Get your own Rapid industrialization and domestic immigration after 1950 gradually meant the urban proletariat assuming a central role in class struggle increasing its industrial share to 25% of the economically active population. Altogether, the total of salaried workers rose from 46% in 1950 to 75% in 1982. With less than quarter of wage labourers unionized and with the "comparative advantage" of extremely law wages (only after wildcat strikes in 1974, did wages manage to exceed to a great extent their 1939 level, only to come tumbling down again after 1976) Mexican capitalism reproduces accumulation at one pole and misery at the other.
The first wave of strikes between 1958 and 1962 mainly in the public sector (railways, petroleum) sparked resistance in other sectors (education, agriculture) and ridiculed various marxist drivel about an "underdeveloped third-world" proletariat. It also forced international capital to invest in new sectors (the auto-industry) initially in Mexico City and then in the north -in the same way Detroit had been previously abandoned- when it confronted the workers' insurgence in the 70's reinforcing the industrial zone of the maquiladora camps (12).
Through compulsory or "legal" land expropriations landless peasants swarm into the cities, particularly the capital. A vast lumpen-proletariat composed of unemployed, underemployed and temporary workers is constantly moving within the agricultural, industrial, commercial and service sectors. While this perpetual mobility brings on the one hand workers in the black economy closer to the unionized ones, on the other hand, it undermines the benefits of the better organized industrial proletariat.
Olvidados (the forgotten ones), those crowded in the "lost cities" of Mexico City, in the colonias proletarias (in the larger metropolitan area of Mexico City half the population lives in these slums), work mainly in small owners' workshops, in hundreds of thousands small sweatshops assembling furniture, and making shoes, clothing etc. Capital controls them both through the supply of raw materials and the sale of the finished products. These workshops are more profitable for capital because the wages are extremely low and the splintering of the workers does not allow for any organized resistance. In 1970, the World Bank programmes "Investments in the Poor" tried through credits to further integrate these neighbourhood workshops into monopoly capital.
The state role in the geographical concentration of this lumpen-proletariat and in the organization of its political behaviour (manipulating the leaders of community movements) was always vital: it regulated its local markets, it organized a phoney petite-bourgeois network of petty-trade and it provided for rudimentary social services (state-run cheap food stores, minimal health care, schemes of land and housing distribution to the homeless etc).
However, the subjective dimension of the recomposition of the proletarians must not be ignored. A general class culture is constantly confirmed either through riots or other dynamic mobilizations. A relatively recent example is Tepito slum, in the centre of Mexico City: after the earthquake in 1985 the inhabitants formed autonomous organizations, occupied their rented houses and forced the government to withdraw its development plans aimed at the gentrification of the area and consequently their evacuation. Tepitanos, known for their outdoor festivals, their everyday practical refusal of work, their solidarity and their communal traditions proved that the colonias proletarias are sometimes disfunctional for the state. That's why when the recuperative practice comes to a deadlock, BARAREM arrives (paramilitary assault squad specialized in driving off "land invaders"). (13)
At the end of the 60's, a student/youth rebellion began expressing a belief (to the very letter) in the nationalist ideology taught in schools and propagandized by the PRI. Zapata, Magon and Cardenas became symbols of a "national change" which was made materially visible only in the form of statues and busts in plazas everywhere. The end of the student democratic movement came with the massacre in the Plaza of Three Cultures in Mexico City on the 2nd of October in 1968. The participation of many proletarians and peasants in that drenched in blood demonstration (perhaps there were about 500 dead protesters) was an indication of the insurgency that was soon to follow. Guevarism was also a very widespread ideology at the beginning of the 70's and was the basic inspiration behind many urban guerilla groups which by 1975 had been broken up.
Despite some limited populist reforms during the early Echeverria presidency (1970-1976) the industrial proletariat starting turning against the state union leaders, the so-called charros. We are talking about relatively well-paid, militant workers concentrated massively in state industrial sectors, that formed the reformist "Democratic Tendency" within the CTM. During this period the first independent unions emerged chiefly in the automobile sector (some of which were recuperated in the early 80's and their leaders became like a red rag to a bull for the coming radical rank and file movement). A series of wildcat strikes spread a spirit of struggle, on the one hand, in rural Mexico igniting land occupations and efforts at unionizing farm workers, and on the other hand, in metropolitan barrios inciting the marginal proletariat to angry mobilizations. In this period, with the "Democratic Tendency", acting as its spearhead, the workers' movement was hit by the inconsistency of its militancy vis-a-vis their respect for the "nation and the presidential institution". Also the army repression, the lay-offs and the austerity measures imposed by the state and the IMF (through a loan in 1976) and the 100% devaluation of the peso, meant the workers' movement died down only to give way to something new. On the other hand, the PRI was forced to meke political constitutional reforms in 1976 (legalizing the CP, increasing minority seats in the Chamber of Deputies to 100 and permitting opposition parties to participate in national elections) in its efforts to confine class struggle within the political arena and thus to disarm it.
Mexico was not of course the only field of class struggle in the 70's. In America and Europe (the eastern one included) wildcat strikes as well as the increasing refusal of work brought about the end of Keynesianism. The fuel of capital's counter-attack was oil, the so-called "energy crisis" of 1973. The planned increase in the price of oil paved the way for the simultaneous decomposition of the working class (the curtailment of the welfare state, wages cuts, unemployment) and recomposition of terrestrial capital accumulation (profiting energy multinationals, finance capital and the oil-exporting states). The recycling of petrodollars financed later the capitalist strategy of automation and introduction of high technology in industries in the west, and what is of importance here, petrodollars were the capital for the loans that generated later the debts (14). In the same period in Mexico capital flows in (through loans) for industrial expansion and the policing of the proletariat, especially after the massacre in 1968. The discovery of oil in Chiapas was of immense importance; Mexico becomes the Arabia of the Caribbean.
At the beginning of the 80's the resurgent class struggle in Mexico took on a more anti-state and anti-party character. Along with the loans working class demands for a slice of oil revenues increased. In early 1981, for the first time for many years, real wage hikes were gained that consequently led to a wider radicalization. Tensions within independent unions intensified and the official union leaders (charros) tried to outflank, though only verbally, the workers' militant demands. Threatened by the pressure of a rank and file movement they begged capitalists to give in stressing the importance of their role. "If we change tactics or abandon the workers to their luck, employers won't have time to realize what will happen: imagine a mob let loose on the streets, out of control", says Velasquez, CTM boss, in March 1982. Just a few months later, in August 1982, the change in international capital's strategy would dispel his apprehension.
What’s widely known as "monetarism" or "Thatcherism" is a capitalist restructuring not based on the previous decade's "energy crisis" but on the "debt crisis". Interest rate increases, the investment strike and austerity measures in western economies bringing about a downturn in world trade as well as a decline in the price of oil after 1979, caused Mexico's debt (together with other countries) to increase astronomically. The Mexican government declared a moratorium on the repayment of debts inaugurating the international "debt crisis". The role of the IMF from Africa to Asia becomes decisive: the vicious circle of loans and debts (new loans for the repayment of the old ones) is accompanied with the World Bank's "Structural Adjustment Programmes" which is the more decent name of the restructuring of class relations through privatizations, unemployment, austerity and immiseration. Between 1982 and 1984, 66 countries of the so-called Third World agreed to austerity programmes imposed by the IMF with a pretext about the "restoration of the balance of payments". In essence it is a new political strategy for the reorganization of the relations between international capital and nation-states and the international decomposition of the proletariat. The "debt crisis" becomes a functional means for the control of national economies and capitalist discipline. The case of Mexico is a typical example, where the "debt crisis" caused a chain reaction: IMF intervention; the implementation of austerity programmes, to which the PRI technocrats adhered eagerly; severe cutbacks of the welfare state and encouraging the growth of the maquiladoras zones. This last one helped many north American industries transfer to the south causing the decomposition of both the Mexican and the American proletariat (for example, General Motors in December of 1991 planned to fire thousands of its American workers while at the same increasing the number of its workers in the maquiladora zone, blackmailing its remaining American workforce into accepting longer hours and lower wages).
The integration of Mexican capital with international capital imposes a restructuring of class relations and proves that the "debt crisis" is in effect a productive crisis and therefore, not an obstacle to capitalist development. Debt repayment which is presented as the objective is nothing more than an excuse for an attack on working class struggles and the violent restoration of self-sacrificial ethics in favour of "the national cause", starting, for example with the donation of 1% of workers' salaries to the government, as the CTM asked for in 1982 in chorus with some leftist parties. This practice characterizes the entire 80's decade until today blackmailing the consent to undermining the welfare state, to unemployment and privatizations, all packaged as solutions to the "national problem".
In the 80's, the prevalent technocratic PRI fraction implemented the IMF-dictated "Structural Adjustment Programmes" to the letter. Over 500 state corporations were privatized and until the early 90's less than 400 had remained under state administration. Some of the most important moments of capital's assault were the subjugation of the independent union at Uramex (state uranium corporation) in 1984, the closure of DINA-Renault in 1986 (after strikes against its privatization), lay-offs at the state oil corporation Pemex, the sale of the state telephone company Telemex, the restructuring of the textile industry... The two sectors of particular importance for the state are the automobile industry in the north (which presents the most rapid development worldwide) and oil in the south. What is notable about the class struggle during the 80's and the early 90's is the emergence of a young unskilled proletariat, not only because it became the main prey of restructuring plans but because of its struggle within some independent unions against the leadership. In Volkswagen, in 1992, a rank and file movement threw out the contract signed by the leadership of their independent union with management which had provided for new flexible work relations. A strike followed which after one month was finally defeated. The management had fired all 14,000 workers only to take them back on again minus 1,500 (who, "accidentally", were the most militant ones) having managed to impose even more unfavourable conditions.
In an attempt to recuperate and check the resurgent movements Salinas' government introduced a policy of concertation (reconciliation) tempting some independent unions to return to the CTM, having substituted some "particularly" corrupt charros, but resorting to violence as well, perhaps more than it wished to. According to the same practice of recuperation and control, PRONASOL (National Programme of Solidarity) was introduced in the late 80's funded by the World Bank and through the sale of Telemex and other former state corporations. This model of "restructuring with a human face" provides sums of money for cheap food, loans to peasants and women's micro-companies, funds for schools, university scholarships, property titles to urban squatters, construction of hospitals and funding infrastructure projects (roads, electrification, dams, draining of lakes etc).
Especially Chiapas in 1993 received more than 100 million dollars in grants. Apart from PRI's electoral benefits through this «decentralizing" methodology, the «participatory" character of these projects was promoted -projects virtually creating the necessary infrastructure paving the way for modern capitalist development in accordance to NAFTA- whereby poor peasants and workers are forced to work at a minimum cost to the state, thereby temporarily alleviating the most painful consequences of capitalist restructuring. Through PRONASOL, a wide spying network was also organised to immediately deal with any possible agrarian movements as it was practised through previous World Bank programmes (e.g. PIDER, c/f next chapter). In general it's part of a long-standing tradition of recuperation/exploitation by the Machiavellians of the PRI -these scientists of manipulation and repression.
The course taken by the PRI integrating the Mexican economy with international capital undermines its own ideological legitimacy: in 1992, article 27 of the constitution, which protected, inter alia, the right to possess a holding on communal land ,the ejidos, was modified. This modification of one of the most representative outcomes of the Mexican Revolution intensifies the ever constant proletarianization of the peasantry bringing with it the new enclosures.
"Banco Rural is our patron (boss).
We're the workers and we don't even get a wage or have a labour union" - a group of ejidatarios in Michoacan, 1981
Within the peasantry, the ejidatarios take the brunt of the assault of capitalist restructuring and are at the centre of class antagonism (setting in motion, now with the Zapatistas, an organized armed struggle). Ejidos are communal lands, mostly Indian, belonging to the community and the village (the pueblo). Their farming is collective -or was so formerly (15). This ancient Indian communal system (in which the collective cultivation, irrigation, harvesting and the widespread mutual aid was a rule) existed before colonialism and survived within the context of feudalism which was transplanted from Europe. The ejidos were small tracts of land on conquistadores' estates and out of the latter, throughout the generations, creole landowners (the hacendados) emerged who increasingly encroached on large parts of Indian land turning the ejidatarios into peons. The communal system continued to exist after Independence and the Mexican Revolution but, on the other hand, the number of rancheros -the independent small-scale farmers- increased, too. The ejidatarios or communeros were the social base of the Zapata movement, a source of inspiration for Magon and a reference point for Kropotkin in "Mutual Aid".
Article 27 of the 1917 constitution protects communal land and forbids ejidos' alienation and mortgage. This article also provides that it is within the discretion of the state to nationalize the lands. It authorizes all Mexican states to set a maximum limit to the amount of land owned by an individual or a co-operative. Moreover it protects private land. Since the beginning of the century, the ejidos were already divided into family holdings (today, less than 10% is collectively cultivated). Given the expansion of the capitalist agricultural production with the help of all governments, capitalist competition, the lack of technology, debts, the brutal force of the landowners' private armies and state compulsion (through loans or "modernization" programmes) the dwindling of the communal land is easily explained.
The various agrarian reforms have left the ejidatarios and the minifundistas with less than 30% of the cultivable land, mostly arid and less fertile. Of course, the official accounts raise the number to 43%. Today more than 80% of those who cultivate the 25,000 ejidos are, at the same time, self-employed, proletarians working as day-labourers for landlords, wandering about the country looking for a job, often forced into domestic migration or going abroad. At the same time there is a permanent rural proletariat that constitutes 12% of the workforce in the countryside.
The "Green Revolution" in the south was relatively delayed compared with the north. Until the 70's, the plan for the south was not development but maintaining less modern social relations whereby landlords were traditionally more interested in primary accumulation than pursuing one on an extended scale -rather reminiscent of the hacendados of the past century- and a mass of farm-labourers, peones, ejidatarios or small holders, often lived in abject poverty.
During the 70's, the World Bank initiated the "Investments in the Poor" project. The PIDER programme (the Integrated Programmes for Rural Development) established big agri-businesses, using peasant labour and financial technical input. "Traditional" Indian smallholders were subordinated to capital through a series of loans and the enforced cultivation of particular crops ready for cheap food processing for export. Their inability to pay off the debts led to the reduction of their land, while on the other hand they had to intensify their subsistence farming (16).
During the 80's, new World Bank programmes (LDA, SAM) approved by the state union of peasants (CNC) led to further expropriations of the ejidos by the large agri-businesses via promotion of the "collaboration" between landlords investing capital in the means of production and ejidatarios providing land and labour.
In the early 90's the most striking feature of rural Mexico is proletarianization and the simultaneous maintenance of subsistence farming and self-employment. Most ejidatarios cultivate their own land to sustain themselves, or on behalf of rentiers and work at the same time as land-labourers or engage in domestic handicraft. They are virtually proletarians disguised as peasants. However, the reform of article 27 in 1992 shows that even this state of semi-proletarian employment does not satisfy capital's demands. The ejidos, only in theory belonging to the ejidatarios, are now virtually expropriated (17). With the acceptance of the production norms set by NAFTA, even the memory of the slogan "The land to the tiller!" must be wiped out. The enclosures, which, according to Marx, constituted the basic process of primary capital accumulation marking the starting point of capitalism in England through forced land expropriations aiming at "liberating" the peasants from the means of production and thus becoming "free" wage workers, are still continuing. The new expropriators, the accountants of the IMF and the PRI, under the pretext of the repayment of the debts, dispossess the peasants of communal land rendering them landless and intensifying capitalist exploitation.
However, the state and capital wouldn't have been able to impose their control without the collaboration of caciquismo, the traditional system mediating social relations in the countryside. Caciques were the Indian leaders who cooperated with the colonialists. Nowadays, whether Indians or mestizos, they are usually political leaders or local magnates, intermediaries between the state and the peasants. The latter consider them as "capable" leaders, "servants of the people", and the caciques, giving out loans or doing "favours" using paternalistic and populist means, manage through political patronage and public relations to defuse or divert class antagonisms, obstructing the explosion of class consciousness and thus fostering state tutelage. Race often takes precedence over class (Indians against mestizos) sharpening internal antagonisms among the poor which are often worked on through the mediation of the caciques. Many agrarian movements and organizations promoting this ideology of "popular interest" ended up as arms of the state, through the co-optation of their charismatic leaders, who took advantage of their representative power over the peasants.
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