Russell Blackwell (Rosalio Negrete) Archive
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Agrarian Question
From The Militant, Vol. VI No. 50, 4 November 1933, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Every effort will be made by the Calles-Rodriguez regime to prevent the Mexican peasants from rearming themselves, and to disarm those still in possession of rifles. During the last four uprisings the peasants participated on the side of the government against the counter revolution. The next uprising will find them aligned against the government which has gone over bag and baggage to the counter revolution. During the past revolts the armed peasant guerrillas proved themselves more than a match for the troops of the regular army many of which supported the rebellions. They are therefore a factor to be reckoned with in the coming events.
For many years the Mexican peasants and their organizations have played an important role In the country’s politics, always however as tools of the different bourgeois and petty-bourgeois political groups which paid them off with broken promises or a few rusty guns. The very nature and composition of the peasantry and its organizations naturally prevented them from at any time, playing a really independent role.
In 1926 most of the scattered local, regional, and state organizations were federated into the National Peasants League, at which all tendencies were represented. This congress did much to cement the relations between the Communists, the peasants and the bourgeois government. The Communist Party dissolved itself into the peasant movement, and rather than building an opposition within it, served as a bridle to keep the more radical elements among the poor ejidatarios and peons from resisting the policies of the rancheros and petty politicians in the leadership. These same leading functionaries of the National Peasants League (Galvan, and Co.) were mostly all members of the Communist party. They did very much as they pleased; Tejeda, then Minister of the Interior, supported the organization with Galvan and Co. on the payroll; and the party dragged along in their trail, boasting in its reports to the Comintern of “our peasant organization of 300,000 members”. But this was only one episode in the opportunist history of the Mexican C.P. Party publications were maintained by government officials and the party’s principal footholds in the labor unions (Jalisco, Tampullpas) were owed primarily to the support of the local politicians who used the Communists as a counter-weight to the reformists of the CROM who were at that time very powerful in national politics through the Partido Laborista.
In 1929, with the inauguration of the “Third Period”, and after the farce of the march days (discussion in the party on armed insurrection which terminated in support to the government) the splits commenced. Galvan finally broke away, and denounced the party. Thenceforward there was a series of splits and counter-splits, expulsions and counter-expulsions in the peasant organizations. Galvan meanwhile has gone to his just reward, but his tradition remains in the main current ot the peasant movement which, under the name “National Peasants League ‘Ursulo Galvan’ (Genuine)”, serves today as the mainstay of Tejeda’s political apparatus. Another section is dominated by the National Revolutionary Party or local politicians affiliated to it, while still other fragments are affiliated to the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc, and a Left wing peasant movement dominated by the Communist party.
It has been seen that Colonel Adalberto Tejeda, has for many years exercized great influence over large sections of the Mexican peasantry. With the approaching 1934 presidential elections in sight, Tejeda is making a play for power. As principal inspirer of the split within the P.N.R. out of which the “Left Socialist Party” was born, he appears as sponsor of a radical “proletarian-agrarian” program. At the same time, he is seeking unprincipled alliances with other political groups (Soto y Gama, “Partido Laborista”, “Partido Antireeleccionista, etc.) which are if anything farther to the right than the P.N.R.
There is every probability that large sections of the peasantry and even of the proletariat will support Tejeda because of his “radicalism”. Meanwhile the Communist Party considers Tejeda as the “main danger” in much the same manner that “Social-fascism” was considered before the advent of Hitler.
This is the second of a series of articles on political developments In Mexico. In the next issue, we shall attempt an analysis of Tejeda’s “Left Socialist Party”.
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Last updated: 3 January 2016