By Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson, ILPS International Coordinating Committee
1 May 2007
The International League of Peoples' Struggle extends its most militant greetings to the workers and other toiling people of the world on the occasion of International Workers' Day.
We commemorate the first May Day in 1887 when hundreds of thousands of workers struck in every major American city calling for an 8-hour workday. In Chicago, the police brutally attacked the strikers and demonstrators. A rally in Haymarket Square to protest the police brutality was also attacked. A number of labor leaders were framed on trumped up charges and hanged while others were thrown in prison.
One hundred twenty years later, the workers still suffer from the barbarities of capitalism. They have to struggle to achieve their own emancipation and the emancipation of mankind.
May 1 has become a symbol of the struggle for the emancipation of the working class from all forms of exploitation and oppression under capitalism.
The workers and other toiling people of the world, especially those in the underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America are subjected not only to the overt violence of the bourgeois state; they suffer even more from the daily violence of the exploitative and oppressive system of capitalism.
More than half the world - nearly three billion people - live on less than two dollars a day.
The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the poorest 48 nations (i.e. a quarter of the world's countries) is less than the wealth of the world's three richest people combined.
Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.
The poorer the country, the more likely it is that debt repayments are being extracted directly from people who neither contracted the loans nor received any of the money. The underdeveloped world now spends $13 on debt repayment for every $1 it receives in grants.
20% of the population in the developed nations consume 86% of the world's goods.
A few hundred millionaires now own as much wealth as the world's poorest 2.5 billion people.
Approximately 790 million people in the developing world are still chronically undernourished, almost two-thirds of whom reside in Asia and the Pacific.
According to UNICEF, 30,000 children die each day due to poverty. And they "die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world." That is around 11 million children a year.
It is very ironic that the working people who are responsible for creating the wealth in the world are confined to a life of misery and deprivation.
In the imperialist countries, the workers suffer from low wages, high unemployment and job insecurity. Their democratic right to form unions and to strike are restricted. The workers in the underdeveloped world are even more exploited and oppressed.
More than ever there is a need for struggle and resistance. The proletariat and other working people in the imperialist countries are rising up to fight for their rights. The peoples in the oppressed countries are fighting for democracy, social justice and national liberation. ILPS reaffirms its commitment to exert all efforts in support of the struggle of the workers and other toiling masses to build a new and better world free from the exploitation and oppression of imperialism and all forms of reaction.
Long live the workers and oppressed peoples of the world!
Advance the struggle for democracy, national liberation and social emancipation!
Long live international solidarity!
