“In Mexico today . . . development occurs without participation and participation very often acts against development.” This seeming paradox stems from the decline of socialist institutions capable of stimulating popular participation due to the imposition of personal politics by the post-1940 new bourgeois elite enjoying the benefits of development.
Albert Meister, a French sociologist of development, has taken an historical approach in the first section of his study. The revolutionary past is classified according to its type of “participation” development: the years 1910-1920 as the jacquerie “revolt;” 1920-1940, the “revolution” with popular participation through socialist institutions; and since 1940, the “ascent” of the new public and private bourgeois elite. During the Cárdenas regime participation, which is equated with social and political mobility, most dramatically increased through the creation of three “socialist” institutions: the ejido, trade union, and collective. One can question whether these were created by Cárdenas as the framework for a “socialist” society or were only redefined and imposed in order to create a mixed economy for economic development.
The well-known social and economic inequalities between the urban and rural conditions are enumerated, based heavily on such sources as González Casanova, Dumont, Huizer, Stavenhagen and Wionczek. They are attributed primarily to the narrowing of popular participation in the governing process since 1940. The socialist institutions were aborted by the new post-1940 elite which replaced them with personalista politics or by what González Casanova has defined as “intermediary” behavior. This disinterested, demagogic, political personalism of the elite is motivated only by its desire for economic and political advancement at the expense of the marginal population. Such behavior has led to the absence of economic planning, encouragement of corruption, willingness to engage in political compromise, and resistance to any form of change. Personalism is becoming institutionalized because of its success over so many years, the dangers of permitting greater social mobility and tension, its usefulness as a means of control, and the fear on the part of the intermediaries themselves that change from within might lead to their own demise. Meister predicts this type of political behavior could be weakened only by a very rapid expansion of the industrial sector capable of channeling the surplus of political aspirants into new compensatory functions.
Although the author believes that this new unified elite has amplified and “institutionalized” the age-old Latin American personalismo, he assumes it arose through popular institutions during the Cárdenas administration. Very few national leaders advanced from the local ejido, collective or labor unions in reality. Did the elite turn to personalism only as a means of control to restrict the successful continuation of social and political mobility? I question whether personalism really declined under Cárdenas and suggest the new elite’s adoption of personalistic behavior occurred during their cooptation into the existing revolutionary military/bourgeois elite because institutions were inadequate.
Finally, Meister rejects two possible alternatives for future Mexican political development: the creation by private enterprise of a participating independent middle class or the political democratization of the regime from within the official party (González Casanova’s position). The most logical, efficient, and easiest alternative would be, he concludes, a technical, administrative hybrid of these two which would neglect the marginal population and might return the “cycle of participation” back to pre-revolutionary conditions and “double colonialism.”
This monograph has tried to clarify González Casanova’s concept of intermediary political behavior after a rather superficial two-part background. Meister has identified this type of behavior not to explain marginalization and internal colonialism but rather to clarify the post-1940 bourgeois elite’s organized desire to limit the popular participation of the Cárdenas era from which it originated. Without empirical data on social and political mobility this hypothesis is difficult to substantiate totally, but should be examined more thoroughly in light of the whole Mexican revolutionary experience.
