Towards May Day 2019!

Let us Fight for Socialism and our Demands!

Today, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) begins its twelfth year of existence with the launching of a broad political offensive against the Canadian imperialist bourgeoisie. We are setting forth on a 15-month campaign which will notably aim to organize a vast and robust group of workers and proletarians for May Day 2019, when we will call for a demonstration of a new breadth in downtown Montreal, to be joined by combative actions elsewhere in Canada, marking the centennial of the Winnipeg General Strike in red ink. With this initiative, we will allow the revolt of the popular masses to grow and we will bring the confrontation with the bourgeois Canadian state to a superior level.

At the moment, the proletariat as a whole is deprived of clear and hopeful perspectives, deprived of a leadership that could allow it to discern a brighter future. A great part of it is deprived of the organic links connecting it to the organized revolutionary movement which could allow it to gain confidence in its potential for action and to awaken to new and emancipatory forms of struggle. The proletariat is deprived of its historical and international class experience which could allow to it to apprehend possibilities that, until now, have gone untapped. This is the state of things that our campaign will aim to transform. Throughout 15 months, we will go to the proletarian masses and promote socialism as the only emancipatory political perspective and as the only alternative to the capitalist system currently dominating the world. We will recall the most important struggles led by the working class in the history of this country, including the heroic struggle of the working men and women who rose up in Winnipeg in 1919, roused by the global upheaval the October Revolution in Russia had triggered two years earlier. We will remind all of society that since this country’s foundation, these struggles have always constituted the greatest existing threat to modern order—one need not look further than the repression they provoked—since they carry the seed of the abolition of exploitation and the establishing of new social relations. We will remind all of society that it is the proletariat who, still today, is the only unconditionally revolutionary class, the only force capable of wholly transforming society. During 15 months, we will be present in working-class neighbourhoods, in public transit, in front of factories and high schools, with one slogan: “Let us Fight for Socialism and our Demands!”

What do we mean by this slogan? Certainly not the same thing as the majority of organizations and activists on the far-left, who understand the struggle for immediate demands to be a first step, at the moment, to bring the masses to gradually develop their will to struggle against capitalism. Unlike that which is said by these organizations—or implied their practical activity—we do not say “Let us first lead the movement for demands and afterwards struggle for the revolutionary transformation of society.” We do not say “Let us struggle to improve our conditions of existence here and now, pending society-wide revolutionary crisis, pending a massive and spontaneous popular uprising against capitalist order, in a hypothetical future.” We do not say “Let us make society progress, step by step, and fight, gradually and until socialism, so that the suffering of the proletariat may diminish and capitalism may take on a more ‘human’ face.” What we say to the contrary is that we must develop and organize the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat immediately, even if that does not necessarily promise us immediate gains, since that is the only manner in which we can one day satisfy all of the rightful demands of the masses, demands that we resolutely support, independently of the possibility of their resolution within the framework of capitalist social relations! By our slogan, we mean that the struggle for socialism totalizes the sum of these demands, that it turns them in to a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

We are side-by-side with proletarians struggling for wages, for housing, for safety, for respect. If workers can force the bourgeoisie to consent to the occasional improvement to their immediate living conditions, then so much the better! This being said, we do not blind the proletariat with illusions in the ways of reformists and opportunists: under capitalism, these improvements will always be partial and temporary; above all, they will never concern the proletariat as a whole. A gift from the bourgeoisie in one hand is always followed by a confiscation by the other; the concessions made on one day pave the way for the successful attacks of the next day. Under the bourgeois regime, the heaviest tendency will always be the deterioration of the conditions of existence of the popular masses. The temporary success of a given struggle for an immediate demand must not allow us to forget this fundamental truth. Put another way, the struggle for immediate gains will always, in itself, be a narrow and confined struggle. The proletariat as a social class will always lose at the end of the day if it does not wage the political struggle for power to completely abolish the capitalist mode of production. We say that we must therefore struggle for our demands—for all our demands—without worrying about whether or not they are compatible with the persistence of the capitalist regime, since the only consideration for us is that they represent our interests and they are right! Lastly, we affirm that the founding of socialism and the transition towards communism is the only way to answer all of these demands, to fix all of the problems caused by the capitalist mode of production, and this, not only temporarily but definitively.

Struggling for our demands, understood as struggling for socialism, requires of us that we adopt other forms of struggle, other forms of organization, other forms of action. By its totalizing character, the true struggle for socialism gives birth to something new: it allows the masses to develop revolutionary practice. This is why our slogan would be meaningless if the political campaign behind it were not orchestrated in such a way as to massively stir to action. May Day 2019 will be one of these moments where mass revolutionary action will be deployed in broad daylight, materializing itself in a physical confrontation with the bourgeois State, in a shock between the old world and the new, emerging one. It will be the moment to test the fruits of 15 months of organizing, to fathom our ideas’ penetration into the masses. Far from being a simple day, far from being reduced to its commemorative aspect, May Day 2019 will above all be a living test: it will be the moment where the Canadian revolutionary movement will activate the forces thus far accumulated, the moment that will allow us to corroborate all the work thus far realized, to determine what we are capable of, and what we can count on from that day forward. It will be a flamboyant show of force, giving confidence to the proletariat and fright to the bourgeoisie! All at once it will be the end point of a long campaign and the beginning of a new step in the development of the revolutionary struggle in Canada. This will be the first in a series of extensive proletarian offensives led by the Party, a series of offensives that ultimately will give birth to People’s War in this country.

Let us launch the Workers’ Spring: Towards a Revolutionary May Day!

Our 15-month campaign will be composed of multiple phases, and punctuated by multiple important days of action that will be the center of gravity of all of our activity. The subsequent acquiry of experience, the generation of new enrolments, the establishment of networks and the organizational work that will need to be accomplished to make all this happen, and for which active participation will be solicited from all those who could be interested in our initiative, at the height of their abilities: all of this will constitute the living material with which we will build the mechanisms intended to light the blaze in May 2019.

We called the first phase of the campaign “Workers’ Spring: Towards a Revolutionary May Day!” This phase will essentially be intended to pose two milestones on our way forward: the first is Revolutionary March 8th, International Working Women’s Day, and the following, a little less than two months later, Revolutionary May Day. On March 8th of this year we will organize an evening demonstration in downtown Montreal, intended to reclaim the proletarian and class-struggle character of March 8th, a day which, lest we forget, was originally added to the calendar by communists as a tribute to the fighting spirit of the women of the proletariat. The demonstration will be an occasion for workingwomen from the Montreal area to reappropriate this day of struggle, long since co-opted by the bourgeoisie, and to come and express their revolutionary enthusiasm in the streets. The women of the proletariat, far too long forgotten on March 8th, will now be at the forefront! For progressive activists who are already accustomed to taking to the streets on the day, the RCP’s demo will allow them to do so without collaborating with the police—unlike the reformists who have been organizing the March 8th rallies for years—and without being held to the respect of bourgeois legality.

As for May Day 2018, the RCP is calling once again to mark the day by charging the “Golden Square Mile”, headquarters of the Canadian imperialist bourgeoisie in Montreal. This will be the fourth year in a row that we will be assailing the same location, in the very belly of the hideous beast that is Canadian capitalism, where the wealth produced by our class, the wealth embezzled from us gets piled up, where the bloodstained treasures plundered from nations the world over are hoarded, where the oppressors of humanity go about their sordid business. This year, we will again make our footsteps heard between the walls of their buildings! We will flood their district with our red flags and banners! We will attack their properties and we will not stop until they are damaged! We will fight their police in the streets! Our message will be clear: One day, the oppressors will be punished! One day, the wretched of the Earth will free themselves of their chains!

With every year, the intensity and the strength of the May Day march grows, for with every year, we gain in experience and we accumulate more forces. Every year, new comrades join the battle, recognizing the nobility of our cause and enthused by the idea of confronting the reactionary class in the street. Every May Day, we deliver blows more audaciously and more vigorously, and the forces of repression learn to fear us more. Our ranks grow thicker and our solidarity grows stronger. The echo of our action resounds further and further among the proletarian masses. This advance will not stop. As for those activists who are already plunged in the torrent of revolutionary struggle, May Day 2018 will be sort of a dress rehearsal for May Day 2019. In 15 months, our target will again be the “Golden Square Mile”, hardened by the confrontations of all the past years, and with multiplied strength!

This winter and this coming spring, in the weeks preceding these two days of action, we will go to the factory workers, warehouse and construction labourers, shopping mall employees, and we will urge them to come out of their neighbourhoods and to come demonstrate against the bourgeoisie in the streets. We also urge proletarians and activists of the metropolis to take part in political education by visiting the Montreal Communist School (École Communiste de Montréal), at the Maison Norman Bethune. These activities will also serve as contact points for all those interested in participating in the campaign and engaging themselves in the revolutionary movement led by the RCP!

Long Live the Workers’ Spring: Towards a Rrevolutionary May Day!
Everywhere, Let us Bring About the Sparks That Will Light the Flame on May Day 2019!