MEXICO CITY, October 2 — Thousands of students, teachers, and workers participated in massive marches to honor the memory and struggles of the 1968 anti-government protests. The Party participated in the marches in Mexico City and in Oaxaca, distributing hundreds of flyers and putting forward its communist politics.
The marches were marked by the strong presence of youth and it was heartening to see that women led the groups coming from rural schools. We face the great challenge of helping those young people abandon the reform struggles to join the fight for an egalitarian society, communism. The massive police presence indicated that the repression experienced in ‘68 will remain a threat as long as the same oppressive class is in power.
Students, organized in the National Strike Council, mobilized close to a million and a half people. One of their essential demands was to abolish the repressive state apparatus and the laws that supported it.
On October 2, 1968, a peaceful demonstration of several thousand students and workers were violently repressed. The business and financial oligarchy, represented by President Diaz Ordaz and the Governing Secretary Luis Echeverría, ordered the military, the police, and paramilitary groups to murder hundreds of protesters. When the demonstrators realized there wasn’t a legislative way to achieve the reforms they sought, many of those youth joined the guerrilla struggles of the 1970s.
By and large, the media distorted the truth about the movement, making it evident that they were just tools of the ruling class. Print media and television promote, to this day, the criminal idea that one should not protest, because “nothing ever changes.” But the historical struggles of ‘68 demonstrate that workers’ aspirations for freedom can only be accomplished if we change the social and economic system in which we live. That was one of its more important contributions.
Thousand of students, who were part of the movement in ‘68, found organization and inspiration in the communist movement of those days. Militant left-wing organizations were part of the leadership. Capitalism was still expanding then. However students and workers participated in great popular movements around the world.
Currently, the essential demands of 1968 are still relevant, because power remains in the hands of the social class that massacred those protesters. If we workers don’t take power we achieve nothing. Eventually, the system takes back all the reforms that we win. Even if we manage to take power away from the bourgeoisie, we must also eliminate capitalist ideas and practices, to prevent what happened in the Soviet Union, where, by maintaining wages and commodity production it created the basis for capitalism to return. Reforming the system won’t work; it has to be destroyed.
One of the motivators of the struggles of ‘68 was the defense of university autonomy. Currently, UNAM (Autonomous National University of Mexico) authorities are trying to create a climate of intimidation to extend the same police control affecting the country over university installations.
The restrictions that the movement of ‘68 forced on the repressive state apparatus and in favor of freedom of expression were lost in a couple of years during Calderon’s government. “Democracy” is only one face of the capitalist political system; fascism is always latent as the other violent and repressive side. For this reason, capitalism doesn’t work for the workers and must be abolished through revolutionary struggle.
During the last sixty years the police and military apparatus has been fortified; the so-called freedoms won in ‘68 and in other struggles, have been reduced due to the strict ideological control that the media, education, and culture exert over the working class. The emergence of mass movements such the UNAM Students Strike, the Zapatistas, Atenco, and Oaxaca never moved beyond the context of capitalist bourgeois legality and eventually were undermined or co-opted by the ruling class. Nevertheless, the potential for rebellions still remains; to make it a reality we must develop a revolutionary organization capable of guiding the working class towards state power. Only a communist party can fulfill that role, which we are building in the PLP.
The movement showed the unity and solidarity of workers in Mexico and around the world against the falsehoods promoted by the government that we are passive and self-centered. There is a potential to struggle and to live in a free and just collectivist society. Workers and student will turn this potential into a reality.
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