FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
International Communist Workers Party
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FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! |
International Communist Workers Party | |
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May Day is International Workers’ Day! It‘s a communist holiday established in 1889 by the Second Communist International. The date honors the workers murdered in Chicago by the US bosses for organizing a general strike on May 1, 1886, for the eight-hour day. Since then, hundreds of millions of workers have marched on May Day beneath the red flag.
Capitalists worldwide try to hide our revolutionary history from us. From Moscow to Madrid, from San Salvador to Shanghai, politicians and trade union officials have made May 1st a “national holiday.” US President Eisenhower declared it “Law Day.” Since 2006 it has been promoted in the US as “Immigrant Rights Day.”
Never was the contradiction between reform and revolution sharper than it was a century ago, on May Day, 1915.
The outbreak of World War in August 1914 shattered the Second International. Most of its opportunist leaders, true only to the logic of their trade-union reformism, scurried to support their “own” capitalist war-makers.
German Social-Democrats called on workers to remain at work on May 1st instead of the usual strike. French Socialists assured authorities that they need not fear May First. They called on French workers to defend “their” country.
But these traitors to the working class could not prevail for long.
In South Africa, a minority of socialists formed the War on War League. They organized a 1915 May Day march in Johannesburg. They split from the white pro-imperialist Labour Party, forming the anti-racist Internationalist Socialist League (ISL).
In Chicago (USA) 10,000 garment workers paraded through the clothing district on May 1, 1915. They celebrated International Labor Day for the first time, setting the stage for a general strike that fall.
International conferences in 1915 and 1916 unified the revolutionary internationalist parties and minorities around Lenin’s slogan of turning imperialist war into civil war. On May Day 1916 they held huge demonstrations in Berlin.
The revolutionary spirit of May Day was triumphing over its reformist past.
In South Africa in 1917, the ISL organized a May Day rally. It advertised (for the first time) an African speaker. Mobs of soldiers and civilians stopped the rally. But in 1918 the ISL made history as two Black speakers addressed its May Day demonstration in a “coloured” neighborhood of Johannesburg.
Fight to End Wage Slavery and Class Society
Eleanor Marx declared at an 8-hour rally in London in 1890 on the first international May Day that “the eight hours’ day is the first and most immediate step to be taken, and we aim at a time when there will no longer be one class supporting two others, but the unemployed both at the top and at the bottom of society will be got rid of.”
Marx quoted Shelley’s 1832 poem:
“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many--they are few.”
Lenin wrote on May 1, 1915 that revolutionary communists were “attentively studying the sentiments of the masses, utilizing the latter’s growing striving for peace … to bring clarity into vague revolutionary sentiments, to enlighten the masses with a thousand facts of pre-war politics.
“They are out to prove systematically, steadfastly and unswervingly the need for mass revolutionary action against the bourgeoisie and the governments of their respective countries as the only road towards democracy and socialism.”
Communists today understand that reform struggles like the 8-hour day are not steps toward the revolution that will end class society.
We have learned from the heroic victories and tragic failures of twentieth-century revolutions that our fight must be for communism. “Democracy and socialism” were really just reforms that could not end capitalism and its horrors.
We fight to build a communist world where we all work for our own class, with the masses making and carrying out all decisions that affect our lives.
We fight to unite the working class, destroying racism and nationalism at their root by ending the capitalist system of private property and wage slavery.
Today the world again lurches into widening inter-imperialist conflicts. The masses are again stirred by revolutionary sentiments. Lenin’s words of July 1915 still ring true:
“During a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government…. Those who stand for the ‘neither-victory-nor-defeat’ slogan are in fact on the side of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists, for they do not believe in the possibility of international revolutionary action by the working class against their own governments, and do not wish to help develop such action, which, though undoubtedly difficult, is the only task worthy of a proletarian.
“Revolutionary tactics … alone [can] lead to … the liberation of humanity from the horrors, misery, savagery and brutality now prevailing.”
March with the International Communist Workers’ Party for a revolutionary May Day 2015!
Rise like Lions after slumber!
Mobilize the masses for communism!
