May Day 2011 Statement
Irish Republican Socialist Committees of North America
1 May 2011
The Irish Republican Socialist Committees of North America send solidarity greetings to our fellow workers and comrades in the class struggle around the world on the working class holiday of May Day, also known as International Workers' Day. We salute and share in your fight against oppression, exploitation, and imperialism. The struggle of any group of workers is the struggle of all workers.
As the North American section of the Irish Republican Socialist Movement, we extend our greetings to our comrades and fellow members of the IRSM in the Irish Republican Socialist Party, Irish National Liberation Army, Republican Socialist Youth Movement, and Teach na Failte, along with all republican socialist prisoners of war in Irish and British prisons. Our commitment to the struggle for national and working class liberation in Ireland, and working class liberation worldwide, is unbroken.
Capitalism remains in the midst of its deepest crisis in decades. Millions of workers have lost their jobs, while millions more live in fear of losing theirs. The bosses use this crisis as an excuse to roll back wages and benefits, while their lackeys in government use it as an excuse to make deep cuts to social services and attack organized labor. These are acts of war against the working class, and the working class must respond in kind.
Until recently, the only noteworthy instances of mass working class resistance in the United States emerged amongst layers of the hyper-exploited immigrant working class, but unionized workers in Wisconsin and Michigan joined the resistance this year, as their rights to organize and collectively bargain were assaulted by reactionary politicians.
We urge all American workers to join the struggle, and to refuse to be divided by the bosses and the promises of the bosses' hired politicians, no matter what political party they belong to. The IRSCNA will continue to actively support all working class struggles, including immigrant and amnesty movements. Indeed, any other position for Irish-Americans and supporters of Irish republicanism would be hypocritical. The IRSCNA will always be found on the front lines of the class struggle, as our members were during the Battle of Seattle in 1999 or in Wisconsin and Michigan in 2011.
Fellow workers, we must begin organizing, educating, and agitating for fundamental changes to how our class-based society is organized. The solution lies in our hands, and our hands alone. We can and must follow the path of revolution until we achieve a sustainable socialist economy that meets the needs of our species and the planet we share.
There must be no war but the class war, until the class war has been won by us and the class system has been abolished. We must reject both increasingly para-fascist conservatism and liberal reformism in favor of the freedom, equality, and fraternity that only socialism can provide.
In Ireland, conditions are growing for a republican socialist alternative to fill the void in revolutionary politics. It is obvious that neither the Good Friday Agreement nor any other imperialist brokered settlement can resolve the fundamental contradictions at the heart of Irish society. Only a socialist Ireland with full self-determination can do that, and a socialist Ireland can only thrive if capitalism is defeated on a wider scale.
On May 5th, voters in the North of Ireland go to the polls for council elections. For the first time in three decades, five IRSP candidates in Belfast, Derry, and Strabane are on the ballot offering a republican socialist alternative. We urge working class voters to cast their votes for that alternative.
Elsewhere this year, we have seen heroic resistance by the peoples of Egypt and Tunisia, as imperialist backed dictatorships were faced down. We take inspiration from these events, and we can envision a world where one imperialist client state after another falls, and where imperialism itself falls to the combined efforts of the global working class. This is a vision that's anathema to imperialists, conservatives and reformists alike.
On behalf of the Irish Republican Socialist Movement, we also extend solidarity greetings to our allies and comrades in the following organizations: All-African People's Revolutionary Party, Communist Party of Cuba, Freedom Socialist Party, Industrial Workers of the World, Party for Socialism and Liberation, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Radical Women, Revolutionary Communist Group, Scottish Republican Socialist Movement, Seattle Anti-Imperialist Committee, Union del Barrio, United Socialist Party of Venezuela, and all others who are struggling to liberate the working class from the shackles of capitalism and imperialism. Our only allegiance is to the working class.
As the great Irish revolutionary James Connolly said, "The great only appear great because we are on our knees, let us arise!"
