MEDIA RELEASE: Let’s Unite and Organize for May Day 2016 in Sudbury!

A day to celebrate the power of workers, who create all the value in the world, yet are robbed of it daily by capitalists! A day to remember the history of workers’ struggles against all forms of domination, while educating, uniting, and empowering the working class today! May Day was born in fierce class struggle and is an expression of international workers’ solidarity, a recognition of our shared interests as proletarians. It is a call for workers all over the world to unite against those who oppress and exploit us: the bourgeoisie, the rich and powerful owners of capital.

In May of 1886, workers were killed by police in the Chicago Haymarket Massacre while demonstrating for an 8-hour work day. Three years later, May 1st was named International Workers’ Day by the most conscious and organized revolutionaries of the time to serve as a reminder of battles fought by our class and the continued need for an organized and revolutionary workers’ movement. In occupied Canada on May Day 1919, industrial workers of Winnipeg went on strike for higher wages, leading to the great Winnipeg General Strike in which over thirty thousand participated.

Today in Sudbury, the bosses and the state are squeezing ever more out of us through poverty wages, back-to-work legislation, the recent deregulation of store hours that puts us on-call whenever they demand, and other anti-worker tricks. Our already high unemployment continues to rise as the mining giants shut down operations due to low returns on investment, leaving over 7400 people in town unable to find work. Gentrification has brought a skyrocketing cost of living, with rent prices rising dramatically, an explosion in food bank use, and hikes in city transit fares across the board. Just an hour out of Sudbury, treaty lands of the Atikameksheng Anishnawbek are being logged and poisoned without consent, with backing from the state. And the cuts to our social programs keep on coming: the real income for people on social assistance continues to fall; the only public daycare in town, and the only one open evenings for those who don’t work 9-5, was closed in 2014; and the replacement for the gutted CSUMB is less adequate than ever.

May 1st belongs to the whole of the working class: the employed and unemployed, the organized and unorganized, here and elsewhere! And let’s not forget those of us doing household reproductive work, those super-exploited through racialized or feminized labour, all those who suffer most under the current system of exploitation, alienation, and oppression of workers and the people. Let us strive to unite our class, the only force capable of leading a revolutionary movement to dismantle the power of capital over the world.

Toward a united, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, combative and festive May Day!

RCP(OC)-Sudbury calls on all workers young and old, the unemployed, proletarian students, and anyone else sympathetic to the struggle of the working class to join the Sudbury May Day Committee. Working as an internally democratic coalition (i.e. by majority vote) guided by the five principles below, we will organize a successful May Day in our city:

★ Anti-capitalism! Capitalism is the primary cause of the misery, poverty, alienation, oppression, and exploitation of workers. It is a mode of production that pits the capitalist class – the minority who control and profit from production – in a struggle to the death with the working class – the majority who sell their labour power to live. Workers and capitalists have a fundamentally antagonistic set of interests that cannot be reconciled. There can be no final liberation for workers until we act independently as a class to overthrow the capitalists, and build a society in which the working class calls the shots!

★ In solidarity with the anti-colonial struggle of Indigenous nations! This country was built on the theft of Indigenous lands, labour, and resources. On that basis it has grown into a powerful imperialist country in its own right. As a settler-colonial state, Canada subjugates the First Nations, Inuit, and Metis within its borders in the interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie. To this day, Indigenous nations are among the most oppressed and super-exploited sections of the people. Our fight against capitalism must go hand-in-hand with the anti-colonial struggle of Indigenous peoples!

★ Anti-imperialism! From Haiti to Syria, the atrocities of Canadian imperialism are plain to see, shattering the idea of Canada as an international peacekeeper. ‘Our’ imperialist bourgeoisie participates in super-exploiting and oppressing the people abroad. Although sections of the working class here have been ‘bought off’ with the ensuing super-profits, this truce cannot withstand the mounting crisis of imperialist capitalism today. The bourgeoisie then tries to deflect our anger toward other workers and oppressed groups – migrants, Muslims, and Indigenous nations. We must reject any attempt by the enemy to divide us or to gain our support for war on the peoples of the world. We stand with the the peoples’ struggles against imperialism, including Canadian imperialism!

★ Independent from and against the bourgeois state! The courts, parliaments, police, prisons, military, and other Canadian state bodies do not serve the workers and the people, but ensure our all-round domination by the capitalists. The bourgeois state exists to shape us to the needs of capital, maintain profits through austerity measures, colonial plunder, and imperialist wars. It represses us when we step out of line and co-opts our movements. Far from a neutral body, it is the concentrated power of the capitalist class and its allies. Both in defending our basic conditions of life and in fundamentally transforming the world, we must fight against bourgeois state power, in step with building an independent new proletarian and popular power!

★ International workers’ solidarity! Workers have common class interests that transcend national borders. On May 1st, workers across the globe in both dominant and dominated countries will participate in mass demonstrations, militant actions, and festive events to give life to our collective vision for a new liberated world. The workers of Sudbury will join them in asserting our commitment to struggle by all means for the complete realization of this necessity.

Bring your ideas and energy to the launch meeting of the Sudbury May Day Committee onWednesday, April 6, 6-8pm at 84 Station Cafe (84 Elgin St, downtown Sudbury). Contact us if you represent a group that would endorse or participate in the Committee. We encourage supporters to please consider making donations of funds, food or other resources, as the May Day Committee is a grassroots initiative of volunteers without ready access to large resources.
 

Follow the Sudbury May Day Committee on Facebook and our website.
 
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