Hail May Day, International Working Class Day!
Victory is Possible Only by Putting Politics
in Command
- Statement of the Manitoba Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), May 1, 2001
The world has entered the 21st century in much the way it entered the 20th, with a growing crisis of overproduction that is exacerbating all of the contradictions in society. The speculation mania of the 1990s and the resulting euphoria about the immortality of capitalism have faded as rapidly as the NASDAQ stock index, to be replaced by speculation about a possible recession. Whether the capitalist system will find a way out of the current economic crisis remains to be seen. The "boom" of the 1990s was based to a certain extent on the plunder of the economies and state treasuries of the former Soviet Union and countries of Eastern Europe. The capitalists are clearly now pinning their hopes on the potential market of billions of people in China and India to eliminate the production surpluses and fuel another stock market mania. However, whether this strategy will succeed depends entirely on their ability to convert the populations of those countries into mass consumers within the next few years, a daunting task to say the least.
In the meantime, the intense competition engendered by the overproduction crisis is leading to sharp trade disputes among the capitalists, as well as to further intensification of the exploitation and oppression of the working people within the capitalist countries. As usual, the working people in the poorer and weaker nations are bearing the main brunt of this assault by capitalism and imperialism, and a broad movement against capitalist exploitation and oppression is developing in many countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. A renewal of the anti-capitalist movements in the more powerful capitalist countries is also taking shape in response to the new economic situation. The 50,000-strong protest at the Quebec City Summit of the Americas indicated that this movement is becoming a genuinely mass movement and expanding to include a broad cross-section of society. Workers constituted a majority of the participants, taking to the street in numbers not seen since the Ontario Days of Action. This bodes well for the future of the movement in Canada.
The urgent need of this growing anti-capitalist movement is the forging of a broad unity around common political goals. There is no room for the sectarianism of the past when the movement was split and weakened by struggles over which individuals and groups were the most correct and pure ideologically and whose "socialist models" were the best. Most of those "models" have now fallen in one way or another, thereby eliminating the basis for these divisions and rendering them irrelevent. The movement is demanding that we deal with the political problems of today, rather than relive the sectarian battles of the past. Balkanizing the movement on a sectarian basis or reducing it to hundreds of separate movements against specialized forms of oppression and discrimination will block the entire movement from achieving its goals.
Exploitation and oppression of all forms can be eliminated, but only on the basis of putting politics in command. Politics is the struggle for political power, for the ability to be effective in changing society for the benefit of one's constituency. Capitalists participate in politics to maximize their own profits and those of their allies. Anti-capitalist revolutionaries must participate in politics in order to place all of the decision-making power in the hands of the working class and its allies, the small producers, the dispossessed and oppressed, that is all of those who are negated by the capitalist system. Those who consider differences of opinion to be more important than political unity are not assisting in the development of anti-capitalist politics. Objectively, they are assisting those forces which are opposing the development of a broad, anti-capitalist movement.
May Day is traditionally a day on which the revolutionary working class not only reaffirms its internationalism and its historic mission to overthrow capitalism, but also reflects soberly on the victories and failures of the past. On this first May Day of the new century, Canadians can take pride in the fact that a new spirit of unity is emerging within the Canadian revolutionary movement, with the working class playing an increasingly important role. If it is successful, this movement for unity of the revolutionary, anti-capitalist forces could be the key to the victory of the emancipation of the working class and the elimination of all forms of exploitation and oppression. However, for it to succeed the working class must take up this movement as its own. Victory is possible only by placing the revolutionary politics of the working class in command.
Hail May Day, the day of international working class struggle and solidarity!
Hail all those fighting for emancipation from exploitation and oppression!
Workers of the world, unite!