Jay Pan

This dissertation asks how the Mexican government moved from championing worker empowerment and land redistribution in the mid-1930s to being widely perceived by the 1950s as a class enemy by certain sectors of workers and peasants on the one hand, and business elites and the political right on the other: denounced by workers for repressing wages, strikes, and union autonomy, while simultaneously accused by capitalists of pandering to socialism by siding with unions in employment disputes, nationalizing industries and maintaining diplomatic engagement with revolutionary Cuba. The dissertation argues that this convergence of hostility emerged from the internal contradictions of social reform. Reform relied on state-led industrial development to expand employment, raise wages, and support economic democracy. At the same time, to achieve its industrial goals, the government imposed economic discipline, administrative hierarchy, and political mediation, seeking to restrain labor while granting concessions. This approach simultaneously expanded employment, wages, and benefits for workers and peasants while imposing economic discipline, administrative hierarchy, and political mediation. Some labor and peasant groups saw the state as too restrictive, while government loyalists accepted its authority. Capitalists, meanwhile, perceived even these limited concessions as a threat to profits and managerial control. The resulting tensions led both opposition sectors of labor and peasants and the capitalist class to view the state as a class enemy.

I conceptualize this dynamic as permanent reform. Social reform was a governing project committed to reshaping capitalism by expanding social rights and workers' bargaining power. However, it remained a permanent feature of governance because its goals of worker and peasant empowerment repeatedly collided with constraints that led the government to implement discipline, austerity, and political containment. Macroeconomic constraints, including inflation, fiscal limits, balance-of-payments pressures, and uneven productive capacity, limited the state’s ability to support economic democracy by creating jobs and expanding worker participation in state-owned and cooperative enterprises, while maintaining productivity and profitability. Microeconomic constraints arose from conflicts at both the sectoral and firm level. Sectoral clashes arose when industries or regions competed for investment, credit, or regulatory advantage. Advancing reform in one sector often required disciplining another. Firm-level tensions arose from the competing demands of unionization, profitability, and innovation, as enterprises had to balance workers’ collective bargaining with the need to remain competitive and invest in technological development. Together, these macro and microeconomic pressures defined the practical limits of social reform, placed the government in conflict with key economic interest groups, and produced the recurring oscillation between empowerment and discipline that this project seeks to elucidate.