The newly formed “Left, Independent, Anti-Capitalist and Anti-Patriarchal Bloc” in Mexico issued its first statement since the June 2 presidential elections, joining the wave of triumphalism promoted by the pro-government media and official circles following the victory of Claudia Sheinbaum, the hand-picked successor of incumbent President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (known as AMLO).
The Bloc was first announced on May 27, the same week of the vote, and is led by a handful of tendencies that broke with Trotskyism decades ago. This includes the Workers Revolutionary Party (PRT) and League for Socialist Unity (LUS), both claiming to be sections of the Pabloite United Secretariat; the Movement of Socialist Workers (MTS), section of the so-called Trotskyist Fraction led by the Argentine Socialist Workers Party (PTS); and the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), the section of the International Workers Unity (UIT-CI). Both the Trotskyist Fraction and UIT-CI have their roots in and uphold the legacy of Argentine revisionist Nahuel Moreno.
While pretending to be an “alternative” to the ruling party in Mexico, the Movement of National Regeneration (MORENA) led by Lopez Obrador, all these formations have a long history of promoting “left” illusions in AMLO and his administration. The Bloc merely provides a new front to better continue this role.
In its statement issued on Tuesday, six weeks after the vote, the Bloc can hardly contain its enthusiasm, writing in one statement of a “total victory,” a “great triumph expressing the aspirations of millions” and a “crushing vote,” etc. In a section that could have been written by Sheinbaum’s campaign team, it adds:
The result shows that AMLO’s thought and proposals during his six-year term—another expression of the progressivism that has emerged in Latin America in recent years—have managed to become ideologically hegemonic in society and lay the foundations for the consolidation of the changes in the political regime that Claudia Sheinbaum is committed to continue.
While pointing to a few limitations, it proceeds to exaggerate the effect of AMLO’s social programs and “progress on labor rights.” The meager cash transfers to students and the elderly and the increases to the minimum wage not only “benefited millions of Mexican families,” according to the Bloc, but were so significant so as to “dynamize the domestic market.”
Lopez-Obradorism is described as “progressive” six times, adding that as a matter of definition it is characterized by “welfare policies.”
The statement takes most of its formulations from an earlier article by Edgard Sánchez, co-founder and longtime leader of the Pabloite PRT, who clearly drafted the statement. AMLO’s social policies are not “simply a clientelistic practice,” he writes, but “a more comprehensive policy as they effectively introduce new social rights.”
Sánchez writes that contrary to his predecessors, under AMLO, “militarization is not reduced to new Tlatelolcos, but rather to the empowerment of the armed forces in the State apparatus…” In other words, there is no danger today that the government will order the military to repeat a massacre of hundreds of student demonstrators like the one that took place in Tlatelolco in 1968.
The Bloc’s founding statement, which was presented at the Havana Café in Mexico City in May by Isabel Vega of the MTS and Sánchez of the PRT, also celebrates the “new mechanisms for labor justice” under Lopez Obrador, referring to a Labor Reform that facilitates the election of so-called “independent” unions vetted by the government in order to replace the discredited and gangster-ridden bureaucracies. In the new statement, the Bloc adds casually that it was a “labor reform promoted by the USMCA [US-Mexico-Canada] trade agreement and imperialism as an opportunity to achieve union democracy ... from which new independent unions emerged in industrial and other trades.”
The most recent statement, moreover, makes an appeal to “trade union organizations that claim to be democratic and in opposition, the majority of which explicitly supported the ruling party in these elections, to return to the path of independent organization and mobilization.”
In a post-election article, the MTS similarly writes that MORENA’s ideological success was greatly aided by “the role of trade union and political leaders, who got out of their way to encourage solidarity and coordination of the emerging [class] conflicts, and aligned themselves with the government,” including “the so-called democratic trade unions.”
Despite not directly advocating a vote for Sheinbaum and MORENA, the documents of the Bloc have the overwhelming intention and effect of reinforcing what they describe as the “ideological hegemony” of the ruling bourgeois party over the working class.
Their fascination with AMLO is only slightly more veiled than during the 2018 elections. For instance, a PRT statement published before the elections by International Viewpoint advocated “an effort to seize the opening that a victory by AMLO could provide to build a united workers’ movement to the left of his party.”
Shortly after the victory of AMLO, such a regrouping was attempted during several “Socialist Forums.” During the July 7, 2018 forum, Jaime González of the LUS said, “We congratulate the people who voted, we think that this avalanche of votes is truly an extraordinary event.” Sánchez of the PRT said “Yes, we are very happy with that. It is a triumph of the popular struggle.”
Manuel Aguilar Mora of LUS, who was presiding over the forum, compared the election of AMLO to a monumental change as large as the dissolution of the USSR. “The Mexican people, very stupid, very little politicized, very little aware, but what a beating it gave to the [former ruling parties] PRI and the PAN,” he added. He concluded with the following invitation:
The purpose of the forum process is that, it is made for that, for all those who have ideas and initiatives, for sectarians, for opportunists, for all those who want to see what kind of relationship we can have so that together we can move forward and at that moment stop being sectarians or opportunists, let’s do it.
In effect, the new Bloc is the concretization, six years later, of such a regrouping of national opportunists.
An unprincipled alliance
In its founding statement, the Bloc warns about the danger that future disillusionment in Sheinbaum will make power fall back into the hands of the traditional, right-wing parties or a far-right movement like that led by Argentine President Javier Milei.
In the same breath, however, the Bloc argues that it is following the model of the Argentine Left and Workers Front-Unity (FIT-U), without seeking to conciliate both positions. The FIT-U, which holds five seats in the Chamber of Deputies and has repeatedly received over a million votes, has become a platform for securing positions in politics, the trade unions, NGOs and academia in Argentina.
As the World Socialist Web Site has extensively analyzed, the rise of Milei was due to the lack of a genuine left-wing alternative, with the FIT-U consistently promoting illusions in, and even “fronts” with, the Peronist politicians and trade union bureaucrats responsible for destroying living standards, social programs and jobs by implementing IMF diktats.
Both coalitions respond to entirely nationalist concerns and are not founded on any principled agreements at all. On the one hand, the Morenoites (as in Nahuel Moreno) of the UIT-CI, which the Mexican MAS and Argentine Socialist Left (IS) belong to, have consistently backed the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, raising funds and sending fighters to the fascist-led Ukrainian army. The Pabloite United Secretariat has also backed NATO propaganda in support of the war. The PTS-MTS partners, meanwhile, claim to oppose both Russia and NATO, while other forces in their coalitions openly back the Putin regime.
The Bloc also conceals the historical record of the groups within it, which have participated in numerous such coalitions with disastrous results for the consciousness of the working class. The Mexican PRT itself was formed as one such coalition after the 1976 elections. At the time, the Pabloite United Secretariat recognized two Mexican sections, the Socialist League aligned with Nahuel Moreno and the Internationalist Communist Group (GCI).
In 1976, the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) blocked other candidacies and won unopposed fearing that any opposition could further galvanize a mass upsurge of student and worker protests across Mexico against inequality and the autocratic PRI regime.
In this explosive context, all Pabloite factions blocked an independent struggle for power for the working class. The GCI initially called for a “front of a revolutionary left” and then for a “national front based on an anticapitalist program.” The Morenoite Socialist League established an electoral coalition with the Stalinist Communist Party, which had played a key role in the assassination of Leon Trotsky only a generation earlier, and presented the Stalinist Valentín Campa as their presidential candidate (although he wasn’t able to get certified) along with joint slates for Congress. The GCI then also endorsed Campa.
Only three years earlier, in a similar coalition, the Pabloites in the Revolutionary Left Movement in Chile subordinated an emerging revolutionary movement of workers to the Popular Front under Salvador Allende and the Stalinists, politically disarming workers before the 1973 military coup and subsequent dictatorship under Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
Later that year, the GCI briefly changed its name to a “League” or LCI, before joining the Morenoite Socialist League to establish the PRT. The new party’s First Congress Documents state tellingly that “the party must start its activity, agitation, etc., from the level of consciousness at which the masses find themselves, however low it may be …”
The Morenoites would be kicked out of the PRT in 1979, after the Mandel-led United Secretariat backed the repression and deportation of Morenoites under the new bourgeois Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The Morenoites then established the Socialist Workers Party (POS), the predecessor of today’s MAS. Among other such moves, the POS would again join a coalition with the Stalinists in the Unified Socialist Mexican Party (PSUM).
Another key turning point for the Mexican Pabloites was the liquidation of the majority of the PRT into the new bourgeois, center-left Party for Democratic Revolution (PRD) led by Cuahtémoc Cárdenas and AMLO in 1989. This turn was led by Edgard Sánchez, while a minority led by Manuel Aguilar left and established LUS in 1996. By 2000, Aguilar would agree to run as the PRT presidential candidate. All these twists and turns were carried out on the basis of immediate tactical considerations based on horse-trading over positions in bourgeois politics, without any subsequent evaluation.
Despite such differences in their past and today, Enrique Gómez of the Morenoite MAS said during the presentation of the new “Left Bloc” in 2024: “There are no substantial differences in the bloc.”
These social layers are indifferent to the disastrous consequences for workers of the intensification of capitalist exploitation, the subordination of the country to war plans against Russia and China, the detention of hundreds of thousands of migrants by Mexican troops, or even the threat of dictatorship and fascism.
Only such an attitude can explain the labeling as “progressive” of Lopez Obrador, a stooge of Mexican billionaires like Carlos Slim, the imperialist governments of Trump, Biden and Trudeau and the brutally repressive Mexican military.
These pseudo-left elements hope to advance their careers by betraying workers through the trade unions and politics at the behest of imperialism. These forces do not fear the capitalist state because they do not want to overthrow it and do not see it as an enemy at all.
Their main appeals read like a job application to the new Sheinbaum government.
The Bloc’s founding statement makes the broadest invitation to “all those sectors that share the need to build a political alternative for the working class, women, sex-gender dissidences, native peoples and all oppressed people in our country.”
Combined with radical phraseology like the need to “impose” demands on the government and taking “to the streets,” the perspective presented is merely one of putting pressure on the Sheinbaum administration. The Bloc presses, in particular, for a greater budget for women’s rights issues, above all against “gender and patriarchal violence” and to overcome the gender wage gap, as well as for election reform to facilitate the participation of smaller parties.
The main leaders, Sanchez of the PRT and Luis Gonzalez and Manuel Aguilar of LUS, are all part of the 1968 generation of middle-class student protesters. These former student leaders made their peace with capitalism long ago. Their “anti-capitalism” is one influenced by anti-Marxist thought, including existentialism, the Frankfurt School and other predecessors of postmodernism, based on discomforts with capitalist society related to lifestyle, sexuality and other subjective and personal issues. Above all, what unites these forces is hostility to Marxism.
Their new Bloc is nothing but a new trap for the working class and radicalized youth. Its deliberate purpose is to undermine class consciousness and subordinate workers to layers of the petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie.
Revolutionaries, as stressed by Leon Trotsky in the founding document of the Fourth International, The Transitional Program, don’t start from the existing consciousness of the working class, which merely means a willing adaptation to the illusions in capitalist governments and institutions like AMLO and the union bureaucracies. The program “must reflect society as it is and not the backwardness of the working class. It is an instrument to overcome and vanquish the backwardness.”
Today, the threat of war and fascistic reaction is growing the world over and it can only be stopped by the independent and international mobilization of the working class for power and socialist revolution. This requires the building of sections in Mexico and across Latin America of the International Committee of the Fourth International, the genuine world Trotskyist movement, through an unyielding struggle against all pseudo-left opportunists and their fake “anti-capitalism.”