From: Joanne Landy <joanne.landy at igc.org> Date: November 28, 2009 5:57:42 PM EST To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Mexico: Rebirth of Class Struggle [part 1 of 2]
http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/279.php
Mexico: The Murder of a Union and the Rebirth of Class Struggle Part 1: The New AssaultRichard Roman and Edur Velasco Arregui
Brothers, companeros, comrades: we must convert the rage, the anger and the helplessness into superior organization, into unified and convergent projects, into cultivating unity without distinctions of any kind, to confront our class enemies because sooner or later, we shall overcome. Forthcoming actions are yet to come and we will come together there again, as we always do, with proletarian pride and with our classist and combative conviction.[1] Central Committee, SME, November 13, 2009.
We are on the threshold of the bicentenary of Independence and the centenary of the Mexican Revolution, and we have to defeat, as before, the transnationals, the dictatorship, the tyranny and the violations of the Constitution. It's time for the people to organize themselves.Martín Esparza Flores, Secretary-General, of SME, quoted in La Jornada, Nov. 12, 2009.
Class Struggle Escalates in MexicoThe neoliberal war on the working people of Mexico reached a new intensity with the government's lightning assault on the power workers union, the Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas (SME Mexican Electrical Workers Union), and on Mexicos energy resources on October 10. The military takeover of the Luz y Fuerza del Centro (LyFC Central Light and Power Company) and subsequent extra-constitutional liquidation of the company, firing of all 44,000 workers, and throwing out of the collective agreement has not led to a collapse of resistance as anticipated by the government. On the contrary, it has led to a spirited class resistance and an expansion of the struggle to wider sectors of the working class and the population more generally. The government has unintentionally forged a unity of resistance that has been lacking in Mexico and placed the working class and workersdemands at the center of popular resistance to the authoritarian neoliberal regime.
The centrality of worker and union demands in a broad and growing resistance movement differentiates 2009 from both 1968 and 2006. In 1968 and 2006, the demands spoke to broad issues of democratic rights. In 1968, students led protests against the one-party authoritarian regime. In 2006, the mass mobilizations in Mexico City and elsewhere protested the fraud perpetrated in the Presidential election. Students were the central actors in 1968; the populist candidate for President was the central actor in 2006, supported by a mass base, heavily working class, but not organized with their own voice and organizational structure. Government-linked authoritarian unions actively opposed both the 1968 and 2006 protests while other unions played an ancillary or marginal role, if any at all.
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