MONTEZUMA’S REVENGE

From Immigrant Rights to National Liberation

By Carlos Petroni

When empires arise throughout history, people who succumb to their ruling classes are “shackled,” “colonized,” “civilized” and “protected” from themselves and their own “weaknesses” by the tyrants of the time. There is one law, to which all of us in this world are subject, which is that we cannot be dominated if we are not subjugated by force. A ruling class must seize our countries, our markets, our labor power as their property and force us to spill our blood and that of other workers and the oppressed during wars of conquest in order to maximize the extraction of all possible wealth possible.

When empires decline, rebellions inevitably begin, and with the ousting of rulers the oppressed can reclaim and rebuild their own land. The prisons and jails are opened; people flow into the streets and break the barricades that until then were invisible. They ignite the fires of liberation in order to be rulers in their own land, revive their culture and take pride in who they are.

There are 50 million Latinos in the United States. A huge majority of them are Mexicanos and their brothers and sisters in history, the Central Americans, and their cousins, the South Americans. They are the sons, heirs and  hostages of “Manifest Destiny,” the plan for a US empire that plundered the still young, inexperienced, weak and semi-unpopulated nations and peoples of Old Mexico and everywhere south of the USA.

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By Carlos Petroni

The labor aristocracy and the labor bureaucracy are the most difficult obstacles to overcome to advance the mass movement in the midst of a situation of deep crisis  of the capitalist economy and social breakdown.

In places as different as Europe, the United States or Argentina, in the face of this political, economic or social crisis one can perceive the absence of an organized workers’ movement possessing a concrete political program and a leadership that having realized the depth of the changes in the world, mobilizes massively, providing leadership for all of the classes of society affected by the crisis of capitalism and formulates a workers’ socialist alternative.

Without concrete political program and effective leadership, there may be mass protests that can cause an imbalance and even the replacement of governments or political parties in power, however it will not achieve a change of system for one that would guarantee full employment, a sustainable economy, good salaries, quality education and housing, and universal health care for all.

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