Nearly 160,000 workers protested the bosses’ austerity attacks in 286 May Day marches and rallies in cities across France. They also marched against the ANI — a national agreement giving the bosses extended rights to fix workers’ wages, hours, and work locations.
The main demonstrations were organized by the “class struggle” trade union confederations which which oppose the ANI. They continually steer workers into the arms of the “lesser-evil” Socialist Party. They repeatedly call for supposedly neutral government mediation in the Peugeot strike.
In Paris, Peugeot factory workers who are beginning their 16th week on strike formed one of the most militant contingents, chanting “Workers’ strength is in striking!”
Many workers in the Paris May Day march attacked the Socialist Party. Jean-Michel, 44, noted that Socialist president “Hollande said [during the presidential election campaign] ‘I want to be the enemy of finance’ but he has given the bosses 20 billion euros [in tax breaks].”
Ten thousand workers marched in Marseilles, many chanting “no, no to austerity!”
In Bordeaux, (6,000) and in Toulouse (5,700) workers blasted Hollande’s austerity attacks. In Lyons, 4,000 marched despite a heavy shower with signs reading “We won’t pay for capitalism’s crisis,” and in Rouen, 2,000 workers, led by oil workers from the bankrupt Petroplus refinery, chanted “death to austerity!”

NEWARK, NJ, April 30 — On April 9, over 1,000 students walked out of Newark’s schools to protest the bosses’ budget cuts. The action was organized by the newly formed Newark Student Union (NSU), whose courage and organization demonstrated its ability to lead masses of students.
As Newark experiences attacks on education similar to many other cities, this new voice — the NSU — is making itself heard. Consisting of high school students citywide, the NSU has not only given leadership to other students but also to everyone fighting back against the racist attacks.
PLP has always maintained that the main contradiction in education is between the ruling class and the students. That is becoming clearer as we see more cops in schools, curriculums changing to meet the Common Core Standards, increasing class sizes and cutting student services.
The ruling class hasn’t done the best job in keeping this quiet either. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, the bosses need to reform education to meet U.S. imperialism’s requirements for the 21st century.
After hearing about a $57 million budget cut this coming school year, NSU —  although only a few months old — quickly sprung into action. Their first meeting, expecting 15-30 students, had attracted over 170 from four different high schools!
Solidarity with Teachers, Unions
Last month the group held its first demonstration outside the New Jersey Performing Art Center during a Brian Lehrer (WNYC) panel on education with Newark School Superintendent Cami Anderson and Newark Mayor Cory Booker. After students listened for over an hour to Anderson and Booker justifying their dismantling of schools and the union here, they rose up in defiance and began chanting, “Newark Students, Stand Up! Fight Back!” They also showed their unity with their teachers by chanting, “Stop attacking our teachers, their unions, their tenure, and their jobs.” 
Walkout
The night before the April 9 walkout, Anderson tried to send an automatic call home to all parents telling them that their students will be suspended if they walk out. She even sent the Assistant Superintendent to one school to try to talk the students out of it. Finally, they ordered a lockdown in all schools five minutes before the walkout took place.
While in some schools students were afraid to walk out (only a dozen made it out of one school), in others, like Science High School, over 300 students walked out through the front door — right past the Assistant Superintendent!
As a result of the NSU’s courage to continue to fight, the Superintendent was forced to backtrack the next day and deny that they tried to keep students from leaving for the protest!
Organize for May Day
PLP students and teachers have participated in these actions and held a meeting to win these students to come to May Day. More than just a communist holiday, May Day gives students the opportunity to see what communism is, and that fighting to stop budget cuts is just a small battle in the much larger battle for communism.

About 250 people came out for the May Day march here. Stockton is a town of many immigrants and farm workers. By all accounts, many are undocumented. The Central Labor Council and immigrants’ rights (mis)leaders organized the march. We missed the speeches by the Mayor and other politicians. PL’ers distributed a leaflet saying, “Nothing short of equality is acceptable.” We must identify ourselves as one working class — the producers of all wealth. Therefore, we must share all that we produce with the international working-class. The only acceptable justice for immigrants and all workers cannot be anything short of a communist revolution.

At its core May Day means revolution, not reform. The future communist society which May Day embodies has been the aspiration of hundreds of millions — in truth billions — of working people in the past. This aspiration, distant though its fulfillment may be, nonetheless persists. The specter of communism Karl Marx wrote of in 1848 still haunts the capitalists and their rule.
May Day 2013, commemorated under the banners of the Progressive Labor Party for the 43rd consecutive year does more than embody the aspirations, the dreams even, of the world’s working people. 2012 May Day in the United States
May Day means we have more than a dream. We have a plan, one that has proven itself and emerged victorious in the face of the most vicious assaults the world’s ruling classes have been able to launch. Twice in the twentieth century communists have turned world war and fascist invasion into their opposite, and at the height of their influence have managed to spread workers’ power over vast portions of the globe.
PLP’s May Day events unite workers and youth worldwide under the call:
Forward to Communism!
Workers today don’t want a world that teeters on the brink of nuclear war at flashpoints from Korea to Kashmir to Syria and beyond, but that’s what we have. Workers have a sense that there is a way — within all the excess paraded in front of us on computer and TV screens — that the grinding poverty that imperialism generates need not be.
Yet we live in a world in which our brothers and sisters in eastern Nigeria are driven to pulverize lead-infested ore with hand tools to extract gold bits, producing a dust that goes airborne and poisons their children. Working people and their allies know that we must find a way to develop the planet to meet human needs without tipping it into climate disaster, and we see that the world’s imperialists are incapable of the reorganization necessary to make this possible — nor do they want to.
As we gather under PLP’s red flag in cities across the globe, we preserve and deepen our commitment to a movement that belongs to the international working class. On May Day, shoulder to shoulder with our comrades old, and new, we draw strength for the task of advancing the fight for communism in the coming year. PLP’s May Day events will cover the Americas, Asia and Africa.

2012 May Day in Berln, GermanyMay Day:One Class, One World, One Party
Our movement knows no borders. The bosses can’t live without borders, and the butchery and mayhem it enforces to establish and maintain them. U.S. imperialism rubs up against Chinese imperialism at the Korean border, with consequences we can’t predict. In Syria U.S. bosses confront Russian interests. Iranian power and influence has flowed across its border with Iraq in ways U.S. rulers cannot and will not take lying down. Despite Obama’s rhetoric of withdrawal, U.S. bases dot the Middle East in preparation for regional wars to come. To the extent that bosses worldwide can force, or worse, win workers inside their borders to spill their blood in wars for or against US imperialism they are increasingly dangerous.
Meanwhile, fascism grows at the border between the U.S. and Mexico. When it comes to the flow of capital seeking maximum profit, the Mexico-U.S. border is no hindrance. But for workers, the border has become a pretext for the rulers’ drone surveillance, racist vigilante shootings and a “guest worker” program that will only institutionalize and legitimize the fascist terror of Obama’s deportation regime. Obama, serving the needs of U.S. capitalists, has deported far more Latin American workers than any president in history.
On the streets of Brooklyn, NY, our slogan resounds:
Stop Racist Deportations; Working People Have No Nations!
Borders, nationalism and racism are natural and necessary under capitalism. Illusions of European “unity” are being dashed on the rocks of competing bosses’ national interest in the European Union’ oppressive austerity and rising anti-immigrant racism. In the U.S., residential and educational segregation has spawned a situation where according to recent polls more U.S. citizens admit to holding racist anti-black views than just a few years ago.
Working-class internationalism is the only antidote to this poison. Progressive Labor Party’s May Day sends a clear message:
‘Smash All Borders, Power to the Workers!’
Communism is the only force that can guide workers to turn the guns of the bosses’ armies back on the bosses themselves,  not on workers from another country. So we chant:
‘Turn the Guns Around, Shoot the Bosses Down!’
May Day is an exercise in this internationalism. In our anti-racist solidarity around campaigns against cholera in Haiti or in support of young rebels against NYPD murder in Brooklyn, NY, we are building a fighting foundation for the communist world workers want, deserve and will win.