The passive Mexican Revolution, part 1: Mass mobilization and leadership refinement

The Mexican Revolution was what Gramsci calls a “progressive-restoration,” or “passive revolution.” In the first of this two-part article, I offer a synthetic explanation of its progressive gains from the 1910s through the 1930s. Mass worker and peasant mobilization drove what I call “leadership refinement”: a process that required increasingly progressive policy proposals and put increasingly progressive political elites in power. Since peasant insurrection had destroyed the old elite, a counterrevolutionary coalition was impossible. Instead, under pressure from mass mobilization and despite U.S. opposition, the political process saw a leftward trajectory of reforms—a very advanced constitution, large-scale land reform, socialization of the railroads, and nationalization of the country’s valuable petroleum reserves—heading in the direction of a socialist transition albeit never crossing the threshold.