MayDay 2007, Part 3: North America

April 28, 2007 · 5 Comments

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.

THEN

NOW

2006 MayDay video, “Gigante Despierta” trailer:

While what follows is the net’s most complete listing of North American mayday events, I am sure it is not comprehensive. If you know of any other events that should be added to this list, please leave a comment with a link and I will update this list to include. Also, please help get this list as wide distribution as possible by copying, linking, etc to listserves, indymedia sites, email groups local webpages and the like. (I asked that people do that with regard to the European list and my visits page is showing that it is having a very positive effect, with scores of visitors coming to the site and surfing through to the Euro links. We can do the same for this North American list.) With no further ado, the list!

The Agitator

MayDay 2007, Part 3: North America

April 28, 2007 · 5 Comments

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