In Living in Revolutionary Time Greg Grandin “What does it feel like to live in revolutionary times?” Revolution, according the Grandin, exists as the “hiatus between the no-longer and the not-yet” (4). The ensuing essays then track revolution and labour organization across Latin America. Grandin relies heavily upon Mayer and builds his argument off of Arno Mayer’s reflection: “Militarism and international conflict, Mayer wrote, are located in “over-reaction to over-perceived revolutionary dangers,” which generates “organic crises that often spin out of control” (42) as well as “where the past exists simultaneously with the future” (6). Certainly the essays within A Century of Revolution depict the push and pull socio-economic factors of the “in between” periods in Mexico, Chile, Cuba, etc. Grandin’s lengthy introduction delves into defining revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence, yet he mysteriously does not return to this theme. However, his observation that “Extreme pain destroys the world by radically reducing the victim’s conscious experience to his or her body, dissolving all other worldly claims” (7) serves as an important road marker for how the book contends with extreme violence, particularly counterrevolutionary, as serving to dispossess peasants from land and by extension, the economy. He also extends this definition of violence to the United States’ continuous attempts to break up land held by peasants, thereby forcing them into the wage economy. For the revolutionaries part, Grandin again turns to Mayer, who states that “Revolutionaries, both successful and aspiring, have to harness these furies [local and personal concerns], linking the local to the national in a novel system of sovereignty. Counterrevolutionaries, for their part, need to mobilize them to their own ends in order to draw the curtains on the future” (15). Grandin also calls for five “suggestions:”
1. We need to historicize political violence
2. We need to explore the active relation between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence
3. We need to acknowledge the dynamic nature of counterrevolution
4. We need examine how the dynamics of conflict outlined above played out on in an international field of power
5. We need to define Latin America’s revolutionary twentieth century as a distinct historical period

However, Grandin stops short of periodizing the “Century of Revolution,” instead allowing the many chapters within the book to serve as the evidence for such a period. It is unclear then how Grandin defines this period, unless he means only to point out that it is a useful categorization. Although the chapters do a sufficient job of addressing the vast majority of his suggestions, he does not revisit the theme of Latin America’s distinct revolutionary period, instead choosing to conclude with an interview transcript with Mayer. The only scant evidence that Grandin offers is that we can historicize this period because each country addressed in the book shares a resistance to subordination by the United States, which although true, seems to ignore the argument that revolutionary violence is bound up in hyper-local concerns and histories of labour organization, as the chapter’s authors argue.

In Michelle Chase’s chapter ‘The Trials Violence and Justice in the Aftermath of the Cuban Revolution,’ she elaborates on Grandin’s position that counterrevolutionary states were themselves responsible for escalating violence by outlining the cyclical escalating violence in rural areas that swayed public support for revolution despite the actual number of casualties. In other words, Batista, the military, police, and paramilitary were doing Fidel Castro’s work for him. This created a world of legitimate and illegitimate violence that placed M-26 as defending itself and campesinos, which in turn allowed it to be seen by many as a sympathetic cause, often framing it as an anti-colonial struggle. This brilliantly explains then why when the US became more involved in Cuba following the Revolution, many Cuban were already primed for and sympathetic to Castro’s anti-colonial struggle. This also partially explains the need for Castro’s government (and governments elsewhere) to continue to rely upon manufacturing crises framed by American imperialism. Castro’s international wars were in a way, a method of turning attention away from domestic detention and harassment of civilians. Chase also brilliantly points out that mass rallies were held as a way of solidifying anti-imperialist sentiment and thereby unifying multiple competing revolutionary causes, entities and vying interests. These rallies, framed around support for trial and punishment for corrupt persons affiliated with Batista, served the dual purpose of cementing Castro and M-26 as the legitimate heir apparent to the country by illustrating the perceived restraint and justice of the new regime. This important point was missed elsewhere in Latin America, for instance in Chile, where Allende was unsuccessful in uniting multiple competing interests under the banner of socialism. It is often overlooked that Castro’s pull towards socialism came after the revolution, more out of convenient virtue signalling to the Soviet Union and alignment with revolutionary goals than a premeditated venture.

In Peter Winn’s chapter, he argues (along with many of the other contributors) that revolutions are not just inherently violent, but reactions to the overreaction of “illegitimate” state violence, as Grandin initially calls for in his introduction as well. This explains then, Winn argues, how Allende failed by trying to frame himself as a constitutional president, rather than as a revolutionary, despite his eagerness for leftist reforms. In order for there to be a legitimate Chilean government, Winn argues, there needed to be more unity in addressing the illegitimate violence and terror of the previous regime, something that Pinochet and his followers were able to capitalize on and gain popular support with. Put another way, Winn seems to argue that the Chilean populous needed to produce revolutionary, and thereby “legitimate” violence in order to restore justice. The counterrevolutionary Right, led by Pinochet, was convincing disorganized rural communities that violence from Allende’s new government was imminent despite few signs, beyond symbolic, that there was any violence coming. Winn’s argues that counterrevolutionary forces had established violence long before the short-lived ascension of Allende. This certainly seems to be the case and may be helpful for us to evaluate the mechanisms under which revolutions were successful or not elsewhere in Latin America.

Ultimately, Grandin, in step with Mayer, argues that the Cold War in Latin America was one of “political reaction” or “’history as containment,’ not of communism but of mass democracy.” In other words, movements on the Right aligned with other groups such as military, religious, peasant, urban, para-military to counter revolutions with violence as a way of containing the spread of communism, which was of course aided and abetted by the United States. Yet Grandin still falls short of fully explaining how he periodizes this era. He does point out that revolution and counterrevolution are intrinsically bound up in each other, agreeing with Mayer that revolutions are usually responses to over reactionary threats to domestic struggles. While I partially agree with this position, Grandin, nor his contributors pull from many firsthand accounts of living in revolutionary times, failing to draw upon diaries or recorded histories of communities seeking violence, which weakens the books position. If revolutions are born from the Latin American countryside, where then are the voices of the campesinos within this book? Another dangling thread from this book is that Grandin and his contributors state that the effects of the Cold War are still in effect in Cuba, Colombia, Peru, etc, so how then do we periodize the Cold War in Latin America? It is not to say that this simple fact negates the book’s position, merely that Grandin’s project of defining this period fails in providing meaningful beginning or closing dates. Is Grandin arguing we are still within the “Century of Revolution?” Additionally, Grandin never really revisits his earlier discussion of defining how physical violence severs connection to body and land, though many of the book’s contributors discuss it. Although not a book about the specifics of violence, it might have been useful to revisit it in the conclusion. Additionally, I don’t believe that Grandin really successfully answers his question of what it was like to live in revolutionary times, providing only the social, economic, and local power structures as framing for people’s lives. Ultimately this book seems to be more about power dynamics than lived experience.

In Spectres of Revolution, Alexander Aviña argues that the historically chronic suppression of popular movements in the state of Guerrero “produced a subaltern political landscape inhabited by militarily defeated yet durable peasant utopias and longings that potentially could—and did—fuel popular insurgencies.” In other words,
the ghosts (like Vázquez and Cabañas- both schoolteachers!) of peasants and revolutionaries have a tendency to reappear and “haunt” the ruling elite. This occurs chiefly through the idea of the unredeemed dead; or the “revolutionary reenactment within subaltern memories and political registers.” To Aviña, these ghosts represent different utopias that are reified by representing different ideals: direct action, dignity, revenge, solidarity. What is unclear however is whether Aviña is saying that family members were bound to the symbolic and malleable ghosts of local revolutionaries as responses to a need to restore justice. The ghosts that exists and are reused are not merely ideas that survive in rural areas and experiences but ideals that are reworked and re-invoked as needed. Aviña argues that these ghosts or memories exist as “utopias” but this feels a little too romantic. Certainly the likes of Vázquez and Zapata represent ideals and they are somewhat disconnected from their historical realities but does that make them utopic? It is unclear how Aviña defines these utopias.

Aviña does link, As Grandin does, corruption and state violence (primarily at the hands of the PRI) as the driving factors behind rural resistance the re-invigoration of Vázquez and Cabañas as ghosts. Aviña’s use of “specter” over “ghost” implies that these supernatural entities were not merely floating apparitions but very tangible (if changeable) threatening and dangerous entities. We can assume here that Aviña means dangerous to the state. A curious point made early on but not reckoned with later is how radio become such a vital method of revolutionary transmission (perhaps we need to add Isles of Noise to the reading list). I would have liked to see more engagement with the tactics used broadly across Latin America as a means of organization, although that is not Aviña’s chief project.

For the most part Spectres of Revolution maintains that the tactics from the 1950s-60s were mostly comprised of peasant unions and protests/demonstrations but were met with excessive state crackdown in the form of violence, which in turn yielded revolutionary violence, which is in line with what Grandin/Mayer argue. Not fully explained however is what exactly the social mechanisms that breed this violence are, even if they are a reaction to counterrevolutionary violence. What exactly is the tipping point? Aviña argues that revolutionary violence must be seen outside of the notion of violence only being reactionary, that it was instead based upon “(r)ural demands for localized vengeance gradually developed into revolutionary movements that fought to establish alternative forms of state power at the national level” (7). Localized tactics and histories of direct action that long precede revolution are present in Grandin as well. Ultimately, rural activists were perhaps more moved by indignities done to their communities and families, as well as being left out of capitalist development, than aligned with Leftist movements. Again though, it begs the question how this cyclical and escalating violence is achieved and more specifically, how the spectres are used as a mechanism within that cycle.

My main question is how extensive/pervasive is this campesino memory? What social conditions led to the political organization of the campesinos if not international socialism, as Aviña argues? For one, violence committed against family members seems to be one of the main catalysts. If this is the case, is it really the ghosts of Vázquez and Cabañas that act as ideals or is it the ghosts of family members and the luminaries act merely as catalysts, with the real drivers being familial/community spectres? Is there even a divide between these two or are they bound to each other? Did these “ghosts” act as the reappearance of the disappeared under the PRI? Certainly these movements were connected to the legacy of the War of Independence and previous labour movements. However, Aviña reiterates that these movements were later linked to socialism via the deft political language of Vázquez and Cabañas, not an inherent through line to these movements such as “Guevarismo.” It seems that, and Aviña argues as much, that Mexican economic gains were only made by the rollback of social gains made up until the 1960s so the thread of economic exploitation is far more likely a catalyst for violence than anything else, if coupled with counterrevolutionary violence. So if those conditions are met, how are the spectres of revolution are brought in? Aviña does perhaps suggest a linkage between the familial ghosts and the spectres of revolution by bringing up the that the state would dump bodies of those disappeared as a deterrent, in effect, creating new physical “ghosts” that littered the landscape.

One question I had is why were schoolteachers disappeared? Teachers and professors always seem to be a target of counterrevolutionary violence but I feel that is less to do with their influence within classrooms than ability to translate political messages to campesinos, as well as organizing at an influential local level. Aviña brings in the Gallery One archive and relies heavily upon it as a source, the documentation of terror arm of the PRI, while the social history of the campesinos, may be limited, the Gallery One archive may be read for limited details of their lives. Despite numerous mentions of caciques, Aviña largely ignores specificity of Indigenous communities, which he perhaps feels are just implied? I am uncertain as to the intersection of campesinos and indigineity, at least in terms of how Aviña is using them here.

Relying heavily on the Gallery One archive, which has its limits as Aviña states up front, but it does illuminate far more about the social lives of the campesinos and the PDLP than most sources available but what specifically are the limits? For one,communiques and pamphlets often portray attitudes rather than behaviours, which only tell us so much about the lived experience of the campesinos and political organziations. I do agree however that generally, rural communities seem far more moved by an alternative utopia (i.e. anything but PRI) informed by local community needs and personal vengeance than by organized leftist movements. However, Aviña does miss that this was also the case in Cuba, even for Fidel Castro, Communism came quite late, as it was primarily Raúl that aligned with socialist thought early on, Fidel choosing to lead more often than not by organizing diverse local discontent against corruption and violence in rural Cuban communities. Despite the “failure” of the PDLP, how much do imagined utopias of revolution need to be fully realized? Can they not also exist as spectres or is it necessary that they make material gains? Avina argues that these utopias existed because “[t]he poor people’s state represented more than a simple inversion of the PRI government. Rather, it was an original project, or, perhaps, a project unfulfilled or betrayed in the eyes of campesino insurgents like Don Petronilo” (3, Conclusion). I am interested with how Aviña and Grandin imagine these utopias and whether they would argue, as they seem to suggest, that the revolutionary project, if we can define it as indeed one, has been achieved. Is Cuba then positioned as a socialist utopia? I am unclear and uncomfortable with any suggestion, however scant, that Cuba’s revolutionary project, although deeply influential, was achieved. For my own research, I would like to read more about the centralization of power in Havana and urban areas in Cuba and the ways in which the Revolution became severed from campesinos and rural needs. It will also be interesting to see how Castro’s specter will loom over the first Castro-less Cuba in sixty years. Similarly, how are and how will Che, Subcommandante Marcos, Zapata, etc be reproduced and reified as neoliberal and far-right movements blossom in the twenty-first century. This notion of ghosts and spectres I find useful in addressing the continuity of revolutionary ideals or “utopias.”

My “fun” reading tonight will be David Leal’s “Democratization and the ghost of Zapata: Mexico from 1959 to 1991”