CPUSA solidarity statement with striking workers and farmers in India
On November 26 India witnessed the largest general strike in the history of the world with 250 million people joining to fight back against attacks by the Modi government on workers' rights and freedoms.
Protests by farmers continue across the country in what is a stunning wave of popular power.
This exceptional solidarity statement issued by the Communist Party USA really captures this historic moment:
Celebrating the Bolshevik Revolution, poet Vladimir Mayakovsky compared it to a poem with 150 million authors. If a people’s uprising is indeed a work of poetry, then yours is vaster yet: 250 million people in the streets, marching and striking against the Modi government’s undemocratic attacks on protections for workers and farmers!
To all of you, our brothers and sisters with weary feet and a tireless commitment to justice, who broke through police barricades and faced down water cannons;
To the organizations of farmers, workers, students, women, and other oppressed and exploited groups, who are showing the whole world the power of solidarity;
To our comrades in the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Communist Party of India, and all allied parties and organizations whose work among the people helped raise the largest coordinated strike in human history:
The Communist Party USA sends its warmest greetings and proclaims its support and solidarity.
We look to you with pride and hope, seeing the struggles of our own people raised up with your flags and carried along by your determined march.
Our farmers, too, have seen their livelihoods destroyed by an agricultural policy dictated by the needs of capital. This is especially true for many migrants and refugees from Central America, driven from their homes when U.S.-imposed “free trade” deals left them unable to make a living by farming.
Our workers, too, have seen their unions busted, their rights in the workplace whittled away, their wages stagnating and their job security evaporating altogether while big capitalists take in record profits.
Our people, too, have seen their resources looted, their public sector dismantled, and their government taken over by reactionary forces who spread the poisons of racism, national chauvinism, male supremacy, and militarism; and who preach and use violence against their political enemies.
And here, too, a powerful democratic movement rises, finding its expression in an historic wave of labor militancy, in protests against police brutality, in the youth-led fight for climate justice, and in the growing struggle to protect and expand voting rights.
Your great uprising, a living poem of freedom and justice composed by 250 million people, calls us to strengthen our own work and deepen our revolutionary hope. It reminds us, amid the interlocking crises of capitalism, that a better world is possible, and that the oppressed and exploited masses will bring it into being.
Solidarity!
People and planet before profits!
We shall overcome!