May 1—Thousands marched in Tel Aviv against genocide and imperialist wars. Over a thousand in Prague rallied against fascism in the Czech Parliament and in the streets.
Tens of thousands in the Philippines confronted police to protest attacks on the working class and the US war on Iran. Many tens of thousands across the USA denounced fascist attacks on immigrants. Hundreds of thousands marched in Turkey.
Workers in Argentina mobilized against fascist anti-labor laws. Transport workers in Ireland, South Korea, Brazil, India, and Nigeria found ways to disrupt the bosses’ system.
May Day marchers targeted capitalism. They expressed international working-class solidarity. Many marched under communist banners. Carried red flags. Sang the communist anthem, the Internationale.
Wherever ICWP brought our Red Flag newspapers, workers and youth took them eagerly. In India, Spain, Mexico, and Occupied Palestine.
In Los Angeles and San Salvador, they also cheered our communist banners, chants, and speeches. Some joined our contingents. Some exchanged contact information. (See articles and letters in this issue of Red Flag.)
We saw and heard disgust with electoral politics and skepticism about reform. Anger at fascists and exploiters. Enthusiasm for class struggle.
Many of our classmates and coworkers, friends, neighbors, relatives, feel this way, too. Not all, but enough to encourage us to raise communist ideas more boldly. To take relationships to a higher political level. To invite more to join and build ICWP communist collectives.
We fight for a communist world without borders or nations. Where all workers are welcome everywhere.
That fight starts by building one International Communist Workers’ Party without borders, that welcomes and connects workers everywhere. We must work more intentionally to meet and recruit workers, soldiers, and youth who live in other cities and countries.
A New Kind of Communist Party
Unlike most “communist” parties, we declare openly that trade-union reformism and electoral politics will never end capitalist wage slavery. They are distractions that reinforce capitalist state power. Liberation requires preparation for armed communist revolution.
Unlike most leftist parties, we have learned from both the mistakes and the victories of the twentieth-century international communist movement. A century of struggle shows that the road to communism doesn’t run through “democracy” or “national liberation” or “socialism.” Those strategies have chained the masses to variations of capitalist exploitation.
That’s the main reason we don’t see communism working anywhere in the world today. Because the old communist movement didn’t prepare workers to fight for and build communism. That’s what the ICWP is now learning how to do.
“US imperialism squashed the left,” friends say. True, US and other imperialists have viciously attacked revolutionary movements everywhere for over two centuries. But it wasn’t communism they attacked, because none of those movements actually tried to build a communist society.
What Is Communism?
Communist society: All working and learning. All contributing politically, socially, economically. Everyone’s needs met as best we can. Nobody lives better or worse than others.
Social relations of sharing and cooperation will replace capitalism’s “cash nexus.” No capitalist competition to maximize profits, no imperialism, no reason for war. A consistent fight against remnants of racism, sexism, nationalism, xenophobia, and other capitalist practices.
Our party works to prepare, organize, and mobilize masses directly for this communism. Nothing less.
All Comrades Must Become Thinkers and Doers
Slogans aren’t enough. We need plans based on concrete and rapidly changing reality. Right now: When the US and Israel have started a war with Iran that they can’t win. When xenophobia spreads globally, fueling fascist movements everywhere. When capitalism’s environmental, military, and economic disasters devastate our working-class siblings
ICWP struggles to help every comrade learn to analyze capitalism’s contradictions. To use dialectical materialism (communist philosophy) as a weapon in the class struggle. Every member and friend should become both a “thinker” and a “do-er.” We lay the basis now for erasing class society’s division between “mental” and “manual” labor.
For example: The capitalist rulers need working-class soldiers to fight their wars for them. The same soldiers whose families are ground down by those same capitalists. Understanding this contradiction means seeing the necessity of communist work inside the bosses’ militaries. That makes revolution possible.
ICWP collectives mutually support their members and friends. They analyze, plan, carry out, and evaluate our communist work. They contribute to the development of the one line that guides that work everywhere. We build direct comradely relations among comrades in different cities and different areas of work.
If you are not yet a member of an ICWP collective, please talk to whoever gave you this paper. Or contact us to meet up.
Let’s all act on an important lesson of May Day 2026: Now is the time to build the International Communist Workers’ Party everywhere we can, near and far!
Pictured below: Scenes from May Day marches in Los Angeles (USA) and Manila (Philippines)
Read the ICWP manifesto Mobilize the Masses for Communism here