People's Democracy

  Reclaim May Day!

                                               Sukomal Sen

THE war cry to reclaim the ‘May Day’ may seem a bit strange, is really not so.

In the phase of imperialist globalisation, which is the most ferocious form of capitalist development, capital is desperately seeking to extract maximum possible surplus value from the workers’ labour and, in the process, an utterly dehumanising existence is being imposed on the entire working class.

Marx said: in every society the ideology of the ruling class becomes the ruling ideology. It means the entire thinking process, culture and the society’s superstructure become dependent on that ideology. 

The today’s phase of imperialist globalisation is out to mercilessly snatche away all the benefits of shorter working hours and other benefits the working class had won through heroic struggles and the supreme sacrifice of the heroes of Hay Market episode of May 1, 1886. On the other hand, the ruling ideology is seeking to idealise longer working hours and inhuman conditions of work as normal and necessary. In such a situation, it becomes imperative for the Marxists to recapitulate the teachings of Marx on normal working day in order to enliven the glories and ideals of the May Day episode for eight hours struggle.

A vicious counter-offensive and tirade is being launched worldwide against the working class --- a class which is the core of a social revolution. Marxists are capable of fighting it back because we have firm conviction based on the revolutionary theory of Marx. Even the Soviet catastrophe could not deter us from our conviction.

In the first volume of his most celebrated work, Capital, Karl Marx investigated what constitutes a normal working day, and clearly brought out the nature of the direct clash between the economic and social interests of the owning class and those of the working class in settling the issue.

Marx posed the question: “What is a working day? What is the length of time during which capitalist may consume the labour power whose daily value it buys? How far may the working day be expanded beyond the working time necessary for the reproduction of labour power itself?”

Marx then says: “The working day contains the full 24 hours with the deduction of the few hours of repose without which labour power absolutely refuses its services again. Hence it is self-evident that the labourer is nothing else, his whole life through, than labour power, and that therefore all his disposable time to be devoted to the self-expansion of capital” (Capital, Vol 1, p 264).

The workers’ struggle for shortening of working hours actually means their resistance against this unlimited greed of the capitalists for extracting maximum surplus value out of the labour power of their workers. Intensification of this struggle means intensification of the class struggle between capital and labour.

The ruling ideology of the capitalist class occupies the minds of many, more so in the phase of globalisation. As a consequence, they feel that this neo-liberal globalisation is something inevitable and that they have to be adjusted themselves with its realities. That is why they think there is nothing to object in the ongoing lengthening the working day for workers, severe curtailment of their rights and the end or drastic reduction of their social security benefits including pension, as this is all in the interest of development.

But those who believe in the principles of Marxism, will do well to recall how Marx explains the mechanism of capitalist exploitation which alienates the labour:

“The worker become all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an even cheaper commodity than the commodity he produces. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things…… the object which labour produces --- labour’s product --- confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer…..”

There is no need here to marshal any statistics to show the formidable dimensions of unemployment of the workers, whether in India or worldwide. Even if we don’t refer to the trade unions’ statistics, the statistics of organisations like the OECD, World Bank, IMF, UNDP and ILO reports also confirm the fast growing unemployment and misery of the workers and the poor. Not content with this, international capitalism has set the agenda of a “trade union free world” simply because it considers trade unions as obstacles to rapacious exploitation of workers and the poor in a bid to maximise the capitalists’ profits in every corner of the world. Further, the imperialists and international capitalism abhor the working class movement which is unquestionably the core of the anti-globalisation and anti-imperialist struggle the world is witnessing today.

Added to severe curtailment of trade union rights, world capitalism is using its agencies like the World Bank and IMF to dictate further depression of workers’ wages, wholesale privatisation of the public sector and even of the government’s functions, drastic downsizing, reckless reduction of staff, replacement of regular employment by contract employment, doing away with social security benefits and above all longer working hours --- sometimes up to 14 hours a day and for IT industries even 16 hours or more.

In India, workers are experiencing formidable attacks on their rights and livelihood, and an alarming rate of unemployment is making the entire country shiver regarding the fate of the people who are in the working age groups. Though the official figures dishonestly seek to hide the truth, the actual number of urban and rural jobless may not be less than 12 crores.

But this is an insoluble structural unemployment that arises out of the structural crisis of global capitalism. That is why the Indian bourgeoisie are not worried about tackling this alarming unemployment situation. Job creation has practically no place in the political and economic agenda of our government. The draft of the Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which has been circulated as a component of the Common Minimum Programme of the UPA government, is proving to be a hoax.

Above all, the all-pervasive pernicious ideology of imperialist globalisation has a tremendous polluting effect on many who are not otherwise bourgeois ideologues. Numerous are falling prey to it, idealising the curbs on labour rights, contract labour, reduction of social security, et al.

Thus all kinds of nefarious attempts are being made by capitalists and their hangers-on to erase the memories of the heroic May Day struggle and its great achievements earned by the world working class through more than hundred years of bitter struggles and sacrifice.

But can this nefarious design be allowed a free passage? In a somewhat similar situation in the USA twenty years back, in the May 1985 issue of Labour Today, a militant monthly publication from Chicago, its editor Fred Gaboury had urged the US workers to recapture the historic meaning of May Day and couple it with the current struggle for a shorter work-week and for workers’ rights.

Fred Gaboury had thunderously urged the workers “to reclaim this holiday (May Day) as part of their history and join with others, regenerating the spirit of the first May Day and the fight for shorter hours and labour rights!”

On the occasion of May Day 2005, when the working class and the poor are getting formidably affected by the holocaust of imperialist globalisation and by the unfettered greed of capital, we have to repeat the same revolutionary call to the working class of India and the entire world --- Reclaim May Day, its glorious heritage, its achievements. The Working class has to doggedly resist the reactionary attempts for a backward turn of the wheels of the history of mankind.

Let the flame of May Day regenerate the revolutionary spirit of the working class to beat back this imperialist globalisation and its merciless offensive against the working class --- the most revolutionary class which, in alliance with the peasantry and all the poor, is destined to change the exploitative capitalist society.

Working class has to prepare and intellectually educate itself to discharge the historic task that has devolved on it, come what may.