Globalisation: The socialist perspective
Unions and socialist ideologies have largely determined South Africas labour history
and the workers struggle
Rayhan Ahmed Topader
Towards the end of the 20th century, more specifically in the decade of the eighties, this process of centralization led to gigantic levels of accumulation of capital. The beginning of the nineties saw the internationalisation of finance capital which had grown in colossal leaps. In 1993, the global stock of principle derivatives was estimated to be over $20 trillion. Subsequently, this globally mobile finance capital had acquired unprecedented dimensions. Currently, the turnover in the global financial transactions is estimated to be over $400 trillion, or, nearly 60 times the annual global trade in goods and services estimated to be around $ 7 trillion. This huge accumulated finance capital required absolutely no restrictions on its global movement in search of predatory speculative profits.
The first of May is a national public holiday in many countries worldwide, in most cases as Labor Day, International Workers Day or some similar name. The 1 May popularly known as the May Day is an official holiday in Bangladesh. All labor-oriented organizations celebrate the day with great honor and dignity. On the following stanzas, what comrade Lenin said is of immense significance: May Day is when the workers of all lands celebrate their awakening to a class-conscious life, their solidarity in the struggle against all coercion and oppression of man by man, the struggle to free the toiling millions from hunger, poverty, and humiliation. Two worlds stand facing each other in this great struggle: the world of capital and the world of labor, the world of exploitation and slavery and the world of brotherhood and freedom. When work is a pleasure, life is a joy. When work is a duty, life is a slavery. Maxim GorkyInternational Workers Day, also known as Labor Day or Workers Day in some countries and often referred to as May Day, is a celebration of laborers and the working classes that is promoted by the international labor movement which occurs every year on 1 May. The date was chosen by a pan-national organization of socialist and communist political parties to commemorate the Haymarket affair, which occurred in Chicago on 4th May 1886.
Their banners read, From 6 to 6, ten hours work and two hours for meals. From 1830 to 1860, the average work day had dropped from 12 hours to 11 hours. Already in this period, the demand for an eight-hour day was being raised. In 1836, after succeeding in attaining the ten-hour day in Philadelphia, the National Laborer declared, We have no desire to perpetuate the ten-hour system, for we believe that eight hours daily labor is more than enough for any man to perform.At the 1863 convention of the Machinists and Blacksmiths Union, the eight-hour day was declared a top priority. The heart of the movement was in Chicago, organized mainly by the International Working Peoples Association. A few years later, in 1872, a hundred thousand workers in New York City struck and won the eight-hour day, mostly for building trades workers. It was in this protracted campaign for an eight-hour day that May Day was born. The movement for the eight-hour day was linked to the date of 1 May at an 1884 convention of the three-year-old Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada, the forerunner of the American Federation of Labor.It was resolved to hold the demonstra tion on 1 May 1890 in keeping with the American Federation of Labors 1886 demonstrations of 1 May. The call was a resounding success. On 1 May 1890, May Day demonstrations took place in the United States and most countries in Europe.
Demonstrations were also held in Chile and Peru. In Havana, Cuba, workers marched demanding an eight-hour working day, equal rights for all and working-class unity. Although the 1889 resolution called for a once-off demonstration on 1 May, the day quickly became an annual event. Throughout the world workers in more countries marked the celebration of laborers rights on May Day. May Day was celebrated for the first time in Russia, Brazil and Ireland in 1891. By 1904 the Second International called on all socialists and trade unionists in every country to demonstrate energetically annually on 1 May for the legal establishment of the eight-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace. Chinese workers celebrated their first May Day in 1920, following the Russian socialist revolution. In 1927, workers in India observed May Day with demonstra tions in Kolkata, Chennai and Bombay. By that time, May Day was truly a world workers day. Ironically,while May Day gained momentum across the world it lost steam in the United States where the celebration originated. Today May Day is celebrated as a public holiday throughout most countries with the exception of the United States, because of the holidays association with Communism. May Day has been celebrated unofficially in South Africa since the 1980s. However, 1 May only became an officially recognized public holiday after the democratic elections of 1994.
South Africas mining industrys history and the development of strong Trade Unions and communist ideologies has largely determined the countrys labor history and the workers struggle. May Day is also a labor holiday in many areas of the world, and that part of its history is a thornier story. May Day has shared a date with International Workers Day since the 1880s. At the time, labor movements around the world were fighting for fair work accommodations like eight-hour workdays and unions. The date was chosen because it aligned with the anniversary of the Haymarket affair in Chicago, where police killed four people at a peaceful protest after someone threw a bomb into the crowd. The event had a huge impact on labor movements across the world. The demand for an eight-hour day..is the demand of the whole proletariat, presented, not to individual employers, but to the government as the representative of the whole of the present-day social and political system, to the capitalist class as a whole, the owners of all the means of production. The decision to declare 1 May as International Labor Day or May Day arose from the historic struggle launched by the American workers for an eight-hour workday and the brutal attack by the police on the workers at a protest rally held at Haymarket Square in Chicago, U.S.A. on May 4,1886. In that rally, the American workers struck work on May 1,1886 demanding an eight-hour workday. The working class across the world attaches great importance to May Day rallies to show their strength.
Red has been selected as the color of the workers in recognition of the blood-shed in the eight-hour workday struggle. May 1 of each year is now looked upon by the organized wage-workers and the observing public as a sort of new Independence Day upon which they will every year strike a blow for emancipation and steadily weaken the shackles of wage slavery. And that is significance of May Day. Initially, May Day was intended to be a one-off protest, and in some ways quite a solemn affair. May Day did not merely enact internationalism and working class solidarity; it celebrated these things with the familiar paraphernalia of badges, flags, art, sporting eventsMay Day is now most commonly associated as a commemoration of the achievements of the labor movement. The holiday may also be known as Labor Day or International Workers Day and is marked with a public holiday in over 80 countries including Bangladesh. On one side stand the handful of rich blood-suckers. They have seized the factories and mills, the tools and machinery, have turned millions of acres of land and mountains of money into their private property. They have made the government and the army their servants, faithful watchdogs of the wealth they have amassed. On the other side stand the millions of the disinherited. They are forced to beg the moneybags for permission to work for them.
Of course, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution turned out to be disasters. Of course, the repeated purges of men like Deng Xiaoping did not exactly endear Chinese socialism to many. But can you really agree with Dengs proposition that it did not matter if a cat was white or black as long as it caught mice? Socialism has always been about the means justifying the ends. It has not just been about ends.On May Day this year,I shall remember with pain the passing of good men like Afghanistans Nur Mohammad Taraki. There was D.N. Aidit who disappeared on a night of brutality in Indonesia long ago. Had Brezhnev not come in the way, Alexander Dubcek would have caused wonders in Czechsolovakia through his Prague Spring in 1968. Would Bangladesh have taken the rainbow-brightened road to socialism had there not been a falling out between Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Tajuddin Ahmad? But my pain comes coated in the belief that there will be time someday for the poor and the dispossessed to reclaim the world for themselves. There will be time for the hungry and the angry and the subjugated to take charge of their lives and their universe and build, brick by patient brick, the structure of socialism that will take us a little closer to the creation of a better, prosperous and educated society for ourselves.
The writer is a regular contributor to, The Independent. Email: [email protected]
