News • 27 April 2003

On May Day, the people reclaim the streets

Matthew Vella

Next Thursday is set for global demonstrations as protestors take to the streets to mark the International Day of Labour. May Day, now synonymous with mass protests, will prove to be no exception this year, with Iraq being the focal point of unrest.

In Malta, both the Labour party and the Nationalists will be convening the masses in Valletta and St Andrews respectively, but their shows are set to be more sedate than what is expected elsewhere around Europe, where spectres of left-wing parties will be facing mass demonstrations.

London will be marking its May Day with protests all the way around Whitechapel and the Houses of Parliament for the fourth consecutive year. A few yards away in 10 Downing Street, Tony Blair will be contemplating the thousands marching against war in Iraq. Thousands of anti-war and anti-global protestors will be taking to the streets in the rest of the world.

The Primo Maggio in Rome, organised by the CIGL, CISL and UIL unions, will celebrate with international music artists. Germany’s Mayday will be pre-empted by a massive rave party in Dortmund.

The communist world will also be facing its foes on the other side of the globe with fortitude and staunch boldness. North Korea, China and Cuba can be expected to hold its traditional display of their armies, shrouded in red flags and sporting fifty-metre high tableaux bearing the vicissitudes of workers. As usual their entire nuclear arsenal will be paraded for the benefit of the West’s concern, a brief reminder of what lays ahead when war in Iraq will finally be over.

May Day will most importantly be highlighting the unbridgeable gulf between the bureaucracy of socialist parties coaxed by the Third Way and the ‘protesting’ classes. It is not only the worker the people will be fighting for but also against capitalist exploitation and for world peace and nuclear disarmament.

In China last year, it was China’s new capitalist elite that was extolled, whilst workers in the north-eastern provinces protested against the inequality and unemployment produced by the pro-market measures.

The class struggle has already been discredited by amelioration of standards for the former working class, homogenised into an ‘across the board’ middle class. For China, opening up to the free market has seen millions of peasants proletarianised into exploited wage workers for multinational corporations and state-owned industries.

Such is the way of millennium socialism. Which is why next Thursday will be marking once again another departure from the original meaning of Workers Day. Tony Blair, no longer the figurehead of Cool Brittania, has to face up to a nation’s discontent of his love affair with belligerent Bush.

For America, this marks the 117 anniversary of May Day. In 1886 workers declared strikes across the US and Canada to demonstrate in favour of the eight-hour working day.

In Chicago police attacked the striking workers and killed six. The following day a bomb exploded at a demonstration at the Chicago haymarket, killing eight policemen. The police arrested eight trade unionists: four were found guilty of murder and executed by the state of Illinois.

The Maltese ‘left’ will be celebrating its Mayday in different fashion from the rest of the world. Sant and Zarb will be at the centre of the demonstration. Staunch eurosceptics, their’s is a socialism unlike the rest of their European counterparts.

Malta has been celebrating Mayday ever since 1926. John Francis Marks (1894-1954), a pioneer of social reform and the Maltese socialist movement, first organised Labour Day in Senglea. His involvement in the workers’ struggle earned him the labels of atheist and bolshevik, but his true concern for the workers would make him one of the most influential of Maltese Fabians in the labour movement.

Today he features little in Labour’s celebrations. Manwel Dimech on the other hand, is deemed a more fit reference towards the labour movement for the MLP, which regularly lay wreaths at the foot of his statue in front of Castille.

Considering May Day’s pagan origins, where people would go off into the woods to collect their trees and once there enter into all sorts of sexual frolicking, the imagery of spring’s fertility has a weighty meaning.

Like Labour’s passage into an alleyway of mixed ideological directions, with xenophobia and euroscepticism all wrapped up in a grammar of ‘working-class interests’, May Day could be a time of rebirth for the MLP. Sant’s message next Thursday will tell us which way Labour is heading.

matthew@maltamag.com