VALLE DE CHALCO, MEXICO, January 25— Occupations, demonstrations, marches and road blockades throughout Mexico greeted the government’s twenty percent price increase on gasoline and diesel. On January 1, as the new price increase went into effect, the government said that if they didn’t increase gasoline prices, they would have to make more cuts in healthcare, education and other social programs.
No matter what, increasing the price of gasoline is unsustainable for the working class, which increases the cost of transportation and the most basic products nationwide.
For workers in Valle de Chalco, this is another chapter in a long battle over securing energy sources like gasoline and electricity for the working class. For members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party, it is an important battle in the struggle for workers’ power.
Capitalist “Gasolinazo,” Electricity Prices = Robbery
The taxes on gasoline and diesel, nicknamed the “gasolinazo” (in Spanish, meaning “gasoline price surge”) are occurring alongside increased prices for electricity for many workers. In Valle de Chalco, the Federal Electricity Commission (Spanish acronym CFE) has been increasing prices for the past seven years, and these new gasoline and diesel taxes find a working class already organizing to fight back.
Here, many workers are marginalized from basic services, including connection to an electrical grid due to the high costs. To get around this, workers built their own improvised bypasses into the electrical grid, called “diablitos” in local Spanish slang (“little devils”). While technically against the law, the diablitos were the only way masses of workers could obtain electricity.
Under the pretense of “modernizing” the electrical grid, the CFE has been slowly implementing new technology to dismantle the networks of diablitos. These changes, which will benefit private interests and not the working class, are being done in complicity with federal, state, and municipal governments in exchange for crumbs received from the wealthy business of production, distribution, and commercialization of the electrical power. Today, the price per kilowatt-hour for the workers is $4.5 pesos, marked up from its real cost of .40 cents per kilowatt-hour.
The working class in Valle has not taken these attacks lying down! On December 14, the residents of Valle organized and formed a group called ANUES (National Assembly of Electric Energy Consumers) and opposed the dismantling of the electricity networks on their streets. This has temporarily forced the retreat of the utility companies and contractors from installing this technology.
A group of workers in ANUES and residents of Valle are CHALLENGE readers, and have been helping organize among the workers of Valle to build a mass fightback. PLP has a history of fighting back, as well as connecting these price increases and attacks to global capitalism in crisis. This is the same capitalist system which is destroying our youth with violence and drugs, that pushes insecurity, unemployment, and poverty. This struggle against CFE is connected to these problems, as well as the recent gasoline price increases.
PLP has been involved in fighting back in the reform struggle, while organizing a party for communist revolution. Four months ago, some workers formed a cooperative and associated themselves with a Portuguese company, called Mota-Engil, with 49 percent of the capital from the workers and 51 percent from the company, to sell the kilowatt-hour at 0.60 cents. Due to the capitalist government’s interference and protection of CFE and its favored companies, they have not been able to obtain the permits needed for the commercialization of electricity.  
We in PLP have been struggling to gain support and awareness of the workers in the cooperative, whose efforts to build this cooperative may be absorbed into the private electricity companies, and lose everything. At the same time, we fight to organize and build a revolutionary communist PLP.
Workers Face Down Capitalist Crises
The struggles for electricity in Valle de Chalco are directly connected to the “gasolinazo” price gouging of petroleum by the capitalist government. While workers in Mexico recently saw a salary increase of 3.9 percent in 2017, it’s a mockery, compared to the increase of twenty per cent to the gasoline price. Our living conditions will worsen, poverty will increase, and all of it will benefit the big capitalists and the parasitic capitalist state. In general terms, oil-rich countries tend to have lower overall gas prices. Yet, in Mexico, gas was already expensive, and has a tax of up to 40 percent per liter. For the bosses, that is $300 million pesos per year.  This money is used by the government to cover the budget gap caused by the price of oil production, and a current drop in value of the peso.
The working class in Mexico also has one of the lowest minimum salaries in the world, which reflects the need for the bosses to super-exploit the working class of Mexico to extract super-profits. For example, today, a worker in Mexico, with a minimum salary, will have to work a whole week to fill an automobile tank with 41 liters of gasoline. In Brazil, it takes a worker less than two days to fill up the same gas tank, while in Norway, less than one. The capitalist system extracts profits from all workers worldwide, which makes these differences between workers from one place to another ultimately irrelevant. In countries like Mexico, the exploitation and oppression can be much sharper, however, that is why we have to organize and fight in mass to face the attacks against our class that much harder. These price increases are just one of these attacks.  
As with the government’s complicity with the disappeared students in Ayotzinapa, the bosses always look to deflect the blame for capitalism’s problems back on the working class. During the demonstrations against the “gasolinazo,” the capitalist media highlighted only the looting that occurred during the demonstrations. The workers knew the government hired groups to do this  looting. The bosses wanted to discredit those who legitimately stand up against the abuses of the capitalist system.
Other working class leaders who refused to be bought and controlled by the government were threatened with beatings, creating terror among the population. This threat prevented many from joining the protests and gave the government a green light to use their military and police presence to try and instill even more fear.
The state apparatus is trying to terrorize the population so we will not recognize the power we have as a class, and the power we have to take control of the means of production when organized in the revolutionary PLP.
Capitalism’s crises cannot be reformed, they must be destroyed with revolution. The bosses’ fear tactics cannot control the working class forever, and CHALLENGE is helping the workers expose them. Capitalism’s crisis will grow as the U.S., Russian and Chinese bosses gear up for bigger wars, and we can only fight it organized in the communist PLP. We’re a party that fights for a communist society and will end exploitation and capitalist inequality. PLP calls on all workers in Valle de Chalco to organize and fight to stop the network change and the high costs of electricity. We call on workers of the world to organize and fight against the capitalist system. Fight back!