Search
Close this search box.

May Day 2013

Ever since it was first declared International Workers’ Day by the Socialist International in1890, May Day has been both a commemoration of those who have fallen in the struggle against exploitation and oppression and a declaration of determination to take that struggle forward – against capitalist exploitation and war and for workers’ rights, both political and economic.

Five years after the onset of the deepest and most internationally synchronised crisis in the history of capitalism, and just days after the appalling events in Dhaka, May Day 2013 dawns on a world in which there is no shortage of new victims of capital’s barbaric quest for profit at any cost.

In country after country, despite the extraordinary potential created by science and technology, millions have no work, those who do have work find their wages cannot keep up with rising prices and the social services on which they rely are withdrawn. Above all, it is women who first bear the brunt of increasing poverty.

In a chilling echo of the last century, a once omnipotent imperial power is challenged by at least one new and dynamic rival. Weakened by the failure of its most recent military adventures, the USA announces a new global redeployment of its forces, the “Pivot to Asia”, giving the world notice of its willingness to plunge humanity into yet greater conflagrations.

Meanwhile, and inevitably also on a global scale, the accumulated impact of two centuries of unrestrained exploitation, not only of humanity but of the planet’s resources, brings the world ever closer to the tipping point of climate change. Nothing could more vividly demonstrate the impossibility of merely national programmes and solutions.

Yet May Day does not dawn on a hopeless landscape. Around the world, capitalism and its agents are confronted by the enemies they themselves create; the working class, the landless peasants, the urban poor and young people in every country. Unseen by most of the world, tens of millions of workers in China fight an almost continuous battle over wages, working conditions and employment rights while in the countryside peasants confront militarised police over illegal land seizures. In Europe, especially in Greece, general strikes and huge demonstrations shake governments as they impose yet more austerity in order to guarantee the profits of the banks and financial corporations.

Across the Middle East and North Africa, the forces and dynamics unleashed by the Arab Spring continue to resist all attempts to repress them, instead, their impact spreads further afield; south into Africa, even north into Europe. Here again, young people are in the thick of the struggle, as they are in Chile, Quebec, Greece.

In India, a new women’s movement is stirring, provoked into mobilisation by a potent combination of economic development, age-old prejudices and discrimination and the impact of the economic crisis.

But elemental resistance and a heroic refusal to be treated as animals, as expendable “production factors”, have never been enough to defeat capitalism. In 1890, the Socialist International not only demanded immediate reforms such as the eight hour day but also “the class demands of the proletariat”, meaning an end to the private ownership of the economy, whose aim was the maximisation of profit, and its replacement by social ownership and production to satisfy human need.

The need to unite the immediate struggles of the working class to the goal of overthrowing the entire capitalist system has never been greater than today. The weakening and disintegration of the mass parties of the “world communist movements” centred in Moscow and Beijing, obscured that goal for millions over the last two decades as did the abandonment of any talk of socialism by the Labour and Socialist parties. The historically long global stagnation and crises of capitalism since 2008 have put the need for the real revolutionary socialist goal, free of bureaucratic dictatorship and subservience to capitalism, back on the agenda.

The forces available to achieve that goal have never been greater in terms of their numbers or their degree of interdependence in a global economy. What is missing, not only at the national level but also, crucially, at the international level, is a political leadership committed to that goal. Around the world, initiatives are being taken to unite left forces and these pose the task of founding new working class parties of struggle. Their success will depend not only on unity in action but on their commitment to a militantly internationalist programme for the overthrow of capitalism and the states that defend it.

The fact that May Day is celebrated as Workers’ Day in virtually all countries is neither a coincidence nor a result of ancient traditions, it is because the most important working class parties of their day formed an international organisation to coordinate and lead their struggles. They declared May Day as a day of demonstrations of international working class solidarity, a symbol both of the international character of the working class and of its goal.

The building of such an international organisation today is the most urgent task of socialists everywhere and it is to that struggle that the League for the Fifth International, and this website, is dedicated.

Workers of all countries, unite!

Content

You should also read
Share this Article
Facebook
Twitter
WhatsApp
Print
Reddit
Telegram
Share this Article
Facebook
Twitter
WhatsApp
Print
Reddit
Telegram