Message of the Comintern (SH) on occasion of comrade Lenin's 154th anniversary

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Message of the Comintern (SH)

on occasion of comrade Lenin's 154th anniversary

22 April, 1870 – 22 April, 2024

[ At the same time valid as the official Comintern (SH) May call for the year 2024 ]

Today we celebrate the 154th birthday of Lenin.

We greet the Leninists all over the world.

As part of our centenary campaign, it is clear that on this day we are placing Lenin's teachings on 1 May at the centre of this greeting address:

What does Lenin teach us about today's 1 May ?

In 1919 Lenin shouted at the May Day demonstration:

Long live the international Soviet republic !

Long live communism!

This is also the May Day call of the Comintern (SH) in 2024 - 105 years later!

Engels fought for the establishment of 1 May and Lenin crowned 1 May with the victory of the first socialist state in the world.

During Engels' lifetime, the II. International was guided by Marxism. Engels was faced with the most important task of securing the international unity of the proletariat on the basis of scientific communism, and he fought for the victory of Marxist forces on a world scale. He was the founding father of the First World Congress in 1889, which directed the international labour movement towards the struggle against militarism and war, and towards the formation and strengthening of political parties and mass trade union organisations in all countries.

It is particularly thanks to Engels that at this congress, 1 May was adopted as a day of struggle for the international proletariat in general and for the eight-hour day in particular. The decision to celebrate May Day for the mobilisation of the masses and the strengthening of international proletarian solidarity was of world-historical significance, has remained so to this day and will continue to be so in the future when it comes to the world socialist revolution.

Today, after 135 years, the struggle for the 8-hour day has still not been victorious for most workers worldwide. In some countries, the 35-hour week and in some cases already the 30-hour week have been demanded for many years. Only in a few cases has this become a reality. Whatever the future working time demands may look like in concrete terms, the struggle to reduce working hours will remain of the utmost importance for the road to world communism even after 135 years.

At the very first May Day demonstration in 1890, Engels called on the international proletariat to turn the annual May Day into a traditional parade of the growing proletarian world army. The slogan

"Proletarians of all countries-unite!"

, as it was first put forward in the Communist Party Manifesto in 1848, was carried onto the streets by the masses of workers worldwide on 1 May 1890.

And today, on 1 May 2024, when the world proletariat has already been welded together as a class and is developing into a globalised world army, the Comintern's (SH) slogan must be carried onto the streets of all countries en masse, namely:

"World proletariat - unite all countries in the struggle for the world socialist revolution !"

Engels recognised early enough the danger that the desire of the workers to unite internationally would be abused by opportunists striving for their leading role at the head of the international labour movement. And if we disregard 1 May in Lenin's and Stalin's Soviet Union and Enver Hoxha's Albania, on a global scale it was above all the reformists and revisionists who had a grip on 1 May and continue to do so until today's 1 May 2024. We Stalinist-Hoxhaists know that this will only change fundamentally with the world socialist revolution. If we look at the international development of 1 May today, we have to realise that open world fascism has gained increasing influence on 1 May and continues to gain influence with every new 1 May. What Stalin teaches us about the two twins of fascism and social fascism can also be applied to 1 May on a world scale. We remember both the social fascism of social democracy and Hitler's fascism, where the one as well as the other had banned the revolutionary 1st of May, suffocated it in blood, as on Bloody May 1929 75 years ago, and finally turned it together into a fascist holiday.

This collaboration between fascists and social fascists is still a great danger to the working class and its 1st of May today. Today, this danger increasingly exists on an international scale. The cause is above all the economic factors, the unstoppable process of decay in which world imperialism finds itself today and which Lenin already characterised back then as the highest stage of capitalism, as monopolistic, rotting, parasitic and dying capitalism. Today, capitalism is in the process of plunging the world into the abyss, not only by ruining the social and economic basis of life of the entire world population, slaughtering people in imperialist wars and plunging them into refugee misery, but also by destroying the entire planet Earth with every new day by overexploiting nature and polluting the environment. On 1 May 2024, we declare revolutionary war on this development!

* * *

Lenin not only welcomed the founding of 1 May by decision of the Second International, but also actively fought for 1 May every year.

Thus Lenin wrote in 1900 with secret ink from the Siberian prison:

The unification of the working class, its union, is not confined to the borders of one country or to one nationality: the workers' parties of different states proclaim loudly and audibly the complete agreement (solidarity) of the interests and aims of the workers of the whole world. They come together in congresses, make common demands on the capitalist class of all countries, introduce an international holiday of the whole united proletariat striving for its liberation (1 May) and unite the working class of all nationalities and all countries into a single great workers' army.

The unification of the workers of all countries is a necessity caused by the fact that the capitalist class ruling over the workers does not limit its rule to a single country. The rule of capital is international. This is the reason why the struggle of the workers of all countries for their liberation can only succeed if the workers act together against international capital. (Lenin, Volume 2, page 101 - 102).

When we defend the Second International, we defend above all the work of Engels and Lenin in it, especially their struggle against the traitors of the Second International. Friedrich Engels pushed through the May Day founding resolution against the resistance of the right-wing opportunists in the Second International. And we also defend Lenin, who continued to fight consistently against the betrayal of 1 May by the right-wing opportunists after Engels' death.

In contrast to the reformists, Lenin represented the only correct revolutionary standpoint on 1 May:

In supporting this struggle

[for partial demands - W. E.]

socialists must always emphasise the connection with the liberation struggle of the proletariat in all countries. And 1 May must be the day on which the workers make the solemn declaration that they are aware of this connection and join this struggle with all determination. ( Lenin, Volume 4, page 361)

But the success of the world socialist revolution depends on two factors, as Lenin said:

It is usually not enough for a revolution that the lower classes do not want to live as before .

It is also necessary that the upper classes are unable to manage and govern as before.

The policy of trusting the capitalists, their government, their reformist endeavours, their war and their offensive policy, such a policy is hopeless. Their bankruptcy is not far off. Their bankruptcy is inevitable. This will also be the bankruptcy of the ruling parties (...). The economic collapse is drawing ever closer. It is impossible to save ourselves from it other than through revolutionary measures by the revolutionary class in power.

The demonstration of the international proletarian movement on this 1st May comes at a time of renewed war in Europe, war in the Middle East and outbreaks of war in various countries around the world. It is a 1st of May when two imperialist world war camps are increasingly openly preparing for a third world war with military adventures.

As a result, this year's May Day is increasingly gaining the character of accelerating the expected world socialist revolution due to the intensification of the contradictions within the camp of world imperialism.

If the world bourgeoisie has to resort to ever greater divisions and distortions in capitalist society in order to maintain its dictatorship, which go further and further to warlike conflicts, the answer of the revolutionary world proletariat can only be to overcome this death-bringing division of society by creating a united revolutionary world front, the creation of a world Red Army for the purpose of overthrowing the dictatorship of the world bourgeoisie and establishing the dictatorship of the world proletariat.

Today, when the dissatisfaction of the broad masses is growing in all countries of the world, when the whole world is in great turmoil and ferment, when the world proletariat everywhere will awaken to revolutionary struggle, it is important on 1 May to draw a clearly visible line of separation from the traitors in our own ranks, a clear line of separation between reform and revolution. At a time when workers are struggling with an increasingly threatening life situation and have to tighten their belts more and more, their resentment and disapproval of all the pseudo-militant May Day speeches by government representatives and their reformist trade union bosses, who lie about the blue sky, promise improvement through reforms and fuel illusions in the so-called "self-healing powers" of capitalism, is also growing. The masses are supposed to be pacified on 1 May, to be kept docile for law and order (of the exploiters and oppressors!) instead of rebelling against the authorities, revolting and fighting for revolution.

On 1 May, the situation has remained the same for years: Last year's 1st May demands were not met the following year and so today's 1st May demands will not be met next year either. Although most of our colleagues are fed up with these empty promises and have lost their illusions that their situation will improve, they have by no means freed themselves from the prevailing bourgeois influence in their minds. It is above all the deep-seated anti-communist ideology with which the bourgeoisie is trying to prevent the proletarian masses from taking to the streets for liberation from wage slavery, for the world socialist revolution. And even if they wanted to, the majority have still not wanted to take to the streets with the red flag, colleagues in their company, in the yellow union or even in their circle of acquaintances would not want to attract so much "negative" attention, would not want to isolate themselves, and would not dare to take to the streets because of the police, who keep a close eye on and monitor every participant on 1 May. The whole atmosphere on 1 May is becoming more and more contaminated with social fascism and the once revolutionary character is fading more and more with every year. Despite the red flags and banners, these are tired marches, not revolutionary demonstrations of struggle.

The 1st of May has remained firmly in the hands of the social fascists and those who run after the social fascists like puppies cannot really be revolutionary.

Do we want to stand idly by and accept this reactionary development of 1 May? Of course not.

Let us once again make 1 May a revolutionary day of struggle to overcome and overthrow the capitalist world order, a day of struggle for world socialism!

Lenin quotes Plekhanov (when this renegade was still a revolutionary):

"In an epoch of strong social ferment, when the political atmosphere is charged with electricity and soon here, soon there, from the most diverse and surprising causes, increasingly frequent outbreaks occur, announcing the approach of the revolutionary storm - in short, at a time when one must agitate or one will have the hindsight, only organised revolutionary forces can exert a significant influence on the course of events. The individual then becomes powerless; only units of a higher order can cope with the revolutionary work: revolutionary organisations." (Plekhanov) (quoted in Lenin, Volume 4, page 359)

And so today the Comintern (SH) will exert influence on May Day as the revolutionary organisation that calls for struggle against the May Day crimes of the social fascists, against the treachery of the yellow trade union bosses and their long and broad rat tail within the "left" movement.

There are the three well-known different main tendencies, the main political tendencies, as they are represented on 1 May, in general:

1. the reactionary to openly fascist rejection of the revolutionary May tradition or the intention to transform 1 May into a holiday of the fascist/social-fascist state.

2. the bourgeois-reformist-social-fascist direction as the currently dominant direction of 1 May, which still exerts far too much influence on the entire "left" movement and thus keeps it in tow.

3. the revolutionary direction, which has remained faithful to the revolutionary character of 1 May and is fighting against the hostile first and second currents for a Red 1 May with the aim of liberating the working class from wage slavery, with the help of the world socialist revolution, with the aim of world communism.

And from Lenin we learn on 1 May the agitation for the necessity of the revolutionary struggle against the present social and political world order:

Here and there the workers had succeeded relatively easily in forcing the employers to make concessions through strikes, and people began to attach excessive importance to this "economic" struggle. People began to forget that, at best, trade union (professional) associations of workers and strikes only succeed in enforcing slightly more favourable conditions for the sale of the commodity of labour power. Trade associations and strikes cannot help if this "commodity" is not in demand as a result of the crisis. They are incapable of changing the conditions that turn labour power into a commodity and condemn the masses of working people to the most oppressive hardship and unemployment. To change these conditions, the revolutionary struggle against the entire present social and political order is necessary, and the industrial crisis will cause many, many workers to become convinced of the correctness of this realisation. (Lenin, Volume 5, page 16).

The protests at the social-fascist May Day rallies this year should show the whole world that the world proletariat is walking firmly on its revolutionary path, without which there is no salvation for the suffocating and rotting alive world.

May the 1st of May come, after which we will celebrate the victory of the world socialist revolution every year!

In 1920 - 3 years after the victorious Great October Socialist Revolution - Lenin called for a subbotnik on 1 May:

The capitalists called labour "free" when the peasants and workers were forced to sell their labour to them, leaving them only the freedom to die of hunger. We call such labour wage slavery.

We will work so that the rule of "all for one and one for all", the rule of "each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" will penetrate the consciousness of the masses, become a habit, become second nature, so that slowly but surely communist discipline and communist labour will prevail.

Only malicious enemies of the working people, only malicious supporters of the bourgeoisie can turn up their noses at the subbotnik on 1 May, only very miserable fellows who have sold themselves to the capitalists lock, stock and barrel can judge disparagingly when the great May Day is used as an occasion to attempt to introduce communist labour on a mass scale.

We know that it is not easy to organise free labour properly and to work under the conditions of the present difficult times. Today's subbotnik is a first step on this path, but if we continue along it, we will create truly free labour. We have succeeded in dislodging an enormously heavy boulder, the boulder of inertia, of ignorance, of stubborn adherence to the habits of "free trade" and the "free" buying and selling of human labour power like any other commodity. We have begun to shake and destroy the most deeply rooted prejudices, the most entrenched, oldest and most ossified habits. Our subbotniks have made enormous progress in the course of a year. They are still extremely weak. But that cannot frighten us. We have seen how the "extraordinarily weak" Soviet power grew stronger before our eyes, thanks to our efforts, and became an extraordinarily strong world power. We will work for years and decades to naturalise, develop, expand and perfect the Subbotniks, to make them at home in our thinking and feeling. We are heading towards the victory of communist labour!

"Pervomaiski Subbotnik" (1st May Subbotnik), 2nd May 1920

Fight in the spirit of Lenin for a May Day on which we celebrate the world subbotnik,

the day of voluntary, world communist labour!

Wolfgang Eggers

1 May 2024


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