The following is an international leaflet distributed at demonstrations in the United States, Venezuela, Turkey, and Italy

Workers! Comrades!

May Day is the day when the world proletariat reaffirms its identity as an international class, the historic enemy of capital, united in solidarity across all national borders. While capitalism—after promising peace and progress—is dragging humanity toward a new catastrophic war, we reaffirm that the only war the proletariat has to fight is that of the exploited against the exploiters.

Because the working class of every country gains nothing by taking sides in defense of the homeland and the national interests of its own bourgeoisie and state, whether Ukrainian or Russian, Iranian or American, Israeli or an illusory Palestinian state.

Wars are no longer fought to establish national states and modern regimes, but are monstrous convulsions of capitalism in its chaotic historical death throes, which can no longer find outlets for its goods amid the crisis of production and profits.

This need for the destruction wrought by war is recognized by the various imperialist states, which plunge into the abyss not for the idealistic, nationalistic, or religious reasons with which they justify the extermination of entire peoples, but for their own selfish material interests: the conquest of strategic positions and the hoarding of raw materials. In addition to the enormous profiteering involved in the production and sale of bombs, missiles, aircraft, tanks…

These true causes of war are concealed from the working class in order to drag it to the front lines, through ideological terrorism and insane and brutal militarist propaganda. The “enemy” is dehumanized to justify massacres and slaughter. Modern wars, increasingly destructive, are designed to mow down the lives of proletarians at an industrial pace. In fact, the reintroduction of compulsory military service is already being planned in countries where it had been suspended. The working class is sacrificed to bourgeois war. Today, the rearmament of states is imposed on workers through wage cuts, the enforcement of social discipline, and cuts to healthcare, education, and other services.

Bourgeois pacifism, by fostering the illusion of a peaceful capitalism governed by law and international institutions, distracts the working class from its subversive role and thus becomes a fifth column of militarism.

An equal danger to the proletariat’s sound direction is posed by the so-called communist parties, which would like to position it on one side or the other of the shifting front-line of conflict between imperialist powers, in partisan resistance stances, under the pretext of defending alleged victims of aggression or national emancipation. All imperialist powers are at once aggressors and victims of aggression, and there are no longer any unresolved national issues in the world that could serve a progressive social function; rather, they are nothing more than instruments of imperialist war—that is, the supreme reactionary instrument.

Capitalism has exhausted every progressive function it once had everywhere: by now, it is nothing more than a mechanism of destruction that cyclically generates crises, wars, and famines, whether it is managed by governments that claim to uphold democracy and liberalism, or by openly dictatorial, totalitarian, theocratic, or falsely “communist” regimes. The urgent need of capitalists worldwide is to postpone the catastrophe of their mode of production, based on commodity production and wage labor, which is becoming increasingly absurd, irrational, and archaic.

Capitalism is objectively under pressure from communism, a necessity that stems not from a moral ideal but from a historically mature reality.

Thus, its sole common enemy—transcending the opposing war fronts of the past and future—is, ultimately, the working class, which embodies within itself—albeit unconsciously—Communism and the political revolution that paves the way for it. Only the proletariat is the force capable of providing a progressive, rather than reactionary, solution to the crisis of war.

The international and powerful working class can stop the war, turn it into a class war to establish Communism, along a path that begins by fighting to defend wages and living and working conditions and culminates in revolution, turning the weapons that the bourgeoisie will place in the hands of the workers, to send them to the slaughter in the imperialist war, no longer against their proletarian brothers of another country but against their own bourgeois regime, according to the communist slogans of all time:

- The enemy of the workers is in their own country!

- The proletarians have no homeland!

- Proletarians of all countries, unite!

- Workers of the world, unite!

The proletariat’s class struggle is directed against its own bourgeoisie, which demands sacrifices and even their very lives in the name of the Fatherland—which is nothing other than the homeland of capital.

In every country today, this means, on the one hand, fighting to free the working class from the control of the regime-controlled unions that divide it, disorganize it, and hinder its struggle, and rebuilding powerful class-based unions; and, on the other hand, joining the party of the international communist revolution.

To give full expression to its great strength, the working class must arm itself with its fundamental weapons of struggle: the class-based trade union, which unites and organizes it, and the revolutionary party, which enlightens and leads it.

Under communism, a global society where production is planned to meet human needs rather than for profit, work—once wage labor has been abolished—will cease to be a commodity and a source of exploitation, and social harmony will replace the productive chaos, misery, and horrors of capitalism.

FOR THE RESURGENCE OF THE CLASS STRUGGLE!
LONG LIVE RED MAY DAY!