May Day is Not a Commemoration but a Class War against Capital!

�      More than 18 million people die of starvation every year, that is, fifty thousand per day. Since 1994 the number would be equal to the current population of the United States of America.
�      Approximately 3 billion people live on less than $2 per day, and more than 1 billion of them live on $1 per day.
�      The resources of the three wealthiest individual capitalists are worth more than 600 million people in the world.
�      More than 100 million children do not have access to education.
�      More than 1.5 billion people are deprived from fresh water and health care.
�      During the last 30 years, the export of capital from Asia, Africa, and Latin America has increased 30 times, and during these same years the the livelihood of these countries has significantly worsened.
�      The budget of the U.S. Department of Defense is greater than the entire income of one billion workers.
�      Weapons-spending by all the world’s governments in 2006 is more than $1300 billion.
�      More than 1 billion people are unemployed.

We are inhabitants of a world where the number starving is rapidly increasing. Many women around the world must sell their bodies as sex workers in order to put the food on table for their kids. Children are kept in sweatshop-dungeons where carpets, bricks, shoes, clothing, and etcetera are manufactured for Capital. This is the world we live in — through the flames of the inhumanity of capitalism, from Iraq and Palestine to the most advanced countries — a world where crime and barbarism is now the norm.

May Day is just another day in our historic class struggle against the current state of our world, against wage-slavery. We have been a Class from the beginning, and up to now we have been in a fight with this system. The existence of capitalism is built on our lives and livelihoods, and at the expense of our security, of our leisure, and of our rights. Any attempt to get even a small portion from our natural human rights and social wealth back is tied to the struggle. May Day is supposed to be about the emergence of the masses, with the aim to report on the class war in history, in our daily struggles. Its goal is to dig a strong trench of our resistance. Let us on this day, talk about how we are to proceed in this class war, let us illustrate our strengths and weaknesses in this war — our unity or lack thereof. Our gathering together for May Day must be for our future offensive, for the renewed international promise to replace this brutal and miserable system with a global organization of worker councils and socialized production.

May First is such a place for the movement against capitalism. The question is this — do all of these May Days taking place in different countries play such a role? Do they exemplify our international class struggle? Without a doubt, many do not play such a role. The platform of May Day is not in the hands of the movement against capitalism, of those seeking to abolish wage-labour. The flag and manifesto of this day, on the contrary, is in the hands of anti-communists, the so-called Trade Unions, bourgeois governments, and social democrats — in one word all the defenders of the political order of wage-slavery. In Eastern and Western Europe, the rightwing reformism of Trade Unions and the heads of social democracy are seizing this platform and turning this Day into more of a submissive statement about the endurance of the exploitation and the miseries of global capitalism. In China, bourgeois reactionary communism, under the name of May Day, is deepening the exploitation of the working class. In Latin America, in the best situations, liberal leftwing populism has seized the May Day platform in the name of workers and socialism. In Russia and Eastern Europe May Day was previously celebrated by the state governments and now the mafia of free market is in charge of May Day. In North America, May Day with the assistance of the Trade Unions has all but disappeared. In Iran, one of the most brutal religious capitalist governments has turned May Day into a cacophony of anti-labour and anti-human sentiments.

These things that are happening this May Day around the world, these days pretending to be May Day, do not show any way out of the global barbarism, nor do they even impose any real demands on capitalism.

The current celebrations of May Day show the shame and the disaster of the working class at the present time. The working class has been stuck on the ground, lacks a view of horizon — and we carry all of these failures on our shoulders. The workers movement is in a crucial moment of its existence and it has reached a fork in the road of its history. The workers movement in this situation is not able to go ahead without seeing that on the horizon. Without that view the movement will not find balance of power. The working class must take May Day back from the rightwing and leftwing reformism.

Workers around the world have no way out but to raise the red flag of anti-capitalism and anti-wage-labour. The international unity of workers around the world facing the international unity of capital is the first step to be taken in this historic class struggle. To have free access to healthcare, education, daycare, and housing; the guarantee of a high level of human dignity and quality of life for all people around the world — where government intervention in our freedoms is completely prohibited — these can be the basic demands to initiate a new anti-capitalist movement. Our common struggle to impose these demands on the global bourgeoisie is the real basis of international class unity for abolishing the capitalist system and the establishment of true working class socialism.

Most of the working class are labouring under the huge pressures of exploitation, under brutal acts of capitalism, and are not only deprived of decent levels of livelihood, welfare, and social rights, but are also immersed in the depths of starvation, poverty, homelessness, and lack of political freedom. This May Day, and next ones, must be about achieving:

�      The unconditional freedom to form council organizations for mass of workers, in every corner of the world, and the prohibition of any government or bourgeois intervention in the formation of these working class organizations.
�      The guarantee of livelihood and social welfare based on the maximum allocation of work production for human public welfare at the expense of profit.
�      The direct intervention of the anti-capitalist movement, of the worker council movement, to decide the means of this livelihood and the social welfare of the citizens.
�      Taking the public services of healthcare, utilities, education, housing, daycare, etcetera, out from under the domination of stock markets and bondholders or any other monetary sytem, and the guarantee that all utilities be free for all of the worker masses.
�      The allocation of a high standard of living and social welfare for all workers, employed or unemployed, irrespective of their age, gender, ethnicity, race, residence, or any other demographic status.

� The direct intervention of mass worker council organizations to make the decisions of what is produced, how it is produced, and how it is distributed.

� The guarantee of a healthy environment for all citizens, and the intervention of mass worker council organizations in the prevention of all industrial contamination.

� The prohibition of the intervention of the government from restricting the political freedom of the citizens.

� The elimination of sexual discrimination and the double oppression of women, putting an end to the economic dependency between women and men, or the economic dependency of children on their parents for education, and the calculating of all hours of housework as legitimate full-time work.

� The prohibition of an international struggle against any kind of war and violence by global capital and the prohibition of the production of weapons.

These demands should be a departure point for the beginning of our movement.

Workers of the world! Our current celebration of May Day, in a style of celebration, has no real relation with our real class situation, with ongoing barbarism and brutality of the world. When we hold our May Day ceremonies in this style and in this context, it is really a celebration of rightwing reformism, of do-nothing Trade Unions, and of the government. It more than anything it represents their victory over our class movement. Let’s take the first day of May back from their hands, from the hands of the bourgeoisie. Let us expropriate what has been expropriated from us. Let us change this day, Our Day, to make it a real manifestation of the struggle against wage-labour. Let’s turn our fundamental anti-capitalist demands into the beginning of our class war against this system. Let this day be the real organized struggle against right reformism and degenerate Trade Unions. We not only free ourselves but all.

Workers around the world unite against Capital!

Anti-Wage-Labor Collective Activist

April 16, 2006