Let's get ready for May Day- 2021!

Each year I report on what various organizations are doing on May 1, International Workers Day. Marxist organizations, along with anarchists and social democrat groups often form parades or some type of activity to honor the day and all the workers it is supposed to honor. It seems there are fewer groups doing something each year. 

Most of the time I don't give much support to Bob Avakian and his Revolutionary Communist Party. My complaints about him are well known by now and he gets regularly trashed by the various Gonzaloistas organizations.[1] So I don't need to go over all of the complaints again. However, I have to admit they are among the few groups in the US that are planning any actions for May 1:

 

The Revcoms

**ANNOUNCING** Celebrate International Revolutionary May 1st — WE ARE HUMAN BEINGS. WE REFUSE TO ACCEPT SLAVERY IN ANY FORM!

Bob Avakian (BA), says: “...We Have 2 Choices: either, live with all this & condemn future generations to the same, or worse, if they have a future at all... OR, MAKE REVOLUTION!”

Time to Get Organized for an Actual Revolution ... GET WITH THE REVOLUTION CLUB

Stay tuned for more info:

Follow: @therevcoms

Watch: http://youtube.com/therevcoms

read: http://revcom.us

 

But their are some other groups doing things. For example:

Revolutionary Student Movement - Toronto

ApSimritSeolpntondh 3a farittd 1:2soc8he rPnMed  · 

International Workers’ Day is coming up on May 1st! Send us a DM if you or your organization would like to work with us toward a red and combative May Day in the Greater Toronto Area.

#Toronto #GreaterTorontoArea #MayDay #MayDay2021 #1ermai #1ermai2021 #InternationalWorkersDay

 

The Toronto group has released its own statement on May Day:

 

And From Revolutionary Student Movement - Toronto:

 

 

May 1st marks its importance in history as a testament to working-class struggles and sacrifices. It was declared as International Workers’ Day by the Second International in 1889, to commemorate the martyrdom of eight revolutionaries in the Haymarket massacre carried out by the U.S. regime. It has since been a day marked by tremendous revolutionary action all over the world by the toiling classes.

This new decade has already been marked by tremendous revolutionary upheavals in the face of an ever-deepening global crisis and imperialism’s reaction. Within the centers of imperialism, the people’s struggles and the Proletariat – in particular – have risen to combative heights unseen for decades past.

Canada has been no exception. This country is not a citadel of stability but an imploding, rotten imperialist State. The intensified Land Defender struggles in Unist’ot’en, Secwépemc Territory, Kanonhstaton, Kanesatà:ke, Nitaskinan, and Miꞌkmaꞌki (to name just a few) give the imperialists a bitter taste of bigger things to come. They show just how the Indigenous National Liberation struggle against settler-colonialism has not dulled in the face of the health crisis, armed reaction, or liberal appeasement. Tenant struggles have been resurgent, resisting the soaring rents and the landlords’ ever parasitic extortion of countless people. Withstanding state- and monopoly capital-attacks, workers’ struggles have worked towards advancing their economic demands despite the usual betrayals from the labour bureaucrats.

On the international level, the escalating tension between imperialist powers are met with an insurgent response from the masses. The People’s Wars in Peru, Turkey, India, and the Philippines continue to light the way as the axis of World Revolution. The armed struggles waged by Communist Parties and Organizations in Brazil, Manipur, Bangladesh, and Ecuador have been persevering and advancing against the General Counter-Revolutionary Offensive of imperialism, revisionism, and world reaction. National liberation struggles of the New African nation, Ireland, Catalonia, Sahrawi, Palestine, and Balochistan, among countless others, are all reaching combative heights after so-called “lulls” in action. Canadian imperialist interests across Latin America, Africa, and Asia have been among targets of the masses’ righteous fury.

The crisis of imperialism that was already exploding in insurrection in 2019 across the world – from Chile to Haiti to France to Lebanon – has intensified with the COVID-19 health crisis. Horrible living standards have worsened as countless people are given a “choice”: to stay at home as expenses increase and protections are scaled back, or to work in unsafe conditions under high risk of infection. Meanwhile, the bourgeois States of the world have only used the lockdown to intensify repressive measures against the masses, with increased surveillance and denial of the right to assembly or movement used to dampen political dissent. In Canada, this is as clear as day. Whether it is used to justify more harassment by police and the rising death toll on the homeless, or to make way for worsening treatment of prisoners and detained migrants, or in the encirclement and cordoning of Land Defender camps, all levels of governments in Canada have taken advantage of the crisis to inflict greater austerity, repression, and terror on the masses.

Despite the deepening of the global crisis, the Communist movement in Canada has been stagnant due to the lingering influence of liquidationism. The postmodernist idler clique in Anglo-Canada, known as the “pan-Canadian Revolutionary Communist Party” (RCP) and publicly represented by the ineffectual academic Joshua Moufawad-Paul, has chosen to hide from any struggle inside or outside their dwindling circles. Choosing self-implosion, they have decided that exerting energies on hidden campaigns against “ultra-leftist influence” takes precedence over engaging in revolutionary political work. In Montreal, an opposing group under the “historic leadership” of the RCP, calling themselves the “Continuators”, have clung to dogmatic politics and ideology that have left them isolated, unable to grow their strengths beyond their limited audience. In the same city, a splinter from the “Continuators”, known as the Charles Gagnon Cell, is attempting in vain to restore the perceived former glory of the RCP through idealist unity projects that result in the purging of all opposition and introducing vile reactionary Quebec nationalism into Maoist ideology.

In the midst of this, the Revolutionary Student Movement (RSM) has become the battleground where liquidationism is being forcefully confronted by Maoism, foreshadowing the bigger struggles to come. Once the self-declared “largest Communist student organization” in Canada, the RSM has reached an impasse in overcoming the lingering liquidationist influence of the old leadership. Some within the RSM continue to cling to this influence, while the Maoists combat it relentlessly. This political struggle will decide whether the RSM will remain isolated from the struggles of working-class youth and students, or whether it will emerge as a Militarized Red Guard organization of youth serving the preparation of the People’s War in Canada.

All these liquidators converge with the pro-imperialist social-fascists like the falsified “Communist Party of Canada” and the New Democratic Party. They divert the explosive potential that the working class and the masses display every day.

In the struggle against these miserable rats, the Communist movement must not only shed these old burdens, but must outright reconstitute the Communist Party! It must do so in hard struggle against all relics of the past. The primary task today is to build a Militarized Communist Party, to unite the most advanced revolutionary forces based on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism–Gonzalo Thought, to link up with and organize the rebellion of the masses.

With that in mind, this year we are launching a country-wide campaign for a red and combative International Worker’s Day as part of the movement for reconstitution of the Communist Party of Canada. This will be an effort which must also contribute to the larger struggle to reunify the International Communist Movement, advancing the new great wave of World Proletarian Revolution.

These stormy times demand that all genuine revolutionaries pick up the red flag and join the fight. We call on all those who wish to bring the revolutionary movement in Canada out of the festering swamp of liquidationism to reach out to us without delay!

UPHOLD, DEFEND, AND APPLY MARXISM-LENINISM-MAOISM–GONZALO THOUGHT!

DISCARD THE DEADWEIGHT! RECONSTITUTE THE COMMUNIST PARTY!

UNITE COMMUNIST FORCES AGAINST LIQUIDATIONIST CURRENTS!

CRUSH CANADIAN IMPERIALISM AND SETTLER-COLONIALISM WITH PEOPLE’S WAR!

———

Signatories:

★

Revolutionary Student Movement - Toronto

 

★

People's School - Toronto

 

★

Guiding Thoughts

Publishers

★

Revolutionary Student Movement - Vancouver

 

This statement is also available here: t.ly/jZgX

 

Of course the above folks have been very critical of the various other Maoist groups. But they are putting something on that day.

 Then from Kites Journal we have this about a US organization:

 

KERSPLEBEDEB: What is kites? Who produces it?

Kenny Lake: kites published its first issue in January 2020, aiming to fill the need for communist theory and strategy for revolution in North America, and to do so in a way that wasn’t full of the same old dogmatism. Two organizations, Revolutionary Initiative (RI) in Canada and the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries in the US, took the initiative to start it. An editorial committee, consisting of comrades in the US and Canada, was formed in 2019 to take responsibility for producing kites. We published our second issue in October 2020 and our third is being released now in February 2021.

For the rest click here.

 

I've never met any of these US citizens or their organization. Maybe in time I will meet them. Then I can judge them for myself. So if any readers can find these groups, or others, on May 1, find them and join in.-Steve Otto

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[1] For example, see this passage from the Peru People’s Movement:

"As we already know, the RCP (USA) and its head Bob Avakian since the beginning of the RIM have opposed the struggle for imposing Maoism in different ways, but the question is how convergences with Avakian continue to exist within the ICM.

The goal of imperialism, that goes through its final crisis, is that revisionism lodges and thrives as an infectious parasite within the ICM so that the struggles of the masses do not go beyond the limit of reform. So that the masses that give their lives all over the world shall do so in the service of one or other imperialist superpower or power, so that they shall tail behind the interests of one of the factions of the big bourgeoisie; finally, so that the proletariat does not assume the leadership of the masses’ struggles, and to try to perpetuate the exploitation of one man by another. It is fundamental to derail the working class from its historical goal: communism, and precisely to this end serves the constant need to isolate the people’s war in Peru. For this reason, imperialism  and new revisionism has raised the new hoax that the PCP does not exist, or that there is no Central Committee that leads it, along with the attacks against the MPP."