The COVID-19 crisis has unmasked the inability of capitalism to ensure the health, work, well-being, and life of the working class. This system serves bosses’ profits, not workers, as evidenced by the following figures:
While big capitalists in Mexico increased their wealth by an average of 20 percent during the pandemic (Forbes, 4/6), 12 million people were left jobless and an estimated similar amount fell into poverty (Expansion, 2/28). As Morena-PT liberals and PRI-PAN-PRD conservatives blame each other, COVID-19-associated deaths through February reached 316,000 (Mexico Excess Mortality Report, 3/15).
Health authorities have presented population confinement as the most effective measure to control the pandemic, but they hide its class nature. Because the most unprotected sector of the working class live day by day, they can't stay at home and have to expose themselves to find a way to survive, resulting in increased contagion and deaths in the most marginalized areas of large cities. Industrial zones have not stopped regardless of the lives of the workers.
The confinement measures were used by the current liberal government of López Obrador, to strengthen the demobilization of social protest, the advancement of its social programs of electoral co-optation and the deployment of the armed forces disguised as the National Guard. All this helps continue the capitalists’ megaprojects of the Interocean Corridor, the Maya Train, the New International Airport of Mexico City, the Integral Morelos Project (PIM) and the Dos Bocas Refinery.
AMLO's liberal government, with its pro-worker mask, has also attacked labor rights. As is the case of the dissenting teachers’ faction of the CNTE, who demand that this government comply with the cancellation of the Capitalist Educational Reform and the fascist ISSSTE Act. It denies fair payment to pensioners and retirees through an administrative trap that calculates their payment using the Update Unit of Measure (UMA) and not the minimum wage as required by the constitution. In that conversion workers lose almost half their wages; UMA is worth $4.48 and the minimum wage is $7.08.
So, this May Day workers will mobilize to stop this action plan to attack the policy of the capitalist liberal state.
Amid the COVID-19 crisis, the bosses will seek to drag us into their electoral circus, heralded as the largest in history at a cost of 694 million pesos, which could be better spent to slow the pandemic. But for capitalists, it is essential that workers see the thm as the only alternative and choose one of them as our savior. In fact, they cynically use vaccinations to build support for the ruling Morena party.
In areas under the control of organized crime, which according to the U.S. northern command estimates is between 30 percent and 35 percent of the national territory, organized crime in contention with the economic and political elites will decide who will participate in the elections and eventually rule. To date, there have been 252 assaults on politicians and 65 murders. (El Universal 4/27).
PLP members support the struggle of each sector of workers to fight for their immediate interests, making it clear that the real and definitive solution for the working class is the revolutionary unity used to destroy the lethal virus called capitalism. This will be done through a conscious and participatory process that leads to the building of communism, a society without oppressors, exploiters, bosses or liberal governments disguised as progressive.
For a revolutionary communist May Day!