Workers Vanguard No. 855	30 September 2005

No Support to Capitalist PRD!
Forge a Workers Party!

Mexico: López Obrador, Democratic Rights and the Tasks of the Working Class

We print below an article translated from Espartaco No. 24 (Summer 2005), published by our comrades of the Grupo Espartaquista de México. The article centrally deals with the attempt by Mexican president Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN) and a section of the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to strip Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) of his political immunity—a process called desafuero—in order to eliminate him from next year’s presidential race.

Last May, while polls showed that Mexico City’s mayor, PRDer Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), was growing in popularity and that he could win the presidency in 2006, the PAN government, together with a majority wing of the PRI, launched a campaign transparently designed to push AMLO aside: the attorney general accused him of “disobeying” a court order for taking too long to return a piece of land he had expropriated to...build a road to a hospital! Through electoral fraud, [late 19th- to early 20th-century leader] Porfirio Díaz remained in power for 30 years and the PRI and its predecessors for 70. For more than 100 years, defense of effective suffrage against fraud has been one of the most recurrent and deeply felt demands of the masses, and it is not surprising that Fox’s maneuver dramatically polarized the country. The desafuero process dominated newspaper headlines and TV news shows. In Mexico City, there were homemade banners everywhere repudiating the PAN and PRI’s stories. Since last August, hundreds of thousands have marched in the streets, especially in the capital, against the new fraud. More significantly, many workers unions, above all the so-called “independent” ones, which contain many of the most combative trade unionists, took part in the demonstrations.

Even the bourgeoisie found itself divided over the desafuero. While important bourgeois sectors backed Fox’s attack, other sections of the bourgeoisie, and even of the imperialists, were worried about the danger of “instability,” i.e., an explosion of social struggle as a result of Fox’s attempt. Thus, some of the most “respected” bourgeois mouthpieces in the world, like the New York Times, denounced the maneuver. The threat of instability provoked a fall in the stock market. According to Proceso (1 May), the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. Armed Forces, Richard Myers, met with Fox in mid April to warn him of the consequences of the desafuero, and the U.S. government itself made its “concern” about political instabilty public. Finally, after the mobilization of 1.2 million people in defense of AMLO’s rights on April 24, Fox backed down.

The attack by Fox & Co. would have meant a pre-emptive right-wing strike, carried out with the approval of the Mexican Congress, to get rid of the candidate that Fox’s clerical gang identifies with the “left.” This attack would have represented a blow against the thin “democratic” layer covering volatile Mexican capitalism and would have reinforced state tyranny. We Spartacists opposed the PAN’s attack against the elementary democratic rights of the entire population: essentially the right of people to vote for whomever they want. As Marxists, we defend democratic rights, among them universal suffrage, which have been won through bitterly fought struggles. We took this position without giving the PRD any political support and while making clear the PRD’s bourgeois and therefore inherently anti-worker nature. As we wrote in a leaflet distributed at demonstrations against the desafuero on April 7 and 24 [see WV No. 846, 15 April]:

“If the working class is to break with the bourgeois parties and move forward toward its political independence, as a basic starting point the working class should not allow Fox’s judicial dictates to prevent it from voting for whomever it wants. If the government can push aside even a timid bourgeois nationalist such as López Obrador, removing him from his elected post and even incarcerating him, what could a class-struggle leadership of the working class expect?”

Working people are fed up with the “government of business owners” and its transparently anti-worker “neoliberal” policies. The PRD, a bourgeois-nationalist party that combines denunciations of “neoliberalism” with meager concessions to the workers and oppressed, has managed to take advantage of this discontent to increase its popularity, especially among the dispossessed masses. Thus, in the demonstrations in defense of López Obrador on April 7 and 24, banners supporting AMLO’s “alternative nation project” were common, as well as others declaring “You Are Not Alone” or “We Are All López.”

But as Marxists, we understand that the main division in society is that between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, two classes with their own, irreconcilable interests. To render this division clear and to combat illusions in the bourgeoisie are our main tasks. The PAN, PRI and PRD are all bourgeois parties, differing only in the form of administering capitalism. None of them challenges—and it could not be otherwise—capitalist exploitation itself. To get rid of the rapaciousness inherent in this system of exploitation and oppression, it is necessary for the working class to take power in its own hands through a socialist revolution, destroying the bourgeois state—whose core is the police, the army, the courts and the prisons—and establishing a workers state, the class dictatorship of the proletariat. Such a state would be based on collectivizing the means of production and using them not in the service of the profits of a handful of capitalists but for satisfying the needs of the population.

“Neoliberalism” and “Populism”: Two Faces of Capitalist Exploitation

Over the last two decades, the Mexican economy has been administered according to policies identified with what is known as “neoliberalism”: brutally slashing social expenditure, privatizing state industries and opening up the economy to foreign investors without any restrictions. The high-sounding goal, according to [former president] Salinas de Gortari, was to bring Mexico into the “First World.” Today, there is nothing left to privatize except the energy sector, and yet the reality is the devastation of the economy and the living standards of the masses. The buying power of wages has fallen 70 percent in the last 23 years. Privatizations have thrown millions onto the streets and significantly weakened the unions. Countless maquiladoras [foreign-owned “free-trade” factories] have been closed. The implementation of NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] and the dismantling of the ejido [communal farming system] have devastated millions of peasants. Together with the tens of thousands who risk their lives every year trying to enter the U.S. in search of employment, thousands of peasants continue emigrating to the big cities, where they join the immense army of the unemployed trying to survive. An estimated 27 percent of the total population is engaged in the “informal economy,” i.e., they are street vendors.

In addition to continuing these reactionary economic policies, the PAN is also the historic party of clerical reaction; it was founded by priests, bosses and landowners in the 1930s as the “respectable” version of the [Catholic fundamentalist guerrillaist] Cristero movement and in response to the Callista and Cardenista blasphemies [referring to the secular presidents Plutarco Elías Calles and Lázaro Cárdenas]. Thus, Fox’s administration is characterized by its general social backwardness, by its campaigns to reinforce “family values,” and by its continuous attacks on the separation of church and state and against the rights of women. Fox grotesquely boasts that the murders of women in Ciudad Juárez have been solved, to the disbelieving ears of the victims’ relatives and of a population horrified by over a decade of unpunished misogynist crimes. It was the PAN government of Baja California that in 2000 denied young Paulina her elementary right to an abortion after having been a victim of rape, and instead sent her...to a priest! Today in Mexico—the second-largest Catholic country in the world—15 homosexuals are murdered every month. Fox is the first president in over a century to kiss the hand of a pope in an official act.

The PAN is made up of openly anti-worker right-wingers, ideologically motivated neo-Cristeros and overt lackeys of American imperialism. Fox himself is nothing more than a Coca-Kulak—an ignorant landowner with a small dose of urbanity courtesy of The Coca-Cola Company. The PAN national leader Manuel Espino is a veteran of the fascistic organization El Yunque. Now the country’s domestic policy is in the hands of Carlos Abascal, an obscurantist fanatic and son and legitimate ideological heir to a leader of the equally fascistic sinarquista movement [a legal political organization based on the peasantry and derived from the Cristeros]. The republican principles of Fox and his monks are probably reduced to their belief that only “Christ is King” [slogan of the Cristero movement].

On the other hand, there is nothing particularly leftist in the politics of López Obrador and the PRD. But they have managed to seize on the crass conservatism of the current federal government and its aristocratic and ignorant disdain for the poor and the workers in order to present themselves to the masses as a friendlier alternative and a viable vehicle to achieve the felt democratic demands of the population (the right to education, national emancipation vis-à-vis American imperialism, etc.). A large part of AMLO’s popularity comes from his statements against the privatization of the energy sector. To a certain degree, López Obrador has translated his democratic-nationalist rhetoric into popular measures, such as an acclaimed subsidy to the elderly and to single mothers and investment in projects of public education and urban infrastructure—timid and elementary measures which in the context of the brutal austerity of the PRI and PAN seem truly significant. This is a dangerous illusion.

The working class should not have illusions in AMLO. The particular positions that distinguish him from other bourgeois politicians (constant denunciations of neoliberalism, opposition to privatization of the energy sector, etc.) are purely conjunctural: they are either electoral campaign promises or measures to defuse the potential for workers struggle. Nationalist populism and economic neoliberalism are simply alternate policies of the capitalist system, often followed by the same individual according to the demands of the moment. As we said in our 7 April leaflet: “If he wins the presidency, the very support López Obrador has among the workers movement would place him in a better position to carry forward the privatization of the electric and oil sectors, which the ineffective Fox has not been able to achieve.”

The same understanding is behind the support AMLO has among important capitalists such as Carlos Slim—the richest man in Latin America, who bought the formerly state-owned communications monopoly Telmex—and statements such as that of the president of the Mexican Banks Association, Marcos Martínez Gavica. Clearly referring to López Obrador, Martínez Gavica commented on the day of AMLO’s inauguration that a “left” politician represents no obstacle to the country’s development: “He can even be a guarantor to further advance reforms in order to make the national economy more competitive” (La Jornada, 5 March). And when these people talk of “reforms” and “capacity to compete,” they invariably refer to privatizations and anti-worker measures. Not one vote to the capitalist parties! For the political independence of the working class! For a workers party to fight for workers rule!

From Lázaro Cárdenas to López Obrador: The Nationalist Sleeping Pill

The history of Latin American capitalism has been one of constant oscillations between “free trade” openness on the one hand and nationalist populism on the other. After decades of “neoliberalism,” in recent years there has been a shift throughout South America back toward nationalist populism. However, this shift in the political climate and balance of forces is not in itself anti-capitalist. In a sense, it strengthens the forces of Latin American capitalism by solidifying the ties of the working class to its own national bourgeoisie, which is well practiced in demagogic denunciations of Wall Street and Washington. As we said in Espartaco No. 20 (Spring-Summer 2003), “The only constants in this inhumane wheel of fortune are subjugation to imperialism and the human misery of millions of peasants and workers.”

The fundamental role of the PRD has been to derail the inevitable daily and spontaneous struggles of the Mexican masses into the sterile framework of electoral ballots. Its goal is to stabilize volatile Mexican capitalism and renegotiate the terms of its subordination to imperialism. It was telling that, at the April 7 demonstration against the desafuero, López Obrador’s speech put particular emphasis on maintaining the peaceful character of the demonstrations and respecting state institutions. His speech had an effect not only on the crowd but also on the big bourgeoisie, which sighed in relief. Even the stock exchange recovered after his speech.

The PRD emerged as a disenchanted faction of the PRI that sought to return to that party’s “golden years.” Thus, in his book Un Proyecto Alternativo de Nación [An Alternative Nation Project], López Obrador writes in reference to the PRI governments before Echeverría that “although we suffered the endemic evil of inequality, Mexico grew constantly at a rate of almost 7 percent a year and with macroeconomic stability in prices and public finances.” In order to polemicize against “neoliberals,” AMLO uses the example of...Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and Adolfo López Mateos, among others. The former is infamous for the [1968] Tlatelolco massacre, while the latter was responsible for the brutal crushing of the great railroad strike of 1957-58, although many (like the leadership of the SME [Mexican Electricians Union]) remember him only for the nationalization of the electric industry. But that is what bourgeois nationalist populism means: the combination of concessions to the workers and oppressed and brutal repression, with the goal of disciplining the working class and pushing forward the interests of the bourgeoisie. Also revealing, though certainly not surprising for Marxists, is his reference to the “endemic evil of inequality.” What workers need to understand is that inequality, exploitation and oppression are endemic to the rule of capital.

It is worth analyzing briefly the politics of the icon of Mexican bourgeois nationalists, Lázaro Cárdenas. During his presidential period, Cárdenas carried out a series of democratic reforms, such as nationalization of oil and railroads and land distribution. Marxists defended these measures against right-wing attacks. The expropriation of oil in particular represented, in the words of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, “the only effective means of safeguarding national independence and the elementary conditions of democracy.”

On the eve of World War II, Cárdenas took advantage of the conjuncture—with the existence of the Soviet Union as a counterweight to the imperialists—to expropriate the British and American oil magnates; he also humiliated them by giving asylum to the Bolshevik Trotsky, the organizer, together with Lenin, of the October Revolution and the founder of the Red Army and the Fourth International. Cárdenas’ aim was to consolidate the Mexican capitalist state and check the excessive ambitions of the imperialists, and this required the support of the working class. In 1940, living in Lázaro Cárdenas’ Mexico and months before being assassinated by a Stalinist henchman, Trotsky explained in “The Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay”:

“Inasmuch as the chief role in the backward countries is not played by national but by foreign capitalism, the national bourgeoisie occupies, in the sense of its social position, a much more minor position than corresponds with the development of industry. Inasmuch as foreign capital does not import workers but proletarianizes the native population, the national proletariat soon begins playing the most important role in the life of the country. In these conditions the national government, to the extent that it tries to show resistance to foreign capital, is compelled to a greater or lesser degree to lean on the proletariat.”

This quote explains quite succinctly the essence of the decades of PRI bonapartist rule in Mexico, during which the state, due to the inherent weakness of the bourgeoisie, often appeared to stand above competing class interests and relied on corporatism—tying political, social and trade-union organizations to the state.

By making these concessions, Cárdenas not only used the working class as a powerful card to play against his local and imperialist bourgeois rivals, but he managed to co-opt it and to then put it under the iron leadership of the CTM [Mexican Labor Federation] bureaucracy. Cárdenas was no “socialist.” When nationalist demagogy was not enough, he didn’t hesitate before unleashing repression against the workers. For example, in 1940 he sent the police to break an oil strike in Azcapotzalco. Despite his nationalist rhetoric, by the end of his administration the Mexican economy depended on the U.S. more than ever before. “Tata” Cárdenas was, in fact, the founder of what Mario Vargas Llosa evocatively called the “perfect dictatorship” of the PRI, which was to last 60 years.

Bourgeois nationalism was the main ideological glue that made possible Cárdenas’ “historic alliance,” i.e., the subordination of the working class to the PRM [Party of the Mexican Revolution, predecessor to the PRI]/PRI. Nationalism is the notion that in the end we are all Mexicans and the key question is to push the nation forward. Today, the PRD mimics Cárdenas’ nationalist rhetoric. This is only a smokescreen to cover capitalist exploitation. The proletariat will successfully struggle to achieve its historic interests inasmuch as it breaks with this bourgeois ideology and realizes that it is an international class, with common interests independent of nationality and counterposed to those of the national and foreign bourgeoisies.

An Alternative Subordination Project

In his book An Alternative Nation Project, which in reality is little more than a great collection of commonplaces and pipe dreams about how Mexico will become a paradise of social justice once the PRD holds the reins of its destiny, AMLO presents a series of proposals to solve one of the country’s oldest and most burning problems: the land. But his program to “reactivate the countryside” is a bad joke. The goal is “to harmonize and support, at the same time, subsistence agriculture, production for the internal market and production for export.” How to achieve it? He writes:

“It would be necessary to promote the strengthening of the subsistence agriculture economy in communities. The purpose is to promote traditional productive activities with small grants....

“There are exceptional cases in indigenous communities where they produce almost everything they consume. There is also, for example, what has historically happened in towns like those of Tlaxcala, where the peasants, in small plots of land, grow corn, with good productivity, and have sheep, goats and cows in their yards, and a loom inside the house.”

The Tlaxcala peasants do so well that they risk their lives to migrate massively to the U.S.! Additionally, AMLO says: “The government action we propose must be oriented to granting credit through verbal agreements for the purchase of animals, grain and seeds, work materials, supplies and all that is destined to strengthen productive activities and traditional technologies.” What does “traditional technologies” mean? Pulling plows with starving oxen? Using mud to build chinampas [Aztec artificial islets used for growing crops on the old Texcoco lake]?

Mexican agriculture, which is in large part subsistence, cannot compete with the huge industrial farms of the U.S., which in addition cover immense expanses of fertile land that simply do not exist in Mexico. To give one example of the enormous differences, here there is one tractor for every 100 people involved in agriculture, while in the U.S. there are 1.5 tractors for every rural worker. Making the Mexican countryside productive does not require “traditional technology” but modern technology: tractors, irrigation systems, processing plants, fertilizers and scientific education for the peasants. But this goal is impossible within the framework of underdeveloped capitalism; to make it a reality, a workers revolution backed by a peasant insurrection is necessary, to expropriate the bourgeoisie and the landowners. This perspective cannot be separated from the struggle to extend the revolution to the colossus in the north, which would make it possible to obtain the technology necessary to pull the countryside out of backwardness and misery.

The national emancipation the masses long for and AMLO promises presupposes a modern industrial economy. But Mexican capitalism cannot rid itself of imperialism. Thus, regarding the maquiladora industry, AMLO holds:

“We propose direct dealing with entrepreneurs to stop the migration of maquiladoras. It is true that in China or other parts of the world there are more relative advantages, above all the low cost of labor, but it is possible to offer other incentives and to re-evaluate the importance of the proximity of our country to the world’s largest market.”

The only way to make the maquiladora industry competitive is to make labor even cheaper, to offer greater fiscal advantages to the blood-sucking investors and to continue the draconian labor regime established by the so-called “protection contracts.”

The reactionary policies of the PRD are not the result of an underhanded betrayal or the corruption of this or that leader, but the logical and inevitable consequence of its class character. In a backward and dependent capitalist country like Mexico, the national ruling class depends overwhelmingly on credit and investment from its U.S. masters. Any political alternative that, like the PRD, stands for the continuation of Mexican capitalism—i.e., that ultimately defends the rule and interests of a wing of the national bourgeoisie—will be forced to reject in deeds the democratic demands it promises. Thus, confronting a modern and socially powerful proletariat and a vast and discontented peasantry on its own territory, the national bourgeoisie is fundamentally much more hostile to “its own” masses than to its American masters. Whatever the rhetoric, there is no anti-imperialist wing of the bourgeoisie. The only thing bourgeois nationalists can propose is to better negotiate the terms of their own subordination to imperialism and the consequent abrogation of the population’s democratic rights. The PRD doesn’t even oppose NAFTA, which by its nature is a “treaty” for the one-sided rape of the Mexican economy by the imperialists, but merely wants to renegotiate it.

The inextricable link between the broad, unresolved democratic demands and the international and socialist struggle of the proletariat is at the core of Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. In one of his “Basic Postulates” of the permanent revolution, Trotsky explained:

“With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of a permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses.”

—Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution (1931)

The peasantry, submerged in the most remote and backward regions, is part of the heterogeneous layer Marxists call the petty bourgeoisie. The landless peasants are reduced, in the best-case scenario, to subsistence agriculture and lack social power. The small landowners compete with each other to market their produce. Their interest lies in the private ownership of land. That is why the peasantry is incapable of reorganizing society, of playing an independent revolutionary role. Today’s peasantry is the product of the backwardness inherent in Third World capitalism; peasants fight against the large, mechanized farms whose spread is turning many peasants into rural workers. We communists take sides with the peasants in their struggles against the landowners and the government and seek to win their support for socialist revolution. But we understand that, inasmuch as it struggles to maintain its existence against modern industrial capitalism, the peasantry seeks to roll the wheel of history backwards. The poor peasantry, still millions strong, may play an important role in the revolution, but it will necessarily be subordinated to the leadership of the industrial urban proletariat.

The working class, or proletariat, is responsible for collectively turning the wheels of the modern industrial economy—the factories, communications, transport. Possessing nothing other than its own labor power, the working class has no interest in the continuation of the rule of private property. Its historic interest lies in the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, which would place the entire economy at the service of human needs and would lay the fundamental basis to eradicate exploitation, oppression and misery. For this reason, the working class is the only genuinely revolutionary class of our epoch, able to lead the peasantry, the impoverished urban masses and all the oppressed in the fight for their emancipation.

The Russian Revolution points the way forward for Mexico. In fact, the Trotskyist perspective was confirmed in practice by the Bolshevik October Revolution of 1917. At that time, the Russian working class took in its hands the tasks of the democratic revolution that the bourgeois regime had not been able to solve: it freed the country from the imperialist yoke by repudiating the foreign debt contracted by the tsar and the bourgeoisie; it laid the basis for the emancipation of women and issued laws banning all types of discrimination against homosexuals and ethnic minorities. It also abolished private ownership of land and called on the poor peasants to carry out an agrarian revolution to destroy the feudal estates and the remnants of peonage. But in order to accomplish this, it was necessary to begin expropriating the means of production and establishing a collectivized, planned economy, as well as a state monopoly of foreign trade. Instead of bourgeois parliamentarism, the Russian Revolution implemented workers democracy through the soviets—councils of workers and soldiers in charge of directing the economy and the whole society. That is what a workers government meant: a government based on the proletariat supported by the peasantry.

These measures laid the initial basis for the socialist reorganization of society. Certainly, given the degree of economic interpenetration in the modern world and as the example of the Soviet Union showed, no country can grow in isolation from international trade. Thus, from the very beginning, a victorious revolutionary party in a backward country—and even more so in one that shares a border with the U.S.—would have to fight, as part of a single international party, for proletarian revolution within the American imperialist behemoth and on an international scale. In fact, only the triumph of workers revolution in the U.S. could guarantee the genuine national emancipation of Mexico. The multiracial U.S. working class, in particular its strategic black component, is potentially the most powerful ally of Mexican workers. As our U.S. comrades recently wrote in an article denouncing the racist atrocities of the paramilitary “Minutemen” and demanding full citizenship rights for all immigrants (WV No. 849, 27 May):

“An effective defense of the working class requires an internationalist program, expressing the common class interests of workers on both sides of the border drawn when the U.S. stole much of the Southwest from Mexico in 1848. The fight for immigrant rights must be seen as part of the struggle against all forms of oppression. And in the U.S., that means a struggle against black oppression, the bedrock of American capitalism. Workers must fight against the capitalist rulers’ attempts to pit one oppressed group against another—such as the recent gross statement by right-wing Mexican president Vicente Fox that Mexican workers ‘are doing the work that not even blacks want to do in the United States’.”

The millions of Mexican and Central American workers and peasants who migrate “illegally” to the U.S., facing all sorts of dangers, lack any rights and are forced to take the hardest and worst-paid jobs. But the racist hypocrite Fox cares for neither the rights of Mexican workers nor those of blacks. For joint class struggle in Mexico and the U.S. against the capitalist rulers!

The LTS: “Free and Sovereign” Reformism

Among those who claim to be “Trotskyists,” the Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo (LTS) opposed the anti-democratic attacks by the PRI and the PAN while correctly emphasizing its denunciation both of the PRD as a bourgeois party and of those “socialist” groups that collaborate with it (Estrategia Obrera, 16 April). However, the strategic aim that the LTS links to its position on the desafuero is explicitly reformist and not revolutionary: for the Mexican masses to mobilize in order to “impose a Free and Sovereign Constituent Assembly in which the great demands of the worker and peasant majorities of the country are discussed.”

This constituent assembly would be open “not only to the PRD and AMLO, but also to all social, labor and left-wing organizations” and would “discuss” burning democratic issues such as a “radical agrarian reform,” “decent wages and employment,” the refusal to pay the foreign debt and the cancellation of “all treaties, like NAFTA, that subordinate us to American imperialism.” The LTS assigns to a constituent assembly—i.e., a bourgeois parliamentary body—the task of solving the just aspirations of the masses, promising beforehand it will include the PRD! Throwing permanent revolution overboard, the LTS’ plan does not mention, even in passing, that the solution of these questions requires a socialist revolution: the creation of a collective, planned economy and the struggle to extend workers power internationally.

For communists, the call for a constituent assembly—i.e., a legislative assembly within the framework of bourgeois democracy—is justified in situations in which existing laws do not even establish the most basic and formal democratic liberties (as in the case of a military dictatorship or under unconsolidated bourgeois-democratic governments, like the Russian “Provisional Government” of February 1917). In those cases, this call can be used to link the concrete and immediate aspirations of the people with the struggle for socialist revolution. It is, hence, a “transitional demand,” proceeding from the spontaneous consciousness of the masses to revolutionary consciousness.

However, if this call is used, as it is by the LTS, simply as a means to “improve” the existing capitalist democracy in a backward country, it has exactly the opposite effect, reinforcing the illusion that capitalist democracy can be qualitatively improved. Linking the legitimate aspirations of the masses for fuller democracy not to the struggle for socialist revolution but to a “Free and Sovereign Constituent Assembly” constitutes a “transitional program” moving from the spontaneous struggle of the masses...to conscious reformism.

IG: From Break with Trotskyism to Break with Reality

But without a doubt, the most absurd of the pseudo-Trotskyist groups is the (mis)named Internationalist Group (IG), whose leadership is made up of ex-members of our organization. For years they have stridently accused us of “abstentionism” and “abstract propagandism,” while they promise to find the road to the masses. Having broken in deeds with revolutionary Marxism, in order to justify its existence the IG first got rid of basic honesty, but now has also had to break with reality.

In its most recent publication in Spanish (El Internacionalista, May 2005), this little group boasts of its absolute indifference toward the legal campaign against López Obrador. The extraordinary thing about the case is that, in the same article, the IG itself affirms that it defends “the elementary democratic right of any political party to run in the elections with whatever candidates it chooses” and recognizes that:

“What they [the Fox government and the PRI] are seeking is that, once he is subject to trial, according to Article 111 of the Mexican Constitution, López Obrador will be denied the right to participate in the elections.”

How do they explain this obvious contradiction? With this absurd argument, which immediately follows:

“But it will be months before this is concretized. At the present time, he [López Obrador] isn’t even the candidate of the PRD (others, including the perennial PRD presidential hopeful Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, are also vying for the nomination), and no party has presented, much less registered, its standard bearer.… Should Fox and the PRI be so bold as to carry out their idiocy…then we would defend the right of López Obrador to run for president.…

“Up to now AMLO hasn’t been denied the right to present his candidacy. To pretend otherwise is to enter openly into the electoral game of the PRD.”

So the IG would only defend the democratic rights of an official PRD candidate? What a Marxist criterion! In reality, the “idiocy” of Fox and the PRI that the IG’s article situates in a hypothetical future (“Should Fox and the PRI be so bold as to carry out”) had already culminated in the desafuero 15 days before the date of the IG’s article (25 April). It is comical that just two days after the date of its article, and three days before the date of the paper in which it first appears, Fox himself gave implicit recognition to the fact that he had been attempting to take away López Obrador’s political rights, and backed down. In denying that the attack on democratic rights was already a reality, the charlatans of the IG would have entered into a de facto bloc with the Fox government…which wasn’t to be because the IG got there too late. But maybe the deposed attorney general, General Macedo de la Concha, would still appreciate their arguments.

The IG also scolds us for opposing AMLO’s desafuero because the fuero [political immunity] for members of the executive branch, the IG maintains, is an “anti-democratic measure.” In order to justify its refusal to defend an elementary democratic right in the concrete, the IG resorts to democratic abstractions. We took a position against the desafuero of López Obrador based on the interests of the working class in the concrete case, not on generalizations about formalities of bourgeois law like whether or not the Chamber of Deputies should vote on whether to prosecute any functionary based on any accusation. The question is rather simple: 1) expropriating land to build an access road to a hospital isn’t a crime against the proletariat; 2) the accusation was nothing more than an anti-democratic lie of the clericalist Fox & Co. to get rid of the bourgeois-nationalist AMLO as a contender for the presidency.

Understandably, many leftist youth who are fed up with the sludge of capitalist politics feel that revolutionaries should never “take sides” in “intrabourgeois” quarrels, nor oppose the injustices of the state when the victims are capitalist politicians, since, from this moralistic point of view, these people “deserve it.” These are the sentiments that the IG appeals to. However, this has never been a Marxist criterion. The task of communists is not to adapt to existing consciousness but rather to raise it, telling the truth in all its complexity. The social polarization at the root of Fox’s maneuver posed pointblank the concrete application of permanent revolution. The IG can quote Trotsky backward and forward, but in refusing to oppose Fox’s attack it is renouncing the essence of the Trotskyist perspective: the struggle for the democratic demands of the population in underdeveloped countries is a motor force of socialist revolution. In deeds, this group turns its back on the millions of workers fighting for their democratic rights.

The IG asserts:

“The attack on López Obrador is not the plot between Fox and the North American imperialists that pseudo-Marxists like the Militante group make it out to be. On her visit to Mexico in early March, hawkish American secretary of state Condoleezza Rice stated that the U.S. government would accept a left-wing government in Mexico. According to a report in Reforma (10 March), ‘Rice ruled out the idea that electoral victories by governments headed by left-wing politicians could worry the United States’.”

The IG shows such touching faith in the promises of the Bush administration! We do not know what secret dealings went on between Fox and his imperialist masters. If for now the U.S. imperialists find it expedient to restrain Fox out of concern that his desafuero campaign could destabilize Mexico, only someone very naive would conclude that the imperialists have forsaken their decades-long practice of using the CIA and other forces to foment military interventions in Latin America against regimes not to their liking.

Indeed, the IG’s dismissal today of the very real dangers posed by the provocations of the right-wing Fox government is reminiscent of the kid-gloves treatment the IG gave to the leaders of the Venezuelan CTV trade-union federation, who are closely linked to the CIA and have played an active role in the imperialist-supported failed coups directed against the populist bonapartist Hugo Chávez. In a November 2000 article, the IG played down the dangers of U.S. imperialist intervention in Venezuela and the connections between the CTV and the imperialists.

The IG’s double standard is captured by the fact that it considers the corporatist CTV to be a genuine trade union while asserting that the corporatist CTM union in Mexico (which sometimes calls strikes against the bosses) “represents the class enemy” (El Internacionalista/ Edición México, May 2001). In the IG’s mind, the only real unions in Mexico are the “independent” unions run by pro-PRD bureaucrats (see “IG on Venezuela—Opportunism Makes Strange Bedfellows,” WV No. 787, 20 September 2002). The IG is incapable of defending the class independence of the proletariat, repeatedly tripping over the class line and oscillating between conciliating the PRD left-nationalists and being blind to right-wing provocations.

The IG also accuses us of repeating “the PRD’s electoral propaganda and joining in its campaign” for having written in Workers Vanguard (No. 846, 15 April), in the introduction to a translation of our 7 April leaflet, that Fox is a “longtime ally of Bush and a favorite of the U.S. imperialists.” That the IG attacks such an obvious assertion is testimony to its distance from reality. It does not take a Marxist to realize that Fox licks the boots of U.S. imperialism and that his right-wing economic policies and obscurantist religious backwardness match those of the current Republican Party administration. The PRD demagogically denounces these facts in order to increase its popularity while making it clear to its masters in the north that AMLO is not a “Mexican Chávez,” as his opponents on the right say.

Polemicizing against us, the IG also writes:

“Taking sides for López Obrador against Fox’s attack, no matter what provisos are tacked on, is giving him political support. Think of parallel cases: ‘Down with the Republican Attack on President Clinton!’ during the impeachment proceedings, for example. Or, ‘Down with Bush’s Attack On Gore!’ following the 2000 elections, when the U.S. presidency was decided by a right-wing Supreme Court. No matter how many times one might say ‘Break with the Democratic Party!’ this would indisputably amount to political support to a section of the bourgeoisie.”

The IG implies, retrospectively, that it was indifferent to the Republicans’ right-wing attack against Clinton. In 1998, the Republicans subjected Clinton to impeachment proceedings, similar to a political trial, for having lied about his sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. This move was part of a reactionary moralistic crusade, which Clinton himself had widely promoted, to shore up “family values.” As our U.S. comrades wrote at the time in an article titled “Impeachment Drive Threatens Right to Privacy for All” (WV No. 697, 25 September 1998):

“The drive to remove Bill Clinton from the presidency for his consensual sexual affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky poses a threat to every one of us. At issue is one of the most fundamental democratic rights, the right to privacy—which in practice comes down to the right to a private sex life without meddling or snooping by state and church authorities. The politicians and media are going after Clinton for about the only thing he’s done that isn’t a crime from the standpoint of the working class.”

In general, one of communism’s most distinctive and unique trademarks is the capacity to distinguish between opposition to reactionary attacks and political support to the victims of those attacks. But the IG finds it very difficult to make this distinction.

Norden vs. Norden

The IG truly has a lot to explain in order to justify its line. In July 1988, in the face of obvious electoral fraud that gave Salinas the presidency over Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and even before the election results were known, we wrote in WV (No. 457, 15 July 1988), whose editor was none other than Jan Norden, today the IG’s main international leader:

“If Cárdenas was elected president, Marxists defend his democratic right to take office. But we do not join forces with a bourgeois Cardenista political bloc; rather we defend the workers’ democratic rights by proletarian means.”

This was a genuinely Trotskyist position, in contradiction with the IG’s current indifference to the same democratic rights. The absurd pretexts that the IG presents today to justify its agnostic position with respect to Fox’s attempted fraud only serve to dishonestly hide its break with this tradition.

In a similar case, in 1984 we offered to contribute a security team composed of trade unionists and supporters of the Spartacist League to defend the Democratic National Convention against growing threats of attacks by the belligerent lunatic Reagan’s Republicans. We wrote then: “The profound political and class difference between the Spartacist League and the Democratic Party in no way belies our position that the Democratic Party has the right to assemble and nominate its candidate” (WV No. 358, 6 July 1984). Has Norden changed his mind? Ironically, our pseudo-Trotskyist opponents at that time accused us of capitulating to the Democrats by inventing a “fictitious threat” to the Democratic Convention, just as today the IG declares Fox’s bonapartist attack to be nonexistent.

While in AMLO’s case we are dealing with a judicial attack and not a military coup, our position in defense of democratic rights under right-wing attack has a historical precedent in the fight of the Bolsheviks against Kornilov in August-September of 1917, on the eve of the Russian Revolution. At that time, Russia was still governed by the bourgeois Provisional Government headed by Alexander Kerensky. Lacking a social base, the Kerensky government tried to balance between the proletariat and the autocratic bourgeoisie. The growing discontent of the workers and the opposition of the workers soviets shackled the Provisional Government. The bourgeoisie and the monarchists were also fed up with social “instability” and the weakness of the government, which was incapable of smashing the workers. Under these conditions, General Kornilov—the Pinochet of his time—risked an attempt at a coup d’état to defeat the Kerensky government and smash the soviets.

Lenin argued for a change of tactic: Since Kornilov’s attack was directed, ultimately, against the masses, it was necessary to fight with Kerensky’s troops against Kornilov, without giving any political support to Kerensky and without ceasing to denounce the bourgeois character of his government. Lenin wrote [“To the Central Committee of the RSDLP,” August 1917]:

“What, then, constitutes our change of tactics after the Kornilov revolt?

“We are changing the form of our struggle against Kerensky. Without in the least relaxing our hostility towards him, without taking back a single word said against him, without renouncing the task of overthrowing him, we say that we must take into account the present situation. We shall not overthrow Kerensky right now. We shall approach the task of fighting against him in a different way, namely, we shall point out to the people (who are fighting against Kornilov) Kerensky’s weakness and vacillation. That has been done in the past as well. Now, however, it has become the all-important thing and this constitutes the change.”

According to the IG’s new line, Lenin was giving political support to Kerensky, “no matter what provisos are tacked on.”

For a Revolutionary Workers Party!

As the entire history of the workers movement shows, no isolated generation of militant workers can, alone, accumulate sufficient experience to form their own fully developed politics. However combative their spontaneous consciousness might be, they will not question the social dominance of the bourgeoisie and will necessarily tend to look for their political complement in one or another capitalist party.

It is urgently necessary that the most advanced workers and radicalized intellectuals who take the side of the proletariat on the basis of a Marxist program organize as an independent and disciplined tendency, that is, as a party. That is the only way to combat class collaborationism, nationalism and all the other ideological means by which the ruling class chains and disarms the proletariat. Only Marxism, which embodies the combination of humanity’s highest culture and more than a century of experience in the workers movement, can arm the proletariat with the capacity to defend its historic interests on the political plane. Thus, to speak of the independence of the working class necessarily implies speaking of forging a revolutionary workers party.

For now, illusions in the bourgeois López Obrador are dominant in the consciousness of the masses in struggle, including the working class. While this continues, however massive their mobilization might be, they will be condemned to remain within the sterile framework of a huge electoral campaign. We know that today our revolutionary politics won’t be the most popular in the movement of the masses. But when, in the not-too-distant future, the Mexican working masses, struggling in their own interests, run up against the bourgeois PRD’s class opposition and begin to consider left alternatives, the most conscious workers will remember who defended their basic democratic rights when the right wing was attacking them in 2005, and, most importantly, who dared to denounce the reactionary nature of López Obrador when he was at the height of his popularity. Therefore, today we invite the most conscious leftist youth and workers to seriously consider these arguments and to join the struggle of the Grupo Espartaquista to build a revolutionary workers party.