The world imperialist capitalist system has unleashed a catastrophe of historical proportions on the masses and the entire civilization.
Today a new heart attack of the world economy is developing, as a continuation of the crash of 2008. In the last 12 years a cycle of collapse of the capitalist systemhas opened. It is a system that is in an open process of putrefaction and survives thanks to a mechanical respirator that the treacherous leaderships of the mass movement have given it.
This crisis caused by imperialism and this catastrophe, which has been here for a long time, have been falling on the shoulders of the masses, as much on the working class of the imperialist countries as that of the colonial and semi-colonial world.
This May 1, 2020 finds the working class in conditions of increasing impoverishment, their historical conquests assaulted in full force by the class enemy. Those at the top have thrown all their crisis at the exploited.
For the masses, the current conditions are even more serious and cruel than those that pushed the workers worldwide to a great international class fighting for 8 working hours, confronting every bourgeois regime and government in the world late in the 19th century.
Now, the capitalists and their governments, in addition to throwing the COVID-19 pandemic at the masses, try to conceal that the most terrible pandemic that plagues the workers and the poor people is hunger. Almost 8 million workers and exploited a year die of chronic hunger, more than 21,000 per day.
262 million migrant, nations-less workers travel the world looking for a place to survive, just like true nomadic peoples. Hundreds of thousands of them end up at the bottom of the Mediterranean trying to arrive in Europe or are buried south of the Rio Grande in their attempt to reach the United States. Millions of refugees flee from the counterrevolutionary massacres that, as in Syria, are caused by imperialism and its ignominious regimes.
On this May Day, the martyrs of Chicago are millions. This rotting system is taking civilization back many centuries.
The development of the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated not only this crisis, but above all, the unprecedented suffering of the masses. The bourgeoisie sent the workers to their jobs also in non-essential tasks, risking and giving up their lives, an issue that only stopped with the walkouts and strikes of the workers in northern Italy and the Spanish State.
In the United States, it is blacks and Latinos who have had the highest number of deaths by doing the worst jobs and spreading it to everyone in their families, as happened in the Bronx, New York. As in Guayaquil, in New York the corpses ended up thrown on the streets or buried in mass graves.
Tens of thousands of health workers have died worldwide. The truth is that they were assassinated by governments and regimes that sent them to hospitals without a minimum Personal Protective Equipment. The slavers threw the pandemic at their slaves.
In China, in the province of Wuhan, where the still uncertain origin of this pandemic has been located, the problem was solved by the counter-revolutionary government in Beijing by massacring tens and tens of thousands of those infected and anyone with symptoms. Fascism, barbarism ... It is capitalism that kills.
In different Latin American countries, such as Argentina, the almost 10 million laid-off and unemployed workers have been confined in popular neighborhoods. Under a police regime, they are locked in true ghettos, under the name of "community quarantine." The reason is, among large families crowded in shacks or small rooms of 2 m. x 2 m. (6ft 6.74in), without sewers or drinking water, the pandemic is prone to devastate the people’s most exploited sectors. The bourgeoisie protects itself and throws a sector of its slaves to an almost certain death.
As a continuation of the 2008 crisis, a new world crash breaks out again, threatening to lead the entire civilization to barbarism
On this May Day, we can see that today a new round of the crash is hitting the world economy as in 2008. The outbreak of the crisis that year destroyed enormous amounts of productive forces and wealth. It shrunk the world market. As we have seen, it left millions of workers out of production process. Capital was concentrated again in fewer hands.
From London to Wall Street, from Frankfurt to Tokyo, with the real estate bubble of those years, a financial super-oligarchy had spent and vanished, on account of profits, 90 trillion dollars of goods that human labor had not yet produced. The 1% of parasites thus concentrated 50% of the planet's wealth.
The bursting of the housing bubble had been nothing more than a thermometer for the parasitic decomposition of the world capitalist system.
The eye of the storm had been unleashed in the United States. The US state injected US$ 600 billion into bankrupt Wall Street banks. It multiplied the budget for high-tech war companies to US$ 252 billion. It greatly increased its deficit, with which it subsidized the bankruptcy of the capitalists, leaving a string of hungry, unemployed and doubly enslaved workers in the United States.
For their part, the banks of imperialist Europe emptied the states, claimed their losses and threw their crisis at the masses.
Already in mid-2015 and 2016, capital's foreseers announced that it was "coming out of the crisis”. But, on the contrary, the imperialist capitalist system survived through more parasitism, multiplying its looting of the semi-colonial world and fiercely attacking its working class, as it did these years.
And it was able to do so since the leaderships of the masses, union bureaucracies, social-imperialist and reformist parties of all coats contained and stopped the enormous combats that the exploited of the world in the 5 continents engaged in response to the crash of 2008. With a perfidious policy of class collaboration, calling for "to moderate the adjustment", handing over the struggle and fighting in counter-revolutionary pacts and agreements a thousand times and, when not, directly supporting the offensive of the capitalist governments and regimes, these leaderships prevented the synchronization of an generalized ascent of masses that could question the imperialist dominance of the planet.
Faced with the crisis opened in 2008, there was no sector of the working class in Europe, the US, Latin America, Africa and Asia that did not engaged in a battle for the bankruptcy of capital. They fought through huge general strikes by 400 million workers in India. The movement of the Indignados broke out in the Spanish State. Workers in France did not leave the streets of Paris in response to government attacks.
The uprising of the US masses forced US imperialism to withdraw its troops from Iraq. Then, in 2011-2012, the Maghreb and the Middle East exploded in revolution in the face of rising food prices.
At the end of 2014, the masses in Ukraine were revolting against the hunger plans of the government of Yanukovich, an ally of Putin and US imperialism. With wages of 250 euros/month, subsistence had already become impossible in that nation, which caused one of the largest intra-European migrations to the imperialist west.
Meanwhile, huge revolts rocked China. In Latin America, the working class did not stop fighting for even a second. People fought in Madagascar and by millions the miners enslaved in the imperialist mines of Africa also fought.
The so-called "Bolivarian Revolution" gave in all struggles and mass offensives in Latin America, which for a decade shook the region. The hardest blow and the worst backstabbing to workers and peoples of the Americas was the infamous pact of the Castro brothers with Obama. They supported this representative of Wall Street when he unleashed a brutal attack on the American working class, in the face of the already blown-up crash.
After the "democratic" deviations in the Middle East, on the mass revolutions that the reformists called "the people's spring", the sabers of the generals and fascist and counter-revolutionary coups were imposed that caused the harsh and cruel defeats of Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Tunisia... and the bloodiest genocide of the 21st century in Syria, committed by al-Assad on behalf of all the imperialist powers.
All the treacherous leaderships of the World Social Forum, the New Left of the Sanders, the Podemos, the Syriza, the Stalinists and the ex-Trotskyists, renegades of Marxism concentrated there, in a true "anti-terrorist front", to support al-Assad and Putin who drowned the Syrian revolution in blood.
The treacherous leaderships broke the trend towards a 1968-74 type revolutionary rise at the beginning of the crash of 2008. Imperialism concentrated its forces to crush the most advanced hot points of the world revolution as well as the historical conquests of the working class. It concentrated the forces of all the treacherous leaderships and all its institutions of domination to achieve this, as for example in Syria through the Geneva conferences among the USA, Turkey and Russia, which supported the al-Assad massacre.
It also concentrated forces in Ukraine in the face of the 2014 mass uprisings to deal a hard blow to the European revolution. With the Minsk accords between Russia and the USA they partitioned Ukraine. Putin took Crimea, and US imperialism, settled down in Kiev’s fascism, grabbed the gas pipelines and gas companies, not without first causing a bloodbath in the Donbass.
As we have already saw, the surrender of Cuba to imperialism by the Castro brothers meant a hard blow to the anti-imperialist struggle of the Latin American masses. It accompanied the evolution of the native bourgeoisie of the subcontinent into direct agents of imperialism.
Gone are the lies proclaimed by Latin American Stalinism about the "peaceful way to socialism" that would lead the Chilean revolution of the 1970s to a bloody defeat. Gone is also the lie of a "socialism of the 21st century" proclaimed by the Chavez, Morales and Castroes in Latin America, with their broken countries and the masses subjected to the worst sacrifices for a policy of pacts and commitments to imperialism.
The curtain was raised on the infamy that “market socialism” meant to cover up the most brutal super-exploitation of the working class in China, Vietnam, etc.
On May 1, 2020, there will be no forgetting or forgiveness for all the traitors of the working class, who for decades have broken with the historical tradition of the internationalist fighting of the world proletariat, who had taken as their own the Chicago Martyrs and their fight for an 8 hours/workday for all workers on the planet.
In recent years, the capitalist system had a survival. As we saw, through treason by the leaders of the working class, imperialism was able to throw its crisis at the masses and, like a monster that feeds itself, it did not stop devouring fictitiously recreated profits. The imperialist era is the dying phase of capital, which is essentially reproduced by developing destructive and parasitic forces.
As of 2008, as we have already said, the world market was shrinking and being disputed by all the imperialist powers. With Trump in 2018, the US entered upon the world economy like an erupting volcano to maintain its domination with a fierce trade war over its spheres of influence. The USA imperialists have gone for China. They closed the powerful USA market as a blackmail to open up the Chinese, Pacific, markets and also that of its competitors in Maastricht's imperialist Europe.
China was besieged. Thus, its growth fell to 2% and its economy entered into an open stagnation.
The same is true today for Russia. The fall in the price of oil and gas, plus a Europe paralyzed and in a frank recession, threatens with a devaluation of the Russian currency, which the opprobrious regime of Putin will throw on the working class.
To get out of its crisis, both the US and the Maastricht powers are obliged to advance over the former workers states, today become "economic powers", but totally dependent on the economy, finances and technology of the central imperialist countries.
In this capitalism in crisis, it is no longer enough to have imposed capitalist restoration in the former workers' states, what allowed the world economy to use China’s slave labor and Russia’s hydrocarbons. Now imperialism is in an urgent need to colonize those nations.
For its part, Germany, settled in the imperialist powers of Maastricht, regained its spheres of influence in Europe, sucking up Russian gas and the slave labor of Eastern Europe. So it got a break from the crash of 2008.
With the rise in tariffs, the US also put a limit on the expansion of Maastricht Europe in its domestic market and throughout the world.
Thus an open trade war began, where the imperialist gangs vie for the market. Actually, there are too many imperialist powers. Minor ones, such as Greece, Spain, Portugal, began a huge decline.
The trade war shows that monopolies are flag-based. It was the imperialist states that saved them from the economic downturn of 2008 and their gunboats feed the war industry.
Today a deep global recession is already underway. The paralysis of the world economy announces the collapse of the GDP of all the imperialist powers and the semi-colonial world. 6.3% is the forecast decline in Germany alone. Taking advance of COVID-19 for removing the masses from the production process so that they do not revolt in the face of the health catastrophe, the bourgeoisie and their regimes have redoubled their wager, using the pandemic as a huge blackmail to the working class to take away all their conquests, impose maquila working conditions and deal decisive blows, both in the imperialist countries and in the semi-colonies.
The bourgeois states, neither before nor now, are going to save the masses, but quite the opposite. They have already launched and will deepen a fierce class war against their slaves. And again they have gone out only to save the dominant elites, as they did after the 2008 crisis, when they were granted loans at a 0% rate, that is, without interest. The US Federal Reserve issued dollars against the sale of US Treasury bonds, transforming the United States into the largest debtor on the planet, supported by the reserves of all countries.
Europe and Japan were not far behind with their imperialist monopolies and banks. But this enormous mass of capital, ultimately fictitious, did not go to an investment process in production that could open a cycle even if it were some short expansion, but the 1% of parasites that controls the world economy put it in the coffers of its banks and companies, which passed those credits as profits. They distributed them among their shareholders as benefits, without going through the production process. They also dedicated themselves to lending them at leonine interest rates to the semi-colonial world or to nations such as India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, etc., for them to buy large amounts of weapons, which would reactivate the industrial-military apparatus of the imperialist countries.
The imperialist states saved their banks and transnational corporations, and they again parasitized. Thus, fictitiously, distributing credits and subsidies as profits, with the falsified balance sheets of the companies, successive crashes of the stock markets opened throughout 2018 and 2019, which signed the world economy was advancing towards a devaluation of the entire capital.
The world financial oligarchy managed to survive, causing a new speculative cycle. It was kept super profits again, accumulating a huge unpaid debt. The world economy was bankrupt, indebted to more than 230% of its global GDP, populated with bad debts of states, companies and banks. The world economy is falling off the cliff.
The global division of labor has broken. A historical crisis of the capitalist mode of production has opened, bringing civilization closer to barbarism and war. As we have already said, the world market has shrunk even more. The world market disputes expressed in the current trade war will deepen exponentially. The vultures will start pecking each other.
To go on new adventures, the imperialist gangs of Tokyo, Frankfurt and Wall Street need to deal hard blows to their respective working classes.
This time, the fight for the spheres of influence will find the imperialist powers openly vying for direct control of the entire world market. Particularly, the looting of Russian gas and oil is disputed and also who will keep the new and rich Chinese internal market, which presupposes the control of its banks and its millions of inhabitants, who are a great reserve of workforce for the world capitalist economy.
The present and future trends are to new inter-imperialist clashes and the breakdown of the political balance between the states. The crisis of all the political and military control devices on the planet will be traversed by this brutal clash of the imperialist powers, where the imperialist primacy would be resolved by “making the competitors kneel down”. The political and military treaties and the European Union itself are in crisis, as is England, which is associated to Wall Street in financial business and to the imperialist Europe in trade. The collapse of Spain, Italy and Portugal threatens to take these imperialist powers on the road to Greece. Europe is in a new earthquake. Ahead: the crisis.
If the working class of the imperialist countries and the semicolonial world does not succeed in stopping this attack by the capitalists and the tendencies to the inter-imperialist clashes that have opened, the monopoly dispute will lead directly to new wars and international conflagrations.
May Day 2020
The way out of this irrational system for the exploited of the world is the socialist revolution, or fascism and war will come
The world economy is in an open recession. A deep depression has begun, which is nothing more than the devaluation of all the capital ... of the shares, the values of the banks, the companies, the sources of raw materials and, how could it be otherwise, of the workforce, which for millions is unemployed and underemployed.
There is too much Industrial, technological and raw material capacity. There is an overabundance of workforce, what amounts to a huge industrial reserve army, which no longer sees or expects the possibility of entering the production process.
The recession brings with it the drop in commodity prices. There are too many minerals and hydrocarbons for the shrank world economy. Huge masses of capital have long since come out of the production process. The ongoing global depression has been followed, as a soul to the body, by a crisis of overproduction of the world-economy as it has not been seen for decades and decades.
The oil storages are completely full. There is no longer value for the "black gold", as the purchase of crude oil has fallen exponentially. The barrel of oil has collapsed at prices so low - and even negative figures - that it is no longer profitable. This is bankrupting all oil-producing countries. Oil companies have stopped paying banks. The crisis of Citibank and Morgan Bank, which have bad debts from these companies, has already been announced.
To get out of this quagmire, Trump has declared that he will grant one and a half trillion dollars to the transnational corporations and bankrupt banks of the United States, issuing them with the Federal Reserve “dollar printing machine”, while between the pandemic and the crash more than 30 million jobs have been lost.
The world economy has stopped. Customs barriers have been erected, with which the capitalists and the imperialist powers defend their businesses, which accelerates and aggravates the world crisis. It hinders trade in goods. The productive forces encircled and tied up within national borders are constricting and retreating.
The stocks of the companies are saturated. Capital has stopped all investment processes. We insist, the world market has shrunk. Depression and, as we said, a brutal crisis of overproduction erupt in this new heart attack of the world economy.
The paradox of the decomposing capitalist system is summarized in the fact that in this crisis there is plenty of machines, minerals, oil, food, factories; and on the other hand, millions and millions of hungry and unemployed cannot find a place to survive in this dirty prison, in which this perfidious mode of production has transformed the planet.
We are facing an insurmountable contradiction that could only be resolved and will be resolved in favor of human civilization with the victory of the socialist revolution, fundamentally in the metropolises, that will remove parasites from the environment that hinder the advance of the productive forces and break customs barriers and national borders to organize a planned world economy so that the exploited can receive the benefits of the wealth produced.
This is the goal for which the Chicago Martyrs and all the internationalist socialist revolutionaries on the planet fought, who for tens of decades called on the working class to march down that path: that of solidarity and militant internationalism, which allowed the working class to strike centralized in all the countries of the planet against their executioners.
In the face of the capitalist catastrophe, the crisis of leadership is worsening
Reform vs. Revolution
It was the Social Democracy, Stalinism and now the renegades of the Trotskyist movement who have destroyed the internationalist combat of the working class, subjecting the proletariat to its national bourgeoisies, to the exploiters, whom they call "progressive bourgeois”.
The parties that used to speak in the name of the Fourth International have dissolved as "anti-capitalist movements" and openly entered into fronts of class collaboration... or, they act as the left flank of the so-called "popular fronts", as PSOL has done in Brazil for years, regarding Lula and the PT. They have dissolved in the British Labor Party and in the "Democratic Socialists" of the US imperialist Democratic Party. They joined "left" Stalinist factions in Italy and South Africa. They formed "international currents" -like PO of Argentina, EEK of Greece and the DIP of Turkey all together-, with Mitina of the Unified Communist Party of Russia, Putin's agent. Others, like the PTS of Argentina, openly proclaim themselves as Gramscians and call themselves Trotsko-Stalinists, or, together with union bureaucracies such as CONLUTAS and their deal with Solidaires of France, they are in a front with "left" factions of the bureaucracy at the international level. In the last period, opportunism and revisionism have gone so far that even the parties that spoke on behalf of Trotskyism and the Fourth International and were relatively independent as an organization, have stopped being so. The New Left thus emerges from the definitive dissolution of the ex-Trotskyists in agreements with Stalinist currents, Social Democrats or openly class collaboration groups, such as Podemos, Syriza, and Brazil’s Lula himself.
This New Left continues to hold the workers' aristocracies and bureaucracies on its shoulders, as Stalinism did before and later on the World Social Forum in recent years.
All of them support the imperialist gangs that plunder the semi-colonial world. They do so in exchange for the dimes thatfall from the super profits obtained from the looting of the oppressed peoples of the planet.
Today as yesterday, the most that reformism-without-reforms proposes to the exploited masses is to fight for "more democracy", separating the fighting country by country, to give them up, divided and dispersed. These leaderships have prevented (and are the greatest obstacle to) a joint struggle of the international working class.
Despite and against them, the world labor movement continued to wage battle. In France, months of strikes, picket lines, revolts and barricade fighting took place, announcing that a proletarian vanguard was emerging in Europe capable of regrouping the ranks of the working class of the old continent to defeat the Maastricht attack against the workers' conquests.
In the Middle East, with the fighting in Sudan, Iraq, Lebanon, the Iranian resistance, etc., the working class was again at the center of the scene. Like twin revolutions, new revolutionary hot spots arose in Latin America, as in Chile, Ecuador and Bolivia. Some of them were crushed by counterrevolution; others were diverted and held back by treacherous leaderships.
Under these conditions, the pandemic and subsequent quarantines were used to contain the masses, decentralize their offensives and save the political regimes in crisis, slowing down the revolutionary processes today.
For now, a trend towards an international mass uprising, which had been opened by the new crisis and the world crash, has been contained. But new class clashes are brewing.
The currents of the reformist and parliamentary left are quickly exposed before the masses. Reformism does not enter strengthened, but weakened to the great convulsions that are already here. Their betrayals are exposed before the masses each time more.
Syriza and Podemos are managers of the capitalists' offensive against the workers. As we have said above, the "anti-capitalists" long ago proved that they have been supporting capitalism and accompanying capitalists in their worst outrages. The parliamentary left has already been integrated into the organic functioning of the bourgeois parliaments.
All of them, in the face of the catastrophe of misery and the health crisis, act as a pressure group to demand that the imperialist bourgeois governments apply measures in favor of the masses that are left at the mercy of the pandemic of hunger and the coronavirus. It is a true disgrace.
They break all politics of class independence. May Days of the 19th and 20th centuries were not days to put the working class to beg for reforms to the bourgeois governments. Just the opposite, they were days of struggle to impose the surrender of the capitalists and, as happened in October 1917, destroy their states and advance towards the socialist revolution.
On this May Day, the revolutionary socialists denounce the reformist left for having liquidated the militant internationalism of the working class. Their May Days are symbolic rallies of a philanthropic socialism, while the rest of the 365 days of the year they refuse to promote any international coordination and struggle. They have left the fighting of the masses of the Middle East dislocated from the struggle of the European and North American working class, to be crushed.
We denounce Stalinists, Social Democrats and those who, in the name of Trotskyism, have dirtied their clean flags and supported the miserable super-oligarchs of the "Great Russia" who, with Putin at their head, act as hit men of imperialism, massacring the Syrian masses.
We denounce those who proclaimed the "market socialism" that in China has enslaved the masses under a fascist regime.
We denounce those who tied the fate of the working class to the "democratic", "progressive" or self-proclaimed "anti-imperialist" bourgeoisies, who took the revolutionary processes to dead ends. We insist, reformism has stopped fighting for a class independence policy a long time ago.
On this May Day we denounce the social-imperialist currents and the Stalinist union bureaucracies that have isolated the struggle of the black workers of Africa, who are martyrized in the mines of the transnational companies with genocides and massacres and die in the Mediterranean seeking to reach Europe. We denounce these leaderships that have separated them from the working class of the imperialist countries, though the workers of Africa are the heart of the proletariat of the metropolises, where they do the worst jobs.
For this reason, on this May Day, one cannot but salute the heroic struggle of the Black Vests of France, which together with the Yellow Vests and the working class throughout the country keep alive the spirit of the revolution in imperialist Europe.
The black workers of the United States, allied with the Hispanics and refugees from throughout the world that are there, facing the social and health catastrophe, will be in charge of uniting the working class of North America with the masses of Central and South America, plundered by imperialism.
In Africa itself, the revolted workers in South Africa have already toppled the Zuma government, which was supported by the Communist Party’s traitors; while the Zimbabwean working class has openly clashed with the ZANU-PF in dozens of huge fighting by miners, health workers, street vendors, poor peasants, etc.
On this May Day we condemn -and call on the world's socialist workers to do so- the world social-imperialist left, socialists by word and traitors in deed, who ran to support Sanders and present him as a "socialist fighter" before their eyes of the North American and world working class.
Again, the role of this representative of the Zionist capitals in the United States was none other than to contain on the left the working class and the youth who had been breaking with the imperialist Democratic Party, to tie them again to the car of Biden, the head of the great gas companies that plunder all of eastern Europe, the Maghreb and the Middle East.
Sanders took off his socialist mask and put on his true Wall Street pirate face. He quit his presidential career. And all the currents in the world that gave him their support, such as the PSOL in Brazil, the PTS in Argentina, the "anti-capitalists" and the ISO, ended up being partners in the Sanders trap and staying at the feet of Biden and inside the imperialist Democratic Party. They have subordinated the labor movement to one of the leaders of the imperialist gangs that plunder and massacre the semi-colonial world and the American working class itself. From this betrayal there is not and there will be no return. Those who yesterday and today continue to support the genocidal al-Assad, and Sanders, one of the greatest impostors of the US imperialist bourgeoisie of Wall Street, will never speak in the name of socialism.
Likewise, we cannot but condemn the treacherous leaderships like the SWP, the "socialists" of the queen, who painted Corbyn and the British Labor Party as "anti-imperialist" and "anti-militaristic". They supported those who subjected the proletariat of that country to the most brutal exploitation in Maastricht Europe.
We denounce the "anti-capitalists" who have supported and continue to support, in Europe and throughout the world, bourgeois governments and states. They are who in the Spanish State put on their shoulders a bourgeoisie and a rich petty bourgeoisie that expropriated the Republic of the Indignados of 2011 and today govern together with the PSOE, supporting the sinister monarchy of the Bourbons that violently oppresses and represses the Catalan and Basque peoples and super-exploits the working class throughout the state.
We denounce the communists-without-communism, who have supported the old recycled Stalinism of Italy, which, here and there, betrayed the entire struggle of the Italian proletariat. We condemn the Stalinist bureaucracies that throughout the world, with the collaboration of the renegades of Trotskyism in the unions, have always acted and continue to act as the internal police of the labor movement.
They are responsible for the defeat of the Greek working class, which after more than 30 general strikes, was subjected to the Troika regime and Syriza's class collaboration trap. They were the guarantors, associated with Putin, of the terrible defeat of the Ukrainian revolution, which was handed over to the Russian oligarchy in the Donbass and disorganized and left to the mercy of fascism in Kiev.
The masses have not surrendered and even in the present terrible conditions they are waging battles
On this May Day we stand alongside the Lebanese working class, which has risen up against the hunger and plunder of imperialism and its local partners, the Maronite and Sunni bourgeoisie and the billionaire Shiite clerics of Hezbollah, who have taken all the dollars, living like kings, while they have left the people as beggars.
We call on the working class to hold their fists high for those who are the advance that announces the return of the masses to international combat: they are the Chilean masses who, from Antofagasta, threaten to re-set Chile on fire, while hundreds of workers begin to catch COVID-19 in mines and ports.
We hail the young people of the French Cités (working class neighborhoods, NT), who maintain the revolutionary fire that will again get Paris ablaze against the infamous regime of the Fifth Republic.
On this May Day we stand next to the Ecuadorian working class, surrounded and left to die in the revolutionary Guayaquil by the murderous government of Lenin Moreno, while the Stalinist leaders of the CONAIE and the FUT (peasants’ and workers’ unions, respectively, NT), which have in their hands the possibility to impose workers and peasants' power, are only supporting that infamous lackey regime of imperialism.
We fight alongside the Colombian working class, which has stood up despite and against the counter-revolutionary agreements of Stalinism and the Castroites with the regime of the 9 US military bases that occupy Colombia.
As happened yesterday in the national strikes of workers, poor peasants and students, today it is the doctors and health workers who have taken the lead in the fight for the demands of the workers. In the hospitals of a country plundered by imperialism, there are neither supplies nor a decent pay for the doctors, nurses and all the health personnel who are risking their lives daily. Meanwhile, millions of hungry people continue without anything to eat and are roaming the towns and cities looking for bread.
Meanwhile, semi-fascist paramilitaries and armies control the lands of the Chiquita Brand, imperialism and the Colombian oligarchy.
The American working class, under unprecedented sufferings from hunger, unemployment and death, has not given up. GM workers and teachers staged huge struggles to recover what the capitalists took from them, as part of hundreds of conflicts that run through the United States. The working class refuses to die in the factory-jails and threatens to stop production to take the defense of their lives into their hands, like the Amazon workers.
To a large extent, the US working class is the one that has paralyzed all attempts by US imperialism to intervene directly in new wars of occupation. The blood of Vietnam and Iraq keeps the American proletariat hostile to any war in defense of the businesses of Wall Street pirates.
We salute the revolts that have begun in China against the massacres with which the pandemic "flattened the curve". The Chinese, the proletariat will be sacrificed again to raise the production of the transnational companies under the whip of pro-slavery mandarins. In the meantime, the Chinese workers have not stopped fighting for a day. By the thousands and thousands the factory combats multiply for better working conditions, against the lay-offs, for the right to set up unions. A huge militant vanguard is emerging from the Chinese working class, which at every step opens cracks and crises in the counterrevolutionary forces of the Chinese CP “red businessmen”.
The Chinese masses have an ally in the fierce anti-imperialist youth and vanguard workers of Japan, who daily occupy and fight to eradicate the US military bases in the city of Okinawa, which are capable of provoking wars of enormous proportions in the Pacific.
On this May Day we reserve a special mention for the maquiladora workers in Matamoros, northern Mexico, who are revolting against the imperialist companies that fiercely make them work without any conquest, like in China, Bangladesh or India. We also call on the international working class to support them. Today these workers are in a state of revolt and general strike, since they either die from COVID-19 or starve in quarantine.
Today, on this May Day, they are the symbol that the working class of the 5 continents, a thousand times enslaved, have not surrendered in the class war declared by the capitalists and will engage in a battle against their new plans for slavery. The combats that until a few months ago shook Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, France, Iraq and the Middle East have only been inconclusive. They will return with greater vigor and strength under the blows and whip of capital. Huge class conflagrations are waiting ahead.
On this May 1, 2020, we revolutionary socialists affirm that reformism-without-reforms can no longer sweeten or paint as "progressive" a system that falls apart on the shoulders of the working class.
The internationalist revolutionary forces of the working class and the international socialist movement must regroup to defeat reformism and coordinate and centralize the fighting of the world proletariat
The solution to the tragedy and the unprecedented hardships suffered by the exploited will not come by the hand of the bourgeois regimes, no matter how "progressive" they paint themselves. Only by attacking the private property of the capitalists, putting all the hands to produce in the now stopped machines, reducing the working day, with wages according to the typical basket, that is, fighting for the sliding scale of wages and hours of work, the working class will be able to face this crisis of overproduction –based on chronic unemployment- that capitalism throws on its shoulders.
Without expropriating without compensation the imperialist bankers, subsidized by the bourgeois states with the money of the people, there will be no solution to the liberation of the oppressed peoples, much less the working class of the imperialist countries will be able to obtain their slightest demand.
The 1% of the planet must be expropriated for the other 99% to live. The path is no other than the fight for the socialist revolution.
On this May Day we proclaim that there is no more immediate task than that of regrouping the forces of the most militant workers worldwide, who at every step try to break the fence of their treacherous leaderships.
Against reformism, the supporter of bankrupt capitalism, the FLTI Trotskyists fight under the banner of the Fourth International.
The fight is no other than recovering proletarian internationalism, fighting side by side to separate the working class from any submission to the bourgeoisie, its regimes and governments.
The militant internationalism of the working class in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was conquered by organized workers in world parties and revolutionary unions, presenting a unified battle line across the planet to the capitalist system.
This will be impossible without causing heavy defeats to the reformist leaderships of the masses, who only make promises of victories and deliver milestones of defeats. It would be even less possible without joining the ranks of the internationalist Trotskyist forces that we fight to recover the Fourth International, our world party.
This May Day the task that is set is the fight to expel the workers' bureaucracies from the labor movement, to take control of the unions from their hands and make the unions thus recovered become an instrument of struggle of the workers and not of the bourgeoisie to oppress them.
To curb the capital offensive, the fight for the independence of the state-ized unions becomes a matter of life and death, just like recovering workers' democracy and self-determination of the masses.
In the hands of union bureaucracies, the millions of immigrant workers, the directly enslaved sectors of the working class, with women and children working as they did in the early 19th century, are totally marginalized from unions. A revolutionary program that based on the interests of the most exploited sectors of the working class and not the working aristocracy becomes essential to effectively unite the ranks of the workers to face the attacks of capital.
The defeat of the union bureaucracy and the unity of the workers' ranks will be impossible to conquer if the masses in struggle do not take as their banner and program the demands of working women, who suffer double and triple exploitation, for which the employers and all the capitalists are responsible, who use women as second-class labor, without paying them for domestic and child-raising work.
We hold both male and female traitors of labor aristocracies and bureaucracies accountable for the tragedy suffered by working women. Their demands have been neglected by unions and labor organizations. They have allowed large masses of working women to be manipulated by the bourgeoisie and led to class collaboration movements. The task of the moment is none other than putting the fight for the demands of working women on the first line in the agenda of the struggle of the unions and workers' organizations, because this will allow the exploited to end all oppression, such as that the working women, both at home and all over the bourgeois society suffer doubly.
There, in the most exploited layers of the proletariat, such as working women and youth and the long-suffering migrant proletariat, the working class will find inexhaustible forces to fight against the capitalists and their governments.
In the civil war, youth fight and die. We saw it among the rebels in Syria, Sudan, Greece, the Bronx, in the "front line" fighting in Chile and Ecuador and in the anti-war movement in the United States. We saw young people in the Cités of France struggles, treated as "vandals" by the Stalinists and the reactionary forces of the bureaucracy.
Open the road to the revolutionary youth! In their hands there lies the future of the international socialist revolution.
Open the road to the migrant workers! Papers for everyone! Open the borders!
Open the road to the working woman! Without their forces at the forefront of the combat of the proletariat, it will have its way to victory closed.
On this May Day, in the face of the harsh attack of the capitalists and their governments, the economic struggle quickly rises to mass political struggle, civil war and extremely hard class clashes.
Where there are fierce dictatorships and the people go out to fight for bread, they directly clash with governments and regimes. The economic struggle begins directly from the start as a political struggle for the fall of the regimes. We have seen this in the revolutionary processes of the last wave of working class fighting, such as in the Maghreb and the Middle East, Chile, etc.
In these processes, the building of self-determination organisms of the struggling masses becomes a key issue so that the revolutionary processes do not regress or are taken to a bloodbath.
The treacherous leaderships are declared enemies of standing up the dual-power organizations of the working class at the beginning of any revolutionary or prerevolutionary situation. Like the bourgeoisie, they fully understand that these organizations, if they arm themselves, will raise the power of the councils of workers, poor peasants and soldiers.
That is what the central task of revolutionaries is all about at the beginning of any revolutionary or revolutionary situation. The fight to set up a revolutionary leadership of the working class to lead a victorious insurrection is inseparable from the fight to put up the dual-power, armed organizations of the exploited. There the decisive battle will take place to eradicate reformism and the conciliationist bureaucracies from the leadership of the masses.
On this May Day we affirm that the policy of class collaboration means submitting the proletariat to the bourgeoisie, which is the same as anulling all its forces to lead the ruined middle classes, the poor peasants, and become leader of the revolution.
Today we see that the tendencies towards the militarization of the regimes are sharpening. Democracy, increasingly, is and will be an ultra-limited and degraded privilege for some imperialist countries.
The siren songs of the class collaboration policy prepare hard fascist and counterrevolutionary blows. We saw it in Senkata in martyred Bolivia, as well as in Yemen and Egypt. The Catalan people suffered, when revolting for their independence against the Bourbons, and also the Basque people, whose best combatants populate the prisons of the monarchy regime.
The Bolsonaros and Trumps seek to take out fascist gangs, which win the streets to terrorize the best of the vanguard of the proletariat.
Central American lumpen gangs are recruited by the CIA to discipline the migrant masses seeking to cross the US borders. All bourgeois governments seek to impose in their own countries the conditions of super-exploitation and the totalitarian regimes that exist in China, Bangladesh or Russia.
In Syria, capitalism showed its true colours. So did reformism in all its shades. A "holy alliance" of Stalinists, Social Democrats, renegades of Trotskyism and "anti-capitalists" supporters of imperialism, unified their forces to isolate the Syrian revolution and allow the butcher al-Assad, Putin and the Iranian Ayatollahs to crush and drown that heroic revolution in blood. It was a revolution where the Sunni "opposition" bourgeoisie did not die. It sold it out from within, but the workers and peasants of the heroic uprisings of 2011 and their vanguard fell, the partisans, who exerted a fierce resistance and are still fighting in the last trenches of the revolution. Meanwhile, Kurdish Stalinism (PKK), supporter of Zionism and sellouts of the Palestinian resistance, supports the sinister Kurdish bourgeoisie, which placed itself under the orders of US imperialism in northern Syria, breaking the front of the revolution.
On this May Day the world working class must prepare for a fierce class war, breaking with the cruel pacifism imposed by the reformist policy of class collaboration. Reformism ties the fate of the working class to bourgeois currents that they consider "progressive" or to the so-called "democratic fronts". Thus, "to confront Trump," they supported Sanders, who in turn led the American working class to the Democratic Party, which together with the Republicans commanded the attack on the world working class.
For years, this perfidious policy of class collaboration, with the Podemos and the Syrizas, led the European working class to an impasse. The so-called "popular fronts" policy that Stalinism promoted in the 1930s, today is common currency within the so-called New Left. This is the fundamental obstacle for the working class to become independent and a leader of the struggle and the combats of the oppressed peoples of the world and to lead, with the support of the ruined middle classes, the revolution of the workers' councils again.
Ultimately, the "backwardness" and crisis of the mass movement is nothing but the backwardness, cynicism and betrayal of its leaders.
The bourgeoisie is coming for all. The parliamentary cretinism of the reformist left, its perfidious policy of class collaboration, aims at wetting the powder of the revolutionary masses, while big capital explores direct counter-revolutionary actions with Bonapartist governments and fascist gangs.
The working class must regroup its forces and must set up self-defense committees and workers' militias in every decisive struggle, to combat any attempt by the bourgeoisie to put up fascist gangs, which will drown the world proletariat in blood.
As the living experience of the last fighting has put it, bourgeois governments send the military. The political struggle of the masses penetrates, as in Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia and the Middle East, inside the army and shakes its lowest layers of rank and file soldiers.
In Ecuador, the workers and peasants, disarming the army rank and file, neutralized the military counterrevolutionary blows.
The fight to set up committees of privates to fight for their right to organize, to disobey their offierces is a first order task, for the revolutionary processes not to end in tragedy, as we saw it in Yemen, Syria and as it is threatening to happen in all the countries that are entering pre-revolutionary or revolutionary situations.
It is utopian and reactionary to think that such contradictions will be resolved through pacifism and bourgeois parliamentarianism. On the contrary. Hence the crisis of reformism, which will accompany the crisis of parliamentarism as a soul to the body
Regimes and governments are militarizing themselves. Huge class shocks are ahead. The capitalist system cannot develop any further.
On this May Day we redouble our fight so that the world working class does not end its struggle for the socialist revolution throughout the world, ley alone in the countries where the Stalinist scourge has given in the conquests of the revolution.
The fight for the international socialist revolution, sooner rather than later, will again put on the agenda the fight for the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the former workers' states, but this time in revolutionary ways. It will end with the cynical and cruel policy of Stalinism, which with its lie of "socialism in one country", liquidated all the conquests of the revolution in China, Vietnam, Cuba, Russia and other former workers states.
The road to socialist revolution is the only one that can be traveled by the exploited to avoid the path to fascism and war.
On this May Day we demand and fight for the freedom of all political prisoners, who were taken hostage by the ruling classes. Together with their parents, we are looking for the 43 missing high school students in Mexico. We fight for the freedom of the Basque and Catalan prisoners. We call to promote an international campaign for the freedom of the political prisoners who are in the dungeons of the Chilean civil-military regime and the coup leaders in Bolivia.
We are fighting for the freedom of the Palestinian and Egyptian prisoners, of the Greek rebel youth and of the activist for the Palestinian cause, George Ibrahim Abdallah, a prisoner in France.
We fight to drop all charges and immediate acquittal of the oil workers in Las Heras, Argentina, and for the punishment of all the murderers of Kosteki, Santillan, Santiago Maldonado, Rafael Nahuel and other martyrs of the Argentine working class.
Thousands of workers and youth disappear in China, after every outbreak, mass revolt or struggle of independent-from-the-state factory committees. We fight and proclaim the need of the fight for the freedom of Chinese prisoners and the thousands of workers who have ended up in the prisons of the Iranian theocracy, where the most combative of the Iranian working class is tortured and murdered.
The fight for the freedom of Mumia Abu Jamal, symbol of the fight of the North American black people against the oppression that they suffer at the hands of the US imperialism, must be a rallying cry of the entire world working class.
On this May Day, we call on the Latin American working class to break with this swindle of the "Bolivarian Revolution" and to fight to recover worker and peasant Cuba that was surrendered to imperialism. We call to fight against the regional blocks of the pro-imperialist bourgeoisies and to advance in the unity of the Latin American working class with the workers of the United States, to conquer the Socialist United States of North, Central and South America.
We call on the proletariat of Western Europe to lead the fight to open borders across the world, to end the concentration camps crammed with refugees as landless pariahs. We call to fight from the unions to affiliate all immigrant workers and let them be granted all documentation. Only in this way will the European working class take all its full forces to fight against the attack of capital.
The workers of Western Europe must take into their hands the struggle and the demands of the Eastern European working class, to conquer a great fight for the Socialist United States of Europe from Portugal to Siberia.
The proletariat of the imperialist countries, from Japan to Europe to the USA, has in its hands the task of paralyzing the war machines of the imperialist powers, of ending with NATO, all invasions, the plundering of the IMF and the looting of the semi-colonial world. They hold the key to the victory of the international socialist revolution.
On this May Day we call to regroup the forces of all the internationalist militants of the world working class, to put up a unified combat of the black working class, from Cape Town to the Bronx and to the slaves who are under the clutches of the Qaddafist bourgeoisie in Libya and who die in the Mediterranean trip to Europe. The fight is for the workers' organizations to prioritize on their agendas the struggle of the millions of migrants, who are left to fend for themselves and massacred by imperialism as a surplus labor force, which they can no longer or do not want to give a bed in a hospital or a school desk in their countries.
In the immediate period, to stop the capitalist catastrophe, the world working class will need the entrance of the combat of its great battalions in China, Japan, India, Russia. Together with them, our fighting will be invincible.
We fight under the banner of the Fourth International. As our program puts it: “All the chatter about the historical conditions for socialism not having yet 'matured' are the product of ignorance or conscious deception. The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only 'matured', they have begun to rot a bit. Without a socialist revolution, and also in the next historical period, a catastrophe threatens all of human civilization. Everything now depends on the proletariat, that is, mainly on its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.” (Transitional Program of the Fourth International, 1938)
The era of national programs is over. Only under these conditions will the internationalist Leninist combat parties, leading the next victorious revolutions, be set up again.
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France
Health workers in hospital Eugeni Espejo – Quito, April 28th
Protests in Lebanon
Protests against Banks in Lebanon
Protests against Banks in Lebanon
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Posters with dead health workers in the US
Guayaquil: "Deaths will not be negotiable!"
Ecuador: "The rebelion is justified"
Senkata, Bolivia
Senkata, Bolivia
Strike of Matamoros
Mesias Tatamuez, chairman of FUT,
and the leaders with Lenin Moreno
Jaime Vargas, president of Conaie, and Lenin Moreno
Weyman Bennett (left) member of the Central Committee of SWP with Jeremy Corbyn in March 2016 during the campaign against racism
Trump and Putin
Biden and Sanders
Common graves in New York
Cemetery in Guayaquil
Deaths in Ecuador
General Strike in Italy – “Now we will write this history” in the refrigeration company of the Chinese group Wambao
Syrian refugees waiting to cross the border to Turkey
Syrian refugees waiting to cross the border to Turkey
Migrants for Honduras and El Salvador
making a human chain to cross Rio Bravo
06-23-2019 Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter Valeria, migrants from El Salvador, dead in the Rio Bravo
Immigrants in the Mediterranean
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