Richard Gilman-Opalsky-AK
Press
May
1, 2024
Let’s
celebrate by coming together to imagine how workers’ collective power can
transform the world.
Each
year, May Day invites us to revisit and rethink revolutionary traditions from
the nineteenth century for the present and the future. The annual international
holiday comes out of a trajectory from the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in
1886, when police attacked workers making demands for an eight-hour workday. At
that time, the demand for an eight-hour workday was understood as a total
opposition to the capitalist workplace, where employers extracted as much as
possible from their exhausted workforce. The beginnings of May Day were not
about better wages and working conditions but about an opposition to the whole
system of life governed by capital and ruled by money. To insist on sixteen
hours for play and rest every single day was understood as a real threat to
capital, a fact corroborated by the hostile opposition to those making the
demand. Take a look at the history of May Day, International Workers’ Day, and
you will see that it comes from immigrants, anarchists, communists, socialists,
revolutionaries of many varieties, and others disenchanted. I think one could
argue that May Day is the holiday of imaginary power and real horizons.
Present
and Future
I
shall begin by presenting three insurgent thoughts on work and life suitable
for the spirit and aims of May Day.
(1)
Our first thought comes from Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law. Lafargue
did not reproduce his father-in-law’s fixation on work and the working class
because Lafargue felt we were better defined by what we did outside of work. As
Lafargue put it, “Modern factories have become ideal houses of correction in
which the toiling masses are imprisoned, in which they are condemned to
compulsory work for twelve or fourteen hours, not the men only but also women
and children. …. . Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact
the century of pain, misery and corruption.” Lafargue wanted us to reconsider
the so-called virtue of hard work, which today remains a relatively
unquestioned “sacred virtue” outside of radical circles. Lafargue considered
the virtue of laziness instead.
Laziness
remains one of the most damning character traits, despite the fact that it is
one of the most common and recurring of human inclinations. Throughout history,
liberals and conservatives have variously spoken of the “right to work,” as if
the most fundamental right we have is to go to work for capitalists. Liberals
often talk about jobs and full employment as if that were the solution to every
problem, and conservatives like the former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker
defend so-called “right-to-work” legislation that gives workers the “freedom”
to not pay union dues. Liberals and conservatives agree that hard work is a
virtue. May Day is an opportunity to question the religion of work, to consider
our lives outside of work, and to consider the virtues of not working, of all
the creative and joyful things we could do in time reclaimed from capital.
(2)
I offer now a second insurgent thought, following an idea from a non-insurgent
source, American philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum. Despite many shortcomings in
and disagreements with Nussbaum’s philosophy, I appreciate that she insists on
play as a central human capability. A good life is not possible without play. I
would add that play — at its best — is an antidote to work. At work, play is
often called insubordination. We have come to think of insubordination as a bad
thing, but consider that the opposite of insubordination is subordination. We
cannot accept subordination as a virtue. Young children know the difference and
distance between work and play and predictably express a general preference for
the latter. For adults, play is often eventually abolished altogether or
reserved for smartphone distractions at the end of an exhausted day. Many
adults only reconnect to play when they’re with young children.
One
thing to notice about play, which I notice in play with children: It is an
activity outside of work, and it follows a different logic. It is not governed
by a profit logic but by imagination, free time, and open space. Play is a
space of imaginary power. For many young people, the first direct experience of
a little liberation is the end of the school day. Free jazz musicians play too.
They make playful music, they play with subversive forms and approaches. On May
Day, we might consider the importance of play and how work aims to abolish it.
(3)
A third insurgent thought now from the feminist philosopher and revolutionary
Silvia Federici, who, in the 1970s, participated in the Wages for Housework
movement along with other important activists and writers, including Leopoldina
Fortunati, Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa. Wages for Housework
highlighted that so much of women’s work is not treated as eligible for wages
and is typically expected to be unpaid. But before readers demand to know who
should or could pay for housework and child-rearing (often called “care work”),
we should clarify the main point. Federici opposes the capitalist wage system,
so winning wages for housework was not the central aim. As Federici put it,
“The things we have to prove are our capacity to expose what we are already
doing, what capital is doing to us and our power in the struggle against it.”
If women actually won wages for housework, which would undoubtedly be an
upgrade from unpaid and surplus labor, that achievement would also
inadvertently prove the virtues of the wage system Federici condemns.
Federici’s point is better made by the impossibility of wages for housework in
the current system of work and life, which is why her landmark essay is titled
Wages against Housework.
Federici
wants to reveal a flaw in capitalism, a system that is incapable of valuing
what people value the most. Simple questionnaires about the most important
functions of any society reliably return “the health and well-being of
children” as among the most fundamental commitments. That commitment is near
universal in terms of cross-cultural and global resonance. But capitalism shows
what it values only with money. Capitalism is incapable of paying wages for
housework because it is incapable of valuing the most basic human values and
wouldn’t survive the back pay. Even in the case where families outsource
childcare to professionals, that labor is overwhelmingly done by women working
low-paid, exhausting and precarious jobs.
Now
take a look at the pathetic state of wage politics today. Liberals and
conservatives today consider it “too radical” to demand $15–20 an hour for a
minimum wage. We should stop to think that $15–20 dollars an hour, at 35 hours
a week, comes to roughly $25,000–36,000 per year before taxes. One position
today, then, taken up by many so-called “democratic socialists,” is to demand
what would be a living wage in the 1940s and 1950s for a family of two or
three. Fifteen dollars an hour is far less than half of what would be a
reasonable demand for a basic living wage in most any city in the U.S. today.
This highlights the fact that reason is too radical for our irrational
capitalist reality. May Day is a fine time to point that out, although it is
worth recalling often in between.
At
what point do we realize that the solutions on offer are simultaneously the
problems? Radicals, by definition, want to deal with problems at their root
causes, and that requires a total transformation of the whole arrangement of
work and life. Until then, the solutions will always also be problems. During
the generalized insanity of a capitalist election cycle, it’s especially
important to point out that we cannot vote for the total transformation we so
urgently need. What we need is not on the ballot. On May Day, all over the
world there are people who know we need a total transformation — sometimes such
transformation is called a revolution.
What
is practical in these insurgent thoughts? I claim that the question of what is
practical is the wrong question here. What is practical is only what can be
implemented in the present situation, and when people ask the question of
practicality, it is often a disingenuous way of saying that what we want is too
far away from what we have. That is why we must insist on a different question,
the question of what is possible and desirable, as we have considered
throughout this book. The possible and desirable is also practical, something
that is easier to see after we start doing it. Many things (including a living
wage) are declared impractical in the world today. Today’s practicality answers
nothing. Neither did yesterday’s.
Past
and Future
Earlier
May Day speeches illustrate the crucial importance of reaching for the possible
and desirable beyond the so-called practicality of the capitalist reality. Let
us consider the speeches of two revolutionary women and one Ukrainian anarchist
and see what lessons we may draw out for the present.
Consider
Eleanor Marx, youngest daughter of Karl and Jenny Marx. In 1890, on the
occasion of the first May Day, she said: “We have not come to do the work of
political parties. …We believe that the eight hours’ day is the first and most
immediate step to be taken, and we aim at a time when there will no longer be
one class supporting the others. …This is only the beginning of the struggle.
…We must speak for the cause daily, and make the men, and especially the women
we meet, come into the ranks to help us.”
May
Day was never for the expressing of what comes through the major political
parties. In the U.S., we do not speak on May Day for Democrats or Republicans,
nor for the Green Party or socialist parties, all of which invest too much in
the rigged game of capitalist elections. We do not speak, in other words, for
what gains we might extract from the world bell hooks called an “imperialist
white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” No, we have to create space for a
critique of all that. The eight hours’ movement was about the reclamation of
space and time from capital for the possible and the desirable, which is to say
for the flourishing of the human being. So many great figures of history fought
for eight! eight! eight!, and today, we give it away without thought or
resistance through screen-mediated lives that, beyond eating up all of our
shrinking leisure time, offer employers total access to us all hours of the
day. May Day was for gathering people for the imagining of hopeful horizons and
rival visions. Eleanor Marx notes, as well, the special importance of bringing
women into revolutionary movement. Women have experiences and perspectives
unique to their lives. This has always been true. Women have shown that living
in a sexist, misogynistic and patriarchal society matters for women’s
experiences and lives, and that revolutionaries need to be especially attentive
to the perspectives that come out of such experiences. For the same reasons
today, we have to be especially attentive to the experiences and perspectives
of transwomen. Transwomen and transmen, as well as those with nonbinary gender
identities, have to confront not only gendered discrimination but also
transphobic and transmisic gender essentialisms that cisgender men and women
cannot simply claim to already appreciate.
Let’s
jump forward in time now to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn on May Day 1941:
May Day traditionally
celebrates victories won; makes new demands; presses forward slogans of
immediate action. …Ten million organized workers in America today and more to
come. Skilled and unskilled, black and white, native and immigrant, man and
woman, young and old — shoulder to shoulder. Let the warmongers shout; let the
profit-mad rave. “We shall not be moved!” retort these millions of American
workers on May Day. …Against all imperialism and fascism, including American!
…Lower the cost of living. Resist wage cuts and longer working hours. Free all
fighters against imperialist war. …End Jim Crowism and anti-Semitism . . .
peace and socialism are in the hearts, in the minds, on the lips of millions
around the world May First, 1941. The “sun of tomorrow” shines upon us. The
future is ours.You
can see that Gurley Flynn wrote in 1941 about racism, fascism, antisemitism,
immigrant and Indigenous workers, and classism. She was an early radical
feminist, a member of the IWW. She thought a lot about sexism, racism and
patriarchy. Segregation was alive and raging in 1941, and the U.S. had no
official position against fascism in May 1941 either. It is worth remembering
that the U.S. did not enter World War II until December of that year, and
previously had no qualms with the rise of fascism in Spain. The U.S. entry into
World War II in December of 1941 did not indicate any opposition to fascism in
principle. It is a horrific fact that we must continue to stand up against
racism, sexism, antisemitism, classism and fascism today, but worse, they are even
resurgent. Perhaps we can now finally conclude that we cannot reform them out
of existence. Slavery could not be reformed into a kinder, gentler institution.
The abolitionists were right. Slavery had to be abolished. The same goes for
mass incarceration today. The same goes for capitalism. We have to add new
things to the list. We have to add transphobia, new permutations of white
nationalism, patriarchal masculinity, and the latest developments in
neocolonial thinking and imperial power. We have to retain Gurley Flynn’s
abolitionist hope, because to abandon it is to accept the unacceptable, to
tolerate the intolerable.
I
want now to move backward to a moment in between the words of Eleanor Marx and
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn to Nestor Makhno, a Ukrainian anarchist on May Day 1928.
“The first of May is considered the Labor holiday. On that date, toilers all
over the world should come together in every village, every town, and organize
mass rallies, not to mark that date as statist socialists as especially the
Bolsheviks conceive it, but rather to gauge the measure of their strength and
assess the possibilities for direct armed struggle against a rotten, cowardly,
slave-holding order rooted in violence and falsehood.”
Indeed,
Makhno himself participated in armed struggles against early imperialist
adventures of the Russian state in Ukraine. The USSR could have been called
“state socialist,” but I prefer the analysis of thinkers like Raya
Dunayevskaya, Cornelius Castoriadis, C.L.R. James and Guy Debord that it was
really “state capitalist,” essentially a state-administered capitalist country,
even going back to the first days of the Cold War.
In
2022, Putin’s regime appeared as a revitalized revanchist state seeking to
reclaim territories the Putin government considered rebel, NATO-related
threats, or otherwise subversive to the interests of the Russian state. Notice
that I say “Putin,” or “Russian state,” and not “Russia.” That is because we
must never mistake any head of state for a whole people. Makhno understood this
well. Many in the U.S. would easily say that Trump or Biden do not represent
us, and we are telling the truth. Why then should we conflate Putin for the
entire people of Russia? There are many in Russia who oppose Putin’s war on
Ukraine and who protested against him and his regime long before the military
escalation in 2022. We should listen to what everyday people in real struggles,
in both Russia and Ukraine, may articulate as possible and desirable, and we
should never choose heads of state as allies, never Putin nor Zelenskyy.
Likewise, we cannot categorically take the side of an entire civil society, of
a whole nation of people, because in every nation there are fascists,
neo-Nazis, racists, conservatives, sexists and capitalists. Who says we must
choose to take sides with any head of state? Who says we cannot take sides,
instead, with real emancipatory struggles against imperialism, colonization,
fascism and capitalism wherever we find those struggles? Whoever says so is
wrong.
In
the U.S. and throughout Western Europe, we should especially beware of the
tendency to ask one imperialist state, like that of the U.S., to deal with
another imperialist state, like that of Russia. Sometimes, in the midst of
heated conflicts, even leftists forget that imperialist states do not oppose
imperialism. Imperialist states do not have a critique of colonization, never
in principle and especially not when they are the ones doing the colonizing.
That is also why the U.S. government scarcely bats an eye when the Israeli
government actively pursues the genocidal murder of Palestinians in Gaza.
Problems
of international conflict under the leadership of state power and capitalist
interests are not easy to solve. Not theoretically, not practically. If there
were easy solutions, we would not have needed so many May Days for the future.
If there were easy solutions, May Day would have become a commemorative holiday
for recalling and honoring past victories. But the issues raised by Eleanor
Marx, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Nestor Makhno — among so many others — are
still before us, and in new and pressing ways.
As
we have seen throughout this book, the possible and desirable are also
practical. Asking someone what they desire is a dignified and appropriate
question. It is not always easy to answer. The question of possibility is also
difficult, because that which is not possible immediately may be deemed
“impractical” up to the point it starts happening. May Day is fundamentally
about imaginary power and real horizons. It has always been, and must continue
to be, for that is the basic orientation of all revolutionary aspiration.
Often, the first struggle is to learn that what we desire can actually be
realized. There are countless examples of this happening.
What
does it mean for us in the here and now? It means that we must search our
talents and desires and place them in the service of the world that we want. I
am a writer, a philosopher, a teacher and some other things too. You are many
things, also, and maybe you are many different things. What do you like to do
and how can you place your joyful activity in the service of revolutionary
aspirations? To answer the question, one has to consult their imaginary powers,
and from there we speak out, teach, gather, protest, write, paint, perform,
drum, care, subvert and sing for the sun of tomorrow.
David
North
On
Saturday, May 4, the International Committee of the Fourth International will
hold an online rally to celebrate May Day. This year’s rally is of exceptional
importance.
The
Biden administration, supported by a bipartisan two-party alliance of
corporate-controlled warmongers and in alliance with all the major imperialist
powers, is escalating relentlessly towards a third world war.
Frequently
in US history, presidential elections have set the stage for war. Woodrow
Wilson ran as the peace candidate in 1916 and entered World War I just one
month after his inauguration in 1917. The US entered World War II one year
after the 1940 election.
John
F. Kennedy, inaugurated as president in January 1961, launched the disastrous
Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba three months later. Lyndon Johnson, the “peace
candidate” in 1964, began bombing North Vietnam in February 1965 and deployed
the first 100,000 US soldiers in July.
Richard
Nixon, claiming as a candidate in 1968 that he had a “plan for peace,” further
escalated the Vietnam War in 1969 and invaded Cambodia in 1970. The first
President Bush, elected in 1988, invaded Panama in 1989 and began preparations
for the first Gulf War in August 1990.
Bush
II, after coming to office in the stolen election of 2000, utilized September
11 as a pretext to launch the long-planned invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and
the second war against Iraq in 2003.
With
the 2024 election only six months away, these historical experiences are of
immediate relevance.
A
third world war is not a distant possibility. The opening stages of this war
are already underway. This is the significance of this week’s bipartisan
allocation of additional tens of billions for global military operations
against Russia, China and Iran.
Moreover,
it has now been reported that the Biden administration has crossed yet another
“red line,” secretly providing Kiev with long-range missiles that can strike
targets well within Russia. There are no limits to the US escalation of its de
facto war against Russia.
In
advance of the election, one can assume that a “secret” decision has already
been taken to deploy US and NATO combat forces within Ukraine. The only
question is whether the direct intervention of the US in the war with American
and NATO troops, aircraft and warships will begin before or after the November
election.
An
unmistakable sign of the preparations for a world war is the violent reaction
of the federal, state and local governments to the anti-genocide protests by
students, using the lying claim of campus “antisemitism.” It is only the first
stage of massive government repression directed against all domestic anti-war
opposition. War overseas means war at home.
The
immense danger of a catastrophic escalation to a world war, which would
inevitably lead to the use of nuclear weapons, requires a serious and
far-sighted political strategy.
The
presidential campaign of the Socialist Equality Party’s candidate, Joseph
Kishore, is centered on the building of a powerful working class political
movement within the United States and internationally against imperialist war.
Opposition to world war is, of necessity, a fight against world capitalism.
Appeals
to the cabal of Democratic and Republican warmongers—or to imperialist
governments in Europe—will achieve nothing.
At
the upcoming May 4 rally, speakers from the International Committee from
throughout the world will advance a strategy and program for the building of a
global movement against war.
Make
sure to attend. Register today!
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