Happy May Day
It's May 1, which means it's International Workers' Day. Well, except in the US where workers' struggles are ignored in favor of Loyalty Day. Loyalty Day was specifically created to counter May Day. Combined with the US's anti-labor Labor Day celebrated in September, Loyalty Day allows good Americans the opportunity to avoid any untoward display of anarchist, communist, or socialist sentiment. It's an easy way to let the boss know you're one of the good workers and not the uppity, trouble-making kind that might need to be hung or beaten to death by security guards.
I suppose Loyalty Day isn't overly popular. Does anyone actually celebrate it? It was created in the same nationalist, anti-revolutionary spirit as the "under God" addition to the Pledge of Allegiance, and the transformation of the national motto to "In God We Trust" as opposed to E Pluribus Unum. Questioning the value of Loyalty Days and of pledges to god and country isn't terribly popular in the US. Americans, it seems, are content to celebrate their allegiance to State, God and Capital rather than their own liberty, or their own historic struggles for it.
Sometimes it's hard to believe there was ever a revolutionary spirit in the US.
We have not come to do the work of political parties, but we have come here in the cause of labour, in its own defence, to demand its own rights. -Eleanor Marx, Speech on the First May Day
The Marxists Internet Archive has a page of May Day links worth reading.
[Update: 5.1.2008 @ 1:23 PM]
Dockworkers Protest Iraq War - New York Times:
Thousands of dockworkers at West Coast ports stayed off the job on Thursday in what their union said was a call for an end to the war in Iraq.
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union said more than 25,000 members in 29 ports stayed off the job. The action came despite an order issued Wednesday by an arbitrator directing the union to tell its members to report for work as usual in response to a request from employers.
Cool.
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