This May Day Progressive Labor Party will proudly unfurl the red flag of workers’ revolution across the world. Why do we carry high the red flag?
In 1890, on the eve og history’s first May Day, Frederick Engels wrote, “The proletariat of Europe and America is holding a review of its forces. It is mobilizing for the first time as one army, one flag, one class...”
Both the red flag and the word “strike” first appeared in 1768, when sailors “struck” (or removed the topgalant sails of merchant ships at port), thus immobalizing the ships. The red flag indicated defiance and readiness for battle. Again in London in 1780, when 100,000 workers marched on Newgate Prison to burn it to the ground, the multi-racial leadership carried the red flag. Their cry was, “Away with all prisons,” because the working class was being increasingly incarcerated in them.
In 1831, the red flag was part of the struggle of the working class in Wales as well as in the revolution to topple the monarchy during the French revolution (1789-1794), especially during the struggle in July of 1791. But the general adoption of the red flag as the workers’ own symbol occurred in 1848 when it appeared spontaneously on the barricades in Paris, and then everywhere throughout revolutionary Europe.
During the Paris Commune of 1871 — when workers first took over a whole city and held it for two months — the red flag of the working class flew over Paris. It had become the symbol of emancipation. By 1892 it flew above the May Day marches throughout Europe, Australia, South America, Cuba and Japan. In 1889, in order for the newly formed Labour Party of Great Britain to win the masses, a song was written about the red flag which became the anthem of the Party: “Bandiera Rosa”
In Italy, too, “Bandiera Rosa” became a symbol of May Day.
In the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the red flag became the symbol of the working class in power. And as revolutions spread around the world in the next 50 years — from China to Eastern Europe — the red flag of working-class emancipation was raised on high. Significantly, the Cultural Revolution that fought the capitalist turn in China were led by the Red Guards.
In 1971, the Progressive Labor Party picked up the red flag from where it had been dropped and has marched proudly with it in every gathering we hold throughout the world. The red flag is truly the flag of workers’ internationalism, as opposed to the hundreds of flags that the bosses-of the world fly to symbolize their respective capitalist states.

The March 13 CHALLENGE article, “War on Terror: Mass Red Movement Can Defeat Rulers’ High-Tech Tyranny”, was a wake-up call for many of us.  The article discussed the various technologies that have emerged at an accelerated rate for surveillance and spying since the Arab Spring.  There are conferences all over the world debating and attacking the growth of fascist technology to monitor and control citizens.
The bosses are using terrorist attacks since 9/11 as an excuse to tighten the screws on all workers and monitor them more closely as a means of social control.  In addition to monitoring cell phones to track workers’ location and activities, the internet increasingly cannot be accessed without proper institutional affiliation (or money).  The bosses control workers’ access to information to make it harder for workers to educate themselves. 
Many progressive workers have tried to fight back against the establishment by promoting free access to educational materials on the internet.  Those who have rebelled have been punished severely. Aaron Swartz, a talented programmer social/activist, committed suicide at the age of 26 last January 1.  He had been arrested two years earlier for allegedly hacking the servers at the Massachusetts Institution of Technology (MIT) to download millions of on-line library files of academic journals. 
In the case United States v. Aaron Swartz, he was facing up to 35 years of jail time and was overwhelmed by despair.  He had the education to understand the need to fight back and revolt against the status quo, but he lacked the discipline and support of a collective so he gave in to the intimidation and bullying of the (il)legal system that serves the capitalist system.
Although his death was actually a suicide, and Aaron’s family acknowledged that he was a troubled person, his father released a statement saying, “Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy.  It is the product of a criminal-justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.  Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts US Attorney’s Office and at MIT contributed to his death.”
Although we cannot consider Aaron to be a member of the working class, as he was a millionaire by 19 and came from a liberal and elite family.  However, he had a very close friendship with Quinn Norton, a tech journalist with working-class roots.  Today, Aaron, Quinn and many other young people understand that corporations and the government pervert and distort technology and the internet to serve their own profit-making interests. We in PL need to work harder to seek out and engage rebellious youth, to expose them to our ideas and struggle with them to see that only with the destruction of capitalism can information be made “free” for workers and youth.
Although Swartz was right to fight against the bosses, many like him are isolated and acting alone, making it much easier for the rulers to destroy Swartz and others who act without a collective like PLP. 
What can we learn from this tragedy?  If we could have more PL’ers in technology to bring our revolutionary ideas — with the focus on the fight for a new egalitarian communist society — Aaron might not have succumbed to extreme individualism and taken his own life in one destructive self-centered act.  Communism could have given him the discipline, focus, and mission to continue on in his work to fight for a better world.
Red hacker

Why does Progressive Labor Party fight for communism? Because capitalism doesn’t work for our class. It doesn’t work when racist kkkops murder hundreds of black and Latino youth in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City. It doesn’t work when U.S. drones kill over a thousand civilians in Pakistan. It doesn’t work when the capitalists’ austerity in Europe throws millions of workers onto the streets. It doesn’t work when Obama deports 1.6 million immigrant workers. It doesn’t work when mainly women workers in Bangladesh are burned alive in textile factories with locked exit doors. It doesn’t work when schools and hospitals all over the country are shut down. It doesn’t work when hundreds of thousands of families near Mexico City are threatened with being flooded out of their homes because of the government’s hydro project. And it doesn’t work when the South African government massacres striking miners.
Truth is, capitalism has never worked for the working class. It is a system built on robbing, lynching, and terrorizing us. It breeds divisive racist and sexist ideologies that prevent us from seeing each other as part of one struggle, one class, one fight. The bosses engage in cutthroat competition on a world scale, leading to wars — wars paid in workers’ blood.
If blood must be shed, let it be the bosses’. Workers, students, and soldiers — turn the guns around.
We have a vision for communism, a system where there is no exploitation, no wages, no racism, no sexism, and no borders. What we would have is a society run by workers, where each person works according to their commitment, and each receives according to their need. Communism is an egalitarian society.
How can such a world be possible? We need revolution! It can only be won by organizing to overthrow these bosses and their state under the revolutionary force of a mass party of millions, PLP. Together, we can conquer the world. Every action we take counts in building for revolution. 
So, join Progressive Labor Party as we march in Mexico, Pakistan, Palestine, Haiti, United States, El Salvador, Colombia, and more! From the beginning, May Day stood for working-class internationalism. Workers have been fighting against exploitation since capitalism’s birth. Let us honor our class, from the 1886 Chicago General Strike from which May Day was born, to the first successful workers’ state in the Soviet Union, to the great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, to each and every one of our current battles.
Workers, we have a world to win. Together, we can create a system that works and rules society for us who do all the work and produce everything of value. Join us this May Day!

As their competition for global supremacy intensifies, Chinese and U.S. bosses are scrambling for allies in a conflict that looks more likely by the day. Speaking in Moscow on March 23, China’s new president, Xi Jinping, “made a case…for closer economic and foreign policy cooperation with Russia” (New York Times, 3/24/13). Xi argued that China and Russia have “converging goals, including an expansion of the oil and gas trade, as they pursue dreams of ‘national revival’ and seek to offset the influence of the developed West.”
A China-Russia axis could be a mortal challenge to U.S. economic power and political influence. China has a huge and rising economy and more people of military age than the total U.S. population. Russia has vast energy supplies and the world’s second biggest nuclear arsenal, most of it aimed at the U.S. Well aware of this threat, U.S. rulers have unveiled their own long-term coalition schemes. In February, Chuck Hagel, Barack Obama’s new defense secretary and the outgoing head of the Atlantic Council think tank, called for military links with potential anti-China allies: India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Turkey.
Oil Dollars and Workers’ Death
Strategic considerations are guiding the resurgence of U.S. oil interests. The biggest bosses are now pushing for intensive drilling and exploration, both within the U.S. and in other areas under the rulers’ control (see below). While this expansion serves the bosses’ class interests as they prepare for imperialist war, it promises only devastation for the working class, from Baghdad and Kabul and Islamabad to New York and Los Angeles and Chicago. The carnage will be heaviest in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, where workers have long suffered racist super-exploitation by the imperialist powers.
Setting the rosters for a possible World War III underlies a number of seemingly unrelated developments. The financial crisis in Cyprus, which holds newfound gas reserves, has as much to do with war planning and energy imperialism as it does with rotten banks.
In talks last week in Moscow over a possible loan to Cyprus, Russia made clear that it expected a piece of the gas pie for its own companies....In Russia’s view, Cyprus, which already has two British military bases,...would also be an ideal place to set up a small naval installation should the Kremlin lose access to Tartus, a Syrian port that risks being swamped by that nation’s civil war (NYT, 3/24/13).
It’s important to note that Russia has shipped arms through Tartus to the pro-Chinese, pro-Iranian Syrian dictatorship.
Behind the scenes in Iraq, meanwhile, ExxonMobil is playing a pair of anti-China hands. U.S. imperialism’s flagship company hired Condoleezza Rice and other war criminals to force Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki to reconsider his threat to transfer Exxon’s stake in Iraq’s biggest oilfield to a Chinese firm. And in northern Iraq, in the rebellious Kurdistan province, Exxon is supplying fuel to Turkey, another prospective Grand War Alliance member:
“Exxon [is] now the largest landholder...after the regional government....The acreage build-up comes as Kurdistan is looking at building oil and gas pipelines straight to Turkey” (Toronto Financial Post, 3/22/13). Secretary of State John Kerry no doubt touched on both issues during his “surprise” March 23 Baghdad visit, which was ostensibly meant to check Iraq’s growing coziness with Iran.
U.S. capitalists need to control Middle East resources — and the naval supply routes that govern access to them — to stay a step ahead in their deadly rivalry with other imperialist powers. Washington has sufficient energy supplies outside the region to meet its own needs. But to dominate the world, U.S. rulers must freeze out enemies like China. They cannot protect their empire without controlling the Middle East and its rich reserves of gas and oil.
U.S. Energy Boom Sharpens Imperialist Dogfight
The shale oil and gas boom within the U.S. takes on ominous overtones when viewed through this lens. In gas, U.S. bosses are developing unprecedented export capacity to combat Russia, China and Iran — economically today, militarily tomorrow. On March 19, the Brookings Institute’s Charles Ebinger testified before Congress that U.S. gas production helps “loosen the stranglehold of Gazprom, Russia’s state gas company, on our east and west European allies.”
In addition, Ebinger sees gas exports as a big boost for the U.S. in a possible Middle East conflagration, where “a blockade or military intervention in the Strait of Hormuz or a direct attack on Qatar’s liquefaction facilities by Iran would inflict chaos on world energy markets.... Additional volumes of LNG [Liquified Natural Gas] on the world market will benefit all consumers.”
U.S. oil’s resurgence is flowing from smaller domestic oil bosses who once demanded an end to “dependence on foreign oil.” Domestic sources were long ignored by larger companies like Exxon, which were accustomed to peacetime access to cheap and adequate sources around the world.  But as U.S. exploration and production fell off, the prospect of global war and shipping route shutoffs made the biggest U.S. capitalists vulnerable. So, they are beefing up their drilling and refining within the U.S.
Warren Buffett’s BNSF railroad and Union Tank Car company now transport half a million barrels of North Dakota Bakken crude a day. The arch-imperialist Carlyle Group bought an old Sunoco refinery in Philadelphia, once supplied by Middle East sources, and re-fired it with Pennsylvanian shale oil. Carlyle shares directors with Exxon. Its founder, David Rubenstein, is co-chairman of the finance-capital-driven Council on Foreign Relations. George H.W. Bush cashed Carlyle checks after committing genocide in the service of Exxon in Iraq.
Turn Oil Wars into Class War
As it heads inevitably toward war, inter-imperialist rivalry spells death for millions of workers around the world. Our goal must be to turn the bosses’ wars into class war for communism. That means sharpening the class struggle wherever we are building ties: in the shops and unions, the schools and campuses, the churches and neighborhoods, and especially in the military.
These struggles are erupting in the score of countries where the Progressive Labor Party is active. The world capitalist economic crisis falls mainly on the backs of the working class. But it also provides the basis to recruit masses of workers and youth to become organizers for a communist revolution. Only communism can bury all bosses and their exploitative, racist, sexist profit system. Join us this May Day!