May Day honors worker solidarity

NEWARK, NJ—May 1st is observed and celebrated worldwide as International Worker's Day, with 66 countries marking it as an official holiday outside the United States.

Across New Jersey, workers (employed in the formal and informal markets and the unemployed and underemployed) continue to organize for workers' rights, including the right to unionize.

Members of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) from New Jersey joined their comrades from the tri-state area to mark the day in solidarity with workers across the globe. Below is the official address I delivered on behalf of the PLP.

Welcome to Progressive Labor Party’s annual May Day celebration down the heart of Flatbush Avenue right here in Brooklyn!!!!  Today is the workers’ day.  Our holiday is rooted in the fight for the 8 hour work day in Chicago in the 1880s.  But almost 150 years later workers all over the globe recognize the power of May Day, setting aside time to commemorate our victories as a working class against the thieving system of capitalism. Here in the Progressive Labor Party, we take this commemoration to its only conclusion.  We call upon working people everywhere to stand up, join our party, and commit to communist struggle, the only struggle that will free the human race from the misery that our class is forced to shoulder. Today, and every day, PLP salutes the decades long struggle here in Brooklyn where our party has led students and teachers  in the fight against the racist under-education of black and latin students.  We salute the militant women-led garment strike in Haiti for a living wage which has gathered support from workers across the country.  We salute the Alabama coal miners who are leading one of the longest strikes in US history for a contract and back pay.  We salute the farmer-led movement of 50 million Indian workers who fought through the devastation of Covid to overturn brutal laws that left people starving.  And we salute the recent unionization of Amazon workers in Staten Island!!!!!  In each of these cases we fight to support the most radical demands coming from our class.  At the same time, we struggle with all workers to see that only a political party that fights today for a world without money, without capitalist borders, without fictional races, without backward gender norms, will have the power to smash once and for all this capitalist system of exploitation and replace it with the complete and just leadership of our class.

Video submitted by Margaret Stevens on behalf of the PLP

As we gather here today, bosses in the US and Russia are having workers kill each other to determine who’s empire will benefit from controlling workers in Ukraine. Workers all over the world continue to be fed the lie that we must choose which ruling class to defend in a bigger world war that they are all to some degree pushing for.  As in every war before this, the bosses drag our class into fighting these wars for them. Millions of workers were killed in World War I on land and sea. Tens of millions more were killed  on land, sea and in the air during World War II. Now the bosses have found a new arena–space and its attendant cyberwarfare and satellite-guided missiles–to include in their deadly arsenal.  Our class has been and continues to be the only casualty in this increasingly volatile world of capitalist competition for profits.  At the height of the pandemic, 200,000 Merchant Marines from around the world were stuck at sea while shipping companies from China to Hong Kong, Korea, Europe and the US  amassed record-breaking profits for two years in a row.  Teachers and students in NYC and all over the world were forced to figure out how to continue teaching and learning during the pandemic and how to return to school safely since the bosses did nothing to improve conditions in the schools while they were closed.  Our class stands to lose no matter who is jockeying for power. So the working class led by the PLP is the ONLY force, not the bosses’ politicians, that has the power to correct these errors of history.

Mayor Adams in NYC, Mayor Baraka in Newark, Biden and Harris in DC, Moise in Haiti, Obredor in Mexico, Xu Jin Pingin China, Putin in Russia, and Zelensky in Ukraine have dedicated their lives to serving the interests of bankers, thugs and billionaires.  Most of the time they take orders from them, and sometimes these misleader politicians give orders to the capitalists themselves. But who does PLP take our orders from? Who is PLP’s Bloc, our base of support and foundation for revolution? We take our orders from the sharpest struggles and the bravest fighters for our class wherever in the world they may be. Who is our base? Millions of workers in Colombia, South America, took to the streets in the summer of 2021 in the face of police arrests and kidnappings to call out the racist abandonment of the working class during the pandemic.  They are our base.  Workers and subcontractors in the SONAPI free trade zone of Haiti for weeks have braved the bullets of policemen to demand a higher minimum wage, and this is only months after a rash of kidnappings and murders of local Haitian activists who spoke out against unbridled rape and abusive living conditions.  They are our base.  In Newark and Brooklyn, PLP refuses to stop fighting alongside the Rodwell-Spivey, Davis and Livingston families while pushing our gospel that the only true justice we can achieve is through abolishing the capitalist system and its racist network of cops and courts.  

But in every part of the world where the working class stands up to the bosses, we have seen how our demands get turned on their heads and the bosses try to take control of our anger, our struggles, controlling the reform movements themselves.  Look at the worldwide protests in the wake of Covid-19’s outbreak in 2020.  Workers from Minneapolis to Paris, Johannasburg and Palestine took to the streets to combat racist police terror and cancel rent, and two years later the bosses have tried to turn our anger into an escapist politics of “self care,” forcing us to pick up the pieces and figure out how to survive in the midst of racially targeted curfews and a lethal pandemic.  No meditation, no yoga, no herbal formula, no medical marijuana, can cure the depression that our class experiences after years of social isolation from a pandemic that the bosses allowed to spiral out of control.  Through social media, the bosses injected self-centered politics of individualism into our youth culture to immobilize the struggle of 2020, manifesting most brutally in that Astroworld festival last November 2021 where dozens of young people were crushed to death at a Travis Scott concert celebrating drug use and mosh pit anarchism in the midst of a pandemic.  But this is nothing new, back in 2008, I personally witnessed how the soldiers and veterans movement led by Iraq Veterans Against the War was handed over by liberal reformers to government agents and provocateurs, replacing our efforts to push anti-imperialism, anti-racism and anti-sexism with a politics of personal care and individualism.  We witnessed dozen of brave, honest, self-critical soldiers and veterans active in our anti-war movement take their own lives, and all the bosses-led reform organizations could promote were vigils when the true cause of their PTSD and alienation was US-led imperialist war for control of the world’s oil.  Individual frustrations are, in reality, only resolved in the larger social context.  As Communists we say self care requires building communist social relations—-we don’t quit our base and we don’t lose political morale.

This is why we are revolutionary optimists. What does this mean? It means that in every element of the bosses’ efforts to outcompete, outsmart and out dominate one another, we find their achilles heel and magnify it, exposing capitalism in its ugly nakedness for our class to see.  The bosses have the biggest weapons and control the media, weaponizing our minds for impending world war and deeper conflict, but PLP has Challenge/Desafio/Le Defi! The bosses all over the world control thousands of newspapers and media outlets, music, television, film and social media, but in this one paper, Challenge, we have the sharpest analysis of world-defining current events that you can find.  Who else is saying workers don’t have a stake in the Russia-Ukraine war and that there are no good imperialists; that  workers from Russia to Ukraine to Yemen, China and Newark are suffering at the hands of the same profit-hungry capitalist class? No one!  Our PAPER is the power of the party.

Prof. Margaret Stevens giving a speech at the Progressive Labor Party’s annual May Day celebration, May 1, 2022. (Photo courtesy of Jennifer Wager)

 We’ve been talking about power, so how has our party, the PLP, been tested? We have not held state power in any part of the world yet, but we have learned some of the most critical lessons for when our time comes: 1) the fight for communism begins NOW, not in some future time; 2) reforms won today will be taken away tomorrow; 3) working people have no nations. Our party exposes the facade of identity politics because it purports to challenge the racist and sexist core of capitalism when in reality it creates “representatives” in the capitalist class who keep this inequality more alive than ever.  Our party, Progressive Labor Party, is RUN by women and men, young and not-so-young, from around the world who have embraced these lessons with a vengeance.   This makes each person here, each new person who joins this organization today at May Day, crucial to our effort to understand where, when and how our class is fighting this capitalist monster.  Each new member increases the power of the party because you bring with us new insights and experiences that allow us to collectively sharpen our struggle. To the young people who are here with us: fight against your personal illusions as soon as possible, and recognize that nothing truly meaningful is accomplished by you and you alone. The bosses create these career goals for us and then tell us to choose one. These aren’t our dreams! The strength of each of us as an individual can only be truly realized once we join this larger collective of workers committed to smashing the conditions that we all face.  

As we march down Flatbush Avenue again this year, as we have done for the past 20 years, watch the faces of the pedestrians, people looking out of apartment windows, and people driving past us. We won’t see cynicism. We will see appreciation, validation of our fight, and we will see love from our class brothers and sisters for sticking to the same analysis–”Asian, Latin, Black and White, to Smash Imperialism we Must Unite!”  We will see respect in their faces as we shout “Who are we? PLP!” to the sounds of dancehall, reggaeton and hip hop beats. We know there is strength in numbers, so our job is to help the PLP become a party of millions worldwide. We may not have a crystal ball, but the best way to predict the future is to make it!  We may be small now, but our confidence in the working class is unmatched and our commitment to fighting alongside and for our comrades can’t be swayed–not by political instigators, not by payoffs, not by visa denials, not by gang-inflicted kidnappings and assassinations, not by poverty, not by previous felony convictions, not by nation, not by race, not by creed….we are One Party, One World, One Fight….That is something the bosses can’t defeat. AND THAT’S THE POWER OF THE PARTY. JOIN US!


Submitted by Margaret Stevens on behalf of The Progressive Labor Party