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Happy May Day 2007!

Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit

[Sorry this is a day late. It is too nice to hold for next year. -NYTr]

The Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory (TOPLAB)
451 West Street
New York, New York 10014
(212) 924-1858
toplab@toplab.org
http://www.toplab.org

Happy May Day 2007!

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point is to
change it." --Karl Marx

*****

May Day. The most meaningful and important holiday for us and our
movement! This year, most activities (in the United States at any rate)
are focusing on immigrants and immigrant rights. (Big demo and march
today, starting at 4:00 pm at Union Square in New York City.)

The Internationale is our song and is essential for celebrating May Day
(now also called International Workers Day). Here are Charles Kerr's
adapted lyrics, as well as the original, in French. Following The
Internationale is a short article on the history of May Day, compliments
of the Wobblies.

- --TOPLAB

*****

Adaptation of Charles H. Kerr translation from the original, for The IWW
Songbook (34th Edition)

online at
http://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/sounds/lyrics/international.htm and
other websites

Arise ye pris'ners of starvation
Arise ye wretched of the earth
For justice thunders condemnation
A better world's in birth!
No more tradition's chains shall bind us
Arise, ye slaves, no more in thrall;
The earth shall rise on new foundations
We have been naught we shall be all.

Refrain:

'Tis the final conflict
Let each stand in his place
The International Union
shall be the human race.

We want no condescending saviors
to rule us from their judgement hall
We workers ask not for their favors
Let us consult for all.
To make the theif disgorge his booty
To free the spirit from its cell
We must ourselves decide our duty
We must decide and do it well.

The law oppresses us and tricks us,
the wage slave system drains our blood;
The rich are free from obligation,
The laws the poor delude.
Too long we've languished in subjection,
Equality has other laws;
"No rights", says she "without their duties,
No claims on equals without cause."

Behold them seated in their glory
The kings of mine and rail and soil!
What have you read in all their story,
But how they plundered toil?
Fruits of the workers' toil are buried
In strongholds of the idle few
In working for their restitution
the men will only claim their due.

We toilers from all fields united
Join hand in hand with all who work;
The earth belongs to us, the workers,
No room here for the shirk.
How many on our flesh have fattened!
But if the norsome birds of prey
Shall vanish from the sky some morning
The blessed sunlight then will stay.

**

L'Internationale

The original lyrics in French, written by: Eugène Pottier, Paris, June
1871 and music by Pierre Degeyter, 1888:

Debout! les damnés de la terre
Debout! les forçats de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratère,
C'est l'éruption de la fin.
Du passé faisons table rase
Foule esclave, debout! debout!
Le monde va changer de base
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout!

Refrain

C'est la lutte finale
Groupons-nous et demain
L'Internationale
Sera le genre humain.

Il n'est pas de sauveurs suprêmes:
Ni dieu, ni césar, ni tribun,
Producteurs, sauvons-nous nous-mêmes!
Décrétons le salut commun!
Pour que le voleur rende gorge,
Pour tirer l'esprit du cachot
Soufflons nous-mêmes notre forge,
Battons le fer quand il est chaud!

L'etat opprime et la loi triche,
L'impôt saigne le malheureux,
Nul devoir ne s'impose au riche,
Le droit du pauvre est un mot creux.
C'est assez languir en tutelle,
L'égalité veut d'autres lois;
«Pas de droits sans devoirs», dit-elle,
«Egaux, pas de devoirs sans droits!»

Hideux dans leur apothéose,
Les rois de la mine et du rail
Ont-ils jamais fait autre chose
Que dévaliser le travail?
Dans les coffres-forts de la bande
Ce qu'il a créé s'est fondu.
En décrétant qu'on le lui rende
Le peuple ne veut que son dû.

Les rois nous saoulaient de fumées.
Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans!
Appliquons la grève aux armées,
Crosse en l'air et rompons les rangs!
S'ils s'obstinent, ces cannibales,
A faire de nous des héros,
Ils sauront bientôt que nos balles
Sont pour nos propres généraux.

Ouvriers, paysans, nous sommes
Le grand parti des travailleurs;
La terre n'appartient qu'aux hommes,
L'oisif ira loger ailleurs.
Combien de nos chairs se repaissent!
Mais si les corbeaux, les vautours,
Un de ces matins disparaissent,
Le soleil brillera toujours!

*****

The Brief Origins of May Day

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
http://www.iww.org/projects/mayday/origins.shtml

The Brief Origins of May Day

by Eric Chase

Most people living in the United States know little about the
International Workers' Day of May Day. For many others there is an
assumption that it is a holiday celebrated in state communist countries
like Cuba or the former Soviet Union. Most Americans don't realize that
May Day has its origins here in this country and is as "American" as
baseball and apple pie, and stemmed from the pre-Christian holiday of
Beltane, a celebration of rebirth and fertility.

In the late nineteenth century, the working class was in constant
struggle to gain the 8-hour work day. Working conditions were severe and
it was quite common to work 10 to 16 hour days in unsafe conditions.
Death and injury were commonplace at many work places and inspired such
books as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Jack London's The Iron Heel. As
early as the 1860's, working people agitated to shorten the workday
without a cut in pay, but it wasn't until the late 1880's that organized
labor was able to garner enough strength to declare the 8-hour workday.
This proclamation was without consent of employers, yet demanded by many
of the working class.

At this time, socialism was a new and attractive idea to working people,
many of whom were drawn to its ideology of working class control over
the production and distribution of all goods and services. Workers had
seen first-hand that Capitalism benefited only their bosses, trading
workers' lives for profit. Thousands of men, women and children were
dying needlessly every year in the workplace, with life expectancy as
low as their early twenties in some industries, and little hope but
death of rising out of their destitution. Socialism offered another
option.

A variety of socialist organizations sprung up throughout the later half
of the 19th century, ranging from political parties to choir groups. In
fact, many socialists were elected into governmental office by their
constituency. But again, many of these socialists were ham-strung by the
political process which was so evidently controlled by big business and
the bi-partisan political machine. Tens of thousands of socialists broke
ranks from their parties, rebuffed the entire political process, which
was seen as nothing more than protection for the wealthy, and created
anarchist groups throughout the country. Literally thousands of working
people embraced the ideals of anarchism, which sought to put an end to
all hierarchical structures (including government), emphasized worker
controlled industry, and valued direct action over the bureaucratic
political process. It is inaccurate to say that labor unions were "taken
over" by anarchists and socialists, but rather anarchists and socialist
made up the labor unions.

At its national convention in Chicago, held in 1884, the Federation of
Organized Trades and Labor Unions (which later became the American
Federation of Labor), proclaimed that "eight hours shall constitute a
legal day's labor from and after May 1, 1886." The following year, the
FOTLU, backed by many Knights of Labor locals, reiterated their
proclamation stating that it would be supported by strikes and
demonstrations. At first, most radicals and anarchists regarded this
demand as too reformist, failing to strike "at the root of the evil." A
year before the Haymarket Massacre, Samuel Fielden pointed out in the
anarchist newspaper, The Alarm, that "whether a man works eight hours a
day or ten hours a day, he is still a slave."

Despite the misgivings of many of the anarchists, an estimated quarter
million workers in the Chicago area became directly involved in the
crusade to implement the eight hour work day, including the Trades and
Labor Assembly, the Socialistic Labor Party and local Knights of Labor.
As more and more of the workforce mobilized against the employers, these
radicals conceded to fight for the 8-hour day, realizing that "the tide
of opinion and determination of most wage-workers was set in this
direction." With the involvement of the anarchists, there seemed to be
an infusion of greater issues than the 8-hour day. There grew a sense of
a greater social revolution beyond the more immediate gains of shortened
hours, but a drastic change in the economic structure of capitalism.

In a proclamation printed just before May 1, 1886, one publisher
appealed to working people with this plea:

* Workingmen to Arms!

* War to the Palace, Peace to the Cottage, and Death to LUXURIOUS
IDLENESS.

* The wage system is the only cause of the World's misery. It is
supported by the rich classes, and to destroy it, they must be either
made to work or DIE.

* One pound of DYNAMITE is better than a bushel of BALLOTS!

* MAKE YOUR DEMAND FOR EIGHT HOURS with weapons in your hands to meet
the capitalistic bloodhounds, police, and militia in proper manner.

Not surprisingly the entire city was prepared for mass bloodshed,
reminiscent of the railroad strike a decade earlier when police and
soldiers gunned down hundreds of striking workers. On May 1, 1886, more
than 300,000 workers in 13,000 businesses across the United States
walked off their jobs in the first May Day celebration in history. In
Chicago, the epicenter for the 8-hour day agitators, 40,000 went out on
strike with the anarchists in the forefront of the public's eye. With
their fiery speeches and revolutionary ideology of direct action,
anarchists and anarchism became respected and embraced by the working
people and despised by the capitalists.

The names of many - Albert Parsons, Johann Most, August Spies and Louis
Lingg - became household words in Chicago and throughout the country.
Parades, bands and tens of thousands of demonstrators in the streets
exemplified the workers' strength and unity, yet didn't become violent
as the newspapers and authorities predicted.

More and more workers continued to walk off their jobs until the numbers
swelled to nearly 100,000, yet peace prevailed. It was not until two
days later, May 3, 1886, that violence broke out at the McCormick Reaper
Works between police and strikers.

For six months, armed Pinkerton agents and the police harassed and beat
locked-out steelworkers as they picketed. Most of these workers belonged
to the "anarchist-dominated" Metal Workers' Union. During a speech near
the McCormick plant, some two hundred demonstrators joined the
steelworkers on the picket line. Beatings with police clubs escalated
into rock throwing by the strikers which the police responded to with
gunfire. At least two strikers were killed and an unknown number were
wounded.

Full of rage, a public meeting was called by some of the anarchists for
the following day in Haymarket Square to discuss the police brutality.
Due to bad weather and short notice, only about 3000 of the tens of
thousands of people showed up from the day before. This affair included
families with children and the mayor of Chicago himself. Later, the
mayor would testify that the crowd remained calm and orderly and that
speaker August Spies made "no suggestion... for immediate use of force
or violence toward any person..."

As the speech wound down, two detectives rushed to the main body of
police, reporting that a speaker was using inflammatory language,
inciting the police to march on the speakers' wagon. As the police began
to disperse the already thinning crowd, a bomb was thrown into the
police ranks. No one knows who threw the bomb, but speculations varied
from blaming any one of the anarchists, to an agent provocateur working
for the police.

Enraged, the police fired into the crowd. The exact number of civilians
killed or wounded was never determined, but an estimated seven or eight
civilians died, and up to forty were wounded. One officer died
immediately and another seven died in the following weeks. Later
evidence indicated that only one of the police deaths could be
attributed to the bomb and that all the other police fatalities had or
could have had been due to their own indiscriminate gun fire. Aside from
the bomb thrower, who was never identified, it was the police, not the
anarchists, who perpetrated the violence.

Eight anarchists - Albert Parsons, August Spies, Samuel Fielden, Oscar
Neebe, Michael Schwab, George Engel, Adolph Fischer and Louis Lingg -
were arrested and convicted of murder, though only three were even
present at Haymarket and those three were in full view of all when the
bombing occurred. The jury in their trial was comprised of business
leaders in a gross mockery of justice similar to the Sacco-Vanzetti case
thirty years later, or the trials of AIM and Black Panther members in
the seventies. The entire world watched as these eight organizers were
convicted, not for their actions, of which all of were innocent, but for
their political and social beliefs. On November 11, 1887, after many
failed appeals, Parsons, Spies, Engel and Fisher were hung to death.
Louis Lingg, in his final protest of the state's claim of authority and
punishment, took his own life the night before with an explosive device
in his mouth.

The remaining organizers, Fielden, Neebe and Schwab, were pardoned six
years later by Governor Altgeld, who publicly lambasted the judge on a
travesty of justice. Immediately after the Haymarket Massacre, big
business and government conducted what some say was the very first "Red
Scare" in this country. Spun by mainstream media, anarchism became
synonymous with bomb throwing and socialism became un-American. The
common image of an anarchist became a bearded, eastern European
immigrant with a bomb in one hand and a dagger in the other.

Today we see tens of thousands of activists embracing the ideals of the
Haymarket Martyrs and those who established May Day as an International
Workers' Day. Ironically, May Day is an official holiday in 66 countries
and unofficially celebrated in many more, but rarely is it recognized in
this country where it began.

Over one hundred years have passed since that first May Day. In the
earlier part of the 20th century, the US government tried to curb the
celebration and further wipe it from the public's memory by establishing
"Law and Order Day" on May 1. We can draw many parallels between the
events of 1886 and today. We still have locked out steelworkers
struggling for justice. We still have voices of freedom behind bars as
in the cases of Mumia Abu Jamal and Leonard Peltier. We still had the
ability to mobilize tens of thousands of people in the streets of a
major city to proclaim "THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!" at the WTO
and FTAA demonstrations.

Words stronger than any I could write are engraved on the Haymarket
Monument:

THE DAY WILL COME WHEN OUR SILENCE WILL BE MORE POWERFUL THAN THE VOICES
YOU ARE THROTTLING TODAY.

Truly, history has a lot to teach us about the roots of our radicalism.
When we remember that people were shot so we could have the 8-hour day;
if we acknowledge that homes with families in them were burned to the
ground so we could have Saturday as part of the weekend; when we recall
8-year old victims of industrial accidents who marched in the streets
protesting working conditions and child labor only to be beat down by
the police and company thugs, we understand that our current condition
cannot be taken for granted - people fought for the rights and dignities
we enjoy today, and there is still a lot more to fight for. The
sacrifices of so many people can not be forgotten or we'll end up
fighting for those same gains all over again. This is why we celebrate
May Day.

- --
The Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory
toplab@toplab.org
http://www.toplab.org

"My fellow Americans, major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the
battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."
--George W. Bush, May 1, 2003

"...I told the American people that the road ahead would be difficult,
and that we would prevail. Well, it has been difficult--and we are
prevailing."
--George W. Bush, June 28, 2005

"Our cause in Iraq is noble and necessary....America is engaged in a new
struggle that will set the course for a new century. We can and we will
prevail."
--George W. Bush, January 10,
2007

"Prevailing in Iraq is not going to be easy."
--George W. Bush, March 19, 2007

+U.S. military fatalities through May 1, 2003: 140
+U.S. military fatalities through June 28, 2005: 1743
+U.S. military fatalities through January 10, 2007: 3017
+U.S. military fatalities through March 19, 2007: 3217
+U.S. military fatalities as of May 1, 2007: 3351 (this figure exceeds
the number of people killed in all of the incidents that occurred
on September 11, 2001)

+Iraqi civilian fatalities through May 1, 2003: 1982
+Iraqi civilian fatalities through June 28, 2005 (estimated by
IraqBodyCount.net): 22,563 – 25,560*
+Iraqi civilian fatalities through January 10, 2007 (estimated by
IraqBodyCount.net): 53,101 – 58,704*
+Iraqi civilian fatalities through March 19, 2007 (estimated by
IraqBodyCount.net): 59,326 – 65,160*
+Iraqi civilian fatalities as of May 1, 2007 (estimated by
IraqBodyCount.net): 62,760 – 68,786*
+Iraqi civilian fatalities as of July 2006 (estimated by The Lancet):
654,965

*These figures are based on the number of fatalities cited in various
news reports and have been criticized, with much justification, for not
giving an accurate assessment of the real civilian death count. A much
more rigorous and statistically-reliable study, conducted by teams from
Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and Al-Mustansiriya
University, and published in The Lancet (the British medical journal)
in the Fall of 2004, put the figure at around 100,000 civilians dead.
However, that data had been based on "conservative assumptions",
according to research team leader Les Roberts, and the actual count at
that time was credibly assumed to be significantly higher. For example,
The Lancet study's data greatly underestimated fatalities in Fallujah
due to the surveying problems encountered there at that time. Most
recently, a second Lancet study, released on October 10, 2006, now
indicates that 654,965 "excess" deaths of Iraqi civilians have occurred
since the outbreak of the aggression and genocide committed by the
United States against the people of Iraq.

Sources: http://www.iraqbodycount.net/
http://icasualties.org/oif/
http://www.zmag.org/lancet.pdf
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1338749,00.html
http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/Iraq_war.html
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php4?article_id=6271
http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20041025/008279.html
http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf

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