Re-visioning the university: José Revueltas and academic self-management

Emergence of a politics of dissent

At the age of 13, following the death of his father, Revueltas was forced to abandon his studies and begin working at a hardware store in Mexico City. It was there that he met Manuel Rodríguez, referred to by his co-workers as ‘Trotsky’, who gave lessons on socialism to the assembled workers.⁸ ‘As a result of these conversations with Trotsky, I decided to search out the communists,’ said Revueltas.⁹ One of his first political activities was to participate in a demonstration in the Zócalo of Mexico City, where a red flag was hoisted atop the flagpole. Caught while trying to flee, the 14-year-old Revueltas was sentenced to ten months in a federal reformatory.

Upon his release, Revueltas joined the International Red Aid, and ‘after a trial period, I should have moved on to the [Communist] Youth, they did not accept me for a stupid, but typical, reason: because I was too “intelligent” for the Communist Youth and, therefore, very dangerous, and they passed me directly to the Party. That was in the year 1930.’¹⁰ Now a member of the PCM, which went underground in 1929, Revueltas would be imprisoned twice more in short order, in both instances at the infamous Islas Marías prison. In 1932, he helped organise a strike at El Buen Tono factory in Mexico City, which earned him five months’ imprisonment. Two years later, he was sent by the PCM to Ciudad Anáhuac, Nuevo León, to organise workers, which also led to a strike and a subsequent punishment of ten months of forced labour on the Islas Marías.¹¹ Based on his time in prison, Revueltas published his first novel, Los muros de agua, in 1941.

He won the National Prize for Literature for his second book, El luto humano, in 1943. That same year he was also expelled from the PCM for the first time for criticising the leadership of PCM head Dionisio Encina.¹² ‘Inside the Party we had an opposition group; my cell, the José Carlos Mariátegui cell, we edited a newspaper called El Partido until they expelled us en masse,’ Revueltas recalled.¹³ Along with being Editor-in-chief of El Partido, Revueltas also led the Unified Socialist Youth. From that position he published a manifesto denouncing the actions and attitudes of the PCM during disputes within the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM). The CTM, a corporatist entity within the state and the ruling Party of the Mexican Revolution (the precursor to the Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI), was urged by the government to expel the Workers’ Movement from the confederation. The PCM supported this action and also opposed its own union’s attempts to separate from the CTM to form explicitly independent and communist unions. Revueltas condemned these positions, which eventually led to his expulsion and that of others from his cell.¹⁴

During his 13 years away from the PCM, Revueltas was involved in other communist projects, such as the publication El Insurgente, the Popular Party, the Mexican Socialist League and more, always seeking ‘to create a new party that would effectively represent Marxist interests and the proletariat’, an effort at which he believed the PCM to be failing.¹⁵ While the PCM was a traditional communist party, a member of the Third International and dedicated to Stalinism, Revueltas was opposed to its dogmatism, orthodoxy and teleology. These differences were most fully highlighted in the 1949 publication of his third novel, Los días terrenales, in which he sought not to valorise the heroic masses of history found in orthodox communist philosophy, but to locate the communist struggle ‘through the everyday, ordinary, anti-heroic lives of real, living men, who struggle to give personal meaning to their existence’.¹⁶

Los días terrenales accomplishes this by way of contrasting the two main characters: Gregorio Saldívar and Fidel Serrano. Both members of the Communist Party, Gregorio is a young organiser, while Fidel is a party leader. ‘The former (clearly Revueltas’s persona) is portrayed as a thoughtful and warm human being who seriously questions the wisdom of Party doctrine … Fidel, on the other hand, is an inflexible, myopic Party functionary whose strict and unquestioning adherence to dogma is unmatched. Totally dedicated to the Communist cause, his zeal has utterly dehumanized him.’¹⁷ In Los días terrenales lies an elaboration of Revueltas’s Marxist humanism and a rejection of unthinking obedience; that a truly communist party must respond to the conditions under which the people strive and suffer in order to be authentically representative of the working class.

As argued by Pérez Domínguez, the primary concern of Revueltas’s work can be understood as ‘human freedom’.¹⁸ Notably, however, that freedom must be fought for, not only by rejecting capitalism, but also the dogma, orthodoxy and authoritarianism of the international communist movement, traditional communist parties and socialist states. Revueltas himself described his work as ‘sceptical’: ‘Look, I don’t belong to a school, a style, a generation, but yes, I believe in scepticism, in doubt, as one of the greatest human values. How important it is to learn to doubt. And I believe this essential doubt has obligated me to write.’¹⁹ Replete with doubt about the PCM and concerned with questions of human freedom and what that means, Los días terrenales captured Revueltas’s evolving and increasingly independent aesthetic and theoretical path.

The strength of Revueltas’s critique can perhaps best be judged by the ferocity of his detractors. The text ‘scandalized members of the Communist Party’ and Revueltas came under unflinching attack.²⁰ One of the first to condemn him was none other than Pablo Neruda, who said he ‘did not recognize Revueltas, his “former brother in common ideals and combat,” that his novel creates in him a “painful disappointment” and that “in it stagnates the poison of a bygone era, with a destructive mysticism that leads to nothingness and death”’.²¹ Others piled in, such as Enrique Ramírez y Ramírez, Juan Almagre and Antonio Rodríguez. The criticism extended to encompass not just Los días terrenales, but also Revueltas’s play El cuadrante de la soledad, which at the time had set a record as the longest-running play in Mexican history. Much of the critique focused on claims of Revueltas’s existentialism, with Ramírez y Ramírez stating, ‘It is impossible to read Los días terrenales without bringing immediately to mind that pseudophilosophy and semiliterature that the pedants call “existential philosophy”.’²² Nonetheless, academics such as Slick, Pérez Domínguez, Martínez Torres and Durán Ruiz argue that it was the political content of the text, with its scathing indictment of the PCM, that truly upset Revueltas’s critics.²³

Revueltas himself seemed to be caught off guard by the intensity of the attacks. In a prominent interview in 1950, he stated that his text was not a critique of the PCM nor was he an existentialist. At the same time, he defended his approach to writing as distinct from the socialist realism mandated by the Third International:

There is analytical realism and socialist realism. To fall within the second tendency that has brought to historical materialism a suspicious ingredient of optimism, my works should end with a song of hope in the future man; with big red aurora lights in the background and an orchestra playing ‘The International.’ This is absurd, and I can’t explain the optimism of those who think that way. If it’s true that the coming of a new social order, with a new economy, with new forms of life, can transform men, this is not to say that good and bad, pain and suffering, are going to disappear.²⁴

His denials did not appease his detractors, leading Revueltas to make the stunning announcement on 15 June 1950 that he had asked his publisher to pull all copies of Los días terrenales from the shelves and to close the curtain on performances of El cuadrante de la soledad. In an open letter, Revueltas admitted the critiques had created ‘a problem of ideological and artistic conscience’ and that they ‘merit the necessity for me to proceed immediately on a radical and exhaustive review of my work as a writer’.²⁵

The debacle surrounding Los días terrenales sent Revueltas into a sort of literary and political wilderness from which he would attempt to return by applying for readmission to the PCM in 1956. Forced to revisit the painful chapter of his life, Revueltas was obliged to write a piece of ‘self-criticism’ as part of his readmission process. In it, he acknowledged Los días terrenales as ‘anti-dialectical’ and ‘anti-Marxist’ and that it fell into a ‘reactionary philosophy’ which resulted in a book that could have no other effect except ‘to disarm the proletariat, slander communists, and to advocate the dissolution and collapse of all values’.²⁶

Forging an independent path

Despite pulling his book and being forced to offer a mea culpa for Los días terrenales in order to be welcomed back into the PCM, Revueltas did not rejoin the party out of naivety or due to a change in his political analysis, but rather in an attempt to reform the PCM from the inside. Indeed, as Booth notes, it was Revueltas’s development of ‘scathing critiques of the Mexican political system’ during this period that laid the groundwork for the role he would assume in 1968.²⁷ At this point in its history, the PCM, like communist parties around the world, was shifting away from Stalinism following the revelation of some of that era’s crimes by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was also wrestling with its own legacy of Stalinism, typified by the leadership of Dionisio Encina, with whom Revueltas had previously clashed, leading to his first expulsion from the PCM.²⁸ Revueltas ‘thought that the PCM should conduct a self-analysis and objectively recognize the errors of the past in order to truly overcome them, but, at the same time, insisted on the duty of remaining in the party to transform it from within’.²⁹

In service of this cause, Revueltas joined with the Karl Marx cell, which, together with other cells and members of the party in Mexico City, led a series of critiques and discussions regarding the core nature of the party. ‘The central point of those debates, beyond conceptual discussions, was the questioning of the PCM as the authentic party of the working class towards socialism.’³⁰ While there was an opening within the party to discuss the legacy of Stalinism, Revueltas and others found it did not apply to concerns about the party, its philosophy and its direction as a whole. Stalinist or not, the party remained dogmatic, anti-democratic and theoretically inchoate, according to Revueltas’s interpretation.³¹

At the same time as various cells within the party were pushing for foundational self-critique and analysis so as to effectively reorient its political and theoretical trajectory, the PCM was engaged in a massive strike by railroad workers in 1958. Its handling of the strike, and its ultimate defeat in 1959, was subjected to severe criticism by Revueltas. For him, the ideological, theoretical and political ineptitude of the party could have resulted in nothing else but defeat. He accused the PCM of ‘gnoseological deformation’, of ‘historical ineffectiveness’, and wrote of ‘the bankruptcy of the communist movement in Mexico, as it is conceived and directed’.³² Such attacks were not tolerated by the PCM, who in turn accused Revueltas of being an ‘ultra-leftist’, a ‘revisionist’ and a ‘liquidator’, before expelling him from the party for the second time in 1960.³³

After spending several months in the Mexican Workers’–Peasants’ Party, attempting to use it as a vehicle to create an all-inclusive working-class party in Mexico, many of those expelled alongside Revueltas in 1960 established the Spartacus Leninist League (LLE), conceptualised as an ‘organized ideological current’ or what Soldatenko described as prefiguring ‘many of the positions of later Mexican Maoist organizations’.³⁴ Along with founding the LLE, Revueltas used this time to elaborate on his criticisms of the PCM and the state of the communist movement in Mexico as a whole, leading to the 1962 publication of his major theoretical work Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza. Previously, in 1958, he had written a lengthy essay entitled ‘México: Una democracia bárbara’, in which he studied the practice of tapadismo or el dedazo in Mexican politics. This phenomenon, which lasted until the 2000 democratic opening that occurred with the election of Vicente Fox of the National Action Party, was the process by which the outgoing president of Mexico would handpick his successor from the ranks of the ruling PRI party. While maintaining the principle of ‘no re-election’, which was a primary rallying cry of the Mexican Revolution, el dedazo nonetheless ensured continuity and the ongoing one-party dictatorship of the PRI. Under such a system, Revueltas argued, aside from the PRI, no political party in Mexico served a purpose except to enable the anti-democratic charade to continue.³⁵

While critiquing the state and all political parties in ‘México: Una democracia bárbara’, Revueltas turned his attention to the PCM in Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza. His thesis was that the working class in Mexico suffered from a ‘historical alienation’ as a result of the particular manner in which the Mexican state came into existence and articulated itself, leading to a ‘proletarian ideology that constitutes nothing but a deformation of worker consciousness … The Mexican working class, in this way, is projected into the history of the last fifty years of the country as a headless proletariat, or that has on their shoulders a head that is not theirs.’³⁶ The PCM, for its part, failed to recognise this alienation and thus unwittingly perpetuated it, playing into the interests of the ruling class.³⁷

In support of his assertions, Revueltas walks through the history of Mexico, from its independence from Spain to the Mexican Revolution to the accommodation of a one-party dictatorship. Particular emphasis is placed on the Mexican Revolution which, Revueltas argues, occurred while Mexico was in a ‘semifeudal’ or ‘pre-bourgeois state’, according to Pablo Oprinari, the outcome of which is misunderstood.³⁸ Instead of being a fully democratic-bourgeois revolution – a necessary step in the eventual coming to power of the proletariat according to the teleology of Marxist-Leninism – the Mexican Revolution led to a consolidation of a ‘national bourgeoisie’.³⁹ The victory of a national bourgeoisie, a ‘reactionary class’ invested in ‘pre-capitalist socio-economic structures’, as the result of the revolution foreclosed various options available under the emergence of a democratic-bourgeois regime.⁴⁰ Notably, it stifled the possibility of the formation of classes independent of the national bourgeoisie, as the latter situated itself as the heir to the revolution. To go against the interests of the national bourgeoisie was therefore to go against the revolution, rendering an independent working-class counterrevolutionary. As Revueltas explains:

In power, the national bourgeoisie has achieved in Mexico what is very difficult to achieve without a fierce dictatorship: to eliminate the political concurrence of adversarial classes. We say without a fierce dictatorship; this is not to say that the type of government that exists in Mexico ceases to be a dictatorship, and a class dictatorship … The social structure the State has adopted in Mexico has come to have, with ‘the revolution made government’, such a particular nature and functioning that the governing class, the bourgeoisie, can immediately label as seditious, as subversive, as ‘contrary to the interests of the revolution’, or as ‘socially dissolvent’ any political concurrence that precisely contains, as we said, a class character.⁴¹

Rather than acknowledging this conundrum, the PCM made the error of viewing itself as an upholder of the ideals of the Mexican Revolution. It therefore appealed to the revolution and spoke of furthering it when, in reality, such efforts only strengthened the position of the national bourgeoisie.⁴²

The result of these developments in Mexican history, and the failure of the PCM to recognise and theorise them, led to a situation in which there was no independent working class in Mexico and the working-class consciousness that did exist, as represented by the PCM, was aberrant and built on faulty foundations. For Revueltas, this problem was compounded by the nature and behaviour of the PCM. It was a party that, while believing itself to be the vanguard of the working class and the only true representative of Marxism in Mexico, refused self-criticism, self-analysis and course correction, and was beholden to dogma, to the detriment of the party and the working class in general.⁴³ Through its adherence to dogma and unquestioning, self-assured righteousness as to the correctness of its positions and politics, the PCM created an ‘absurd mystique that can be seen among the militants, not as if these belonged to a revolutionary party but rather a religious congregation’.⁴⁴ As a result of these internal dynamics, and certainly based on his own experiences, Revueltas ruled out the possibility of the PCM transforming itself into the true head of the proletariat body. Indeed, Revueltas concluded that while there was a group calling itself the PCM, the existence of a true communist party in Mexico was a ‘historical unreality’.⁴⁵ It was therefore necessary to work outside the PCM, outside political parties, outside the state, to organise the working class, correctly analyse its historical conditions and rectify the skewed consciousness that was only leading it in the service of the national bourgeoisie.

Although the LLE funded the printing and distribution of Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza in 1962, Revueltas would soon find himself at loggerheads with the organisation he had helped establish. In 1963, he published several articles critical of Maoism and democratic centralism which led to an intense debate within the LLE. Revueltas was particularly strident in asserting ‘individual freedom’ and ‘the free expression of criticism’, regardless of the position of the organisation to which one belonged.⁴⁶ The majority of the LLE central committee disagreed and voted for his expulsion, along with others, on 17 June 1963. As Rodríguez Araujo summarised, ‘He already had the experience of being expelled from the PCM and the LLE because he was in favour of freedom of expression and democracy within the “vanguard of the working class” parties or those aspiring to become such. His free spirit and his enormous intelligence clashed with the mental framework of many of the left-wing militants of those years.’⁴⁷

Articulating academic self-management

After his expulsion from the LLE, Revueltas went on to form the short-lived ‘Karl Marx Leninist Cell (without party)’, before stepping back from political organising for several years. He would never again join a political party. During this time, he focused largely on literary and aesthetic production, publishing his sixth novel Los errores in 1964, the theoretical essay ‘El conocimiento cinematográfico y sus problemas’ in 1965 and Obra literaria in 1967. That same year he received the prestigious Xavier Villaurrutia Award in recognition of his life’s work. This lull in militant activity did not last, however, as the explosion of 1968 drew Revueltas back into the midst of agitation, theorisation and organisation.

The immediate events prior to the mass student movement in 1968 began on 22 July, when a fight between two student groups in Mexico City was brutally broken up by riot police. Four days later, two protests held by students in the city were again attacked by riot police. In response to the state’s violence, students began to form committees of struggle on their respective campuses. The situation was further exacerbated when the military fired a bazooka at the doors of the San Ildefonso Preparatory School on 29 July during a student protest. More than 100,000 rallied on the UNAM campus on 1 August, and on 5 August, students from various universities held the first joint mass demonstration of 1968. Three days later, the committees of struggle from various university and high school campuses united to form the CNH and issued a list of six demands: freedom for all political prisoners; the abolition of the riot police; the firing of the Mexico City police chiefs; the repeal of the sedition law Article 145; reparations for the victims of repression and that those responsible for the repression be held accountable.⁴⁸

As Jaime Pensado and José Revueltas both argue, however, the events of 1968 cannot be understood as emerging out of a vacuum. Pensado traces the origins of 1968 back to the first mass student mobilisations in post-revolutionary Mexico in 1956 at the National Polytechnical Institute and in 1958 at UNAM.⁴⁹ These early student actions contributed to the emergence of the New Left in Mexico, ‘in which students assumed the role of central protagonists of “revolutionary” and/or “democratic” changes who embraced innovative strategies of defiance and opened new spaces of contestation’.⁵⁰ This New Left, akin to Revueltas’s own politics, rejected both the empty revolutionary rhetoric and claims of the state as well as the authoritarianism and dogma of the traditional leftist parties. While mistakenly labelling his thinking as ‘orthodox’, Pensado credits Revueltas with contributing to the growth of the New Left among students:

Finally, leftist activity inside the university during the 1960s also included more militant groups that, armed with orthodox Marxism and greatly influenced by the writings of UNAM professor José Revueltas, sought revolutionary changes with a capital ‘R,’ as the prelude to the implementation of a socialist system. In particular, these self-proclaimed ‘Revolutionary’ students of the New Left were influenced by Revueltas’s piercing critiques of the Mexican Communist Party for having failed to take a leading position during the railroad workers’ strike of the late 1950s; these students, in agreement with their mentor, saw these labor strikes as the most important confrontation led by the working class against the bourgeoisie up until that time. But especially resonant for these students was Revueltas’s critique of the moderate New Left, concerning what he interpreted as the misguided assumption that the solution to the proletariat problem could be found in the Mexican Revolution.⁵¹

As mentioned above, Revueltas traced the origins of 1968 back a decade to 1958 and the defeated railroad workers’ strike. The events around the strike informed Revueltas’s own critique of the PCM, as encapsulated in Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza. In 1968, Revueltas saw a continuation of history, an evolution of struggle, that could be identified as a legacy of the strike. Reflecting on the events in 1975, Revueltas noted:

The process of 1968 had a dual character: spontaneous and conscious. I will refer only to the former. Spontaneous in that it obeyed an underlying historical rebellion that came from the previous decade, the railway strike. A strike that is savagely repressed, suppressed, decapitated. It couldn’t remain so; on the contrary, it went to work as ‘the mole of history’ that Hegel speaks to us of, underground. In order to fester and to explode in any sector of society.⁵²

That sector of society, partly under the tutelage of Revueltas himself, would be the organised students in and around Mexico City.

Even before July 1968, Revueltas was involved in the events of that year, meeting with students and young people to act in solidarity with the mass mobilisations in France.⁵³ In an open letter to the ‘French revolutionaries’ in May 1968, Revueltas applauded their actions while maintaining the critiques he outlined in Los días terrenales and Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza, writing,

Your mass action, which has become immediate historical praxis, from the first moment, takes on the peculiar character of also being a great theoretical leap, a radical subversion of the theory mediated, deformed, fetishised by Stalinist disciples. You are showing that to emancipate Marxism, to free it from the narrow mental prison and from the unbreathable atmosphere of communist parties, to tear off of theory the straitjacket of a spurious ‘democratic centralism,’ constitutes the essential requirement of the Revolution, that begins, as such, in one’s own home, occupied by by ideological liars and swindlers.⁵⁴

This letter would foreshadow Revueltas’s stance when the student movement coalesced in Mexico, as he placed no faith in the capacity of political parties to move the resistance forward but only to impede it due to their own theoretical limitations.

As mentioned above, when the movement did begin in Mexico, Revueltas immediately got involved. He became a member of the CNH, representing the Committee of Intellectuals, Writers, and Artists, as well as a leading member of the Department of Philosophy and Letters’ Committee of Struggle. Over the course of the movement and into his imprisonment, he wrote prolifically, attempting to analyse and influence what he clearly understood to be a major historical moment as it happened. As Draper describes, Revueltas understood the uprising as ‘a theoretical act’ that was both a ‘singular event’ and one rooted in a deeper history of past struggles that would have ramifications long after the streets emptied.⁵⁵ This act was a development that coincided neatly with his own politics: a conscious mass movement with revolutionary potential that was openly hostile to the state and organised itself independently of political parties. He was particularly interested in giving it a form or structure that would allow it to both sustain itself after the initial explosion and spread beyond the student body into society at large. The vehicle he envisioned for achieving this was the concept and practice of academic self-management.

In his first piece on the movement, written just days after the initial protests started and presciently titled ‘Our “May Revolution” in Mexico’, Revueltas issued a call for academic self-management in order ‘to convert the university into the most active critical element of the society in which we live’.⁵⁶ In his work on Revueltas’s theory, Sainz Paz notes that ‘Through academic self-management, the university becomes the critical consciousness of society, its self-awareness that seeks to transform its environment and thereby contribute to its disalienation.’⁵⁷ Throughout the duration of the movement, Revueltas would continue to expand and develop the idea of academic self-management and its various components, including ‘organized consciousness’, ‘cognitive democracy’ and grassroots control.⁵⁸

For Revueltas, the university was a unique site of struggle – indeed, the only place capable of fomenting the necessary upheaval for the transformation of society. According to his analysis, and drawing on insights from Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza, in the post-revolutionary era, the Mexican state through its forms of exercising power, its corporatist and clientelist structures and its repressive apparatus, effectively made struggle independent of state-permitted avenues impossible. The battles undertaken by unions, political parties, peasant organisations and more were all effectively coopted or smashed by the state while it cloaked itself in a revolutionary mantle. The university was the only arena not yet in the grip of such an arrangement. Thus, while the university represented a privileged sector of society, as distinct from the working class, it was the only sphere where the ‘crime [sic] of integrity and of independence’ were permitted and therefore must be where the struggle for a new society emerged.⁵⁹ This analysis corresponded with the perspective of the students themselves, as the CNH declared the student body to be ‘the most active conscience of the country and, in this conscience, resound all the ills that afflict the nation’s body’.⁶⁰

Academic self-management was the means to maintain the independence and struggle of the university, as well as to extend it to broader society. To Revueltas, academic self-management meant placing control of the university, in all its aspects, in the hands of the students and faculty, making no distinction for hierarchy. It meant that together, these two groups would formulate a plan of study and determine the functioning of the university as a whole. Practising academic self-management was the highest form of academic freedom and university autonomy and would lead to the development of an ‘organized collective consciousness’ through rigorous inquiry into every problem facing society, with no topic off limits or not subject to criticism.⁶¹ ‘Nothing is definitive, nothing permanent, for academic self-management, everything is questionable within the field of higher education and outside of it. Self-management is the active and living form of militant and critical knowledge.’⁶² The formation of an organised collective consciousness through study informed by academic self-management also requires the emergence of a ‘cognitive democracy’: ‘the acceptance of all schools, tendencies, and currents of thought and the right of those to organise themselves to act in whichever direction may be’.⁶³ In its various facets, academic self-management could be understood as libertarian: leaderless, without hierarchies, embracing to the fullest the practices of academic freedom and freedom of expression, self-directed, directly democratic, non-specialised and concerned with grappling with the fundamental issues and problems facing Mexican society at large. Indeed, in understanding the struggle at hand, Revueltas invoked both ancient Greece and the Paris Commune in identifying the ‘new forms of political activity’ and the ‘total system change’ underway within the student movement.⁶⁴ For such efforts to have any impact, however, they could not remain restricted to the university. Revueltas envisioned these tools being refined first in higher education and then implemented among every sector of society, eventually leading to the ‘implantation of socialism in Mexico within the broadest and most unrestricted forms of freedom and democracy’.⁶⁵ Sainz Paz observes that, ‘For Revueltas, this was not merely a proposal for establishing self-governance in universities, but a step toward the movement extending into social self-management.’⁶⁶ Academic self-management was not merely an intellectual exercise, but the means to transform the entire country and orient it towards maximum freedom, democracy and justice.

Revueltas envisioned the impact of academic self-management as spreading throughout society via intentional organisation, an organisation typified by grassroots control. He called for the creation of a popular struggle council that would take on what is now referred to as a ‘spokescouncil model’. The council would comprise representatives from a workers’ council, a popular council and a student council. Those three councils would, in turn, be made up of representatives from coordinating committees based on factories or industries, geographical location and educational centres, respectively. Coordinating committees would be populated by representatives from committees of struggle organised across all three sectors. Finally, those committees of struggle would include representatives from organised brigades from the workers’, popular and student struggles.⁶⁷ Organised as such, power would move from the bottom-up, from the brigade level – those conducting on-the-ground mobilisation efforts within their respective sectors – to the committees-of-struggle level, made up of brigade members, who in turn comprised the representatives forming the coordinating committees, members of which then formed the workers’, popular and student councils. From those three councils, representatives were selected to sit on the popular struggle council. While Revueltas did not go into detail regarding decision-making processes nor the selection of representatives, based on his militant embrace of freedom and democracy, as well as his rejection of leaders, one can imagine he had an accountable, transparent, directly democratic practice in mind.

The success of the popular struggle council, however, was primarily contingent on the success of academic self-management within the universities in the creation of something new that could then be transmitted to the broader society. The importance and functioning of this project merits lengthy quotation. In the short essay ‘¿Qué es la autogestión académica?’, Revueltas wrote:

Self-management transforms the centres of higher education into the self-critical part of society. That is to say, if higher education previously only carried out a critical role, now, through self-management, it will carry out a transformative and revolutionary role. Critique represents a parallel action directed from the outside, towards society, without any commitment, as a simple definition, as an inert classification, in the same way a phenomenon of nature is defined or classified. Self-management, however, questions society from the inside, as the part of it that it is, and that, in such a state, it becomes the self-critical consciousness of said society. This consciousness, as critique, is the negation of a given society (bourgeois or socialist), and as self-critique is the negation of the negation: it subverts said society, it represents the new and implacable struggle against the old.⁶⁸

Through academic self-management, the nature, purpose and direction of the university will change. Instead of standing apart from society and critiquing or classifying it, it will recognise the role that it plays in society and act accordingly, as the motor by which to understand society and the problems confronting it, as well as the self-reflexive body from which will emerge proposals and organisation to bring about change based on its self-criticism. In turn, these proposals and practices will be adopted by other sectors of society who organise themselves according to the popular struggle council model discussed above. What emerges from the university via self-management will be implemented and further elaborated on as diverse branches of society themselves begin practising self-management. Eventually, all of society – with the exception of disinvited oligarchs and imperialists – will be analysing, studying, questioning and addressing the problems they face from their unique positionalities, in cooperation with other segments of society.⁶⁹ The means by which to resolve problems will not be left to the state, political parties or corruptible leaders, but rather to the self-organised, federated masses.

In the formation of the CNH, the collaboration of teachers fighting alongside students in the struggle and the work of the political brigades who went into the city to reach out to labour and civil society, Revueltas saw the student movement of 1968 as already practising academic self-management.⁷⁰ The next step was for it to move from ‘spontaneous self-management’ to a ‘collective consciousness in continual practice’, inside and outside of the classroom.⁷¹ As González Rojo notes, ‘Revueltas had the pretension of making conscious an unconscious activity with the goal of consolidating, deepening, and extending it.’⁷² Revueltas attempted to push this by consistently articulating, writing and calling for academic self-management within the context of the struggle. Perhaps unsurprisingly, at times this would land him in trouble. In response to President Gustavo Díaz’s State of the Union address on 1 September 1968, Revueltas wrote a piece calling for academic self-management.⁷³ This was unimaginatively interpreted by the Committee of Intellectuals, Writers, and Artists, for whom he was a delegate to the CNH, as a call for a return to classes and a breaking of the strike. As such, he was removed from his position as delegate and resigned from the committee.⁷⁴ Others were more receptive. Following the Tlatelolco massacre, as the movement was attempting to reorganise itself and as Revueltas himself was in hiding, he put forward a proposal on 4 November 1968 to UNAM’s Philosophy and Letters’ student-teacher assembly via the Philosophy and Letters’ Committee of Struggle to adopt academic self-management. The assembly unanimously approved his proposal and the next day it was presented to a plenum of the CNH, the outcome of which is unknown.⁷⁵

Perhaps the most well-known move to further academic self-management was Revueltas’s lecture on 15 November 1968, mentioned in the introduction, when he was smuggled onto the UNAM campus and spoke to a packed auditorium, protected by students from arrest by the police. What precisely was said was not recorded; however, we do have Revueltas’s own outline, as well as accounts from journalists and police. La Jornada noted that Revueltas spoke to ‘the direct democracy and free expression in the assemblies, the solidarity, the living contact with social and political reality’ as ‘triumphs of the movement’.⁷⁶ The police, for their part, alternatively labelled Revueltas’s calls for academic self-management as ‘imitating Mao’s Red Guards from the Cultural Revolution’ as well as more thoughtfully noting the opinions of students of his proposals:

The students consider ‘academic self-management’ as self-driven and self-directed higher education, or that is, what comes after junior high school. The activity of an organized collective consciousness not aiming for uniformity of thought but rather trying to learn and to know. Exercising freedom of expression and of confrontation with thought, without limits … They consider that ‘academic self-management’ is to learn, to know, to challenge, to change, to transform.⁷⁷

As mentioned, Revueltas was detained the day after his talk while staying in a safe house provided by students. Sentenced to 16 years’ imprisonment, he would continue the struggle from the inside, writing on academic self-management, going on hunger strike alongside other political prisoners and composing perhaps his most acclaimed novel, El apando.

Released on 13 May 1971 as part of Luis Echeverría’s democratic opening, Revueltas remained committed to the cause of academic self-management. This became all the more urgent after the 10 June 1971 Halconazo – a manifestation of the iron-fisted side of the Echeverría regime – when dozens of protesting students were killed by the state-backed paramilitary group Los Halcones. In the context of the Cold War, Revueltas saw the radical reorganisation of the university as the first step in saving humanity from nuclear war and the failings of both capitalist and socialist states. González Rojo reflects that ‘Revueltas, in effect, was obsessed by the nuclear era in which we lived.’⁷⁸ Such concerns were present before the student movement and were treated extensively in Revueltas’s May 1968 letter to ‘French revolutionaries’.⁷⁹ They were taken up again in a lecture delivered in August 1972 at Nuevo León University, where he articulated an understanding of nuclear powers as constituting a single ‘Super State’, despite their differences.⁸⁰ These states keep all people under a unified form of oppression – that of nuclear war and annihilation – that can be countered only through a rescuing of our consciousness, which is work that must occur within a critical, self-managed university.⁸¹ Again, according to González Rojo, ‘Self-management is, to say, the rational antidote to the third world war.’⁸² A self-managed university would lead to a self-managed society, one that is critically conscious and able to act against the nuclear threat of the Super State.

Though beyond the scope of this article, it merits mention that this internationalist positioning of academic self-management places Revueltas firmly within a transnational Latin American conversation regarding university reform and autonomy as the means to societal improvement. As Nicolás Dip has thoroughly outlined, ‘These discussions [of which Revueltas was a part] addressed many of the issues facing the left in other parts of the region, such as the crisis in higher education, controversies surrounding the legacy of reform, and the significance of student political participation.’⁸³ In his remaining years, Revueltas would continue this dialogue, lecturing nationally and internationally, including at Stanford University in 1972 and the University of California, Berkeley in 1974. Failing in health, partly because of his time in prison, José Revueltas died on 14 April 1976, at the age of 61, still technically on parole by the state that both celebrated and incarcerated him.

Conclusion

Less than a week after Revueltas’s arrest, the CNH voted to end the strike and return to classes on 21 November 1968. Lasting a total of five months, with hundreds dead and hundreds imprisoned, the strike among students in central Mexico marks that country’s contribution to the tumultuous year that was 1968 and is an event that continues to have repercussions to this day, with annual protests being held every year on 2 October. While students and faculty members spent time in prison for participating in the events of 1968, those responsible for the movement’s repression, including the Tlatelolco massacre, remained unpunished.

While the movement was crushed with force, its legacy lives on. Part of that legacy is the work of José Revueltas, ‘perhaps the most prominent and polemic figure of 1968 in Mexico’.⁸⁴ As this article has attempted to show, 1968 represented not only a culmination of post-revolutionary social movements in Mexico, but also the culmination of Revueltas’s own theoretical and political trajectory. Over the course of his lifetime, Revueltas practised continual reflection and analysis, as demonstrated through his clashes with the PCM and the Spartacus Leninist League and the critiques of the PCM by way of both Los días terrenales and Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza. His conclusion that revolutionary change was only possible outside of the state and political parties coincided with the explosion of 1968, a movement that mirrored his politics and one in which he was uniquely positioned to participate.

His contribution to that particular moment, by way of the theory of academic self-management, has received limited attention, despite his prominent role in the movement and the lasting implications of his theory. In Revueltas’s own summation, the movement itself epitomised academic self-management:

Although the concept of self-management was not explicitly deployed as such by the 1968 Movement, self-management constitutes, nonetheless, its essential theoretical conquest and one of the greatest achievements obtained. Self-management was, in fact and without any doubt, the very practice of the Movement, its existential form of being, in accordance with its own concrete reality and its content as questioning of the system.⁸⁵

As student movements continue to inflect political practice and debate from Mexico to the United States and beyond, Revueltas’s theory of a university controlled and jointly administered by students and faculty, whose programme of study exemplifies academic freedom, autonomy and the self-critical role of the university within society – and seeks to spread that form of self-organisation into other sectors of public life – continues to hold relevance.

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Conflicts of interest statement

The author declares no conflicts of interest with this work. All efforts to sufficiently anonymise the author during peer review of this article have been made. The author declares no further conflicts with this article.