Demonstrate in the Streets; For the Unity of Action by All Working People in Defense of Their Living Standards, Their Civil Liberties, and in Defense of World Peace
TO ALL PEOPLE:
On May First, people of the entire world will celebrate the one hundred thirty-eighth anniversary of that day which was born out of the struggle of the American working class for the eight-hour day.
May Day is the day when the workers of the world demonstrate their international solidarity. On this day they close ranks and press forward to new struggles.
Let us reclaim our history on May 1. Let us go out into the streets and demonstrate that, in this time of crises, we refuse to stay silent. Let the rulers in Wall Street and Washington hear that we will fight for bread for our families, for peace and against the forces of reaction. Let the unity of labor defeat the menace of international fascism. Let unity of workers blaze the way to social justice. Let us make this the May Day one of the Popular Front, of a united working class against the war machine.
PEOPLES UNITY TO SMASH FASCISM
The riders of reaction are abroad in the land. Neocons, the war mongers, the deep state, and all the reactionary forces of Wall Street, have launched a bitter attack against our democratic rights, our civil liberties, against our working class organizations. The anti-union forces of Wall Street aim to make the United States one vast sweatshop, to make of the workers the serfs of the open-shoppers.
Let the people demonstrate in the streets on May Day against these reactionary forces. Let the whole country ring with the giant voice of labor. Let the bankers and industrialists and their puppets in the Supreme Court and Congress know that under no circumstances will the American working class permit them to establish fascism in this country.
TO FIGHT FOR OUR LIVING STANDARDS IS TO FIGHT THE BANKERS
Our demonstrations must be a living defiance against reaction. We must serve notice that we will not yield an inch to the pressure of reaction. We must show through the Popular Front that all Americans can and will prevent the victory of fascism.
President Biden tells us the economy is booming while American people starve in the street. Meanwhile, the bankers, employers, and war profiteers have become fat under continued government handouts. Their profits have multiplied by hundreds of percent. While they hoard their millions, the children of the workers are deprived of food and housing by the high cost of living.
The Biden administration boasts of recovery, but this recovery has only brought increased profits for the speculators and bankers. Our government officials use their position to engage in corrupt acts such as insider trading, as opposed to representing the interests of their constituents. For the workers it has brought back-breaking speed-ups, wages have been cut, and food and rent have soared sky-high. Two-thirds of Americans still cannot afford a $400 emergency.
In this, the richest country in the world, millions are living below the poverty line. Yet the reactionaries through the capitalist-controlled media are demanding that all relief be cut off, that nothing should be done to aid the distress of the working population. Unfortunately, Biden has given in to their demands. Instead, our government has passed H. R. 815, which provides military aid, both money and weapons, to Taiwan, Israel, and fascist Ukraine.
EVERY CITY A UNION TOWN
Let us honor our history and make of May Day a day of struggle for higher wages, for the six-hour day, for the five-day week without reduction in pay, end of “right-to-work”, for the end of company unions and yellow dog contracts. On that day the organized workers must extend their hands in fraternal greetings to the unorganized. We must pledge that we will help to bring millions of unorganized workers into the trade unions and build a powerful class-oriented trade union movement, based on industrial unionism. Make every city a union city.
We must demand that the unemployed receive adequate relief, that wherever a factory is closed, the government must open it up and put men back to work at union wages. The demands of the workers for the repeal by Congress of the Taft-Hartley Act must be echoed by all labor. The interests of the unemployed and the employed are the same. A blow against one is a defeat for the other. Let all workers, employed and unemployed, young and old, black and white, immigrant and native born, demand genuine social insurance, demand that the aged be well taken care of, and that the youth shall be given jobs and the right to education.
May Day is not just labor’s day. It is also the day of all those oppressed by reaction, of all deprived of jobs and homes. The bulk of small farmers and family-owned businesses have been driven to bankruptcy, unable to repair their own equipment. Labor must join hands on May Day with migrant workers and demand security and the right to organize.
SOCIAL JUSTICE FOR ALL OPPRESSED COMMUNITIES
Labor must extend its hand to the African American community and other minorities, doubly oppressed and exploited by the capitalist rulers. The life of the African American people has been turned into one big horrible Scottsboro case, which was an historic case from the 1930s in which nine African American boys, were unjustly accused of raping two white women in a moment of racist hysteria. The boys were defended by American Communists, among others. White labor cannot be free as long as black labor is enslaved. May Day must become a day of struggle against discrimination, and a day of struggle for the full political, social and economic equality of all oppressed communities.
We must resist the efforts of the bosses to profit from child labor. No child should have their life warped and stunted by back-breaking work in the factory or slaughterhouse. We must fight for the abolition of all child labor.
On May Day we must have in our ranks all working women and all the wives of workers and farmers. We must defend them against the attacks of the reactionaries who wish to reduce them to beasts of burden, to make them mere breeding animals for the warmongers. We must fight for their special interests and needs. Let us demand full social and economic equality for women.
NEEDS OF THE YOUTH
The youth of America, the flower of the country, has less and less prospects for jobs or a future. Let us demonstrate on May Day for the vital needs of American youth. Let us demand the immediate adoption of the program of the American Student Union which calls for a federally funded youth program.
AGAINST NATO’S WARS
May Day comes this year when the peace of the world is threatened more than at any time since the end of the last World War. NATO’s aggressive encirclement of Russia and China and the encouragement of fascism in the Ukraine have brought us to the brink of World War 3. The capitalist warhawks seek to Balkanize Russia then move the conflict towards China. U.S. hegemony wants to stifle out any movement towards a multi-polar world. The fascist warmongers are striving to form an alliance of all the capitalist powers for a “crusade” against the memory of the U.S.S.R. – citadel of socialism and the hope of the working class of the world. Soviet monuments and cemeteries are being destroyed, meanwhile the Waffen SS collaborator organizations openly parade in Europe and North America, like the Ukrainian organization led by Stepan Bandera.
END THE GENOCIDE IN PALESTINE
For decades the Palestinian people have been under the occupation of the Israeli Zionist apartheid regime. This genocide has severely escalated ever since the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on October 7th. Now, as has been said by the Defense Minister of Israel, the Gaza Strip has been held for six months in a state of complete siege – no electricity, no food, and no fuel are being allowed into the region. This behavior from Israel mirrors that of Nazi Germany in the ghettos which they formed in Eastern Europe. These ghettos were areas in which Jewish people were concentrated in small areas without access to sufficient resources for life. Just as the Jewish people rose up in one of these ghettos during World War II in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Palestinians have now chosen to fight back as well. We throw our full support behind the Palestinian people for a just resolution that includes their own sovereign state with 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. As Comrade Nelson Mandela said, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
THE FIGHT FOR PEACE
Let us on May Day show our unbreakable determination to fight for peace. Let us unmask the diplomacy of the Biden government, which preaches the policy of “spreading democracy”, but forces countries to pay tribute to Wall Street. In the name of defending so-called “democracies”, Biden is carrying out a jingoist war in the Ukraine, on China’s borders, in the Middle East, and on the Korean Peninsula. Nazis in the Ukrainian government are being given $100 million dollars every 24 hours.
Under the guise of “spreading democracy” the Biden administration sends shipments of materials for war to puppet regimes – Taiwan, Ukraine, South Korea, Japan, and Poland. Our own reactionaries and capitalist media – CNN, MSNBC, FOX, Washington Post, New York Times, etc.– encourage fascist militarism to attack countries that threaten U.S. economic and military hegemony. Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Syria, Nicaragua, Belarus and Iran are just a few of Washington’s targets. Let us press onward and build a real working class blockade against all munitions shipments and the shipment of all war materials to the fascist war machines.
We cannot trust Biden’s stumbling words about “spreading democracy”. His policy is helping to pave the way so that the bankers can drag the United States into the next world war, just as his predecessors went to war to protect the profits of finance capital.
DEFENSE OF THE SOVIET EXPERIENCE
We must demonstrate our determination to join hands with all workers throughout the world in the fight for peace, in the fight against the instigators of a new world war. Let us unite with all working people, both inside our country and around the globe, to keep America out of war, to save humanity from the horrors of a new world slaughter. Let us on May First, the traditional day of socialism, pledge ourselves to defend the legacy of the first country of socialism – the Soviet Union. Let American working people show that they stand solidly behind the peace policy of the Soviet experience, which planned no aggressive action, which enslaved no people, which had no capitalists trying to coin money out of death and destruction.
On May First, the day on which the working class demonstrates for its own class interests, let us raise high the banner of struggle for independent working class political action. The three years of the Biden regime have shown the workers that they cannot depend on the two old capitalist parties to fight for their interests. The Democratic and Republican Parties may have differences as to how to divide the stolen monies taken from working people. They are the parties of Wall Street, owned and directed by the banks and monopolies.
AGAINST THE TWO-PARTY SYSTEM!
We should not rely upon politicians like Biden or Trump, who pay lip service to working people as they carry out the dictates of finance capital. Do not believe those labor leaders who ask you to line up behind Biden and to abandon the class struggle. This is the road to disaster for America’s working people. This will keep people chained to the Democratic and Republican Parties, the parties of Wall Street. This will weaken the independent force of labor and its alliance with the people. This leaves us completely at the mercy of Biden, Trump and the Party Bosses.
If we are to make the rich pay the cost of the crisis, if we are to relieve working people of the unbearable burden of taxation and inflation, if we are to give work to the unemployed and hope to the youth, if we are to prevent the victory of fascism in the United States, if we want to defend and preserve peace, then we must build a united people’s front against war and fascism.
RELEASE POLITICAL PRISONERS!
As we march through the streets and raise our voices in protest against fascism, let us extend the hand of solidarity to the victims of class war in the United States and throughout the capitalist world. Let us demand the freedom of Julian Assange, the Uhuru Three, Leonard Peltier, and all those framed and imprisoned by the capitalists for their struggle against reaction and their efforts in behalf of the working class.
On May First, let the Ukrainian pro-fascist rulers hear our demands to release the Ukrainian anti-fascist Kononovich brothers, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Steve Donzinger, Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, the tens of thousands of other anti-fascist victims, and the thousands of Palestinians imprisoned by the Israeli government. Let us support the struggle of the Nicaraguan, Cuban and Venezuelan peoples for their national independence from Washington’s economic and military threats.
As we march on May Day let us remember that we live in the richest land in the world. There is wealth enough for everyone. Not a single man, woman or child would have to go hungry if the warehouses were opened, if the closed factories started to operate again, if human needs were put above the profit drive of a small infinitesimal minority.
FOR SOCIALISM, FOR A SOVIET AMERICA!
No capitalist country is so ripe for socialism as the United States, where the workers have built up the greatest, formerly productive plants in the world. Inspired by the great victories of socialism in the Soviet Union, where unemployment was abolished, where hundreds of nationalities lived in peace, where the greatest culture in the history of the world was built, let us resolve that we in the United States fight for the victory of socialism, for a Soviet America.
Workers, farmers, Socialists, Communists, trade unionists, unemployed, stand up on May Day. Demonstrate the power of the American working class. Make of labor’s May Day parades a mighty fist challenging the tyranny and greed of the bankers and open-shoppers. Let this May Day become the day from which the American working class will advance to new victories.
- Stand up on May First!
- All out into the streets! Build the mighty united front of working people on May First!
- For the six-hour day, for the five-day week without reduction in pay! For higher wages, against the high cost of living! We cry out for a thirty hour work week at forty hour pay!
- Make every city a union city! For a powerful class-oriented trade union movement based on industrial unionism!
- For unemployment, old age and social insurance!
- For full social, political and economic equality for all oppressed communities! Jobs and schools for American youth! Demand the program of the American Student Union!
- For a People’s Front against war and fascism!
- Keep America out of war! Against $100 million dollars every 24 hours to Ukraine! Use that money at home to build for improvement in the infrastructure!
- End the genocide in Palestine! Implement the two-state solution of a de-Zionized and demilitarized Israel and full UN recognition of an independent Palestinian state along the pre-1967 borders!
- Remember the peace policies of the former Soviet Union! Defend the socialist legacy of the Soviet Union – the first land run by peasants and workers!
- Using the Soviet Union as our guiding light, we need to build real socialism in the United States!
PARTY OF COMMUNISTS, U.S.A.
Chris Bovet, National Chair,
Joe Morman, General Secretary
