The Mexican Revolution -What It Did, What It Made Possible, and What It Did Not Do

considered it Revolutionary. (3) My interest is in purposeful class struggles, my analysis as if from a Comintern intelligence officer, say in 1928 (and anachronistic in my own words).

What then did the Revolution do?

(1) It broke the long-established imperialist deal on Mexico, the informal complex of arrangements among U.S., British, German, and French banks, corporations, and governments (improvised through the previous 50 years) that they would transact their business and push their policies in Mexico in civil terms, if not exactly peaceful, at least no wars or bellicose proxies there, unlike in Central America or the Caribbean. This break took place at the very beginning of the Revolution, in 1910, when Standard Oil, sore at the Mexican government’s favoritism for Eagle Oil, backed the main conspiracy then to overthrow the government. As the Revolution continued under its first government, the break turned sharper, meaner, stronger, encouraging and aggravating the imperialist conflicts. These deepened into proxy belligerence in the contentious overthrow of the Revolutionary government in 1913, when Washington lost control of the coup to a London- and Berlin-backed general, whom it then backed Revolutionaries to overthrow until (given U.S. armed intervention at Veracruz) they succeeded in 1914. But Washington-New York gained nothing against London, or Berlin, or Mexico. Even if the Revolutionary armies on their victory had tried to restore the old imperialist deal, or negotiate a new such arrangement, as better for Mexico than imperialist proxy wars, they could not have done it, for the imperialist powers started their own, modern Thirty-Years-War in Europe in 1914, its first round lasting until the U.S. military engagement there in 1917 forced the Armistice of 1918. Revolutionaries in Mexico during the First World War used its imperialist conflicts to make wars against each other, which intensified U.S.-U.K and German use of them as proxies, provoked a second U.S. armed intervention in Mexico, prolonged the Revolutionary civil war,