www.newsandletters.org
|
|
MAY DAY 2002The celebration of May Day 2002 is taking place as, at one and the same time, we are confronted with new threats to our freedom and yet everywhere see new openings to a very different freedom-filled future. On the one hand we are both suffering a global economic crisis and being threatened by George Bush with a "permanent war" complete with new nuclear weapons. On the other hand, this has brought forth a newly revived movement against the destructive power of capitalism with hundreds of thousands of anti-globalisation and anti-capitalist activists recently marching in Barcelona, and two million Italian workers marching against that government's anti-labour laws as well as the ongoing "permanent war", while May Day in London will see a similar - and unprecedented - convergence of these forces. It is a moment when there is a growing sense that the time has come to return to Marx. Just as May Day has been a focus for new revolutionary movements from France in 1968 to China in 1989, the new moment we are confronting today calls on us to look with new eyes at the legacy of May Day as it was dialectically interwoven into the development of Marx's philosophy and practice of revolution. The bloody labour struggles for the 8-hour day became the axis of his greatest work, Capital, because he saw the creative role of labour as the key to everything else. He showed that the actual necessity of revolt arose out of the fact that capitalism was destroying society, and that the only force which could overcome it was what he called, in his greatest work Capital, "the development of human power which is its own end - the true realm of freedom." History proved to Marx that in demanding control over the length of their working day, the workers were reaching beyond mere "reform" towarda completely new kind of society in which TIME would no longer be governed by the dictates of an external measure - "socially necessary labour time" - but would be measured in terms of the free self-determination of the producers. "Time," said Marx, " is the space for human development." What is urgent is to make sure that it is to Marx's Marxism that we return, and not the truncated kind of Marxism on which post-Marx Marxism has rested, that separates philosophy of revolution from actual revolution. Instead of narrowing the problems facing us today to a question of mere reform within the structures of the present, what is needed is the uprooting of the old and the creation of a totally new society grounded in a new kind of labour that will unite our mental and manual capabilities. Today the barrier standing in the way of working out our own future is the lack of a total view that expresses not only what we are against, but what we are for. Thus, in light of September 11 and its aftermath, it became clear that it is insufficient to oppose the imperialism of our rulers while refraining from a serious critique of the terrorist attacks, and expressing our opposition to all the forms of fundamentalism threatening our freedom. None know this better than the Iranian revolutionaries who saw counter-revolution arising from within their revolution in 1979 when, in the name of fighting U.S. imperialism, a new form of nationalism arose to steal the fruits of the workers' struggles. We cannot afford to repeat these lessons again today. As Marxist-Humanists we are dedicated to a total banner of liberation on the basis of the philosophy of revolution worked out by Raya Dunayevskaya. From England to Iran, and from the U.S. to Ukraine, we stand with all the forces trying to reconstruct the world on new, human foundations today - in the battles women are waging for their liberation, in the world wide struggles against racism, in the growth of the movement to end the unfreedom of global of state capitalism, as well as in new trade union struggles. This is why - along with our strikes and our marches, our protests and our demonstrations - we are inviting you to join us in a philosophic dialogue about what Marx's Marxism means for today. London Corresponding Committee (England) |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
