GEM Speaker at April 24 Mexico City Mumia Protest:

“Unleash the Power of the Working Class Internationally”

We print below a translation of a speech by Adrian Ortega of the Grupo Espartaquista de México at an April 24 united-front protest to free Mumia Abu-Jamal at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City.

The Grupo Espartaquista de México, Mexican section of the International Communist League, fights for the immediate freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal as part of our revolutionary duty to defend all social activists victimized by state repression. But the state’s murderous machinery will not be stopped until socialist revolution wins internationally. Only the expropriation of the capitalists and their imperialist bosses by the international proletariat will lay the foundation for an international system that puts an end to misery and social injustice, as well as the exploitation of man by man.

In Mexico, this means struggling politically to break the shackles that bind the Mexican proletariat to the bourgeoisie. It means breaking with AMLO [Andrés Manuel López Obrador] and his bourgeois PRD [Party of the Democratic Revolution], who—just like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela—uses nationalist and populist rhetoric to obscure the class divisions in society and to shackle the exploited to their exploiters. The proletariat is the only class with the social power to lead the poor peasantry and the rest of the oppressed in socialist revolution.

This revolution must be extended to the U.S. through the human bridge of immigrant Mexican workers, and to the rest of Latin America. Only workers revolution can break imperialist subjugation, bring genuine democracy to the masses through workers councils, and eliminate rural poverty through agrarian revolution. The main ally of the Mexican workers in this struggle is the powerful multiracial working class in the U.S., especially black workers who will play a leading role in the socialist revolution in the U.S.

It is from this perspective that today we seek the mobilization of the power of the working class to fight against the privatization of PEMEX [Mexico’s state oil company] and the electrical industry, as well as the devastation of the countryside caused by NAFTA. Even providing for the basic necessities of the population requires a collectivized and planned economy under workers control internationally.

Defending Mumia means opposing imperialist depredations in Iraq and Afghanistan. As we did in the former Soviet Union and East Europe, we will fight on the last barricades for the unconditional military defense of the deformed workers states: China, North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam. We fight for proletarian political revolution to sweep away the Stalinist regimes and replace them with workers democracy based on workers, peasants and soldiers soviets. We say: Down with the anti-Chinese riots in Tibet!

Our class-struggle defense of Mumia and other class-war prisoners is based on mobilizing the broadest possible support, centered on the working class, under the principle of strike together, march separately. This also means struggling against the role played by reformist groups that seek to subordinate the movement for Mumia’s freedom to illusions in the bourgeois state. This is shown in their slogan for a “new trial” and their rejection of Arnold Beverly’s confession that proves the police and courts in the U.S. are a web of corruption and lies. Mumia will never receive a fair trial under racist U.S. imperialism. Today, thousands throughout the world demand Mumia’s freedom, now.

As part of united-front actions, it is important to raise differences over the correct strategy necessary to fight for Mumia’s freedom—even though many of the speakers have not mentioned these fundamental differences. These same illusions in the state are promoted by groups in the Mexican left like the Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo [LTS]—who we are glad has spoken here today—whose perspective of democratic reform of the state is expressed in their slogan for the “dissolution of the repressive apparatus of the state.” The bourgeois state will never dissolve; it must be destroyed through proletarian revolution. Similarly, the speaker from the Internationalist Group spoke about mobilizing the working class, above all in the unions, and mentioned the union in Brazil. What this speaker did not say was that in 1996 this same union was dragged through the courts by comrades from his own organization. This is well documented in our press and you can check it out yourselves. Police and security guards, courts, and all of the bourgeois state out of the workers movement, out of the unions! The state must not be allowed even a small step inside the workers movement.

The way to mobilize the working class is through movements such as this: united-front mobilizations that bring out important sectors of the workers, such as workers at the Political Science School at UNAM, the COSATU union, and other unions internationally.

The key to victory in Mumia’s case is to unleash the power of the working class internationally and to break with bourgeois nationalism, which is nothing more than an ideology that permeates the working class, nothing more than poison that prevents the working class from mobilizing on a class basis. The working class needs its own party, a revolutionary party, section of a reforged Fourth International, that joins together the vanguard of the working class and declassed intellectuals under the banner of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevism; a party that fights against every form of oppression in society, connecting the immediate demands of the population to the need for socialist revolution and a workers and peasants government.

Today, Mumia faces possible execution or imprisonment for life. Neither of these is acceptable. Free Mumia now! Free this innocent political prisoner! Abolish the racist death penalty!