Book Reviews

559

Robbie Shilliam, rather like Schwarzmantel in ggp, sees the question of agency
as critical, and explores it in relation to Gramsci’s engagement with Jacobinism. For
Gramsci, the Jacobins had assumed hegemony in the French revolution by actively
reshaping the state and social relations into forms appropriate for capitalist mod-
ernisation, while in the Italian Risorgimento the ancien régime had in effect
absorbed different components of the rising bourgeoisie into a historic compromise
with landed interests and the state, a process he characterised as ‘passive revolution’.
Gramsci concluded that the Italy of his own day still required a ‘Modern Prince’
along Jacobin lines, a role which only a disciplined Communist Party could play;
by analogy, neo-Gramscians propose that the global justice movement can function
as a ‘post-Modern Prince’, by articulating a new common sense based on experi-
ences of oppression that, despite their diversity, can all be traced to the overarching
dialectic of capitalist social relations. But for Robbie Shilliam, the lesson to be
drawn from the Jacobin success in generating a ‘national-popular’ collective will
capable of seeing through the bourgeois revolution depended not on the inevitabil-
ity of the rise of capitalism, but on the contingent circumstances of France’s exter-
nal rivalry with Britain, whose forms of state and citizenship provided a benchmark
for the new order. He concludes that the new social movements opposed to con-
temporary neoliberal globalisation are shaped by similarly liminal and contingent
circumstances.
Taken together, these two volumes show that contemporary work in the Gramscian
tradition remains vigorous and contested, both within international political economy
and more widely.

References
Gramsci A (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey-
Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Bieler A, Morton AD (2008) The deficits of discourse in ipe: Turning base-metal into
gold? International Studies Quarterly 52(1): 103-28.

Author biography
Hugo Radice is a life fellow in the School of Politics and International Studies, University of
Leeds. He is currently working on the crises of capitalism and of the socialist movement.

Adam David Morton

Revolution and State in Modern Mexico: The Political Economy of
Uneven Development, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011; 301
pp: 9789742554894 (hbk) £49.95

Reviewed by Alf Gunvald Nilsen, University of Bergen, Norway

In Revolution and State in Modern Mexico: The Political Economy of Uneven Development,
Adam Morton has produced a study that is nothing short of seminal. Building a compel-
ling theoretical dialogue between the revolutionary theories of Gramsci and Trotsky,
Morton argues that ‘the struggle-driven course of uneven and combined development

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560 Capital & Class 36(3)

and modern state formation in Mexico can be best understood as a set of constructed
and contested class practices characteristic of a passive revolution, that is, a condition in
which capitalist development is either instituted and/or expanded, resulting in both a
“revolutionary” rupture and a “restoration” of social relations’ (p. 4).
The first part of the book presents a magisterial map of the contested trajectory of
Mexican state formation from the revolution of the early 20th century, via developmen-
talism centred on import substitution industrialisation (isi), to the contemporary regime
of neoliberal capitalism.
In a context of long-standing feudal stagnation, the Mexican revolution of 1910 was
‘the first passive revolution of the twentieth century in Latin America’ (p. 47). Popular
agency was a central driving force in the revolution, but its trajectory was ultimately
defined by a state-directed expansion of capitalist relations of production. With the
advent of Cardenismo, the project of national modernisation was expanded through a
partial incorporation of peasants’ and workers’ organisations so as to ensure what Morton
refers to as ‘a bourgeois minimal hegemony under the single state-party system’ (p. 58).
In an effective analysis, the book brings out how the era of isi developmentalism wit-
nessed a continued deepening of capitalist property relations, driven by a state that rap-
idly became ‘the fulcrum of capital accumulation’ (p. 67). Morton details the spatial
unevenness of capitalist development across Mexico’s regions and argues that this period
was one in which Mexico witnessed the emergence of a ‘state in capitalist society’ (p. 72)
that – despite its limitations as a less than fully-functioning capitalist state – was capable
of ‘tying the nurturing and consolidation of a national bourgeoisie to state intervention,
within a world context dominated by foreign capital’ (p. 86).
Morton then details the unravelling of isi developmentalism and the onset of neo-
liberal restructuring – a process which finally brings about ‘a capitalist type of state’
(p. 76) in Mexico. A key feature of the analysis of this transition is the emphasis put
on ‘the articulation of capitalism through multiscalar relations’ and the ways in which
states come to function as ‘political nodes in the global flow of capital’ (p. 110).
Developed through a critical engagement with William Robinson’s theory of the
transnational state, Morton’s analysis is arguably at its finest and most significant in
deciphering how the neoliberal turn was orchestrated by a Mexican technocratic elite
that effectively internalised ‘certain transnational class interests’ and put the state to
work in ‘producing the spatial configurations of the neoliberal accumulation process’
(p. 120). Attention is also given to how the ‘minimal hegemony’ of the Mexican state
is reconfigured through, on one hand, a turn to more overt uses of coercion against
oppositional elements and, on the other hand, anti-poverty programmes like the
Programa Nacional de Solidaridad (pronasol), which displaced radical popular
agency and modernised populism in a direction that was commensurable with the
neoliberal policy regime.
Within the space of these three chapters, Morton has not only produced a rich and
sophisticated analysis of the trajectory of state formation in postcolonial Mexico. He has
also produced an exemplary approach to the study of development more generally. As
Colin Leys (2009: 43) has noted, the study of development has increasingly been reduced
to a ‘policy-oriented social science within the parameters of an unquestioned capitalist
world order’. By bringing back in perspectives from critical historical sociology, Morton
has provided significant resources for those who wish to shift the focus of attention of

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Book Reviews 561

development research towards the contested political economy of this world order. As
such, comparative work across the regions of the Global South, crafted according to the
analytical mould that Morton constructs here, will doubtlessly be a highly fecund
endeavour for critical students of global development.
The second part of the book presents three chapters that comment on and analyse
different aspects of Mexican state formation: the literary work of author and public intel-
lectual Carlos Fuentes; the democratic transition in Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s; and,
finally, the Zapatista uprising.
Drawing on the cultural and literary theory of Gramsci and Trotsky, Morton’s analysis
of Carlos Fuentes focuses on how his work initially served a ‘critical social function’ that
‘highlighted how certain class forces thwarted the progressive aspects of the revolution to
culminate in the reorganisation of capitalism of Mexico’ (p. 144). This, of course, reso-
nates with the wider theme of the blocked dialectic of revolution and restoration that is
at the heart of passive revolution, but, as Morton points out, Fuentes has served this
function in a contradictory and partial manner. His writing retains an elitist character in
which the lifeworld and subjectivities of the masses remain opaque and distant. In other
words, Fuentes and his work have, in Morton’s assessment, become ‘fully assimilated into
the capitalist project’ (p. 158).
Morton moves on to discuss the end of one-party dominance in Mexico. As Morton
makes clear, liberal theories of democratisation are flawed in a number of ways, and
not least in terms of their disconnection from the ‘social power relations in which
institutions are rooted: the very structures of power, authority, interests, hierarchies
and loyalties that make up socioeconomic and cultural life’ (p. 172). As an alternative,
Morton draws on William Robinson’s concept of ‘polyarchy’ – a form of low-intensity
democracy – well suited for resolving conflicts between dominant groups, whilst
avoiding the disruption of mobilisation from below. Calibrating the concept to cap-
ture the specificities of the Mexican context, Morton argues that the promotion of
polyarchy can be discerned in substantial US funding of governance reforms and civil
society organisations, as well as the value attributed to restricted popular participation
in politics by some actors in this process. Not least, the internalisation of democratic
discourses that can underpin ‘a neoliberal state attuned to establishing a series of
mechanisms conducive to resolving disputes within the remit of a polyarchic system’ is
highlighted (p. 191-2).
In the final part of the book, Morton turns to the Zapatista uprising. Analyzing
ezln resistance in the context of uneven agrarian development, he articulates an
important critique of Eric Hobsbawm’s theory of ‘the death of the peasantry’ by
focusing on how the upsurge of popular struggle in the Chiapas highlands has to be
understood in terms of ‘the constitution and reproduction of peasants through the
dynamics of capital accumulation’ (p. 200). A particular virtue of the analysis is the
fact that he inserts the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (ezln) into a spe-
cific regional context – a welcome change from the bland and disembodied bird’s-eye-
view accounts of the Zapatista movement that are all too numerous in the literature
on alterglobalisation, for example – in which forms and relations of production have
been changing rapidly since the 1970s, and in turn giving rise to new forms of peas-
ant organisation. Morton proceeds to show us the complex set of achievements and
limitations of a movement that has activated both national and international civil

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562 Capital & Class 36(3)

society, vindicated indigenous peoples’ rights whilst simultanously moving beyond

narrow ethnic claims, and campaigned for the deepening of democracy and new spa-
tial forms of governance in Chiapas. In what is easily the most captivating part of the
book from the point of view of understanding subaltern praxis, Morton provides an
illuminating analysis of the ezln in terms of the workings of ‘the three spaces of its
autonomous practice of resistance’ (p. 203) – namely, alternative economic organisa-
tion, educational projects, and healthcare provision. This dynamism, he argues, holds
the potential to ‘propel new cycles of class struggle’ that may generate ‘new ways out
of the structure of passive revolution’ (p. 250).
Yet it is precisely here that one possible criticism of the book emerges. And that is
that the analysis would arguably have been further enhanced if it had delved even more
deeply into the lifeworlds and struggles of subaltern groups as these have been consti-
tuted by and constitutive of the political economy of revolution, state formation and
uneven development in modern Mexico. Morton presents a penetrating and valuable
analysis of the accumulation strategies and hegemonic projects of dominant social
groups, and deftly decodes the ways in which subaltern groups were woven into the
‘unstable equilibria’ (Gramsci 1971: 182) that undergirded these strategies and projects.
However, the lived experiences of subalternity in Mexican capitalism – and the lived
reality of the collective efforts to overcome this subalternity – remain somewhat muted
throughout the book. This, however, is a very minor quibble in the face of what is,
without a shadow of a doubt, a work of considerable and substantial merit. Revolution
and State in Modern Mexico combines theoretical sophistication and innovation with a
thoroughgoing understanding of empirical complexities in an analysis that, when it
comes time to construct a canon of Marxist historical sociology, will sit comfortably
and appropriately among the classics on whose insights it draws and to whose legacy it
contributes.

References
Gramsci A (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey
Nowell-Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Leys C (2009) The Rise and Fall of Development Theory. Bloomington, in: Indiana
University Press.

Author biography
Alf Gunvald Nilsen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of Bergen.
His work focuses on social movements in the Global South and Marxian approaches to the study
of global development. He is the author of Dispossession and Resistance in India: The River and the
Rage (Routledge, 2010) – a comprehensive study of popular resistance to dam-building in the
Narmada Valley, India.

Emir Sader
The New Mole: Paths of the Latin American Left, trans. Ian Bruce.
London: Verso, 2011, 224 pp: 9781844676927 (hbk) £14.99

Reviewed by Philip Roberts, University of Nottingham

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