ISRAEL-PALESTINE
We PL’ers in Israel-Palestine participated in three May Day marches in our region, two in Tel-Aviv-Jaffa and one in Nazareth.
On April 30, a march was organized in north-central Tel-Aviv by the pro-boss Histadrut union federation as well as its youth movement, HaNoar Hoved (Working Youth) and its adult counterpart, Dror Israel (Freedom Israel). While this march was organized by liberals, a more progressive group attended it: the Coalition for Direct Employment. This group, of which one local PL’er is a member and another is a supporter, fights against the horrors of contract work and for regular employment and unionization.
Approximately thirty contract workers, including PL’ers and our friends, attended this march, carrying signs calling for full-time employment and against the contract bosses. Slogans compared the contract bosses to organized crime bosses (which they are) and called for an end of this ultra-exploitative phenomenon. Many of the marchers were social workers, a profession which is increasingly outsourced by the government, as well as housekeeping workers, a job which is almost entirely outsourced to contract bosses.
On May 1, May Day itself, hundreds of workers, including local PL’ers marched in central Tel-Aviv in the main May Day demonstration. This march was organized by fake leftists (the Israeli “Communist” Party and Socialist Struggle) as well as liberals (the Meretz party), but militancy was high and flags ran red. The march was headed by a sign reading “Workers of the World - Unite!” Some of our friends, Palestinian and Jewish, attended. Under the red flags, workers demanded an end to exploitative capitalism and to contract work. However, the phony reds mostly shouted slogans about “nationalization,” which, under capitalist rule only means the industries moving from ownership by one boss to collective ownership by the entire capitalist class through its state. We countered this by calling for revolution and the elimination of capitalists to be replaced by workers’ power.
On May 2, a May Day march was organized in Nazareth by the fake Israeli “Communist” Party. This party has a strong base there and was able to fill the streets with red flags and celebrating youth, but did not really call for communism or a revolution. PLP came and raised the red flag in this city as well.
In all cases we raised the red flag high and put communism forward, in most cases together with our friends. We hope that next year we will present an even stronger red block on May Day.
COLOMBIA
Comrades, friends, and workers of the world, we send militant greetings from Bogota, Colombia.
Today we are celebrating one more year of struggle on the International Day of the Working Class. We celebrate with our sights set on the unity of the workers of the world under the red flag of communism and its communist party, PLP. This has been one more year under the rule of the parasitic capitalist class, its racist wage system, its endless wars, its sexism that divides us and weakens us, and its fascism and violence against our class. In short, it’s been a year of working-class struggles, protests, work stoppages, strikes and mobilizations that keeps us committed to the communist ideals of a better world.
In Colombia, workers live in misery and need. There is a teachers’ strike, unemployment, low wages, poverty, prostitution, crises and chaos in the health care system, malnutrition, drug addiction, high cost of living, a cynical bourgeoisie and a prostrated left that advocates working for peace. But we tell workers, through our newspaper CHALLENGE, that revolution is not negotiable; that we will not negotiate to escape from slavery and will not negotiate to escape from capitalism. We tell workers that the capitalist state is our sworn enemy, an enemy of the working class and of our youth. We tell them that we reject the passivity and the electoral distractions, and that the state cannot be reformed but must be destroyed by a communist revolution. That’s why we need revolutionary organized violence under the leadership of our Party.
Capitalism has thoroughly shown that it can no longer rule the destiny of humanity, because its laws and contradictions make its destruction inevitable. That’s why we are organizing workers politically in more than 27 countries, consolidating our revolutionary line to overthrow it with the power of the international working class. PLP and its newspaper CHALLENGE call on the unity of communist to fight for this noble goal. Join us!