Arturo Ramos, a professor of sociology, higher education and pedagogy at several Mexican universities, opens the book with his essay, “Utopia, Realism and Imagination in the Mexican Left: The Political Conjuncture of 2010-2012.” Ramos spends a hundred pages in a long, abstract and vague discussion of Mexican history and politics before coming to his point, namely that even Lenin and the Bosheviks held long discussions over the question of whether Czarist Russia needed a democratic or a socialist revolution. The author suggests that perhaps Trotsky, Lenin and the Bolsheviks made a mistake by opting for the soviets (the workers' councils) and socialism – a decision which ultimately gave rise to a bureaucratic dictatorship – rather than pursuing a longer slower march through democratic revolution. Mexican radicals and socialists, Ramos argues, must not make the same mistake. They must make the leap from utopian idealism and the dream of socialism to practical politics and the fight for democracy. The task for today, he writes, is to support a democratic revolution and an alternative project for the nation.
Structural Transformation of Capitalism
With an attempt to reach out to all those on the
Mexican left, Ramos argues that the basis for a revolutionary democratic
program can be found in the proposals of López Obrador, the Zapatista
who led the armed uprising of 1994 in Chiapas, and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas,
son of president Lázaro Cárdenas and founder of the Party of the
Democratic Revolution (PRD). Interpreting what he sees as the central
elements of these various documents, Ramos argues that the democratic
program must be linked to a structural transformation of capitalism;
Mexico must recover its rights under the Constitution of 1917, but must
add to those the rights of the indigenous, women, homosexuals and youth.
Equally important, the country must create a real system of social
security from food and housing to health and education for all of its
citizens. Finally, in order to establish the rule of law it will be
necessary to hold a constituent assembly to write a new constitution.
Speaking to socialists' desire to build an
independent working-class party, Ramos argues that participating in the
campaign for López Obrador will give radicals and socialists the
opportunity to organize the country's working people and the poor as
part of the long process of creating a more conscious and
better-organized working-class. He concludes his essay arguing that this
call for socialists to work for the democratic revolution in Mexico
corresponds to the theory of “permanent
revolution,” though he has no discussion of where and how that
theory arose or what it explained. With a few offhand references to
Trotsky and Lenin, Ramos argues that socialists can fulfill their dreams
through López Obrador's populist movement.
Lechuga's essay, titled “A Political Psychological
Profile of AMLO as a Candidate in the Political Conjuncture of
2010-2012,” attempts to paint a psychological portrait of López Obrador
using the most eclectic theories, from the ancient four temperaments to
Freud and Jung. She writes that the candidate is “of a choleric
character: AMLO being characterized by being direct, frank, irritable,
rational, willful, fatalistic, decisive, sure of himself, arrogant,
proud, suspicious and a scrutinizer of reality.”
López Obrador, austere and well organized, a realist
and a problem solver, she suggests would be the perfect match for
Mexico, a country with what she describes as having a tendency toward
ambivalence.
“We Mexicans don't practice what we
preach. We praise the laws in speeches, but in fact we violate them
constantly, for example in the acts of corruption that we practice at
all levels; we are fatalistic and we live with a faith and hope, we are
individualists and egoists and at the same time mutually supportive and
generous.”
She offers her psychoanalysis of Mexico:
“Thus the psychosocial profile of the country of Mexico is that of a nation divided, the product of an incomplete independence, of an unfinished revolution, its geographical location next to a neighbour as powerful as the United States; a profile which is the product of a variety of conflictive mediations of its history, an ambivalent personality: courageous, dramatic, impatient, naïve, capricious, finicky, colorful, festive, humorous, cheerful, pleasant, creative, self-sacrificing, and dreamy.”
In short, she argues, López Obrador, strong,
well-organized and decisive, is just the man that Mexico needs.
Lechuga's essay provides a psychosocial justification for a caudillo, a charismatic populist who can lead the
Mexican people into a new era.
Surprisingly, neither of the essays in this little
book have any discussion of López Obardor's actual biography and
political practice. They have nothing to say about his role as a
politician in the state of Tabasco. Nothing to say about his role as
Mayor of Mexico City. Not a word about the class character of López
Obrador's “Legitimate Government” (2006-2011) or about the new political
organization MORENA (Movimiento para la Renovación Nacional or
Movement for National Renovation). The authors have avoided all the hard
questions.
Mayor of Mexico City
López Obrador is usually praised on the left as the
mayor who gave pensions to Mexico City's elderly, but he also did much
more. As Mayor of Mexico City, López Obrador worked to encourage private
corporations and wealthy individuals to rebuild, modernize, and
gentrify the city. Most famously he created a partnership with Carlos
Slim, the multi-billionaire who is Mexico's and the world's richest man,
to restore and gentrify the historic district of the city. He also
offered tax breaks to large corporations to encourage them to build
office and apartment buildings, leading to one of the biggest building
booms in the country's history. To take on Mexico City's rising crime
rates, he brought in New York's former mayor Rudy Giuliani, known for
his attacks on organized and white collar crime, as well as for his
strict handling of low level crime and what the well-off perceive as
public nuisances such as the homeless and panhandlers.
Most troubling was López Obrador's labour policy.
While mayor of Mexico City, López Obrador permitted the Labour Board to
continue to deal with phony unions and their corrupt lawyers and union
officials, while turning a deaf ear to the demands of independent
unions, union reformers and rank-and-file workers. Many of the city's
200,000 public employees found it impossible to have their independent
labour unions legally recognized. Workers at the time said: whatever we
have won we got by going to the streets – the López Obrador government
didn't give us anything.
In 2006 López Obrador was the presidential candidate
of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), a party founded in 1988
by Mexican nationalist politicians from the Institutional Revolutionary
Party (PRI), which had ruled Mexico for 75 years as a one-party-state,
but who rebelled against the party's new technocratic and neoliberal
leadership. The PRD also attracted the Stalinist Communists and other
leftists and became a congeries of left sects and opportunistic
politicians held together by their desire to displace the PRI from
power. Both the PRI and the PRD were affiliated with the Socialist
International, which includes the socialist parties of the world. The
PRD suffered several scandals in the 1990s and 2000s, including internal
elections marked by fraud and political payoffs that were videotaped
and broadcast on television.
When López Obrador lost the election in 2006 through
illegal activity by the out-going president Vicente
Fox and alleged massive voting fraud, he called for massive protests
in which hundreds of thousands participated. That was followed by his
National Democratic Convention and subsequently, standing alone on a
platform in the national square, the Zócalo, in Mexico City, he
proclaimed himself the “Legitimate President.” He then appointed a
cabinet which he called the “Legitimate Government.” Since 2006, López
Obrador spent six years as a peripatetic pretender to the presidency
visiting hundreds of cities, towns and villages throughout Mexico and
creating an organization of tens of thousands who support him.
MORENA
With the PRD's growing reputation for fraud and
infighting that nearly paralyzed it, López Obrador then turned his
“Legitimate Government” into a new political organization called MORENA.
At this party's founding convention on October 6, 2011, there were no
votes and no elections, simply the assembly's approval of López Obrador
as leader and candidate. Afterwards López Obrador announced his cabinet
appointments which included many figures with histories in the PRI and
PRD who had espoused neoliberal policies in the past as legislators or
directors of various institutions. With the PRD in crisis, some
ambitious politicians have moved into Morena (without of course severing
their ties to the PRD) in order to see if the new organization can help
further their careers.
So far López Obrador has failed to set in motion the
vast popular forces he needs to win the election, running third in the
polls. The candidate has addressed that problem by turning to the right.
As head of Morena, López Obrador has announced that he is attempting to
create “the loving republic,” a slogan that allows him to avoid talking
about the serious issues of social class and political program. He has
also made overtures to the Mexican business class hoping to win broader
support on the right for his campaign. And he has attempted to woo the
corporate media by arguing that he is not the fire-breathing López
Obrador of 2006 who the media constantly compared to Hugo Chávez, the
radical president of Venezuela who calls for “Twenty-First Century
Socialism,” but rather a moderate who should be compared to Luis Inácio
Lula da Silva of Brazil, the recently retired president of Brazil who on
the one hand brought social welfare payments to the country's poor, but
also worked closely with banks and construction companies during his
presidency.
With the conservative National Action Party (PAN)
headed by President Felipe
Calderón in power, and with the rapacious Institutional
Revolutionary Party (PRI) leading in the polls, many on the left in
Mexico understandably see a vote for López Obrador as the best of all
options or at least the lesser evil. Led by the Mexican Electrical
Workers Union (SME) [Ed.: see Bullets No. 279 and No.
280 for more information], some on the left and in the labour
movement who are reluctant to simply join Morena founded the Political
Organization of the People and the Workers (OPT) on August 27, 2011, as a
vehicle to engage in the independent organization of workers while
supporting López Obrador's candidacy.
The Electrical Workers have been leading a massive
and militant fight for their jobs since October 13, 2009, when Calderón
ordered the police and military to seize the Light and Power Company
plants, liquidated the state-owned company and fired 44,000 workers.
After trying to win the PRI's support to get their jobs back, the SME
turned to López Obrador, creating OPT to support his campaign. The
Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT) of Mexico, a Trotskyist socialist
group, has been involved in the founding of this new proto-workers
party, as have many other social and political organizations. In early
February of 2012, López Obrador at a meeting with the Electrical Workers
leadership and members promised to help the union win back the jobs of
the 16,500 workers who continue to fight for them. While the OPT at this
point is a weak reed, it is a genuine attempt to move to the left, to
avoid a popular front style alliance with a bourgeois candidate, and to
create an independent workers movement within the context of the popular
mobilizations surrounding the López Obrador campaign. This approach may
in the end find it difficult if not impossible to avoid being drawn
into López Obrador's wake, but it is at least a serious attempt to
address the issue.
The problem with this book by Ramos and Lechuga is
that it addresses none of the actual structural and political problems,
discusses no actual political forces, parties, labour unions, social
movements, and faces none of the issues raised by the record of López
Obrador. Unfortunately, many in Mexican left and social movements, I
fear, will also choose the simple path the authors have, entering Morena
and backing Andrés Manuel López Obrador, believing that this strong and
charismatic figure can lead Mexico into the Promised Land of democracy
and perhaps even socialism. It is either a naïve dream or an
opportunistic maneuver, but in any case it is a far-fetched prospect.
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