---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 2 May 1995 16:40:07 -0400
From:gsantos@academic.csubak.edu
Subject: Re: May Day
1. I thought Martha's sharing of the brief history of May Day from the PSN
cellars was as fine as sharing with us a vintage bottle of wine. Thanks.
2. In Mexico, where the capitalist-road version of the single-party state
reached its most elaborate & refined mode of corporativism, certainly in the
world's South, I grew up watching the fantastic spectacle every May Day, of
huge working-class parades displaying banner after banner eulogizing "LOS
MARTIRES DE CHICAGO". In Mexico City, since the days of Obregon (1920s), every
May Day, hundreds of thousands of workers marched pass the Presidential Palace,
waving their banners to the Sen~or Presidente in turn, in a ritual
re-affirmation of the social compact between rulers and ruled. Kind of like the
Soviet ritual, sans the military components (no superpower imperative here,
merely reaffirming the loyalty of workers to the *presidencialista* system).
Yesterday, for the *first* time since the 1920s, the ritual was *cancelled*.
The "official" union bosses, led by ninety-something Fidel Velazquez of the
CTM, declared to the media they were not doing the May Day parade, for "fear
the rank-&-file might get out of hand", post-devaluation, post-collapse of the
"proyecto neoliberal" of the Salinas Administration. Salinas in his best years
had had to endure the "mentadas de madre" (loosely "fuck yous, Mr. President")
of the increasingly worse-off workers forced to march past him ("acarreados"),
to the point that the TV monopoly network had to deeply censure the coverage of
the "celebration". Now, Zedillo send word to his "incondicional" Velazquez: no
parade. Instead, yesterday, Zedillo, "momiza", "dinosauros", and asorted
pre-selected "workers", celebrated May Day ... in a close-doors auditorium!
In the Zocalo, in front of the Presidential Palace, tens of thousands
marched, in defiance & protest to the rape of Mexico and the draconian policies
of the Zedillo Administration to "rescue" the foreign and domestic speculators
behind the whole mess. There were open confrontations with the riot police sent
to defend the empty palace.
The corporativist model is in its death throes, the neoliberal policies
rammed down the throat of the Mexican people now through a two-party alliance
(PRI-PAN) with dubious future. But the spell is broken. Open class warfare is
the order of the day. The Zapatistas awoke a lot of people not so much to
their miserable condition, but from their ruler's siren songs of NAFTA-yeske
"BIENESTAR PARA TU FAMILIA" (well-being for your family) just ahead, the PRI
slogan in last year's election, but from their own sense of powerlessness
against the enduring system of rule.
Whether the Mexican Left, better positioned today than ever before since the
times of Porfirio Diaz and the Flores Magon brothers, already in possession
of a party-vehicle, the PRD of Cardenas et al., with a superb & brilliant rural
offensive in Chiapas (with a brilliant young post-Cold War leadership), with
all the "objective" and "subjective" conditions it could dream of ever having
clearly unfolding (at least domestically) with such force and speed, rises to
the historic opportunity and makes full use of it to chart the "first
anti-systemic challenge of the XXI Century", as the Mexican Revolution was for
this century, is an open question. (phew... what a mouthfull!)
I just hope that if and when it does, in today's globalized conditions, it
won't become contained, "frozen", and eventually converted into another model
of peripheral capitalist "development", as the first challenge did!
Now, repeat after me the slogan these days in Mexico City: "Todos Somos
Marcos!"
G. Santos