The CWI salutes the workers, young people and poor of the world on May Day 2026. We stand in solidarity with all the struggles challenging capitalism and the countless ways the profit system blights the lives of the world’s working class and poor.
This year to mark May Day, the CWI is publishing our new “What We Fight For” programme, a companion piece to “Programmatic Foundation of the CWI and the Historical Struggle for a Revolutionary Socialist International 2026”, published one month ago. In these two documents we distil the political, and theoretical foundations of the CWI, outline our history and reaffirm our understanding of socialism, the role of the working class in bringing it about and the methods by which revolutionaries work to assist this.
The closing words of “What We Fight For” serves as an apt May Day greeting from the CWI:
“The first attempt to create a workers’ state was during the 1871 Paris Commune, which was brutally crushed by counter-revolution. The class struggle has ebbed and flowed since then. Revolution and counter-revolution have vied with each other. The working class proved it can win political power with the 1917 Russian Revolution and has stood on the threshold of power in many other countries since. But the working class has not yet succeeded in consolidating and holding power in a democratic workers’ state. All the tendencies within capitalism that prepare the objective basis for a world socialist society continue to strengthen. Indeed, the world has become over-ripe for socialism. Above all the potential power of a now billions-strong and truly global working class to act as capitalism’s “gravediggers” has never been greater. The CWI believes we can play an important role in assisting the working class to build the necessary mass forces to win power and to bury the profit system. This will banish exploitation and oppression once and for all, preparing the way for future generations to build the classless communist society anticipated by Marx and Engels and all the other great Marxist figures and generations of working class militants.”