Teachers’ Strike in Mexico
Brutal Mexican State Repression Against Striking Teachers:
Victory to the Mexican Teachers!
For United Working Class Struggle Across Borders Throughout the Americas!
Educators, students and school employees in Mexico are approaching a watershed moment of struggle against union busting, austerity and the wholesale privatization and/or junking of public education. Already in some quarters this struggle has reached more advanced consciousness and forms of organization than even those seen in the strike wave in France. And not a moment too soon. The tops of the Mexican Federal government declare that they are not responsible, but the police have felt authorized to kill strikers with impunity.[1] Will the education workers in Mexico be able to rally the big battalions of the working class? They need to in order to have any hope of winning.
Spurred on by U.S. imperialist capital, the ruling class in Mexico is attempting to privatize education but is getting a more militant and determined response from class struggle oriented workers who do not take it lightly when their teachers, students and comrades are gunned down by the police. As reported by ABC News:
“Business leaders and government officials said Wednesday (6/29/16, ed.) that supplies of gasoline, food and other goods are running out in southern Mexico because protesting teachers have blockaded key highways…,
…The supply of gasoline in the southern state of Chiapas was expected to completely run out Wednesday. The head of the Chiapas association of gas stations told local media there might be some gasoline left in the city of Tapachula, near the Guatemala border, but that in 90 percent of gas stations, supplies ran out by Wednesday morning.
Groups of protesters, sometimes just a handful, have blocked highways at about three dozen places. They sometimes let cars pass, but refused to allow freight and tanker trucks through.
The protesters oppose new laws that require testing of teachers and weaken their unions’ control over hiring.
The Interior Department said the blockades had caused many businesses to lose 80 percent of normal sales, putting thousands of jobs at risk.”[2]
Since 2013, the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (CNTE) teacher’s union has waged a struggle against the “neo-liberal” education reforms of the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto. These education reforms are part of an all-out assault across the world on public education and public services as world imperialism seeks to restore its falling rate of profit. A principle philosophical underpinning of their “recovery” program is to cast off what they see as the unnecessary dead-weight of social wages, the public services and social programs benefitting the workers and the poor.
The struggle in Mexico has waxed and waned for three years from encampments in July, 2013, building up to teachers engaging in occupations and road blockades today. On June 19th, federal, state and local police fired on unarmed demonstrators, killing twelve students and teachers and wounding more than 100, and casualties were not limited to Oaxaca. An estimated 8,000 teachers have been fired, over 4,000 for strike activity, while seven leaders of Teachers union Section 22 (roughly equivalent to a District Council) in Oaxaca have been arrested.[3]
Ruben Nunez Gines, the Secretary General of Section 22, and Francisco Villalobos Ricárdez, the Organizational Secretary, are among the arrested, framed up on bogus charges of “money-laundering” for collecting membership dues the Federal Government terms “funds from illicit sources.”[4] This is nothing but an attempt by the Mexican state to break the CNTE and the strike. Ominously, at least 23 strikers and supporters have been reported “disappeared.” The CWG demands “Immediately drop all charges and free all arrested, including Gines and Villalobos! Added to the missing 43 students of Ayotzinapa we demand a public accounting of the 23 missing strikers!” SMASH THE POLICE STATE! FOR ARMED WORKERS TRIBUNALS TO FIND OUR MISSING STUDENTS AND STRIKERS AND TO ESTABLISH RESPONSIBILITY AND JUSTICE!
The teacher’s strike has won support of students and their parents as well as from other sectors of the working class such as oil workers, telecommunications workers and professors from UNAM, Latin America’s largest university. 200,000 doctors went on strike in 70 cities, including in the state of Oaxaca, against proposed healthcare reforms and in solidarity with the teachers struggle. Despite the silence of the bourgeois media, workers around the world have also rallied to the defense of the Oaxaca teachers from Japan to New York. The Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA), AFL-CIO, of Sacramento, California, released a statement denouncing the repression.[5]
The three month struggle of the Mexican teachers is very fluid as we write this. On July 1st, Interior Minister Osorio Chong presented an ultimatum to the striking teachers that they clear the highway blockades. The CNTE responded that this threat was “paving the way for escalating repression, even if they will need to do it by force” and that the CNTE will hold an indefinite strike against the government attacks on education. The union leadership is only demanding a dialogue with the government over education reforms, not for their outright revocation. The Nieto regime will not even acquiesce to this unless the teachers give a blank check to education reform. The union leadership at least has the courage to demand punishment for those responsible for police repression and the release of all those arrested during the strike. The claim by the Nieto regime that the blockades are causing hardships has been countered by bourgeois agricultural and state authorities, as well as local merchants, who stated that the government’s claims are exaggerated and being used to justify state repression.[6] The Mexican state has a history of brutal repression, from the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950’s, the 1968 massacre of students in Mexico City, the repression directed at the 1994 Zapatista uprising, the 2014 Tlatlaya massacre and many others.
The Bloody Hand of U.S. Imperialism
The murderous Mexican state of Peña Nieto is carrying out the dirty work of U.S. imperialism. It is the policy of Obama and of both presidential contenders Trump and Hillary, all willing puppets of Wall Street. Mexico is a laboratory for the U.S. imperialist ruling class for imposing its own education and health care cuts at home. The U.S. political elite of both the Democratic and Republican parties have supported the Merida initiative, which has militarized Mexico under the banner of the “war on drugs,” a 100% cynical for-profit exercise. U.S. military and police support programs of the U.S. Agency for International Development provides arms for Mexican police forces and has swollen the profits of U.S. small arms manufacturers. It is not a stretch to say the “war on drugs” is a war fomented by the National Rifle Association.[7]
The combined effect is to refashion Mexico from a dependent nation into a colony of the U.S. Billionaires. This process was accelerated by the passage of NAFTA in 1993. The maquiadores, the collapse of the corn price and the most recent collapse of oil prices, ongoing as we write, have all contributed to the immiseration of the Mexican masses.
It was NAFTA, passed under the Clinton administration that gave the green light to the American ruling class to increase the exploitation of the Mexican working class. It was NAFTA that sparked the heroic armed Zapatista (EZLN) revolt of the indigenous Mayans of Chiapas in 1994.[8] NAFTA also saw the expansion of the free-trade zones like the maquiladores, which are notorious low-wage industrial parks of super-exploitation with few job protections for the desperate Mexican masses and total disregard for stewardship of the environment.
Global Attack on Education and Public Services and the Vacuum of Leadership
For their part, the U.S. ruling class is waging a bipartisan assault on public education, with the push for charter schools, attacks on tenure, abuse of adjunct faculty, refusing recognition to graduate student (Teaching Assistant) labor unions and refusing to bargain where local unions have been recognized.
Democrats for Education Reform[9] is a PAC (political action committee) stocked with high-profile figures with name recognition, such as State Senator Gloria Romero of California and U.S. Senator Corey Booker from New Jersey, with a privatizing and union busting agenda. American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Weingarten was and is an early vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton. AFT was the first major union to endorse Clinton and both have been supporters of privatizing public schools. Governor Andrew Cuomo tried to slash state university budgets this spring while college professors for City University of New York and AFSCME campus workers, both working for years without a contract, told Cuomo they would strike. Cuomo caved in!
One of the more dynamic strikes in recent years in America was the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike in 2012 against Democratic Party Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s cuts in public education. Like the struggle in Mexico, the CTU strike demonstrated the seething anger below the surface of the working masses that is breaking out periodically in sharp struggle aimed at the boss’ attacks. Sold out by the CTU Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) leadership of the union, composed of alleged socialists in Solidarity and the International Socialist Organization (ISO), along with Democratic Party bureaucrats, it demonstrated what could have been with a class struggle leadership that was willing to fight.[10]
At every step, if it is not the liberal Democratic Party union bureaucrats or activists misleading the struggles, to make them “respectable” in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, then it is the reformist socialists who are more than willing to fill the gap, to limit and put a lid on the struggles of the workers and oppressed. This is the true picture of every labor struggle in recent memory. The militant Longshore (ILWU) workers in the EGT struggle of 2011 in Longview Washington engaged in class struggle tactics that harkened back to the militant class battles of the 1930’s. They were not defeated on the picket line, but by the Democratic Party ILWU bureaucracy who rammed through a rotten settlement. Ditto the Renton, Washington machinists at Boeing.
Black Lives Matter engage in militant street protest and there are advanced class conscious workers such as those BLM activists who are educating for armed self-defense against racist police terror, but BLM has yet to find a political expression or organization beyond a loose and politically contradictory protest movement. To date, BLM is very much like the Occupy movement that expressed outrage at the “1%.”
What is needed is an internationalist class struggle leadership to unite the struggles of the workers and oppressed across national boundaries, a leadership that is going to politically arm the masses with a revolutionary program that points the way forward towards fulfilling the historic task of the working class, which is the abolition of capitalist exploitation. Leninist-Trotskyist workers parties need to be built throughout the Americas and internationally as part of a new, revived revolutionary workers international.
Mexican unions
Already in Trotsky’s time, all the way up until 1940, the biggest Mexican unions were being integrated into the capitalist state. By this we mean it increasingly became the union’s program to reproduce the conditions of exploitation of the workers they nominally represented in “struggle” with the bosses. Additionally, the bureaucrats began enjoying privileges otherwise reserved for the comprador class, in return for sweetheart deals with imperialist employers, chiefly from the U.S. Like their counterparts in the AFL-CIO, Mexican Union leaderships have tied their fortunes to support for one of the main bourgeois parties; indeed even more so. The bureaucrats are interchangeable figures with the leaders of the PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which was in power continuously for 70 years!!!
Lest you think we communists are exaggerating, griping and otherwise making this up, consider this report and especially its source, a bosses’ service organization dedicated to helping capital make profit:
“In the early twentieth century, in order to facilitate Mexico’s dramatic postwar economic growth, labor unions in Mexico accepted wage increases that did not exceed productivity gains. This helped reduce the effect of inflation, but fell short of the gains many workers hoped to achieve through their organizations. Furthermore, the CTM and several other CT-member union federations resorted to coercion and bribery to limit wage demands. Over the years, the CTM has increasingly become more agreeable to employers’ moves aimed at increasing productivity and creating jobs….” – Tecma Trust, “Labor Unions in Mexico”, https://www.tecma.com/labor-unions-in-mexico/
For International Class Struggle!
American workers can best help the embattled Mexican proletariat by organizing to wage uncompromising class struggle against U.S. imperialism at home. The fight against English-only bigotry, and for open borders and immediate full citizenship rights for all immigrants would go a long way towards uniting American workers with their class sisters and brothers from Latin America, South America, and the Caribbean. Mass labor, black and brown mobilizations and labor political strikes are needed to stop “Deporter-in-Chief” Obama’s La Migra deportations.
Joint trade union international committees are needed to coordinate international solidarity and struggle. Workers should demand same work, same contract across borders! Consulate protests against the repression of Mexican teachers need to be raised to the next level. For labor political strikes to defend the Mexican teachers!
The fight to guarantee necessary public services, and for free, quality education, healthcare and housing is the fight for ending capitalist exploitation through socialist revolution.
The road forward for the embattled Mexican working class for democratic and economic rights is through permanent revolution; the fight for socialist revolution. There is no other way to win an egalitarian democratic society free from the grip of world imperialism.
It was the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky who developed the Marxist theory of Permanent Revolution, based on the observation that the democratic revolution in the semi-colonial world could not win independence from imperialism, conquer basic democratic rights and achieve democratic land reform under the sway of the native capitalist class and its political formations. Trotsky’s greatest contribution to Marxist theory would explain that the native bourgeoisie could not develop the material wealth and power and coalesce as a cohesive class capable of acting in its own interest against imperialist domination, specifically because of its ties to, dependence upon and subordination to the various imperialist nations and blocs. Thus the democratic bourgeois revolution accomplished in France in 1789, in Britain in the 1640’s, in the U.S.A in 1776 and 1865, cannot be accomplished in the semi colonies in the age of imperialism. The conquest of the historically democratic tasks accomplished in the bourgeois revolutions today require the socialist revolution, a revolution that can only be carried out by the working class leading the oppressed, the landless and forsaken.
Mexican government:
Hands off the teachers! Victory to the Teachers strike!
Build revolutionary workers parties in Mexico, the United States and throughout the Americas!
Build a new revolutionary workers international, the world party of socialist revolution!
[1] NPR, “Mexican Teachers Strike Turns Deadly”
http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/07/09/485274389/a-mexican-teachers-strike-turns-deadly
[2] ABC News, “Supplies Run out in Southern Mexico Amid Teachers’ Protests”
[3] City Lab, “The Ugly Reality of Police Violence Against Mexico’s Protesters”
http://www.citylab.com/politics/2016/06/oaxaca-violence-police-clashes-protesters-violence/489224/
[4] With no special legal precedent, the Pina Nieto government attempts by sheer fiat to accomplish what Friedrichs vs. the California Teachers Association failed to do, i.e., ban the collection of dues checkoff by the union, and by implication by any union of government employees.
[5] Labor Video Project, “Mexico Teachers’ Murders Protested In SF “Massacre Made In USA””
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2016/06/22/18787916.php
[6] Telesur, “Mexico City Teachers Begin Indefinite General Strike”
[7] War is Boring, “Mexico Is Arming Itself With U.S. Military Hardware”
https://warisboring.com/mexico-is-arming-itself-with-u-s-military-hardware-a57c91b8283a#.9vxsbwqhc
[8] Yes Magazine, “Zapatistas and the Globalization of Resistance”
Also see:
[9] Los Angeles Times, “The new face of Democrats who support education reform”
Also see:
http://www.uft.org/feature-stories/who-are-democrats-education-reform
http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-real-obama-education-legacy
http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/12/0903/2258/
[10] CWG, “Lessons of the Chicago Teachers Strike”
