'Aquí se ve la fuerza del SME': A political economy analysis of the Mexican Electrical Workers Union's path towards self-management

This research engages with and contributes to political economy scholarship and broader academic research on the energy sector in the Global South. It uses anthropological methods to contribute to the social science scholarship on International Development, Labour, and neoliberalism in the Global South, specifically in the Latin American context. The thesis examines how the reconfiguration of national political economy has modified the Mexican state, structuring particular possibilities in the electricity sector. It argues that energy resources have been used to give coherence to the Mexican state and that the sector’s modification has affected how sovereignty is imagined, understood, and defined. The thesis analyses how a neoliberal logic condemned the performance of a parastatal entity, the Central Light and Force Company [Compañía de Luz y Fuerza del Centro, CLFC], ordering its closure to transform electricity from a public service to a commodity ruled by the open market and managed as a private enterprise. It also modified and shaped the processes and practices of collective subject formation, power relations, notions of sovereignty, and coherence within the Mexican state. The thesis uses an ethnographic approach and methodologies to provide an in-depth analysis of the impacts of this modification by focusing on the case study of the labour force of the CLFC, the Mexican Electrical Workers Union’s [Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas, SME]. The closure of CLFC diminished SME’s leverage over a critical public service, decimating its political power and impacting its possibilities for survival. It uses SME members’ experiences and narrations to explore how the changing structural configurations, under which SME is now transformed from a parastatal organisation into a self-managing enterprise, have modified its members’ social world and outlook. The examination is possible because SME acts as a complete social institution that shapes every aspect of its members’ public and private spheres of interaction. This thesis reviews the tools that have supported SME’s survival and reinsertion into the energy sector. It provides the ground to understand the centrality of the union’s infrastructures for the movement of resistance and the preservation of the workers’ identity. This research argues that the workers’ development of skills and expertise and their interaction with technology, machinery and infrastructure allowed the union to construct a particular type of politics and political power that enabled it to craft a way back into the liberalised and privatised energy sector through self-management practices. This thesis investigates SME’s social relationships by focusing on three subgroups to analyse the processes, practices, and contradictory understandings of collective subject formation inside the organisation. It interrogates how the modification of political economy has transformed SME’s internal structures and gender ideology allowing women to participate in leadership roles. The thesis also explores the role and interactions of workers in resistance with groups of retired and liquidados workers [literally translated as ‘the liquidated’ it refers to those that took the settlement from the government], whose relationship to the organisation was modified by a change in their labour conditions, but that still make claims on and to the union. Both groups provide an entry point to discuss the transformation of SME’s social world and the resignification of its ideology and identity under the neoliberal order. It argues that retirees provided the preservation and legitimation of ideological and historical values crucial to the cohesion of the resistance movement, which has been transformed and modified to fit the new ideology. Similarly, liquidados workers provided a decisive point of contrast to how workers in resistance defined the esmeita identity based on neoliberal moral commitments that prize persona— and familiar—sacrifice to the resistance movement over the persona itself. Under this logic, sacrifice is intertwined with the esmeita identity and can define which workers deserve to participate in the union’s self-managing endeavour. Overall, the thesis shows how the changes in the political economy allowed SME to transition towards a self-managing enterprise testing the organisation’s ability to create coherence among its economic ventures and its identity and values.