The European Communist Action calls on the working class across Europe and all the popular strata to participate in the working-class mobilizations on May Day —International Workers' Day— and flood the streets to show the organized strength of workers. We honour the heroes and the fallen of our movement, from those in Chicago to the present day. We continue defiantly along the same path!
The conditions under which we workers in Europe are approaching this May Day are shaped by the war economy and the escalation of military preparations. Our living standards and labour conditions continue to be worsened with the abolition of collective labour agreements; the deterioration and privatization of public services continue to advance; housing prices continue to rise; and the cost of living, of shopping baskets, of energy, of fuels continue to skyrocket unchecked. At the same time, the offensive against the interests of migrants and working-class women continues driven by racist, sexist, irrational and reactionary views, seeking to divide the working class and to make it accept a war that is alien to its interests as its own.
Imperialist aggression is the dominant topic as a result of the accumulation of tensions and conflicts for years at various levels and in different regions of the world. Today, the imperialist aggression is being waged in various locations of the globe, though it reaches its most belligerent levels and has the worst consequences for the workers in the Middle East — particularly Iran, Palestine, and Lebanon due to the barbaric attacks launched by the US and Israel.
The competition between different countries and capitalist blocs is escalating, and the various governments are preparing themselves for all the scenarios. In this context, rearming, militarization of the economy, and the preparation of the peoples for war are taking place:
- Governments are mobilizing in order to ensure a rearming, thus deepening the market of arms production, purchase, and sale, and also of military intelligence;
- The economy is being subdued to the interests of war (increase in defence expenses, transformation of productive sectors, creation of employment linked to war activity...);
- Capitalism is using the propaganda machinery to ensure the ideological and social acceptance of the war and all the costs it has for the working class. It also promotes a false and dangerous appeal to broad sections of the working class to shed their blood for the interests of the capitalists.
The European Union and various bourgeois governments are clear examples of these processes. They support the imperialist attacks against the peoples, are involved in them in multiple ways and back their despicable pretexts all the while hypocritically waving the flag of “No to war” and deepening their pursuit of strategic autonomy. They also seek to deceive the working class by promoting a European community of capitalist interests against any other imperialist alliance or bloc. There is no such community of interests between capitalists and workers within any border, only among the exploited workers all across the world.
The European workers are clear: our class interests have nothing to do with the interests of those who exploit us nor their political representatives.
While capitalists are promoting the anti-people policies, austerity, budget cuts and redundancies, the working class can barely reproduce its labour power. While capitalists need to increase the production in their military industry, the working class is being murdered in other countries with weapons produced by that same industry. While capitalists are fostering reactionary stances and exercise the repression against the working class, the working class is enduring persecution and attempts at class conciliation with their exploiters. While capitalists are broadcasting war-mongering propaganda, the working class responds with proletarian internationalism. These are just some examples evidencing that their banners are not ours.
In this context, the working class should articulate its own response to the attacks we are enduring, and we should take the lead in responding in a united and organized manner. In this path, it is essential to detach ourselves from dividing, reactionary, anti-trade union, racist, and sexist discourses, but also from the harmful influence of social democracy within the workers' movement, unveiling their practices of social conciliation and peace, which serve to disorientate and restrain mass mobilization and class struggle. The organized working class cannot trust in “better models” of capitalist management. In order to make the foundations of capitalism stagger and overthrow it, we need a class-oriented and independent programme of struggle that clashes with the power of monopolies, is opposed to the imperialist war, and practices proletarian internationalism.
This response is built at workplaces, in working-class and popular neighbourhoods; in each strike, demonstration, and social protest; from the class-oriented organization in trade unions, from the communist and workers' parties. Workers of Europe, every step we take, every advance we achieve united strengthen us, every partial victory is accumulated until the construction of a working-class opposition capable of overthrowing this system of exploitation and building a society free from it, i.e. socialism. With that victory, the needs of workers at workplaces can be prioritized.
Long live the struggle of the working class!
Long live May Day!