Recently, especially in the 60s, many works devoted to the socio-economic and political history of Mexico were published in the USSR. More and more attention is being paid to the analysis of the socio-economic and political transformations that have taken place in Mexico in recent time1 . In the research of Soviet scientists, as well as in many works of progressive Mexican authors, which are usually based on a broad source study base, 2 an attempt is made to take a more in-depth and comprehensive approach to the consideration of a number of issues that are important for understanding modern problems in Mexico. In this article, the author seeks to address some of these issues that require close attention and further study. These include, first of all, problems related to the history of the formation of the class structure of Mexican society. The question of when and under what historical conditions the main features of the social structure of Mexican society as a bourgeois society were determined is closely related to determining the chronological framework of Mexico's transition from the pre-capitalist to the bourgeois stage of development. 3
1 Of great interest is the thesis recently defended at the Institute of General History of the USSR Academy of Sciences: N. M. Lavrov. The Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917 Abstract of the dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences, Moscow, 1970. See also: A. F. Shulgovsky. Mexico at a sharp turn in its history. Moscow, 1967; O. G. Klesmet. Mexico. M. 1969; E. V. Kovalev. Socio-political Transformations in Mexico (1930-1960). Voprosy Istorii, 1970, No. 6.

2 Among the latest works of Mexican scientists, it should be noted - Jesus Silva Herzog. Breve Historia de la Revolucion Mexicana. Mexico. 1962, his preface to the book: Emilio Romero Espinosa. La Reforma agraria en Mexico. Mexico. 1963; Daniel Cosio Villegas. Historia Moderna de Mexico. El porfiriato. Vida economica. Vol. VII, tt. I, II. Mexico. 1965; Alonso Aguilar Monteverde. Dialectica de la economia Mexicana. Mexico. 1968; Gerardo Unzueta. Penetracion en el pasado, polemica contemporanea. "Nueva Epoca", 1969, abril - mayo.

3 Currently, these problems are widely discussed in the Mexican scientific literature and are linked to many other issues related to the characteristics of the main stages of Mexican history. Monteverde puts these questions most clearly in his 1968 book Dialectics of the Development of the Mexican Economy. The Marxist researcher Gerardo Unsueta, in a review article of this book published in the theoretical journal of the Mexican Communist Party, puts these questions as follows:: 1. Can the regime of Spanish colonial rule in Mexico be considered as slave-owning? If this is accepted, does it mean that feudalism in Mexico begins with a war of political independence? 2. Isn't it more correct to assume, as others have argued, that feudalism was typical of all colonial life? 3. When did feudalism end in Mexico and capitalism begin? During the War of Independence or during the civil War of 1855-1857? Or perhaps in the late 19th and early 20th centuries or with the beginning of the revolution of 1910-1917? (Gerardo Unzueta. Op. cit., p. 20).

page 65
In Mexico, this transition began at the end of the eighteenth century and ended in broad outline at the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century with the bourgeois revolution of 1855-1857. Progressive Mexican economist and sociologist Alonso Aguilar Monteverde rightly attributes this transition to the long process of eliminating the country's colonial economy and gradually integrating Mexico into the world capitalist market. 4 Mexico's capitalist development accelerated markedly in the last third of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Under the influence of both internal and external factors, significant socio-economic changes took place here at this time.

The bourgeois mode of production was painfully slow and difficult to establish in the country. The reform laws issued in 1859-1860, which provided for the nationalization of church lands, and the grandiose land speculations that followed during the Diaz dictatorship (1877-1911), connected with campaigns for land division and colonization and other land "reforms", established bourgeois ownership of land and created a huge reserve army of labor which became the source of the formation of the agricultural and later industrial proletariat. One of the most prominent progressive Mexican scientists, Jesus Silva Ersog, rightly draws attention to the objective bourgeois consequences of the transformations of the 50s and 60s and the land speculations of the end of the XIX century. "The reform laws and the Constitution of 1857, on the one hand, and the laws on colonization and on 'free lands', on the other, "he writes ... they contributed to the extraordinary concentration of land ownership in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many communal lands, common lands, and smallholders ' lands had ceased to exist, and the many thousands of people who had previously owned and used these lands had no choice but to earn their living by becoming peons in ranches, medium-sized and large haciendas; and as the supply of labor increased, the number of people who had previously owned and used these lands was reduced to the demand for them exceeded, and the law of supply and demand inexorably entered into force. " 5
At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, the division of labor on a national scale became increasingly visible in Mexico. The share of the population employed in non-agricultural sectors of production is growing. The economic isolation and isolation of certain areas is gradually easing, while the expansion of local markets is increasing. In agriculture, there is a sector that serves the needs of exports. All this, and especially the development of manufacturing industry and the construction of railways, could not but contribute to the gradual rapprochement of separate, previously economically disunited parts of the country and create prerequisites for the formation of a single national market.

During the Diaz dictatorship, which was one of the most reactionary forms of bourgeois political superstructure, a capitalist mode of production developed and developed in Mexico, but it got along with pre-capitalist ways and was often organically intertwined with these backward forms. Therefore, the characterization of social relations in Mexico as a whole as feudal during Diaz's reign, which is given by some Mexican historians, is very controversial .6 In the light of

4 Alonso Aguilar Monteverde. Op. cit., p. 60.

5 Jesus Silva Herzog. Op. cit., pp. 35, 36.

6 Thus, in exposing the reactionary nature of the existing order in the Mexican countryside at that time, based on the rule of large latifundia, Rafael Ramos Pedrueza calls these orders "porphyriac feudalism" (Rafael Ramos Pedrueza. La lucha de clases a traves de la Historia de Mexico. "Ensayo marxista". T, I. Mexico. 1936, pp. 235, 236). The same idea, but more clearly expressed by Lombard Toledano, who speaks, in essence, about the rule of feudal productive forces.-

page 66
The traditional view that the struggle in this period was between feudalism (represented by the Diaz regime) and the bourgeoisie gives way to more accurate estimates of the socio-economic structures and social forces involved in the struggle. The argument was really between the old and the new. But the concepts of" old "and" new "in Mexico at that time were more complex than the concepts of" feudalism "and"capitalism." The complexity of the situation was mainly due to the fact that capitalism developed in the country on the basis of the relations that had developed there during the era of Spanish rule, which were not eliminated by radical measures, as was the case in many other cases. He sort of "penetrated" into old relationships and often even kept their clothes on.

This peculiarity in the development of capitalism in Mexico is reflected in both the economic and social life of the country. Land, although monopolized by a handful of big reactionary landlords, was in free commodity circulation. A large Mexican landowner, who had previously had little resemblance to a traditional feudal lord, in many cases turned into a bourgeois landowner. And not only because he himself sought to use bourgeois methods of farming and the corresponding forms of exploitation on his estate, but also because, along with the estate, he often had a factory or factory. The capital of many landlords was invested not only in agriculture, but also in industry and trade. Landlords participated in financial transactions. Bourgeois relations were established in much clearer forms in industry and in exchange. The country has embarked on the path of creating modern means of communication and communication. All this gave Mexico the characteristics of a State that had entered the initial stage of industrial development, which was taking place in conditions of extreme backwardness and merciless exploitation of the country by foreign capitalists.

In this regard, special attention should be paid to the views expressed on these issues in the works of modern progressive Mexican scientists dealing with the problems of socio-economic history of Mexican society. In one of his last books, Monteverde puts forward the thesis that in Mexico capitalism became the dominant mode of production just when the bourgeois world made the transition to the imperialist stage of development, that is, at the end of the XIX - beginning of the XX century7 . This thesis is supported by Unsueta. However, he warns of the danger of absolutizing the capitalist trend in the development of Mexico at that time. While agreeing mainly with Monteverde, Gerardo Unsueta believes that it is necessary to emphasize the importance of pre-capitalist remnants in the country's socio-economic life. "There is no doubt that the social and economic structure of Mexico at the end of the nineteenth century was not feudal or semi-feudal," he writes. But while agreeing with this position, we must at the same time recognize the great importance of the strong remnants of feudalism, which were expressed in such real forms as alcabala, peonage, landowner's shop, guild privileges, etc., which have been preserved

In Mexico, during the period opposed by the Mexican bourgeoisie in the revolution of 1910-1917 (Vicente Lombardo Toledano. Carta a la juventud sobre la Revolution Mexicana, su origen, desarollo y perspectives. Mexico. 1960, p. 30). Raul Mejia Zuniga also writes about the" almost feudal internal structure "of Mexican society and the "feudal organization of Mexico". La Revolution Mexicana (Ensayo Historico). Mexico. 1965, pp. 52, 53). In one of his most recent works, Moises Ochoa Campos refers to the current system in Mexico as neo-feudalism, which, in his opinion, reached its greatest flourishing during the reign of Diaz (Moises Ochoa Campos. La Revolucio Mexicana. T. 1. Mexico. 1966, pp. 11, 66).

7 Alonso Aguilar Monteverde. Op. cit., p. 203.

page 67
in Mexico until the end of the century, they prevented the free circulation of goods and the formation of a single national market. " 8 Erdoğan has similar views. He believes that the relations that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Mexico were not feudal. In his opinion, the social system that existed in the country at that time cannot be characterized as feudal, since it did not have the features inherent in European feudalism during its heyday. From Ersog's point of view, the main social representatives of the Mexican countryside, the haciendado and the peon, were also deprived of feudal features. "In many cases," the author notes, " the Mexican landowner-haciendado was a shareholder in mining enterprises, as well as rentiers. In terms of living standards, habits, and connections, he was no different from a merchant, industrialist, or financier. In reality ,the haciendado was a bourgeois, not a feudal lord. But this bourgeois also had estates, which gave him specific features. " 9 The author's opinion about peon and peonage as a system of exploitation also reflects the objective situation of the Mexican rural worker on the eve of the revolution of 1910-1917.

Peonage as a system of exploitation, Mexico inherited from the time of Spanish colonization. But it would be wrong to consider this institution unchanged. The peonage of the eve of the revolution of 1910-1917 was significantly different from the peonage of the beginning and even the middle of the XIX century. In fact, it already had a bourgeois origin, because it was the result of the mass expropriation of land from the peasantry and communal Indian tribes as a result of the policy of delineation and colonization of so-called empty lands carried out at the end of the XIX century. The impoverished, destitute Mexican countryside has become a source of huge labor reserves. Thus the ground was formed for the emergence of the most barbaric and parasitic forms of exploitation of former peasants and Indians: in the city-in a factory or factory, in the village-in hacienda. The main type of exploitation in agriculture was wage labor, which was, however, so burdened by a multitude of pre-capitalist forms that it very often lost the signs of" free " wage labor inherent in the capitalist mode of production. Therefore, in Mexico, such a monstrous form of exploitation of wage labor, that is, bourgeois at its core, as peonage appeared, which cannot be identified with either classical slavery, serfdom, or plantation slavery in the south of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, although in its varieties peonage could resemble both, and third 10 .

The transformation of a peasant into a peon was usually a consequence of his desolation. Having lost his land, he was forced to take a job with a landowner, from whom he received a piece of land. For this, the peon was obliged to work for the landowner formally a certain number of days, and in fact-as long as the landowner needed. Wages were extremely low: they ranged from 25 to 40 centavos a day, remaining unchanged despite rising prices. But even this paltry sum the peon did not receive on his hands; he was paid in special bonds, he was forced to take

8 Gerardo Unzueta. Op. cit., p. 29.

9 Entrevista con el profesor Silva Herzog el 7 de diciembre de 1963. Version de L. Cordoba R., p. 6 (архив автора).

10 Ersog holds exactly this point of view: "The peon of the Mexican hacienda cannot be called a serf in the proper sense of the word, just as the haciendado cannot be called a feudal lord, and the entire agrarian system of the Diaz government cannot be called feudalism... To have characteristics more consistent with the truth, it would be more accurate... call the peon a hired worker, the haciendado a large landowner, and the agrarian system of the hacienda a certain system of land ownership "(Jesus Silva Herzog. El. agrarismo mexicano y la reforma agraria. Mexico. 1959, p. 130).

page 68
in payment for wages, goods at high prices in the debt shops that were available at each hacienda (the so-called tienda de raya) were deceived in calculations and tied to the hacienda with many threads, condemning them to eternal bondage to the landowner. Remnants of the past, such as debt bondage and the landlord's shop , which persisted in Mexico until the end of the nineteenth century, 11 and in many cases until the revolution of 1910-1917, played a major role in the peonage system. "The landowner's shop," writes Ersog, " played an extremely important role in this system. It sold blankets, soap, corn, beans, vodka, and many other items to Peon and his family at prices that were usually higher than market prices and not always of good quality. Wages were paid in goods, and only the small remainder that was not sold in the shop was paid in money. The shop kept careful records of debts that passed from fathers to children and could never be repaid because the meager salary could not meet the basic needs of the peon and his family. It was advantageous for the landowner to have a debtor peon, as it made it easier to tie him to the land and exploit him. " 12
The church played a special role in maintaining the rules of order that were favorable to the master class in the Mexican countryside, which served as an" ideological whip " in relation to the peon. The Church preached Christian renunciation and humility to the faithful, promising the obedient a heavenly paradise, and the disobedient hell torments in the underworld. If economic and moral coercion did not sufficiently ensure the submission of the peon, then the means at the disposal of the powerful landowner were used, such as prison, corporal punishment, and forced conscription .13 Ersog is the most complete description of the forced labor of the Mexican peon of the late XIX-early XX century. At the same time, he is least inclined to consider the Mexican peasant of that time as a serf or as a slave. He believes that the peon was indeed subjected to severe exploitation, "but this Mexican peasant... in the central regions of the republic (which Ersog calls "the heart of Mexico", emphasizing the crucial importance of these areas for the whole country .) did not work for a landowner for a certain number of days for free, as a serf ploughman did for a feudal lord. The form of exploitation of the Mexican peon was different from that used in the feudal era for the exploitation of serfs. " 14 This point of view, far from questioning the cruelty and inhumanity of the then existing methods of exploitation, most objectively expresses the social characteristics of the Mexican peon on the eve of the revolution of 1910-1917, when the development of bourgeois relations penetrated quite deeply into the Mexican the village, sometimes a monstrous combination of old and new, which was, in fact, peonage. The correctness of these judgments is confirmed, in particular, by the fact that at the beginning of the twentieth century, a significant part of the peons were used in Mexican haciendas as hired workers seasonally and therefore could not be "enslaved" by such means of economic coercion as debt bondage. The American bourgeois historian Henry Parke cites, for example, data from which it follows that on the eve of the revolution, under debt bondage, there was a large number of people living in the Soviet Union.-

11 Unzueta believes that wage payments based on debt bondage persisted in Mexico at least until the end of the nineteenth century (Gerardo Urizueta. Op. cit., p. 24).

12 Jesus Silva Herzog. El agrarisrno mexicano y la reforma agraria, p. 134.

13 Ibid.

14 Entrevista con el profesor Silva Herzog el 7 de diciembre de 1963. Version de L. Cordoba R., p. 6 (архив автора).

page 69
About half of Mexico's rural population was born. This is rightly regarded as a fact of the barbaric exploitation of millions of workers in the Mexican countryside. 15 At the same time, one can conclude that the second half of the rural population was obviously no longer under debt bondage and belonged to the category of "freely" selling their labor force.

New developments in the Mexican countryside, mainly the development of manufacturing industries and the emergence of new industrial areas, gradually changed the economic appearance of the country. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the centers of economic activity were the three areas of the greatest concentration of industry that had been formed by that time: the Central (including the Federal District, the states of Puebla, Jalisco, and Guanajuato), the Northern (mainly Monterrey, where the modern metallurgical industry began to develop), and the Gulf Coast (primarily the textile factory area of Orisaba). The Center zone produced almost half of the country's industrial output, the north-29% and the Bay area-13%. According to statistics for 1902, 77% of enterprises were located in these three most developed industrial zones, 83% of workers were employed, and 92% of the country's industrial output was produced. The five states most important for industrial development accounted for 57% of the total manufacturing output. At the same time, attention is drawn to the extreme unevenness of industrial development. While the most developed states, such as Nuevo Leon, the Federal District, Mexico City, Veracruz, and Puebla, produced 57.7% of industrial output, the states of Baja California, Chiapas, Colima, Cameeche ,and Tamaulilas accounted for only 1.2%.16
Manufacturing was concentrated mainly in the Central and Gulf of Mexico areas. From the point of view of the factors that determined this placement, the Central Zone is most interesting. At the beginning of the 20th century, almost all areas of communication in the country converged to this zone, which became the main core of the national market. Here were the most populated areas and the main economic centers, which were constantly growing and showing the ability to master new equipment and sell finished products as the economy developed. There was also an abundance of workers trained in craft workshops. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the Federal District became the main center of the manufacturing industry in Mexico in the first decade of the XX century. It was followed by Nuevo Leon, Puebla and Guadalajara.

Changes in the country's economy determined the nature of demographic processes. In the thirty years leading up to the revolution of 1910-1917, the population in the main industrial centers grew significantly. The population has doubled in Mexico City, more than quadrupled in Monterrey, and thirteen times in Orizaba. Changes occurred in the structure of the amateur population, which reflected the complex processes that took place in the economy, and mainly the lag of agriculture. From 1895 to 1910, the annual growth of the amateur population was 0.8%. If we take the same indicator for the main sectors of the economy, we will see that in agriculture it was 1.3%, and in industry-only 0.6%17 . The self-employed population grew more rapidly in agriculture than in industry. This was due to a number of reasons. But home page

15 City Of Parks. History of Mexico, Moscow, 1949, p. 269.

16 Daniel Cosio Villegas. Op. cit., Vol. VII, t. I, pp. 391, 392.

17 Ibid., p. 401.

page 70
One of them was that extensive methods continued to be applied in agriculture, while the manufacturing industry followed the path of intensification of production.

In industry, production grew not by increasing the number of workers employed, but by improving its technology and improving the skills of the working class .18 This is confirmed by the qualitative changes in the structure of the working class during this period caused by the displacement of handicrafts and manufactures by factory production. "The progress of factory production has retarded the development of handicrafts and at the same time created a wider field for the application of labor and the absorption of labor power freed up as a result of the ruin of handicraft enterprises."19 This was the process in Mexico of transforming the free craftsman of the nineteenth century into a proletarian factory worker. The way in which the industrial proletariat was formed was common in bourgeois society, although it had some features characteristic of an underdeveloped country that was heavily economically dependent on foreign monopolies. Compared to the developed capitalist countries in Mexico, this process is more than half a century late. The youth of the working class, which was formed at the expense of recent artisans and peons and Indians who came from the countryside, determined its weakness, its exposure to immature, mainly petty-bourgeois, ideological influences and moods.

Such phenomena as the emergence of a manufacturing industry oriented towards the domestic market, and the emergence of the main features of the social structure characteristic of bourgeois society, reflected the entry of Mexico on the bourgeois path of development. The political superstructure was also fundamentally bourgeois, despite its extremely reactionary forms. The Mexican sociologist Campos rightly notes that " for the liberal revolution in Mexico (meaning the bourgeois revolution of 1855-1857, led by Juarez - B. R.), porphyrianism (the reactionary regime of the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz - B. R. ) was the same as the Napoleonic regime for the French revolution. At one time and in that context, they both meant the consolidation of the bourgeois state. " 20
Of course, Mexico at that time cannot be judged by the relatively advanced capitalist sectors of the economy. Along with them, especially in agriculture, there were the most backward and primitive forms and ways of life. This backwardness was associated not only with reactionary land ownership by landlords, but also with the presence of Indian tribes and tribal associations that had survived from ancient times, living mainly in geographically isolated areas and using primitive forms of farming .21 Because of these circumstances, the bourgeois relations that were developing in Mexico at that time were not always in their purest form. On the contrary, as already noted, in many cases they were mixed with pre-capitalist forms of relations and obscured by the latter. This was evident both in the countryside and in the city-in factories or mines .22 However, Mexico did not escape the general, natural consequences of the-

18 Between 1895 and 1910, the total number of workers employed in manufacturing increased from 553,000 to 606,000, or about 10% (Ibid., p. 402).

19 Ibid.

20 Moises Genoa Campos. Op. cit. T. II. Mexico. 1966, p. 14.

21 In 1910, the Native American population of Mexico was 1,685,864, or 11.1% of the total population. This ethnic group, in turn, broke up into tribal unions and separate tribes (Moises Ochoa Campos. Op. cit., T. II, p. 69).

22 Jose Mancidor writes that during Diaz's time, every factory became a fief, and gives the following description of the order in one of the factories located near Queretaro: "The lords of Rubio turned the Hercules factory into a po-

page 71
temporary society of development paths. At the beginning of the XX century. it was a country already dominated by bourgeois relations. This was what determined both the class character of the contradictions and the social structure of Mexican society inherent in bourgeois relations.

The overall picture of social and class relations that developed in Mexico by the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries can be presented only with these real factors in mind. This approach allows us to see that it was precisely at this time that the main features of the class structure characteristic of the bourgeois system were already formed in Mexico. The developing bourgeois system gave this structure greater clarity, gradually erasing the racial and ethnic differences inherent in certain social groups of Mexican society since the period of Spanish colonization. The predominant influence of the socio-economic factor on the formation of the structure of Mexican society became more and more obvious. Of course, the delay in the country's economic development sometimes led to the preservation of pronounced ethnic features of individual nationalities and tribes that existed in semi-isolation, and sometimes complete isolation in remote areas. But the face of the nation, the main trends in the development of its social structure, were increasingly determined not by the characteristics of individual most backward groups of the population and districts, but by new economic and cultural centers, where, under the influence of bourgeois relations, a new social structure and a new physical, biological and cultural appearance of the Mexican were formed. The Mexican nation, like other nations, was formed primarily on the basis of socio-economic development. Therefore, the characterization of the structure of Mexican society at that time, based only on racial or ethnic characteristics (as one of the first bourgeois researchers of the structure of Mexican society, Andres Molina Enriquez, once did), is rightly regarded as an attempt to replace classes and social strata with ethnic and racial categories .23
Compared to the studies of Andres Molina Henriquez, who divided the population of Mexico at that time into three main social groups - Creoles, Mestizos , and Indians, 24 the methodology used by sociologists and historians of Mexico to study the class structure of Mexican society is much more advanced .25 When defining-

achieving an independent republic. They, and not the government, dictate laws in this factory, force them to obey them, punish those who violate them (try criminals)" (Jose Mansisider. Historia de la Revolucion Mexicana. Mexico. 1959, p. 39).

23 See M. S. Alperovich. The Mexican War of Independence (1810-1824), Moscow, 1964, p. 405. Moises Ochoa Campos also notes: "To say that at that time Creoles and Mestizos were integral parts of the social structure is anachronistic, since the old castes no longer existed" (Moises Ochoa Campos. Op. cit., T. II, p. 61).

24 Andres Molina Enriquez. Las clases sociales mexicanos durante el porfiriato (Fragmento de "Las grandes problemas nacionales". Mexico. 1908) .Published in Ensayos sobre las clases sociales en Mexico, Mexico. 1968, p. 47 (see also Abelardo Villegas. Andres Molina Enriquez y las grandes problemas nacionales. "Anuario de Historia". Mexico. 1962, pp. 115 - 147).

25 A peculiar exception is the views of the modern Mexican sociologist Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, who put forward a version that was called the theory of "markinalism". According to this theory, the entire population of Mexico is divided into two main groups: the group that uses the products and benefits of progress and the group that does not use these benefits. The latter is a super-exploited part of the population that is "outside" of civilization. The first, dominant group is called the Spanish, or Spanish - speaking group; the second, the native, or Indian group. In her classification, Kasanova proceeds from the fact that Mexico is an underdeveloped country, not affected by the world process of industrialization, in which the city "colonized" the village, and in the international arena it itself is part of the "world village". From this, it is concluded that Marx's propositions concerning the social structure of "classical capitalism", or " in-

page 72
In order to determine the position of a particular group in society, they increasingly attach importance to the economic factor. The bourgeois historian and sociologist Mendieta y Nunes, for example, gives the following definition of the concept of "classes": "Social classes are large groups of people who differ from each other in their culture and economic status." 26 Mexican sociologist Moises Ochoa Campos (considers the social class "as open (not "caste"). R) and a dynamic sector of the state's population, which is characterized by a more or less equal standard of living of its members and is formed as a result of the interaction of economic and cultural factors determined by this political system." According to the concept of this author, both economic, cultural and political factors participate equally in the formation of social classes, and the latter supposedly performs the "final" work. In his opinion, the social class " arises in certain economic conditions, acquires a certain cultural shape and is finally formed under the influence of the orders established in society by the political system." Defining the social structure of Mexican society at the beginning of the 20th century, Moises Ochoa Compos actually takes as the main criterion such an economic indicator as the attitude of a given social group to property. "In 1910, Mexican society was divided into three large social classes: the lower (popular) class; the middle class; and the upper (affluent) class."27 In this case, the initial classification is property, wealth: those who do not have property, do not have wealth belong to the "lower" class; all those who have large real estate in the city and village or own large capital belong to the higher, well-off class. To these two main primers is added a third - "middle class", which includes "neither rich nor poor". The main disadvantage of this classification is that the concept of "classes" is not associated with a historically defined system of social production, and the class itself is not considered as a social factor that occupies a certain place in the system of social production.

Answering the question of what classes are, V. I. Lenin wrote: "Classes are large groups of people who differ in their place in the historically defined system of social production, in their relation (mostly fixed and formalized in laws) to the means of production, in their role in the social organization of labor, and consequently in their methods of production." and the size of the share of public wealth that they have at their disposal. Classes are groups of people from which one can appropriate the labor of the other, due to the difference in their place in a certain order of social economy. " 28 Since in Mexico, on the eve of the revolution of 1910, the " historical-

industrial society", cannot be applied to the" social evolution " of countries like Mexico. The development of capitalism as a factor that has long determined social processes in Mexico is essentially ignored. Meanwhile, this development, especially in recent years (meaning, first of all, the process of industrialization that unfolded in Mexico after World War II), which called into question the thesis of "underdevelopment" and dispelled the myth of Mexico's belonging to the "world village", clearly demonstrates the artificiality of such theoretical constructions. As for the division of Mexico into "Spanish or Creole" and "native or Amerindian", this is very similar to a return to the Enriquez methodology, which was unsuitable even for the time of Porfirio Diaz (see Pablo Gonzales Casanova. La demoeracia en Mexico. Mexico. 1965, pp. 62 - 65; ejusd. Enajenacion y conciencia de clases de Mexico. "Ensavos sobre las clases sociales en Mexico", pp. 152 - 154).

26 Cit. по: "Ensavos sobre las clases sociales en Mexico", p. 50.

27 Moises Ochoa Campos. Op. cit., T. II, pp. 10, 61.

28 V. I. Lenin. PSS. Vol. 39. p. 15

page 73
Since the" definite system of social production "was represented by relations in which the bourgeois mode of" social economy " was dominant, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and the peasantry were already distinguished as the main classes in the structure of Mexican society. Of course, each of these classes, in turn, had a complex and peculiar structure, just as the socio-economic features of the Mexican society that gave rise to these classes were complex and in many ways peculiar.

The latter applies primarily to the Mexican bourgeoisie. Mexican bourgeois researchers do not use the term "bourgeoisie" to refer to the dominant social group on the eve of the revolution of 1910-1917. They call it, as already noted, "the upper or affluent class of Mexican society." Mendieta and Nunez identify the following characteristics of the "upper class": the possession of wealth, profits, capital, and power; a refined lifestyle full of material and spiritual comfort; a sense of complete confidence and class pride; a reactionary and conservative worldview, etc. 29. they bring to the fore landlords - landowners as the main component of it. Moises Ochoa Campos writes, for example, that "the large landlords-the haciendados-were the most powerful constituent of the Mexican upper classes until the revolution of 1910...." 30 Indeed, this part of the dominant group retained the vast wealth of Mexico and held a commanding position in the Diaz administration. However, the most powerful and promising part of the ruling stratum from the point of view of the development of capitalism were not just large landowners - haciendados, but rich landowners-bourgeois, large Mexican industrialists, merchants and bankers, since they occupied leading positions in the bourgeois relations of production of the country. Only "wealth", i.e. purely quantitative indicators, is not a sufficient criterion for class characterization. Ignoring the qualitative point leads to ignoring the extremely important fact that on the eve of the revolution of 1910-1917, a significant part of Mexican landlords, while continuing to engage in agriculture (rebuilding it mainly in a capitalist way), at the same time took deep roots in industry, trade, actively participated in banking operations, etc. The figure of the landowner-bourgeois became typical of the country, and this reflected one of the important features of the development of capitalist relations in Mexico. All this gives grounds for calling the bourgeoisie the ruling class of Mexico at that time.

The Mexican bourgeoisie of the early twentieth century was a relatively small group of people. It exploited and appropriated the labor of other social strata that made up the vast majority of Mexican society. The bourgeois class included large industrialists, merchants, bankers, bourgeois landlords, and the rest of the mass of landlords. The latter represented the most reactionary wing of the bourgeoisie class, since, being drawn into capitalist relations (by virtue of the objective process of the country's economic development), they at the same time remained closely connected

29 Cit. by: Moises Ochoa Campos. Op. cit., T. II, p. 163.

30 Ibid., p. 165. It should be noted that the unscientific use of the term "class" leads this author to confuse the concept of "class" with the politically dominant class grouping at this stage (sometimes called "oligarchy" or "plutocracy"). "The upper class," he writes, " was created in the colonial era by the Spaniards... But in the period of Porphyry, a new class of large landlords, together with foreign investors, formed the dominant plutocracy" (ibid.).

page 74
with various pre-capitalist forms of economy. These groups of the bourgeoisie, which formed the core of the class, were joined by the highest stratum of state officials, army generals, church dignitaries, prominent lawyers, prominent doctors, and other intellectuals. The differences in the position of individual groups of the bourgeois class in the system of production relations ultimately determined their political positions. The conflict that arose at the beginning of the twentieth century, for example, between the Diaz government and the liberal-bourgeois opposition led by the bourgeois landowner Francisco Madero, was basically a conflict between the industrial-commercial and landowner groups of the bourgeois class.

An idea of the strength and influence of the main groups of the bourgeoisie class can be drawn from official Mexican statistics, as well as from the calculations of the Mexican bourgeois sociologist Iturriaga. The latter does not single out groups of people associated with industry, commerce, or agriculture in the "upper" class; it simply divides this category of the Mexican population into rural and urban representatives of the "upper class". The author considers 18,3006 people out of 12,698,330 who made up the country's population in 1895, i.e. 1.44% of the total number of its inhabitants, to be the "upper" class. Of this number, 49,542 people (0.39% of the population) represented the urban "upper class", and 133,464 (1.05% of the population) - the rural "upper class"31 . As a result of the ongoing process of wealth concentration, by 1910 the number of the so-called "upper class" in the total population of the country had further declined. This year in Mexico, out of 15160,369 people, only 76,500, or 0.5%, belonged to the "upper class" 32. These data point to the tendency of capital concentration characteristic of bourgeois development, which is also characteristic of Mexico at the beginning of the XX century.

As bourgeois relations developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a working class was also formed in Mexico, which was formed primarily at the expense of the population employed in the manufacturing and extractive industries .33 It is significant that at the beginning of the XX century. The number of workers employed in the steel mills and machine shops, which were the most rapidly developing part of the country's manufacturing industry, grew particularly rapidly. At these enterprises, from 1895 to 1910, the number of workers increased from 35 to 56 thousand, that is, by almost 60%. In this category of workers, the number of mechanics increased especially rapidly (during these 15 years, it increased from 5.7 to 23 thousand), which was a consequence of the increased demand for this specialty due to the introduction of new equipment and the development of mechanization in many industries .34 There was also an increase in workers employed in the woodworking industry, in enterprises that produce vehicles, in the printing industry, etc.

Any of the manufacturing industries of Mexico at that time included, along with modern factories and factories, semi-artisanal enterprises. Therefore, in the general mass of workers employed in the manufacturing industry in 1910, along with factory workers, there were many people employed in semi-artisanal workshops and enterprises inherited from manufactories-

31 The calculations of Iturriaga and Campos are based on an analysis of data from the first Mexican census of 1895 (see Jose E. Iturriaga. La estructura social y cultural de Mexico. Mexico-Buenos Aires. 1951, p. 82; Moises Ochoa Campos. Op. cit. T. II, p. 165).

32 Moises Ochoa Campos. Op. cit. T. II, p. 195.

33 Daniel Cosio Villegas. Op. cit. Vol. VII, t. II, p. 403.

34 Ibid., p. 404.

page 75
stage of development 35 . These circumstances, as well as the immaturity of the working class as a whole and the general backwardness of the country, explain the slow growth of the formation of self-consciousness of the Mexican working class, which was reflected in its role in the events that unfolded on the eve and during the revolution. At the same time, the barbaric exploitation of the working class, the extremely difficult financial situation and the almost impoverished standard of living of the bulk of its population have transformed the Mexican proletariat into one of the most active social forces in the country, which fearlessly embarked on the path of struggle against the reactionary regime.

The living conditions of the Mexican working class at the beginning of the twentieth century, if we take the bulk of the workers, were not much different from those of the peon. This can be said first of all about wages. Although entrepreneurs were forced to raise their nominal wages in some cases in the face of the intensification of the workers ' struggle to improve their situation, the real wages of the worker essentially remained unchanged throughout the Diaz dictatorship. While the minimum daily wage in Mexico's manufacturing industry rose from 22 centavos in 1877 to 59 centavos in 1910, the real minimum wage index in the same industry rose from just 32 centavos in 1877 to 36 centavos in 191036 . Naturally, the amount of wages fluctuated depending on the branch of industry, the skill of the worker, the complexity of the work performed by him, etc. In 1892, for example, with the average daily wage for the entire manufacturing industry of Mexico of 55 centavos, foundry workers received 87 centavos, brewers - 67 and soap makers - 57. In each branch of factory production, in turn, there were groups of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers who received different wages. For example, in the textile industry, the highest-paid group of workers were weavers (who made up about 1/3 of the factory staff), who in 1896 received 1 peso a day, spinners (among whom there were many children) received 40 centavos a day, and carders (among whom women and children predominated) had a daily salary of 50 centavos. Women's wages were significantly lower than men's. In 1902, for example, the average daily wage of male workers (nationwide) was 1.45 pesos; for female workers, it was only 80 centavos .37
Female and child labor was widely used in the industry. Women made up a third of the country's workers. Women's labor was used mainly in such industries as footwear, tobacco, textiles,food processing, earthenware, and glass. In the tobacco and clothing industries, for example, 55% of workers were women. Many children also worked in factories and factories. As one of the English travelers who visited Mexico, A. H. Campbell, wrote, Mexican textile factories "employ such small children that they have to stand boxes at the machine." According to some sources, in 1896 on textile fabry-

35 Some researchers of these problems seek to separate workers employed in factories and factories from those employed in the handicraft industry. For example, according to the data provided by Campos, by 1910 in Mexico there were 400 thousand industrial workers and 600 thousand artisans of the "lower level" (obviously, we are talking about the poorest artisans who did not exploit other people's labor), whom the author refers to as "lower class". According to Campos 'calculations, the" working and artisan population " of Mexico at that time reached 1 million people (Moises Ochoa Campos. Op. cit. T. II, pp. 101, 102).

36 Calculated from prices in 1900 (see Daniel Cosio Villegas. Op. cit. Vol. VII, t. II, p. 412).

37 Ibid., p. 412.

page 76
In Mexico, 12% of the workers were children 38 . Women and children were the most exploited part of the Mexican working class.

As in other countries, capitalist industrialization in Mexico was carried out primarily through the brutal exploitation of workers. The conditions and general conditions in which most Mexican workers lived were not much different from those of a peon on Hacienda: working from dawn to dawn (10 to 14 hours a day); a factory shop, through which the manufacturer reduced the worker's wages in the same way as the landowner did with the hacienda shop; and a pitiful job in which the owner was able to shack for housing; unhygienic conditions in the factory and at home; almost complete isolation from cultural life and lack of any opportunities to give elementary education to children.

A special place in the social structure of Mexican society at the beginning of the 20th century was occupied by the peasantry, which made up the bulk of the rural population and was represented mainly by peons. Analyzing the question of the class structure of bourgeois society, V. I. Lenin wrote: "We know only three classes in capitalist and semi-capitalist society: the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie (the peasantry as its main representative), and the proletariat." 39 An important feature of the structure of Mexican society was that the Mexican peasantry, for the most part, could not be attributed to the class of the petty bourgeoisie, that is, to those social groups that in bourgeois society occupy a middle, intermediate position between its two main classes - the proletariat and the bourgeoisie - and are generated by petty-bourgeois production. The Mexican peasant-peon was not the owner of the land. At the beginning of the XX century. he was mostly a hired agricultural worker. Given the complexity of the Mexican economy, the forms and methods of its exploitation were not and could not be purely capitalist. We have already drawn attention to this feature of Mexican peonage above. Until the end of the nineteenth century, there were remnants of semi-feudal methods of securing peasants to landlords in Mexico, and a form of debt bondage was still widely practiced in the early twentieth century .40 These methods, inherited from the pre-capitalist stage, were designed to secure workers in the hacienda and indicated the presence of elements of forced and semi-forced labor in the countryside. In peonage, one can see a combination of capitalist and pre-capitalist forms of exploitation of the labor of the worker, From the peasant as a social type in peon remained basically only that he carried out agricultural work. In all other respects, it was an indentured worker, limited, however, in his right to "freely sell his labor power and receive wages by a whole series of pre-capitalist survivals.

These features of peonage as a peculiar, transitional form of exploitation of the rural worker are clearly visible when considering the two main ways of using it that were then practiced in the Mexican estate. In late 19th - early 20th-century Mexico, there were two types of peons. The first of these is the peon acasilado, which means that they lived all year with their family on the territory of the hacienda and were essentially permanent workers. In order to keep this part of the workers from leaving the hacienda and avoid the problem of workers, there was a system of debt bondage, a local landowner's shop, repressive dictatorship institutions, and so on. -

38 Ibid., p. 405.

39 V. I. Lenin. PSS. Vol. 34, p. 297.

40 Gerardo Unzueta. Op. cit., p. 24.

page 77
The same applies to local churchmen and the entire administrative staff of the hacienda. The second category of peons was represented by day laborers (peones de tarea), who were hired seasonally, most often during sowing or harvesting. 41 The main body of day laborers consisted of Indians and mountain dwellers who descended into the valleys during the sowing season and at the harvest barka and offered their services to the landlords. But in many (especially in the southern) states of Mexico, the suppliers of such workers were the government and local authorities, who rented out to landlords as Indian workers who had been expelled from their native places. Mexican statistics show that the number of peons in Mexico did not decrease during the entire period of the Diaz dictatorship. In 1895, there were 2595,162 of them, in 1900 - 2549,659, and in 1910 - 312,3975. In 1910, out of 11672,363 people in the rural population of the country, 9,500 thousand were peons (including members of their families). According to some estimates, the landless mass of the Mexican peasantry in 1910 ranged from 82.24% to 97.7% of the working population of the village .42 On the eve of the Revolution, peons represented 62.67% of the country's population, meaning that out of every three Mexicans, two were landless peon peasants. This shows how extremely important the problem of the landless peasantry was for Mexico at the beginning of the twentieth century. Mexican peonage was a special social phenomenon that resulted from the unprecedented pauperization of the bulk of the rural population. Solving this problem was the most important task of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917.

The mass of the landless peasantry was joined by an insignificant stratum of farmers-smallholders-owners of small plots of land. According to Mexican statistics, parcels made up 6% of the amateur population in 1895, and together with family members they numbered 649485 people . The situation of this category of rural population was very difficult, especially during the period of intensified campaigns on land delimitation and colonization, directed against small-scale land ownership. Smallholder farmers were constantly harassed and often directly exploited by large landlords - haciendados.

As for the class of the petty bourgeoisie as such, in Mexico it was formed mainly not in the countryside, but in the city. This peculiarity in the history of the social structure of Mexican society was a consequence of the process of monopolization of land ownership in the hands of large landowners, which prevented the formation of small and medium-sized land ownership and gave rise to mass landlessness of rural residents .44 The most accurate representation of the share of the petty bourgeoisie in the total mass of the amateur population of the city and village of Mexico at the end of the XIX century (1895) is given by the calculations made by Iturriaga. According to the author, the "autonomous" groups of the urban and rural "middle class", which, in fact, formed the core of the petty bourgeoisie, numbered in 1895 in the city 140644 people (with family members - 473119 people), in the village - 64732 (with family members - 194196 people)45 . Thus, the main part of the petty-bourgeois stratum of the population at the end of the XIX century was 205376

41 Raul Mejia Zuniga. Op. cit., p. 81.

42 Moises Ochoa Campos. Op. cit. T. II, pp. 76 - 78.

43 Jose E. Iturriaga. Op. cit., p. 35.

44 Bourgeois researcher Mac Bride reports that on the eve of the revolution, more than 95% of all heads of Mexican families living in rural Mexico (with the exception of only 5 states) did not own any property. Luis Cabrera estimated that by 1910, 90% of farmers in the central plateau of Mexico had no land (cit. by: Nathan L. Whellen. El surgimiento de una clase media en Mexico. "Ensayos sobre las clases sociales en Mexico", p. 56).

45 Jose E. Iturriaga. Op. cit., pp. 68, 69.

page 78
people (together with family members-667,315 people). Among the "autonomous" groups of the "middle class", Iturriaga refers to small and medium-sized owners who live off the income from their property. The "autonomous" group of the urban "middle class" includes well-to-do artisans, small urban merchants and entrepreneurs, small shareholders of joint-stock companies, and so on.The "autonomous" group of the rural "middle class" includes small landowners, ranchers, small merchants, and owners of traditional craft workshops.

The process of formation of the petty bourgeoisie, as well as such segments of the population adjacent to it as the bureaucracy, employees of various categories, engineers and agronomists of average qualification, people of liberal professions, etc., accelerated somewhat at the beginning of the XX century. This reflected the general trend of bourgeois development in Mexican society at that time. The birth and development of the Mexican petty bourgeoisie, as well as the other classes of Mexican bourgeois society, is connected with the development of industry, trade, the expansion of the market, the growth of cities and the spread of wage labor.

These were the most characteristic features of the social structure of Mexican society, which formed the basis of the alignment of political forces on the eve of the bourgeois revolution of 1910-1917. By its main characteristics by the beginning of the XX century. Mexican society was bourgeois, although its social structure had its own peculiarities, which consisted primarily in the fact that due to the domination of the country by a bloc of reactionary landlords and agents of foreign capital, which led to an unprecedented concentration of land wealth in the hands of a few individuals, Mexico did not pass, in essence, the "peasant stage" in its development. The democratic character of the revolution of 1910-1917 was the result of the active participation of the broad masses of the city and countryside, and above all of the landless Peon peasants, who became the main driving force of the revolution. The peasant armies of Zapata and Valcia were the revolutionary vanguard in the armed and political struggle that shook Mexico for a decade. The special revolutionary character of the Mexican peasantry is explained by the specific character of this class of Mexican society. The Mexican peasantry was not essentially a peasantry as such, that is, a petty-bourgeois class occupying in capitalist relations of production an intermediate position between the main classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, as was the case in other capitalist or semi - capitalist countries. It was a landless mass of agricultural workers-peons, people who had no property and were exploited by landlords-haciendados. This was the main reason why the Mexican countryside was particularly revolutionary. The Mexican peon, who was the backbone of the revolutionary armies, fought not only against the exploitation of him and his family by the landowner, but also to get land, to become a true peasant. The revolutionary potentials of the Mexican peasantry were so great that in the course of the revolution they were able to proceed with the constitution of peasant power and made an attempt to create a peasant state by convening a convention of revolutionary military peasant leaders in 1914-1915, which formed its own government and began drafting a constitution. The Great Peasant War in Mexico, led by the outstanding people's leader and hero of Mexico, E. Zapata, demonstrated at the same time the enormous revolutionary capabilities of the peasantry and its inability to independently, without the proletariat, solve the revolutionary tasks of the struggle against the system of exploiters.

page 79

Permanent link to this publication: