May Day was just the Beginning: Learning and Growing for the Fights Ahead
Yesterday was May Day, otherwise known as International Workers’ Day, a day in which we celebrate workers across the world and raise our voices against the capitalist classes that serve to exploit us and our communities.
This year’s May Day, however, was not just a celebration but was a day of fighting for survival for many workers, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Workers across the country, especially at Target, Whole Foods, Amazon, and Instacart are calling on for a General Strike, are demanding basic rights and protections. During the pandemic, many workers have either been deemed as “essential”, from nurses to workers at supermarkets, or have no choice but to continue working to maintain themselves financially, such as workers at Amazon distribution centers.
Major companies, from Amazon to Whole Foods, have done little to protect their workers from contracting the virus. Many of them have not provided basic resources, such as masks or gloves or sanitizer, for their workers. The federal government has also failed its responsibility to protect its workers by not providing such basic things as a universal basic income that can cover for necessary expenses like groceries or universal healthcare, or a suspension of rent.
Because of this, workers at these companies are refusing to work until they receive such things as masks and gloves and hazard pay for placing their lives on the line. Therefore, the workers at places like Target, Trader Joe’s, Wal-mart, Whole Foods, Amazon and Instacart are demanding that consumers/fellow workers to also refuse to shop at the companies listed until management finally meets their demands.
That said, we should view this May Day as the beginning of building a broader national labor movement. We must learn from past mistakes and instead, take this opportunity, as more and more workers are striking or confronting their employers in various ways, to return to a broader class struggle.
THE DECLINE OF LABOR
Over the past forty years, the power of the mainstream labor movement in the U.S., including among its major labor unions, has been greatly diminished. Prior to the last decade and to the resurgence of wildcat strikes and other forms of labor resistance, the labor movement had become a marginal political and economic force, with liberal and conservative capitalists having -opted it for their own purposes.
This trend took shape due to several different reasons, but some of the more important ones include the repression of Left-wing radicals inside the labor movement and the drifting away of the mainstream labor movement from class struggle, and finally, the rise of what we call now “neoliberal” politics.
During the New Deal, the labor movement was at its peak, with workers taking over factories and directly challenging the authority of their employers. Black sharecroppers in the South were rising up against the white planter class who were denying them basic political and economic rights. Much of this reawakening was attributed to Left-wing radicals in the labor movement, especially communists, who understood that the only way to improve the lives of workers was to demand what they deserved and to demand it as a collective.
However, as the movement succeeded in pushing FDR and his administration further Left, labor union leadership drew closer to the Democrat Party. Following the end of WWII and with the Cold War starting, this meant so-called “moderate” labor unions and their leadership, and even labor unions who claimed to be socialist bu were anti-Marxist, started to marginalize Left-wing voices within the movement. Many unions, even those who depended on Communists as organizers, either threw out so-called “Reds” from their unions or stripped them of their influence.
With the sudden loss of radical leadership, the labor unions immediately shifted away from class struggle to accommodating and maintaining the “balance” between the capitalist classes and workers. Even as more Black men and Black women and White women were integrated into the labor movement, they were integrated into a movement that was invested in defending the rights they had from the New Deal rather than being part of a struggle daring to fight for more of what workers deserved.
In the meantime, the capitalist classes themselves persisted in rebuilding a counterrevolutionary movement against labor. This involved funding think tanks, elevating so-called intellectuals and media pundits, as well as exploiting economic and political conditions for far-right politicians to emerge. By the 1970s, those most energized in taking down labor believed in the economic and political concept of “neoliberalism”. Neoliberalism, boiled down to its core platform, is the belief that profit and growing the GDP must be prioritized over the basic needs and interests of ordinary people. According to neoliberals, preserving and strengthening the so-called free market, through deregulation of major businesses and cutting of taxes for the wealthy, will serve to help society broadly.
Neoliberal thinkers and politicians, like Ronald Reagan, saw their opportunity to seize power by the late 1970s, when the country descended into another recession. Because the labor unions failed to radicalize workers, or educate them on why recessions occur (capitalism will always produce an economic crisis every few years even when reformed), figures like Reagan exploited their frustrations and fears, especially among whites. Reagan told them a story that the recession and the “lawlessness” on the streets were occurring because of too much government and of too much union corruption, and implicitly because Black and Brown people, especially poor and working class, had become spoiled by government welfare and social programs.
Eventually, figures like Reagan, relying on white resentment, swept into power by the 1980s, enacting policies that concentrated more and more power in the hands of the corporate elite at the expense of labor. The Democrats themselves gradually turned away from labor as well, believing in the neoliberal idea that labor rights are less important than economic development. Consequently, policies like deregulating major companies, allowing for anti-union state laws to emerge, allowing for companies more latitude in preventing workers to organize, cutting away of basic social services that workers would depend on, and cutting taxes for the wealthy, have become the norm.
RESURGENCE
Fortunately, in the last decade, the neoliberal consensus has gradually been breaking down. This has been a result of workers rising up in response to the continued deterioration of their working and living conditions. With basic living and working conditions continuing to deteriorate to levels unimaginable, many workers have been pushed into responding.
We’ve seen teachers rising up across the country, demanding better working and living conditions for themselves and the communities they teach in. We’ve seen other types of workers in service-sector industries also doing the same, such as Instacart employees more recently going on strike to demand basic protections against Covid-19.
These types of direct action is an echo of what was normal prior to the rise of neoliberalism, where workers were tired of being pushed around and decided to take direct action themselves. The strikes and other types of direction action are a reflection of a renewed spirit among workers to no longer settle for less and to instead, demand what they’re owed.
Hence, the May Day protests and the call for a general strike should serve as the beginning of a new phase in labor resistance in the U.S. It’s a renewed opportunity to continue building class power that can effectively neutralize and overcome the power and influence that major corporations have accumulated.
However, there are at least three major lessons we must keep in mind if we hope to not repeat the mistakes of the past and this time, successfully push for the radical changes to the economy for workers.
The first lesson is whatever happens May 1, we must continue to build class power across the U.S. Despite the amazing work done by labor organizers and workers across the U.S. there will still be many workers who will not be able to participate or many of whom left unorganized. After all, the strikes and mobilizing that have been taking place across the country remain sporadic and scattered. At the same time, unlike years before, there are more strikes taking place and more workers expressing a renewed interest in pursuing direct action.
Building a broader workers’ movement can take root by creating spaces for more and more workers to connect to one another, through Left-wing community organizations and Left-wing unions and even through groups like the DSA. It also requires organizing past May Day around issues impacting workers and ordinary people.
At our own chapter, most of our efforts in organizing has been focused on campaigns to freeze rent and to help workers organize at their workplaces. The mission is to keep developing a radical political consciousness among people and to develop more and more organizers for the long-term by having people engage with issues affecting them and others like them.
Second, we must build upon a labor politics that can draw together different types of workers, across race and gender-identity and ethnicity and nationality. This means looking back somewhat to the radical labor politics of groups like the CIO prior to their re-assimilation into the AFL as well as the radical politics of Black and Brown socialists and communists, who understood that workers, based on their race and gender, do not share the same exact set of challenges or the same level of exploitation, but can still share a common enemy. However, different from the more “moderate” labor strategy, which is to ignore race and gender, we know that instead of expecting solidarity to naturally emerge between workers, we have to cultivate and strengthen it.
Doing so would require educating one another on the necessity of class struggle, on why reforming capitalism will never be enough, on why socialism provides an answer to the problems we’re faced with now, but also educating workers on the history of whiteness and how whiteness has served as a deterrent to building class power. Similarly, this means educating workers on how patriarchy and capitalism are intertwined and on how the nuclear family is a construct meant to serve capital. The point is to inoculate workers against right-wing appeals for so-called law and order and to help build empathy and care and solidarity. This type of work isn’t going to be easy and one should not expect all workers to understand. But the goal is to try and inoculate enough workers as possible.
The third lesson is that we need to continue to pursue actions that directly attack the economic and financial institutions holding power over us. This ranges from continuing to withhold our rent and our labor as well as occupying banks to occupying and demanding that policymakers respond to our interests as workers. This agitation will serve as empowering us, as well as bringing together different workers.
The final lesson (for now) is that whatever happens, we must continue to be in solidarity with one another. This means, again, not shopping at Amazon, Target, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Instacart, etc. until demands are met. Most importantly, we must continue to support and empower workers who have been described as “essential” to take on the status quo, from Black and Brown immigrant labor on farms and in the meat-packing industry, to workers across the service-sector economy.
The only way we will survive these times is by sticking together and believing in our collective power as workers.
*Photo credit: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
