May 1: Making International Workers’ Day a Day of Action Against Imperialism
End the War in Afghanistan, Shut Down AFRICOM, Resist the Militarized Occupation of Black and Brown Working-Class and Colonized Communities
War, repression, and imperialism characterize the objective plight of billions of humans still gripped by the vicious colonial-capitalist world system. May 1 is the day laboring classes claim for themselves as International Workers' Day to reaffirm the struggle against the dehumanization and degradation of the global capitalist order kept in place by state violence and war. May 1 also is the deadline the United States agreed to last year to pull out of Afghanistan to end the suffering of that nation of workers and peasants. It also is the day the workers and poor of Haiti have chosen to revolt against the puppet government imposed on them by the Biden-Harris administration, a duo that has proven in its first 100 days its commitment to Black life does not extend beyond domestic public-relations stunts.
Over a million Black working-class and poor people rot in the gulags of the United States as a surplus population, unneeded by capital except as an income generator for prison custodians and slave labor. And for the rest of the Black and Brown working class and poor, the domestic army referred to as the police are tasked with the responsibility to protect and serve the capitalist extraction of surplus value from labor through coercion and, when needed, terror.
This is the domestic expression of a global system that produces billions of people living in abject poverty in nations ruled by a contemptible neocolonial ruling class, usually supported by the United States or one of the other European colonial powers. These neocolonial puppets have no hesitation in using unimaginable violence to keep the people in line.
But the people are in resistance.
In Haiti, the people have fought for their collective dignity against a U.S. stooge for over a year. Having taken to the streets in the thousands, they have sustained the resistance to the point that the state has turned to increasingly desperate, escalating violence in its goal to contain the people.
In the United States, hundreds of wildcat strikes have occurred, demonstrating that even in the midst of a pandemic, the spirit of working-class resistance finds expression.
And in Venezuela, the Bolivarian process is still holding firm against all measures of U.S. provocations and cruel sanctions meant to punish the people, who refuse the indignity of surrender to Yankee imperialism.
The inability of capitalist states to protect the fundamental human rights of its citizens, revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic, has resulted in a new consciousness among workers and laboring classes globally. It now is clear the interests of the global capitalists are different from the interests of the rest of collective humanity. And because of that understanding, the warmongers are finding it a little more difficult to mobilize the public to protect imperialist interests.
On May 1, the Black Alliance for Peace stands in solidarity with the workers of the world and pledges our commitment to do our part to confront the capitalist dictatorship.
We say without hesitation or concern for retaliation on this International Workers' Day that we will intensify the opposition to imperialism. From the streets of Atlanta, Detroit and Baltimore, to Cuba, Haiti, Libya, and Venezuela, we will “turn imperialist wars into wars against imperialism.”
Banner photo: A sea of Cubans march under the slogan, "Preserve and Perfect Socialism," in Havana on May 1, 2012, to mark Labor Day. (Adalberto Roque)