May Day! This is the day when politically conscious workers of the world put forth their demands and demonstrate their strength and international solidarity. May Day 2013 finds the workers faced with new, historic opportunities and with grave and growing dangers.
The shifting of production from human labor assisted by electronics to automated, electronic production without or with very little human labor is the central content of our time. It is re-doing all the economic and social relations of the past. It is putting social revolution on the agenda of our time.
Electronics shifts production from advanced industrial countries to low wage areas, and then from low wage areas back to the advanced countries as fully automated production. This process disarms the workers in their economic battle with the capitalists. They are now forced into the political arena and ultimately into a battle for state power and control of the economy. This is the prelude to political revolution.
New conditions have created a solid, objective foundation for revolutionary ideology. The struggles of the workers for the better world will, upon this new foundation, be victorious. The demands of the workers have moved from the realm of morality to the realm of necessity. Never before have the workers of the world been so interdependent and in such close communication. Electronics, in the process of creating worldwide production with a worldwide working class has raised proletarian internationalism from a moral goal to a relation necessary to the survival of the workers. Never before has their international solidarity arisen from a concrete and objective basis.
In years gone by, the workers could only achieve reforms made possible by changes in the economy. Today, the capitalist class is faced with the demand for fundamental, revolutionary social change because fundamental, revolutionary change is taking place in the economy.
May Day 2013 sees the shredding of the façade of bourgeois democracy by unending war, the looting of the national treasury and the steady decline of the living standards of the workers. As the bribery of the workers in the advanced countries declines and the people awake politically they are confronted with the rise of a violent fascist police state.
The world is on course for the decisive and final conflict. The exploiting class is already fighting back with the ferociousness of a wounded and dying beast.
Our forces are scattered, politically and ideologically confused. Yet, we celebrate this May Day with confidence in our class. Despite the exploiting class’ technology, their network of spies and agents, their seeming overwhelming military superiority, we know that the future belongs to us.
May/June 2013. Vol23.Ed3
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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