The following text is the Why I joined speech delivered by a young PL’er at our May Day march in Broooklyn:

Over the last year, capitalism has murdered:  

1,300 workers in the U.S. by cops

10,000 farmers in Pakistan

35,000 workers in Gaza

1 million workers in the Congo, and COUNTING

Now more than ever we need to unite, fight back, and join the Progressive Labor Party (PLP).

My family is from Eritrea in the Horn of Africa. Many of them were freedom fighters in the struggle for national liberation.

I have family members who have died and became martyrs to the struggle, who were imprisoned, and who’ve had to flee their homeland in search of refuge. Although the Eritrean independence movement was confined to its national borders, growing up, I admired the feat of a people smaller than the size of New York City fighting an entire country backed by Western and Soviet imperialists! 

No it was not easy, many lives were lost and workers sacrificed everything…my grandparents were threatened, tortured, and had their house burnt down all because they held down the line for their country and did not sell out to imperialist forces.

It was the political will and strength of Eritrean workers who struggled to fight for thirty years and WIN! 

This is my family’s story and it used to primarily inform my ideas, but despite what the bosses’ propaganda tells you, I realized the international working class is worth fighting for past nationalism. 

Fast forward, I met PLP online, and then on the streets handing out CHALLENGE newspaper. 
After meeting the Party in person, I got the chance to meet many members from all over the world. It was from them that I learned that PLP does not just struggle over ideas, but that we are a FIGHTING Party and we have been for decades.

I met comrades who recounted stories of fighting the KKK and engaging in revolutionary class struggle in Colombia, Haiti, and Mexico, I met comrades who lived out the idea of multiracial class unity in action.

These days, I’m a college student going to protests for Palestine where fellow students in over 120 cities across the country facing immense pressure from their institutions, are getting suspended, surveilled on their phones, kicked out of school, harassed, and beaten by cops all because they are pleading to their institution to stop supporting genocide.

When I ask my classmates and friends what they’re fighting for, they tend to say: 

Free Palestine, Free Congo, Free Sudan, etc.

But struggles for national liberation are not enough!!

We cannot beg our bosses for freedom… 

The most important freedom is freedom from exploitation, from capitalism.

We do not ask them; we take it, united as the international working class.

The working class is divided by local bosses and held captive by nationalist ideas; the ruling class does not want us to see that we have more in common with the Pakistani farmer, the Congolese miner, and the migrants on Staten Island than we do with fascist Eric Adams or genocidal Joe Biden.

Our destinies as workers of the world are interconnected. We depend on each other to live and fight another day. The working class makes the WORLD go round, whether that’s in building our phones, harvesting our food, teaching our children…it’s us, not the bosses.J

Now more than ever is when we need multiracial class unity

Now more than ever we need to smash borders

Now more than ever we need to unite under an international communist party
 
THIS IS WHY I JOINED PLP, AND YOU SHOULD TOO!