Time and Urgency

If the Other Campaign contributes - as it seems to be doing, through its acts and through its deficiencies - to the victory of the government's candidate, PANista Felipe Calderón, we will not have long to wait for the offensive by the right and by imperialism and the subsequent repression, because they will have to strike while the iron is hot... Large sectors who will be voting for López Obrador, hoping for a change, will retain general support of zapatismo, especially if it is attacked, as the right desires, which says the truce is no longer justified, but those sectors will have accounts to settle with Marcos and with the Other Campaign...

No matter how you want to parse it, that says, "Shut up and get in line."  Which is kind of the whole reason for the Other campaign in the first place, right?  Because, like in the US, there is no place in Mexican electoral politics for the opinions of those on the bottom.  Did I miss something?

Luckily, he saves that embarrassing passage for the end.  Here's the meat of what he wants us to know about the real agenda of Don Marcos:

...For example, the Other Campaign displays huge portraits of Stalin everywhere.  They are not "official", but rather the expression of the ignorance of a group which calls itself "communist" and which is active in the organization of the trip.  Tolerance in the face of that aberration is a demonstration of paternalism ("they have the right to be ignorant."), but also of a total lack of concern for ideas and for the fact that Stalin's portrait is, in large measure, a tacit program.  It indicates, if not a policy presented as a model, at least a lack of repudiation of disastrous and counterrevolutionary policies which destroyed the October Revolution and created a powerful bureaucracy with capitalistic values, which gave rise to the mafia government and to the current Russian neo-capitalists.  It warded off and sabotaged the world struggle against capitalists, buried revolutions, killed millions of campesinos in the Soviet Union, inoculated other millions of workers against socialism and emasculated Marxist thought...

Stalin Posters!  The scourge of History.

Just in case you didn't get it the first time:

The Other Campaign is, it is true, fighting against capitalism's lack of ethics and its agents (the rapes, assassinations, dispossessions, the terrible exploitation, racism), but it does not present an opposing ethic (!!).  That is why it has no problem accepting the portraits of Stalin, whose system assassinated millions of workers and campesinos, raped en masse, built inhuman labor and extermination camps, collaborated with the nazis during the Molotov-Ribentropp Pact, destroyed all democratic rights and physically annihilated their opponents.

Got it?  Uncle Joe's picture wants to kill your mama!

But really, it just seems so grousy and sad.  This poor professor is breathing thin air, alone with his crusty colleagues, alienated from the hope created when people who are not used to anyone being interested in what they think or endure in their lives, get an opportunity to speak and be heard.  

The great thing about authentic organizing - who's first phase is always listening - is that it makes elitist screeds like Almeyra's utterly irrelevant.  Only the power of what they can build together will decide what they can accomplish.