May the First 2013 – Capitalism is now a nauseating corpse. Its economy, political institutions and social superstitions are merely waiting to be buried by its gravediggers

LONG LIVE COMMUNISM !

May the First is the day when workers throughout the world, by transcending the barriers of nation, race and religion, assert their common membership the same social class, linked by their common interests and fighting the same battle to emancipate themselves from exploitation, misery and poverty.

For over a century this historic aim has been a real possibility, no longer a utopian dream, thanks to capitalism itself which, condemned by its very nature to the pursuit of profit, has developed the productive capacity of labour to such a point that the needs of humanity as a whole can now be fully satisfied.

However, if on the one hand capitalism created the material conditions for this to occur, on the other it actually prevents such a historical goal from being achieved because it chains labour to the laws of profit, which are irreconcilable with the satisfaction of the needs of the greater part of humanity.

Due to the crisis which has hit the economy of the entire planet, this May the First 2013, workers of every country throughout the world find themselves in a situation which for several years now has been getting steadily worse rather than improving. Lurching from crisis to crisis – the present crisis is the fifth since 1974, and naturally follows on from it – capitalism is destroying the myths of peace, progress and increasing prosperity, all of them inextricably linked to the very worst of capitalism’s social and political superstitions, democracy, which now stands revealed as the form of capitalism’s dictatorship.

In the countries where capitalism is older, in Europe, America and Japan, where the economies are in full recession, the working class is hit by wage reductions, by cuts in social spending, by mass unemployment.

However the consequences of the crisis are starting to be felt in more recently industrialised countries as well, across China and India, from South Korea to Vietnam and Indonesia, and this is despite the low wages and extremely harsh working conditions. In Latin America Argentina is again in the throes of a deep crisis, but in all the other South American countries, from social-democratic Brasil to ‘Chavist’ Venezuela and laissez-faire Chile, the various regimes – despite not having yet been hit with the full force of the crisis, are adopting the same ‘austerity’ policies and seeking to ratchet up the exploitation of the working class.

In North Africa, the proletariat’s struggle to improve their living and working conditions and achieve political and trade union rights has been diverted towards the false objective of democracy and changes of government, the result being that the machinery of exploitation and capitalist oppression has been left totally intact. In South Africa, the impressive struggles organised by the mineworkers over the last few months has shown that in the younger and more vital capitalisms the exploitation is just as bad.

For now the bourgeoisie, supported by the fake ‘labour’ parties and patriotic trade unions, linked by a thousand threads to the government, the police and when necessary, the army, are managing to keep the lid on the pressure cooker of proletarian revolt. But the heat has not be turned off, and the moment when it will blow up is not far off.

The real  causes of the economic crisis

The real causes of this economic crisis, as predicted by Marxist economic analysis, lie in the overproduction of commodities caused by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, an ineliminable and relentless feature of the capitalist

economy because an integral part of the infernal mechanism that drives it forward: the incessant search for profit by means of the exploitation of wage labour.

As each day goes by, Capitalism can only sink further and further into crisis. The various proclamations of the bourgeois governments of ever stripe, left and right, which dream of overcoming the crisis by tweaking the economy, by imposing ‘rules’ on the markets, etc, is just propaganda to convince the workers they must accept sacrifices because ‘things have to get worse before they get better’, while the cuts in social spending, unemployment benefits and pensions, are pointless but ruthless measures imposed by the Bourgeoisie to assert their dominance over the proletariat and the middle classes.

From economic crisis to war?

Capitalism is a permanent struggle between States, between industrial and financial groups, banks and companies, with each of them defending the interests of their own capital, their own profits.

To win its battles, the bourgeoisie in each country calls on ‘their’ workers to make sacrifices to render the national economy more competitive; it says to them: “we are all in the same boat”. But the fact is, we aren’t. In this war it is always the same side which is defeated, always the proletarian side. Whenever the workers agree to link their destiny to that of the firm, to the country, they effectively enrol in the bourgeois army, and end up fighting amongst themselves, getting hit today by low wages and increased working rhythms, and tomorrow by bullets and shells.

In every country the inevitable worsening of the economic crisis will make proletarian living conditions more and more unbearable, and as the economic, commercial and military competition between the various bourgeois States becomes more and more cutthroat, on the agenda will inevitably appear the alternative of either global imperialist war or international communist revolution.

The proletariat will then have to reconnect with the revolutionary tradition delineated by the victorious revolution in Russia in October 1917 – which halted the First World War by unleashing a tide of global revolution – and have to devote its entire energy to preventing yet another global massacre, which would certainly be even more bloody and terrible than the two previous imperialist wars which gave this infamous regime a new lease of life, allowing it to survive a further century.

What is to be done?

Workers must first of all organise on a day to day basis to defend the living and working conditions. They must strive for unity by overcoming the artificial divisions of nation, religion and trade, and fight to defend their wages, to reduce the working day and to oppose sackings, redundancies and layoffs by demanding the same salary for less work.

In all countries the economic struggles to resist the attacks of the ruling class will have to eventually take the form of Class Trade Unions prepared to intransigently defend workers’ living conditions and committed to rejecting any responsibility for the nation’s, or the company’s – the capitalist – economic situation, because conscious of the fact that if capitalism fails, the workers won’t die along with it, but will grab the historic opportunity to overthrow the bourgeois state regime and install the proletarian dictatorship, freeing the productive forces from the economic laws of capital and wage labour.

It is in this historic phase of international revival of the class struggle that the International Communist Party, the inheritor of the historic program of revolutionary communism bequeathed by Marx and Engels and Lenin and the Italian Left, will be able, by gathering around it the most combative and determined vanguards of the working class, to launch the battle to prevent a new global massacre and, with the revolution, bury capitalism, along with its insane exploitation of human labour, its permanent wars and the growing misery and poverty of millions upon millions of proletarians.

Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains and an entire world to conquer !