The Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) sends its warm regards and revolutionary greetings to comrades and friends all over the world on 1 May 2019.
In every part of the country where we are active our comrades are working hard to bring our revolutionary message to workers on the streets, in their workplaces and homes.
At this moment of great political turmoil in our country, our party is undertaking a mass campaign of political propaganda in defence of the interests of the working class; not least the exposure of the sham of British democracy and our defence of the Brexit referendum result.
Taking up the political tasks outlined at our eighth congress in 2018, our comrades are well on the way to meeting our organisational goal of distributing more than 100,000 copies of our Proletarian free sheet, and on 1 May 1st in several cities we have been adding to the work already done with leafleting campaigns and social celebrations to mark International Workers Day.
Since 1889, the international working class has chosen this day, the first of May, to mark the mutual solidarity of all workers in our struggle for work, for rest and for recreation; for the equality of all nations and peoples, and of women and men.
On May Day we mark our determination to struggle for decent pay and conditions within the old capitalistic order of exploitation, within which we remain imprisoned by our wage-slavery, and we also renew our struggle to build a better world, in which we will move forward to a higher, fairer, more decent order of society and of relations between nations; our struggle for socialism.
Today we reaffirm our resolute intention to cast off this parasitic and decadent capitalist system, and with it the exploitation of one human being by another and one nation by another.
We must never forget that no matter how well our trade unions battle for higher wages and better pay, they are fighting against the effects, and not the causes of our exploitation.
As long as we receive wages for our labour, rather than taking ownership of the very means of producing – the land, the housing stock, the factories, the mines, the retail stores, the distribution and communications networks, the banks and industries, the media and government – we will remain the pawns of our exploiters, powerless to effect change in our interests; beggars at the feast.
We do not need ‘fairer’ wages alone; we need to end this capitalist system of exploitation and robbery in its entirety.
And we must record, in passing, the fact that since the heroic miners’ strike of 1984/5, which ended in the defeat of the once mighty National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), for the most part, our unions have failed even to engage in everyday skirmishes effectively; they have failed even to resist the constant drive of the capitalists to force our wages to rock bottom.
The pitiful wages of the McDonalds strikers, or of our hospital cleaners; the totally inadequate levels of ‘minimum wage’ and ‘living wage’, and the legions of ‘illegal’ workers who do not even scrape these meagre sums, are all testament to this sad fact. As is the inability of even better-off workers to afford decent homes.
Our ministers and parliamentarians have no answers to our most pressing problems.
Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!
You have nothing to lose but your chains; you have a world to win!
