Editorial
May 2000

May Day comes alive in anti-globalization movement

As the heads of international finance munched on chilled shrimp, chicken Casablanca and raspberry mousse, police doused young protesters with pepper spray in the streets of the nation's capital. These scenes unfolded in late April, on the eve of May Day 2000, as demonstrators protested policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) which were meeting jointly in Washington, D.C. Five months earlier the same protest movement successfully disrupted World Trade Organization deliberations in Seattle. These two mass actions announced a new internationalism of labor, environmentalism, and human rights in the heart of the new globalized economy that capitalism has pinned all its 21st century hopes for the future on.

The protesters were calling attention to a growing separation between rich and poor born of a shaky economic expansion. IMF and World Bank-backed projects have pillaged the environment and exploited workers to the extreme, but they have also helped evince a new global movement, one with two faces.

One face is the spontaneous strikes, most often by teenage women, in the export factories of Southeast Asia, China, Mexico and other areas of the Third World. The other face is the sit-ins and protests at over three dozen U.S. colleges this year, demanding an end to sweatshop conditions where university products are manufactured.

SOLIDARITY AND REACTION

Coming as they do on the eve of the first May Day of the century, comparisons with the first ever May Day are compelling. A campaign of simultaneous strikes were to take place across the country on May 1, 1890, until the eight-hour day for workers was achieved.

The first May Day arose in a time of reaction and financial crisis following what Karl Marx at the time and W.E.B. DuBois 70 years later called the great emancipatory movement to free Black labor. It was led by the Abolitionists and it brought on the Civil War of 1861-1865. The end of slavery was followed by a decade of constitutional reforms for Blacks and organizing opportunities for labor.

Reacting to these advances, to keep Black labor shackled to the land through farm tenancy, to harness northern labor rising against the railroad barons, and to suppress Indian resistance to land seizures, U.S. rulers ended Reconstruction in 1877.

The precursor to the American Federation of Labor (AFL) took over the struggle, and in 1886, 80,000 went on strike for the eight-hour day. Historic labor battles in Homestead, Pa., Coeur D'Alene, Id., and the great Pullman strike ensued in the 1890s. Meanwhile the one and a quarter million Southern Black populists challenged the boss-and-black relationship that represented a millstone around the neck of organized labor everywhere.

May Day, then as now, is a signal for labor's emancipation. The movement for the eight-hour day at the heart of May Day represented a cause greater than the Magna Carta or the Declaration of the Rights of Man because, according to Marx, it was concrete in focusing on when a worker's day begins and when it ends.

TODAY'S INTERNATIONALISM

Solidarity with Third World labor and indigenous struggles marks today's movements, from exposing the plights of workers in Nike Corporation's sweated global production network to supporting the resistance of U'wa Indians in Colombia against oil exploration on their lands.

Today's movement unfolds in a global economy whose expansion ever since the restructuring of the 1970s has been fueled by speculation and capital mobility rather than sustained industrial development. Despite the ruling class' triumphal rhetoric about the power of the capitalist global market, today's anti-globalization struggles can take credit for thoroughly undermining the assumption that global capitalism is unassailable and that human intervention can't change labor conditions.

Many are searching for a political and philosophical foundation for their struggles. This was evident in conferences preceding the Seattle and Washington, D.C. protests and in recent News and Letters Committees meetings and classes on the globalization of capitalism.

An important part of the history of May Day does not bear repeating, however. Despite taking the crusade for the eight-hour day abroad where the newly formed Second International adopted May 1 as the date for an international demonstration, and despite its courageous shouldering of the eight-hour campaign of the 1880s, the AFL retreated to xenophobia and craft unionism. The Second International itself slid backward into narrow nationalism, leading to its giving the green light to World War I in 1914.

While it is true that trade unionists were a significant presence at the teach-ins and protests in Seattle last year, distancing themselves from Big Labor's traditional pro-capitalist posture which often colluded in U.S. imperialist policies, little separates a recent AFL-CIO demonstration against trade normalization for China from the panderings of Patrick Buchanan to nationalism and racism.

Furthermore, the efforts by the Jubilee 2000 campaign to forgive World Bank and IMF debt of technologically underdeveloped nations do not speak to class struggles inside those countries between the indigenous bourgeoisie and the working class pummeled by state-enforced austerity measures.

These detours only reinforce the need for nothing less than uprooting global capitalism, not reforming it. Even bourgeois economists like Nobel laureate Amartya Sen acknowledge that "the battle against the unfreedom of bound labor is important in many Third World countries today for the same reasons the American Civil War was momentous." Whether abroad or at home, only a vision of absolute freedom can carry us to a time when every day is May Day.