Every year, Labour Day is observed the world over in memory of American workers who lost their lives on May 1, 1886, when the police forces in Chicago opened indiscriminate fire on a demonstration of workers.
Over 200,000 workers had participated in the protest demanding an eight-hour work day. When they reached the Hay Market, the police started shooting, killing dozens.
The decision to commemorate May 1 as an International Workers Day was taken at the founding congress of the Second International in July 1889 in Paris. The congress had taken place under the leadership of great Marxist thinker Fredrick Engels. May Day is the only event that cuts across frontiers and transcends all divisions of region, caste, creed, race and nationality. It reminds us of the need to build solidarity among the working classes so that class struggle can be taken forward.
In 2017, May Day is being commemorated amid turmoil, instability, and bloody conflicts. The global economy has yet to recover from the downturn it witnessed because of the most recent crisis of capitalism in 2008.The crisis had unleashed an onslaught by the ruling elites against the working classes all over the globe. The policies of de-regulation, privatisation, restructuring, downsizing and liberalisation have been wreaking havoc on workers. These policies are being imposed with stringent conditions by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
Along with the rising misery and turmoil in societies all over the world, there has been an increased socioeconomic aggression against the working classes. But in spite of the turbulence and the betrayals, there are innumerable resurgent movements of the workers, youth, and the oppressed masses against this vicious system. Despite the advances in information technology, artificial intelligence, and robotics, the working class still exists and class struggle continues. Without the toiling classes there can be no production or consumption of goods and services. In this volatility with persistent outbursts of strikes and mass struggles, the ruling elites in most countries are worried about the looming dangers of unified workers’ uprisings moving in the direct of revolutionary socialism.
Some of the more serious analysts have pointed in that direction. In the wake of the eruption of mass upheavals in the Middle East and the Occupy Wall Street Movement, The Guardian wrote in 2012, “Communism is not just the carnival of mass protest when the system is brought to a halt; Communism is also, above all, a new form of organisation, discipline and hard work… [Karl] Marx’s key insight remains valid, today perhaps more than ever… We feel free because it lacks the very language to articulate our unfreedom … Today all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict — ‘war on terror’, ‘democracy and freedom’, ‘human rights’, etc. are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think about it.”
In an article in 1904, Vladimir Lenin noted: “Comrade workers! May Day is coming; the day workers of all lands celebrate. Their awakening to a class conscious life, their solidarity in the struggle against all coercion and oppression of man by man, the struggle to free the toiling millions from hunger, poverty and humiliation. Two worlds stand facing each other in this great struggle: the world of capital and the world of labour, the world of exploitation and slavery and the world of brotherhood and freedom.”
The sole purpose of designating May Day as the day of unity of the workers of the world had been to prepare, unite and organise workers into a united international proletarian movement. The goal was and is the emancipation of the oppressed through a victory of revolutionary socialism. Today advanced communication technologies ensure that the struggles in one part of the world simultaneously impact struggles in other parts. May Day is above all a renewal of the pledge of the working classes to unite and fight in this class struggle to transform society. Its essence is profound: “An injury to one is an injury to all.”
Ever since the class society came into existence the class struggle has been the basic contradiction and fight to end the coercion and tyranny of the ruling classes. Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto in 1848, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle… Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
Now this struggle has to be fought to the finish. Today science and technology have developed to a level that for the first time in human history it is possible to obliterate all want and deprivation. A society without deprivation can enter the realm of communism — the ultimate emancipation of the human kind, ending class society with its drudgery, deprivation, violence and terror.
The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at [email protected]