May Day, now reduced to a farcical festive occasion, was originally established as the international day of struggle for the proletariat following a bloody incident in Chicago in 1886. On 1 May of that year, during a strike for the reduction of the working day to eight hours, the police fired on the crowd attending the rally, causing the deaths of numerous workers. That tragic event and the class-based significance this day has held ever since are now nothing but a memory. The bourgeoisie, which caused those deaths and subsequently brutally suppressed so many other struggles of the global workers’ movement, has, over long decades of democratic intoxication, managed to appropriate this occasion, transforming it into an interclassist festival, a sterile republican celebration of social pacification.
Yet workers today have absolutely nothing to celebrate: instead, they must return to the struggle against a social and economic system which, in addition to provoking an unbroken sequence of crises and wars, subjects them to the continuous deterioration of their living and working conditions.
This widespread attack on workers’ material conditions, which states and governments—whether right-wing or left-wing—are all implementing, is dictated by the intensifying international crisis, which thus forces the various national bourgeoisies to shift the burden of increased global economic competition onto the shoulders of the working class. And it is precisely the worsening of this crisis of capitalist overproduction that intensifies the trade conflict and amplifies the economic and political contradictions between competing imperialisms. It is a short step from trade war to actual warfare: it is in fact the very dynamics of capitalism that lead to war, understood as the extreme solution to its recurring crises.
And so, after the first and second Gulf Wars, after Bosnia and Kosovo, after Afghanistan, we have arrived at the current armed conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, with the massacres of defenceless proletarian masses.
In the Middle East, yet another clash is unfolding between competing capitalist powers for control and management of an area of strategic importance due to the energy reserves it contains. Whoever controls that area dominates the flow of oil and reaps the profits, gaining an enormous advantage over their direct or potential economic rivals.
Proletarians, comrades!
The sole provocation of war is the very existence of the capitalist social system. The inevitable crises of overproduction, which truly decimate the rate of profit, end up transforming into wars of plunder and destruction, into imperialist wars for a new division of markets. Therefore, capitalism and peace are incompatible, and the conflicts that are multiplying and intensifying are concrete proof of this. But the bourgeois regime, which seeks to impose social peace as a guarantee of rights and freedom, confirms to us instead that in daily life, the dignity of one’s condition and the possibility of struggle can only be achieved through the exercise of force.
Proletarians, Comrades!
The current economic crisis is a fundamental collapse of the world economic system, a large-scale manifestation of the general crisis of capitalism, and given its depth, it presents no historical solution other than the alternative: either revolution or war! The revolution will come if war is halted in its tracks and turned on its head, that is, if war is prevented from developing. For this to be possible, a powerful international party must be organised on the principle that only by overthrowing capitalism can the cycle of wars be stopped.
In short, the alternative is this: either war prevails, or revolution prevails.
It is therefore hypocritical to believe, as pacifists of various religious or secular persuasions do, that wars—or violence in general—can be abolished through conferences, marches or torchlight processions. Any demand based on the pretence of a capitalism without wars is both hypocritical and futile.
For the international proletariat, there are no ‘just wars’ to defend or support! The only way to break the vicious circle that periodically generates crisis and war is through revolutionary defeatism, the breaking of national solidarity with one’s own bourgeoisie, class solidarity, and the struggle for one’s own exclusive immediate and historical objectives.
The institutional trade unions remain firmly committed to collaboration: they are concerned with keeping the proletariat constantly tied to the bourgeoisie’s cart. And so it has been for decades; they yield on all fronts, constantly accepting new sacrifices and the worsening of living and working conditions.
In the face of redundancies, wage cuts, and the rise in flexible working arrangements and precarious employment that are affecting every sector of the economy day after day, trade union opportunists, with the help of left-wing politicians, are promoting social peace and preaching national harmony. And all this finds its fitting global representation on May Day, which has been transformed into a democratic festival characterised by light music and the waving of national flags—those very same flags under which, in the not-too-distant future, the proletariat will once again be lined up for the next world war.
Comrades, workers!
We call for the resumption of the workers’ struggle, for the immediate aims of defending their own condition and for the historic aims of the emancipation of the working class, through the weapon of Marxist criticism:
- For the revival of class solidarity above all productive categories, all religions, races and nations;
- For the unity of all struggles;
- For the uncompromising defence of class interests;
- For substantial wage increases and a significant reduction in the working day without any reduction in pay.
A revival of the political class struggle is necessary under the leadership of the Revolutionary Party, consistent with the teachings of the 1848 ‘Communist Manifesto’:
“The Communists do not conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be achieved only by the violent overthrow of the existing social order. Let the ruling classes tremble at the thought of a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”
01/05/2026
International Communist Left – at the Magrè Workers’ Circle. Via Cristoforo Magrè, 69, Schio (Vi)
La Sinistra Comunista Internazionale 
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