Short Thoughts for May Day
Comrades-
It is today the first of May. Since Haymarket, this has been not simply a day to celebrate the mighty creative power of human labour, but a day of battle, a day of the fighters of the world working class and the exploited toilers and colonized and oppressed peoples of the world. Let this year be no exception.
There is an old American (I think it’s American) Christian song that says, of the Second Coming of Christ: stay awake! be ready! you do not know the hour when the lord is coming! As communists, we disdain all lords wherever they come from- but the message might as well be true about the coming of the revolutionary situation. We cannot know, and it would be mechanistic pseudoscience to claim to know, just when exactly the subjective conditions of the masses and the objective conditions of their state of life will be just so developed as for the Leadership to truly reconstitute a militarized leading Marxist-Leninist-Maoist communist Party to emerge and for the revolutionary People’s War to ignite.
As I look at this country today, I see huge masses of people waking up to the realities of the capitalist-imperialist world. Hardly anyone anymore can still believe it is tenable for the people to live in “democracy” only by choosing which of the two murderous bourgeois factions heads up the state and corporate apparatus of capital that exploits and brutalizes them, and the world. While both camps of the US imperialist bourgeoisie, their state, and the capital of their firms are committed ever more adamantly to the worldwide imperialist project, the American masses wake up more and more every day to the untenability of this contradictory political-economic mode. Today the uprising of college students against the imperialist capital intimately embedded in their universities, which profits at home by exploiting them and the workers of their schools and the establishments that support them, and abroad by violently taking over ownership and use of the peoples and resources of colonized countries, has cleaved together in a broad revolt the proletariat (many college students in North America today are proletarians), lumpenproletariat, the lower echelons of the petit-bourgeoisie, and even those who are sympathetic from the upper reaches and willing to betray their own interests for those of humanity and above all the world proletariat and peasantry and colonized peoples. This revolt has become a shot-heard-round-the-world. There can be no greater honor to the North American student movement than to see the faces of our rebels on banners in Yemen, Palestine, and more.
Stay awake! Be ready! You do not know the hour!
I look at this situation, and I think of Russia, in 1905. This was the first of Russia’s “three revolutions,” as they were once called. The second was Kerensky’s, for bourgeois republican rule; the third was the socialist one. In 1905 the toiling masses and their allied strata were not yet ready to take over large swathes of the country, to build up dual power, face capital on the battlefield, and conquer the country to use proletarian revolutionary state power to build a socialist society. But the nascent forms of what would become the organs of that new state-social order, the socialist Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat in the form of soviet republics, had begun to form. The soviets that took to the streets in 1905, after the firing of 12 years in the furnace and the emergence of a democratic vanguard leadership in the CPSU(b), were ready to unseat the bourgeoisie as ruling class and set up through revolutionary war a socialist society and proletarian state-social order.
I look at the US today and I cannot help but see a 1905 moment. Have we not the nascence of revolutionary rule, in our encampments and occupations? At Columbia? At Weylaunee? It is a humble start- but a start.
Of course, the movement against the Vietnam War was also a 1905 moment- and the 1917 to match hasn’t come yet. But it will.
Stay awake! Be ready!
We know that the communist revolution is inevitable, as inevitable as the tides. We know this because as long as there remain contradictions in the capitalist-imperialist system, between the private interests of a few bourgeois parasites and the collective interests of the proletarian mass, between imperialist capital’s drive toward abstract accumulation of value and the need of human beings and colonized nations for concrete use-values of their own from what they produce, between capital’s drive to accumulate infinitely and the finite scale of the ecosystem, the negation of one social force (capital, the bourgeoisie) by the other (proletarian power, communists) will continue and a resolution of struggle through the victory of the negating power will remain a necessary future outcome. Just as surely as, as long as the gravity of the Moon contradicts that of the Earth, there shall be tides. Any effort to suppress the proletarian rising, which comes to negate the same bourgeois power that was once itself the negation to feudalism, will only sharpen and heighten the contradictions of capital and its states against the workers and people of the world, making the revolution all the more necessary.
Historical necessity means we have no choice but to win- eventually. It does not mean we win this time, or next time, or the time after. But we cannot be stamped out. For the weapons the capitalist system wields against revolutionaries only further accentuate the circumstances that beget revolutionaries. So what if we lose again, and again, and again? History does not, cannot, end with a system that lasts forever. Nothing can ever last forever. The moment when capitalism dissolves in the revolutionary resolution of its social contradictions is inevitable, as sure as the tides. We must only keep fighting.
You do not know the hour!
To be a revolutionary, in the 1905 moment that comes before (we do not know how many years before) the 1917 moment is to be committed to a hard life, a long road, a continuous war-campaign of battle after battle. It is not a thing one can commit to for one’s own self-interest. For we know we, the present generation, may well not live to see the socialist republic in North America. But just as surely we know it will come, and we must do all we can to bring that moment closer, for those who will live to see it and to build it and to conquer this country for the proletariat.
We must go on fighting!
If we falter, we can only fire ourselves in the name of the collective interests of the proletariat and all humanity. Fight on in the name of our martyrs, those no longer here to fight. The dead of the Palestinian liberation struggle, and the ongoing revolutionary People’s Wars in Turkey, Peru, the Philippines, and India, and all the fights everywhere against imperialist big capital. In the name of the recently martyred heroes of the PLGA. And especially, in the name of our great Chairman Gonzalo, martyred in the prisons of the fascist comprador-bourgeois semicolonial state in his country, whose leadership was central to the world foundation of present-day Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought as the guiding ideology of the proletarian world revolution, whose work as a Great Leader in applying that thought to Peru, in the particular national guiding thought of MLMism-Pensamiento Gonzalo, forged universal lessons crucial to the further advancement of the world revolution today.
Fight on! Fight on!
To the barricades!
-Kelly Sears, California, May 1, 2024.
