NEW YORK CITY, March 18 — I joined several comrades at the City Univeristy of New York Graduate Center to hear a professor from Mexico. He was representing the parents of the 43 students from a rural teachers college who were kidnapped in September 2014 and never found. Since tens of thousands of disappeared people have turned up dead in the last decade, the parents dread they will never see their children again.
The teachers college, in the town of Ayotzinapa in the state of Guerrero, admits students from poor backgrounds, trains them to become teachers, and sends them back to their community to educate others. The college views teachers not simply as transmitters of knowledge, but as agents of social change who will join with workers and peasants to demand a better life. When they were kidnapped, these students had been rallying for more funding for their college, just as students and faculty at CUNY are demanding more funding now.
What I found most admirable about the professor’s talk were his repeated calls for a revolution in Mexico to — in his words — “end the exploitation of man,” referring to the corporations and the politicians who serve them. He said the parents had no faith in any of the bourgeois political parties and that all of them “should be dumped in the trash can.”
On May 4, 1886, in what led to the first May Day, 80,000 workers marched down Michigan Avenue to Haymarket Square in Chicago to demand a reduction in their workday from ten hours to eight with no loss of pay. We’re often told that people can’t change. But one of the leaders of that march was Albert Parsons, who as a teenager had fought for the Confederacy — that is, he’d fought for slavery, on the opposite side of Harriet Tubman. After the war, however, Parsons moved to Texas, worked with ex-slaves and dramatically changed his outlook. He became an advocate for equal rights for former slaves. He also married a former slave, Lucy, who became an important radical activist in her own right.
Albert Parsons was among four trade union leaders hung in 1887 after being falsely convicted of throwing a bomb at the Haymarket Square rally. He was targeted because he was a well-known socialist and anarchist who edited The Alarm, a newspaper whose banner headline read: “Workingmen of All Countries, Unite!” In the week before he was executed, Parsons advised his followers, “Lay bare the inequities of capitalism; expose the slavery of law; proclaim the tyranny of government; denounce the greed, cruelty, abominations of the privileged class who riot and revel on the labor of their wage-slaves.”
Like the students and teachers in Mexico, Albert and Lucy stood for something more than reforms. They believed in bringing to birth a new society, one that would end class exploitation — a society where we share the fruits of our labor.
A friend  of mine is one of the hardest-working, most determined young people I know. Tragically, her mother died when she was young and her life has not been easy. Yet she’s worked hard and well as an Emergency Medical Technician. She would like to go to college and get her degree, but it’s been difficult for lack of money and time. When we talk about a new society — a communist society — we’re talking about one where everyone has the right to a life-long education, to decent housing, to proper food and health care. These won’t be commodities for sale; they will be basic human rights. Socially-needed work will be shared, to give everyone the opportunity to learn and to teach. Racist and sexist practices will be abolished, and we’ll erase those capitalist-created lines called borders.
There will be two May Days this year in New York City. The first will be on Friday, May 1, and it will demand some worthwhile reforms. But in the end, all reforms to capitalism are inadequate bandages on a system of festering wounds. The Progressive Labor Party understands that radical surgery is necessary. The following day — Saturday, May 2 — PLP will lead a rally and march in Flatbush, Brooklyn, to put forward our vision of the classless, egalitarian society so urgently needed by the workers of the world. Join us!