SEATTLE, May 3 — At 8:00 AM today, up to 250 campus workers and students conducted mass picket lines throughout the day to protest budget cuts and show our strength in the face of current contract negotiations for graduate students and the upcoming contract expiration for the custodians at our university here. The UAW union leadership unilaterally chose to extend the grad students contract rather than strike, as many rank-and-filers demanded.

Earlier, at 4:30 AM outside clock-in stations for campus workers, we asked them to join our picket lines. Many took our flyer and did join throughout the day, despite intimidation from management who told them joining students could cost them their jobs.

This student strike was organized as a continuation of the nation-wide March 4 events. These angry students and workers want to fight the budget cuts that mean higher tuition, lower pay and layoffs for all campus workers, especially targeting black and Latino and low-income students.

A coalition of workers and students (who see themselves as part of the working class) organized the strike. Many understand the class politics that places the university as a “center of production,” seeing student-worker unity as having the power to stop that production.

The series of picket lines was designed to give students and workers pause on entering the campus and think about what it meant to cross the lines. We marched in the crosswalks and blocked traffic and, despite police threats of ticketing and arrests, many students and workers refused to leave the streets for the sidewalks.

While the turnout was less than the 1,000 workers and students who demonstrated on March 4, there was a qualitative leap forward over March 4. Then that student strike became a march led by the cops and moved off campus, losing its intended focus. Today we picketed
despite the cops’ threats and harassment, not with their “guidance.” Students and workers who joined us united as one, defying the bosses and their henchmen.

The picket lines eventually spontaneously marched onto the campus (not part of our original plan), to win more students to participate. A few did join, although we also lost some workers and students who had planned to meet us at the picket lines. Now we must begin to judge these actions not only by quantity but also by quality.

The quality of our action was a step forward in our struggle, one which more and more workers and students are understanding is long-term. On the picket lines we discussed what a “fair contract” for grad student workers would mean, particularly for other workers. We explained the nature of reforms, where they come from and how the bosses often simply take from one group to throw crumbs to another.

With the upcoming custodians’ contract expiration, we stressed the importance to be there for them as they stood by us. We’re beginning to see these reforms as merely temporary fixes (if that) for systemic problems in the university and in capitalism generally.

This important battle signified the potential power of worker-student unity. Now we must better understand how to use that power and the long struggle ahead, as well as the nature of capitalism and the history of workers’ struggles. We must steel ourselves for a grueling fight, not only on the campus but as part of the larger struggle of the international working class, a fight which means destroying a system that puts these cuts on the backs of workers and working-class students.

On this May Day, International Workers’ Day, the international working class is under sharpening fascist attack while the drums of global war beat louder and slaughter millions. World capitalism pushes its economic crisis onto workers’ backs with mass racist unemployment, wage-cuts, soaring food prices and resulting starvation.

Yet masses of workers are fighting back, from immigrant workers striking in France and rebellions in Greece to workers and youth across the U.S fighting against racist budget cuts. This May Day we must stand as one class, with one interest: to destroy the capitalist murderers with communist revolution and build a communist world based on production to fulfill the needs of our class.

International workers’ solidarity must meet the bosses’ assault head-on, especially as they use the attacks on the world’s 200 million immigrants to attack ALL workers. Immigrant workers are victims of racist super-exploitation, which impoverishes the whole working class by creating a “reserve army of the unemployed,” which the bosses use as a club over the heads of all workers, including white workers.

Capitalism has spawned this migration across all borders. We say smash all boss-created borders. We are one class, internationally.

Capitalism created the working class, a class with nothing but its labor power to sell in order to survive.

Early on, the capitalists moved millions of Africans as slaves from that continent to wherever they could produce the most profit. With capitalism’s global expansion, immigration is now a worldwide phenomenon. Capitalism’s unrelenting drive for maximum profits has uprooted hundreds of millions of workers, forcing them into the squalor of sprawling mega slums, from Haiti to Venezuela to Brazil to Nigeria to China, where 80 million Chinese-born migrant workers are branded as “illegal.”

Many die crossing deserts and oceans from Africa to Latin America trying to reach jobs in the U.S. and Europe, as well as from starvation, malnutrition and curable diseases. Those migrating to the more industrialized countries are not only super-exploited but are used as scapegoats, blamed for capitalism-created problems like unemployment, and are treated as slaves or modern indentured servants.

In the past, immigrant workers were on the front lines of class struggle. Global capitalism has created its own gravediggers — the working class — and internationalized it even more. This provides the opportunity for a communist-led working class to forge the unity necessary for communist revolution. Immigrant workers are now positioned geographically and socially to help lead this fight worldwide.

Their role will become even more crucial as the imperialists’ rivalry for world domination intensifies, particularly in the U.S., a declining power fighting desperately to hold its position as top imperialist. Meanwhile it gears up for wider Middle Eastern wars and eventually world war versus the rising powers in China, Russia and the European Union.

The U.S. rulers’ fight over immigration reform involves the tactics and strategies on how and when to wage these wars. One sector wants to do it cheaply with a small, technologically-superior military. These bosses opposing immigration reform just want to terrorize immigrant workers with deportations to continue super-exploiting them.

The liberal imperialist sector, however, needs an immigration policy that builds patriotism among immigrants through a 12-year-long path to citizenship. This is in exchange for recruiting millions of young soldiers as cannon fodder in their imperialist wars and to maintain a workforce of millions of super-exploited workers for their war industries.

The vitriolic anti-immigrant stance of their opponents also serves the liberal bosses, creating the terror and despair that drives immigrant workers into the arms of their “lesser-evil” liberal politicians, churches and unions, with their pacifism and dead-end electoral politics.

Their immigration reform and DREAM Act, aim at forcing undocumented youth into the military under the farce of “helping them go to college,” which they can’t afford. This “Green Card army” will eventually become the army of all, via the draft or some militaristic “national service” scheme. The slave-like conditions and low wages of indentured immigrant workers will be used to depress conditions for all workers.

The needs of the ruling class are forcing them to bring together two of the most oppressed, potentially militant and rebellious sectors of the working class: black workers and youth, crucial in industry and the military — possessing a rich history of fighting the U.S. bosses’ racism — and immigrant workers with a long history of fighting U.S. imperialism.

With PLP building international unity and a base for rebellion and revolutionary communism among industrial workers, soldiers, and students — black, Latino, white, Asian and Arab, immigrant and citizen, men and women — we can fight the bosses’ racism, nationalism and patriotism, and unite the world’s workers to destroy the scourge of capitalism forever.

The fire of May Day burns brightly in a vibrant and growing internationalist PLP! Workers of the World Unite! Fight to end racism and wars for profit. Smash all bosses’ borders! Spread CHALLENGE, the internationalist, revolutionary communist newspaper! Fight for communism! Join us! J



May Day is the working class’s international holiday celebrated by tens of millions of workers worldwide. It was born out of — and honors — the Chicago workers’ historic struggle for the 8-hour day on May 1, 1886, launching a general strike that spread to 350,000 workers across the country. It’s a day when workers around the globe march for their common demands, signifying international working-class solidarity.

In 1884, the AFL passed a resolution to make eight hours “a legal day’s labor from and after May 1, 1886.” Workers were forced to labor “from sun-up to sundown,” up to 14 hours a day. The Chicago Central Labor Council then called for a general strike on May 1, 1886, to demand the 8-hour day.

On that day, Chicago stood still as “Tens of thousands downed their tools and moved into the streets. No smoke curled from the tall chimneys of the factories and mills,” reported one paper.

On May 3, the cops murdered six strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works. The next day thousands marched in protest into Chicago’s Haymarket Square. A bomb was thrown by a police agent. Four workers were killed, seven cops died and 200 workers were wounded in what became known as the Haymarket Massacre.

Nine demonstration leaders were framed for “instigating a riot.” Four were hung. A mass protest movement forced the Governor to free those still alive after the government admitted the frame-up.

The tens of thousands who won the 8-hour day saw it eroded, so another general strike was called for May 1, 1890. At the July 1889 meeting of the International Workers Association, organized and led by Karl Marx, the U.S. delegate reported on the struggle. The Association decided “to organize a great international demonstration, so that...on one appointed day the [world’s] toiling masses shall demand...” the 8-hour day. “Since a similar demonstration has already been decided upon by the American Federation of Labor....this day is adopted for the international demonstration.” [This kind of international solidarity is vitally needed today.]

As it progressed, the international communist movement took up the struggle and organized May 1st celebrations every year. In the U.S., it was championed for many years by the old Communist Party, with 250,000 marching in New York City in the 1940’s. But when that party abandoned its principles, May Day was resurrected by the Progressive Labor Party in 1971 which advanced more revolutionary ideas. May Day marches have been organized by the PLP for the past 35 years, in many cities — Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Houston, Delano, California and others, as well as PLP contingents in Latin America.

While the bosses try to smear May Day as being “imported from Soviet Russia,” it remains as a signal contribution of the world’s workers born in the actions of those Chicago strikers over a century ago. Today we march for the universal demands of all workers, regardless of capitalist-created borders: against imperialist war, against racism and sexism, for unity of immigrant and citizen workers, against wage slavery, against fascist police terror and for the communist solution to all these attacks facing the international working class.

How prophetic were the last words of Haymarket martyr August Spies as the hangman’s noose was tied around his neck and he declared, “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!”