Message of ILPS chairman Crispin B. Beltran for May Day 2004
To the mass membership of the International League of People's Struggles (ILPS)
Working People of the World, unite!
This year we celebrate International Labour Day with greater determination to put an end to the war unleashed by imperialism against the working people of all nations. There are more and more signs that imperialism is in death throes, even as the monster governments that prop this destructive system continue to launch wars of aggression against nations who stand defiant. Imperialism is under siege.
The illusions the capitalist system have woven for a century have all been exposed as lies. Even those who claimed to support it and sang praises to it and its policies of liberalization, deregulation and privatization have slowly and shamefacedly begun to admit the weakness and even destructive nature of imperialism, or globalization.
In the belly of the beast, the US economy supposedly grew at a sizzling 8.2 percent in the third quarter. Job growth, however, was not the automatic result. The economy shed off about 2.6 million jobs since Bush took office. In the past few months, it has begun creating new jobs, but not nearly enough. It actually continued to lose jobs in the politically sensitive manufacturing sector, some 19,000 in the last months. Job creation in the US at the current rate will not make much of a impact on overall unemployment in the coming months. Long-term unemployed workers, now 24 percent of the total, are at their highest share since 1983.
Wages lag in the wake of inflation. Businesses have been assiduously cutting take-home pay by shifting health costs to employees through reduced workers contributions and higher out-of- pocket co-payments.
All over the world, meanwhile, governments deliberately ignore the demands of workers for immediate economic relief. Not only have the real value of wages gone down because of the continuing slide of the currencies of the majority of poorer nations' exchange value against the dollar; but employment has also deteriorated.
Workers and government employees have not received the slightest economic assistance from puppet governments. Wages and salaries have remained pegged to the floor, and other monetary, health, housing and insurance benefits have been slashed through infamous and treacherous means. The charges against governments that they dip into the various social security and health funds of the people are all true. International development agencies, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, impose a “one size fits all” strategy of liberalization and destroy economies in massive sweeps. At no period in recent history has the plight of the labouring sectors been as miserable as now.
In the face of all this, however, all over the world, workers, peasant, urban and rural poor join hands with other progressive and revolutionary sectors in denouncing globalization and the destruction it wreaks on the lives of billions. The collective outrage of billions is now being directed against governments such as that of the United States and Great Britain currently headed by the terrorist-tandem of George Bush and Tony Blair.
By launching an all-out war of aggression against the people of Iraq, and installing a pro-US regime, Washington hopes to tighten its grip on Persian Gulf oil--and all who depend on it. These global predators utilize and manipulate the war as the knife cutting and reshaping the region's political map and weakening anti-US resistance. According to the New York Times, top officials argue that “an Iraq under new governance could become a new Western ally, helping to reduce American dependency on bases in Saudi Arabia, to secure Israel's eastern flank and act as a wedge between Iran and Syria.”
Launching war against Iraq is also most evidently a crucial test of the so-called “Bush doctrine” of pre-emptive wars against any nations the US considers a threat. Those running the empire are determined to show the world that the US is prepared and able to crush any challenger, or obliterate any impediment to its power.
The US agenda in Iraq--and the whole “Bush doctrine"-have nothing to do with “protecting the world” or "saving the lives of American people” or the people of other nations for that matter. It is all about naked imperialist power politics--gangsterism on a global scale. And this the international progressive and revolutionary movement of the poor and working people know.
The propaganda of Bush and Blair regarding the international threat of terrorism and the supposed need reorient economies, military agenda and political administrative functions towards its defeat have failed to convince the majority of an international community now awakened and militated to condemn imperialism and its proponents' crimes against humanity. Daily, millions take to the streets to denounce the war and its proponents, imperialism and its puppets.
The challenges facing the international progressive and revolutionary people's movement today are unprecedented; but it is also true that, in expanding the reach of its bloodied talons for greater regional and global domination, US imperialism, along with its sycophant puppet governments are over-stretching its actual capabilities.
The forces the working people confront are daunting, and there is still a tremendous need to unite more and more people to the fight against imperialism; but no one doubts that the heroism of the revolutionary people's movement to continue their resistance, and all working people – the exploited and oppressed masses must stand shoulder to shoulder to build a genuine internationalist and revolutionary global movement to bring imperialism to its knees and defeat it once and for all.
Genuine proletarian internationalism offers the final resistance the toilers of the world, creators of history and civilization have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history. The people's movement is abetted by the enormously encouraging signs of strengthening militancy and revolutionary fervour of the masses. The end of imperialism is at hand.
Long Live International Solidarity! Workers of the World, Unite!
May1, 2004