‘A Plague of Salaried Marxists’: Sexuality and Subsistence in the Revolutionary Imaginary of Concha Michel

Decades after the singer and activist Concha Michel returned from her visit to the Soviet Union (1932–3), she would recall that experience as the source of her disillusionment with communism. ‘I realized that Russian women were as screwed [amoladas] as Mexican women, communist or not,’ she explained to the renowned interviewer Elena Poniatowska. ¹ Recalling what she had learned from her experience in the Mexican Communist Party (PCM), she recounted, ‘I saw that the Communists used women just like the clergy did: to run errands, to take orders, to heat the coffee; what’s more, many were used for sexual diversion.’ ² She argued with her compañero, the PCM Secretary-General Hernán Laborde, about whether the ‘woman problem’ was a mere superstructure that would fall away with the proletarian revolution or rather, as she contended, results from ‘the organization of life, not from the economy nor from politics.’ Since they were going to expel her anyway, she told him, she would save them the trouble and tore up her Party card then and there. ³

Due to the party’s clandestine nature, it is difficult to pin down when Michel joined the PCM, but it is clear that she was inspired by the revolutionary movements that swept Mexico in the first decades of the twentieth century. Having grown up amid class and racial privilege as the daughter of a French-descended merchant, Michel would abandon her bourgeois comforts to dedicate her life to activism, rural organizing, and writing and teaching about indigenous culture. Perhaps it was the fervor of the converted that engendered Michel’s high expectations for revolutionary movements; her writings often seethe with indignation against revolutionary leaders – whether Mexican or Soviet – who failed to fulfill their promises of social justice.

Michel was not among the PCM’s founding members in 1919 but circulated in the same social and political circles with some of its earliest adherents, particularly among members of Mexico’s charismatic cultural left. ⁴ By the early 1920s, PCM leaders had forged alliances with sympathetic artists and writers – the muralist Diego Rivera, the photographer Tina Modotti, the poet Germán List Azurbide; in 1923, Rivera would join the party’s Executive Committee. ⁵ In 1926, Michel was among those who cheered Alexandra Kollontai’s arrival at the port of Veracruz. During Kollontai’s brief tenure as Soviet ambassador to Mexico, Michel often sang at embassy parties and met with Kollontai to discuss women’s status in their respective countries. ⁶ In 1929, she played guitar and sang at the PCM’s New Year’s party, entertaining a who’s who of Mexico’s cultural left; several months later she would provide the musical accompaniment for Modotti’s solo exhibition at the National Library, as she would a quarter-century after that for the painter Frida Kahlo’s only solo exhibition. ⁷ (A year after that, she would lead a chorus of ‘The Internationale’ and other revolutionary songs as Kahlo’s inner circle witnessed her cremation. ⁸ ) PCM militants described her singing during meetings at Rivera’s and Kahlo’s famed Casa Azul, the site of countless political and social gatherings. The artist Alfredo Zalce recalled attending parties in Mexico City where ‘Concha Michel sang and Diego Rivera opined.’ ⁹ Sometime in the 1920s, she and Laborde became romantic and domestic partners; secret police described them both as ‘Communist leaders’ as they surveilled the couple in their working-class neighborhood of Mexico City. ¹⁰

By the time Michel rang in the New Year at the 1929 PCM party, its membership had grown to about 1500 members, and its newspaper El Machete had a circulation of 11,500. ¹¹ Like many who joined the PCM during these early years, Michel was inspired by revolutionary promises of social transformation and threw herself entirely into the movement, sharing the ideals that writer Rafael Ramos Pedrueza expressed upon his return from the Soviet Union in 1929. ‘The October Revolution, the first phase of world revolution,’ he wrote, ‘will be considered as the dawn of true civilization, whose benefits spill without limits over all beings.’ ¹² Michel soon learned, as would many of her comrades, that her particular vision of revolutionary change put her afoul of party leadership.

This article draws on a longer biography of Michel and attends principally to the pamphlet, Marxistas y ‘marxistas,’ that she wrote upon her return from the Soviet Union and that resulted in her definitive expulsion from the PCM as she linked her disillusionment with the twinned issues of reproductive labor and sexual exploitation. ¹³ Biographies have occupied considerable space within the scant scholarship on the relationship between women and the PCM. ¹⁴ Although there is no extant biography of Concha Michel, she looms large in the historiography, not least because she published her writings and proved to be a willing and dynamic interview subject to explore both why the PCM appealed to women and why it alienated them. ¹⁵ This article centers on the concerns that would result in her expulsion from the PCM but that drew support among both contemporaries and subsequent feminist activists.

Although Michel petitioned to rejoin after the pamphlet’s publication, her refusal to disavow it prevented her re-entry. In it, Michel insisted that a truly revolutionary society would bring an end to the sexual and labor exploitation of women. ‘I have no more will,’ she wrote to The New Masses editor Joseph Freeman, ‘to witness that everywhere in the revolutionary movement, women are treated the same as by the bourgeoisie.’ ¹⁶ This pamphlet that gained Michel such ignominy within the Party and such admiration outside it made an argument that gained considerable traction in subsequent decades: that modernization schemes, particularly revolutionary modernization schemes, failed to account for vast amounts of subsistence labor required to sustain social and cultural life. ¹⁷ Throughout the pamphlet, she equates the diminution or elision of these labors with what she sees as forms of perversion, including homosexuality, sex work, and intersex, to contrast what she dubbed the ‘natural economy’ with the more artificial ‘social economy.’

When Comintern leaders had looked for places to foment revolution in the wake of the October Revolution, Mexico seemed like an obvious choice. Mexico’s own protracted, bloody, fragmented revolution (1910–17) had galvanized the popular classes, fostered considerable political instability, and fueled long-smoldering resentments against US imperialism. ¹⁸ In December 1918, the Partido Socialista would hold its first congress and elect the Indian Communist M.N. Roy as its Secretary-General. ¹⁹ The following year, Roy would, with support from the Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin, establish the PCM.

The Soviet and Mexican revolutions invite comparison because of their chronological proximity and their shared emphasis on social justice and on modernization. ²⁰ The two revolutions certainly had some ideological affinities and, in 1924, Mexico became the first country in the Americas to grant diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union, much to the dismay of the United States government. However, while the Bolshevik revolution emerged as an internationalist effort animated by the industrial proletariat, the Mexican revolution veered between localist and nationalist as various factions of peasant uprisings and military brigades jockeyed to assumed the mantle of revolutionary leadership. These issues of nationalism and agrarianism would bedevil committed revolutionaries as they wrestled with how to adapt the Bolsheviks’ lessons to the Mexican context. At its first Party congress in late 1921, the PCM resolved to transform Mexico’s agrarian revolution into a proletarian one, diminishing the peasantry’s critical role in overturning the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. By its second congress in March 1923, the agraristas’ continued mobilization and radicalism, particularly under the leadership of Primo Tapia in the center-west state of Michoacán and Ursulo Galván in the gulf coast state of Veracruz, compelled the PCM to seek ways to incorporate agrarian radicals into the Party, however clumsily. ²¹

During these first years of party conflict, Michel faced her own struggles. She had married a man 20 years her senior, had a son, and soon divorced, leaving her a single mother supporting herself. Her divorce, hardly commonplace even amid the post-revolutionary regime’s aggressive anticlericalism, fits her self-presentation as innately rebellious and drawn to revolutionary movements. ²² In interviews over the years she described standing up to authorities, whether the nuns in her convent school or the Mexican president Plutarco Elías Calles or leaders of the Comintern. She attended the Guadalajara conservatory, where she learned classical and operatic roles, before abandoning her musical studies to work in rural communities, teaching and collecting folk songs. ‘I left everything for the Revolution,’ she told an interviewer in 1983, ‘It seemed more interesting to me to see what the people said. And I liked it.’ ²³

During the 1920s and 1930s, as the PCM struggled to build membership amid a hostile post-revolutionary regime, its leadership splintered into factions of agraristas, Trotskyists, and Comintern loyalists. Michel’s compañero Hernán Laborde led the Moscow-endorsed Stalinist faction, becoming Secretary-General in 1929 and the party’s presidential candidate in 1934. Michel meanwhile worked for the Ministry of Public Education’s Cultural Missions Program, teaching not only music and handicrafts but also organizing skills to train campesinos to make collective land claims to exercise their political rights. Although she continued to clash with authorities, she often gained support among community members who petitioned to have her remain behind when her Mission moved on to another community. ²⁴ Michel became particularly involved in PCM efforts to recruit women, for which the Cultural Missions served as an important vehicle, particularly after the socialist Narciso Bassols took the helm of Public Education in 1931. ²⁵ The Cultural Missions’ emphasis on music, theater, and dance, all part of their effort to create secular spaces of sociability, offered Michel a means to support herself and her son, while also integrating her musical training and her political commitments.

Despite her peripatetic work with the Cultural Missions, Michel remained involved with PCM activities in Mexico City, the center of PCM operations. In October 1931, Michel was among a group of Communist women who spent the night in jail after protesting at a ruling-party congress of women workers and peasants. ‘They were taken immediately to the cells in the police precinct,’ reported the Mexico City daily Excélsior, ‘where they spent the night not allowing the other inmates to close their eyes for all the shouting and racket they produced.’ ²⁶ The PCM initially celebrated the episode. The party newspaper El Machete recounted how the comrades had ‘unmasked the government’s submission to imperialism and denounced the treason of reformist leaders and the [ruling party’s] dirty demagoguery’ and described numerous ‘workers and people in general’ marching alongside the PCM women as they were paraded through the streets to the police precinct. ²⁷ In characteristic PCM fashion, the next issue offered a thoroughgoing critique of the intervention, insisting that the question of Mexican–Soviet relations (which had been suspended in 1929) should take center stage and PCM members should avoid ceding any legitimacy to either the ruling party or the Catholic Church. ²⁸

Despite – or perhaps because of – her romantic connection to Laborde, the PCM subjected Michel’s ideas and activities to considerable scrutiny. Two weeks after Michel went to jail with her comrades, El Machete ran a substantial piece explaining that the Party’s Central Committee had convinced her to resign a position teaching music and singing in the Jalapa, Veracruz, normal school. She had been hired by Adalberto Tejeda, the independent socialist and popular two-term governor of Veracruz that the PCM deemed

the most dangerous of the petty bourgeois demagogues, the false leftist who, while he deceives the masses with radical phrases and gestures, orders killings of poor workers and peasants and allies himself with the lapdogs of laborism to harass the revolutionary workers.

In her statement agreeing to the directive, Michel submitted,

I agree entirely with the Central Committee’s conclusions, which I make my own in all its parts. … I am, as always, ready to subject myself in every way to the Party’s political line, which in Veracruz is a struggle without quarter against Tejeda and in favor of a victory for the majority of workers, peasants, and poor masses in general and for the independent revolutionary struggle under the Communist Party’s direction. ²⁹

This episode indicates that, not long before she articulated the ideas that would lead to her expulsion, she underscored her eagerness to submit herself to the party line and in language typical of a party confession meant to wash away her political sins.

It is impossible to know all of Michel’s motivations for setting off for New York City in March 1932, or even whether she initially intended to continue on to the Soviet Union. Many PCM members, including close friends such as Diego Rivera, had traveled to the Soviet Union as part of efforts to gain prominent supporters abroad. ³⁰ ‘No foreigners came to the USSR during these first two decades of Soviet power with more enthusiasm than did Mexicans,’ writes historian William Richardson. ³¹ Michel may have been running away from Mexico as much as anything else. The wealthy industrialist and art collector Jackson Cole Phillips purchased tickets for Michel and her son Godo, and she seems to have set off for New York fairly suddenly and with no particular plan. ³² She was stopped briefly in the Port of Veracruz and questioned about taking Godo out of Mexico without his father’s consent, and she was detained again at Ellis Island until a sponsor – most likely Phillips again – put down a deposit to guarantee that she would not overstay her six-month visa.

Michel arrived to a New York City abuzz with what the New York Times described as ‘the present enormous vogue of things Mexican.’ ³³ At the end of 1931, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) had opened an immensely popular Diego Rivera retrospective. The coordinator, Frances Flynn Paine, had grown up in Mexico, organized an exhibit of Mexican folk art in 1928, and made it a pet project – in collaboration with John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and his wife Abby Aldrich Rockefeller – to identify promising and influential Mexican Communist artists and entice them with the ‘generous face of capitalism.’ ³⁴ Following Rivera’s 1929 expulsion from the PCM, Paine assured Abby Rockefeller that ‘he still is, sincerely and intensely, “for the people” but one can now reason with him and from that point much can be hoped.’ ³⁵ Michel would have arrived in New York at the height of Rivera’s popularity, before his notorious fallout with the Rockefellers over Lenin’s appearance in the Rockefeller Center mural. Members of the CPUSA and the fellow-traveling John Reed Clubs engaged in overheated arguments about art’s revolutionary utility. ³⁶ The John Reed Club of New York invited Rivera to speak at a meeting on New Year’s Day 1932 but then rebuked him for his capitalist sympathies and returned his $100 donation. ³⁷ Under the pseudonym Robert Evans, The New Masses editor Joseph Freeman would mock Rivera in the following month’s issue, indicating that his 1929 expulsion from the PCM had led to his ‘corruption as a man and bankruptcy as an artist.’ ³⁸

Unsurprisingly, given both her temperament and her convictions, Michel was immediately pulled into this mêlée. During her two sojourns in New York, bookending her trip to the Soviet Union, Michel made friends from a variety of backgrounds, including the Rockefeller family, who invited her to sing to the aging John David Rockefeller and at the newly inaugurated Museum of Modern Art, and the inventor and writer Buckminster Fuller, who passed along a typewriter he had used for the previous six years. ³⁹ She quickly became involved with a leftist women’s organization, which helped her to get her bearings. But she mostly forged connections through the Communist Party. Alberto Moreau, the indispensable intermediary between Spanish speakers and the CPUSA, put Michel in touch with Freeman, who had lived in Mexico for several months in 1929 and had ties to the PCM. ⁴⁰ Freeman helped her to land singing gigs at the John Reed Club and the School of Social Sciences. ⁴¹ In these performances, as well as those for the Rockefellers and MoMA, she and Godo donned traditional Mexican charro outfits and sang duets. Their repertoire included folk songs Michel had collected during her travels in Mexico and protest songs she composed herself, such as a melancholy ballad dedicated to the mother of First World War resister Tom Mooney, which she wrote during her stay in New York. ⁴² Her performances were a hit with CP members and their fellow travelers, and Michel would send Freeman a fully harmonized version of ‘To the Mother of Tom Mooney’ to sell in support of The New Masses. ⁴³

In August 1932, she scrambled to raise money for her trip to the Soviet Union, not wanting to jeopardize the deposit that secured her visa. She set sail the following month, enduring days of seasickness, on the steamship Kungsholm en route to Gothenburg, Sweden, and from there to Stockholm, where Alexandra Kollontai was serving as Soviet ambassador. ⁴⁴ Equipped with contacts from Kollontai and Rivera, Michel made her way to Leningrad, where she received the standard tour of a Soviet factory, complete with childcare and dining services as well as a theater, library, and newspaper. ⁴⁵ During her time in Leningrad, the Sociedad Latino-Americana and the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS) put her in contact with other artists and women’s organizations. ⁴⁶ ‘From the day I arrived in Leningrad,’ she reported to Freeman, ‘I have had doors open to me to connect with all the types of activities being developed in the USSR.’ ⁴⁷ Speaking only Spanish and limited English, however, Michel was at the mercy of her local guides.

A month later, Michel made it to Moscow, where VOKS agents continued to shepherd her, and she reconnected with her comrade Tina Modotti. ⁴⁸ She finally made contact with the Women’s Department, which invited her to give two talks – a report about women’s efforts in the PCM and another about the ‘possibilities and problems for the development of a women’s movement within the Party.’ ⁴⁹ This second topic clearly raised a red flag for her handlers; the event organizers required her to complete a lengthy questionnaire about her presentations. ⁵⁰ She left her son Godo with the family of a Women’s Department leader while she visited factories and cultural centers on the outskirts of Moscow, talking about why the Communist Party needed to recognize the importance of caring labors and combat the sexual exploitation of women. These were the issues that would raise hackles among the PCM leadership.

Three months after disembarking in Gothenburg, Michel was ready to head home. She left very little record from her time in Moscow but wrote to Freeman in mid-December, beseeching him to help her return via New York City to earn some more money, ‘even if I have to walk back to Mexico.’ ⁵¹ It would be several more months before she would make her return trip, but by the spring she was back in New York; by the summer, she had returned to Mexico; in mid-August, she was expelled from the PCM. In November, El Machete would publish a particularly prominent expulsion notice, pointing to Michel’s threat to publish her ideas and their deviation from the PCM program. At its August meeting, the notice explained, the Central Committee had reviewed Michel’s case. She had been told upon her return from the Soviet Union – ‘a journey she made of her own initiative and with the authorization of the CP of the United States, where she found herself at the time’ – that she should put herself at the disposal of the Mexico City regional committee. In response, Michel had written the Central Committee a letter proclaiming that she was ‘not in agreement with the fundamental points upon which the communist movement rests’ and that, given the Party’s position on women’s issues, she would no longer submit to its authority. ‘Given the antecedents of the ex-compañera Michel,’ the notice stressed, smearing her with her bourgeois background, ‘without doubt [her writing] will deal with her anti-Marxist conceptions of working women’s role in the revolutionary movement of capitalist and colonial countries and in the struggle for socialism under the Government of workers and peasants.’ ⁵² El Machete appeared to concede the merits of Michel’s concerns when it assured readers that the Politburo was open to discussing such ‘necessary and opportune’ questions, but its editors insisted that the PCM ‘would not tolerate in the heart of the Party people who openly defy the Comintern program and who refuse to submit themselves to Party discipline.’ Likely referring to her friendships with targets of earlier purges such as Diego Rivera, the notice stated that Michel

threatens the Party with a campaign against the Comintern, which surely will gain approval from the renegade Trotskyists and other expelled Party members, and in general from all the enemies of the revolutionary movement, for her fight against the Comintern and the Soviet Union.

The Party warned its members to be ‘on guard against [Michel’s] future activities, which inevitably will have a counter-revolutionary character,’ and it promised to

launch an ideological campaign against her anti-Marxist and confusionist ideas within and outside the Party. For this reason, it is necessary to combat the underestimation of women’s role in the class struggle and strengthen our efforts among women to incorporate the woman worker and peasant into the revolutionary labor and agrarian movement and attract to the Party the best militants.

Michel made good on her threat to publish her critique of Communists’ ideas about and treatment of women, but Marxistas y ‘marxistas’ did not limit itself to targeting the PCM. Indeed, perhaps more offensive to Party leaders, she tarred the Communists and Mexico’s post-revolutionary regime with the same brush. The pamphlet drew not only on her experiences in the PCM and the Soviet Union but also on her experiences working for the Ministry of Public Education and traveling throughout Mexico. As Michel threw herself back into a full schedule of activism and work with the Cultural Missions, her frustration with the hypocrisy and corruption she witnessed intensified. ⁵³ Neither Mexico nor the Soviet Union was the workers’ paradise promised by revolutionary governments, much less had they addressed the problems of women’s labor and sexual exploitation. Several years after writing Marxistas y ‘marxistas,’ she would openly scorn the leftist labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano for his admiration of Soviet policies toward women. ‘The only thing that Lic. Lombardo Toledano forgot to say in his fifty ‘truths’ [about the Soviet Union],’ she chided,

is that Soviet women and men also share in childbirth. That is to say: the woman gives birth to one child, and the man has the next, since only in this way could one justify that attitude toward undifferentiated responsibilities between men and women for subsistence production. ⁵⁴

In the months following her expulsion from the PCM, Michel penned Marxistas y ‘marxistas,’ spotlighting the gaping divide between theory and practice. ‘Nothing could be more damaging for the realization of the aspirations that inspire every sincere revolutionary and the working class directly,’ she stated at the outset, ‘than the fact that the exploiters (first officials and then all of them) of every country have become the revolutionary leaders; that is to say, they falsify the true direction that the revolution needs to triumph.’ ⁵⁵ After a prefatory note saying that she had left the PCM involuntarily but could not ignore the ‘double enslavement’ of women by class and by sex, she launched into an attack on the ‘false revolutionaries’ and the ‘farcical official Marxism’ of the post-revolutionary regime. ⁵⁶ She recounted stories of fraudulent cooperatives paying kickbacks to politicians and their family members, while communities endured unremitting poverty, receiving only unfulfilled promises of land reform. While powerful families continued to control land, campesinos had only tattered clothes ‘because they lack even soap to wash them, much less enough for new clothes.’ ⁵⁷ She described armed guards and corrupt officials enforcing a system that seemed more semi-feudal than post-revolutionary. For the campesinos, it was ‘the same song different verse.’ ⁵⁸

What Michel found most exasperating was that government agents, including her colleagues in public education, arrived in these communities armed not with the tools to combat inequality and poverty but rather with the weapons of anti-fanaticism. Teachers were fired for admitting to their belief in the existence of God, and students were encouraged to risk their lives in battles against Catholic militants. ⁵⁹ ‘It is completely idiotic,’ she wrote,

to arrive in places that have been subject to religious education for centuries and offer as their introduction to socialism and socialist education that ‘God is a phantasm and the saints the products of unscrupulous artists.’ The effective and honorable way to orient these people would be to teach with practical means about the history of exploitation that weighs upon them, leading exactly to the current situation; to organize them to demand better labor conditions, salaries, land, water, etc.

Instead, she lamented, rural communities received only a ‘plague of salaried “Marxists” who spread the most varied and contradictory propaganda.’ ⁶⁰ Instead of teaching about theories of class struggle, historical materialism, and surplus value, she insisted, socialist teachers should impart practical organizing skills.

About a third of the way into her controversial 34-page pamphlet, Michel opens her section on the woman problem and the Communist Party with the assertion that there are two fronts of social struggle: the class struggle between the exploiters and the exploited and the struggle for the recognition of the vast amounts of reproductive labor performed by women. ⁶¹ Michel insisted that the Communists, who had endured ‘every manner of persecution, of misery and incarceration for the “crime” of propagating [Marxist] theories,’ had the ‘only just position’ on class issues, but that the PCM still had ‘no precise line that duly addresses the woman problem.’ ⁶² She restates her commitment to the teachings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin but insists that the Communist Party’s weakness – both in Mexico and in the Soviet Union – is a failure to recognize that there are ‘two imbalances: one, the economic, that began with private property and exploitation, and the other, the biological, in which the man empowered himself with sexual control over the woman and as a result deformed those relations.’ ⁶³

Michel rejects Engels’s argument that women will be liberated by ‘social production’ and that the collective will assume the responsibilities of reproductive labor, but she turns to Engels and several of his contemporaries – in particular the studies of ancient matriarchies by Henry Lewis Morgan (Iroquois), Jean-François Champillion (Egypt), and Johann Jakob Bachofen (ancient world) – as evidence of a natural order of things that a true revolution would restore. Her fascination with gender complementarity in pre-industrial societies, particularly indigenous Mexican societies, would increase over the coming decades and become a defining aspect of her work. ⁶⁴ She joined a strong contingent of Mexican Communists who argued that communist principles of land and labor distribution were not a foreign import but rather drew on autochthonous, precolonial Mexican cultural practices. ⁶⁵ In Marxistas y ‘marxistas,’ she conjures a romantic image of primitive communism in which ‘women attend to the administration of collective wealth, which is meant first and foremost to secure or guarantee the life of descendants.’ ⁶⁶ In this telling, mechanization and increased production shifted economic and social control to men, while women and their labors declined in value. Throughout these pages, she cites at length from Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) seemingly to bolster her case that her ideas fit within the Comintern line, donning Engels as form of armor against the impending attacks from the Politburo.

More controversially, Michel also draws on the writings of Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law whom Engels scolded as a ‘so-called Marxist’ because of his writings against work. Indeed, Lafargue’s 1880 pamphlet Le droit à la paresse (The Right to be Lazy) was, by 1906, the second most translated Marxist pamphlet, trailing only The Communist Manifesto. ⁶⁷ Michel demonstrates more interest in his 1904 pamphlet La question de la femme, but her critique of the Communist Party’s emphasis on commodified labor as the path to revolutionary consciousness echoes that of Le droit à la paresse and put her fundamentally at odds with Marxist doctrine. ⁶⁸ Lafargue originally wrote his pamphlet to chide the members of the French Workers’ Party who clamored for the right to work, arguing that the working class should fight instead for the right to leisure. Describing laziness as the ‘mother of the arts and noble virtues,’ he particularly lamented – as Michel later would – the deleterious effects of women’s entrance into factory labor. ⁶⁹

Where are those gossips of which our legends and old tales speak – those bold with words, frank of mouth, and lovers of the lush bottle? Where are those cheerful lasses, always trotting, cooking, sowing life, generating joy, giving birth without pain to healthy and vigorous little ones? Today, we have the girls and women of the factory, pale, sickly flowers, with pallid blood, concave stomachs, and languid limbs. They have never known robust pleasure and cannot recount spirited tales of how they lost their virginity. ⁷⁰

While Michel would prefer the language of the ‘natural economy’ rather than ‘laziness’ and conjured a far less carefree image of women’s lives, she proffered a similar argument: that cultural production and reproductive labors should and of necessity would remain outside the ‘social economy.’ She dubbed absurd Engels’s conviction that women would become equal through participation in factory labor and dubbed the Communists’ campaign for equal pay a form of ‘vile reformism on the part of the interpreters of the revolution.’ ⁷¹

Also like Lafargue, Michel fairly quickly turns from questions of economy to questions of sexuality, always grounding them in a conception of gender complementarity that ran counter to Communist efforts to diminish gender difference. Pointing to depictions of deities born only from men – whether Jupiter begetting Minerva and Bacchus or the Christian Holy Trinity – she asserts that ‘sodomy or faggotry [jotería], as it is called’ resulted from this decisive blow against both matriarchy and maternity. ⁷² Michel had been influenced by Alexandra Kollontai’s writings on marriage and free-love, citing her extensively in Dos antagonismos fundamentales, the 1938 publication that built on her arguments in Marxistas y ‘marxistas.’ ⁷³ ‘The sexual force or energy is of inestimable importance and is wasted in the most idiotic manner, from the brothel to the most chaste home blessed by the Pope himself and sanctioned by all the judges high and low,’ she explained. ‘The control and channeling of this energy belongs directly to the woman.’ ⁷⁴ Here, however, she departed not only from Kollontai and Lafargue but also from the bohemian mores of her left-leaning cultural comrades in New York and Mexico City. ‘The sap of life, which is in this case the seminal energy, should only be tapped,’ she insisted, ‘with the conscientious determination to conceive.’ ⁷⁵ Like Kollontai, she emphasized that sexual freedoms too often left women alone caring for children, but Michel differed radically from most women on the left in that she saw contraception and abortion as abuses of women’s bodies with the principal objective of making women sexually available to men.

On the question of marriage, Michel turns again to Engels, who describes monogamy as the ‘subjugation of one sex by the other … the proclamation of an antagonism between the sexes unknown in all preceding history.’ ⁷⁶ She then pushes past Engels, even as she recognizes that her ideas will seal her exclusion from the party. ‘I am not going to say that man and woman are antagonistic classes by nature,’ she writes,

but I will say that man has acted and acts as such, since the outbreak of the society without classes, and will continue to act in this way so long as woman does not appear as a woman, that is to say, becoming a different entity in the economic, ideological, and biological realm. ⁷⁷

The issue of equality and difference has been central to debates over women’s rights and status for centuries, but for Michel the terms of difference were always inextricably linked to motherhood. ⁷⁸ ‘In the biological order,’ she explained,

we have different needs. Just as it is absurd to think that the capitalist will stand up and ‘deliver’ what the workers need, it is idiotic and foolish to think that a masculine society – so-called communist – can ‘deliver’ equality to women. ⁷⁹

Continuing to use Engels as a shield against predictable attacks by her PCM comrades, she underscores his critique of the sexual double standard and the rise of prostitution, pointing to more ‘brazen’ and ‘demoralizing’ forms of prostitution that have adapted to capitalist production. As if to underscore the mounting sexual perversion, Michel points to the growth in ‘prostitution in reverse,’ in which men set the price and women pay it. ‘Already in New York, Paris, Berlin, London, and all the great capitals, this form of prostitution in reverse appears quite common.’ Unable to resist the urge to tweak the PCM leadership, she exclaims, ‘What a contrast between the scientific and healthy revolutionary Engels and the “revolutionaries” of today!’ ⁸⁰ The Mexican Revolution, she insisted, had created traveling brothels, and the post-revolutionary presidents had all enriched themselves through prostitution and other vices. The PCM, she lamented, ‘also has a twisted interpretation of the manner in which to utilize women in the movement.’ ⁸¹

Throughout the rest of the pamphlet, Michel returns to the theme of sex not as a source of pleasure but rather as a form of labor. Michel had voiced these concerns well before her visit to the Soviet Union. The writer Anita Brenner noted in 1926 that Michel ‘recognize[d] sex as the key to things’ and dismissed her fellow PCM militant Elena Torres as having ‘the “right” theory but no conception of practice.’ ⁸² In Marxistas y ‘marxistas,’ she points to the reluctance both in Mexico and in the Soviet Union to discuss why women turn to sex work and why the focus is always on disciplining sex workers themselves rather than their clients. She concludes the pamphlet by creating an equivalence between the work of the laborer and the sexual work of women – not of sex workers but rather of women in general. ‘The (male) worker,’ she explains,

is weakened by an overload of physical labor; meanwhile, the woman is dulled and weakened by foolish and abnormal sexual relations, on top of physical labor. … The physical destruction by the abnormality of sexual relations at the hands of men, is just as absurd as what the capitalist system does to the economy. ⁸³

Several years later, Michel would propose that the Instituto Revolucionario Femenino launch a Lysistrata-style sex strike to demand suffrage; the suggestion met with a resounding rejection. ⁸⁴

Michel concludes Marxistas y ‘marxistas’ with a seemingly incongruous reference to the work of Spanish endocrinologist Gregorio Marañón, one of the founders of the Association of Friends of the Soviet Union in Madrid. Among his many writings were several on the topics of intersex and human sexuality. ⁸⁵ After a parting shot at Engels, insisting that women have always participated in ‘social production,’ she ends with the sentence,

Furthermore, on biological matters and in relation to women, Dr. Gregorio Marañón also contributes very useful knowledge, but many of his conclusions [like Engels’s] are also false, since in some cases these conclusions are taken from abnormal circumstances and in others his perspective is idealist and not materialist. ⁸⁶

This odd final comment targets the ways that the ‘scientific’ principles of communism had eclipsed the lived experiences of men and women struggling for social justice – those very objectives that had drawn people like Michel to the Communist Party in the first place. Her clear unease with Marañón’s discussion of intersex reflects her insistence on excluding any possibilities outside of gender complementarity.

By January of 1935, Michel reconsidered her decision and wrote to her friend and confidant Joseph Freeman to ask his advice about petitioning to re-enter the PCM, but on her own terms. Freeman wrote back that her picture, taken by a The New Masses photographer, hung on the wall of his house and that he often tried to sing her songs at CP gatherings, but he exhorted her to ‘work within the collective and not to buck big forces alone, an unarmed individual.’ ⁸⁷ Still, she stood by her pamphlet, and her petition for re-entry was rejected. Freeman would be purged from the CPUSA in 1939 for his criticism of Stalin and sympathy toward Trotsky in his 1936 memoir An American Testament. ⁸⁸ Even Hernán Laborde himself would fall victim to the Purging Commission of the 1940 Extraordinary Congress. ⁸⁹ Michel would throw her lot in with Mexico’s post-revolutionary regime, if only ambivalently. She supported herself through work for public agencies such as the Ministry of Public Education and the National Institute for Fine Arts. She emerged as a reluctant icon among feminists searching for a maternalist, Mexican variety and alienated others who watched her commitment to gender complementarity develop into a full-throated homophobia. ⁹⁰ The critique that she first disseminated with Marxistas y ‘marxistas’ and to which she would return until her death in 1991 – that modernizing revolutionary movements had no plan for liberating women from what Lenin dubbed ‘the barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-wracking, stultifying and crushing drudgery’ of domestic labor – resonates still. ⁹¹ For Michel, the solution would come not with the elimination of this labor through modernization but rather through the elevation of these labors along with the social and cultural labor that formed the connective tissue of social life.