The International May Day event took place:

Worker, internationalist, and for the socialist revolution!

Organized by the Trotskyists of the FLTI

From the Black Africa...

Speech by James of the Worker's International League (WIL)
of Zimbabwe

We salute this May Day and come to express the voice, silenced a thousand times over, of the African working class, the most exploited sector in the world, which produces enormous wealth and suffers martyrdom, genocide, famine, unemployment, and plunder at the hands of a handful of black bourgeoisies who enrich themselves by doing business with transnational imperialist corporations over a sea of starving slaves.

Comrades: this day finds the African continent experiencing the greatest plunder in its entire history.  Imperialist pirates and the native bourgeoisies grow ever richer at the expense of our oil, gas, minerals, and raw materials, obtained through the labor of millions of workers and peasants across the continent, subjected daily to the lash of hunger and the bullets of the bourgeoisie when we rise up and say “Enough!”

One hundred million of our children, as young as three years old, are exploited by imperialist mining companies as slave labor in agriculture and to extract the minerals and rare earth elements coveted by the technology industry, at the service of imperialism and its weapons of war, with which our brothers and sisters in Gaza and Lebanon are being massacred today in the Middle East. These wretched modern-day slaveholders don't even wait for our children to be fed and grow up before exploiting them in their quest to amass fortunes!

 In order to put food on the table, day after day, miners forced into the informal sector, exploited by imperialist mining companies, risk their lives in precarious mines that can collapse at any moment, as often happens in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Millions of our brothers and sisters drown in the Mediterranean or are gunned down by European imperialist rifles when they try to cross borders in search of decent work to feed their families, attempting to escape war and famine.

The African bourgeoisies, servants of imperialism, subject us to these humiliations, and the Stalinist leaderships of the parties and unions in imperialist countries silence our suffering, separate our struggles and demands from those of our class brothers and sisters in Europe and the US, and thus have crushed every attempt we have made to rise up.

Comrades: those Stalinist leaderships that today call left and right throughout the world to fight against the “far right” and “fascism” are the same ones that yesterday diverted our revolutions and national liberation struggles. They installed governments like those of ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe, MPLA in Angola, FRELIMO in Mozambique, and the ANC in South Africa, which rule with an iron fist over millions of starving people, while guaranteeing the blatant imperialist theft of our wealth, our land, and our labor.

 We are the Black working class that was enslaved and taken to every continent under the worst conditions to build the foundations of factories, cultivate plantations, and extract wealth from mines upon which the foundations of the capitalist empires of Europe and the United States were built. For this reason, we are part of the vanguard in the struggles that shook the citadels of power, as the Black Vests did in the French Fifth Republic. We are the ones who built the Black Lives Matter movement, which terrified Trump and forced him to take refuge five stories underground, and which was later co-opted by the Democratic Party, from which emerged the genocidal Biden, who, along with Netanyahu, initiated the genocide against the people of Gaza in 2023.

The descendants of the slaveholders will pay for every martyrdom, massacre, and genocide they have inflicted upon our Black brothers and sisters!

 Decade after decade of capitalist barbarity, we have never stopped rising up to break the yoke of oppression, massacre, and hunger imposed by this pestilent system. Decade after decade, we have never stopped trying. In recent months, as in Nepal and Indonesia, in Africa, young people and the exploited have been at the forefront of revolutionary processes and insurrections: Cameroon, Madagascar, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Morocco are just a few examples. In every case, the struggle for land, against governments that exploit the people, and against the IMF's plans have been the catalysts. Unfortunately, on every occasion, the political and union leaderships that masquerade as our allies have betrayed the struggle here and around the world. Nevertheless, we must try again.

This May Day, we say: our Chicago Martyrs are the 34 miners of Marikana, murdered for going on strike against the imperialist mining companies and their lackeys in the ANC government;  Our Chicago Martyrs are the African workers who die trying to cross the Mediterranean, murdered by the hand of imperialist Europe; our Chicago Martyrs are our African, Ukrainian, and Russian brothers and sisters dragged to the front lines in Ukraine to die in a fratricidal war that has already lasted four years. Our Chicago Martyrs are our Middle Eastern brothers and sisters massacred by the imperialist offensive of the US and Zionism in the region. Our Chicago Martyrs are our migrant brothers and sisters persecuted by Trump's Gestapo. We salute the massive general strike of the workers and youth of the US who are taking to the streets to stop the imperialist war machine!

A system that cannot feed its slaves deserves to die! Therefore, imperialism must be defeated and expelled from Africa in a unified struggle of the entire workers' movement within the imperialist powers!  The path was marked yesterday by the strike of dockworkers in Europe and the Mediterranean, and today it is continued by the powerful general strike of the labor movement and youth in the US.

In Africa, to end the suffering imposed by imperialist plunder, we must end the treacherous union bureaucracies and coordinate workers, poor peasants, and rebellious youth to end the governments that starve us, break with the IMF, expropriate the transnational corporations, and recover our resources. Only in this way will we win bread, work, and a dignified life.

A luta continua