May Day Reflections

Good News and Not-So Good News

There’s good news and not so good news about the May Day protests that took place against “billionaire rule” and oligarchy across numerous United States cities and towns last Friday.

It’s great that tens of thousands of students and workers, including contingents of super-exploited immigrant laborers, walked out to protest capitalist inequality, oppression, racism, nativism, and war.

It was no small thing for these young and working-class masses to step outside their employment and school routines to say No! to how everyday people are being treated in the workplace, to political authoritarianism, to ICE terrorism, to massive economic inequality and poverty, and to the criminal US war on Iran.

It was inspiring to learn that 100 largely youthful Sunrise Movement activists opposed to capitalist ecocide undertook a courageous act of civil disobedience outside the New York Stock Exchange. And that, as Time Magazine reports:

“Rallies were underway across all five boroughs in New York City Friday morning. People gathered at locations including Washington Square Park in Manhattan, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and MacDonald Park in Queens. At 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time, protesters began marching from Bryant Park in Manhattan towards Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos’ penthouse. Just before 10:30 a.m., people headed towards Amazon’s office from the New York Public Library….”

It is gratifying to learn that dozens of people, including public officials, blocked traffic in the name of workers’ rights at San Francisco’s Logan Airport.

In Raleigh, North Carolina, thousands of North Carolina teachers, students, and activists marched in a “Kids Over Corporations” demonstration. School districts across the state canceled classes due to the absences of teachers enlisted in the protest.

Thousands marched in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and Washington DC, calling for livable wages, union rights, proper school funding, educational freedom, taxing the rich, no wars, no border walls, and the dismantling of ICE. Many speakers at these events nobly upheld the legacy of the original May Day’s 1886-87 Haymarket Martyrs -- the Chicago radicals (the inspiration for the designation of May Day as the International Workers Day) who were scandalously executed at the command of that city’s retail mogul Marshal Field because of their fierce opposition to “capitalist wage slavery.”

The not-so good news is that the May Day protests didn’t bring out hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. Surely the multiple and extreme outrages being inflicted day after day by Donald Trump and his party and backers deserved a truly massive outpouring. Among its many grave transgressions against humanity, the Trump 47 regime has swept up more than 80,000 of our immigrant brothers and sisters into a giant network of concentration, torture, and death camps. It has killed hundreds of thousands abroad with its USAID cuts, kidnapped and jailed the sovereign head of the Venezuelan state, and extrajudicially executed more than a 100 people in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. It has killed more than 3000 people, including hundreds of schoolchildren, in Iran. Trump has repeatedly and maniacally threatened to annihilate the entire nation of Iran.

Also problematic was how silent the rally speakers and groups were about the existence of a supremely dangerous and specifically fascist regime atop the world’s most lethal superpower. Outside the modest contingents organized by Refuse Fascism (RF) and the Revcoms, the May Day protests included no calls for the immediate removal of the Trump fascist regime. (As a Chicago RF activist writes, “without our presence, there would have been precious little mention of Donald Trump’s name or fascism.”)

This was a glaring omission, reflecting and feeding the dangerous illusion that the people of the US and the world can wait this regime out, “get through” its horrors, tame its excesses, contain its crimes, and remove it from power through normal electoral and legal means.

The Trump47 regime is much worse than just another if particularly harsh expression of billionaire class oligarchy. It is a fascist regime seeking nothing less than the complete makeover of American society on genocidally racist, arch-patriarchal, xenophobic-nationalist, irrational, and dictatorial lines. It is bidding to replace what’s left of the rule of law and elections and reasoned deliberation with the rule of violent, deeply reactionary, and irrational men. It cannot be lived with or waited out in a world chock full of nuclear weapons and on the edge of a potentially terminal climate catastrophe. It must be removed from power as soon as humanly possible, before it’s too late.

Going forward, antifascist activists need to work and ally with the people and popular energy that came forward this May Day, encouraging them to understand the Trump47 regime as fascist and an immediate existential menace to all humanity, not just another noxious right-wing billionaire class administration that can be waited and voted out.