Eric Hobsbawm suggested that, after 1917, the key question for communists worldwide was what to do when their hoped-for revolution failed to materialise.Footnote 1 From around 1935 to 1961 the bulk of the Mexican Marxist Left simply asserted that the Mexican Revolution which began in 1910 was their ‘hoped-for revolution’, despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary. Archie Brown has observed that, ‘for individual members of Communist parties the consciousness of belonging to a great international movement was of huge importance, the more so if their own party occupied only a small part of the political spectrum in their home country’.Footnote 2 The leaders of the Mexican Marxist Left, however, found the solution to their political ‘smallness’ not in the pursuit of global revolution but in an appropriation of the nationalist discourse of the (non-proletarian) Mexican Revolution.Footnote 3
The mid-1940s represented a crucial conjuncture in Mexico, a point at which several key processes overlapped: the institutionalisation of the post-revolutionary regime, most obviously the form of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI);Footnote 4 the permanent shift to civilian government; a significant move to the Right in the ruling party's ideology; the growth of local anti-communism contributing to a Cold War political culture from within; and the last phase of a catastrophic decline for the Left, in part due to its own decisions and actions.Footnote 5
In 1945, the Mexican Marxist Left comprised three main groups: the Partido Comunista Mexicano (Mexican Communist Party, PCM); supporters of Vicente Lombardo Toledano (lombardistas), later the Partido Popular (Popular Party, PP);Footnote 6 and independent or dissident Marxists, some of whom later formed the Partido Obrero-Campesino Mexicano (Mexican Worker-Peasant Party, POCM).Footnote 7 As the 1946 election loomed, the Marxist Left was structurally weak and factionally divided, lacking a broad constituency or distinctive ideological programme. The two larger sections of the Marxist Left – the PCM and lombardistas – assumed the existence of an informal ‘Popular Front’, enthusiastically endorsing the Miguel Alemán of the PRI, the successful candidate.Footnote 8 While the smaller dissident or ‘independent’ Left was more sceptical, it lacked support and leverage. Within two years the political – as distinct from cultural – Left was manoeuvred into a position of virtual irrelevance; at that point the regime turned its fire on the more threatening target of radical labour. Without the presence of effective political allies, the defeat of the militant unions followed swiftly, and by 1950–1 the PRI had eliminated the radical Left as a significant force in both the political and labour arenas.Footnote 9 As Barry Carr has argued, the socialist project was set aside in the name of cooperation with the PRI, aiding the PRI in its dual strategy whereby radical elements were either subsumed (‘tamed’) or eliminated.Footnote 10
The setting aside of socialism was justified under the rhetoric of progressive nationalism. Where Marxism and nationalism have attempted to coexist, nationalism has always (eventually) won out over the internationalist impulse inherent in Marxism.Footnote 11 Mike Davis has recently argued for a renewed examination of the relationship between Marxism and nationalism; moreover, he has demonstrated that within the Marxist canon there existed a much richer, more nuanced engagement with nationalism and national identity than is usually conceded.Footnote 12 However, while he challenges the truism that ‘nationalism is the fact against which Marxist theory breaks itself’, it nonetheless holds true for Mexico.Footnote 13 What makes the Mexican case particularly interesting is not only the strength of nationalism on the Left, but also the fact that it was the dominant progressive tradition into which (and sometimes against which) Marxist ideas were introduced. Nationalism was an area in which Communist Parties worldwide had an unusual degree of tactical freedom as the Second World War ended; in Latin America, the war had weakened Communist Party ties to the Soviet Union as compared to the period before 1940.Footnote 14 When confronted by a nationalist hegemon in the form of the PRI, most Mexican Marxists – both inside and outside the PCM – opted to follow Lombardo in accepting the form and trajectory of that hegemon, rather than presenting an alternative vision.Footnote 15 As Brian Latell puts it, the PCM ‘remained small and ineffective, seemingly more easily manipulated by the PRI than by Moscow’.Footnote 16 Though Communist Parties everywhere compromised with nationalism to some extent in the post-war period, in Mexico, leaders and theoreticians active in this era based their policy choices overwhelmingly on nationalist rather than Marxist principles. The bulk of the Mexican Marxist Left favoured the ex post facto addition of class-based language to what, fundamentally, was a defence of both the Mexican nation-state and its post-revolutionary institutions.Footnote 17 This meant the deference of many leftist leaders to the ‘national bourgeoisie’, the class they identified as best placed to defend the gains of the Mexican Revolution.
Why does this matter? The absence of Marxism as an effective influence in Mexican politics, at least between 1938 and 1961, is striking.Footnote 18 Left radicalism (a broader category than Marxism, to be sure) appears only fleetingly in Gillingham and Smith's recent volume on the period 1938–68, and with good reason.Footnote 19 Outside the conventional boundaries of politics, but with a great deal of influence nonetheless, Marxists such as Jesús Silva Herzog and Alonso Aguilar Monteverde remained a prominent force in universities and the arts during this period. However, this article concentrates primarily on national parties with a Marxist orientation, and during the era in question these groups were characterised by weakness and fewness. The lasting consequences of this political lacuna were manifold. Attacks on labour in the post-war period (particularly the imposition of PRI stooges – charros, or cowboys – to union leadership positions) were made much easier once the political allies of radical unions were permanently weakened. Furthermore, ceding the heritage of the Mexican Revolution to the ruling party not only narrowed the Mexican polity – effectively to a one-party state – but also allowed the PRI to cloak authoritarian, repressive governance in an internationalist, revolutionary rhetoric which the Left was unable to challenge until the late 1980s. While Mexico's revolution is notoriously singular, the implications of its ‘leftwashing’ may be rather broader.
The first part of this article outlines dominant and dissident positions on nationalism taken by various groups and parties of the Mexican Marxist Left. The local interpretative struggle is placed in the context of broader doctrinal debates over the desired balance between nationalism and internationalism. A Latin American Marxist alternative to pro-Soviet orthodoxy – that of José Carlos Mariátegui – is presented, and the dualistic importance of international solidarity as both a rallying cry and a fig leaf for nationalists on the Left is emphasised. The second half of the article takes as a case study the Marxist Round Table of January 1947 to illustrate the thesis that communist principles were repeatedly subordinated to Mexican nationalism – both in a general sense and more especially in the form espoused by the PRI.
Marxism, Nationalism and the Mexican Left
Marxism and Nationalism
An emergent school of Cold War studies sees local agency – in particular, action by autochthonous groups – as a crucial variable in the broader left–right, communist–anti-communist conflict.Footnote 20 Communist Parties in the immediate post-war period had some theoretical autonomy and a great deal of practical freedom. Partly because most Latin American governments had cut diplomatic ties with the USSR, and partly owing to the unfolding diplomatic and military crisis in Europe, the Comintern (and successors) and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) displayed little interest in the political affairs of Latin American Communist Parties.Footnote 21 While Andreas Wirsching is partially correct to assert that ‘in the long run, no politically active communist could escape a fundamental and very personal choice: either accept unconditional subservience to the will of Moscow or break with the movement’, where the will of Moscow was vague or absent, the political direction of ‘local communisms’ – such as the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) under Browder – took on greater significance.Footnote 22
The confrontation between the mythologizing nationalism of post-revolutionary Mexico on the one hand, and political Marxism's prioritisation of class concerns over national interest on the other, shaped the political choices of both Lombardo and the leadership of the PCM. A near-consensus existed on the Left, using Marxist categorisations and definitions but concentrating on imperialism and colonialism rather than domestic socio-economic concerns.Footnote 23 This consensus was constantly reinforced, not by marginalising or obscuring internationalist aspects of leftist discourse, but by detaching them entirely from the Mexican domestic political situation – put simply, Mexican political and economic elites were held to far lower ideological standards than those elsewhere. For example, in his 1944 pamphlet ‘What Are the Urgent Tasks of the Peoples of Latin America’, Lombardo made sweeping condemnations of both ‘traditional dictatorships’ and ‘clerical fascism’ (the latter describing the Argentine government) in Latin America, while fulsomely praising the achievement of ‘national unity’ – indeed, ‘the unity of all patriotic Mexicans’ – under Ávila Camacho in Mexico.Footnote 24 Overlooking the many strikes which defied the 1942 Labour Unity Pact, Lombardo proclaimed that Ávila Camacho had won the outright support of the proletariat.Footnote 25
By 1945, oficialista nationalism had achieved dominance on the Left and Centre of Mexican politics. To the right of the PRI were three competing strands of nationalism: first, a populist centre–right trend which implicitly considered the revolution a deviation from Mexico's natural trajectory towards a modernising North American development model; second, the Catholic conservatism of the Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party, PAN) with its paternalistic and moral conception of the nation; and third, the Unión Nacional Sinarquista (National Synarchist Union, UNS) and its vision of militarism, a planned economy, and resource nationalism. On the left, cardenismo was a strong and somewhat separate tradition, espoused by Heriberto Jara, Miguel Henríquez Guzmán, Francisco Múgica and Cárdenas himself. An economic nationalism, moderately redistributive and with an emphasis on state planning, it remained popular with those generals excluded from the new civilian elite. However, it operated as an adjunct to the oficialista strand rather than in opposition to it. At (and beyond) the left fringes of the PRI there was lombardismo, which was, according to Knight, ‘a kind of simplistic nationalist Marxism, which, while recycling Marxist notions of capitalist exploitation and class conflict, plotted them on to an international scenario, in which the United States became a surrogate for the exploitative bourgeoisie and Mexico was a put-upon proletarian’.Footnote 26 Of the several other groups which identified themselves with the Marxist tradition the largest, the PCM, was avowedly committed to the patriotic discourse; the ‘independent’ Left was a little more circumspect; and the Trotskyist Left the most clearly internationalist. Not even the Trotskyists could escape the traumas of the nationalism debate, however, its tiny base dividing and eventually splitting over the question of relations with pro-Soviet and pro-PRI groupings.
Peru, Mariátegui, and the Latin American Alternative
The troubled relationship between Marxism and nationalism had been exposed in Peru. The antipathy – not always or completely mutual – between the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, APRA) and the Partido Comunista Peruano (Peruvian Communist Party, PCP) in their appeals to Peruvian labour during the 1930s foreshadowed that of the PRI and PCM in Mexico a decade later, and the experience of Peruvian Marxism in the face of the APRA was plain for the world (and specifically its communists) to see. As Paulo Drinot has suggested, anti-communism can be ‘inversely proportional to the influence of Communism and Communist parties’, and in Peru – as in Mexico – the Communist Party was ‘small, weak, and electorally insignificant’.Footnote 27 Drinot's conclusion – that ‘repression alone cannot explain the ultimate failure of the PCP to capture labor … [a] large part of the explanation rests with the PCP's labor strategy’ – certainly applies to Mexico, though there it was the withdrawal of PCM activists from rural organisation (rather than industrial unions’ rejection of communism) which proved crucial.Footnote 28
There is a sharp contrast between the lombardista conception of the Left–nation relationship and that of the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, who was noticeably more confident about ‘the leading role of the proletariat’.Footnote 29 As an alternative to Stalinism, the work of Mariátegui shares many similarities with that of Gramsci, where carefully constructed ‘united fronts’ with progressive potential allies would usher in a period of socialist hegemony; a Marxist party as ‘the embryo of a new society constituted by people able to both think and feel, based on the overcoming of the social divisions’.Footnote 30 In Mexico the reverse was true; leftists chose their friends poorly, and their Marxism was usually subsumed by the dominant nationalist ideology of the Centre. In socio-economic terms, this meant the rejection of the campesino as a progressive political agent and the abandonment of the peasant–worker alliance in favour of bourgeois–worker unity.Footnote 31 In addition, in the context of overwhelmingly Catholic Latin America, Mariátegui ‘privileged the spiritual and ethical dimensions of socialism, faith in the revolutionary struggle, absolute commitment to the emancipatory cause’.Footnote 32 Where mariateguismo has been described as ‘the internationalist approach to national democracy’, lombardismo can be counterpoised as a ‘simplistic nationalist Marxism’ incorporating anti-imperialist rhetoric.Footnote 33 Lombardo and Mariátegui were among the most prominent and influential Latin American Marxist intellectuals, at least prior to the Cuban Revolution – Mariátegui, according to Michael Löwy, was ‘the most important and most inventive of the Latin American Marxists’.Footnote 34 Yet few on the Mexican Marxist Left put his heterodox, regionally-specific variant of Marxism into practice despite it being well known to his contemporaries throughout the hemisphere.Footnote 35
The intertwined nature of the regional left in the interwar period is well documented. As Silvana Ferreyra has shown, the transnational network of leftist activists which developed in Latin America in the 1920s had strong roots in both Peru and Mexico; both Jesús Silva Herzog and Gerardo Murillo (better known as ‘Dr Atl’), for instance, contributed to Mariátegui's literary journal Amauta.Footnote 36 Though Mariátegui was himself unable to attend the founding conference of the Confederación Sindical Latinoamericana (Latin American Syndical Confederation, CSLA) in 1929 – the Profintern-era precursor of Lombardo's Confederación de Trabajadores de América Latina (Confederation of Latin American Workers, CTAL) – Peruvian delegates attended alongside Mexican communists David Alfaro Siqueiros, Elías Barrios and Samuel Rodríguez Cerrilla.Footnote 37 Siqueiros and Valentín Campa then joined the General Council of the CSLA as its Mexican representatives.Footnote 38
A few days later, at the Buenos Aires conference of Latin American Communist Parties, Peruvian socialism was represented by Hugo Pesce and Julio Portocarrero: they presented three papers outlining specific aspects of Mariátegui's thought. The Peruvian delegates caused significant doctrinal discomfort by insisting (following Mariátegui) that ‘the directives for our nations given by the South American Secretary of the Comintern must be different because each region's conditions are different’; this was a direct challenge to the view of the Secretary – Argentine-Italian Communist Victorio Codovilla – that ‘[Peru] is a semi-colonial nation like the others’.Footnote 39
Though relatively immobile, Mariátegui was an important part of this intra-regional network as Secretary-General of the Peruvian Socialist Party (later the Communist Party). Furthermore, he had intervened on the topic of Mexico and proclaimed the non-revolutionary nature of the ruling party. In his 1930 essay ‘The New Course of Mexican Politics as Seen from the Margins’, Mariátegui asserted that:
The historical experiment begun in Mexico with Madero's insurrection and the overthrow of Porfirio Díaz provides the observer with an accurate and unique collection of proofs of the inevitable attraction toward capitalism and the bourgeoisie of all the political movements led by the petite bourgeoisie, with all its particular ideological confusion.Footnote 40
Since the post-revolutionary model in Mexico was a direct inspiration for Haya de la Torre in his conceptualisation of APRA – ‘the Mexican Revolution is Our Revolution’ – Mariátegui's subsequent comparisons between Mexico's ‘regulatory state’ and Mussolini's ‘national and unified state’ did not endear him to his countryman.Footnote 41
‘Good revolutionary praxis’, for Mariátegui, was ‘based on the careful application of Marxism to the concrete reality of different nations’.Footnote 42 Indeed, this was the root of Mariátegui's interpretation of Marx: ‘Marxism, in each country, for each people, works and acts on the situation, on the milieu, without overlooking any of its realities.’Footnote 43 This is in marked contrast to the ‘productivist and statist strains within the culture of Mexican socialism [that] weakened the left's critical stand’ – both the PCM and Lombardo supported an approach to state-led industrialisation which corresponded closely to that of Stalin's USSR.Footnote 44 While it is unclear how much direct influence Mariátegui had on the dissident Left in Mexico at this time, there can be little doubt that senior figures such as Campa and Hernán Laborde – a prominent Marxist and former PCM presidential candidate who had been expelled from the party in 1940 – were familiar with his ideas; they certainly came to very similar conclusions about the post-revolutionary government in Mexico and the limitations of a democracy steered by the bourgeoisie. For Campa, comparison with Mariátegui and Julio Antonio Mella – ‘the greatest Latin American comrades’ – was the highest possible praise; he reserved this honour for Laborde after his death.Footnote 45 Crucially, like Mariátegui, Campa saw the alliance of urban and rural proletarians as being of fundamental importance for any future leftist success; as Alberto Flores Galindo puts it, Mariátegui wished to ‘[strengthen] the alliance between workers and peasants to incorporate the ayllus into the agrarian revolution, not limiting this to the struggle against feudalism, but heading towards socialism’.Footnote 46 Furthermore, as Fernanda Beigel has shown, Mariátegui's theories on race, class and the state pervaded the hemisphere under the guise of indigenismo; while these ideas were dismissed by orthodox Communists as ‘petty bourgeois’, in Mexico it was Campa and Laborde (among others) who first recognised the weakness of rigidity in class and labour categorisation as it pertained to party organisation.Footnote 47
Internationalism as Solidarity
Leftist solidarity with fraternal movements worldwide was less common between 1945 and 1947 in Mexico than in subsequent years, when the Korean War initiated a period of large-scale opposition to US foreign policy. Nonetheless, there were frequent observable examples of transnational solidarity: with other socialist or communist parties and leaders; with exiles in Mexico City fleeing regimes throughout the western hemisphere; with sympathetic ‘progressive’ regimes; and with the USSR and its allies. During the immediate post-war period, solidarity was directed primarily towards the dispersed fragments of the Spanish Republic, but careful attention was also given to the ongoing struggles in China and Greece, as well as the fortunes of leftist parties throughout the Americas. These instances of public solidarity offer a set of comparative examples with which to contrast the Left's analysis of the Mexican situation.
In January 1947, Lombardo described China as the site of ‘a tremendous struggle by the forces of the people that aspire to a profoundly popular democracy’.Footnote 48 Yet even at this stage he called for a government of national unity, a ‘new republic’ which would allow the emancipation of China at some point ‘in its future’.Footnote 49 The PCM deviated somewhat from this view, recognising that the national government was in fact dominated by a ‘reactionary clique’. An anti-clerical character was also assigned to the ‘selfless and heroic Chinese people’ whose oppression was reportedly aided by the Vatican.Footnote 50 The Greek civil war also attracted ongoing interest. PCM newspaper La Voz de México carried reports that the ‘white terror’ exacted upon the Greek population was backed by ‘the English and the monarchist government’.Footnote 51 Lombardo raised the particular difficulties of Greece and Iran with regard to their recent relationships with imperialist states.Footnote 52 In May 1947, Laborde backed calls for the formation of a coalition government in Greece, to be followed by a ‘complete purge of traitors and collaborationists’.Footnote 53
More frequently, the political activities of other Latin American Lefts were cited as inspiration. La Voz de México predicted the ‘Triumph of the Uruguayan Communist Party’ before the parliamentary elections of 1946.Footnote 54 The Uruguayan example was apposite for the PCM in particular since there (as seemingly in Mexico) the Communist Party had taken the view that ‘revolutionary change was to be achieved within the legal framework of bourgeois society’.Footnote 55 In the same edition of La Voz de México, the Venezuelan Communist Party was praised by PCM leader Dionisio Encina; its Congress, it was reported, ‘opened important perspectives for the revolutionary movement’. Encina, returning from the Congress where he had been an invited observer, noted that his counterparts in the ‘fraternal country’ had raised key issues such as agrarian reform, industrial development and the high cost of living, as well as the need to combat ‘reactionary and pro-fascist forces’. Once more anti-fascism and anti-imperialism were allied with ‘the development of the bourgeois-democratic revolution’.Footnote 56 Other networks of solidarity throughout Latin America were emphasised by the PCM in the pages of La Voz de México. There was alarm and indignation at the prospect of the Brazilian Communist Party being outlawed by ‘the fascists’.Footnote 57 In the early months of 1947 there were reports of Paraguay's ‘struggle against tyranny’ and the Brazilian people's determination in their fight ‘to secure democracy’.Footnote 58
Solidarity was not limited to struggles for national liberation in the developing world. Henry Wallace – former vice-president of the United States, editor of The New Republic and future presidential candidate for the Progressive Party – was lauded heartily by the Mexican Marxist Left. Yet the language used to praise him was rooted in the leftist conception of nationalism. Lombardo supported Wallace's position on monopolies, taxation, increased wages and a peaceful foreign policy.Footnote 59 For Blas Manrique of the PCM, Wallace offered hope since he was a ‘representative of democratic opinion’. Manrique claimed there was a binary choice between Truman and Wallace, ‘the two ways out of the current global situation’.Footnote 60 Laborde, objecting to the widespread accusations of treachery levelled at Wallace in the United States, made the case that he was, in fact, a patriot.Footnote 61 This followed the broad line of the Mexican Marxist Left, which equated patriotism and progressive politics. ‘Progressive’, in the case of Wallace, meant vocal support for the nascent peace campaign and the fostering of ‘friendly cooperation’ throughout the Americas.Footnote 62
There had been several examples of disastrous collaboration between communist parties and their nationalist counterparts, alongside some more fruitful unions from which the Mexican Marxist Left might have drawn lessons. In the former category stands the First United Front in China between 1925 and 1927, an alliance that ended with the Shanghai Massacre, and while Haya de la Torre's admiration for the Kuomintang is perhaps overstated, fears that Peruvian communists might fall into a similar trap as those in China were one of the underlying factors behind the Haya–Mariátegui rupture.Footnote 63 Chile and Mexico in the 1930s may be counted among the more successful examples of communist–nationalist collaboration.Footnote 64 Not only were there several practical examples to draw upon; there had also been extensive debate in the realm of Marxist theory and praxis.Footnote 65 The question of whether Mexican communists misjudged the PRI brings us back to the revolutionary or non-revolutionary nature of the ruling party. The PCM and lombardistas continued to discern revolutionary potential into the late 1940s, and it suited the Mexican ruling party that such a view dominated the Left.
The Marxist Round Table of 1947
A key moment in the development of the nationalist discourse of the Mexican Marxist Left was the Round Table of January 1947.Footnote 66 The tentative elucidation of differences between the various factions on the Mexican Marxist Left set the pattern of debate for much of the following decade. Some disagreements seem minor yet were debated at length; many were fundamental but only ever hinted at. The Round Table was held at the Palacio de Bellas Artes between 13 and 22 January 1947.Footnote 67 In attendance were groups from the three strands of the Marxist Left under consideration here, alongside several smaller groups and some independent thinkers.Footnote 68 The most complete contemporary source for the addresses made to the Round Table was El Popular, a newspaper with avowedly Marxist sympathies though at that stage no official affiliation.Footnote 69 There are also copious diplomatic records recounting the event, as well as the personal recollections of several attendees.Footnote 70
For a small gathering of Marxists in a country where communism posed little threat, the United States took a particular interest in the Round Table.Footnote 71 Four reasons were given for the close attention to the ‘Marxian Mexican left’: first, ‘an influence on national policy out of proportion to its relatively small size’; second, ‘a great influence on the thinking and tactics of the left in other Latin American countries’; third, ‘Lombardo Toledano has for years played a key role in that aspect of Soviet strategy which provides for the molding and utilization of important sectors of international opinion in conformity with the Soviet's (sic) interests’; and fourth, ‘Lombardo and the Mexican left no doubt influence to some extent the point of view toward our country of a sector of Latin American opinion which is broader than just the left’.Footnote 72 The first two claims are arguably greatly exaggerated; they are also difficult to quantify.
While the dominant strands of opinion at the Round Table did engage explicitly with geopolitics, inasmuch as support for the USSR and opposition to US imperialism were advocated strongly, the basis of their position seemed more rooted in a Second World War context than that of the emergent Cold War. This was significant mainly because the Mexican government was working within the new paradigm – rapidly moving towards the North American post-war anti-communist consensus – and the rather outdated views of both Lombardo and the PCM placed the Left as a whole in a weakened position.
The Language of Bourgeois-Democratic Revolution
A striking aspect of the discourse of Mexican Marxism at this time is its integration of the language of ‘bourgeois-democratic’ revolution. This appropriation was unapologetic, frequent and prominent in the manifestos, newspapers and pamphlets of the Left. It was a commonplace that a communist future would be arrived at as the logical conclusion of the bourgeois-democratic present; other than industrialisation, little of the path between the two had been illuminated. In attempting to link the process and outcome of the Mexican Revolution with the aspirations of the Marxist Left, major currents of the latter accepted ‘our revolution’ on the terms of its dominant faction, the ‘national bourgeoisie’; thus, the Left willingly used the pseudo-official description of the revolution as ‘bourgeois-democratic’.Footnote 73 To circumvent the apparent class contradiction in this position, Lombardo asserted that while the proletariat could lead the bourgeois-democratic revolution, it was less clear whether it in fact should. Footnote 74
The PCM line moved increasingly towards the ‘dissolutionist’ position held by the CPUSA, that being the suggestion that the party should dissolve or merge with a more moderate alternative.Footnote 75 The tendency towards Browder-inspired ‘dissolutionism’, which had strengthened during the Second World War, was attacked dramatically in April 1945 by Jacques Duclos (a leading French Communist, though acting with the approval of the Soviet government); subsequently communist parties throughout the Western Hemisphere began publicly to re-evaluate their unconditional support for ‘progressive’ governments.Footnote 76 Yet these dissolutionist ‘deviations’ were hardly the autonomous phenomena implied by the designation of Browderism as a ‘heresy’. The Soviet Union was keen to show that Browder had ‘exaggerated enormously his independence and importance’ relative to international communism, implying that in fact he was more follower than leader;Footnote 77 Carr argues that, for Mexico at least, ‘those aspects of Browderism which did take root were built on developments that were already well in place’, most importantly the strategy of class collaboration.Footnote 78
The PCM clung to the hope that the bourgeois-democratic revolution would usher in a political system in keeping with the communists’ stated ideological aims. For many countries where ‘bourgeois revolutions’ were deemed incomplete, this had been the explicit policy of the Comintern until its dissolution in 1943: ‘the passage to the dictatorship of the proletariat is possible only through a series of preparatory stages; only as the result of the transformation of the Democratic-Bourgeois Revolution into a Socialist Revolution’.Footnote 79 Hence in Mexico, PCM congresses were routinely racked by lengthy debates over the precise position of the nation on the road from feudalism to bourgeois democratic capitalism. In the interminable debate over Latin America's precise economic taxonomy, Lombardo was a proponent of the ‘semi-colonial and semi-feudal’ designation.Footnote 80 Lombardo – having weighed local conditions by assessing ‘their own correlation, their own struggle, their own contradiction’ – favoured obeisance to the ruling party which was judged to be in a position to lead the country out of a ‘semi-feudal physiognomy’.Footnote 81 The PCM usually concluded that Mexico was ‘at a crossroads’, thus avoiding a commitment to either position, but in practice there was an inertia which left the PCM treading the collaborative path.
Yet the adherence to the feudal/bourgeois democratic dichotomy was a narrowly Stalinist view – narrow in both ideological and temporal/contextual senses – and was contested by non-Stalinist Leninists, whether pro-Soviet or otherwise. Though much effort was expended discussing whether Mexico was in fact ‘at the crossroads’ in developmental terms, a heterodox view of multiple local transitional paths to socialism already existed: in Russia, where early twentieth-century social conditions were in marked contrast to those of, say, Germany; and in contemporary China, where communists had adapted to embrace the concept of peasant revolution.Footnote 82 This ‘multiple paths’ reality had great relevance for Latin America.Footnote 83 In their uncritical and unguarded adherence to the ‘national bourgeoisie’ and ‘bourgeois-democratic revolution’, the leaders of the Mexican Marxist Left diverted the energies of existing class struggle towards the PRI project of class collaboration.Footnote 84
Lombardo and the Round Table
Contemporary critics and historians alike have seen the Marxist Round Table as part of a particular narrative, that of Lombardo and his desire to form a new party outside and to the left of the PRI yet supportive of the government and sharing its revolutionary ideals.Footnote 85 While there was certainly more to the Round Table than this – at least in terms of scope if not outcome – it is nonetheless useful to trace the development of the idea in the actions of Lombardo himself. He had first mentioned his plan to form a new, independent party as early as August 1945, when he shared his hopes for the formation ‘in each country of Latin America a single party of the working class’.Footnote 86 At that stage, he did not believe that the PCM fulfilled that role; by 1947 he would alter his view, becoming content to leave the working class as an exclusive constituency for the PCM and hoping to create a broad cross-class base for his new party.Footnote 87
The next stage in the genesis of the PP was the Marxist Round Table. The conference was inspired, according to Lombardo, by ‘the evident confusion throughout the leftist movement of this country’.Footnote 88 Lombardo's opening address detailed the aims of the conference, including his desire to establish the new PP. He contextualised the aims of the Left by claiming that there was ‘a new situation in Mexico’ without quite explaining what that situation entailed other than a great confluence of important global events. ‘We find ourselves’, he suggested, ‘in the epoch of historical transition between capitalism and socialism’.Footnote 89 Despite – or perhaps because of – this new situation, Lombardo retained an unrequited loyalty to his erstwhile ally Alemán. Nor was this merely a case of praising the king while blaming his advisors, since Lombardo ‘took pains to defend the Alemán administration from strictures passed upon it by other speakers’.Footnote 90 Ignoring the political persuasions of the new president, Lombardo insisted that a grace period be granted to demonstrate his true intentions. Recalling the event, Valentín Campa of the ASU wrote: ‘Lombardo and others from his group insisted that they could not attack Alemán without allowing him time to reveal his political orientation.’Footnote 91 Lombardo, incidentally, did not extend such grace to his colleagues on the left, whom he ‘castigate[d] practically one and all … with the authority of a patriarch and potentate’.Footnote 92 Campa asserted that the character of the Alemán government had been revealed in the course of its first six weeks. The new president had engaged in measures which were ‘extremely reactionary’ and was acting ‘like a representative of the haute bourgeoisie’. Here was an analysis of the new government undertaken in terms of class struggle; such an approach grated with the ‘nefarious policy of “unity at all costs”’ as expounded by most of the Round Table participants.Footnote 93 Villaseñor agreed: with hindsight he also condemned the continued insistence on a broad ‘unity at all costs’ programme, which had produced ‘such disastrous results during the Ávila Camacho presidency’.Footnote 94
Lombardo highlighted four main domestic problems facing the Left: factionalism within and between unions, especially the danger of a split in the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (Confederation of Mexican Labour, CTM); problems of union operation including careerism among union leaders and government interference in day-to-day union operations at state level; the failure of the PRI to solve national problems (interestingly this was posed as a problem and not as an opportunity for the Left, further underlining how much Lombardo portrayed himself as a friendly critic of the government); and, perhaps most seriously, that there was no working-class party in Mexico. Yet Lombardo did not propose the formation of a working-class party, nor the rejuvenation of the PCM. Many representatives of what is termed here the independent Left were in favour of the latter, to the extent that they suggested the re-absorption of the smaller independent groups into the PCM (and, importantly, not the PP). Laborde – who like Campa can fairly be characterised as a dissident communist – emphasised the importance of a strong and unified PCM: ‘the transformation of the Mexican Communist Party into a party of the masses is both necessary and urgent’:Footnote 95 brave, contrite, or both, given the bitter history between Laborde and the party. Lombardo argued for the unity of working class, the reinvigoration of CTM and the reorganisation of the peasant confederation – all vague and open-ended policies. More concretely, he suggested the formation of a civil society shadow of the PRI, a corporatist organisation to establish a unity of political line between workers, peasants, women and the public sector.
Most importantly, Lombardo called for the creation of a progressive popular party, again not a party specifically of the working class, concluding once more that the agreed tactic should be one of national unity. This was identical both to the ongoing preferred PCM position and to his own position in advance of the 1946 election, when the Left had uncritically and enthusiastically supported Miguel Alemán – despite his hard line on labour radicalism – in the name of ‘Unidad Nacional’. This paralleled the contemporary turn of, for instance, most US and Cuban leftist leaders away from class antagonism. As early as 1929, Mariátegui had identified problems with the adoption of such an approach in a Latin American context: ‘The national bourgeoisie … believe cooperation with the imperialist powers to be their best guarantee of a rising rate of profit; and they are sufficiently convinced of their control over political power in their own countries to feel no serious fears for national sovereignty.’Footnote 96 Similarly, Laborde claimed that the Mexican bourgeoisie was attempting ‘to regroup their forces under the hegemony of Mexican finance capital, subject of imperialist finance capital’.Footnote 97 Regarding the idea that sections of the bourgeoisie would lead a progressive alliance, Mariátegui had written: ‘the Latin American bourgeoisie … is totally unwilling to consider the idea that a second struggle for Independence is necessary … the illusion of national sovereignty remains intact and effective.’Footnote 98 Lombardo's view was completely at odds with this, his insistent anti-imperialism notwithstanding: where Mariátegui wished to form a group which would ‘affiliate … with the Communist International, but … also wished to preserve some measure of local autonomy’, Lombardo asserted his independence from foreign influence and assured the ruling PRI that the PP shared its political aims and would not oppose its policies. The existential crisis this implied for the PP went unacknowledged.Footnote 99
Concessions to the post-revolutionary elite are apparent in both the vague and moderate nature of his programme and also in its similarity to that of the PRI.Footnote 100 He summarised his position as follows:
In the national sphere, the party will fight for the emancipation of the nation, for the economic development of the country, for the industrial revolution of Mexico, for the raising of the standard of living of the people, and for the perfection of democratic institutions. In the international sphere, the party will fight for the preservation of peace, for the extermination of Fascism, for the independence of colonial countries, for the emancipation of semi-colonial countries, for the Good Neighbour policy, and for the unity of Latin America.Footnote 101
While the Mexican government was moving onto a Cold War footing, with attacks on communists and radical labour in the very first weeks of the Alemán government, Lombardo seemed out of touch. His rhetoric was that of the Spanish Civil War and Second World War, of grand alliances and of anti-fascism. It did not fundamentally engage with the post-war situation other than to say that American imperialism was a threat to Latin America, and that if it came to war, the Left should support the USSR. These were notable points of consensus for the attendees of the Round Table, though they were rather abstract in relation to the immediate political and material conditions in Mexico.Footnote 102
Responses to Lombardo
In response, representatives of the PCM raised several points which Lombardo had passed over: that Mexican economic dependence on the United States had increased during the war, and that many of the post-revolutionary leaders had turned away from reform and towards self-enrichment, thus forming a bloated plutocracy. It was also stated without equivocation that only the working class could lead the Mexican revolution, yet, in deference to Lombardo, the PCM broadly agreed with his plan to form a progressive front. The ambiguity of the term ‘to lead’ therefore papered over a potential rupture.
Something approaching a mariateguista position was adopted by Valentín Campa of the ASU, the small, independent socialist group which itself called for a workers’ party and not a progressive front. While Lombardo did engage in the rhetoric of class struggle, he clearly was keen to knit workers’ demands into a broader range of goals as a programme for a progressive coalition. In contrast, Campa maintained a more orthodox Marxist position, giving primacy to class struggle and arguing that ‘the proletariat must influence and lead the last stages of the Bourgeois-Democratic Revolution’.Footnote 103 Campa's memoirs suggest that his acceptance of the hegemonic language of bourgeois, democratic revolution was reluctant. However, he did stress the need for proletarian leadership and criticised the international trade policy of the ‘national bourgeoisie’, which he believed was ‘creating a political and economic atmosphere … favorable to the imposition of Yankee capital.’Footnote 104
Campa also asserted the impossibility of representing such a broad swathe of economic groups, ‘from the captain to the busboy [waiter's assistant], from the capitalist and landlord to the proletariat’.Footnote 105 Like Mariátegui he seized upon the example of APRA in Peru as a warning against the dilution of workers’ radicalism and specific demands; better examples, said Campa, were to be found in Cuba and Costa Rica. He was applauded for emphasising the need for cooperation between any new party and the PCM – a cooperation which was clearly vital to the success of any leftist project, though one which the 1952 election shows was doomed to failure. Furthermore, Campa reportedly raised concerns that the prioritising of ‘national unity’ was counter-productive for the prospects of the class struggle in Mexico; with so much enthusiasm for the former, the latter was ‘beginning to look “anti-unitarian”’.Footnote 106 This was a rare insight, and identified the key strategic problem for the post-war Left: the reconciliation of nationalism (favouring class collaboration) and class struggle. Campa also tried to rein in the unguarded enthusiasm for industrialisation which, alongside anti-imperialism, had seemingly filled the field of vision of many on the left. He pointed out that while industrialisation through state capitalism was an achievable aim, the policy was pointless ‘if the billions of pesos belonging to the Mexican people which are in the bank vaults are dedicated to the making of new Mexican multimillionaires’.Footnote 107
Yet these concerns were all subordinated in the name of a seemingly unachievable unity. La Voz de México reacted to the Round Table with some warmth, suggesting a significant degree of PCM support. In parallel front-page leaders, Lombardo explained the necessity for a cross-class alliance while Dionisio Encina reiterated the fact that ‘only the proletariat has the capacity to carry the revolution to its conclusion’.Footnote 108 This did not contradict the lombardista position: ‘The bourgeois-democratic revolution cannot be led by the bourgeoisie … which is very weak in the face of imperialism and is extremely divided.’Footnote 109 There was a clear implication that the Mexican bourgeoisie had the best interests of the workers at heart, but structural problems prevented the fulfilment of those interests. Together the Encina and Lombardo positions formed an argument devoid of a logical middle step: there must be a popular alliance to support the national bourgeoisie which has led the revolution in the past; only the proletariat can finish the revolution in the future. Both effectively agreed that the Mexican working class must set aside its immediate demands indefinitely for the national good, with no concrete programme for a transition to socialism despite assurances that such a transition was under way.
While the Marxist Round Table was generally fruitless for the Mexican Marxist Left, it at least provided the impetus for the lombardistas and independent socialists to act under their own initiative (notwithstanding the counterproductive direction in which the lombardistas proceeded). The Communist Party, by contrast, went into a rapid decline. Carr describes how the PCM became ‘weakened’ and ‘unresponsive’ before moving into a period of ‘virtual slumber’.Footnote 110 Dionisio Encina remained firmly ensconced as leader, despite the reversal of fortune suffered since the PCM declared renewed loyalty to the ruling party during the Second World War. The structural constraints and strategic errors which had hampered the PCM for several years each began to have a greater effect. In addition, and with increasing importance, the geo-political context changed with the onset of the Cold War.
Conclusion: A Lasting Disunity
There were, undoubtedly, personal enmities and factional loyalties which prevented the Marxist Round Table from resulting in lasting unity.Footnote 111 Yet the most important underlying division which emerged was that between those who broadly supported the ruling party, its institutionalised regime and the oficialista conception of the Mexican Revolution, and those who adhered to a primarily class-based politics, criticising the ‘national bourgeoisie’ where deemed necessary. The former attempted to cast Alemán and his early presidency in the most progressive possible light. The latter, few in number and careful to work within the implicit and explicit parameters of political debate, nonetheless made clear their criticisms of the post-revolutionary project and called for protection for workers against the increasing cost of living and attacks on militant unions.
The imbalance between these two groups tells us a great deal about the strength of both Mexican nationalism and of the PRI: at this point both ruling ideology and ruling party were approaching their peak.Footnote 112 That the majority of the non-parliamentary Left chose to act as allies (or, perhaps, in Linzian terms, ‘pseudo-opposition’) rather than position themselves outside the tolerated boundaries of political debate supports a view of the early Cold War PRI as supremely dominant in national politics without needing to resort to systematic violence.Footnote 113
With hindsight, the Round Table represented an attempt by the Mexican Marxist Left to refocus and unite, though, owing to a variety of factors, the attempt failed, leaving the Left ideologically fractured and unable to provide an adequate defence of the Mexican working class over the subsequent decade. When confronted by a nationalist hegemon in the form of the PRI, most Mexican Marxists – both inside and outside the PCM – opted to follow Lombardo in accepting the form and trajectory of that hegemon, rather than presenting an alternative vision. Even the nationalism-with-reservations of Laborde and Campa – a heterodox communism and close to the mariateguista tradition – was brushed aside when it occasionally raised a dissenting voice.
Given the sophistication and ingrained nature of Mexican nationalism, the political cost of anything less than fulsome patriotism was considered too great by the majority of influential leaders and thinkers on the Marxist Left.Footnote 114 Strongly nationalist proclamations often originated – apparently unprompted – within the Marxist Left, whether as a functional attempt to win support from particular social sectors or as a reflection of the Left leadership's contemporary ideology. As Spenser puts it, ‘the PCM could not renounce its internationalist calling in the same way that it could not give up being Mexican’, maintaining the contradictory position of support for the Soviet Union in the context of global conflict with support for the increasingly anti-communist PRI domestically.Footnote 115 The de-emphasis of revolutionary internationalism and class struggle removed the unique political appeal of the Marxist Left. As indistinct adjuncts to the PRI, both lombardismo and the PCM were structurally weak and politically vague in the post-war period. Here this article is in constructive dialogue with political histories of Latin America and North America more broadly. In both (overlapping) regions, examples of wartime and post-war tendencies towards self-dissolution, centrism and anti-radicalism abounded on the Marxist Left.
This article has demonstrated the tangible influence of a widely pervasive nationalism on the political discourse of the Mexican Marxist Left, with particular reference to the Marxist Round Table of 1947. Mexican nationalism was not merely a backdrop against which the Left interacted with other political elements, but a political leviathan in and of itself, and one with which the Left felt compelled to negotiate and – more importantly – to compromise. Nationalism was an important element in most local communisms during the early Cold War, and the Mexican case is a useful example. The degree to which all sections of the Marxist Left – even, with reservations, the Laborde–Campa group – subordinated their ideological Marxism-Leninism to a heavily-diluted ‘socialism in one country’ is striking. A lombardista approach to the nation, to the national myth, and to state-building became the effective consensus position, while a possible alternative – something akin to Mariátegui's ‘locally-modified internationalism’ – was relegated to the political margins. Thus, the Marxist Round Table, which – nominally – had represented a blank slate for the Left, concluded with a refusal to challenge the PRI line and the acceptance of the ‘national bourgeoisie’ as the class best placed to oversee Mexican industrial development.Footnote 116 Lombardo made use of his role as convenor and the attendee with most political power to achieve a near-consensus, his own strategic position writ large.
