Mexico: Teachers’ Strike Hits Capitalist Education

MEXICO CITY, September 2 — For the last two weeks, 80,000 Oaxaca teachers from the CNTE (Coordinator of Education Workers) Local 22 have been on an indefinite strike against the education reform proposed by the bosses’ government of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. They have organized massive blockades of government buildings, the stock exchange, TV stations and the Mexico City airport.
Teachers from the states of Michoacan, Guerrero and the Federal District have joined these protests. Members of Progressive Labor Party have participated as well, distributing more than 5,000 flyers advancing our communist politics. We’re planning a series of talks on dialectics with a group of teachers who are participating in the struggle.
At one distribution, a teacher told us, “I already have that flyer, I kept it to make copies and pass around.” Two other teachers asked us to spread the struggle, and we said we were doing just that. We explained that this fight is an inspiration to the working class worldwide. Both teachers raised their fists in agreement and comradeship.
Bosses’ Atrocities Spark Workers’ Rebellion
Class struggle is the motor of history. The capitalists’ greed is limitless. Their system’s inequities and atrocities have sparked workers’ rebellions around the world.
In Mexico, the bosses have used Pena Nieto and other stooges in the congress to pass the secondary law of education that regulates “competency exams” for teachers. The hiring and firing power then is taken away from the unions and schools. Their future plan is to eliminate the state-owned companies for oil, electricity and water, the only industries left to privatize. The bosses divide up their loot from our natural resources. “Labor reform,” meanwhile, creates a legal framework for the capitalists to super-exploit the working class.
By using standardized tests, without concern for the cultural social and economic differences of certain regions, indigenous and marginalized communities will be at a disadvantage and as a result will be evaluated in a racist manner. In Mexico, the capitalists have concentrated their educational investments in the country’s most industrialized northern regions, which generate profits. The southern regions are left behind. These reforms will be used to foster an increase in racist inequality.
In the capitalist jungle, only the “most capable” survive (meaning those who get “better” evaluations) — those who follow the system’s ideology. That’s fascism. The bosses need a working class that’s easy to control, is productive but with a minimum of technical training. The reforms, through evaluations, try to standardize our youth with a fascist and competitive ideology.
Teachers’ Struggle Fights Passivity
Police and military terror, a product of the so-called war on drugs, along with the alienating culture promoted by the bosses’ mass media, have induced passivity among large sections of the working class and in many trade unions. The militancy of the CNTE’s class-conscious teachers is therefore vital to class struggle.
 The debate over energy reform, now active among politicians in the electoral parties PRI, PAN and PRD, aims only to establish which group of bosses will control the energy wealth. PRI and PAN want to share oil profits with a sector of Mexico’s capitalist class and the U.S., European, and Chinese imperialists. The fake left PRD, led by Andres Manuel López Obrador and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, pretends that the profits will go mainly to Mexican bosses. Neither proposal has any benefits for workers. Only under a communist society, where the working class holds state power, will resources be distributed among those who produce all value through our labor.
Under capitalism, oil belongs to the “nation.” That bourgeois concept has divided workers for hundreds of years, in every corner of the world. But the working class has no nation!
Oil wealth inevitably winds up in the pockets of the big bosses even when considered “state property.” Over the last 12 years, with the government led by the right-wing PAN, oil earnings were the highest in history, with total profits of more than $70 billion. During Felipe Calderon’s recent six-year term, the number of millionaires in Mexico increased by 32 percent, while officially 53 million workers live in poverty.
In the criminal capitalist system, everything is a commodity; for the capitalists, everything is driven by profit. The bosses will never worry about workers’ well-being. We must not fall into the trap of fighting for one group of bosses’ politicians in their squabble over energy wealth.
Today we fight for our jobs, for public education, and for the freedom of political prisoners. But we are also fighting to destroy capitalism, the root of inequality, racism, sexism, imperialism and war. Our aim is a classless society, communism, led by a mass revolutionary Progressive Labor Party.