Daily Times

This year May Day falls at a time when severe crisis of capitalism has led to an unprecedented onslaught against the working class of many countries. For over 130 years, tens of millions have expressed their determination on this historic day, again and again, to rid the world of oppression, war and poverty against naked and brutal exploitation of capitalism.

If Keynesian model of capitalism with state intervention in the economy was a disaster for the oppressed masses, the consequences of the monetarist model of free market economics have been preposterous. The policies of deregulation, privatisation, restructuring, downsizing and liberalisation have wreaked havoc with lives of workers across the globe. Workers have been forced to organise to defend themselves from Indonesia to Chile, from Argentina to Greece, and to Pakistan.

The continuous vicious downward spiral of the crisis of the economy in Pakistan has exposed the hypocrisy and impotency of the elite to move society forward. No section of the ruling classes, the state and the intelligentsia has any clue how to overcome the chaotic conflagration and malaise within society and the country. The only thing that is transparent is Pakistani elite’s indifference, callousness and contempt for the masses.

Despite fall in the oil and other commodity prices there is no stopping the plunder by the imperialist institutions in the form of debt servicing, along with alleged institutionalised corruption of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and others. Health, education, and state enterprises are up for privatisation. In an environment with no political party representing the cause of the workers and the poor, the mantras like privatisation as a recipe for economic development have been inducted into the economic programme of all mainstream political parties. Everybody seems to have capitulated to this vicious exercise, which makes products and services more expensive, resulting in massive redundancies, adding to a huge army of the unemployed, and brutal crushing of the oppressed by the ‘market’ forces. Government introduced one corporate tax exemption after another, boosting its own and its backers’ rates of profit. If this was not enough its leaders remained busy in hiding billions in offshore bank accounts as exposed by the Panama Papers.

Economic stability is a myth, social development is sham, and poverty alleviation is deception. Poverty and misery are on the rise, with the crisis unravelling into a conflagration. Bourgeois democracy has failed. The system doesn’t have the capacity to sustain it. The inherent rottenness and weakness of the Pakistani bourgeoisie also goes a long way explaining the reason why it had to resort to brutal and naked oppression in the form of a military rule for almost half of its history. Military rule has failed again and again and is not an option. Even in the last few years of a relative lull in the Pakistani society there have been sporadic workers’ upheaval, and the strikes such as the PIA shutdown this year shook society and the state to its foundations. There are more to come. Society is rotting and the oppressed masses are yearning for a change. The missing element is the entry of the workers and youth into the arena of history to change their destiny. Once they are on the move, these military and democratic edifices of capitalist coercion will crumble. This deceptive political theatrics shall be swept aside. The movement will carve out a revolutionary leadership and a party once it surges forward.

The organic crisis of capitalism has deepened day by day. Workers need to arm themselves with a programme that can answer their needs and aspirations. They need to reclaim May Day’s tradition of struggle. May Day was born out of struggle. It was the brutal and naked murder of American workers in Chicago on the 1st of May 1886 that put this day on the international calendar of the proletariat. They were in a demonstration demanding an eight-hour working day when they were butchered by the hired killers of their American bosses. Under the leadership of the great Marxist teacher, Fredrick Engels, the founding congress of the second international was held in July 1889 in Paris, where it was decided that that day would become the symbol of proletarian internationalism. May Day is the only event that transcends all divisions of religion, race, nationality or any other prejudice of the past amongst human beings. It is commemorated in all continents in every nook and corner of this planet by the toilers.

However, with the ideological and political degeneration of the second international the essence of proletarian internationalism in May Day began to fade. Social patriotism began to dominate workers’ organisations, and its degeneration as a national event by reformist and opportunist leaders of social democracy. The sole purpose of designating May Day by the Paris International Socialist Congress was by means of simultaneous demonstrations by workers of all countries on the same day, to prepare, unite and organise them into a single international proletarian organisation of revolutionary socialism. It had to be built on the lines of the First International Workers Association created by the communist league in the leadership of Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels in 1864. The Marxist international is based on one world proletarian party that organises workers cutting across national, religious and other divisions imposed by ruling classes to drive a wedge in the unity of the proletariat. It is an organisation that is based on the method of democratic centralism: maximum internal democracy and debate and maximum unity in action. This means a period of world politics, world diplomacy, world wars and, hence, a world revolution is needed to emancipate the human race from the misery, poverty, want and deprivation that it has been plunged into by this obsolete and callous capitalist system.

This year’s May Day is being commemorated today with a greater zeal. With the lives of workers becoming more and more miserable the situation is getting unbearable. Lenin once wrote, “Politics is but precipitated economics.” The mass consciousness is fast catching up with the economic reality of capitalism in a catastrophic crisis. This would ultimately reflect in the political arena with the new explosion of class struggle. The challenge of May Day is clear: it has to be understood from the essence of its origins: workers of the world unite! When tens of millions of workers and youth protest on the same issues with the same slogans on the same day, it means the formation of a mass workers’ international. The fight is to unite the struggles of the workers of all lands and continents, with the support of other oppressed strata in society for overthrowing of this system that is in terminal decay. A socialist victory in any important country will spread the revolutionary change across this globalised world that is interconnected as never before.

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com