Article by Rui Paz, collaborator of the International Department
The 1st of May was a day of struggle of the workers, throughout all the continents. In Portugal, more than 150.000 demonstrators, celebrated the date, the people and the Portuguese workers, in a a great demonstration, publicized, in the streets, the fall of the longest fascist dictatorship in Europe, 34 years ago. Unfortunately, the same did not happen in Turkey, where the workers were sanguinary repressed. A thousand wounded is the provisional result of the repressive forces orgy, in a State that has the second biggest army in NATO. The police forces charged up to the hospitals front doors. These are scenes that we, in Portugal, know from the fascism times.
But for imperialism, these facts must be silenced. They cannot occupy the newspapers front pages nor the prime time on television news. The separatist project of Tibet is in the order of the day.
From Tibet to ex-Yugoslavia, the Baltic States to the ex-Soviet Republics of Asia, Iraq to Afghanistan, Palestine to Lebanon, imperialism seeks to divide and launch peoples against each other. Not in order to "liberate" them, but to weaken and reduce them to slavery. The financier capital does not want free and sovereign peoples, but instead, colonies, protectorates and vassals.
It's becoming more and more clearer that, within the framework of capitalism, there is no solution for the problems that workers and humanity are confronted with. In Germany, The Minister of Labour, social-democrat Olaf Scholz, did not dare to make an appearance during the 1st of May celebrations. He was not able to face the over 400.000 demonstrators, that all over the country, celebrated the Worker's Day. In previous years, his equally social-democrat predecessors had been dismissed from the tribune by the participants, together with a chorus of whistles.
The present members of the government together with the social-democrat, labour or socialist leaders, could in fact, be Christian-democrat leaders or from other even more conservative and right-wing parties. Their main concern is to win the competition for the best capital server. The substance of democracy, the power of the people, does not matter to them.
They are sold out to a perverted system, which has no moral authority to proclaim to be a defender of human rights. This is the great truth the 1st of May 2008 has revealed throughout all the continents. The British Labour electoral disaster in the local authority elections, last week-end, and the German social-democracy discredit, prove that workers and peoples can be often deceived, but not during their whole life. This is the reason why the members of governments, servers of imperialism, are so hastily discredited. In some countries, such as Italy, they hastily try to change the names of their own parties, the label of the product they have forged, and therefore, expecting to continue to serve a system, that cannot survive without exploitation and repression, war and torture, crimes and massacres.
That is the reason for the PCP's censorship motion to Socrates' government, in Parliament, bringing about the cry of protest that echoes and emerges throughout all the country. The workers' class and the workers of the whole world, need , more and more, to have communist parties, revolutionary parties that do not lay at rest the powerful and the defenders of an antidemocratic, unjust and oppressor society model.
