AMLO’s “Revolution of Consciousness”: The Mexican People, the MORENA Party, and the State
Rodrigo Guillot
Abstract
This article examines the concept of “revolution of consciousness” coined by former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) to describe the process through which Mexico’s popular majority recognized, organized against, and electorally defeated the neoliberal regime, thereby inaugurating the Fourth Transformation (Cuarta Transformación) under the MORENA party. Drawing on Marx’s analysis of the dialectical relationship between material conditions and consciousness, the essay argues that while AMLO’s charismatic leadership and daily morning press conferences (mañaneras) successfully shaped public discourse and legitimized transformative policies during his administration, this approach created structural dependency wherein MORENA functioned primarily as a “managerial” party subordinated to presidential initiative rather than as an autonomous vanguard organization. The article contends that the national-popular state, formed through electoral means and interclass alliances rather than violent revolution, remains structurally constrained by the balance of forces within civil society and its own political anatomy, making it insufficient for sustaining revolutionary consciousness once material conditions have been partially transformed. As President Claudia Sheinbaum begins her term amid challenges including internal party contradictions, growing popular demands that exceed state capacity, premature succession debates, and the global resurgence of right-wing discursive models, the author argues that MORENA must transcend its dependence on state apparatus and position itself at the vanguard of consciousness, continuously reactivating the paradoxical moment wherein organized popular will transforms material reality rather than merely reflecting the achieved balance of forces within the national-popular state structure.
Keywords
Mexico, AMLO, Fourth Transformation, MORENA party, revolution of consciousness, national-popular state, civil society, party-state relations, Rodrigo Guillot
