May Day: Fellow Workers Joining Together

Once again we celebrate May Day, the international holiday of the working class. These May Day celebrations are small in comparison to the great numbers and strength of our class. But throughout the country, in every major industrial center, workers are uniting. Today is our great day, the day when the solidarity of the international proletariat is expressed throughout the world by demonstrations as the sign of solidarity. May Day is there for us to renew our bonds of international fellowship. Throughout the world, people today are adjusting themselves to the chaotic conditions created by world upheaval. Capitalism has left countries in ruins and made their peoples exiles and refugees. The capitalist world sinks ever deeper into the crisis. It heaps misery upon misery upon backs of the helpless and the vulnerable. For countless millions of human beings, life today is torturous hunger, unbearable toil, and dark boding anxiety. At the present time, war and pestilence and famine, started by capitalist rivalries, have got out of hand. Everywhere the reformers look for remedies. Yet the profits of the big corporations continue to pile up bigger than ever. Perhaps there has never been another May Day of such importance to the workers as the symbol of their international solidarity because there never was a May Day when capitalist interests were more solidly welded and soldered together in the international exploitation of the workers than they are at the present moment.

 When we come to see these events with clearer eyes, unclouded by media misinformation but instead with discerning insight and understanding in our hearts, we must realise that even the most adverse situations light the fires of revolt and foster the forces that feed the social revolution. We in the Socialist Party are not fooled into believing the working class is the midst of a "revolutionary upsurge" nor that the idea that they wallow in "docility". Our fellow-workers are not revolutionists as yet but there are fresh signs of hope appearing around the world. 

We revolutionary socialists, who celebrate May Day in the spirit of international comradeship throughout the world, are content to leave reforms to Tory and Labour Party mis-leaders. We know that the more the workers are organised politically and industrially on a revolutionary basis, the faster and the thicker will reforms be offered up. They are the desperate sandbags that defend the trenches of capitalism. But it will be a fight to the finish for the ending of capitalism. The drive for the establishment of a world socialism is unstoppable. 

On this May Day let us stand proud and upright to be counted. We need to get together. The world will always be against us if we are not for ourselves. We have been oppressed, we have suffered; we have endured, now let us unite and rise united against capitalism. “Why cannot we always be together?” is the thought in the mind of every active worker in the labour movement after the May Day demonstrations.

May Day is the preparation for social revolution, a trial mobilisation of the forces of the working class. When the workers of the world are united we are ready for battle.