BROOKLYN, May 1—May Day greetings to the international working class! One hundred and sixty five members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined a lively May Day Zoom celebration hosted by our high school club. The celebration began with a slide show and video celebrating past May Days in honor of our fallen comrade Joan Heymont. While our usual May Day celebration, which consists of familiar chants anwd beats down Flatbush Avenue accompanied by enthusiastic responses from the community, was disrupted by the global coronavirus pandemic, it did not stop PLP from celebrating the international workers holiday.
May Day is the celebration of the working class. It is a reminder of the need to bridge our demands together to collectively fight for communism. A society run by workers and for workers. The working class produces everything of value and should rightfully receive the benefits of our labor. Collectively, we can determine how to share what we produce, according to need. We have no need for the blood-sucking bosses who steal the value of our labor through wage slavery. The coronavirus is an opportunity for bosses to increase their power but also for workers to fight back and build a world worthy of us. Only hard work on our part will guarantee that we will win.
The main speaker, a young Black woman from Newark, New Jersey, talked about the Party’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, showing how a communist world, where we rely on each other instead of bosses, could be possible. PLP and friends have been creating mutual aid groups around food, shelter and resources. Teachers have gone into overtime as additional full time therapists for their students and parents. Members of PLP in Haiti, LA and Chicago are still finding innovative ways to physically distance themselves while protesting for more workers to fight for a world without police violence, prisons and exploitation.
A nurse from a Brooklyn hospital spoke about the need for solidarity to counter the bosses’ greed. She spoke about the anger she feels knowing that the government has chosen wealth over health, “Right now, only the bosses are winning. The president wants us all to return to work because at the end of the day, he’s a businessman in this capitalist world we live in. What we really need to do is make these bosses take the losses.”
She emphasized that solidarity is the key component needed to turn this crisis around.
The bosses have not only failed the working class by offering limited aid from their inadequate health care system, but have also displayed their lack of regard for students' education. A new member highlighted the role teachers must play during this pandemic,
“Communists today in PLP fight to learn and learn to fight, and in this crisis that means providing our students opportunities to confront the failures of capitalism.
The working class needs not only the vaccine against Covid-19, but also the vaccine against capitalism. That vaccine is communist revolution.” The ruling class is committed to perpetuating anti-communist propaganda into the education system to ensure students do not discover that the cure for their suffering is the eradication of capitalism and replacing it with communism. Young people are the future and it is the job of adults to ensure they understand how deadly capitalism is. It is important to take time during this pandemic to weave politics into lessons, regardless of the subject.
The poem “Good Morning Revolution” by Langston Hughes was performed by the high school club and “Home” by Warsan Shire was read by two teachers and dedicated to immigrant and refugee students around the world:
You have to understand,
that no one would put their
children in a boat
unless the sea is safer than the land
no one burns their palms under trains
beneath carriage no one spends days
and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper
unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
Life for workers under capitalism will never be sustainable. However, under communism, profit will never be put before workers’ lives; in fact, there will never be a profit incentive to begin with. All of our working class brothers and sisters will be treated equally and all racist borders will be smashed. We will unite as the working class and fight against this capitalist system for a better world. Nationalism is an anti-worker ideology that enables the imperialist rulers to exploit natural resources and cheap labor—and nationalism promotes war with other imperialists in competition for more profit.
Communists are internationalists because the working class is one international class, with a common class interest, under one red flag. This is the world PLP has fought for from our start. We will continue to fight until our class prevails.
We invite all workers to join this struggle—for ourselves, and for our children and grandchildren. Our vision for communism can be realized only with millions of workers and youth, with people just like you.
Our fight is sparked by class anger against the bosses and their viruses, killer kkkops, and all those who serve capitalism. But what sustains our communist movement is our working-class love—for industrial and domestic workers, for soldiers and students. United as one class, freed from exploitation and artificial borders, the working class can build a new world from the ashes of the old.
May Day is your chance to join Progressive Labor Party. Take the leap. And when you do, you will be joining hands with billions of fighters past, present, and future—with a historic movement of working-class struggle. The future belongs to us, but only if we dare to fight for it. Long live communism! Power to the workers!
