Otto's War Room (毛派): Revolutionary Praxis May Day Statement 2019

Each year I try to post as many May Day statements I can find on line. I focus mainly on Marxist-Leninists or MLM. So here is one more May Day Statement:

-សតិវ អតុ

From Maoist_Revolution:

“In society in which there are very rich people and very poor ones, the standard of usefulness is utterly confused” - William Morris

May Day is the day of the international working class a day to celebrate our victories past and prepare for the future. The situation which now faces the human race is one of extreme emergency. The earth now faces a huge ecological catastrophe. The cause? Capitalism!

May Day, May Day, Emergency on Planet Earth!

The capitalist system is based on commodity production. From its early days as a free market four hundred years ago it has since a century past grown into a number of parasitic imperialist great powers. They unleash wars of ever greater violence upon the people of the world and unremittingly devour the resources of the earth, poison land and oceans and envelope the world in greenhouse gases. They throw untold millions into poverty, millions into exploitative wage labour and oppress and divide people to strengthen the rule of an ever wealthier and ever smaller capitalist class. They divide people through racist, national and sexist oppression. The ruling class is now whipping up nationalism to create suspicion and division among the working class, presenting false promises of a better life through both the EU Brexit and Remain camps.

The truth is whether in or out of the EU cartel Britain will still be part of another trade agreement and global trade favours the imperialist states over the poor countries and keeps them poor. A socialist planned economy will address these imbalances. The increasingly catastrophic contradictions mounting up leave two deadly possibilities for humanity and all other species on the earth; global thermonuclear war or an unstoppable destruction of our ecosystems. The system of capitalist imperialism which seeks endless growth through the production of more and more socially useless commodities brings about ever more pollution, waste, and species extinction. It can never stop this insatiable quest for more profits and thus more production of crap we don’t really need. Human society is now at a period where we are encouraged to want what we don’t need and what we actually need we don’t want. Workers are forced to work to get paid to spend money just to get buy and waste what is left on useless products, whether it be in a garment sweat shop in Bangladesh, a factory worker in China, a retail worker in New York or a baker in London. In the world today there is more and more who must sell their labour for a wage and have no control over their conditions. Is opens up the great prospect of ending this insane system of endless growth and destruction. There is only one way out!

Revolution

As the working class we have more in common with each other across different countries then we do with the rulers in our home countries. The poor countries cannot ever make their own choices or organise their societies to meet the needs of their own people because of the stranglehold of imperialist powers like Britain. More and more workers work for huge transnationals based in these great powers and even poor peasant farmers can not escape their grip. Through political education, military organisation and unity the working class and peasantry can overthrow capitalism, end the endless and destructive commodity system and replace it with communism. Then the means of production will be owned by society as a whole and we will produce what is needed for life and survival, for education, health, shelter and food. It must be sustainable production and when we produce what is needed we will not consume the vast amounts of energy which this system does. We will be able to use the sun and waves for the energy we will require and it will be less when we need not produce so many unnecessary commodities. We will be able to work on a planned cooperative basis without the division of labour and employers. The products we make will be a common work of creativity. The working class exercising its own political power through socialism can built this new society.

Class Struggles

The first opening of the road to communism was the October Revolution of 1917, the ripples of which were felt in every corner of the earth, and led to the Chinese Revolution of 1949 which laid the foundations for a new age. While the forces of revolution suffered internal defeat in the Soviet Union it proceeded in China.

New ways of production for human need and communal living were established and the people began to challenge all old culture, customs and habits to build a society free of exploitation, class and oppression. These great revolutionary victories met with tragic defeat in recent decades and the ebb of revolutionary upsurges. Yet struggles have continued following the great examples set by China. The Peoples Wars in Peru, the Philippines, Turkey and India are the continuation of this struggle for communism with Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as their indispensable tool. They show the way forward!

Ecocide

While the imperialists destroy the ecosystem, the foundations for the very existence of life on this planet, many people worldwide have protested and struck in anger. This is an international struggle because climate catastrophe and pollution know no borders. The poorer countries are already suffering from this catastrophe. The peoples of the world increasingly realise we must all save ourselves from the parasitic and rapacious system but many are confused or misled as to how. Yet the Peoples Armies have demonstrated that revolution is in the forefront of ecological defence in the past decade. In India mining companies have been attacked by communist guerrillas. They have sabotaged and prevented the transport of bauxite and other ores. The New Peoples Army of the Philippines have defended indigenous peoples homes from timber companies. They have attacked the production of biofuels which has ruined the traditional food staples of local people and halted the extraction of gold from the land and destroyed other mining plants. In Turkey the Peoples Liberation Army has in the past attacked the trucks of timber companies and communist guerrillas destroyed the control centre of a hydro electric plant. Where the Peoples Armies have established base areas they have established forms of mass democracy and social ownership in which the needs of the community are met in harmony with the rest of nature.

The time has come

The capitalist system is now heading for a crisis which will be ecological as well as economical. If it is permitted to continue its endless growth then the life support system of our planet will cease and the earth will become a dead planet. The earth continues to warm up and the oceans acidified. The working class must organise itself into a Communist movement at the earliest moment and stop the capitalist rulers’ march to ecological destruction. This can only be done through conscious social revolution.

“The objective world which is to be changed also includes all the opponents of change, who, in order to be changed, must go through a stage of compulsion before they can enter the stage of voluntary, conscious change. The epoch of world communism will be reached when all mankind voluntarily and consciously changes itself and the world.” - Mao Zedong