The Power of the Party
The following is an excerpt from a speech from the Progressive Labor Party’s annual May Day celebration in Brooklyn, NY.
Today is the workers’ day. Our holiday is rooted in the fight for the eight-hour work day in Chicago in the 1880s. But almost 150 years later workers all over recognize the power of May Day, setting aside time to commemorate our victories as a working class against the thieving system of capitalism. We call upon working people everywhere to stand up, join our Party, and commit to communist struggle, the only struggle that will truly free the human race from the misery that our class is forced to shoulder.
Today, and every day, PLP salutes—
We fight to support the most radical demands coming from our class AND build a base for workers to see that only the fight for a world without money, without capitalist borders, without fictional races, without backward gender norms—a system of communism, led by PLP—will have the power to smash once and for all this system of exploitation and replace it with the leadership of our class.
Pols take orders from profiteers
The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) doesn’t have a crystal ball, but our Party can see–and many workers agree—the general direction of history is increased capitalist rivalry that will only explode into world war sooner or later. The current imperialist war in Ukraine reveals how rapidly the tensions between the major capitalist rivals, led by a declining U.S. imperialism on one hand and rising Russian and Chinese imperialist aggression on the other, can play out in these smaller-scale, but no less deadly atrocities.
As in every war before this, the bosses drag our class into fighting these wars for them. Millions of workers were killed in World War I on land and sea. Tens of millions more were killed on land, sea and in the air during World War II. Now the bosses have found a new arena–space and its attendant cyberwarfare and satellite-guided missiles–that has been tested already on workers to include in their deadly arsenal. Our class has been and continues to be the only casualty in this increasingly volatile world of capitalist competition for profits, and yet the working class led by the PLP is the ONLY force, not the bosses’ politicians, that has the power to change the course of history.
Bourgeois politicians—Eric Adams in NYC and Ras Baraka in Newark, Biden and Harris in DC, Jovenel Moise of Haiti, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of Mexico, Xi Jin Ping of China, Vladmir Putin of Russia, and Volydmyr Zelensky of Ukraine—have dedicated their lives to serving the interests of bankers, thugs and billionaires. Most of the time they take orders from them, and sometimes these misleader politicians give orders to the capitalists themselves.
PLP takes orders from workers
But who does PLP take our orders from? Who is PLP’s Bloc, our base of support and foundation for revolution? We take our orders from the sharpest struggles and the bravest fighters for our class wherever in the world they may be. Who is our base? Millions of workers in Colombia, South America, took to the streets in the summer of 2021 in the face of police arrests and people being disappeared to call out the racist abandonment of the working class in that country, investing millions on weapons and tanks in the midst of the pandemic.
The bosses’ traps
But in every part of the world where the working class stands up to the bosses, we have seen how our demands get turned on their heads and the bosses try to take control of our anger, our struggles, controlling the reform movements themselves. Look at the worldwide protests in the wake of Covid-19’s outbreak in 2020. Workers from Minneapolis to Paris, Johannasburg and Palestine took to the streets to combat racist police terror. Two years later, the bosses have tried to turn our anger into an escapist politics of “self care.” No meditation, no yoga, no herbal formula, no medical marijuana, can cure the depression that our class experiences after years of social isolation from a pandemic that the bosses allowed to spiral out of control. Through social media, the bosses injected self-centered politics of individualism into our youth culture to immobilize the struggle of 2020, manifesting most brutally in that Astroworld festival last November 2021 where a dozen young people were crushed to death at a Travis Scott concert celebrating drug use and mosh pit anarchism in the midst of a pandemic.
But this is nothing new. Back in 2008, I personally witnessed how the soldiers and veterans movement led by Iraq Veterans Against the War was handed over by liberal reformers to government agents and provocateurs, replacing our efforts to push anti-imperialism, anti-racism and anti-sexism with a politics of personal care and individualism. We witnessed dozens of soldiers and veterans active in our anti-war movement take their own lives, and all the bosses-led reform organizations could promote were vigils when the true cause of their PTSD and alienation was U.S.-led imperialist war for control of the world’s oil. Individual frustrations are, in reality, only resolved in the larger social context. As communists we say self care requires building communist social relations—we don’t quit our base and we don’t lose political morale.
Revolutionary optimism
This is why we are revolutionary optimists. It means that in every element of the bosses’ efforts to outcompete, outsmart and outdominate one another, we find their achilles heel and magnify it, exposing capitalism in its ugly nakedness for our class to see. The bosses have the biggest weapons and control the media, weaponizing our minds for impending world war and deeper conflict, but PLP has CHALLENGE! The bosses worldwide control thousands of newspapers and media outlets, music, television, film and social media, but in this one paper, CHALLENGE, we have the sharpest analysis of world-defining current events. Who else is saying workers don’t have a stake in the Russia-Ukraine war and that there are no good imperialists; that workers from Russia to Ukraine to Yemen, China and Newark are suffering at the hands of the same profit-hungry capitalist class? No one! Our PAPER is the power of the Party.
We’ve been talking about power, so how has our Party, the PLP, been tested? We have not held state power in any part of the world yet, but we have learned some of the most critical lessons: 1) the fight for communism begins NOW, not in some future time; 2) reforms won today will be taken away tomorrow; 3) working people have no nations. Our Party exposes the facade of identity politics because it purports to challenge the racist and sexist core of capitalism when in reality it creates “representatives” in the capitalist class who keep this inequality more alive than ever. But our Party, Progressive Labor Party, is RUN by women and men, Black and white, young and not-so-young, from around the world who have embraced these lessons with a vengeance.
This makes each person here, each new person who joins this organization today on May Day, crucial to our effort to understand where, when and how our class is fighting this capitalist monster. Each new member increases the power of the Party because you bring with us new insights and experiences that allow us to collectively sharpen our struggle. To the young people: fight against your personal illusions, and recognize that nothing truly meaningful is accomplished by you and you alone. The bosses create these career goals for us and then tell us to choose one. These aren’t our dreams! The strength of each of us as an individual can only be truly realized once we join this larger collective of workers committed to smashing the conditions that we all face.
The best way to predict the future is to make it
As we march down Flatbush Avenue again this year, as we have done for the past 20 years, watch the faces of the pedestrians, people looking out of apartment windows, and people driving past us. We won’t see cynicism. We will see appreciation, validation of our fight, and we will see love from our class brothers and sisters for sticking to the same analysis–“Asian, Latin, Black and White, to Smash Imperialism we Must Unite!” We will see respect in their faces as we shout “Who are we? PLP!” to the beats of dancehall, reggaeton, and hip hop. There is strength in numbers, so our job is to help PLP become a party of millions worldwide.
There is no crystal ball, but the best way to predict the future is to make it! We may be small now, but our confidence in the working class is unmatched and our commitment to fighting alongside and for our comrades can’t be swayed—not by political instigators, not by payoffs, not by visa denials, not by gang-inflicted kidnappings and assassinations, not by poverty, not by previous felony convictions, not by nation, race, creed….we are One Party, One World, One Fight….That is something the bosses can’t defeat. AND THAT’S THE POWER OF THE PARTY. JOIN US!