One was that many working people supported the candidate of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The article could have reported more explicitly on this fact, which has been evident in the large rallies the PRD has continued organizing to contest the electoral victory of Felipe Calderón of the National Action Party (PAN).

The article did note, however, that as mayor of Mexico City, López Obrador promoted welfare policies that were “popular among the most impoverished”—his main credentials in the election campaign—and that his campaign demagogically professed to be “for the good of all, the poor first.”

Brisini also correctly notes that the “article failed to mention that the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) did not support any of the candidates” of the three contending bourgeois parties.

He suggests the article should have reported that “the EZLN leader, Subcomandante Marcos, claimed that the problem in Mexico was the capitalist system.”

Such statements by the EZLN leadership, however, are not new. Like many middle-class and bourgeois politicians in Mexico, they often criticize capitalism and talk in classless terms about “those on top” and “those on the bottom,” as Marcos did during his several-month-long tour of Mexico dubbed “The Other Campaign.”

But critiquing capitalism and all the main political parties means nothing by itself—it’s what you are for that counts. And no political party or current in Mexico today, including the EZLN, offers a political strategy for workers and peasants to overturn capitalism and take political power.

I would agree with Brisini on the “the need in Mexico for a workers’ party to provide leadership to the workers’ struggles and for socialism.” Advocating that view, however, is better suited for an editorial or opinion column than a news article.

Finally, while it’s worth noting what the EZLN leadership is doing in the arena of middle-class radical politics, much more important is the ongoing struggles by working people in Mexico, from the strikes by copper miners in the north to the battle led by teachers in the southern state of Oaxaca and fights by farmers for land and against police violence.

It’s in those kinds of struggles—out of which a revolutionary, working-class party can be forged—that the future lies.  
 
 
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