May Day message by the Communist Party of Ireland
“Workers of all countries, unite!” has been the universal call of the workers’ movement since it emerged more than a century and a half ago.
We take this opportunity to salute the courage and tenacity of all workers battling against the covid-19 pandemic.
We offer our solidarity to those nations struggling to build socialism and independence under blockade. The imperialist powers are using the pandemic as an opportunity to intensify the pressure imposed upon millions of working people. The United States has stepped up its sanctions and blockades against Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Iran, ignoring appeals to at least suspend them and all hostile actions and to allow these countries to mobilise their resources to combat the disease. Yet despite the blockade Cuba has continued to extend the hand of solidarity to those struggling against injustice, oppression, and the global pandemic.
We stand in solidarity with those peoples and nations that face a military threat and violence from the forces of imperialism and their allies. Those same destructive forces and other capitalist industries are ensuring that our planet is being ransacked and destroyed by the actions of transnational corporations in their drive to exploit the natural resources that belong to us all, for profit to enrich a few.
Today this slogan continues to resonate around the world as billions of workers, poor and oppressed experience quarantine in the face of the global pandemic.
The capitalist system is in crisis and is headed into a global depression, with hundreds of millions of workers sacked, leaving many without any means to support themselves and their families, while at the same time a handful of individuals own more wealth than half the world’s population. This injustice can no longer be tolerated.
As never before, workers must organise to defend and advance our own interests. We cannot go on with “business as usual”; there must be no going back to “normal.” The political establishment, their ideas and institutions are bankrupt. We also know from experience that the ruling classes here in Ireland and around the world will attempt to make us pay a heavy price for the growing and deepening structural crisis of this failing capitalist system. We need to resist them at every stage and at every opportunity.
The time has long past for patching up this inhuman and decaying system. It is time for real, radical change—time to end the destruction of our planet and the impoverishment of its people, time to end the capitalists’ booms and busts, time to end global imperialist wars. It is now time for the interests of workers, peasants, the poor and oppressed to come first, a time for unity between women, men and youth, regardless of colour, religion, nationality, or sexual orientation. It is time for workers’ interests to come first and foremost in economic and political decision-making and to end once and for all the exploitation of man by man.
Workers of all countries, unite! We have nothing to lose but our chains, and a world to win!
