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Published bimonthly since 1986, AGAINST THE CURRENT is a Solidarity-sponsored analytical journal for the broad revolutionary left. The May/June 2013 editorial focuses on what is at stake in the decision to build the Keystone XL Pipeline. Malik Miah’s Race and Class column takes up the immigration debate and calls for open borders; Chokwe Lumumba outlines the strategy behind his run for mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. Dan Georgakas paints an overview of the Greek financial crisis and the struggle against their “odious” debt while Maïa Pal recounts the occupation against outsourcing at England’s Sussex University and Jaime Rivera, Secretary of the Sindical de Trabajadores de Sector Electricos in El Salvador explains the latest attempt by Washington and the World Bank to impose another round of privatization. Comics artist Ethan Heitner depicts the great Flint sitdown strike – and more!
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Re:Mexicans vote to return PRI to power
The author suggests that part of the reason López Obrador lost the elections was because he moved to the right:
"Did some of his potential voters lose confidence in a candidate who changed his identity from left to center? Perhaps. In any case, the move to the right clearly failed to improve on his 2006 performance."
However, any analysis of the elections must go deeper than this. In the first place, the author gives too little importance to the many forms of electoral fraud (the purchase of people's voter ID cards, vote-buying, vote tally fraud, etc.) the influence of the two TV monopolies (one of which was paid millions to promote Peña Nieto's image), and the fact that workers in PRI unions and other workers who depended on PRI jobs and patronage were forced to vote for the PRI.
But assuming that López Obrador would have lost even without all of the vote rigging that clearly took place, to attribute this to the fact that he moderated his message assumes that a supposedly more politically progressive base was alienated and chose to stay home. If the candidate wasn't radical enough for them, they would not then vote for the two neoliberal parties. Yet the author doesn't cite the numbers who voted in these elections in comparison to six years ago to see if abstention went up. Of course, only a survey of those who abstained could reveal the real reasons. Did they have accessible voting centers with reasonable hours and sufficient booths? Was there transportation to these centers?
Considering the rapid rise of the student movement just six weeks before the elections, this hypothesis is problematic. The students are politically more advanced than the general population, as poor as it is, so an argument that the more advanced students supported López Obrador while large numbers of workers and peasants abstained would have to be explained.
The author's claim that the Mexican left would have been better off Mexico’s left would have been better off "pursuing some other alternative" instead of "embracing a rightward moving populist" seems to be a rejection of participation in electoral struggles. However, Latin America's greatest victories in the past 14 years have been the election of presidents who are either socialists or not hostile to socialist values.
The people usually have a good sense when it comes to voting for those who are not overtly socialists, but who represent the possibility of breaking with capitalism's domination over the state. They are more optimistic than the abstentionist leftists, and this optimism is an essential ingredient for a popular victory. The Mexican left's embrace of López Obrador was the right decision because it was in line with the aspirations of Mexico's oppressed majority.