Dear General Secretary Baudouin Deckers
and Comrades of the Workers Party of Belgium:
On behalf of the National Committee of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (US) please receive our greetings of comradely solidarity and best wishes for the success of your 15th International Communist Seminar. We were very pleased to participate in your convergence last year and hope to be invited to do so in the future. Despite our earlier intentions, we were not able to send a delegation to this year’s event, due to the overwhelming demands of work here, particularly in regard to the newly emergent mass movement for immigrant rights.
The explosive growth of this new movement in just the past two months is, in our opinion, the most important development in the working class movement inside the United States in many decades. Millions of people took the streets on May 1, 2006. The capitalist press here has vastly undercounted the numbers who marched that day, reporting that one million demonstrated. In reality, at least three million people, mainly Latino immigrants but joined by growing numbers from other immigrants and non-immigrant communities, joined the May 1 protests. Millions more stayed away from work, school or any commercial activity, and thousands of businesses closed for the day. Not for generations, has there been a day like May 1, 2006 for the U.S. working class.
At the same time, the Party for Socialism and Liberation is continuing in the struggle against U.S. imperialist aggression around the world. Even while engulfed in war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington is pressing ahead with its campaigns against Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Korea, Haiti, the Sudan, Syria and Lebanon, and all other states which refuse to bow before the empire. The European imperialists have joined with their U.S. counterparts and Israel to inflict starvation on the Palestinian people for having elected a government displeasing to the "great powers" ("great," as Lenin wrote, only in their violence against the oppressed). As part of the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition, we are continuing to build the anti-imperialist wing of the anti-war movement, and to ground that movement more solidly in the multi-national U.S. working class.
Once again, we extend our internationalist solidarity and wish your meeting the greatest success.
With Fraternal Communist Greetings,
Brian Becker and Gloria La Riva
For the Political Committee
Party for Socialism and Liberation
4 May 2006