In Honor Of May Day 2017-From The American Left History Blog Archives -From The May Day 2012 Organizing Archives –May Day 2013 Needs The Same
Efforts
Boston's International Workers Day 2013
BMDC International Workers Day Rally
Wednesday, May 1, 2013 at Boston City Hall
Gather at 2PM - Rally at 2:30PM
(Court St. & Cambridge St.)
T stops Government Center (Blue line, Green line)
To download flyer click here. (Please print double-sided)
Other May Day events:
Revere - @ City Hall - gather at 3:pmbegin marching at 3:30 (to Chelsea)
Everett - @ City Hall - gather at 3:pm begin marching at 3:30 (to Chelsea)
Chelsea - @ City Hall - rally a 3:pm (wait for above feeder marches to arrive) will begin marching at 4:30 (to East Boston)
East Boston - @ Central Square - (welcome marchers) Rally at 5:pm
BMDC will join the rally in East Boston immediately following Boston City Hall rally
Supporters: ANSWER Coalition, Boston Anti Authoritarian Movement, Boston Rosa Parks Human Rights Day Committee, Greater Boston Stop the Wars Coalition, Harvard No-Layoffs Campaign, Industrial Workers of the World, Latinos for Social Change, Mass Global Action, Sacco & Vanzetti Commemoration Society, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Party of Boston, Socialist Workers Party, Student Labor Action Movement, USW Local 8751 - Boston School Bus Drivers Union, Worcester Immigrant Coalition, National Immigrant Solidarity Network, Democracy Center - Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridge/Somerville/Arlington United for Justice with Peace, International Socialist Organization, Community Church of Boston
******* Why You,
Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012
Actions -This Is Class War-We Say No More-Defend Our Unions! - Defend The
Working Class-Take The Offensive!-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 beating back 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 that 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 to 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!
******
<b>Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!</b>
*******
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 connected with the Haymarket
Martyrs in 1886 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, 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.)!
*End the endless wars- <b>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! For 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 left-wing 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.
*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 winning the 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 to us 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 have 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.
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