Friday, 29th April 2011
will commemorate May Day in one of the most turbulent and traumatic
periods in history. The world is ravaged by wars, terrorism, bloodshed,
economic catastrophe and unprecedented poverty, misery, disease and
destitution. The vast majority of the human race has been plunged into
the abyss of deprivation, hunger and agonising suffering.
After the failure of the Keynesian model in the 1980s, free market
enterprise or the “trickle down” economy has led to the biggest
financial crash in the history of capitalism. And the exploitation and
drudgery of the working classes has worsened horrendously. The gains of
the workers through immense struggles of the last fifty years are being
drastically slashed even in the advanced capitalist countries.
A new norm has been established. Already the relations between labour
and capital had deteriorated with the policies of privatisation,
downsizing, liberalisation, restructuring and contract labour.
Redundancies and layoffs have become a regular feature of modern
capitalism. Social services and the benefits of the workers have been
viciously cut through draconian austerity measures throughout the
capitalist world.
Even during the recession when the workers had to bear the brunt of
the financial meltdown, the bankers, capitalists and the bosses of the
multinational corporations plundered on and enriched themselves to
obscene levels. The gap between the ruling elites and the toiling masses
has widened to unprecedented levels.
In the largest capitalist country of the world, the USA one percent
of the richest households now own more wealth than the 95% of the rest
of the population. The same story is repeated throughout the world. The
situation in countries like China and India is even worse. Out of the 16
members of the standing committee of the Politbureau of the Communist
Party of China (which is neither communist nor a party), 12 are
billionaires. India has 20 percent of world’s population yet hosts about
40 percent of world’s poverty and yet now there are more billionaires
in India than in Japan. The highest amounts of plundered money stashed
away in Swiss banks belong to Indian capitalists, reportedly 14.7
trillion dollars.
This looting and plundering by the bourgeoisie has ushered in a
malaise within society on a world scale. In his latest book, “Reformism
and revolution”, the renowned Marxist theoretician, Alan Woods gives a
graphic description of this decline. He writes, “The crisis of the
capitalist system is reflected in a crisis of bourgeois values,
morality, religion, politics and philosophy. The mood of pessimism that
afflicts the bourgeoisie and its ideologues in this period is manifested
in the poverty of its thought, the triviality of its art and the
emptiness of its spiritual values. It is expressed in the wretched
philosophy of post modernism, which imagines itself to be superior to
all previous philosophy, when in reality it is vastly inferior…. They
talk of the end of ideology and the end of history in the same breath.
They do not believe in progress because the bourgeoisie has long since
ceased to be progressive. When they talk of the end of history it is
because they have ended in an historical dead-end and can see no way
out. When they talk of the end of ideology it is because they are no
longer capable of producing one”.
However, after a relatively long period, a new wave of class struggle
is emerging. After the movements of the oppressed in Latin America and
the youth and workers’ movements in Europe, the Arab revolution has
shaken the planet.
In the context of these stirrings of the working class May Day 2011
attains an extraordinary significance. Every year May Day is
commemorated in memory of those workers demanding an eight hour day that
were brutally shot and killed by the police in the American city of
Chicago on 1st of May 1886. The decision to commemorate it as
a labour day was taken at the congress of the Second International in
July 1889 held in Paris. The leading figure in the meeting of this
international was Fredrick Engels who along with Marx was the founder of
scientific socialism and co-author of the epic work “The Communist
Manifesto”.
The unique feature of May Day is that it is perhaps the only
anniversary that is commemorated all over the world. It cuts across the
prejudices of race, colour, creed, religion, nationality, ethnicity and
caste, which are used by the ruling classes to drive a wedge in the
unity of the proletariat. Hence the real message of May Day is that of
proletarian internationalism. It is also the reaffirmation of the pledge
for unity in struggle on a class basis against this system of
exploitation and plunder. The ultimate victory of this struggle can only
be achieved by the overthrow of capitalism through a socialist
revolution. Anything else attributed to this day is a deceit and
distraction for the workers. In the present epoch the crisis of
capitalism offers no progress or prosperity to the human race. Rather,
with every passing day it is intensifying exploitation, coercion, death
and destruction for the masses. The spectre of barbarism haunts society
shackled by this decaying and moribund system.
Reforms under capitalism are a thing of the past. Hence reformism or
narrow trade unionism cannot offer any way out of this misery. Most of
capitalist investment today, if any, is not labour intensive in
character, but it is capital intensive. This means that it will create
more unemployment rather than generating any new jobs. All the
technological advances enhance exploitation rather than alleviating the
plight of the workers. Capitalism cannot cope with the spirit of the new
technology to which it has given rise. This has torn through the
national boundaries of the bourgeois state. In the present epoch we live
not only in a world economy, but most social and political relations
have also been moulded by this crushing domination of the world market.
That explains why no proletarian revolution can survive on a national
basis for long. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the capitalist
degeneration of the Chinese bureaucracy are glaring examples of this.
But the masses around the world are yearning for change, for a
transformation of this agonising socio-economic system. A successful
socialist uprising in one country would unleash a revolutionary wave
that this obsolete system and its bosses would not be able to stop. That
is the real message of hope for the oppressed and the essence of
Marxist internationalism that May Day espouses.