May Day has been pretty quiet in Australia for a long time. This is the first time that large May Day activities have been organised on the actual day, rather than on the first Sunday of May. People who thought that the USSR was socialist had control of May Day committees for years organised it around whatever slogan suited the Soviet Union, usually some version of "big power detÕent". A solid few union activists and socialists who challenged the idea that the USSR was socialist also joined in. But it was not inspiring. The best May Day in recent decades in Australia was 1998, in a huge show of solidarity with the MUA wharfies. A serious struggle by workers can rally many supporters.
Where workers engage in large-scale class struggle, they inevitably raise the question of who owns and controls the social wealth, the means of production. This points to a definite answer Ñ that the means of production should be owned in common, and their use democratically controlled for the common good rather than being governed by a destructive and greedy competition to expand the already-mammoth wealth of rival profiteers.
We, who are on the streets for May Day, know that we are not the rich and powerful, we are not the big end of town, we are not the big-time gamblers in the stock exchange casino, we are not the ones living in multi-million dollar waterfront mansions, we are not on the boards of directors of the big companies, we are not the ones who can decide what should be produced, or who will be allowed to earn a living by producing it, or in which country it will be produced. We are not the ruling class.
Many working class people who are not joining May Day in 2001 know this too, but they still think that they are middle class, or don't even consider that class as relevant to their lives. The lie has been perpetrated Ñ that the working class is dead.
So consider this:
There are more than 2.8 billion wage workers in the world (World Bank 1997):
550 million work in industry
850 million work in services
1.4 million work in agriculture
City dwellers comprise about 40% of the population of low to middle-income countries, and 77% of the population of the high-income countries.
In addition to wage workers is the informal sector of workers, people like clothing outworkers, tradespeople, taxi-drivers: 40-65% of the urban workforce in Asia and Africa.
There are more than 164 million trade unionists worldwide (International Labour Organisation, 1995).
Compare this to England and Wales in 1867, the most industrially developed area in the world when Marx published Capital.. Only 17% of working-age people were employed in industry, i.e. 1.7 million people and there were only 250,000 trade unionists.
Trade unions are growing fast. In just 10 years,1985-1995:
South Korea 61%
Thailand 77%
South Africa 127%
The anti-capitalist movement in Australia and other countries has chosen May Day as a day of anti-capitalist global action.
Quebec City, Davos, Prague, Melbourne, Seattle have all brought the anti-capitalist movement to the developed countries. These cities have all hosted meetings of the World Trade Organisation or the World Economic Forum. The protests have focussed on obstructing these bodies from meeting and making decisions that are in the interests of global capital rather than the working class and its allies. Slogans raised by some sections of these protests are "Abolish the IMF, WTO and World Bank", and to cancel third world debt.
These slogans clearly have a mobilising power, but they express a deeper sentiment that is against the whole capitalist system. But the realisation of these slogans will not abolish capitalism for a number of reasons. They limit the focus of protests to a set of consultative bodies for managing capitalism but without which capitalism could still continue to survive. The issues these bodies are dealing with and which the protestors are trying to obstruct, are primarily trade issues. The core of capital's weakness is not trade but at the points of production. It is the people who make the goods and services that capital trades without whom capital cannot survive.
The anti-capitalist movement is more militant, more radical and more energetic than the workers' movement: the trade union movement. Many in the anti-capitalist movement are working class people, but are not necessarily joining in with the movement from a working class perspective. They may have judged the union movement as an ageing dinosaur in contrast to the youthful nimble-footedness of the anti-capitalist movement, and see in it the possibility for socialist solutions to our problems. They may not recognise the central long term importance of solidarity amongst fellow workers to building a movement that can replace the power of global capital. They may overlook the potential of organised labour and the strength of working class loyalty and camaraderie, because they see only the institutionalised role and the politics of most union leaders bound to the system, and binding the class to the system unnecessarily. Anti-capitalist activists who also take up the role of labour movement activists will be the ones who help to recreate the radical energy of the Australian working class.
Trade unionists who do want to re-energise the movement, to commit it to a clear and militant platform of class struggle, can find allies and inspiration in the anti-capitalist movement. In some cases, notably the CFMEU leadership in Sydney, this will mean going against officials who seem to mistrust the radicals in the anti-capitalist movement, and protect their own positions by trying to segregate their members from some sections of the anti-capitalists. This is why there are separate May Day activities in Sydney, on May 1. There is also the ÔofficialÕ May Day on May 6.
In Melbourne, Trades Hall has been ambivalent about the anti-capitalists. When the trade union march at S11 (actually on S12) was officially not meant to join the blockade of the Crown Casino, many unions, including the AMWU, did organise blockade contingents nonetheless!
Segregation is damaging to both sides of the movement Ñwe need not only maximum solidarity and links between the two movements, but we also need free and open discussion of ideas and the way forward. Let's join together to increase our powers!