THE PHILANTHROPIC OGRE
Paz, Octavio
In this essay the distinguished Mexican writer Octavio Paz reflects on some of the problems of his country—problems that to one or another extent seem characteristic of those countries that cannot...
...45 In Mexico, the state belongs to the double bureaucracy: the administrative technocracy and the political caste...
...The PAN has been the eternal loser of elections, though not always legitimately...
...Another characteristic of the Mexican situation is the total lack of influence of leftwing intellectuals on the evolution of the Mexican Communist party...
...Despite the all-pervading presence and omnipotence of the 20th-century state—and despite the example of the anarchist tradition, so rich in divinations and prophetic descriptions— criticism of power and of the state was reborn only a short while ago...
...Some countries indirectly influence public opinion by means of different groups—especially students, journalists, and other professional sectors...
...But this superiority in the professional and moral spheres becomes inferiority when we turn from administration to politics...
...Though it is trying to forget its authoritarian and "Maurrasian" leanings, it has not succeeded in becoming a Christian Democratic party...
...This did not happen, and with Diaz the state began to turn into the agent of modernization...
...Why was the Mexican state weak...
...Yet, there are two basic differences...
...I believe that Mexico, like the other Latin-American countries, must find her own modernity...
...First, the brief but ineradicable democratic period of the Restored Republic (1867-76), which interposed itself between the state of New Spain and the modern state...
...on the other, it is the lever to get modernization underway...
...In England as in France, the modern regimes struggled from the start to endow the new bourgeois state with an ad hoc bureaucracy, radically different from that of the 17th- and 18th-century monarchies...
...Except during the interregnums of anarchy and civil war, we Mexicans have lived in the shadow of governments that have been despotic or paternalistic in turn, but have always been strong: the Aztec priest-king, the viceroy, the dictator, Mr...
...Beside the weakness of the bourgeoisie, another often neglected factor must be mentioned: the Czarist state could not be an efficient agent of modernization because, in its structure, its leaders, and its animating spirit, it was still to a large extent a "patrimonialist" state, to use the term coined by Max Weber...
...If everyone is the king of his house, the kingdom is like a 51 house and the nation is like a family...
...WHAT ABOUT the other parties...
...Marxists more optimistically thought the century that saw the rise of socialism would also see the withering-away of the state...
...The contradiction between the courtly society and the technocratic bureaucracy does not immobilize the state, but it does make its progress difficult and tortuous...
...Far from, being the mere political superstructure of the capitalist system in the West, it is the model for economic organizations...
...it has two ways of understanding politics, two kinds of sensibility and morals...
...2. The heterogeneous conglomeration of friends, favorites, intimates, minions and proteges, the legacy of the courtly society of the 17th and 18th centuries...
...The conservative historian Carlos Pereyra points out that the political convulsions and the chaotic state of the country right up to Diaz's dictatorship essentially resulted from the weakness of governments from Independence, in 1821, onward...
...The modernization of Mexico, begun at the close of the 18th century by the viceroys of Charles III, continues to be a half-completed task that affects our consciousness only superficially...
...Its influence is especially profound, and frequently ominous, in the economic sphere...
...It is a task that demands not only favorable historic and social circumstances, but an extraordinary realism and a no less extraordinary imagination...
...It is easier to understand this phenomenon if one looks at it from the perspective of persistent patrimonialism...
...I need hardly warn readers that my opinions are a series of reflections, not a consistent theory...
...We must not forget that the PRI is not a party that has won power: it is the political arm of power...
...Masks of Robespierre and Bonaparte, Jefferson and Lincoln, Comte and Marx, Lenin and Mao: if history is theater, our country's history has been a masquerade interrupted time and again by the explosions of riots and revolts...
...The latter is the more lamentable, and casts a harsh light on one of the most serious failings of Mexico and all Latin America: the absence of a democratic socialist tradition...
...In Spain, significantly enough, the prime minister was called `Privado' (Favorite...
...Civil society" has almost completely disappeared: nothing 43 and no one exists outside the state...
...The bureaucracy of the PRI is halfway between the traditional political party and the bureaucracies that operate in the name of an orthodoxy and as militias of God or History...
...Were this to happen the erosion of the PRI would get worse and, in order not to evaporate, the state would have to rely on other social forces: not on a political bureaucracy like the PRI but on a military bureaucracy...
...The question that history has posed in Mexico since 1968 not only consists in whether the state will be able to rule without the PRI but also in whether we Mexicans will let ourselves be ruled without a PRI...
...The first is made up of administrators and technocrats...
...EDS...
...I must clarify: it was not the country but the body politic that was poor...
...Moreover, what decided the issue was not economic policy but the goal to strengthen the state...
...The situation of the political parties is one of the signs of the ambiguous modernity of Mexico...
...Therefore, although all courtiers are cut from the same cloth, patrimonialist regimes do not rigidify into orthodoxies nor turn into bureaucracies...
...They are the opposite of a church, and for this reason the bonds between courtiers are not ideological but personal, quite unlike the bonds formed in such bodies as the Catholic church and the Communist party...
...The same mixture of treacherous and short-term realism informs their attitude to the satraps and tyrants of the New and Old Worlds...
...It was weak, says Pereyra, because it was poor...
...Luckily, Mexico is an increasingly diverse society, and the practice of criticism—the only antidote for ideological orthodoxies—is growing in proportion to the diversification of the country...
...All the polemics between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks stem from the different positions that these groups adopted to deal with this situation...
...Narrow though this margin may seem to us, it is at any rate considerably wider than that which separates Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, or Cuba from the Soviet Union...
...An impossible requirement: the state is not an enterprise...
...The second is composed of political professionals who run the various levels and divisions of the PRI...
...And so, although Mexico is not really a democracy, it is not a totalitarian ideocracy either...
...Or, rather, as Norbert Elias has admirably demonstrated, the 19th- and 20th-century bureaucracies in the West were formed within the Third Estate, in permanent conflict with the courtly society of the absolutist regimes...
...A strange brew: religious brotherhood, fascism and revolutionary Jacquerie...
...The conjunction of political power and economic power—both of them absolute—produced neither the bourgeois democratic revolution nor socialism, but the implantation of a totalitarian ideocracy...
...in Mexico—with such rare exceptions as Jose Revueltas, Eduardo Lizalde, and a few others—Marxist intellectuals have been faithful though unimaginative apologists of "historic socialism" through all its contradictory metamorphoses from Stalin to Brezhnev...
...By its origin, work patterns, hierarchies, and morals the new bureaucracy was the negation of patrimonialism...
...Why not...
...This failing ultimately prevented it from completing the task that, according to the Marxists, was its historic mission: the modernization of Russia...
...Those claws were (and still are) called bureaucracy and army...
...The Mexican Communist party is a university party, and this paradox (which would have scandalized Marx) indicates an appreciable strategic conquest: the universities are one of the country's sensitive spots...
...But she must start with the ways of living and dying, acquiring and spending, working and playing that our people has created...
...They are no longer exceptional beings, only mirrors of normalcy...
...Therefore it wants to be reformed...
...but the results were as contrary to the forecasts of the Mensheviks as to those of the Bolsheviks...
...These groups lived and still live in its shadow, since they form part of the PRI.* Yet, it would be wrong and simplistic to reduce our image of their relationship with public power to that of subject and ruler...
...Side by side with it, sometimes as its rival and sometimes as its associate, stands a mass of friends, relations, and proteges united by bonds of a personal nature...
...I have used the example of Russia, although it seems far-fetched, because this sheds light, indirectly, on the peculiarities of the Mexican situation...
...On the contrary, today the PAN is weaker than it was 15 years ago...
...Most likely, far from alleviating the situation, this poor imitation of pluralism will aggravate the regime's identity crisis...
...In a certain sense she must invent it...
...they are a remnant of patrimonialism...
...And this is one step toward democracy...
...But they have not yet exorcised the ghosts of Maurras, Mussolini, and Stalin .. • One political organization that carries no terrible past with it and arose out of a genuine desire for social and democratic change is the Mexican Workers' party (Partido Mexicano de Trabajadores...
...I do not preach return to a past, imaginary as are all pasts, nor do I advocate that we go back into the clutches of a tradition that was strangling us...
...It is true that his regime based its economic policies on private enterprise and foreign capital...
...Today the regime is looking for a new legality in pluralism, and herein lies the novelty of the situation...
...In political and ecclesiastic bureaucracies, the hierarchy is sacred and governed by such objective rules and immutable principles as initiation, novitiate or apprenticeship, length of service, competence, diligence, and obedience ' to superiors...
...Most of our profound attitudes to love, death, friendship, food, festivals are not modern...
...it wants to save itself...
...Its nature is ambiguous, contradictory, and in a certain way fascinating...
...I believe that this duty has fallen to our generation and the next...
...Between the idea/And the reality/ Between the motion/ And the Act/Falls the Shadow...
...Partido Revolucionario Institutional (Institutional Revolutionary party), which has been in power under different names, since 1929...
...Translated by RACHEL PHILLIPS q...
...The function of the friars and clerics of New Spain now is fulfilled by university communities and writers...
...Except that, as evil grows larger, evil-doers grow proportionally smaller...
...When it collapsed, it left behind a rich class that was extremely powerful and divided into irreconcilable factions...
...perhaps the way out is to return to our origins...
...On the one hand, it is heir to the patrimonial regime of Spain...
...The corruption of the Mexican public administration, a scandal at home and abroad, is basically only another manifestation of the persistence of the ways of thinking and feeling exemplified by the dictate of the Spanish theologians...
...The PAN is a nationalist, Catholic, conservative party, which, as its name indicates (Partido Accion National, National Action Party), grew out of tendencies more or less influenced by the political thinking of Maurras and his Action Francaise (monarchism and anti-Semitism aside...
...The 20th-century state has proved itself a force more powerful than the ancient empires and a master more terrible than the old tyrants and despots: a faceless, inhuman master who functions not like a demon but like a machine...
...Moreover, the Mexican CP has been too timid, and its record is riddled with silences and concealment...
...At the same time, the state stimulated and favored industrial and rural workers' organizations...
...Strictly speaking, evil did not exist, only evil men, exceptions, special cases...
...The fault is congenital, and I have indicated the reason above: the state is neither a factory nor a business...
...Unfortunately, such criticism has not been explicit...
...The liberals thought that modernization would be carried out by the bourgeoisie and the middle class, as it had been in other parts of the world—in England, France, the United States...
...In many aspects, especially in its dealings with the public and its manner of conductigg business, it continues to be patrimonialist...
...The gains and losses of a nation are calculated differently from what the rules of accounting teach us...
...Second, while the totalitarian state wiped out the Russian bourgeoisie, subdued the peasants and the workers, exterminated its political rivals, murdered its critics, and created a new ruling class, the Mexican state has shared its power not only with the nation's bourgeoisie but also with the cadres who control the great unions...
...The presence of the United States in Mexican life is a historical fact that needs no demonstration...
...The PRI was born of necessity: it had to assure the continuity of the postrevolutionary regime, threatened by quarrels among the military chiefs who had outlived the wars and upsets after the overthrow of Porfirio Diaz...
...The absence of a central moderating power, combined with the nonexistence of democratic traditions, explains why opposing factions quickly took to arms in order to settle their differences...
...I mean, it is a relationship of domination that cannot be reduced purely and simply to the concept of dependence...
...later, sometimes calculatingly and sometimes through cowardice, they became the dictator's accomplices...
...Opportunism does not entirely explain these failings and incoherencies...
...This indifference explains why neither the PAN nor any of the other opposition groups 49 on the right or left has been able to organize a national resistance movement...
...Among the Sinarchists the tradition of the agrarian uprisings was still alive, as it had been in Mexican history from the 17th century on...
...A Hitler or a Stalin, a Himmler or a Yezhov astonish us by their mediocrity as well as by their crimes...
...Here our scholars are still obsessed by the themes of dependence and underdevelopment...
...But in our mythology this prickly pear is not the plant of the kingdom of the dead...
...But before undertaking the criticism of our societies, their history and their actuality, we Hispanoamerican writers must begin by criticizing ourselves...
...I am thinking especially of France, Germany, and the United States...
...What counts ultimately in a patrimonial regime is the will of the prince and his relatives...
...3. The political bureaucracy of the PRI, made up of political professionals, less an ideological association than one of factional and individual interests, a broad channel for social mobility and a great fraternity open to ambitious young men, usually without means and recently graduated from the colleges and universities...
...First and foremost, the state created by the Mexican revolution is stronger than the 19thcentury state...
...As in the case of Cuba, this influence sometimes has little relation to the country's actual power and progress on the economic, social, or cultural fronts...
...The rebirth of imagination, in the realm of art as in that of politics, has always been prepared for and preceded by analysis and criticism...
...they are divided by conflicts of interests, ideas, and personalities...
...it is a relationship that allows a certain freedom of negotiation and movement...
...In the last 50 years we have witnessed not the expected socialization of capitalism but its gradual, irresistible bureaucratization...
...The following pages, dealing with the case best known to meMexico—are the result of such fascination...
...These two bureaucracies live in a continuous osmosis, everlastingly moving from the party to the government and vice versa...
...This relationship is considerably more complex: for one thing, in a one-party regime like Mexico's, the popular organizations are the almost exclusive source of legitimization of the state's power...
...It is not a wall of stone or ideas or interests, it is a wall of emptiness...
...There the process has been more rapid and more ruthless...
...But the crisis of the Mexican political system has not favored the PAN, which has not been able to capitalize on the discontent directed at the official party...
...Nor are our public morality, our family life, the cult of the Virgin, our image of the president...
...On the other hand, it was constitutional, since it was the result of formal and legal elections...
...The essay is reprinted, with permission, from the Mexican journal Vuelta...
...Their intellectual insignificance confirms Hannah Arendt's verdict on "the banality of evil...
...I could mention other independent parties, but they are minuscule in size and have no appreciable strength...
...Furthermore, these latter are not homogeneous either...
...cactus land," like the land in Eliot's poem, littered with broken idols and moth-eaten images of saints...
...Like Japan during the Meiji period, it made use of appropriate legislation and a policy of privileges, stimuli, and credits to further and protect the development of the capitalist class...
...The PRI uses no terrorist tactics...
...People irreproachable in their private behavior, shining lights of morality on their home ground, have no scruples about disposing of public goods as if they were their own property...
...However, thanks to its control of some student groups, and especially of various unions of employees and professors, it has gained strength in the universities...
...Of course, in moments of political crisis the influence of the American ambassador to Mexico can be—and indeed has been—as important and decisive as that of the satrap of the Great King during the Peloponnesian war...
...In this essay the distinguished Mexican writer Octavio Paz reflects on some of the problems of his country—problems that to one or another extent seem characteristic of those countries that cannot quite be called either "underdeveloped" or "advanced...
...Since 1968, and not without contradictions, Mexican governments have been looking for a new legitimacy...
...One is the lack of a conservative party like the Republican party in the United States or the conservative parties of Great Britain, France, Germany, and Spain...
...The ministers are the intimates and servants of the king...
...It is true that our situation is different...
...Despite having been the prime agent of modernization, it has not succeeded in becoming entirely modernized itself...
...The colonial state of New Spain had been a construction of extraordinary solidity, capable of withstan44 ding both rebellious landowners and despotic bishops...
...This inferiority is obvious in the realm of international relations...
...In all the European courts during the 17th and 18th centuries public posts were sold and there was traffic in influences and favors...
...Their politics vis-a-vis Stalin were no more clear-sighted...
...The discontent of the Mexican people has found expression in abstention and skepticism rather than in forms of political activism...
...Do we just "go round the prickly pear...
...By virtue of their situation as well as their implicit ideology and method of recruitment, these bodies of courtiers are not modern...
...But the founding of industrial enterprises and the construction of factories and railroads was less the expression of the dynamism of a bourgeois class than the result of a deliberate government policy of stimuli and incentives...
...The logic of history is not quantitative...
...The new legality sought by the regime is based on the recognition that other parties and political projects exist—that is to say, it is based on pluralism...
...Leaving aside the dummy parties that have for years played the role of puppets in the electoral farce, the PRI's only serious rival has been the PAN...
...First we must cure ourselves of the intoxication of simplistic and simplifying ideologies...
...However, as we have seen, this project faces the same wall that has blocked the path of other initiatives by our intellectuals and men of state, from Juarez and the liberals of 1857 to our day...
...In a regime of this sort the head of government—be it prince or president— considers the state his personal patrimony...
...I mean, it owns the means of production, products, and producers...
...I might add that they have been more humane and more tolerant as well as more efficient...
...The governments that followed Diaz, once the violent stage of the Revolution was over, went on getting richer, and soon, with Calles, another general [president 192428, and the power behind the presidency 192836], the Mexican government embarked on a career as great entrepreneur...
...Perhaps we have mistaken the path...
...This is a contradiction that the liberal bourgeois state has been unable to resolve...
...The government needs the unions as much as the unions need the government...
...The exception is the brief period that Cosio Villegas calls the Restored Republic, during which the liberals tried to blunt the claws of the state we inherited from New Spain...
...Within the Mexican state, there exists an enormous contradiction that no one has been able or even tried to resolve: the body of technocrats and administrators, the professional bureaucracy, shares the privileges and risks of 47 public administration with the friends, intimates, and favorites of the current president, and with the friends, intimates, and favorites of his ministers...
...In order for an organism to be able to complete such historic tasks as the modernization of a country, the first prerequisite is that it be strong...
...In Mexico as in Russia, when faced with the relative weakness of its own bourgeoisie, the central agent of modernization has been the state...
...The peculiar nature of the Mexican state is shown by the presence of three different orders or formations (different, but in continuous communication and osmosis): 1. The government bureaucracy proper, more or less stable, made up of technicians 48 and administrators, created in the image and likeness of the bureaucracies of the democratic societies of the West...
...My earlier observation about the ambiguous relationship between the unions and the Mexican state can be applied to a certain extent to the one that unites us with Washington...
...Political Reform was thought up by one of Mexico's most intelligent men, a true intellectual who is also a shrewd politician...
...This courtly society is partially renewed every six years— that is, each time a new president comes to power...
...So it imposed economic rationalism, which is essentially quantitative regarding the discharge of state business...
...It is the direct descendant of the National Sinarchist Union, an organization inspired by a nationalistic and religious populism recognizably based on the traditional aspirations of the revolutionary peasant movements, along with scraps of fascist ideology...
...But it knows that to reform itself it must reform the country...
...The Mexican Democratic party has origins similar to those of the PAN, though its supporters are not middle-class people but the poor peasants of the central region...
...At first, their intransigence and selfishness toward Germany favored the rise of Nazism...
...The state does not have two kinds of politics...
...Its essence was compromise between a true democracy with political parties, and dictatorship of a political boss as had happened in the other Latin-American countries...
...There is a margin for action...
...Its evolution was the same as that of the bourgeoisie, which moved from a world of privilege to one of economics and from judicial logic to the logic of private enterprise...
...The presence of a courtly, patrimonialist moral code in the bosom of the Mexican state is another example of our incomplete modernity...
...However, in the short run it is legitimate to doubt that a few legalistic measures will be enough to change the political structures of a society...
...From the perspective of the administration of things, the bureaucracies of the democratic bourgeois societies have been incomparably superior not only to those of the old monarchies but also to those of the totalitarian states of our day...
...The theme of Political Reform, as the Mexican government's recent attempts to introduce pluralism are called, merits a short digression...
...In practice, the only two forces capable of negotiating with the government are the capitalists and the leaders of the workforce...
...The events of 1968, which culminated in the slaughter of several hundred students, seriously shattered this legitimacy, already worn thin by half a century of uninterrupted dominance...
...The most casual observer is immediately aware that there are two large gaps in this panorama...
...it has a physical, material reality...
...And yet, these bureaucracies are not autonomous, and they live in a constant relationship—rivalry, complicity, alliances, and ruptures—with the other two groups who dominate the country along with them: private capitalism and the working-class bureaucracies...
...Theologians and moralists had conceived of evil as an exception and a transgression, a blot on the universality and transparency of Being...
...The rationale of the state is not utility nor profit but power—gaining it, conserving it, and extending it...
...We stumble over the disconcerting mixture of modern and archaic traits in the lowest levels of society—the peasants and their religious and moral beliefs—as well as in the middle class and the high bourgeoisie...
...The bourgeoisie never succeeded in freeing itself totally from the tutelage of the autocracy...
...President...
...All this can be summed up in one basic difference that contains all others and is paramount: whereas in Russia the party is the true state, in Mexico the state is the substantial element, and the party is its arm and instrument...
...In this, as in so many other things, the revolutionaries have not only shown decidedly traditionalist leanings but have been unfaithful to the liberals of 1857 whom they claim as their predecessors...
...The Mexican Democratic party is suffering an identity crisis like that of the PAN, and has not yet defined its new democratic profile...
...Finally, as in Russia, our state inherited a patrimonial regime—that of the viceroys of New Spain...
...Up to now it has mattered only to a few people that the PRI invariably wins elections...
...Here I will only repeat that we Mexicans have undertaken various projects of modernization since the time of the great Hispanic schism (the crisis at the end of the 18th century and its consequence, Independence...
...irregularity and even simple individualism are forms of evil, that is, of nothingness...
...In the Soviet Union the state owns things and men...
...Under General Diaz's dictatorship the Mexican state began to emerge from poverty...
...To a certain extent this change implies criticism of its own Stalinist past...
...Is Mexico "the dead land...
...It shows that the central power in Mexico lies not in private capitalism nor in the syndicated unions nor in political parties, but in the state...
...And so the plague of militarism was born: the sword was a response to the weakness of the state and the power of the factions...
...There is another remedy, though it is contemplated with horror by the Mexican political caste: to divide the PRI...
...This is why the model of political and religious bureaucracies is a military one, the Society of Jesus, the Communist party...
...Just look How big I am...
...No doubt, inspired and encouraged by the example of the European countries (Italy, Spain, and France), the Mexican Communist party has recently declared itself a partisan of democratic pluralism, although it has not renounced Lenin's "democratic centralism...
...Today it is the most powerful capitalist in the country though, as we all know, neither the most efficient nor the most honest...
...But the oddity of our societies should not prevent us from studying the Latin-American state, which is actually one of our greatest peculiarities...
...In its turn the state is owned by the Communist party and the party is owned by the Central Committee...
...Economic rationality depends on the relationship between expenditure and production, investment and earnings, work and savings...
...it does not want to change men or save the world...
...The liberals wanted a strong society and a weak state—an exemplary attempt that soon failed: Porfirio Diaz [who was president in 1877 and again in 1884-1911] inverted the proposition and fashioned Mexico into a weak society dominated by a strong state...
...This is an authentically plebeian party...
...Ideology today occupies the place that once belonged to theology and religion...
...Unfortunately, this party has still not been able to formulate a clear program (nor a clearly democratic one, which is no less serious) to grant it a political physiognomy and to distinguish it from the other left-wing groups...
...It was born in the 1968 crisis, and its emergence was looked upon with great sympathy by many groups of 50 students and intellectuals, and also by those veterans of the working-class movement of the past who had survived its setbacks...
...However, it is not a totalitarian state nor a dictatorship...
...Patrimonialism, in essence, is the incrustation of private upon public life...
...If the state is the king's patrimony, how can it not also be the patrimony of his relations, friends, servants, and favorites...
...Naturally, the most substantial reality is the multiple power of the United States: a power that is economic, social, technical, scientific, and military, all at one and the same time...
...I still must mention another noteworthy characteristic of the Mexican state...
...The might of the United States becomes a fascination—that is, it inspires a contradictory feeling of attraction and revulsion...
...Their counterparts are the totalitarian bureaucracies of Eastern Europe...
...The Mexican bureaucracy is modern, is proposing to modernize the country, and has a modern set of values...
...The Soviet bureaucracy, which succeeded the autocracy, took upon itself the task of modernization that, historically, according to Marxist opinion, belonged to the bourgeoisie...
...The State is Capital, Work, and Party—a secular Trinity...
...The modern state is a machine—a continually self-reproducing machine...
...Indeed, before all else we should ask ourselves, which political parties would be able to challenge the PRI for leadership...
...The 20th-century state inverts the proposition: evil ultimately Mexico, 1978 conquers universality and presents itself wearing the mask of Being...
...these people are government personnel and legitimate successors of the bureaucracies of the colony and the "Porfirist" period...
...For this reason, far from constituting an impersonal bureaucracy, the body of civil servants and government employees— from the ministers to the page boys and from the magistrates and senators to the janitors— forms a huge political family bound by ties of kinship, friendship, personal obligation, similar backgrounds, and other such matters...
...The radical authors—Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky—who at the turn of the century concerned themselves with the social history of prerevolutionary Russia were at one in pointing out the weakness of the bourgeoisie when faced with the authoritarian state...
...One of the characteristics of Russian capitalism was its dependence on the Czarist state...
...IN THE LONG RUN and if it does not fail, Political Reform will realize the dream of many Mexicans, a dream continuously postponed since Independence—the transformation of the country into a true, modern democracy...
...The other is the absence of an authentic socialist party supported by workers, intellectuals, and middle class...
...As I have pointed out, the relationship between the various Mexican governrpents, the leaders of Mexico's workers and peasants, and the bourgeoisie is ambiguous, a sort of unstable alliance that is not without quarrels, especially between the • private and public sectors...
...Finally, not content with stimulating and, to a certain extent, creating both the capitalist and the working-class sectors in its own image, the postrevolutionary state ended its evolution by creating two parallel bureaucracies...
...It is significant that in recent declarations the Mexican Communist party has shown its affinity to the positions adopted by the French CP, the most conservative and centralist of the three great European Communist parties...
...The change in the European Communist parties is due in good part to the criticism of their dissident intellectuals...
...Will the Mexican pluralism for which Political Reform is preparing be composed of minority parties that barely deserve the adjective democratic...
...Jove up there in the sky...
...LatinAmerican societies are highly peculiar: the Counterreformation and liberalism exist side by side as do the landed estates and industry, the illiterate and the cosmopolitan man of letters, the political boss and the banker...
...OVID, Metaphorphoses, 13, lines 839-42 Liberals used to think that "civil society" would flourish thanks to the development of free enterprise, and the function of the state would correspondingly be reduced until it was merely supervising humanity's spontaneous evolution...
...On top of everything else, it is torn apart by internal battles and undergoing a sort of identity crisis...
...Not only have all these projects proved unworkable but they have disfigured us...
...The theologians found nothing in divine or human laws that was contrary to this practice...
...How could the bishops be subjugated, and how could law be made to prevail in a society where each family head considered himself a monarch...
...During the regency of Mariana of Austria, at a moment when the public treasury was hard pressed, her favorite, Don Fernando Valenzuela, decided to consult the theologians as to whether it was admissible to sell to the highest bidder the important positions of the kingdom, among them the viceroyalties of Aragon, New Spain, Peru, and Naples...
...They are the mind and arm of modernization...
...Another sign is corruption...
...The state was poor, compared with a church that owned half the country and a propertied and landowning class that was immensely wealthy...
...The source of the former legitimacy was, on the one hand, historical or rather genealogical, since the regime has always considered itself not only the successor but the heir of the revolutionary chiefs by right of primogeniture...
...However, though it is poor in material resources and in ideas, it still has an influence over some of the peasant groups in the central areas of the country...
...These hopes and prophecies have evaporated...
...The great multinational companies already hint at a bureaucratic capitalism...
...In short, there is no doubt that the weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie, when confronted with the patrimonialist state, was the determining cause of the 46 Revolution's final outcome...
...In Mexico as in Russia at the turn of the century, the historic goals of the intellectuals and also those of many prominent groups and the enlightened bourgeoisie can be epitomized in the word "modernization" (industrial development, democracy, technology, laicity, etc...
...Mexican capitalism was born long before the Revolution, but it came to maturity and grew to what it is now thanks to the actions and protection of revolutionary governments...
...it also penetrates the realms of technology, science, culture, popular sensibility, and, of course, politics...
...The Mexican Communist party is a small organization with little or no influence among the workers, even though it was founded more than 50 years ago, before the PRI...
...Examples of the political ineptitude of the bourgeois democracies abound...
...Under Porfirio Diaz the Mexican state recovered the power it had lost during the conflicts and wars that followed Independence...
...The description is hasty and schematic but not inexact...
...Perhaps its left wing, united with other forces, could be the nucleus of a true socialist party...
...These parties have one feature in common: all three would like to forget their authoritarian past...
...Except for Manichaean tendencies, in the philosophic tradition of the West evil lacked substance and could be defined only as an absence, that is to say, a lack of Being...
...The concentration camp, which reduces the prisoner to a nonperson, is the political expression of the ontology implicit in the totalitarian ideocracies...
...Now, indeed, another sector is becoming more and more influential and independent: the middle class and its spokesmen, students and intellectuals...
...The regime born of the Mexican revolution lived on for many years before anyone called its legitimacy into question...
...In Latin America, there is much less interest in the state...
...It is a surprising inversion of values that would have made Nietzsche himself shudder: the state is Being and exception...
...The issue is less one of immorality than of the unconscious operation of another set of morals: in the patrimonial regime the frontiers between public and private spheres, family and state are rather vague and fluctuating...
...The interaction of all these classes, groups, and individuals takes place within a framework—the international arena...
...The revolutionary state did more than grow and get rich...
...The archetype of power does not lie in economics but in war, not in the polemical relationship of capital to work but in the hierarchical relationship of commander to soldier...
...Recently, Althusser described it in Le Monde as a closed organization, military in nature, a "fortress...
...on the contrary, it is the heraldic plant chosen at the founding of Mexico Tenochtitlan, [the Aztecs ancient name for Mexico City] and its bloodred fruit symbolizes the union of the solar element and the primordial water...
...he can't be any bigger...
...for another, the popular unions, especially the workers' unions, have a certain freedom of movement...
...large enterprises and businesses imitate it and tend to turn into states and empires more powerful than many nations...
...Their attitude toward Hitler was an extraordinary mixture of inconsistency and blindness...
...I have tried to answer this question elsewhere...
Vol. 26 • January 1979 • No. 1
