May Day ’09

Taken from a March 23 commentary. Go to www.prisonradio.org to hear Mumia’s audio columns and www.millions4mumia.org to get legal and political updates on his case.

While May Day has historically been a day of workers’ solidarity and a celebration of labor power, this is not a day or year like any other.

That’s because many nations are in the midst of economic recession and financial failure, and it is workers worldwide who are suffering from layoffs and mass firings in almost every sector of the global economy.

While labor is depressed, capital is aggregating to itself bigger and bigger shares of national and global wealth, as governments rush to bail out banks and investment firms, but only if they are “too big to fail.”

Under the newly amended rules of capitalism, corporations—especially in the financial sector—can scam, steal and hustle virtually everyone, and when the economy falls, the government sails in and bails them out with public money!

Under a system such as this, capitalism can never lose. It’s like a gambling casino, where the house rules change every half hour, or depending on who’s winning and who’s losing. But workers are losing.

Around the world, workers are facing lost jobs, vanished careers, foreclosed homes and families broken and shattered against the grinding wheel of capital.

This will be one hell of a May Day, but it’s the one that globalized capital has fashioned for us all. Only if labor is truly globalized can it fight for and demand its fair share from the ravages of capitalism. Let that be our mission for May Day and for tomorrow.