May Day is the international working class holiday. It's when workers and socialists gather to celebrate their victories in the class struggle, remember the past and look forward to the future.

But when you live in a country without a mass workers' or socialist movement, it can feel a little anachronistic. Which is why I so enjoyed yesterday's May Day party I went to. We heard reports about the recent French victory against neoliberal labour laws and healthcare struggles at home; intense, moving poetry about Palestine; and stirring accordion renditions of Pete Seeger songs. There's nothing like raising your fist to sing The Internationale to reconnect you with the socialist aspirations that inspire millions the world over.


This was not my May Day. But I wish it was - garment workers rally in Dhaka, Bangladesh

I Love America

Illegal immigrants in the U.S. held a general strike yesterday for immigrant rights. I don't know the overall numbers, but according to the New York Times, over 400,000 rallied in Chicago alone. Coming on the heels of a similar action two weeks ago, momentum is growing:

The protesters, a mix of illegal immigrants and legal residents and citizens, were mostly Latino, but in contrast to similar demonstrations in the past two months, large numbers of people of other ethnicities joined or endorsed many of the events. In some cases, the rallies took on a broader tone of social action, as gay rights advocates, opponents of the war in Iraq and others without a direct stake in the immigration debate took to the streets.

This is what I'll keep banging on about till the revolution: change comes through struggle. You can educate all you want - and that's important to do - but when people take to the streets, ideas change very quickly.

How we often see Americans

There's way more going on here than immigrants 'wanting to be American'. The protestors are asking huge questions about their working conditions, the structures that keep them illegal, and the very definition of citizenship as handed down by the state, vs. the right of working people to work where they need to. The participation of those "without a direct stake" is called solidarity, and it's the most important weapon the Left has. When people struggle, they discover natural allies: in this case, that the same U.S. government that's sending the children of immigrants to die in Iraq is also denying them the right to work. This movement isn't socialist; but it shows that socialist questions - about power, work, and who rules society - get posed concretely when people rise up.

... what Americans are actually like - immigrants rally in L.A.

And for anti-Americans: was there an illegal general strike in your country yesterday? Isn't about time you rethought your definition of America? Workers in the U.S. have a long, rich tradition of overcoming racial divides to fight the bosses. To be anti-American is to claim that workers are the same as their bosses, that America has no class divide - an argument the U.S. ruling class is quite happy with.

Trainspotting

Or leftist trainspotting, to be precise. This means finding far-left references in popular culture. I've written before how I'm a big fan of Ali G, the British impersonator whose alter-egos take the piss out of politics, art and right-wingers. Here he is trying to get a book deal:



International Publishers is the press of the Communist Party USA. Those are copies of the Marx-Engels Collected Works in the background. He didn't get the deal, which is too bad - I'd pay good money for Ali G's writings on communism.