May Day is the day on which workers throughout the world, overcoming the barriers of nation, race and religion, confirm that they are joined together as one class, are united by the same interests, and are fighting the same battle to free themselves from exploitation and poverty.

May Day 2015 finds proletarians everywhere in a situation which has been getting worse and worse for years due to the crisis of world capitalism.

Bourgeois propaganda is keen to exaggerate the small signs of recovery in industrial production emerging in the United States and has announced that the crisis is over, when in fact it is only just beginning; already it is spreading and deepening and now it is hitting China. All the financial measures carried out by the United States, Japan, China and Europe to ‘kick start’ production will only result in a new financial bubble that will burst in a few months’ time, and which will be much worse than the one in 2008, which made the comatose state of the capitalist economy abundantly clear in the middle of a major crisis of over-production.

This crisis, which has been forecast and expected by revolutionary Marxism as an inevitable consequence of the capitalist system of production, has already thrown tens of millions of proletarians out of work throughout the world, pushed down wages, and resulted in the dismantling of the so-called ‘Welfare State’. And competition between workers will keep on making the situation worse if the class proves unable to prevent it by mobilising against it, by means of reorganisation and class struggle.

The economic crisis is also intensifying the clashes between imperialist states, great and small, who are competing to: acquire new markets where they can sell off their surplus production; to control the areas rich in the raw materials needed to reproduce capital; and to position themselves strategically in anticipation of the third world war. The war to control the sources of oil, which the ’terrorists’ are fighting, financed by the opposing imperialist centres, has devastated the entire Middle East, and in particular, Iraq, Syria and Libya, and has forced tens of thousands of refugees to abandon their homes fearing for their lives. The contest between the old and the new imperialist powers is also spreading to Africa.

Europe has seen war return to its eastern borders. A few years ago national and religious divisions served as the pretext for the partition of Yugoslavia. Today, the fragility of the Ukrainian state has allowed the United States to interpose itself between Germany and Russia and provoke bloody clashes, which yet again seek to divide the proletariat and harness it to the interests of the various bourgeois States.

In the Far East the arms race embarked upon by bourgeois and capitalist China, which is committed to gaining control of an area commensurate with its economic power by shattering the equilibrium established at the end of the second imperialist war, is bringing it into conflict with the neighbouring states of Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and Vietnam; and in open defiance of the United States, which dominates the surrounding seas with its atomic fleets.

The bourgeois myths of progressive disarmament and of peaceful coexistence between states, which have somehow survived two deadly world wars, are belied by the continual increase in armaments production, including atomic weapons, and by the increasingly violent clashes between the imperial juggernauts, even if for now they are being conducted as proxy wars between mercenary and irregular forces, such as the Islamic State militias.

The small States are the first to pay the price of this power politics; however, the proletariat in these countries, and internationally, mustn’t allow itself to get drawn into the defence of national interests, as for example the ‘left-wing’ government is attempting to do in Greece, by stoking up patriotism and resistance to the economic aggression of Germany, or as the Chavist government is attempting to do in Venezuela, against United States imperialism. And when a war is already taking place the proletariat shouldn’t feel it has to line up on one of the two opposing bourgeois fronts as is happening, for example, in Palestine, where the only revolutionary perspective is that of a single working-class State opposed to both the Israeli and the Arabic bourgeoisie, who have been using proletarians as cannon fodder for decades, although mainly Palestinian proletarians for sure.

Only with its own party, founded on a sound theory of its own, which encompasses a comprehensive vision of the world which we call Marxism, will the working class be able to repel these opportunist influences and the corrupting ideologies of the enemy classes; only then will it be a class that can fight for its own interests. This party is the revolutionary and internationalist Communist Party, which from the very outset rejected all the bourgeoisie’s false principles, above all democracy, in the knowledge that the engine of history is powered not by opinions, but by class struggle.

The bourgeoisie will never relinquish its miserable privileges unless forced to do so. It prefers war, so it is up to the global proletariat to take up the challenge: by engaging in an economic war to defend wages, organised in genuine class trade unions, against the economic war of the bourgeoisie to defend its profits; by engaging in the revolutionary class war against the wars between bourgeois national states, and organised and led by its own united and disciplined international communist party.

We don’t know how long the death throes of the capitalist beast will last, but what we do know, drawing largely on the lessons of the past century, is that the organs of the revolution, that is Party and trade union, must have prepared themselves well before the revolutionary crisis breaks out, in order to be recognised and utilised by the class. Working to form the political and defensive organs of the working class today, in the midst of the enduring counter-revolution is already communism, is already revolution.

This party already exists in embryonic form today, as the International Communist Party.