In Honor Of May Day 2014-From The American Left History Blog Archives -From The May Day 2012
Organizing Archives –May Day 2013 Needs The Same Efforts
From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-This
Is Class War-We Say No More-Defend Our Unions! - Defend The Boston Commune!
Take The Offensive!- Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization
Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
http://www.bostonmayday.org
Click on the headline to link to the <i>Boston May
Day Coalition</i> website to find out about actions planned in the
Greater Boston area. Google May Day and your city for actions in other
locales.
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge
in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West
Coast activists back on December 12, 2011and the subsequent defense of the
longshoremen’s union at Longview, Washington and the beating back
of the anti-union drives by the bosses
there. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made as part of the Boston solidarity rally with
the West Coast Port Shutdown on December 12th this is the way forward as we
struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society.
Not everything has gone as well, or as well-attended, as
expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston on the afternoon of
December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the struggle against
the bosses, including plenty of illusions or misunderstandings by many newly
radicalized militants about who our friends, and our enemies, are. Some of that
will get sorted out in the future as we get a better grip of the importance of
the labor movement in winning victories in our overall social struggles. May
Day can be the start of that new offensive in order to gain our demands
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Labor
Movement And Its Allies! Defend All Those Who Defend The Labor Movement! Defend
All May Day Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It
Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
OB Endorses Call for General Strike Call-Labor And Its
Allies Should As Well
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly
on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international
General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental
sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for
all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial
equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition
that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
***********
Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs
To Join The May Day 2012 Actions-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises,
unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of
poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result
of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words,
perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also
the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s
when the vicious ruling class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,”
and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one
half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain
their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back,
fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day
symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need
to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we
individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the
furies, collectively against the robber barons of the 21st century.
No question over the past several years (really decades
but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has
taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with
massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors
(and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low wage,
two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers), paying for the
seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and
corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective
tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer
debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college
student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is
little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream”.
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing
immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced
in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it
is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will
continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable
future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the
time of our grandparents (or, ouch for some of us, great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some
lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the
ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle
like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and
Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of
working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling
class of that day by their front man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut
the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.
The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take
(and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks
(up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to
eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits.
Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can
help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed,
homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from
under. All Out On May Day 2012.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our
Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works
projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and
water systems, etc.)!
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led
Fourth International In 1938-Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the
masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now
more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of
pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or
better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here
those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of
concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic
afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist
system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and
methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on
the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the
politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of
militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all
other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the
toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living
conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as
slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick.
Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume
an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a
sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an
automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the
proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the
workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a
crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to
the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to
the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being
shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as
“conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public
works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other
mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the
solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would
then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of
the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same
as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed
minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any
other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the
“unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in
addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically
denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal”
collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding
the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of
life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of
the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands
inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish.
“Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the
relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of
this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers
will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of
Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here
no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage
increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher
education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No
transportation worker lay-offs! Free quality public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1,
2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective
participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal
workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing, where a strike is not possible,
to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”.
*We will be organizing students from kindergarten to
graduate school and the off-hand think tank to walk-out of their schools (or
not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a
central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass
consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to
make purchases on that day.
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The
World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Agree or disagree with the Wobblies and their political
concepts for class struggle but read their very early statement about the
nature of class warfare. “Big Bill” Haywood and his crowd got it right then and
have useful words to say now. Read on.
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in
common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions
of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all
the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the
workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of
production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of
industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope
with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a
state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another
set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage
wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers
into the belief that the working class has interests in common with their
employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the
working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its
members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work
whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an
injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's
wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary
watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do
away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for
everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism
shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the
structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Watch this website and other social media sites for
further specific details of events and actions.
All out on May Day 2012.
Please join
Veterans For Peace, the Smedley Butler Brigade and Samantha Smith Chapters,
United for Justice with Peace, Mass Peace Action, and the American Friends
Service Committee for a ceremony for Peace on Memorial Day. 
Directions
from the Aquarium T stop:
