TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS — Over 100,000 people marched more than two miles in Tegucigalpa, Honduras in the May Day celebration. The marchers were mainly from the working class and unemployed workers. They feel that with every passing day, their survival and that of their families becomes more difficult. Their poverty wages become insufficient to meet their basic needs, without any options to improve their lives. In fact, they have recently suffered greater exploitation, discrimination and oppression by the ruling-class owners of the means of production who lead them into greater poverty.
In Honduras, like most, if not almost all, of the rest of the world, the gap between the working class and the oligarchy is becoming greater every day. This is nothing more than the consolidation of the capitalist system in its highest stage of imperialism. The imperialists keep absolute control over the means of production, and the accumulation of capital. Competition between the big trade groups, and productive and financial monopolies, means that to be able to exist, the working class must submit to greater exploitation. So poverty increases, leading to more poverty and all the problems of humanity.
Due to this situation, the comrades in Honduras see with great hope that qualitative and quantitative changes in favor of the working class are coming. But these can only happen with the slogans and ideas that communists must promote. The mainly economic reforms, for which the working class in general struggles today, have only served to stop or hold back the real struggle for complete emancipation. That is the struggle to shake off the yoke of exploitation that the capitalist system has imposed on us and achieve a just system, a communist society.
We believe in our judgment that we communists should no longer refer to the celebration of workers' day, as we have been accustomed to do. That is because now the worker is nothing more than a commodity, subject to the service of the exploiting class. We should now refer to this as the day of
protest, of mass struggle against the capitalist system that keeps the worker as a wage slave in its service and not as a human being worthy of a better future. For it is a lie that capital produces value. It is the worker who produces all value, and that is how it will be understood in a communist society.
The working class and the other exploited sections of society participated in this show of force, under the leadership of the Honduran Workers' Central, the General Workers' Central, the teachers' unions and others. They chanted diverse slogans, such as: "Death to Capitalism and the Exploiter Oligarchy," "Workers of the World, Unite!," "Enough of so much exploitation," "the people united will never be defeated," "we're heard, we're seen, the people are in struggle," "Murderous government who kills farm workers," "Capitalist exploiters, the power will very soon belong to the workers," "Military and Police—The Bosses' Attack Dogs," "IMF Get Out," "the people, starving and emigrating, are now awakening."
They made some statements regarding self-determination of the people in the face of neocolonialism, the substitution of a social model that serves the majority for the neoliberal model, and other statements.
As we did last year, the ICWP participated in this great May Day event, showing solidarity with the peoples' struggles, distributing some pamphlets that we had of Mobilize the Masses for Communism and seeking closer ties with some future comrades.