Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
When Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas’ candidacy exploded onto the national scene in 1987-1988, an intense debate broke out on the left about what to do in the face of such an unexpected event. Something about his personal characteristics and the historical representation of his last name struck a chord in the national sentiment that reverberated in the face of unsatisfied social demand and concern. It was a political and personal phenomenon in that specific historical moment with a weight that was impossible to stop.
From the corner of the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (Revolutionary Workers Party PRT), of the Trotskyist line and member of the Fourth International, the Cardenas phenomenon attracted the attention of Adolfo Gilly and others for it could represent the opportunity to build a democratic and progressive mass movement, breaking the monopoly that the PRI exercised over the workers and peasants movement in Mexico.
Cárdenas moved around the country, galvanizing areas such as the Central Valley of Mexicali or La Laguna, where peasant organizations said, “the General’s son is around; we must support him”. Meanwhile, in Mexico City, the National University (UNAM) students were grouped around the defense of a tuition-free university education. The CEU movement did not yet know Cárdenas and had no links with the peasant organizations, which, for the first time in decades, began to demonstrate against their party leaders and demanded the right to support the “Tata’s son”. Rural and urban Mexico were beginning to come together.
Most of the PRT Central Committee was willing to support, once again, the presidential candidacy of Rosario Ibarra de Piedra. It considered Cárdenas’ candidacy as a by-product of the inter-bourgeois struggles, as well as incidental and irrelevant. It was, it was said, a distraction from the revolutionary struggle that the PRT was waging with Rosario Ibarra de Piedra. They claimed that the bourgeois candidacy of Cárdenas deceived the masses.
The alternative vision put forward in the Central Committee of the PRT by Gilly and several others was that Mexico is a country of revolutionary traditions and mass movements that had articulated, in its last cycle, around the oil expropriation and the irruption of a state model for the exercise of social rights, including agrarian, educational and social security reforms. With that history in mind, the working masses swirled around Cárdenas, seeing him as a new and more advanced guide for their historical struggles. The possibility of articulating a great mass movement with a progressive and democratic agenda presented itself for the first time in the lives of all of us, and we considered it our political responsibility to act to build the moment of rupture of the traditional Mexican system.
Gilly participated in the PRT debate as a political militant with an intuition of how revolutionary social movements can move and also, as Gilly the historian and intellectual. He combined intelligence, firmness, and humor with finesse, making him one of the ideologues and strategists who would eventually shape the ideology of the PRD. His influence was seen when, on the eve of the formation of the PRD, the predominant idea was to name the new party the Party of the Mexican Revolution, in direct allusion to the PRM of General Lázaro Cárdenas. Gilly insisted until he was convinced that returning to the past would be a mistake. It was necessary to look to the future, and that look implied an appropriate name for the new historical moment the country was living. The historian had this clarity about the processes of history. He proposed the name Partido de la Revolución Democrática, which was accepted.
Going back to the debates in the Central Committee of the PRT, there was the fact that the Partido Mexicano de los Trabajadores (Mexican Workers Party PMT), formed by Herberto Castillo, and the Partido Mexicano Socialista (Mexican Socialist Party PMS), of communist origin, were already allies of Cárdenas. Castillo and Cárdenas had coincided in the National Liberation Movement in the late fifties, together with General Cárdenas. The communists, now disengaged from the communist part of their origin, agreed with the support given to the candidacy of Cárdenas, who was already the official candidate of the Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution (PARM). That is to say, around the presidential figure of Cárdenas moved both the former PRI members of the Corriente Democrática and those of the PARM, a former historical ally of the PRI. But also the leftist opponents, historically opposed to the PRI, such as the PMT and the PMS. Unexpectedly and surprisingly, a new political bloc with the potential to govern was naturally formed, which came to move the national chessboard, surprising all and sundry. It confirmed a profound ebullition and discontent in the depths of Mexican society. And it confirmed the historical rule that when nothing was supposed to change, suddenly everything could change.
“And it confirmed the historical rule that when nothing was supposed to change, suddenly everything could change.”
Gilly’s reflection revolved around the need for a flexible, expectant, and novel vision of what history could offer. Only dogmatists and sectarians thought of the linearity of history. The intricacies, vagueness, and contradictions of social and political movements had to be accepted as an essential part of change processes, with advances and setbacks as an inevitable companion. The individual political actor and the collective had to know how to adapt to these different and changing realities. Nothing is absolutely predictable; everything is absolutely unexpected.
While the parties were moving and surprising, society was also mobilizing outside the parties and their structures. Evidently, the parties did not grasp the scope and depth of this social upheaval. The 1985 earthquake provoked a social movement that had not yet achieved its objectives. UNAM and other universities were on strike. Miners, doctors, and peasant movements were moving throughout the country. For the first time in decades, the State and the PRI were loosening their grip on control. The earthquake of 1985 showed the weakness and ineffectiveness of the government and its party in the face of a crisis of that dimension. Mexico City was at the forefront of the new anti-government social insurgency.
The Central Committee of the PRT debated these issues because it had to decide between joining a process of the confluence of a new diverse political current, eclectic and without a socialist profile but progressive and of the masses, or sticking to its ideological project defined from the writings of Marx and Trotsky on the permanent revolution, as a party that considered itself the political vanguard to build a socialist Mexico.
One side of the internal debate argued that if Rosario Ibarra de Piedra were the candidate for the Presidency of the Republic, then it would be possible to lead a revolutionary break towards the socialist left in the context of a social effervescence, thinking that Mexico could be living a “pre-revolutionary” period. Adolfo Gilly, myself, and others argued that the mass movement was responding, in its historical memory, to the call of Cardenismo, a mass movement of intense social vindication within the post-revolutionary State of Mexico. It was not, as yet, a movement aimed at taking power as a class but to demand from the State the compliance of unfulfilled historical demands put on the table by the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the Constitution of 1917. And what better than to recognize that the leadership “of the General’s son” represented the best of that historical epoch of the nation. It was a mass movement, democratic in perspective, because it was a break with the old regime, but ready to echo the Cardenist spirit. Perhaps in this, Gilly himself heard, identified, and recognized the response of the Argentine masses to the call of Perón and Peronism, whose dynamism and cohesion still exist today.
The majority of the PRT Central Committee resolved to follow the route of its own presidential candidacy and to denounce both the PRI and the “betrayals” of sectors of the Mexican left that joined the Cárdenas candidacy. Gilly, myself, and others broke with the PRT to support Cárdenas, determined to join the mass movement that accompanied that candidacy. To this end, we allied ourselves with other leftist groups, both from the CEU, Punto Crítico, trade unionists from the university movement, poets, teachers and peasant leaders, former guerrillas, political exiles, as well as some government officials, to join the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), whose manifesto was written and read by Adolfo Gilly at an inaugural event.
We were accused by the Fourth International of becoming traitors of the world working class and suffered the excommunication customary in such cases. The formation of MAS was intended to give organicity to a diverse group of left organizations outside of communism that sought a common denominator. The common denominator was support for the budding Cardenista movement from a democratic left perspective. That is, in favor of promoting free trade unionism, against state control of the peasant movement, and the free exercise of the vote without coercion or intimidation. Also, the attention to the social demands favoring more redistributive economic policies of the national income in favor of the popular classes.
The result of the election, apart from the electoral fraud that stole millions of votes from Cardenas and the popular movement, including his possible victory, was the consolidation of a vast popular movement that forever broke the PRI’s absolute control over the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. And Mexico’s slow and sometimes violent process toward democratization began. A democratic rupture would be the product of the thrust of that mass movement that began with an uncertain and challenging electoral process.
By isolating itself from that process and movement, the PRT lost its legal registry as a party and, more importantly, its relevance in the national debate. Adolfo Gilly continued to be a relevant voice in the successive political processes of the Mexican left as an authorized opinion to evaluate and define the processes to come and the directions to follow.
When López Obrador was Mayor of Mexico City, Gilly described him as “a neoliberal welfarist”. It is a label also applicable to López Obrador in the Presidency of the Republic, along with the necessary addition of a “social conservative”. The part of the Mexican left that came to power with López Obrador has abandoned the guiding principles of the left that Gilly defended.
The process of those times, with all its vicissitudes and complexities, yields lessons that today may be relevant to face what is to come. Sectarianism and radicalism only harm the progress of progressivism, while those who do not know how to join in are condemned to lose their relevance. And, perhaps as important as the above, recognized leadership is critical in a person who can stand out. This recognition must be understood as a subject that, for objective and subjective reasons of a nation, summarizes the collective aspirations that no one else manages to crystallize. That leadership embodies a historical program of heartfelt demands that require satisfaction.
Adolfo Gilly understood the contradictory processes of history, and he was not intimidated to assume a role in that vast whirlwind of sometimes indecipherable events. Because at the same time that he took personal and political risks, he maintained a meridian clarity about his values, ethos, and ideological and political convictions in the struggle for a better world. To this Adolfo, we pay homage.
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