Fellow workers!

Capitalism’s drive for profitable accumulation has been in crisis for a long time now. In fact we have reached the point where the world’s greatest power [the USA] survives only thanks to its capacity to drain surplus value from the rest of the world in the form of parasitic income and because it does not have to pay its debts - a consequence of the enormous power of both the dollar and the US’ military apparatus.

In order to maintain the power of the dollar, and preserve these strategic conditions for the future, the US administration decided to invade and occupy Iraq.

The enemy wasn’t the dictatorial regime of Saddam (always defended by the US when it suited them) but the contracts which Saddam had entered into with the European states to sell oil in Euros. This would have eroded the absolute dominion which the dollar has on world oil, and other primary, product markets.

The European states could not line up to support a war against ... themselves! This started the process which led to the conflict between the USA and an area which is not yet well-defined but is based on the Euro.

It is a process entirely within the imperialist dynamic of modern capitalism. It is therefore a process of war, which, like all capitalist wars, is first of all against ourselves, the workers. But how many of us feel almost insulted when we are called “workers”? Too many, because there has been too much damage done to the idea of the proletariat or working class, first by Stalinism in the USSR, and then by its democratic descendants.

But the working class consists of all those who are employed (or unemployed or even those contracted as supposedly “self employed”). We work to create profit for the system without minimally sharing in it, receiving a wage in return.

Because of this May Day this year has a special value.

Workers, Comrades!

May Day was born as the day of world proletarian struggle against capitalism in memory of the bloody events of Chicago on May 1st 1886 when the US police during a number of demonstrations for the 8 hour day killed six demonstrators while another six workers were hanged after a farcical trial. Now almost everywhere today the bourgeoisie, supported by the counter-revolutionary reformist organisations and the unions, has transformed that day into a holiday, which refers more to May Day’s pagan origins than to the great and painful struggle of the working class.

Since 1886 living conditions for the world working class has improved only in the imperialist centres where the proletariat has been able to fight to extort some wage increases. Yet, even in these countries, the gap between the wealth that is created and what workers earn is growing. When the proletariat produces enormously more wealth in a greatly reduced time whilst the basic services to the working class are reduced then this is a cut in the indirect wage. Schools, healthcare, pensions, public transport, are all increasingly becoming luxury items as society’s wealth, produced by the working class alone, increases. And, for thirty years, even direct wages and general working conditions have become worse all over the world under the violent attacks of the bosses and governments, aided by trades union complicity. In the countries of capitalism’s periphery the working class and the masses of the poor have been simply reduced to starvation and desperation. Moreover, capitalism is going from one war to another towards the real one, that is between the capitalist blocs, and is thus leading us to catastrophe.

These are sufficient reasons why May 1st should return to being the May Day of international proletarian struggle, the day of struggle in which the isolated, but still existing, demonstrations of resistance to the attacks of capital can unite. The revival of class struggle is possible and internationalists must strive to contribute to it.

We call on revolutionary workers in every country to unite with the affiliated and sympathising organisations of the IBRP in order to re-launch the communist perspective and turn it into a material force.