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As we mark International Workers’ Day May 1, the ruling classes of the world are attacking the working class everywhere. People demonstrating against the unemployment and poverty that characterizes the capitalist world today are beaten and arrested. The police are waging a campaign of terror and murder against the poor and anyone who voices opposition to the rule of the corporations. The “anti-terrorism” laws are used to strip us of our rights and subject us to unlimited surveillance and arrest without charges. The government ignores our pleas for help and offers us bullets, billy clubs and budget cuts instead. We are living under the fascist dictatorship of the corporations.
But what appears to be our enemy’s strength is really proof of their weakness. History is on the side of the people today. We have the possibility of throwing off the rule of the corporations and building a whole new society that serves the people. What we need is a strategy for victory.
May Day has its roots in the May 4, 1886, Haymarket affair in Chicago, where the police fired on a public assembly of workers during a general strike for the eight-hour workday. Over the next 100 years or so, the struggle between worker and capitalist in the US was basically to get a bigger share of the pie for the workers. It was a fight for reform, and the capitalists periodically granted reforms when it suited their interests.
Today, the reforms have been stripped away, and there is no going back to the old days. No more reforms are possible, because the electronic revolution has transformed the economy. Robots and computers are taking the place of human labor, eliminating one job after the other. Millions are now permanently unemployed or underemployed, and their ranks grow daily. The spreading permanent unemployment shrinks the market, and the corporations take steps to boost their profits—they cut more jobs, cut wages, cut benefits, cut government services. They go to war to open up markets. Everything they do to boost profits makes things worse and invites resistance. They are reduced to protecting their wealth and power by force. This is why they attack the people.
Yet the same electronic revolution that is producing mass unemployment has given us the possibility of unlimited abundance. If the people owned and controlled the economy—the banks, the factories, the mines, the offices—we could create everything we need and simply distribute it to people. And in fact, we have no choice but to fight our way forward into such a new, cooperative society. Electronics spells the end of every economy based on private ownership of the social tools of production.
The people cannot win without a vision of what they’re fighting for. We must continue to demand that the government guarantee the necessities of life to every one of us, not because we expect the corporate government to grant those demands, but because the corporations’ refusal to do so will show millions of us what we are really fighting for—a cooperative society, where the people are in charge and the abundance we produce is distributed according to need.
