I came of age in a country that was not in the First World, but was not a peasant country either, which gave it a very particular form. My initial commitment to the revolutionary movement came first—books came afterwards. What I read seemed rather to confirm what my experience and intuition had already been telling me. In fact, I think this is generally the case: one is led towards rebellion by sentiments, not by thoughts. At the end of his statement to the Dewey Commission, Trotsky described being drawn to the workers’ quarters in Nikolayev at the age of eighteen by his ‘faith in reason, in truth, in human solidarity’, not by Marxism. But perhaps the most crucial sentiment is that of justice—the realization that you are not in agreement with this world. There is a story that Ernst Bloch was asked by his supervisor, Georg Simmel, to provide a one-page summary of his thesis before Simmel would agree to work on it. A week later, Bloch obliged with one sentence: ‘What exists cannot be true.’ The thesis later became The Principle of Hope.3 It was this kind of ethical moment that was crucial for me—the discovery that there was a necessary connection between justice and truth.

they lack devotion to the idea of revolutionary Marxism. Though that phrase has always struck me as a pleonasm—for me it was always a given that any Marxism would have to be revolutionary.

If I had to choose a handful of books that made a particular impression, there would be André Breton’s L’amour fou, which I read in 1949, and C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, which I read in French on a train to Bolivia in the late 1950s, as well as his study of Melville, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways. Curiously, when reading Moby Dick some fifteen years earlier I had been struck by the very same sentence from which James took his title. Melville and James are marked by the same refusal of injustice I mentioned earlier. I also found it in José María Arguedas, a Peruvian who wrote an extraordinary autobiographical novel called Los ríos profundos, and in the poetry of another Peruvian, César Vallejo. And of course it’s present in Frantz Fanon. I recall buying Les damnés de la terre in Rome, in a bookshop on the via Veneto on 4 December 1961—I remember the day exactly because I read the book in one sitting, and it made a big impact on me. I discovered Gramsci around the same time, during a stay in Italy. I also read the work of Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti and the group around Quaderni rossi, and of course the writings of Rossana Rossanda, Pietro Ingrao and the leftist tendencies inside the Italian Communist Party.5 I became familiar with Subaltern Studies and the work of Ranajit Guha and Partha Chatterjee in the late 1980s. I only really read Edward Thompson in the 1990s. His Making of the English Working Class and Customs in Common lay a lot of emphasis on the category of experience, which in my view is extremely important to Marxist thought.

Taken together, all of these works have in common a concern with the preoccupations of the people, based on the impulse to understand their world and what motivates them. The reasons why people rise up in revolution are not incidental, they are substantive. In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky writes that the masses didn’t rise up because they were thinking of the future, but because what they were experiencing in the present was intolerable. Walter Benjamin expresses a similar thought in his theses on history. When Guha writes of the ‘autonomous domain’ of the subaltern, and of ways of conducting politics ‘below’ official politics, it comes from his experience as a communist militant in India. In a way, when I wrote on the Mexican Revolution I was concerned with the same phenomena of social life as in Guha’s work, though mine took a more elemental form. Many look at the support for Perón or Cárdenas and say they were Peronists, or Cardenistas. But the parties in question were just the epiphenomenal form taken by the desires of all these people. Parties often think they are the ones organizing and instructing the people on how to mobilize, but that’s not the case—they were the best institutional form for securing particular ends, and the impulse comes from elsewhere, from long years of suffering, from an intolerable reality.

That same year I also spent time in Italy. There I found the Trotskyists to be more focused on political questions—what line should be taken—rather than on the very real changes that had been taking place in the factories. Automation had brought about significant shifts in the labour process, and it seemed to me that there had also been a shift in the mode of domination, which needed to be understood in order to develop different forms of labour organization. When I was there, I witnessed the beginnings of the autonomia movement and workers’ councils. In my view these were similar to the internal commissions set up in factories in Argentina in the 1940s, and which had been misunderstood by much of the Left. The rebirth of these councils in many ways prepared the way for the hot autumn of 1969. The current that seemed to me closer to these preoccupations was the Quaderni rossi group, which developed the form of the ‘worker’s enquiry’. It struck me that the enquiries were focused on the same question that always interested me—what do these people want?

Of course, it was unjust that I was there at all, but the regime was almost like a monastery. It was good to be insulated from all the turbulence of political praxis—which deputy voted how, getting leaflets out, and so on. I had time to read a lot of literature, and read all of Capital again. As an experiment, I read the eleven or twelve volumes of the Marx–Engels correspondence chronologically, from cover to cover, in order to follow the course of the two men’s thought as they were writing to each other. I read Hegel, and reread Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. In a sense, prison also saved my life: one of the Mexican police agents who beat me once or twice told me I should be thankful, since the Guatemalans were ‘real sons of bitches’; and it’s true that all my comrades there were killed by the Guatemalan security services.

I think one has to draw a distinction between the established left parties and the broader Left. The PRD, after all, is at best an anti-neo-liberal nationalist party which originated in the PRI, whereas La Jornada is fed by a much broader left culture. But at present, in Mexico as elsewhere, the space for a classical revolutionary organization of the Left, along twentieth-century lines, is small or non-existent. This is because of the form that capitalism takes today, rather than being the fault of any particular individuals. The place formerly occupied by unions, workers’ and peasants’ organizations and their political reflections has shrunk, and politics has become the exclusive domain of capital and its negotiators. Yet the masters of the world are having to pay a price for this: an expansion of the space occupied by rage and fury. In Mexico, the anger has grown as a result of a series of disasters in the past twenty years: the electoral fraud of 1988; the assassinations of hundreds of PRD activists under Salinas; the violation of the San Andrés Accords by the Zedillo government; the new electoral fraud in 2006; the repression in Oaxaca and Atenco; not to mention the stream of deaths in Ciudad Juárez and elsewhere—there are now scores of people being killed every day on the streets, many of them tortured before being killed.