Copyright CSR / ONPP

The history of the Mexican socialist left, in the last three decades, has been more of divisions or exciting unifications that almost always end in new divisions that discourage militancy and contribute to its deepening fragmentation. If, due to some unusual circumstance, the militants or cadres of all the organisations of the Mexican socialist and communist left met together at this time, it would be difficult for us to fill a room of 1,500 people in a country of more than 120 million inhabitants.

The common denominator that explains the failure of these unification processes has been the lack of socialist strategic political and ideological consistency of the organisations, a product of the misunderstanding of the national and international political situation; the absence of strategic political agreements for action; of being arranged through leadership-to-leadership conversations in cafes, without the participation of the bases of their organisations and the people; the absence of a Leninist democratic framework of operation, the right of tendencies and the discipline to adhere to majority agreements. This is due to the everlasting caudillismo of its leaderships and the intolerance and inability to deal with tactical and secondary differences within the organisations and, furthermore, it should be emphasised, due to the enormous weight of electoral opportunism that has prevailed in recent decades within the Mexican left.

Our case aims to be different. We seek to start from solid agreements in the characterisation of the national political situation and from a common practice within the social movements in which we participate. Although we do not disdain electoral participation, we have not made it the center of our activity either. We have sought to have discussions at the grassroots level and not only between our representatives. We agree on the creation of a revolutionary Marxist organisation of a democratic, internationalist, anti-neoliberal, eco-socialist and feminist character and above all to build popular power in the different social sectors that are part of the Mexican people.

Our great strategic political agreements do not exclude tactical differences, but we will seek to resolve them in a respectful, democratic framework, understanding that the construction of a revolutionary party, with a Leninist profile, requires an enormous wealth of debate to find the best answers to the great diversity of problems that the class struggle will always pose to us.

The process of rapprochement between the ONPP and the CSR began within the Organización Política del Pueblo y los Trabajadores (OPT/Political Organisation of the People and Workers), where both groups had a series of agreements from 2012, and later continued with the formation of a front of organisations of the socialist left, the Movimiento de Unidad Socialista (MUS/Socialist Unity Movement),—from the defeat of the neoliberal bloc in power and the resounding triumph of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in July 2018— as well as in the fight for renationalisation of the electrical industry, the audit of the payment of the public debt and the fight for the independent and democratic organisation of rural and city workers.

Consequently, we have supported progressive reforms such as for social programmes or the recovery of energy sovereignty, but we are critical of AMLO’s policy of continuing to pay the illegitimate public debt or the inconsistency in resolving various demands and conflicts of the working class.

We believe that the construction of the MUS three years ago, in December 2019, has been a great success on the path of bringing together the Mexican socialist left. Our new organisation will not only maintain its membership within the MUS and in other united front-type spaces that we have created, but we will continue determined to deepen and achieve the broadest unity of the Mexican socialist left. Our aim is to form a broad and powerful mass political organisation capable of influencing the course of the country, both to wipe out neoliberalism and to establish a new democratic and proletarian regime that lays the foundations for building socialism.

Although our ideological origin comes from diverse Marxist sources, this does not imply any impediment to the merger. The most important thing is our agreement on what to do now within a strategic perspective. In addition, this type of merger is not new. In Portugal, the formation of the Bloco de Esquerda (Left Bloc) was successful as a result of the merger of three organisations of different tendencies, the same occured with the formation of the Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (PSOL/Party of Socialism and Freedom) in Brazil. In the Philippines, a non-Trotskyist split from the Communist Party joined the Fourth International. There are more examples. Therefore, I believe that one of the tasks of the new organisation will be the promotion of an internationalist movement of the revolutionary socialist left globally and in particular from Latin America.

The unification of the ONPP and the CSR will imply various organisational changes in the militant and social work that we carry out. A little more than fifty members of the CSR will join the new organisation, and the ONPP will contribute more than a hundred. The ONPP will continue to exist as a front of social organisations in which we will participate, but the new political organisation will be made up of the joint membership of both organisations.

Our new organisation will remain faithful to the principles of Marxism. In the absence of an eco-socialist alternative, based on the self-organisation of those from below, the infernal machine of big capital will continue to spin out of control across the planet. As internationalists and anti-colonialists, our hopes are nourished by the feminist and anti-dictatorship mobilisations in Iran, the strikes for higher wages in England, the demonstrations for democracy in China, struggles for unionism and against racism in the United States and the fight against the new dictatorship in Peru.

Membership and close collaboration will be maintained with the Fourth International. We will participate in their meetings, debates and activities, but individual affiliation will not be mandatory and we will seek to advance in the construction of an international that brings together revolutionary Marxist forces from all over the world.

In 2023 we start building a new political organisation with the hope of regrouping in a single party all those who are committed to a socialist perspective. We are not a left that manages the system. We seek to be an organisation convinced that we cannot end the exploitation, oppression and destruction of ecosystems without overcoming neoliberal and rapacious capitalism and without a revolutionary transformation of society We seek to create an organisation in dialogue and debate with other currents of the social movement, without sectarianism. We are open to the integration of new organisations and individual affiliation. We want our unification to be a starting point and not an end in itself. For this reason, this project is more pertinent than ever.

Today, we seek to renew the thread of the construction of a useful party for the exploited and the oppressed.

José Luis Hernández Ayala