May Day is International
Workers' Day, the day allocated by the working class movement to celebrate its
struggles for a better world and a memorial for those workers at Haymarket in
the United States who became martyrs in struggle at the hands of the
state.
May Day this year should
be a time of reflection on the positive results of our class's struggles of the
past and also of the negative outcomes. The Russian and Chinese Revolutions were
the great high point of the working class struggle for a better world in the
twentieth century and the defeats of these revolutions have been a great setback
for our class.
Capitalism may have had a temporary
victory in these blows to our class but it cannot solve the problems facing
humanity. In the 21st century the need for
communism is greater than ever before and the future of our very species depends
upon it. In Britain and the West our
economic growth is largely based on money
laundering, financial speculation and over-inflated land values. The real needs
of the people are neglected and welfare provision is being daily cut back while
wages stagnate, workers are over-worked and many are thrown into poverty,
homelessness and starvation. In the less developed countries progress is
held back. Many of the
people in these countries and therefore the world live without the basic
necessities of life, their countries chained into debt and interest payments and
their resources bought sold and pillaged by the big powers led by the USA. This
state of affairs benefits a few thousand billionaires whose luxury and wealth is
unparalleled in history at the same time as inequality is rapidly widening
across the world. This at a time when humanity is at its most technologically
advanced and capable of providing food and shelter for everyone.
Britain has a great
tradition of working class struggle. The Chartist Movement was a mass working
class movement which fought for the rights of the people. They waged many heroic
battles and even threatened to march on Parliament and destroy it! Unfortunately
in Britain we do not possess such a movement today. We need to start building
one and stop tailing the Labour Party, a party of support for
capitalism.
In the 20th century the working
class movement went from strength to strength gaining many advances and reforms.
The greatest victory for the working class and all the oppressed came in 1917
with the October Revolution in Russia. This year is the centenary of the Russian
Revolution and the fiftieth anniversary of the Great Naxalbari Insurgency in
India which continues its brave and heroic struggle today, even more significant
now that India languishes under the jack boot of reactionary Hindu nationalism.
The people's wars being waged by the peoples of India, Philippines and Turkey
show the way forward for workers and oppressed people today.
When the workers and
oppressed can take control and exercise real collective ownership of the world's
resources a new society would in the words of English communist William Morris
“be co-operative in the widest sense. It would of course be subordinate to the
real welfare of society;
i.e., the production of wares
would not be looked upon as the end of society (as the production of
profit-bearing wares now is), but it
would be regarded as the means for the ease and happiness of life, which
therefore would never be sacrificed to any false ideas of necessity, or to any
merely conventional views of comfort or luxury.”
“Without
a Peoples Army, the people have nothing”
Mao Tse-tung
It is clear to many
people that capitalism is an outmoded and decaying system of waste, inequality,
war, pollution and premature death. It's crap and we need to get rid of it!
Armed struggle is an essential part of the class struggle and the means by which
capitalism and its state, the instrument of its ruling class, can be
overthrown.
In India the Communist
Party of India (Maoist) is guiding the Peoples Army with Marxism-Leninism-Maoism
which is the shining path to liberation. We in Britain can learn a lot from the
struggles of the oppressed masses of India and should ignore the leftist
rhetoric of Labour and trade union leaders. Mao Tse-tung said “the East wind
prevails over the West wind” meaning the revolution against capitalist
imperialism has begun in the poorer east of the planet but will spread
west.
All workers, peasants and
oppressed people across the planet have the same enemy - global capitalism - and
we all have one way out and that is socialism leading on to communism. History
never stands still: if we do not move forward then we will move backwards. The
choice before us in the coming period is, as Rosa Luxemburg once put it,
“Socialism or barbarism”.
Workers
and oppressed peoples of all countries, unite!
Contact: contact@revolutionarypraxis.org
Website: www.revolutionarypraxis.org
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