The Mexican Communist Party and the nationalization of the labor movement under the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas

Abstract

This text shows how the success of Cárdenas’s mass politics was largely due to the role played by the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) in the labor movement during the crucial years 1936-1938. Little recognized in the historiography of the period, the communist contribution to consolidating State hegemony over the organized masses consisted basically in unconditionally handing over the leadership of the labor movement to pro-government groups within the CTM and in subordination to national-revolutionary ideology.