In the short period from 1916 to 1920 the Mexican working class faced a large number of challenges. A sharp decline in real wages, a crisis in urban housing, and a mass repatriation of workers from the United States in the postwar recession combined to produce a significant deterioration in living conditions for workers in many areas. Within the workplace, the as yet unregulated labor provisions of the 1917 Constitution gave a new impetus to labor-capital conflict as both workers and capitalists tested their respective strengths. Meanwhile, at the level of labor organizations, the defeat of the general strike in Mexico City and the dissolution of the Casa del Obrero Mundial stimulated a rethinking of worker strategy. This led to two currents within the organized working class—the formation of the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (CROM), with a national leadership espousing a “realistic” trade unionism; and the temporary merging of anarchist, syndicalist, and socialist currents within the Gran Cuerpo Central de Trabajadores and the Mexican Communist party (PCM) during 1918 and 1919.
Pablo González Casanova grapples with some of these issues in his elegantly written contribution to the ambitious new series of studies on the history of the Mexican working class that will eventually comprise seventeen volumes. Approximately one-third of this volume is devoted to a discussion of the background to the formation of the Mexican Communist party. This section, which many readers will find the most interesting part of the book, is one of the few attempts to take the PCM’s foundation seriously and it goes a long way beyond the usual anecdotal approaches to the theme. As with the rest of the study, however, it is flawed in its handling of sources. On the PCM, these consist mainly of two items: M. N. Roy’s Memoirs and Gales Magazine, both of which require a more critical treatment than that provided.
The remainder of the book involves a discussion of two topics: the developing pattern of state-labor organization relations, and the character of labor conflict. The chapter devoted to this second topic bears the promising title “Hacia una nueva forma de gobernar en las fábricas” and provides a good general discussion, with some examples drawn from Puebla and the Federal District, of worker and employer responses to the 1917 Constitution. Here again, though, there is a notable absence of primary source research, very little discussion of topics such as wages and working conditions, and no recognition of the geographical diversity of the labor-capital relationship.
