May Day: Pakistan

PAKISTAN — In almost every city and small town in Pakistan the working class aggressively held rallies, processions, meetings and seminars honoring May Day. Angry workers came out on the streets with red banners, chanting opposition to capitalism and the bosses. They were demanding jobs, increases in wages and social security and better working conditions. They exposed the fake leftist union leaders, saying, “The friends of the bosses are traitors to workers.”

Progressive Labor Party played a leading role, actively participating in the marches and distributing leaflets explaining how to get rid of capitalism and imperialist wars by organizing into an international, revolutionary communist PLP. 

Workers chanted, “Down with capitalism”; “workers of the world unite”; “unite against exploitation, inequality and corrupt bosses”; “bosses are killers”; “east and west, PLP is the best”; “Asia is Red”; and “long live communist revolution.”

Speeches by PL’ers and friends exposed the capitalists and their puppet union leaders who are sabotaging the working-class movement. They’re preventing it from organizing against poverty, exploitation, price-hikes, unemployment, shortages of electricity and natural gas, corruption, injustice, target killing and terrorism. We accused these bosses’ puppets of misleading and terrorizing workers.

Bosses have their “own” union leaders, rigging union elections to elect their own puppets to leadership. To change the situation and to lead big struggles against the bosses we must be ready to face the state power used to rig this process. We must advance real communist leadership in the unions to lead militant struggles against the bosses as well as to expose capitalism as the source of our problems. Reforms cannot substitute for revolution. While winning leadership in the unions won’t change the capitalist system, it can effectively help win the working class into the PLP.

The Party also organized a march independently in one small town where young members and friends explained to workers and students that the bosses are trying to build a new party (as they’ve done in the past) to divert workers’ anger, spreading the illusion that this new boss-inspired party will bring change to the lives of poor people.

But voting for any electoral party, whether “leftist” or rightist, old or new, only protects the interests of capitalist bosses. We must fight to build the international revolutionary communist PLP to establish a communist society that will eliminate exploitation, poverty, racism and wars. No other party can do this.