Mexico Teacher’s and School Workers Strike here ♦ Letter: Communist Education for a Classless Society here ♦
Mexico: Teachers’ and School Workers’ Strike: The Masses Need Communist Education to Destroy the Wage System
MEXICO CITY, June 2—On May 15, “Teachers’ Day,” teachers and school workers went on strike to demand the repeal of the 2007 reform to the ISSSTE (Social Security) law. This reform eliminated a retirement system based on intergenerational solidarity and administered by a government fund. It was replaced by individual savings accounts managed by banks, the so-called Retirement Fund Administrators (AFOREs). The money in these accounts comes from the total exploitation of the working class.
The capitalists, through their government, have used this system to attack workers in the private sector since 1997. In 2007, they extended these attacks to government employees, including school workers and teachers, despite massive protests.
Although the current rulers promised to repeal these “neoliberal reforms,” they now claim that conditions and funds aren’t sufficient. Teachers chanted, “Sheinbaum said everything would change! Lies, lies, the same crap!”
In February 2024, before leaving office, President Lopez Obrador promoted new laws. He deceived some workers, promising, among other things, higher salaries and pensions. Teachers have been unraveling this deception.
The returns promised to workers on their individual accounts are minimal. But banks and their fund administrators (AFOREs) have grown richer. According to official information from May 15, banks earned 76 billion pesos from January to March 2025 from these accounts. AFOREs control 68 million individual accounts, equivalent to 7.2 trillion pesos, approximately 20% of the country’s gross domestic product.
The strikers are also demanding a 100% salary increase. The government has granted 9% plus 1% for August. They also demand that pensions be paid in “minimum wages” instead of in UMAs (Updated Units of Measure, introduced by the government to collect debts and now worth about half of a minimum wage), as this has reduced retirees’ pensions by almost half.
School workers and teachers are angry and mobilized. However, they need to focus their protests against the entire capitalist system, joining the ICWP and working for a worldwide workers’ organization to end capitalism.
They must fight for a communist society where our lives don’t depend on a meager retirement pension, but on collective production to meet the needs of all the world’s workers.
Teachers must educate for such humanity and against students becoming obedient wage slaves. They can educate students to be communist leaders in the fight to change the world.
The strike may not achieve all its goals. Nevertheless, it will be a great learning experience for new working-class forces joining the struggle to free our class from the capitalists and their wars for profit. For a communist world! Join ICWP!
Letter: Communist Education for a Classless Society
During my first week as a teacher, a seven-year-old from Mexico almost wet his pants in class. I did not speak enough Spanish to understand his polite request: “Maestra, el servicio, por favor!” Finally, a bilingual girl told me that he needed to use the “sanitary service,” a polite term for the restroom. A crisis was averted.
After many years in public schools, I now teach in a community college. When students need to use the restroom, they quietly leave the room. But their schooling is increasingly overtly designed to prepare them to be wage slaves in the capitalist workforce.
Public schools were organized to train rural children to become obedient appendages to machines. That meant that they could not respond appropriately to their bodily needs. The production process has always come first.
School systems have evolved as the needs of capitalism have evolved. Students are taught the skills that the profit system needs, but most of all to do what they’re told—on the job and in the military.
Being a communist teacher has meant exposing this process while working within it. Teaching history from a working-class, international, communist perspective. Making my classroom a safe place for students to organize protests and walkouts. Recruiting and consolidating student comrades.
Capitalist rulers design capitalist schooling to serve the needs of capitalism—a system organized around obedience, competition, exploitation, and alienation. The working class around the world cannot survive the vicious system that capitalism has created.
We’re fighting for communism. Education in a communist society without wages or money will have to develop the skills of creativity, cooperation, and meeting the needs of humanity.
Our pamphlet: Communist Education for a Classless Society explores what that could look like. We invite you to read and discuss it and send us your ideas.
—Red teacher in the US
ICWP Pamphlet: Communist Education for Classless Society here