Mexican Revolution and Anarchy

The first revolution since the emergence of Anarchism as a political movement, the 1910 Mexican Revolution involved significant Anarchist activity, led by the Anarcho-syndicalist House of the World Worker (COM), the Anarcho-communist Mexican Liberal Party (PLM), and the Anarchist-influenced Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Industrial Union of North and South America (UIANS), and the Liberation Army of the South (ELS).

Anarchists, rather than Marxists, dominated the anti-capitalist labor movement of Mexico from the 1880s to 1920. As Barry Carr notes, “Historians of twentieth-century Mexico generally agree that Marxism contributed little and late to the Mexican workers' movement […] The dominant ideological strands informing Mexican worker activities in the forty years before the 1910 Revolution were various versions of anarchism, libertarianism, and radical liberalism.”

Started in 1910, the Mexican Revolution began as an uprising led by Fransisco Madero against the dictator Porfirio Díaz. Díaz resigned and went into exile in 1911, but the revolution continued until at least 1920, by which time it had become a civil war between multiple factions. Mexico's 1917 Constitution, which included many provisions organized by the above-mentioned Mexican Liberal Party, was one of the major outcomes of the Mexican Revolution.

Mexican Liberal Party (PLM)

In 1903, the brothers Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magon fled Mexico to the United States due to frequent arrests and police surveillance. They published the paper Regeneracion, and in 1905, they announced the establishment of the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM). Despite its name, the Party espoused revolutionary Anarchism. In 1905, the PLM's newspaper Regeneracion sold 200,000 copies each edition.

The Party consisted of decentralized guerrilla units, each with about fifty members on average. Some units, however, had two hundred to three hundred members. Despite this partially decentralized structure, the Party did not avoid the hierarchical trappings of a military organization. Each unit elected a jefe and subjefe, who in turn reported to clandestine delgados. The PLM divided Mexico into five zones, and each zone had a delgado. Finally, the delgados reported to the revolutionary Junta.

The PLM's significant influence may be demonstrated by that many demands in their platform, issued on 1 July 1906, became central demands by the country's urban and rural labor movements and were incorporated into Mexico's 1917 Constitution. The PLM's platform issued various fifty-two demands, including a minimum wage, a six-day work-week, and redistribution of rural lands. As James Cockroft writes, the labor section of the PLM platform “would be adopted in great part by the major labor movement of the Mexican Revolution”. The Zapatistas' Plan of Ayala “contained some fairly obvious allusions to earlier PLM rhetoric,” including an ending—“Liberty, justice, and law”—that resembled the PLM slogan “Reform, Justice, and Law”. In 1917, the government of President Venustiano Carranza issued a new Constitution of Mexico, which fully met twenty-three of the PLM platform's demands and partially met an additional 26. The Constitutional only neglected three of the PLM's demands.

The historian Alan Knight argues that the PLM had a marginal impact. “Causal connections cannot be inferred from a simple ideological congruence—comparing the 1906 Plan of St Louis and the 1917 Constitution, for example. Rather, they must be shown to thread through the actions and decisions of men in the intervening years. In the case of the PLM, this thread is hard to locate.” Knight points out that the PLM membership shrunk significantly as a result of state repression and of members becoming alienated by the increasing overtness of the Party's Anarchist ideology.

House of the World Worker (COM)

House of the World Worker (COM, or Casa), Mexico's largest explicitly Anarchist group during the Revolution, had 50,000 members. COM became “the omnipotent labor organization in Mexico” by early 1913, according to Hart. They led many strikes across the country, including a strike at Mexico City's Cafe Ingles, which forced management to concede to workers' demands. COM also organized an Escuela Racionalista and other community schools that taught workers literacy and spread revolutionary propaganda.

Zapatistas

The Zapatistas, a movement of rural small farmers that began in the state of Morelos under the leadership of Emiliano Zapata, exhibited many anarchistic qualities and drew direct inspiration from Mexican Anarchists. Nonetheless, histories vary on the extent to which they mention this linkage. The Zapatistas had two main organizations: a military called the Liberation Army of the South, with 70,000 militants in 1915, and a civilian organization called the Industrial Union of North and South America. John Womack's Zapata and the Mexican Revolution demonstrates that the Zapatistas organized themselves in a decentralized manner with a minimal amount of coercive hierarchies among the men (the region was also historically a site of patriarchal local and Catholic traditions). Womack explains the way that Emiliano Zapata's leadership rested on popular consensus rather than authoritarianism: “Zapata is most prominent in these pages not because he himself begged attention but because the villagers of Morelos put him in charge and persistently looked to him for guidance, and because other villagers around the Republic took him for their champion.” Within their territories, the Zapatistas minimized the use of centralized force, preferring to settle conflicts at the community level. Womack writes that “Zapata never organized a state police: law enforcement, such as it was, remained the province of village councils.”

On 28 November 1911, Zapata proclaimed the Plan of Ayala, a framework for land redistribution and local political autonomy. Although Womack sees the Plan as wholly original, the historian John Hart argues that it had its roots in a long agrarian radical tradiation, a tradition largely shaped by Anarchist organizers. For instance, Hart mentions Jose Maria Gonzalez, an early organizer and spokesperson of agrarian Anarchism in Mexico. At one point Gonzalez wrote, using quite explicitly anti-statist language: “The Social Revolution. What is the Object of that revolution? To abolish the proletariat. Then cannot the government pass laws to bring about this goal. The government is unable to do anything.” Hart, and the Zapatista secretary Antonio Diza Soto y Gama who Hart cites, believe that the Plan of Ayala was a continuation of the tradition of agrarian radicalism and Anarchism. Alan Knight goes further in affirming the Zapatistas' anarchistic tendencies, asserting that “Zapatismo approached the Proudhonian ideal, a society marked not by the total dissolution of order and structure, but by the resurgence of small, local social units (families, clans, villages) enjoying self-government and linked in a loose, voluntary formation.”

While Knight sees a Proudhonian tendency in the Zapatistas' gradualism, Robert Millon sees a commitment to capitalism. Millon argues that while the Zapatistas were influenced by Socialist, Anarchist, and Indianist concepts, the movement belonged to none of these tendencies. Millon specifically contends that the Zapatistas were not anti-capitalist; Millon describes their ideology as “anti-imperialist and bourgeois-democratic”, saying that their policies regulated large capitalists but allowed them to remain, and that they proposed a parliamentary republic.

Even if Zapata was not anti-capitalist, the implementation of the Ayala Plan would have arguably made capitalism impossible. According to Adolfo Gilly, "implementation of the Ayala Plan would have effectively smashed the living roots of capitalism. For it would have involved nationalization of all the property of the ruling classes. More important still--because actually applied by the peasantry--was the principle that the people themselves should decide, 'arms in hand'; that, instead of waiting for the revolution to triumph and enact the necessary legislation, they would begin cultivating and defending the land."

Jason Wehling emphasizes the Zapatistas' anarchistic tendencies, although he notes that the movement contained strong contradictions. Wheling describes the military structure as “agrarian communalist”, referring to the significant degree of autonomy that each locally-based unit enjoyed. He explains, citing Womack and Friedrich Katz: “While Zapata was responsible for specifying operations, the overall structure of command was relatively decentralized. This worked very well […] The entire military organization was tied, intimately, with the local communities. The actual guerrilla units were fairly small, usually composed of only 200 to 300 men each. But this was the result of where the base originated: the villages.” Wehling describes the Zapatistas' social structure as “libertarian municipalist,” referring to the philosophy developed by Murray Bookchin, a Vermont-based green Anarchist. Wehling claims, “the Libertarian-Municipalism that was instituted in the villages under Zapatista control was very close to the Anarchist ideal.” Specifically, towns were liberated from most aspects of state and federal authority. The territories' General Law mandated a one-year term-limit for political office-holder, to prevent the development of a class of professional politicians. Wehling also notes that some Anarchist members of Casa went on to join the Zapatista movement, including Antonio Diaz Soto y Gama who served as the Zapatistas' secretary, Rafael Perez Taylor, Luis Mendez, Miguel Mendoza Lopez Schwerdtfeger, and Octavio Jahn.

A synthesis of these positions might acknowledge, on one hand, the Anarchist influences and anarchistic tendencies of the Zapatista revolution (self-government, confederalism, communal land administration) and on the other hand take note of the hierarchical tendencies (a reformist acceptance of large capitalists and a representative parliamentary system). The Zapatistas were not Anarchists with an upper-case “A”, but in practice their horizontal organizational tendencies were comparable to the PLM and Casa.

Anarchists' Collusion with Carranza

In 1915, the Anarcho-syndicalist COM sided with the liberal Constitutionalist leader Venustiano Carranza in his conflict against the Zapatistas. COM even sent fighters to join the Red Battalions in fighting for the Constitutionalists against Zapata's Liberation Army of the South. In 1919, a contingent of Constitutionalists set up a meeting with Zapata, falsely claiming a desire to defect to the Zapatistas. At the meeting, they assassinated Zapata.

The Mexican Anarcho-communist Ricardo Flores Magon wrote these words in response to COM's betrayal of the Zapatistas: “By taking arms against the workers of the fields, you have taken arms against your own interests, because the interests of the exploited are the same whether they use the plough or the hammer. You have shot down your class brothers, the Zapatistas and the anarchists of the Mexican Liberal Party, with impunity, but in this way you have strengthened the enemy, the bourgeoisie, who today are paying for your services with misery, and when you protest, death!”

Hart argues that the COM's reason for siding against the Zapatistas had to do with cultural factors. COM members prided themselves on their urban identity and saw themselves as more culturally advanced than the rural Zapatista farmers. Furthermore, the COM had a purist rejection of religion and thus frowned on the Zapatistas' Catholicism. Finally, the COM was unimpressed by Zapata and Villa's 1914 invasion of Mexico City: “[T]he Casa directors witnessed what they considered a pitiful spectacle as the Zapatista troops humbly begged tortillas on the doorsteps of 'bourgeois homes',” writes Hart based on interviews.

The International Socialist Review, a Trotskyist journal, suggests that an alignment between the COM and Zapatistas would have weakened certain authoritarian tendencies within the revolution: “what if workers and their unions had cemented an alliance with the other side, with Villa and Zapata? It would have dealt a serious blow to Obregón’s efforts, and he knew this. At minimum it would have been difficult for him to maintain his military 'rear' and his supply lines while he challenged Villa. But even more importantly, in political terms it would have made his plans for national control a difficult proposition, if facing the active opposition of the working class of the capital.” The government ended up outlawing the COM, and the Anarchist movement deteriorated after 1920.