PLP Must Spark Revolutionary Opportunities from Crisis Hitting the Working Class
May Day is the day the international working class reviews its forces, assesses the struggles over the past year and marks the beginning of a new year of struggle against the dictatorship of the capitalist class. The international working class faces its worst crisis in decades, but within every crisis is an opportunity. The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is using it to unite the working class to smash racism, sexism and nationalism with communist revolution.
PLP has mantained the tradition of marching on May Day and calling for the dictatorship of the proletariat (working class) for 40 years, since 1971, picking the red flag up out of the mud where it was dropped by revisionists — fake “communists” — who abandoned the fight for revolution. Despite weaknesses, PLP is in motion, leading and participating in struggles around the world.
Fighting Racism Is A Key Struggle
Racism is capitalism’s lifeline because it is both the source of super-profits and the primary weapon against the international working class. Racism, along with its twin — nationalism (advocating unity of all classes in subjection to the bosses’ flag) — divides and pacifies our class from unity.
Anti-immigrant racism is the cutting edge of racism today. Bosses worldwide hope to build nationalist loyalty among workers to fight their imperialist wars while simultaneously building anti-immigrant racism. This intimidates both “legal” and “undocumented” workers into passivity.
Capitalists worldwide use racist immigration laws to do this. In the U.S., workers from Latin America are mainly targeted; in France, workers from northern Africa; in Germany, workers from Turkey; in China, workers from Southeast Asia. In many countries, Muslim and Arab workers are also especially terrorized. In an address to members of the German Christian Democratic Union Party (CDU) on October 17th, 2010, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared the German “experiment in multiculturalism” had “utterly failed,” stating non-Germans, particularly Arabs and Muslims, were incapable of living “side-by-side” with the German people.
In the U.S. — a country where 2.6 million, 70% black and Latino workers, are in prison and where Obama’s election supposedly signaled a “post-racial” era — Obama set a record-breaking goal of deporting 400,000 immigrant workers in 2011. He plans to deport up to 700,000 workers per year by 2013. In the state of Arizona, the government passed the fascist law SB 1070, requiring workers to carry documentation proving U.S. residency at all times, and to immediately show them when asked by police.
In response, PL’ers from Los Angeles joined bus caravans to Arizona organized by their labor unions and carried red flags to the Arizona state capitol. Distributing CHALLENGE, PL’ers placed the debate on immigration within the context of the needs of U.S. imperialism, while exposing the liberal bosses’ DREAM Act trap as a disguised military draft.
Capitalists and their politicians, like Merkel and Obama, punish immigrant workers with deportations, but it is their system that creates the conditions forcing workers to roam the globe for work. Workers in Africa have few other options after 400 years of European imperialist-led theft and enslavement of the African continent through privatization of land and resources. This includes the devastating modern-day U.S., European and Chinese imperialist-funded civil wars. Globalization means investments and the bosses that control them are free to travel throughout the world seeking markets, resources, and more workers to exploit for profit.
Only the international working class is bound within national borders, and this is why the Progressive Labor Party is building one international Party and raises the slogan, “smash all borders, workers of the world unite.”
Elections Are No Way Out
Capitalism has always presented workers with crisis and imperialist war for profit, and the working class has always heroically fought back. Today, millions march and strike around the globe against being forced to pay again for another capitalist crisis. But most workers are still limited by reformist ideas: they still believe in some or all of whatever future changes that liberal bosses and political misleaders promise.
In the U.S., “anti-war” president Obama’s famous election slogan “change” has meant continuing the Exxon-backed occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan; expanding the wars against workers in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, as well as against workers in the United States. Reformists like Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, or the FMLN in El Salvador have not served the working class. The FMLN, the current governing party, betrayed the guerilla army which waged a bloody civil war in the 1980s against fascist U.S.-backed death squads.
Despite all their talk, the reformers are servants to one or another group of capitalists. Elections are no way out. Fighting in the day-to-day class struggle, raising communist politics, and expanding CHALLENGE networks, the Progressive Labor Party is gradually building a revolutionary mass party that will lead the working class off of the reformist treadmill.
Dangers and Opportunities Amid Crisis and War
Following the October Revolution in Russia, the first victorious communist-led revolution, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin wrote:
“Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries. And this ‘booty’ is shared between two or three powerful world plunderers armed to the teeth, who draw the whole world into their war over the division of their booty....Imperialism is the eve of social revolution of the working class. This has been confirmed since 1917 on a world-wide scale.” (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Preface to the French and German editions, 1920)
World War I ended with the victory of the Bolsheviks, who built the first workers’ state, the Soviet Union. Twenty years later, the Soviet-led international working class smashed the Nazi war of annihilation in World War II, which was followed in 1949 by the victory of the Chinese revolution over U.S. backed Chinese fascists.
Both world wars began as imperialist wars costing tens of millions of lives, but they ended in class wars for revolution that inflamed revolutionary upsurges and class struggles around the world. The Progressive Labor Party was born out of these struggles, learning from the fatal political errors and reversals of the old communist movement, which fought for socialism. It carried capitalist baggage, leading back to a full-blown profit system.
The rival imperialist bosses in the U.S., Europe, Russia and China will inevitably clash again in world war — but PLP raises the red banners of working-class internationalism to win millions of workers, students, and soldiers to our Party, that can turn the looming imperialist World War III into a revolutionary war for communism.
On May 1st, workers around the world celebrate the working class’ only real holiday — May Day. A long march is ahead, but joining the Progressive Labor Party means building a mass fighting party in over 20 countries and counting, to free our class from the nightmare of capitalism. JOIN US!
