soC!: No. 647 ~X-523 7June 1996 exico: Fight Austeritv­ Mobilize Workers Power! m U> 1J III S ()o Hundreds of thousands of workers by striking teachers, seriously injuring marched through the streets of Mexico at least 40. And earlier in the month, City with trade-union and leftist ban­ Javier Elorriaga and Sebastian Entzin ners on May Day last month, filling the were given prison sentences of 13 years city's huge central plaza, the Z6calo, to and six years respectively for alleged ties overflowing. The mammoth turnout, a to the EZLN. half million or more, was a sharp Washington's hand is clearly visible challenge to the Institutional Revolu­ in the current wave of repression coming tionary Party (PRI) government of Pres­ down on Mexico's working people. The ident Ernesto Zedillo and the hidebound Mexican army's bloody massacres in corporatist Confederation of Mexican Chiapas were carried out with weapons Workers (CTM) which serves its inter­ supplied by the U.S., and recently the ests. For the second year in a row, CTM PRI government agreed to an unprece­ head Fidel Velazquez, the 96-year-old­ dented pact to have Mexican soldiers charro (bureaucrat) who has run the fed­ trained at American military bases, as eration with an iron hand for more than part of a scheme for joint policing of the 50 years, had not only canceled the tra­ border. Meanwhile, the Clinton admin­ ditional official unio.n rally but had istration has militarized large parts of called for a ban on any labor demonstra­ the border and drastically stepped up its tions marking May Day, the international racist deportations of Latin American workers holiday. Yet Velazquez' dictate immigrants. was defied not only by a large number From the outset, the International of independent unions, but as well by Lopez Mills/AP Communist League has denounced ten unions traditionally allied with the Mexico City: Half a million workers pour into city's central plaza on May Day, NAFTA as an imperialist "free trade" PRI regime. defying ban by pro-government corporatist labor chiefs (top); May 23 rape of Mexico. Against the racist pro­ The massive outpouring of Mexican demonstration of 7,000 striking teachers brutally attacked by police (above). tectionist policies of the U.S. labor working people on May Day reflected bureaucrats, who rail against Mexican widespread and growing unrest among workers "stealing American jobs," we broad sectors of the population, as the settlements averaging half the rate of regime has responded by unleashingdra­ fight for common class struggle by work­ imposition of the North AmeriCan Free inflation. In April, the government ap­ conian repression against Mexican ers in Mexico and the U.S. The key is Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994- proved a 12 percent rise in the minimum workers and peasants, from the brutal forging internationalist vanguard parties coming on top of austerity attacks wage (to less than $3 a day), while at army invasion to suppress a rebellion by to lead the working class in struggle imposed at the behest of the world bank­ the same time raising the price of Zapatista (EZLN) peasant rebels in the against U.S. imperialism and all the cap­ ers' cartel, the International Monetary government-controlled staples like milk southern state of Chiapas beginning in italist rulers. Fund (IMF)-has led to a cataclysmic and com tortillas by up to 30 percent. 1994 to the imprisonment of leaders of The following article is translated, assault on living standards. Since the This in tum has provoked a rising tide the independent SUTAUR bus workers from Espartaco No. 8 (Spring-Summer Wall Street-engineered crash of the peso of labor combativity, with the month of union in Mexico City last year. On May 1996), newspaper of our comrades of in December 1994, real wages have May registering the highest increase in 23, Mexico City police unleashed an the Grupo Espartaquista de Mexico plummeted by over 35 percent, with pay strike activity in the recent period. The orgy of violence against a demonstration (GEM), section of the ICL. ~~ It is in the interests of the whole work­ .... ing 'class to demand immediate and a unconditional freedom for all activists I") and fighters for the exploited and a ...... Rich~rd Pipes: Exorcising oppressed who are being held in the jails co of the bourgeois state! When the gov­ ~ ernment of Ernesto Zedillo jailed eleven I'­ N the Russian Revolution leaders of SUTAUR last year and sub­ 11'\ N ---------------------SEEPAGE8---~----------------- sequently imprisoned, along with others, continued on page 12 .... Letters Moscow patronage of Politburo member Anastasy 17 May 1996 Mikoyan. To the Editor, In his final years, Vrachev's primary We have just learned that Ivan concern was to use the opening allowed Yakovlevich Vrachev passed away on 22 by Gorbachev's glasnost to record for December 1995 at the age of 97. He was history his unique knowledge of certain the last living link to the Bolshevik lead­ truths buried for decades under moun­ ership of the October Revolution and to tains of Stalinist lies. In an interview the central cadre of Trotsky's Left Oppo­ with comrades of the International Com­ sition. Like a number of other Oppo­ munist League (ICL) in 1990, Vrachev Ivan Vrachev (far left) with his family in Moscow, 1991. sitionists, in 1929 Vrachev renounced told us: his Trvtskyist views. Other prominent "To tell the truth of the events, that is nographer, a tape recorder, text that I negotiations with German imperialism. my credo. If the Institute of Marxism­ could verify. Once dead, all this will be It is another thing altogether to hear the capitulators were nevertheless executed; Leninism was interested like you are lost. There are things that I alone know." Vrachev survived the purges of the words of Lenin and Trotsky, reverberat­ interested, they would provide for me the When we first met him in 1990, Ivan 1930s, he believed, because of the conditions wherein I would have a ste- ing with all their conviction, related by Yakovlevich was in robust health and an actual participant in the first days of perfectly lucid. But he lived less than Bolshevik power. two years after the death on 8 February During the Civil War, Vrachev served Jacobinism and Communism 1994 of his second wife, Rebecca on the Southern fronts in various lead­ Mikhailovna Boguslavskaya, to whom ing army and party posts, eventually The program of communism-for a just he had been married for 25 years. She and egalitarian society based on the over­ becoming Chief Political Commissar of was the daughter of Mikhail Solo­ the Red Army of Transcaucasia. The Red coming of economic scarcity---has its roots monovich Boguslavsky, who was a Jew­ in the rational humanism of the Enlighten­ Army played a key role in extending pro­ ish working-class fighter in the 1905 letarian power to the region, defeating ment. The Great French Revolution, espe­ revolution, a delegate to the October cially under the Jacobin dictatorship of imperialist-backed nationalist forces in 1917 Second Congress of Soviets in Azerbaijan and Armenia and a pro­ 1793-94, sought to realize the most radical Petrograd at which the workers seizure principles of Enlightenment thought under imperialist Menshevik government in of power was proclaimed, a prominent Georgia. The consolidation of Soviet the banner of "liberty, equality, fraternity." Soviet government leader in the Ukraine But by the late 19th century, capitalism rule in economically backward and eth­ TROTSKY LENIN and Russia during the period of 1917- had outlived its progressive period and its nically kaleidoscopic Transcaucasia and 1924 and a prominent supporter himself Central Asia was based on the combina­ ideologues were denouncing Jacobinism, which they identified with "red revolution." of the Left Opposition at one time. In his seminal work laying out the theory of permanent revolution for backward tion of proletarian social ~revolution in Representatives of the ICL were for­ the urban centers, agrarian revolution in Russia, written after the defeat of the 1905 Russian Revolution and vindicated by tunate enough to be guests on several the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Leon Trotsky paid homage to the historic achieve­ the countryside, and the struggle for full occasions in the Vrachev's Moscow equality for all nationalities and ethnic ments of Jacobinism, while indicating that its program of revolutionary bourgeois home. Their apartment was always bus­ democracy had been transcended by the proletariat's struggle for socialist revolution. groups. Where today Yeltsin's slaughter tling with family and pets and filled with in Chechnya reduces whole cities to rub­ In the heroic period of French history we saw a bourgeoisie, enlightened, active, warm hospitality. The last time I visited ble, the birth of soviet power in the as yet not aware of the contradictions of its own position, upon whom history had Ivan Vrachev was in September, just region was based on a smychka (alliance) imposed the task of leadership in the struggle for a new order, not only against the three months prior to his death. of the predominantly Russian oil refin­ outworn institutions of France but also against the reactionary forces of the whole In keeping with their wishes, Ivan ery workers of Grozny with the pro­ of Europe. The bourgeoisie, consistently, in all its factions, regarded itself as the Vrachev is buried in his family's plot in Soviet rising of the landless mountain leader of the nation, rallied the masses to the struggle, gave them slogans and dictated the Danskoy Crematory and his wife is people, the Chechens. their fighting tactics. Democracy bound the nation together with a political ideology ...