OAXACA, MEXICO, June 1 — Led by Oaxaca Local 21, class struggle in Mexico once again has taken the form of a teachers’ strike. A week after the strike began on May 21, it was joined by the workers of Michoacan, Guerrero, and Chiapas, along with Locals 9 and 10 of the Federal District and Local 36 of the Mexico Valley, Sinaloa and Veracruz.

The main demand presented by the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educacion (CNTE), the teachers’ coordinating committee, is to eliminate the deceptively named Quality of Education Project, which is designed to privatize public education, take back hard-won labor benefits, and destroy the National Education Workers Union (SNTE).

U.S. imperialism’s economic globalization strategy, enforced by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and carried out in alliance with the national ruling classes of each country, has medium-term and long-term goals. It aims to control natural resources (oil, electricity, minerals, water), mass media (telephone, television), and public services (health, education, transportation).

Bosses’ Reform Attacks Labor

In addition, the bosses’ plan requires cheap, well-trained and docile labor to carry out mega-projects like the Puebla-Panama Project and the Turistic Corridor in the Tehuantepec Isthmus. To make these hugely profitable projects possible, the capitalists have implemented political reform, which changes existing legislation, and labor reforms, which attempt to take back the historical gains of the labor movement and destroy the unions. 

To defend their gross exploitation and accumulation of wealth, the bosses use state terror, or fascism, to discipline their own class and to keep the working class intimidated and under control. The ruling-class Confederación Patronal de la Republica Mexicana (COPARMEX), in collaboration with the group “Mexicans First” (led by Televisa and TVAzteca), launched an angry campaign to denounce and discredit teachers. As a pretext to take over the business of education, the campaign tries to blame teachers for the education system’s failures and for everything wrong in society.

Meanwhile, the Alliance for Quality Education (ACE), is attempting to privatize basic education (from pre-school through high school) and to restrict such basic labor rights as retirement and access to social services. Since 2008, 32 Mexican states (excluding Oaxaca) have been testing students with the universal evaluations Enlace and Pisa. New teachers undergo regular certification evaluations to determine the terms of their temporary contracts.

Teachers Block Airport 

The universal evaluations are not used in Oaxaca because the militant Local 22 organized large demonstrations to block the airport as well as PEMEX (the state-owned oil company) and other transnational and Mexican businesses. In Guerrero, Michoacan and Chiapas, dissident teachers have limited the use of these evaluations by seizing all printed copies.

The capitalist bosses of COPARMEX, CONACINTRA, CONACOPE, Televisa, and TVAzteca have used the media to furiously attack the CNTE teachers and try to turn public opinion against them. After teachers took over Oaxaca’s historical center, this ruling-class consortium called a citizens’ march to violently evict them.  On Sunday, June 3, only 150 people showed up for this reactionary march — a handful of businessmen, a few right-wing members of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and some misled parents and students. Once it was clear that the bosses’ plan failed, they chose to retreat instead of looking ridiculous. Mexican President Felipe Calderón said, “Stop using the children and throwing tantrums, we’re going to enforce the law!”

Calderon’s Genocide

Calderon’s statement showed that he cares nothing about the education of poor people and could at any moment order the bloody repression of the CNTE, just as Vicente Fox did in Oaxaca in 2006.  He has already revealed himself as Mexico’s worst terrorist and criminal when he crushed the Electricians’ Union (SME), putting more than 40,000 workers out of work and causing the genocidal death of 60,000 people in the so-called War on Drugs.

Investors claim that no one will invest in Oaxaca because the new state government, led by Governor Gabino Cué, deceived them. In fact, the outside investors that came to Oaxaca created very few jobs, paid extremely low wages for 10- to 12-hour work-days. They took huge profits from this super-exploitation while expropriating natural resources, archeological and cultural centers, and many other riches. They have dispossessed the peasantry, turning them into poorly paid workers. 

New Politicians, Same Old Capitalism

Oaxaca’s workers, including its teachers, were tired of the PRI’s 70-plus years of theft, corruption, repression and death. They had high hopes when they thought they elected a progressive government in 2010. But nothing changed. Poverty and unemployment increased daily. The last two years have seen more workers disappeared and murdered. Amongst the disappeared are two teachers, Carlos Román Salazar and Guadalupe Perez Sanchez. Last December, Prof. Rafael Vicente Rodriguez, a former union leader, was murdered. More recently, Bernardo Sanchez, leader of the movement against a Canadian mining company established in San Jose del Progreso, was riddled with bullets.

All of these attacks against the working class — Calderón’s genocides, the repression of the worker and student movements, the forced disappearances and assassinations — expose how fascism is rising to maintain this rotten capitalist system. It’s also clear that the bourgeois parties that take turns running the government are all the same, all equally bad. Voting for these politicians brings only unemployment, poverty, betrayals and death. The only true solution to the problems caused by this system of wage slavery is to organize and to struggle for a new society that meets workers’ needs. Join PLP and fight for a communist future!

Under capitalism, immigrants are exploited for super-profits and demonized by the bosses in a relentless effort to divide the working class. Unitarians from across the country are congregating in Phoenix from June 20 to June 24 to stand in solidarity with immigrant workers and oppose Arizona’s racist, anti-immigrant law, SB 1070. Despite President Obama’s announcement (see page 2) to suspend deportations for a limited group of students and workers, many Unitarians understand that immigrants will remain under attack in Arizona and elsewhere as long as our society is geared to create profit for the few at the expense of the rest of us.  

Obama’s cynical election-year ploy will allow an estimated 800,000 undocumented immigrants under the age of 31 to obtain driver’s licenses and renewable two-year work permits, but only if they came to the U.S. before they turned 16 and are in school or have a high school diploma or GED.

It does nothing for the 11.2 million remaining undocumented workers in the U.S. who fail to meet these criteria, including the children and youth who have been failed by the bosses’ decaying education system. (According to recent U.S. Census data, 41 percent of Mexican immigrant teenagers in New York City — with or without papers — have dropped out of school.) Even for the relative few who may benefit under the changed policy, there is no path to citizenship or permanent residency. 

Obama: Immigrants’ False Friend

After campaigning as a champion of immigration rights, Obama has escalated racist attacks against the undocumented. His administration has installed more border agents and more fencing between the U.S. and Mexico. Since taking power in 2009, it has deported 1.4 million people — a record 400,000 per year, double the rate under Republican George W. Bush. Families have been ripped apart in midnight raids; dozens of immigrants have died from abuse and neglect in detention centers controlled by the brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

While this reign of terror has met the bosses’ need to intimidate workers who provide cheap labor, it angered Latinos who voted for Obama in the last election under the illusion that a liberal Democrat would serve their needs.  The “bluntly political move” (NYT, 6/16/12) to suspend some deportations may help Obama win pivotal states like Florida and Colorado in his election race against Republican Mitt Romney. 

The new policy is also a significant step toward the passage of “comprehensive immigration reform” (CIR), a bipartisan campaign that is backed by the Unitarian Universalist Association. CIR plays into the hands of finance capital, the section of the U.S. ruling class that is most committed to maintaining and expanding U.S. global supremacy. It is a losing proposition for immigrants — and for all workers.

In addition to creating a slave-labor force of “guest workers,” CIR includes the Dream Act, a bipartisan proposal to offer two routes to legalization: full-time college attendance leading to graduation (with no work permitted), or enlistment in the military. Since few undocumented youths have the means to be full-time college students for three or four years running, the Dream Act would effectively funnel young immigrants into the military to fight the bosses’ imperialist wars. 

In 2006, the rulers used their loyal stooges in the unions and the Democratic Party to build a popular movement for CIR, including demonstrations by millions in the streets. After the stock market crash and the end of the housing bubble, and the waves of layoffs that followed, the immigration reform movement retreated. The Dream Act was shelved.

Republican Party opposition reflected the thinking of some capitalists who wanted to build gutter racism and blame immigrants for the economic crisis. But finance capital’s first priority is to stave off the challenge of rising imperialist powers like China, and to expand the U.S. military and build workers’ allegiance for the broader imperialist conflicts to come.

As Obama noted last week, the new limited deportation policy is aimed at “talented, driven, patriotic young people….These are young people who pledge allegiance to our flag” (Washington Post, 6/15/12). 

Global Scapegoats

The oppression of immigrants is a global phenomenon. Find a capitalist country in economic crisis, and you will find a surge in anti-immigrant racism. It targets Africans in France, Roma people in Italy, Turks in Germany, Latin Americans in Spain, Muslims in Holland, Poles in Ireland, Indians in Singapore. Immigrants are scapegoated for the mass unemployment that stems from the boom-and-bust chaos of capitalism. They are labeled as parasites and accused of taking benefits without “deserving” them or contributing to society.

In reality, as studies have repeatedly shown, immigrants take the dirtiest, most difficult, and most dangerous jobs that would otherwise go unfilled. They pay taxes for benefits they are ineligible to receive. Their reward is to be attacked by racist scum like the Minutemen in the U.S., the Freedom Party in Germany, and the National Front in France.

Like capital, workers have no borders. The North America Free Trade Agreement and other treaties enable U.S. exports like corn to flow freely across borders and destroy local economies in other countries. These ruling-class pacts have forced millions of workers to uproot themselves and come to the U.S. to feed themselves and their families. At the same time, tens of thousands of jobs in auto and other industries have migrated from cities in the Midwest to Latin America, Asia, and right-to-work (non-union) states in the South.

These developments were created by capitalism, with its inherent need to maximize profits by driving down labor costs and creating unemployment throughout the world. Capitalism is the only reason why hundreds of millions who want to work cannot find it.

PLP Fights In Immigrant Workers’ Struggles

The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party has a proud history of participation and leadership in immigrant workers’ struggles, from the Hormel strike in Minnesota to organizing garment worker shops in Los Angeles. But the ultimate victory can come only from a communist revolution. PLP’s solution is to overthrow capitalism and fight for a world without exploitation, racism, sexism or nationalism. Attacks against immigrants will end only when we have a world without borders, run by and for the international working class. That’s what PLP is fighting for. Join us!

The hell of capitalism is intensifying for the working class of Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of workers are demonstrating in the streets every day, opposing the bosses’ stranglehold on their lives. They are struggling against massive unemployment which has risen 43 percent since 1999. About 75% of the country’s population of 180 million — 6th largest on earth — earns no more than $2 a day. While Pakistan has the 7th largest standing army in the world and a nuclear arsenal, 110 million people are hard-pressed to even eat two meals a day.

Of its ten million industrial workers, half are controlled by fake, essentially company unions, puppets of the bosses while the other half are excluded from worker-led unions altogether. Eighteen million farm workers are completely unorganized. Child labor is spreading. There is no electricity from 14 to 22 hours a day and no natural gas for two to three days a week.

Industries are closing down and fleeing to even lower-wage levels in Bangladesh. Inflationary prices of essential commodities have climbed from between 300 to 500 percent.

Target Women

Women, who comprise half the population, are targeted for killing in the name of “honor” by the bosses’ religious and cultural customs and face acid attacks, torture, gang rape, forced marriages and forced prostitution. Fifty percent are physically abused, 15 percent sexually and 90 percent psychologically.

Kiln workers (brick producers) have no rights at all. Every family member is forced to work 12 to 18 hours a day and suffer virtual slavery, sold by one owner to another.

Whenever workers strike against many of these horrific conditions, to divert their struggle, the bosses raise non-issues such as “national security” or opening or closing NATO supply routes, as well as divide workers on a nationalist basis. 

Recently the government began a police operation, supposedly against target killers, gang warriors and ethnic/religious/nationalist terrorists. But they started it in Liyari, a poor working-class neighborhood. This reign of terror continued for ten days but the people fought back, strongly resisting the police oppression, bringing the operation to a halt. Now the police cannot even enter the neighborhood. 

Bosses Profit on Workers’ Backs

The Pakistani economy is crumbling and is becoming increasingly dependent on the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the USAID and Coalition Support Fund to run its murderous capitalist system. Its domestic debt is in the hundreds of billions, has the lowest foreign investment in 60 years and the highest inflation rates, all leading to Pakistan’s ruling class trying to sustain itself by intensifying the exploitation of the working class. Workers are forced to sell their children and body organs to escape a life of hunger and poverty and unfortunately many are driven to suicide.

Corruption, terrorism, ethnic cleansing and nepotism prevail on the soil of Pakistan while the bosses push a federal budget that only benefits the rich. A 20 percent “increase” in public-sector salaries is a wage-cut in the teeth of 300 percent inflation. It’s even worse for private-sector workers who do not even receive the government-announced minimum wage.

A Dictatorship of the Ruling Class

Various bosses’ electoral parties vie for power in order to grab more profit for each. Their elections use the working masses in the name of democracy but actually establish a dictatorship of the ruling class that exploits the working class even more vigorously. In several provinces the bosses are using nationalism as a major tool to divide our class in order to prevent rebellion:

   • Baluchistan — The rulers provoked an insurgency in which thousands of workers have been killed and/or “disappeared. This province is Pakistan’s largest in area, has immense resources and is of great geo-strategic importance for international imperialists, sharing borders with Iran and Afghanistan and has a newly built port. Since the fundamentalists’ presence is relatively low and the majority of people have a progressive outlook, the bosses are fueling the fire of nationalism to divide them.

   • Punjab — Pakistan’s most populous province will be divided by creating a new Saraiki province which has large numbers of extremist and fundamentalist groups, leading to even more destruction and chaos and badly affecting the country’s crumbling economy.

   • Sindh — This is Pakistan’s second largest in population. In the last five months, 880 people have been killed in Karachi, the province’s largest city. This is an outgrowth of rivalry between various ruling political parties that are trying to seize control of different parts of the city. They represent militant groups involved in land-grabbing, weapons dealing, drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping and ransom.

These bosses provoked a war between the Sindhi and Urdu-speaking populations. Nationalist parties are killing each other’s working-class activists. Many are losing their lives in an unholy combat between different ethnic groups. Karachi is a port city used by NATO to ship supplies. Interestingly, 7,000 containers have disappeared here.

   • Kyber Pukhtoonkhawa — Nationalism is at the root of fighting between two large ethnic groups, the Pukhtoons and Hazarawals. It suffers from terrorist attacks as well as U.S. drone bombings. The province borders Afghanistan and China and is a battleground for the “war against terror.” It is a safe haven for various terrorist groups fighting for or against U.S. imperialism, especially in the FATA territory.

Pakistan has fast become a laboratory for nationalism, racism, fundamentalism and sexism, the results of which can be applied worldwide. But it also provides increasing opportunities to build a base for PLP everywhere — in the factories, farms, offices, campuses, villages, kilns, among women and wage workers. The Party is striving to become more and more involved in class struggles in these areas, organizing PL clubs.

Amid this poverty, injustice, exploitation, mass unemployment and gender discrimination, only a PLP-led international communist revolution can free the working class from these capitalist evils.

OAKLAND CALIFORNIA, June 18 — PL’ers along with parents, teachers, students and Occupy Oakland Education have been fighting the closing of five Oakland elementary schools that serve mainly black and Latino youths. We’re currently occupying Lakeview Elementary in Oakland and are running a free summer school, “The People’s School.”

The bosses already decided the fate of the schools. Lakeview Elementary is scheduled to be transformed into Administrative Offices. Another will become a charter school, one is being leased to neighboring Emeryville, (for revenue) and the other three will close, pushing their students elsewhere creating even more overcrowding.  

In discussions with people, we are working to make communist ideas the topic of conversation. (More next issue.)