On this May Day, International Workers’ Day, the international working class is under sharpening fascist attack while the drums of global war beat louder and slaughter millions. World capitalism pushes its economic crisis onto workers’ backs with mass racist unemployment, wage-cuts, soaring food prices and resulting starvation.

Yet masses of workers are fighting back, from immigrant workers striking in France and rebellions in Greece to workers and youth across the U.S fighting against racist budget cuts. This May Day we must stand as one class, with one interest: to destroy the capitalist murderers with communist revolution and build a communist world based on production to fulfill the needs of our class.

International workers’ solidarity must meet the bosses’ assault head-on, especially as they use the attacks on the world’s 200 million immigrants to attack ALL workers. Immigrant workers are victims of racist super-exploitation, which impoverishes the whole working class by creating a “reserve army of the unemployed,” which the bosses use as a club over the heads of all workers, including white workers.

Capitalism has spawned this migration across all borders. We say smash all boss-created borders. We are one class, internationally.

Capitalism created the working class, a class with nothing but its labor power to sell in order to survive.

Early on, the capitalists moved millions of Africans as slaves from that continent to wherever they could produce the most profit. With capitalism’s global expansion, immigration is now a worldwide phenomenon. Capitalism’s unrelenting drive for maximum profits has uprooted hundreds of millions of workers, forcing them into the squalor of sprawling mega slums, from Haiti to Venezuela to Brazil to Nigeria to China, where 80 million Chinese-born migrant workers are branded as “illegal.”

Many die crossing deserts and oceans from Africa to Latin America trying to reach jobs in the U.S. and Europe, as well as from starvation, malnutrition and curable diseases. Those migrating to the more industrialized countries are not only super-exploited but are used as scapegoats, blamed for capitalism-created problems like unemployment, and are treated as slaves or modern indentured servants.

In the past, immigrant workers were on the front lines of class struggle. Global capitalism has created its own gravediggers — the working class — and internationalized it even more. This provides the opportunity for a communist-led working class to forge the unity necessary for communist revolution. Immigrant workers are now positioned geographically and socially to help lead this fight worldwide.

Their role will become even more crucial as the imperialists’ rivalry for world domination intensifies, particularly in the U.S., a declining power fighting desperately to hold its position as top imperialist. Meanwhile it gears up for wider Middle Eastern wars and eventually world war versus the rising powers in China, Russia and the European Union.

The U.S. rulers’ fight over immigration reform involves the tactics and strategies on how and when to wage these wars. One sector wants to do it cheaply with a small, technologically-superior military. These bosses opposing immigration reform just want to terrorize immigrant workers with deportations to continue super-exploiting them.

The liberal imperialist sector, however, needs an immigration policy that builds patriotism among immigrants through a 12-year-long path to citizenship. This is in exchange for recruiting millions of young soldiers as cannon fodder in their imperialist wars and to maintain a workforce of millions of super-exploited workers for their war industries.

The vitriolic anti-immigrant stance of their opponents also serves the liberal bosses, creating the terror and despair that drives immigrant workers into the arms of their “lesser-evil” liberal politicians, churches and unions, with their pacifism and dead-end electoral politics.

Their immigration reform and DREAM Act, aim at forcing undocumented youth into the military under the farce of “helping them go to college,” which they can’t afford. This “Green Card army” will eventually become the army of all, via the draft or some militaristic “national service” scheme. The slave-like conditions and low wages of indentured immigrant workers will be used to depress conditions for all workers.

The needs of the ruling class are forcing them to bring together two of the most oppressed, potentially militant and rebellious sectors of the working class: black workers and youth, crucial in industry and the military — possessing a rich history of fighting the U.S. bosses’ racism — and immigrant workers with a long history of fighting U.S. imperialism.

With PLP building international unity and a base for rebellion and revolutionary communism among industrial workers, soldiers, and students — black, Latino, white, Asian and Arab, immigrant and citizen, men and women — we can fight the bosses’ racism, nationalism and patriotism, and unite the world’s workers to destroy the scourge of capitalism forever.

The fire of May Day burns brightly in a vibrant and growing internationalist PLP! Workers of the World Unite! Fight to end racism and wars for profit. Smash all bosses’ borders! Spread CHALLENGE, the internationalist, revolutionary communist newspaper! Fight for communism! Join us! J



May Day is the working class’s international holiday celebrated by tens of millions of workers worldwide. It was born out of — and honors — the Chicago workers’ historic struggle for the 8-hour day on May 1, 1886, launching a general strike that spread to 350,000 workers across the country. It’s a day when workers around the globe march for their common demands, signifying international working-class solidarity.

In 1884, the AFL passed a resolution to make eight hours “a legal day’s labor from and after May 1, 1886.” Workers were forced to labor “from sun-up to sundown,” up to 14 hours a day. The Chicago Central Labor Council then called for a general strike on May 1, 1886, to demand the 8-hour day.

On that day, Chicago stood still as “Tens of thousands downed their tools and moved into the streets. No smoke curled from the tall chimneys of the factories and mills,” reported one paper.

On May 3, the cops murdered six strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works. The next day thousands marched in protest into Chicago’s Haymarket Square. A bomb was thrown by a police agent. Four workers were killed, seven cops died and 200 workers were wounded in what became known as the Haymarket Massacre.

Nine demonstration leaders were framed for “instigating a riot.” Four were hung. A mass protest movement forced the Governor to free those still alive after the government admitted the frame-up.

The tens of thousands who won the 8-hour day saw it eroded, so another general strike was called for May 1, 1890. At the July 1889 meeting of the International Workers Association, organized and led by Karl Marx, the U.S. delegate reported on the struggle. The Association decided “to organize a great international demonstration, so that...on one appointed day the [world’s] toiling masses shall demand...” the 8-hour day. “Since a similar demonstration has already been decided upon by the American Federation of Labor....this day is adopted for the international demonstration.” [This kind of international solidarity is vitally needed today.]

As it progressed, the international communist movement took up the struggle and organized May 1st celebrations every year. In the U.S., it was championed for many years by the old Communist Party, with 250,000 marching in New York City in the 1940’s. But when that party abandoned its principles, May Day was resurrected by the Progressive Labor Party in 1971 which advanced more revolutionary ideas. May Day marches have been organized by the PLP for the past 35 years, in many cities — Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Houston, Delano, California and others, as well as PLP contingents in Latin America.

While the bosses try to smear May Day as being “imported from Soviet Russia,” it remains as a signal contribution of the world’s workers born in the actions of those Chicago strikers over a century ago. Today we march for the universal demands of all workers, regardless of capitalist-created borders: against imperialist war, against racism and sexism, for unity of immigrant and citizen workers, against wage slavery, against fascist police terror and for the communist solution to all these attacks facing the international working class.

How prophetic were the last words of Haymarket martyr August Spies as the hangman’s noose was tied around his neck and he declared, “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!” 

Wars over access to resources, markets and workers’ labor result inevitably from capitalism’s dog-eat-dog competition and kill workers by the millions. Attacking this mass murder for profit is essential to the long struggle towards communist revolution our Party marks on May Day. May Day 2010 finds U.S. capitalists, led by Obama, shedding workers’ blood openly in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as they try to shore up a faltering worldwide empire largely based on control of energy. U.S. rulers, meanwhile, must soon confront Iran and have longer-term plans for facing off against China and Russia.

For Exxon’s Bottom Line, Obama
Keeps GIs in Iraq Despite
‘Withdrawal’ Pledge

The U.S. invasion of Iraq has slaughtered over one million civilians (Opinion Research Business poll, 2007) and 4,300 GIs in pursuit of a promised 12 million barrels of oil per day (mbd). Obama’s phony “withdrawal” plan (which helped elect him) has become a 50,000-soldier “residual” force that will continue the carnage. U.S. combat boots on Iraq’s soil, needed to protect Exxon Mobil’s, BP’s and Shell’s new oil stakes there, incite violence from local bosses seeking a piece of the elusive 12-mbd bonanza for themselves.

Masquerading as religious leaders, billionaire Osama Bin Laden (through al Qaeda in Iraq) and would-be pro-Iranian oil baron Muqtada al Sadr have been battling both the U.S. and each other to overturn the Exxon-led deals. Just after a U.S. raid wiped out two al Qaeda bigwigs, al Qaeda bombs killed 72 people near Sadr-affiliated mosques around Baghdad on April 23.

To Rulers, Mid-East Oil, Gas Mean Everything, Workers’ Lives Nothing

U.S. capitalists’ main goals for their murderous Afghan campaign are: securing the path of the proposed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline and establishing a military presence that physically separates U.S. foes Iran and China. “Shoot-first” orders from top U.S. brass cause a civilian massacre every week in Afghanistan.

NPR reported (4/23): “Earlier this week, NATO troops opened fire on a vehicle in Khost province, killing four unarmed civilians, including three teenagers. Last week, a military convoy shot up a large passenger bus in the southern city of Kandahar, killing at least five civilians and wounding 18 others.”

The U.S. war machine is now gearing up for a June offensive to take Kandahar, which lies directly on TAPI’s route. But even if gas never flows, U.S. installations in Afghanistan, like the Bagram mega-base, will have driven a geographic wedge between U.S. rival China and its protégé Iran.

Obama has enlarged U.S. rulers’ Afghan effort into Pakistan, with similar disregard for working-class lives. An April 24 Predator drone strike directed from a bunker in Nevada incinerated seven people in northwest Pakistan. But the Pentagon-Pakistani death squad couldn’t care less who they were. “We don’t know yet if any high-value target was present in the area at the time of attack,” said a Pakistani official. (Agence France Presse, 4/24)

A nuclear-armed Iran — pro-Chinese and pro-Russian — presents an immediate threat to U.S. imperialism’s precarious leverage over oil-rich Iraq and even richer Saudi Arabia. In response, U.S. bosses plan two basic options, both loaded with danger for our class. One involves a U.S. (or U.S.-aided Israeli) attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. If that happens, Teheran’s oil-soaked ayatollahs vow they will close the Straits of Hormuz, shutting off U.S.-controlled crude exports from Iraq, Kuwait and eastern Saudi Arabia. A massive U.S.-led invasion would soon follow.

The other option, now moving through Congress and seemingly “more peaceful,” is for sanctions, including an embargo on gasoline to Iran. The Christian Science Monitor (4/24) warned: “The only way to really enforce such a crippling sanction against the Iranian economy would be through an American-led naval blockade which, by international law, is an act of war....It was a U.S. ban on the export of oil to Imperial Japan for its invasion of China that triggered the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. And a U.S. naval blockade of Cuba in 1962 almost led to nuclear war with the Soviet Union.” [Despite some off-the-wall religious views, Christian Science is actually a Wall Street/Rockefeller Republican outfit. Goldman Sachs ex-CEO Henry Paulson belongs, as does Nelson Rockefeller ally and Jay Rockefeller father-in-law ex-senator Charles Percy.]

China’s Bosses’ Growing Navy
Challenging U.S. Rulers’ Control of Oil

China’s capitalists are the U.S.’s biggest rival for Mid-East energy. The NY Times (4/24) reported China’s “military is seeking to project naval power well beyond the Chinese coast, from the oil ports of the Middle East to the shipping lanes of the Pacific, where the United States Navy has long reigned as the dominant force.”

Meanwhile, neo-czar Putin is using Russia’s enormous gas supplies as both carrot and stick to create a vast anti-U.S. Eurasian bloc of nations dependent on, or loyal to, Moscow. With U.S. conventional forces tied up elsewhere, Obama’s response has been to flaunt Washington’s nuclear trump card. At his recent 47-nation “weapons reduction” summit, Obama in fact retained 1,500 strategic warheads and unlimited smaller, battlefield ones; maintained U.S. nukes based in Europe; and implicitly threatened Iran with a nuclear strike.

Conventional wars are widening and nuclear conflicts are looming, with dire consequences for workers. But on this working-class May Day holiday, while widespread anti-war sentiment exists, the rulers have managed to channel a great deal of it down the dead-end road of electoral politics that put their stooge Obama in the White House.

We must rebuild an anti-imperialist anti-war movement with a pro-worker, communist outlook. Stepping up our organizing efforts on the job, at school and in the neighborhood will help. So will the bosses’ intensifying war-making, which will lay bare capitalism’s wartime horrors to millions who still feel unaffected. Since the “economic draft,” which pushes jobless youth into the military, has proven insufficient to fill the war-makers’ military needs, U.S. rulers will someday soon have to draft the so-called middle class as well as the working class into its killing machine.

While it was the cauldron of capitalists’ global conflict that provided the conditions for the Soviet and Chinese workers’ revolutions, political errors brought capitalism back to both places. But an inevitable World War III, driven by the world’s competing capitalists, can result in the bosses’ digging their own graves, provided there is a mass revolutionary movement led by PLP to build a true communist world. What we do now surely will count greatly.