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.