LOS ANGELES — About 20,000 people marched in this year’s May Day celebration here. This year’s march was far smaller than previous years. Instead of one unified march, there were several smaller marches that left from different areas of the city at different times. This reflected the splits within the nationalist, reformist and revisionist (unity-with-bosses) organizations. But, there were definitely more friends marching with us this year. We maintained high energy, held up the red flag, and distributed CHALLENGE.  

Thirty PL’ers and friends marched in our open contingent. We led revolutionary chants, like “Raise those red flags, raise ‘em high, the PLP is marching by,” and “Las luchas obreras no tienen fronteras, the fight of the workers has no racist borders!”  

Several high school students participated by helping lead chants in English and Spanish, even though Spanish is not the first language for some. The best part of the march by far was when the revisionists and the cops attempted to divert the march from joining the other marches that ended in Pershing Square.

As a result of strong leadership and long-term base-building at several local college campuses, we were able to lead a breakaway march of more than 50 workers and students that took the streets, confronted the police, and stopped traffic, chanting “Whose streets, our streets!”

 “From Tahir Square to Pershing Square,” and “Capitalism means, we got to fight back!”  It was a powerful experience for us and a small taste of working-class power. 

Many of the college students thanked us for our leadership and boldness. They took CHALLENGE and exchanged contact information. Much work lies ahead of us for next year. There are new people to follow up with and struggles to continue, but this march was definitely an inspiring moment for our Party and our friends.

BERLIN — Nearly 35,000 workers and youth marched in May Day demonstrations throughout Germany, the largest being in Berlin with other marches in Nuremberg, Hamburg, Leipzig, and Kiel. Meanwhile, anti-racists stopped or routed neo-Nazis in Neumuenster, Neubrandenberg and Wittstock. 

Over 25,000 celebrated May Day in Berlin, marching through the city’s political center under the slogan, “Pressure is rising for social revolution.” They were viciously attacked by a mass of cops with riot clubs and tear gas. Many were injured and arrested. Left-wing and anti-fascist groups organized the march which included several Kurdish and trade union youth organizations. They declared that the march was “a clear demonstration to the rulers that people will not put up with Capital’s attacks on people’s living standards anymore.”

In Hamburg, 1,400 marched under the motto, “No alternative to revolution!” When 1,000 cops, included mounted police, attacked the marchers with clubs and pepper gas, the cops were hit with stones, bottles and firecrackers.

In Kiel, speakers urged the destruction of crisis-generating capitalism and denounced the racist European Union refugee policy.

Nazis Routed

In Neumuenster, direct action by 2,000 anti-fascists — organized under the slogan, “They shall not pass!” — halted an attempted Nazi demonstration. The fascists were stoned at the south train station, forcing them to call off their rally.

In Wittstock, 500 May Day marchers prevented 170 neo-Nazis from marching. In a three-hour action, the anti-fascists blocked the streets and the Nazis gave up after marching barely 200 yards.

In Neubrandenberg, when 1,000 cops using riot clubs and pepper gas cleared the way for 300 neo-Nazis, hundreds blocked the streets, forcing the Nazis to circle back to the train station and end any march.

CARTAGENA, COLOMBIA, April 16 — At the Summit of the Americas, the celebrity singer Shakira sang the Colombian anthem. She portrayed a microcosm of what imperialism has in store for Latin America. 

Shakira announced that she’s sponsoring new educational projects throughout Latin America covering 6.200 children of the 35 million who have no access to any type of education. This educative philanthropic project, which earns her great economic dividends, will “resolve” the educational problems of 0.018 percent of the continent’s children. 

Lecturing hundreds of the Summit’s capitalists about her “new” education idea, she said that investment in early education is a promising business which can net surprising profits. She maintained that each dollar invested could reap $17 in profit in adulthood. She knows this from the tax privileges she has enjoyed in Colombia and in other countries.  She repeated the usual formula that education can end poverty and that her 17-year philanthropic project in education has redeemed six million children. 

She criticized as “obsolete and old fashioned” the idea that the State must provide education. “Education not only helps masses emerge from poverty” but “is a virtue converting them into potential clients.” Thus, investors win double: gaining direct returns in education and assuring future buyers of their products, earning profit as businessmen and world fame as philanthropists, like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and George Soros.

This capitalist lecture about education is not new. It’s the same one repeated by a bunch of technocrats and economists made in USA: university deans, Board of Education speakers, the World Bank and the fascist educators. But what’s new is that an out-of-tune singer presented this project. She declared that capitalist philanthropy is the best way to solve poverty and achieve “the sure prosperity that we deserve and have always dreamt.” As we know, capitalism’s dreams are workers’ nightmares.

Lesson No. 1: Capitalist Philanthropy

What happened in the orgy that Obama’s secret service agents organized in Cartagena matches what U.S. ambassadors, secret service agents, military advisers and mercenaries are used to doing: sexist imperialism. They transform places they visit into brothels and prostitute young native girls, carried out with a death threat, as if it were an honor for women in those lands. This is how U.S. capitalists see Latin American countries and their people: as brothels occupied by poverty-stricken prostitutes, with their governments as unconditional pimps. The Colombian government, protected by U.S. imperialists, just demonstrated this in fine detail.

Lesson No. 2: The Free Trade Agreement

The Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between Colombia and the U.S. is exploitation on a grand scale, a product of inter-imperialist contradictions. In Colombia, where part of these contradictions develop, its capitalists kneel before bosses from China, Spain and North America, fighting for control of the country’s natural resources.

With a smile of betrayal from those that know they have traded Colombia’s riches for a plate of lentils to the imperialist U.S., various Colombian government speakers announced that starting May 15th the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement will go into effect. In reality, this happened since the Cartagena Summit. 

Unemployment will increase with the arrival of U.S. products, but the official advertisers and their media of misinformation assure that new jobs will be created more than ever.  

While the FTA increases harassment and murders of union members and workers’ leaders in Colombia, U.S. governmental circles and those in Colombia maintain the agreement is a “blessing” for unions. The insatiable search for natural riches and the construction of infrastructure routes to transport products to the U.S. will destroy ecosystems, seas, rivers and forests but journalists say this will mean more environmental protection and exploitation of these riches.

What remains of education will be privatized, but they assure us that such measures will improve services and the flow of private businessmen who will take us out of poverty and underdevelopment, like Shakira. But all they do is generalize illiteracy and ignorance. The brutal import of U.S. junk food will destroy the feeble foundations of agricultural production, but they assure us that our diet and nutritional habits will improve eating this trash. 

Lesson No. 3: ‘Humanism’ of the Colombian State

In a clear demonstration of state humanism, the Colombian State’s oppressing forces swept Cartagena street by street, house by house, to oust the poor from the city’s center because they “made it ugly” and were a bad showcase for the sale of Colombia to transnational capital. They even removed the dogs, along with the homeless, the street vendors, popular cooks and anyone else in the way.

Avenues were remodeled so that Barack Obama’s caravan of about 20 limousines and expensive cars wouldn’t have to stop anywhere in its way. The city militarized itself as never before, employing thousands of police, military, secret agents, divers and pilots to guard it.    

The price of these security measures, along with the Summit’s expenses, may have reached $100 million, while schools, hospitals, parks or universities go wanting. This shows how public resources are only used in big measures to pay the external debt and finance the war against Colombia’s exploited.  

Workers Great Potential

The world’s workers have risen and organized themselves under reformist ideas. Struggles from Brazil to Afghanistan have shown the great potential we workers have, but we will only see change if the workers are led by communist ideas. Our Party will be present on May Day, commemorating the day of struggle of the international working class. Conscious that there’s still much to do, we will raise our red communist flags to continue the road that communists from the past began. Workers’ class struggles have taught us that communist ideas are needed to destroy this parasitic and murderous system, to build with the Progressive Labor Party a communist society that will free us from slavery.

In the first week of May a new underground youth group plastered Kabul with hundreds of posters depicting former warlords as criminals and denouncing the U.S. and Karzai who gave them government positions in 2001. 

April 28 was Mujahadin Victory Day, a national holiday celebrating the defeat of a Marxist government in 1992 by the fundamentalist warlords — known collectively as mujahadin — and the establishment of an Islamist state. For Afghans the day is a brutal reminder of the tens of thousands killed, the rape of thousands of women and children and the destruction of Kabul that followed as the seven groups that made up the U.S.-backed mujahadin fought for territory and power until driven to the north by Taliban forces four years later. 

The youth group’s proclamation, “Enough is enough! We will no longer be a witness to your corrupt and predatory ways,” reflects the popular mood. Political parties are organizing, clandestinely and openly, to break the hold of the ruling class and the unbearable conditions of daily life. 

Capitalism the Problem, Communism the Answer

Afghans once organized a movement, influenced by Marxist ideas that identified capitalism as the root of the vast economic disparity between rich and poor, advancing communism as the solution to end it. The idea that communism is needed to eliminate capitalist forces that are currently oppressing Afghans is taking hold again. 

Starting in the 1960s among university students, a movement spread into the urban and rural working class. “We thought that money and wealth is concentrated in just a small class of the society,” said a former student at Kabul University, “that socialism is the only way for poor people to be equal, to receive what they work for.” Dedicated young men and women formed clandestine study circles that became a force in raising the political consciousness of the whole population. Peasant uprisings, labor stoppages, student strikes and demonstrations paralyzed the country in 1968. 

Ten years later the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan, (PDPA) the largest of the Marxist parties came to power. The popular new government cut food prices, raised wages, opened health clinics and schools, confiscated the land of the old aristocracy and redistributed it to the peasants. New laws ended the practice of bride price. Women and minorities were given equal rights.

All gains made when the PDPA was in power are gone. During those years, despite the intervention of the imperialists, and the PDPA’s own mistakes, from 1978 to 1992 conditions for Afghans improved tremendously: jobs were created and hospitals and schools built. Women made great gains: half the university students in the country were women; women were 40 percent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 percent of its teachers and 30 percent of its civil servants.

Counter-revolutionaries, wealthy landowners and fundamentalists sabotaged the new programs and spread anti-government misinformation. They joined the jihad — religious war — against the communists which the CIA was secretly organizing in Pakistan, funded by the U.S and Saudi Arabia. Maoists, who followed the Chinese anti-Soviet line, calling the PDPA puppets of the Russians, joined them. Over the next ten years, at a cost of $40 billion, the U.S. recruited, supplied, and trained — militarily and ideologically — almost 100,000 jihadis or mujahadin from Afghanistan and 40 countries. (This included Osama bin Laden who bankrolled the jihad and later formed al Qaeda.)

The broader U.S. aim was to draw its imperialist rival, the Soviet Union, into a trap, a debilitating war. Russian forces went into Afghanistan in support of the government in December 1979, starting 33 years of war for Afghans as the country became the battleground of a 10-year proxy war between the USSR and the U.S. One million Afghans were killed, four million fled, many to Pakistan and Iran, and the economy and infrastructure of the country were devastated. 

The legacy of these war years has left deep scars on Afghan society.  

But although the promise of equality was never fulfilled, the idea of an egalitarian communist society motivated thousands of Afghans then and still does today. In Afghanistan and working class areas of Europe and the U.S. where many Afghan exiles live, Afghans are looking at why the old movement failed, in order to find a way forward. 

They identify the egotism of some within the PDPA leadership, who focused on building a power base, dividing the party in a struggle between two factions rather than developing communist ideology.

The PDPA took power in an army coup organized by military officers, and although the party had an estimated 25,000 members, it lacked a strong base among the working class. Its attempts at a transformation of society was misunderstood by some and met with resistance, especially in the countryside, where wealthy landowners with religion and coercion dominated rural workers. 

The party had close ties to the Soviet communist party, which professed anti-nationalism in theory but in practice made little effort to build an international working-class movement. 

In the year after the PDPA took power certain corrupt leaders brought in supporters whose interest was personal gain, not building an egalitarian society. They imprisoned and killed those who opposed them including innocent civilians and under the banner of communism alienated the unorganized masses, making them open to the intensive, anticommunist propaganda of the Afghan ruling class, the U.S. and Arab fundamentalists.

The Afghan communists followed the theory of socialism as a stage to communism, practiced by the USSR and China. PLP, in “Road to Revolution 4,” analyzed that experience and concluded that socialism reverts back to capitalism.

Today PLP rejects the two-stage theory, nationalism, racism, sexism and the cult of leadership. We are building a mass international party to fight directly for communism and invite the heroic Afghan comrades who have kept the ideas of an egalitarian society alive to join us. 

 One World, One Flag, One Party.