MICHOACÁN, January 26 — Progressive Labor Party applauds the angry workers in Michoacán who have had enough of the drug cartels’ violence and have picked up guns and fought back. In an inspiring example of working-class rage, many workers not only took up guns, not only attacked the criminal cartel but also attacked the police and federal agents.
This armed struggle marks the intensification of the conflict between the exploited and the exploiter. It also illustrates another contradiction: the dialectical concept of appearance vs. essence. It appears that this workers’ uprising against the cartels is spontaneous and fully rooted within the working class. But in essence, there may be another cartel arming and directing this movement as well. There also may be opportunist elements within Mexico’s ruling class helping them.
The workers are attacking a symptom of capitalism, not its cancer. Either way, the fact that many workers have turned to armed struggle to challenge the cartel brutally dispossessing them as well as the capitalist state apparatus is a very positive development — workers here are not lulled by pacifism and are willing to pick up arms to fight the bosses.
A major question is, where did these workers get their guns? They appear to be following Mao Tse-Tung’s tenets of guerrilla warfare. A small group began with a few hunting rifles and shotguns. They then raided the police stations and some of the cartels’ arms caches.
This is one way how PLP can arm itself, develop a Red Army and seize state power. However, our primary way is by organizing directly in the bosses’ military, backed by a mass base in the working class.
The armed workers now have automatic weapons and armored vehicles. Needless to say, much of the ruling class is worried about masses of armed workers taking power into their own hands and thereby setting an example to workers worldwide — from Cambodia, to Bangladesh, to France to the U.S. — armed struggle against capitalism!
PLP also recognizes that politics are primary. Though the armed workers have had enough — “Basta Ya!” (Enough is enough!) — they are not fighting to seize the means of production, institute the dictatorship of the proletariat and transform society through communist revolution. We must recognize the contradiction between the positive aspects of workers arming and organizing themselves against a ruthless oppressor and the fact that without destroying the systemic structures of capitalism, they wind up either simply putting a new boss in charge or preserving the social order that allows Mexico’s capitalists to rule. In fact, the cartel they’re deposing actually started as an armed reaction against exploitation!
We applaud the armed struggle, but we’re critical of the lack of a political thrust alongside a populist reaction to the terrible exploitation and brutal violence that the cartels enact upon them. The armed workers also recognize that the Mexican police and agents, despite the millions that they receive in U.S. aid, are ineffectual in stopping the cartels.
The police, the agents, the bosses, the banking system, the Drug Enforcement Agency and a whole line of federal agents all make some money off the very lucrative drug trade. The poisoning of the working class reaps big money flowing into a lot of pockets.
A breaking scandal is exposing how U.S. rulers directly helped the Sinaloa Cartel. Another scandal, “Fast and Furious,” reveals how the U.S. directly supplied weapons to the cartels themselves.
PLP recognizes that the cartels are part of capitalism’s exploitative apparatus because they divide and brutalize the working class and make vast profits for the bosses, either indirectly through money laundering or directly through kickbacks, bribes or outright gun sales that echo the British gun-running in Africa during slavery.
The vast majority of the armed workers appear to be those who were deported from the U.S. and are refusing to passively accept the burden of brutality that the workers in Michoacán have stoically accepted until now. This illustrates a consequence of the U.S. deporting so many workers into Mexico and destabilizing the extortion rackets on which the ruling classes of the U.S. and Mexico have been enriching themselves.
These armed and masked workers are not fighting for some religious ideology, but actually challenging elements of the state apparatus in order to improve conditions of workers in this life, here and now. This struggle will not end the tyranny of the cartels, since too many capitalists are enriching themselves from our class’s addictions. It lacks a communist center, its politics and, most importantly, a Party to organize it and defend the working class’s gains. That communist Party is PLP and it needs to be built in the furnace of the Michoacán uprising. The PLP, both in Mexico and worldwide, will continue to struggle to bring communist politics to this armed struggle.