Goldfrank TheoriesRevolutionRevolution 1979

Theories of Revolution and Revolution without Theory: The Case of Mexico
Author(s): Walter L. Goldfrank

Source: Theory and Society , Jan. - Mar., 1979, Vol. 7, No. 1/2, Special Double Issue on
State and Revolution (Jan. - Mar., 1979), pp. 135-165
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/657001
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135
THEORIES OF REVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION WITHOUT

THEORY:
The Case of Mexico
WALTER L. GOLDFRANK
For a long time now the Mexican revolution has fascinated laypersons
engaged scholars from different disciplines, distinct orientations, an
countries. Numerous confusions surround its interpretation. Some even
tion, with good reason, whether "it" existed as an historical process wi
identifiable coherence.1 For the most part, attention has focussed on
aspects: on the heroes and villains of the violent struggles of 1910-19
the reorganization and reforms instituted by President Lazaro Cardenas
(1934-1940); on the so-called economic miracle of the decades since then
(Gross Domestic Product averaged a 6.5% annual increase from 1940 to
1970);2 and on the victims of that miracle, the children of Sanchez in the
cities and their "colonized" compatriots in the countryside.3 Yet the great
transformation of Mexico began well before 1910, in the last third of the
nineteenth century. While not ignoring the dramatic years of armed struggle
nor the remarkable changes that have occurred since, this essay concentrates
rather on the earlier time. It attempts to account primarily for the outbreak
and character of the revolution (to assume for a moment its coherence),
which in the long view of the last hundred years appears to have decisively
enhanced Mexican national autonomy, economic growth, and, to a lesser ex-
tent, the well-being of the rural and urban workers. Yet these "successes" can
be, and typically are, exaggerated: Mexican autonomy is gravely restricted by
the country's dependent position in the world economy and by the low level
of political mobilization; Mexican economic growth has greatly profited
foreign corporations, left the state with a large foreign debt, and owed much
to Mexico's proximity to the U.S.;4 and the reforms alleged to benefit the
working class have neither halted the trend toward increased inequality nor
substantially affected a large number of so-called "marginal" persons,5
serving, rather, as a means of social control.6
University of California, Santa Cruz.

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136
Why, though, did the social controls of the previous years collapse, so that
alone among Latin American countries Mexico experienced a revolution
before World War II? After some prefatory considerations, this question leads
us first to examine competing theories of revolution; second, to see how
those theories help with explaining the Mexican case; and third, to sketch and
apply an alternative framework which draws upon yet goes beyond existing
conceptions.
Metatheory and the History of Revolution
Even if the political action flowing from their understandings are typically
antithetical, Liberal and Marxian approaches to macrosociology are often
complementary.7 Liberals and Marxists see different aspects of the same
reality, and see realities that one another do not look at. Apart they tend to
slight the attractive and useful aspects of their "class enemies" (the best ana-
lysts of course escape this failing), whereas taken together the humanity of
all participants in the social drama receives proper appreciation. Both liber-
alism and Marxism claim to include and supersede the other. Liberal scholars
typically reduce Marxism to "economic determinism" and then call it reduc-
tionist, while attending to all the "factors" or "variables" that explain large-
scale phenomena. At their worst, Marxists do shrink the world beyond recog-
nition; but at their best, they manage to transform the "factors" and "varia-
bles" of conventional social science into parts of a totality fundamentally
shaped by determinate social relations of production.
For myself, while tending toward the latter camp, I start only with the pre-
disposition that virtually all ruling groups deserve more opposition than they
receive. Among other things, a revolutionary situation is one in which the
ordinarily suppressed anger and resentment of working people, that is, ex-
ploited humans,8 can surface with less than suicidal risk. One of the most
consistent and serious errors of liberal social science in my view is to see
legitimacy where there is merely acquiescence, self-interested obedience to
the enforcers.9 Tenuous and problematic for Max Weber, legitimacy is reck-
lessly imputed by his avowed heirs to all manner of state and private powers.10
Perhaps this is one reason many social scientists treat riots and rebellions as
"irrational outbursts" while accepting, if only by default, the real as rational.
The mirror image of this wishful thinking can be seen in some leftwing ana-
lysts' exaggerated attributions of radical consciousness to dominated groups,
who are typically far more absorbed in making do than in making history.11
But revolutions make history - quantity can turn into quality - when the
structural opportunity for sustained revolt permits such groups to escape the
bounds of quotidian politics.

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137
Revolution is a rare phenomenon, a compound of several more frequent ones:

administrative breakdown and/or violent rebel movements, and substantial
social transformation, more or less administered politically. Thus we exclude
from direct consideration irregular changes of regime instigated by elite
groups (coups, dynastic wars, national unifications), rebellions from below
(jacqueries, urban insurrections), most wars of national independence on the
one hand; and, on the other, rapid modernization from above by conservatives
(Meiji Japan is the best known case), or by Marxists (as in contemporary
Eastern Europe). We do this in spite of the frequency with which participants
in one or another of these events claim or are said to be revolutionary, be-
cause revolutions have both inspirational and terrifying effects well beyond
these more common phenomena. This definition is necessarily imprecise at
the edges: how much administrative breakdown? how widespread the social
movements? how substantial the social transformation? Not only do these
questions have different possible answers in general, but also, historically, the
ante has been raised, so that what shook the world in 1789 looks rather lim-
ited in 1976. As one moves further away from the classic cases of France,
Russia, and China, agreement on inclusion in the category lessens, but defen-
sible claims can be made for the Netherlands' revolt, the English Civil War,
and the self-styled revolutions in Mexico, Yugoslavia, Bolivia, Cuba, Algeria,
and Viet Nam; it is perhaps too soon to say about popular movements recently
come to power elsewhere in the world.
One further prefatory point. Thus far in the history of the modern world, it
appears that revolution occurs within finite developmental limits in the tra-
jectory - itself problematic - of any given nation-state from weakly organized,
overwhelmingly agrarian, poor (and in some cases dominated by foreigners)
to strongly organized, industrial, relatively prosperous (and relatively auton-
omous in the world). Before a certain point (call it Time I), there is no state
worth seizing and no state machinery capable of effecting social transforma-
tion. Surplus appropriation and political attachments are primarily local in
character (or confined to export enclaves). Market mechanisms do not sub-
stantially affect the lives of large numbers of cultivators, generating potential
rebellions. Or, important sectors are so strongly linked to foreign power that
effective control exists only outside the territorial boundary. After Time II,
on the other hand, at least the ruling groups are nationally organized and the
state is too valuable to those who control production to let it slip away. Suf-
ficient wealth exists to make timely concessions possible, while a substantial
proportion of the population (say, at least one-third) has a material stake in
the way things are. Administrative and technological improvements, further,
make for a widening military advantage over any conceivable popular army.12
Revolution, then, may but need not occur between Time I and Time II. The

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138
strengthening of the central state apparatus that revolutionaries typically

carry out (to compete internationally, defend against counter-revolution, and
enforce social reforms) makes further revolution unlikely, perhaps impos-
sible.13 But it is also the case that nation-states can pass from Time I to Time
II without revolution, if the state and those who control industry and com-
merce gain sufficient strength at the expense of unprogressive sectors of the
landed class and/or other aristocratic elements.14
What do these prefatory points imply for what follows? First, the essay draws
critically on both liberal and Marxian analyses, synthesizing where possible,
yet ultimately referring to the situation of Mexico within the totality of a
capitalist world economy.)s Second, it takes seriously the projects of all the
participants, neither reducing ideology to opportunistic sophistry, nor accept-
ing the claims of the powerful at face value, nor endowing the oppressed with
virtues they were prevented from developing.)6 Third, it treats the Mexican
revolution as an instance of revolution; but the upper case "R", commonly
used, is rejected here, to symbolize the contradictory character of the several
rebellions and the fragility of the connection between those rebellions and
the eventual social transformation. Fourth, it conceives of the revolution as
a structurally determined outcome of the expansion of world capitalism, as
the Mexican ruling groups attempted to promote a strong, prosperous, and
autonomous nation-state in large part by welcoming investment from those
who envisioned Mexico as a safe, dependent source of inexpensive raw mate-
rials and repatriated commercial profits. If it accomplished nothing else, the
revolution hastened the elimination of the reactionary elements of the landed
class from national political influence, and led to the establishment of state
machinery sufficiently strong both to mollify the negative effects of foreign
investment and to regulate class conflict. Violent protest is far more likely than
revolution in Mexico's future.
Theories of Revolution
What do existing theories tell us to look for in explaining revolution? We shall

review in turn the unsystematic notions of laypersons and historians; aggregate
social psychologies; natural history and social system conceptions; political
conflict models; and Marxist hypotheses. Then in the subsequent section, the
applicability of these theories to the Mexican case will be discussed.
The popular notions of ordinary laypersons and untheoretical historians can

be treated briefly. They are basically covered by two metaphors, focussing
far more on rebellion than on transformation. One is the "pressure cooker"

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139
model, the other, an "outside agitator" model. In the first, too much misery
and oppression lead "the people" to revolt against the unjust conditions that
constrain them. Or, in the more elaborated accounts of standard historians, a
cumulation of serious problems - in foreign policy, banking and finance, taxa-
tion, social conflict, government corruption, among them - so overburdens a
government that it falls while at the same time popular aspirations are suf-
ficiently frustrated to rebel. In the second model, otherwise contented people
have their baser political passions inflamed by self-serving propagandists;
neurotic, misguided, foreign-inspired.
These conceptions are not wholly illusory, but as theory they do not take us
very far. Both widespread oppression and inflammatory agitation occur with
far greater frequency than revolution, or even rebellion. Further, in the con-
ventional historian's list of "factors" one finds little connective tissue, and
typically little sense of the relative importance of the various ingredients in
the pressure cooker.17
Aggregate social psychologies focus on member discontent as the prime ex-

planation of revolution, relying on a frustration-aggression hypothesis from
that point on. Societies are depicted as collections of individuals whose ex-
pectations may be met or frustrated. In the well-known "J-curve" formula-
tion of James Davies,18 rising expectations engendered by increasing prosperity
continue to operate after economic downturn sets in. The gap between expec-
tation and reality grows too great to be tolerated. Or, in the work of Ted
Robert Gurr,19 "relative deprivation" is the crucial variable for explaining
political violence (that is, the political violence of rebels; governments and
goons escape his attention). In the case of revolution, both aspiring elites and
the mass of the populace must suffer relative deprivation, with the former
manipulating the latter to engineer widespread violence.20 In empirical tests,
proponents of the theory have failed to operationalize directly "relative de-
privation," whereas skeptics with adequate measures have found no significant
connection between frustration and radicalism (or political violence).2? Gaps
between expectation and reality can and do occur in many ways (e.g., stable
expectations and falling realities; declining expectations and plummeting
realities, etc.) and in many times and places without provoking violent up-
heavals. More fundamentally, it is wrong to posit member satisfaction as
a primary requisite for social stability, whatever one's model of how dis-
content is generated. And it is topsy-turvy in the analysis of a collective,
politically organized process to treat institutional factors as "mediating" and
individual mental states as crucial. The social psychology of discontent can
perhaps play a useful secondary role in explaining revolution.

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140
Social systems theorists - most prominently Neil Smelser and Chalmers

Johnson22 - avoid psychological reductionism by talking about strains and
disequilibrium rather than relative deprivation. Their underlying imagery
revives the "normal - pathological - normal" movement discerned by the
natural historians of revolution, Lyford P. Edwards and Crane Brinton.23
Societies held together by value consensus internalized during childhood so-
cialization undergo severe tensions only to be re-equilibrated by the institu-
tionalization of a new ideology, after "legitimate" elites have been unable
simultaneously to contain dissent and implement reform. Persistent situations
of value dissensus, non-synchronization of values and environment, or elite
reliance on coercion to maintain order are all theoretically impossible, no
matter how empirically frequent. The systems approach to revolution has not
been tested systematically; rather, its proponents gather illustrative examples
of ideologies preceding revolutions. Puritanism in seventeenth century Eng-
land, the Enlightenment in eighteenth century France, Marxism in twentieth
century Russia (Brinton's "desertions of the intellectuals") are the most
illustrious cases. But while Johnson has proposed a series of possible indices
of disequilibrium,24 neither he nor anyone else has attempted to correlate
these indices with instances of revolution or even large scale ideological move-
ments. And given the frequency of such movements, the rarity of revolution
is an embarrassment to that approach. Further, when peasants and the urban
poor act with revolutionary consequences, they are usually motivated not by
alternative values or articulated ideologies but by immediately pressing short-
ages of land, food, and justice. Widespread dissensus, or dissynchronization of
values and environment, is simply too common to be a useful explanatory
framework, and "symptons" of societal instability are tolerated by the body
politic far more than they presage revolutionary change.25
Among the most trenchant critics of both social-psychological and natural

history or social systems conceptions of revolution has been Charles Tilly.26
He has proposed instead a focus on conflict: conflict among governments,
contenders already active within the legitimate polity, and challengers for
entry into the polity. In the typical case, an alliance or coalition of some con-
tending and some challenging groups creates a situation of dual sovereignty
until either the government or its enemies re-establish sole authority. Winning
depends in large part on gaining the voluntary commitment of large popula-
tion segments: the model is analagous to depictions of the electoral process in
which two elite parties compete for the votes of the masses. But as Skocpol
has pointed out,27 however much this newer perspective improves on earlier
ones, it yet falls back on member discontent and the development of new
ideologies in accounting for the commitment of large numbers to revolution-
ary contenders. And it tends to picture the state as simply one organized

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141
force among two or more competitors rather than as the organization which
must collapse and then be reconstituted for revolution to occur. Still, Tilly's
approach should help restore the state to a central place in analyses of revolu-
tion, countering the tendency to treat political processes as epiphenomenal.
Marxist theories of revolution share some of the defects of the above concep-
tions: state and politics are treated as epiphenomenal, this time to "basic"
contradictions and to class struggle. And revolutions are portrayed as the
grandest of social movements- "made" by the participants rather than arising
conjuncturally.28 As in the political conflict model, clearly defined antagonists
struggle for power; as in the social systems model, a new society emerges
violently from the strains (contradictions) of the old one; as in the social-
psychological model, the expectations of the historically progressive class are
frustrated ("fettered") by the social relations enforced by the reaction?29
Twentieth century Marxists have either grafted Lenin's strategic notions onto
class analysis to explain revolutions' occurring where they were unexpected,
or they have sought to elaborate models of class consciousness that can ex-
plain the non-occurrence of socialist revolutions in the industrial West despite
the repeated economic crises that have marked the history of capitalism.
Given their notion of the role of the party, many Marxists have a stake in
conceiving of revolutions as heroic social movements, thus slighting the struc-
tural opportunity. And given the Eurocentric and time-bound origin of
Marxist theory itself, problems arise with describing transitions (can sup-
posedly deterministic stages be "skipped"?) and social classes (are peasants
"petty bourgeois" or proletarian or sui generis? are white collar workers a
new middle class, a new working class, or some of each?).
At the same time, Marxist theory has some distinct advantages. It is historical-
ly grounded rather than abstract. It points to contradictions within and be-
tween social structures, and to class conflicts between groups of concrete
actors. It has stimulated the most notable recent published comparative work
on the causes and consequences of revolution, by Barrington Moore, Jr., Eric
R. Wolf, and Jeffery M. Paige.30 In addition, two current trends of Marxist
inspiration point the way to a yet more adequate conception: one is the
"structuralist" emphasis on the relative autonomy and independent impor-
tance of the state31; the other is the conceptualization of the capitalist world-
system as the point of departure, the relevant "reproduction context," for
the analysis of any particular nation-state?32 But before advancing a concep-
tion that puts together the world-system, the state, and class conflict, let me
review the ways in which the theories sketched thus far illuminate the data of
the Mexican revolution.

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142
Theory and Data in Mexico
When the foregoing five conceptions are held up against the reality of the
Mexican revolution, their usefulness and limitations are further evident. While
each points to something real, none accommodates all the critical facts.
Popular conceptions - too much misery and oppression, too many problems
for the existing government, and the work of outside agitators - can intro-
duce the Mexican revolution but they cannot explain it. Misery and oppression
were indeed widespread. In the countryside and the cities, wages were very low,
working and living conditions pitiable, governmental abuses legion. Given
these conditions, revolution might well have occurred at almost any time
during the role of Porfirio Diaz (1876 to 1911) but it did not. Given similar
conditions elsewhere in Latin America, revolutions could have been expected
but did not occur. Further, many of the most miserable and oppressed Mexi-
cans took no part in the original insurgencies or in later struggles: this holds
for most victims of the tropical plantations - including the scandalously
brutal Yucatan henequen fields, for the urban poor, and for the resident agri-
cultural laborers (acasillados) on central Mexican haciendas.33
Historians' and others' lists of "causes" of the revolution are the other variant
of the "pressure cooker" metaphor. These lists can expand to include the
results of long term factors such as the original Spanish conquest, the hacienda
system, problems unsolved since the achievement of national independence,
and the consequences of the Reform Wars of the mid-nineteenth century34;
middle term problems of the Porfirian era such as widespread foreign invest-
ment, increasing concentration of landed and commercial wealth, expansion
of the hacienda system, labor troubles in the new industrial and mining cen-
ters, and political repression; and short term strains such as the drought and
crop failures of 1909 and 1910, fiscal difficulties following conversion to the
gold standard in 1905, the agitation of exiles in border communities, and
Diaz's infirmities in old age (he was 80 in 1910). Such lists tend to confound
the motives of the participants (their "causes" they fought for) with analytic
explanations ("causes" in quite another sense). They also tend to ignore the
connections between the various problems indicated, because they lack a
model of society as a whole.
As for "outside agitators," some did in fact play a role in Mexico. Spanish
anarchists and socialists, persecuted at home, spread their message into Mexico.
Militant trade unionists in the United States, most notably the I.W.W., also
had some influence, both on Mexican workers who temporarily labored in the
U.S. and on those they met when working in Mexico. In more particularized

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143
contexts, some have argued, the urban intellectuals who in small numbers
joined the insurgent movements of Pancho Villa in the North and Emiliano
Zapata in the South-Center were outside agitators. But the reverse is more
nearly correct; the rural rebels inspired and attracted the intellectuals more
than the other way around. Much has been made of the activities of the Flores
Magon brothers, anarchist agitators in exile in the U.S. whose newspaper
Regeneracion reached a wide audience: they have been honored semi-official-
ly as "Precursors" of The Revolution. But judging from their near total failure
to generate support for their own revolutionary activities, they cannot have
had the influence attributed to them.35 More important, it makes little sense
to talk of "outside" agitation in a system of world capitalism: extensive inter-
national flows of commodities, investments, and laborers brings with it inter-
national flows of ideas. In my judgment the mostly unsystematic ideas of the
Mexican rebels were not more influenced from abroad than the predominant
ideology of the upper strata, a home brew of positivism and Social Darwinism.
In any case, leftist agitation was common around the turn of the century in
all but the most backward of the Western countries, and hence can have played
a causal role in Mexico only in combination with more fundamental factors.
Aggregate social psychology at first glance looks promising. The best estimates
of minimum real wages show a rise from 1877 to 1898-99, then a gradual
decline until 1908, and then a sharper drop from 1908 to 191 1.36 But aside from
the impossibility of knowing reliably the "underlying" mental states of the
revolutionaries, problems arise when the objective data on satisfactions and
deprivations are disaggregated. For example, the Zapatista revolt centered in
Morelos drew its activists primarily from villagers who were experiencing a
fairly steady deterioration in their situation: sugar planters were encroaching
on their historic lands, converting some of them to wage laborers and making
survival problematic for others. They fit into the third category discerned by
Katz in his review of hacienda labor during the Porfiriato, having suffered
"both absolute and relative deprivation."37 Katz's second grouping, absolute
deterioration but relative improvement, includes both the more secure acasil-
lados (who tended not to rebel) and the tenants and temporary laborers in
the North. The latter were hard hit by the combined effects of recession in
the U.S., unemployment in Mexican mining, and crop failures in 1909 and
were an important social base for the popular bands allied with Madero in his
military challenge for the presidency (1910-1911), and for both the Consti-
tutionalist and Villista armies later in the decade. Further, in Katz's first
grouping - the upwardly mobile - are the northern cowboys who figured
prominently in the northern armies.38
For the other elements in Mexican society, quite mixed patterns of satisfac-

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144
tions and deprivations can be suggested. The Mexican capitalists who sup-
ported Madero and later the Constitutionalists chafed under the regime of
favoritism to foreigners and selected monopolists and were blocked in their
aspirations by limited domestic demand.39 They backed "collective violence"
but did not engage in it. The middle strata in the North were severely disad-
vantaged by inequities in the tax system, by the deprivation of municipal self-
government, by commercial competition from Chinese, by discriminatory
freight rates on U.S.-controlled railways. For both these groups the situation
had been improving, and they wanted more; and even if a "J-curve" or some
"relative deprivation" (say, from the 1907 downturn) accounts for their dis-
content, how then explain the political quietude (even cowardice)40 of the
capitoline middle strata who grew in number and prosperity throughout most
of the period only to see price rises squeeze them in the later years.41 In
short, without reviewing the stratification sub-group by sub-group, it appears
that the social psychology of discontent is less fruitful a path than the struc-
ture of interests and opportunities among variably organized groups.
What about the natural history or social system model? This one is practical-
ly useless for Mexico. The initial condition it posits - a society in equilibrium
or harmony - can hardly be said to have existed at any time, at least since
the Conquest.42 The heterogeneity of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural elements,
on the one hand, and the use of force and its threat to maintain the hacienda
system of rural surplus extraction on the other make a mockery of any con-
ception of social stability that rests on value consensus and/or the internaliza-
tion of shared norms. Folk and elite Catholicism were (and still are) suffi-
ciently different to constitute virtually separate religions, and from around
1800 there has also existed a strong, secularist anti-clerical current as well. So
punctuated by civil wars and coups was the half-century after Independence
(1821) that one is tempted to see Porfirian political stability as more the ex-
ception than the rule.
Further, there was among pre-revolutionary Mexican intellectuals no ideol-

ogical movement comparable to the French Enlightenment or to Russian or
Chinese Marxism. In large part, rather, various elements of the regime's own
liberal ideology - which it had increasingly abandoned in practice -were
reasserted in middle class and artisan circles: freedom of speech, press, elec-
tions, and assembly; local self-government; protection from arbitrary punish-
ment by police and judges. Besides that, there grew up fairly standard work-
ing class demands for the right to strike, improved conditions, workers' com-
pensation and the like; but these demands in no way distinguished Mexican
from other workers and can even impressionistically be said to have been
comparatively mild. Articulated agrarian and working class ideologies arose

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145
far more in the course of struggle than as its precondition, while the great ar-
tistic and intellectual flowering came in the 1920s. As Frank Tannenbaum
summarized the revolution, "No great intellectuals prescribed its program,
formulated its doctrine, outlined its objectives."43
With its primary focus on organized groups struggling for power rather than
on discontent or ideology, the political conflict perspective is more helpful
than the previous ones in making sense of the Mexican realities. Situations of
multiple sovereignty existed at two discernible periods during the decade of
armed conflict. The first was during the six-month insurgency under the
banner of Madero (1910-1911). The second existed from soon after Huerta's
coup (1913) past the definitive defeat of Villa (1917) until the assassination
of Zapata (1919), or perhaps even until the ascent to the presidency of Obre-
gon (1920), depending on how seriously one takes the scattered rebel bands
that resisted subjugation by the Constitutionalist government of Carranza.
Madero's insurgency took shape following the suppression of his 1910 elec-
toral campaign against Diaz for the presidency. It included a nucleus of elite
supporters who were clearly members of the legitimate polity and middle
strata elements seeking wider participation through the restoration of demo-
cratic politics, as well as assorted agrarian rebels (Tilly's "challengers"). In
the North, the latter chafed under the moderate Maderista command; in other
areag, support for Madero was largely tactical, based more on hope than on
ideological or programmatic unity. Diaz's resignation (May, 1911) cut short
the growth of multiple sovereignty as first a provisional government (June to
October, 1911) and then the freely elected Madero government (October,
1911 to February, 1913) held constituted authority in a society-wide polity.
But the center could not hold. From the left came unmeetable demands for
sweeping social reform that would reverse the capitalist momentum of the
Porfiriato, demands, furthermore, backed by the threat of disruptive strikes
and of renewed guerrilla warfare close to the capital city. From the right,
which included many holdover elements in both the civil and military govern-
ment bureaucracies, came subversion of the first steps toward reform, vitriolic
attacks on the government in the press, and incessant plotting for a coup. One
such plot came to fruition in early 1913. Victoriano Huerta, one of the gener-
als involved in the conspiracy assumed the presidency and attempted to rule
through the federal army, the civil bureaucracy, and the political apparatus
left over from 1910.
But Huerta was unable to restore the status quo ante. Several northern state
governors refused to recognize his government, and so did the United States.
The so-called Constitutionalist armies were raised in the North, while agrarian
rebels across south-central Mexico renewed their attacks on the federal army.

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146
Within several months, sovereignty so multiplied that Huerta's government

was one of four major forces, with the other three (and many more autono-
mous bands controlling small areas) arrayed in a shaky tactical alliance: Car-
ranza's Constitutionalists, Villa's Division of the North, and Zapata's Army of
the South. By July, 1914, Huerta had lost, reducing the principals to three,
allied in opposition but unable to coalesce once in power. The radical Villa-
Zapata coalition at first enjoyed the upper hand militarily, but the Constitu-
tionalists rebounded and eventually won out, to become the single sovereign
government.
So far the model helps. However, where it suggests that winning depends on
the voluntary commitments (through ideological appeals) of large segments
of the (disoriented, discontented) population, there are difficulties. True,
concessions to the industrial workers gave the Constitutionalists part of their
edge in the ultimate showdown, and their promises of agrarian reform may
have softened some of the radical opposition. But far more important at most
stages of the process were other factors: the heterogeneity of the agrarian
rebels, the availability of arms to diverse groups, the differential application
of military tactics invented in World War I, the changing role of the United
States and other aspects of the international situation. Winning was far more
a matter of establishing dominance than of gaining adherents. Further, the
vagueness of the political conflict perspective in suggesting antecedent con-
ditions or subsequent transformations rather severely limits its utility in
Mexico.
Marxist treatments of the Mexican revolution have problems with the hetero-
geneous character of the revolutionary forces, and with fitting Mexican devel-
opment into a sequential model derived from European historical experiences,
but in spite of these problems point the way to a more satisfactory under-
standing. Basically two phases can be seen in Marxian approaches: that of the
Third International, and that of the "New Left." Both capture important
elements but have difficulty with others. The older interpretation, evident
above all in the writings of Soviet historians and in the politics of the left
under Cardenas,44 assimilates the Mexican case to the model of a national-
democratic-bourgeois revolution. Here the revolution's principal antagonists
are the "feudalism" of the hacienda on the one hand and the imperialism of
the U.S. and the advanced countries on the other, while its protagonists are
the national bourgeoisie, the petit bourgeoisie (a sublimely elastic category
including urban middle strata, small farmers, tenants, peasant villagers) and
the small industrial proletariat (whose turn will come when it is time for the
revolutionary transition to the next stage). In the newer Marxist interpreta-
tion, the category of "feudalism" is no longer applicable to Latin America

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and the national bourgeoisie no longer exists as a progressive force (or as

much of a force at all).45 In one such version, the Mexican revolution is an
anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist proletarian struggle that failed in part because
of the immaturity of the proletariat and in part because of the limitations of
its intellectuals.46 In another version, Trotskyist in conception, it is an "inter-
rupted" proletarian revolution that lives on in the hearts and minds of the
working class to resume in the near future.47 In yet another version, it is a
"peasant war" presumably against the encroachments of capitalism, although
admittedly only one of the important elements in the struggle fits that des-
cription.48 If the Zapatistas, other autochthonous agrarian groups, and the
essentially capitalist haciendas are categorically mangled to fit the older
Marxist framework,49 proponents of the newer one overstate the "proletar-
ian-ness" of the proletariat or discount the seriousness of the bourgeois radi-
cals. And, strikingly, in terms of a causal analysis, all the Marxist treatments
tend to recapitulate the well-worn list of "factors" said to be operative in
standard accounts except that "class" labels are attached to the actors. These
labels clarify some of the strengths and limitations of the parties to the con-
flict, but do little to advance an explanation of the revolution itself. Similarly,
simply to refer to Lenin's or Trotsky's notions of "uneven and combined
development" - the coexistence of productive forces appropriate to different
stages - in relatively backward countries, barely begins to suggest why revolu-
tion rather than some other outcome should occur.
To summarize briefly, the popular conceptions rehearse justifications or

excuses rather than advancing causal interpretations; insofar as they advance
causes, the causes are too general for the effect. Aggregate social psychologies
fit some but not enough of the data. Perhaps frustrated expectations occa-
sioned some of the discontent in Mexico, but absolute economic and political
deprivations seem much more important. Social system models overemphasize
shared values and the inappropriateness of old norms to new situations, but
where political "illegitimacy" itself approaches the status of a norm,50 and
new ideologies appear after rather than before the revolution, these concep-
tions are of little help. The political conflict perspective is more applicable,
drawing one to the situation of multiple sovereignty in the Mexico of 1913-
1919. But it suggests little about why the previous system broke down, what the
aims or outcomes of the revolts might be (beyond widening the polity), and
misleadingly implies that mobilized social support rather than military
strength would be the key to victory. Marxist models, f'mally, begin to move
away from concentration on the sources and forms of insurgency towards at-
tention to critical contradictions in the system as a whole. But the indepen-
dent role of the state is presumed away by the theoretical limitation most
Marxism shares with liberalism: the derivation of the state from society.51

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Toward a Structural Explanation of the Mexican Revolution
How then account for the Mexican revolution? Logically, we need a concep-
tion that brings together elements which by themselves are insufficient con-
ditions. That is, "x", "y", and "z" may be necessary conditions but will not
be sufficient conditions unless they occur simultaneously or in a particular
sequence. Substantively, we need to identify those conditions in a way that
goes beyond the uniqueness of the particular Mexican case (rendering the
Mexican revolution comparable with others). But we need to avoid going so
far beyond it as to reduce it to an instance of "collective violence," irregular
change of regime, or rebellious movement.
Four conditions appear to be necessary and sufficient, although as these con-

ditions interact and overlap with one another, it is difficult to say exactly
where one leaves off and another begins.52 For any particular national society,
they are: 1) a tolerant or permissive world context; 2) a severe political crisis
paralyzing the administrative and coercive capacities of the state; 3)wide-
spread rural rebellion; and 4) dissident elite political movements.53
World Context
In her work on the major social revolutions in France, Russia, and China,
Skocpol has made the case explicitly for the second and third conditions
while treating the first and fourth in the course of analyzing the outcomes.
She has fully appreciated the role of international competition in spurring
states to undertake politically difficult modernizing efforts and directly in
bringing on potentially revolutionary crises. Perhaps because the cases she has
treated are all states with great power ambitions if not great power status, she
does not explicitely raise as a causal necessity favorable configurations of the
world system as a whole and of the immediate international context. As one
moves toward the present temporally and toward the periphery of the world
system spatially, this condition becomes increasingly critical. For France in
1789, there was first no power or combination of powers strong enough to
block the revolution, and then a counter-revolutionary alliance that pushed it
further, until its expansionist thrust led to Napoleon's losses and finally to
Restoration. For Russia in 1917, the World War absorbed the energies of the
other principal powers, whose expeditionary forces were too little and too
late to stem the Red tide, and whose leading political elements included both
middle class liberals and working class socialists with considerable sympathy
for the victors over tsardom. China is a more complicated case, since the crisis
of 1911 was not really resolved until the Communist victory in 1949: at the
early stages, the balance of national imperialisms and then World War I pre-

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vented outside powers from coming to the Manchus' aid; the Japanese invasion
prevented Chiang Kai-shek from consolidating his rule with what might other-
wise have been sufficient aid from the Western great powers, and the Cold
War meant that the Soviets had to protect the newly victorious revolutionaries
against the U.S. threat during the critical first decade in power.
In the case of lesser and/or more peripheral states, the world system variables
assume greater importance. Wallerstein has shown how the Netherlands revolt
against Spain in the 1570s was furthered by the international situation: Eng-
land wanted the Hapsburgs weakened and so did France, while France also did
not want to see the cause of Protestantism advanced and was thus paralyzed.54
The successful independence movements in Latin America in the early nine-
teenth century reflected the ascent of Great Britain to world hegemony and
the decline of Spain, perhaps more than any internal changes.55 The Cuban
revolution in our own day depended at first on the division of opinion within
the U.S. and later on Cold War rivalry to sustain its momentum.56 And the
Vietnamese revolution is in part clearly a creation of determinate great power
configurations: the displacement of the French by the Japanese and the
former's attempt to reestablish sovereignty; the U.S. effort to stop the spread
of communism; and the Soviet and Chinese capacities to thwart that effort.
In general terms it is difficult to reduce the variety of favorable world con-

texts to a single formula. Provisionally, several possibilities can be suggested.
First, when the cat's away, the mice will play: the preoccupation of major
powers in war or serious internal difficulty increases the likelihood of revolu-
tion. This holds both in a general sense for the world system as a whole, and
in its specific application to instances of revolution in societies dominated by
a single power. Second, when major powers balance one another, especially if
that balance is antagonistic, the likelihood of revolution is increased. Third,
if rebel movements receive greater outside support than their enemies, the
likelihood of revolution is increased. (At the same time, it is worth nothing
that "outside intervention" in support of the old order may deepen and
further the revolutionary process if it comes too little or too late: this is the
lesson the U.S. drew from Cuba and put to use in Guatemala, Venezuela, and
Chile.)
What was the favorable world situation that helped to cause the Mexican Re-
volution? First, the changing balance of world power in the Carribbean region
made it progressively less possible for Mexico to continue the diplomatic bal-
ancing act of playing off European versus U.S. interests. Still a debtor nation
overall, the U.S. had invested heavily in Mexico, where in 1911, 45.5% of U.S.
(compared to 5.5% of Europe's) foreign investments were.57 This had two

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principal consequences: it meant that diplomatic pressure from the U.S.

could put the Diaz government in a bind, since it owed its financial prospects
to foreign investors but its political support to increasingly nationalistic Mexi-
cans.?8 It meant that especially given the European convulsions of World
War I, little help would come to Mexican conservatives from abroad. And it
also meant that internal U.S. politics would make a greater difference to
Mexico than before.
Second, then, is the shape of U.S. politics in the critical years from 1910-
1913. This was a period of domestic realignments in the U.S., such that no
clear policy emerged towards Mexico and the initial rebellions. U.S. opinion
ranged from the plutocratic conservatism of most foreign investors to the
openly anarchist and socialist sympathies of the more radical workers. At the
top, the Republican president faced a Democratic congress in 1911 and 1912,
as well as the division in his own party that resulted in Theodore Roosevelt's
Bull Moose campaign. Both before and after 1910 domestic political consider-
ations restrained Taft from vigorously suppressing rebels north of the border,
as did hopes for pressuring Diaz into reorienting his policies in a more pro-
U.S. direction. With the election of Wilson in 1912 came a period of confu-
sion, as the new president preached popular sovereignty and free elections for
Mexico while the holdover ambassador in Mexico City abetted the right-wing
movement to overthrow the government of Madero. Unsolicited U.S. inter-
vention and quasi-freely purchased U.S. arms and ammunition hastened the
downfall of Huerta.
Third, the increasing U.S. involvement in World War I left Mexico alone for a
time after Pershing's abortive and uninvited hunt for Villa. By then the U.S.
had settled on the eventual winning side, so that when it helped Obregon mop
up pockets of resistance in 1919-1920, the way was clear for renewing U.S.
influence and thwarting for almost twenty years - until the Great Depression
gave Cardenas an opening - much of the nationalist impulse of the revolu-
tion.
It is not accidental that more than the Mexican revolution occurred in the
period around World War I, when the great powers were fighting one another:
revolution from above in Turkey leftward movement in Argentina and Uru-
guay, a spurt of nationalism in India, and of course the beginnings of revolu-
tion in Russia and China. But this general world context had to be comple-
mented by a favorable situation in the United States. Otherwise, the Diaz
regime might have been more firmly supported in its last days and an orderly
succession worked out. Otherwise, sanctuary and arms supplies would have
been denied insurgents at several critical junctures. Otherwise, armed inter-

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vention could have thwarted the continuation of the revolutionary process (as
for example in the Sandino affair in Nicaragua). And otherwise, Mexican
state bureaucrats and private capitalists would not today share so strongly in
the control of Mexico's political economy.
Political Crisis
A second necessary condition of revolution is the breakdown of the admini-

strative and coercive capacities of the state in a political crisis - a revolution-
ary "situation." While from the point of view of some revolutionists (especial-
ly those wedded to class conflict models), such situations may appear acci-
dental, from an analytic stance above or outside the rush of history, they are
determinate if not exactly predictable. For France in 1788-1789 the crisis
came with the bankruptcy of the royal treasury and the convening of the Es-
tates General; for Russia in 1917 it was the Tsarist government's failure at
war; for China in 1911 it was the Manchu autocracy's inability to manage
reforms without losing control to regional gentry cliques. Each of these crises
was determined by a significant disjunction between the state and the upper
classes.
In Mexico, the rough picture is not dissimilar. The precipitating trigger was
the failure of the government to snuff out quickly the initial Madero insur-
gency (itself a typical Latin American pronunciamento). This failure occurred
in the context of a succession crisis, as Diaz himself was eighty years old in
1910, and had been unable through the recently created institution of the
vice-presidency to pave the way for a successor. The crisis deepened after
Madero took over the presidency in 1912, as he was unable to carry out prom-
ised reforms with an army and civil administration held over from the Porfiri-
ato, yet from the perspective of many powerful groups was too open to such
reforms and the loss of social power it would entail for them.
What brought the Mexican state to such a critical passage was a set of con-
tradictions inherent in the political economy of the Porfiriato as it developed.
The most serious was the relationship of the state to the class structure,
though also grave were the political practices strengthening Diaz's personal
rule and the difficulties of representing the Mexican nation while relying
heavily on foreign capital.60
Diaz's rise to power coincided with the great worldwide expansion of indus-
trial capitalism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as the competi-
tive search for markets, materials and investment outlets sent European and
U.S. firms into new territories and invigorated their activities in old ones.

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Mexico in this period experienced rapid growth, in mining, commercial agri-

culture, and manufacturing for the national market. In this situation, three
social groups shared power. There were first the older estate-owners who
relied on indebted resident laborers to turn a small profit; Catholic in religion,
conservative in politics, this group was conciliated by Diaz but never allowed
to exercise influence at the national level. The most important group was the
entrepreneurial bourgeoisie, a heterogeneous lot including promoters, import-
export merchants, bankers, estate owners who modernized their operations
(using more machinery and more wage-labor), and manufacturers. Varied in
ethnic origins and regional loyalties, oriented to diverse markets, increasingly
differentiated as the economy became more complex, and content with the
state's protection of property, these "modern" bourgeois had little incentive
to organize as a class, beyond distinct interest groups. The third important
group was the political machine of Diaz: governors, generals, local bosses,
mostly mestizo, socially excluded, culturally distinct.
Before the turn of the century and increasingly after that time, the second
group - particularly those with extensive foreign connections- came to
dominate economic policy. They also endeavored to institutionalize their
future control over Mexico by insisting on a vice-presidency and by forming
a political party. Their political rivals, especially in the third group, fought
back, with Diaz playing the one off against the other. The ruler in fact became
"indispensable," as he feared armed foreign intervention if he handed the
government over to nationalistic mestizo politicians and even greater foreign
economic dominance (and possibly open revolt) if he entrusted the future to
the unpopular bourgeoisie. The disjunction between state and ruling class that
was a source of leverage for the regime in its hey-day weakened it severely in
the crisis.
Diaz's political methods were likewise successful in the short run but disas-
trous in the long run. Fearing the military, he juggled commands, reduced the
budget (also helpful for impressing foreign investors), and allowed corruption
to flourish; the result was a federal army unable quickly to suppress the
Madero insurgency. In civil politics, he destroyed the potentially selfcorrect-
ing liberal institutions (free speech and press, independent judiciary, meaning-
ful legislative assemblies and elections) that elsewhere regulated conflict with-
in ruling groups and helped them to absorb popular demands - in that period
in Latin America typically originating among the urban middle strata. A per-
sonal political machine was enhanced at the expense of liberal institutions,
while the ideology of liberalism was paid lip service. Thus it is not accidental
that the Madero insurgency began as an electoral campaign for the presidency,
and that demands for reinvigoration of liberal institutions were the most

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important points in his program. In addition to concentrating power in his

own person, Diaz carried the techniques of discrediting potential rivals to
such a point that no strong-man successor was available.61
Finally, the Mexican state was weakened by its compromises with foreign
capital and foreign governments, particularly the U.S., at a time when business
rivalry, imperialist penetration, and the use of U.S. personnel in managerial and
highly skilled occupations were generating increasingly potent nationalist
interests and sentiments. A number of diplomatic incidents from 1907 to
1910 increased tensions, incurring Washington's displeasure with the Diaz
regime without reestablishing the nationalist credentials Diaz had earned for
himself in the war against the French almost fifty years before. As Diaz was
also favoring a British oil firm in its competition inside Mexico with U.S.
firms, the U.S. government was even less friendly to him. At the end Diaz's
diplomatic balancing act - attempting to maintain diversified dependence-
failed, as the British ceded primacy in Mexico to the U.S. As the Madero
insurgency gathered momentum (in large part from the participation of
refugees and sympathizers in Texas), the U.S. government did not move
vigorously to help suppress it. Diaz then chose to resign rather than invite a
protracted struggle that risked armed intervention by the U.S.
Had the diversified upper class been able to form itself into a political bloc
under Madero's leadership, social revolution might have been averted. But the
elements were too disparate - ethnically, regionally, economically, religiously,
and ideologically. Further, some of them including Madero himself were com-
mitted both to increasing the political participation of other social groups and
to redressing some of the capitalist "excesses" of the preceding years. Ele-
ments of the holdover army first thwarted Madero's efforts to negotiate with
what was still a small-scale peasant uprising, and then carried out the 1913
coup that made for a truly revolutionary crisis.
Widespread rural rebellion
However, a political-administrative crisis and a favorable work context are

insufficient conditions for revolution, as the cases of Meiji Japan (and perhaps
present-day Portugal) remind us. Rural rebellion is a third necessary condition,
interacting with the previous ones. In the French and Russian cases peasant
revolts facilitated by the crumbling of royal power furthered its collapse; in
the Chinese case the Communist Party was able to mobilize peasant rebellion
faster than the KMT could squash it. In Mexico the rural revolt was neither
so widespread as in France or Russia nor so nationally organized and ideolo-
gically sophisticated as in China. This relative weakness contributed to the

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fact the Mexican revolution was relatively less successful in removing the
landed upper class from power. But as in the other cases, so in Mexico it was
the country people who fueled the revolutionary process, pushing would-be
reformers further than they would otherwise have gone,62 and preventing the
landed class from playing an important role in stabilizing elite coalitions at
the national level.63
The heterogeneity of rural Mexico increased greatly during the period prece-
ding the revolution. Thus several distinctive rural rebellions accounted for the
greater part of revolutionary participation, and the regions and groups that
were relatively quiet also showed considerable differences in the nature of
cultivation, the organization of labor, and the extent and kind of political
organization. In general terms, it can be said that rural rebellion was strongest
where two conditions obtained simultaneously: first, where the newly dy-
namic capitalist (though not exclusively export) agriculture had most deeply
penetrated; and second, where the rural labor force enjoyed what Wolf (in
spite of his promiscuous usage of the label "peasants") termed "tactical mo-
bility" - meaning village organization and/or relative autonomy from super-
vision and/or geographical-military advantages.64
TABLE 1:
Rural labor force:

"tactical mobility"
+-
New capitalist + Chihuahua

penetration Sonora Yucatan
Morelos
Oaxaca Central plateau

haciendas
Table 1 presents both the array of centers of rural revolt and

only one of or neither of the necessary conditions obtained. Y
analytical abstraction is insufficient for capturing importan
among the rebel groups, differences that severely limited the
concerted, as opposed to parallel, political action.
In the thirty years before the revolution, capitalism spread o

countryside unevenly and in different forms. In the Yucatan,
tations were established to grow the raw materials for bindi
U.S. and Canada. Much of the indigenous Mayan population w
fled further and further into the jungle, so that the labor force

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155
ly imported from other parts of Mexico, most notable from the northwestern
state of Sonora where other indigenous groups, the Yaqui and Mayo, were
defeated by the federal army as part of a land grab. The heterogeneous, bru-
tally exploited, plantation workers took no part in the revolutionary events,
while a Constitutionalist army took over the state in 1915 and used henequen
revenues to help finance the struggle against the rural revolutionaries from
Morelos and from the North.65
In Oaxaca, the peasantry was notably quiet during the revolution. In this case,
however, it was more because modern agricultural capitalism had not pene-
trated the state, and less due to the weakness of the cultivators' organization-
al and geographical potential for political action. Estate owners were less
prominent in the state's political elite, and they encroached little on the lands
of Mixtec and Zapotec peasants after 1880. Sugar was grown in small quanti-
ties by old methods; where coffee was introduced it was primarily grown by
small scale producers. "With the salient exception of the La Canada and Tux-
tepec regions, the only parts of Oaxaca that sustained any significant peasant
revolutionary action, capitalism in the form of modern agricultural enter-
prises did not over-run the countryside."66
The third non-revolutionary combination of variables includes neither signi-

ficant capitalist transformation of agriculture nor large degrees of peasant
autonomy, organization, and military-geographic potential. This combina-
tion describes a large portion of the central Mexican plateau. In most of this
region, the conventional hacienda predominated with its well known under-
utilization of land and technology and overexploitation of labor. While scat-
tered estates went over to intensive cultivation of the century plant (a cactus
yielding juices fermented into pulque, an alcoholic beverage popular with the
demoralized urban poor) or to dairying, the majority took advantage of
favorable land legislation to expand their holdings without measurably in-
creasing production. One result was that the cultivation of food crops lagged
behind the growth in agriculture for export and for domestic processing, not
to mention a considerable growth in population.67 Another result was to in-
corporate the majority of the formerly autonomous peasant communities
into the hacienda, and to encourage migration out of the region. Residents,
perpetually indebted peons (acasillados) comprised the stable labor force,
which was supplemented at peak seasons by day laborers and migrants.
Probably because they enjoyed the advantage of job security and suffered the
disadvantage of close supervision, the resident estate laborers were notably
absent from revolutionary participation.68
Rural rebellion then arose where both new capitalist thrusts occurred and for

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one or another reason large numbers of workers were tactically mobile. But
the three principal loci of revolt differed greatly from one another, both in
the developing patterns of capitalist agriculture and in the organizational
structure and capacity of the working population. In Sonora and some other
parts of Northern Mexico, small to medium scale commercial farmers rallied
against discriminatory taxation, high freight rates on the foreign controlled
railroads, and preferential treatment of U.S. firms and individuals in land
deals.69 The Sonoran rebels were also able to recruit among the defeated
Yaqui and Mayo whose lands had been distributed to large-scale agricultural
operators and whose compatriots had been deported to the henequen planata-
tions. This combination, with provincial professionals as well as commercial
farmers in the lead and recently subjugated peasant cultivators in the ranks,
readily lent itself to the standard military organization of companies and
batallions. Remote from Mexico City, separated from the Northern desert
plateau by the Sierra Madre, and bordering on the U.S. so that arms could be
rather easily acquired, Sonora was a stronghold of rebellion throughout the
decade, once the political changes following Diaz's fall weakened the pre-
existing apparatus of coercion. On the other hand, the Sonoran rebels were
led by elements of the middle strata who allied themselves with the moderate
Constitutionalists after 1914 to defeat the more plebeian armies of Villa and
Zapata. They also parlayed their military success into control of the Mexican
presidency until the nineteen-thirties.70
In other parts of the Mexican North, particularly Chihuahua, capitalist agri-

culture expanded mainly in cattle ranching, although cotton production and
the cultivation of India rubber (guayule) were also important. Debt peonage
was on the wane in the North, with sharecropping, cash rentals and wage
labor becoming common.7? The mining and railroad booms stimulated food
production for local and export markets. The giant ranches provided spec-
tacular examples of latifundismo yet were increasingly modern enterprises
well suited to the terrain. Their owners controlled local and state politics,
making life difficult for cultivators. They employed hundreds of cowboys-
often irregularly employed - and sustained the uncertain livelihood of
numerous "illegal operators whose involvement in smuggling, banditry, and
cattle rustling benefited as much from the proximity of the United States as
from the asylum for their bands provided by mountains and desert."72 When
in 1909 the Northern Mexican economy was hurt as a consequence of a down-
turn in the U.S., workers returned from across the border only to find stagna-
tion in mining and then drought in agriculture.73 They were available to join
the relatively rootless proto-cavalrymen who eventually formed the core of
Villa's army, after first providing the bands that enabled Madero to oust
Diaz.74 Yet the background that made this popular cavalry strong, the devel-

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157
opment of fierce independence and equestrian skill, was also a limitation:

their contempt for settled cultivators made them very parochial in their land
policy and their exclusion from civic life rendered them politically inept,
unable to consolidate their military gains.
The third major locus of rural rebellion was Morelos, a small state strategical-
ly located over the mountains from the capital city. There- and in adjacent
portions of Guerrero, Mexico, and Puebla, as well as non-contiguous places like
the Huaesteca - independent villagers whose livelihoods were being squeezed
by the expansion of newly capitalized haciendas spearheaded rural rebel-
lion. In Morelos it was the capitalization of sugar cultivation after 1880 that
set in motion the squeeze on the villagers. In order to pay for new milling
machinery and to reach markets that the railroads put within reach, the ha-
ciendas that had formerly coexisted with peasant production came utterly to
dominate it. Some villages lost lands and water, others (15% of the state's
total) disappeared completely. Villagers turned to stock raising in the moun-
tains, to sharecropping the worst hacienda lands, to day labor in contracted
gangs, even to the hated alternative of becoming resident peons. Increased
competitive pressure (from beet sugar and other regions) after 1900 pushed
the planers to higher investment and greater expansion at the villagers' ex-
pense,75 but the Madero insurgency in the North furnished the occasion for
a counter-attack by the villagers. Protected by the mountains they drew upon
a tradition of rebellion stretching back almost a century to the independence
war against Spain and organized into a classic guerrilla army defending its
homeland. Their pressure on Mexico City helped Madero win in 1911, and
when reforms were slow to come, they resumed armed struggle for the better
part of a decade while carrying out their own agrarian reform in between
extermination campaigns against them. But the village organization that gave
their backward-looking egalitarian idealism its awesome tenacity also entailed
a localistic orientation that gravely impaired their capacity for political action
at the national level. The Zapatistas made agrarian reform a national priority
but were shut out of the victorious coalition that would eventually, haltingly
carry it out.
Together these three sorts of rural rebellion made a moderate stabilization im-
possible, whether under the reformist liberal Madero or the more conservative
but by no means reactionary Huerta.76 From the standpoint of comparative
analysis, however, two points deserve emphasis. First, the rural rebellion in
Mexico was not a nationwide conflagration, a general rising against landlords
or peonage or "feudal" forms of surplus extraction. Except for a few locali-
ties, irreversible de facto land reform did not occur as in revolutionary France
or Russia until the government enacted and enforced it. Second, the hetero-

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158
geneity of the rural rebels, each set responding to a different form of capital-
ist penetration, mirrored the heterogeneity of the bourgeoisie. If the latter
were unable to agree on programs and policies because of their material, cul-
tural, and regional differences and the absence of mediating institutions at the
national level, so the rural workers failed to make a coherent bid for political
power. And no party, like the Communists in China, came along to do it with
and for them.
Dissident Political Movements
The fourth necessary condition for revolution is the existence of dissident

urban political groups capable of reshaping the state to achieve or hasten
modernizing transformations and to increase its competitive standing in the
world system. Dissident movements need not predate administrative break-
down and political crisis, though like the subversive moralists of pre-revolu-
tionary France77 or the agitational parties of pre-revolutionary Russia they
may contribute to such crisis. Nor need dissident groups link up in an orga-
nized way with peasant rebellion, as the CCP did. In varying degrees such
groups arise and grow as a logical consequence of a revolutionary conjuncture,
given the unusual opportunity. And since the victors typically write their own
histories, we must be wary of their claims to have cleared their own paths to
success.
In the Mexican case, three movements can be identified. Several "precur

movements came into existence after the turn of the century, spreading
ventional liberal ideas at times tinged with anarchism and/or labor grieva
Madero's presidential campaign in 1910 built on the network of liberal "c
that had formed in many provincial cities. Finally, the Constitutionalist
movement resisted Huerta's government after the coup ousting Madero in
1913, built a coalition whose armies defeated Villa and Zapata, wrote a new
constitution in 1917, and became the new government. The first two pre-
ceded and contributed to the revolutionary conjuncture, while the third
emerged from it. The first two were utterly normal political phenomena, dif-
ferent in local detail from protest movements and electoral campaigns else-
where but clearly part of ordinary politics; their causal necessity can easily be
overemphasized. The third was a logical outcome of governmental breakdown
at the national level and of widespread rural rebellion, and it insured that
neither anarchy or a return to the status quo ante would result.
The "precursors" of the Mexican revolution paralleled three kinds of protest

movement current in that era, in varying degrees, in the rest of the Americas,
movements that either succeeded peacefully or were absorbed, deflected, and

189.202.196.3 on Mon, 04 Mar 2024 16:13:12 +00:00
159
repressed elsewhere. They included civic and electoral reform spearheaded by

the professional middle class, agrarian populism, and syndicalist labor agita-
tion. Within them dissident intellectuals formulated overlapping critiques of
the regime, focussing on the restoration of constitutionally guaranteed indi-
vidual and community freedom, an end of favoritism to foreigners, and the
elimination of labor abuses. Besides preparing the ground for Madero's elec-
toral challenge in 1910, these movements had the important consequences of
increasing the political awareness and abilities of the Mexican refugee com-
munities in South Texas and generating support for reform in Mexico among
liberals and the left in the United States generally.
Madero's presidential campaign and subsequent insurrection is conventional-

ly regarded as the beginning of the Revolution.79 While such an understand-
ing makes political sense for the inheritors of Madero's mantle, it misdirects
analysis by uncritically taking over the Spanish "revolucion" (= armed
overthrow). Madero's ascent to the presidency was a temporary solution to
the succession crisis of the Diaz regime, orchestrated by high officials so as
to defuse incipient local rebellions by instituting an interim presidency and
allowing free elections. The solution was temporary because the political
freedoms of the Madero presidency facilitated the exacerbation of class con-
flicts and further weakened the state. Important elements of the old order
were entrenched in the military and civilian bureaucracies where they first
thwarted implementation of change that would satisfy popular demands.
They then carried out the coup that damaged the state beyond rescue, pro-
voked rural rebellion and brought forth the dissident movement that would
ultimately consolidate a revolutionary outcome, the Constitutionalists.
The Constitutionalists, so called because of their aim to undo the illegal coup
against the duly elected Madero, began as a group of provincial landowners
and professionals concentrated in the North. They formed a civilian cabinet
under the leadership of their "first chief" Carranza, a minor official under
Diaz and a state governor under Madero, and they gathered an army com-
prised of defecting federal troops and rebel groups previously loyal to Madero.
They depended upon tactical alliances with the peasant and working class
rural rebels until Huerta had been ousted but refused to participate in the
revolutionary convention dominated by the latter in 1914. Rather, relying
first on the middle class agrarians led by Obregon and then on an alliance
with urban workers, they put together an army which defeated Villa and con-
tained Zapata. But in the course of the struggle, the civilian liberals were
pushed to the side, as more radical elements dominated their army, and, after
elections in the provinces they controlled, dominated the 1917 constitutional
convention as well.80 Obregon's assumption of the presidency in 1920 sym-

189.202.196.3 on Mon, 04 Mar 2024 16:13:12 +00:00
160
bolized the shift from liberalism to populism, and the state he and his succes-
sors reconstituted fits well the model of the populist state.8?
Aspects of the revolutionary outcome - an end to debt peonage, the begin-

ning of serious though insufficient land reform, the legal foundation for
nationalizing foreign mineral holdings, improvement in the protection and
bargaining power of labor - had been discussed before 1910 by dissidents
and reformers, but no movement was able consciously to guide the revolu-
tionary process. The "precursor" movements and Madero's electoral campaign
and insurrection helped to make a revolutionary conjuncture; the Constitu-
tionalists were finally able to reconstruct the state, though by no means with
overwhelming popular support. True, their victory entailed some concessions
to the radical demands represented in armed struggle by these elements of the
rural poor who rebelled (and Morelos was the first state to see sizeable land
reform), but that victory more importantly required the military defeat of
those very forces. That the Mexican revolution did not go further to the left
is in part explained by the fact that the Constitutionalists made promises to
the masses but unlike the Russian or Chinese Communists did not develop or
practice an ideology requiring cadre self-discipline and urging mass participa-
tion.
Analytically, we can suggest that a dissident movement capable of reorganizing

the state and restoring order, which the Villistas and Zapatistas were unable
to do when militarily they held the upper hand, is a necessary condition for
a revolutionary outcome: otherwise, anarchy and/or reversion will occur. Yet
such a movement seems in the Mexican case to follow upon the fulfillment of
the other three necessary conditions and thus ought to be accorded a less in-
dependent causal status.
Conclusion
The above analysis identified four conditions as necessary and sufficient for
revolution in general and the Mexican revolution in particular: a favorable
world context, an administrative and coercive crisis of the state, widespread
rural rebellion, and dissident elite movement(s). The first three interact to
produce a revolutionary situation; the fourth, given the near-automatic exis-
tence of alternate contenders, emerges to effect political and social transfor-
mation after military superiority is proved. Other conceptions of revolution
- with their foci on expectations and deprivations, or dissensus and ideology,
or political conflict, or change of "stage" and class struggle -were found
wanting theoretically and to varying degrees unhelpful in making sense of the

189.202.196.3 on Mon, 04 Mar 2024 16:13:12 +00:00
161
empirical realities of the Mexican case. The historically grounded, world-sys-

tem informed structural explanation better fits the data. And theoretically,
it integrates the two levels of description that analysts of revolution must
comprehend: changes in social and political organization, and conscious
human action. It preserves the distinction between revolution and other less
far-reaching socio-political phenomena. And it suggests, sternly and surely,
that in contemporary advanced societies the kind of conjuncture specified
above cannot occur. Past revolutions may inspire but cannot serve as models
for our own future.
NOTES
1. Jean Meyer, La revolution mexicaine (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1970); A. Cordoba, La

ideologia de la revolucion mexicana (Mexico City: Era, 1973).
2. Nora Hamilton, "Dependent Capitalism and the State: The Case of Mexico," Kapi-
talistate 3 (1975), pp. 72-82.
3. Oscar Lewis, Children of Sanchez (New York: Random House, 1961): Rodolfo Sta-
venhagen, "Classes, Colonialism, and Acculturation," in J. A. Kahl (ed.), Compara-
tive Perspectives on Stratification: Mexico, Great Britain, Japan (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1968); Pablo Gonzfilez-Casanova, La democracia en Mexico (Mexico City:
Era, 1965).
4. On the importance of tourism and remittances from workers in the U.S. see Robert
I. Rhodes, "Mexico - A Model for Capitalist Development in Latin America?",
Science and Society XXXIV, 1 (Spring, 1970), pp. 61-77.
5. Gonzalez-Casanova, op. cit.
6. See for example Stanley Meisler, "Why They're Paving the Streets of Atoyac," San
Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, October 19, 1975, Sunday Punch, p. 7.
7. Cf. R. Alford, "Paradigms of Relations Between State and Society," in L. Lindberg
et al (eds.), Stress and Contradiction in Modern Capitalism Public Policy and the
Theory of the State (Lexington, Mass: Lexington, 1975), pp. 145-160.
8. J. O'Connor, The Corporations and the State (New York: Harper + Row, 1974),
ch. 2, provides a clear statement of how workers create surplus value which is ap-
propriated by others.
9. Marxists can make the same mistake - for example, N. Poulantzas, PoliticalPower
and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1973) on "legitimation" - as well as
the more common one of reducing legitimacy to ideological hegemony.
10. Cohen, Hazelrigg, and Pope are perhaps unfair in singling out Talcott Parsons for
blame in this regard, though he is surely one offender. "DeParsonizing Weber: A
Critique of Parsons' Interpretation of Weber's Sociology," ASR 40 (April, 1975),
pp. 229-241; see also, "The Divergence of Weber and Durkheim," ASR 40 (August,
1975), pp. 417-427.
11. For an elaboration of the distinction between making history and making do, see
Richard Flacks, "Making History vs. Making Life," Working Papers for a New
Society II, 2 (Summer, 1974), pp. 56-71.
12. In world historical terms, we may have reached a point beyond which revolution is
impossible in all but the most peripheral zones unless a significant part of the armed
forces joins it from the start. The absence of substantial army participation in the
Chilean revolutionary coalition was clearly fatal; see Jorge Nef, "The Politics of

189.202.196.3 on Mon, 04 Mar 2024 16:13:12 +00:00
162
Repression: The Social Pathology of the Chilean Military," Latin American Perspec-
tives I (Summer, 1974), pp. 58-77. Poulantzas suggests as much in "The State and
the Transition to Socialism," Socialist Review 38 (March-April, 1978), pp. 9-36.
13. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China is an example of political mobi-
lization by some sections of the ruling party apparatus against others, though some
of the initial surge came from below.
14. The price for avoiding or even postponing revolution may well be fascism, as Bar-
rington Moore, Jr. argues (Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship [Boston:
Beacon, 1966]) and recent developments in Brazil, Chile, and Indonesia suggest. See
also Ellen Kay Trimberger, Revolution from Above (New Brunswick: Transaction,
1977).
15. Suggestive here are the treatments of the Netherlands revolt and the English Civil
War in Immanual Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and
the Origins of the Eruopean World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York:
Academic, 1974).
16. Exemplary in this regard is the work of Eugene D. Genovese on slave society in the
Southern United States, most notably Roll, Jordan, Roll (New York: Pantheon,
1974).
17. A widely respected example is Charles C. Cumberland, Mexican Revolution: Genesis
Under Madero (Austin: University of Texas, 1952). More recently, and by a social
scientist, is Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Har-
per and Row, 1970), pp. 3-26.
18. James Davies, "Toward a Theory of Revolution," ASR 27 (Feb., 1962), pp. 5-19.
19. Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University, 1971).
20. Gurr, "Psychological Factors in Civil Violence," World Politics 20 (Jan., 1968),
pp. 245-278.
21. Cf. Theda R. Skocpol, "Explaining Revolutions: In Quest of a Social-Structural
Approach," in L. Coser and O. Larsen (eds.), The Uses of Controversy in Sociology
(New York: Free Press, 1976).
22. Their works are, respectively, Theory of Collective Behavior (New York: Free Press,
1963) and Revolutionary Change (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966).
23. See, respectively, The Natural History ofRevolution (Chicago reissue: University of
Chicago, 1972) andAnatomy of Revolution (New York reissue: Anchor, 1958).
24. Johnson, op. cit., ch. 6.
25. Despite the title "Revolutionary Change," Johnson nowhere describes the changes
revolutionaries intend or revolutions typically bring about.
26. For example, "Revolutions and Collective Violence," in Fred. I. Greenstein and
Nelson Polsby, Handbook of Political Science, Vol. 3 (Reading, Mass.: Addison-
Wesley, 1975), pp. 483-555.
27. Ibid.
28. An exception is the single concrete historical example in Louis Althusser's Fo
(N.Y., 1970) when the conjuncture of contradictions that "made" the Russia
volution is laid out.
29. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Robert
Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972).
30. Respectively, Social Origins, op. cit.; Peasant Wars, op. cit.; and Agrarian Revolution
(New York: Free Press, 1975).
31. In the U.S., see James O'Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Mar-
tin's 1973) and the international journal Kapitalistate. In another vein, but with
similar import is Franz Schurmann,The Logic or World Power (New York: Pantheon,
1974).
32. Here the work of Wallerstein, op. cit., has superseded the "satellitization" model of
Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New
York: Monthly Review, 1967).

189.202.196.3 on Mon, 04 Mar 2024 16:13:12 +00:00
163
33. Friedrich Katz, "Labor Conditions on Haciendas in Porflrian, Mexico: Some Trends
and Tendencies," Hispanic-American Historical Review 54, Feb., 1974), p. 30.
34. Wolf, op. cit., pp. 3-13.
35. Lowell L. Blaisdell, The Desert Revolution, Baja, California, 1911 (Madison: Uni-
versity of Wisconsin, 1962).
36. Katz, op. cit., p. 1.
37. Ibid., p. 42.
38. Ibid., pp. 36-43. Katz also points to the need for further research on the social
composition of the revolutionary armies and bands.
39. Wolf, op. cit., p. 23.
40. Mariano Azuela, The Flies (Berkeley: University of California, 1970).
41. Wolf., op. cit., p. 20.
42. A limited exception might be the sluggish colonial society in those portions of the
seventeenth century when demand was slack and the indigenous population deci-
mated by disease.
43. Frank Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution quoted in Wolf, op. cit., p. 26.
44. M. S. Alperovich et al., La revolucion Mexicana: Cuatro Estudios Sovieticos (Mexi-
co: Los Insurgentes, 1960); R. Millon, Vicente Lombardo Toledano: Mexican Marxist
(Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina, 1966); N. & S. Weyl, The Reconquest of
Mexico (London: Oxford University, 1939).
45. Luis Vitale, "Latin America: Feudal or Capitalist," in James Petras and Maurice
Zeitlin, eds., Latin America: Reform or Revolution (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett,
1968), pp. 32-43; see also the debate on "dependency" theory in Latin American
Perspectives I, 1. See also Andre Gunder Frank recanting the old and heralding the
new in Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution (New York: Monthly Re-
view, 1969), p. xiv.
46. James Cockcroft, Intellectual Precursors of the Mexican Revolution (Austin: Uni-
versity of Texas, 1968).
47. Adolfo Gilly, La Revolucion Interrumpida (Mexico: E1 Cabillito, 1974).
48. Wolf, op. cit. Gilly's subtitle also calls it a peasant war.
49. Robert Millon, Zapata, The Ideology of a Peasant Revolutionary (New York: Inter-
national Publishers, 1969).
50. Irving Louis Horowitz, "The Norm of Illegitimacy: The Political Sociology of
Latin America," in Horowitz et al. (eds.), Latin American Radicalism (New York:
Random House, 1969), pp. 3-28.
51. Much recent research is converging on the importance of seeing the control of the
state by a single dominant class (the "executive committee" formula) as only one
of several possible conditions, particularly in post-colonial or late industrializing
societies. See, e.g., Trimberger, op. cit.
52. The first is drawn from Wallerstein, op. cit., pp. 201-211 and his "The Compara-
tive Study of the Radicalization of Nationalist Movements in Black Africa," Trans-
actions of the Sixth World Congress of Sociology; the other three are adapted from
Skocpol, op. cit., and "France, Russia, China: A Structural Analysis of Social Re-
volutions," Comparative Studies in Society and History 18 (April, 1976), pp. 175-
210.
53. Combinations of two or three of these conditions constitute important phenomena
other than revolution. The first, second, and fourth add up to "revolution from
above," as in Meiji Japan and many national independence attainments. The second,
third, and fourth together produce repressive foreign intervention, as in Cuba at the
turn of the century. The first three without the fourth describe the chaos of newly
independent Haiti.
54. The Modern World-System, p. 210.
55. Stanley and Barbara Stein, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America (London: Ox-
ford University, 1970).

189.202.196.3 on Mon, 04 Mar 2024 16:13:12 +00:00
164
56. The justly infamous Bay of Pigs hlvasion, while sponsored by the U.S., was con-
spicuously not a U.S. invasion.
57. Luis Nicolau d'Olwer, "Las Inversiones Extranjeras," in Daniel Cosio Villegas, ed.,
Historia Moderna de Mexico (Mexico: Hermes, 1965), Vol. VII, Part 2, pp. 1166-
1167.
58. See my "World System, State Structure, and the Onset of the Mexican Revolution,"
Politics and Society V, 4 (1975), pp. 417-439.
59. For the general picture, see Robert Freeman Smith, The United States and Revolu-
tionary Nationalism inMexico, 1916-1932 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1972);
on the oil question, see Lorenzo Meyer Cossio, Mexico y Estados Unodos en el Con-
flicto Petroleo (1917-1942) (Mexico: E1 Colegio de Mexico, 1968).
60. For a classical Marxist interpretation using Gramsci's terms and not incompatible
with this one (but stressing rather more exclusively the splits in the Porfirian bour-
geoisie), see Juan Felipe Leal, "El estado y el oloque en el poder en Mexico, 1867-
1914," Latin American Perspectives II (Summer, 1975), pp. 34-47.
61. On the sources of legitimacy of the "strong man," see Richard M. Morse, "Political
Theory and the Caudillo," in Hugh M. Hamill, Jr., ed., Dictatorship in Spanish
America (New York: Knopf, 1965), pp. 62-63; on the weaknesses of the Porfirian
military, see Edwin Lieuwen, Mexican Militarism, The Political Rise and Fall of the
Revolutionary Army, 1910-1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1968),
chapter 1; on Diaz's political strategies see Andres Molina Enriquez, Los Grandes
Problemas Nacionales (Mexico: Instituto Nacional de la Juventud Mexicana, 1964),
pp. 85-97, 265-347.
62. The basic source on the peasantry as an unwitting agent of "modernizing" transfor-
mations remains Moore, op. cit.
63. Ronald Waterbury points out that in the state of Oaxaca, where there was virtually
no peasant participation in rebel movements, hacendados did in fact continue to
take part in the political direction of the stage government. "Non-revolutionary
Peasants: Oaxaca Compared to Morelos in the Mexican Revolution," Comparative
Studies in Society and History 17 (October, 1975), pp. 410-442.
64. Wolf, op. cit., pp. 292-294.
65. Luis Cossio Silva, "La Agricultura," in Cosio Villegas, op. cit., Part 1, pp. 115-125.
66. Waterbury, op. cit., pp. 438-439.
67. Seminario de Historia Moderna de Mexico, Estadisticas Economicas del Porfiriato.
Fuerza de Trabajo y actividad economica por sectores (Mexico: El Colegio de Mexi-
co, 1964), pp. 61-63.
68. Friedrich Katz, "Labor Conditions on Haciendas in Porfirian Mexico: Some Trends
and Tendencies," Hispanic American Historical Review 54 (February, 1974), p. 28.
69. Wolf, op. cit., pp. 38-39, and the sources cited there. Unlike the movements in
other parts of Mexico, that in Sonora and Sinaloa has much in common with the
"reform commodity movements" described in Jeffery M. Paige, Agrarian Revolu-
tion (New York, 1975), pp. 45-48.
70. On the so-called Sonoran dynasty, see Howard F. Cline, The United States and
Mexico (New York: Atheneum, 1965), pp. 192-203.
71. Francois Chevalier, "Survivances Seigneuriales et Presages de la Revolution Agraire
dans le Nord du Mexique," Revue Historique CCXXII (1959), pp. 1-18.
72. Wolf, op. cit., pp. 33-34. Surely it stretches the terms "peasant" and "middle
peasant," however, to imply that these rural folk fit within either of those cate-
gories.
73. Katz, op. cit., pp. 35-36.

74. The tactics and style of these bands and later armies exemplify the neglected We-
berian category of military charisma. For descriptive materials, see John Reed,
Insurgent Mexico (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1969), or Martin Luis Guzman,
Memorias de Pancho Villa (Mexico: Cia General, 1966).

189.202.196.3 on Mon, 04 Mar 2024 16:13:12 +00:00
165
75. By 1910, "the seventeen owners of the thirty-six major haciendas in the state owned
over 25% of its total surface, most of its cultivable land, and almost all of its good
land." John Womack, Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Knopf,
1969), p. 49.
76. Huerta is conclusively shown to have been less reactionary than his enemies quite
logically painted him in the revisionist work of Michael C. Meyer, Huerta: A Poli-
tical Biography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1972).
77. Robert Darnton, "The High Enlightenment and the Low-life of Literature in Pre-
revolutionary France," Past and Present 51 (May, 1971), pp. 81-115.
78. For the "Plan Liberal," see Jesus Silva Herzog, La Revolucion Mexicana, Vol. I,
Fondo de Cultur Economica. On the "precursor" intellectuals, see James D. Cock-
croft, Intellectual Precursors of the Mexican Revolution (Austin: University of
Texas, 1968); in the agrarian sphere, see John M. Hart, "Agrarian Precursors of the
Mexican Revolution: The Development of an Ideology," TheAmericas XXIX (Oc-
tober, 1972), pp. 131-150.
79. For example, Wolf, op. cit., p. 25. Wolf makes no mention whatever of the Madero
regime, implying utter continuity between the events of 1910-1911 and those
after 1913.
80. On liberal and radical factions within the Constitutionalist movement, see Robert
Quirk, The Mexican Revolution 1914-1915: The Convention of Aguascalientes
(Bloomington: Indiana University, 1960) and E. V. Niemeyer, Jr., Revolution at
Queretaro (Austin: University of Texas, 1974).
81. Cordova, op. cit.; Malori J. Pompermayer and William C. Smith, Jr., "The State in
Dependent Societies: Preliminary Notes," in Frank Bonilla and Robert Girling,
eds.,Structures of Dependency (Stanford, 1973), pp. 102-128.
Acknowledgement
Conversations with Theda R. Skocpol and John Womack, Jr. helped to clarify
the issues discussed in this paper.
Theory and Society 7 (1979) 135-165

? Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in the Netherlands

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Theories of Revolution and Revolution without Theory: The Case of Mexico

Author(s): Walter L. Goldfrank

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/657001

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THEORIES OF REVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION WITHOUT

The Case of Mexico

University of California, Santa Cruz.

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Metatheory and the History of Revolution

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Revolution is a rare phenomenon, a compound of several more frequent ones:

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strengthening of the central state apparatus that revolutionaries typically

What do existing theories tell us to look for in explaining revolution? We shall

The popular notions of ordinary laypersons and untheoretical historians can

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Aggregate social psychologies focus on member discontent as the prime ex-

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Social systems theorists - most prominently Neil Smelser and Chalmers

Among the most trenchant critics of both social-psychological and natural

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Theory and Data in Mexico

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Further, there was among pre-revolutionary Mexican intellectuals no ideol-

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Within several months, sovereignty so multiplied that Huerta's government

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and the national bourgeoisie no longer exists as a progressive force (or as

To summarize briefly, the popular conceptions rehearse justifications or

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Toward a Structural Explanation of the Mexican Revolution

Four conditions appear to be necessary and sufficient, although as these con-

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In general terms it is difficult to reduce the variety of favorable world con-

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principal consequences: it meant that diplomatic pressure from the U.S.

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A second necessary condition of revolution is the breakdown of the admini-

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Mexico in this period experienced rapid growth, in mining, commercial agri-

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important points in his program. In addition to concentrating power in his

Widespread rural rebellion

However, a political-administrative crisis and a favorable work context are

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Rural labor force:

New capitalist + Chihuahua

Oaxaca Central plateau

Table 1 presents both the array of centers of rural revolt and

In the thirty years before the revolution, capitalism spread o

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The third non-revolutionary combination of variables includes neither signi-

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In other parts of the Mexican North, particularly Chihuahua, capitalist agri-

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opment of fierce independence and equestrian skill, was also a limitation:

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Dissident Political Movements

The fourth necessary condition for revolution is the existence of dissident

In the Mexican case, three movements can be identified. Several "precur