Americas

Alan Woods and Esteban Volkov, Trotsky’s grandson, addressed a packed meeting last week in the auditorium of the Leon Trotsky Museum, in Coyoacan, Mexico, to launch the Mexican edition of Leon Trotsky’s Stalin’s Gangsters.

On May 30 the Mexican edition of Reason in Revolt was launched in a large lecture theatre in the Polytechnic, with about 150 students, workers, trade unionists and peasant activists listening and taking part in the debate. The mood was very enthusiastic and once again shows the powerful impact the Marxist Tendency is having in Mexico.

With court orders and arrest warrants against the management of the Flasko factory, which operates under workers’ control, the decision has been made to hand over the administration of the company to an administrator under the control of the old bosses. The administrator named by the judge has already dismissed 50 workers, starting with all the members of the Factory Council elected by the workers’ assembly.

The non-renewal of the broadcasting licence to private TV station RCTV in Venezuela has been used by the oligarchy and imperialism to unleash the coup-plotting campaign they were unable to launch at the time of the December 3rd elections. Despite all the hue and cry over “freedom of expression” the real aim of the oligarchy in Venezuela is to create a situation of chaos, violence and confusion.

Earlier this year a Spanish comrade visited the occupied factories in Brazil and wrote this report. This was before 150 armed police raided the factory on orders of a judge. This report gives you a taste of what the CIPLA workers had achieved. We must not allow all this to be destroyed. Please take part in the international solidarity campaign and raise this issue wherever you can in the labour movement.

On Tuesday, May 29, over 150 people, mainly workers and trade unionists filled a hall in the Workers' University of Mexico to hear Alan Woods speaking on Venezuela and the Latin American revolution. The ideas he outlined connected immediately with the mood of Mexican workers and youth after the tumultuous events of last year when millions mobilise against electoral fraud.

The workers of the occupied factory CIPLA were surprised this morning by 150 men, heavily armed, from the Federal Police, who invaded the factory in order to arrest the members of the factory committee.

Alan Woods spoke at a second meeting in Puebla, presenting Reason in Revolt. The meeting was a great success, and shows the growing thirst for revolutionary ideas in Mexico.

On Thursday May 24 the supporters of the Mexican Marxist Tendency Militante and the Frederick Engels Foundation in Puebla organized a very successful public meeting to launch the book Bolshevism: the Road to Revolution.

In the advanced capitalist countries people take water almost for granted, or at least they did until recently. Now more and more of us have to pay huge bills for our water. In the underdeveloped countries, however it is much worse, with over one billion having no access to safe water. Water will become a source of class conflict, as the experience of Bolivia has confirmed.

Chavez has announced sweeping measures of nationalisation. This represents a big step forward for the Venezuelan revolution and would be a serious blow against capitalism and imperialism. Big enemies are lining up to stop this process, the most dangerous being inside the Bolivarian movement itself. It is now time to go all the way and put an end to capitalism in Venezuela and spread the revolution to the rest of Latin America.

Using the old and tested mechanism of organising economic sabotage from within, the Venezuelan oligarchy is consciously manoeuvring to organise “food shortages”. The government has imposed price controls and is attempting to set up publicly owned food industries, but in order to successfully combat this sabotage it must go all the way and expropriate the oligarchy as a whole.

Just six months after Calderon assumed the presidency and the anti-fraud movement and the APPO were defeated, the situation in Mexico is heating up again. The previous showdown over the elections and the revolutionary struggle in Oaxaca solved nothing. The bourgeois, foolishly, perhaps believed that the working class was finished, and that the struggle was over. They will not be able to maintain that opinion any longer.

In the U.S., Labor Day is officially celebrated in September, and has all but lost its original political and class character. But the real origins of May Day can be traced right to the United States and the bitter struggles of working men and women for better wages, rights, conditions, and the eight-hour day.

We wish all our readers a red May Day! Here we briefly look at the historical origins of this day of struggle.Â