Casa del Obrero Mundial

The Casa del Obrero Mundial (English: House of the World Worker) or COM was a socialist and anarchosyndicalist worker's organization located in the popular Tepito Barrio of Mexico City, founded on Septembre 22, 1912. It served as a cultural institution promoting worker's education and social transformation through a rationalist, socialist orientation, and as the headquarters for a number of syndicates and unions on a mutual aid basis.[1]

Formation and the revolution

The Casa del Obrero Mundial was at the center of the Mexican labor movement in the early 20th century, and was nourished in part by Spanish anarchosyndicalist exiles of the CNT who brought important knowledge of their labor struggle experiences with them. At the time, the Mexican labor movement was relatively advanced, and though it was not a predominantly industrial economy its non-peasant workers were fairly conscious of popular struggle and their weight in society.[2] It was born in the general uprising of the Mexican Revolution after long periods of the heavy-handed repression of labor under the Porfiriato.

It sought abolition of the Mexican state and the coordination of worker's syndicates into a confederated socialist economy. In order to do this it engaged in many strikes that struck Mexico before and during the revolution, aiming for its preferred goal of general strike. In a heavily agriculture-based economy, however, its alliance with Mexican campesinos was crucial to its success, but in this aspect it failed, and, through the convoluted situation of the revolution, allied itself with Carranzista forces and formed Red Battalions to fight its supposedly counter-revolutionary enemies, namely the rural-based Zapatistas. After the suppression of Zapata's Morelos Commune, strikes were banned by Carranza and the House went into decline, ultimately pushed out of the labor opposition by officialized labor unions, like the CROM.

See also

References

This article was adapted from the equivalent Spanish-language Wikipedia article on June 28, 2013.

  1. ↑ "La Casa del Obrero Mundial". Comité Nacional Mixto de Protección al Salario. Secretaría del Trabajo y Protección Social (in Spanish). November 18, 2010. Retrieved September 10, 2011.
  2. ↑ Cockcroft, James (1992). Mexico: Class Formation, Capital Accumulation, & the State. Monthly Review Press.

External links