The OPT, a proletarian alternative to the crisis of Mexico's political parties

2011-11-22 · first published in International Viewpoint · 166 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.

As credited on the page: “link to internationalviewpoint.org”

Only part of this piece survives. The capture it was recovered from is truncated, so the text below stops before the article did. The original is still readable at International Viewpoint: read it in full. The full piece runs to about 5,608 words against the 166 that survive here.

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On 27 and 28 August the Workers and People’s Political Organization (OPT) held its founding conference. It was the culmination of months of preparation, since October 2010 when Martin Esparza, General Secretary of the SME (Mexican Electrical Workers’ Union) publicly announced at a rally of 50,000 people in the Azteca Stadium, the proposal to create what at that time was called a ’national political grouping’ (OPN). With the OPT’s founding congress a new phase has begun, of consolidation, recruitment and organization, at the same time as the SME’s own resistance struggle continues, alongside the broader call to organize Mexico’s “indignados” against the neoliberal and repressive policies of the present regime.

The OPT Congress was held in the SME’s headquarters and was attended by 956 registered delegates on Saturday 27th, 300 of them elected by the electrical workers, rising to more than 1,100 registered delegates on the Sunday at the OPT’s launch rally in Mexico City’s Zocalo square.