Another May Day in the Shadow of War

Another May Day surrounded by conflict - imperialist wars between capitalist rivals, and class war, with the world's rulers united against the working class, and the poorest people on the planet.

Peace, prosperity and freedom - heavy sacrifices are demanded for these objectives in the form of blood, sweat, and a reduced quality of life. Not only are these ideals more distant with every passing year, but time reveals them for what they are: a cynical deception. However things cannot be any different as what we see is a result of the crisis of the cycle of capital accumulation which, for more than thirty years has not gone away. On the contrary it is tightening its grip

The financial cyclone unleashed by the collapse of sub-prime mortgages is one more demonstration, and the proof, that the uncontrolled financial speculation - unleashed by capital to attempt to revive its accumulation process through the parasitic appropriation of surplus value extorted on a global scale - and the brutal plundering of entire sectors of the population (including small-scale capitalists), have done nothing but make the problem with which the capitalist economy is struggling worse.

The intensification of exploitation, increasing job insecurity, declining wages, the increase in compulsory overtime, and the return of forms of management over the workforce which remind us a great deal of the nineteenth century, allows individual capitalist to shamefully enrich themselves, but they are not sufficient to secure a rate of profit sufficient to kick off a new cycle of accumulation. The bourgeoisie wants us to swallow all this with slogans like "the need for modernisation"!

The shift of productive activities abroad - where wages are dramatically lower than in the advanced countries - and the movement of huge masses of migrant workers, is pumping a little fresh air into a rate of profit certainly in need of a bit of oxygen, but in the end not a lot has changed. On the contrary these phenomenon, whilst not capable of reviving the capitalist economy, create a competitive tendency amongst the wage labourers of the entire planet to lower wages.

War, the increase in exploitation, the destruction of the environment, to such an extent that it almost irreversibly threatens (so far) the biological basis of life on the planet, have not yet provoked an adequate response from workers beyond a few significant episodes of class struggle.

The entire working class is paying for the process of decomposition and recomposition which began thirty years ago, and is still going on. Forced by the hateful blackmail of job insecurity, the working class is struggling to recover from the disappointment of having seen it belief in what it thought was "another possible world" (the fake socialism of the USSR) shattered. In short it has no class identity and succumbs to capitalist ideology in all its variants: the most narrow regional separatism, classical nationalism, religious fundamentalism to end up with more or less traditional reformism. It's a dark picture but there is a way out. This demands a real class struggle outside of and against any compromise with capitalism, a class struggle which does not stick to the usual union logic.

But a working class fightback, even if it is more violent and radical, will end up back inside the framework of the system without the political guidance of its class party. A party which has the ability to politically unify on an international scale all the different struggles of the various sectors of the world working class and understands how to oppose capitalism's permanent wars with the practice of revolutionary defeatism. For this the dispersed revolutionary vanguards need to concentrate their energies in preparing the ground for rebuilding the international party of the working class.

It is this task which inspires the activities of the IBRP and all its constituent organisations. As ever our slogan remains:

Workers of the world unite!

International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party May 1st 2008

This English language version is produced by the Communist Workers' Organisation, the British affiliate of the IBRP. Translations in various languages - including, for the first time, Polish - can be found on our website.

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