MARCH ON MAY DAY—FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM

Progressive Labor Party will once again march for communism and celebrate May Day, the historic international workers’ holiday. The capitalist bosses say communism is dead. The masses of workers about to demonstrate around the world—taking leadership from PLP—say otherwise. The lessons of history are clear. Only communism can smash the racist and sexist inequalities of the rotten profit system. Only communism can foster an egalitarian world run by and for workers, or develop a society based on workers’ needs.
Never has our task been more urgent. Consider just a few of the latest deadly capitalist attacks on the working class:

• The inter-imperialist proxy war in Syria has displaced more than 11 million people, half of them children.
• Recent earthquakes in Japan and Ecuador have left hundreds dead, thousands injured, and countless homeless. The United States imperialists have responded by sending troops. If the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa are any indications, we can expect more fascism in the wake of these crises.  
• In response to the Zika virus outbreak, capitalist rulers in Latin America are waging a victim-blaming campaign against working-class women and families. In Brazil, troops are going door to door, warning people to refrain from sex and avoid pregnancies. As in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the 2012 storm that struck Cuba, Jamaica, and the U.S. eastern seaboard, the government response has focused on the “personal responsibility” of the victims, rather than the failure of capitalist infrastructure and public health.

As growing numbers of workers are devastated, inter-imperialist rivalry drives the world toward an inevitable collision—a broader global war—between super-powers China, Russia, and the United States, along with their shifting alignments of allies. As the U.S. “pivots” toward Asia, China is doing the same in Latin America, expanding its investments and influence in the backyard of U.S. imperialism. As China builds new air and naval bases and lays claim to international waters in the South China Sea, the U.S. counters with an “Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement” with the Philippines. As the U.S. backs openly neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine, Russia escalates the nuclear arms race by developing intercontinental ballistic missiles with independently targetable warheads.
No corner of the globe is safe from capitalist horrors. Faced with rising working-class anger, the imperialist bosses are desperately trying to divide and mislead workers with their political puppets, from gutter racist Donald Trump and phony “socialist” Bernie Sanders in the U.S., to fake-left parties like Podemos in Spain or Syriza in Greece, to fascist movements like PEGIDA in Germany, the National Front in France, or Greece’s goose-stepping Golden Dawn. The list of capitalist reform “solutions” to capitalist crises is endless. But none of them ever work, because none of them confront the root of the problem: the profit system itself.
A Proud History of Working-Class Rebellion
The international working class has always fought back against the capitalist bosses.
In 1791, slaves in San Domingo rebelled against slavery and colonialism. In 1804, they successfully ended slavery and established Haiti—an inspiration to slaves in the U.S. Under courageous leaders like Nat Turner and John Brown, violent rebellions struck at the heart of chattel slavery and spread fear among the slave-holder class.
Workers in Paris have their own long history of fightback against capitalism. In 1789, the French Revolution overthrew the parasitic monarchy and abolished feudalism. Amid economic crisis and imperial rule, they succeeded in 1871 in creating the Paris Commune, the first seizure of state power by class-conscious workers, many of them dedicated to internationalist and communist ideas. In May 1886, the Paris Commune inspired workers in Chicago to fight for the eight-hour day in what is known as the Haymarket Square Riot. Led in large part by communists devoted to the destruction of capitalism, against a backdrop of murderous police violence and extreme exploitation, this multiracial movement mobilized hundreds of thousands of workers throughout the U.S. and gave birth to our modern May Day. The capitalist class never stops trying to distort and hide workers’ history of fightback. They try to tell us that our class is powerless. But we know better. We know that millions of workers have paved the way for us to continue to fight for a better world—a world without bosses, profits, sexism, racism, or imperialist war. Working-class fightback continues!
The bosses’ media have failed in their efforts to conceal the growing fightback around the world. Over the last year in Haiti, workers led mass demonstrations by the thousands, rocking the government by demanding the ouster of President Michel Martelly and Prime Minister Evans Paul, along with lower prices for gas and the removal of the criminal forces of the United Nations Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH). Thousands took to the streets of Port-au-Prince to chant, “The gas thief in the prime minister’s office has to go! Do you hear that, Obama? Do you hear that, Bill Clinton?” The working class in Haiti clearly sees the connection between their local capitalist thugs and arch-imperialists like Barack Obama and the Clintons. Students and workers of Haiti had the correct response to a presidential runoff election that the bosses were forced to cancel in January: Don’t vote, rebel!
Last fall, in South Africa, a mass, student-led rebellion pressed for free education for all and forced the government to cancel planned tuition hikes. The fightback spread to university workers, many of them undocumented immigrants, who are paid an unlivable minimum wage—just one example of the racist inequalities that have endured despite the abolition of legalized apartheid. Led by militant students and workers, masses are striking against the outsourcing of university jobs and for a livable wage and improved water and sanitation services. In Asia, the working class is exploding with anger, as workers refuse to remain slaves to a system that cheats, steals and poisons them with toxic air and water. In industries across China in 2015, according to the China Labour Bulletin, there were more than 2,700 strikes and protests over withheld wages and health benefits and mass layoffs. Let’s not forget that the struggle also continues in Ferguson, Missouri, where Mike Brown was murdered by a kkkop in 2014. Women workers are leading the charge in Ferguson and also in New York City, where Kyam Livingston, Shantel Davis and Kimani Gray—among many other victims of the racist, criminal injustice system—are not forgotten.
In the U.S., even as we go to press, Verizon workers are on strike yet again to fight against a wage cut. Although we understand that capitalism can never be reformed to serve workers’ needs, strikes are valuable schools for class struggle—and powerful demonstrations of the potential of workers’ power.
No workers are alone in this fight. As we tell our stories of fightback, we build working-class unity—the one force the rulers truly fear. Workers will continue to go to any length to defend ourselves, because we can win. We can win a better world for our class—communism.
Why communism? In our vision, the working class will determine the future of society. It will destroy the capitalist world and its brutal exploitation. It will smash a system that drives us into chronic unemployment and poverty. It will smash the racism and sexism that drag down all workers. It will eliminate the racist cops who break our strikes and kill our Black, Latin, Asian and immigrant sisters and brothers. And it will put an end to the imperialist wars that send our youth to kill their class brothers and sisters worldwide, all for the bosses’ profits.
A Communist World
Here is our vision for a communist world:
• A society run by workers and for workers. The working class produces everything of value and should rightfully receive the benefits of our labor. Collectively, we can determine how to share what we produce, according to need.
• Abolition of the exploitative wage system and the money that runs it. We have no need for the blood-sucking bosses who steal the value of our labor through wage slavery.
• Multiracial unity with women and men workers and an end to the racism and sexism that divides the working class. Racism and sexism is rooted in capitalism; the bosses use them to steal trillions in super-profits worldwide.
• Elimination of all national borders, artificial lines drawn by the bosses to make even more profits from workers called “foreigners.” Nationalism is an anti-worker ideology that enables the imperialist rulers to exploit natural resources and cheap labor—and to war with other imperialists in competition for more profit. Communists are internationalists because the working class is one international class, with a common class interest, under one red flag.
This is the world PLP has fought for from our start, more than 50 years ago. We will continue to fight until our class prevails. We invite all workers to join this struggle—for ourselves, and for our children and grandchildren.
Our vision for communism can be realized only with millions of workers and youth, with people just like you. Our fight is sparked by class anger against the bloody bosses, kkkops, and all those who serve capitalism. But what sustains our communist movement is our working-class love—for industrial and domestic workers, for soldiers and students. United as one class, freed from exploitation and artificial borders, the working class can build a new a world from the ashes of the old.
May Day is your chance to join Progressive Labor Party. Take the leap. And when you do, you will be joining hands with billions of fighters past, present, and future—with a historic movement of working-class struggle. The future belongs to us, but only if we dare to fight for it. The fight for communism can’t stop, won’t stop because workers can, workers did, workers will continue to fight back!
Long live communism! Power to the workers!