The Mexican Revolution Today
Paz, Octavio
The revolutionary movement, as a search for—and momentarily finding of—our own selves, transformed Mexico. To be oneself is always to become that other person who is one's real self, that...
...Once imperialism had disappeared and prices in the world market had been regulated to eliminate excess profits, the "underdeveloped" nations would have been able to obtain the resources they needed for their economic transformation...
...Thus our essential problem, according to the experts, is to obtain the resources vital to our growth...
...The former entail political and economic conditions, hence the latter are preferable...
...It is clear that the problem is not only one of increased population but also of insufficient economic progress...
...spiritually, they lived in barbarous or picturesque societies...
...Now that the bourgeoisie has grown more powerful and is more in command of itself, it is attempting to enter the government, not as a protected group but as its sole director...
...Thinking is the first obligation of the intelligentsia, and in certain cases the only one...
...On the other hand, imperialist expansion unified the planet: it seized all its riches, converted them into merchandise, and cast them into the stream of international trade...
...For example, the debate between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin regarding the "spontaneous revolution of the masses" and the function of the Communist Party as the "vanguard of the proletariat" would perhaps gain new meaning in light of the respective conditions in Germany and Russia...
...In contrast, rational direction of world economy—that is, socialism—would have created complementary economies instead of rival systems...
...They talk as if we were living at the beginning of the last century...
...And the fact that North American capital, despite our nationalistic legislation, is increasingly more powerful in the vital centers of our economy is even more decisive...
...Our gains have to be defended constantly...
...We have forgotten that many others are as isolated as ourselves...
...New farming areas have been opened up, and new industries and centers of production have been established, but they have not been sufficient to absorb the growth in population...
...Despite these accomplishments, however, thousands of our rural citizens live in dire misery, and other thousands have no recourse but to emigrate to the United States each year as temporary laborers...
...This was the background of the Mexican Revolution and, in general, of the revolution of the twentieth century...
...It was not brought about by a temporary bonanza or by the prosperity of one isolated industry—such as oil in Venezuela or sugar in Cuba—but rather by a fuller and more general development...
...There is always the possibility of changes in Soviet society, of course...
...The "advanced" nations reply very calmly that it is all a matter of "natural economic laws" over which human beings have very little control...
...The Revolution was going to create a Mexico that would be faithful to itself...
...others are simply agents or intermediaries of international capital...
...The Revolution did much more than expropriate: it created new state industries by means of a network of banks and credit institutions, gave financial and technical assistance to others (private and semiprivate), and in general tried to guide our economic development rationally and for the benefit of the public...
...This acceleration took the form of state intervention in the economy and partial direction of it...
...The most disconcerting fact of all is the absence of a socialist revolution in Europe, the very center of the contemporary crisis...
...The transition from primitive to international capitalism produced radical changes within each country and in the world as a whole...
...Our lack of capital could be remedied in another way...
...This means that in foreign trade we are subject to the fluctuations of the world markets, and that at home we suffer instability, poverty and a cruel difference between the lives of the rich and the poor...
...The greater part of the country suffers from rural overpopulation...
...It is very different from the spiritual aridity of a closed system with its syllogistic, police-state morality...
...by Grove Press, Inc...
...If we tear off these masks, if we open ourselves up, if—in brief—we face our own selves, then we can truly begin to live and to think...
...All this explains the rather zigzag progress of the state, as well as the desire of its leaders not to upset the "equilibrium...
...It is of little importance, in a general definition of the phenomenon, whether the state allies itself with certain sectors of the native bourgeoisie or, as in Russia and China, abolishes the old classes and entrusts the imposition of economic changes to a bureaucracy...
...Along with the cult of the leader there is the official party...
...Since the Carranza epoch, the Mexican Revolution has been a compromise between opposing forces: nationalism and imperialism, the labor movement and industrial development, a regulated economy and "free enterprise," democracy and state paternalism...
...Perhaps the most significant sign is the attempt to create a "diversified economy" and an "integrated" industrial structure (that is, one which takes into account our resources and their limitations...
...At the same time, the peoples thus annexed were assigned a merely passive role...
...After the general collapse of Faith and Reason, of God and Utopia, none of the intellectual systems—new or old—is capable of alleviating our anguish or calming our fears...
...He probably believed that revolutions in the backward countries would precipitate revolutionary changes in the capitalist world...
...we do not make machines that make machines, and do not even make tractors...
...The struggles in the Orient are related to our own...
...The truth is that the resources of our nation as a whole are insufficient to finance our development or even to create what the experts call an "economic infrastructure," the only solid basis for real progress...
...But it is we who are mistaken, not history...
...at the other Stalin...
...The only persons to gain anything were the leaders, who became professional politicians...
...Our situation in Latin America is that of the majority of the peripheral countries...
...Past, present and future...
...The state rewarded them by protecting the labor unions...
...One of the remedies most frequently offered to us by the "advanced" nations—especially the United States—is that of private foreign investments...
...The revolutionary movement, as a search for—and momentarily finding of—our own selves, transformed Mexico...
...As we know, there is a method whose efficacy has been proved...
...Are we going to ignore them...
...It is true, however, that no known society has ever achieved this state, and it is no accident, of course, that the Revolution has not given us a vision of man comparable to that of colonial Catholicism or the liberalism of the last century...
...For the first time in over three hundred years, we have ceased to be an inert material which the strong could use as they wished...
...In fact, capitalism gradually developed from a primitive accumulation into more and more intricate forms, until it reached the stage of high finance and world imperialism...
...it is at once an army, an administration and an inquisition, combining both spiritual and secular power...
...Meanwhile, what can we do...
...On the contrary, we have witnessed a barbarous regression, that of Hitler, and a general rebirth of nationalism in all of the Old World...
...Democracy as the West understands it is mixed with new and sometimes barbarous ideas, from the "directed democracy" of Indonesia to the idolatrous "personality cult" of the Soviet Union...
...It is true that certain authors—Isaac Deutscher, for instance—believe that as soon as abundance has been achieved, the state will almost imperceptibly move in the direction of true socialism and democracy...
...To be oneself is always to become that other person who is one's real self, that hidden promise or possibility...
...Finally, instead of a rebellion by a democratically organized proletariat, the twentieth century has seen the birth of the "party," that is, f a national or international grouping that combines the spirit and organization of two forces in which discipline and hierarchy are the dominant values: the Church and the Army...
...Where and how can we obtain the necessary economic and technical resources...
...Even so eminent a philosopher as Lukacs, who has devoted so much energy to denouncing the "irrationality" of bourgeois philosophy, has never seriously attempted to analyze Soviet society from the point of view of reason...
...And it is also true that the danger of a return to monopolization of the land still exists...
...And suddenly we have reached the limit: in these few years we have exhausted all the historical forms Europe could provide us...
...But the bourgeoisie does not form a homogeneous whole...
...The Revolution has not succeeded in changing our country into a community, I mean a world in which men recognize themselves in each other, and in which the "principle of authority"— that is, force, whatever its origin and justification—concedes its place to a responsible form of liberty...
...This question, which I will attempt to answer a little later, should not be asked in isolation, but rather in connection with the whole vast problem of economic development...
...Our lack of an "ideology" has saved us from committing those tortuous persecutions which characterize the exercise of power in certain countries...
...Nevertheless, this state exists...
...Some of its members, heirs of the Rev olution (though sometimes they do not know it), are striving to create a national capitalism...
...Also, the agrarian reforms not only benefited the rural population but also broke up the old social structure, making possible the birth of new and productive forces...
...As our delegates have stated in many inter-American conferences, it is impossible even to sketch out any long-range economic programs until this instability is remedied...
...But despite its extraordinary fecundity, it was incapable of creating a vital order that would at once provide a world view and the basis of a really just and free society...
...Was the Communists' use of "dialectic" rational, or was it merely a rationalization of certain obsessions, as happens in other neuroses...
...We are surrounded by many dangers, and also by many temptations, from "government by the bankers" (that is, the intermediaries) to Caesarism, along with nationalistic demagoguery and other spasmodic political forms...
...They are so busy winning the next war by means of military pacts with ephemeral or unpopular governments, so busy conquering the moon, that they forget what is happening in the rest of the world...
...But where, and how...
...it is not an aberration or `historical error...
...This notion, false as it is, still causes us to regard the history of the great powers as the unfolding of some majestic logical proposition...
...Nakedness and defenselessness are awaiting us...
...In Latin America, which was tranquil until recently, we have seen the fall of various dictatorships and a new revolutionary spirit...
...On the contrary, it searches for opportunities that promise better and more rapid earnings...
...To understand it correctly, it is necessary to see it as part of a general process that is still going on...
...It was a matter of breaking the capitalist chain at its weakest link...
...Every society is historical, by which I mean that it is subject to transformation...
...Or perhaps it is too late: history is moving swiftly and the great powers expand more rapidly than we are able to grow...
...And the leaders who surrendered their unions to the government were the very same leaders who had fought hardest against all forms of corruption in the labor movement...
...Yet the face of Mexico began to change, despite the difficulties and contradictions...
...Can anyone assert that Stalinism was rational...
...To be ourselves would be to oppose the freezing of history with the mobile features of a living human face...
...politically, they were colonials or semicolonials...
...Their political, economic and technical transformations seemed to be inspired and guided by some superior coherency...
...Above all, the "rational" use of workers and a controlled economy signify—among other things—forced labor, concentration camps, the displacing of races and nationalities, the suppression of the workers' basic rights, and the rule of a bureaucracy...
...We console ourselves by saying that everything has happened as it should not have happened...
...For obvious reasons, we have made practically no gains whatever in this field...
...Many of the prophecies and even dreams of the nineteenth century have been realized (the great revolutions, progress in science and technology, the transformation of nature, etc...
...True, Lenin thought it was possible to take a historical leap and assign the traditional task of the bourgeoisie—industrial development—to the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...Finally, the government contains many technicians who still champion—with varying success—a policy respectful of the revolutionary past and dedicated to the public interest...
...It hardly seems necessary to underline the aggravating circumstances: The European prole tariat is the best educated and best organized of all, with the oldest revolutionary tradition, and the "objective conditions" favorable to a seizure of power have existed in Europe on a variety of occasions...
...We lack capital, and the rhythm of internal capitalization and reinvestment is still too slow...
...This frustrated any possibility of a workers' party or, at the very least, of a labor government like that in the United States, apolitical but autonomous, and free of government meddling...
...The word "Communism" is associated with Stalin...
...Perhaps it is too soon...
...A human society...
...Both classes lived in the shadow of the state and have only now begun to achieve an autonomous life...
...In some countries, including Mexico, it is an open group to which almost anyone who wants to participate in public affairs can belong, and which includes great sectors of both the left and the right...
...but in a paradoxical or unexpected manner, defying the well-known logic of history...
...This is also true of the Congress Party in India...
...the industrialist hopes to replace the technician or politician...
...Unfortunately the alliance became a surrender on the part of the union leaders, who were given high political offices...
...Franco is "democratic" and forms a part of the "free world...
...It tried, within a short time and with a minimum of human sacrifices, to complete a task that had taken the European bourgeoisie more than a hundred and fifty years...
...No one doubts that totalitarian "socialism" can change the economy of a nation: what is doubtful is whether it can give men freedom...
...It should be clear that I am not suggesting we abandon the old methods or reject Marxism, at least as an instrument for historical analysis...
...We Mexicans must acquire a new awareness of Latin America...
...They are "strong men" and political real ists, but they are also inspired leaders, and dreamers, and—sometimesdemagogues...
...As for the claim that since the policies of the Cardenas administration were revolutionary, it was very natural for the unions to support them, the fact is that the labor leaders permitted their unions to become merely one more segment of the Party of the Revolution, that is, of the government party...
...Nor is it possible to claim that the proletariat has been the decisive agent in this country's historical changes...
...We can now see more clearly what the Revolution undertook to accomplish...
...At the same time, several isolated revolutions—in Spain, for example, and recently in Hungary—have been mercilessly suppressed, without the international solidarity of the workers having manifested itself...
...Essentially, then, we are still a country producing raw materials, despite a certain amount of industrial growth...
...Grove Press, 1962...
...Considering the unstable situation in the world today (basically a reflection of the imbalance between the "great" and "underdeveloped" countries), it might seem that a good deal would be accomplished in this area...
...And it had to be done without infringing on the social rights guaranteed by the Constitution of 1917, especially the rights of the workers...
...But before the flow of historical life congeals completely— and the "draw" between the great powers is leading to this— there are still opportunities for intelligent concerted action...
...How is it possible that the contemporary intelligentsia—I am thinking especially of the heirs of Europe's revolutionary tradition—has failed to make an analysis of the present situation, not from the perspective of the last century but from that of the new reality confronting us...
...The masses identify with them and follow them...
...And they have been the effective agents of almost all the changes that have taken place since the first World War...
...National capitalism was not merely a natural consequence of the Revolution: to a great extent it was actually a creation of the revolutionary state...
...The contrast with the periphery is very revealing...
...From the viewpoint of traditional revolutionary thinking, or even from that of nineteenth-century liberalism, the existence of historical anomalies like the "underdeveloped" countries or a totalitarian "socialist" regime, here in the middle of the twentieth century, is absolutely scandalous...
...We must recognize that our alienation is not unique, that it is shared by a majority of the world's peoples...
...To do so, we had first to secure our political independence and recover control of our natural resources...
...In Europe and the United States these conquests were the result of over a century of proletarian struggle, and to a considerable extent they represented (and represent) participation in earnings from abroad...
...our foreign exchange is balanced only because of tourism and the dollars our seasonal workers send back from the United States...
...Our material resources are few and we have still not learned how to use them effectively...
...If it had not been for land redistribution, major public works, government-formed enterprises, public investments, direct or indirect subsidies to industry and, in general, state intervention in the economy, our bankers and businessmen would not have had the opportunity to perform their work or to become part of the "native personnel" of foreign-owned companies...
...Imperialism linked them to the destiny of the West, but now they are turning to themselves, discovering their identity and participating at last in world history...
...were these rational...
...The Mexican hides behind a variety of masks, but he tears them away during a fiesta or a time of grief or suffering, just as the nation has cast off all the forms that were stifling it...
...most of our ideas have been borrowed from the United States or Europe...
...We have done very little thinking on our own account...
...The object of these reflections is no different from that which troubles other men and other peoples: How can we create a society, a culture, that will not deny our humanity but will also not change it into an empty abstraction...
...The labor groups are winning more and more autonomy...
...Even the counterrevolutions like Fascism and Nazism fit into this scheme...
...We do not have any basic industries except for the beginnings of a steel industry...
...It protects us but also oppresses us, hides us but also disfigures us...
...The banker is replacing the revolutionary general...
...And the "theory of collective rule," and that of "different roads to Socialism" and the Pasternak scandal...
...Also, national self-sufficiency is a costly experiment that must be paid for by the workers, consumers and peasants...
...The contradictory violence of our reactions and the explosions of our intimate selves and our history all began as a rejection of the petrified forms oppressing us...
...The men and the political forms that have embodied the insurrection of the "backward" nations are widely varied...
...The grand words that gave birth to our peoples now have equivocal values and no one knows exactly what they mean...
...At the same time, rural underemployment is retarding industrial development, because it is not increasing the number of consumers...
...In the second place, the result is bound to be economic dependence and, in the long run, political interference in our domestic affairs...
...As for their language, they combine messianic formulas with the ideology of democracy and revolution...
...we have turned our backs on the sea, and lack ports, vessels and a fishing industry...
...These formless masses have been organized by professional revolutionists or specialists in coup d'etat...
...Until recently the middle class was a very limited group made up of small businessmen and the members of the traditional "liberal professions": lawyers, doctors, teachers, etc...
...They are quite right...
...we are still short of roads, bridges and railways...
...Everything seems to be one gigantic mistake...
...it universalized human labor (the textile worker, perhaps thousands of miles away, continues the work done by the cotton-picker), making real for the first time, as a fact rather than a moral postulate, the oneness of the human condition...
...The Mexican Revolution was chronologically the first of the great revolutions of the twentieth century...
...We are alone at last, like all men, and like them we live in a world of violence and deception, a world dominated by Don No One...
...One of the purposes for which the United Nations and its specialized organizations were founded was to assist the economic and social development of the "underdeveloped" countries, and the charter of the Organization of American States includes analogous principles...
...We have many unknown friends in the United States and Europe...
...They are trying to change the government more and more into a political expression of their interests...
...They also supported Obregon and Calles for the same reason...
...and it destroyed the eccentric cultures and civilizations, forcing all the world's peoples to orbit around two or three suns, from which radiated all political, economic and social power...
...In the first place, everyone is aware that the earnings from these investments leave the country in the form of dividends...
...Industry is not growing with the speed which our growing population demands, and the result is underemployment...
...The Revolution also proposed, as noted earlier, to recover our natural wealth...
...Our century is a huge cauldron in which all historical eras are boiling and mingling...
...Almost everywhere— Indonesia, Venezuela, Egypt, Cuba, Ghana— the ingredients are the same: nationalism, agrarian reform, better conditions for the workers and, at the top, a state determined to complete the process of industrialization and thus leap from the feudal era to the modern...
...The background—and, indeed, the very substance— of contemporary history is the revolutionary wave that is whelming in the peripheral countries...
...But new facts, radically contrary to the predictions of theory, demand a new set of instruments or at least a sharpening of those we already possess...
...In Mexico, however, we have neither the population nor the natural and technical resources required by an experiment of such proportions (not to mention our proximity to the United States and other historical circumstances...
...Socialism" means a group of gentlemen defending the colonial order...
...It is a portrait-gallery with very different types: Cardenas, Tito, Nasser...
...Little by little a new working class and a bourgeoisie arose...
...There are martyrs like Madero and Zapata, buffoons like Peron, intellectuals like Nehru...
...The great revolutions of our time, not excluding the Russian, have taken place in backward countries, and the workers have represented only one segment—almost never the determining one—of the great popular masses made up of peasants, soldiers, the bourgeoisie and thousands of other persons harassed by wars and crises...
...In view of our country's social characteristics, the labor movement cannot be effective unless it avoids the sectarianism of some of its new leaders and seeks an alliance with the rural workers and with a sector that was also born during the Revolution: the middle class...
...There is also the fact that private capital is not interested in the sort of investments we need: those offering long terms and accepting small profits...
...There are no prescriptions any longer...
...History has its own logic, and if we can discover the secret of its functionings, we can control the future...
...One of the facts that characterize world economy is the imbalance between the low cost of raw materials and the high cost of manufactured products...
...It is better that we have no prescriptions or patent medicines for our ills...
...The question of whether our social and economic policies have succeeded is a standard topic of debate...
...Our intellectual instruments are even poorer...
...Most of these men would have been inconceivable as political leaders during the past century or even during the first third of the present...
...All these things, and many others, were accomplished slowly and not without a certain amount of blundering and corruption...
...There are experts who hold forth on the technical errors that have been committed, and moralists who decry the continuing power of our traditional rural bosses and greedy politicians...
...But there is a valid point of departure: our problems are our own, and we are responsible for solving them, but at the same time they are also everyone's...
...Thus a wholly new type of state has arisen, in which various revolutionary traits—a directed economy, for example, or the disappearance of private property—are inseparable from such archaic traits as the sacred nature of the state or the deification of its leaders...
...now we are attempting to resolve them by creating a society which is not ruled by lies and betrayals, by avarice and violence and dissimulation...
...Despite certain differences in degree, in methods and in "historical time," our situation is much like that of many other countries in Latin America, Africa and the Orient...
...We should mention here that one of the healthiest traits of the Mexican Revolution—due, no doubt, to the lack of an orthodox political creed as well as to the open nature of the party —is the absence of organized terrorism...
...In Mexico we had no colonial income to distribute...
...It was indispensable, in a country whose economy had been stagnant for over two centuries, to accelerate the "natural" growth of our productive powers...
...True, we have suffered from violence, repression, caprices, arbitrarinesses, brutality, the "heavy hand" (mano dura) of certain generals, etc., but even at the worst moments it has always been human, that is, the result of passions, of circumstances, even of chance and fantasy...
...On the one hand, the differences between a worker and his boss (after the colonial and semi-colonial peoples had been exploited for a century and a half) were less great than the differences between that same worker and a Hindu pariah or Bolivian peon...
...Also, not one left-wing European intellectual, not one "Marxicologist," has studied the blurred and shapeless face of the agrarian and nationalistic revolution in Latin America and Asia in an attempt to understand them for what they are: a phenomenon of world-wide importance which demands a new interpretation...
...On the contrary, the changes were to reveal our true being, the face that was both known and unknown to us...
...Our population increase—a circumstance the first revolutionary governments failed to take into account—is partially responsible for the present imbalance...
...No doubt the best—and perhaps only—solution lies in the investment of public capital, either as direct government loans or through international organizations...
...Economically, they were nothing but cheap manual labor and producers of raw materials...
...These "parties" are unlike the old political parties in every way...
...Progress" brought them certain material benefits, but it also required them to accede to historical "normality": to be, that is, mere phantoms...
...Its first job was to recover and divide up the land, open other lands to cultivation, and establish irrigation projects, rural schools and agrarian banks...
...These materials are our principal source of income, and thus constitute our best chance of financing our economic development...
...Our nationalism, to be more than a mental illness or self-adulation, must search the whole world...
...The Mexican Revolution is a part of world history...
...but there is no other way of raising the standard of living...
...The political philosophy of these movements has the same variegated character...
...But at least the feudal regime has disappeared: to forget that is to forget much too much...
...Therefore the Revolution's problem was not merely one of beginning at the beginning: we had to begin before the beginning...
...There is no doubt that it has to do with more than techniques or the errors and corrupt practices of certain groups...
...Countries like Mexico—which is to say, the greater part of the world—suffer from the continual and unforeseen changes in the world market...
...But, at the moment, both systems are characterized by their resistance to change, their unwillingness to respond to external or internal pressures...
...The distinctive—and decisive —characteristic is that this is not a proletarian revolution in the "advanced" nations but an insurrection of the masses and peoples who live on the periphery of the Western world...
...Also, the growing gap between the "advanced" and "underdeveloped" countries cannot be lessened if the former refuse to pay a just price for raw materials...
...Actually, of course, the law they are talking about is the law of the lion's share...
...And to do all this without betraying ourselves...
...It is our own phenomenon, but many of its limitations result from circumstances that have been determined by contemporary world history...
...The capitalist cannot and will not involve himself in a general plan for economic development...
...None of our gains could have been won within the framework of classical capitalism...
...In the last few years, however, there has been something of a change...
...And this last is all that interests us, and all that can justify a revolution...
...They forget that classes or castes with absolute political and economic power have been created in the meanwhile...
...However, we have not yet found a way of reconciling liberty with order, the word with the act, and both with the evidence—not supernatural now, but human— of our fellowship with others...
...What is more, without the Revolution and its leaders we would not even have any Mexican capitalists...
...It is still crude and ignorant from a cultural viewpoint, but it is full of vitality...
...Capital, after all, is simply accumulated human labor, and the extraordinary development of the Soviet Union is nothing but an application of this formula...
...and then there is Mao Tse-tung...
...The history of the twentieth century causes some doubt (to say the least) as to the validity of these revolutionary theses and especially in regard to the role of the working class as the embodiment of the world's destiny...
...A socialist revolution in Europe and the United States would have facilitated the transition of all the "backward" countries to the modern world, and in this case in a truly rational and almost imperceptible way...
...In this regard, Mexico's situation is no different from that of the majority of countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa...
...The notion of an "imperceptible" turning toward socialism is as fantastic as the myth of the "gradual disappearance of the state" on the lips of Stalin and his successors...
...The revolutionary governments, that of Cardenas in particular, called for the nationalization of oil, the railroads and other industries...
...We have retreated now and then in our search, only to advance again with greater determination...
...The colonial and "backward" countries, since before World War I, have undergone a whole series of disturbances and revolutionary changes, and the tide, far from ebbing, rises year after year...
...The danger is that they will choose war in preference to change...
...But there, in that "open" solitude, transcendence is also waiting: the outstretched hands of other solitary beings...
...For the first time in our history, we are contemporaries of all mankind...
...In the same way, there is no doubt that the Soviet Union hardly resembles what Marx and Engels thought a workers' state should be...
...The same can be said of Nasser or Nehru for the West...
...they are get ting rid of their corrupt leaders and are fighting for more democratic unions...
...The silence of the Latin American and Asian intelligentsia, who live in the center of the whirlwind, is even more discouraging...
...In other words, to make the leap that our most forwardlooking liberals had dreamed about, and convert Mexico into a modern nation...
...For Moscow, Tito is a disagreeable reality, but he is a reality...
...We were objects before, but now we have begun to be the agents of historical changes, and our acts and omissions affect the great powers...
...A little before he died, Trotsky wrote—with greater humility and percepception— that if revolution did not break out in the advanced nations after the second World War, the Marxist view of world history would perhaps require a complete revision...
...Thanks to this policy, our evolution has been the most rapid and constant of any in America...
...At least we can think and work soberly and resolutely...
...Clearly we are faced with a wall that by ourselves we can neither leap over nor break down...
...This new movement could be one of the decisive forces in the rebirth of democracy in Mexican life...
...technical progress and the basest of political magic, economic development and slave labor, science and a state theology: this is the prodigious and terrifying visage of the Soviet Union...
...At one extreme, Gandhi...
...It is equally clear, however, that we are faced with a situation that is beyond the capabilities of the government and even of the nation as a whole...
...A third front, then...
...The most advanced countries, except for Germany, turned from the NOTE: This essay is excerpted with permission from The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico, by Octavio Paz, translated by Lysander Kemp...
...With our present resources we are unable to create even the minimum amount of industrial and agricultural employment required by our excess of hands and mouths...
...Our industrial and commercial development, along with the increase in public works, has caused the middle class to expand considerably...
...It should be mentioned in passing that our industrial growth would have been impossible without the nationalization of the petroleum industry...
...it is a vast reality, which manifests itself in the only way possible to living things: by the solidity and fullness of its existence...
...The process reached its zenith during the Cardenas administration, which was the most radical period of the Revolution...
...A society that does not make man an instrument of the state...
...Like all modern revolutions, it proposed to liquidate feudalism, transform the country by means of industry and technology, put an end to our economic and political dependence, and establish a genuinely democratic society...
...ancien regime to modern bourgeois democracy in a way that could almost be called natural...
...In the Communist countries the party is a minority, an exclusive and omnipotent sect...
...Their ideologies are confused, but they share two ideas that once seemed irreconcilable: nationalism and the revolutionary aspirations of the masses...
...Imperialism is withdrawing from Asia and Africa, and its place is being occupied by new states...
...It must be added, however, that we are still far from achieving everything that is needed...
...we did not even own the oil, minerals, electric power and other resources with which we had to transform the country...
...Its function was to consist in bringing about a revolution in the most advanced countries, thus creating the bases for the liberation of mankind...
...if necessary, we must invent new words and new ideas for these new realities that are challenging us...
...However, the nationalism of the "underdeveloped" countries is not a logical response: it is the inevitable explosion of a situation which the "advanced" countries have made unbearable...
...From the time of the utopian socialists it was claimed that the working class would be the principal agent of world history...
...Or to be more exact, we simply do not have enough cultivable land...
...The efforts of an "underdeveloped" country to industrialize itself are in a certain sense anti-economic, and demand great sacrifices from the people...
...Our foreign policy has been a just one, but doubtless we could have achieved more if we had joined with other countries whose problems are similar to our own...
...History demonstrates that no class has ever voluntarily surrendered its gains and privileges...
...This policy brought us into conflict with economic imperialism, and the state had to back down and suspend its expropriations, though without surrendering what had already been recovered...
...in another sense, of equal importance, it has extended nationality to races and classes which neither colonialism nor the nineteenth century were able to incorporate into our national life...
...The Revolution made the new state the principal agent of social change...
...But in reality the sums devoted to these ends have been a mockery, above all in the light of what the great powers spend for military preparations...
...There is nothing left except nakedness or lies...
...The methods of "socialist accumulation," to use Stalin's phrase, have turned out to be much more cruel than the "primitive accumulation" which aroused the justified anger of Marx and Engels...
...And we should not forget the respect—the veneration, even—which Mexicans show for the figure of the President...
...A new club of nations, a club made up for the poor...
...By means of a controlled economy, which avoids the waste and confusion inherent in the capitalist system, and the "rational" use of an immense work force, directed to the exploiting of equally vast resources, the Soviet Union has become, in less than half a century, the only rival of the United States...
...We have freed ourselves from feudalism, military bosses and the Church, but our problems are essentially the same...
...The image of the present-day world as a struggle between two giants, with the rest of us as their friends, supporters, servants and followers, is very superficial...
...We must learn to look reality in the face...
...In one sense, then, the Revolution has re-created the nation...
...Government protection of the working class began with a popular alliance: the workers supported Carranza in exchange for a more advanced social policy...
...These countries are waking up now...
Vol. 9 • September 1962 • No. 4
