Stumbling Its Way through Mexico: The Early Years of the Communist International

By Daniela Spenser

Stumbling Its Way through Mexico records the early attempts by the Moscow-based Communist International to organize and direct a revolutionary movement in Mexico. The period studied, from 1919 to 1929, was characterized at the beginning by a wave of revolutions in Europe that the Bolsheviks expected to grow into an international phenomenon. However, contrary to their expectations, the revolutionary tide ebbed, and the new age they had expected receded into an uncertain future. In response, Moscow sent agents and recruited local leaders worldwide to sustain and train local revolutionary movements and to foment what they saw as an inevitable seizure of power by Communist-led workers.
 
Unlike the Soviet seizure of power in Russia, the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920 had not changed the fundamental character of the nation-state. However, it did represent a sea change in the relationship between the state and society. When the Bolshevik Revolution broke out in Russia in 1917, Mexican workers already had generations of experience in the struggle against oppression, in forming class solidarity, in organizing strikes, and had tasted both success and failure. For decades in their workplaces, Mexicans had debated how to end the exploitation of labor and practice international solidarity. Mexico had an indigenous labor movement acting with some success to establish a place in a new Mexico. The agents that Moscow chose to lead the Communist movement in Mexico lacked an understanding of the local situation and presumed a lack of indigenous confidence and experience that doomed to failure their efforts to impose external control over the labor movement.
 
Based on documents found principally in the Soviet archives recently opened to the public, Stumbling Its Way through Mexico is an invitation to rethink the history of Communism in Mexico and Latin America.
 
Copublication with the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780817385491

Book preview

STUMBLING ITS WAY THROUGH MEXICO

The Early Years of the Communist International

Daniela Spenser

TRANSLATED BY

Peter Gellert

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

English language translation copyright © 2011 Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social and The University of Alabama Press

Los primeros tropiezos de la Internacional Comunista en México. © 2009 Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: Bembo

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Spenser, Daniela.

    [Primeros tropiezos de la Internacional Comunista en México. English]

    Stumbling its way through Mexico: the early years of the Communist International/Daniela Spenser; translation by Peter Gellert.

        p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-8173-1736-2 (cloth: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8173-8549-1 (electronic)

1. Communist International—History—20th century. 2. Partido Comunista Mexicano—History—20th century. 3. Communism—Mexico—History—20th century. I. Title.

    HX113.S6613 2011

    324.272'075—dc22

                              2010047593

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Bolshevik Revolution on the March

2. The First Stumbles

3. The Soldiers of the World Revolution

4. The Encounter with Mexico

5. The Aftermath of the Encounter

6. Epilogue to the First Stumbles

Notes

Name Index

Illustrations

1. Congress of the Second International in Amsterdam, 1904

2. Lenin in front of the Uritsky Palace with Maxim Gorky, Grigori Zinoviev, M. N. Roy, and Charles Phillips

3. Detail of Lenin in front of the palace

4. Delegates to the Second Congress of the Comintern standing in front of the Kremlin murals

5. V. I. Lenin at the Second Congress of the Comintern with Grigori Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Josef Stalin

6. Delegates to the Second Congress of the Comintern standing in front of a train with salutary inscriptions

7. V I. Lenin in 1922 in Nizhni Novgorod

8. M. N. Roy

9. M. N. Roy with an unidentified comrade

10. Sen Katayama as a student in the United States

11. Mikhail Borodin's Mexican passport

12. Linn A. E. Gale

13. Gale's Magazine in English published in Mexico

14. Mexico City taxi drivers strike, 1923

15. Sen Katayama as a Comintern functionary

16. Louis Fraina with his wife, Esther

17. Edgar Woog, alias Alfred Stirner, and Bertram Wolfe

18. José Valadés, Julio Díaz, José Durán, and Nicolás Bernal in 1925

19. Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama gives a fiery speech in the Chamber of Deputies, 1921

20. Office of the Mexican Communist Party and its organ El Machete in the center of Mexico City, 1927

Acknowledgments

Thanks to financing from the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT) between 1994 and 1996 and between 1999 and 2001, I was able to conduct research in Moscow, Russia; in College Park, Maryland; in Boston, Massachusetts; and in Palo Alto, California. Without this economic support from the CONACYT and without the infrastructure of the Center for Research and Higher Education in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), it would not have been possible to carry out the project. The Ángel Palerm Library of the CIESAS in Mexico City and its librarians understood the demands of the project and provided me with all the bibliographical materials I needed.

The solidarity offered by several friends and colleagues was enormously beneficial, among them Dagmar Dolan in Palo Alto, California; Erika Pani in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Mary Kay Vaughan in Washington, D.C. Gregg Andrews, Paul Buhle, Daniel Campione, William Chase, Tim Davenport, Sho Konishi, Dan La Botz, Javier MacGregor, Franco Savarino, Lewis Siegelbaum, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, and Mauricio Tenorio contributed ideas and research materials that enriched the book. Catherine Rod and Cheryl Neubert, archivists at Grinnell College in Iowa, provided me with unpublished materials and photographs to complete the portrait of Sen Katayama. The critical observations of those who reviewed the book helped improve the text. Peter Gellert translated the book from Spanish into English, adding not only his understanding of the language but also his understanding of the conceptual and political problems.

Ruth Tosek, my mother, accompanied me in the fascinating journey from the beginning of the research until its conclusion. Daniel Yanes, my son, wrote his undergraduate thesis in economics while I edited this text in a discipline that in comparison with his seemed melancholic. To our mutual benefit we read each other's work. His observations were incorporated into the pages of this book.

Introduction

Wherever knowing and doing have parted company, the space of freedom is lost.

—Hannah Arendt, On Revolution

This book offers an overview of the first years in which, under the influence and orientation of the Communist International, an attempt was made to build a communist party and movement in Mexico. The period under discussion, 1919–29, was characterized by the revolutionary wave in Europe that the Bolsheviks believed was going to grow and, contrary to what they expected, by a downturn in the mobilization of the lower classes and a delay in the realization of the goal of a world conflagration toward an uncertain future. Although that wave reached Mexico, the country's own revolution put a barrier in the way of its growth. When the influence of the Bolshevik Revolution declined, in Mexico the social movements applied pressure on the government and mounted a resistance to the conservative opposition in order to ensure fulfillment of the precepts of the unconcluded Mexican Revolution.

In Mexico the revolution was not the founding act of the nation-state although it represented a turning point in the trajectory of the relationship between the state and society. The revolutionary processes, the Mexican and Russian revolutions, ran almost simultaneously, and each was circumscribed to its own historical genesis. The Bolshevik Revolution wanted to be worldwide, but to do so it had to win over the population to its international project. By the time it reached Mexico, the Mexican Revolution had run its course with a dynamic that could not be detained or detoured from the path it followed that began with the fall of the old regime, a civil war, and a new Magna Carta that incorporated the masses' yearnings to improve their economic life and position in society, protected by the state.

This book is based on the thesis that when the Bolshevik Revolution erupted on the scene in 1917, in Mexico the workers and artisans already had several generations of experience in struggling against oppressors, in defending their interests against abuses by the employers, in class solidarity, in organizing strikes, in resisting and debating how to end the exploitation of the working class, and in practicing an incipient international solidarity. During Porfirio Díaz's government (1874–1911) a radicalization occurred among workers and artisans as a result of different experiences, such as Mexican workers becoming employed in American companies, both in Mexico as well as in the United States; a growing consciousness that capitalism and the bourgeoisie treated workers, on whose labor they depended, unjustly; the worsening of living conditions, which undermined the hegemony exercised by the dominant groups in society; and the influence of revolutionary thinkers from inside and outside Mexico. Undoubtedly, the influence of Ricardo Flores Magón, the Magonistas, and the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM) contributed to the radicalization of sectors of the working class and artisans since their ideas began to be heard through their newspaper, Regeneración. Their agitation against the authoritarian rule of Porfirio Díaz converged with the labor insurgency in the main industrial centers, both mining as well as textile, and although the Magonistas did not directly participate in organizing strikes, their anti-Porfirista slogans served as a stimulus for working-class defiance during the revolution.¹

While the Bolshevik Revolution was spreading news of its accomplishments and the grandiose dreams it aimed to achieve, Mexico was experiencing the end of the revolutionary war and the beginning of institutional life, though repeated outbreaks of violence eroded it or did not allow it to take root. However, compared to the pre-revolutionary period, Mexico had changed. The country had a new legal framework that, though not complete, served as a reference point for the working classes and the charismatic leaders of the revolution, the caudillos, who aspired to a different future. Through constitutional article 123 the government legislated labor conditions and work-related social benefits, guaranteeing the minimum wage, workers' right to participate in company profit sharing, and the right to strike. Through article 27, the Constitution of 1917 jeopardized the inviolability of private property rights and questioned the bases of liberal capitalism. The social reforms promised the working class a sense of security and their own place in society. Therefore, the workers considered the constitution one of the results of the revolution and the legitimization of collective action. The constitution's radical clauses guaranteed that workers were not tempted to overthrow the dominant social order but rather demand fulfillment of its promises and the defeat of the vestiges of the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship that had been an obstacle to doing so.

Indeed, the 1917 Constitution accelerated the organizational trends incubated before the revolution erupted. The constitution legitimized the state mediation that workers took advantage of to negotiate with the government, given the incessant competition among the elites for control of the state. Economic nationalism, through which the revolution incorporated the workers and peasants into the nation-state, gave the project its popular character to the extent that foreign interests were affected, especially in the mining and oil industries, textiles, and transportation, and the governments showed signs of defending the population's interests. The inclusion of the popular classes in the political project of the revolution, even when they were subordinate to the project of the elites, strengthened the ideological ties between the state and the lower classes and subordinate sectors of society.²

In 1918 the Regional Mexican Workers Confederation (CROM) was founded under government aegis. This represented the culmination of a process of mutual support between the working class and the state and it meant distancing most of the workers from anarcho-syndicalism. From a position of weakness the workers consented to an alliance with the state, accepting corporate capitalism in exchange for being included in the state project, the only one that appeared to guarantee tranquility in the country and the revitalization of the economy. In the next few years, revolutionary nationalism became a political and ideological recourse that the lower classes would appeal to in demanding compliance with the promises of the revolution and that the ruling elites utilized to display their fidelity to the same revolution. The state recognized the existence of the class struggle and supported the workers, but it was far from favoring the victory of the proletariat and the end of capitalism.³ It was this historical trajectory and the political and ideological climate in which the emissaries of the Bolshevik Revolution wished to intervene in order to channel the social energy unleashed by the Mexican Revolution toward the construction of a communist movement linked to the Third International. In this task, the peasants and the agrarian movement played a secondary role.

This book explores the question of communism that other authors have already addressed.⁴ However, the book is also a radical departure from cold war historiography written from the 1950s to the early 1970s in which historians treated the communist parties as no more than pliant tools of Moscow with little or no internal life of their own. Their works usually relied on secondary literature and published sources since archival evidence was not yet available.⁵ In reaction to their studies, in the 1980s historians of labor movements, communist parties, and the left in general moved from mere political history toward the social history of the left in Latin America. In the course of reconstructing the world of labor as it had grown and branched out from domestic roots, they tended to play down exogenous factors that had influenced Latin American social movements. As a result, the history of the Comintern's involvement in the shaping of the Latin American labor movements was neglected, even though several archives were available, both in the United States and in Europe, providing ample evidence of its activities in the region.⁶

The purpose of this book is to examine the question of communism from national and international perspectives, bringing the Communist International back into the picture, and to contribute to its historiographic and conceptual enrichment with research conducted in the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (Rossiiskyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'noi and politicheskoi istorii, RGASPI), which opened to the public in the 1990s. The RGASPI is home to the archival collection of the Mexican Communist Party, along with a vast body of documentation concerning the structures and leadership bodies of the Communist International and the personal files of prominent figures in communist history, which have just begun to be systematically studied.⁷

The opening of the Soviet archives has been an invitation to rethink the issue of communism in Mexico in light of the new sources and to reexamine our assumptions and conclusions reached without access to these files. In most of the countries in which the Communist Party played a part in social and political life, its history has been subjected to a critical review in light of the new documents.⁸ This has still not occurred in Mexico. This book should contribute to this collective task; it also seeks to open a dialogue and interaction with other authors who have written on the topic and with the readers of such works.

In a recent reflection, Barry Carr recognizes that the opening of the archives of the CI and its collateral organizations (such as the Red International of Labor Unions or Profintern) unquestionably represents a key moment in the history of studies on communism.⁹ But he cautions us not to let the new sources distract us from other endeavors, including the study of the presence of communism in the different regions of the country, biographical studies, and research into different social groups and occupations, as well as studying the significance of being a communist in Mexico, its social bases, and the relationship with and influence of communists on the non-communist sectors of society. In delving into such questions, Carr advocates broadening the international framework within which the communists functioned in addition to the Communist International to include the American and Latin American scenarios. He also calls on historians to expand the time frame, given that even though the Communist International was dissolved in 1943, the history of communism continued. Finally, but not less significant, the importance of anticommunism in the history of communism should not be forgotten.¹⁰

Undoubtedly the Comintern archives, together with other collections, is the source that enables a reconstruction of the political and social history of Mexico's trajectory influenced by communism because it highlights individual personal experiences that were otherwise buried under piles of pamphlets, newspapers, declarations, circular letters, and manifestos. Through the documents in the Comintern files we are exposed to the agents of history that we had known only through their leaders or official organs. The memoirs of the active participants are important for documenting the history of the Communist International. However, the two sources, archival documents and testimonies, do not always coincide, and therefore they have been compared against each other and the differences between them have been analyzed with the aid of an entire array of literature on Mexican and American communism, the social and political history of the left, the workers' movement, revolutions, and the formation of states in the revolution. In complementing the documents on Mexico with the archival materials of the Communist Party of the United States it has been possible to more reliably establish the connections between Mexico, Soviet Russia, and the United States that influenced the evolution of the communists. The documents in the Comintern archives also help us compensate for so many lost experiences and information, given that the members of the communist parties often followed the instruction of revealing as little as possible about their lives and their organizations, leading historians to dead ends and erroneous interpretations.¹¹

Chapter 1 seeks to re-create the Soviet and international climate in which the founding of the Communist International occurred and the Soviet and international scenarios in which its first congresses were held. The chapter delves into the overall problems of the trajectory of the initial years of the Bolshevik Revolution, whose leaders believed in the immediate and inevitable outbreak of world revolution. As this perspective receded to an uncertain future, the Soviet government and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union adapted their internal and external policies to the new situation.

Chapter 2 re-creates the social and political situation in Mexico after the civil war that followed the revolution subsided and before the new regime became institutionalized. It emphasizes that prior to the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution, Mexico already had its own experiences with trade union organization and internationalism ever since Mexicans, Latin Americans, and Americans found themselves together in the workplace, in unions, and in strikes in both countries. I argue that the traditions of social organization and community life of the workers and peasants, radicalized at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decade of the twentieth century, and strengthened by the Mexican Revolution, served to block receptivity to the ideas and the organizational forms proposed by the Bolsheviks. The result of the attempt to establish a communist party in 1919 can also be attributed to the chaotic circumstances in which the founding meeting took place based on the initiative of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and his new Mexican acolytes.

The book seeks to recover the ideas and the actions of the men—we rarely find women—involved to construct the historical moment in which the encounter and the confrontation between the two revolutions took place. One of the methodologies used for such effects is comparing the defining periods of the historical evolution of each country and their articulation with the periods on a world scale during the time frame under discussion in order to understand the coincidences and lack thereof between the two projects for radical change. A prominent role is assigned in the book to the leading participants who took or assumed responsibility for carrying out the projects of revolutionary change. Chapter 3 discusses their origins and contexts, their personal characteristics, the experiences and motivations that influenced their decision to dedicate a part or all of their lives to the construction of a different society, and their strengths and weaknesses.

Chapter 4 delves into the task that the emissaries of the world revolution brought with them to Mexico and the vicissitudes of their presence in the country when confronting the fluid reality that they found on the scene and how that compared with their preconceived ideas of Mexico. The chapter details the Comintern representatives' zeal in convincing the workers that the Third International's proposal was superior to the politics of anarcho-syndicalism and the project derived from the Mexican Revolution. The chapter ends with a balance sheet of the results of the Comintern emissaries' efforts.

Chapter 5 describes and analyzes the consequences of the encounter of the Comintern emissaries with Mexico after Soviet Russia changed its foreign policy line from confrontation to collaboration with the capitalist governments. The change translated into the abolition of the agency that represented the Comintern in Mexico, whose objective was to consolidate a communist party by convincing the different currents in the labor movement that Soviet communism was their best ideological and organizational option. In 1921 the Comintern representatives founded the Communist Party of Mexico for a second time. The chapter ends with several balance sheets of the experience of organizing a communist movement in Mexico.

Chapter 6 recounts the consequences of the first mishaps of communism in Mexico, when in the desire to spur the massive growth of the communist parties the Comintern instituted a political line that included other social classes and was less rigid than the previous policy in terms of ideological purity and tolerance toward the national governments. In fact, the Comintern exhorted the parties to enter into broad alliances with both other classes and governments while maintaining their ideological independence. This approach changed at the end of the 1920s when several crises simultaneously erupted within and outside the Soviet Union and Mexico, which did not have causal and intentional connections among them. However, in the Soviet Union's world vision, all were connected and, taken together, they had consequences for the evolution of global developments.

The decade ended with an antagonistic approach on the part of the Soviet Union toward its environment and with the economic crisis of the capitalist system. In Mexico, the 1920s concluded with the assassination of the president elect and the military uprising by his followers that shook the regime as a whole. In these circumstances, the government severely punished the challenge posed by the Mexican Communist Party (PCM), which played around with the idea of an insurrection without actually carrying it out. Due to its difficulties in achieving hegemony among the popular classes, the dominant class, and the revolutionary family itself, as the political elite was known, as well as in reaffirming national sovereignty in relation to foreign countries, the cornered government interpreted the attempted insurrection of the communists as the hand of Moscow. The communists were confined to prisons or murdered, the PCM's offices were raided, foreign communists were expelled, and diplomatic relations with the USSR were broken. With the experience of the 1920s behind them, the communists would face a new stage of the Mexican Revolution in the following decade that did not fit into their vision of the world and to which it would take time to adapt.

1

The Bolshevik Revolution on the March

History was Trotsky's instrument, the world was his stage, mankind his audience.

—J.T. Murphy, New Horizons

The Bolsheviks did not conceive the October Revolution as an isolated development but rather as the first step toward the world revolution. Two months before the insurrection, Leon Trotsky polemicized against those who opposed this view: To us internationalism is not an abstract idea existing only to be betrayed on every opportune occasion . . . but is a real guiding and wholly practical principle. A lasting, decisive success is inconceivable for us without a revolution in Europe.¹ When on November 7, 1917, Trotsky told the crowds of Petrograd workers and soldiers that the Provisional Government² had ceased to exist and the much-applauded Vladimir Ilyich Lenin predicted the outbreak of the world social revolution, Grigori Zinoviev proclaimed at the top of his lungs: This day we have paid our debt to the international proletariat. The North American writer John Reed, witness to these scenes, during the intoxicating days of November ran into the vice president of the Russian trade unions, David Riazanov who, biting his gray beard, shouted, It's insane! Insane! The European working class won't move!³ For the Bolsheviks there was a single road: after sweeping Europe, the October Revolution would spread to the rest of the world. This road was inevitable based on the people's demands, the conscious expression of the unconscious historical process.⁴

The Russian communists conceived of the October Revolution as the concretization of the humanism of the Enlightenment, of the social explosion and the radical political transformation of the French Revolution. They considered it endowed with a universal validity notwithstanding the specific characteristics of pre-revolutionary Russia. This universalist thought denied borders, affirmed a continuous evolution of history, progress, and culture, and strove for constantly overcoming partiality and diversity. The Russian revolutionaries also conceived gender as universal and neutral.⁵

The Bolsheviks' other source of inspiration for conceptualizing their project as ecumenical was Marx and his followers. In Marx's vision, the proletariat was politically and scientifically universal because, alienated from their labor and their communities of origin, workers lacked the material ties and were endowed with their own consciousness, different from that of the other social classes. Marx believed that the countries where a working class existed would be the first to advance toward socialism. Asia and Africa, which experienced a different historical process than Europe, were characterized by another mode of production, which organized societies in agglomerates of isolated rural communities connected to a despotic or inefficient state. This conception allowed Marx to see in imperialism an agent of progress although he sympathized with its victims. Marx and Engels identified the nation-states with spaces in which class struggle took place, but the national empirical references illustrated the general pattern of the sociopolitical organization of each of the eras examined, whose significance was objective and international.⁶

With Marx as their ideological guide, Lenin and the Bolsheviks sought to overcome the dilemma between the international essence and national form of the class struggle because they considered nationalist ideology to be an obstacle to liberation movements and modernization. Lenin's theoretical perspective, outlined in his book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, was the basis for predicting the escalation of conflicts between the European states and their colonial possessions and a change in the character of capitalism as a system in the process of decay. Even though Marx and Engels centered their analysis of the capitalist system in Europe and the United States, Lenin understood that the intensity of the imperial rivalries provided new possibilities and meaning to the anti-imperialistic struggle in non-European countries.⁷

THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONALISM OF SOVIET RUSSIA

From the time of the seizure of power in Russia, the revolution was in danger. Its first challenge was to defeat the different forces opposed to the consolidation of the Bolshevik government in order to defend the new order and fight its adversaries seen—although this was not always the case—as part of the counterrevolution and intent on sabotaging the revolution. The other forces to defeat were the invading Western powers, Japan, and the units of the white armies. Peasants also rebelled against the new government, which implemented drastic economic measures such as the mandatory seizure of their grain and livestock to feed the cities and the army. In different areas of the country, peasants were caught in the crossfire between the red and white armies, which fed their ill will toward both. Also in opposition to the Soviet government were several socialist, anarchist, and liberal currents that viewed the Bolsheviks' inclination to monopolize power with concern.⁸

Despite the civil war and the fragmentation of the socialist movement in Russia, the Bolsheviks did not give up their hope that the Russian revolution would spread to the rest of the world. The political conditions in Europe confirmed what the Bolsheviks predicted. The German workers, Marxists and reformists, who in 1914 had voted in favor of war credits so that Germany could launch a military offensive, turning, according to Lenin, their internationalism into social patriotism and national socialism, began to protest and show sympathy for Bolshevik Russia. Russia pleaded for peace, a peace that went hand in hand with the elimination of the economic, political, and social conditions that had caused the war. Instead of peace in defense of