Last year in Mexico’s presidential election Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (aka AMLO) came to power in Mexico). He rode a wave of massive discontent with the previous president Enrique Pena Nieto. Also, he promised an end to official corruption which he calls Mexico’s IV transformation. The other three, he argued, were the War of Independence (1810-1821), the War of Reform (1858-1861) and the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917). The following is a report on the reality of this so-called transformation.
AMLO’s arrival to power in Mexico must be analyzed within the obvious failure of its policies, which, in the late 1970s, represented an option to rescue the capitalist system. Around the world, this failure is evident and demonstrates that the only two options to reorganize the distribution of the world are war and the fake democratic process. The working class is either deceived to accept or openly subjected to the vagaries of the market and the consequent exploitation of raw materials and people.
In Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Greece and Mexico, the bosses have taken advantage of the distrust and depoliticization of the working class to boost charismatic politician allied to the system. These characters take advantage of the workers’ anger and frustration in the face of the ineptitude, corruption and all-out thievery of the rulers who preceded them, and based on this discontent, they get them elected.
In Mexico, AMLO’s electoral campaign got the workers to accept the candidate’s trap. The leadership of Andrés Manuel simulated an opposition to the governments that have taken the workers to the extreme conditions of exploitation in which they have lived, as well as to a war against drug trafficking that has sown the territory with bodies of the dead and soldiers.With AMLO in power, the consensus and agreements necessary to make legitimate use of force have been developed. Arguing their status as a democratic government that represents the interests of the people, the imperialist projects have been given continuity, which entails confronting the “opponents” of these projects with the use of force or co-optation, and thus obtaining the support of public opinion. In reality, the new government represents with its actions, the interests of capitalists who aspire to have a greater share of power and resources in the country.
This government’s conduct does not represent a change, it essentially benefits for the most powerful sectors of the Mexican bourgeoisie, who see the possibility of breaking with their dependence and submission to US imperialism and the opportunity to conduct business with other imperialists from Europe and Asia. For example, China aspires to have a leading role in the construction of the Mayan train.
For this reason, an adequate environment for foreign investment is guaranteed, with the support of the population gained through a new version of political patronage that promises the redistribution of taxes for the needy. In this way, conditioning the support of the people to the unsanctioned approval of the conditions for the reproduction of capitalism based on extractivism, investment-dependent production for maquiladoras, monopoly and super exploitation.
The megaprojects promoted by the previous governments were continued and multiplied in the 4th Transformation. Since they guarantee big capital’s need to reproduce and to exploit within its territory: minerals, hydrocarbons, exploitation and privatization of gas, construction of thermoelectric plants and gas pipelines.
Thus, instead of seven Special Economic Zones (EEZ), a free zone will be created with six industrial parks along the Isthmus of Tehuantepec-that connects to the ports of Salina Cruz, Oaxaca and Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz- one of the most lagging areas of the country (La Jornada April 25, 2019. Alma E. Muñoz and Fabiola Martínez). It will be called a Trans-Isthmic corridor, as well as the creation of maquiladora parks in the southeast, thermoelectric plants, gas pipelines and energy infrastructure projects with Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. According to AMLO, these projects will also serve to contain the wave of migrants seeking asylum who are facing violence and unemployment in their countries. The United States conditioned the imposition of tariffs on Mexican export products in exchange for Mexico becoming a dam to contain migrants.
One of the first tasks of the newly created National Guard, has been to deploy more than 6 thousand soldiers to stop migrants, but its main mission is to contain social protest, since there are more than 400 environmental conflicts being waged by many social organizations and defenders of the environment; they oppose the effects that the 26 thousand mining concessions produce. The new police state protects the mining bosses and attacks and represses the working class.
The US bosses will benefit tremendously from the industrial corridors planned in Mexico and Central America, since the transportation of goods will be cheaper to reach Asia, in particular China. This situation has similarities with what happened in the Middle East where the imperialists made war to facilitate the transfer of gas and oil where only a few benefited through the death of thousands of people.
The working class must understand that the capitalists will create wars and allow governments such as AMLO’s to guarantee their interests and continue exploiting the natural and human resources of its territory. They will try to make us believe that their shameless implementation of fascism is, in reality, the will of the 30 million people who voted for it. Many workers thought they were voting to the end of decades of social and political injustices but, in the end, AMLO is just delivering the continuation of neoliberalism.
The disappointment of the workers in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador and Greece in the face of the failures of the “progressive” governments to solve their problems opened the doors for fascist governments. The PLP communists in Mexico and the world fight against the plans of the liberal and fascist capitalists, but mainly we organize our class and educate ourselves so that we understand that communism is the only alternative to the hell of capitalism. Join us!

 Words of praise poured in for the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison when she died on August 5, 2019. She was lauded for her mastery of language, the depth of her characterizations, and her profound understanding of the lived consequences of sexism and racism. She was also celebrated as a national treasure. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy K. Smith wrote, “I don’t believe there is a writer who understood America better and loved it with more ferocity than Toni Morrison.” There is no doubt that Morrison was not a radical, but a liberal, and that her heavy reliance on psychoanalysis to explain her characters’ behavior fails to target the roots of their systemic oppression in the coercive power relations generated by capitalism.  
Morrison’s Black female characters: Pecola Breedlove in The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula and Nell in Sula (1973), Sethe and Baby Suggs in Beloved (1987) all experienced extreme suffering, physical and psychological. But the direct and indirect sources of their oppression, found in the capitalist drive to profit, remain obscure. Morrison’s idealist approach to causality is reinforced in her novels by her occasional reliance upon the supernatural to account for her characters’ motivations. In her book of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), Morrison ahistorically traces many white writers’ individualistic conceptions of heroism to a generalized need to dominate and marginalize a racialized “other”; the material origins of this need remain largely unexplored.
In one of her novels, however—A Mercy (2008)—Morrison quite persuasively utilizes the tools of class analysis to explore the origins of race-based social inequality. Set in late 17th-century colonial America, the novel confirms and enacts a Marxist understanding of the ways in which the category of race emerged and then hardened as capital accumulation took increasingly brutal forms. The kinds of insights into the origins of race and racism that we gain from historical texts like Lerone Bennett’s The Shaping of Black America (1973) and Theodore Allen’s The Invention of the White Race (1994, 1997) are amply borne out in Morrison’s fictional treatment. Theodore Allen’s biographer asserts that Morrison claimed to have read both volumes of Allen’s important study before writing A Mercy.
The novel stresses the common oppression experienced by a group of laborers in the same household: Lina, a Native American woman who survived a smallpox epidemic; Rebekkah, an English mail-order bride from an impoverished family of religious fanatics; Sorrow, a dark-skinned young woman who refuses to hate her own body; Scully and Willard, two indentured servants who may never escape their bondage; and Florens, a young woman of mixed parentage who mourns her unexplained abandonment by her mother. Moreover, Jacob Vaarck, the “master” of the household, while clearly positioned to benefit from the labor of those he controls, is portrayed as initially humane and free of racialized preconceptions. He respects as an equal the free Black man whom he hires as a blacksmith; he hardens into a racist only when his wealth is invested in the Caribbean slave trade, and he aspires to turn his farmhouse into an Old World-style mansion with wrought-iron gates.
The novel is a painful read, in that Florens, through whose consciousness much of the story is told, never understands why her mother—an enslaved Angolan brought to Barbados—chose to “give” her away to Jacob Vaarck. Only at the end is the reader exposed to the thoughts of Florens’s mother, who feared that her spirited daughter would be dragged into the whorehouse of chattel slavery should she remain on the Caribbean plantation. Ironically, the loss of her daughter was “a mercy” compared to such a fate.
Mainly, though, the novel testifies to the fluidity of conceptions of race in the colonial period; indeed, the narrative never uses the categories that would subsequently become “natural” descriptors: white, Black, Negro Indian. Moreover, Bacon’s Rebellion of 1677—the last multiracial rebellion of oppressed laborers before the hardening of racial divisions—is referenced early in the novel as a lost possibility.
The novel is narrated in the present tense: the reader knows where the nation is headed, but the characters do not. That the United States should end up being founded on racialized inequality was a function of the ideologies of superiority and inferiority accompanying the development of capitalism, not an inevitable reflection of the human need to exploit those who look different.  Tracy K. Smith’s description of Morrison as a lover of America is not borne out of the incisive analysis of the class-engendered politics of divide and conquer that shapes A Mercy. In this novel, Morrison may have “understood” America; that she “loved it with . . . ferocity” is highly dubious.

Guerrero, MEXICO—A massive demonstration on September 26 will commemorate the struggle for the return of the 43 students who disappeared in Ayotzinapa  five years ago. The details of this incident, part of the criminal history of the capitalist system against the working class, have never been been revealed. Communists in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) believe that as long as the capitalists are in power, they will continue to use state violence and criminal gangs to assassinate and disappear the students and workers who fight back. The only way to confront the bosses’ violence is to organize our class for communist revolution!
Guerrero: target for local, international capitalists
The state of Guerrero, where the rural education school of Ayotzinapa is located, has historically been one of the poorest in Mexico. The misery of the workers in this mountain region is similar to the most extreme poverty in Africa, and has its roots in the racist exploitation of a population with indigeneous and African roots.
International and local capitalists look to amass the wealth of the resources in the region through militarization to enforce increasingly fascist order upon the working class around some of the richest gold mines in Mexico. Exploitation of these mines, along with some of the largest poppy fields in the country, require tight control of the territory and the transportation routes by the drug traffickers located in the region.
To the bosses, any working class resistance that threatens their profits is unacceptable. With the support of the political apparatus of the capitalist state, especially the police and the military, they can protect their investments by systematically attacking the students and workers. Under capitalism, these criminal groups of capitalists entrenched in the mining industry and the repressive state apparatus are one and the same - and the workers need to organize to confront them all!
Capitalist dictatorship fears workers’ fightback
The previous government administration, under Enrique Peña Nieto, used so-called “education reform” to begin to eliminate teachers’ schools and to criminalize all types of social protest. Those of us fighting these conditions found ourselves in the crossfire of the repressive forces of organized crime that in reality are the same part of the police, military and paramilitary capitalist state apparatus that protects the mining interests and drug trafficking interests in the state.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) promised justice in the Ayotzinapa case, but the repression of the workers has only increased since he came to power. In order for the capitalist class to carry out their exploitation and control of the region’s resources, AMLO has taken advantage of the support of the working class that brought him to power to guarantee the benefits of the capitalists. For example, his new “ley garrote” (nightstick law), enacted in the state of  Tabasco criminalizes social protest and resistance to the capitalists’ megaprojects. There can be no justice for the workers under capitalism. The laws and the courts only serve to defend the interests of the capitalists.
Past and present: workers rebel!
This oppression has given rise to armed rebellion that began in the 1970s, under the leadership of teachers Genaro Vasquez and Lucio Cabanas, who graduated from the rural Education School of Ayotzinapa. For many young people in the region, to become a teacher is to live a life of subsistence. Many of these young teachers have helped to raise the political consciousness of the working class communities where they work. For this reason, the state has begun to eliminate these rural education schools and the resistance that they generate, due in large part to the pro-working class and communist ideas they learn in the schools.
We cannot expect justice from poiticians like AMLO. Only a society led by the workers can end the misery, exploitation and crimes committed against our class. PLP honors the memory of the 43 students and all of our class brothers and sisters who have been killed or disappeared for the bloodlust of capital. We call on the workers to have confidence in our class and to organize against this criminal system. Read and distribute CHALLENGE and join a study group or action today!

On August 5, 38,000 paramilitary troops from India entered the “semi-autonomous” area of Kashmir, an open act of imperialist occupation. They were acting on orders from hyper-nationalist Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his fascist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This is just the latest in a string of vicious attacks conducted by the BJP, which has dramatically ramped up anti-Muslim racism in the country. Recently it threatened to strip citizenship status from nearly four million workers in the Indian state of Assam, and deport them to Bangladesh (Slate, 8/9).
In service to the Indian capitalist ruling class, Modi and the BJP are desperately trying to consolidate control over resource-rich Kashmir at the expense of capitalist rivals in Pakistan and China. They have been emboldened by the tacit support of imperialists in the U.S. and European Union, who share an interest in slowing the advance of Chinese imperialism.
As with any conflict between rival capitalist bosses, the working class stands to suffer the most. Confronted with the poisons of imperialism, nationalism, and religious fundamentalism, workers in Kashmir need to reject all capitalist political traps in favor of proletarian internationalism. As the international working class, we must unite in the communist Progressive Labor Party and organize a mass Red Army that crushes the capitalist class worldwide and builds a communist society to meet workers’ needs.
Economic, political crisis drive Indian fascism
For years, Modi and the BJP have sought to divide workers by fanning the flames of anti-Muslim racism. In 2015, a year after the party assumed power, India saw a 17 percent increase in religiously motivated violence (India Today, 2/10/17). In 2002, as chief minister of Gujarat state, Modi himself infamously presided over the massacre of more than a thousand Muslims at the hands of fascist mobs (Washington Post, 8/16).
India is the world’s seventh largest economy, home to a huge, productive working class and major industrial centers. But the contradictions of capitalism are provoking an economic contraction. Growth slowed to 6.8 percent in 2018 and to 5.7 percent in the last fiscal quarter. The automobile and real estate industries are in crisis (Economic Times, 8/21).
By exerting more direct control over Kashmir, the Indian ruling class sees an opportunity to reverse the economic slowdown. They hope to cancel a law blocking outsiders from buying property in the state, a potential land grab like the Israeli bosses’ racist seizure of territory in occupied Palestine. Although the population of Kashmir at present is majority Muslim, the Indian rulers’ takeover could drastically change the demographic to majority Hindu—a de facto and inevitably deadly ethnic cleansing (Foreign Affairs, 8/9).
The BJP also aims to take charge of Kashmir’s glaciers and rivers, including the Indus, which serves almost 270 million people (GlacierHub, 3/13). Control over fresh water equates to power in India, where lethal heat waves this summer rocked the country and killed dozens (New York Times, 6/13). As climate change threatens greater ecological destruction, the bosses’ fights over water will only become more deadly.
Inter-imperialist rivalry sharpens in South Asia
That the U.S. and EU made hardly a sound about the occupation speaks to their own internal divisions, but also to the rise of fascism on an international scale. The gutter racist politics of Modi and the BJP finds common ground with nationalist appeals from U.S. Klansman-in-chief Donald Trump, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and France’s Marine Le Pen.
The U.S. and European bosses’ tolerance of Modi’s aggression in Kashmir also reflects India’s strategic importance as a counter to rising imperialist power China. China has governed a portion of Kashmir since the early 1960s, and recently has pushed to expand its influence in the region. China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative has invested nearly $50 billion in the area (Foreign Affairs, September 2019).  
The Chinese rulers’ support for Pakistan, India’s chief regional rival, sharpens the inter-imperialist tensions. In 2016, the Chinese Overseas Port Holding Company opened a deep water port in the coastal Pakistani city of Gwadar in populous Balochistan Province, securing a 43-year contract for resource extraction. At least 22,000 students from Pakistan are now studying in China, a dramatic increase (The Diplomat, 1/24/18).  The Indian bosses’ racist anti-worker offensive in Kashmir aims not only to weaken Pakistani capitalism today, but also to prepare for a Chinese imperialist challenge tomorrow.
Although Trump’s erratic foreign policy has complicated relations here as elsewhere, the U.S. ruling class remains mostly aligned in backing India as a counterweight to China. Both Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Secretary of Defense James Mattis paid diplomatic visits after India purchased a missile system from the Russian bosses (Bloomberg, 9/3/18).
While Trump and the domestically oriented capitalists he represents bear obvious political parallels to Modi’s racist nationalism, the  finance capital main wing of U.S. imperialism has nurtured close economic and military ties with the Indian capitalists for close to two decades, through the Barack Obama presidency (Foreign Affairs, September 2019).
Reject all capitalist misleaders, fight for communist revolution
Though treated as pawns in a power struggle between multiple nuclear-armed countries, workers in Kashmir have not taken their oppression and exploitation lying down. Since the start of the Indian military occupation in early August, the working class has regularly clashed with security forces and led marches and demonstrations in opposition. In the Soura neighborhood of Srinagar, Kashmir’s largest city, workers have put up barricades and armed themselves with stones (Al Jazeera, 8/20).
Unfortunately, the workers’ brave efforts risk being absorbed into the bosses’ reactionary movements. Local opposition parties, like the National Conference and the People’s Democratic Party, have vocally opposed the occupation. But these liberal reformers will never advocate for the destruction of capitalism and the dictatorship of the working class. Like all bosses, they seek to unite workers around the dead ends of nationalism and religion—the covers they need to exploit us in their own interests.
To truly advance to our own collective liberation, we need a Party that rejects all of the bosses’ deadly schemes: the international Progressive Labor Party. Building a mass PLP to organize communist revolution is the only way out of the disaster of capitalism. From Kashmir to Palestine, from Mexico to Tanzania—workers of the world, unite!