On the day of May 1, the immense gathering of proletarians from all over the world must recover the use of its class power to fight the chains of all bourgeois, imperialist and war-mongering States and take back the control of its own destiny, shaking off all the ideological, economic, social and political oppression of the bourgeoisie. On the day of 1 May, the proletariat, which speaks all the languages of the world, must contrast the nationalism, servitude and deception implemented by the various bourgeoisies in their imperialist wars, with the flag of its own united, international battle.
With this flag, in this necessary alignment, national frontiers can be cancelled: in opposition to the geography of imperialist States, what must be recovered is the geography that has a single, irremovable frontier, that of class.
The day of 1 May has its origin in economic claims: eight-hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for living, as opposed to the bourgeois need to squeeze profit out of paid labour until it is completely exhausted, the proof that there are no mutual interests between „bosses“ and „workers“ in the firm called Capital. With these slogans in 1886, the 1 May is internationally proclaimed a day of struggle, a movement of strikes that spreads inexorably throughout the industrialized world. In Chicago, after two workers are killed in a picket line, a huge protest march is organized to support the strike. A bomb explodes and the police open fire on the crowd. This is the pretext for arresting eight anarchist militants and, after a farcical trial, condemning seven to be hung, the sentence being transformed into life imprisonment for two of them. One year later, four of them are hung in public. Since then, those militants are remembered as „The Chicago Martyrs“ by all those fighting for the cause of the workers. And since then we have learned that the economic needs expressed by the strikes cannot and must not be contained within the confines of companies and categories: they are and must become social claims, the terrain of political battle, a class struggle to be carried through right to the end - the real movement that overthrows the present state of things must become a revolutionary battle.
But there is another May to remember and learn from: that of 1871, the Paris Commune!
Exhausted by the ruinous Franco-Prussian war, the Parisian proletariat rises up in March of that year against new betrayals by the national government and, almost without realizing it, for the first time carries the class war right through to the end. It seizes power and proclaims the Commune in opposition to the bourgeois republic. In May, its as yet timid resolutions, tending to expropriate the bourgeoisie of its political and economic power, are to be drowned in the blood of over twenty thousand proletarians, mown down by the bayonets of the French and the Prussians, enemies only yesterday: divided in their opposing national interests, the two bourgeois States instead join to massacre the proletarians, organized for the first experiment of a Workers’ State. Since that May, we have learned that nations and fatherlands are prisons for us: not only are our living conditions damned similar everywhere, but the movement to overthrow the present state of things cannot be closed within local confines.
The proletariat is international, antinational and revolutionary. Either it is communist, or it is destined to remain an immense mine of labour to be exploited, bought and sold. Or exterminated.
It becomes a class, an active subject, when it recognizes and fights for its own interests and against the convenient local, ethnic, nationalistic and religious prejudices it has been fed for centuries by technicians, scientists, priests, intellectuals of all sorts and levels: all parasites who survive by sharing out the wealth produced by exploiting salaried labour. When it recognizes a salaried worker like itself beneath the uniform the „enemy“ is made to wear, and not only do they desert together, but they keep a close hold on their arms and direct them against their common exploiters. Then the class recognizes that every State, including the one they survive in, is imperialist, even when it does not seem militarily aggressive and overpowering, because at this stage of Capital’s political organization the State must guarantee control of the sources and exchange of raw materials and the expansion and maintenance of its own monopolistic free market by means of all the diplomatic and military violence possible… And on the „domestic“ front, this modern collective capitalist must maintain order and consensus by democratically extorted authoritarianism, by the monopoly of violence, legal mediation and ideology in all its forms and practices.
The proletariat becomes a class, an active subject, when it ceases to look for the rights or wrongs of one State or another, the aggressor or the attacked, the authoritarian or the democratic, a fatherland to defend or a fatherland to liberate, or, worse still, a „peace“ that will prove favourable to the social gains of the workers… When it recognizes that not only is the enemy in our own home: it actually is our home! And to free ourselves from it, no complicity can be tolerated, but defeatism and organized desertion must take root and, as in Russia in 1917, a civil war within its own State, to be extended subsequently to other States; when, faced with the slaughter, the genocide, ethnic cleansing and sacrifice of thousands of human beings on the altar of a national abortion, as has been happening in Palestine for over a century now, it does not close its eyes but acknowledges that the killers are not only the Sionist murderers but also the Islamic patriots and their supporters, calling for martyrdom and, with the monopoly control of aid, keeping millions of human beings hostages.
It becomes a class, an active subject, capable of defending its own working conditions, when it has a stable organization for developing economic struggles: a militant organization, not bound to one category or another but with claims and grassroots organisms that unite women and men, employed and unemployed, migrants and residents, pensioners and precarious workers… But this type of „class union“ alone is not enough. In order to organize the workers, it is necessary to help them defend themselves together, to be a class as an economic group: a class in itself, but not yet for itself. The proletariat can become an active subject, a class for itself, when it is organized as a Party that acts to guide it in the movement to change the present state of things, leading the class war right to the end: thus allowing the international proletariat to become the ruling class and set in motion the process that will eliminate monopoly ownership of the means of production and wealth produced, the rigid social division of work and classes.
May 1st, 2026
