The 2013 mobilisation of Mexican teachers – a key opportunity to radicalise the movement

Since late July 2013, an important and radical sector of Mexican’s National Teachers Union has staged massive protests and called for a sectorial strike that, even if many times interrupted and not followed by the majority of the Trade Union, has shaken the ground in the country.

As an immediate response to a constitutional educational reform proposed by the government and approved by a multi-party coalition in the Parliament, this mobilisation also shows an increasing discontent towards the political system and its economic foundations. The reform, that in substance is more a labour “reform” along the lines of labour flexibility and weakening of traditional unions, is only one of many in the neoliberal agenda of the Mexican state, and it shows the determination of Mexican capitalism to prevail over organised labour.

However, after four months of continuous mobilisation, this sector of the union did not achieve a strong alliance with other sectors of the working class and has been partially defeated on the political front by the promulgation, almost without changes, of the original draft of the reform. As if this were not enough, the state, supported by an oligopolistic bourgeois media and its own institutions, has fomented anger and groundless criticism against trade unionism in particular and social protest in general. The rank and file of the mobilised sector witnessed a growing gap between themselves and their leadership, and between their leadership and the leadership of their potential political ally, the Movement for National Regeneration (MORENA), on its way to becoming the more radical party on the left.

This article offers an overview of the situation, clarifying why the mistakes of the leadership and the chosen political strategy have been crucial to explaining the standstill – although not yet a complete defeat – of the movement so far. [Note: This article was written in early November]

Historical context

After a progressive bourgeois revolution at the beginning of the XX century, the Mexican state consolidated its political strength on the basis of a crony and corporatist structure. During the 1940s, the so called phase of “institutionalisation of the revolution”, the Teachers’ Union (Sindicato Nacional de los Trabajadores de la Educación, henceforth SNTE) achieved an important degree of operational autonomy, but at the cost of renouncing its political autonomy. In exchange for votes and political support and stability for the state, the SNTE would keep a strict control over the teachers’ contracts and positions, would concentrate all fees paid by teachers without any kind of control (either from the government or from the workers themselves) and would be the only body responsible for the selection, admission, evaluation and promotion of teachers at the national level –and under such lack of transparency, evaluation was discarded.

The union’s independence, strength and access to resources would not be negative if it were not because of its own anti-worker approach. As opposed to genuine workers’ organisations, built on the basis of class struggle and with the clear task of defending the achievements of workers’ political mobilisations, the SNTE was created from the top by the bourgeois state with the aim of controlling and co-opting a section of the working class. Therefore, since its birth the SNTE’s leadership has openly been an administrative appendix of the state: bureaucratic positions have been filled on the basis of political allegiance and support for the government, allowing for an impressive accumulation of wealth at the top of the pyramid, as well as effective control over the masses through unequal and opaque distribution of job positions, housing credits and benefits, and political favours.

As part of the political crisis of the Mexican state in the late 1970s, which slowly modified but failed to destroy the basis of cronyism and political repression, the authoritative nature of the SNTE was put under question. The union’s leadership was not offering any consistent road towards union democracy, progressive policies regarding education, or at least some transparency in its finances –let alone any intention to become the spearhead of a workers’ movement.

In 1979, a bloc of the SNTE, made up of different branches of democratic teachers – mainly from the South of the country – set itself up within the trade union as an opposition to the bureaucratic and state-led leadership of the SNTE. Thus, the National Teachers’ Coordination was born (Coordinadora Nacional de los Trabajadores de la Educación, henceforth CNTE). The CNTE fought strongly against the SNTE leadership and built up strongholds in many rural areas of Mexico, dedicating economic and political resources to the construction of a national struggle, first against the Union’s national leadership and then against the “neoliberal” policies of the Mexican state during the 1980s. In 1989 the CNTE lived its golden moments: after calling a successful national strike, it defenestrated the SNTE’s leadership and won a substantial pay rise for teachers of the Southern, mostly poor regions of Mexico.

But the CNTE made numerous mistakes during the following years. Instead of pushing forward a radical programme after the success of the national strike of 1989, the CNTE accepted to negotiate with the state and the SNTE to determine the new leadership (still controlled by the bureaucratic apparatus). Also, the CNTE decided to stay within the structure of the SNTE and limited itself to being “a dissident faction” without, however, radically challenging the policies and procedures of the union. Under these conditions, a de facto autonomy from the SNTE, but also co-optation by the state, was easily achieved. The so called democratic leadership of the CNTE started to follow very similar crony dynamics of the SNTE at local levels (especially in the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero): to this day it controls, distributes and sells jobs, and distributes workers’ benefits and political favours. The increasing corruption of the top leadership has translated into a widening gap between it and the CNTE’s rank and file[1].

What was the present strike about?

For over 30 years now that Mexican governments have followed policies of counter-reform aimed at moving from a more state-supervised capitalism – with a historically small and selective welfare state – towards a fully market-based and strong finance capitalism. During the 1980s and1990s over 800 public enterprises were privatised and numerous labour “reforms” were introduced to reduce the legal responsibilities of the state towards workers. In late 2012 a labour reform was approved by all major parties (including the PRD, a left of centre political party that eagerly follows an openly bourgeois programme), which has had a strange outcome, even from a liberal point of view. On the one hand it has fully liberalised the labour markets to the point that independent unionism is hardly recognised at all and virtually no legal limits exist on outsourcing, among other practices. On the other hand, it has preserved the corporatist and corrupt structures of traditional unions that have always pledged allegiance to federal governments.

In the education system, the packet of reforms implies that a system of wage related productivity, based almost exclusively on efficiency, will be implemented to evaluate teachers. Although it is clear that a mechanism of evaluation is much needed – given the extremely poor state of Mexican education – it should be organised and planned by workers and teachers, not by a coalition of technocrats and union bureaucrats. This means that in such an economically unequal and culturally diverse country, the process of assessment would be unified, but would inevitably become unfair and unequal. The reform also foresees a weakening of traditional labour rights, such as full-time and permanent contracts, sick-pay and pensions and, most of all, the right to set up independent trade unions outside the corporatist structure. The SNTE is perhaps the most important of these traditional unions… but the CNTE, its opposition, is directly threatened by these reforms.

Who are the SNTE and the CNTE today? The SNTE claims to be the largest union in Latin America (with over 1.3 million teachers for whom enrolment is compulsory). During the last 15 years, its leadership has negotiated with two different political parties at the national level –and with many more at local levels – to guarantee: a) the presence of the SNTE bureaucracy in the national Education Ministry, b) the continuity of the union’s lack of transparency and the non-enforcement of union democracy, and c) to mobilise votes in favour of those parties in exchange for the previous points[2]. However, as a result of a political manoeuvre, Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico’s new president since 2012, had Elba E. Gordillo, the leader of the SNTE since 1989, imprisoned after being accused of corruption and embezzlement. This confirmed that the new government is not ready to renounce its grip over the SNTE, especially because the newly appointed leadership immediately pledged allegiance to the government. But this political circus allowed the CNTE to radicalise and, again, move slightly away from the SNTE.

Today, the CNTE is composed of over 100,000 teachers, many of them “veterans” of previous mobilisations and strikes[3]. The organisation presents itself as a “mass organisation built by democratic teachers of the county, independent from the bourgeoisie and its state […], and a class front, since it is composed of workers that accept the universal principle of class struggle”. It defines its main goals as the “re-conquest of the SNTE for it to serve the interests of the masses and not those of the leadership”, and “the democratisation of the SNTE”. Following this openly radical declaration of principles, and from a tactical point of view, having decided not to split from the SNTE seems to have been the correct approach. However, given the extreme gap between the CNTE’s current leadership and the rank and file, exemplified by the negotiations it held with the government and the SNTE’s new leadership after the 1989 strike, by the huge existing wage differential and by the political co-optation – manifested through voting agreements with bourgeois political parties – the movement is going through a critical period. As we will discuss later, it is essential for the radicalised masses to develop a political strategy that could either replace the corrupt leadership of the CNTE (and then that of the SNTE), or join with other layers of the organised working class, something which has not happened under the current leadership.

Some of their demands are simply indefensible. Although the CNTE insists that it fight is against a constitutional reform aiming at privatising education, it shamelessly defends its own right to sell and inherit job positions. From a Marxist perspective, privatisation means the transformation of a good or a service into a commodity under the social dynamics of private property, i.e., something that can be tradable according to its exchange-value, and not necessarily through its use-value. Besides, the appropriation of the surplus that labour itself produces – and thereafter the exchange – occurs on an individual basis. In this case, individual teachers or union bureaucrats enriching themselves through the commodification of job positions and social benefits is in itself a process of privatisation. It is definitely different to the openly privatising aims of the constitutional reform, but it is nonetheless a dynamic through which the logic of capitalism strengthens its position in education. And this is indefensible.

Yet, this should not be considered as a reason to deny any kind of support for the CNTE. On the contrary: it is the leadership that perpetuates these dynamics of accumulation and privatisation, and even if individual teachers might benefit from it, they are still a minority among the masses and once the whole organisation shifts to the left, these corrupts individuals will be marginalised. Some critics on the centre-left and even of the ultra-left have argued that since some demands of the CNTE are unacceptable, the whole organisation should be condemned.

Our comrades from La Izquierda Socialista in Mexico understand that this is not the way forward, and this for at least three fundamental reasons: the strength of the movement (real or potential); its potential capacity to ally with other sectors of the working class; and the analytical process that we need to follow to understand that the CNTE is going through a phase of radicalisation of the rank and file versus the reaction of the leadership.

The CNTE’s strength: Apart from its membership of over 100,000 teachers, the recent mobilisation of the CNTE in Mexico City (which became a full-time sit-in in one of the city’s squares) was enriched by the presence of members from other semi-independent trade unions, such as the electricity workers of the SME, some sectors of the student movement and a few organisations within MORENA. Although the full leadership of MORENA was very quiet about CNTE’s mobilisation, some of its sectors responded, because they understood that, in the final analysis, it was a common struggle against privatisation advanced by the bourgeois state, and that it is not only about education, but also about the very nature of the economy in general. The real strength of the CNTE lies therefore in an understanding of these processes, not in the limited defence of one or other of its prerogatives.

Who are the allies? The answer to this question should be straightforward, but unfortunately it is not. An important sector of the former elite of the PRD has split and is trying to build a new political party on the basis of a nationwide political movement (MORENA). This leadership, spearheaded by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, twice defeated in past presidential elections, has always presented a contradictory position between progressive and conservative politics and tactics. Today, when it comes to uniting and opposing the constitutional reforms on the basis of a critical socialist programme, López Obrador and the leadership of MORENA have stepped aside, have denied direct support for the CNTE and have concentrated themselves on another politico-economic issue: the constitutional energy reform. The conservative mentality of López Obrador (incapable of developing a programme of genuine transformation and simply limiting himself to opposing changes to existing progressive aspects of the Mexican State) is weakening the broad movement, but MORENA’s rank and file should stand up as a strong ally of the CNTE’s progressive masses by opposing its bureaucratic leadership. MORENA’s 3.5 million members are, therefore, the clearest ally: neither autonomist organisations in Mexican rural areas nor small independent unions in the industrial sector expressed open support for the teachers’ mobilisation.

But this is also the CNTE’s fault: by merely criticising MORENA as a reformist organisation, the leadership of the CNTE has avoided any strong political contact. The irony is that this is not a proclamation made by the masses of the movement, but by an already co-opted leadership: some journalists suggest that the CNTE’s leadership is closely linked to the PRD. Therefore, by being radical in words they try to discredit MORENA.

The masses-leadership divide: At one of the high points of the mobilisation in early September, it was reported in many newspapers that the masses of the CNTE were starting to criticise the leadership for not informing them about the outcome of its negotiations with the government. Discontent has grown stronger among the ranks of the movement and mistrust towards the leadership is provoking two separate developments: the division and weakening of some militant sectors of the CNTE (especially in Guerrero), and on the other hand provoking a radical consciousness among other teachers’ groups about the importance of pushing a much more radical programme. Teachers from conservative states such as Guanajuato, Chihuahua and Querétaro, traditionally controlled by the bureaucratic structures of the SNTE, started to mobilise along the lines of the CNTE.

The importance of critical action before the opportunity is lost

After several months of protests in Mexico City, the strength of the CNTE appeared to be fading away, much to the delight of the mainstream media and the government alike. This was due to the lack of coherence between the pressure of the masses and the sectarian and corrupt attitude of the leadership. However, other areas of the country started to experience important mobilisations and this is extremely important for those traditionally conservative regions of Mexico. However, the coordination of a national movement cannot be articulated under the flags of the CNTE as it is now constituted, but this could change if the rank and file of the teachers’ movement were to decide to take control of their own organisation. An opposition within the CNTE has already emerged in some regions of the country and a coordinated alliance with other sectors of the working class should be built to resist attempts of political co-optation.

The CNTE’s leadership entered a process of negotiation with the government that proves its lack of links with the rank and file. MORENA’s leadership decided not to participate in any kind of nationwide movement. And the implementation of new labour laws is complicating the creation and political action of independent trade unions. The scenario, from this point of view, seems grim. But the hundreds of thousands of mobilised teachers, students and members of MORENA that took to the streets in each corner of the country showed that what is needed is a radically different leadership with a clear programme to defeat the government and the capitalist system that stands behind it. Without this, mobilisations will easily be defeated and the media will back the “negotiating abilities” of the government and the so-called “progressiveness” of its constitutional reforms. When a mass mobilisation, such as that of the teachers, reaches such a high level it is important to apply pressure on the leadership to change direction before the momentum is lost.