This is part five of a series about Black communists in the Spanish Civil War. In the early 1930s, Spain’s urban bourgeoisie (capitalists), supported by most workers and many peasants, overthrew the violent, repressive monarchy to form a republic. In July 1936 the Spanish army, eventually commanded by Francisco Franco, later the fascist dictator, rebelled to reestablish the repressive monarchy. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy gave Franco massive military aid.
In 1936 the International Communist Movement, called the Comintern, headquartered in the Soviet Union and led by Joseph Stalin, organized volunteers, mainly workers from more than 60 countries into the International Brigades (IBs) to go to Spain to defend the Republic. Black workers, especially Black communists, emphasized the importance of fighting racism to win anything for the working class. And they brought this antiracist fightback with them when they returned to the United States.
But, in defending the Republic, they were defending capitalists. This was part of the united front against fascism, where communists united with so-called liberal capitalists against the fascist capitalists.
In the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), we are against any unity with capitalists. They all have to go, and the working class must rule: that’s communism.
If the working class is to seize and hold state power throughout the world, Black workers and their leadership are essential. Without their leadership, our class cannot destroy racism—the lifeblood of capitalism. The following continues that story:
Admiral Kilpatrick was born in Denver on February 20, 1898. His father worked first as a cowboy in Oklahoma and then as a miner in Colorado. When Admiral was six years old, his father got a job with a steel company and moved the family to Cleveland, Ohio. Kilpatrick’s father was a Socialist, and his son accompanied him to political meetings when he was as young as 12 years old.
He eventually joined the Socialist party and, when he was 19 years old, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). After high school he worked in mills, foundries, electrical shops, and lumber camps. Kilpatrick joined the Army during World War I and served in France as a mechanic. Kilpatrick worked with the union in the 1919 Cleveland steel strike, in which the companies brought in thousands of Black workers to serve as strikebreakers.
Kilpatrick joins the CP
Kilpatrick joined the Communist Party (CPUSA) in 1928. In 1931 the Party sent him to study at the International Lenin School in the Soviet Union. In 1935, during the Great Depression, he returned to the United States and helped organize the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO - a communist-led union) and the unemployed movement (also led by communists).
While the CP became a tremendous reform organization during the Great Depression, unfortunately, it gave up the fight for a communist revolution. So all the evils of capitalism are still with us today, from racist killings by the bosses’ cops to homelessness and looming nuclear world war.
Before World War II, Kilpatrick went to fight in the Spanish Civil War against the fascists. He served in a transport unit, as an ambulance driver, and in an intelligence unit. While working as a frontline driver, Kilpatrick was wounded by shrapnel from an aerial bombardment.
Back in the U.S., he resumed his union activities becoming president of Local 735 of the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. In the late 1940s the union was expelled from the CIO for being dominated by communists. The liberal capitalists were starting to take back whatever reforms the CP was able to win in the 1930s. Kilpatrick was called before congressional investigators during the Red Scare of the 1950s. He refused either to name other communists or to take the Fifth Amendment.
Kilpatrick: CP "gives up the class struggle”
Kilpatrick remained a committed Marxist. He was expelled from the CP “because I wasn’t going to go along with the fact [that] now all of a sudden you can build a Party with all classes.” His problems with Party leadership had begun during the Popular front , a coalition of working-class and middle-class parties. The very idea that the Party “was carrying on the traditions of Lincoln, Jefferson, and Douglass,” in Kilpatrick’s opinion, was “a lot of bull.” He told an interviewer:
Any Party or grouping that calls itself communist, gives up the class struggle, and won’t follow the road of Marxism-Leninism is completely out of step with what is going on in the world today. The revisionists, the scabs and sectarians have no answers to any questions in today’s class struggle.
In the late 1950’s, Kilpatrick, along with fellow Spanish Civil War veteran Harry Haywood, was involved in the short-lived Provisional Organizing Committee for a Communist Party, aiming to found a new, revolutionary communist party. They were not successful, but in the 1960’s another group of CP members left to form Progressive Labor Movement, which today is the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party. Join us.
Admiral Kilpatrick in his own words:
In the class struggle you can’t stay in it when it’s good and jump out and leave it when it’s bad. You go all the way …
I don’t have to have no damn praise … about going to Spain ... But I wasn’t doing it just for Spain alone. … I was doing it because I was a member of the movement that believes in that type of struggle ... I was a Communist. A Communist fights oppression, and they fight tyranny everywhere.
As far as I was concerned, this was the only way that the common man was to have anything, was to carry out these types of actions. My understanding of the world and its problems is based on Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.
I’ve been in jail so goddamn many times, I thought I was living in jail. You get in jail for demonstrations, you get in jail for standing up in strikes, violating strike regulations about how many pickets you can have ...
But in the class struggle you can’t stay in it when it’s good and jump out and leave it when it’s bad. You go all the way. They send you to jail,what difference does it make? People have died for causes and things.
Kilpatrick continued his organizing even into retirement, serving as the chairman of the tenants’ committee in his retirement home. He never found the organization that would, as he put it, “go all the way.” Well, in the Progressive Labor Party we do want to “go all the way.” Whatever fightback you are involved in, join us and integrate the fight for communist revolution to your struggle. Let’s “go all the way!”
Source: http://alba-valb.org
I’m excited for May Day!
I was excited to see the announcement for May Day in the April 13 issue of the paper and hear workers’ voices extolling its importance to them.
I went to my first May Day march in 1986. I was 22 years old. It was my first real political demonstration and it blew my mind. Never before had I seen people from so many different backgrounds united in common struggle. We marched as one force: militant, resolute, enthusiastic! It was thrilling and invigorating, a taste of workers’ power.
I met people who came from many different countries, spoke different languages and had different customs, but who all realized that our world is gripped by a system that has utterly failed, and were unafraid to say, “Capitalism’s gotta go!”
This year May Day is more important than ever as we confront yet another major imperialist war that threatens to erupt into world war. Bosses worldwide spend so much time and effort sowing nationalist divisions among the working class. But International Workers’ Day is OUR day! It’s our time to announce our presence throughout the world. WE ARE THE MIGHTY, UNITED WORKING CLASS!
Thank you, CHALLENGE, for continuing, in every issue, to hammer home the reality that capitalism cannot serve the needs of the world’s workers and that the only true solution is communism. We have a lot to learn on this road, but we truly have A WHOLE WORLD TO WIN. March on May Day!
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We exposed imperialist drive in Ukraine war
My comrades and I in the DC-Baltimore area recently held a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) cadre school. Three of us led it, although it was a full Party effort. Because of the current Ukraine conflict, we discussed imperialism, militarism, and racism. While I tend to get nervous with public speaking, I know it is important to practice speaking. The audience consisted of about 30 people, 10 of whom were friends of PL. We were able to record all the presentations to share with workers who couldn’t make it. PL’ers and friends alike were receptive to our message, offered great feedback, and asked engaging questions.
My presentation on imperialism showed how it is the logical extension of finance capitalism. Another comrade showed how the military industrial complex was self-perpetuating and how the capitalist U.S. military is oppressive. The last presentation demonstrated how racism played an integral role in propaganda, justifying war and attempting to convince people how wars are or are not justified, based on a given boss’s interest.
Then, we broke into small discussion groups. We discussed how, while it may appear that workers in the imperial core benefit from imperialism, it ultimately hurts all workers because it divides the working class and prevents communist revolution.
Finally, we applied our knowledge to the conflict in Ukraine in a discussion. The conflict is due to a variety of rival capitalist pursuits, fueled by NATO expansion, Ukrainian International Monetary Fund debt, and the 2014 coup in Ukraine (facilitated by the U.S.).
Meanwhile Russia is still an imperialist power that escalated the conflict. We also talked about the importance to the U.S. imperialists of the strength of the U.S. dollar and how this conflict is undermining it.
There is not a workers’ side in this conflict. We need to build the working-class voice through communist revolution.
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World war is coming
The war in Ukraine shows that U.S. imperialism is declining relative to Russian and Chinese imperialism. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin pointed out that wars to divide and redivide the world are inevitable so long as capitalism exists. At the moment, the U.S. is the preeminent imperialist power, and the dollar reigns supreme. Any country that dares to deviate from subservience to U.S. domination is bombed to total destruction or starved with sanctions. But the U.S. has not won a war since WWII and now it has to prepare for war with China and it must have allies.
The U.S. depends on NATO members, all without exception dependent on Russian energy and raw materials. Now imperialist bosses in Russia have required the bosses in Europe to pay for fuel with rubles (see editorial, page 2). The sanctions imposed on Russia have resulted in a major threat to the dollar’s hegemony [dominance].
U.S. imperialism needs the war in Ukraine in preparation for WWIII. The longer they can prolong this war, the more false flag Russian “atrocities” they and their NAZI allies can create, and the better their chance to pry the Europeans free from Russian dependence.
Our Party must focus on the relationship between the war in Ukraine and the preparation for world war by the imperialist powers, especially the declining imperialist power, the U.S., a paper tiger with nuclear teeth, a giant with feet of clay.
We must emphasize the colossal racism underlying the news media response to the war in Ukraine and the Ukrainian refugees being welcomed in Poland while refugees from Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq freeze in the forests of Belarus. We must point out to our friends the incredible subservience of the mainstream media to U.S. imperialist lies and propaganda. And we must build the Party, the only hope for the working class to emerge victoriously.
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Whether in Russia, China or the U.S., the capitalist bosses use the media to oppress, mislead, and manipulate the working class. In wartime, in particular, the media’s job is to sell the bosses’ lies and hide the ugly truth about imperialism. The historic task for Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and the international working class is to turn inter-imperialist war into communist revolution for workers’ power. Workers have the capacity to do just that, but only if we reject the bosses’ fictions and are clear headed about what is really happening in the world.
In vilifying Putin and beating the drum for the victims of Russia’s invasion, the U.S. media isn’t helping the working class in Ukraine or anywhere else. In fact, it is just the opposite. Although the U.S. bosses are saying—for now—they want to prevent World War III, their goal is to build mass support for wider warfare to protect their profits against their imperialist rivals. While they may seem to have less formal control over television or newspapers or social media than in Russia or China, the liberal big fascists who own and run the mass media (with the exception of Fox) share the same class interests as ExxonMobil or JPMorgan Chase. Their phony claim of “objectivity”—an impossibility in class society—makes U.S. media more deceptive and even more dangerous. When push comes to shove—in Kuwait in 1991, in Iraq in 2003, in Ukraine in 2022—they guarantee that their “news” coverage serves the interests of finance capital.
Let’s look at three big lies the U.S. bosses’ media are spreading in their efforts to mobilize our class to die in their next global conflict.
Lie #1: The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a war crime and moral atrocity, far worse than the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan or the U.S.-backed devastation of Yemen.
The U.S. ruling class media is working overtime to convince workers that nothing compares to the atrocities perpetrated by Russia on Ukraine. Images of maimed and murdered workers and children are heartrending. But coming from the U.S. bosses, who are guilty of the slaughter of millions upon millions, this is racist hypocrisy of the first order.
The U.S. bombed civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq for decades. According to the Lancet, the top British medical journal, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq killed more than 600,000 people (10/11/06). After a United Nations official estimated that half a million young children in Iraq were killed by UN/U.S. sanctions, Madeleine (Died Too Late) Albright, a leading architect of U.S. imperialism, infamously defended this atrocity by calling it “…a very hard choice, but …the price is worth it.” What Albright left unstated were the stakes for the liberal fascist bosses: U.S. power in the Middle East and control over the region’s oil.
Today, as the media bombards us with blood-soaked images from Europe, a mostly overlooked war is raging on the Arabian Peninsula. Armed by the U.S., a Saudi-led coalition has killed over 375,000 people in Yemen (Al Jazeera, 2/9). The horrendous racism of U.S. news coverage couldn’t be more blatant. While workers are conditioned to identify with fair-skinned people in Ukraine, Muslim workers are either ignored or even blamed for their plight. The coverage of Ukraine is preparing us to die for U.S. imperialism.
Lie #2: The war in Ukraine proves that Putin is a madman who will stop at nothing.
Over and again, the U.S. media are screaming that Putin is an unhinged megalomaniac. But in reality, in the context of imperialist competition, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is completely logical. The Russian, U.S., and Chinese bosses are fighting to redivide the world’s resources and markets. After the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the U.S. bosses expanded NATO while denying Putin's request to join it—all to keep their military advantage. Now, with U.S. imperialism on the downslide after defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, Russia is trying to claw back some of its old sphere of influence. Beyond Ukraine’s strategic location between Russia and Germany, the country is a critical source of wheat, natural gas, and metals like lithium, an essential element of electric car batteries.
Imperialists are driven to war not by psychosis, but by the drive for profit. By painting Putin as a madman who may soon turn to “weapons of mass destruction,” the U.S. bosses are laying the basis for their own use of nuclear weapons. Representing the only country in history to drop atomic bombs on a civilian population, President Joe Biden confirmed that the U.S. would not rule out a first-strike nuclear attack (dailymail.com, 3/26). If the U.S. bosses are losing a conventional war with Russia or China, and they consider the stakes high enough, they won’t hesitate to press the nuclear button.
Lie #3: The fight to defend Ukraine is a noble war for democracy and Ukrainian national sovereignty.
The U.S. ruling class media has worked hard to build support for Ukrainian nationalism, which has been riddled with open fascism and anti-Jewish racism since the 1940s (huffpost.com, 12/25/14). The whole concept of nation states serves only the rulers who created them to define and protect their wealth. Nations are a disaster for the working class. They lead workers to identify with “their” bosses and to shed the blood of their class sisters and brothers in other countries. Our class has no side in an inter-imperialist war.
As President Joe Biden and the bosses’ media try to rally workers around a war for “democracy” versus “autocracy,” they don’t mention how the U.S. has subverted and overthrown democratically elected governments whenever its imperialist interests are threatened--in Guatemala, Chile, Honduras, Iran, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, just for starters. Then there’s Ukraine itself, where the current crop of bosses inherited power after President Viktor Yanukovych leaned too hard toward Russia and was kicked out in a coup the media now calls “The Revolution of Dignity.” The U.S. invested more than $5 billion to destabilize the Yanukovych government and pave the way for regime change (Counterpunch, 4/14/15).
Liberal democracy or Putin-style “autocracy” is a distinction without a difference. They both represent a dictatorship of the capitalist bosses. And they both lead to fascism and war. The ruling class will say and do anything to preserve their power. We must expose the truth and build the fight for communist revolution. Under communism, the media would serve the interests of the class that creates all value—the working class. Join us!
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MAY DAY IS COMING! Celebrate the international working class
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- 02 April 2022 109 hits
Voices from May Day
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On May Day, we smash borders
Comrades, workers all over the world are all experiencing similar difficulties. But, in Haiti as elsewhere, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) must continue to organize workers, students and soldiers with a view to building a true international mass Party, capable of leading the class-struggle that will destroy capitalism and put an end to all its inequalities. We will build a society that serves the interests of the working class. – A communist worker in Haiti (2021)
We organize and lead the struggle to defend our class brothers and sisters, to try to build up our ranks with our literature and win workers to our revolutionary message. We fight to make our presence known in political, worker and student meetings. Dark night will have its end, with a new and glorious communist dawn. – a communist in Colombia (2019)
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On May Day, generations of communists march towards the future
The victory of communism means working collectively to build a worker-run society; smashing the oppression of women, sexism; abolishing racism and the concepts of “race” and gender.” The victory of communism means no more police murders that rob us of Breonna Taylors, George Floyds, Adam Toledos, or Ma’Khia Bryant. That is our victory. Today's victory is joining the class struggle against capitalism, fighting for the international working class and joining the Progressive Labor Party. (2021)
I am a high school student and I stand in solidarity with the international working class to eradicate this capitalist system, and eventually, fight for worldwide communism. Capitalism is a system that gets working class people killed. We are killed from hunger. We are killed by homelessness. We are killed by bombs, drones, and bullets. We are killed by overdose or suicide. I have been forced to grow up in a system that was not created for me. Millions of my peers are the future and it is our responsibility to fight for a communist world now because our future is on the line. (2019)
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Red Greetings! I participated in my first May Day 73 years ago. Our Party, having overcome any and all conditions in organizing for our international working-class holiday, I find that today’s march contains probably the biggest hurdle we’ve yet encountered in battling the virus of capitalism. It’s great to realize that our Progressive Labor Party has won so many young people to fight for communism. Truly, you are the future. On May Day, I celebrated my 90th birthday yesterday and our celebration is the happiest present I could receive! HAPPY MAY DAY, comrades, and continue building our multiracial revolutionary communist Party. (2020)
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On May Day, we celebrate class struggle
May Day is the celebration of class. Today, we bridge our demands together to fight for communism, a world where exploitation of workers by bosses is banned and racism and sexism is outlawed. 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.
With our responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, communists and friends of the Party are already showing how a communist world where we rely on each other instead of bosses could be possible. Haiti. Mexico. Colombia. Chicago. Los Angeles. East Africa. All over the world, we are finding innovative ways to safeguard the health and fighting spirit of our class.(2020)
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On May Day we strive to become communists
To be a communist means to step up in defense of the working class, now in crisis, and forever in struggle. The opportunities to serve our class will continue even after Covid-19. It is only by the international working class uniting to fight back against this racist, sexist system. (2020)
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PLP gave me a whole new perspective for understanding the world, and the way capitalism is constantly contorting, shape-shifting and creating new ways to distort our reality and create unnatural divisions amongst workers. Best of all, the most exciting part of being a communist is the way it makes me feel more alive as opposed to just living or existing. Looking back, I always felt like communism was natural to me. (2019)
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I decided to commit to communism and join the Progressive Labor Party because it was the right thing to do—the progressive thing to do for my family, friends, community, and the earth. These are loose stats, but it feels as though one out of two people I talk to are workers who are tired of working, exhausted by capitalism, not having insurance, and drinking Robitussin and other homemade remedies for their colds and ailments because they can’t afford to go pay for prescribed medicine. I’m done with being super-exploited as a Black, queer woman and disgusted with U.S. imperialism and the effects that war and greed has on the Earth’s land and atmosphere…
I joined because I’m fed up with reformism and respectability politics and shaming the poor, working class on whether they vote or not. I’m tired of police brutality and innocent people dying in prisons… The Progressive Labor Party is passionate and direct about what our struggles are and what we need to do to win and defeat capitalism. (2019)
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March 15, NEWARK, NJ - “No good mayors in a racist system,” shouted members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) alongside the family and friends of Justin Rodwell as we rallied for over an hour outside of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) at Newark Mayor Ras Baraka's annual State of the City.' This multiracial group of roughly two dozen people of all ages gathered in front of a line of snickering policemen to bravely demand the prison release of Justin, a young Black man whose family local cops targeted in June 2021. PLP and the Rodwell-Spivey Defense Committee (RSDC) refuse to abandon the “Free Justin Now” campaign, using this crisis to expose the danger that supposed cultural symbol Baraka represents for workers of color as the city ramps up for local elections. Workers in cities from Los Angeles to Guangzhou, Johannesburg to Chicago, and Newark are experiencing the intensification of capitalist displacement and gentrification which always requires government-backed force, the latter manifesting in police repression and harassment in the Rodwell-Spivey case. . As ruling class tensions all over the world increase the drive toward world war, political managers of capitalism like Baraka invariably utilize fascist measures for maintaining control over our class, and PLP is committed now more than ever to condemning capitalist politicians of every stripe and party.
As Justin remains in jail without bail for nine months now, PLP and the RSDC have continued actively demanding that all charges be dropped and harassment against his family end. To add insult to injury, the very morning of the State of the City address, a Newark cop shot a 15-year old (PATCH, 3/15), providing yet another example to the hundreds of patrons who attended the annual propaganda ploy that the failures of liberal politicians are more relevant than ever. CHALLENGE was disseminated to workers in the area and Rodwell-Spivey family members who were at the protest showcased on Instagram LIVE what militant workers’ power looks like while the Baraka administration displayed a sham video in the NJPAC theater touting “progress” around crime and police relations.
Custodians of capitalism
Racist bail laws, useless body cameras, cynical social work partnerships, and ineffective civilian review boards are all that Newark’s “progressive” administration can point toward, reminiscent of past and current efforts of the notorious NYPD under Democratic leadership of first DeBlasio and now Adams. The Baraka administration boasted that “the City of Newark reallocated five percent of the police department’s budget to be able to develop violence prevention programs,” yet that funding hardly materialized where working-class people live. Instead, it goes toward lining the pockets of cynical consultants or advancing programs that force the homeless away from new high-end housing developments in Newark’s downtown financial center. Baraka, like former NYC Mayor DeBlasio, introduced 10 social workers to partner with Newark police in response to intercommunal violence (PATCH, 6/21). Now under the current NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ administration, social workers are pairing with the police to harass homeless people and clear out their encampments in fast-gentrifying sections of the city.
While Baraka’s goons gloat about creating the first Civilian Complaint Review Board in NJ, PLP and the Rodwell-Spivey Defense Committee are speaking out on the failures of other police reforms that were created under their liberal administration. Justin Rodwell scored a low-risk point number on a scale that’s supposed to determine the risk of releasing someone from jail in lieu of gutter racist bail systems. Still Justin’s judge ‘went against his better judgment’ and left him in a jail cell. In 2014, the Newark Police Department signed a consent decree to train officers to behave better and wear body cameras, yet a Black worker, Carl Dorsey was killed by Newark kkkops in 2020.
“You want to act like nothing’s going on in Newark? We’re suffering!” Monique Rodwell shouted to Baraka outside of the NJPAC doors. As she shouted, workers in Ukraine were under armed attack from capitalist war efforts between the Russian, U.S., NATO member imperialists. Under capitalism, workers are facing militarized terror all over. Not to mention global displacement that is fueled by competitive commodification of land and profits. When workers can’t afford to keep up with the cost of living, we are forced to work ourselves to death or be left for dead in the streets. Under communist leadership, quality housing and neighborhoods won’t be driven by profit and will be obtainable by the same people who help maintain it–the WORKERS.
Workers must strengthen the state of the working class on May Day
The most effective weapon that PLP has to terminate liberal misleaders selling our class out is to strengthen our credibility, friendships, and struggles with workers around issues like police terror and housing. We don’t just fight to “win” the case by having the charges dropped against Justin; PLP fights to deepen ties with the Rodwell-Spivey family around the need to overthrow this system for good, demonstrating to our class what real workers’ power means.
Self critically, we have to extend our comradery to countless City workers under the Baraka administration who need our analysis and commitment because they, too, suffer tremendously from poor working conditions and political corruption. May Day is PLP’s annual “state of the working class” celebration, a reminder to ourselves and fellow workers that the only way to correct the errors of capitalist misleaders is for our party to grow worldwide. We need workers inside of City Hall and in the streets of Newark to come with us to Brooklyn so that we can show the world what a ‘State of the Communists’ will look like on April 30th for May Day. From every corner of the world, join us!
