For the working class, for our own international party - IBRP statement

For too long May Day has been a ritual with no meaning for the working class. The occasion has been used for decades to mobilise workers in support of reformist parties whose policies are anti-working class. Despite all the election promises, their reforms in reality have led to 30 million job losses throughout the OECD, real wage cuts (i.e. loss of purchasing power) and continued loss of job security.

Despite all this, working class internationalists have always attended the May Day rallies. Whenever workers take to the streets we have to be there, even though the ideology behind the demonstrations is directly against workers' interests.

So, we are out with our publicity knowing that this time is no different: most workers are influenced by some sort of more or less radical reformism. Even the existence of the working class is denied. Instead we are all supposed to be “citizens”. Any sense of working class internationalism is being channelled towards impotent pacifism, and the struggle against the bourgeois state is turned into a defence of false democracy.

However this May Day also falls at a significant time.

First of all, signs that the capitalist crisis is getting worse are multiplying. Profit rates are falling markedly and financial/speculative capital prevails more and more over the industrial sector. This crisis is now so great that it is pushing the bourgeoisie of all countries to violently attack the entire working class. “Old” forms of wage slavery are on the increase, as are job losses - hence the increasingly desperate migrations of those who otherwise would go hungry - whilst low wages and insecure jobs are the norm even in the “strong” economies. It is a crisis which is propelling the principal imperialist countries into wars for the control of markets and raw materials, especially oil, which is not only a fundamental source of energy but the means for parasitically acquiring revenue in dollars and potentially in euros. This again is forcing countries which are not so strong financially to stay in the fray, so that they can join in the haggling over who gets what from the diminishing surplus value extorted from the working class. A crisis moreover, which, with the help of the finance capitalists, has put the whole of the “southern world” in real danger of general impoverishment and has reduced Argentina to total bankruptcy.

However this year there is another novelty: the reappearance of real working class struggle independent of all the capitalist parties, including the reformists. At the forefront is the great struggle of the Argentine piqueteros movement. But in the “North” too, amid the usual petty bourgeois democrats and traditional trade unionists, young workers have appeared within the radical-reformist / anti-globalisation movement. They have clear anti-capitalist demands and a more radical hatred of the bourgeois state, as we saw last July in Genoa during the demonstrations against the G8 Summit.

These new outbursts, however embryonic their anti-capitalism really is, make it even more necessary to rebuild a communist party on a global scale.

We call on all conscious revolutionaries and organisations to assume their responsibilities by combating the organisations and parties which are spreading democratic illusions and supporting an impotent activist movement. The groups and organisations inside that movement have conflicting aims and different programmes but they share the general idea of “the possibility of a new world”. This disguises the fact that they are opposed to the communist programme for social ownership of the means of production, i.e. the abolition of capitalism (money, wage labour, commodities). It also disguises the fact that they are not in favour of the overthrow of the bourgeois state, the only way to impose workers' power and begin the transition towards a truly human society. Their “new world” is a dangerous illusion - denied by daily reality - that capitalism can be democratised.

It is therefore crucial that a functioning revolutionary political organisation (the international party of the proletariat) comes into being: to circulate the communist programme, to struggle against compromise with capitalist domination, and to lead a revolutionary fight back.

Such an international party will have to lay down the methodological basis, the theory and the policies of the revolutionary programme. In so doing the whole counter-revolutionary experience of Stalinism and the social democratic practice of the Third International will be discarded.

The internationalists who are slowly but surely gathering around the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party have already started this process. We call on working class militants and their organisations to join us in this difficult task. Otherwise capitalist barbarism - with the objective, if unwitting, support of the more or less radical reformists - will continue to triumph.