Trotsky’s final assessment of Mexico under Cárdenas
Trotsky’s evaluation of developments in Mexico went through a series of stages and modifications, as the battle between the state and the working class was played out. In the last eighteen months of his life, in discussions with Mexican...
Permanent revolution in Mexico
Despite its relative economic backwardness in the 1930s, Trotsky did not rule out the possibility that Mexican workers might seize power – even before their counterparts in the US. (Latin American problems: a transcript, Writings supplement 1934-40, p.785) However he...
Trotsky on the ruling party and the 1940 presidential election
Trotsky never equivocated on the nature of the ruling party, including the character of the PRM created by Cárdenas in March 1938. In his discussion with comrades in November 1938 he argued: “The Guomindang in China, the PRM in Mexico...
Trotsky on the nature of the Cárdenas regime
Trotsky made few remarks on the nature of the Mexican regime in the first eighteen months of his asylum, and when he did, these were brief allusions. For example in the article on the freedom of the press in August 1938 he described Mexico’s democracy...
Trotsky and the unions in Mexico
Trotsky began to write about developments in the unions in mid-1938. Before the Stalinist-organised pan-American trade union congress in Mexico City on 6-8 September 1938, which set up the Confederation of Latin American Workers (CTAL), he denounced (in the name...
Trotsky on freedom of the press and the working class
In the summer of 1938 Lombardo began a campaign against the reactionary press in Mexico, intent on placing it under “democratic censorship” or banning it altogether.
Trotsky was unequivocal in opposing this drive. He wrote: “Both theory and...
Trotsky’s attitude towards the oil expropriations
Trotsky publicly supported Cárdenas’ expropriation of the oil industry. On 23 April 1938 he wrote to the Daily Herald in Britain, pointing to the hypocrisy of the Chamberlain government and defending the move of the grounds of national economic...
Trotsky’s analysis of Mexico
Trotsky arrived in Mexico on 9 January 1937. A longstanding Mexican Trotskyist Manuel Rodríguez originally suggested the asylum to his boss, General Francisco Mujica, a member of the Cárdenas cabinet (and his predecessor as governor of Michoacán). However it became a...
Cárdenas veers left
Cárdenas enhanced his reputation as a leftist with an aggressive agrarian policy. During his presidency around 50 million acres (18 millions hectares) of land were distributed to peasants, mainly in the form of collective ejidos – double the entire amount of land redistributed...
The first years of Cárdenas
Lázaro Cárdenas was chosen by Calles as his candidate for the presidency in 1934. Cárdenas had been an acclaimed officer during the revolution and was made a general in 1920 at the age of 25. Between 1928 and 1932 he was governor of his home state of Michoacán and loyal...
The origins of Mexican Bonapartism
The Mexican revolution (1910-1920) resulted in the defeat of the old landowners and their allies but also the exhaustion of other contending classes, particularly the bourgeoisie and the working class. Between one and two million people (out of population of 15...
Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez has made a series of radical announcements following his re-election in December, which require the attention of socialists everywhere. He announced plans to nationalise companies in telecom and electricity privatised by previous administrations. Chávez says he wants...
Around 6,000 workers marched through the streets of Caracas on Thursday (8 February) demanding nationalisation of all strategic industries as well as steel firm Sidor, manufacturing firm Sanitarios Maracay and others under workers’ control.
There are some initial reports and good pictures on the A...
In Solidarity 3/105, 25 January 2007 we reported on the Papernas party in Indonesia, which held its first conference on 18-20 January. The party includes the People’s Democratic Party (PRD), the main socialist opposition party in Indonesia, which includes Dita Sari and other militants.
Papernas...
Earlier this week I found out that Mary Low Machado had died on 9 January, aged 94. I have been researching the Spanish revolution, one of the great events of the twentieth century, which she participated in as a Trotskyist. This is what I know of her life:
Mary Low was born in London of...
Socialist Appeal and its international current, In Defence of Marxism are the foremost “Trotskyist” apologists for Hugo Chávez. Two recent articles they’ve produced indicate the extent of their disorientation as well as making me laugh.
Last week, Jorge Martin reported on Chávez’s new government...
The reactionary nature of the sectarian militias in Iraq has been demonstrated yet again with the killing of more trade unionists.
On 11 January militia gunmen abducted eight engineers from the Iraqi Oil Ministry as they were travelling to a Federation of Workers’ Councils and Unions in Iraq...
In an otherwise useful piece in the Guardian on 17 January on the cant around the forthcoming bicentenary of slave trade abolition, Chavez-loving journalist Richard Gott manages to miss a key point – popular agitation.
He rightly points out the role of slave rebellion in the abolition of the slave...
By Paul Hampton
The shape of Venezuelan “21st century socialism” has become clearer since the election, with Hugo Chávez announcing plans to nationalise strategic industries and form a new ruling party. The direction is towards state capitalism, headed by a Bonapartist bureaucracy.
On 8 January...
The struggle in Oaxaca was one of high points of workers struggle anywhere in the world last year. Now the movement of teachers and others in APPO is facing savage repression. We need to tell the story of the Oaxacan commune and make practical solidarity with workers under attack. (For an eyewitness...
Augusto Pinochet, the butcher of Chile is dead. Good. He overthrew an elected reformist government, murdered thousands of revolutionaries and militants and pioneered neoliberal austerity on the backs of Chilean workers.
I demonstrated against him when he was briefly detained here a few years ago...
In a somewhat eclectic attack on the “pro-war left” in the SWP’s latest International Socialism journal, Richard Seymour at least manages to smear the AWL by association.
Referring to a statement called ‘United Against Terror’ organised by Jane Ashworth of Labour Friends of Iraq in 2005, Seymour...
The latest issue of Mexican Labor News and Analysis is now available online. I think this is one of the best sources on the real balance of forces in Mexico today.
It has a sober analysis of the situation with the inauguration of Calderón, the repression in Oaxaca and the Zapatistas. The editor...
A new left-wing consensus is emerging, a “common sense” that takes Latin America as its point of departure and which combines many of the worst features of previous versions of “socialism from above”.
The new orthodoxy is articulated by talking heads such as Tariq Ali and Richard Gott as well as...
Iranian trade unionist Mansour Osanloo has been arrested again. Osanloo is president of the trade union of Workers of the Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company, and was only released on bail in August after a long campaign of intimidation by Iranian police and state security agents that has seen him and...
Review of Tariq Ali, Pirates of the Caribbean, Pluto 2006
Tariq Ali is a prominent man of the left who long ago gave up on the working class movement and on socialism. As he expresses it in this book, it is no longer possible to be “a man of 1917” (p.3)
His “street fighting years” far behind him...
Coca-Cola workers in Venezuela have seized the factories where they work and are preventing distribution trucks from leaving in a bid to force the company to pay out agreed-upon compensation to ex-workers.
Venezuelanalysis has a useful article on the dispute.
According to International Viewpoint the People’s Democratic Party (PRD) in Indonesia is about to form a new political party. At the end of November, the National Liberation Party of Unity, or PAPERNAS will hold its founding congress.
Of particular interest in the article are comments on the...
The Fidel Castro Handbook by George Galloway is a hagiography about one of the last grand Stalinist autocrats by one of its most loquacious apologists.
It is the modern equivalent of the biography of Josef Stalin by Albanian tankie Enver Hoxha.
The book has the overtones of an extended obituary...
You can guess how bad John Rees’ new book, Imperialism and Resistance is from the first page, where George Galloway is described as “simply the most implacable and eloquent opponent of imperialism I know”. (2006 p.xi)
Rees is the new pope of the SWP, establishing himself since Tony Cliff’s death...
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