May Day 2010: The critical issue

The May Day demonstrations this year, from Los Angeles to New York and many points in between, are breathing new life into the working-class struggle in the United States.

It’s about time. In Arizona, the right wing has launched an offensive against immigrants hoping to split the working class at a time when tens of millions of workers are struggling with personal crises caused by lack of jobs and a mountain of debt. Home foreclosures and evictions are at an all-time high and working-class communities are struggling to stay above water.

The crisis isn’t just personal — it’s systemic, caused by an inevitable economic collapse of the kind that has recurred many times over the last 200 years of capitalism.

The bankers and bosses, whose wealth continues to be astronomical, are treating working people like garbage to be thrown out once we are no longer useful to them. There is no other recourse but to fight back in a united struggle — and that’s what May Day symbolizes.

To get the full measure of the significance of this year’s demonstrations, it is necessary to review the history of this special day — what it was like in earlier periods of struggle, what happened to it during the many decades of reaction that are only now breaking up, and how it was revived with a bang in the year 2006.

This story goes all the way back to 1886 in Chicago. Working conditions were terrible and made worse by a depression. While many could find no work, others had to toil for 12 to 16 hours a day. On May 1, 200,000 workers walked off their jobs in a general strike demanding an eight-hour day. Two days later, police killed two striking workers at the McCormick Reaper Works.

The next day, May 4, a protest rally in Haymarket Square was attacked by police and someone — it was never proven who — threw a bomb. Police as well as workers were killed and injured. This was the excuse the bosses needed for an all-out anti-labor offensive. Eight labor leaders were arrested and charged with murder in the death of one of the cops. Four were hanged, one died in prison and, eight years later, the other three were pardoned by Illinois Gov. John Peter Altgeld, who condemned their trial as unfair.

In 1889, at an International Socialist Workers’ Congress in Paris, some 400 delegates voted to call a universal day of demonstrations for the eight-hour day. A U.S. delegate asked that the date for this event be May 1, in honor of the Haymarket martyrs. That’s how May Day was born as the international workers’ day.

For decades, millions of workers all over the world marched on May Day in a show of international solidarity and unity. As workers’ revolutions began to topple governments in Europe and Asia, May Day became an official holiday in many countries.

But not in the United States. Here, where May Day was born, it took a struggle, led by leftists, to bring out the union movement on May Day. After the anti-communist witch-hunt period of the 1950s, some of the best militants were hounded out of the unions. In 2005 the Million Worker March Movement, led by Black trade unionists and their allies, held a May Day rally in New York. But in general, the huge May Day demonstrations of the 1930s became little more than a memory.

Until May 1, 2006. On that day, between 1 million and 2 million people demonstrated across the country. It was a stunning development that caught the bosses by surprise.

Who revived May Day in the United States? Immigrants from some of the poorest countries, especially from Latin America. U.S. corporations had virtually destroyed their local economies as a result of NAFTA and other “free trade” agreements, leading to a huge exodus by people seeking work. There were no longer barriers in their countries to exploiting U.S. corporations, which took over huge areas for agribusiness. But when the displaced workers and farmers sought to come to the U.S. for jobs, they found insurmountable barriers to prevent their legal entry.

When a bill was introduced in Congress in 2006 to criminalize these workers and their families, they came out in the millions to demand immigrant rights. Since then, May Day coalitions uniting workers of all backgrounds have held annual marches.

This May Day, immigrant workers will again be in the forefront. They will be joined by many unions and U.S.-born workers. Their demands will encompass the changes needed by the whole working class:

• a real government program to provide jobs for all;

• a moratorium on foreclosures, evictions, utility shutoffs and the seizing of workers’ property by banks and other financial institutions;

• health care for all;

• a rollback of the cuts in education, hospitals and all other social services, and

• money for jobs, education and health care, not bailouts to big business or wars abroad.

But there is another demand of the greatest immediate importance to the millions who are threatened every day by Gestapo-like immigration raids in their communities: the demand for legalization.

So-called immigration reform, as embodied in a bill being drafted by Sen. Charles Schumer, is not the answer. What workers of all nationalities need is unity in the working class and the freedom to struggle in their own class interests. That’s why legalization should be a cutting-edge demand of all May Day marchers.

Bosses and corporations in the United States are the richest in the world — while the workers have been losing ground for more than 30 years. The exploiters use their power over the political process and the media to create an atmosphere of racism, hatred of immigrants, sexism and oppression of lesbians, gays, bisexual and transgender people. These parasites know that if workers are constantly fearful and fighting each other, we can’t effectively fight the profit-driven parasites who are driving down our wages and stripping us of our dignity.

The unions taking part in May Day can lead the way toward broader unity of all sectors of struggling workers by endorsing these demands. In fact, why not hand out union cards to all the undocumented as proof that they have a right to live and work in this country?

Organization and the broadest unity are what all workers need to fight the vicious plutocracy that has plunged the whole planet into crisis. That struggle is sure to evolve into one against the whole rotten system of capitalism. The working class, united and organized, has the power to shut down capitalism and set up a socialist society - one geared to meet all human needs, not hand over mega-profits to a few.