Marxism and the Nationalization of Oil in Mexico

(Quote of the Week)

The Calderón government in Mexico is threatening to reverse the 1938 nationalization of oil by the regime of Lázaro Cárdenas, which touched off a furious imperialist reaction that included a British boycott of Mexican oil. As Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky made clear, the proletariat internationally, and particularly the workers of the advanced capitalist countries, must oppose the depredations of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Marxists in oppressed semicolonial countries, while opposing imperialism, must stress the need for the independence of the proletariat from the national bourgeoisie.

The oil magnates are not rank-and-file capitalists, not ordinary bourgeoisie. Having seized the richest natural resources of a foreign country, standing on their billions and supported by the military and diplomatic forces of their metropolis, they strive to establish in the subjugated country a regime of imperialistic feudalism, subordinating to themselves legislation, jurisprudence, and administration. Under these conditions expropriation is the only effective means of safeguarding national independence and the elementary conditions of democracy….

Without succumbing to illusions and without fear of slander, the advanced workers will completely support the Mexican people in their struggle against the imperialists. The expropriation of oil is neither socialism nor communism. But it is a highly progressive measure of national self-defense….

The international proletariat has no reason to identify its program with the program of the Mexican government…. Without giving up its own identity, every honest working class organization of the entire world, and first of all in Great Britain, is duty-bound to take an irreconcilable position against the imperialist robbers, their diplomacy, their press, and their fascist hirelings. The cause of Mexico, like the cause of Spain, like the cause of China, is the cause of the international working class. The struggle over Mexican oil is only one of the advance-line skirmishes of future battles between the oppressors and the oppressed.

—Leon Trotsky, “Mexico and British Imperialism,” 5 June 1938,
printed in Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937-38)