Response To Harris Book Review

Abstract

by Donald and Ross Gandy James Cockcroft's El imperialismo, la lucha de clases y el Estado en Mexico and Donald and Ross Gandy's Mexico 1910-1976: Reform or Revolution? were reviewed in Latin American Perspectives (Number 32, Winter 1982) by Richard Harris. He charges Cockcroft with professing that society was thoroughly capitalist even during the early colonial period. Cockcroft does not say this in his book and tells us that he does not believe it. Harris says that Hodges and Gandy claim that the Mexican Revolution was a struggle between the semifeudal large landowners, the peasantry, and an emerging new bureaucratic class, and adds that leftist Mexican scholars have argued it was a bourgeois revolution. They believe that the class nature of a social revolution is determined by more than the class origins of the participants. Harris is arguing that we fail to look for the class character of the Mexican Revolution in its structural consequences for the society and so fail to see the bourgeois character of the Revolution, something clear to most Mexican Marxists. But throughout our book we argue the opposite; we say that all revolutions must be classified by their structural results. And that is why in our book we agree with our critic that the Revolution was bourgeois! Harris claims to Marxist while Cockcroft and ourselves are supposed to stray from true doctrine. He claims to follow Marxist theory in seeing the bourgeois revolution in Mexico as a struggle between the porfirista landed bourgeoisie and the revolutionary modern bourgeoisie. But it is the ABC of Marxism that a revolution is the transfer of political or economic power from one social class to another. Harris's transfer of power from one bourgeois fraction to another is not a revolution at all. Who is really following Marxist theory? Harris claims that Gandy's distinction between political and social revolution partly comes form the right-wing tradition. Gandy copied the distinction out of the classics of Marxism. If he makes reference to Samuel Huntington while discussing the distinction, it is only to allude to a known conservative scholar saying something similar. Our book is not a sectarian work written for a narrow Marxist audience but an attempt to reach the public in conservative England and America with radical ideas. Harris' insinuatiuon throughout his review that we are infected with right-wing thinking is more than irritating. He claims that Hodges' chapter on The Bureaucratic Class is unaware of the literature on such classes because cites none. Our book is