May Day 2019 -- Day of Working Class Unity and Struggle
in Defence of the Rights of All

Workers Must Strengthen the Work to
Advance Their Own Demands

- Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) -

Montreal, May 1, 2018.

Hail May Day! International day of working class unity and affirmation
of the struggle for its rights, claims and emancipation!

The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) sends its militant May Day greetings to the workers of Canada, Quebec and around the world. The working class is showing in deeds its mettle and maturity in the battle for its rights, claims and emancipation. Working people are striving for their own empowerment in economic and political affairs. Workers are speaking out in defence of what belongs to them by right and increasingly using their own organized means of communication to express their views and opinions.

CPC(M-L) believes that the battle for empowerment is the key to the defence of rights, political renewal and to open a path to the emancipation of the working class. Empowerment is centred on political renewal and requires independent thinking and organization of the working class. Without the working class building its own independent institutions with its own voice, media, thinking and analysis, it becomes easy prey for the financial oligarchy. To empower itself, the working class discusses amongst itself in its own organizations its demands, claims, and actions with analysis, setting its own agenda and line of march.

The working people have legitimate claims on the economy and society. Their claims clash with those of the ruling financial oligarchy but the workers' opposition is up to the challenge as long as it guards its independence of thinking and action and does not become embroiled in the acrimony and divisions of the ruling elite and line up behind one or another of their social bases and cartel political parties.

The workers' opposition is waging continuous battles to defend its rights against the anti-social offensive and pay-the-rich schemes of the ruling elite, in opposition to government anti-worker legislation and state court rulings denying workers their right to withdraw their capacity to work and organize other actions to defend their terms of employment. Workers are finding ways to meet head-on the arrogance, dictate and refusal of the global oligopolies to negotiate collective agreements acceptable to those who do the work. Such is the case with working people everywhere rallying behind USW Local 9700, representing locked-out ABI aluminum workers in Quebec and their courageous 15-month battle with the global oligopoly Alcoa. The working class also fights for the rights of women and children, the striving of the youth for a bright future, and the people's claims for a healthy natural and social environment, and is in militant solidarity with the Indigenous peoples and their centuries-long struggle to assert in practice their hereditary rights.

Working people organized into their own workers' opposition are developing a consciousness of their own that emerges out of real life, synonymous with social change and free from preconceived notions. Their social consciousness gives workers the strength of mind to defeat the assault on them, especially from the liberal mantra to divide themselves according to the various factions of the financial oligarchy organized as cartel parties.

During this election year, the ruling elite are already putting enormous pressure on the working class movement to fall behind this or that cartel party and give up their independence of thinking and action. The mass media and others are spreading fear of a rise to power of the Conservative Party and insist the only thing working people can do is reduce themselves to supporting one or another of the cartel parties to "stop the right."

But workers have learned from the antics of the federal and provincial cartel parties that to join and follow them and become their voting cattle weakens and eventually destroys the struggle for their rights and claims. For the working class to give up its independence of organization, thinking and action, and come under the influence of either the liberal or conservative social base and the favoured cartel party of the moment spells death to its movement to defend its rights and claims and for political renewal and empowerment. To subsume itself into the cartel party electoral system reduces the workers' movement to a helpless, hopeless, humiliated state.

Organize and Fight for Empowerment and Political Renewal!

Workers must intensify their movement to empower themselves, not divide behind this or that faction of the rich under the pretext that one is better than the other. The independence of organizing, thinking and actions of the workers' opposition becomes a bulwark against the disastrous line of constantly responding to and following the agenda of the financial oligarchy and its so-called right-wing and left-wing cartel political parties.

Working people cannot afford to stay in the trap of "left" versus "right." What exists is a cartel party system within anachronistic liberal democratic institutions over which the people exercise no control whatsoever. The striving for empowerment is the present reality that working people must embrace, nurture and use to secure their future. Working people can turn things around by refusing the agenda set by the ruling elite and speak directly to those matters that concern themselves. Discussing and working out how to resolve the economic, political, social and environmental problems in ways that favour working people and not the rich, and engaging in actions with analysis to strengthen their independent institutions and the fight to defend the rights of all will lead to a mass movement for empowerment and political renewal to build the New.

This article was published in

Volume 49 Number 15 - April 27, 2019

Article Link:
May Day 2019: Workers Must Strengthen the Work to Advance Their Own Demands

    

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