STATISM, ITS RECURRING CYCLES IN MEXICO & ROMANIA

CONCEPTS

Much analysis of Mexican History since 1910 has involved assessing the meaning Mexico’s Revolution beginning in that year, and, if there was a real Revolution, when did end:

The Official Party of the Revolution (1929-2000)

claims that it Institutionalized the

Movement of 1910 to rule Mexico

for more than 7 decades as the

Permanent Revolution Under One-Party Democracy,

which since 1946 carries the name

(PRI- Partido Revolucionario Institucional);

and now in 2012, claims that in the election July 1st

it will regain the Presidency of Mexico

In 2000, the PRI was voted out of the Presidency and replaced without civil war by the

PAN- Partido Acción Nacional,

which has launched Mexico’s

Democratic Revolution

under which Presidents Vicente Fox (2000-2006) and

President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012)

have officially recognized that the Presidency of Mexico finally

shares Constitutional Power with the

Congressional and Judicial branches of government

(both of which had served since the dictatorship

of Porfirio Diaz, 1876-1911,

mainly as rubber stamp agencies)

The PRD- Partido de la Revolución Democrática

claims that the both the PRI and PAN

stand for Private Monopoly Capitalism in favor of the elites

and that only by making a Revolution to empower State Capitalism can

Mexico’s people gain their fare share of the national income

(In 2006 the PRD missed winning Mexico’s Presidency

by 0.6% of the vote)

CONCEPTS CONTINUED

In contrast to the above claims of on-going processes of Revolution,

many scholars see the Mexican Revolution as having

ended in the following years:

1919

(when Emiliano zapata and his idea of land reform

were killed as ordered by President Carranza)

1920

(when Carranza was assassinated, ending major anarchical violence

VIEW: http://mexicanhistory.org/revolution.htm )

1940

(after Mexico’s escape from World Depression #1 through "massive

distribution of land

into communal farms as well as nationalization of the foreign owned

rail and oil industries" by leftist President Lázaro Cárdenas)

1940-1946-1952

(when Mexico overtly shifted to Industrial Revolution and

urban development "benefitting the wealthy—not the masses

of communal farmers and common workers,"

as articulated by Daniel Cosío-Villegas, Jesús Silva-Herzog, Ramón Beteta,

Thomas Benjamin, etc,)

1959

(when Carlos Fuentes sees the Revolution of 1910 as having died

after having passed through agonizing stages of death examined

in his world-famous novel, The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962),

which downplays Mexico’s Commercial Revolution and the rise of

Mexico’s Middle Class

1968, 1982, 1994, 2000

(years for which Donald Hodges and Ross Gandy implicitly

revise Fuentes stages of death concept in their book

The End of the Revolution (2002)

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The year 1994

when President Salinas a) changed the Constitutional requirement of 1917

so that land would no longer have to be distributed to communal farms.

b) led Mexico into NAFTA (U.S.-Canada-Mexico

Free Trade Agreement).

c) isolated the Rebellion in Chiapas by Subcomandante

Marcos, as articulated by

Michael C. Meyer et al. in The Course of Mexican

History (2007 and 2011)

A minority view by one scholar wo argues that

no Revolution occurred in 1910

(as articulated by Ramón E. Ruiz, who sees only a Great Rebellion,

which existed from 1905 to 1924)

Ironically, in today’s Mexico all three major political

parties (PRI, PAN, PRD)

argue that they are each the only standard bearer of the

True Mexican Revolution.

Two of the parties have Revolution as part of their name:

the PRI and the PRD; and all three base their ideologies on

tackling unresolved issues from the pre- and post-20th century

Revolutions

The current general ideology of Mexico’s Presidents since 1983

Is based on framework of

Mixed State and Private Capitalism

established by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari

(Virtual President 1982-1988 and President 1988-1994),

the PRI’s intellectual and political leader who set

the standard followed by i) his PRI successor in the

Presidency of Mexico (1994-2000); and

ii) the PAN’s two Presidents (2000-2012)

The PAN now in 2012 claims that it will

continue in the Presidency but Revolutionize itself to implant

Catholic values in Mexico as it moves to favor

Private Capital more than State Capital

while finally winning the

"War Since 2006 Declared by Calderón Narcotraficantes,

Extortionists, and Kidnappers," who do not want a political

Revolution,

but rather to nullify Police and Military Powers seeking

to wipe out criminal activity that controls life

in more than half of Mexico’s 32 states

In the meantime, the PRD (until 1988 the left wing

of the PRI) has now

in 2012 allied with the PT- Partido del Trabajo

(which was founded in 1990 based on Maoist ideals);

The PT seeks to sharply restrict the role of Private Capital

as it adopts new nationalizations of domestic and foreign monopolies

to return in 2012 to Revolutionary State Capitalism

Although each of the above approaches offer incredibly important information and microanalysis to flesh out our understanding, they all miss the larger view that, since the Pre-Colonial era, Mexico has undergone 13 major Cycles of Revolution to ranging from Statism to Anti-Statism, each one causing major upheaval in the economic conditions of all social classes and their political status.

Mexico faces dozens of historical obstacles to development, which recur as the country moves from cycle to cycles. The cycles usually involve change in generational attitudes that fail to realize that resolution of problems is only half-solved (if that) even as new generations wants to identify the problem and priorities as they see them:

There are the dozens of identified obstacles throughout this Schema as hindering Mexico’s ability to improve the way Mexico functions domestically and interacts with the world.

The obstacles presented throughout the book are not all articulated, and readers are welcome to make implicit obstacles explicit so that they can be added to the number discussed here, sometimes as 25, 27, 28, 30, etc. Compare your own list of obstacles to those given in the 1909 book entitled The Huge National Problems, by Andrés Molina Enríquez and to those problems now evident now under President Calderón (2006—).

DEFINITIONS

The State is the system of power that holds the nation-State together. In Mexico it involves central authority (including police and military) that since the 19th century delegates some power to political units in the country, now 31 state governments¹ and the Federal District (which is like the D.C. in the USA). The Mexican system has three powers (presidency, Congress, and Judiciary) that have only since 2000 come to have equal powers (as in the USA, which has served as the general model for government). Mexico’s political units have their own legislatures and municipal governments (as in the USA).

Although Mexico’s overall model has followed that of the USA, the bureaucracy follows the French and Spanish models, but this is changing as Mexico now begins to implement the U.S. concept of justice (innocent until proven guilty, the right to confront accusers, and cross-examine witnesses in front of judges—situations that did not previously prevail. Too, the banking and stock market systems have come to mirror those of the USA in order to facilitate flows of capital.

Culturally, Mexico has often been compared to Italy: In both countries the senses of music, art, literature, and humor have thrived, in spite of often adverse conditions of juridical and politico-economic considerations. For Italy and the world, Machiavelli defined governance by deceit behind masks, a process defined for Mexico and the World by Octavio Paz as living behind false faces, which he calls masks.

Therefore, we can identify waves, and cycles of

a) Statism (high central government authority) have alternated with

b) Anti-Statism (minimal central government authority), and with

c) The Active State (mediating between a and b).

Statism, and trends of it occurs anywhere when the State Central Government, controlling a big part of (usually over 50% and in some cases people to improve the standard of living. For the people of Mexico, and Romanian people respectively. The Romanian President Nicolae Ceausall) of the national economy (GDP), claims to operate in the name of the escu who was elected in 1965, did just that, by nationalizing all industries, in orders to start socialism.

a. Statism is accompanied by full control of politics and society (not easily quantified), resulting in predatory dictatorship making decision through partial or full Central Planning. Theoretically individuals are more important than the State but the reverse is true. The masses are expected to follow orders of their supreme leader and his regional and local bosses, doing so without argument. Government may be based on State Capitalism—see below.

Politically Statism is associated to a long-lasting dictatorship and one-party democracy to justify control of power, thus reducing Congress and the Judiciary to a role of rubber-stamping the presi- dents wishes.

Authoritariansm in Mexico rules, as in the following three cases:

The record for an Official Party’s presidency is held by Mexico: which 79 years (implicitly beginning in 1921, when peace was restored to enable the rebuilding of a destroyed nation). Explicitly, however, Mexico’s Official Party lasted 71 years from the time it was established in 1929 through 2000 when it was voted out of power.

The Official Party began as the PNR (founded March 1929, Partido Nacional Revolucionario), which became the PRM (March 1938, Partido de la Revolución Mexicana), and was reorganized as the PRI (January 1946, Partido Revolucionario Institucional). The PRI (now the Former Official Party), has high hopes of regaining the presidency in 2012, but without the hope that it can again be the Official Party because the Judicial Power and The Legislative Power have gained co-equal status with the Presidential Power. (Under the Official Party, judges and legislators followed the presidents orders.)

The second longest period of one-party rule was the USSR, which lasted (implictly, with elections and internal party purges) 74 years from 1917 to 1991. Explicitly,² the Russian Communist held power for 67 years (1924-1991).

The third longest period of rule is held by China—its Communist Party has ruled for 61 years (since 1949), with no end in sight.

The fourth longest statist socialist rule was Nicolae Ceausescu’s rule of Romania since 1939 to 1989. His predecessor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej has been placed as a puppet president by the Soviet Russia, and ruled by nationalizing all strategic industries till December 1989. But Romanians had it with statism by 1947, when the Iron Curtain fell, and Ceausescu had started his own brand of statism, named multilateral statist society.

Nicolae Ceausescu was designing, together with the Communist party, 5 years-long out-of-touch with reality planning, where all achievements were gross lies.

Finally, Romanians, and the minorities had it with statism by December 1989, and the revolt against statism, and rule by decree started and ended up in a big blood bath.

b. Anti-Statism is a political movement aimed to break the monopoly of inefficient and omnipresent Centrally Planned State. Anti-Statists hope to give the primary role to the private sector, especially by selling state-owned enterprises to private individuals and establishing and/or restoring free market economy. Anti-Statists seek to assure that former state agencies (such as airlines, ports, railways, manufacturing industries, telephone system), which have already been sold in Mexico , remain in private hands. Anti-Statism can lead to the anarchy caused by greed for power (as in the case of Wall Street bringing down the World Economy, 2008—). To break the power structure of the old USSR after the implosion of the USSR in 1991, Russia privatized big parts of its oil industry (such as Yukos Oil), but after Putin came to power in 2000, he renationalized some it (including Yukos in 2006).³

c. Active Statism sees the role of the State Central Government as a mediating one. The Active State serves to bridge Statism and Anti-Statism by adopting from both to

1. own public utilities (such as the energy sector) which theoretically will be operated efficiently;

2. support an efficient and productive private sector as well as encourage joint ventures between the state (public sector) and private sectors (be they domestic or foreign). Government will be limited to the basic services for citizens (such as police and fire protection, education, social safety net, postal service, etc.) provided that they increase the well being of the population.

3. intervene in a national economy to rectify problems of the free market. This process was validated’ by the theories of British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883- 1946), who in the 1930s advocated that governments intervene via fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate the adverse effects of boom and bust economic recessions and the serious, on-going World Great Depression I, which began in 1929. His ideas are the basis for what is known as Keynesian economy theory. Keynes overthrew the older ideas of neoclassical economic theory that claimed free markets would automatically adjust (for example, by providing full" employment as long as workers flexibly adapted to the need to reduce their wage demands in times of economic crisis.

Following the outbreak of World War II, wrote Time Magazine in 1999, Keynes’s ideas concerning economic policy were adopted by leading Western economies. During the 1950s and 1960s, the success of Keynesian economics was so resounding that almost all capitalist governments adopted its policy recommendations.⁴ Time concluded that Keynes radical idea that governments should spend money they don’t have may have saved capitalism.

Keynes’s influence waned in the 1970s, partly as a result of excessive government regulation that had begun to afflict the Anglo-American economies by the end of the 1960s, and partly due to critiques from such economists as Milton Friedman (1912-2006) who, from his base at the University of Chicago, argued governments could not well regulate the business cycle through fiscal policy.

But, the advent of the world financial crisis in 2008 has caused a return to Keynesian economics that has provided the theoretical underpinning for the plans of such world leaders as President Obama and U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown as they seek too timidly to prevent World Great Depression II, through what I has called the Active-State.

The concept of Active State was first presented in my 1967 book

The Mexican Revolution: Federal Expenditure and Social Change Since 1910 (James W. Wilkie, Berkeley: University of California Press, first edition 1967; second edition 1970 and in the revised and enlarged editions in Spanish beginning in 1978:

La Revolución Mexicana (1910-1976): Gasto Federal y Cambio Social (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1978).

http://www.profmex.org/mexicoandtheworld/volume8/1winter03/03index1.htm

On debate about my concept of the Active State, see Miguel Rivera-Ríos, La Posrevolución Mexicana y la Estimación de James Wilkie del Cambio Social: La revisión de un debate, Economía Informa (UNAM, Número 314, Feb. de 2003), pp. 44-52; also: