YES! Time to revive May Day

The most significant thing about this year’s attempt to revive May Day as a day of international working class solidarity is that it comes from a segment of the working class itself—particularly from the Black working-class leadership of the Million Worker March Movement, along with others.

May Day Rally for Jobs, Not War-- Bring the Troops Home Now!

May Day has historically been a day for the working class to declare itself as a class against the bosses and to raise its particular demands in each country and its international solidarity with the struggles going on around the world. May Day began as a struggle for the eight-hour workday in the United States in 1886. It became international in 1890. From then on throughout the world, including the United States, marched under the slogans of the day—against imperialist war, colonial oppression, racism and lynching, free dom for political prisoners, universal suffrage and other demands.

May Day 2005, to be held in Union Square in New York as well as San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities, is in that tradition.

This 2005 May Day call, signed by working class, community and movement leaders, concludes with such demands as: end the occupation—bring the troops home now; jobs at a living wage; housing, health care, education for all; fight against racism and political repression; hands off Social Security; no draft; workers’ right to organize; solidarity with immigrant workers; solidarity with lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people; and solidarity with the peoples of the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean who are resisting U.S. imperialism’s drive to own and exploit them.

The demands end with a clarion call for the rebirth of worldwide solidarity.

Ruling class tried to erase May Day

In the post-World War II era, when U.S. imperialism launched its anti-communist Cold War from a position of hegemony, one of the important tasks of the ruling class—along with witch-hunting communists, socialists, progressives and militant trade unionists of any type—was the suppression of May Day as a working-class holiday. Reactionary elements were rallied to launch physical attacks on May Day parades as the Cold War ratcheted up in the late 1940s.

As far back as 1949, the Americanism Department of the Veterans of Foreign Wars began a campaign to have May Day declared Loyalty Day.

A decade later, after May Day had been suppressed by the witch hunt, Congress passed Public Law 529 designating May 1 as Loyalty Day in an attempt to make sure that it was not revived.

In 1961, a joint resolution of Congress revised this and declared May 1 as Law Day USA.

Moderate, social-patriotic, official Labor Day marches in early September, organized by the AFL-CIO leadership, were elevated to take its place.

The capitalist bosses were extremely conscious of May Day as a day for the political manifestation of class consciousness and internationalism among the workers and were thoroughgoing in their attempt to wipe it off the calendar of the working class.

Not just a ceremonial May Day

Since the witch hunt abated, there have been many May Day activities organized by various political groups, although less and less so since the collapse of the USSR. Those attempts, regardless of their varied politics, and well-meaning in many instan ces, were nevertheless strictly symbolic and ceremonial in character. This was because they were not, and for the most part could not be, connected to any genuine development of a militant, class-conscious current in the leadership of any section of the organized working class. A working-class leadership of the caliber of the Million Workers March Movement had not yet matured.

What is distinctive about the attempt to revive May Day as a militant, working-class day of political struggle in 2005 is that it emanates from advanced leaders in the workers’ movement who have fought the workers’ battles and who have watched working-class rights being torn away.

These are the leaders of the (MWMM). And they want to strike out on an independent political path.

The MWM leaders have watched in anger and frustration as the AFL-CIO leadership has continued along the path of support for the war; ignored racism and the myriad of social and economic issues of the workers; engaged in lackluster, top-down organizing or no organizing at all; and placed much of its reliance—to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in workers’ dues—in the Democratic Party politicians.

The May Day 2005 development does not come out of the blue.

The MWMM leaders announced their determination to open up an independent road by coming out on Oct. 17, 2004, on the steps of the Lincoln Monument, in the midst of the presidential election campaign, and declaring that the workers should organize “in our own name.”

They linked opposition to the war with struggle for workers’ rights at home. In doing so, they had to fight the hostile upper crust of the AFL-CIO leadership, which was fully committed to elect the imperialist, pro-war Democratic Party candidate John Kerry as president and which was deeply opposed to the independent class politics advocated by the MWMM.

Additionally, the MWMM had to contend with various currents in the anti-war movement and radical movement that were panicked by any attempt to divert resources or attention from the Kerry campaign and turned their backs on the ground-breaking effort to chart an independent course.

MWMM leaders refused to bow down, and came out publicly for the 2005 revival of May Day from the steps of the Lincoln Monument.

Then they took another historic step forward by uniting with student, youth and community activists and the Troops Home Now Coalition on March 19, 2005, for a joint anti-war, anti-imperialist, pro-working class rally and march on the second anniversary of the Iraq War. This rally, which boldly brought together the workers’ struggle and the militant anti-war struggle, was additionally significant because it began in Harlem.

The 2005 May Day demonstration is not just ceremonial. It is an attempt to stimulate the reemergence of the class struggle and it is political preparation to shape the struggle in a militant, class-conscious, independent direction. It has been called by working-class leaders in alliance with other progressive and revolutionary forces in the U.S.

This is not merely an exercise in paying homage to the past, but a concrete preparation for the future—for struggles that are imminent as the Bush administration and the capitalist class bear down upon every sector of the working class and the oppressed, and even sections of the middle class, with union busting, budget cuts, attacks on Social Security, and continuing war and war spending in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

May Day must again become rooted in the working class. Once it does, the connection between May Day, imperialist war and the class struggle becomes a material factor in the struggle that is powerful and truly profound.

One particular May Day event, held at the height of World War I, is particularly relevant today because it sheds light on the vital connection between the working class, war and militarism.

Liebknecht, May Day
and World War I

One of the most important May Day demonstrations in history, after the original demonstration in Chicago in 1886, was the one called by socialist leader Karl Liebknecht on May Day, 1916, in the midst of the first global imperialist war. Lieb knecht was a Social Democratic Party representative in the Reichstag, the German parliament. He was the only one out of 116 Social Democratic deputies to vote against war credits.

The German capitalist class was whipping up social patriotism, chauvinism and war fever. Millions of German workers were on both the eastern and western war fronts. Demonstrations against the war were illegal. The anti-war struggle had been suppressed.

Liebknecht dared to call a May Day anti-war demonstration in Berlin. Hundreds of thousands of workers turned out. He began his talk with “Down with the war, down with the government.”

He had issued and distributed a May Day Manifesto which declared: “Poverty and misery, need and starvation, are ruling in Germany, Belgium, Poland and Serbia, whose blood the vampire of imperialism is sucking and which resemble vast cemeteries. …”

“Let thousands of voices shout ‘Down with the shameless extermination of nations! Down with those responsible for these crimes! Our enemy is not the English, French, nor Russian people, but the great German landed proprietors, the German capitalists and their executive committee.’”

Liebknecht was dragged off the platform by police, who were there in the thousands, and put on trial. He used the trial to denounce the war and the ruling class. He was put in jail. But that May Day demonstration was the beginning of the end of German imperialism’s war effort. It gave confidence to the workers that it was possible to break the war-time repression.

More and more, resistance spread to the soldiers. By 1918 they were throwing down their arms and refusing to fight. There were mutinies in the navy. Soldiers and workers poured into Berlin and other cities and ended the war by driving the Hohenzollern rulers off the throne.

Similar rebellions of the worker-soldiers shook the French army. By May Day, 1917, there were massive anti-war demonstrations in Italy, Scotland, and of course in revolutionary Russia.

In fact, the rebellion of the German soldiers was stimulated further by V.I. Lenin’s policy on the Russian front of telling both the Russian and German workers that their enemies were at home. This strategic slogan by Lenin was translated into life when the Russian working class and peasantry overthrew and made their socialist revolution. And that is how World War I ended.

The working class in Germany had a mass political party and experience of political and class organization. They were betrayed by their Social Democratic Party leadership, which supported the German government in the war. But revolutionary elements like Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg emerged to reestablish genuine working-class resistance and leadership.

Disarm the Pentagon’s nuclear warriors!

Today, everything is on a different scale.

The Bush administration and the ruling class as a whole have expansion ary plans to conquer new territories. The more desperate they become, the more dangerous and adventurist they become. Of particular concern is the prospect of the nuclear ambitions of the Bush administration.

Right now workers in this country, youths who thought they had joined the military for an education or a job opportunity, are being sent to kill and be killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The ordeal is so traumatic that the Pentagon is running out of troops. Its recruiters are searching the schools and neighborhoods for poor working-class youth who are denied a future in civilian life because of capitalist greed, low pay or no job at all.

Being strapped for troops, the temptation to develop and use tactical nuclear weapons to overcome the need for soldiers grows stronger.

Tactical nuclear weapons, combined with the already-existing 10,000 nuclear warheads, constitute a grave danger to the world. Such nuclear terror by Washington compels every country in the world that is in the cross-hairs of U.S. imperialism to try to develop a nuclear deterrent just for self-defense and survival. Every day the threat of a nuclear-armed Pentagon and its nuclear-armed proxy in Israel—with its estimated 200 nuclear weapons—continues. All independent nations, such as Iran and North Korea, are under pressure to develop nuclear weapons.

For decades it was only the Soviet Union’s possession of nuclear weapons that kept the Pentagon from using them. The only time nuclear weapons were ever used was by the U.S. in 1945 in Japan—and that was before the Soviet Union had the bomb.

Henry Kissinger, as a representative of the Nixon administration, threatened the Vietnamese numerous times with nuclear attack during the Paris peace talks to end that war.

During the Korean War of 1950-1953, Gen. Douglas MacArthur wanted to use the atom bomb against Chinese forces that were assisting the Koreans in pushing back the U.S.-led invasion of their country.

After the retreat of the Gorbachev regime and the collapse of the USSR, the Soviet Union was no longer a military and nuclear deterrent to U.S. ambitions. This opened the way for Washington to make war on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq—twice.

For decades the USSR had advocated complete and unconditional destruction of all nuclear weapons. The U.S. simply ignored this, year after year, while it built up its nuclear arsenal and forced a deadly and costly arms race.

The only road to stopping nuclear war is to disarm the Pentagon.

And the example the German workers gave in World War I, as well as that of the Russian workers who finished the revolutionary process by overthrowing capitalism, is clearly the only historically possible road to genuine disarmament of imperialism, which is war-like in its nature because of its insatiable greed for profit.

Preparations for future wars are bankrupting the U.S. treasury. And it is the work ers and oppressed peoples who are being made to pay to make up the shortfall.

Capitalist industrialists are racing each other to build more and more factories, offices and housing, all with the anticipation of great profits. But those profits depend more and more upon lowering wages, cutting benefits, setting up sweatshops at home and abroad. Every form of oppression is increasing. The ruling class attacks on workers here are creating the very conditions that gave rise to the rebellion of the German working class.

The working class in the U.S. is a long way from where the working class was in Germany in 1916-1918. But the longest journey begins with a single step.

No one knows how long the journey of the workers and the oppressed in this country will be. The growing oppression, exploitation and imperialist war are bound to accelerate this process and shorten that journey.

But the struggle to revive May Day as a day of international working-class solidarity is a definite attempt to take that first step.