Central Executive Committee, YCL-LJC
May, 2017
International Workers’ Day is a time to celebrate and advance our struggles as part of the ongoing fight for the emancipation of the working class around the world. Right now, continued global capitalist economic, environmental and social crises are fuelling imperialist war and reaction.
The global situation is increasingly desperate with young people being offered lives of poverty, precarious employment, unemployment, migration, criminalization, and no access to education. Youth around the world demand their right to a present and a future worth living. This right is being denied by the global capitalist system, which concentrates all society’s resources in the hands of a few to be used only to extract greater profits. It is a right that will be won through struggle and solidarity against imperialism by the world’s youth.
Faced with the horror of poverty, capitalism offers us the obscenity of private wealth: David Thomson and Galen Weston, the two richest Canadians, who possess more wealth than 11 million people living in Canada combined.
We are faced with the growth of imperialist war around the world with the Canadian government and NATO complicit in ramping up the drive to world war. We can see this in Iraq, Ukraine, and the Baltics where Canadian military forces are deployed, as well as in the government’s promise to deploy troops “somewhere” in Africa. In places facing imperialist aggression, Canada is also complicit, including Palestine, Korea, Yemen, Iran and Venezuela. In this dangerous and deadly international situation we must work to build a mass anti-war movement capable of moving towards an independent foreign policy of peace and international solidarity.
In addition to war, imperialism’s inability to move away from fossil fuels, and our own government’s insistence on building pipelines and expanding the tar sands, puts the very livability of the planet at serious risk. Now is the time to organize for system change, not climate change.
Increasing economic insecurity combined with Islamophobic, pro-war propaganda promoted by the corporate media, has created a situation where large sections of people have become susceptible to reactionary ideologies. The backdrop to this development is the capitalist crisis, which has caused sections of the ruling class to abandon liberal bourgeois ideas and embrace ultra-right and fascist movements. The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States was both helped by the rise of the ultra-right and also emboldened these movements. This has a reflection in Canada, which has its own deeply embedded history of racism created by ongoing colonialism of Indigenous peoples and the systemic oppression of racialized communities.
There is an urgent need for broad unity in action against the ultra-right, while recognizing that, we cannot abandon our struggle against the heart of the system that gives rise to fascism, war and reaction: capitalism.
But young people in Canada and around the world are fighting back as part of the working class resistance to capitalist crises. Across North America, precarious and low-paid workers, many of them young, are struggling for a $15/hr minimum wage and an end to poverty wages. Students from 40 cities across Canada last fall came together for a Pan-Canadian Day of Action for Free Education demanding their right to access post-secondary education and reverse privatization. Young workers and students have often led resistance to the growth of the ultra-right in recent months, demanding that no more lives be lost to white supremacist violence after the Islamophobic murders in Sainte-Foy, countering ultra-right mobilizations, demanding that refugees be welcomed, and Canada’s own racist immigration laws be reformed to allow this. These struggles and many more show that young people are in action and we can build and strengthen the fightback to the system’s exploitation and oppression.
This May Day arrives only a couple weeks before young Communists from across Canada are set to meet at the Young Communist League’s 27th Central Convention. We will convene under the slogan: “Now is the time to organize against imperialism and reaction. Honouring our past we build our socialist future”. In honouring our past we remember that this year marks the 100th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the first time in history that working people overthrew imperialism and built a socialist society, showing that another world is not only necessary, but possible.
Celebrating International Workers’ Day this year is also a part of honouring our past. We remember the first May Days as being a part of the struggle for the eight-hour day, for peace and for socialism. Today we look back proudly on the history of working people resisting capitalism and we look toward the defeat of imperialism for a world of peace and solidarity.