Defend Striking Teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico!

NEW YORK CITY—The Spartacist League joined a September 21 picket line protest of some 125 people outside the Mexican Consulate in New York City, which was called under the slogans “Protest Repression in Oaxaca, Mexico—Defend the Striking Teachers!” The teachers, joined by workers, students and activists, have occupied large parts of Oaxaca City, including government buildings, since June 14, when tens of thousands of workers forced 3,000 police to flee the city center. In addition to demanding better wages, the teachers and their supporters have demanded the ousting of the governor of Oaxaca state, Ulises Ruiz of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

The threat is posed of a bloody military crackdown to oust the strikers. A spokesman for Felipe Calderón of the right-wing National Action Party (PAN), who was named the winner of the recent presidential elections by a dubious “electoral institute,” has declared that the “challenge to authority” posed by the teachers and their supporters in Oaxaca is the country’s “main problem.” The PAN and the PRI have called for the federal government to put an end to the Oaxacan teachers’ plantón (encampment). As for the bourgeois-populist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), while its national leadership has called for negotiations, a Oaxaca PRD leader has backed repression.

The main organizer of the New York protest was the centrist Internationalist Group (IG). Endorsers included teachers and professors at the City University of New York organized in the Professional Staff Congress union, some CUNY student groups and several left organizations, ranging from the International Socialist Organization to Progressive Labor Party to the League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP). The Spartacist League endorsed the protest and carried such placards as: “For Workers Revolution in Mexico and the U.S.!” and “No Illusions in the Capitalist PRD—For a Revolutionary Workers Party!” Our comrades chanted, “Capitalism means strikebreaking and war—Workers revolution is what we’re for!” and “Stop the anti-immigrant attacks! Down with the Republicans and Democrats!”

Speakers from the various reformist and centrist organizations used plenty of leftist rhetoric while taking pains not to differentiate themselves programmatically from each other. Walter Daum of the LRP and Jan Norden of the IG, both pseudo-Trotskyist organizations, denounced the PRD and gave lip service to the need for a revolutionary workers party in Mexico and for socialist revolution. But the Spartacist League speaker was the only one who put forward the strategic perspective for workers revolution in Mexico—Trotsky’s concept of permanent revolution—and raised some crucial questions pertaining to the workers’ struggles. Our speaker began by stating:

“The Spartacist League, U.S. section of the International Communist League, stands with the teachers and other workers and oppressed of Oaxaca against murderous state repression. This is part of widespread social and class struggle in Mexico. The ICL salutes the victory last month of the militant four-month strike against government union-busting, a strike by the miners and steel workers union in Lázaro Cárdenas. Our comrades of the Grupo Espartaquista de México have intervened in these struggles, and in the protests over the presidential elections, putting forward a program of permanent revolution. For Mexico, to achieve national liberation from the yoke of U.S. imperialism, to achieve the liberation of the oppressed women, indigenous peoples and the peasantry, capitalist rule must be smashed through workers revolution, part of international socialist revolution.”

Our spokesman took out the IG for its refusal to defend corporatist unions in Mexico—i.e., those historically affiliated to the former ruling PRI—against the bosses and state repression. While these unions are run by a corrupt, gangster-ridden bureaucracy, they have increasingly come into conflict with the capitalists and their state, as seen for example, in the strike in Lázaro Cárdenas by the SNTMMSRM union (see “Mexico in Turmoil,” WV No. 876, 15 September). Yet the IG denounces these unions as “the class enemy” of the workers. Our comrade noted, “The only unions that they defend in Mexico are the unions which support the PRD.” Thus does the IG conciliate the bourgeois-nationalist PRD, serving to reinforce the nationalist consciousness that ideologically chains the Mexican proletariat to the bourgeoisie.

As in the U.S., the struggle to forge a revolutionary internationalist workers party in Mexico demands a fight for the political independence of the proletariat from the bourgeois state and all bourgeois parties. The SL speaker noted, “Our comrades of the GEM fight to break the workers, including the Oaxacan teachers, from their illusions in the bourgeois-nationalist PRD, in the populist López Obrador.” He concluded with the call: “For workers revolution in Mexico and the U.S.! Down with state repression in Oaxaca! Victory to the teachers strike!”