Out in the streets, defending our rights, without conciliating with the bourgeoisie!
May 1st is the international day of the working class. We go out to the streets to reaffirm our will to put an end to capitalism: a system of exploitation, oppression, hunger, violence, wars and depredation of nature. We must reject any attempt to put our remembrance and this day of protest at the service of the plans of any bourgeois or “progressive” government. To defend our rights we must, first of all, preserve our class’ political independence.
The catastrophe threatening us
Global capitalism faces a new economic crisis. All forecasts are negative: production stagnates, investment decreases and millions of workers are pushed towards unemployment and job precariousness. At the same time we are heading towards an increase of the cost of living and growing indebtedness of families. The more developed countries, led by the USA, unload the crisis on the rest of the world with unpayable debts, tying them to new conditions of domination and surrendering of resources for their multinationals. They impose free trade treaties and tax, labor and social reforms that enable the exploitation and plundering of ecosystems.
The way out of the crisis that the governments find is attacking the rights of the workers, whose overexploitation is the only source of profits and wealth accumulation. That became evident during the pandemic: while thousands of millions plunged into poverty and misery, a miniscule group of capitalists exponentially increased their fortune. It is the 1% of the privileged against the 99% of the rest of humanity. Only a world revolution can put an end to this contradiction. It is with that flag, and in memory of the martyrs of Chicago, executed in 1886, that we take to the streets every May 1st to proclaim, like they did, our mortal hatred against capitalism. Our class hatred against the bourgeoisie and imperialism.
Barbarism and resistance
The entire world has been talking for more than a year about the war in Ukraine, the rise of fuel prices, the banks that go bankrupt, the devaluation of currencies, the increase of banks’ interest rates and the growth of the foreign debt; also the rising food prices and electricity rates, while the alteration of the climate due to global warming wipes out crops, causes rivers to overflow and destroys the homes of millions. Unemployment and low wages push billions into job insecurity and social degradation. Bourgeois democracy proves useless to improve the quality of life and guarantee well-being to the majority of human beings. Instead, taxes and military spending are increased, while rights to health and education, housing or public services are cut.
Huge flows of migrants travel the world in search of opportunities, expelled from their countries by poverty, wars, droughts and the violence of societies that have closed off all opportunities for young people and are doubly cruel to the poorest women, condemning thousands of these displaced persons to die in their desperate journeys. They are the most dramatic image of the barbarism to which capitalism is dragging us.
But where there is resistance, there is hope. The Ukrainian people heroically defend their territory, against the bloody Russian invasion, in the midst of the economic, political and military dispute of the superpowers for the control of the planet. Workers’ strikes in Europe are multiplying as governments are discredited, as it has happened in France for the pension reform, violently rejected in the streets, or in Great Britain with the struggles of transport, health and education workers. The Palestinian people face the permanent aggression of the Zionist state of Israel, fractured by its own contradictions, and the Saharawi people resist the occupation of Western Sahara by the Moroccan kingdom. A few months ago we experienced the uprising of Iranian women against the fundamentalist bourgeois dictatorship. All these struggles for national self-determination, economic, democratic, or directly anti-capitalist, have a common motive: the offensive of the big business conglomerates against the workers and peoples, through their States and governments. It is the class struggle, the great engine of the revolution.
For our rights and against conciliation: it is time for revolution!
In many parts of the world the political far-right is trying to rise its head in the face of the threat of situations that overflow the bourgeois order. But the most dynamic factor of the global reality is the tireless struggle of the workers and peoples that expresses itself with social uprisings, massive strikes, mobilizations and military resistance to invasions or occupation of their territories. The main obstacle we must overcome is the conciliatory policy of the leaderships of the reformist political parties and the leaderships of the social and trade union organizations, controlled by those parties, and even of the governments of the peoples in resistance, as is happening in Ukraine with Zelensky and his mafia oligarchs.
In Colombia we are living a similar situation. The rise of Gustavo Petro to the Presidency was the electoral expression of the social outburst, which weakened the far-right, but the policy of his government, the Pacto Histórico and the leftist parties that compose it, has been to negotiate its reforms with the most rotten of the traditional parties, handing over ministries and contracts and accepting the demands of the big national and foreign capitalists, particularly those of the financial sector. This is how the tax reform was cut, reducing the resources of the State destined to the social sector, the health reform is modified to maintain the EPS, the unions reject the labor reform that barely seeks to recover conquests lost three decades ago, the pension reform threatens acquired rights and leaves the new generation of workers in uncertainty. That is why we must retake the banners of the national strike and prepare new days of struggle.
The recent visit to Biden, head of world imperialism and sworn enemy of the peoples of the world, was evidence of the trust placed by multinationals and financial speculators in Petro’s government. In exchange, like the Mexican government, it commits itself to be a border guard for the US in the face of the migratory wave, a forester of the Amazon and an intermediary with the repressive government of Nicolás Maduro. He will continue, however, to guarantee the punctual payment of the fraudulent foreign debt while he talks about the fantasy of a “decarbonized” capitalism and expects part of the crumbs that imperialism offers to continue persecuting drug traffickers and miners who devastate the jungle.
We won’t reject any reform that benefits the workers or the people, but we are against those reforms being negotiated behind our backs. Every acquired right has been the product of decades of struggle and mobilization, sacrifice and deaths of the working people, the youth and marginalized communities. That is why we must march independently this May 1st.
Against the union bureaucracy, that mortgages our class independence, we invite the affiliated to the CUT to support list 72 for the Executive Committee, headed by Ima Yurley Pérez, president of the Union Association of Educators of Medellin. It is a list that embodies a socialist and revolutionary program for our union central, the most important of the country.
And to advance in the construction of a revolutionary alternative, we invite you to join our ranks. Impulso Socialista and the Grupo de Trabajadores Socialistas, in the framework of the International Socialist League, soon will unify to contribute to that process. The flags of the International are the flags of our next victory!
General increase of salaries against inflation!
No more job precariousness: no more contracts through ODS!
Immediate incorporation to the payroll of the State for all temporary workers!
Quality healthcare for everyone: elimination of the EPS!
Respect for the rights of the retired!
Free and open access Superior Education, with welfare and high quality!
For a plan of public works that guarantees housing and infrastructure for education and health and the commercialization of the production of poor peasants!
No to the Fiscal Rule. No the payment of the foreign debt! Nationalization of the entire financial sector!
No more repression: immediate dissolution of the ESMAD!
Work, land, housing, healthcare and education for everyone!
For a government of the workers and the poor!
Russia out of Ukraine! NATO out of the Eastern Europe!
Long live the strikes of the European workers, long live the resistance of the peoples of the world!
Proletariats of the world: UNITE!
Impulso Socialista – Grupo de Trabajadores Socialistas
International Socialist League – ISL