THURSDAY WAS INTERNATIONAL WORKERS' DAY

From Wikipedia:

International Workers' Day (a name used interchangeably with May Day) is a celebration of the social and economic achievements of the international labour movement. May Day commonly sees organized street demonstrations by millions of working people and their labour unions throughout most of the countries of the world — though, as noted below, rarely in the United States and Canada. Communist and anarchist organizations and their affiliated unions universally conduct street marches on this day.

International Workers' Day is the commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886, when Chicago police fired on workers during a general strike for the eight hour day, killing a dozen demonstrators. In 1889, the first congress of the Second International, meeting in Paris for the centennial of the French Revolution and the Exposition Universelle (1889), following a proposal by Raymond Lavigne, called for international demonstrations on the 1890 anniversary of the Chicago protests. These were so successful that May Day was formally recognized as an annual event at the International's second congress in 1891. The May Day Riots of 1894 and May Day Riots of 1919 occurred subsequently. In 1904, the International Socialist Conference meeting in Amsterdam called on "all Social Democratic Party organizations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on May First for the legal establishment of the 8-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace." As the most effective way of demonstrating was by striking, the congress made it "mandatory upon the proletarian organizations of all countries to stop work on May 1, wherever it is possible without injury to the workers."

May Day has long been a focal point for demonstrations by various socialist, communist, and anarchist groups. In some circles, bonfires are lit in commemoration of the Haymarket martyrs, usually right as the first day of May begins. It has also seen right-wing massacres of participants as in the Taksim Square massacre of 1977 in Turkey.

And

The United States has its own Labor Day holiday, celebrated on the first Monday in September instead of on May Day. The U.S. version of Labor Day was a creation of the Knights of Labor, and was adopted officially in 1887 in an effort to disassociate labor activism from the radical left. Subsequent efforts to officially switch Labor Day to the international date of May 1 have failed. In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 both as Loyalty Day and as Law Day.

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I've been so busy with work and the show I'm about to open that I almost forgot. But my old anarchist pal Vince, the guy who once introduced me to the only real communist I've ever met, emailed me from the Far East to wish me a happy May Day. He called me "comrade." I fucking love that. We ought to call everybody we work with "comrade." But not the people we work for. Only the people we work with.

Anyway, the point to observing May Day here at Real Art is to stress that, in the United States, workers have no sense of unity. We're all on our own. I mean, sure, go back six or seven decades and the story was different; workers understood that they shared common goals and interests, and were able to force the wealthy elite who own and run the country to give them a greater share of the wealth they created with their labor. This actually affected mainstream culture such that the middle class became the huge social sector that it was after WWII. Cab drivers, butchers, ditch diggers, all these people were able to afford homes, able to have a comfortable lifestyle with only one bread winner in the family.

Not anymore.

Decades of propaganda telling us that we're just the same as the wealthy, that their interests are our interests, that business success is the same as worker success, have turned all of that upside down. Now days, if you're out of work, or get shitty wages, conventional wisdom is that it's your fault. Even the press, which once considered itself to be working class, laughs at the notion of worker solidarity. We're supposed to compete with each other these days, not help each other.

Well, that's all crap. We're not the wealthy, and most of us never will be. But I am at a loss for how to get Americans to understand that. I mean, of course most people know that they're not rich, but so many Americans get starry-eyed when politicians talk about tax cuts and getting the government off the people's backs: they think the politicians are talking about them--the reality, rarely exposed by Big Media, is that tax cuts are for the rich, and getting the government off the people's backs means deregulating big business so they can pollute the environment, poison our pets and children, and send good jobs overseas.

Man, if the working Joes in this country ever figured it all out, it'd be over. I mean, O-V-E-R. Can you imagine what a general strike lasting only a week would do? It would freak out the elite so much they'd be falling all over themselves to get us good health care, shorten the work week, raise wages, lower college tuition, and on and on and on.

We need some good old fashioned class war in this country, and I don't mean the kind that the elite have waged relentlessly on the population throughout American history. I mean some real flexing of national might. A real demonstration that America really can be of, by, and for the people.

I'm not looking to the Democrats to lead the charge.



Happy belated May Day, comrades!

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