Workers Vanguard No. 1032
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18 October 2013
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Defend the Nationalized Energy Industry!-Mexican Government Drives to Privatize Oil
The following article was translated and excerpted from
Espartaco No. 39 (September 2013). Espartaco is published by the
Grupo Espartaquista de México, section of the International Communist League
(Fourth Internationalist).
Since the 1980s, the PRI [currently ruling Institutional
Revolutionary Party] and PAN [National Action Party] governments have been set
on privatizing anything in state hands that can be sold—from
bicycle and textile factories to strategic industries such as railways and
telecommunications. But the real jackpot that the U.S. imperialists (and some
domestic magnates) have been waiting for is the oil industry, nationalized by
Lázaro Cárdenas in 1938. Although the 2008 energy reform act opened the door to
private participation in limited areas of the energy industry, no government had
dared, until now, to push for privatization. This is a potentially explosive
question, since large masses of Mexican workers and poor regard the oil
expropriation as a historic gain, deeply connected with their heartfelt
democratic aspirations, particularly national emancipation. Tens of thousands
have been taking to the streets in protests initiated by Andrés Manuel López
Obrador and the PRD [Party of the Democratic Revolution].
The proposal by [President Enrique] Peña Nieto would essentially
open up the whole process related to oil and gas to national and foreign private
capital, from the exploration and extraction of fossil fuels and the processing
of natural gas to the sale of electricity. Unlike what happens with the service
contracts that are currently permitted, this reform would allow private capital
to keep the profits (despite not being legal owners of the natural resources). A
proposal put forward by the PAN would likewise amount to the privatization of
the industry. The government and the PRI claim that its reform is not
privatization because [state-owned oil company] Pemex will not be
sold— “not even a screw.” But basically, all of its operations
will be opened for private investment!
As revolutionary Marxists, we defend the nationalized energy
industry as an elementary measure of neocolonial Mexico’s defense against
imperialism. As Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky—co-leader
with Lenin of the 1917 Russian Revolution—wrote in defense of the
oil expropriation against the schemes and attacks of the British imperialists,
who were affected the most by the nationalization:
“The oil magnates are not rank-and-file capitalists, not ordinary
bourgeoisie. Having seized the richest natural resources of a foreign country,
standing on their billions and supported by the military and diplomatic forces
of their metropolis, they strive to establish in the subjugated country a regime
of imperialistic feudalism, subordinating to themselves legislation,
jurisprudence, and administration. Under these conditions expropriation is the
only effective means of safeguarding national independence and the elementary
conditions of democracy.”
— “Mexico and British Imperialism” (June 1938)
For a Workers and Peasants Government!
As Trotsky himself explained, “The expropriation of oil is neither
socialism nor communism.” Although it raises an obstacle to imperialist
dominance, the nationalization of oil or other strategic industries does not
lead, in and of itself, to genuine national emancipation. We Spartacists base
ourselves on Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, confirmed by the Russian
Revolution, which maintains that the bourgeoisie of backward countries like
Mexico, no matter how radical its political representatives might sound, is
incapable of solving the historic tasks associated with the bourgeois-democratic
revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. The problems of political democracy,
agrarian revolution and independent national development can be solved only
under the class rule of the proletariat, through socialist revolution.
The working class in power cannot stop at these democratic tasks
but must immediately move forward to the socialist tasks—the
expropriation of the bourgeoisie as a class and the establishment of a
collectivized, planned economy. The revolution must be extended internationally.
The survival of the revolution in Mexico and its subsequent development toward
socialism is unthinkable, economically and militarily, without the help of the
multiracial U.S. proletariat. A workers revolution in Mexico would give a
formidable impulse to revolution north of the Río Bravo. The proletariat in the
U.S. must make its power felt in joint class struggle with its Mexican brothers
and sisters against the designs of the capitalist rulers.
Break with the Bourgeois Nationalists!
Imperialist penetration has developed a powerful proletariat in
Mexico. The national bourgeoisie, fearful of the working class and tied by a
thousand threads to its imperialist masters, zigzags between these two poles at
different times. As Trotsky explained, to the extent that the capitalist
government tries to offer some resistance to excessive imperialist demands, it
must lean on the proletariat. This was the case back in the 1930s with Lázaro
Cárdenas, who stimulated national capitalist development through some
nationalizations and secured the support of workers and peasants in the face of
imperialist bullying. On the other hand, the governments in backward countries
that consider it unavoidable or more advantageous to walk hand in hand with
foreign capital destroy workers organizations and establish more or less
totalitarian regimes.
Until the 1980s, PRI governments after Cárdenas pursued, to a
greater or lesser extent, these nationalist politics. Mexican bourgeois
nationalists maintained relative stability in the imperialists’ backyard for
half a century through brutal repression against striking workers, the left,
union dissidents and rural guerrillas and, at the same time, granting
significant concessions to the working class and the peasantry and carrying out
some nationalizations. More recently, the Mexican rulers have been impelled by
the economic crisis, their own ideological inclinations and certainly the
counterrevolutionary destruction of the USSR in 1991-92—which
removed a global counterweight to U.S. imperialism—to open the
doors to unbridled plundering of the country by the imperialists. This was done
particularly but not exclusively through NAFTA, the treaty for the imperialist
rape of Mexico.
If there is something that Mexico’s recent history demonstrates, it
is that neoliberalism and populism are but two sides of the same coin. The PRD
and Morena [López Obrador’s Movement for National Regeneration] represent a
nationalist wing of the bourgeoisie which strives to return to some version of
the old PRI populism; these organizations serve the class interests of the
Mexican bourgeoisie, and through this agency, the interests of world
imperialism.
In any case, the PRD has a lot of gall posing as an opposition to
energy privatization. Last year this party, along with the PRI and PAN, signed
the “Pact for Mexico,” which includes pushing forward “the necessary reforms to
create a competitive environment for the economic activities of refining,
petrochemical processing and transportation of fossil fuels”—the
core of Peña Nieto’s reform. Now the PRD, which also lost face after its support
to the sinister education reform, has resurrected Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of
General Lázaro Cárdenas, to launch a campaign against privatization. [For more
on these issues, see “‘Pact for Mexico’: War on Workers, Poor,” WV No.
1019, 8 March.]
Government Hands Off the Oil Workers Union!
Privatization will also mean attacks on the oil workers union and
the labor gains of its members. Given the strategic nature of the oil industry
and the state monopoly, the oil workers union is the most powerful in the
country. The Economist magazine (10 August) declares that one of the
problems with Pemex is that “it has never been treated as a profit-making
company”; company revenues account for some 40 percent of the government’s
income instead of being reinvested. The same article complains that the “bloated
and pampered” union is a burden on the company because many workers cannot be
fired even when the wells they work have dried up. An article in Letras
Libres (September 2008) lamented: “Currently, union members at Pemex enjoy
the best contract of all public employees” and “are the only ones with their own
health care system, which currently includes dozens of doctors’ offices, 15
clinics and 22 hospitals.” Oil workers are also entitled to a bonus equaling 60
days’ wages as well as significant company support for renting, buying,
building, remodeling or repairing a house, among other benefits. These are gains
worth defending and extending!
Carlos Romero Deschamps, head of the union and also a PRI senator,
has avoided taking a clear position on Peña Nieto’s reform. What he made clear,
however, is that the union will “defend its rights through dialogue” and not by
mobilizing: “Unionized oil workers will not behave like the teachers in the
National Coordination of Education Workers (CNTE) when energy reform is taken
up” (El Economista, 21 August).
For the time being, the PRI does not seem keen on going after the
union on the eve of the vote on its reform. But neither the PAN nor the PRD nor
Morena misses any opportunity to demand state action against the union. PRD head
Jesús Zambrano declared that there can be no further development of the oil
industry “on the basis of the corruption underlying the quasi-state company’s
union” (La Jornada, 19 March). In fact, the demand “Out with Romero
Deschamps!” is part of Morena’s “energy proposal.”
Workers must oppose any intervention by the bourgeois state in the
unions. Romero Deschamps is undoubtedly a corrupt and gangster-like bureaucrat,
but the working class must clean its own house. As shown by the “Quinazo” and
the “Elbazo” [referring respectively to the incarceration of a long-serving
leader of the oil workers union and, earlier this year, the head of the SNTE
teachers union], state intervention in the basic defense organizations of the
working class can have no goal other than furthering state control over the
unions, if not their outright destruction. The capitalist state—at
its core made up of the police, the army, the prisons and the
courts—is a machine of systematic repression directed against all
the exploited and the oppressed. It operates at the service of the bourgeoisie
in order to keep the working class under submission and to secure capitalist
class rule. The state cannot be reformed to serve the interests of the working
class; it must be destroyed through socialist revolution and replaced by a
workers state that defends proletarian class rule.
The oil workers union, like other unions, is led by a
pro-capitalist bureaucracy that acts to defend its own privileges. The
bureaucracies that support the PRI generally stave off the membership through
the fist of repression, while those loyal to the PRD more often resort to
nationalist ideology to push class collaboration and illusions in the state. But
whatever their ideology or political differences, all of these bureaucracies beg
the state to be their protector and, frequently, their arbiter.
Trotsky’s program of permanent revolution is the alternative to
trusting in fantasies that the backward Mexican bourgeoisie, lackey of
imperialism, will be a vehicle for liberation. As communists, the Grupo
Espartaquista de México, together with our comrades throughout the International
Communist League, fight for an international socialist economy through new
October Revolutions around the world in order to end imperialism and every form
of exploitation and oppression.
Leon Trotsky
The Mexican Oil Expropriations
A Challenge to the British Labour Party
(April 1938)
Written: April 23, 1938.
First published: Forward, 7 May 1938.
Source: Socialist Appeal [New York], 14 May 1938, from the collection at the Holt Labor Library.
Translated: Daily Herald [London].
Transcription/HTML Markup: David Walters.
Copyleft: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 2004. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
First published: Forward, 7 May 1938.
Source: Socialist Appeal [New York], 14 May 1938, from the collection at the Holt Labor Library.
Translated: Daily Herald [London].
Transcription/HTML Markup: David Walters.
Copyleft: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 2004. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
The Editor,
Daily Herald,
London
Daily Herald,
London
Dear Sir:
In the vocabulary of all civilized nations there exists the word “cynicism.” As a classic example of brazen cynicism, the British government’ s defense of the interests of a clique of capitalist exploiters should be introduced into all encyclopedias. I am therefore not mistaken if I say that world public opinion awaits the voice of the British Labour Party regarding the scandalous role of British diplomacy in the question of the expropriation of the Eagle joint-stock oil company by the Mexican government.
The juridical side of the question is clear to a child. With the aim of exploiting the natural wealth of Mexico, the British capitalists placed themselves under the protection and at the same time under the control of Mexican laws and the Mexican authorities. No one compelled Messrs. Capitalists to do this, either by military force or through diplomatic notes. They acted entirely voluntarily and consciously. Now Mr. Chamberlain and Lord Halifax wish to force mankind into believing that the British capitalists have pledged themselves to recognize Mexican laws only within those limits where they find it necessary. Moreover, it accidentally occurs that the completely “impartial” interpretation of the Mexican laws by Chamberlain-Halifax coincides exactly with the interpretation of the interested capitalists.The British government cannot, however, deny that only the Mexican government and the Supreme Court of the country are competent to interpret the laws of Mexico. To Lord Halifax, who nourishes warm sympathies for the laws and courts of Hitler, the Mexican laws and courts may seem unjust. But who gave the British government the right to control the inner politics and legal procedure of an independent state? This question already contains part of the answer: the British government, accustomed to command hundreds of millions of colonial slaves and semislaves, is trying to fit those same methods also to Mexico. Having encountered courageous resistance, it instructs its lawyers hurriedly to invent arguments in which juridical logic is replaced by imperialist cynicism.
The economic and social side of the problem is as clear as its juridical side. The executive committee of your party would, in my opinion, act correctly if it created a special commission for studying what British, and in general foreign, capital has contributed to Mexico and what it has extracted. Such a commission could within a short period present to the British public the stunning balance sheet of imperialist exploitation!
A small clique of foreign magnates, in the full sense of the word, pumps out the living sap of Mexico as well as of a series of other backward or weak countries. The solemn speeches about foreign capital contributing “civilization,” about its assisting in the development of national economy, and so forth, are the sheerest Pharisaism. The question, in actuality, concerns plunder-ing the natural wealth of the country. Nature required many millions of years in order to deposit gold, silver, and oil in the subsoil of Mexico. The foreign imperialists wish to plunder these riches in the shortest possible time, making use of cheap labor power and the protection of their diplomacy and their fleet.
Visit any center of the mining industry: hundreds of millions of dollars, extracted by foreign capital from the earth, have given nothing, nothing whatever, to the culture of the country; neither highways nor buildings nor good development of the cities. Even the premises of the companies themselves often resemble barracks. Why, indeed, should one spend Mexican oil, Mexican gold, Mexican silver on the needs of faraway and alien Mexico, when with the profits obtained it is possible to build palaces, museums, theaters in London or in Monaco? Such are the civilizers! In the place of historical riches they leave shafts in the Mexican soil and ill health among the Mexican workers.
The notes of the British government refer to “international law.” Even irony powerlessly drops its hands in the face of this argument. About what kind of international law are we talking? Evidently about the law which triumphed in Ethiopia and to which the British government is now preparing to give its sanction. Evidently about that same law which the airplanes and tanks of Mussolini and Hitler are already announcing in Spain for the second year with the British government’ s invariable support.
The latter held endless conversations about the evacuation of foreign “volunteers” from Spain. Naive public opinion long thought this meant the halting of intervention by the foreign fascist bandits. Actually the British government demanded of Mussolini only one thing: that he remove his armies from Spain only after he guaranteed the victory of Franco. In this case, as in all others, the problem consisted not in defending “international law” or “democracy” but in safeguarding the interests of British capitalists in the Spanish mining industry from possible attempts on the part of Italy.
In Mexico, the British government carries on basically the same politics as in Spain – passively in relation to Spain, actively in Mexico. We are now witnessing the first steps of this activity. What will be its further development? No one can yet foretell. Chamberlain himself does not yet know. One thing we can affirm with assurance: the further development of the attempts of British imperialism against the independence of Mexico will to a great degree depend upon the conduct of the British working class. Here it is impossible to evade the issue by resort to indefinite formulas. Firm resoluteness is necessary to paralyze the criminal hand of imperialist violence. I therefore finish as I began: world public opinion awaits the firm voice of the British Labour Party!
P.S. – Several imperialist newspapers have attempted to represent me ... as the initiator of the expropriation. Such nonsense does not even deserve refutation. I, a private person, enjoying the hospitality of this country, have learned only from the papers all the stages of the struggle of the foreign capitalists against the Mexican laws. But this was completely sufficient to form an opinion. To state this opinion aloud is the elementary duty of every participant in the liberating struggle of the proletariat.
Former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden had a statement read at the “Stop Watching Us” Rally against mass surveillance in Washington,DC. It was read by Justice Department whistleblower and attorney with the Government Accountability Project, Jesselyn Radack.
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