Photo/Austin Long-Scott.
Editor’s note: The following excerpts are from a May Day speech by Ethel Long-Scott given to the ILWU, Local 10, in San Francisco, CA.
I bring you greetings from the Women’s Economic Agenda Project! I’m going to talk about advancing from a MOMENT OF RESISTANCE to a MOVEMENT FOR FREEDOM. I don’t have to tell you what a hell of an attack is being waged on all of us workers. The history of May Day is about how men and women in different parts of the world stepped forward to lead a class of exploited people, and how they understood the absolute necessity of the unity of the poor—across EVERY line that usually divides us.
Injustices are everywhere. Public services should benefit everybody! But our two-party political system has been captured by corporate money. President Trump’s proposed huge tax cuts for the wealthy, budget cuts, and austerity for everyone else and his savaging of the Affordable Care Act equals government of, by and for the billionaires.
And now—guess what! Capitalism is breaking down. Its contract of paying workers enough to purchase the products of their labor cannot be sustained when humans are replaced by robots. Because capitalism is dying, the society built upon it is being shaken apart. We’ve got government by corporate America determined to preserve their wealth at our expense.
We are operating under 21st century fascism. Fascism is when corporations take over the government and run it for their benefit instead of for “We the People.” The billionaires and corporations need fascism to steal our public assets by privatizing public resources. It is actually a corporate dictatorship.
Here’s some hope. All these attacks are generating a new social force. The dispossessed-marginalized people are being forced out of the economy, and are growing daily as technology replaces human labor. The revolutionary changes in the economy are creating a new equality of poverty that requires class unity. We may be different colors, genders, cultures, but we are all under attack. We can’t win if we fight each other and ignore the real enemy. Our government should benefit ordinary people, not the fortunate wealthy. It will take the united work of all struggling marginalized workers behind a new vision of an economy that works for all of us to win this fight.
Our vision is putting the robots that are killing capitalism to work on behalf of “We the People,” rather than more profits for the wealthy. The way to do this is to energize the rising new social force. This will be the fight of our lifetime, but we can do it! For the first time, it is possible to unite a section of the working class politically that can in turn influence broader sections of society in a fight for a cooperative reorganization of society. The wonderous new electronic tools can create an amazing abundance but it requires a major transformation in our thinking about how best to take advantage of them.
We need to go forward from a Moment of Resistance to a Movement for Freedom! Freedom from Want, Freedom from Hunger, Freedom from Homelessness, Freedom from Trafficking, Freedom from Racism, Freedom from Violence. We’ve got a world to win!
