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Today is May Day - International Workers Day. Mick Brooks looks at the origins and traditions of May Day and why it matters.
On 23rd March 1989 the oil tanker Exxon Valdez left normal shipping
lanes and smashed into the Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska.
Within hours, the once mighty vessel had spilled over ten million
gallons of oil into the icy waters: the largest oil spill in ever
recorded in US waters.
One of the issues confronting the G20, and one the official communiqué is likely to duck, is the threat of climate change making parts of the globe uninhabitable. Nowhere is the peril more present and manifest than Bangladesh, home to more than 130 million people. The G20 leaders may smile for the cameras as their conflab closes, but the working people of Bangladesh are at the sharp end of capitalism’s failure to deal with threat of climate change
The G20 is in process as we go to print. Yet we can already make predictions as to the outcome of the talks. The poor will gain nothing from the summit. The Global Monitoring Report from Unesco estimates that as a result of the slump the 390 million poorest Africans will see their income drop by around 20% - far more than in the developed world.
As the leaders of the ‘free world’ at the G20 summit sit down to champagne, caviar and the grand task of ‘solving the economic crisis’, the last thing likely to be on their minds are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The new administration in Washington triumphantly tells us that Iraq is stabilising and that the conflict in Afghanistan is 'winnable'. Two shattered countries with no infrastructure and over one million dead and they tell us that 'the objectives have nearly been achieved'!
Today, April 1st 2009, leaders of the G20 nations meet in London. The G20 covers two thirds of the world’s population, 80% of all trade and collectively produces 90% of the world’s income. Their leaders will dine well, enjoy fine wines and strut the public stage. They are here to discuss the world economic crisis and how to solve it. We confidently predict they will achieve nothing.
Under capitalism there is a steady unremitting pressure on workers’ living standards from the capitalist class, particularly as they compete with one another, and with bosses all around the world, to cut costs - especially labour costs. This need for employers to attack the wages and conditions of European workers has been intensified by the onset of crisis. There are huge discrepancies between national rates of pay within the European Union. Naturally bosses would like to exploit these differences. And the European Court of Justice is trying hard to help them.
In Pennsylvania last month judge Mark Ciavarella, and the judge of the juvenile court Michael Conahan, pleaded guilty to having accepted $2.6m (£1.8m) from the co-owner and builder of a private prison where children aged from 10 to 17 were locked up.The cases of up to 2,000 children put into custody by Ciavarella and Conahan over the past seven years are now being reviewed in a scandal called "kids for cash". 
The present
economic crisis, through its sheer scale and reach, is bringing about a
wholesale change in the consciousness of working people the world over. It is
the poor, the oppressed, and the workers who shoulder this weight in order to
hold up the privileges of the rich. There is no portion of the working class
that has so greatly and extensively borne this affliction than working women.
French students are out of the classroom and back on
the street. On Thursday, 29th January, students and teaching staff
joined in the national strike that had an estimated 2.5 million French workers
marching in the major cities to prove to President Sarkozy that his provocative
remark in the summer of 2007- ‘These days, when there’s a strike in France,
nobody notices,’ was as wrong as it was rash.
Last November we
reported how Binyam Mohamed had been tortured with the enthusiastic participation
of the British security services.
Israel has recently declared a unilateral ceasefire, bringing to an end
one of its bloodiest military incursions into the Gaza strip. As the
dust settles, the scale of the devastation becomes clear: over 1,300
Palestinians lie dead, with estimates of the number wounded topping
5000. Much of Gaza's infrastructure lies in ruins, with power stations,
water networks and sewage systems destroyed; homes, mosques and even
schools have been reduced to rubble. According to the UN, the cost of
rebuilding Gaza could run into billions of dollars.
Over the weekend, from the 9th to the 11th of January, the
International Marxist Tendency organised the 5th Northern European
Winter School in Berlin. The number of comrades and IMT sections
participating was much greater in comparison to previous years. Around
20 to 40 comrades attended the Winter Schools in past years. That was
already a success, but this year we had 150 comrades and sympathisers
from Germany, Poland, Russia, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia, Switzerland,
Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, Britain, France, Italy and Austria coming to
a city with a great revolutionary history and tradition. We also had
guests and speakers from Pakistan, Venezuela, Brazil, Canada and the
United States. The attendance clearly exceeded our expectations and put
a big question mark over the name "Northern European Winter School".
In
the
afternoon of Wednesday, January 29 (Venezuelan time), two workers
were killed by police in the state of Anzoategui, Venezuela. The
workers killed are Pedro Suarez from the Mitsubishi factory and José
Marcano from nearby auto parts factory Macusa. They were killed when
regional police of Anzoategui was attempting evict hundreds of workers
who had been occupying the Mitsubitshi (MMC) factory.
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