The following is a speech given by a new PL’er at the conclusion the of the NY/NJ march.

Hi Everyone, today is one of the most exciting days of my life , words cannot express how i feel to be here celebrating May Day with my comrades and be active like I wanted to be a year ago. I want to share with you all my experience, and why I chose to join the fight. I join the fight to defend my convictions and my ideas. From my experience, I know that only the struggle pays off. This is the reason I came here And not staying in my corner to push a rant.

I joined PLP because I know that although the bosses try to fool us with their “Labor Day” in September, we know that May Day is the real holiday for workers because it emphasizes working-class unity and shows the potential of our class to lead society. I experienced this when I flew to Alabama with one of my teachers to support the nine months-long miner’s strike. That's when I discovered more about PLP and saw workers’ power in action. Despite the bosses’ best efforts to distract us, workers around the world and around the U.S. will celebrate May Day with marches and rallies like the one we are having right now. Workers around the world are showing that we must build multi-racial unity and working-class consciousness to raise a new, dynamic political construction: the dictatorship of the workers, where every worker is respected and given the opportunity to contribute and lead in society.

I joined PLP because I am currently a nursing student at Lehman College. My school is made up of working-class Black and Latino students who have been neglected because of the racism of the capitalist system. We know that communists believe that workers need to be truly educated, not just in how to treat patients and prescribe medicines, but also in how capitalism functions, how class struggle is the key to progress, and how workers can run society. I still remember my first experience fighting this racism - joining a march to the CUNY chancellor’s house. We marched against racism and for better pay for our teachers. As a student I couldn’t just sit back and watch what is happening at CUNY without joining the fight. I united with Hostos students to fight for the opening of the cafeteria and their cafeteria is now open. Together we can succeed!  Just like in China in 1949, we know that when the working class, led by communists such as us in PLP, take power again we will bring this education to every worker in the world! 

I joined PLP because I was born in Haiti, and when I look at how the working class there continues to suffer under racist oppression, I know there has to be a better way. We can see how the system forces our brother and sister to run away, how they force us to leave our beautiful community for a better life elsewhere, and what happens to the people who stayed. What happens to people like me that have family that we would like to spend time with? They use our own people to kill us, they use fear to tear us apart, to divide us, to convince workers to turn against workers. We are strong together, we did it before, we can do it again. Nou se premye pep nwa libere, nou konen byen unite se fos nou, we show others the way, we can find our way back and save workers in Haiti and around the world from this mess. Let’s unite, let's find our way back, let's fight together.

I joined PLP because we are fighting for a society where everyone should have the same opportunities to build a life. Where ordinary individuals can become extraordinary.Where another of our brothers will not have a knee on his neck for another 9 minutes 30 seconds. Say his name. George Floyd. In that society we are fighting for, no role will be bigger or smaller because it  will guarantee the idea of human equality. You, you, and you, join us, join me, let’s unite, and fight this system that keeps breeding servants of the ruling class, killer cops, racist unemployment and imperialist war!

Join me and fight together against anti-immigrant policies!

Join me, join us, let’s fight together for the international working class!

Join me, join us, let’s fight for a communist revolution!

At least 500 workers have been killed and hundreds of thousands more displaced since the start of a bloody civil war in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. This will always be the fate of the working class under capitalism, a system built on competition and exploitation, and which in times of crisis resorts to fascism and war.  As the U.S. bosses—the most criminal rulers of them all–call for “democracy,” we remind our working-class brothers and sisters to not be fooled by this trap. The capitalist bosses will never have our interests at heart. We call on workers in Sudan and across the globe to join Progressive Labor Party in the fight to smash this profit-driven system and create a communist world.

Imperialism creates instability in Sudan
Less than four years ago, the two current warring generals and capitalist thugs, Abdel Fatahl al-Burhan and Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, were championed by millions of Sudanese workers (and the U.S. ruling class) as they partnered in a coup d’etat against Omar al-Bashir, the blood-soaked dictator aligned with the Chinese imperialists. But as CHALLENGE pointed out (7/27/19), this fake campaign for “democracy” was in reality a violent push by the U.S. ruling class to limit the Chinese bosses’ influence over the region’s energy and trade routes. 

As we noted at the time, the main contradiction in Sudan is the same one shaping events worldwide: inter-imperialist competition among a rising China, a resurgent Russia, and a declining U.S.  We warned that workers in Sudan will be “sharing” power with the very forces responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of workers in Darfur and Yemen. Whenever workers are duped into compromising with the bosses, the consequences are deadly. Sudan, the third largest country in Africa, is now a tinderbox for an expanding regional war. As the desperate U.S. rulers keep losing ground to their rivals, their inability to control events will inevitably lead to a global conflict that will sacrifice millions of workers. The working class needs international communist consciousness more than ever to turn imperialist war into class war against the capitalists! 

Russia, China target Sudan’s riches
Sudan rests between two critical choke points on the Red Sea, a passageway for 10 percent of all global trade. The Suez Canal connects markets in Asia and Europe; the Bab-el-Mandeb strait links the Red Sea to the Arabian Sea. Sudan is also where the White Nile and Blue Nile rivers converge, a critical intersection for trade and access to fresh water. Additionally, it contains large reserves of gold and uranium, and houses critical infrastructure for refining and transporting oil from South Sudan. No imperialist power will easily let go of such a large prize. Russia’s interest in Sudan predates the current conflict.

In 2017, President Vladimir Putin joined with al-Bashir to form Meroe Gold, a subsidiary of the Wagner Group of Russian mercenaries. After al-Bashir was deposed and jailed, Putin strengthened ties with General Degalo, a criminal best known as a leader of the genocidal Janjaweed militias in Darfur, a region of western Sudan. Degalo built a vast pool of wealth and political power by leveraging his ties with al-Bashir to seize some of the richest gold mines in Darfur (Guardian, 4/17). The Janjaweed evolved into the Rapid Support Forces that are now at war with Sudan’s military.  Sudanese gold now appears to be financing Russia’s war with Ukraine in return for weapons and training for Degalo’s militia (CNN, 4/21).

Meanwhile, China has long relied on Sudan’s minerals for Chinese industry. Between 2011 and 2018, as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, China made hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to Sudan and invested in oil pipelines, textile factories, railways, and bridges across the Nile. China is Sudan’s largest trading partner and their biggest supplier of goods. Stability in the region is a priority for the Chinese bosses.

U.S. complicity in Darfur genocide
Ever since Chevron discovered oil in Sudan in the 1970s, the U.S. ruling class has kept a hand in the country (Human Rights Watch, 2003). Under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency worked closely with the notorious General Salah Gosh, who rose to become head of intelligence for Sudan (The Daily Beast, 1/9/2019). Between 2003 and 2008, al-Bashir, al-Burhan, Degalo, and Gosh were responsible for the mass murder of at least 300,000 workers in Darfur and for displacing 2.7 million more. In return for al-Bashir’s help with a “counter-terrorism” campaign against Al Qaeda in Iraq, the U.S. bosses turned a blind eye to the genocide and kept sharing intelligence with Sudan.

Before the latest armed conflict broke out, the Joe Biden administration continued to negotiate with these war criminals to find a path back to “democracy,” the bosses’ word for capitalist dictatorship. But like the CIA support for U.S.-friendly pro-democracy coups in the Arab Spring in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Syria, U.S. moves in Sudan have backfired and further exposed the weakness of the U.S. ruling class.  

Fight for communism!
Liberal democracy is a nationalist tool to mislead and pacify the working class. From Sudan to the U.S., we are asked to choose between one mass murderer and another. When we are fooled by the bosses into thinking that their fight is our fight, we lose sight of the essence of capitalism: imperialism and war.
The only solution is communist revolution and a dictatorship of the working class, a society run by and for workers. It is our task to expose this dogfight between the bosses and the slippery slope to World War III. We must connect the attacks on workers in Sudan to attacks on workers everywhere. Join us! Build a fighting PLP!

Brooklyn, April 29– In the midst of steady rain, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and friends marched through Brooklyn to commemorate the day that calls for workers to take power around the world: May Day. This year’s theme was a call for the international working class to unite to smash inter-imperialist war in a time of rising capitalist crisis around the world. Rather than die in the bosses’ wars, PLP fights to bring together the strengths of the working class to organize for a world worth fighting for, a communist world. May Day is an expression of our collective efforts to build that egalitarian, just world in which workers will make sure that our entire class is fed, educated, sheltered, and taken care of communally.

Smash racist borders
For this reason, the fight for communism knows no borders. Regardless of where you are, you are a member of the working class—our May Day march is for all of us! This affirmation of unity was front and center at our march. International greetings from Colombia, Pakistan and Haiti helped inspire marchers with the class struggle waged by the Party around the globe. Speeches before the march echoed this call for workers to organize and join PLP so that the working class can seize state power. In the face of the bosses’ rising fascism, our class must turn the guns around and build towards revolution. In line with the party’s internationalism, each speech was translated into Haitian Creole, Spanish, and English, reflecting PLP’s multiracial fight for a communist future. Though many were wet and cold, 200 marchers from numerous places along the East Coast of the United States showed up to express their commitment to the international working class.

Communist optimism drowns out the rain!
Wearing red ponchos to match red flags, we raised our fists to show the unity of workers marching down Flatbush Avenue. Demonstrating that workers have what it takes to adapt to any situation, members of the PLP carefully wrapped CHALLENGE newspapers in plastic grocery bags to keep them dry and to sell. Hundreds of copies of CHALLENGE were distributed to supportive working-class Brooklynites in this way. When chanters on the front truck could not use the onboard sound system because of the rain, comrades took turns making a beat with an umbrella, which energized those at the front of the march to maintain a passionate chanting spirit. Marchers showed their indomitable strength chanting together, “We don’t care about the rain! Flush these bosses down the drain!”

Many workers dared to be soaked as they walked towards the doors of shops, paused to listen, dance, put their fists up, and smile, commemorating the moment by putting their phones up or waving to their class marching by. A lot of others opened their windows and watched with awe and joy from high story buildings and encouraged us when we noticed them. One worker waved two red roses out of her window in a show of solidarity with the march.

Fascism means… Build communist leadership
At the close of May Day, onlookers cheered on as they heard the speech of a new Haitian comrade who spoke about how the party’s dedication to internationalism and antiracist class struggle won her over to communist revolution and to join PLP. Young comrades from Kingsborough Community College also spoke of PLP’s fight against racist police violence within education. They exposed the liberal bosses’ attempts to split the working class by appointing a Black college president to arrest and harass Black students. Though the liberal misleaders attempt to make us treat the openly fascist white supremacists like Trump as the main danger, PLP understands that it is the multicultural face of liberal fascists that is most venomous to our class. We call these liberal capitalists Big Fascists (see Glossary) because they are more capable of building support for imperialist war and convincing our class to make sacrifices to preserve their profit system in crisis. Against the Big and Small fascist bosses’ efforts to divide and conquer, PLP fights to unify all members of the working class towards a communist horizon.

Against the bosses’ dreary, gray world of capitalist exploitation, marchers left with a renewed optimism of revolutionary potential—that though the night is dark, we can be the sun that breaks through. Ending with a recitation of the Internationale, marchers sang with resounding conviction even as rain tore through paper sheets with lyrics. Because rainy days mean… we got to fight back! 

Our event shows PLP’s continued commitment to fostering new leadership within our organization. Most of this year’s May Day planning committee was new to the committee and confronted unforeseen challenges. We want to develop millions of students and workers to become leaders of the international working class in the fight for communism. Join PLP!

International Workers’ Day, represents a day of unity for the working class, but not as an end in itself. Despite our diversity as an international class—women and men; young and old; workers and students; rural and urban; Black, Brown and white; immigrant and native-born—we should use May Day as a catalyst in our struggle to thwart the will of all the bosses—the worldwide ruling classes and their flunkeys. Their aggressive attempts to trample on all the needs and aspirations of workers everywhere will, in the end, fail and capitalism/imperialism will come crumbling down and be replaced by an egalitarian society through the means of communist revolution.

And make no mistake about it: ruling classes everywhere are becoming more and more aggressive in the race for power, where imperialist war (or war between the imperialists’ proxies) would be one of the surest strategies to increase not only their capital but also their control of the world’s resources. If we follow the strategies put in place by the bosses, our class will pay the cost: the lives of workers (soldiers and civilians), more racism and sexism, more economic and health misery.

The bosses need to increase social inequality to try to save their crumbling system, while workers need to fight back to stop them. There is no other choice. It’s “them” or “us,” and we want “us” to be the winners—short-term and long-term—in this struggle.

Rebellion needs communist focus
Workers in France are currently fighting back valiantly against the cutbacks in pension benefits that the rulers need to impose to save their system. Students are fighting side by side with them, against the class enemy, because they know that their own future is in the balance. And we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them as well. But we need to fight for more than reforms of the capitalist system. Reforms won can be taken away if the same capitalist system remains. Yes, we can win this battle but lose the war if we don’t fight to rebuild the international communist movement, fight to smash the capitalist tread-mill of reformism once and for all. This is the goal of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP)—one working class, one mass party, all fighting for the same political line!

Our world to win
Solidarity between all comrades, among workers on a planetary scale, is the only way we can win. By building the PLP, we will fight for communism everywhere, following the leadership of the most advanced among us, and fight for the emancipation of our class and transform society on an egalitarian basis.

To our comrades in the PLP and our friends everywhere: Let this May Day be the beginning of a new year of revolutionary struggle on the part of the foes of capitalism and imperialism. To all comrades, current and future: Our struggle against the bosses/ruling class will inevitably lead to a transformation of society on an egalitarian basis.