, it contained the seeds of its own demise.
In Mexico, the revolutionaries were a diverse group that fought incessantly for its soul in the 1920s until President Cárdenas brought dramatic revolutionary transformations in the 1930s. Following those achievements, though, the revolutionary impulse could only go forward or backwards, and as increasingly conservative elites took control of the revolutionary party in the 1940s, backwards they went, culminating in the defeat of railroad workers in 1959 and the massacre of students in 1968. By that time, to be a revolutionary in Mexico was to be in prison, just as to be a revolutionary in Russia often landed one in Gulag. Both revolutions had become caricatures, and in Mexico when President Carlos Salinas de Gortari stole the 1988 elections and imposed a very neo-liberal North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, the Mexican revolution was consigned to history books.
With a century of revolution behind it, the contemporary world has focused on their failures. Their successes in raising the standard of living for a substantial period, in carrying out fundamental institutional changes, for creating modernity from tradition, for dramatic new rights for working people, for defeating Germany in World War II and providing extensive land reform for the rural poor in Mexico, for providing medical care and pensions and education to millions that had lacked both, are today entirely ignored, while their failures, to create a socialism that Marx would have recognized as such, to raise productivity and the standard of living as much as the west, or a new form of democracy where those from below could determine society, are greatly though justly magnified.
But what is missed in the historical record is that both revolutions emerged from the dramatic transformations of late 19th century globalization. Today the world is much more global than 1917, carried now by the electronic speed of the internet rather than the steam-powered speed of the railroad. There is without doubt immense new wealth being created, but also, as in the late 19th century, much new poverty and stagnation along with an unprecedented attack on working-class incomes. The transformations today not only rival, but in fact are greater than those of a century ago.
In 1908, nobody in Mexico would have predicted revolution. In 1913, nobody in Russia would have foreseen a Bolshevik seizure of power. The rich and powerful in both societies were interested in their wealth and power and were convinced that the poor and powerless would follow along. And the poor and powerless did, until they didn’t. The leaders of Russia’s February revolution as well as Francisco Madero believed that elites could disrupt the system while still maintaining control. Today the leaders of Brexit along with Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief advisor, believe they can disrupt the system while still retaining control. And perhaps they can. But it is useful to remember that globalization today, as a century ago, may provide new wealth for those on top, but also new misery for those on the bottom, those who generally lack voice. History doesn’t repeat itself, so it’s hard to predict that the new globalization, which includes climate change, and the new inequalities of wealth and power will generate new revolutions. But it’s equally hard to say they won’t. All we know from the past is that the disruptions of globalization thoroughly transform the old societies, and sometimes in revolutionary ways.
Jeffrey Bortz is professor of history at Appalachian State University in North Carolina.
Marcos Aguila is professor of history at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco in Mexico City.
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