MAY FIRST 2013: Comrades, oppose bourgeois society! Resist capitalist exploitation! Unite with your fellow comrades and fight for people’s power! - By RCP Canada

MAY FIRST 2013
Comrades, oppose bourgeois society! Resist capitalist exploitation! Unite with your fellow comrades and fight for people’s power!

 An economic storm is brewing in Canada. The strength of domestic financial and real estate markets will inevitably crumble with the intensification of the global crisis. In the wake of the U.S., Canada will intensify the terrible battle that all the bourgeoisies are waging to lower labor costs. The capitalists command of proletarians: “Workers, take your pay and give your boss what he wants!” And so, capitalists are demanding their governments: “Make the workers obey! Unleash your police against them, corrupt their leaders and break their strikes —our future depends on it!”

Who can still believe that the federal or provincial government is siding with us workers and that we just have to elect a “good one” in order for things to change? Throughout the country, the unemployed are affected by the cuts imposed by the Harper government and are facing harassment from EI investigators. In Quebec, the supposedly “progressive” PQ government has just imposed additional constraints and cuts on welfare recipients and plans to increase university tuition fees. Meanwhile, the Charbonneau Commission has exposed systematic, massive corruption involving construction contractors, engineering firms and politicians. In Toronto, shelters for the homeless are full while city and provincial authorities are washing their hands.
Meanwhile, the police are accentuating the repression against those who dare to protest and take part in demonstrations. The governments at all levels are giving them new legislative and regulatory weapons to increase repression, such the new regulations against the wearing of “masks,” with penalties up to 10 years prison!
Meanwhile, the fortune accumulated by the 1,426 billionaires of the world has increased by 800 billion USD over the last year —an increase of 14.8%! Totalling 5.4 trillion dollars, this global wealth from a small number of individuals ranks third after that of the governments of United States and China.
The future of the capitalists depends on our subjection. Our future as workers depends instead on our insubordination. That is, our disobedience to the bourgeois order and consequently, our determination to fight for collective ownership of the means of production, for socialism and workers’ power.
We need to take inspiration from what our comrades are doing in Dhaka factories in Bangladesh, in the streets of Athens and in the mines of Spain; we need to resist like our fellow workers in Europe and China, like the poor peasants and popular masses in India, and in the streets of Montreal.
The Revolutionary Communist Party calls on all workers, unemployed, retired, youth and students to make May 1st, International Workers Day, a moment when the bourgeoisie will fear our class is in the process of choosing insubordination; that we are rising and reclaiming the essence of our legitimate struggles —including those powerful ones that will radically change the face of Canada.
Let’s protest by the thousands in all major cities across the country. Let’s brandish our red flags everywhere and throughout this whole day of struggle. Prevent the police from seizing and destroying the red flags and class struggle banners. Let’s forge a new fighting spirit made of unity and militancy. Shoulder to shoulder, let’s answer the various calls that will arise by May 1st. Workers, students or pensioners, let’s make May First a powerful day of revolutionary action!
•  In Montreal: Rally the red contingent from the PCR-RCP Canada in the May Day demonstration organized by the Convergence of Anti-Capitalist Struggles (CLAC-Montréal)! Gathering at exactly 6pm at Place Jacques-Cartier (in front of City Hall).
•  In Ottawa: Take part in large numbers in the event organized by the PCR-RCP Canada at the Babylon Night Club, 317 Bank Street. Doors open at 9 pm.
•  In Toronto: Join the May First demonstration initiated by the PCR-RCP Canada (details soon)!

* * *

We want serious changes. The whole society must change. With its facade of democracy and its rampant inequality, corruption, wasting of resources, exploitation of workers who are discarded after use; with the consumerism that handcuffs us to goods instead of freeing us from our needs; with all these diseases arising from the competition between private corporations, this system is not ours. We are the ones who work so that it can survive, but we do not support it and are fighting for a change. This necessary struggle for change will necessarily be a revolution.
From one country to another, pillars of the bourgeois society are proving increasingly fragile. The capitalist economy is facing one crisis after another. Austerity measures that are implemented to solve one crisis only create others. This is a testimony of the cycle of decay of capitalism in which we are entered. Recessions are lasting five years or even more, as in Greece. Unemployment is affecting a quarter of the working class, as in Spain. Youth are literally sidelined, as is North Africa and many European countries. The real wages of workers are reduced by the fifth or quarter, as in the United States and Britain. Workers’ pensions are attacked as in Canada, Italy and elsewhere. For the majority, labor income is literally stolen by the interest on credit, taxes, and various fees imposed on public services. What a worker gets, the bankers, the capitalists and their governments are quickly retaking it.
Corporations make the law and the governments implement it, but neither the one nor the other have the interest of the masses at heart. Bourgeois politics, with its degenerating parties, its endemic corruption, its ridiculous leaders and sterile debates, is largely seen as a circus going around in circles in a deserted tent. Bourgeois democracy is only a shadow of itself. There is nothing to gain from fighting for it. The people’s democracy we need will only happen by fighting against the rotten bourgeois system. It will be a hundred times better than the doubtful legacy the bourgeois system leaved us. We are demanding global and full-scale changes: that’s why we are revolutionaries!

* * *

Solidarity against police repression in Montreal: We will not submit to the municipal by-law P-6
With this public declaration, we assert our opposition to by-law P-6: we will continue to demonstrate without negotiating our demo routes with police, and we will systematically challenge all tickets that arise from this by-law.
The past year has been marked by an escalation of police repression against political protesters in Montreal. As our political movements take to the streets in larger numbers, with more frequency and militancy, we are attacked more brutally and arbitrarily than ever, with batons, pepper spray, tear gas, sound grenades, and rubber bullets. Our friends are mass arrested, humiliated, kettled, and in many cases badly injured.
Within this context of police escalation against political protesters, the Montreal police (SPVM) are attempting to normalize another practice: arresting demonstrators before they can even begin to demonstrate, or even gather to demonstrate. Three times within one week - March 15 on the International Day Against Police Brutality; March 18 before a planned night demo; and March 22 on the anniversary of student strike protests - the Montreal police stopped demonstrations before they could begin by surrounding protesters with riot police and arresting them en masse, in the hundreds. One clear goal of the police tactic is to scare demonstrators, and potential demonstrators, from taking to the streets
The SPVM can’t be bothered to make criminal charges. Instead, they use municipal by-law “P-6” which makes demonstrations that don’t provide an advance itinerary to the police to be a contravention of the by-law. A municipal by-law offense is not a criminal charge, it’s the equivalent of a parking ticket. However, the P-6 offence was raised to more than $500 ($637 with fees) for a first offence last May in the context of the student strike movement.
The P-6 by-law prohibits “obstructing the movement, pace or presence” of citizens who are also using public space at the same time. How can we take the streets without obstructing vehicular or pedestrian traffic? Moreover, the P-6 by-law demands not only communicating demo routes in advance, but also the approval of our routes by the police. This is the equivalent of giving the police the arbitrary power to refuse our routes if they judge them to be too disruptive, and also to prevent marching to locations that have been chosen as political “targets.”
We refuse to negotiate with the police our freedom of expression, our right to demonstrate and our right to disrupt the existing social, political and economic order that we consider profoundly unjust and illegitimate.
Part of the response is in our hands, as part of grassroots, autonomous community organizations. There is no obligation to provide the police our demo routes, and the Montreal police in particular, who abuse their authority with impunity, don’t deserve any accountability from us. Instead, we’re accountable to each other, and the social movements we come from. We always retain the right to protest spontaneously, and with demo routes that reflects our needs and demands.
In the face of police repression, let’s take back the streets with our weapons of solidarity and support.
This statement is endorsed by:
The Anti-Capitalist Convergence (CLAC)
No One Is Illegal-Montreal
Quebec Public Interest Research Group (QPIRG) at Concordia
Revolutionary Communist Party (PCR-RCP Canada)