NYC Youth Maintain May Day Momentum

BROOKLYN, NY, May 24 — A multi-racial crowd of nearly one hundred teachers, students and their families gathered in a local park to share food, fun and politics as we try to build on the excitement of May Day in preparation for summer activities. This weekend barbeque is a tradition in our area, and was the largest in several years.

After the food ran out due to the bigger-than-expected attendance, speeches highlighted the key role of industrial workers in the revolutionary process. We called on guests to join this year’s Summer Projects in Seattle and Los Angeles. One college graduate explained his decision to work in the transportation industry. Two high school seniors, both valedictorians at their respective schools, described how the Party helped guide them along a path of struggle in school, rather than passivity.

Our multi-racial and inter-generational crowd once again made an impression, this time on several parents at the cookout. They’re now considering sending their teenagers to the West Coast this summer.
Young people who had led walkouts in their schools and marched on May Day together used their recently-honed organizing skills to bring friends and family to kick back and enjoy this day of food and sports.

PL’ers in the NY Urban Debate League are planning a city-wide forum on the Sean Bell case and on criminalization of youth in schools. This will help us stick to our plans of keeping our red ball rolling from May Day right into the summer and the next school year.

The winning of youth into our Party and its anti-racist activities demonstrates the important role young students and workers play in our movement. It also shows youth that instead of fighting and shooting each other (a rash of which has erupted in the city), we should be fighting for a society that eliminates the racist warmaking bosses who cause the social problems workers and youth suffer.

Texas May Day Shows Workers Need Unity, Not Borders

TEXAS — May Day was a modest success for our group in this state. Our May Day dinner was organized by young teachers, workers and students with a program of speeches and music, good food and lively discussion that focused heavily on the role of education under capitalism. Later, many of us attended our city’s Immigrants Rights march, where we had an opportunity to show how communist ideas and action make possible a true education in working-class politics.

At the rally we distributed over 300 flyers exposing the liberal rulers’ tactics of using promises of citizenship to recruit immigrants as cannon fodder for U.S. imperialism. Our leaflet became the leading source of information for all participants and onlookers at this reformist march for immigrant rights. More importantly, as we marched with our friends, we discussed the need to smash capitalism’s borders worldwide and struggle for communist revolution.

I was joined at the march by one of my students and her sister. We talked about the capitalist purpose of borders and the need for workers to unite across them. The heavy police presence also sparked discussion of police brutality and why cops were enemies of the working class; they ultimately act in the interests of the bosses, killing thousands of workers worldwide in order to instill fear and hopelessness in working people.

Afterwards we went to dinner where we sharpened our understanding of the history of the U.S./Mexico border. During dinner someone mentioned the ruling-class propaganda that, without borders, millions of Mexicans would flood “our” streets and steal “our” jobs. I explained how the existing border had been created out of the southern U.S. slaveholders’ effort to push slavery further west during an historical period when Mexico had outlawed slavery. We finally concluded that what was labeled independence by the ruling class was also the enslavement of the Mexican and black workers in the South.

During the march we had received a flyer announcing a protest at a prison in another city that jails immigrant families and many U.S.-born children. My student wanted to join the protest and is currently organizing others within the school to join us. These students are writing a leaflet calling for the need to unite workers and smash the bosses’ borders. It will be really exciting to travel alongside my students in support of immigrant rights and ultimately communist revolution!

More May Day Reports from Around the World

OAXACA, MÉXICO
A PLP group participated in the annual May Day march held in downtown Oaxaca. Thousands marched, particularly teachers and farmworkers, showing their disgust with the government and the capitalist system it represents.
Our group distributed 600 flyers with our communist analysis of capitalist exploitation, and we put up 100 posters walls around the march reading “A system that creates inequality, wars, racism and exploitation must be destroyed.” We also distributed 50 copies of DESAFIO.
Our participation was modest, but we are already making plans to increase our efforts in future activities, including May Day 2009. The working class and its allies here, and worldwide, need a revolutionary alternative to a system which only breeds hunger, wars among drug cartels and a dim future for humanity.

PAKISTAN
Greetings from revolutionary communists in Pakistan. Our PLP group had a great May Day here, with comrades involved in many activities. Our communist ideas were well-received. We made new friends as more and more workers and their allies are becoming disillusioned with the fakers on the “left” who offer no solutions to a capitalist-imperialist system breeding endless wars for profits under the cover of religion, “democracy,” etc.

Speech from May Day

Good evening to all. Thanks for joining us at this dinner to celebrate May Day, the International Workers’ Day. Tonight, I’ll talk a little about the international situation, which means talking about what’s happening in the two great armies that are locked in a fight to the death—the army of the bosses and the army of the working class. The bosses are fighting to maintain their system of exploitation and murder—where every year more than 100 million of our class, 32 million of them children, die of hunger or diseases that could be prevented or cured for less than $1 per person. This is the system that the bosses say is the “best” system in the world, where more than 2 billion workers live with less than a dollar a day, while the bosses pocket millions of dollars a day from our exploitation. Our class fights for a better world, a communist world where we’ll produce to meet the needs of the international working class, a system where we can live with dignity and develop ourselves as useful, productive, and creative members of a society that knows no borders, racism or exploitation.

In the capitalist camp, all is not peace and love. There’s a rivalry between them for control of markets, natural resources, and cheap labor of the world. Capitalism’s relentless competition for maximum profit means this rivalry always lead to war: local wars, regional wars and eventually world wars. Even though the bosses and many others say the contrary, we are living in the build up to WWIII.

With this war the imperialists try to solve their crisis and decide who will dominate the world. We can’t predict exactly when it will start but we can definitely say that it is inevitable and that it is getting closer. We won’t go into detail to prove this analysis – but be it enough to say, as Lenin said, that since capitalism developed into imperialism the world entered an epoch of world wars and working class revolutions. The two world wars of the last century prove this, as do the workers revolutions in Russia and China.

On our side, the working class needs to respond to greater exploitation and to the capitalist crisis with demonstrations, protests, strikes, walkouts and rebellions. We need revolution. But revolutions only happen if there’s a communist party with the correct communist political line and a big enough political base inside our class. That’s why it’s important to review our forces. How are we doing in confronting and coming out victorious in the face of this great challenge that history presents us? How can we convert the attacks on our class and the coming world war into a class war for communism?

For now we don’t have the millions needed to make the kind of revolution that the workers need. The old international communist movement has died—a hard blow for our class. The new communist international that we’re building has made modest but important advances—since PLP is organizing in the US and in Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador, Spain, and Pakistan—but it needs to grow in many more countries. In the face of this gigantic task and our current conditions, it may seem impossible to achieve our goal. But as the capitalists attack harder, if we lead the fight against them with our communist line out front, workers will join us. Many of our class internationally dedicate their lives to the fight for a better world. But, others become apathetic, get demoralized, abandon the struggle or don’t want to join it because they don’t yet see big advances. That’s why it would be good to give a brief history of the struggles of our class to see how the revolutionary communists who preceded us overcame these obstacles.

At the beginning of the last century, like today, capitalism entered a deep crisis and World War I could be seen threatening on the horizon. The international communist movement had suffered big reversals. Many of its leaders betrayed the working class by supporting their own bosses in the approaching war. In 1912, the Russian revolutionary communists, the Bolsheviks, only had some 300 members in St. Petersburg, their main concentration—in a city of over 2 million people.  They had some hundreds more in all of Russia that had at the time 166 million inhabitants. In the armed forces, they had a modest group of members doing serious organizing. In 1914, World War I began.

How to convert imperialist war into a civil war for workers’ power? How did they convince a good part of the 14 million soldiers in the armed forces– the majority “apolitical” farm workers—that they have to turn their guns around to fight for socialism—which is what the Russian communists at the time fought for? How to convince workers of this when the Russian bosses had launched massive propaganda accusing Lenin and his party of being traitors to the “nation”, German agents, who wanted to sabotage the war effort so the Germans could conquer Russia?

This would seem an apparently impossible task to achieve with a small group of revolutionaries. But the Bolsheviks did not retreat in the face of these rebuffs, attacks, and even physical attacks by bosses’ agents and even some backward workers or soldiers. Under repressive conditions they concentrated their efforts in the factories, especially arms factories, and the bosses’ armed forces, waging the struggle against the capitalists and the struggle to ideologically convince the masses of workers and soldiers. Their newspaper, Iskra, had a mass readership.

They maintained their unbreakable confidence in the working class, and the workers responded. By 1917 they had 32 thousand members in St. Petersburg—240 thousand nationally and by the end of that year they were taking power—establishing for the first time in history workers’ rule–the dictatorship of the proletariat. This was the most important event in the last century. The working class had achieved the impossible!

Clearly this didn’t fall from the sky. It was the result of almost thirty years of political work, in which many Bolsheviks were exiled, many went to prison, and others executed, but they never stopped fighting shoulder to shoulder with the workers in their daily struggles in the factories, their demonstrations and strikes,  and with the soldiers in the barracks and the trenches, showing them that the enemy was the capitalists, not German workers. This is what gave them unbreakable confidence in the working class and in turn the working class’ great confidence in them.

CLASS STRUGGLE, IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLE, AND CONFIDENCE AND MORE CONFIDENCE IN THE WORKING CLASS. This and a correct political line, and only this, will guarantee our triumph, however impossible it seems today. As the bosses’ attacks increase, if we organize the fight against them, with our politics in the lead, the workers will join us.  The changes that are coming will put hundreds of millions of our class in motion. They will awaken politically and be open to radical solutions. If we keep firmly to our convictions, if we deepen our political ties to our fellow workers, especially industrial workers, and with soldiers and students, give leadership in daily struggles, build mass distribution networks of CHALLENGE, and if we recruit to our party, what today seems like a dream, tomorrow the working class will make into reality.

There are many examples of supposedly “impossible” achievements by our class, but we don’t have time to tell them all. The task that history presents us isn’t easy—but we have the advantage of having learned from the great achievements and the errors of those who came before us. They knew they would make mistakes. We have too and we’ll make more. We have to be a fighting party—all the time! That’s why Lenin said, “Our children will fight better than us and they will win!” We say the same thing. But now, we are the children of the old international communist movement, inheritors of their great revolutionary tradition but also the great responsibility, that we cannot and must not evade, of organizing and leading the working class in its struggle for communism—throwing out the goal of socialism with its concessions to capitalism that was the great error of  our predecessors.

But this requires a fighting communist Party that has enormous confidence in the working class together with perseverance, patience and urgency. The bosses are not sleeping, they are fighting us for the loyalty of our class—they want to win them to patriotism, racism and fascism, to support their imperialist wars. That’s why they’re pushing Obama and Clinton so much. On which side the workers fight depends on us. Our class has shown that with communist leadership it is willing to fight to the death against the bosses and will not break, sell out or surrender. On this May Day, let us renew, and redouble our historic commitment to our class. Join the Progressive Labor Party! Long live May Day! Long live the international working class! Long live communism! Power to the workers!

May Day Sees PL’s Ideas Growing in Spain

SPAIN, May 1st — “I knew the PLP in the United States,” said a Spanish youth when he got a PLP leaflet. He was happy to find out that communist political work is a lot bigger throughout the world than he thought. “Long Live May Day! Long live the working class!,” we chanted today. Here and in all parts of the world, the work of the Progressive Labor Party is clear: spread the true ideas of communism far and wide.

The Workers’ Commissions unions Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) and the General Union of Workers (UGI in Spanish) in Spain organized a May Day march for workers from all over, but in reality workers know that these reformists and revisionists are part of the capitalist system and that the only thing they’re good for is to try to pacify the masses. We won’t rest. We’ll keep working hard to bring the workers the real revolutionary struggle, not like these sellouts.

It was a real celebration. There were workers from all parts of the world, and we passed out many communist leaflets in the march. I believe that with a lot of concentration, our work will grow a lot. We have made ties with workers and have vowed to bring them CHALLENGE and other material to be able to build the fight to destroy this capitalist system that kills the working class and finally to implant the only solution for the international working class: THE COMMUNIST SYSTEM!

PLP’ers Make Mark At Colombia May Day

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA, May 1 — A 100-strong contingent led by PLP participated in the May Day march here. Amid pro-capitalist reformist ideas pushed by union hacks and fake leftists as the “solution” to the pro-war policies of President Uribe’s death-squad government, U.S. rulers’ most loyal ally in the region, PLP’s internationalist communist politics stood out. Our revolutionary chants, distribution of 3,000 communist leaflets and hundreds of DESAFIOS brought many workers and youth around our contingent and joined our chants. (More next issue.)

May Day Spirit Spurs Seattle Summer Project

SEATTLE, WA., May 3 — “The world needs communist politics now more than ever,” declared a young Party worker, our keynote speaker, at tonight’s May Day Dinner. He followed an Iraq veteran who urged all to continue fighting U.S. imperialism’s Mid-East occupation at the upcoming “Winter Soldier” events. Finally, a student leader invited the multi-racial group of students, educators, campus workers, military veterans, active-duty soldiers, Boeing workers and families to join our July Summer Project.

The keynote speaker outlined the brutal attacks from U.S. bosses preparing for wider wars, eventually World War III, how they need to attack workers at home in order to attack workers abroad. Fascist intimidations cited included 2.4 million now languishing in prisons, neglected Katrina survivors, the assassination of Sean Bell, the brutal exploitation of Latino immigrants in war factories and government immigration raids.

“Ultimately,” our speaker said, “this racism is used to divide us and hide the fact that wage slavery is the curse of all workers regardless of ‘race’ and gender.” Just ask the striking American Axel workers how the wage system “serves” them!

Many volunteered for our July Summer Project as we fight for “the hearts and minds” of Boeing workers whose contract expires this fall, and of soldiers at nearby Ft. Lewis (one in attendance) and McChord Air Force base.

One friend brought her husband, who “loves to talk politics.” He was not disappointed. Between mouthfuls of food, we discussed how communist society could and should function, how to make communist politics primary, and how to have confidence that our Party and the working class can lead society.

Between the dinner and Thursday’s May Day immigration march we distributed EVERY CHALLENGE in the city to readers and sellers. A thousand leaflets about the communist international spirit of May Day and another about Sean Bell circulated among marchers, in Boeing shops and other workplaces, homes and classes. Friends gave generously as we passed the hat to help pay for all the literature.

A Boeing retiree we’ve known for over 30 years made a special contribution and then took extra literature for a mosque and a mostly black church. “I’m glad to see you passing the hat,” he said. “This good stuff costs plenty.”

On weekends prior to May Day, a team visited Boeing readers and sellers at their homes to discuss the ideas our friends were already reading in CHALLENGE over coffee (a Seattle obsession!). This helped make our dinner a modest success.

Class struggle and agitation are crucial, but without these personal ties, we will remain stuck in neutral.
We’ll expand these team visits between now and the Summer Project to bring the communist class-consciousness expressed by our young keynote speaker to many more in the area.

“Today on May Day,” he concluded, “we remember that it’s the working class who built this world; we planted every field and laid every brick. All the wealth of the world was created through the labor of the working class. This world is not for us to slave in, but to master and to own. We have nothing to lose but our chains and a world to win.”

Mexico May Day Inspires Re-commitment to PLP

MEXICO CITY,  May 1st— A group of members and friends of PLP participated in the mass May Day March in Mexico City where hundreds of thousands of workers come to show their anger against the capitalist system and its government. We distributed 15,000 leaflets and 300 CHALLENGES in which we exposed the capitalist system including the privatization of oil and the need for a communist revolution in order to build a society that meets the needs of the working class.

Our contingent marched with banners and chanted slogans like , “LONG LIVE COMMUNISM! DEATH TO CAPITALISM!’’ AND “ONE CLASS ONE PARTY, WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!” We also sang songs like “Bandera Roja” and “Bella Chao” and of course the INTERNATIONAL. We were a small militant group but we captured the attention of many marchers.

After the march we had a gathering where we talked about the day’s activities. One of the things thatinspired many comrades was that many new youth participated with us who hadn’t before. One of them said that he’d participated in other organizations and that none of them had convinced him as PLP had.

That’s why he asked that we keep inviting him to future meetings. We decided to have a meeting this same week to plan some activities and to maintain constant communication.

Another thing that inspired many was the participation of someone who had been inactive in the last few years. At the end of the march, this friend gave a small speech in which he talked about why it’s important to celebrate May Day and the need to continue organizing the working class, thus announcing his recommitment to the Party. Some suggested that he help organize a cadre school about political economy and help in continuing to deepen the political understanding of more comrades.

We hope that next year we’ll have a bigger contingent with more political leadership.

S.F. Bay Area: PLP’s May Day Activities Cover the Waterfront

BAY AREA, CALIF. — PLP members and friends celebrated May Day in activities throughout Northern California, providing many opportunities to advance our communist politics. Despite the limitations of liberal-led marches and rallies, workers were open to our revolutionary message. The ongoing struggle to develop newer Party members and recruit new ones remains the main limitation of our potential. Despite this we spread our communist ideas throughout all the May Day events.

In the inland port city of Stockton, Party members made contacts with longshoremen who had struck for eight hours to protest the war in Iraq. In San Francisco, by selling CHALLENGE and distributing leaflets to the dockers, significantly we brought a communist revolutionary analysis to this otherwise liberal-led march and rally. Previously, the International Longshoremen’s and Warehouseman’s Union (ILWU) had struck against the World Trade Organization in Seattle; for the framed Mumia Abu Jamal; and an “unofficial” one-day protest of an on-the-job death of one of their comrades.

These actions refute the lie that workers won’t fight around “political issues.” But they’re all framed to appeal to the capitalist electoral system. This ties into those capitalists who trace the Iraq war to the Bush administration attempt to run the Iraq war “on the cheap,” while undermining the overall U.S. world position. This is a far cry from the workers taking the bosses’ war head on. (See box.) Our challenge is to push beyond these limits and bring revolutionary politics to the forefront.

We also attended a rally and March in Dolores Park where a PL teacher met with former students who helped distribute our literature there.

In Oakland, PLP members joined the immigrant rights march. Those around us picked up our chants, focused on internationalism, working-class unity and revolutionary ideas. The march grew larger as it progressed and was the most multi-racial in recent years. Four student friends of the Party from a local university marched with us. Several Party members have already followed up contacts made there.

Elsewhere in the inland Bay Area, a young teacher comrade participated in a march organized by teachers against the budget cuts at their school. We hope to continue to develop this class struggle.

Transit workers, teachers and college students attended a May Day dinner this weekend. Old friends enjoyed good food, great speeches, and an afternoon of communist celebration. A conversation with an old friend revealed how the reality of life can be used to show workers that capitalism is the root of our problems. Our challenge is to present communist revolution as the answer. Overall, this May Day helped build the influence of the Bay Area Party.

BOXXXXXX

During the May 1st West Coast dock strike, the ILWU continued to load military supplies bound for Iraq. They said, “We wanted to show we oppose the war but support the troops.” This position undermined the protest as one opposing the war.

Ninety years ago, Seattle dockworkers showed a clearer resolve. Then U.S. bosses had landed troops in Siberia to back Russian counter-revolutionaries opposing the Soviet revolution, one of 17 capitalist countries trying to destroy it. When a shipment of 50 rail cars loaded with “sewing machines” arrived in Seattle for dispatch to Russia, the longshoremen, thinking it odd that a country embroiled in civil war would need so many sewing machines, “accidentally” dropped a crate.   It was filled with rifles bound for the U.S.-backed Russian general Kolchak. The longshoremen refused to load it and called for a permanent boycott of shipments to Russia. When 40 scabs showed up to load the weapons, they were met by 400 longshoremen.

Of course, it was a different world in 1918. The despair that had gripped communists when the Second International had caved into supporting their national governments’ war efforts was wiped away by the success of the revolution in Russia. Revolutionary optimism became primary. Thousands of pamphlets, leaflets and newspaper articles had influenced workers in Seattle about the struggle to support the first Workers’ Republic. Dock workers can learn from this international workers’ solidarity by U.S. workers.

Celebrating May Day Coast to Coast

NEW YORK CITY, May 3 — Over 800 workers, students and soldiers from the East Coast kicked off PLP May Day here with a bang. Activities spread across the city.

“The Workers, United, Will Never be Defeated” chanted nearly 200 members and friends of PLP marching through Brooklyn streets carrying red flags and banners calling for unity of the international working class and the need to smash police terror with a communist revolution. Anger over the acquittal of Sean Bell’s NYPD execution squad and billionaire Mayor Bloomberg’s racist budget cuts spurred several high schools walkouts on May 1 (see page 3) and lent an extra urgency to this year’s May Day. Passing cars responded enthusiastically to our signs, “Honk if you hate racist police murder.”  Over 2,600 CHALLENGES were distributed.

The State of the World….

All the events heard state-of-the-world talks, one showing why capitalism only offers a future of more war and fascism regardless of who wins the 2008 election and inspired renewed optimism by connecting the growth represented on May Day with the necessity and ability of the working class to create a communist future, without minimizing the hard reality of the difficulties in building such a movement.

At another dinner the two keynote speeches were written and delivered by young female comrades who showed polished political analysis, poise and righteous anger over the capitalist system that wages war against the working class for bosses’ profit. The speeches emphasized class struggle and the unity of female and male workers worldwide, as well as a call to combat a capitalist society mired in crisis and marked by endless wars.

And a third dinner’s speech stressed that despite what cynics say, workers can be won to fight capitalism. But these ideas don’t fall from the sky. Workers need communist leadership and need to become communist leaders themselves.

Life Teaches the Reason for — and History of — PLP

A highlight at one celebration was hearing why comrades from three generations joined the Party: One who met a PL’er in his church was physically confronted by cops on horseback at an anti-war march, sparking the realization that democracy does not work. Everything learned over time from the PL’er then clicked; he now knew the real solution was to fight for communism.

Another joined after several hard experiences in community organizations led to the conclusion that reform doesn’t work. Although initially disagreeing with some things, after years of struggle he realized that they were necessary. Being in PLP and building a base in the working class simply became the right thing to do.
The third joined at age 12 to “be part of a group,” but after two years of study groups, club meetings, summer projects and ideological struggle, fighting for communism and being a member of PLP took on a whole new meaning.

A brief history of PLP was viewed through the lens of one member’s life experience as a teacher. When NYC parents fought for more control of their children’s schools in the 1960’s, thousands of teachers followed their racist union leadership to strike against a mostly black and Latino community. This member was part of a PLP-led fight to physically open the schools as well as launch “freedom schools.” One member recalled being called a racist epithet at five years old for crossing the racist picket line.

Stay Tuned for Communist Revolution!

Young people were front and center throughout the evening, from the planning to the speeches to the cultural performances, showing the Party’s growing vitality and attention to developing new leadership. A poignant skit created by a group of twenty young people highlighted youth leadership as it exposed military recruitment as a scam to win youth to fight and die in imperialist wars to defend the profit system. The skits and an open mic showcased the drive and enthusiasm youth have to grasp revolutionary ideas and make them their own.

Several veterans of PLP’s military work emphasized the importance of youth enlisting to build PLP.  Many ideas were also presented on how to win veterans who return home disillusioned from receiving nothing of what they were promised and scarred by U.S. imperialist atrocities. A young female industrial worker did a great job explaining to the young people present just how powerful the workers can be when won to communist ideas.

The crowd was inspired by an outpouring of original communist music, poetry and visual art by three generations of comrades and friends of the Party. Individual comrades took the floor to give detailed answers to key questions, such as, “How will communism fight to destroy racism, sexism, and nationalism?” and “How can joining the Party change the world?”

All in all, these workers, soldiers and students assembled on a highly-charged day that both celebrated past achievements and pointed toward a challenging but ultimately victorious future on the road to a communist society. “Stay tuned!”

LOS ANGELES

April 26 — “The bosses can’t carry on their wars without workers producing for these wars,” declared a woman industrial worker at a May Day Dinner. “We are those industrial workers! The factories are the heart of the society and they need to be the heart of the revolution. That’s why it’s so important that we organize in the factories using CHALLENGE networks….I’m an industrial worker and CHALLENGE opened my eyes to the reality of capitalism, oppression and discrimination at work….It’s very important to expand the readership of CHALLENGE so that our fellow workers can understand the racism, sexism and exploitation which we are forced to live with and can join with us in the PLP. Long live Communism!”
Another comrade explained that “Revolutions only happen if there’s a communist party with the correct ideas and a political base among workers and others, especially industrial workers.” The speaker cited “the Bolsheviks [who] didn’t retreat….under fascist repression, concentrating in the factories and the armed forces…. [With] unbreakable confidence in the working class and in turn the workers’ great confidence in them, they achieved the ‘impossible’ in 1917 when the workers took power.”
One speaker reported on the struggles in the colleges against cutbacks and on the Summer Project to bring communist politics to workers. Speakers highlighted the key role of soldiers in fighting to end imperialist war with revolution. At one event a high school student presented the historic importance of May Day, followed by a comrade who linked the legacy of May Day to the 1968 worker-student uprising in France, citing the decisive role of workers, the need for the worker-student alliance and the political leadership of a truly communist party like PLP.  A moving poem captured outrage at the effects of capitalism as well as the desire to fight for communism.

About 300 people participated in these activities, enjoying songs and delicious international food and camaraderie. They reflected intense political struggle throughout the year to bring communist politics to workplaces, schools and friends. We concluded with enthusiastic preparations for the distribution of CHALLENGE, leaflets and flags for the May Day immigrant-rights march. J

DETROIT

April 26 — Today PLP re-established its May Day tradition in Detroit with a dinner of over two dozen workers, teachers and youth, including special guests from the American Axle picket lines.

A young community college teacher gave a brief history of May Day, how the PLP re-established May Day in the U.S., and how he looks forward to marching each year to advance international communist revolution. A couple from American Axle spoke about the difficulties of the strike and how the UAW leadership was in bed with the AAM bosses and GM to cut their wages.

A third speaker talked about the acquittal of the killer cops who murdered an unarmed black man Sean Bell in NYC on his wedding day. He said that the bosses need racist police terror to enforce a future of wage cuts, poverty and war, and that the Sean bell case and the American Axle strike were two very good reasons to join PLP and build a revolutionary movement to smash the racist rulers.

This may be a small step in the big picture, but it can be an important event for the future of PLP and the class struggle in Detroit.