By Langston Hughes (1938)

‘Chant for May Day’
by Langston Hughes (1938)
To be read by a Workman with, for background, the rhythmic waves of rising and re-rising Mass Voices, multiplying like the roar of the sea. WORKER :
The first of May:
When the flowers break through the earth,
When the sap rises in the trees.
When the birds come back from the South.
Workers:
Be like the flowers, 10 VOICES :
Bloom in the strength of your unknown power, 20 VOICES :
Grow out of the passive earth, 40 VOICES :
Grow strong with Union,
All hands together—
To beautify this hour, this spring,
And all the springs to come 50 VOICES :
Forever for the workers! WORKER :
Workers: 10 VOICES :
Be like the sap rising in the trees, 20 VOICES :
Strengthening each branch, 40 VOICES :
No part neglected— 50 VOICES :
Reaching all the world. WORKER :
All workers: 10 VOICES :
White workers, 10 OTHERS :
Black workers, 10 OTHERS :
Yellow workers, 10 OTHERS :
Workers in the islands of the sea— 50 VOICES
Life is everywhere for you, WORKER :
When the sap of your own strength rises 50 VOICES :
Life is everywhere. 10 VOICES :
May Day! 20 VOICES :
May Day! 40 VOICES :
May Day! 50 VOICES :
When the earth is new, WORKER :
Proletarians of all the world: 20 VOICES :
Arise, 40 VOICES :
Grow strong, 60 VOICES :
Take Power, 80 VOICES :
Till the forces of
the earth are yours 100 VOICES :
From this hour

International May Day Greetings from Columbia

Workers, comrades and friends of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), we send you all a revolutionary greeting from Colombia. We are getting ready to commemorate the international day of the working class, a day on which millions of workers around the world will march remembering their history of struggle against the exploitation inherent in the capitalist system and its disastrous consequences for the workers, who have been alienated by the search for profit maximization.

The intensification of the contradictions between big and small fascists in Colombia has shown that the bosses' democracy is a retrograde and corrupt system that does not work for the benefit of the proletariat, which is why it must be destroyed by workers' power.  It cannot be reformed.
Capitalism has created a world where women, men and children die en masse due to poverty, hunger, racist and sexist violence, police brutality and environmental destruction. Unemployment, wage slavery, sexism and war undermine the rebellious consciousness preventing the red flag from waving around the world.

In this way, the revolution will only be possible with the strengthening of working class consciousness and organizing the struggle through the revolutionary line of PLP, self-criticism being a key element in the process of defeating the dark night.

Our call for the workers of the world is to strengthen our work, being creative, dedicated and dialectical. The road to revolution is long and adverse but possible, even though the enemies of communism and the working class present it as something illusory and outdated.

On this May Day in Colombia, many comrades and friends of PLP will march through the streets of Bogotá, many of them unemployed young people and constant victims of state repression and its policies of misery and hunger. We will be demonstrating our growing interest in defeating capitalism with communist revolution.

Everything we do in favor of the communist cause counts, which is why in Colombia we organize ourselves in favor of the confrontations of our class sisters and brothers in their collective struggles, seeking to form new study groups around CHALLENGE and the dissemination of PLP’s line.

When the resurgence of fascism becomes imminent, the fight becomes even more urgent. So, our fighting cry is an open invitation to all the comrades of the world to break the chains that capitalism has imposed on us. LET US ALL FIGHT to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and the arrival of the glorious communist dawn.

Forward working class, let's strengthen PLP and its communist line!

CHICAGO, April 7 – Communists from Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined with a multiracial crowd of dozens of workers and youth to organize against capitalist-caused gun violence. The occasion was an annual “Peace Walk” on the city’s northwest side, organized by various faith groups and mass organizations.

The physical and emotional trauma unleashed upon workers who are victims of gun violence is horrifically profound and wide-reaching. For many Black and Latin workers particularly, living in neighborhoods that have been systematically neglected by the city’s racist liberal mis-leadership, the damage cannot be understated.

But whatever amount of violence is committed by workers against other workers, it pales in comparison to the poverty and violence inflicted on our entire class by the racist and sexist capitalist bosses every day. Rather than relying on one set of fascist bosses to “protect” us from another set of fascist bosses, PLP calls on workers everywhere to build a mass revolutionary movement that overthrows our common oppressors and constructs a communist world where all workers are given an opportunity to thrive.

Revolutionary versus reactionary violence
The action began at the front of a local church known for social-justice organizing. A handful of speakers addressed the crowd, including those who had personally lost loved ones to gun violence. Different proposals were put forward during the speeches on how to address the violence, including praying more, pushing politicians to pass stricter gun laws, and finding ways of building community and mental health treatment among neighborhoods.

In the absence of a revolutionary communist outlook, many well-intentioned efforts from workers can get funneled into treating just the symptoms of this sick profit system and not attacking it at the root. At their worst, many of the reform campaigns pushed by the liberal Big Fascist wing of the U.S. ruling class can lead to gun laws that get enforced in racist ways and result in more criminalization and incarceration of Black and Latin workers.

To sharpen the political tone, a PLP member made a sign that read “A violent system breeds more violence – Let’s build a collective world” which was met with agreement by many in attendance. We also distributed at least ten copies of CHALLENGE newspaper to help connect this struggle to the wider international movement against capitalism with its deadly competition and wars for profit.

As communists, it’s important to make it clear that we are not pacifists – but there is a legitimate difference that must be made between reactionary violence and revolutionary violence. Reactionary violence is that violence inflicted by the bosses and the kkkops and militaries that they control to prop up their decadent system. This reactionary violence is also unfortunately used by many workers who sometimes choose to mimic the capitalist bosses to attack and prey on our own class.

On the contrary, revolutionary violence is organized force wielded by the masses under communist leadership to overcome the oppressive capitalist forces. It is ultimately what will be necessary to do away with a system that crushes so many workers and our potential every single day. Destroying capitalism is our proposal to end gun violence!

KKKops and bosses are the real gangsters
During the walk portion of the event, we were disgusted by the presence of two kkkop escorts from the racist Chicago Police Department (CPD). Although some of the marchers might be won to the idea of the cops keeping our class safe, the reality couldn’t be further from the truth – CPD is by far the biggest gang in the city!

To protest their presence, a PLP member quickly listed a number of names of Black and Latin youth gunned down by CPD in recent years and waved it in killer cops’ faces. The list  included LaQuan McDonald, Rekia Boyd, and Adam Toledo. We can expect no peace while the klan-in-blue are given free rein to stalk and terrorize our class for the benefit of their capitalist masters.

We were quick to point out to our friends at the event that it’s impossible to expect a city to take care of its youth when over one-third of the annual Chicago budget is spent on the kkkops (The Civic Federation, 6/23/20). This mind-blowing amount doesn’t even account for the payouts to workers who are victims of police terror, which in itself has amounted to close to $600 million since 2016 (WGN, 4/3).

What’s all the more telling for us workers is that all these attacks have been going on for decades with the open consent of Chicago’s Big Fascist (see Glossary, page 6) liberal leadership. New Black progressive Mayor Brandon Johnson – who predictably walked back previous claims to defund the police during his campaign – will not alter this trend. A capitalist system that is rocked by crisis has no choice but to resort to more fascist violence against workers, and all politicians back capitalism at the end of the day.

Join PLP for working-class power and collectivity
Imagine a society where all youth and workers were given the resources and means to contribute to the wellbeing of society, free of cost. Where youth engage in learning and collective action to shape society based on their interests, and practice pro-worker means of resolving conflict among ourselves. It’s not a pipe dream; it’s an egalitarian communist society! For all of us who truly want a world of peace among all working people, we invite you to join and help build PLP today.

Under capitalism, it is no crime to shoot an unarmed Black man 46 times as he tries to run for his life. That was the law laid down by a grand jury in Akron, Ohio, which refused to charge the eight kkkops who assassinated 25-year-old Jayland Walker last June. It was one more outrageous example of how deadly capitalism is for Black workers, and for young Black men and youths most of all. The capitalist bosses use their criminal injustice system to defend racist murder because it serves their interests to divide and terrorize the working class. Only when the working class takes power through communist revolution will all workers have a future to live for.

After chasing Jayland Walker for the capital offense of a broken taillight, the cops in Akron cornered him on foot in a parking lot and gunned him down with nearly one hundred bullets. The grand jury’s despicable failure to hold these murderers accountable exposed how young Black workers are blamed for their own assassinations at the hands of the state.

Racist terror epidemic
After mass uprisings in 2020 in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, many workers desperately hoped that capitalism could be reformed to the point where Living While Black would no longer be a crime. But Jayland’s killing proves once again that as long as we allow the profit system to exist, the capitalist rulers will keep siccing their racist mad dogs on Black and Latin and immigrant workers. Once the bosses diverted the reform movement to defund the police into the election campaign for Jim Crow Joe Biden, the liberal politicians flipped, as usual, to serve their capitalist masters.  Despite the fact that the U.S. murder rate fell last year and remains far below what it was in the 1980s and ‘90s (USA Today, 1/26), the bosses are using a trumped-up “crime wave” to pour more money into police terror and put more cops on the streets.

The results? In 2022, at least 1,176 workers and youth—a record high--were slaughtered by the cops.  Fewer than a third of these killings involved even an alleged violent crime. The lynching of Jayland Walker was no aberration. Nearly one hundred murders-by-cop involved traffic violations; nearly four hundred involved people fleeing—workers mostly shot in the back. And 24 percent of these victims were Black workers and youth, nearly double their proportion in the general population. Over the last ten years, Black residents were three times more likely to be killed by cops than white residents. In Chicago, the rate was 25 times higher; in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, 28 times higher (The Guardian, 1/6).

Capitalism can’t exist without racism
The capitalist ruling class needs the racism that empowers cops to criminalize, dehumanize, and murder Black workers. They count on the terror that these armed-to-the-teeth mercenaries unleash on the most exploited sections of the working class. For hundreds of years, the U.S. bosses have reaped obscene profits from the unpaid labor of enslaved workers and from the wage slavery in their factories and fields. Today, as capitalism worldwide spirals into crisis, hard-won gains by the working class – led by Black workers and the communist movement – are quickly disappearing. While low wages and a lack of affordable housing or decent health care are scourges that plague the entire working class, they fall hardest on those targeted by capitalist racism and sexism. The median wage of Black workers is 20 percent lower than that of white workers (lending tree.com, 2/7).  For Black women, the difference is 46 percent (AAUW.com). The official unemployment rate for Black workers is 60 precent higher than for white workers (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4/7).

To justify their system’s terror and racist inequalities, the capitalists trot out their tired old lies about Black workers, and particularly about young Black men. The bosses’ more openly racist faction, now fronted by the Republican Party, explicitly courts the allegiance of the likes of Andrew Lester, the racist vigilante in Kansas City who shot 16-year-old Ralph Yarl for ringing the wrong doorbell. But the liberal Democrats are also eager to convince workers to fear and scapegoat one another and to rely on the bosses for protection. Black mayors like Eric Adams in New York and Karen Bass in Los Angeles are leading the push to put more killer cops on the streets (LA Times, 4/18).

These misleaders and apologists are appealing to workers made cynical by the chronic failures of capitalism. Their job is to deceive our class into trusting that the problems in their neighborhoods—drug abuse, homelessness, gang violence—can be solved by the very same capitalists who created those problems in the first place.

Profits, war, and fightback
Workers in Akron and Kansas City are right to be taking to the streets, marching shoulder to shoulder, demanding change. They are joining a wave of working-class anger simmering across the globe. From France and Britain to Canada and South Korea, workers are rising up and fighting back. Miitant protesters against Amazon and Adidas are calling out the billionaires who exploit our class from Seattle to Southeast Asia. Though the working class is not yet organized, not yet confident in its own enormous power, many are seeing that capitalism is an abject failure. The more we unite with each other to confront the bosses, the more confidence we build in our class.

At the same time, we must understand that capitalism cannot be fixed or reformed to serve workers’ needs. As a system driven by maximum profit, it must constantly lower labor costs. But as the working class becomes more impoverished, we cannot buy what the bosses need to sell. This basic contradiction fuels the inter-imperialist competition for resources and markets that will inevitably lead to the next global war. As the capitalists gear up for that conflict, they will need workers’ allegiance more than ever. As their crisis deepens, they will be forced to drop the mask of liberal democracy in favor of open fascist terror. The racist violence the bosses are now directing at Black workers is a reminder of what lies in store for all of us. The capitalists will stop at nothing to try to save their rotten system.

The bosses’ greatest fear is that the working class—armed with multiracial unity and the bold leadership of Black workers within a communist party—will transform the reform struggle against racism into a fight for communist revolution. The hard fact is that the working class has no need for capitalism or its bosses. Even if Jayland Walker’s killers had been indicted, like the murderers who killed George Floyd, we would all too soon be mourning another lost brother or sister. Under capitalism, the bosses need cops to keep them in power and sustain their profit system. Under communism, the working class will organize society to enable us to look out for one another. With no ruling-class parasites to protect, no exploitation to enforce, we’ll have no need for cops. Fight for communism! Join Progressive Labor Party! Power to the working class!