May Day is the International Day of the working class. A day of struggle when the billions of proletarians around the world unite, raise their fists, wave their flags and let their voices be heard, paying homage to the martyrs of Chicago and proclaiming that the world must be led by those who have nothing to lose but their chains.
Day in which the proletariat and the peoples of the world measure their forces against the imperialist bourgeoisie and its lackeys in the oppressed countries, express solidarity with their brothers and reaffirm their decision to march to the establishment of socialism and communism throughout the earth.
This year, May Day comes in the midst of the great convulsions of the agony of imperialist capitalism, which no longer has anything to offer except super-exploitation and destruction of nature, hunger and misery, death and war.
Imperialist capitalism threatens society and life on the Planet
The world economic crisis that began in 2008, from which the system cannot recover, has exacerbated all its most important contradictions: between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, between the imperialist countries and the oppressed countries, between the imperialist countries and between the monopolies; also presenting itself in an increasingly acute form the contradiction between capitalism and nature.
The expression of the fundamental contradiction of the system, between the increasingly social character of world production and the increasingly private character of appropriation in the hands of a few magnates and monopolies, exposes openly and starkly, that the world contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is today the main contradiction of imperialism; manifested not only in the imperialist countries but also in the oppressed countries: mass political strikes, uprisings, rebellions and insurrections, give account of the rebellion of the main productive force of world society, against the outdated capitalist relations that demand the passage to the new socialist society.
This contradiction tends to be displaced by the inter-imperialist contradiction, visible in the growing arms race, in the preparations for world war for a new division of the world, and the consequent alarm at the possibility of atomic war, which threatens the very existence of society and life on the planet.
Wars like the one suffered by the peoples of Ukraine and Russia, where Yankee imperialism and its NATO allies are confronting Russian imperialism; aggressions against the peoples like the current genocide against the Palestinian people carried out by the Zionist State of Israel, the Yankee hound in the Middle East; attacks like the recent ones between Israel and Iran; armament movements, reinforcement and creation of new military bases in different countries, including Colombia; military operations in Southeast Asia; internal wars sponsored by the imperialists of the West; attacks like the recent ones between Israel and Iran; movements of armaments, reinforcement and creation of new military bases in different countries, including Colombia; military operations in Southeast Asia; internal wars sponsored by the imperialists of the West and the East in the dispute for the natural resources in Africa and other latitudes…. confirm the imperialist preparations for war on a world scale. Catastrophe that can only be prevented by the World Proletarian Revolution.
The army of the gravediggers of imperialism has risen to its feet
In more than a century of agony, imperialist capitalism has extended and deepened the chains of exploitation and oppression in every corner of the globe: plundering the peoples of the world, destroying nature, disputing through wars the sources of raw materials, the markets and the labor force subjected to the most voracious super-exploitation in the oppressed countries, ruining in its path the small and medium producers, displacing through violence the peasants and indigenous peoples, devastating their cultures and endangering their existence. A terrifying reality that, on the other hand, has also strengthened and forged, for the hope of humanity, the social force that will bury it: the proletariat. The most numerous and powerful force in today’s world society.
Billions of proletarians all over the world constitute the powerful army that survives by selling their labor power: In the big agro-industrial plantations; in the mines, quarries and wells; in the maquilas and big and medium industries; in the commerce of the big, medium and small surfaces; in the call centers, supply chains and transportation; in health and education; or as relative floating overpopulation in informality; or in the growing army of migrants that breaks the borders of countries, nations, languages and customs, offering their hands for the enrichment of the elite in the metropolises; or as an industrial reserve army. All this powerful army has stood up, responding for now spontaneously to the bourgeois-imperialist onslaught to continue unloading the systemic crisis on its back.
Revolutionary leadership is needed
Marx rightly said that numbers are not enough to triumph over the enemies; the proletariat needs, in addition to numerical strength, to be united, just as its action demands to be guided by knowledge. And indeed, the great workers’ and popular uprisings that have shaken world society since 2019, indicating a new general upsurge of the revolution, do not count for the most part on the revolutionary leadership of the conscious proletariat, whose forces have not yet overcome the crisis, after the defeats suffered in the former socialist republics, especially in the USSR in 1957 and in China in 1976.
Crisis manifested in the lack of a Program capable of uniting the world proletarian army around its maximum objectives; in the absence of a revolutionary Tactic to confront its common enemies in all countries and, therefore, in the inexistence of a single organization that acts as the leading center of the World Proletarian Revolution.
It is urgent as never before the new Communist International, armed with the science of the revolution of our days: Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. The only coherent, classist and practical theory capable of understanding reality in a scientific way, to extract from there the tasks that the vanguard class must undertake; in struggle against the bourgeois theories apologists of wage-earning exploitation and imperialist domination; in struggle also against old and new revisionism, as well as against «leftism» useless to lead correctly the battles for the emancipation of the proletariat. Analysis and struggle that must go hand in hand with the clarification of the strategy and tactics of the proletariat according to the concrete conditions in each country.
In this sense, deeds such as the heroic people’s wars in India, the Philippines and Turkey, led by the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist communists, constitute at present advances of the proletarian revolution, which serve as an example, stimulate and sow confidence in the victory of the New Democratic Revolution in the countries where semi-feudal relations predominate, and in the Socialist Revolution where capitalist relations of production prevail.
Likewise, the existing coordination between some parties and organizations in support of the people’s wars and other tasks of internationalist solidarity, as well as the edition of the international magazine Two Line Struggle, are important steps in overcoming dispersion; but it is necessary to advance in the discussion of the divergences, as well as in the coordination of common tasks in close connection with the masses, as part of the preparation and organization of a new International Conference of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoists.
It is useless to reform capitalism: it must be buried!
The absence of a world revolutionary center and the Party of the working class in most countries as part of it, and the weakness and impotence of the communists, has allowed the growing rebellion of the exploited and oppressed to be diverted by reformism and in many cases led to strengthen the bourgeois institutionality. A temporary and passing way out allowed by the ruling classes and imperialism, as happened in Chile and Colombia, in the face of the danger that the rebellion would unleash the revolution and put an end to the existing order.
A maneuver to calm the storm, while they prepare their hosts to impose reactionary measures, with the vain pretension of crushing the growing rebellion of the peoples, as the most cavernous sectors of the ruling classes are trying to do, both in the imperialist countries and in the oppressed ones, as in the case of Milei in Argentina, Modi in India, or Meloni in Italy… confirming that in imperialism the tendency is towards political reaction and not towards freedom.
Colombia is no stranger to what is happening in the world. The economic, social, health and environmental crisis, the war against the people… continue to hit the working class and other workers of the countryside and the city, being this the deepest base of the general discontent; that although it was numbed during the first year of the Petro government and the promises of change, today it is again coming to the fore in the hundreds of demonstrations, blockades, strikes, land seizures… because the demands of the popular uprising have not been resolved and the parasitic ruling classes are not willing to give them up.
On the contrary, the most backward sectors, commanded by the mafia and paramilitary sector, maintain the permanent threat of a coup d’état and try to channel the popular discontent for their purposes of imposing a regime of terror, as was seen in the demands of their demonstrations last April 21.
For its part, the reformist government of Petro insists on its failed «national agreement», making concessions to the imperialists and the big Colombian capitalists, bourgeoisie and landowners, to the detriment of the workers, whom it has called to support it, inciting on occasions to rescue the People’s Assemblies as forms of popular power opposed to the power of the capitalists, only to sit down again to negotiate with the enemies of the people, with whom it continues to govern. Such actions have generated disenchantment and distrust in a large part of those who voted for the promises of change, forced to take up again the path of direct struggle to mitigate their distressing situation.
It is therefore up to the communists, revolutionaries and workers and popular leaders to unite and take the initiative to make the growing rebellion of the exploited and oppressed express itself consciously in the Popular Assemblies, around the real immediate economic, social and political demands, demanded in the uprisings of 2019 and 2021, and collected in the Immediate Program proposed by the Communist Workers Union (mlm).
Popular Assemblies that must be transformed into true instruments of Popular Power in opposition to the power of the exploiters; that make decisions democratically and enforce them with the organized force and mobilization of the people.
People’s Assemblies that will serve as a school and prepare the workers of the countryside and the city for the decisive battles that will destroy with the revolutionary violence of the masses, with the People’s War, all the old power of the bourgeoisie, the landowners and imperialists and will establish the new power of the armed workers and peasants, necessary to advance to the establishment of socialism.
We communists, as part of the workers and representatives of the working class, will persist in the struggle for the unity of the people in the fight against the enemies, without renouncing the most pressing need: to build the Revolutionary Communist Party as part of the new Communist International.
In this sense, we call on other communists to work together in the preparation of the Congress for the Restoration of the Party in Colombia and the preparation of the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist-Maoists that will provide the communists of all countries with a center of leadership on the road to the new International, essential instruments to bury imperialist capitalism.
Long live the Internationalist and Revolutionary May Day!
Against imperialist war: Proletarians and peoples of the world, unite!
Down with imperialism, world system of oppression and exploitation!
Long Live the World Proletarian Revolution!
Death to imperialism: the future must belong to socialism and communism!
Communist Workers’ Union (mlm)
May Day 2024