by Vahidha Nizam
May Day is the symbol of the struggle of the international proletariat for its emancipation. It is indissolubly bound up with the political significance of the working class' demand for shorter workday. Although apparently the upsurge was in demand of eight-hour work and increased wages, in its content and idea the struggle was violently against the wickedly exploitative system of capitalism.
It will be political naiveté to believe that the May Day Martyrs—August Spies, Parsons, Lingg, Fischer and Engel—were hanged simply for the strike in the Haymarket Square demanding eight-hour working day.
No!
They were murdered to extinguish the fire of revolutionary zeal burning in them; they were butchered to stub out the faith of human liberation in them. They believed to change the social order to build a society of free people—neither the exploited nor the exploiters. They wanted the Earth to belong to all and make it a peaceful homeland to all those who labour to create wealth, with no borders or tyrants, bosses or butchers. That was what they fought for and that is what the Chicago Martyrs died for.
When the capitalist conspiracy reached its climax and the vicious jury in its closing remark shouted ‘hang these men and you kill Anarchy in this country!', when the bourgeois daily press took up the refrain and cried ‘anarchy is dead', it was simply the contrary that had established. The judicial murder of the martyrs neither ‘killed' anarchy nor abated in the least the revolutionary sentiment. The faith and feeling of the martyrs spread rapidly across the world awakening the world working class to take up cudgels against the capitalist exploitation.
This unimpeachable faith of the martyrs that the capitalist conspiracy would never succeed to throttle the voices of workers ricochets in the worldwide protest movements even today. August Spies, when he embraced the gallows, challenged the tyrannical rulers: “If you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labour movement... the movement, from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil in misery and want, expect salvation—if this is your opinion, then hang us! Here you will tread on a spark, but there and there, behind you—and in front of you, and every-where, flames blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out.”
That fire, the unfathomable conflagration, is bound to simmer underneath the surface of that society where exploitation of man by man is the cardinal economic order. After over a century and a score on this May Day, the fire is found and felt furiously all around the world. There are protests, spontaneous and seething, here, there and everywhere, of the people raging red against the ruthless capitalist system that renders lives unlivable—jobless, wageless and deprived of all that they created. Across the globe from Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, France, Britain and now Cyprus, capitalism finds itself gasping for breath. Writhing in the worst of pains it faces the most serious existential threat in its original heartlands, the Americas and Britain. The era of Capitalism has to end. Capitalist slavery should be defeated.
Now is the historic moment. Capitalism, running the riot of brutal massacre of jobs and livelihood, contracting real economies to let prosper the speculative financial capitalists creating wage slaves, private property and nurturing fat cat financial institutions is now crumbling down with its own contradictions. World capitalism is in peril and is facing a terminal crisis, but not before ravaging the workers around the world to the bone by the devastation of the neo-liberal capitalism. There are protests against the brutal system. There is a global social revolution arising from the generalised and systematic failure of the capitalist system as dramatically heralded by the 2008-2009 global economic crisis. This Great Recession has revealed the fundamental problem of today's society.
Imperialist onslaught, in its highest form of oppression, social, political and economic, has created hordes of discontented people who are not prepared anymore to be deceived. The class-storms that gusted Tunisia against the corrupt ruler Ben Ali, the rampage of the youth against the ruthless Egyptian tyrant Hosni Mubarak, the anti-government demonstration in Libya against the ruler Muamar Gaddafi, the determined demonstrations of the workers, youth, women et al. in Europe and America against the economic policies—all at once reveal the restive mood of the masses.
There were the pioneering revolts against the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the IMF-WB-WTO combine in the late 1980s and 1990s in Africa, Asia, Latin America as well as in Eastern Europe. As a climax of all these in the mid-1990s Hugo Chavez, the man who had the courage to call the US President ‘the devil', made a revolution to adopt the Bolivarian Constitution that pledged to establish the ‘21st Century Socialism' in Venezuela.
Thereafter, in early 2000 the crisis and revolts reached the belly of the beast—Seattle, Geneva when the world financial institutions that pauperised the masses were rebuffed by the angry protesters however small in size. The protests have now reached a qualitative stage in the post-2008 global economic recession. The global economic crisis that has ripped apart the peaking stage of capitalist onslaught has for the first time created the basis for a globalised resistance. Global economic crisis and revolts happening simultaneously and interchangeably in the global South and global North—a completely new phenomena has given birth to a new era of crises and revolts. Thus from Tunis, Tahrir Square, Madrid, New York, London, Paris, Chicago, Washigton, Athens, Cyprus and all over the latest and most explosive revolts set the stage for the overthrow of capitalism. The “Occupy Wall street” movement, that protested capitalism in its very soil, spreads across the globe confronting the capitalist system in all its dirt and blood. The ‘Occupy movement' is reaching out to the working class struggles in workplaces, education, housing, unions, media etc. and much of this activity is live-streamed, tweeted or blogged continuously. In India we have witnessed the coming together of all the central trade unions in protest against the pro-corporate and anti-people policies of the government.
Thus far we have seen that the structural contradictions of capitalism have prepared the ground for transforming the social system. Will these struggles against militarism, national oppression and in defence of the people who are the victims of the imperialist aggression be the beginning for a social transformation? Using the above dialectical analysis of the global crisis of capitalism and the revolts it is unleashing it is perfectly legitimate and necessary to assess if these struggles can evolve into a working class revolution.
Revolution here means a social revolution, a phenomenon which has been defined by Theda Skocpol, an American sociologist and political scientist at Harvard University, as follows:
“Social revolutions are rapid, basic transfor-mations of a society's state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below... What is unique to social revolution is that basic changes in social structure and in political structure occur together in a mutually reinforcing fashion. And these changes occur through intense socio-political conflicts in which class struggles play a key role.” Therefore for a revolution to happen the three ingredients necessary are rapid political change, deep and lasting structural transformation of the economy and active mass participation.
For the class struggle to play the key role the proletariat has to prepare for the dual task according to Lenin. First, the proletariat should emancipate itself fully and thereby the society, through political liberty. Hence, it supports the struggle for political liberty against absolutism and feudal oppression as its own struggle, to prepare the political climate in which alone can the socialist struggle grow. Second, among all the classes and strata fighting for democracy, the proletariat is the only thoroughly consistent, unreserved, staunch and resolute supporter of democracy; it is the only class which is ready to take the fight for democracy to its end, to its natural culmination and to its full completion. Every other class, by its very position within the class structure of society, can only provide qualified support to the struggle for democracy; their democracy is half-hearted.
This constant and critical engagement with received wisdom is the hallmark of a living revolutionary tradition. This tradition to prepare the working class and awaken their sentiments to the establishment of an equitable social order has to be conscientiously worked and laboured through. This learning and teaching is essential to build socialism, as Marx said. “Scientific socialism has to be built” and it will be built after the overthrow of capitalism by the working class revolution. But is the global working class adequately equipped today to lead a movement to build a scientific socialist structure? What learning do these global revolts give the conscious working class movements, Left-oriented trade unions and political parties?
As we follow the current philosophy of capitalism and the hasty reparations, we under-stand the world economy must go through a deep depression to restore the rate of profit. No bourgeois or capitalist party can stop this, only a working class revolution can do this. The working class has two options sharply before it: socialism or capitalist barbarism. The bour-geoisie cannot rule without invoking extreme repression, first by the smashing of democracy and then, unless the workers stop it, fascism. The workers cannot live with capitalism. For workers to live, capitalism must die. But is the global working class capable of this as yet? Assimilating all these and making a real assessment of the situation we may recall Lenin who would term it a “revolutionary situation where the extreme rottenness of global capitalism threatens destruction of humanity and where the working class is ready and willing to fight to the death but has yet to overcome a huge lack of class consciousness and organisation”.
Capitalism cannot be reformed and the working class, to survive, must become class conscious and overthrow it. But the global revolts do not still possess the character of a class struggle to deliver the mortal blow against the capitalist system. Class consciousness is in its infancy and disoriented, and in the absence of real mass global revolutionary movements of their own, the global revolts and anti-ruling class movements tend to fizzle out or be hijacked by the bourgeois political parties or often cannot make out as to who the real devil on the cross is.
Only lived experience and actual struggles under the leadership of the modern proletariat will de-colonise the mind and hasten the sure coming of real and defining battles against this historically fated but still fighting ruling class. It has to be the dawn of Socialism. Therefore radical workers, youths, rural farmers, activists, women and revolutionaries must be realigned into a force against the capitalist order. The focus must remain not only on the construction of the working people's own anti-capitalist and revolutionary movements built on a national, regional and global basis but giving an ideological reorientation to the workers to align as a class, a class that will be the ‘grave diggers' of capitalism.
As Marx and Engels had rightly envisaged, “the wheels of history are now moving quicker and quicker for capitalism to meet its ultimate fate”. The working class demands its space on the global and historical stage and the time has arrived to conquer. On this May Day, we turn to Chicago once again: Chicago shows us the path, let us march as a class to reach our destiny.
The author is a Secretary of the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC).