As recent events confirm, that fundamental relationship between U.S. imperialism and the rulers in Mexico has not changed. Moreover, what is happening to toilers in Mexico right now is not exceptional. It is just one variant of the future facing every country held in economic bondage to world finance capital. This relationship between oppressed and oppressor nations accelerates conflicts among the imperialist countries themselves. And it underlines the fact that, in the context of world capitalism's deflationary conditions, the stability of the imperialist countries is increasingly held in bondage to the effects of crises and breakdowns in the exploited Third World.

Until less than two weeks ago, Mexico was one of a handful of models pointed to by boosters of the so-called free-market system of how the entire "post-Cold War" world was now going to develop, grow, stabilize, and democratize together. They painted a radiant picture of economic growth, booming profits, national development, expanding democracy, better education, and rising incomes for all. Far from capitalism becoming less volatile, the new debt crisis that will eventually emerge will make the one in the 1980s look mild.

The economics and the politics of all this cannot be untangled. Those who lend vast amounts of money to reap enormous interest payments, those who seek to take over whole parts of the Third World to squeeze profits from superexploitation of workers and peasants--those same barons of finance capital simultaneously put their tentacles in every powder keg all over the world and add to its instability. They are ultimately held hostage by their own rapaciousness and by their own successes. Where have the capitalists ever had such success--on their own terms--as they have proclaimed in Mexico over the past decade?

And do not believe a word you read in the press about the irreversibility of the "trend toward democracy" in Mexico. Do not believe a word about how much the U.S. rulers and those around Zedillo in the Mexican bourgeoisie want to break up Bonapartist party rule there. Given the volatility and uncertainty in Mexico, what the bourgeoisie needs and wants is an even stronger Bonapartist state. But what is happening right now underlines both why they need a "stronger" state in Mexico and the problems they'll have in getting one.¹ We are just beginning to see the results in Mexico for working people and also for the newly arising professional and commercial petty bourgeoisie.

Zedillo can go on television next week and announce the "rescue plan" that capitalists in the United States and Mexico have worked out. But implementing it will be another matter. Even by the Mexican government's own figures, it was only two years ago that workers' real wages finally began to recover from a decade-long plunge. A lot of workers remember that as recently as 1987, prices were leaping by more than 150 percent annually.

Not everybody in Mexico is going to cheer when they hear the new president talk about permitting big U.S. banks to begin buying up Mexican banks. Millions will not look kindly on allowing Wall Street to seize more and more of the national patrimony as collateral to ensure payment of blood money on new loans. There are sure to be protests against beginning to give away little hunks of Pemex to the Yankee colossus--directly or indirectly. 
 
 
1. Originating in periods of deep social crisis, a Bonapartist regime relies on a centralized executive power that presents itself as standing above conflicting class interests in order to maintain the power of the dominant social layer. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels coined the term from the experience with Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's regime in France from 1852 to 1870, as the bourgeoisie strengthened its dominance over the working class in the wake of the retreat of the democratic revolutions of 1848-49.

In Mexico the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has used Bonapartist methods of rule since 1929 on behalf of the rising capitalist class, claiming the mantle of the revolution as a political weapon against any challenge by workers and peasants to their rule. The PRI initially presented itself as the arbiter between, on the one hand, the rebellious peasantry that powered the 1910 revolution and its allies among a small but growing industrial working class, and, on the other hand, the traditional landowning class and commercial capitalists most directly tied to U.S. and British imperialism.

In midterm elections in July 1997, the PRI for the first time ever lost its majority in the House of Deputies, as well as the powerful post of mayor of Mexico City. Between 1997 and early 1999, the PRI also lost several more state governorships; until 1989 it had filled this office in all thirty-one of Mexico's states. This shift registers the Mexican bourgeoisie's growing difficulties in maintaining the stability of its Bonapartist rule.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home