Fw: May Day Greetings from the DSP Australia

["Alan Bradley" <alanb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi comrades.
I thought I might forward this.  Someone else may send some version of it
too.  There's some nice background material in the second piece which could
be handy.

Of course, since this is from the DSP, it reflects their positions.

Hopefully the next issue of Green Left Weekly will have a report (not
written by me!) on May Day in my own crappy little town.  If so, I will
forward it.

Alan Bradley
alanb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

--------------------------------------------------------------
> Dear Comrades,
>
> Attached below is a May Day message and greetings for progressive forces
> around the world from the Democratic Socialist Party of Australia.
>
> Also attached is the text of a speech given by DSP Political Committee
> member Doug Lorimer at the May Day dinner organised by the Worker
> Communist Party of Iraq in Sydney on April 29, 2000.
>
> With solidarity on May Day,
>
> Comradely greetings,
>
> John Percy
> National Secretary
> Democratic Socialist Party
> Australia
> intl@xxxxxxxxxx
>
> _______________________________
> DSP May Day Greetings 2000
>
> As we celebrate the first May Day of the new Millennium, the glaring
> inequalities and injustices and contradictions of global capitalism
> appear more acute than ever. The gap between rich and poor continues to
> widen. Images of obscene wealth and disgusting luxury and waste contrast
> with pictures of starving populations on our nightly TV screens. Can
> those bourgeois apologists still claim that capitalism is the best of
> all possible worlds?
>
> Flood, famine, drought and disease ravage countries, even whole
> continents such as Africa. But most of the misery, starvation, and
> deaths are preventable. These are man-made disasters: deforestation,
> global warming, poisoning of our rivers and oceans, and the biggest
> man-made disaster of all, the robbing of the wealth of the majority of
> the world by a tiny few ? capitalism.
>
> In April the Dow and Nasdaq indices plummeted. The billion dollar
> gamblers held their breath, some panicked. The market resumed its roller
> coaster ride, but all know the bubble will burst. Can they really think
> capitalism is the stable, natural order?
>
> Increasing numbers of workers, poor farmers, and young people around the
> world are deciding no! Capitalism is the problem, and it has to go. The
> massive demonstrations in Seattle and Washington showed the way. Similar
> demonstrations will confront the World Economic Forum when it meets in
> Melbourne September 11-13.
>
> Neo-liberal capitalism needs to extract ever greater profit from
> workers, so we need greater struggles and better organisation to fight
> back. The MUA campaign in 1998 was a great fight, in spite of the
> outcome. Workers in our region are waging inspiring struggles, in South
> Korea, in India, in Pakistan, in the Philippines, in Indonesia. Our task
> here in Australia is to rebuild militant trade unions that defend
> workers interests, not make peace with capitalism.
>
> Around the world racism is rampant. In Australia Pauline Hansen's One
> Nation Party drew on all the basest prejudices and bigotry. Young
> people, especially high school students, mobilised in their thousands
> against this racist threat. Resistance can be especially proud of the
> role it played in mobilising high school students. We made a difference.
>
> But Howard has now taken up Pauline Hanson's racist banner. Iraqi and
> Afghanistan refugees fleeing terrible repression are locked up in desert
> concentration camps. Kosovans promised "safe havens" are forced back to
> live in the rubble of Kosova. Aboriginal people are denied decent living
> conditions, compensation for past wrongs, denied even their history. Our
> task is to wage a continuing struggle against racism, defending
> aborigines, migrants, and refugees.
>
> This May Day we can reflect on some partial successes, and strengthen
> our resolve to continue til final victory.
>
> Reflect on East Timor, now free from Indonesian rule. Devastated yes,
> poverty-stricken and still suffering. But free, and its workers and poor
> farmers are politically organising more openly. We've seen the
> encouraging growth and organisation of the Socialist Party of Timor,
> PST.
>
> We in the Democratic Socialist Party and Resistance can be well pleased
> with the role we played since last May Day. We stepped up our solidarity
> work, which we've been carrying out for many years through ASIET, and
> played a leading role in organising large demonstrations around
> Australia last September, pressing for Australian government action and
> UN intervention, to stay the genocidal attacks of Indonesia's murderous
> militia. Our action was able to make an impact.
>
> Reflect on Indonesia, Suharto is gone, threatened with war crimes
> hearings, his ill-gotten billions threatened with investigation and
> seizure. Certainly, it's still a very fragile and limited democracy;
> sure, it's a government where the IMF and Washington are still pulling
> the strings, forcing austerity measures against the mass of the
> population. But it's an increasingly aware and mobilised population. The
> Peoples Democratic Party has grown, with young activists already steeled
> in many battles.
>
> And Elian Gonzalez is free. He's reunited with his father, out of the
> clutches of the Miami mafia. He's not yet back in Cuba, but that is
> surely inevitable. The cause of Cuba took a tremendous boost from this
> incident, exposing the anti-communist fanatics, making Washington's
> blockade and embargo look ridiculous and needing to go. Any long delay
> in repatriating Elian would be an even worse defeat for the US ruling
> class. Already it's Cuba's biggest propaganda victory in their 41-year
> defence against the assaults of US imperialism.
>
> So we've had some victories, but we've had repeated reminders that the
> need to replace this capitalist system with socialism is urgent.
>
> May Day is not just a day for speeches, for looking back on past glories
> and victories, but a day to prepare ourselves for action, to strengthen
> our resolve, to ensure our future victories over the capitalist monster,
> and the winning of socialism around the world.
>
> That means organisation, and activity, and commitment, and the building
> of a Marxist party to play our part in the international struggle for
> socialism by overthrowing the rule of profit and greed here in
> Australia, the rule of racism and sexism and exploitation and
> environmental destruction. That's our main task here.
>
> But we also have a duty of extending international moral support,
> material support, and mass political support to the struggles of the
> workers and oppressed around the world, and especially in our region.
>
> Increasing attacks by global capitalism are giving rise to growing
> consciousness of the oppressed, and growing recognition of the need for
> international socialist renewal, discussion, collaboration, regroupment
> of the Marxist forces. Especially in the Asia Pacific region, new
> parties and movements are emerging, revolutionary parties are growing,
> new links are being forged. We saw this new growth and this new dynamic
> spirit at the Asia Pacific Solidarity Conference in April 1998, and at
> the Marxism 2000 conference in January this year.
>
> On may Day 2000 as we celebrate workers unity and struggle and
> international solidarity, we look forward to further collaboration,
> discussion and cooperation with revolutionary parties, from many
> traditions, in our region and around the world.
>
> Workers of the World Unite!
>
> ____________________________
>
> The Meaning of May Day
>
> (Text of speech given by DSP Political Committee member Doug Lorimer at
> May Day dinner organised by Worker Communist Party of Iraq, Sydney April
> 29, 2000)
>
> Tonight we are commemorating May Day ? May 1, 1890 ? when the socialist
> workers in Western Europe staged an internationally coordinated day of
> street demonstrations to demand the legislative restriction of work-time
> to no more than eight hours a day.
>
> That first May Day expressed a conception of working-class struggle that
> intertwined three cardinal ideas.
>
> Firstly, that the struggle to free labour from capitalist exploitation
> can only be achieved through their own, organised, self-activity.
>
> Secondly, that for this organised self-activity to even begin to free
> labour from capitalist exploitation it must take the form of a movement
> that champions the interests of labour as a whole, as a class, against
> the interests of the capitalist class. That is, it must be a political
> movement, a movement against the political policies and the political
> power of the capitalists, against the governments and laws that protect
> the capitalist private-profit system.
>
> And, thirdly, that the struggle to free labour from capitalist
> exploitation is not a national, but a social problem, embracing all
> countries that are dominated by the capitalist private-profit system, a
> system that is by its very nature an international system, and,
> therefore requires solidarity between the workers of all nationalities.
>
> These three crucial ideas, embodied in that first May Day, express the
> conception of the working-class movement that Karl Marx first set forth
> in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 and again, in more abbreviated form,
> in the preamble to the general rules of the first international
> organisation of labour, the International Working Men's Association,
> founded in London in 1864.
>
> This, of course, should come as no surprise, because that first May Day
> was organised by the Marxist-led workers' parties of Western Europe upon
> the initiative of an international labour congress held in Paris in July
> 1889.
>
> This congress was convened as one of 69 international congresses held in
> connection with the International Exhibition arranged by the French
> government to commemorate the centenary of the beginning of the Great
> French Revolution.
>
> In fact there were two labour congresses held in Paris in July 1889. One
> was arranged by the British trade unions and the French reformist
> socialists, or ``Possibilists'' as they were then called.
>
> The other was called by the German Marxists and arranged by the French
> Marxists, or ``Impossibilists'' as they were called because they
> rejected the reformist illusion that labour could be freed from
> capitalist exploitation simply through trade-union action or
> parliamentary reforms of the legal relations between labour and capital.
>
> It was the congress of the Marxists which issued the called for May 1,
> 1890 to be an international day of struggle for an eight- hour day law.
>
> Ironically, it was also the congress of the Marxists in Paris in July
> 1889 that later came to be regarded as the founding congress of the
> second international labour association, the Labour and Socialist
> International. Within a generation of this congress, the conception of
> the working-class movement expressed by the ``Possibilists'' ? that
> labour could be freed from capitalist exploitation by means solely of
> gradual and piecemeal reforms ? had come to dominate the Socialist
> International, an organisation which still exists and which is
> officially represented in this country by the Australian Labor Party.
>
> The choice of May 1, 1890 as the day on which to hold an international
> demonstration in favour an eight-hour working day came at the initiative
> of the American Federation of Labor. On May 1, 1886 200,000 workers
> organised by the AFL staged a one-day strike to demand that their
> employers individually agree to an eight-hour working day. Two years
> later, the AFL decided to repeat the action on May 1, 1890.
>
> The four hundred delegates at the international congress of Marxists in
> Paris in 1889 decided to designate May 1, 1890 as an international
> working-class holiday in solidarity with the American workers' action.
>
> The AFL later dissociated itself from this international day of
> working-class solidarity and instead promoted the idea of a purely
> national holiday ? Labor Day ? to celebrate the achievements of trade
> unions through the reformist social partnership of labour and capital.
>
> The idea behind May Day goes back even further than the international
> day of demonstrations for the eight-hour working day on May 1, 1890 or
> the American workers' strike on May 1, 1886.
>
> Rosa Luxemburg, the great German Marxist who was murdered in 1919 by
> soldiers acting on the orders of a government headed by the German
> ``Possibilists''or Social-Democrats as they were officially called,
> explained it like this:
>
> ``The inspired thought of introducing a proletarian holiday as a means
> of obtaining the eight-hour working day first originated in Australia.
> As early as 1856, the workers there resolved to call for one day of
> complete work stoppage; the day to be spent in meetings and
> entertainment instead ? as a demonstration for the eight-hour day. The
> 21st of April was designated as this holiday. In the beginning, the
> Australian workers thought of instituting such a holiday but once, in
> the year 1856. But even this celebration made such an impression on the
> proletarian masses of Australia that it was decided to repeat the
> holiday annually.
>
> ``... the idea of a proletarian holiday was accepted very quickly and
> began to spread from Australia to other countries...
>
> ``The first to follow the example of the Australian workers were the
> Americans. They designated the first of May as the day of generakl work
> stoppage in the year of 1886.''
>
> Unfortunately, the Australian labour movement also later followed the
> American in abandoning May Day as a day of working-class struggle in
> favour of a Labour Day celebration of ``pure'' trade- unionism or, as it
> has become today, a capitalist-sanctioned nationalist celebration of
> business unionism.
>
> Throughout the world class-conscious workers observe May Day as a day on
> which we commemorate the battles fought and the sufferings endured not
> simply in the struggle for the eight-hour working day, but in the
> struggle to free labour from capitalist exploitation everywhere in the
> world.
>
> On this coming May Day, class-conscious workers in Australia can take
> pride in the fact that since May Day 1999 we have undertaken actions
> that embodied each of the three cardinal themes of the original May Day.
>
> Through the organised self-activity ? the trade-union bans and street
> demonstrations ? that we carried out in September last year in
> solidarity with the workers and labouring farmers of East Timor, we
> built a political movement that forced the political power of the
> Australian capitalists to end its 24-year policy of supporting the
> Indonesian capitalist elite's enslavement of East Timor.
>
> Today, as a result of that political movement, labour in East Timor has
> more freedom to struggle against capitalist exploitation.
>
> Of course, freedom to struggle against exploitation does not guarantee
> success in the struggle to be free of exploitation.
>
> Workers in Australia long ago won the freedom to politically struggle
> against capitalist exploitation. They used that freedom to win reforms
> that improved their living standards and working conditions far above
> those of their forebears and of most people in the world who have had to
> labour in offices, factories and fields.
>
> But they have lacked the class-consciousness and organisation required
> to use this freedom to build the sort of political movement needed to
> free themselves from capitalist rule and capitalist exploitation.
>
> And today this is a failing which, saddled with leaders who think that
> labour can only achieve what capital says is possible within the
> capitalist private-profit system, is leading to the rolling back of
> those working conditions and to the steady lowering of their living
> standards.
>
> If the working-class movement in Australia is to reverse this situation
> it will have to adopt the conception of working-class struggle that
> inspired the first international May Day 110 years ago.
>
> In 1924, when the NSW Labour Council was, for a brief time, inspired by
> that conception, it issued the following appeal, which has lost none of
> its relevance as we commemorate May Day 2000:
>
> ``The Australian movement desires not only that the [labour] day
> [celebration] be fixed for May 1, but that the whole character and
> purpose of the demonstration should be changed. Dinners, sports, picnics
> ? these are not good enough. The movement is worth more than this. Let
> our May Day certainly be a day or rejoicing, but let it also be a day in
> which all active elements of the movement take stock of the work of the
> last year, of the prospects ahead, and the program required. Let it also
> be a day of demonstrations which express a growing class-consciousness
> of the working class and a declaration of war upon capitalist society.
> We want a labour day which will give the movement a chance to unite for
> a real move forward on the basis of all the more pressing interests of
> the workers. Forward to a new battle! Forward to world revolution!''
>
> _________________________
>