Marxism and Anarchism in the Formation of the Mexican Communist Party, 1910-19

Abstract

H TISTORIANS of twentieth-century Mexico generally agree that Marxism contributed little and late to the Mexican workers' movement.' Certain historians explain the limited impact, for example, of the early Mexican Communist party (PCM) by reference to the strength of nationalist ideologies within the Mexican Revolution and the exotic and antinational character of Marxism.2 Historians of the left comment on the absence of a vigorous Social Democratic tradition and bemoan the deleterious impact of anarchist and libertarian ideology on the Mexican working class, whose capture by bourgeois revolutionary coalitions they attribute to the obfuscatory impact of antistate and antipolitical thought that affected many workers outside formally anarchist circles.3 And although the early history of Mexican communism has been almost totally unexplored, many historians of the Mexican labor movement have commented negatively on the anarchist presence within the PCM during its first ten years. It is this factor that supposedly explains the seriousness and frequency of the theoretical and tactical errors that the party committed in its attempt to confront the emerging national state in the 1920s.4 In fact, this conflation of Social Democratic and anarchist and syndicalist sectors was by no means peculiar to Mexico or to Latin America, as is so often claimed.5