Stalin, Lenin, and May Day on the streets of London.
What are you? Some kind of Communist? I met a Cuban couple on holiday in town who were shocked and confused by all this.
Each week, people around the world take streets of their cities to remind their governments that their voices matter. In this series I want to collect the best images from protests around the world.
The International Worker’s Day is all about freedom, equality and justice among the workers and employees around the world. On this day we should celebrate our unity and organize ourselves to ask for more rights from our employers. The same way as our parents did in the early 20th century, when they fought for 8-hour-working day and gave us rights not to be treated as slaves.
It is our turn now. The time has come for us to act. We should go further and get the rights that we don’t have but we deserve. The rights that will make us stop hating Mondays. And in order to do that — first — we need to get rid of the elements among our ranks that stop us from doing it.
I could see plenty of these elements this year on May Day in London. People who were fighting against the “Killings of Ahwazi people by Iran” or “Kurdish Rights”. Why are they there? They shouldn’t be there. May Day is about workers’ rights — not issues in the Middle East. We ruin the purpose of May day by allowing every imaginable political movement to express every imaginable idea on that day. This is what it looked like on that day.
“I was passing through the Trafalgar Square and saw people with placards screaming slogans ‘Justice for Ahwazi people’. So what? I thought. There are plenty of protests in London. Ten minutes later I forgot about it. It was not the end of the day when I looked at my phone and saw the date 1st of May. That’s when I asked myself ‘Why were these people there?’”
These are the words of my friend who happened to be at the heart of London that day. She shares my concerns about destroying the purpose of May Day.
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3. However, there were those who remembered the exact purpose of that day.
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5. I have never thought that I will see portraits of Lenin on the streets of London in 2016. Lenin is forgotten even in modern Russia today. But it seems that the streets of London still remember him.
6. Even Stalin was there.
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9. What was surprising for me is that protesters often like to pose for the cameras. I should tell you — that makes life of photographers much easier.
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A story from Mukokuseki — the photographer himself:
What are you? some kind of commie?!
I met a Cuban couple on holiday in town who were shocked and confused by all this. I told them it was a yearly routine day for all the various trade unionist/socialist/communist groups to make themselves heard. They said they should send em for re-education in the gulags, see what they make of that.
Moral of the story? Mayday in London, despite the buzz you feel on the day, is actually quite a small demo and rarely gets a mention in wider media. I also think that a lot of the politics on display, while clearly well-intentioned, is hopelessly outdated. The first guy who offered me some reading was from the New Internationalist, he was alright, and I’ve often read his magazine. The second guy was from some fringe group claiming to be the only ones there calling for genuine revolution, heralding a new dictatorship of the proletariat. I’m pretty sure people have tried that one before. It didn’t go well.
Acknowledgments:
Mukokuseki. I stumbled on his photos on his Tumblr page and was stunned. Really good work and great shots.
Previously in Protest:
It’s all started when a jury said that a policeman who shot unarmed man 59 times did not use excessive force. More…
