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Revolution in the Counter-Revolution: A Paradigm Zapata and the Mexican Revolution by John Womack, Review by: Mark Mancall The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Winter, 1971), pp. 339-348 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/202648 . Accessed: 24/04/2012 16:50
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MIark Mancall

Revolution in the Counter-Revolution: A Paradigm and Revolution. JohnWomack, (New York, Jr. Zapata the lvlexican By
Alfred A. Knopf, 1969) 435 pp. $Io.oo

In the judgment of history, Zapataand his followers must be failures.

Years of struggle and many lives were spent in defense of the lands of

the Morelos pueblos and their people's ancient rights. They were humble people, and, we are told, all they desiredwas to be left alone. But in the end, aftertheirrevolution, outlanders settledin theircountry and took their land. Earnestyoung men from the university came to modernize them. A new political ritual ruled in the offices of their
government. Anenecuilco, Zapata's home, languished, and its people

fell furtherand furtherinto debt. Those who felt uncomfortablein the new dispensation, like FranciscoFrancoand Ruben Jaramillo,the one to safe-guardthe past, the other presumingto protestthe future, daring were assassinated, the new rulers of the land did little more than and frown on this reminderof theirpre-bourgeois,uncouthpast. This is the story that Womack tells magnificentlyand rigorously. But by that alchemy which Clio and Calliope have practicedtogether so often in the past and, undoubtedly,will continue to practice, steedbecamea star-whitehorse galloping riderless through the hills. He
Zapata and Zapatistas have been transformed into epic heros. Zapata's himself was glimpsed in the mountains, awaiting, perhaps, another call

from his people. In the darkdays of McCarthyism,MarlonBrandoand all Hollywood renderedhim homage by way of reminding the masses in the movie housesthat the struggleagainstoppressionhas its nobility. At Delano in CaliforniaZapatahasbecome the symbol of resistance for La Huelga, his picture appearing, so fittingly, on the cover of El Malcriado. Zapata,along with Che Guevaraand Camilo Torres,has become an avatarof the archtypicalrevolutionaryhero. Failureso tragic, so complete, is, it seems, its own greatestsuccess.Perhapsthe revolutionary hero is of necessitytragic, both in the personaland in the historical dimensions.Zapata, Che, Camilo, all died violently, the only
Mark Mancallis AssociateProfessorof History at StanfordUniversity. His articles have appeared numerousjournalsrelatingto Russianand Chinesestudies;he edited in to Formosa EarlyRelations 1728 (New York, I964), andhis RussiaandChina: Their Today (Cambridge,Mass.)will appearsoon.
5*

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MARK MANCALL

grace grantedthem that they did not live to witnessthe historicaldeath of their revolutions. "... [T]he truth of the revolution in Morelos is in the feeling of it" (x), writes Womack, and one cannot readand study this book without perceivingthe great symbolic power that Zapatawields in history, a power that even the Mexican ruling circles could handle only by studiouslytrying to ignore it for yearson end. And becauseof the conviction that the truth of the revolution is immanentin the story of the revolution itself, the authorhas consciouslyeschewed analysisand definition. Where analysiswas possible or relevant, he wove it directly into the narrative.Thankfully,he has not tamperedwith the vigor of the narrativenor the beauty of his language by intruding the often of deadeningapparatus contemporarysocial science. Nevertheless,it is precisely at this point that one must begin to doubt, though not necessarilyto quarrel.Several questionshaunt the reader throughout this book, the answers to which seem somehow elusive, perhapsbecause the intellectualassumptionsupon which this work is basedwere left implicit in the narrativeitself. To begin with what may be the most important, and the most difficultquestion:What is this truthof the revolutionin Morelos thatis to be found "in the feeling of it?" One suspectsthat it can be expressed only in what we loosely call existentialterms, that this revolution, and that perhapsall greatrevolutions,was a protestagainstthe strangulation is often the human condition. And again, that this revolution, perhaps like all revolutions,was doomed to failure,for, though one may protest the human condition, can one overcome it? This solution contains a kind of noble banality, but it is belied by the author's observations about Anenecuilcans,who, he believes, have the strength to stand the strainof the New Dark Ages. Such a conclusion,however, is not supported by the story itself. This must lead one to ask anotherquestion:Is it indeed so that the truth of this revolution is in the feeling of it, that is to say, within the revolution itself? The assumptionis that meaning is immanent in hisone tory, and that through some form of Verstehen will come to grasp It is this assumptionthat leadsto the historian'sdilemma, that meaning. one horn of which is the uniquenessof the historicalevent, the other being the need for generaldescription.Would it not be more accurate to suggest that the truth of the revolution is in the tellingof it? Even in thisbook the feeling of the revolutionmust be conveyed in language, and it is through language that Man constituteshistory's meaning,

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or even history itself. How differentthis work would have been had Womack selected a straightforward, flat, narrativestyle as his instrument of expression.Instead,the epic quality of the Zapatistarevolution is not conveyed but rather is constituted by the author'slanguage, in which a peculiarform of sentenceinversioncreatesthe feeling of an epic in prose. It is this style that carriesthe readeralong on the high tide of revolutionto the extent thatit is possibleto misread,if not actuallyto miss, those final pages of the book which record the failure of the It protagonists. may be, as one reviewerhas suggested,that the historian himself does not appearin the pages of the work (at least not until the whose very end), that he has respectedthe autonomy of his characters, Womack himselfinsistson story he haslet them tell themselves.Indeed, lest this point by refusing to use the word "peasants" he raiseabstract questionsof theory. Similaris his insistencethat he has told a story, not made an analysis.No model, no paradigm,we are led to conclude, is It presenthere. But languageitselfis paradigmatic. definesthe factorsin anotherin a very analyticalfashion, the story and relatesthem to one both grammaticallyand through the choice of termsthat divide reality into categorieswhich, within the context of the historian'snarrative, exist both in and for themselves. The chief protagonistof thisbook is not Zapata,who, as the author tells us, "is most prominentin thesepagesnot becausehe himselfbegged attention but becausethe villagers of Morelos put him in charge and persistentlylooked to him for guidance, and because other villagers around the Republic took him for their champion" (x). Rather, the chief protagonist, the real hero, is "the people," "the villagers," "countrypeople," a point made all the strongerby the fact that the prologue is entitled "A People Chooses a Leader"and the epilogue, "A People Keeps Faith." The choice of this term, and the very consciousrefusalto use the becauseto useit would be "to verge on raisingabstract word "peasants" questions of class" (x). immediately places Womack outside of the Marxist school of history, for instance, with its own highly selfconsciousmodels and paradigms.It does place him, however, directly within what we might call a "populist"school of history, with a particular dependence on Robert Redfield's concept of the little community and, perhaps,on Rousseau's"generalwill." The evidence for this is apparentthroughoutthe book. For instance, Morelosemerged:in of In suchclearreliefthe character revolutionary the very cropspeopleliked to grow, they revealedthe kind of com-

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munity they liked to dwell in. They had no taste for the style of individualson the make, the life of perpetualachievementand acquisition, of chance and change and moving on. Rather, they wanted a life they could control, a modest, familial prosperity in the company of other modestly prosperous families whom they knew, and all in one
place....
[24I]

This is more than simply the ascription of personality to a group; it is the assumption of the existence of a "general will" that is particularized in individuals, as is strikingly obvious in Womack's description of Zapata's selection as leader in Anenecuilco. Zapata is presented as the embodiment of the general will, who, moreover, felt "uneasy and depressed" away from Anenecuilco. The people's general cohesiveness in its home and its rejection of urban environments (where, after all, "the people" is atomized) finds its particularistic expression in Zapata's rejection of personal opportunity in Mexico City and, on occasion during the revolution, his own discomfort in the city and his distrust of its politics and politicians. This image of Zapata as the incarnation of the general will is emphasized by Womack: Anenecuilcansnever referred to hill as Don Emiliano, which would have removed him from the guts and flies and manureand mud of local life, sterilizingthe real respectthey felt for him into a squire'svague respectability.He was one of their own, they felt in Anenecuilco, and it never made them uncomfortableto treat him so. [7] Zapata was not just a leader of the people; he was the people, the individuation of general will, and Womack must agree with Rousseau that I hold then that Sovereignty, being nothing less than the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated,and that the Sovereign, who is no less than a collective being, cannot be representedexcept by himself: the power indeed may be transmitted,but not the will.I A Marxist historian writing the history of the Morelos revolution, in which a peasant class was the main protagonist, would inevitably be led to define the existence and emergence of that class's consciousness in terms of its socio-economic conditions. But the consciousness of "the people" cannot be so defined, because the socio-economic conditions are not the same for all the members of "the people." That consciousness does have content, however, which, for want of any other point of
I JeanJacques Rousseau (trans. G. D. H. Cole), The Social Contractand Discourses(New York, 1959), 23.

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reference, is defined in terms of a vague and generally shared historical experience. Womack writes: What they [the people] conquered, cleared,leveled, and settled was not a territory, which they only recovered, but a society, which they thus recreated. And the people had a dream, which was very old: In central and southern Mexico the utopia of a free associationof rural clans was very ancient. In various forms it had moved the villagerslong before the Spaniards came. The Morelos revolution was one of the incarnations of this dream: Its latest vehicle was the Zapatistaarmy: ironically, Morelos's country families had clarified their civilian notions in military service. The LiberatingArmy of the Center and South was a "people's army." And to the men who fought in its ranks,and to the women who accompanied them as private quartermistresses, being "people" counted more than an "army." being This consciousness was refracted variously in different registers: Far from an autonomous military corporation, like Villa's or Orozco's drifters,the revolutionary army that took shape in Morelos in I913-I4 was simply an armed league of the state's municipalities. And when peace returnedin the late summer of 1914, the villagers refounded local
society in civil terms. [224-225]

We have, therefore, the beginnings of the description of the abstract theory that informs this study of Zapata's revolution. In a certain sense, this study is an exercise in the exploration of Wallace's theory of revitalization movements,2 and Womack sees the revolution as the instrument of the revitalization of the people and an expression of the general will. The revolution was a transcendental experience for the people: As she [Mrs. King] recovered, so did the local revolutionaries.The impassionedexperience of the last five years, culminating in an eighteenmonth effort to establishlocal, popularwelfare, had createda consuming sense of union among Morelos's rural families. Together they had enjoyed the high hopes of their own reform, and together again they had sufferedthe awful disasterof Gonzalez'sinvasion. "It seemed," recalled
2 Anthony F. C. Wallace, "Revitalization Movements: Some Theoretical Considerations for their Comparative Study," AmericanAnthropologist,LVIII (I956), 264-281.

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the observerof the refugee crowd at Tehuiztla, "... that a single family had reunited there. Everybody talked to everybody else with complete confidence. People lent each other help, and men and women who had never seen each other talked as intimately as old friends."[258] The objective of the revolution was Utopia, which was nothing more and nothing less than the sovereignty of the general will in history: In rich, wet, warm country like Morelos, where the only pausebetween harvestswas for the crop to ripen, the emerging patternof tenurewas the outline of the old populist utopia. A kindly but shrewd American anthropologist [Redfield] researchingin Tepoztlan saw rustic harmony, easiness,and contentment as the essence of life there. The same vision transfixed a usually acerbic American reporter [Carleton Beals]. "Tepoztlan! Will you be as self-sufficient,as heroically beautiful a hundred years from now?" he cried. "IfI read the god-like palm of your destiny aright, you will forever cherishyour traditions... ." [374-375] The people is revitalized; it has achieved the new steady state that is the end product of Wallace's revitalization cycle. History has an objective, an end, which, though the author nowhere states it explicitly, must be utopia. We are, therefore, in the presence of a model of society and even a theory of history. The protagonists in the historical drama are the people and the enemies of the people, that is, those who are not the people, not the dclasses but, as it were, the depeuplIs. History is the record of the struggle of the people against its enemies, a struggle for the maintenance of community, the expression in the socio-political realm of the general will in institutions that have their roots deep in the people's consciousness. Exploitation and repression are the assertion of the power of the enemies of the people over the people and, thus, the deformation and inhibition of the expression of the general will. Let me emphasize that nowhere is this made explicit in Womack's work, though it pervades almost every page. One of the most interesting questions centers on the problem of legitimacy. Mexico from I9IO to I920, like China from I9I2 to at least the late I920s, presents a curious scene in which warlords march and counter-march against each other across the land in search of the power that final victory grants. In both countries a spurious kind of international legitimacy is maintained through the structure of inter-state relations-spurious because in neither case does the so-called "national government" refer itself to any even reasonably well-defined source of

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legitimacy within the society. In China, with the final victory of the Communistrevolutionin I949, the problem of legitimacyis resolvedin two ways. First, the new regime is the next link in an inevitable historical (and universal) chain that leads from primitive communism of through the various transformations class society to Communism. Second, the regime finds its legitimacy in reference to China's own revolutionarytradition,for revolution with a new dynasticsuccession was the sanctifiedresponseto corruptionand evil in the highest places.
In Mexico between I9Io and I920, however, legitimacy was a scarce

commodity on both the national and local levels. At the beginning, in I9IO, the Porfiriatofound its legitimacy in ideological terms, however but the rapidity with which national inweak, as did the Maderistas, the stitutionscollapseddemonstrated shallownessof both parties'claim the to that legitimacy. Furthermore, revolutionarytraditionin Mexico itself, though present, was obviously concerned primarily with the problem of revolt againstforeign invadersor oppressors:the Spaniards of I8IO,and the Frenchin the middle of the nineteenthcentury. As the revolution progressed,it developed its own sense of legitimacy, which has served succeedingregimes well. For Zapata, though, it is obvious that legitimacy did not have its sources in ideology nor in a revoluof tionary tradition.It lay in the consciousness the people, in a sense of how things ought to have been. In the structureof the people's consciousness there was a set that was missing in their reality, and, once the

political-policepower of the Porfiristaregime began to crumble, the insisted people attemptedto constitutethe reality that its consciousness had to exist. The ancient land tenure documents of Anenecuilco had been shown time and againto have little value within the context of the politico-legal structureof the Porfiriato, but for the Anenecuilcans, particularlyfor Zapata,they assumedsuch overwhelming importance that Zapata paid extraordinaryattention to their preservation,eventually entrusting them to Francisco Franco and instructing him to remain outside the war zone. As Womack points out, in 1914, for instance, Zapatashowed the documentsto some visitors and said, "This
... I am fighting for," to which Womack adds the gloss, "not these

titles, but this record of constancyand uprightness"(372). The Anenecuilco documentswere the symbol of a life under attackfrom a future alreadyimmanentin the present,but the symbol'spoint of referencein reality was missing, and the revolution took place in the intersticebetween the presentsymbol and its absentpoint of reference.The past, too, was immanent in the present; the people's salvation, as Sotelo

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Inclan understood,lay in the past. Womack notes, "To Franco and other Anenecuilcans,their heritagewas the only conceivablesource of their salvation."And Sotelo Inclanhimself wrote, "In seeing them [the suffer,it seems to me I am presentat the anguishof all Anenecuilcans] The pastand the futureareboth immanentin the present,andboth collapsedinto the present.Utopia, in this perspective,is neither a prehistorical Golden Age nor a dream of pie-in-the-sky in some posthistorical future. It is immanent by virtue of its presence in the consciousnessof the people, but only immanent; the revolution is the struggle to diminishthe dissonancebetween a presentin which utopia is immanent and a present in which it is absent. The revolution is a denial of the irrevocabilityand irreversibilityof history. "The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode," wrote Walter Benjamin,"is characteristic the revolutionaryclassesat of the moment of theiraction."3It needs no legitimacy outside of itself; it is its own legitimation. The murderof FranciscoFrancoat Christmasof tide I947 and the evidently mysterious disappearance the Anenecuilcan documents is particularly poignant. They had continued to represent an alternative present to the one embodied in the government, the past generations" (381).

an alternativesourceof legitimacy whose very existencechallengedthe officialinstitution.They had to disappear. Anotherquestionthatmust be askedis: Who is making the revolution againstwhom? In the Mexican case, of course,this is a particularly
important question, for, if revolution must be against, what was it to thinking of revolution as opposition to someone who is oppressive,

of againstafterthe disappearance the Porfiriato?We are so accustomed

and counter-revolutionas the effort to reimpose oppression,that one cannot read Womack's book without being disturbedby the fact that there does not seem to be any specific institution or leader or party against which the Zapatistaswere in revolt. The holders of power and changedrapidlyin Mexico City, and the hacendados new industrial seem almost too diffuseto serve as an enemy over a full agriculturalists decade. The revolutionariesare easily identifiable;their enemy is not. There may be severalways out of the dilemma. First,perhapsafterthe overthrow of the Porfiriatowhat happenedin Mexico was a civil war ratherthan a revolution. The protagonistsmay use the word "revoluas tion" for purposesofjustification,legitimation,andpropaganda, may their descendants,but as analystswe must question that. In fact, of
3 Walter Benjamin, Illuninations (New York, I969), 261.

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course, the Zapatistaswere not interested in seizure of power on a national scale; they wanted to be left alone. Zapata rarely went to Mexico City and almost as rarelyacceptedresponsibility history on for ratherthan revolutionary.What I mean is this: counter-revolutionary, If we returnto the problem of legitimacyand make the assumptionthat of legitimacy lay in the people'sconsciousness its own integrity, of past as present, then those who sought change, who tried to force upon it such social rearrangementsas the people did not want, were the and and revolutionaries, the Zapatistas the people of Morelos, in rejectThis is not ing that revolution, were, in fact, counter-revolutionaries. a word game. Third, perhapswe assumetoo easily that revolution just seeks change, seeks to createsomething new at the expense of the old. were strugglingto createthe old at the expenseof the But the Zapatistas In any event, we may do well to remember that the word "to new. revolt" is an intransitiveverb. It has an objective but no necessary object. The recognition of this simple fact might lead the student of revolution to what we need, a phenomenology of revolution. is One last point: Zapataandthe MexicanRevolution magnificent One has the impressionthat it may also be and rigorous scholarship. But radicalscholarship. why does it give that impression? Womack is a committed scholar,and his sympathieslie very obviously with the villagersof Morelos, with Zapata,and not with most of the other characters in his story. As Fuentesand others have observed, Womack feels this revolution not just becausehe is a studentof it but becausehe is in sympathy with it.4 It is his sympathy and his successin capturingthe epic qualitiesof the event that lead to the impressionthat it is a work of must be Yet, in the final analysis,radicalscholarship radicalscholarship. based on something besides feeling and sympathy. If there is to be a it radicalscholarship, will be distinguished the questionsit asksand by the intellectualfoundationsfrom which those questions arise. I have triedto suggestthat the ideationalfoundationsof Womack's work lie in a populist tradition. If one surveys radicalthought in America today one and readshistorians' essaysinto radicalscholarship, cannothelp but be struckby the impressionthat populism is what is radicaltoday. But thereis a dangerinherentin populism that radicalhistoriansmust face: It is, afterall, a posture,an attitude,a cognitive style. It is not, or at least it is not yet, a coherentview of the world. It is not a rigorousintellectual
4 See, for example, Carlos Fuentes, "Viva Zapata," New York Review of Books, XII
(13 March 1969).

the national level. Second, perhaps the Zapatista movement

was

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it and, position.On the contrary, tendsto theromantic whilerigorous cannot with romanticism, romanticism give scholarship be infused may riseto rigorous As has scholarship. EugeneGenovese shownworking fromMarxism, Womackfrompopulism, can and radical scholarship be if non-Marxist is to develop,it radical However, rigorous. scholarship mustbeginto developa rigorous of methodology its own, to dealwith and Womack's book is a superb paradigms models,to analyze. beginbecause asks: it Wheredo we ning.It is in theway of beinga challenge, go fromhere?