Mexico: Seeds of Emerging Struggle Fertile Ground for Revolution

PLP must go where the workers are, get our newspaper around and motivate the class struggle. Reforms are not the workers´ way to victory but can be used as a way of learning to fight, since what we really need is to destroy this murderous system. The workers of the Mexican electricity company have been on strike since March, and they need solidarity as much from the outside as the inside. We need to make our presence known there. We will also motivate the workers from Volkswagen with our solidarity.

Our class ties will grow as well as our feelings of brotherhood. We will grow and learn from the class struggle there. That´s what we communists do. We learn a lot from strikes such as the one from Stella d’ Oro in New York, and they elevate our level, encourage our revolutionary spirit and our commitment to fight until we accomplish our objective. We contribute collectively and win new comrades to communism in the struggle, and we expand the distribution of our newspaper.

While we learn and teach, we prepare for the destruction of the capitalist system and building a new society in the service of workers, where everyone will have what they need and where collectivism, not individualism, will determine our actions.         

There are 10 billionaires in Mexico, includng Carlos Slim, the second biggest billionaire in the world. Meanwhile, 70% of the population is poor, the tenth part of the poorest population earns 1.1% in income, 53% are malnourished, 24% are extremely poor and 18% of indigenous children don´t attend school. The capitalist system is unable to meet the most basic needs of workers, but if we build the PLP, we can make our own communist history which will solve these problems.  

Mexico is the second largest oil provider for the United States, with oil reserves of 47 trillion barrels which cost about $102 trillion. Oil represents about 40% of Mexico’s internal production, with 4 million barrels a day. Mexico is the world´s 5th largest oil producer; 75% of this oil ends up in the United States. The petrochemical industry provides Mexico with a profit of more than $45 million, but 140,000 of its workers get dirt-poor wages as a result of the deals made by the union to serve the greed of the oil bosses.

Places such as Chiapas and Tabasco are towns in misery, with killings and drug trafficking everyday happenings, and the workers don’t understand where the profit they create as part of the industry goes to the bosses’ pockets. The supposed achievement of the union, putting five of its representatives on the board of directors of the company, hasn´t benefited the workers. It has helped the oil companies to exploit and oppress the working class even more.

There are more than 5,000 assembly plants along the border of the United States, the second most important area in the economy, employing about two million workers. Because of the NAFTA treaty, the bosses can get the most work out of them and maintain their profit even in a crisis. The NAFTA agreement has generated more poverty and allowed international companies to exploit Mexican workers even more, as the profits of these companies show earnings of thousands of dollars even in the time of crisis.  

Drug-trafficking generates about $40 billion dollars annually and is the third generator of profits in Mexico according to Seminario. The bourgeoisie profits, even if they hypocritically say they are fighting drugs. They need the violence, killings and kidnappings to intimidate the workers and keep them passive.

The supposed fight against drug-trafficking also works as a screen to disappear and kill union leaders, human rights activists, reporters and politicians that step out of line. Curfews have been imposed like those that were used in dictatorships like Pinochet’s Chile. The police raid homes for supposed drug traffickers, when they really know their names and where they are hiding. There are cases such as the 72 immigrants to the United States who were killed in August and found after some of the workers that escaped filed a report. They still don’t want to say in whose house the others were killed and are scared to tell the truth, because they know the the power of the owner. In reality the ruling class is knee-deep in this, and that is why the investigators have never found an answer.          

Neither the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), nor the PAN (National Action Party), PDR (Party of the Democratic Revolution) can solve the problems of the workers, because they all represent the billionaires and drug traffickers. All the things they represent are products of the capitalist system: poverty, exploitation, oppression and corruption.  

The union leaders aren´t happy because the workers haven´t been passive. According to the informative bulletin from IMMEX this year, there have been 918 strikes and demonstrations approved, but only five have been carried out. Volkswagen preferred to set up in Guanajuato and not Puebla, because the average wage in Puebla is higher. Also, in Puebla there is an old tradition of struggle, and the bosses don´t want to deal with it.

 But now the Volkswagen workers approved a strike for Wednesday the 29th, mainly fighting for a wage increase. We will be with the workers, just as we were with them in the teachers’ strike in Oaxaca and the strike from UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) and will bring our communist ideas, because wage movements alone do not fix the lives of workers.  

The history of the working class is full of triumphs against the bosses. These are the real stories that capitalists fear and these are the struggles that today continue to inspire workers around the world. The strike of thousands of French workers against their bosses for their pensions, the demonstration of thousands in India against unemployment and for their pensions; these tell the capitalists that we have potential.

A spark lights a flame, but we need to improve the revolutionary consciousness of the working class. We can´t look only at the immediate demands, because we limit our real possibilities.  However, the struggles that are happening in the world help us learn that the working class can become class conscious and break away from these imaginary limits, erasing all capitalists with an international communist revolution.