On this May Day, International Workers’ Day, the international working class is under sharpening fascist attack while the drums of global war beat louder and slaughter millions. World capitalism pushes its economic crisis onto workers’ backs with mass racist unemployment, wage-cuts, soaring food prices and resulting starvation.
Yet masses of workers are fighting back, from immigrant workers striking in France and rebellions in Greece to workers and youth across the U.S fighting against racist budget cuts. This May Day we must stand as one class, with one interest: to destroy the capitalist murderers with communist revolution and build a communist world based on production to fulfill the needs of our class.
International workers’ solidarity must meet the bosses’ assault head-on, especially as they use the attacks on the world’s 200 million immigrants to attack ALL workers. Immigrant workers are victims of racist super-exploitation, which impoverishes the whole working class by creating a “reserve army of the unemployed,” which the bosses use as a club over the heads of all workers, including white workers.
Capitalism has spawned this migration across all borders. We say smash all boss-created borders. We are one class, internationally.
Capitalism created the working class, a class with nothing but its labor power to sell in order to survive.
Early on, the capitalists moved millions of Africans as slaves from that continent to wherever they could produce the most profit. With capitalism’s global expansion, immigration is now a worldwide phenomenon. Capitalism’s unrelenting drive for maximum profits has uprooted hundreds of millions of workers, forcing them into the squalor of sprawling mega slums, from Haiti to Venezuela to Brazil to Nigeria to China, where 80 million Chinese-born migrant workers are branded as “illegal.”
Many die crossing deserts and oceans from Africa to Latin America trying to reach jobs in the U.S. and Europe, as well as from starvation, malnutrition and curable diseases. Those migrating to the more industrialized countries are not only super-exploited but are used as scapegoats, blamed for capitalism-created problems like unemployment, and are treated as slaves or modern indentured servants.
In the past, immigrant workers were on the front lines of class struggle. Global capitalism has created its own gravediggers — the working class — and internationalized it even more. This provides the opportunity for a communist-led working class to forge the unity necessary for communist revolution. Immigrant workers are now positioned geographically and socially to help lead this fight worldwide.
Their role will become even more crucial as the imperialists’ rivalry for world domination intensifies, particularly in the U.S., a declining power fighting desperately to hold its position as top imperialist. Meanwhile it gears up for wider Middle Eastern wars and eventually world war versus the rising powers in China, Russia and the European Union.
The U.S. rulers’ fight over immigration reform involves the tactics and strategies on how and when to wage these wars. One sector wants to do it cheaply with a small, technologically-superior military. These bosses opposing immigration reform just want to terrorize immigrant workers with deportations to continue super-exploiting them.
The liberal imperialist sector, however, needs an immigration policy that builds patriotism among immigrants through a 12-year-long path to citizenship. This is in exchange for recruiting millions of young soldiers as cannon fodder in their imperialist wars and to maintain a workforce of millions of super-exploited workers for their war industries.
The vitriolic anti-immigrant stance of their opponents also serves the liberal bosses, creating the terror and despair that drives immigrant workers into the arms of their “lesser-evil” liberal politicians, churches and unions, with their pacifism and dead-end electoral politics.
Their immigration reform and DREAM Act, aim at forcing undocumented youth into the military under the farce of “helping them go to college,” which they can’t afford. This “Green Card army” will eventually become the army of all, via the draft or some militaristic “national service” scheme. The slave-like conditions and low wages of indentured immigrant workers will be used to depress conditions for all workers.
The needs of the ruling class are forcing them to bring together two of the most oppressed, potentially militant and rebellious sectors of the working class: black workers and youth, crucial in industry and the military — possessing a rich history of fighting the U.S. bosses’ racism — and immigrant workers with a long history of fighting U.S. imperialism.
With PLP building international unity and a base for rebellion and revolutionary communism among industrial workers, soldiers, and students — black, Latino, white, Asian and Arab, immigrant and citizen, men and women — we can fight the bosses’ racism, nationalism and patriotism, and unite the world’s workers to destroy the scourge of capitalism forever.
The fire of May Day burns brightly in a vibrant and growing internationalist PLP! Workers of the World Unite! Fight to end racism and wars for profit. Smash all bosses’ borders! Spread CHALLENGE, the internationalist, revolutionary communist newspaper! Fight for communism! Join us! J