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Mexico:

Teachers from Section 22 Need to Take the Communist Road

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MEXICO— Thousands of federal police in the “Gendarmeria” are deployed in Oaxaca to stop protests in the schools by teachers and other school workers. The government says that restructuring the State Public Education Institute of Oaxaca (IEEPO) will remove the “privileges and abuses” of Section 22 of the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE). They have frozen Section 22’s bank accounts and the allocation of union dues (which the government continues to deduct from the workers’ paychecks).
These school workers are among the many workers worldwide who are fighting the evils of capitalism in response to the use (not only abuse) of the workers’ labor power. The workers did not stop fighting even after the Soviet and Chinese leaders renounced communism in the last half of the 20th century.
Many of today’s fighters were never influenced by those leaders.  Many heard about communism only from the mouths of capitalist propagandists.
However, many thousands around the world have been protesting and giving their lives following leaders who are leftovers of that same movement. This false communism did not disappear. It renounced its name and symbols only to pursue its participation in the bourgeois governments, allying with capitalist politicians throughout Latin America, for example. It has not been for the good of the working class.

The International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP) has never underestimated the consequences of this fake communism. We have confronted it with our limited forces. In large part, the eventual triumph of the working class over the bourgeoisie depends on this. The same is true with respect to the religious leaders who mobilize thousands of workers only to substitute other capitalists who will also use workers’ labor power.
Section 22 removed from its leadership the leaders of the SNTE, administering the union resources and the contract, especially when they could manage things in part at the state level. They improved the wages of the members. They were even able to get some of their members into the IEEPO bureaucracy.  This was supposedly to participate in the management of (capitalist) education.  But the government always kept real control in its own hands, naming every Director to whom other leaders were subordinate.
Today the government has excluded those of Section 22. However, in each state of the republic the Institute of Education or Secretariat (the titles vary) is linked to the SNTE.  Often it is controlled by it. And the corruption was not stopped with the imprisonment of ex-union President Elba Ester Gordillo; the others only adapted it to their interests.
Unions became part of the capitalist state apparatus in Mexico long ago. The workers need to organize ourselves into a Party to put an end to capitalism, not to participate in the capitalist bureaucracy.
Socialists adapted to the system. The indignation of the workers has been channeled into material improvements, not against the wage slavery to which we are subjected, whether in the Mixteca area or in the Isthmus. Many teachers remain affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which ruled Mexico for 70 years.
The so-called “independent organizations” (taxi drivers, home-seekers, etc.) are indistinguishable from the style of the rural organization Antorcha.  This is a pro-PRI organization which started as “Leninist” (The Party of the Mexican Working Class-PCOM) and which now receives a state subsidy.
The working class needs consciousness “for itself:” that is, the need to constitute ourselves in a Party, according to the Communist Manifesto of 1848.   It is what the working class of the whole world needs. Join ICWP!

Red Flag comments:
Thank you for showing the dangers of the wrong political line among the working class. We  hope to read about the reaction of teachers to these ideas. We also hope that you write about how communist education contrasts with capitalist education, and discuss how communist education and society will function.


September 30--280,000 teachers in Kenya defy a court order to go back to work and continue a five week strike for a pay increase against the government of Uhuru Kenyatta.

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