At its core May Day means revolution, not reform. The future communist society which May Day embodies has been the aspiration of hundreds of millions — in truth billions — of working people in the past. This aspiration, distant though its fulfillment may be, nonetheless persists. The specter of communism Karl Marx wrote of in 1848 still haunts the capitalists and their rule.
May Day 2013, commemorated under the banners of the Progressive Labor Party for the 43rd consecutive year does more than embody the aspirations, the dreams even, of the world’s working people. 2012 May Day in the United States
May Day means we have more than a dream. We have a plan, one that has proven itself and emerged victorious in the face of the most vicious assaults the world’s ruling classes have been able to launch. Twice in the twentieth century communists have turned world war and fascist invasion into their opposite, and at the height of their influence have managed to spread workers’ power over vast portions of the globe.
PLP’s May Day events unite workers and youth worldwide under the call:
Forward to Communism!
Workers today don’t want a world that teeters on the brink of nuclear war at flashpoints from Korea to Kashmir to Syria and beyond, but that’s what we have. Workers have a sense that there is a way — within all the excess paraded in front of us on computer and TV screens — that the grinding poverty that imperialism generates need not be.
Yet we live in a world in which our brothers and sisters in eastern Nigeria are driven to pulverize lead-infested ore with hand tools to extract gold bits, producing a dust that goes airborne and poisons their children. Working people and their allies know that we must find a way to develop the planet to meet human needs without tipping it into climate disaster, and we see that the world’s imperialists are incapable of the reorganization necessary to make this possible — nor do they want to.
As we gather under PLP’s red flag in cities across the globe, we preserve and deepen our commitment to a movement that belongs to the international working class. On May Day, shoulder to shoulder with our comrades old, and new, we draw strength for the task of advancing the fight for communism in the coming year. PLP’s May Day events will cover the Americas, Asia and Africa.

2012 May Day in Berln, GermanyMay Day:One Class, One World, One Party
Our movement knows no borders. The bosses can’t live without borders, and the butchery and mayhem it enforces to establish and maintain them. U.S. imperialism rubs up against Chinese imperialism at the Korean border, with consequences we can’t predict. In Syria U.S. bosses confront Russian interests. Iranian power and influence has flowed across its border with Iraq in ways U.S. rulers cannot and will not take lying down. Despite Obama’s rhetoric of withdrawal, U.S. bases dot the Middle East in preparation for regional wars to come. To the extent that bosses worldwide can force, or worse, win workers inside their borders to spill their blood in wars for or against US imperialism they are increasingly dangerous.
Meanwhile, fascism grows at the border between the U.S. and Mexico. When it comes to the flow of capital seeking maximum profit, the Mexico-U.S. border is no hindrance. But for workers, the border has become a pretext for the rulers’ drone surveillance, racist vigilante shootings and a “guest worker” program that will only institutionalize and legitimize the fascist terror of Obama’s deportation regime. Obama, serving the needs of U.S. capitalists, has deported far more Latin American workers than any president in history.
On the streets of Brooklyn, NY, our slogan resounds:
Stop Racist Deportations; Working People Have No Nations!
Borders, nationalism and racism are natural and necessary under capitalism. Illusions of European “unity” are being dashed on the rocks of competing bosses’ national interest in the European Union’ oppressive austerity and rising anti-immigrant racism. In the U.S., residential and educational segregation has spawned a situation where according to recent polls more U.S. citizens admit to holding racist anti-black views than just a few years ago.
Working-class internationalism is the only antidote to this poison. Progressive Labor Party’s May Day sends a clear message:
‘Smash All Borders, Power to the Workers!’
Communism is the only force that can guide workers to turn the guns of the bosses’ armies back on the bosses themselves,  not on workers from another country. So we chant:
‘Turn the Guns Around, Shoot the Bosses Down!’
May Day is an exercise in this internationalism. In our anti-racist solidarity around campaigns against cholera in Haiti or in support of young rebels against NYPD murder in Brooklyn, NY, we are building a fighting foundation for the communist world workers want, deserve and will win.