Few figures loom larger in the history of twentieth-century Mexico—save perhaps presidents and revolutionary fighters—than labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano. A giant of the Mexican Left and a representative of Mexican and Latin American workers on the world stage, he made himself indispensable to the country's leaders during the complicated processes of state formation that followed Mexico's bloody social revolution.
From the 1930s through his death in late 1968, Lombardo Toledano was an omnipresent figure in Mexican politics, not least because, as Daniela Spenser compellingly details in this book, he promoted an ideology—unrelentingly supportive of the Soviet Union and of Stalinism—that centered the state, rather than the proletarian masses, as the crucial actor that would drive historical change. That ideology, and Spenser's careful reconstructions of the experiences that underpinned it, help explain the complex relations that Lombardo Toledano had with Mexico's ruling party, the many rival labor leaders in the country, and the broader Mexican Left.
In a field crowded with hagiographic biographies, there is no one better suited to an objective accounting of the life of Lombardo Toledano than Spenser, whose previous work has detailed the history of Soviet relations with Mexico in the 1920s and beyond. One of the key contributions of this book, which was published first in Spanish by a major trade press in Mexico and now appears in this English version, is its transcendence of sources that many previous biographical studies have used, such as Lombardo's published work and a widely cited oral history that he did in the 1960s. Spenser adds to this well-known corpus not only material from state archives in Mexico, the United States, and Europe, but also some 1,300 boxes of personal papers to which few others have had access previously but which have now been digitized by the Universidad Obrera in Mexico City.
As such, this book gives the reader a new lens into Lombardo's thought and action through private letters, notebooks, and manuscripts. The book is driven by these sources, condensing a dizzying amount of archival material into a clear account of the most important events in Lombardo Toledano's political life, especially the founding and leadership of the Mexican Workers’ Confederation (CTM), the Latin American Workers’ Confederation (CTAL), and the Partido Popular (PP, later PPS).
Spenser's clear-eyed and even judgments put Lombardo's political calculations in crucial context. Perhaps because it was first written for a Mexican audience, the book provides explanatory background for world-historical events at more length than for the complicated internecine struggles of the Mexican state—knowledge of the major players and key turning points in Mexican postrevolutionary history is sometimes assumed. The book therefore excels at locating Lombardo in the major struggles of the international Left, taking the reader along for his wide-ranging international travels and explaining his contempt for Trotsky, his refusal to criticize Stalinism, his vehement opposition to the capacious threats of fascism and US imperialism, and his distaste for the social movements of the 1960s, including the Prague Spring and Mexico's own student movement. But it also explains the seemingly incongruous stance he took—as a communist, labor militant, and opposition party founder—in nearly unwavering support of the Mexican state under the hegemony of what became the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). A resolutely stagist thinker, Lombardo approached the development of socialism in Mexico with what Spenser calls a kind of “secular theology” (386), one that required subordinating the needs of the workers’ movements to what he understood as the logic of history—and therefore to the state's project for rapid capitalist development.
A singular and consequential figure in the history of Mexico, Lombardo Toledano was also deeply the product of much larger historical forces, and this indispensable biography weaves those two threads together with expert skill.
