May Day arrives this year at a moment when the world is more than ever overshadowed by war, crisis, and insecurity. Global capitalism increasingly resorts to militarism, repression, and destruction in order to preserve its decaying order. War is no longer a distant event confined to battlefronts; it has entered the daily lives of millions of workers, unemployed people, women, migrants, and youth. War means inflation, layoffs, destruction of social services, displacement, hunger, and death. Therefore, our class struggle against exploitation and oppression must today be inseparably linked to the struggle against war.
The Middle East has become one of the central theatres of this catastrophe. War and interventions by regional and global powers now directly or indirectly involve at least ten countries. From Palestine and Lebanon to Syria, Yemen, and Iraq, an entire generation is growing up under bombardment, homelessness, and social collapse. This fire has not remained there; it has extended to Ukraine, where workers once again pay the price for the rivalry of power blocs.
In this context, the Iranian workers’ movement—one of the most political and resilient workers’ movements of our time—stands at the center of this offensive. The working class in Iran has long fought against economic exploitation, political despotism, and social repression. Today it faces both state repression, poverty wages, imprisonment, and also the threat of war, destruction of infrastructure, and mass unemployment. An attack on the Iranian workers’ movement is an attack on one of the most important centers of social and class resistance in the region.
But May Day itself was born out of struggle against such an order. Its roots lie in the 1886 general strike in the United States, when hundreds of thousands fought for the eight-hour day. The bloody repression of Haymarket in Chicago transformed May Day into an international symbol of workers’ resistance.
The history of the workers’ movement contains both great victories and heavy defeats. The Paris Commune of 1871 showed that workers can govern society without the bourgeoisie. The October Revolution of 1917 was an immense attempt to end imperialist war and open a path toward human emancipation. Yet defeats and the rise of bureaucracy disarmed the working class politically and organizationally on a global scale.
That is why many parties and institutions that once spoke in the name of workers have been integrated into the capitalist order. Social democracy, trade union bureaucracies, old communist parties, and states speaking in the name of socialism all seek to empty May Day of its radical and internationalist content.
Yet the working class remains the real force capable of changing the world. Without workers, society cannot function. Every struggle for bread, freedom, and dignity is incomplete if it is not also a struggle against war. And every struggle against war remains unfinished unless it becomes a class struggle against capital.
Our historic task today is to rebuild workers’ internationalism: organization from below, cross-border solidarity, and common resistance against war, poverty, and tyranny.
Long live May Day.
Long live international working-class solidarity.
Against nationalism, against neo-fascism, long live internationalism.
Forward toward anti-war, anti-capitalist nuclei.
Internationalist Workers’ Organization (IWO)