The passive Mexican Revolution, Part 2: The urban poor as social wedge

The Mexican Revolution was what Gramsci calls a “progressive-restoration” or “passive revolution.” In the second of this two-part article, I offer a novel analytic explanation of the “restoration” phase, focused especially on the 1940s. Prior to this decade, mass mobilization and worker-peasant convergence yielded major reforms. But by the 1940s, many rural dwellers were migrating to cities, especially Mexico City, where a portion of them settled in irregular settlements. Rather than link workers and peasants horizontally, which probably would have sustained the earlier dynamic, the new urban poor oriented themselves vertically, soliciting subordination to political society. By dividing workers from peasants socially, these vertical relationships throttled pressure from below, allowing Thermidorians to halt and even reverse progressive reforms, without resorting to wholesale repression, and to consolidate a popular-bourgeois regime centered on the Institutional Revolutionary Party.