PHOTO/JOE PIETTE
May Day is the day when we the workers put forth our demands and demonstrate our strength and international solidarity in the struggle for a new world. May Day 2017 finds us faced with new opportunities and with grave dangers.
Our opportunity lies in the new conditions that are opening the minds of millions. It’s seen in our fight for a living wage. In the millions marching for women’s equality. In the Town Hall meetings for healthcare for all. In our fight to house the homeless. In our demand for No Wall! No Ban, and No Police killings. In our fight for clean water, science and saving the Earth. Our demands are not separate fights. They express our longing for a moral society, for democracy and freedom from corporate rule.
Underlying our movement is the new economy. Robots and computers are doing more and more of our work. This could be a good thing. It could free us up to enjoy our lives and contribute to society. But as workers, our only means of surviving is to sell our labor and, given automation, the jobs are few today. Recently a young woman in Alabama who had just found work was crushed as she tried to repair a robot on an assembly line. It started up abruptly while she was working on it. A coal miner expressed the situation this way. “We have made these companies billions of dollars. And what do they do? They take our lungs. They take our dignity. Maximum profit is their priority regardless of our health and the environment, and it’s getting worse.”
As automation replaces our labor, we are cast out into the street. The ruling corporate class is not going to provide healthcare, housing, food or anything to workers whose labor they can no longer exploit. Millions are already homeless, drinking poisoned water, and going to bed hungry. Corporations own everything and we either pay or do without. They can get away with this because they own the economy. They own the government. This will go on as long as we let it.
Can we envision a different way of organizing society? Where the abundance the robots produce—and the industries that produce it—are owned and shared by all? Where corporations and the likes of Trump and the rest of the billionaires are a thing of the past? Where having to work for an employer is a thing of the past?
The possibilities are immense, but we have to come together as a class to win. The ruling class is trying to divide us by blaming joblessness on the immigrant, the refugee, the poverty wage worker—while robbing the country blind. The corporate class has no solution except to keep amassing their wealth. The future is in our hands. It’s time to create a shared vision of a cooperative world and how to achieve it. Contact the People’s Tribune if you would like to talk! Email info@peoplestribune.org.
