Mondo MayDay 2007

The most complete preview of MayDay 2007 worldwide anywhere on the web.

MayDay 2007 Part 1: Europe

MayDay 2007 Part 2: Latin America

MayDay 2007 Part 3: North America

MayDay 2007 Part 4: Africa

MayDay 2007 Part 5: Asia & Oceania

In the era of globalized capital, there is only one force that could possibly check the power and greed of organized wealth:

“Workers of the World, Unite!”

Lift up your voice and sing!

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation
Arise ye wretched of the earth
Our reason boils with indignation
And makes us die to find new birth

We’ll tear down this planet’s false foundation
And build a better world anew
And we that live in humble station
Shall walk erect as is our due

Through the conflict comes power
Each will lift high his face
And in the end the Internationale
Becomes the human race (Repeat)

 

 

MayDay 2007, Part 5: Asia & Oceania

Well, I’ve painted myself into a corner here. MayDay is now upon us. we’re well into the 30th in precisely the part of the world that I haven’t covered yet. Not too bright there, Mr. Lauritz the Agitator. Try to remember where the international dateline is in the future, you Yankee dolt! But, I have managed to collect some links so I have put together some notes and will beat the clock!

MayDay 2007, Part 4: Africa

While globalizing capital seeks to impose conditions of precarity on labor in late capitalist societies, working people in Africa have never known anything else. In the competitive neoliberal “race to the bottom” for labor, social and environmental standards, the relations of production and of power that prevail throughout most of Africa are the goal, that capital seeks to duplicate everywhere. It has long been a trite liberal cliche that “Africa is the world’s future”; at long last we are discovering the truth therein, not one of social and economic advancement for African workers, but the implementation of neocolonial standards of exploitation and oppression that are widespread in Africa should become the global norm.

However appealing the norms of hyperexploitation common in much of Africa may seem to the global capitalist elite in their bourses and office suites, their penthouses and villas, such conditions can never be imposed on humanity without resistance. The price of such superprofits is a state of ongoing economic unrest and social conflict that even the most brutally authoritarian regimes cannot suppress. So it is on MayDay, 2007, that much of Africa is the site of open and pitched conflicts between global capital and their comprador regimes on one hand, and working class African society on the other. I take a look at some of those conflicts, and list the few MayDay events that I managed to find on the web, in the extended text.

MayDay 2007, Part 3: North America

It’s often forgotten by Americans that May 1 as the International Workers’ Day has its origins here in the United States. For well over a century, the ruling class and their faithful and obedient servants in press and pulpit have sought to portray MayDay as someting strange, distant and menacing, grim and alien Leonid Brezhnev surrounded by apparatchiks surveying a column of T-72 tanks from atop Lenin’s tomb. International Workers Day transformed in the American imagination from a celebration of labor and a challenge to the dominance of capital into a threat to the US, the “American Way of Life”, an attempt to substitute Mr. Cabbage Roll for Kentucky Fried Chicken.

And yet International Workers Day, MayDay, has its origins in that most quintessentially American of all places, Chicago, in the classic Americn tale of immigrant workers that came to the New World to build a better life for themselves, struggling for something we all have taken for granted for decades, the eight-hour work day. That eight-hour work day was gained not least by the sacrifice of four American immigrant workers at a grave injustice, sentenced to hang for a crime they did not commit.
So for better than a century, the American people, including its working class, outside of the ever-present handful of labor radicals, had little to do with MayDay. Annually it passed unmarked and unobserved, outside of a few pseudo-pagan festivals with thinly disguised phalluses festooned with parti-colored streamers. That is, until 2006, when another generation of working class immigrants in America saw themselves and their lives and families imperiled by the unbelievably punitive HR4437 anti-immigrant bill, a throwback to the type of legislation advanced by the powerful KKK of the 1920s that put the end to America’s earlier immigrant heritage. All across America, a new giant awoke, and the streeets were filled with millions of immigrants from dozens of lands, all shades of the human spectrum. HR4437 was quietly killed in the aftermath, and nativist Americans hoped that they had seen the last of such uprisings. But again this year the call to MayDay as a workers manifestation in America has gone forth, primarily but not entirely focused on the conditions and challenges facing immigrant wokers and their families. It will be interssting to see whether the powerful social force that erupted in 2006 can be replicated this year. If it does, it may be taht MayDay, International Workers’ day, has finally come to reside in its place of birth, brought home by a new generation of immigrants.

As I have done previously with Europe and Latin America, I have serached the web for as many local MayDay events as I could find, this time for North America, which you can find in the extended text.

MayDay 2007, Part 2: Latin America

While on MayDay 2007 workers in most of the world are at best desperately attempting to hold the line against the one-sided global class war, the situation across much of Latin America is different, more positive, and hopeful for the present and future of working people.Perhaps because for most of the past quarter century, Latin America was the proving ground for the doctrines of neoliberal globalism;

Perhaps because nowhere else are the failures of the corporatist so-called “free market”so obvious, with its austerity programs, its privatizations and its privations, its World Bank and IMF and trilateralism having taken so many nations, so many peoples down to economic calamity;

Perhaps because nowhere else have the destructive consequences of the policies of privatization and the tyranny of the quarterly report been more clear in their consequences for workers, indigenous peoples and the environment;

Perhaps because the economic and social calamities resulting from the neoliberal era have caused a rebirth of a sense of social solidarity, of a vast web of social and political organizations and networks that incubated empowered people and brought forth new ranks of activists, thinkers and leaders;

For these reasons and more, MayDay, 2007 in Latin America is a celebration of what has been achieved in recent years, and a rallying cry to continue the march forward for justice.

Of course conditions are not uniform, and no victory is final. In many places, the forces of oppression and exploitation retain power and control in oligarchic hands. Elsewhere there is often the disappointing co-optation of authentic leaders who upon achieving real power become reconciled to the interests of the hegemonic system, betraying the hopes of those that brought them forward. And in those places where the progress for the poor and working people begins to truly alter the relations of power in society, there is no limit to the measures hegemony will employ to crush those beacons of hope. Still, Latin America stands apart as the sole region on earth where the trend today is away from the hegemony of corporate domination, where the long arc of the moral universe is bending toward justice. For this reason, when the working people, the poor, the peasants and the indigenous take to the streets, to the great squares and plazas this MayDay , they do so not only to celebrate their own victories, and to push forward their own march to justice and democracy, they also do so as the vanguard of the working people everywhere struggling against the power of neoliberal hegemony. Never has it been more truly said:

iEl pueblo unido jamás será vencido!

For listings of MayDay 2007 events in Latin America, continue to the extended copy.

MayDay 2007, Part 1: Europe (Updated w/More Events)

This post includes information on MayDay 2007 events in Athens, Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, Cordoba, Cork, Erfurt, Florence, Freiburg, Ghent, Glasgow, Hamburg, Hannover, Helsinki, Istanbul, L’Aquila, Liege, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Magdeburg, Malaga, Milan, Munich, Naples, Nottingham, Nuremberg, Palma de Mallorca, Paris, Perpignan, Pinerolo, Poznan, Sligo, Strasbourg, Stuttgart, Thessaloniki, Tokyo, Tubingen, Turin, Vienna, and Warsaw. And with the list of 31 CNT events in Spain, there’s now too many more to keep listing them all up here! (For full events listings, see extended copy below.)

As far as I can tell, this blog entry contains the most complete list of autonomous, independent, radical European MayDay rallies, marches, protests, parades and demonstrations anywhere on the web. Your help is needed to help get this resource the widest possible distribution to websites, blogs, listserves, IndyMedia sites and other independent infochannels that can help get this information out to the most possible people. Feel free to copy, link and otherwise distribute all the information in this post, it does no good for anyone if the information just sits here. Also, if you know of events other than the ones listed below, please leave a comment and I will add it to the list! Full information in the extended text.

Precarity, or Why 69 is Pink

Are you now, or have you ever been, precarious? Are you working temp or part-time, contingent or “subcontracted”, flexploited labor? Are you an “assistant manager” on salary in a chain store, unlimited hours and no benefits? Is your neighborhood in the sights of a real estate developer? Is your company shifting work overseas? Are they hiring undocumented workers at ridiculously low wages? If so, then you’re precarious. (More below on the fact that the undocumented worker is the most precarious of all.)

Are contemporary neoliberal government policies of social disinvestment gutting your schools, filling privatized jails with your pot-smoking neighbors and relatives, leaving your levees to burst? How high do gas prices have to go before it doesn’t even make sense to commute to your job anymore? What happens to you and your family if you get sick? Are you like the Little Mermaid, minding your own business, struggling but getting by, and then in a split second…

Photo by xinhua.net

You’re suddenly PINK?!?!

Something Rotten in the State of Denmark

Here’s the story of how the Danish government and police, acting on behalf of an extreme right-wing religious cult group with mucho kroner, tore down the building at Jagtvej 69, Copenhagen, where International Women’s Day was first organized in 1910 by such legendary feminist fighters as Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg:

and the determined resistance of the young people, artists, hippies and anarchists that tried to save the “Ungdomshuset”, or Youth House:

The Most Astonishing Poll of All

No, it’s not another silly name-recognition 2008 horserace poll. It’s not even another case of Bush falling to all-time lows, sweet as those are. This is more significant. It’s not about American attitudes toward the war in Iraq, or even Iraqi attitudes toward the US occupation. It’s even more significant than any of those, and it contradicts much or all of the conventional wisdom about American attitudes about the world.