January-February 2001:
International YouthPeace Week 2000
YouthPeace Experiment 3
Globalization and Militarism
Campaigning for Real Change
Ruth Benn Leaves WRL Staff
Our Debts to Ruth
Letters:

Homepages:
War Resisters League
The Nonviolent Activist

Letters

Marx, Traven and Chiapas

In Matt Meyer’s review of Bill Weinberg’s Homage to Chiapas in the November- December issue, Meyer writes,

Included in this rapid-fire … historical overview is an account of Marx and Engels’ “rejoicing” at the conquest of Mexico in their time. Though realizing that U.S. capitalists would be the real winners, their fundamental distrust of peasantry and indigenous “primitive” movements led them to turn away from the resistance movements of the mid-1800s.

What is the source of this assertion? This seems to me to be a total distortion or miscomprehension of Marx’s thoughts, which I have been seriously studying for six years, which means that Bill Weinberg is doing a great disservice to the radical Left movement.

—Kai Utsumi
Los Angeles, CA

After reading Matt Meyer’s review of Homage to Chiapas, I’m moved to recommend B. Traven’s “Jungle” novels, set in Chiapas, leading up to the Mexican revolution of 1912. The three I’ve read—there are six in all—vividly describe, through the eyes of different Indian contract workers, their exploitation and virtual enslavement and include biting satire of business [people], government officials and clergy under Porfirio Diaz’s dictatorship. These short novels make interesting reading.

—Ruth Dear
Oak Park, IL

Bill Weinberg responds:
“Rejoic[ing]” in the gringo conquest of Mexico was Friedrich Engels’ term, not mine. The quote is from his essay “The Movements of 1847,” reprinted in Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Collected Works, International Publishers, New York, 1984, vol. 6, p. 527 (as Kai could learn from the footnotes in my book). It is those who cling rigidly to 19th-century ideas who are doing a disservice to the radical Left.

I too am a big fan of B. Traven, whom I actually mention (with some other of my inspirations) in the dedication of my book. I also quote from his novel, General From the Jungle, which anticipated the 1994 Zapatista uprising with uncanny accuracy in 1939!