For Workers Strikes Against the War!

ILWU to Shut Down West Coast Ports May 1 Demanding End to War in Iraq, Afghanistan

In a major step for the U.S. labor movement, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has announced that it will shut down West Coast ports on May 1, to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East. In a February 22 letter to AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, ILWU International president Robert McEllrath reported that at a recent coast-wide union meeting, "One of the resolutions adopted by caucus delegates called on longshore workers to stop work during the day shift on May 1, 2008 to express their opposition to the war in Iraq."

This is the first time in decades that an American union has decided to undertake industrial action against a U.S. war. It is doubly important that this mobilization of labor’s power is to take place on May Day, the international workers day, which is not honored in the U.S. Moreover, the resolution voted by the ILWU delegates opposes not only the hugely unpopular war in Iraq, but also the war and occupation of Afghanistan (which Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and Republican John McCain all want to expand). The motion to shut down the ports also demands the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the entire region, including the oil sheikdoms of the strategically important Persian/Arab Gulf.

The Internationalist Group has fought from the moment U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan in September 2002 for American unions to strike against the war. Despite the fact that millions have marched in the streets of Europe and the United States against the war in Iraq, the war goes on. Neither of the twin war parties of U.S. imperialism – Democrats and Republicans – and none of the capitalist candidates will stop this horrendous slaughter that has already killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The only way to stop the Pentagon killing machine is by mobilizing the power of a greater force – that of the international working class.

The action announced by the powerful West Coast dock workers union, to stop work to stop the war, should be taken up by unions and labor organizations throughout the United States and internationally. The ILWU should be commended for courageously taking the first step, and it is up to working people everywhere to back them up. Wherever support is strong enough, on May 1 there should be mass walkouts, sick-outs, labor marches, plant-gate meetings, lunch-time rallies, teach-ins. And the purpose of such actions should be not to beg the bourgeois politicians whose hands are covered with blood, having voted for every war budget for six and a half years, but a show of strength of the working people who make this country run, and who can shut it down!

Now is the time for bold class action. Opposition to the war is even greater in the U.S. working class than in the population as a whole, more than two-thirds of which wants to stop the war but is stymied by the capitalist political system. In his letter to Sweeney, the ILWU president asked "if other AFL-CIO affiliates are planning to participate in similar events." Labor militants should make sure the answer to that question is a resounding "yes!"

There should be no illusions that this will be easy. No doubt the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) bosses will try to get the courts to rule the stop-work action illegal. The ILWU leadership could get cold feet, since this motion was passed because of overwhelming support from the delegates despite attempts to stop it or, failing that, to water it down or limit the action. And the U.S. government could try to ban it on the grounds of "national security," just as Bush & Co. slapped a Taft-Hartley injunction on the docks during contract negotiations in the fall of 2002, saying that any work stoppage was a threat to the "war effort," and threatened to occupy the ports with troops!

The answer to every attempt to sabotage or undercut this first labor action against this war, and against Washington’s broader "war on terror" which is intended to terrorize the world into submission must be to redouble efforts to bring out workers’ power independent of the capitalist parties and politicians. If the ILWU work stoppage is successful, it will only be a small, but very important, beginning that must be generalized and deepened. It will take industrial-strength labor action to defeat the imperialist war abroad and the bosses’ war on immigrants, oppressed minorities, poor and working people "at home."

ILWU in the Forefront of Labor Action Against the War

Workers strike action against imperialist war isn’t new – it just hasn’t happened here for a long, long time. During World War I there were huge mass strikes in Germany against the battlefield carnage, culminating in the downfall of the kaiser in November 1918. A year earlier in Russia, working-class opposition to the war led to the overthrow of the tsar and the October Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks. The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International call today for transport workers to "hot cargo" (refuse to handle) war shipments. In the early 1920s, Communist-led French dock workers did exactly that, boycotting ships carrying war materiel to suppress a colonial rebellion in the Rif region of Morocco, as they also did during France’s war in Indochina in the 1950s.

In the U.S., the ILWU struck in 1948 amid Cold War hysteria and in defiance of the "slave labor" Taft-Hartley Act to defend its union hiring hall against the bosses and government screaming about "reds" in the union leadership. In 1953, at the height of McCarthyite witch-hunting, the ILWU called a four-day general strike in Hawaii of sugar, pineapple and dock workers over the jailing of seven union members for being communists. During the Vietnam War, socialist historian Isaac Deutscher said that he would trade all the peace marches for a single dock strike. The ILWU was the first U.S. union to oppose the Vietnam war, but during war and especially during the 1971 strike union leader Harry Bridges refused to stop the movement of military cargo. (Ship owners made use of this by falsely labeling cargo as "military" to evade picket lines and undermine the strike.) This betrayal went hand in hand with a "mechanization and modernization" contract that slashed union jobs.

As the U.S.-led imperialist invasion of Iraq was looming, in January 2003 train drivers in Scotland refused to move a freight train carrying munitions to a NATO military base. The next month, Italian railroad unionists and antiwar activists blocked NATO war trains by occupying the rails. In the United States, ILWU dock workers were a target of "anti-terrorist" government repression, as police fired supposedly "less than lethal" munitions point blank at an antiwar protest on the Oakland, California docks, injuring six longshore workers and arresting 25 people (who eventually won their legal case against the police). And every year since the war started, the San Francisco/Oakland ILWU Local 10 has voted for motions for labor action against the war. Usually they were voted down at caucuses and conventions of the ILWU, but not this time.

Last May, Local 10 longshoremen and Local 34 ships clerks refused to cross picket lines set up by the Oakland Teachers Association and antiwar activists, defying arbitrators’ orders by refusing to work ships of the notorious antiunion outfit, Stevedoring Services of America (see "Oakland Dock Workers Honor Picket, Shut Down War Cargo Shipper," The Internationalist No. 26, July 2007). In the aftermath of that action, the union issued a call for a Labor Conference to Stop the War that would "plan workplace rallies, labor mobilizations in the streets and strike action against the war." The Call to Action stated:

"ILWU Local 10 has repeatedly warned that the so-called ’war on terror’ is really a war on working people and democratic rights. Around the country, hundreds of unions and labor councils have passed motions condemning the war, but that has not stopped the war. We need to use labor’s muscle to stop the war by mobilizing union power in the streets, at the plant gates and on the docks to force the immediate and total withdrawal of all U. S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq."

As the conference date approached, the union was the target of several police attacks, including a vicious cop assault on two black dock workers from San Francisco working in the port of Sacramento. Some 250 demonstrators from every ILWU local in Northern California rallied in their defense outside the courthouse. Their trial to be set march 18 at a hearing will encounter even larger demonstrations.

The Internationalist Group and its union supporters helped build and attended the October 20 conference, along with some 150 labor and socialist activists from the Bay Area, elsewhere in California and across the country. At the meeting, a particular focus was resistance to the Transportation Workers Identification Card (TWIC), which threatens minority workers and the union hiring hall, and which the Democratic Party in particular has been pushing in order to carry out a purge of dock workers in the name of the "war on terror." Not long after that conference, a federal judge ordered Local 10 elections canceled and replaced by a Labor Department-run vote, on the eve of 2008 contract bargaining. Federal agents even invaded the union hall to enforce their order. This action is a threat to the independence of all unions.

This set the stage for the recent longshore-warehouse caucus, which voted a motion for a 24-hour "No Peace, No Work Holiday" against the war. The resolution was introduced in Local 10 by Jack Heyman, who also presented the motion for the 24 April 1999 coast-wide port shutdown demanding freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther and renowned radical journalist who has been on Pennsylvania’s death row for the last quarter century. Although the union tops maneuvered to prevent Heyman from being elected as a delegate to the Coast Caucus, the motion passed in Local 10. At the Caucus, the delegate from Local 34 referred to the October Labor Conference to Stop the War as the origin of the motion.

At the close of the Caucus on February 8, there was a vigorous debate on the resolution. The union tops tried to stop it, to no avail. They kept asking, "are you sure you want to do this action." The delegates overwhelmingly said "yes." Even conservative trade unionists, including veterans of the Vietnam War, were getting up saying the government is lying to us, we’ve had it with this war, we’ve got to put a stop to it now. So instead the bureaucrats tried to gut the motion, which was cut down from 24 hours to 8, and changed into a "stop-work" meeting (covered by a contract clause) instead of a straight-out shutdown, thinking that this would lessen opposition from the employers. In the end there was a voice vote and only three delegates out of 100 voted against.

The efforts to undercut the motion continue, as is to be expected from a leadership which, like the rest of the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, seeks "labor peace" with the bosses. In his letter to Sweeney, ILWU International president tried to present the action as an effort to "express support for the troops by bringing them home safely," although the motion voted by the delegates says nothing of the sort. Playing the "support our troops" game is an effort to swear loyalty to the broader aims of U.S. imperialism. It aids the warmongers, when what’s needed is independent working-class action against the system that produces endless imperialist war. Yet despite the efforts to water it down and distort it, the May 1 action voted for by the ILWU delegates is a call to use labor’s muscle to put an end to the war.

Mobilize Labor’s Power to Defeat the Bosses’ War!

For the West Coast dock workers union to shut down the ports against the war means a big step forward in the class struggle. The Internationalist Group has uniquely fought for workers strikes against the war, when all the popular-front "peace" coalitions dismissed this and even some shamefaced ex-Trotskyists refused to call for it, saying it had "no resonance" among the workers (see our October 20007 Special Supplement to The Internationalist, "Why We Fight For Workers Strikes Against the War [and the Opportunists Don’t]"). With signs, banners and propaganda we have sought to drive home the central lesson that it is necessary to defeat the imperialist war abroad and the bosses’ war "at home" by mobilizing the power of the workers movement independent of and against the capitalist parties.

That means fighting the war mobilization down the line. First and foremost, this means actively joining the struggle for immigrant rights as the government turns undocumented working people into "the enemy within." Class-conscious workers should demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants. Last year, San Francisco Local 10 voted to stop work and join marches for immigrant rights on May 1, but this was opposed by the employers PMA and sabotaged at the last minute by the union tops. Shamefully, Local 13 in Los Angeles, a majority Mexican American port, made no protest when police attacked immigrant rights protesters that same day. Today, as the ICE immigration police stage Gestapo-style raids across the country, organized labor should take the lead in organizing rapid response networks to come into the streets to block the raids. Despite the campaign by the capitalist media and politicians to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria, there is widespread disgust among American working people toward the jackbooted storm troopers who are terrorizing immigrant communities.

At the same time, the unions should use the power to put a halt to the attacks on civil liberties which are part of the home front of the imperialist war. Driver’s licenses with biometric data, TWIC identification cards with "background checks," warrantless spying and phone tapping, setting up special military tribunals for "trials" in which defendants are denied the right of habeas corpus, to know the "evidence" or even the charges against them – all these are part of a drive that is in high gear pushing the United States toward a full-fledged police state. There have been scores, perhaps hundreds of resolutions by unions and city, county and state labor bodies against the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, showing that labor activists are well aware of the danger. But just as is the case with the countless union antiwar resolutions, there has been no labor action. It is commonplace in the labor movement to bemoan the lack of real action when Reagan broke the 1981 PATCO air traffic controllers’ strike, paving the way for massive union-busting, takeaways and racist attacks all down the line. Let’s not let the labor bureaucrats bury the vital struggles of today.

Now is the time to turn words into deeds, to speak to the capitalist rulers in the only language they understand. The imperialist war parties must be defeated by a class mobilization of the working people at the head of all the oppressed. The ILWU motion to stop work on May Day to put a stop to the war can provide working people everywhere with the opening to turn from impotent protest to a struggle for power. For that the key is to build a class-struggle workers party fighting for a workers government, for socialist revolution here and around the world, that will put an end once and for all to the system of endless war, poverty and racism.

Write to the Internationalist Group, Box 3321, Church Street Station, New York, NY 10008. E-mail: internationalistgroup@msn.com. Visit us on the Internet at: www.internationalist.org

State of Siege in Oaxaca, Preparations in Mexico City

For a National Strike Against Repression

State of Siege in Oaxaca,
Preparations in Mexico City

Paramilitary Federal Preventive Police behind electrified barbed wire in Oaxaca. (Photo: Indymedia)

Down with the PRI, PAN and PRD! Break with the AMLO Popular Front!
Forge a Revolutionary Workers Party!

The following is a translation of a leaflet put out by the Grupo Internacionalista,Mexican section of the League for the Fourth International.

NOVEMBER 30 – As Mexico is preparing to hand over power from President Vicente Fox, of the right-wing clerical National Action Party (PAN), to fellow PAN member Felipe Calderón, the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca is under a state of siege, while in the Federal District (Mexico City) preparations are underway so that the capital will awaken December 1 under a virtual police state. The outgoing president promised to carry out the dirty work of putting an end to the mass strike in Oaxaca before his successor took office. For his part, the “president-elect” – by the vote and grace of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal – promises to bring down “the full weight of the law” against those who oppose his taking office and his takeover of the National Congress. Fox’s six-year term is ending, and Calderón’s begins with the tanquetas (armored personnel carriers mounted with water cannon) deployed and the pounding of military boots in the streets. The prospect is for a bleak future, and/or an outbreak of fierce class struggles.

Already on November 20, a kilometers-long metal wall was erected around the Chamber of Deputies, on the basis of rumors of an occupation of the legislative palace by “uncontrolled” groups. This provocation produced rancor among the legislators who were harrassed (by police), and anger among residents of near-by neighborhoods, forced to make long detours on foot. Later, on November 28, deputies of the PAN seized the podium in San Lázaro (the Congress building) in order to head off the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which had promised to prevent the swearing-in of the imposed president Calderón. The PAN maneuver precipitated a brawl in parliament the likes of which has seldom been seen in a bourgeois legislative chamber. At the same time, it was revealed that at least 50 members of the Presidential General Staff [the chief of state’s praetorian guard] were already in the building. In the early morning hours today, hundreds of Navy troops began arriving to tighten the ring around the Congress and Auditorio Nacional.

We have warned that this attack represents an act of class repression directed against the workers, peasants, Indians and working people of the whole country by a capitalist regime which fears an uprising of the exploited and oppressed. It is the follow-up to the series of massacres against steel workers in Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán in April, against peasants and townspeople in Texcoco and San Salvador Atenco, Mexico state in May, and the teachers of Oaxaca in June. Even more, it is revenge for the defeats suffered by the forces of “law and order” at the hands of their victims, who in each of these cases ran off the killers in uniform. Against the bourgeois onslaught, the Grupo Internacionalista has urged that workers defense committees be formed, independent of the bourgeois parties and state, and a national strike undertaken to counter the repressive wave hanging over the entire country.

Donneybrook in San Lázaro Legislative Palace. PAN deputies seize podium in Chamber of Deputies supposedly to block PRD, provoking free-for-all. (Photo: José Carlo González/La Jornada)

It is also necessary to combat this attack politically. Tomorrow in the capital, thousands upon thousands of demonstrators will go into the streets to oppose the taking of office by “Fecal” (Felipe Calderón), the reactionary technocrat tied to the sinister Catholic order of Opus Dei (heirs of the Franco regime in Spain) and the cristeros of El Yunque.¹ Challenging the “bogus president,” the beneficiary of wholesale electoral fraud, many identify with Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his PRD. Widely known by his initials, “AMLO” was designated the “legitimate president” in September by the National Democratic Convention organized by the PRD, and was sworn in at Mexico City’s Zócalo (Constitution Plaza, the main square in the capital) on November 20, the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution which the present group in power rejects. However, despite the “progressive” airs they give themselves, AMLO is a bourgeois politician and the PRD is a bosses’ party.

The Grupo Internacionalista calls to break the popular front which chains large sectors of the working people to the PRD and its standard-bearer, López Obrador. It is this class-collaborationist alliance that has stood in the way of extending the Oaxacan teachers strike to the rest of the country. It also blocked workers action over the police attack against Atenco and the assault on the SICARTSA steel plant. And not by accident. In each case, PRD legislators and officials were jointly responsible for unleashing the repression itself (Governor Lázaro Cárdenas Batel in Michoacán, the mayor of Texcoco Nazario Gutiérrez and the PRD fraction in the Oaxacan legislative assembly). Against the attacks by the bosses’ parties, it is urgently necessary to forge the nucleus of a revolutionary workers party which fights for a workers and peasants government to expropriate the bourgeoisie and launch the international socialist revolution.

Night and Fog Operations in Besieged Oaxaca

November 25 in Oaxaca: PFP claimed to be reestablishing “tranquility.” Instead they have imposed
state of siege, brutally beating and randomly arresting people to terrorize the population. (Photo: AFP)

Five days ago in Oaxaca, a peaceful march of tens of thousands of opponents of the bloody governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz and his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was brutally repressed by the militarized Federal Preventive Police (PFP) and PRI paramilitaries. It was the seventh “mega-march” against the murderer-governor since the beginning of the teachers strike at the end of May (see “Mexico: Oaxaca Teachers Repel Bloody Cop Assault,” The Internationalist No. 24, Summer 2006). On this occasion, the demonstrators added the demand “URO [Ulises Ruiz Ortiz] and PFP Out of Oaxaca!” When demonstrators arrived at the historic center of the city, they began setting up new barricades around the PFP, entrenched in Oaxaca’s Zócalo behind electrified barbed wire. Suddenly police sharpshooters on the rooftops began firing off hundreds if not thousands of tear gas canisters. Soon dozens of automobiles were set on fire along with several offices of the state government. Combing the streets in search of anyone suspected of being a sympathizer of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO), the police arrested more than 140 people in the long night of November 25 (see “Oaxaca, November 25: The Night of the Hyenas”).

In the following days, the PFP and Oaxaca state Ministerial Police have carried out house searches, checked identity documents of passengers on public transport and kidnapped defenseless pedestrians in the streets. “Dozens of convoys of ministerial police prowl the city, each composed of five pick-up trucks with 8 police with assault rifles in firing position,” reports an APPO bulletin. “We have run out of tolerance,” says the commander of the PFP. Police say they have arrest warrants for 300 people, and intend to arrest the entire State Council of the APPO. In a display of police lunacy, the PFP talks of “at least 100 people of Cuban, French and Venezuelan origin, who ‘have financed and advised’ the ‘radical groups’” (La Jornada, 29 November). To prevent mobilizations demanding the freeing of those jailed, the authorities transferred 141 prisoners to a federal prison in the state of Nayarit. None of the arrested have been able to talk with relatives or lawyers. When representatives of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), a government outfit, were able to examine 17 of the inmates, “they said that all had been severely beaten” (La Jornada, 30 November).

As of yesterday, according to the Oaxaca daily Noticias (30 November), the number of those arrested is estimated at 250, of which 90 are teachers of Section 22, SNTE-CNTE, whose six-month strike resisted the whole gamut of repression and threats by the PRI state government. Others of the arrested include 13 from Oaxaca’s “Benito Juárez” Autonomous University (UABJO), six from the Oaxaca Institute of Technology, and one from the Secretariat of Health. In addition, a human rights investigator linked to the United Nations was seized, and at least 39 disappeared have been reported (including 13 women). The general secretary of the Union of Workers and Employees of UABJO, Rosendo Ramírez Sánchez, declared that “in Oaxaca individual rights have been canceled.” He roundly denounced a “military occupation in gray uniform. We are living under a state of siege, with state terrorism.” Students at the School of Medicine reported three people killed, whose bodies were dragged off by the repressive forces. As they were announcing this in an outdoor press conference, they were fired on by cops from a pick-up truck passing by at high speed.

The pirate radio state of the PRI death squads, “Citizens Radio,” called to burn down the offices of the Oaxaca New Left (NIOAX), headed by Flavio Sosa, one of the most prominent spokesmen of the APPO; only a few hours later the building was torched. The federal government pretended to be open to dialogue, but three hours before the scheduled start of talks, state police arrested Erik Sosa, Flavio’s brother and himself a member of the Assembly’s statewide council. Yesterday in the pre-dawn hours, the various police bodies (federal, state and municipal) launched an operation to dismantle the last barricade, located at the Cinco Señores intersection, site of the victory of thousands of APPO supporters over the PFP hordes on November 2 (see “The Battle of Oaxaca University,” The Internationalist supplement, November 2006). Later in the day, some 200 federal police crowded the entrance to the University, where Radio APPO has been transmitting over the antenna of Radio Universidad. After three days of massive raids, the population didn’t dare to come out in defense, and the defenders decided to turn over the station to university authorities. Bertha Muñoz, La Doctora, the calm and tireless announcer of Radio APPO, along with APPO leaders who had been holed up in the Church of the Virgin of the Poor managed to slip out surreptitiously without being arrested.

Oaxaca teachers staged 48-hour walkout demanding immediate, unconditional freeing of arrested protesters.
(Photo: Noticias)

Today, despite the massive repression aimed at terrorizing the population, thousands of teachers of Section 22 staged a 48-hour work stoppage, demanding an end to arbitrary arrests, immediate freeing of the arrested and the presentation of the disappeared alive. Two weeks after returning to classes, they threatened to go back on statewide strike. The response of “URO” and his thugs didn’t take long in coming. Ministerial police broke into classrooms of schools that hadn’t yet shut down and violently arrested dozens of teachers in the municipalities of the Central Valleys region. “They dragged out primary, secondary and kindergarten teachers at gunpoint in front of their students,” according to an APPO bulletin. Tomorrow, the teachers, once more on strike, and the APPO have announced a march to protest against the swearing-in of Felipe Calderón. Several of the APPO and Section 22 leaders are PRDers (among them Flavio Sosa, a national councilor of the PRD, and Enrique Rueda Pacheco), and it is evident that, as they did with their call for a “punishment vote” against the PAN and the PRI (and therefore implicitly for the PRD) in the July 2 presidential vote, they are again seeking to attach their struggle, if only “tactically,” to a mobilization on behalf of López Obrador.

Forge a Proletarian and Revolutionary Leadership!

Until now, the struggle in Oaxaca has been wholly waged under the watchword of democracy. However, as we have repeatedly emphasized (see “Oaxaca Is Burning” and other articles of the 10 November supplement to The Internationalist), underlying the turbulent mass strike in Oaxaca is the class war. In order to win this battle, a proletarian leadership is required which breaks with all the bourgeois parties on a genuine class program and mobilizes the tremendous power of the working class nationally against the capitalist state. The present leaders of the Oaxacan teachers and their APPO allies, in contrast, have restricted their demands to the confines of the state and have sought the support of bourgeois forces. Thus they call for the removal of the PRI governor by senators of the PAN and PRD. Despite the support of the church hierarchy for sending in the PFP (which they themselves initially accepted), APPO spokesmen have called for the intervention of arch-reactionary anti-Communist pope Benedict XVI. Now they are appealing to the United Nations, that den of imperialist thieves and their flunkeys that authorized, after the fact, the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

These calls are made in the name of “human rights,” the myth used by supposedly democratic imperialists in order to subjugate troublesome regimes. The human rights crusade was one of the battle cries of their anti-Soviet Cold War, and the Yankee imperialists even pretend to be defending the rights of women in Afghanistan. The reality, as affirmed in the German version of the revolutionary proletarian anthem, is that “the International will win human rights,” through socialist revolution.

Tomorrow the candidate of the Neanderthal right, Felipe Calderón, backed by imperialist companies like Wal-Mart and Pepsi-Cola, will succeed the former Coca-Cola executive Vicente Fox. He will have the parliamentary support of the PRI, bought for the price of keeping Ulises Ruiz in office in Oaxaca. The “PRIAN” (PRI + PAN) government cannot be fought by joining with the PRD, a bourgeois party whose very reason for existence is to maintain capitalist rule by extinguishing workers’ struggles. It is necessary to forge a workers party – revolutionary and internationalist, Leninist and Trotskyist – which fights for the taking of power by the proletariat, supported by the peasantry, the indigenous peoples and all the oppressed.

The “democratic” program has led to a dead-end, because the struggles of the working people cannot be resolved on the basis of bourgeois democracy – which, moreover, is impossible in semi-colonial countries like Mexico. As Trotsky indicated in his perspective (both a theory and a program) of permanent revolution, today no wing of the capitalist class is capable of carrying out the tasks which the great bourgeois revolutions accomplished in centuries past. The agrarian revolution necessary to free poor peasants and Indians from their centuries-old poverty; national liberation from the imperialist yoke; and democracy for the exploited and oppressed, the wage slaves of capital, can only be won through workers revolution, expropriating the profit-hungry bourgeoisie and extending to the very heart of the empire, where today more than ten million Mexican workers toil. For this struggle to be the beginning of “the revolution of the 21st century,” as a slogan stenciled on the walls in Oaxaca proclaimed, it must break out of the narrow mold in which it is now constrained. We do not look backwards, to the heritage of Zapata’s peasant nationalism; instead, we seek to be the proletarian Bolsheviks of the 21st century. n

Grupo Internacionalista at rally in defense of Oaxaca teachers by SITUAM union at Iztapalapa
campus, November 11.

---

¹ The cristero revolt of 1926-29, so-called for its battle cry of “Christ the King,” was a war of Catholic reaction against secular education and anti-clerical government measures following the 1910-17 Mexican Revolution. El Yunque is an ultra-rightist secret society based in Guadalajara, Jalisco, which was a center of the cristero revolt. It includes many PAN leaders.

Spirited Solidarity Picket in New York: "Oaxaca Teachers, We Are With You!"

Demonstrators outside Mexican consulate in New York City, September 21. (Internationalist photo)

On September 21, some 150 teachers, professors, trade-unionists, students, leftists and community activists joined in an energetic picket outside Mexico’s Consulate General in New York to “Protest Repression in Oaxaca, Mexico – Defend the Striking Teachers.” (See leaflet with endorsers list.) The picketers were demonstrating militant solidarity with the 70,000 teachers in the southern Mexican state on strike since last May 22, who have braved massive police repression and death squads that have killed at least five strike supporters in the last month.

“Maestros oaxaqueños, estamos con ustedes” (Oaxaca teachers, we are with you), the NYC demonstrators chanted. The chant was so loud, in fact, that it was heard all the way to Oaxaca, via a live broadcast from the picket line to the strikers’ station, Radio Plantón (Sit-In Radio). Pictures of the protest were printed in El Diario-La Prensa in New York and La Jornada in Mexico City. On the same day in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, members of the teachers union (SEPE) from the steel city of Volta Redonda carried a banner proclaiming: “SEPE-V.R. Calls on the Working Class to Strike in Solidarity with the Teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico.”

The New York protest exceeded the organizers’ expectations, as protesters kept arriving. Soon it was almost impossible to move in the narrow area blocked off by steel barriers set up by the police to cordon off demonstrations. Picketers chanted, “From New York to Oaxaca, fight for the right to strike!” Other chants included, “Oaxaca, Atenco, massacres in Mexico,” “International solidarity with Mexican teachers,” “Defend Mexican teachers against death squad terror” and “¡Viva la huelga de los maestros oaxaqueños!”

An important aspect of the Oaxacan teachers’ struggle is the fight against the oppression of the indigenous peoples of this state, where more than a third of the population speaks native languages. One of the signs carried in the September 21 protest carried a greeting in Mixteco from a Oaxacan teacher thanking New York teachers for their support. Another declared in Spanish: “Against Racism, Discrimination and State Terror, Defend the Indigenous Peoples of Oaxaca and Chiapas!” (A large majority of the striking teachers in this heavily indigenous state are women, many from the Zapotec, Mixtec, Mixe, Triqui and other Indian peoples.)

The united-front protest was in response to a call endorsed by more than 70 individuals and organizations, including scores of professors from the City University of New York (CUNY) and teachers from the city’s public schools. For several weeks, union activists from the Professional Staff Congress (PSC, representing CUNY faculty and staff) and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) have been gathering support for the protest in support of the Oaxaca teachers. The Internationalist Group and supporters in the PSC and UFT as well as members of the Internationalist Clubs at CUNY played an important role in initiating and building the protest.

The broadcast over Radio Plantón was particularly important, lasting for 25 minutes before the connection was broken. The strikers prepared beforehand to transmit on all the occupied radio stations in Oaxaca. So when the call from New York came in, four other stations (Radio La Ley, Radio APPO, and others) were networked in. Amid the chanting some of the signs carried by protesters were mentioned, among them the call for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. A student from the CUNY Internationalist Clubs spoke from personal experience growing up in the state of Guerrero about the racism directed against indigenous peoples in Mexico. CUNY professor Electa Arenal sent greetings to the Oaxacan teachers she had met while attending a tri-national (U.S.-Canada-Mexico) conference in defense of public education there last March.

As demonstrators called to fight for the right to strike, we explained to listeners that under New York’s anti-labor Taylor Law, public sector workers are banned from striking here, yet last December the powerful Transport Workers Union (TWU) shut down the city’s subways and buses for three days. Despite massive fines, the TWUers were unbroken. A spokesman for the Internationalist Group explained to listeners that this was intimately connected to the burning need for a revolutionary workers party, both in the U.S. and Mexico, because all the bosses’ parties supported repression against the strikers. The announcer in Oaxaca said that many strikers had expressed the need for a party representing the working people.

The picket was being broadcast while Oaxacan strikers were beginning a long trek by foot to Mexico City that is expected to last two weeks. Marchers listening to the broadcast from the striker-occupied radio stations called in questions to Radio Plantón to pass on to the protest in New York. One listener wanted to know what unions were represented (dozens of members of the PSC, UFT and TWU). Another asked if any document had been brought to the consulate. We reported that a New York teacher and a high school student had tried to deliver a letter from UFT president Randi Weingarten protesting the repression against Oaxacan teachers, but they were rebuffed.

There is no doubt that the radio broadcast gave marchers trekking through the Oaxacan countryside a real lift hearing the chanting from New York and knowing that there was a large and combative solidarity demonstration in the heart of U.S. imperialism supporting the strikers. Now the right-wing government of Mexican president Vicente Fox is threatening to send in federal forces to dislodge the teachers. Governor Ulises Ruiz has issued an ultimatum for teachers to return to work by Monday, September 25, or he will replace them with scabs and send in the police. It is urgent for the working class internationally to come to the aid of our class sisters and brothers in Oaxaca.

Bloody Repression, Hard Class Struggle

For the last four months the Oaxacan teachers and their supporters have been engaged in a hard and protracted class battle, the likes of which hasn’t been seen in Mexico in several decades. On June 14, the governor sent an army of 3,500 riot police to evict strikers camped out in 52 blocks in the heart of the state capital. The repressive forces let off repeated volleys of tear gas (and rifle fire), burned the strikers’ tents, invaded the teachers union headquarters, destroying the strike radio station, and brutally beat anyone they came across. But after a tenacious struggle, tens of thousands of teachers retook the city center.

Two days later 300,000 people marched in solidarity with the teachers. Ever since, the entire city has been in the hands of the teachers and their allies. Police, often masked, periodically sneak into town for nighttime incursions in unmarked vehicles. After one such raid in late August, in which a strike supporter was shot to death by a marauding “caravan of death,” more than 500 barricades were thrown up all around Oaxaca city. The city hall, state legislature, supreme court and governor’s office are all occupied, as well as several radio stations and the state government’s TV channel.

Upon receiving phone reports from our comrades of the Grupo Internacionalista in Mexico about the bloody June 14 cop attack on the striking teachers, the Internationalist Group in New York called an emergency protest outside the Mexican consulate on an hour’s notice. The IG initiated a second demonstration at the consulate the following day which was joined by a large contingent from the PSC. Photos of that demonstration were published in the Mexico City daily La Jornada and in Noticias in Oaxaca, the widely read daily newspaper which is supporting the teachers.

Over the next two and a half months, militants of the Grupo Internacionalista were in Oaxaca almost constantly, distributing thousands of leaflets to the strikers and talking of the need for a national strike against the murderous government, the formation of workers defense committees and fighting to forge class-struggle unions to break the stranglehold of the corporatist “unions” which for decades acted as labor police for the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party). A particular focus was the GI’s call to break with the popular front around the bourgeois-populist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) led by presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, widely known by his initials AMLO.

This was a key issue among the teachers, since after saying for a month that they would boycott the July 2 elections, the union leadership and their allies in the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO) ended up calling for a “punishment vote” against the hated PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) of the bloodthirsty governor Ruiz, which ruled Mexico for 70 years and was still in power in Oaxaca, and against the right-wing clericalist PAN (National Action Party) of Mexican president Fox. This popular-frontist appeal amounted to a call to vote for AMLO and the PRD, which 46 percent of the voters in the state did. At the end of July, supporters of the Grupo Internacionalista held a video showing of the film “Land and Liberty” about the Spanish Civil War and forum on the popular front which drew several dozen strikers.

In August, a youth leader of the GI addressed a mass meeting of 1,500 strike supporters in Oaxaca called by the APPO, declaring that there would be no “democracy” under capitalism for the poor and working people, women and indigenous peoples, denouncing the role of the PRD, and calling for a revolutionary workers party. As PRD supporters attempted to shout him down, our comrade held his ground, while a number of teachers called out to “let him speak.” In the end he got more applause than a PRD senator. Striking teachers crowded around to see photos of the June 14 and 15 protests in New York City and effusively asked IG supporters to convey their thanks to NYC teachers for their solidarity. 198 copies of a new issue of the Mexican edition of El Internacionalista were sold as strikers lined up and called out for copies.

The struggle of the Oaxaca teachers figured prominently in a Grupo Internacionalista forum on “Mexico: Bourgeois Elections and Workers Blood” and “Revolution and Counterrevolution in the Post-Soviet World” held in the Leon Trotsky Museum in Coyoacán (Mexico City) on August 19, the eve of the anniversary of Trotsky’s murder there by a Stalinist agent in 1940. Starting in late August, supporters of the International Group back in New York began agitating and working with activists of the PSC and UFT, to build a labor protest of solidarity with the embattled Oaxacan teachers. UFTers to Stop the War was among the initiators of the demo. Although the union tops refused to endorse, many individual members enthusiastically did.

The IG had a stand at the annual West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn on September 4, selling copies of The Internationalist with several articles on the hot struggles in Mexico. A well-attended forum was held by the Hunter Internationalist Club on September 7 showing a just-completed video produced by the Internationalist Group on “Class Battles in Mexico” (copies of the video are available for sale). On September 9, several hundred leaflets calling for the protest along with a fact sheet on events in Oaxaca were distributed and dozens of endorsements for a protest gathered at the Labor Day parade, despite the wretched Democratic (and in some cases Republican) politics of the pro-capitalist union tops.

On September 14, a “report-back” meeting was held at the City University Graduate Center, sponsored by the Association of Latino and Latin American Students and endorsed by the PSC, CUNY Internationalist Clubs and the Doctoral Students Council. In a room packed to overflowing with more than 60 people, CUNY faculty who recently were in Oaxaca recounted the struggle there and segments were shown from a video shot and being edited by Professor Tami Gold of the Hunter Film Department. After the presentations there was a lively debate with more than a dozen speakers in the audience over the role of the PRD, the nature of the corporatist “unions” in Mexico and the need for solidarity action in the United States.

On September 17, flyers were distributed and 50 copies of El Internacionalista sold at the Mexican Independence Day festival in New York. As momentum built for the picket, an IG spokesman gave an interview on WBAI radio emphasizing key aspects of the struggle in Oaxaca, including the important issue of racism against indigenous peoples. The Hunter Internationalist Club held a sign-making session making dozens of signs. In Mexico City, the Grupo Internacionalista held a forum on the teachers’ struggle, with students who traveled from Oaxaca speaking, at the CCH-Sur preparatory school which was attended by over 100 students. Meanwhile, in Brazil, supporters of the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brazil, section of the League for the Fourth International, were pushing for the teachers union there to demonstrate support for the Mexican strikers. In all three countries, the Internationalist video was shown.

These intense efforts prepared the way for the successful September 21 protest. At the picket, an Internationalist Group leaflet was distributed with an update from Mexico on the “Threat of Heavy Crackdown in Mexico.” At the end of the hour-long protest, the crowd was addressed by a number of the participants. An executive board member of TWU Local 100 spoke of the battle for the right to strike and against the union-busting Taylor Law, after which demonstrators again chanted to fight for the right to strike. A prominent member of the PSC spoke of how teachers in Oaxaca had inspired teachers in New York, and of the need for the working class to become active against the war. Protesters chanted “For workers strikes against the war!” and “Defeat U.S. Imperialism!” An activist from the UFT told how the consulate refused to receive the letter from the NYC teachers union, with 150,000 members, against the repression in Oaxaca.

There were also speakers from Grassroots Haiti, the CUNY Internationalist Clubs, the International Socialist Organization, the League for the Revolutionary Party, Progressive Labor Party and the Spartacist League. The speaker from the Internationalist Group emphasized that the key issue is revolutionary leadership: the Oaxacan teachers have certainly shown tenacity and courage, and have massive popular backing, but the strike is undercut by the leadership’s support for the PRD, many of whose members have been scabbing on the strike and whose legislators are now calling to bring in the Mexican federal police to dislodge the strikers. The fight against massive poverty, to defend immigrants’ rights, to defeat the imperialist war on Afghanistan and Iraq, both in Mexico and the U.S., require the leadership of a revolutionary workers party.

The demonstration ended with vigorous chants to fight for the right to strike, denouncing death squad repression, and proclaiming “¡Viva la huelga de los maestros oaxaqueños!” n

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To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

Israel launches Regional War on the Road to World War III

Defend the Palestinian People and Lebanese Shiites -
Defeat Zionist Expansionists! No to U.N. Mercenaries!

Drive the Zionists Out of the Occupied Territories!
Drive the U.S. Imperialists Out of Iraq and All the Near East!


Israeli girls write messages on a shell at a heavy artillery position near Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel. Photograph: Sebastian Scheiner/AP

On July 14, Israel began a full-scale assault on Lebanon, bombing targets, military and civilian, throughout the country. The first target was Beirut's airport, followed by blowing up bridges and highways leading out of the country. Aside from a few tens of thousands who managed to rush to the Syrian border before the main roads were destroyed, the entire Lebanese population is now trapped. Having blockaded the country, the Zionist militarists are proceeding to pulverize the southern part of the capital, flattening whole city blocks, as well as attacking cities and Palestinian refugee camps from north to south. Particularly hard-hit have been the Shiite Muslim communities where the Islamic organization Hezbollah is strong. To date (July 18) well over 200 Lebanese have been killed in the indiscriminate Israeli bombing.

Leaders of the Zionist state portray their assault as "retaliation" for Hezbollah's July 12 surprise attack on Israeli military forces on the border, in which eight soldiers were killed and two captured. This effective attack left the Israeli army smarting, but what followed is far more than a reprisal. It was "a wonderful option to do something the army was already prepared to do, with a well-constructed operational plan on the shelf," commented the head of an Israeli "peace" center. War minister Amir Peretz, head of the Zionist "Labor" Party, declared that "we shall not allow Hezbollah forces to remain any further on the borders of the state of Israel." The only way that can be accomplished is by an Israeli occupation, and today the first Israeli troops moved into southern Lebanon.

Whatever the pretext used by Israel to justify its aggression, the international workers movement must stand squarely for defense of the Palestinian people and Lebanese Shiite population under attack and for the defeat of the Israeli assault. The current invasion of Lebanon is part of an overall plan by the Zionist expansionists to unilaterally withdraw the borders of the Near East and impose their military dominance on the Arab peoples. Having declared the bogus "peace process" dead, the Palestinians are to be fenced in and confined to giant prisons in Gaza and the West Bank, the Zionist settlements will fill in huge swaths of the Occupied Territories, and the stage will be set for a future mass expulsion, euphemistically known in Zionist circles as "transfer." This "final solution" to the "Palestinian problem" today is openly avowed only by Zionist hardliners, but it is the logic of the decades-old policy of "creating facts on the ground.”

There is no "equivalence" between the blows struck by the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah and Palestinian groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and various secular nationalist resistance forces on the one hand, and the Zionist military juggernaut on the other. Contrary to the hysteria trumpeted by the bourgeois press in the West, the existence of the Hebrew¬ speaking population of Israel is in no way threatened today whereas the Palestinian Arab and Lebanese Shiite populations are very much in danger of being decimated and driven out of their lands. At the same time, while noting that the Israeli attacks on Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank are far deadlier, proletarian internationalists oppose indiscriminate attacks on the civilian population such as suicide bombings of non-military targets and the rockets which struck a railway repair shop in Haifa, killing eight workers. The League for the Fourth International calls to drive the Zionists out of all the territories conquered by Israel in the 1967 war, including East Jerusalem. All the West Bank settlements are military outposts for the subjugation of the Palestinians.

Revolutionary Marxists recognize the right of self-determination of both the Palestinian Arab and Hebrew speaking peoples, that is, their right to national existence in the area. The creation of the state of Israel, a theocratic Jewish state which is inherently oppressive to the Palestinians, was a historic crime by the Western imperialists, coming on top of the monstrous annihilation of 6 million European Jews in the Nazi Holocaust. Instead of accepting the Jewish refugees from the fascist slaughter, the "democratic" imperialists pushed them into Palestine. But the fact is that there is now a Hebrew-speaking nation in the same territory as the Palestinian Arab population, and proletarian revolutionaries defend the democratic rights of both.

Since the demise of the phony "peace" process following the collapse of the Camp David talks in 2000, when U.S. president Clinton demanded Palestinians submit to the carving up of the West Bank, and the subsequent provocation staged by Ariel Sharon at the Al Aksa Mosque with the full cooperation of the "Labor" Zionist government of Ehud Barak, many Palestinian secular nationalists and Israeli leftists have abandoned their earlier support for a Palestinian "mini-state" and call for a democratic, secular Palestine. This was the original program of the Palestine Liberation Organization. However, there is no way that under capitalism there can be an equitable and democratic solution to the conflict between two competing claims to national self-determination on the same territory. How would the water rights be divided between Israel and Palestine, for example? What about the undeniable right to return of the Palestinian refugees forced from their homes in 1948?

The Trotskyists of the Internationalist Group and LFI oppose forced population transfers and all religiously based states, whether a Jewish state of Israel or an Islamic state in Iran or U.S.-occupied Iraq. We hold that in the case of historically intermingled peoples, the only possible framework for a just solution to national rights is under proletarian rule, when the working people of all nationalities, peoples and minorities can resolve democratic questions through their common efforts in a collective economy. In the present case, while recognizing the right of national self-¬determination on behalf of both the Palestinian Arab and Hebrew-speaking peoples, we fight for an Arab-Hebrew workers state in a socialist federation of the Near East. This can only be achieved by joint struggle of the working people against their Zionist, Islamic fundamentalist and Arab nationalist rulers.

The current Israeli assault is in many respects a repeat of Ariel Sharon's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which led to almost two decades of occupation and Israel's ultimate withdrawal. Last year they tried to set up a puppet government in Beirut by forcing Syrian forces to leave the country. While giving no political support to the nationalist Syrian government, Marxists point out that Lebanon was carved out of Syria in the 1940s by the departing French colonialists as an artificial state, then dominated by pro-Western Christian forces, in order to hold Arab nationalism in check. As demonstrated in the civil war of two decades ago, Lebanon is a checkerboard of communalist enclaves, which under capitalist rule is will always be oppressive to one national minority or another (Shiites, Christians, Alawites, Druzes, etc.)

But the current military escalation comes in a new context, of U.S.-led imperialist invasions and colonial occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Palestinian "president" Abbas, a figurehead without a state or a government, warned that the attack on Lebanon could lead to a regional war. In fact, Israel has already launched the war. The Zionists are counting on the Saudi, Egyptian and other reactionary Arab regimes to do nothing, which they undoubtedly will do, and is calling for the Lebanese government to control Hezbollah, which it will not and cannot do. As a result, many European imperialists in the Group of 8 meeting in the tsarist palaces of St. Petersburg, Russia, have called for United Nations intervention. But U.N. "blue helmets" will only serve as mercenary border police on behalf of Israel and U.S. imperialism.

The U.S. imperialists have been attempting to impose a Pax Americana on the region for decades, particularly since the 2001-2003 attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. The Zionists have always sought to serve as cat's paws for imperialism, going back to when they got British foreign minister to issue the famous Balfour Declaration in 1917 by offering to act as pawns for Britain astride the vital Suez Canal. But the interests of the Zionists and the imperialists are not always identical. In fact, crazed Israeli right-wingers and their defenders abroad are perfectly prepared to blow up the world in pursuit of their messianic expansionist plans. Currently, Zionist spokesmen in the U.S. have declared that World War III has begun, and that the key is for the United States (and Israel) to "prevail." Democrats and Republicans alike rushed to defend Israeli aggression, with warhawk Hillary Clinton taking the lead in saber-rattling. Against the bipartisan war party, we fight for a revolutionary workers party.

At the time of World War I, the German communist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg declared that the choice facing mankind was barbarism or socialism. Certainly, the Zionist rulers of Israel and the imperialist warmongers in Washington show the ugly face of barbarism as they rape and pillage their way through Iraq and dismember the Palestinian people. We call on the workers of the world to unite in class struggle to drive the imperialists from Iraq and Afghanistan, to defeat the colonial occupation and the "war on terror" which is actually a drive to terrorize the world into submission, as well as to drive the Zionists from all the occupied territories, from Gaza to the West Bank to Lebanon. And to put an end to the imperialist chamber of horrors, from the carnage of World War I to the Nazi holocaust (and U.S. atom bombing of Japan) in World War II, to the torture and murder camps of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, it is necessary to sweep away the capitalist system through international socialist revolution.

For more information, write to: Internationalist Group, Box 3321, Church Street Station, New York, NY 10008. Telephone: (212) 460-0983 Fax: (212) 614-8711 E-mail: internationalistgroup@msn.com
Visit the IG/LFI on the Internet at www.internationalist.org

Oaxaca Teachers Repel Bloody Riot Cop Assault

After Massacres at Sicartsa Steel Mill and Atenco

300,000 march in Oaxaca, June 16, denouncing repressive governor and supporting teachers strike.
(Photo: Marco Ugarte/AP)

Not One Vote For the Bourgeois Parties PRI, PAN y PRD!
Break with López Obrador, the PRD and their Popular Front!
Forge a Revolutionary Workers Party!

The following is a translation of a leaflet by the Grupo Internacionalista, Mexican section of the League for the Fourth International, distributed in Oaxaca where 300,000 people marched June 16 to protest the bloody police attack on striking teachers there two days earlier.

JUNE 16 – Two weeks before the Mexican presidential elections, the government of Oaxaca under Governor Ulises Ruiz of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) staged a blatant provocation, violently evicting teachers who have been occupying the downtown area of the state capital. In the classic manner of military dictatorships, thousands of city and state police fell upon the teachers as they were sleeping in the 53 blocks where they have been camped out for the last three weeks. Firing off tear gas grenades in all directions, they invaded the union headquarters, destroyed the teachers’ tents and burned what was left of their encampments. But the government only succeeded in shooting itself in the foot, and the eviction was a failure. After three hours of pitched battle, the 40,000 strikers managed to break through the police barriers and to drive out the forces of repression.

Amid the great confusion reigning in the city, there were reports of several people killed: an initial notice by the Mexican Red Cross reported eleven dead, a number that was later reduced to four according to spokesmen for the teachers and the Oaxaca daily Noticias. Clarity is still lacking on this issue. What is certain is that Social Security hospitals treated 92 people wounded in the attack, several of them in serious condition; in addition, a number of teachers are still missing. In short, the streets of Oaxaca ran red with the blood of the working people. It was a real massacre – the third in less than two months – coming after the April 20 shooting of workers at the Sicartsa steel plant in the Pacific Coast port city of Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán; and the deadly attack on the townspeople of San Salvador Atenco, near Mexico City, on May 4. In the electoral contest, each of the three main bourgeois parties is posing as being the toughest on “security” issues. In fact, the PAN (National Action Party), PRI and PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) have all sent killer cops against the working people. This is how the Mexican ruling class prepares its electoral farce drenched with workers’ blood.

In the wake of his failed paramilitary operation and facing the fury of the working class nationally and internationally, Governor Ruiz had to retreat. He freed ten strikers and suspended (but did not drop) arrest orders for 25 teachers union leaders. The federal government of President Vicente Fox joined in and the Ministry of the Interior (under the rightist Carlos Abascal) dispatched an undersecretary to act as mediator. They intimated that all of a sudden they might be able to find federal funds to pay for “rezoning” the teachers which would provide a minimal raise to their starvation wages. But matters will not be resolved with a round-table “dialogue.” This battle is not over, and any “truce” could prove fatal. Although they have withdrawn from the center of the city, the strikers have not abandoned their mass sit-in and they are now demanding the head of the repressive governor. The union has called not to vote for any of the presidential candidates, and is proposing to boycott the July 2 election – which they have the power to disrupt, at least on the state level.

What is urgently needed at this time is to break out of the state framework and to undertake a national strike against the murderous government, fighting for victory to the strikes by Oaxaca teachers and mine workers; for total trade-union independence from the bourgeoisie, breaking the shackles of the corporatist pseudo-unions and throwing back the government attack on miners and metal workers; for freeing and dropping all charges against the arrested workers, peasants and teachers, victims of the repressive onslaught by the ruling class. Above all, what’s needed is a political reply to the bourgeoisie’s class offensive, refusing to give a single vote to the PAN, PRI, PRD or any other bosses’ party, breaking with the popular front tying the “independent” unions to the PRD candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and forging the nucleus of a revolutionary workers party which would fight for a workers and peasants government to begin international socialist revolution.

Teachers, Miners and Peasants in the Face of the Capitalist Assault

Teachers (in rear) confront an army of police following eviction, June 14. (Photo: Indymedia México)

It is striking that in each of the recent massacres, the workers under attack tenaciously resisted the repression and routed the repressive forces. In Lázaro Cárdenas, they took back the Sicartsa steel mill in a hard battle against the police and marines. (It now seems that the Fox government may be trying for a repeat performance in the copper mine town of Cananea, Sonora near the Arizona border, where the miners walked out when they were ordered to work on the centenary of the great strike that sparked the Mexican Revolution of 1910-17.) In Atenco, hundreds of police from the state of Mexico fled from the fury of the population incensed over the arrest of some flower sellers. And now in Oaxaca, the uniformed guard dogs of capital received a sharp response from those they sought to put down.

It began with a silent operation in the early morning ours of June 14. At 4:50 a.m., the general secretary of the union, Enrique Rueda Pacheco, sounded the alert over Radio Plantón (Radio Sit-Down, the strikers’ radio station), calling on the ranks to prepare for “organized resistance against the repression that the state government is carrying out in an irrational manner.” At 5:15, the police took over the Teachers’ Hotel (union headquarters), a few blocks from the city center, and then advanced on the Zócalo, Oaxaca’s central plaza. Enveloped in dense clouds of tear gas from troops on the ground and from a helicopter which flew over the plaza for hours, the police managed to momentarily “recapture” the Plaza de Armas and the Alameda. At gunpoint and brandishing riot clubs, they pillaged and burned the teachers’ encampments, dismantled the equipment with which the strikers broadcast Radio Plantón, and savagely beat teachers they encountered.

But what happened next certainly wasn’t part of the operational plan. While the governor with hands soaked in blood tried to hide his crimes behind his own cloud of verbal laughing gas, talking about a fantastical “state of law,” Excélsior (15 June) reported on its front page that the teachers “Force Police to Flee.” The Oaxaca daily Noticias described how the teachers used buses to smash through police barricades:

“At around 7:45, the 40,000 teachers regrouped almost in their entirety and began to corner the police who as the minutes passed were forced to fall back on the Alameda de León and the Zócalo, due to a shortage of munitions, mainly tear gas canisters. A helicopter of the special operations police circled over the historical city center and fired off grenades on multiple occasions, but still they could not defeat the teachers….

“About 8:50, the educational workers now numbered thousands and proceeded to launch the final battle. The police were forced to pull back and abandon the Zócalo, retreating along Bustamante Street, after offering their last defense.”

Throughout the day, federal and state authorities bandied about threats of a new attack by the Federal Preventive Police (PFP). It was reported that Hercules troop transport planes filled with the paramilitary police were headed to Oaxaca to “finish the job.” The governor wanted to “clear” the Zócalo in order to “promote tourism” and carry out the demands of the state Coparmex (employers’ association) to get rid once and for all of this “rabble” of teachers who fight for higher wages. Ruiz claimed to have the support of the federal government, but apparently the president’s office decided otherwise. Interior minister Abascal announced later that it would be “better” not to attempt a new eviction. The federal government made an electoral calculation and decided to leave the PRI governor twisting in the wind.

The Story of the SNTE and CNTE: Oaxaca Teachers in the Eye of the Storm

In the face of the all-sided anti-labor repression, what’s needed is a class-struggle leadership to wage an all-out battle against the capitalist government. In the first place, it is necessary to burst the shackles of the corporatist “trade-unionism” (represented by the CTM, CROC, CROM, CT, SNTE and related federations) which during more than half a century of PRI rule served as the labor police of the regime to suppress the Mexican workers, break their strikes and murder their best fighters on a mass scale. Today the corporatist bureaucrats offer their services to the Fox government, although they have occasionally fallen afoul of their godfather as they find themselves caught between a furious proletariat and a decaying regime in a tight spot. This is what happened with the mine leader Napoleón Gómez Urrutia (“Napito”) after the “industrial homicide” in Pasta de Conchos¹ for which the corporatist mine and metal workers union was co-responsible along with the company and the capitalist state.

Police destroyed the teachers camp and burned the remains. (Photo: Indymedia México)

The effects of the corporatization of the workers movement in Mexico are still being felt. The National Education Workers Union (SNTE), under its caudillo (strong man) Carlos Jonguitud, served for decades as the political instrument of the PRI (of which it was a part) to control the rural areas of the country. When discontent over his misrule boiled over, Jonguitud was replaced by the current “moral leader” of the SNTE, Elba Esther Gordillo, who was hand-picked by the PRI president Carlos Salinas de Gortari and designated union president in an all-night meeting in Gobernación (the interior ministry). The SNTE maintained its control over the teachers through internal terror, with bands of hired gunmen whose job was to “clean out” any dissidents. Jonguitud and Gordillo between them are responsible for the assassination of more than 150 members of their “union.” When a labor body engages in mass murder of its members, dedicates itself to breaking strikes and not simply selling them out (as the reformist bureaucrats regularly do), when it is an integral part of a whole repressive apparatus, then it is no longer a workers union, but instead a state apparatus for control of labor.

The Oaxacan teachers in particular rebelled against this repressive apparatus, playing a key role in the National Educational Workers Coordinating Committee (CNTE), a union tendency which in much of the country acts as a separate union. This is the case in the state of Oaxaca, where the CNTE controls Section 22 of the SNTE. Although the PRI no longer holds the presidency of the country, the corporatist apparatuses have continued offering their services to the federal government, now run by the PAN. Thus the general secretary of the SNTE, Rafael Ochoa, declared that “the SNTE dissociates itself” from the Oaxaca teachers’ struggle. In the same tone as Fox’s education secretary, he asked “who is supplying the money to pay for the [strike] movement” (La Jornada, 6 June). Even after the June 14 massacre, Ochoa insists that “the teachers in the struggle belong to the National Education Workers Coordinating Committee (CNTE) and not to his union” (Noticias [Oaxaca], 15 June). The SNTE leaders yearn to put an end to the labor militancy of the Oaxaca teachers and would not hesitate to call on the police to do so, as they have done against the CNTE in Mexico City.

But breaking the stranglehold of corporatism on the Mexican workers is far from sufficient. It is also necessary to free the proletariat from the political bonds tying it to the ruling class via the pro-capitalist leaderships of the “independent” unions who are subordinate to the PRD, among them top leaders of the CNTE. It is pro-PRD union bureaucrats in the first instance who stand in the way of joint action by the proletariat on a national scale against the repression (offering the mockery of a three-hour national work stoppage). They don’t want to pose problems for PRD candidates and particularly for its presidential hopeful, López Obrador, who calls for “dialogue” with the butchers (i.e., for the teachers, miners, peasants, etc. to surrender).

Massacres and Elections: Plenty of Stick, Not Much Carrot

The six-year term of Vicente Fox is drawing to a close as mass repression rains down on the working people of the countryside and the cities. Fox’s victory in the 2000 elections was seen as the longed-for end of the “perfect dictatorship” of the PRI. But the end of the PRI-government regime of a state party and its replacement by a PAN-PRI-PRD condominium has only brought more repression, helping to dispel many democratic illusions. No matter who emerges as the victor in the July 2 elections, the workers’ blood will continue to be spilled until the gruesome capitalist ruling dynasty in Mexico is swept away once and for all.

In fact, the string of police massacres is closely linked to the elections. The PRI, PAN and PRD are up to their necks in the electoral circus and are going after each other with all they’ve got. The main theme of their campaigns is the “lack of security.” The bourgeois candidates are competing over who can be the best repressor in upholding the business affairs of capital. Felipe Calderón of the PAN promises a “firm hand”; Roberto Madrazo of the PRI says he “knows how to do it”; and López Obrador proposes to throw in a little carrot along with the stick. Until now, the triplet parties of the pseudo-democratic “alternation” have not hesitated for an instant in banding together in the hour of repression. At Sicartsa, it was a joint action by the local (PRI), state (PRD) and federal (PAN) police. In Atenco, the repression was ordered by a PRD mayor and the PRI governor, backed by the PAN federal government. They cut down 14-year-old Javier Cortés and National University student Alexis Benhumea, who died last week after more than a month in a coma. The death toll in Oaxaca is not yet known.

The Oaxacan teachers of Section 22 also know that the “PRI, PAN and PRD are the same thing,” as a teacher said last week in a union assembly of the sit-down strikers. “First they kill the Sicartsa workers in Michoacán, then two youths in Atenco,” he went on. “This is the work of the same wretches. The PRI, PAN and PRD, all three of them, are parties of the rich. We call not to vote for any of them; what we have to do is boycott the July 2 elections.” His conclusion is correct, but insufficient. A negative, passive policy is not enough. In the face of the repressive onslaught by the capitalist regime, we must build the indispensable vehicle to wage a political struggle against the bourgeoisie: a revolutionary workers party.

It must be a Leninist vanguard party; a party of class struggle, which points the way and mobilizes the working people to win battles like the Oaxaca teachers’ strike; an internationalist party, capable of fighting the nationalist demagogy peddled by the bourgeois politicians (while grossly subordinating themselves to the imperialists), which is also reflected in the empty posturing of the Other Campaign². It must be a party based on the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution, which in the face of the anti-democracy of the bourgeois regime that oppresses the peasants, Indians and all working people raises the program of workers revolution, not only in Mexico but also on the other side of the Line, in the imperialist bastion to the north, where millions of Mexican workers form a human bridge and a growing, potentially militant sector of the North American proletariat.

In fact, the struggle of the Oaxaca teachers and the massacre they have suffered has had a strong impact in the United States. Our comrades of the Internationalist Group, U.S. section of the League for the Fourth International (LFI), initiated a mobilization protesting the repression in Oaxaca in front of the Mexican consulate in New York. Already on April 14, the day the massacre took place, the IG called an emergency picket, pulled together in less than an hour. Yesterday, June 15, they held another protest attended by more than 50 people, among them many members of the Professional Staff Congress, the faculty and staff union of the City University of New York. Demonstrators chanted angrily, “Atenco, Oaxaca, massacres in Mexico,” and “Hail the Mexican teachers’ strike!” Union speakers expressed solidarity with their Mexican brothers and sisters. And last night, the San Francisco local of the West Coast U.S. dock workers union, the ILWU, unanimously approved a motion protesting the repression in Oaxaca.

The IG also fights for full citizenship rights for all immigrants under the slogan: “The workers’ struggle has no borders.” In Mexico, the fundamental objective of the Grupo Internacionalista is to build the nucleus of a genuinely revolutionary workers party, as part of a reforged Fourth International. This is not something that will become necessary in the distant future: faced with the government repression against the working people, it is necessary to build this indispensable political instrument for proletarian revolution. Today is when it is possible to give the final push to bring down the tottering corporatist edifice and land a telling blow against the murderous regime. We call upon teachers and other fighters who want to go from resistance to a fight for revolution to joint the ranks of the Grupo Internacionalista. n

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¹ On February 19, an explosion in the Pasta de Conchos mine in the state of Coahuila trapped 65 miners underground where they were left to die. In the face of the outraged relatives of the doomed miners, who complained to the press that the “union” was “the same as the company,” Gómez Urrutia accused management of “industrial homicide,” even though the union had signed off on fraudulent safety certifications along with the company and state labor inspectors. Thereupon, the mine owners demanded Gómez’ ouster and the Fox government summarily dismissed him (just as they had installed him four years earlier over opposition in the miners’ ranks). The Grupo Internacionalista opposed the government intervention while calling on the miners and metal workers to break the corporatist stranglehold and fight for genuine workers’ unions, free of state control, with a class-struggle leadership .

² The “Otra Campaña” initiated by the Zapatista insurgents calls for opposing the mounting repression without suggesting the means to fight it, other than repeated demonstrations. While claiming to be “anti-capitalist,” their real complaint is that the rulers “are destroying what is our Nation, our Mexican Fatherland (Patria).”

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To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants!

Up to 1 million marched for immigrants’ rights in Los Angeles March 25. (Photo: Los Angeles Times)

Defeat U.S. Imperialist War on Iraq!
Build a Revolutionary Workers Party!

We reprint below an Internationalist Group leaflet distributed along with an 8-page tabloid special issue of The Internationalist at an April 10 immigrants’ rights march in New York.

The United States is bogged down in a losing war and colonial occupation of Iraq. Meanwhile, immigrants in the U.S. are facing mounting racist attack. These two facts are intimately connected. From the beginning of the 20th century and the U.S. conquest of the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico, through World Wars I and II, the Vietnam War and up to today, imperialist war has always been accompanied by virulent immigrant-bashing. The bottom line is: to defeat the racist onslaught, you have to defeat the war and bring down the capitalist system that produces both.

The Internationalist Group, U.S. section of the League for the Fourth International, fights for full citizenship rights for all immigrants, documented or undocumented, and for the defeat of U.S. imperialism in its “war on terror” which in reality is an attempt to terrorize the world into submission to its dictates. We warn against placing confidence in any capitalist parties or politicians, defenders of a system that was founded on slavery and remains racist to the core. We seek to build a workers party to lead the struggle for international socialist revolution.

For the past four months, immigrant communities across the U.S. have grown increasingly alarmed over the prospect of immigration “reform” that could mean losing their jobs, imprisonment and deportation. The passage last December of the vicious H.R. 4437 bill introduced by Representatives James Sensenbrenner and Peter King – that would make all undocumented immigrants felons, make church workers who aid them criminals, and build a 700-mile wall along the Mexican border – has galvanized a population that was politically invisible. All immigrants are affected.

In recent weeks there has been a wave of massive protests in defense of immigrant rights: over 50,000 in Washington on March 7, up to 300,000 in Chicago three days later, and anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million in Los Angeles March 25. Now nationwide demonstrations have been called for April 9-10 that are expected to bring out several million participants. Never before in the history of the United States has there been such a huge political mobilization of immigrants. But what will be the outcome? What program should immigrants fighting for their rights defend?

The massive show of immigrant strength took the capitalist politicians by surprise. The maneuvering over immigration reform legislation was thrown into turmoil. Supporters of a bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Ted Kennedy and John McCain felt they were on a roll. Republican Senate leaders scrambled to cobble together a “compromise” bill. The Spanish-language New York paper El Diario-La Prensa (20 March) headlined, “Triunfamos” (We Won). But faced with resistance from the racist hard-liners, suddenly the deal-making collapsed. Politicians fled the capital. Insiders declared immigration reform dead for this Congress.

Mainstream immigrant rights groups such as the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF), the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the National Council of La Raza and a host of local coalitions all call for “amnesty.” They are also all tied, one way or another, to the Democratic Party, one of the partner parties of U.S. capitalism. Most support the Kennedy-McCain bill, as do many unions. But we warn that amnesty is no solution, and the Kennedy-McCain immigration “reform” is a trap that will make things worse for immigrants.

Internationalist Group banner calling for full citizenship rights for all immigrants and to build a revolutionary workers party, at demonstration against Iraq war, New York City, March 18.
Internationalist photo

Why is that? In the first place, all the different immigration bills floating around the halls of Congress include the provisions for drastically increasing U.S. military action along the Mexican border, which is already the most militarized international boundary in the world. The compromise Senate bill supported by Kennedy and McCain calls for doubling the size of the U.S. Border Patrol and creating a “virtual wall” of sensors, cameras, vehicles and aircraft to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border. This will mean many more immigrant deaths.

Secondly, the Kennedy-McCain bill includes provisions for a “guest worker” program that would supply U.S. employers with several hundred thousand disposable workers, who would have no rights and would be sent back after six years (or if they lose their jobs). Contrary to the delusions of President Bush and others, not even a tiny fraction of immigrant workers already in the U.S. would sign up for such a program. More fundamentally, this is a form of indentured servitude, supposedly outlawed under the U.S. Constitution. In fact, “guest workers” would be worse off than the original indentured servants, who could stay in America. This will mean many more deportations.

Thirdly, the Kennedy-McCain bill calls for a crackdown on employers’ hiring of “illegal aliens.” In recent years, employer sanctions have seldom been enforced as the real policy on checking documents has become “don’t ask, don’t tell.” In 2004 there was a grand total of three actions against employers for employing undocumented workers. The capitalists know that they desperately need immigrant labor to keep up their profits. But the “bipartisan” immigration reform seeks to regain control of the labor supply. This will mean many more factory raids.

All defenders of immigrant workers’ rights should oppose such slave-labor programs. Yet the bourgeois immigration coalitions support such programs as part of a deal to get “amnesty.”

So why don’t Marxists call for amnesty? Of course, even limited legalization can be a gain for immigrants who presently have no legal rights at all. But “amnesty” is no answer for immigrants on several counts. To begin with, it is asking forgiveness for committing a “crime.” Many in recent protests have held up signs and banners saying “immigrants are not criminals.” But their leaders, along with bourgeois liberals and reformist pseudo-socialists, tell undocumented workers they must beg for a pardon. Revolutionaries, in contrast, say all workers should fight for their rights.

Ever since The Communist Manifesto written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels a century and a half ago, Marxists have held that “the workers have no fatherland.” But amnesty accepts the “right” of the capitalist rulers to police their borders. It does nothing to fight the massive militarization and police repression aimed at persecuting immigrants, whether on the Mexican border or in New York City. Moreover, any amnesty will grant limited rights to certain workers, those who arrived before a certain date, while going after the next wave of “illegal” migrants and those who don’t “qualify” under the bourgeoisie’s laws.

In fact, the present situation, with over 12 million people living in the U.S. without any legal rights, is the direct result of the 1986 amnesty. When he signed it into law, Ronald Reagan said that this measure would let the U.S. “humanely regain control of our borders” by tightening controls on those entering the country, while imposing civil and criminal penalties against employers who hired undocumented workers. (This “humane” act was passed while Reagan was whipping up hysteria about a “red tide” of refugees from Central America crossing the Rio Grande River.) A new amnesty will just reproduce this situation a few years down the road.

The program of the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International is straightforward. We don’t beg the rulers for amnesty, we fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants, now, period. Otherwise the bosses will use the lack of legal rights to victimize undocumented workers and set one part of the working class against another. Anyone who lives here should have the same rights as everyone else. That’s what serious defenders of immigrant rights should be fighting for.

But in the imperialist epoch, the fight for basic democratic rights requires hard class struggle. The bourgeoisie is waging a war not only against Iraq and Afghanistan but also against working people, minorities, immigrants and the poor in the U.S. The rulers are systematically curtailing civil liberties while they drive down wages, slash social programs, shove the cost of health care onto workers and gut their pensions. Immigrants are often the first target of this capitalist onslaught, such as in the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act and the “Real ID” Act last year, the first step toward imposing a national identification card.

Imperialist war and anti-immigrant repression go together. Above: Over 1,000 striking miners in Bisbee,
Arizona, led by the revolutionary syndicalist IWW, were rounded up in July 1917, loaded into box
cars and stranded in the New Mexico desert. Hundreds were later deported.* An extensiveexhibit
on the Bisbee deportation is available at http://www.library.arizona.edu/exhibits/bisbee/
Photo: Arizona Historical Society Library

The same thing has happened during and after every imperialist war over the last century. In World War I, the liberal Democrat Woodrow Wilson jailed socialist opponents of the war and ordered the arrest and deportation of militant immigrant workers. Striking miners of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) in Arizona, most of them Mexican, were rounded up at gunpoint and shipped into the desert in box cars to starve and die of thirst (see “‘Reds’ and Immigrants: The Bisbee, Arizona Deportation of 1917,” The Internationalist No. 2, April-May 1997. After the war, the bourgeoisie launched a “red scare,” deporting thousands of foreign-born communists. The Italian anarchist workers Sacco and Vanzetti were executed.

In World War II, the government jailed 18 Trotskyists, led by James P. Cannon, and leaders of the Minneapolis Teamsters for their revolutionary opposition to the imperialist war. At the same time they put tens of thousands of Americans of Japanese ancestry into concentration camps. After the 11 September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as the U.S. government launched a war on Afghanistan and Iraq, thousands of immigrants from the Near East and South Asia were locked up and held incommunicado. The City University of New York moved to drive out thousands of undocumented students by more than doubling their tuition, justifying this as a war measure.

Now U.S. rulers are preparing to launch anti-immigrant repression on a massive scale. The New York Times (3 February) reported that the Army Corps of Engineers awarded a $385 million contract to the Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary of Halliburton Corporation for the construction of a string of “temporary immigration detention centers,” each holding up to 5,000 people. KBR would build these concentration camps for the Department of Homeland Security, to hold “an unexpected influx of immigrants,” people fleeing from a natural disaster (another New Orleans), or “for new programs that require additional detention space.”

And what might those programs be? This is part of a Homeland Security program codenamed “ENDGAME” which is described by the DHS as “a mission first articulated in the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798” (which the Supreme Court has never ruled on, although past Court opinions presumed them to be unconstitutional). Its goal is the capability to “remove all removable aliens,” including “illegal economic migrants, aliens who have committed criminal acts, asylum-seekers” and “potential terrorists.” Last year, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the DHS included the pursuit of a “fugitive population of 400,000 illegal aliens ordered removed” in its budget plans for Fiscal Year 2005.