With Foot in Mouth, Don’t Bite

IG Brief for Anti-Union Drive in Mexico

The following article was submitted by our comrades of the Grupo Espartaquista de México.

The polemic “IG Chokes on Defense of Mexican Teachers Union” (WV No. 1025, 31 May) seems to have hit the Internationalist Group (IG) where it hurts. In response, the IG has written a 15-page, single-spaced article, “SL on Corporatism in Mexico: Games Centrists Play” (internationalist.org, 5 July), available to date on the Web and only in English. Full of alibis, distortions and petty lies, with a dash of libel, this exercise in demagogy has but one purpose: to try to hide the simple fact that the IG fails to uphold the elementary proletarian principle of defending the trade unions, no matter how bureaucratic and pro-capitalist their leaderships, against attack by the capitalist state.

Central to the IG’s diatribe is our response to the attack led by Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) on the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE). As part of pushing through an anti-union education “reform,” in February the government arrested Elba Esther Gordillo, a widely hated bureaucrat who headed the SNTE for over two decades. The murderous and extravagantly corrupt Gordillo has committed enormous crimes against the working class. But her arrest was a direct attack on the teachers union and the labor movement as a whole. In a March 4 leaflet, the Grupo Espartaquista de México demanded: “Government, hands off the SNTE!” and called “for the immediate release of Gordillo and all arrested union officials” (see WV No. 1019, 8 March). In Mexico as elsewhere, it is labor’s task to clean its own house.

In contrast, the IG’s Internationalist (March 2013) refused to defend the SNTE, writing it off as purely “a state institution, a labor police agency whose purpose is to prop up the regime and regiment the workers.” Denouncing our comrades for defending the union, the IG engaged in centrist double-talk designed to obscure its betrayal. The March Internationalist article acknowledged the obvious point that Gordillo’s arrest was “intended to crush any resistance from the side of the teachers.” But while raising the demand “Peña Nieto, hands off the teachers!”, it avoided calling the SNTE what it is: a union. As our polemic put it: “You can’t have it both ways: either you defend the union under attack, despite its brutal, pro-capitalist leadership, or you add grist to the union-busters’ mill.”

Now the IG makes its anti-union stance even more clear, omitting from its massive, turgid response the demand “Hands off the teachers” as well as any hint that Gordillo’s arrest may have been an attack on the workers movement. With unusual candor, the IG writes that the WV No. 1025 article “says ‘Gordillo’s arrest is a direct attack on the teachers union and the entire Mexican labor movement,’ part of a bourgeois drive to ‘dismantle the unions.’ Yet Peña Nieto went out of his way to insist he was not attacking the SNTE, that he would maintain ‘a respectful and constant dialogue with the SNTE’.” And if the Commander-in-Chief says it, who is the IG to question it?

Seeking to cover its crass opportunism, the IG relies on a concocted “theory” according to which corporatist unions such as the SNTE are not “workers unions at all” but “the class enemy” and, ultimately, “death squads.” As we explained in our polemic, corporatism has long been a hallmark of the capitalist system in Mexico, particularly since the 1930s left-nationalist regime of Lázaro Cárdenas. Through this system, major unions, primarily grouped in the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), have been integrated as components of the PRI, with the government installing and removing union bureaucrats (charros) at will. “In return,” we wrote, “these charros (cowboys) policed the unions for the state, purging and often killing dissident workers while benefiting generously from corruption.” But even those unions most integrated into the state apparatus have been compelled to wage some struggles against the capitalists’ drive to extort ever more profit from the labor of their members, particularly in recent decades as cracks appeared in the corporatist setup.

Taking the degree of bureaucratism and violence as its standard, as opposed to a class analysis, the IG dismisses about half of Mexico’s unions, refusing to defend them when they come under attack. Seeking to manipulate workers’ anger with their union leaders in order to push through a union-busting line, the IG provides a thin coating of red paint to widespread petty-bourgeois anti-union prejudices in Mexico and elsewhere.

What drives the IG’s attacks on the GEM as “CTM socialists” is its appetite to accommodate to the bourgeois-nationalist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). All of its obfuscations cannot hide the fact that the only unions the IG will recognize as genuine are those whose leaders are loyal to the PRD, while unions closer or affiliated to the PRI are but “the armed fist of the bourgeoisie.”

The pro-PRD union tops tie workers to the Mexican bourgeoisie by pushing nationalist ideology and sowing illusions in reforming the capitalist state, engaging in their own bureaucratic methods to reinforce their hold on the unions. For the IG, this spells “a class difference between the official state labor bodies and the new ‘independent’ unions,” as its response proclaims (emphasis in original). While the IG admits that the pro-PRD union leaders are politically tied to the bourgeoisie, it states that “they are not state or ruling-party functionaries or leaders answerable to the government, not the union ranks.” So for the IG, union leaders’ support to the PRD is evidence of the members’ control of their unions. Militants who raise opposition to those bureaucrats’ class collaboration will no doubt come to a different conclusion.

Baffled by Reality

The actions of the SNTMMSRM miners union in particular have put the IG in a real predicament. The SNTMMSRM, which used to be a staunch pillar of the old corporatist system, has been for at least a decade one of the most militant unions in the country. The IG’s schema simply cannot account for this fact. In “IG Chokes,” we noted that in 2006 the National Action Party government went after the union by trying to oust and imprison its leader, Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, a move that touched off a series of powerful strikes. Among these was a nationwide strike, which the IG dismisses for lasting “all of 72 hours.”

Most important was the militant 2006 strike at Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán, which the IG barely mentions in passing. This strike—lasting “all of” 141 days—withstood an attack, at the cost of two workers killed, by some 800 police and obtained a smashing victory, including economic gains and recognition of the union and its leader. The IG, we pointed out in the same article, “refused to defend the SNTMMSRM leadership or the union itself against the state, undoubtedly given the union’s charro leadership and history of affiliation with the PRI.” The article continued:

“Prefiguring its line that Gordillo’s arrest was a ‘settling of scores among the rulers,’ the IG claimed that Gómez Urrutia’s ouster was a ‘settling of accounts within the regime’ (even though the PRI was not then in power). While vaguely calling to ‘reject this frontal assault by the government,’ the IG’s El Internacionalista/Edición México No. 2 [August 2006] omitted any call for victory to the strikes or for dropping the charges against the union leader.”

Labeling this another one of WV’s “smears,” the IG’s response quotes their 2006 article at greater length, in the process confirming that they did not call for victory to the strikes or for dropping the charges against the union leader. After some painful contortions seemingly designed to give the impression that they, too, defend the miners union, the IG quotes a February 2008 article about a strike in Cananea, Sonora, that started on 30 July 2007. After many strikes carried out by the miners union throughout the country over a period of two years, the IG started to sense that its line was not too popular among militant miners.

Neither quite sticking to their position nor repudiating it—they are as infallible as they are prone to bending with the wind—the IG choked out a couple of lines that they do, in fact, “demand that all the charges against leaders of ostensible labor organizations be dropped.” We do not know how many strikes a union has to wage before the IG drops its sneaky “ostensible” label. But simply defending the miners union, its strikes and its leaders against the bourgeois state was enough for the GEM and the International Communist League to be accused by these windbags of alibiing “death squads”!

Attempting to reconcile the proven militancy of the Cananea miners with its line that their union is essentially a nest of bourgeois cops, the IG now declares with breathtaking disingenuousness that Cananea Local 65 has “partially broken” from the national union. This is a lie that would infuriate any of these miners. Three years after police broke their strike, Local 65 refuses to go back to work. All along, the miners have demanded that the company recognize the union and that the federal government recognize Gómez Urrutia as its leader.

Ever Deeper in Their Labyrinth

The IG purports to show that it inherited its union-busting line from the ICL and is now upholding it against our “degeneration.” To this end, its 5 July tome reproduced 13 quotes from Espartaco, newspaper of the GEM, and WV between 1987 and 1996. We only wish that readers would study these articles. They will not find a single statement to the effect that the PRI-affiliated unions are mere agencies of the bourgeois state. Nor will they find any refusal to defend their leaders against the state. As the GEM wrote in “Break with All Bourgeois Parties: PRI, PAN, PRD!” (Espartaco No. 14, Autumn-Winter 2000): “Given their conception of themselves as infallible caudillos, IG leaders Norden and Negrete imagine that, since they held this or that position behind the back of the party when they were still members of the ICL, theirs had to be ‘the line’ of our organization.”

When confronted with the evidence, the IG opts for stealthy retreat. A case in point is that of Joaquín Hernández Galicia (“La Quina”), head of the PRI-affiliated SRTPRM oil workers union at the national PEMEX oil company. When “La Quina” was arrested in January 1989, we ran articles calling for his defense in both WV (with Norden as editor) and Spanish-language Spartacist. In the WV No. 1025 polemic we quoted a central point of those articles, which referred to the Soviet Union, not yet destroyed by capitalist counterrevolution:

“The Trotskyists, who understand the class character of the USSR as a workers state despite its bureaucratic degeneration under Stalinist rule, and thus defend it against imperialism, likewise defend the unions against the bosses despite the sellout bureaucracy which sits atop these repositories of workers power.... Those who don’t defend the Soviet Union also can’t defend the oil workers union in Mexico.”

—WV No. 470, 3 February 1989

Those articles also quoted Leon Trotsky’s statement from In Defense of Marxism (1939): “In the last analysis a workers’ state is a trade union which has conquered power.”

Seventeen years after its founders defected from Trotskyism, the IG has finally repudiated these programmatic articles. But even the repudiation is dishonest and politically cowardly. The IG writes that the articles, “while correctly defending La Quina, wrongly equated the STPRM [sic] with U.S.-style unions” and were “ambiguous and contradictory” on the class nature of corporatist unions.

Like a squid sensing danger, the IG’s natural reflex is to squirt a cloud of ink in order to cover its dash toward safety. Thus it tosses in the poisonous slanders that we defend death squads and have “aided and abetted” state repression against the IG—not even bothering to cook up the when, where and how of this “aid.” Slander is the classic recourse of the politically bankrupt. Conscientious readers will not be fooled. As a subscriber wrote in a July 22 letter to WV: “Most noticeably, the IG completely ducks the Russian Question in their article.” The writer continued:

“If the installed leaders of the corporatist unions in Mexico are, as the IG writes, thuggish, murderous, pro-capitalist strikebreakers (and they are) then why were the Russian Stalinists, who murdered Trotsky and the core of the Bolshevik Party, who slaughtered more workers than ‘La Maestra’ [Gordillo] has ever known, not thrown in the same sack as her? By all accounts, the actions of the Stalinists, in Russia and internationally, did far more harm to the working-class than any of the charro leaders in Mexico.”

What about the analogy with U.S. unions? Like garden-variety Latin American nationalists, the IG gringo-baits the ICL while performing quite a facelift on the imperialist-bribed American union bureaucrats. The IG writes that “with supreme imperialist arrogance (and ignorance) [the Spartacists] claim that Mexico is no different than the U.S., that ‘unions’ with death squads killing scores of their members (over 100 teachers in Oaxaca alone) are the same as the Teamsters under Jimmy Hoffa.” Well, Jimmy Hoffa was no Quaker. More generally, for the IG the AFL-CIO’s help in engineering bloody coups throughout Latin America, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants, is small change compared to the SNTE tops’ murderous violence. And then there is the AFL-CIO bureaucracy’s promotion and funding of “free trade unions” in East Europe—centrally Polish Solidarność in the 1980s, which spearheaded capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet bloc.

“Ambiguous and Contradictory”: The IG’s Lingering Claims to Trotskyism

The claim that the ICL ever held the IG’s anti-union line is simply laughable. The ICL’s Mexican section was consolidated through the July 1990 fusion of the GEM and the Fracción Trotskista (FT), made up of former leaders of the then Partido Obrero Socialista (POS—today the Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo). They were expelled from that Morenoite organization because of their solidarity with the ICL’s unflinching defense of the USSR and the deformed workers states against the rising forces of capitalist counterrevolution and with our call for proletarian political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracies. And defense of “La Quina” as a concrete implementation of a proletarian class stand played an important role in the fusion process and the political arming of the GEM, in contradistinction to the bulk of the Mexican left, which refused to defend him with essentially the same arguments now wielded by the IG.

The May 1990 document “Main Points of Agreement” between the ICL and the FT—a comprehensive statement—provided a concise basis, together with the FT’s own Platform, to move toward fusion. Point Nine of the document reads:

“Defense of the labor unions against the attack of the bourgeois state, as in the case of the ‘bazukazo’ against ‘La Quina’ and the PEMEX workers union (historically one of the strongest trade unions in Mexico). This doesn’t mean ‘political support’ to such bureaucratic leaders but a clear class position: complete independence of the unions from the bourgeois state. Condemn the capitulation to the Mexican government made by the [Mandelite] PRT and the PTZ [predecessor of the POS] during those events. Fight for revolutionary leadership of the unions; for trade-union fractions on the basis of the Transitional Program.”

The IG’s Negrete played a key role in writing this document and in the GEM-FT fusion as a whole. But that was then.

Having repudiated the class basis on which the ICL defended “La Quina,” how can the IG still claim that defense of this PRI gangster was correct? The IG elucidates: “When La Quina was arrested, it was absolutely necessary to defend him and demand his release, because in going after him, [then PRI president Carlos] Salinas was targeting a leader who had partially broken from the corporatist system, not-so-secretly supporting [PRD founding leader Cuauhtémoc] Cárdenas in the 1988 presidential elections.”

That’s what it takes, then, to at least partially “break from the corporatist system” and to go from a police agency to a (semi?) genuine trade union: support the PRD. We will stick with Trotsky. In his 1940 essay “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay,” Trotsky encapsulated the guiding principles in the struggle to transform the unions into instruments of revolutionary struggle—in Mexico and other capitalist societies—as “complete and unconditional independence of the trade unions in relation to the capitalist state” and “trade union democracy.” In regard to all unions, this means a fight to oust the pro-capitalist bureaucrats on the basis of opposition to all bourgeois parties.