May Day 2016

Under the capitalist regime there can be no peace between States
So let there be war between classes!

The social peace this May Day 2016 is like a volatile layer of fly-ash, polluting the atmosphere while holding back a fire that is bound to flare up again sooner or later.

Over the many years of crisis we have seen the main national capitalisms, from Europe to the United States, from Japan to Russia, from Brazil to South Africa, reduce their production in a recession without end. The proletariat and the middle classes have been impoverished and unemployment is on the rise. Even China, now the second largest global economic power, which seemed to be defying the crisis, is showing clear signs of stagnation.

The economic crisis is driving capitalists in every country, with whatever type of government, to press for lay-offs and to increase the exploitation of workers in defence of their profits. In Britain, thousands of workers now face the loss of their jobs because of massive over-production in the global steel industry.

The bourgeois States, despite being heavily in debt, are increasing their spending on armaments and are preparing to confront one another militarily for zones of influence, markets and materials, so that they can secure even lower prices.

This peace is in reality only a brief truce ready to explode under the blows of a new aggravation in the economic crisis, which must also take political, social and military forms.

In the Middle East, the fragile truce achieved in Syria conceals an extremely tense situation; the opposing States in this disaster area are preparing a new, broader confrontation with one another. Eastern Europe, supported by the United Sates, is rearming against Russian imperialism. In the southern Caucasus the confrontation between Azerbaijan and Armenia is reigniting, with the flames fanned by the growing antagonism between Turkey and Russia. In the South China Sea, the dispute between Peking and other coastal States is worsening: Japan is accelerating rearmament, and Australia is doing the same, while the United States openly declares that China is its principal economic and military adversary.

Bourgeois Europe, which until just recently made false and hypocritical boasts about being “social states” promoting “freedom” and “democracy” and receiving “asylum-seekers”, while oppressing its own working class with its barely concealed dictatorship, is paying Turkey to take back Syrian proletarians fleeing in their hundreds of thousands from bombs, from massacres, from the war, and from the hunger caused by the criminal action of all the imperialisms of Europe, America and Asia.

Terrorism, masked by religious pretexts, is in reality the product of the war between imperialisms and is bankrolled and protected by States large and small and their secret services, whether for mercenary interests or to spread the seeds of hatred all over the world – yet another instrument for preparing the people for new wars.

It is up to the global working class to respond to this mortal challenge by overthrowing the power of the bourgeoisie and their States, and abolishing the capitalist relations of production, which consist of waged labour and capital, in order to make way for the communist management of production and distribution.

There are already the first signs of this. In many countries in the north, south, east and west of the globe, the working class is proving its readiness to fight for the defence of its class objectives. Proletarians, often isolated and disorganized, are looking to recover the lost solidarity and fraternity of the dispossessed, beyond the divisions of nationality, of gender, of religion and race.

In order for these struggles to be maintained, consolidated and finally victorious, it is essential that in every country the workers organize themselves into genuine class trade unions, independent and opposed to the regimes and institutions of their bourgeois rulers, determined not to give way to the seductions of opportunist reformism and determined to resist open repression.

It is vital to strengthen the revolutionary class party, the International Communist Party, indispensable instrument for directing the struggle all the way to the conquest of power and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which alone can open the road to Communism.