For those of you not in the know May Day is a celebration of the social and economic achievements of the western labour movement. Specifically May 1st is used because in 1884 the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions demanded an eight-hour workday in the United States, to come in effect as of 1 May 1886. This resulted in a general strike and the U.S. Haymarket Riot of 1886, but eventually also in the official sanction of the eight-hour workday.
While May Day originates in the U.S. with the struggle for the eight-hour workday and the incarceration and murder of the Haymarket anarchists who fought most vigorously for it, the holiday is barely recognised in the U.S. And, throughout the world, people tend to forget the emphatically anti-authoritarian roots of the events they’re commemorating. The battles fought at the end of the 19th century weren’t for hierarchical unions, political parties, or traitorous union bosses. The prize most people had their eyes on back then was egalitarian worker control of the means of production and the idea that ordinary people should make the decisions about the things that effect their lives. Which is, of course, the whole point of anarchism, and the reason why it was anarchists who were eventually fitted with the hangman’s noose. If you’d like to know more you couldn’t do much better than Haymarket Scrapbook.
Frogblog, the NZ Greens own weblog, points to another report damning the NZ Labour Government’s tertiary education policy and goes on to expose the government’s hollow rhetoric on the matter. I’m reminded of a recent campaign we’ve been exposed to in London, designed to entice kiwi expats back home based on their emotional attachments to NZ; land and family. Don’t they see that this is just rubbing it in our faces. If it wasn’t for my student loan and the ludicrous rate of interest I’m charged I’d be home already. I’d really like to know the history behind and the justifications given for charging a rate of interest anything more than inflation. Anyone have the scoop on this?
Lila Guterman, a senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education explains how and why the Lancet study was ignored in the U.S., which, at the time, estimated 100 000 Iraqis had died due to the invasion. She notes that five months have passed since the paper came out. If the death rate has stayed the same, roughly 25 000 more Iraqis have died. We really shouldn’t be surprised when we get the likes of General Tommy Franks pointing out that “… we don’t do body counts.”
An article titled This Is Our Guernica, in the British newspaper the Guardian, co-written by Dahr Jamail, a friend, and the only independent, unembedded journalist reporting in Iraq for months, states:
“In the 1930s the Spanish city of Guernica became a symbol of wanton murder and destruction. In the 1990s Grozny was cruelly flattened by the Russians; it still lies in ruins. This decade’s unforgettable monument to brutality and overkill is Falluja, a text-book case of how not to handle an insurgency, and a reminder that unpopular occupations will always degenerate into desperation and atrocity.”
Democracy Now! interviews Dahr Jamail.
Washington beats its war drums as Cuba and Venezuela enter into a trade pact, committing the intolerable crime of offering an alternative to U.S. hegemony. Hugo Chávez, President of Venezuela, launches a “Anti-Hegemonic” media campaign and Lord Tubby’s The Daily Telegraph laments Latin America’s “drift to the left,” putting the blame down to the United States being “obsessed with the Middle East for the past three years”.
And in Haiti, one of the U.S.‘s biggest ongoing fuck ups of the century, five people are killed in a demonstration calling for the release of political prisoners loyal to Haiti’s first democratically elected president, ousted with the backing of the U.S government in February 2004. The violence came as the U.S. State Department has confirmed it plans to waive an arms embargo to allow sales of thousands of arms for the brutal Haitian police.