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Revolution Within the Revolution
Cotton Textile Workers and the Mexican Labor Regime, 1910â"1923
By Jeffrey Bortz STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7964-7
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Purpose of the Book
Through most of the twentieth century, Mexico's history differed sharply from the rest of Latin America. When military dictatorships gripped the Southern Cone and dictatorship and revolution swept through Central America, Mexico was an oasis of stable and relatively tolerant, if not exactly, democratic governments. With peace and stability came economic growth, industrialization, and modernization. Without revolution from below or dictatorship from above, Mexico was an island of relative harmony in a Latin American sea of turbulence.
Political harmony is a product of hegemony, which raises the question of what created a hegemonic political system in Mexico. What happened in Mexico that did not happen in other Latin American countries of relatively similar social, economic, and cultural processes? While the obvious answer is the Mexican Revolution of 1910, it is less clear how "the Mexican agrarian revolution," as Frank Tannenbaum aptly named it, could bring lasting peace to a country whose immediate future lay in industry and cities. Mexico needed urban as well as rural peace if it were to emerge from the chaos of revolution. Without doubt, the liquidation of the old land-owning class and the extension of land ownership to millions of campesinos, a process made possible by the rural violence of Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa, and other agraristas, contributed to postrevolutionary hegemony. By itself, however, land reform could not have produced close to a century of stability in rapidly urbanizing Mexico.
It is a goal of this book to explain how a workers' revolution within the revolution contributed to later political peace in Mexico. From 1910 to 1923, industrial workers challenged authority, threw out the old order, and forced new governments to come to terms with labor. This revolution within the revolution created the most hegemonic, proworker labor regime in Latin American history to that point, perhaps to date. It was this labor regime that became the foundation for political hegemony among the social class that represented Mexico's economic and political future, the urban proletariat. Of the many great histories of Mexico's revolution, the one actor ignored by historians has been the winner, the industrial working class. The standard explanation for a new labor relations system has been that it was a gift from above, from the state and its allies in the labor bureaucracy. These explanations either ignore industrial workers or see their participation in the revolution as marginal. As a consequence, the new labor regime appears as the miracle work of politicians and lawyers, a story in which workers do not appear.
Lawyers and politicians, in Mexico as in other countries, were not a particularly generous lot. The generals turned politicians who ruled postrevolutionary Mexico were interested in amassing great sums of money, not limiting the rights of owners to become rich. Carranza was wealthy and Obregón and Calles used their tenures in office to amass as much money as they could. Cárdenas was more modest but not his successors. Why would the wealthy landowners and businessmen who created Mexico's postrevolutionary state want to create an apparently proworker labor regime? It made no sense for them, pursuing their private goals, to have created what must have seemed a workers' paradise in Mexico. While some scholars claim that they carried out their work in order to win elections, Mexico was not an electoral democracy before, during, or after the revolution, so the vote argument simply dissipates.
In fact, the workers' revolution was not a product of the state but rather of workers themselves. Through their actions in the factories and in their communities, mill hands destroyed the old, prerevolutionary labor regime and imposed a new one. While contemporaries acknowledged this, later scholarship did not. In 1976, Ramon Ruiz argued that the activities of workers resulted in a "failure of most of labor to successfully achieve their goals." Twenty-five year later, scholars still claimed that workers benefited from the revolution only because they "encountered revolutionary leaders willing to regulate by decree many of the insecurities of work." This literature did not explain how industrial workers went from a position of weakness in 1910 to one of strength in 1923 if, as they suggest, the factory was quiet, workers quiescent, and central government nonexistent or weakened for much of that period. It doesn't make sense.
That the state rather than industrial workers shaped the historiography, if not the history, is not surprising. If you look for the state, you will find it. As that knowledgeable bon vivant Salvador Novo remarked during his gay life after the revolution, "In Mexico everything happens according to the spasmodic ejaculations of its politics." Of course Novo was a novelist more attuned to his friends in government than illiterates in the factories. His state, however, did have the capacity to shape historical writing in the decades after the revolution. In 1926, Vicente Lombardo Toledano, the outstanding labor intellectual of the new government, argued that "Union freedom is, in Mexico ... a new road created by the State for the complete emancipation of the proletariat." Later scholars echoed his sentiments, even though the Mexican state from 1910 to 1917, the critical period in the transformation of Mexican labor, could not have created much; it was ceasing to exist.
Later scholars perhaps failed to observe Mexico's workers' revolution because the larger revolution did not follow the classic models of France, the contemporaneous Russian Revolution, or the later Chinese or Cuban revolutions. Most relevant was the contrast with the 1917 Russian Revolution, in which the Bolshevik Party appeared to dominate workers, the revolutionary process, and later, society itself. In contrast, Mexico's revolution lacked, as Alan Knight has argued, "a vanguard party or a coherent ideology." Nonetheless, without either party or a stable set of leaders, Mexican cotton textile workers carried out an antiauthority, anti-owner, prolabor revolt from below, employing every means at their disposal from strikes to workplace violence to murder. In the absence of a central government, the workers defeated the owners, imposed unions, a new labor regime, and ultimately union control over the workplace. It was a social revolution from below. Textile owners saw it, but in the midst of the broader rural uprising, it was missed by later scholars.
Since the country's largest and most important factory industry in the early twentieth century was cotton textiles, it is not surprising cotton textile workers were in the forefront of the Mexican workers' revolution. This volume describes the rebellion of cotton textile workers from its outbreak in 1910 to its successful legal conclusion by 1923. While much literature on the revolution has focused on anarchist leaders and heroes, this book contends that it was not them but rather common workers and labor activists who carried out the revolution that was to transform the country's labor regime. This helps explain the deficit in the historiography on Mexico's workers' revolution, because workers who mostly did not write carried out the revolution, not the anarchist leaders and editors of left- wing newspapers.
A second goal of this book is to explain how the workers' revolution in Mexico was fundamentally different from the other great revolutions of the early twentieth century, particularly in Russia. In one area, of course, these revolutions had much in common. Each was a true social revolution, an upheaval from below that fundamentally altered property relations. In Mexico, however, no revolutionary party prepared the revolution, guided workers through it, or took power afterwards. Mexican industrial workers were on their own. This is not to say that workers, artisans, and activists were completely unfamiliar with socialism and anarchism. In fact, anarchists played an important role in founding the Casa del Obrero Mundial and the later Confederación General de Trabajadores (CGT). Marxists founded the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) in 1919, later establishing the Confederación Sindical Unitaria de México. Nonetheless, what is most striking about the workers' revolt in the cotton textile industry is the degree to which it was carried out by activists, militants, and just plain working people, initially angry at specific problems at work or in the community, but not much imbued with socialist or anarchist theory. Without guidelines or a directing party, worker anger and militancy increased in direct proportion to the decline of the capacity of the state to repress them. Radical laborism rather than socialism or anarchism drove Mexico's workers' revolution.
As a consequence, process rather than predetermined plans propelled this revolution. There was no Marx in Mexico, nor Lenin's State and Revolution. Without a guiding ideology, the process followed a path that led from concrete work experiences to specific grievances, to generalized complaints, to forming and defending trade unions, and finally to a generalized challenge to the authority of owners. In the beginning, the outbreak of the broader revolution and its impact on government provided an opening for cotton textile workers to express their anger about work: arbitrary and capricious supervisors; unfair disciplinary measures; low wages for long hours; and a generalized understanding that workers were less valued, less important, and less respected than bosses. When they sought a resolution, the owners, supported by long-standing habit, refused to institute changes. In response to the obstinacy of capital, militants and workers created organization because individually they were too vulnerable. Since their historical experience included trade unions, workers in the textile industry quickly turned to them rather than political parties or secret societies. From late 1911, when the revolution's first unions demonstrated their new strength, the process of defending and using trade unions, sindicatos, drove the workers' revolution. Owners, who understandably did not want interference with their heretofore unchallenged authority in the factory, tried to fire unionists and destroy unions. Increasingly wide circles of workers responded by defending their organizations at any cost; without unions, there was nothing else they could defend. As conflict in the workplace grew, workers and their unions attacked the authority of foremen, factory administrators, and owners, so that the workers' revolution became a revolution over authority in the factory.
In no other twentieth-century revolution — with the possible exceptions of Bolivia and Spain — did unions play such a central role. Of course, workers' councils, or soviets, were fundamental to the Russian Revolution. In Russia, however, power in the revolution and in the councils fell to the Bolshevik Party. Once in power, the Bolsheviks claimed to rule for workers and their unions but soon suppressed independent union organization. For Mexican textile workers, the vanguard of the workers' revolution, unions were the subject and object of revolution. Trade unions were the main organizational vehicle for workers to challenge owners. This centrality of unions brought success but also limits. The success was that unions replaced owners in controlling the shop floor. The workers' revolt in the cotton textile industry so completely overturned the authority of owners that it transferred control of the factory to unions. Owners controlled the outside — buying machines, materials, and technology, and selling products — but workers' unions controlled the inside — hiring, firing, and disciplining labor. The labor process thus became a process of constant negotiation between managers and union leaders. Unions imposed on owners significant reductions in the hours of work, increases in pay and other benefits, and a new status for common workers. Powerful unions came to control politics in the mill towns and the social mobility of work. In the Latin American context, the gains were many and revolutionary.
The revolution was limited by its relationship to authority. The workers' revolution did not attempt to abolish the authority of the market. Although mill hands disputed the authority of owners to run the factory, they did not dispute ownership or private property. Indeed, trade unions needed all three, owners, private property, and the market, to justify their existence. Therefore, when unions acquired power in the factory, the factory remained subordinate to the market and to private property. Unions quickly discovered that the ultimate limit to the control of work came from outside the factory. Workers' organizations controlled the shop floor but could not determine the price of input materials nor the price of competitors' products. They controlled hiring and firing in the factory but not the supply and demand for jobs in the broader labor market. During the later revolution, workers discovered that they had no alternative but to turn to the state to solve the market problem, to institutionalize their victories, and to protect their unions. If during the early revolution, a collapsing state allowed trade unions to assault owners, during the later revolution trade unions discovered that they needed a state after all. Thus, bowing to the authority of the market meant bowing to the authority of the state, albeit a new, postrevolutionary state.
As a consequence, authority played an ambiguous role during the workers' revolution. Workers challenged authority at work but did not seek to abolish the hierarchy of authority. By disputing the authority of owners rather than authority per se, workers reproduced relationships of hierarchy and subordination in the unions that paralleled the old relationships of hierarchy and subordination in the factories. Similarly, workers did not abolish command, they just moved it from the mill to the union. As a consequence, by the late revolution, union leaders acquired some of the power lost by owners. Authority continued, transferred from mill owners to union leaders. Similarly, although the workers' revolution brought forth some challenges to the authority of men over women, it could no more resolve this problem than that of authority at work. Finally, the workers' revolution represented the victory of modernization, the struggle for rational society and nominally equal citizens. It could not, however, challenge the contradiction of modernity, nominal political equality amidst the fundamental social and economic inequality determined by private property.
Despite the ambiguities, authority played a central role in the Mexican Revolution, as in all social revolutions. William Rosenberg argued that in Russia, "Authority based on traditional social hierarchies in the workplace weakened dramatically." This was because, as McKean and Smith have demonstrated, "working people challenged ... the all-pervasive authority of factory managers, foremen, and petty workshop proprietors." So too in Mexico, the workers' revolution challenged and weakened authority based on traditional social hierarchies. Workers achieved their strongest institutional gains in the aftermath of the 1917 Constitution, with state labor codes that ratified a formal shift of authority to workers and their unions. After 1921, however, labor gangsters began a series of labor wars that wracked the textile industry, the communities, and the unions. The outcome did not negate the workers' revolution but did substantially alter its final nature by shifting authority from workers to gangster-run unions. It was a new form of authority but authority over workers nonetheless.
The revolutionary process affected the culture of the working class. The years of violence, of challenging authority, of creating new social relationships at work, altered the attitudes and behaviors of workers toward authority in general, toward traditional hierarchy, and to some extent, toward traditional family and gender roles. The new culture of urban working-class Mexico, later portrayed in film by the great comedians like Tin Tan, reflected and shaped attitudes about race, class, hierarchy, authority, and nation. Many of the traditional ideas about respect for social superiors collapsed during the revolution, often replaced by a culture of violence, of cleverness, and of reliance on friends and family for support at work and in the union. What did not collapse, what the workers' revolution fortified, was respect and love for the nation, another ambiguous participant in the workers' revolution. The workers' revolution was product and cause of developing modernity, as in Russia.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Revolution Within the Revolution by Jeffrey Bortz. Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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