By KD Tait
On May Day 2025 we demonstrate our international solidarity with working class and oppressed peoples fighting against the descent into great power rivalry and war which threatens people and planet with unprecedented barbarism. With our face against every attack, with our back against every attack, we rededicate ourselves to the struggle for workers’ power and socialism.
The possibility of strengthening our forces against the rising tide of reaction and outlining a path to a world free of exploitation, oppression and war is on display in the massive demonstrations against Donald Trump, the overthrow of the Syrian dictatorship, and protest movements of workers, women and youth, in Argentina, Turkey, South Korea, Greece, Kenya, and many other countries on all continents.
The trade wars, the attacks on democratic and social rights, the abandonment of multilateral climate commitments, and, above all, the massive rearmament programmes are a certain sign that the great powers are preparing to resolve the deep crisis of their system by plunging the world into a new war.
These policies are accelerating the ecological crisis, fomenting racism and xenophobia, and forging new chains of national and social oppression. Everywhere workers are made to pay the cost of the ruling class offensive. In this new era of great power rivalry, as new alliances are built and old ones unceremoniously dumped, there are no good camps to choose from. Neither Putin and Xi, nor the US Democrats and European social democracy, nor the fledgling or sclerotic dictatorships in India, Turkey, Hungary or Iran will act as a shield against, or brake on this descent into barbarism.
The United States, humiliatingly ejected from Afghanistan and Iraq, has now turned its attention to its own neighbours. Nuclear armed India and Pakistan menace each other in their struggle over Kashmir. Ukraine, bled white in its fight against Russian imperialism’s attempt to extend its neocolonial empire, confronts the prospect of many peoples before it – not least the Kurds – who placed their trust in Western imperialism.
The cynical claim that defence of Ukraine requires unprecedented rearmament and the slashing of what remains of the working class’ postwar gains in healthcare, education and social security has to be exposed. The European Union is exploiting the United States’ America First policy with its own European imperialism first policy, positioning itself as the third imperialist bloc – with the requisite military capacity to enforce its will in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Against the crystallisation of a world of armed camps of thieves and exploiters, Workers Power calls for an internationalist movement against imperialist war and militarism, based on the independence of the working class, which is the only standpoint from which it can organise real solidarity with justified struggles against invasion, and with national liberation struggles – from Ukraine to Palestine. Only proletarian internationalism can steer our struggle successfully against the imperialist powers or their regional allies oppressing national minorities in Kurdistan, Myanmar, the Sahel, and elsewhere.
As the 20th century opened with the genocide of the Armenians and indigenous Namibians, so the 21st has seen genocidal campaigns against the Uyghurs, the Rohingyas, and, in full glare of the world’s media, with the participation or connivance of the great powers, of the Palestinians.
The heroic resistance of the Palestinian people against Israel, the historic movement of international solidarity has confirmed two inescapable facts: that imperialism, red in tooth and claw, has no progressive side, liberal or conservative; and that the working class and its organisations in the imperialist centres have the potential, but not yet the organisation or leadership, to force their rulers to bring Israel to heel.
The Gaza genocide and the Ukraine war show the need to rebuild the international working class movement on a rigorous programme of anti-imperialism and defence of the rights of nationally oppressed peoples. Without this, the leadership of progressive struggles is left to reactionary organisations whose fundamental objectives and methods are opposed to the interests of the struggling masses.
Another world is possible and necessary. A world based on the common ownership of humanity’s ecological patrimony and its industrial and intellectual creations, in which production is democratically planned to meet the needs of people and planet, not the competition for the accumulation of privileges and profits.
As the world’s capitalist rulers step closer to war and rearm, they will also demand that the working class foots the enormous bill for their weapons of mass destruction, with cuts to pay, social services and sustainable environment. Our response must be not only, Welfare not Warfare, but Not a Penny nor a Person for the Defence of their System!
On International Workers’ Day, we call on the workers of Britain and the world, of oppressed nations and oppressor states, to join in the largest possible numbers to highlight the historic objective of the working class and its allies everywhere: the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist class and the inauguration of the worldwide socialist order and federation of nations.
In the movements of resistance to the menace of fascism, against the fatalism of ecological catastrophe, against the enslavement of oppressed peoples, against the new chains imposed on women and LGBT+ people, and against militarism and war, we call for the building of a new, Fifth, communist International, which can unite the revolutionary energy and aspirations of the masses in the struggle for socialism.
