To comrades around the world—Here we are in the month of May just like that of 1886. A May that reminds us of the bitter victory of our class: the work day had been cut to 8 hours, but many workers and union leaders died, were jailed, wounded, or were hung for their efforts.
Yes, May is a month that marks us, and we will mark it as well, after the end of the bosses’ rule. This is the moment that we will celebrate. We won’t be celebrating our lives only as workers, but as revolutionaries.
Let us deplore that, in spite of the struggles carried out, all the demonstrations and marches against the exploitation of our class by the bosses, our working conditions are often worse than in most of the countries in the world. And it is this sad reality which pushes us to unite as a class, to build, under the leadership of the Progressive Labor Party, a communist revolution. Communism, a system where workers rule in their own interests as a class, is the only solution to all the horrors of capitalism – racism, sexism, nationalism, unemployment, exploitation, poverty, imperialist wars, and all the rest.
Today, comrades in New York and around the world, the working class of Haiti, and the PLP of Haiti, salute you as we march together for our needs as a class. We in Haiti are fighting against many of the forms of capitalist exploitation that infect the rest of the world. Tens of thousands have been in the streets protesting against the bosses and their politicians, all of whom line their pockets at our expense. In Haiti, we are fighting against the corruption embodied in the PetroCaribe oil scandal, against the atrocious poverty under which many Haitian workers and their families rarely find one decent meal a day, in a country where over 70 percent of the workers are unemployed.
Mass marches in large Haitian cities on May 1, as well as other political activities, show that our class is on the move. We are fighting to build the PLP as the leadership of the working class in Haiti.
We shout out to you today: ON TO VICTORY!