MAY DAY: Mexico

On May 1, 30 enthusiastic and militant comrades carried red flags, banners with messages related to the International Workers’ Day and communist revolution, and chanted revolutionary PLP slogans, all well-received by workers. We handed out 7,000 flyers denouncing the fascist conditions faced by Mexico’s working class and workers worldwide and offered the Party’s solution. Lastly, we made plans to continue the struggle. Following is the flyer we distributed.
Smash Capitalist Hell with International Working-Class Unity
Under capitalism our minds are chained to the racism, individualism, nationalism and sexism of the system. These ideological chains, in addition to dividing us, weaken our forces as a working class. The May Day celebration is a call for the international unity of the whole working class to shed the nationalist yoke and fight for an egalitarian society: communism
Capitalism wreaks havoc on the life of the working class, through exploitation, misery, violence, hopelessness and death, out of which it generates tremendous profits for the capitalists.
Due to the labor reform, working conditions in Mexico are increasingly unstable; workers must work longer hours for lower salaries. According to the Autonomous National University of Mexico Center for Multidisciplinary Analysis (CAM), 66 percent of the employed population earn minimum salaries or less.
In another study, CAM reports that in 33 years the earning power of salaries has accumulated a loss of 79.20 percent, which means that to purchase basic necessities workers must work 52 hours a week.
Amongst the countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) workers here work the most hours annually, with an average of 2,226 hours, but have the lowest salaries, averaging $12,850 a year, or $1.01 an hour. This is less than half of what a worker earns in Chile.
Mexican capitalists and their politicians have turned the working class here into the most exploited, impoverished and cheapest in the world, a condition allowing them to reap the greatest profits, attract investors and compete with the bosses elsewhere, such as those in China.
Conditions are even worse for the nearly 6.6 million workers who are unemployed or lack adequate employment. Capitalism will not provide employment or education to 7.5 million youth between 15 to 29 years of age who are the most vulnerable to capitalism’s individualistic culture. Ultimately many end up murdered or criminalized by the bosses’ media, according to the national Institute of Statistics and Geography.  
As workers’ misery increases, so do the bosses’ profits and all their luxuries. According to La Jornada (3/14/2016), by the end of 2015 profits for Mexico’s leading corporations increased 8 percent.
As the exploitation intensifies and profits increase, the gap between rich and poor grows. Mexico is one of the most unequal countries in the world. One percent of the population owns 43 percent of all the country’s wealth. According to Oxfam, half the population lives in poverty.  
Workers who struggle against these injustices, fighting for their rights, suffer disappearances, murders, repression or jailing, as was the case of the CNTE teachers, student teachers, electricians, IPN students, indigenous communities and Atenco peasants. When capitalism is in crisis, fascism is the order of the day
One might think conditions couldn’t get worse, but the global capitalist crisis and sharpening of imperialist rivalry will lead inevitably to another world war in which capitalists will destroy the lives of millions of workers, the means of production and natural resources.
For workers, the fight against this criminal system is a matter of life or death. We must organize ourselves as a class as part of the international communist Progressive Labor Party. It’s imperative to destroy capitalist exploitation to build a new egalitarian society.
Capitalists promote the idea that communism failed, but it’s capitalism that has failed. The specter of communism still haunts the capitalist vultures and the communist demonstrations organized internationally by PLP are a beacon of hope for the millions of workers worldwide. The working class will remain exploited until we set ourselves free from capitalism; communism is the key to our liberation. Until victory!
Long live communism! Death to capitalism! For a revolutionary communist May Day!