CERTAIN documents--Womack's book and films like Potemkin and The Battle of Algiers--lead me to ask what may be a naive question: do the people, because they are right, always win out in the end?

Films of Socialist realism, because they promote a particular ideology, always answer in the affirmative. Womack's answer is less biased, but strangely equivocal. He shows how, when Carranza was overthrown, the remaining Zapatista leaders won pivotal roles in the government of Obregon. The ejido program of the early twenties, which granted previously-claimed land to villages, was a Zapatista victory. The boost given the ejidos by Cárdenas in the thirties nearly satisfied the revolutionary goals of the Morelos villagers.

But, returning to Zapata's own village today, Womack finds that though the campesinos survive in the sixties, they do not prosper. They have been bypassed, shunted aside by the industrialized Mexico which began under Cárdenas, the man who protected their interests. In Five Families, Oscar Lewis draws a similarly dismal picture--a day in the life of a family in Tepotzlan, one of the Morelos villages, and a day in the life of a Tepotzlan family which has moved to a working-class barrio in Mexico City. Both families continue to exist as their revolutionary ancestors did--marginally, badly.

Were you to ask Womack whether the campesinos of Morelos triumphed, he would say, "well, they survived."

Survival was all they sought and, ironically, all they got.

That people could seek only the survival of their way of life, or want a revolution so limited, so circumscribed and conservative, these notions are alien to out sophisticated way of thinking.

Several years ago a lay psychoanalyst who had been studying people in Morelos announced in The Atlantic that all rural people hate the land from which they grab their living. Land is fickle, he said, yielding some years and not others. Why then were the campesinos of Morelos willing to give up their lives to secure tiny fields for their children? I get from Womack's book the same feeling I have gotten from watching campesinos in other parts of Mexico talk about land. It is not something you love or hate, it is a part of you, and as you would fight to stay alive, so you would fight to protect you land from dismemberment. Only such strong feelings can serve to explain how Zapata and his followers could have made the terrible, ruinous journey they made. Their revolution demanded of them a self-sacrifice which few of us, with our theories and our brains and our shifting loyalties, could make.