For us May Day has never been a mere memory, a yearly ritual or a “holiday”. On the contrary, it has always been a battle call that sums up the history and experience of the world proletariat, projecting it towards the future: a future that has to be won by fighting tooth and nail, because it is not going to fall into our hands like a ripe pear.
Today, 2020, May Day is even less of a “holiday”. Events connected to the Covid-10 pandemic have revealed yet again the savagery of a class society, the society of Capital. In hundreds and hundreds of thousands of workplaces all over the world, which have remained open despite lacking even the most elementary means of protection, whilst all the rest closed down “in everyone’s interests”, workers have been treated like butcher’s meat. The facts show that this mode of production, upheld by the laws of profit, competition and exploitation, is not merely incapable of solving the contradictions that it, itself, produces: the use that has been made everywhere of the pandemic and the emergency, of illness and medicine, over the past few weeks clearly proclaims it isn’t true that “we are all in the same boat”.
Let’s repeat it once again: the virus isn’t the cause of the crisis. The executives of Capital are using the virus to accelerate the introduction of anti-proletarian measures that the economic crisis, already widespread well before the outbreak of the pandemic, makes necessary in order to defend clear capitalist interests. Let us take advantage, then, of this umpteenth proletarian mourning (because this is what is involved: widespread class murder) to try and open up “a year” of battle not only over wages. Let us prepare to boycott all measures for “social” and national solidarity that are being and will be introduced: precisely because we are in an “emergency situation”, wherever possible let us respond to the re-opening of workplaces with complete disregard for the health of proletarians, by “staying at home”, taking sick leave, staying away from work using the tactic of absenteeism, going on strike in order to force closure. Not in the form of individual or sectorial choices and initiatives but as an organized response to the blackmail by entrepreneurs and the state!
They will want to force us back to work to “rebuild the national economy”. They will stop us holding gatherings, meetings, marches, demos, accusing us if we do so of “spreading disease”, if not of “seditious assembly” or “rioting”. They will accuse us of boycotting the “national effort” and they will set police in riot gear on us, with tanks, helicopters and drones, magistrates and judges, all the legal and illegal power of the State. We reply that the “national economy”, the “economy of Capital” is not our business – in fact we fight against it because it is at the root of all the tragedies that are killing us, from the present pandemic to the continuous devastation of the environment, from the unceasing slaughter of migrants to the periodical, huge destruction of precious human collective energy and to the bloody conflicts that prelude a new, monstrous world war… This is their dictatorial democracy or democratic dictatorship, inherited directly from previous anti-proletarian régimes!
And so we shall have to organize ourselves better and better to face all this. Grass-roots territorial organizations for struggle and defence of the proletariat must reappear, taking responsibility for all aspects of the proletariat’s life and work (or lack of work), without distinction of age, gender, origins, socio-economic status, not getting lost in devastating corporative jealousy or harmful ideological bickering: their widespread and active presence, their ability to respond to the attacks of Capital from outside and against the dispersive action of the mainstream trade unions will provide necessary and useful training for the shift from defence to attack. But in order to do this, and to avoid this shift becoming a new and painful defeat, it will be necessary to strengthen and put down worldwide roots for the revolutionary party – the necessary organ of the proletarian class to put an end to this infamous mode of production, now merely destructive and murderous, and take the path of revolution, the seizing of power, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat – towards a society that is finally classless, towards communism.
This is what May Day is.
International Communist Party