The Future of the Fourth Transformation: Plebeian Assault or Pseudo-Technocratization?

ByMexico Solidarity

This editorial appeared in the August 19th, 2025 edition of Intervención y Coyuntura, Revista de teoría y crítica política. We encourage you to visit and support the journal.

The Rolexes, the trips, the supposedly “exhausting days”: everything points in one direction. Either the political-legal instrument of the Transformation movement is shaken by a plebeian assault that rebalances the forces, or a group of individuals, with personal ambitions and shielded under the false umbrella of technocratization, will end up squandering popular victories.

Modern political parties are electoral machines where grassroots participation is minimal, and Morena has been no exception: its leadership has avoided opening spaces of distinction, recognition, and identity for its members. Concerned only with numbers and volumes, they seek to consolidate an electoral base they never recognize as a legitimate interlocutor.

In the current political context—a scenario marked by strategic coalitions, clientelist filters, and eternal multi-member elections—where the militancy is viewed as an electoral resource, not as political subjects, and where interest networks are privileged over the organized community and the people, a plebeian assault will not be simple or smooth. It would have to shake up party structures that run the risk of being captured by factions, leaders, and bureaucrats. More than a window-dressing of “democratization,” what’s at stake is for militancy to be taken into account, to stop being ignored, to be allowed to institutionalize its partisan identity.

Faced with this situation, Morena’s Eighth Extraordinary National Council represents a breath of fresh air: a call to organize from below, affiliate, and activate the membership as a political body—not a passive mass. It speaks of forming more than 71,000 Sectional Committees for the Defense of Transformation, a territorial extension of the largest scale: colonias, ejidos, and popular neighborhoods transformed into cells for grassroots organizing.

However, Morena’s difficult days don’t end with the 8th Extraordinary National Council, as shoring up structures is not enough if there is no real power. What is alarming is that, despite this organizational display, internal party rules continue to restrict fundamental rights: members can organize, disseminate, and defend their actions, but not vote or be voted for. This friction threatens to turn the committees into mere instruments of mobilization without real political representation. Furthermore, their leaders are displaying their emptiness. The ignominy of the organizational secretary Andrés Manuel López Beltran’s trip to Japan, shielded by hollow justifications, is merely the tip of the iceberg. The plebeian assault, not as an organized process but as a spontaneous rebellion, can only ignite in the heat of the electoral machinery’s ignition.

Here we are faced with a dramatic choice: a plebeian assault or institutional pseudo-technocratization. The former would create a shock that would displace the technocratic elites, forcing the real recognition of militancy as a political subject. But the risk exists: without clear organization, this movement can be swallowed up by currents, clientelist leaderships, and bureaucrats masquerading as “advocates of change.” The other, a formally participatory institutionalization, but one that silences electoral rights and curtails militant autonomy. What is organized from above can become a veneer, a farce that replaces emancipation with electoral obedience.

The truth is that demagogues and “juniorcracies”—that new elite that squanders popular victories on banalities and the trivialization of politics—are already on the scene and will be responsible for any potential defeats in 2027. In the meantime, only real organization, with recognized rights and power seized by the grassroots, can transform the electoral machine into a people with their own voice.