This is the main speech at PLP’s May Day in NYC

What Day? May Day! Whose Day? Our Day!

Today, we celebrate the working class. today, we celebrate our revolutionary force that can’t stop and won’t stop fighting back!

In Haiti, we fight back!

In Mexico, Pakistan, Ferguson, Baltimore, Brooklyn, we fight back!

Today, we celebrate the 50 years that Progressive Labor Party has been a fire under the bosses’ ass. We celebrate the 50 years that PLP has been fighting for the communist aspirations of millions of families, youth, and workers! And we are growing in numbers beyond the hundreds and hundreds present here today, growing beyond the borders this country — across 28 countries and five continents!

PLP is a powerful organization built by ordinary people uniting to accomplish extraordinary things. we began small. small but potent.

when neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan terrorize workers and say, “get back!” what did we do? we fought back! Whether we marched into their own headquarters to smash their brains like we did in 1975 in or beat them with bricks at own their rally, PLP made the fight against racism the heartbeat of our life’s work.

When in Harlem, the cops murdered a black teenager, the mayor and police commissioner outlawed rallies. so when the bosses, the civil rights leaders said, “don’t take the streets!” what did we do? we took the streets! the only force that had the guts to give political leadership was PL. Black workers from the other side of the country recognized our leadership in the Harlem Rebellion.

PLP has a history in defying the bosses. We were and are forceful enough to shake the ground underneath the bosses’ feet, if only for a moment. this history is strong only because we believe that workers got the power! who’s got the power? we got the power! what kind of power? workers’ power!

today, when the bosses said, “don’t march,” what did we do? we marched! and what a powerful march it was! When everybody else abandoned May Day, PL brought the workers’ holiday back to them and have been celebrating it for 44 years! We march to honor your courage to fight back, to honor workers who have fought back, and honor our class that will continue to fight back! I know you are tired as hell. Tired of racism,sexism, borders, killer kkkops, slave wages, exploitation, and war. May Day represents abolishing all of that. Everyone here today is the seed for communism: an entire world simply based on need and collectivity. A world that brings out the best of human potential.

This task sounds impossible. But in the hands of the masses, we can turn the impossible into a living fact! Our class’s history says we can win!

1: When Hitler seemingly ruled the world, the Red Army defeated fascism! That was exactly 70 years ago today, when a red soldier waved the red flag over Berlin! So, defeating fascism. Workers did that!

2: Chinese revolution of 1949 and 1966: Eliminate syphilis, prostitution. Done! Educate the masses and rule society without cops. Workers did that!

I make this sound easy, but in reality these victories required the unshakable commitment of millions working together as one for a vision of equality. As long as revolution and communism is grounded in the working class, there is no stopping communism.

Who’s got the power? We got the power? What kind of power? Workers’ power!

While we look to our history for inspiration, we recognize that many movements have failed and turned a workers’ paradise into its opposite. So the question most people ask is how is it going to be different this time?

We gotta rely on only one force: us! These ideas of communism aren’t for any one person to own. There’s nothing special or smart about us that makes us understand communism as the alternative. These ideas belong to the working class. This is not negotiable. Depends on the youth in the streets, the factory workers, the unemployed workers, the women workers, the undocumented farm workers — not the liberals, not de blasio, or obama. not anyone but a fighting member of the working class. it is with that that we can say, the only solution is communist revolution.

With billions on our side, the task of communist revolution is more than just a possibility. We are breathing in a little victory this very moment.

 Today, the working class says, “the rebellion in ferguson? we did that. Baltimore? yea, we did that.” So, There will come a day, when we look back an say, “kill capitalism? yea, we did that.” “smash racism? yea, we did that”

Communism is not just a possibility. Communism is alive!

 The real impossibility is capitalism.

This system proves day in day out that it sets us up to fail. That’s why thousands of African migrants die crossing the most lethal route in the world. Their only crime was seeking to escape poverty and war. That’s why thousands of women will return to the same garment factory that murdered/burned their co-workers if means another day to feed their family! It is impossible to get justice under this system!

While this system proves everyday it’s a failure, workers prove every day that communism is the answer. The way we intend to treat our kids or stand for someone who is under attack provides clues as to the kind of what world we want to live in. In time of disasters like Hurricane Katrina or Sandy, it is the workers who go out and help. Or when in Ferguson over night, they went from being just another kid being terrorized by the cops to a soldier in the streets! All these are glimpses of collectivity, running a society that feeds on justice. What are only glimmers today will be human nature and instinct under communism.

Our choice of revolution lives, whether dormant or waking, in all.

When capitalism, killer health conditions, not ebola, took the lives of 10,000 in West Africa. Workers fought back demanding basic supplies! And just so the bosses can prove how impossible it is to live a decent life under capitalism, the only thing they provided these protesters were bullets and tear gas! When those workers resisted, it cued us to do the same!

So if workers fight back and have always been fighting back. And if communism isn’t so far fetched, what’s holding the world back? Without one party, there is no revolution.

Like in 1963 in Birmingham Alabama. It was one of the flashpoint of segregation and fightback. That’s where a klan thug bombed a church, murdering four little black girls. That’s where thousand of kids and young people had the courage to stand up against vicious attack dogs, the kkk, the mayor, the water hoses that washed the kids down the streets, the jails. All for what? There’s a footage of this black teenage girl among all her comrades in a jail cell smiling and said, “i want my rights. i want equality.” For these youth, equality meant fighting jim crow. But it wasn’t enough.

They were mostly nonviolent. What the bosses fed them was — when the dog bite, when the cops shoot, when the kkk lynches, stay calm. The bosses shoved nonviolence down the throats of the youth and choked them into defeat. Capitalism is the most violent system in history. We will not surrender our lives to that! We will fight force with revolutionary force. And we will live!

So forward from Alabama to right here in Flatbush — fifty years later — youth ignited a rebellion after the cops slaughtered Kiki Gray.  It was a tremor, but shook the ground underneath the cops’ feet. We chanted, “NYPD you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” But, it wasn’t enough

One year later, Ferguson. Youth again flooded the streets because cops killed Michael Brown. Again, they had courage to withstand the dogs, the kkk, the national guard, the tanks, the rifles, the tear gas, the rubber bullets. With PLP, the chant went from “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot” to “Fists up! Fight back!”

8 months later. Baltimore. and it still won’t be enough.

All For what? To end Jim Crow in 2015  to live in a world without the dictatorship of the racist cops, the banks, the courts, and politicians. But it wasn’t enough. What did the bosses have to offer to black fighters? The ballot box.

Rebellions will spark. The pent up rage of these brutal years will explode over and over. But the flames will be put out. Without a revolutionary party, we can’t turn a spark into a fire this whole system down.

How do we go from from fighting the cops to fighting the Rockefellers? To fighting the oil bosses? PLP. We need one organization leading one world into the final victory? What is victory today? Joining PLP. How can we sustain a victory? Fighting with PLP. With a party armed with communism, turn down for what?

No matter how dark the night, The sun and daughter of revolution will rise! What gives us such confidence to say this? The very people in this march! The people walking by! The revolution will be won by ragtag soldiers, the revolution will be won by the very people the bosses discard as surplus, as useless. the very kids the bosses starve will feed themselves revolution. the very youth the bosses put into prison, or declare not worth teaching will be the ones to lead us into communism. They will break free of the biggest jail of all: capitalism.

And that’s why our future is bright.  Make no mistake of it, that day will come, and workers will live. The Kikis and Kyams of the world will live! But, it can’t and it won’t happen without you.

This Ferguson was a preview. Baltimore was a preview. It was a little taste of we got in store for the bosses. The politicians wanna declare war on our kids, from the neighborhoods of Chicago, Brooklyn to the tents in Haiti, Syria, and Ukraine. To the bosses we say, you can’t stop the revolution!

Every kid you kill is an inch deeper you dig in your grave. Because the working class never forgets. Who killed Shantel? Who killed Kyam? Who killed Eric? Who Kiki? Who killed Rahmarley? Who killed Freddie? Who killed Mike? Who killed Tyrone? There are too many names! For every kid you will, a hundred more bear witness to this racist system that feeds off the blood of your youth. You expose yourself for the bloodsucker you are, leeching off the labor of workers.

So while the bosses preach that communism is dead, it’s them whose time is ticking! Everyone in this march — in every place that PLP has a base — can attest that communism is alive!

From the birth of exploitation, workers fought back! For fifty year, PLP has been fighting back! Onwards to another fifty! Because today — May Day — is the beginning of another year of winning thousands to communism. So where do we go from here? We gotta turn up! We gotta toughen up! We gotta bring out the communist aspirations in people and motivate them to act on it! To those who can’t wait to see communism, bring communism to where you are at.

For those of you who are questioning, like my little sisters are, I tell you the same thing i tell them. The only thing I have to offer you is the best organization that exists in this world. There is no security under capitalism. I can’t guarantee food, or a job, or safety. The only thing I could show you is a fighting chance for you to create the kind of world I wish I could’ve raised you in.

So sisters and brothers, join us in creating the world we know our kids need. From Baltimore to Nepal, the world calls out to you. This is your chance to join. Take the leap. And when you do, you are joining the hands, life, and blood of billions of fighters past, present, and future. With that, how could we not win? the future belongs to us only if we dare to fight for it! The fight for communism can’t stop, won’t stop because workers can, workers did, and workers will continue to fight back! Long live communism! Power to the workers!

The cops are one of the capitalist state’s tools of oppression, an essential instrument to terrorize workers and deter  fightback against racism and inequality. But the history of class struggle shows that police atrocities also expose the bosses’ vulnerability. They spark anti-racist rebellion. They bring us closer to the revolution that will smash this brutal system once and for all.     
The latest example of this contradiction came when working-class youth in Baltimore rebelled against capitalist exploitation and the racist murder of Freddie Gray. In a frantic move to turn down the heat, Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby brought criminal charges against six cops involved in the modern-day lynching. (Three of them are Black.) Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic Party candidate for president in 2016, is vowing to reform “justice” in the United States, notably a prison system that locks up a higher proportion of Black men than South Africa’s at the height of apartheid.
But make no mistake: these charges and promises will do nothing to end the scourge of cop terror. All politicians serve one capitalist faction or another; all rely on the police to enforce the racist segregation that divides our class. They need cops to attack strikers and protect the bosses‘ super-profits that depress all wages by paying Black and Latin families $612 billion less yearly in income than white families (PEW Research Center). In addition, cop terror and the school-to-prison
pipeline in poor neighborhoods act to lower wages even further. These racist policies create a desperate army of unemployed youth who are forced to work for poverty pay.  
When liberal politicians like Mosby and Clinton try to pacify workers’ anger, they reflect the dominant finance capital wing’s concern about threats to the capitalist order. As the U.S. ruling class prepares to challenge its main imperialist rivals, China and Russia, it needs to gain the allegiance of working-class youth, the people who fight the bosses’ wars. Mass alienation and anti-racist anger would doom the U.S. capitalists to defeat, as they saw all too clearly in Vietnam.
The Progressive Labor Party stands firmly with the youth who rebelled against the system in Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York, and Ferguson, Missouri, and in dozens of other cities in the U.S. and around the world. We call upon workers everywhere to follow their example, under the banner of communism — the only system where racist murders, unemployment, sexism and all the evils of capitalism have no place.
Prosecution and Pacification
Mosby’s decision to charge the cops who murdered Freddie Gray — in contrast to the free pass given the killers in Ferguson — is tied to the agenda of the dominant U.S. capitalist wing. The charge is being led by arch-imperialist George Soros, the liberal billionaire whose life’s mission is to make sure the U.S. is ready for war against Russia or China.
Soros bankrolls the Open Society Institute (OSI), which seeks to channel anti-capitalist rage into war-bent, pro-U.S. sentiment in strategic areas around the world. The OSI has funneled millions of dollars to potential anti-capitalist hot spots, from Black Lives Matter to the Arab Spring countries in the Middle East. In Ferguson alone, the organization spent $33 million after the racist murder of Mike Brown (Daily Mail, 1/15/15). In Ukraine, the OSI has fervently supported the
CIA-backed leadership in its conflict with Russia. Soros is hoping to influence the trajectory of Baltimore’s unrest in a similar way.
Soros has found an ally in Mosby, whose assistant prosecutor, Portia Wood, has served on OSI-Baltimore’s Leadership Council since 2008. On May 3, the New York Times, the U.S. bosses’ leading daily paper, published Baltimore-based activist Sonja Sohn’s reaction to Mosby’s move: “On Friday, one city official seemed to finally answer the desperate pleas of poor Baltimore residents.” It’s probably no coincidence that Sohn’s Baltimore Wake Up project also cashes OSI checks.
But problems have already surfaced with Mosby’s prosecution. She acted in such haste to please her capitalist masters that she may have undermined her chances of convicting the six killer kkkops, always a long shot in the rigged “justice” system. Technical questions have arisen over whether a knife allegedly found in Freddie Gray’s possession was a switchblade. (Not that the knife had anything to do with his being arrested without cause or subsequently traumatized into a coma while inside a police van.) In addition, it appears that the charges filed by Mosby’s office may have mistakenly identified a plumber and an elementary school cafeteria manager instead of two of the cops (Baltimore Sun, 5/4/15).  
Hillary, You Liar
In an April 29 speech at Columbia University, self-styled humanitarian Hillary Clinton said, “What we’ve seen in
Baltimore should, indeed does, tear at our soul.” She proposed a thorough reform of the criminal “justice” system — an end to mass incarceration, an overhaul of mandatory minimum sentences. But Clinton, too, works for imperialist U.S. interests. The policy-shaping think tank she co-founded, the Center for American Progress (CAP), is bankrolled by Soros, Citigroup, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Its board includes Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, who once said the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children from U.S. sanctions throughout the 1990s were “worth it.”
Clinton’s anti-jailing stance stems from a March 23 CAP report, “Expanding Opportunities in America’s Urban Areas,” which notes that up to 100 million U.S. workers — as many as one in three — have a criminal record. Like her capitalist patrons, Clinton is worried that these millions will have no stake in fighting for a system that robs them of freedom and job prospects.
In her Columbia speech, Clinton spoke of “alternative punishment” to jail. Clinton wants to unpack prisons to fill the barracks. She failed to mention, however, that it was her husband, Bill Clinton, who instituted the policies that threw millions of Black and Latin men and women into the prison system in the first place. Or that it was Bill Clinton who shredded welfare, sending millions of families deeper into poverty. Hillary Clinton’s new talking points are a deceitful ploy to gain support for her presidential bid and to channel working-class youth into the military. She is singing the same tune as the Soros-funded Huffington Post. In a 2014 column, “Uncle Sam (Should) Want You: National Service vs. Mass Incarceration,” an Ohio State University professor, Steven Conn, wrote:

For roughly 30 years between 1940 and 1973 American men were drafted into the Military….[T]hat period of service helped many with their transition into adulthood, exactly at that moment when some young men wind up in the criminal justice system today. I am not suggesting a return to compulsory military service. Instead, I am suggesting that a more widely conceived program of national service might have a significant impact on crime and on the men most likely to commit it by providing them with the kind of work, structure and sense of purpose that is missing for too many of them.

From Rebellion to Communist Revolution
Workers in Baltimore and worldwide should beware of reformers’ attempts to “fix” the exploitation of capitalism.  As long as society is run by and for profit, racism, sexism,
unemployment, and imperialist slaughter can only get worse. The one way to rid the world of these plagues is to organize under the leadership of the Progressive Labor Party. PLP fights to lead the working class to smash the system in its entirety. We will create the only society that values every life — a communist society.

BROOKLYN

Hundreds of members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party marched on Flatbush Avenue this past Saturday, hailing from New York, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Boston, and New Jersey. The May Day march was led by high school and college students, and the multiracial composition of the marchers was received enthusiastically in the predominantly Black and Latin working-class Brooklyn neighborhood. More than 6,000 CHALLENGEs were sold and over $5,000 was raised from the community, and at various points  members of the community joined our march, raised their fists and give us their contact info. Shutting down traffic in one direction, a sound truck with a DJ playing beats at the lead kept the chants loud and the atmosphere militant! Drivers saluted us honking their horns.
This May Day celebrates 50 years of the Progressive Labor Party. Speakers throughout the march pointed out that as we celebrate the history of the international working class. PLP’s international history is proud and just getting warmed up. PLP has been involved in or led militant struggles in at least two dozen countries, in North America, Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia and Africa.
As our march proceeded past intersections where unarmed Black youth were murdered by the police, a comrade on the sound truck addressed the marchers and the community that the only answer to these racist police murders is to join PLP and help us continue to build an international, fighting revolutionary Party. The spirit and militancy of the march showed that PLP is ramping up its forces for the tasks of the next 50 years, becoming a mass working-class Party and organizing communist revolution!
A highlight was a report from two PLP students from Baltimore who spoke of their struggles there since Freddie Gray’s murder, and a background to the racist conditions in that city. The keynote speech at the conclusion of the march connected the current conditions of the international working class and the need to fight for communism with her own life and struggles as an immigrant worker. She then invited all who believe in fighting racism and capitalism to join PLP’s fight, that a communist world is possible, and that we can win.
Following the keynote address, two friends of PLP from Germany spoke and commented that this was their first U.S. May Day, and how inspired they were to participate in the march. They explained that in Germany, where May Day is an official holiday and is treated as more of a parade, PLP’s May Day brought out militancy and struggle! The crowd was then treated to a poem written by one of the Baltimore students, before dispersing into a nearby park for box lunches.
On PLP’s 50th anniversary, our fighting international Party, and our fight to build a mass multiracial communist movement, is growing. This May Day in New York City, in the belly of the U.S. imperialist beast, was both a celebration and a call to be a part of the next 50 years of world history. Fight for your class sisters and brothers and join us!

SAN FRANCISCO

PLP members and friends participated in two separate May Day coalition marches on both sides of the Bay.
We were impressed and inspired that the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) workers voted for a stop-work meeting to honor May Day as the International Workers’ Day with the spotlight on labor against police terror. The ILWU has a long history of work actions that support anti-racism and for international solidarity with fighting workers: anti-apartheid, the racist murder of Oscar Grant, attacks on workers in Palestine, and attacks on immigrant workers. The ILWU on the West Coast came out of the Communist Party organizing industrial unions in the 1920’s and 1930’s.  At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, they refused to load ships with supplies going to U.S. soldiers in Siberia who were fighting the newly-found Soviet Union. It still reflects some ideas from this earlier communist movement. The May Day shut-down of the ports was a small taste of workers’ power.
In San Francisco, the May Day march focused mainly on issues facing immigrant workers, but also on the whole range of how capitalism devastates the working class around the world: by paying workers low wages, state terror against immigrant workers, and marginalizing indigenous workers from San Francisco to Mexico, forcing Black, Latin, and immigrant workers into the prison system.  
In both marches, PLP joined with and led chants in English and Spanish. Our banner and red flags, and communist literature tied individual issues to their root in capitalism’s racism and exploitation of the working class.
We’ll shut it down every day ,
 ….We’re doing this for Freddie Gray  
…..We’re doing this for Amilcar Lopez
 ….We’re doing this for Alejando Nieto.
….We’re doing this for Ramarley Graham.
Las luchas obreras no tienen fronteras.
Immigrant workers are under attack, what do we do? Stand up , Fight back.
Primero de Mayo, Communista y Proletario.
Fight for Communism power to the workers.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

We PL’ers in Israel-Palestine participated in three May Day marches in our region, two in Tel-Aviv-Jaffa and one in Nazareth.
On April 30, a march was organized in north-central Tel-Aviv by the pro-boss Histadrut union federation as well as its youth movement, HaNoar Hoved (Working Youth) and its adult counterpart, Dror Israel (Freedom Israel). While this march was organized by liberals, a more progressive group attended it: the Coalition for Direct Employment. This group, of which one local PL’er is a member and another is a supporter, fights against the horrors of contract work and for regular employment and unionization.
Approximately thirty contract workers, including PL’ers and our friends, attended this march, carrying signs calling for full-time employment and against the contract bosses. Slogans compared the contract bosses to organized crime bosses (which they are) and called for an end of this ultra-exploitative phenomenon. Many of the marchers were social workers, a profession which is increasingly outsourced by the government, as well as housekeeping workers, a job which is almost entirely outsourced to contract bosses.
On May 1, May Day itself, hundreds of workers, including local PL’ers marched in central Tel-Aviv in the main May Day demonstration. This march was organized by fake leftists (the Israeli “Communist” Party and Socialist Struggle) as well as liberals (the Meretz party), but militancy was high and flags ran red. The march was headed by a sign reading “Workers of the World - Unite!” Some of our friends, Palestinian and Jewish, attended. Under the red flags, workers demanded an end to exploitative capitalism and to contract work.  However, the phony reds mostly shouted slogans about “nationalization,” which, under capitalist rule only means the industries moving from ownership by one boss to collective ownership by the entire capitalist class through its state. We countered this by calling for revolution and the elimination of capitalists to be replaced by workers’ power.
On May 2, a May Day march was organized in Nazareth by the fake Israeli “Communist” Party. This party has a strong base there and was able to fill the streets with red flags and celebrating youth, but did not really call for communism or a revolution. PLP came and raised the red flag in this city as well.
In all cases we raised the red flag high and put communism forward, in most cases together with our friends. We hope that next year we will present an even stronger red block on May Day.

COLOMBIA

Comrades, friends, and workers of the world, we send militant greetings from Bogota, Colombia.
Today we are celebrating one more year of struggle on the International Day of the Working Class. We celebrate with our sights set on the unity of the workers of the world under the red flag of communism and its communist party, PLP. This has been one more year under the rule of the parasitic capitalist class, its racist wage system, its endless wars, its sexism that divides us and weakens us, and its fascism and violence against our class. In short, it’s been a year of working-class struggles, protests, work stoppages, strikes and mobilizations that keeps us committed to the communist ideals of a better world.  
In Colombia, workers live in misery and need. There is a teachers’ strike, unemployment, low wages, poverty, prostitution, crises and chaos in the health care system, malnutrition, drug addiction, high cost of living, a cynical bourgeoisie and a prostrated left that advocates working for peace. But we tell workers, through our newspaper CHALLENGE, that revolution is not negotiable; that we will not negotiate to escape from slavery and will not negotiate to escape from capitalism. We tell workers that the capitalist state is our sworn enemy, an enemy of the working class and of our youth. We tell them that we reject the passivity and the electoral distractions, and that the state cannot be reformed but must be destroyed by a communist revolution. That’s why we need revolutionary organized violence under the leadership of our Party.   
Capitalism has thoroughly shown that it can no longer rule the destiny of humanity, because its laws and contradictions make its destruction inevitable. That’s why we are organizing workers politically in more than 27 countries, consolidating our revolutionary line to overthrow it with the power of the international working class. PLP and its newspaper CHALLENGE call on the unity of communist to fight for this noble goal. Join us!