Fascism/Antifascism (9)
| MEXICO |
| Another parallel is possible. During the Mexican bourgeois revolution, the major portion of the organized working class was for a time associated with the democratic and progressive State in order to push the bourgeoisie forward and assure its own interests as wage earners within Capital. The "red battalions" of 1915-1916 represented the military alliance between the union movement and the State, headed at the time by Carranza. Founded in 1912, the Casa del Obrero Mundial decided to "suspend the professional union organization" and struggle alongside the Republican State against "the bourgeoisie and its immediate allies, the military professionals and the clergy." A section of the workers' movement refused and violently opposed the C.O.M. and its ally, the State. The C.O.M. "tried to unionize all types of workers in the constitutionalist zones with the backing of the army." The red battalions fought simultaneously against the other political forces aspiring to control the capitalist State ("reactionaries") and against the rebel peasants and radical workers. [24] |
| It is curious to note that these battalions organized themselves according to occupation or trade (typographers, railway workers, etc.). In the Spanish war, some of the militias also carried the names of trades. Similarly, in 1832, the Lyon insurrection saw the textile workers organized into groups according to the hierarchy of labour: the workers were mustered into workshop groups commanded by foremen. By such means the wage-earners rose up in arms as wage earners to defend the existing system of labour against the "encroachments" (Marx) of Capital. A difference in kind separates the revolt of 1832, directed against the State, from the Mexican and Spanish examples where the organized workers supported the State. But the point is to understand the persistence of working class struggle on the basis of the organization of labour as such. Whether it integrates itself or not into the State, such a struggle is doomed to failure, either by absorbtion into the State or by repression under it. The communist movement can conquer only if the proletarians go beyond the elementary uprising (even armed) which does not attack wage labour itself. The wage earners can only lead the armed struggle by destroying themselves as wage earners. |
| [24] A. Nunes, Les révolutions du Mexique, Flammarion (1975), pp. 101-2. |