May Day is the working class’s international holiday celebrated by tens of millions of workers worldwide. It was born out of — and honors — the Chicago workers’ historic struggle for the 8-hour day on May 1, 1886, launching a general strike that spread to 350,000 workers across the country. It’s a day when workers around the globe march for their common demands, signifying international working-class solidarity.

In 1884, the AFL passed a resolution to make eight hours “a legal day’s labor from and after May 1, 1886.” Workers were forced to labor “from sun-up to sundown,” up to 14 hours a day. The Chicago Central Labor Council then called for a general strike on May 1, 1886, to demand the 8-hour day.

On that day, Chicago stood still as “Tens of thousands downed their tools and moved into the streets. No smoke curled from the tall chimneys of the factories and mills,” reported one paper.

On May 3, the cops murdered six strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works. The next day thousands marched in protest into Chicago’s Haymarket Square. A bomb was thrown by a police agent. Four workers were killed, seven cops died and 200 workers were wounded in what became known as the Haymarket Massacre.

Nine demonstration leaders were framed for “instigating a riot.” Four were hung. A mass protest movement forced the Governor to free those still alive after the government admitted the frame-up.

The tens of thousands who won the 8-hour day saw it eroded, so another general strike was called for May 1, 1890. At the July 1889 meeting of the International Workers Association, organized and led by Karl Marx, the U.S. delegate reported on the struggle. The Association decided “to organize a great international demonstration, so that...on one appointed day the [world’s] toiling masses shall demand...” the 8-hour day. “Since a similar demonstration has already been decided upon by the American Federation of Labor....this day is adopted for the international demonstration.” [This kind of international solidarity is vitally needed today.]

As it progressed, the international communist movement took up the struggle and organized May 1st celebrations every year. In the U.S., it was championed for many years by the old Communist Party, with 250,000 marching in New York City in the 1940’s. But when that party abandoned its principles, May Day was resurrected by the Progressive Labor Party in 1971 which advanced more revolutionary ideas. May Day marches have been organized by the PLP for the past 35 years, in many cities — Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Houston, Delano, California and others, as well as PLP contingents in Latin America.

While the bosses try to smear May Day as being “imported from Soviet Russia,” it remains as a signal contribution of the world’s workers born in the actions of those Chicago strikers over a century ago. Today we march for the universal demands of all workers, regardless of capitalist-created borders: against imperialist war, against racism and sexism, for unity of immigrant and citizen workers, against wage slavery, against fascist police terror and for the communist solution to all these attacks facing the international working class.

How prophetic were the last words of Haymarket martyr August Spies as the hangman’s noose was tied around his neck and he declared, “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!” 

Wars over access to resources, markets and workers’ labor result inevitably from capitalism’s dog-eat-dog competition and kill workers by the millions. Attacking this mass murder for profit is essential to the long struggle towards communist revolution our Party marks on May Day. May Day 2010 finds U.S. capitalists, led by Obama, shedding workers’ blood openly in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as they try to shore up a faltering worldwide empire largely based on control of energy. U.S. rulers, meanwhile, must soon confront Iran and have longer-term plans for facing off against China and Russia.

For Exxon’s Bottom Line, Obama
Keeps GIs in Iraq Despite
‘Withdrawal’ Pledge

The U.S. invasion of Iraq has slaughtered over one million civilians (Opinion Research Business poll, 2007) and 4,300 GIs in pursuit of a promised 12 million barrels of oil per day (mbd). Obama’s phony “withdrawal” plan (which helped elect him) has become a 50,000-soldier “residual” force that will continue the carnage. U.S. combat boots on Iraq’s soil, needed to protect Exxon Mobil’s, BP’s and Shell’s new oil stakes there, incite violence from local bosses seeking a piece of the elusive 12-mbd bonanza for themselves.

Masquerading as religious leaders, billionaire Osama Bin Laden (through al Qaeda in Iraq) and would-be pro-Iranian oil baron Muqtada al Sadr have been battling both the U.S. and each other to overturn the Exxon-led deals. Just after a U.S. raid wiped out two al Qaeda bigwigs, al Qaeda bombs killed 72 people near Sadr-affiliated mosques around Baghdad on April 23.

To Rulers, Mid-East Oil, Gas Mean Everything, Workers’ Lives Nothing

U.S. capitalists’ main goals for their murderous Afghan campaign are: securing the path of the proposed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline and establishing a military presence that physically separates U.S. foes Iran and China. “Shoot-first” orders from top U.S. brass cause a civilian massacre every week in Afghanistan.

NPR reported (4/23): “Earlier this week, NATO troops opened fire on a vehicle in Khost province, killing four unarmed civilians, including three teenagers. Last week, a military convoy shot up a large passenger bus in the southern city of Kandahar, killing at least five civilians and wounding 18 others.”

The U.S. war machine is now gearing up for a June offensive to take Kandahar, which lies directly on TAPI’s route. But even if gas never flows, U.S. installations in Afghanistan, like the Bagram mega-base, will have driven a geographic wedge between U.S. rival China and its protégé Iran.

Obama has enlarged U.S. rulers’ Afghan effort into Pakistan, with similar disregard for working-class lives. An April 24 Predator drone strike directed from a bunker in Nevada incinerated seven people in northwest Pakistan. But the Pentagon-Pakistani death squad couldn’t care less who they were. “We don’t know yet if any high-value target was present in the area at the time of attack,” said a Pakistani official. (Agence France Presse, 4/24)

A nuclear-armed Iran — pro-Chinese and pro-Russian — presents an immediate threat to U.S. imperialism’s precarious leverage over oil-rich Iraq and even richer Saudi Arabia. In response, U.S. bosses plan two basic options, both loaded with danger for our class. One involves a U.S. (or U.S.-aided Israeli) attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. If that happens, Teheran’s oil-soaked ayatollahs vow they will close the Straits of Hormuz, shutting off U.S.-controlled crude exports from Iraq, Kuwait and eastern Saudi Arabia. A massive U.S.-led invasion would soon follow.

The other option, now moving through Congress and seemingly “more peaceful,” is for sanctions, including an embargo on gasoline to Iran. The Christian Science Monitor (4/24) warned: “The only way to really enforce such a crippling sanction against the Iranian economy would be through an American-led naval blockade which, by international law, is an act of war....It was a U.S. ban on the export of oil to Imperial Japan for its invasion of China that triggered the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. And a U.S. naval blockade of Cuba in 1962 almost led to nuclear war with the Soviet Union.” [Despite some off-the-wall religious views, Christian Science is actually a Wall Street/Rockefeller Republican outfit. Goldman Sachs ex-CEO Henry Paulson belongs, as does Nelson Rockefeller ally and Jay Rockefeller father-in-law ex-senator Charles Percy.]

China’s Bosses’ Growing Navy
Challenging U.S. Rulers’ Control of Oil

China’s capitalists are the U.S.’s biggest rival for Mid-East energy. The NY Times (4/24) reported China’s “military is seeking to project naval power well beyond the Chinese coast, from the oil ports of the Middle East to the shipping lanes of the Pacific, where the United States Navy has long reigned as the dominant force.”

Meanwhile, neo-czar Putin is using Russia’s enormous gas supplies as both carrot and stick to create a vast anti-U.S. Eurasian bloc of nations dependent on, or loyal to, Moscow. With U.S. conventional forces tied up elsewhere, Obama’s response has been to flaunt Washington’s nuclear trump card. At his recent 47-nation “weapons reduction” summit, Obama in fact retained 1,500 strategic warheads and unlimited smaller, battlefield ones; maintained U.S. nukes based in Europe; and implicitly threatened Iran with a nuclear strike.

Conventional wars are widening and nuclear conflicts are looming, with dire consequences for workers. But on this working-class May Day holiday, while widespread anti-war sentiment exists, the rulers have managed to channel a great deal of it down the dead-end road of electoral politics that put their stooge Obama in the White House.

We must rebuild an anti-imperialist anti-war movement with a pro-worker, communist outlook. Stepping up our organizing efforts on the job, at school and in the neighborhood will help. So will the bosses’ intensifying war-making, which will lay bare capitalism’s wartime horrors to millions who still feel unaffected. Since the “economic draft,” which pushes jobless youth into the military, has proven insufficient to fill the war-makers’ military needs, U.S. rulers will someday soon have to draft the so-called middle class as well as the working class into its killing machine.

While it was the cauldron of capitalists’ global conflict that provided the conditions for the Soviet and Chinese workers’ revolutions, political errors brought capitalism back to both places. But an inevitable World War III, driven by the world’s competing capitalists, can result in the bosses’ digging their own graves, provided there is a mass revolutionary movement led by PLP to build a true communist world. What we do now surely will count greatly. 

SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, April 26 — On April 24, this area had a very successful May Day celebration, especially because PLP’s future is growing from our hands-on activities. We have long-term ties with young adults, family groups and on-the-job fight-backs. This provides the potential for Party growth from a growing circle of people influenced by PLP’s activities and ideas.

This is particularly significant as capitalism intensifies its devastation of the international working class. May Day gives new leadership the opportunity to develop, younger and older Party members working together.

A very integrated group of around 60 people of all ages participated, plus 20 younger children. In a world in which people are divided, isolated and filled with the bosses’ individualism, this was a great accomplishment. Some who attended for the first time remarked about the mix of Latino, black, Asian and white. The speeches were bi-lingual. Friends and comrades collectively prepared the food, set up and cleaned up.

Unionized government workers in general, and transit workers and teachers in particular, are under intense, racist attack here, representing capitalism’s institutional racism. The impact of cuts in transit and education is greatest on black, Latino and immigrant families who depend on these services. This is predominantly true in the make-up of the transit work-force with a concentration of black workers since the 1960s. These are areas where PLP members have been very active in class struggle for years.

The celebration reflected this base of support for PLP; a significant number of those attending were transit workers. Many made a real effort to attend, given rotating shifts, days off and commutes. Party members from AC Transit, East Bay and MUNI-San Francisco described how they’re organizing with coworkers to fight the bosses’ attacks on transit workers and riders, along with their desire to win workers to build a PLP that can destroy capitalism and establish communism.

Another Party member addressed the world situation, stressing that May Day reflects the significance of our movement. He emphasized the intensifying attack on immigrant workers in the U.S. His speech presented both analysis and action. One Party member reported on the support for the physical attack on the Nazis in Los Angeles the previous weekend. The Nazi-style law recently enacted in Arizona is one example of what the ruling class has in store for us. We must develop the tangible anger against this law into a class-conscious one to build PLP.

Immigrants Rage Against
Nazi Arizona Law

Immigrant workers who attended expressed rage and concern about the law while also appreciating the unity of citizens and immigrants at our celebration. After singing the Internationale in English and Spanish, a woman from Central America commented: “This is a very emotional song for us.” She and other families who attended lost relatives in the revolutionary struggles there in  the 1970’s and know first-hand the problems facing immigrant workers in capitalism’s failing economy.

Many families brought their children for whom younger comrades organized activities and a playground. This careful planning made the event family-oriented, enabling parents and grandparents to actively participate.

Class struggle continues in the Bay Area. An Oakland teacher called for solidarity for a one-day strike on April 29. A MUNI operator invited all to attend a solidarity march with passengers on May 5 and to support a planned safety “work-to-rule” campaign in opposition to service cuts.

This organizing prompted one retired transit worker to declare: “This gives me a great sense of optimism. The working class is in motion and communists are in the middle of it. We have a world to win!” The words of The Internationale rang true: “We have been naught, we shall be all!” 

NEWARK, NJ, April 17 — Around 250 teachers and students protested the new wave of capitalist attacks on the working class today. This time the attacks are taking the form of extreme cuts in education. The New Jersey governor has announced that he will cut $1.09 billion from schools across the state. As usual, these cuts are inherently racist because the schools which suffer the largest cuts serve primarily black, Latino and immigrant students. The results of these cuts will be larger class sizes due to teacher lay-offs, a diminishing of after-school programs and extra-curricular activities, wage freezes and healthcare give-backs, to name a few.

When we arrived at the protest, most chants and signs pointed to Governor Christie as the problem. The chant “Hey hey, ho ho, Governor Christie’s got to go” could be heard for blocks along with the honks of support from every car that passed. While Christie is an easy person to hate, this is not enough. We must struggle with workers and students to understand that capitalism and its inevitable economic crises and ever-expanding imperialist wars are the source of these cuts, not individual politicians. In attempts to bring this message to the workers, we led chants linking the cuts to the war, gave a speech connecting the cuts in education to all the other capitalist attacks on the working class and distributed CHALLENGE.

While we were able to play a role in leading the demonstration, our consistent work in mass organizations is what made the difference. For over a year now, we have been active in, or connected with, a couple of mass organizations in the area. That commitment is what has put us in a position for our communist politics to lead some of this struggle.

The day after the protest, we brought students and teachers from the demonstration to a May Day fundraiser. We discussed communism as the only solution to the cuts in education that are used to fund bank and corporation bailouts and oil wars. Within that discussion, we made plans for how to bring communist politics to the May Day march in New York City. We will continue to work within the movement against the budget cuts, to fight to win more workers and students to understand that capitalism will never fulfill the needs of the working class. J

April 27 — As we go to press thousands of students across the state walkout against the budget cuts. Full story, next issue of CHALLENGE.