Review

Reviewed Work(s): The Mexican Revolution by Alan Knight

Review by: V. G. Kiernan
Source: History Workshop, No. 34, Latin American History (Autumn, 1992), pp. 184-186
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4289193
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REVIEWS

ALAN KNIGHT, The Mexican Revolution (1986; pb. edn, 2 vols, 1990, Univ. of
Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London: 0-8032-7770-9 & 0-8032-7771-7, ?13.95 and
?14.95)

In his immensely valuable study Alan Knight writes of the Mexican Revolution of

1910-20 as the last of the old type, with limited, national horizons, 'Tocquevillian'

instead of 'Leninist' (2: 497). He has a great deal to offer to any readers interested in
the twentieth century, in the third world, in social, especially agrarian history, or in

the psychology of politics and civil war. He has also very much to offer Marxists, in
the way of material and ideas that can fit well into their own modes of thinking, but
still more in the way of objections and challenges to those modes. Marxism began as a
searchlight made in Europe; there are still many things for it to explain about

Western-European history, and it has floundered in most of its attempts to extend its
observations from China to Peru.

Mexico provides a semi-European model, with an extraordinary diversity -

geographical, social, intellectual - for it to try its methods on. A good part of the rura
population has remained Indian, especially in the uplands where it has been pushed,
like other aboriginal peoples the world over, by stronger competitors. But more than

anywhere else the ancient stock, and mestizos or men and women of mixed blood,
have continued to play a part in the country's history. Porfirio Diaz, the dictator
whose eventual overthrow in 1911 was the first victory of the Revolution, had an

Indian mother. Knight points out that Mexico differed vitally from Kuomintang
China in drawing on a reservoir of popular energy (2: 516). It should be added that
this was not an ordinary, individualized peasantry, like the European or Far Eastern,
but one cradled in tribal prehistory, its ancestral ties to primitive communism still
intact.

Knight sees his subject as 'a genuinely popular movement', and one of the few
significant moments of history 'when the mass of the people profoundly influenced

events' (2: xi); he is 'an unashamed conservative, or anti-revisionist', in adhering to a

once-accepted belief in an authentic agrarian upheaval, which latter-day scholars

have belittled. Diaz governed on behalf of a ruling class of landowners, and further
promoted their welfare by transferring to them broad stretches of land formerly in

collective ownership - a privatizing like the one that England's village commons, and
much land elsewhere in Western Europe, had been subjected to not long before. This
brought with it a reduction to the status of peons, degraded farm labourers, that

could be as painful to cultivators as were their worsened conditions of living. When

they revolted they were not fighting for what Marxists have been too light-heartedly

History Workshop Journal Issue 34 (?) History Workshop Journal 1992

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Reviews

185

willing to call 'progress', but for a return to a better past. They were behaving
sensibly enough, Knight points out: 'progress', or commercialism, benefited only the
landlords, their oppressors. Their outlook fitted with a regional spirit, a local

patriotism, dislike of interference with local ways and traditions by a modernizing,

centralizing government far away. The most popular of the caudillos who came to the
front, Zapata and Pancho Villa in the van, could appeal to both of these rooted

feelings. 'Zapatismo' meant 'autonomous agrarian revolt' (2: 6).

Marxism has still to shake off its illusion of an industrial working class,
revolutionary by instinct, chosen by History as the giant-killer to put an end to

exploitation. In Mexico this class had plenty of grievances, but 'Industrial

confrontation did not necessarily imply political radicalism' (1: 134). Urban
wage-earners were not yet very many, and they could sometimes, unlike dispossessed peasants or discarded artisans, find ways to better their position without resort

to arms. Along with the middle classes, they took a much smaller part in the bat.les,

but got some benefits from the outcome. Between them and the peasantry no alliance
was conceivable, or only in fantasy. Marxism was of course not on the scene, but
whether if present it could have arranged a marriage of hammer and sickle seems
very doubtful.

There has been a kind of indeterminacy about much of Latin America's

evolution. Was the hacienda, the plantation-estate, 'feudal'? Was Mexico a

'capitalist' country? In such a setting it is easy to agree with Knight that the old
hard-and-fast Marxian classification may be unhelpful (still easier to agree that

Wallerstein's 'world-system' is worse). Mexico had a large 'non-market sector', and

it was 'where capitalism was less entrenched' that the revolution caught fire (2: 227).
Knight is particularly stimulating when he comes to that social limbo or no-man's
land, the petty-bourgeoisie, which in Mexico was coming politically to the front. He
regards the label as a shorthand term to describe 'a mentalite more than a class
relationship' (2: 230). It might be better to say that it stands for a whole spectrum of

mentalities, any of which, from socialist to fascist, can be brought out by

circumstances. Other classes have fixed shapes and fixed thoughts; happily for
human ability to change, the petty bourgeoisie is a chameleon, capable of new, if
sometimes evil, thinking.

Education can be a transforming factor, as Knight says, and turn different

petty-bourgeois forms produced in a single cultural environment in opposite political

directions. Another transforming influence could be the revolution itself, dislodging
individuals from their old ruts or slots. Submerged strata were coming up out of the
social depths, and displaying capabilities that middle-class Liberals found hard to

credit. (On the whole Knight -- like Lenin - awards low marks to intellectuals.) Very
illuminating on these processes of change is an analysis of how men and women
separated out, in the final bout of civil war, into the parties led by Carranza, the staid

bourgeois, and Villa, the ex-bandit (2: 263ff). These large groupings, it is recognized, have to be considered in their totality on Marxist, class lines; but which way
this individual or that would go, especially among the military men whose swords

decided the issue, can only be scrutinized in 'Namierite' fashion, in the light of a host
of accidental factors and personal ties. Each camp had a solid nucleus, attracting
round it miscellaneous satellites. Both sides altered in complexion in the course of
the contest.

Carranza's following held together better; it had more 'national awareness and

efficacy', rising above regional loyalties (2: 268). Thanks largely to this he won, only

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186 History Workshop Journal

to be killed by rebels in early 1920 before completing his presidential term. He had to

wrestle with a society 'economically shattered' by five years of strife (2: 406). What
things had been like may be glimpsed most vividly from the folk-style prints and

cartoons of Jose Posada, a kaleidoscope of history seen through the eyes of the
masses; piles of skulls, skeletons marching or riding, firing-squads at work as in
Goya's Disasters, a peasant rebel hanged by landlords, poor men dragged off to enter
the 'voluntary contract' of conscription, Zapata and his stalwarts with fierce
moustachios and wreaths of bandoliers, a revolutionary falling dead from his

coal-black steed . . . Years went by; peasants and workers were alike exhausted,
disenchanted; the gains were going mostly to families which had contributed little, or
less than nothing, to the Revolution (the usual drawback of revolution as a means of

political advance). Many of the old landowners survived; many from the new 6lite
joined their ranks. Altogether the new order had a good deal in its make-up of the old
order built by Diaz. In so far as its policies were novel, they accelerated changes that
the masses had set themselves to resist.

Most of the agrarian reforms of the decade were brought about by spontaneous

local action. Some of the great estates were dismantled, some debts that had long
held peons in servitude were cancelled. Even Liberal politicians, whose Mexico

moved along paved streets in tramcars, realized that the countryside was in the
throes of an agrarian crisis, acute and urgent. Slowly and grudgingly the post-

revolutionary regimes had to make concessions, above all to the passionate desire of

the peasant masses to have their village lands restored to them. Much of all this is
condensed into Knight's epigrammatic summary: 'Popular revolts are, after all

strange and rare events, when, to an extent, the world is turned upside down'

(2: 294).
V. G. KIERNAN

JO FISHER, Mothers of The Disappeared, Zed Books, London and Boston 1987, 0

86232 804 7 hb; 86232 805 5 pb. ?7.95.

'At 3.30 every Thursday afternoon this square belongs to us.'

This is the story of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo told largely in their own words.
It records how amidst the tragedy and violence of repression in Argentina a small
group of women grew into a movement which openly challenged the military regime

responsible for one of the worst records on human rights in Latin America.

The story begins in 1976 when the military under General Videla took power in an
unopposed coup sending the elected President Isabel Peron into exile. No-one

expected the military's promise to restore order to materialize in the widespread

campaign of terror which held Argentina in its grip until the elections of 1983. In the
language of the junta it was a war against subversion and those branded as

subversives - or even for having what were considered 'subversive ideas' - were to be
liquidated. A distinctive feature of the repression unleashed in Argentina was the
widespread kidnappings which led to the disappearance of some 20,000 people -

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