The following are excerpts from a tri-part speech given by young PLP veterans: a teacher and community worker, and a  young community worker who joined the Party recently on Saturday May 3rd at the New York/New Jersey May Day celebration.

Greetings, comrades! Happy May Day! We are teachers, community organizers and members of the Progressive Labor Party continuing the fight back against this racist, sexist, capitalist system–from Newark to New York, from Palestine, to Mexico! 

Today, May Day, is about the U.S. celebrating OUR legacy, OUR power as the working class, OUR fight for a communist future and raising the red flag against fascism! As we march down Flatbush today, we want everyone to raise those red flags! AND Raise them high!!
From every corner of the globe, the spirit of internationalist fightback lives on — here are just a few powerful moments:

In New York City students at Bronx Community College have been denied access to decent food by a racist administration whose only function is to normalize cutbacks that target Black and Latin working class students. But students are fighting both to demand their own access to food and show their classmates the connection between their own hunger and the hunger felt by workers all over the world, and to see that in all cases it is the bosses who are taking the food from our mouths. 

In East Los Angeles,  students walked out last year to demand bilingual education and the right to organize without punishment. They stood up against racist deportations and fascist detentions, fighting to protect workers of the entire world!

In Palestine, students are bombed in their classrooms, with entire universities being leveled, just so American imperialism can maintain its outposts in the Middle East. But this does not stop students from organizing protests and civil disobedience against Israeli settlements. In just one example of this bravery, students in Palestine demonstrated to open up Shuhada (Sho-ha-dah) street in Hebron where the racist Israeli rulers have denied them access for two decades.  
-Teacher & veteran PL’er
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When the bosses close our hospitals, cut our jobs, and abandon us to deal with the disastrous results of their murderous system, we in PLP build worker, patient unity to care for one another in and out of the medical rooms. We storm the bosses' public health conferences and affinity groups and show our fellow workers how to fight to make a health system that benefits us–under communism!

When the landlords hike up rent prices three fold and make it impossible for us to secure housing, or sicc the murderous cops on us to evict us or exterminate us during a period of endless mental health crises, we as working class fighters house each other, feed each other, show up to court en masse and set up communities based on mutual aid that show the working class that we CAN build a moneyless, antiracist, antisexist society.

Only building for a communist future will heal the wounds of our class. Having comrades — here and around the world — who have your back and fight alongside you will transform your life. 

-Community worker & veteran PL’er
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In the greater sense mutual aid is just one example of the self-organization of our class; that workers can organize society for each other. We must take this a step further— if we arm ourselves with communist ideas we can build a revolutionary movement to run society.

This is working-class solidarity and an act of resistance against the bosses who want us to believe we need them. We don’t need them—we have each other, always. We engage in building relationships and spreading communist ideas because mutual aid alone will never be enough to free us from capitalism. We must continue to care for our fellow workers, to listen, to build friendships, to defend one another, and to love each other.

It was, in fact, an act of love that brought me into the Party just a year ago. I was at a protest for Palestine, standing in the pouring rain—alone, without an umbrella—just chanting, soaked to the bone. A Party member tapped my shoulder and offered to share their umbrella with me. 

We began chanting together, then talking. I met other Party members who showed me kindness, and after the protest, I joined them for my first-ever communist study group. 

And now I’m super hyped to be here at my first ever May Day march!

We must share the giant, Earth-sized umbrella of communism with one another—so that, at last, we can all be dry and warm together.
As we march forward into a new day, fight for communism! Now more than ever is the time to up the ante! 
- A new PL’er and community worker