The Pittsburgh Marxist Student Association, representing students at Pittsburgh colleges and high schools, expresses its solidarity with the struggle of the Instituto Politecnico Nacional students in Mexico, our comrades in CLEP-CEDEP and La Izquierda Socialista, and the protesting students kidnapped in Ayotzinapa. The IPN students have been on strike for over a month demanding an end to the repression, better quality of education, and an increase in state funding to education. Masses of IPN students have taken to the streets with the support of students at other schools, groups of workers, and the general population in a concrete demonstration of the revolutionary potential of the Mexican youth. Meanwhile, the Mexican state, the cartels, and the system that both are native to have provided an equal demonstration of their rottenness. On September 26, a bus carrying students from the Normal Rural de Ayotzinapa Teacher Training School was stopped by the local police in Iguala, Guerrero. Without warning the police opened fire killing three students and three bystanders on the spot. The police, with the collaboration of notorious drug gang Guerreros Unidos then kidnapped remaining students who have not been seen since. The gruesome discovery of a series of mass graves with burnt bodies suggest the students might have been also killed. So far, none of the bodies have been identified and 43 students remain missing. The cartels control large parts of Mexico in collaboration with local and regional authorities and all the main political parties. When communities have organised themselves in local self-defence organisations, the state has moved to arrest them, and there is a long tradition of militancy of students from Rural Teacher Training schools. This is clearly a politically motivated attack aimed at intimidating anyone who organizes to defend the rights of workers, peasants and the youth against the attacks of Mexican capitalism. The struggle to defend state education against cuts and the demand that education be of high quality and free of charge are fundamentally at odds with the capitalist system. We are in total solidarity with a such a struggle and demand. The movement of the IPN students is an inspiration to us here in the States, for we too are suffering constant cuts as well as rising tuition fees. The IPN movement has demonstrated the way forward against cuts for students across the Americas and the whole world- mass militancy and mobilization in the face of capitalist attacks. We send revolutionary greetings to the Polytechnic students, to its General Assembly, to the movement for justice for the 43, and particularly to the comrades of CLEP-CEDEP as well as the Mexican section of the International Marxist Tendency, La Izquierda Socialista. We are watching the events in Mexico closely, with the knowledge that a struggle for affordable and quality education can only be fully won with an overthrow of the capitalist system itself. We know also that revolutions respect no borders, and are preparing for similar movements here in Pittsburgh and across the US that will one day join forces with the youth and workers of all of the Americas and wipe the system responsible for the Ayotzinapa kidnappings off the face of this hemisphere. #TodosSomosPolitecnico #TodosSomosAyotzinapa
Posted on: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 19:58:14 +0000
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