May Day 2021: Only World Revolution Can Stop the Crisis of Capitalism

While the economic crisis is exacerbating the tensions between States and accelerating the rearmament race, on this May Day, marked by pestilence and the winds of misery and war, the international proletariat, united across all borders, launches anew its challenge to the dying bourgeois world:

COMMUNISM !

The vaccine trade war that has been unleashed between States prevents them from addressing the health crisis. This also shows that the regime of Capital, based on profit and the exploitation of wage labor, is the regime of a dying society that is now incapable of knowing and doing.

Instead of uniting the efforts of science and technology in the common goal of its containment, which is only possible in a society that has moved beyond commerce, the pandemic has, on the contrary, given further impetus to the antagonisms and confrontation between national bourgeoisies, above all blocs and alliances.

Not one state has hesitated to sacrifice its workers to defend the “national economy”, which only means national capital, in an attempt to use it to gain an advantage over its competitors.

Vaccines, which should be freely available to all humanity, have become a weapon of the rich bourgeoisie against the poor classes of the less industrialized countries, and an instrument of diplomatic or military pressure.

The economic crisis caused by the overproduction of goods, exacerbated by the pandemic, is causing unemployment across the globe. In this situation, the working class is seeing its conditions worsening everywhere.

In all countries the ruin of the small and medium bourgeoisie has accelerated; most of their commercial and small production activities are closed, while profits and revenues continue to grow for big business.

Pay below the living wage, working hours so prolonged that there is no room for any other human activity, the increasingly frenetic pace of work, unemployment, permanent precariousness and insecurity, the double exploitation of proletarian woman; these are the weapons of extortion imposed on the working class for the economic privilege of an inept bourgeoisie now condemned by history.

Faced with this attack on an international scale by the bourgeois regime, the response of the working class must be equally solid.

There are already scattered attempts at real class struggle around the planet. They appear in some categories, often those proletarians that are most oppressed. These struggles show that proletarian minorities know are being exploited and rebel against the yoke of capital even if they fail to fully unite and lead the vast majority of proletarians, who are often still dominated by the illusions of reformism.

The regime of Capital is becoming more and more despotic and militaristic, even in states that proclaim themselves to be democratic. Laws against strikes and class-based trade unions are being strengthened everywhere, and populist, racist, nationalist and religious-extremist movements are being bred, all ready to support the repressive apparatus of the state against any attempted proletarian rebellion.

But the proletariat has nothing to gain from the defense of bourgeois democracy, which is only a mask for its ruthless dictatorship.

The economic crisis, aggravated by the pandemic, has repercussions for states’ finances; the proceeds of taxation have collapsed, while interventions to come to the aid of the capitalists have inflated the public debt.

Whereas great efforts should be made to strengthen the world healthcare system, to drastically reduce the insane overproduction of useless goods, and to defend those natural resources that allow the harmonious reproduction of animal and plant species, it is clear that nothing is changing in the regime of Capital, nor can change, in the purpose and function of social forces and resources.

Meanwhile the growth of military expenditure is accelerating. The larger states are adopting aggressive attitudes to ensure control of regions and strategic hotspots, preparing for a new general war. In 2020, world military spending exceeded a whopping $ 1.83 trillion, up 3.9% on the previous year in real terms.

The economic crisis will not stop with the end of the pandemic. And it will have a violent impact on the working classes and the middle classes. But it will also overwhelm entire financial, industrial and commercial sectors. The tension between the major economies and imperialisms will increase further: the USA, China, Russia, Germany, Japan, Great Britain, France…

In this crucial situation, the proletariat – a class that has always been international, in fact and in its historical destiny – must look back and rediscover the great strength of its powerful economic and political organizations, those which, a century and a half ago, “stormed heaven” in the Paris Commune and, a century ago, made all the ruling classes of the world tremble, successfully taking power in Russia and establishing its own dictatorship.

The first proletarian state was destroyed from within by Stalinist betrayal; there is still a long way to recover from that defeat, but the time will come.

The proletariat will then reject any nationalist parochialism, any national solidarity with its own bourgeoisie. Rejecting the path of class collaboration onto which the social democratic parties and collaborationist trade unions invite it, the proletariat will strengthen its organizations against them: its real trade unions, which are necessary for the defense of its daily conditions, and its party, the indispensable organ for directing the struggle against bourgeois States for the world communist revolution.