The Illusion of a Change that Won’t Happen and the Urgent Task of Building the Party
MEXICO—Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) took office as president of Mexico on December 1. Thousands of people gathered in the main square of Mexico City to celebrate the beginning of his term. Millions of workers, teachers and young people, inside and outside of Mexico, celebrated this as a great triumph.
And it is logical that, after 70 years of governments of the PRI and the PAN, plagued by corruption scandals, benefits for the ruling class, massacre and repression, AMLO’s proposals to end corruption and implement reforms for the benefit of the majority fill the masses who crave a better life with hope.
“People have a lot of illusions in him. They’ve been waiting for a change for a long time,” said a young Red Flag reader in a recent ICWP study group. At the meeting in Mexico City we analyzed and discussed his speech, and our proposals.
The most significant reforms that he has promised are: the repeal of educational reform, a scholarship program, construction of 100 universities, increase of workers’ wages, lower gasoline prices, and reactivation of agriculture.
We don’t deny that these reforms can benefit in some way a part of the working class for a time. But for a real transformation that will lead to a life that will allow us to develop our human potential, reforms are not a viable path
By keeping production relations intact and preaching the reconciliation of social classes (just like that all the other leftists who have governed bourgeois states) reforms can be reversed when in the future the crisis of capitalism sharpens.
In the discussion, another young woman said that six years is not enough time to make a profound and radical change. A comrade teacher responded that if the masses controlled the way production is carried out and the most important decisions in society, in six years we could do vastly more than what AMLO can do from the bourgeois state.
The working class, if it wants to enjoy the fruits of its labor, must put an end to the material base of capitalism and create its own political-military organizations which will allow it to defend what it has won.
“So, what do we do? Organize!” said a young party member. The urgent task is to mobilize industrial and agricultural workers, students and intellectuals for communism. This won’t be possible if we limit ourselves to criticizing reformist governments. We have to be creative to strengthen our party structure with a plan and a strategy to organize more and more people.
The working class in Mexico stands on territory that has the potential to make the revolution that can be the spark to light the prairie fire. A communist revolution in Mexico will put into the working class’s hands enough resources to start a fierce struggle against decadent capitalism and at the same time to meet the needs of the masses in the areas controlled by the party.
Within the study group there are different points of view about what AMLO may or may not do. But we agree on the need to continue discussing and carrying out activities, such as passing out leaflets at the factories, to organize more people to come to our study circles and to the party. As one of the young women concluded, “For a revolution, an evolution of consciousness is needed first.”
May Day, Mexico City, 2013