For a National Strike Against the Privatizing “Reforms”!

Defeat the Union-Busting
Attack on Mexican Teachers

Against the Bourgeois Government of the PRI, PAN and PRD,
Fight for a Workers and Peasants Government!

OAXACA, Oaxaca, August 26 – Early in the morning of July 21, the city of Oaxaca was the scene of a police and military operation worthy of a preventive civil war. As in 2006, when the state of Oaxaca rose up in rebellion against a government attack on teachers,¹ once again the entire force of the state was applied in an attempt to break the combative Section 22 of the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (CNTE – National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers). Four thousand federal police, 2,000 military police, as well as 4,000 soldiers from the military zone were mobilized to seize the Oaxaca State Institute of Public Education (IEEPO, according to its initials in Spanish), the offices of the Special Prosecutor for Affairs Concerning Teachers (FEPAM) and strategic points around the city.

By air and land, troops of the Army, Navy and federal and state police took up position in intersections, public buildings and radio stations of the state capital, as well as the airports of Oaxaca city and the vacation spot Huatulco, in the Central Valleys and coastal regions. It was a genuine Blitzkrieg (lightning war) against the teachers, as Luis Hernández Navarro put it in La Jornada (24 July). Along with 30 arrest orders for members of the union leadership, the bank accounts of Section 22 and some of its leaders were frozen, and the media hate campaign against the combative teachers intensified. In a display of cynicism, federal and state governments announced that more than a thousand gendarmes of the federal police would occupy the schools to carry out “cleaning up” of the facilities.

In the following days, the militarization of the state capital deepened, as well as of “hot spots” and strategic facilities around the state. In the face of objections by jurists that the intervention by the military in police matters pertaining to the states was unconstitutional, Governor Gabino Cué, sent a formal request to President Enrique Peña Nieto, and requested authorization by the obedient state legislature, in order to legalize the military occupation post facto. In reality, the majority of the federal forces have been in Oaxaca since the eve of the June 7 elections, which were massively boycotted by the militant teachers.² Ever since, the state of Oaxaca has been under a de facto state of siege.

After Section 22 let it be known that it might not begin the school year as normal on August 24, the authorities escalated the stationing of police in the schools. In addition to the initial arrest orders, 15 more were issued against mid-level cadres. Spokesmen for the teachers condemned the provocation, but ultimately the threats had an effect. In a statewide assembly, the teachers decided to move up the school opening to August 20, two days before the date decreed by the federal Public Education Secretariat (SEP), and to dispense with the proposed strike action. In announcing the change of plans, Section 22 leader Rubén Núñez Ginez characterized it as “an exercise in self-criticism and responsibility” (La Jornada, 19 August).

The early return to the classrooms announced by the CNTE was a far cry from the failure that the Cué government claimed: “Parents Respond to Section 22’s Call to Resume Classes” was the headline in Gráfico (21 August), while El Imparcial of the same date announced that in the Tehuantepec Isthmus region, “90% of Schools Began the 2015-2016 School Year.” Teachers held marches on August 20 throughout the state, although the numbers were markedly smaller than on other occasions (2,000-3,000 in Oaxaca city). Although the CNTE carried out a retreat (“under protest”) in returning to school, dissident sectors in 21 states, notably Guerrero and Morelos, continued with the August 24 work stoppage or carried out other protests against the “educational reform.”

It is one thing avoid falling into a trap and prepare for a successful fight. It was clear that the federal government intended its coup against the IEEPO to provoke a violent reaction by the teachers of Section 22, in order to arrest the leaders and thereby decapitate the teacher insurgency. But in order to defeat the onslaught of the bourgeoisie it is necessary to strengthen the teachers’ side, firming up ties with parents and community groups, as well as obtaining the active support of other union and worker sectors. Section 22’s capacity to mobilize the masses has not diminished: the megamarchas of July 27 and August 14 brought out tens of thousands. But it is not possible to defeat a powerful enemy with marches alone.

However, even if it were correct to undertake a temporary retreat in the face of government provocations, the decision by Section 22 has had a demobilizing effect. The fact that the independent teachers unions act separately, state by state, has enormously weakened their protests. This is what happened in 2013, when teachers in Guerrero took the initiative in undertaking strike action³, which was not followed up by other states until months later, contributing to the defeat of the strike movement. This past August 9, the National Representative Assembly of the CNTE approved a motion calling to carry out a “national strike.” Now a “National Teachers Convention” has been announced for September 12. If at that point the necessary steps are not taken to implement the strike, all this will turn out to be a dead letter.

The counterpart to Section 22’s retreat in the realm of union action has been flirting (“dialogue”) with bourgeois opposition forces, from Father Solalinde to Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his National Regeneration Movement (MORENA). Simultaneously, the leadership claims to be fighting “through legal channels,” seeking amparos (protective orders) against the threat of arrests and firings. When these are rejected by the courts, it appeals to the Supreme Court and imperialist agencies such as the International Commission on Human Rights or the International Labor Organization.

To claim that seeking support among sectors of the bourgeoisie will stop the anti-worker onslaught by the Mexican state is to have learned nothing of the lessons of the defeats which the workers movement has suffered in recent years. The Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) also sought amparos, lobbied for the “support” of federal Congressmen, requested “dialogue” with the Interior Ministry (Gobernación), etc., all of which led the workers into a dead-end.⁴ As we have emphasized since the first round of the battle for public education in 2013, in order to win against this offensive by imperialist capital, carried out by a united Mexican bourgeoisie, it is necessary to break with all bourgeois political forces and launch a genuine national strike against the privatization reforms.⁵

For a Class Struggle Against Capital, and All the
Bourgeois Parties, Alliances and Politicians

The current battle goes far beyond the limits of the state of Oaxaca. For President Peña Nieto it is an attempt to demonstrate “firmness” in order to dispell the image of weakness that has enveloped his government since the escape earlier this summer of El Chapo Guzmán, the head of the Sinaloa drug cartel, from the Almoloya High Security Prison. It is another attempt to escape from the worldwide ignominy brought about by the disappearance, kidnapping and assassination of the more than 43 rural teachers college students of Ayotzinapa a year ago in September.⁶ It is an effort to revive his “energy reform” which has been stalemated by the nosedive of crude oil prices curtailing the hoped-for international investment. And now he is also trying to undo the reputation of lack of security in Peña Nieto’s Mexico which has been reinforced by the collective assassination (of photojournalists and activists) in Mexico City.

On the other hand, the attack against the Oaxaca teachers represents a continuation of the by-now traditional tactic of Mexican presidents at the beginning of their administration, or whenever they are in trouble, of attacking the unions: as Carlos Salinas de Gortari of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) did in 1989 with his bazooka attack against the oil workers chief La Quina and the mine workers of Cananea; as Vicente Fox of the clerical-rightist Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) did in 2006 against the miners at Pasta de Conchos, the Sicartsa steel workers and Section 22; as his PAN successor Calderón did in 2009 against the SME electrical workers; and as the current PRI president Peña Nieto has done by attacking the CNTE from 2013 on. Unfortunately, today the CNTE leadership is in practice continuing the same policies that have led to defeat in the past, orienting mobilizations to pressuring the capitalist state.

The educational counterreform ordered by the imperialist financial institutions (International Monetary Fund, World Bank and Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development) seeks to privatize public education as much as possible and to break the power of the teachers unions. It is a centerpiece of the tripartite government of the Pact for Mexico of the PRI, PAN and PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) and almost all capitalist sectors. This phoney reform has been pushed by the corporatist National Education Workers Union (SNTE), which despite its name is an outfit totally integrated into the capitalist state. But the the hard-bitten resistance of the dissident teachers of the CNTE has hindered the implementation of the privatizing and union-busting plan.

While the current attack goes after education in the first instance, tomorrow the privatizers will take aim at public health, social security and other public services from which they want to milk profits. The blows being landed against the CNTE are part and parcel of the war of capital against the working class, both nationally and internationally. At bottom, what is happening in Oaxaca is the same as what has been taking place in Greece over the past five years. And against this frontal attack by the bourgeoisie on the whole of the workers movement, we cannot win by confining the struggle to the narrow limits of a largely peasant provincial state. Instead it is necessary to respond with all the social and economic power of the working class.

That means fighting not only for national work stoppage, as the CNTE leadership has episodically called for, seconded by various leftist groups, but for a genuine national strike which transcends the limits of the teachers union and is able to mobilize the heavy battalions of the proletariat, to bring down the privatizing “reforms” and open the road to a workers and peasants government that would begin the socialist revolution. In the face of the evident disorientation of the leaders of the CNTE and Section 22, it is urgently necessary to forge a revolutionary leadership that is up to the tasks posed by this hard class battle, and whose main axis is full political independence from the bourgeois parties and politicians.

The New and Old IEEPO

Section 22 under the leadership of the Democratic Movement of Education Workers of Oaxaca (MDTEO), and the CNTE nationally, has freed themselves from the shackles of the corporatist SNTE, to which they are still formally affiliated although they act with total autonomy and almost always against this organ of the capitalist state. Corporatism is a heritage of the one-party regime of the PRI, which ruled Mexico for 70 years. It is an instrument of bourgeois control which the governments of the fraudulent “democratic transition” have not been able to do without.⁷ But while the institutional SNTE serves as labor cops for the government of the day, the leadership of the democratic CNTE has not broken politically with the bourgeoisie.

Despite being quite militant, the trade-union action of Section 22 and the CNTE is based on pressure politics, according to the formula “mobilization-negotiations-mobilization,” along with parliamentary lobbying. But now they are facing a ruling class that is not disposed to negotiate or to countenance any truce. The old reformist pattern of class collaboration has become utterly sterile and contrary to the interests of the working people, by diverting them from the class struggle against the capitalist state and all the bourgeois forces. Until the working people, and above all the most advanced sectors, have completely broken from the bourgeoisie, their struggles will be undermined and ultimately defeated, due to perilous democratic illusions in this system.

The most striking proof of this is the political support that Section 22 gave to Gabino Cué in his 2010 campaign for governor, then calling him “democratic” and now labeling him a “traitor” when in reality he is just a typical, run-of-the-mill bourgeois politician who defends the interests of his exploiting class against those of the exploited.

The question of the political class independence of the workers directly concerns the question of the participation of Section 22 in the Oaxaca State Institute of Public Education. In announcing his decree reforming Decree No. 2 of 1992 which created the IEEPO, Governor Cué made a whole series of false statements about the teachers and their union. He claimed that for the last 23 years, the “direction” (rectoría) of education in the state was in the hands of Section 22. He alleged that “the CNTE imposed the heads of all the leading positions of primary and secondary education as well as all the heads of departments.” The press publishes stories about corruption in the IEEPO, dreaming up million-peso salaries and blaming it all on Section 22.

At the event at which he announced his master strike against the CNTE, the governor was supervised by the head of the federal SEP, Emilio Chuayffet. This same top operative who as interior minister (secretario de Gobernación) under PRI president Ernesto Zedillo in 1994 was responsible for the blood-drenched mass murder of Acteal, now proposes to annihilate all trade-unionism independent of state control, starting with the teachers. In reality, it is not the state of Oaxaca that will determine the direction of the schools, but rather the lawyers and cops in the IEEPO who are implementing the dictates of the federal government, which in turn is imposing the educational “reform” designed by the imperialist financial institutions. Thus in reality it is Wall Street bankers who are determining the “direction” of education.

As for the supposed control of the IEEPO by Section 22, Governor Cué himself has declared that “The CNTE never had control … the director of the IEEPO was always named by the governor at the time, as were the coordinators” (El Universal, 22 July). There certainly is corruption in the IEEPO, sponsored by the same bourgeois politicians who have used it as their caja chica (piggy bank) to cover undeclared expenses. Among the aviadores (fly-by-night operatives who are paid but don’t teach classes) who get a second salary from the Instituto there are a number of PRI and PRD legislators, as well as Cué’s travel director. As for million-peso salaries, in the first half of 2015 the director general of the IEEPO Moisé Robles Cruz earned 762,000 pesos (approximately US$45,000), which is five times the salary he is supposed to receive according to the federal education secretariat (Noticias [Oaxaca], 4 August).

In reality, what the authorities are trying to accomplish with their “reform” of the IEEPO, which was prepared in Los Pinos (Mexico’s White House), is to eliminate all influence of the teachers in the administration of public education. According to the governor, there were about 300 mid-level officials who belonged to Section 22, but at the same time he stated that 92% of all the Institute’s employees are unionized. In the new decree (Article 10, paragraph 15) all workers in the IEEPO except for teachers are henceforth “considered to be de confianza” (in a position of trust), and are therefore barred from union membership. It is also stipulated that neither the director general nor any department head may “have had a union office or commission” during the previous five years.

So at bottom, what has been decreed is a total ban on unionization, and replacement of educators in the administrative positions of the Institute by “professionals” who lack any pedagogical experience. Of the 17 recently named officials there are “eight lawyers, four economists, two company executives, a communications specialist, an IT engineer and one with a degree in tourism” (Hernández Navarro, in La Jornada, 30 July).

In defending the CNTE against this attack on public education, we fight for the total independence of the trade-union movement from the capitalist state and against all forms of class collaboration. The participation of Section 22 in the IEEPO was a deal between the union bureaucracy and the governors in exchange for accepting the educational decentralization imposed by the PRI government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari. At the same time as it made it possible to resist the imposition of the curricula being pushed by the privatizing “reformers” and to largely prevent wholesale victimization of teachers for their union activities, this deal opened the doors to corruption. It’s no accident that the union bureaucracy of the Section had its most loyal base in the IEEPO.

We defend the unionization of the employees of the state Institute of Public Education. Nevertheless, using the disciplinary system and placing union officials in executive positions in the system is to implement bourgeois control of education. It is a semi-corporatist practice which can undermine the solidarity of the teachers against the class enemy. Unlike the corporatist SNTE, which is so thoroughly integrated into the state apparatus that it names the directors of state education departments in at least 17 states, which designs and loyally carries out all the plans for privatization and regimentation of public education, in Oaxaca the state government always had control at the top. Section 22 of the CNTE in Oaxaca, in contrast, has resisted the blows of capital, as in the bitter battle of 2006 against the attempt by Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz to destroy it, for which reason it is now being purged from the Institute. But ultimately, this participation gives the state a lever with which to control the union.

The same is the case with the union dues check-off: while union officials like this, since it gives the organization a degree of financial stability, it also gives the bosses a weapon that they can use to paralyze the union in the middle of a hard conflict. It’s no accident that this system has also been eliminated under the “New IEEPO.” Rather than trying to “use” the bourgeois state, the Trotskyists have always insisted that the union should collect its own dues, which strengthens it in the struggle against that state which is also its boss. Our aim is not to “reform” the control of public education by the capitalist governments, but to eliminate it. As Karl Marx wrote in his Critique of the Gotha Program (1875):

“‘Elementary education by the state’ is altogether objectionable. Defining by a general law the expenditures on the elementary schools, the qualifications of the teaching staff, the branches of instruction, etc. …  is a very different thing from appointing the state as the educator of the people! Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school.”

The Struggle for Revolutionary Leadership

“[T]he trade unions in the present epoch cannot simply be the organs of democracy as they were in the epoch of free capitalism and they cannot any longer remain politically neutral, that is, limit themselves to serving the daily needs of the working class…. They can no longer be reformist, because the objective conditions leave no room for any serious and lasting reforms. The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.”

–Leon Trotsky, Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay (August 1940)⁸

The military/police “educational reform” in the interests of capital (see “No to the Militarization of Oaxaca and Education!”) being pushed by imperialist agencies and carried out by the butchers of Atenco (Peña Nieto) and Acteal (Chauyffet) will not be held back by pleas for honest “dialogue” nor by coalitions with supposed “allies” among the bourgeoisie. Only internationalist class struggle by the working people can defeat the offensive of capital. And for that, the key task is to forge a proletarian revolutionary leadership.

On the eve of the widely repudiated elections of June 7, carried out under the boot of the military, the government of Gabino Cué promised that in Oaxaca the punitive evaluation of teachers would not be implemented if they desisted from their boycott activities. The Section 22 leadership gave in, putting the brakes on mobilization and withdrawing pickets from the airport, superhighways, the refinery and hydroelectric plant. But the next day, Chuayffet, head of the SEP, announced that the evaluation of the teaching personal “will not be put off or held back,” justifying stringing the CNTE along in negotiations by arguing that “the political situation obliged us to keep a strict silence in order not to disturb the development of an electoral project.”

Nevertheless, the (pro-PRI) leadership of Section 22 kept on believing in negotiations with the PRI federal government and the state government it had helped elect until the breaking point came, with the repressive forces deployed throughout Oaxaca. All that the general secretary of Section 22, Rubén Núñez Ginez, had to say was that “they pulled a fast one on us.” Inside the union, various political forces including the Unión de Trabajadores de la Educación (UTE – Education Workers Union) linked to the Revolutionary Popular Front (FPR) and the Communist Party of Mexico Marxist-Leninist (PCM-ml) complained, arguing that the state government had “betrayed” them and it was necessary to get rid of those elements of the Section’s leadership for being “incompetent sellouts” (Noticias, 20 August).

In reality, a leadership like that of Section 22 today which lets itself be hoodwinked with such regularity not only shows its incompetence but also the bankruptcy of its political program of class collaboration which it shares with the UTE-FPR.” As for the supposed betrayal by Gabino Cué, a bourgeois politician defending the interests of his class, they neglect to mention that the FPR and PCM-ml called to vote for him in 2010, and even supplied him with an assistant secretary for Indian affairs, Zenén Bravo. Today the UTE is attacking Núñez Ginez and the “pelones” and “pozoleros” of PRI supporters around organization secretary Francisco Villalobos from the right, claiming that their boycotts and stop-work mobilizations had brought the union into “disrepute” in bourgeois public opinion.

In the August 20 march by teachers in Oaxaca city, the UTE distributed a pamphlet titled “The ABC of the Democratic Worker” in which it lays out its program in detail. It calls there for a United Front of Struggle (FUL) based on “mutual commitments” which are “relevant and achievable,” and that it is necessary to:

“seek appropriate moments to struggle against the education reform and privatization of public education. We must never again make it possible, because of our protests, for the Mexican state and reactionary mass media to deceive the population and to turn it against our movement.” 

The UTE called for an “unlimited national work stoppage,” but only at a more propitious time, and which would consist of “peaceful civil resistance which avoids repression by the military/police forces,” with “objectives that benefit all and don’t harm anyone”! With this sleight of hand, these Stalinists exclude any boycott action, whether of elections or of the punitive exams being used against the teachers.

Another declaration of the UTE, FPR and PCM-ml printed in a special bulletin of Vanguardia Proletaria (27 July) is even more explicit, declaring that “total radicalization of the movement” serves the government, that it will only call an unlimited national work stoppage “if other states do it on a single date,”  and that meanwhile they call for actions “in defense of the fatherland, sovereignty and natural resources,” etc. With this flag-waving and pacifist verbiage, the Stalinist reformists try to hide their capitulation before the threats and provocations of the government. The truth is that in the face of an enemy “looking for pretexts to attack the teacher,” one can only hope to avoid repression by not responding to the attacks. And even that won’t work.

In contrast, the revolutionary Trotskyists of the Internationalist Group fight to mobilize a greater force than the capitalist government, namely that of the Mexican proletariat. In the face of the provocations and military assault against Section 22 in Oaxaca, the response must be to shut down the key sectors of the national economy.

The capitulatory policies of the UTE-FPR are coming into conflict with the will to struggle of the ranks. Not calling for the final battle against the provocation of the coup against the IEEPO could be correct it it was a part of the preparation of a genuine national strike, a class action rather than one of “ national unity” (with bourgeois sectors), to unite all the struggles against the anti-working-class reforms. It’s necessary to bring together the different sectors which will be put under the guillotine if they permit the defeat of the CNTE: workers in the public health and social security (IMSS) sector who are facing creeping privatization, and the oil workers who are now facing massive layoffs due to the energy “reform.” But this perspective requires uncompromising struggle to break the shackles of their corporatist “unions.”

The anthem of the combative Section 22 of the CNTE is Venceremos, from the Unidad Popular of Salvador Allende in Chile. But the UP was a popular front which with its policies of class collaboration prepared the terrible defeat of the Chilean working class, on 11 September 1973, at the hands of the military junta led by Augusto Pinochet, who was defense minister in the UP government. In Oaxaca during the semi-insurrection of 2006, the policy of the popular front had fateful consequences when the People’s Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) called for a “punishment vote” against the PRI of Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, a veiled call to vote for the PRD of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (popularly known as AMLO). Whereupon the PRD deputies in the Oaxaca state legislature approved the governor’s request to bring in federal police and the army.

Today, the UTE and other sectors in Section 22 want a FUL (United Front of Struggle) which would be a second edition of the APPO. A spokesman for the section called for “dialogue” with all groups opposed to “neoliberalism,” including Subcomandante Marcos, the poet Javier Sicilia and of course with AMLO. Even organizations which call themselves leftists and Trotskyists such as the Movimiento de Trabajadores Socialistas (MTS, Movement of Socialist Workers, formerly LTS) advocate an alliance with López Obrador’s MORENA. Thus in a 29 July article, the MTS calls for mobilization in the streets of “all political and social organizations” and to put pressure on “the Morena leadership” to not limit itself to declarations of support:

“If AMLO really, as he says, is with the teachers, he has to put all his political and material resources in the service of their struggle – without requiring any electoral support – and become part of the actions in support of the teachers. No disputes or political differences can serve as an excuse in this push for a great united mobilization.”

Along with this “unity”-mongering rhetoric, the MTS, like the FPR and much of the left, advocates a (bourgeois) constituent assembly, calling to subordinate the teachers movement to the capitalist opposition to the tripartite government of the Pact for Mexico. AMLO is not opposed on principle to the privatizing measures, he just wants to negotiate better conditions for the Mexican bourgeoisie. This popular-front policy is counterposed from head to toe to the struggle for the class independence of the workers, which is key to the struggle against the capitalist “reforms” that will only be successful with a proletarian policy, preparing the way for a workers and peasants (and in Oaxaca, Indian) government which begins the international socialist revolution.

The “education reform” of Peña Nieto, Chuayffet and Cué, and standing behind them, of the IMF, the OECD and World Bank, is a veritable gag law aimed at silencing the teachers. It is an attack on parents, who will be required to take on the cost of educating their children. Rather than “saving” the IEEPO, the Trotskyists of the Grupo Internacionalista call to fight for control of the schools by councils of teachers, students, workers and parents. Rather than a new popular-frontist FUL/APPO, we call for the formation of workers, peasants and Indian councils to organize the struggle against all the capitalists. And as we chanted in the megamarcha of July 27, “when the struggle turns military, it’s necessary to organize workers defense guards.”

Unlike those who placed their confidence in Gabino Cué and now AMLO, the Trotskyists call on working people to have no confidence in the bourgeoisie and only in our own forces. Above all, we fight for a revolutionary workers party, a genuinely communist, Leninist party based on Trotsky’s program of permanent revolution, to lead the struggle and take it into the heartland of imperialism, where our class sisters and brothers confront the same enemy. This is the program of the Grupo Internacionalista and the Comité de Lucha Proletaria (Committee for Proletarian Struggle). ■