We salute the comrades fighting back —
Against racist background checks at DC Metro where they successfully fought for a bus driver who’d been fired after returning to work after a year-long struggle with cancer;
In Haiti, where in the universities they continue the fight against the vicious attacks facing the working class;At CUNY, against warmonger David Petraeus, who was invited to lecture and ultimately convince and recruit working-class students to fight and die for U.S. imperialism. On his first day of work, students chased Petraeus, screaming at him as he walked toward the subway;In Mexico, where teachers once again took to the streets of Oaxaca and Mexico City last summer in a massive months-long strike. In the midst of this sharp struggle, PLP has won fellow workers to the necessity of going beyond reform to revolution;In Newark, where the education struggle has intensified as students, workers and parents took their fight to the streets with two big demonstrations over the past month against the racist cutbacks against mainly black and Latino students.
These fightbacks are the bright spots we look to because here, the Progressive Labor Party is active!  Here, workers and youth are being won to the long term and only answer to the attacks of capitalism — communist revolution.
Looking beyond our field of influence, it’s been another year of mass upheavals since last May Day, this time in Venezuela and Ukraine, but the politics of those fights are at best dead-end roads and at worst pathways to fascism.
Many workers- and youth involved in mass struggles across the globe are won over to nationalism and even forms of fascism. Others are striving toward a more egalitarian future, but without communist leadership they are limited to the vocabulary and concepts of the ruling class — “freedom,” “justice,” “dignity.” The ruling class speaks of freedom because they need to be free to throw workers out of work and send us off to war. They speak of justice because their courts operate according to laws written to protect the rich, laws that set racist killer cops free time and again. For the working class freedom and justice take on another meaning:   
Freedom to attend schools where students develop lifelong interests and abilities, where workers aren’t separated by imaginary borders and the bosses’ racism.
Justice for the Davis and Livingston families whose sister and daughter were taken from them by racist police murder.
Dignity?  There is nothing dignified about a ruling class who has plunged the globe into war, world war, environmental collapse, whose culture reeks of sexism and racism, who squander the one most precious thing — human potential — with a recklessness that is astonishing even to the most clear-eyed and determined communists among us. No, if there is any repository of dignity left in this world it resides deep in the working class, among the poor, between two who share when there is not enough to feed one, between a teacher who stays late at work helping a teenager learn to read and to question and the youngster who is brave enough to confront and correct the damage the bosses’ schools have done.
We need that teacher and that student to understand that capitalism kills every form of freedom, justice and dignity they might want to build a life around. These ideals can only be fulfilled under communism.
When I was a teenager, I knew something was wrong with the world, I just couldn’t put my finger on the cause and unfortunately I had a deep sense that there was nothing I could do about it. My friends and I faced the same issues many of my students face today: parents who worked their asses off at dead-end jobs to keep food in the fridge;, prison-like conditions in our school, where assuming the position was the only thing we were guaranteed to have learned upon graduating; and the incorrect idea that if we just worked hard enough we could make it…but we knew that wasn’t true. We knew that wasn’t true because no one worked harder than our mothers and they certainly didn’t “make it.”
In 11th grade, I met PLP and things began to make sense. I realized that capitalism couldn’t be fixed because it wasn’t broken. It works for whom it was made to work for, the bosses. Most important, I learned and finally understood that there was an alternative to capitalism. And though it’s a long-term struggle, communism is the only system that can serve the working class. I was given an opportunity to fight for that world, and that’s what I want to offer to you today.
One International Working Class, One World, One Party
Communism means working collectively to build a worker-run society. We will abolish work for wages, money and profits. While capitalism needs unemployment, communism needs everyone to contribute and share in society’s benefits and burdens. Communism means abolishing racism and the concept of “race.” Capitalism uses racism to super-exploit black, Latino, Asian and indigenous workers, and to divide the entire working class. Communism means abolishing the special oppression of women — sexism — and divisive gender roles created by the class society. Communism means abolishing nations and nationalism. One international working class, one world, one Party. Only communism means dignity for the workers and not a return to the same old conditions under a new set of rulers. Join us!
Progressive Labor Party fights directly for communism because history teaches us that socialism leads back to capitalism, that reform does not lead to revolution. We know that cutting deals with the bosses, voting for the “lesser evil,” settling for crumbs when we bake the bread, settling for homelessness when we build the homes, leads back to capitalism.
To get to communism, we need to do more than to know the bosses’ fatal weaknesses; we need to act on them! We must seize the time, every day. Each flaw — their splits, their need for racism, their need for war, their economic collapse — each one is a fracture that presents itself to us to enter, expose, widen, and ultimately smash! We have a world to win and nothing to lose but our chains!
Communism will be won, comrades. It will be won because the working class will always fight back for a more egalitarian world. Bitter anger against the ruling classes and their corrupt political bosses, bitter anger at the ever-diminishing opportunities for a decent life under their system will continue to bubble up. The job is ours alone; we must earn the right to provide leadership in these mass struggles, to spread the message that only one path leads to the fulfillment of the goals for which so many of our class brothers and sisters continue to lay their lives on the line for real freedom, real justice, and real dignity — communism.
Today’s struggles where the Party is active and winning our class to the fight for communism are the seed bed for tomorrow’s participation in large-scale mass struggles, and our aim will be the same. Only communism means emancipation for the workers. Our activity today among the hundreds and the thousands is our training to lead the millions tomorrow. Make no mistake: our goal is to lead millions, and history says we can do it. We are proud of our communist past — it strengthens us. No matter the twists and turns, the setbacks and advances ahead. Mass struggle will continue to be sparked, the Party will continue to win new members to the fight for communism, and when the two come together — when PLP can shape mass struggle into class struggle for communism — the bosses are doomed. They are doomed!  May Day is our annual re-commitment to and celebration of this future doom of the bosses and their system. What a great day! Fight for communism!