COLOMBIA— union workers, teachers' associations, students, drivers, women's groups, indigenous people and a multitude of social organizations organized dozens of demonstrations in fields and cities against Duque's tax reform and warlike policy. In Bogotá, we commemorated May Day once again -- the international day of the working class. We promoted the vision of the unity of the workers of the world, under one red flag and our communist Party, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP).
Gone is another year under the rule of the capitalist criminal class and its racist wage slavery system, its endless wars, its sexism that divides us and makes us weaker, its fascism and violence against our class. Meanwhile, we have known one more year of workers' struggles, protests, strikes, mobilizations that keep us firm in our communist ideas, fighting for a better world.
The state of workers here is one of pandemic, death, misery and need. Unemployment, low wages, indigence, prostitution, crisis in the health system, malnutrition, drug addiction, a high cost of living, a fascist bourgeoisie and a “left” that kneels to them in order to defend bourgeois democracy and “national unity.”
We are active in these protests to show our class, with the help of our newspaper CHALLENGE, that we fight for communist revolution. We are not negotiating to get out of wage slavery. We do not negotiate to reform capitalism, which is our declared enemy. The youth and workers are rejecting passivity, surrender and the electoral circus. The racist state cannot be reformed. it must be destroyed with a communist revolution and for this we need organized and revolutionary violence under the communist leadership of our Party.
Since the pandemic, the Duque-Uribe mafia government has kept us locked up with fear of the virus and continuous curfews. Because of the risks, this great commemoration of the workers' struggles was held more locally in 2020. This year it was held in a neighborhood in the south of the city where our Party and literature have been present for more than 20 years, making friends and building a good part of our social base.
Here we have been involved in the fight against the persecution of street vendors and police brutality. Because of this, over 40 PLP members, women and men, motivated by the current rise in the class struggle enthusiastically organized this revolutionary protest.
We started in a local park giving a discussion about the national strike and our commemoration, with our flags, banners and slogans such as “Capitalism is the pandemic, the vaccine is communism” and “Long live May 1st!” We began our march towards the center of the city, accompanied by horns of cars and motorcycles and people on the sidewalks, who raised their fists in approval while others joined the protest.
Along the way, more PLP members arrived, and more community groups joined, including sports leagues of women and men, street vendors and independent workers who fight daily against racist oppression and to defeat misery. By the end of our march there were more than 350 people, whom we tried to organize on the basis of unity of the international working class. Against the fascist state, communist revolution is the best weapon!
With people from other organizations we agreed to continue participating in the sit-ins, cacerolazos (protests in which we bang pots and pans), mass community assemblies and the strike committees organized by workers. Many enthusiastically accepted our message of unity and our literature and flyers in which we made a call to communist revolution as a response of our class to the capitalist pandemic, to the sexist brutality and murder of the police state against more than 45 young protesters during the recent general strike.
At one point, some older people with medical comorbidities isolated themselves trying to avoid possible COVID infections, while most of the protesters continued to the north of the city under a heavy downpour of rain. The air was thick with the siege and strong smell of gases fired by the esmad (riot police), but we pressed on.
Hours later a group of workers ended up making an analysis of what was done, congratulating those youth, students, and workers for their drive and courage—above all for being friends, supporters and collaborators of our innovative communist PLP, fighting for workers’ power worldwide.