Arise! Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution
Christina Heatherton, University of California Press, £25

ONE of the most overlooked figures in the history of socialism as written in the global North has to be the great Indian revolutionary MN Roy.

Many scholars would agree that Roy has not been given full due in accounts of the debates swirling in the tumultuous wake of the 20th century’s two great revolutions, in Mexico and then Russia.

Roy — founder of the Mexican Communist Party and later its Indian counterpart — fomented a critical debate about colonialism that inspired and irked comrades in equal measure but that without doubt retains resonance today at this juncture on the left.

He insisted that the overthrow of capitalism globally was simply impossible without an end to colonialism, the very existence of which enabled the imperialist bourgeoisie to maintain control over the (white) Western working class.

Lenin was sympathetic to his ideas and tasked Roy with providing an historic supplement to his 1920 Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions presented at the Second World Congress of Comintern. 

While Roy disagreed with Lenin’s strategic praxis towards colonial societies that promoted the potential for revolutionary alliances with bourgeois nationalist elements in countries such as India, his legacy is broader, drawing attention as it does to the consciousness of the colonial subject.

As Christina Heatherton writes, Roy “promoted the centrality of the colonised and racially subjugated world in the class struggle, and thereby countered the ideal of the classically conceived white industrial proletariat, an image reinforced by the colour line.”

His detractors included John Reed, the delegate of the US Communist Labour Party, as well as British socialists which immediately recreated the invisible but, undoubtedly for Roy very visible “colour line” of racial bias that drove imperialism, a term associated with the black thinkers Frederick Douglass and WEB Du Bois. 

This fulcrum between the struggle for socialist revolution constructed on the basis of a colour-blind consciousness of class, and the struggle to throw off the chains of racial oppression that characterised imperialism in practice, is a central thread woven throughout Arise! just as identity has been at the heart of divisions in post- and neo-Marxist thought.

Heatherton takes the Mexican Revolution as a focus for this theme upon which she constructs a history of radical internationalism, the solidarity that was overflowing with such seething potential on the left after 1910. 

While referencing class extensively, she weaves a continuous thread of radical interconnections between several prominent figures engaged in, or inspired by, the revolutionary ferment to whom racial solidarity was of formative importance. 

It is without doubt that many black and Asian as well as female revolutionaries came to socialism via the very obvious lived reality of racial and gender oppression.

Heatherton examines the experience of internationalism in the lives of select protagonists such as Roy, Ricardo Flores Magon, Alexandra Kollontai, Dorothy Healey and Elizabeth Catlett from the period of Mexican revolutionary nationalism itself to its aftermath. 

As the theoretical backdrop to her story, she foregrounds the ideas of Douglass and Du Bois.

This history is essential and inspiring, and the author’s enthusiasm cannot be concealed. Moreover, it is timely, because her thesis speaks to unresolved and, at times, divisive debates about how to reconcile the two main engines of radical consciousness, identity and class. 

Arise! however, is ultimately a lost opportunity. Other than tracing the hidden personal histories of several characters, we are left hungry for theoretical insights enabling us to fully understand internationalism as a political phenomenon.  

While the book is driven by laudable moral outrage at the experience of black slaves and continuing racial oppression in the US itself, including the mistreatment of Mexican migrants, it pays only cursory attention to the social origins of Mexico’s revolution, the disinheritance of the indigenous masses, who are by a long stretch history’s greatest victim of the imperial “colour line.”

Solidarity with Mexico’s vast indigenous hinterland, artificially subsumed by the post-revolutionary state under the nationalistic rubric of “mestizaje” yet still oppressed today, is not explored in these annals with anything like the historical attention it deserves.

The same might also be said of the book’s treatment of the native peoples of both Latin America and north America more generally, which is doubly ironic, because it is possible that Douglass, for example, had some Native American heritage.

Moreover, the author only scratches the surface of internationalist sentiment across Latin America, often more inclined to paint eloquent, eclectic vignettes through a lens of black social thought than to provide a forensic examination. 

These are not trivial points because if we are to take away one message from Heatherton’s otherwise unmissable work about the Mexican revolutionary ripple effect, it is that the most intoxicating forms of solidarity are, like the best brands of tequila, usually colourless.