International May 1st, 2023: Take to the Streets!

WE REFUSE TO ACCEPT THIS SYSTEM’S FUTURE!

A Better World Without Oppression and Exploitation Is Possible

No U.S./NATO War With Russia!
Stop U.S. Threats Against China!
No World War 3!

It’s This System, Not Humanity, That Needs To Become Extinct!

NOW IS THE TIME
TO GET ORGANIZED FOR A REAL REVOLUTION

We—almost eight billion people on the earth now, are human beings. We do not have to live this way. A whole different way to organize society, a whole better world is possible…

This basic understanding must come through in everything we do over the next months and directly in preparation for International May 1st, 2023. Projected far and wide—it needs to be commented on, talked about in whispers, and shouted from roof tops… engaged in classrooms and online.

The revcoms, youth of different nationalities, students, people of all ages, everyone who is fed up, outraged, angry, passionate that no one should have to live and die with the way the world is doing people today. We are calling on you to be on a mission to put revolution on the map—and yes, learn about why and how and what for as you make this real. The people of the world, and our own futures, cannot afford for you, for us, to do less.

This May Day, we march under the main banner:

WE REFUSE TO ACCEPT THIS SYSTEM’S FUTURE!

A Better World Without Oppression and Exploitation Is Possible

We do so, understanding the urgency and the potential of this rare time in U.S. history. And we do so struggling hard with masses of people everywhere we can wielding the slogan of the mission we are on that:

NOW IS THE TIME TO GET ORGANIZED FOR A REAL REVOLUTION

NOW IS THE TIME because the future hangs in the balance over the next months and very few years. As Bob Avakian has analyzed, the crisis and deep divides in society today can only be resolved through radical means—either radically reactionary, murderously oppressive and destructive means, OR radically emancipating, revolutionary means. And this resolution could quite possibly happen, one way or the other, within the next few years. The radically reactionary path has momentum, including with two threats that could spell the end of humanity itself.

• The proxy war in Ukraine between the U.S. and Russia—it is still referred to, for now, as a proxy war because official U.S. troops are not directly fighting; instead, the U.S. is providing intelligence and arms with the Ukrainians doing the fighting and dying for the U.S./NATO bloc. This bloody war in Ukraine has become a conflict over which imperialist gangster can gain obscene advantage over the other in their global dog-eat-dog competition for dominance over people and resources. Now, in different ways they threaten use of nuclear weapons, but in the do-or-die logic they are committed to, threats can become real. A reality that defies comprehension.

Agitation and focus on the danger of this war, including the ratcheting up of war with China, and even China and Russia, will be the leading edge of May Day 2023.

• There are existential stakes as well with the destruction of the climate which is closing in on a tipping point where the possibility of reversing the damage done could become impossible. As illustration of this, you can’t just refreeze the polar ice caps which were millions of years in their creation when they melt—which they are doing at an accelerating pace. Two weeks ago, Joe—Mr. Climate President—Biden green-lighted drilling in the pristine wild arctic of Alaska for more oil, sending a message to the world that this country, which has done more damage to the environment than any other, is saying "fuck you" to the planet and its people.

This May Day it is not just these two existential situations that cry for RADICAL—pulling up by the roots—change to bring a new, liberating state power into being. Not a day goes by where someone, no, actually closer to three people, are shot down every day, beaten down or suffocated like dogs by the police… women have had their fundamental right to control their lives and are suffering tremendously as the fundamental right to abortion has been stripped away and continues to be under unrelenting assault with hundreds of new draconian laws on the dockets. And the same Christian-fascist forces that are going after women and abortion are aiming at LGBTQ people in a vicious, deadly political offensive with hundreds of more repressive laws. This motherfucking system—39 migrants, from at least six Latin American countries that the U.S. has savaged, were burned alive in a detention center just across the border from El Paso, Texas, as a result of the Democratic Biden administration illegally denying thousands of people asylum, leaving them in unsafe conditions on both sides of the border. All of this and worse is real. This is not a fucking video game that trains you, our youth, to be callous, indifferent and vicious.

The reality is that the intensified oppression and the continual increase of these society-wide shocking, dislocating jolts are shaking people deep in their core. And people really do care about each and all of these outrages. As Bob Avakian says in the Interviews he did on The RNL Show, he sees that caring from even the hardest youth when pushing their kids in their strollers: “I see you out there, pushing the little ones around. I see the pride that you have in the little ones. So don’t tell me you don’t care, because I know different and I know better. And there is a way, but we’ve got to give people the way. And that means a tremendous amount of struggle. It’s not just handing them a way, and they’re going to take it. It’s a tremendous amount of struggle. And we have to also, especially in this rare time when revolution becomes more possible, we have to get right down on the ground with them and explain in terms they can understand, and then get more into the complexities as we go along. But get them the basic thing, that there is a way out of all this. And right now, we have more opportunity than we’ve had in your lifetime or my lifetime to do this. And we can’t afford to be wasting this time and this opportunity in bullshit. We’ve got to get with this revolution so we can get all this shit off our backs, and make a future for the next little kids that you’re pushing along that’s worth living, so that they don’t have to go through what you’re going through now.” Students, too, even with their noses in their phones and careers on their minds, care too.

People care, but we have a lot of sharp struggle to wage to turn that caring that lies beneath the surface into thinking and acting in a totally different way that is in accord with the reality we face, challenging and inspiring them to get with the revolution that we need to free humanity. The very people who should and need to be with this revolution are mentally imprisoned in all forms of anti-scientific self-absorption—whether giddy, depressed, or viciously vindictive (sometimes with all three simultaneously). We need to and can crack this with sharp polemic that brings out both the actual situation to shake and wake people to the reality that’s unfolding while inspiring them, to be pulled towards, attracted to, the emancipating future that is possible through revolution on the basis of the new communism.

May 1st, 2023—A Message to the Masses of People Here and Around the World That There Is a Way Out of This Madness

People need to learn through the work, before and on May Day, that they have a leader, Bob Avakian, BA—who has developed an actual strategy for making a real revolution in this time and place. He has developed a foundation and roadmap for masses of people to take up the science of revolution as enriched in the new communism he developed and the vision and concrete blueprint for the new society in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America.

To get ready, not just for May Day but for revolution, masses of people need to be watching the BA Interviews on The RNL Show, getting into BA’s talks and writings on revcom.us. Key in preparing people for May 1st and for the future is The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show, which brings decisive weekly orientation for the movement for revolution.

I am going to put it to you straight: there is organization and a movement you need to get with and join as you learn more about the revolution. Get with the Revolution Clubs—people who critically think, wrestle with the big questions facing all of humanity with science and heart. Future people on fire taking revolution to the people. We revcoms crave a new world not for ourselves alone—we are living and fighting for the future of all the people of the world.  

Without you and many more like you doing this NOW, there will not be an emancipating future, but precisely the opposite. AND, history has shown… it can become too late. Just as there is a moment now of just months and a few years to try to stop and reverse the destruction of the earth’s climate, so too is there a moment when revolution is more possible that could be lost and on the other hand so much gained if we put this revolution on the map now. Let’s make May 1st 2023 an accelerant to getting ready for revolution.

Be a part of liberating humanity. Be a part of a serious force that has the vision, the science, the strategy and the heart, to organize for a real revolution now to bring about a radically new world.

Be a part of International May Day 2023.