What Mexico election spotlights
(editorial)
The reason Washington and Wall Street applauded the watershed election of businessman Vicente Fox, leader of the National Action Party (PAN), as president of Mexico, which ended decades of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in office, has nothing to do with democracy. Despite their rhetoric, the last thing the billionaire sharks are interested in is the democratic right of the Mexican people to decide their destiny. Their hope, backed up by pressure, is that Fox will help break down further obstacles to U.S. capital controlling Mexico's resources, markets, and superexploited labor power. They want an even stronger state in Mexico, one that can keep workers and farmers in check.
But the elections also underscore the problems the U.S. and Mexican capitalists are having in maintaining stable bourgeois rule. For most of the past seven decades it has dominated Mexican politics, the PRI has served the ruling class well. It has relied on a centralized executive power and political demagogy, presenting itself as standing above conflicting class interests and representing "the Mexican nation" as a way to hold together the bourgeoisie while defusing or cracking down on worker and peasant revolts.
But the world capitalist economic crisis, which has led to shrunken oil revenues, a mushrooming debt squeeze by imperialist banks, and devastating conditions for working people, has led to economic and social volatility. These growing pressures led to the fracturing of bourgeois politics in Mexico and the defeat of the PRI.
Over the past decade, the PRI-led governments increasingly acceded to imperialist demands to break down trade barriers to U.S. goods, sell off state-owned companies, slash state subsidies, and impose other austerity measures. Thousands of workers have been laid off, and many more peasants have been driven off the land and into the ranks of the rural and urban working class. The PAN administration, with collaboration from the PRI, which still remains a powerful force, will seek to continue and accelerate this course.
But this is only part of the picture. What will continue to unfold in Mexico is increased class polarization--both resistance by working people and counter responses by growing rightist formations. Workers and farmers who voted for the PAN as a lesser evil to kick out the hated PRI have expectations that their conditions will improve, and will press their demands. At the same time, to meet the demands of the employers and imperialists, the new government will have to take on more directly the unions and recently emerged peasant organizations.
One consequence of this economic crisis, the accelerated immigration by millions of Mexican workers and peasants to the United States, underscores how the fate of working people on both sides of the border is becoming more and more intertwined. Workers arriving here from Mexico are finding themselves in the middle of the growing labor fightback in the United States, and often part of its leadership. Likewise, working people in the United States have much at stake in supporting the struggles of our class brothers and sisters in Mexico.
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