The Organizing Junta of the Mexican Liberal Party to the workers of the United States November 17, 1914

    It is known that the Mexican people are in a state of armed Revolution since four years ago, but very little is known about the nature of the gigantic movement, due to the fact that the capitalistic press tries to confuse through different means the minds of its readers, pretending that all the trouble there lies in useless quarrels of leaders, a conflict between spurious ambitions, whose only object is to strive for the Presidency of the Republic.

    Nevertheless, as time flies away the truth is by and by illuminating the doings that occur to the South of the Rio Grande. Those doings prove that the movement developing in Mexico is not the result of the clash of petty passions, but a social phenomena produced by the antagonism of the interests of the two classes in which capitalist system has humanity divided, that of the rich and that of the poor, that of the well-fed and that of the starving, that of the proprietors and that of  the proletarians.

    If to the surface of this tremendous conflict come the names of Villa, Carranza or any other personality, who as shown by their actions, do not have any other objective than the adquisition of power, the truth is that those men are not the Revolution, but mere military leaders that pretend to profit to their personal wishes out of the popular movement.

 

The Revolution

    The Mexican people revolted in arms in November, 1910, to conquer their economic freedom. In the minds of the rebelled workingmen there is no place for the idea of elevating this or that individual in the Presidency of the Repulic, but that of wrenching the land, natural mother of all riches, out of the hands of the capitalist class and to make it the propriety of all and everyone of the inhabitants of the Mexican Republic, men and women alike; and if the Revolution is still on foot after four years have elapsed it is because that just aspiration has been unable as yet to succeed in all the country.

 

President Wilson’s opinion

    That the Mexican Revolution is esentially of an economical nature at its bottom, is the opinion of the President of the United States, who instructed the American Delegates to the Peace Conferences at Niagara Falls not to accept any resolution that would not have as its basis the elimination of Huerta and the establishment of a government in Mexico that would guarantee the solution of the Agrarian Problem, the President clearly expressing his opinion that there could not be peace in that country while the peons would not be in possession of the land.

 

The facts

    This opinion is conformed by the facts. Large territory extensions have been taken since the beginning of this Revolution in different sections of the Republic by proletarian multitudes that have placed it into cultivation and have been gathering the crops for themselves. The property deeds have been burnt in the official files; the fences have been torn down; the warehouses and granaries have been left at the disposition of these revolutionary masses that understand that such expropriation is necessary to subsist while the first crops are gathered; the houses have been left at the disposition of those who before had not a single clod of earth on which to lay their heads, and a marked tendency to socialize all the industries begins to be crystalized with the fact that the sugar factories and the distilleries of alcohols are being operated by the expropiating peons in the southern sections where those industries predominate, and, in the fact, too, that some mines, wood mills and other enterprises are being operated by workingmen that have had the courage of recognizing that the machinery must be the property of the workingmen, and who, rifle in hand, have taken possession of it in the name of the Revolution, that means in the name of Justice.

 

Another opinion

    The Mexican Liberal Party, by means of its oral and written propaganda and by its deeds, has played an important role in the class struggle that is being enacted in Mexico. This Party is represented by a Junta residing at 2325 Ivanhoe Avenue, Los Angeles, Cal., formed by five members, Ricardo Flores Magón, Librado Rivera, Enrique Flores Magón, Antonio de P. Araujo and Anselmo L. Figueroa, and the official organ of this organization is REGENERACIÓN written in Spanish and English.

    The Senator fom New Mexico, Mr. Fall, a member of the Committee appointed by President Taft to investigate and study the Mexican Revolution, declared in the official report presented by that Committee, that it was due to the activities of the Mexican Liberal Party the awakening of the Mexican workingmen to class consciousness, and that to the propaganda of its members should be attributed the revolutionary movement that is shaking Mexico. Mr. Fall came to this conclusion after long months of minute study of Mexican affairs, and after interviewing parties of different creeds and opinions, Mexicans and of  other nationalities.

 

Solidarity

    Proved as it is that the Mexican revolutionary movement is of economic character, it is a duty of all class conscious workingmen to support with all their moral and material strength the workingmen that are spilling their blood to shake off the yoke of Capitalism. The Mexican Problem is not really a problem incumbent only to Mexico; it is [a] universal problem, it is the Problem of Hunger, the problem that the disinherited of all the world have to resolve under the penalty of living with their bodies bended down under the yoke of the master class. To deny solidarity to the Mexican workingmen that are struggling to conquer their economic freedom is to stand against the Labor cause in general, because the cause of the wage-slave against his master has no frontiers; it is not a national problem, but a universal conflict; it is the cause of all the disinherited of the world over, of every one who has to work with his hands and his brains to bring to his family a loaf of bread.

 

What the American workingman will gain

    The fate of the American workingman depends on the fate of the revolutionary labor movement of Mexico. If the Mexican proletariat succeeds at last in emancipating himself from his executioners, he will not have to come out of Mexico to earn his living, for there he will be able to earn it better than in any other place, and all the Mexican toilers now residing in this country would haste to go to Mexico to enjoy the new era of freedom and welfare that will be enjoyed down there when is conquered the economic, political and social emancipation of the proletarian, which is the aim of the present movement. In this case, the American proletariat will not have to suffer the consequences of the immigration of Mexican workers into this country, immigration that, as a result of the competence in the labor market, is felt by the reduction of salaries, as may be corroborated by the American workers from the southern tire of the United States. Once the Mexicans are gone back to Mexico because of the welfare that in Mexico will be ejoyed, the salaries shall be raised immediately in the regions affected by the congregation of said workers. And they will come back in mass to Mexico, because neither the uses, the language, nor the treatment accorded to them here, induce them to remain in this country.

 

The Revolution crushed

    But if the Economic Revolution is crushed, the American workingmen will suffer the consequences, for an immigration of Mexican workingmen, still longer than the one that there has been during the last ten or fifteen years, will take place, and the salaries in this country will be lower still. But that is not all; the crushed Revolution means a victorious Capitalism. The wealth of the magnates of American industry will flow into Mexico, to, then, a land of permission for all the adventurers and all the exploiters; the manufactures of United States would be transplanted to Mexico, that would become an ideal land for Business because of the cheapness of salaries, and the American workingmen will find closed down their factories and firms in this country, because it will be more profitable to their bosses to open there where they will pay twenty-five to fifty cents a day for the same kind of work for which they would have to pay two or three dollars a day in this country. Then, you see, American workingmen, that it is not only because they are champions of the struggle of your class that you should help those in Mexico fighting for Land and Liberty, but for the fact, too, that they are laboring for your own; which comes to prove that the cause of the working class is but one, and that what affects the cause of the working class in one country, equally affects the working class in the rest of the countries of the world. There is why the workingmen of one country should consider himself tightly united to the workingmen of all the other countries.

 

Help, that you will be helped

    Let us suppose that the Mexican proletariat Revolution would not succeed, that the noble efforts of those workingmen to conquer their economic, political and social freedom be at the end drawn in blood, if you help them now, they will feel then profound sympathy toward you and will exert themselves to show it to you, coming in full force into your own movement, adding one more probability to your victory. But if instead of defeat is victory that would crown those lions’ titanic efforts to conquer their economic emancipation, if you have helped them to victory you will have in the proletarians of that country an inexhaustible source of resources for your own struggles, because those redeemed slaves will remember with affection that your hand lent them timely help to conquer their freedom.

 

Importance of the Mexican element

 

    Keep in mind that the Mexican population of the Southern states of the American Union runs to the millions; keep in mind that the lands and the mines from Texas are being worked by Mexicans; that the fields from Louisiana and Mississippi are tilled by Mexicans; that the mines from Oklahoma and many others from Arizona, Nevada and Colorado are operated by Mexicans; that the great plantations from Colorado and California progress by the work of the Mexicans; think that the workingmen laboring along the railroad lines are Mexicans and that Mexicans are the ones that keep running all the smelters scattered along the boundary line from this country with Mexico, and that numerous camps of Mexican workers are found in Wyoming, Iowa, Illinois and other states. Think, American proletarians, on what means to the raise of your salaries and to your complete emancipation the pacific conquest of the Mexican toiler, and help, help without delay your brothers that with their virile battle cry of “Land and Liberty!” make privilege and tyranny grow pale with fear.

 

Money is strength

    To give a formidable impulse to this war against privilege and opression money is needed most urgently. You have got it; give it to us! Our antecedents of struggles and sacrifices for over twenty-two years place us above all suspicion. The best guaranty of our honesty are the twenty-two years that we have undergone in dungeons when tyranny would thrust its fangs in our throats to punish our loyalty and devotion to the interests of the working class, or in the clutches of poverty—that grim companion of all of us that would not sell our conscience nor betray our ideals.

Archimedes said: “Give me a basis and I will upturn the world”.

We tell you: lend us solidarity and we will bury in Mexico the capitalist system.

 

The labor press

    The labor press of this country could give a great impulse to this movement of solidarity in behalf of the Mexican revolutionists by publishing in its columns this Manifiesto, starting in its columns permanent public subscriptions to foment the war for the economic freedom of the Mexican workingmen, publishing in all their issues alusive articles to the Mexican movement—for which we would furnish all the information desired. Extend invitations to your press to deal on the cause of  your Mexican brothers.

 

Agitation

    Agitate in your Unions and Associations, on the streets, in the street cars, in the theatre, in your homes, in the shop, the factory, the mine, the camp and wherever you be, anywhere you be at speaking distance of men and women of your own class, in any place where you might find kind hearts that be open to all that is generous and great and sublime.

    Agitate incessantly. Show your brothers in chains the noble gesture of this Mexican brother that has broken his chains and with them, handling them as a battering ram, batters down the walls of the castle where privilege and tyranny, shaking of fear, have sought safety, and remember them that their future depends of that rebelled slave, that the interests of the working class are blended in such a way that it is impossible to look upon any aspect of the class struggle with disdain without commiting suicide. To act!

Send all correspondence and money to Anselmo L. Figueroa, P.O.

Box 1236, Los Angeles, Cal.

Land and Liberty.

Los Angeles, Cal., November 7, 1914

Ricardo Flores Magon. Enrique Flores Magon. Antonio de P. Araujo. Anselmo L. Figueroa.

Librado Rivera