Demonstrating Unity in Action on May Day!

In London, as has become a firm tradition, the annual May Day demonstration took place on Wednesday, May First. In other cities, marches took place on the May Holiday weekend.

London May Day March and Rally

The demonstrations were full of banners representing the international unity of the working class, and the spirit was one of demonstrating the unity in action of workers and oppressed people to fight for a change in direction of society, for a genuine alternative where the people are the decision-makers.

Increasing numbers of trade union contingents and their banners made up the demonstrations. This spirit in essence is one that only the working class can save the day, and workers who came together on these demonstrations genuinely greeted one another in this spirit, smashing the neo-liberal mantra that there is no alternative to the austerity programme imposed by the rich on the working class.

Tyne & Wear May Day March and Rally

On Saturday, May 4, several hundred people took part in the annual May Day March and Rally which started from Times Square headed by Backworth Colliery Band and passed through the centre of Newcastle to Exhibition Park for the Rally. Speakers included Hank Roberts, President ATL, Kathy Taylor, President UCU, Peter Pinkney President, RMT, Jamshid Ahmadi Assistant General Secretary CODIR as well as a number of speakers from Tyne & Wear, Newcastle Campaign against the bedroom tax, Tyne & Wear Coalition of Resistance, Newcastle Stop the War Coalition and others. Activists of RCPB(ML) took part in the march with the north east banner Fight for the Alternative!, Stop Paying the Rich! For An Anti-War Government! and many copies of the party's publication The Line of March were sold and distributed from the party bookstall. Copies of the Society for Friendship with Korea (Northern Region) newsletter entitled Who Wants War, Who Wants Peace! Were also distributed by members of the association

South Tyneside May Day Rally Celebration.

On Wednesday, May 1, a May Day Rally and Celebration also took place in South Tyneside. The May Day Chairperson Roger Nettleship with Speakers Dr Helen Groom from Keep Our NHS Public, Merv Butler from the South Tyneside Public Services Alliance and Clare Harewood from the Tyne & Wear Coalition of Resistance took up the theme of building the resistance to the attacks on public services, schools and the health service and fighting to safeguard their future. The rally finished with a performance from the singer songwriter Steve Daggett which included extracts from his Save the City Hall (Newcastle) CD featuring his North East Allstars.

London May Day Celebrations

Karl Marx Library - Clerkenwell GreenThousands turned out for the May Day march and rally from the historic Clerkenwell Green to Trafalgar Square through the heart of central London. A contingent of RCPB(ML) carried the banner Fight for the Alternative!, Stop Paying the Rich! Increase Investments in Social Programmes! and shouted militant slogans en route. Scores of the May Day issue of the monthly publication of RCPB(ML), The Line of March were distributed amongst the participants, along the route of the march and in Trafalgar Square itself.

In Trafalgar Square, Martin Gould of SERTUC (South East Regional TUC) and Linda Kietz of GLATUC (Greater London Association of Trades Union Councils) co-chaired the rally on behalf of the London May Day Organising Committee. The themes of the rally which came through were those of proletarian internationalism and the fight against austerity, for public services and for the alternative. That there was an alternative and the call to unite in action to fight for the alternative was the bedrock of the rally.

Speakers included Christine Blower, the general secretary of the NUT; Paul Nowak, assistant general secretary of the TUC; Damien Pettit of the PCS; disabled trade union activist Sean McGovern; Len McCluskey, general secretary of Unite; MP Jeremy Corbyn; Dr Jacky Davis of Keep our NHS Public; a number of speakers from the international communities in London; and rounding off the rally, John McDonnell MP.

Marches, rallies and meetings also took place in Manchester, Chesterfield, Bridgwater, Plymouth, Bristol, Exeter, Swansea, Croydon, Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Inverness, Irvine, Glasgow, Nottingham and elsewhere. Some events are also taking place today, Monday May 6.

Internationally

Countless international marches, demonstrations and meetings took place on May Day. According to reports, some of the notable events took place in Jakarta, Indonesia, where 55,000 participated; Athens, where a general strike was called; Moscow and across Russia, where as many as 1.5 million took part in the parades; Istanbul, Turkey, where protesters braved riot police water cannons and tear gas after the government placed a ban on demonstrations; across France, where broad sections of the people participated; cities in India, as well as across Asia, particularly in condemnation of the collapse of the Bangladesh clothing factory; Berlin and other places in Germany where May First is a national holiday; Switzerland, Spain and Denmark were among other European countries where protests took place; in Seoul, South Korea, some 7,000 organised workers participated; Cambodia and Taiwan also held demonstrations; in Manila in the Philippines, an estimated 8,000 workers marched; and in Hong Kong, 5,000 marched in support of striking dock workers.

May Day - Dublin Hundreds marched in Dublin against the government’s austerity programme, and the Dublin Council of Trades Unions upheld the slogan: “1913-2013: Unfinished Business”. This is a reference to the 1913 Dublin Lockout, a heroic page in the history of the Irish working class.

Across Canada and the US, demonstrations were held.

Hundreds of thousands marched through Havana’s Revolution Square in a May Day parade that paid tribute to the late Venezuelan Commandante Hugo Chávez. The event was headed by Cuban President Raúl Castro.

In the DPRK, May Day was marked by workers across the country in their workplaces and institutions, who celebrated together with officials of the government and of the Workers’ Party of Korea.

In Latin America, demonstrations were held in Caracas, Venezuela; in Bogotá, Colombia; and in Santiago, Chile, where up to 150,000 marched. Elsewhere, demonstrations were held in Guatemala and Bolivia.

At least 25 demonstrations took place across South Africa under the slogan, “A united working class for a radical economic transformation.”

Stop the war activists from across the country took part in the first national "Ground the Drones" demonstration in Lincolnshire on April 27. It brought together the workers movement from Lincoln and Stop The War groups from many parts of Britain to oppose these barbarous terrorist weapons that are being operated from the base at Waddington over Afghanistan. The government further plans to use them to intervene in Africa. The demonstration brought together War on Want, CND, the Drone Campaign and Lincolnshire Trades Union Council who exposed the use of these weapons against the people of many countries, and in the case of Israel and USA against their own people as well.

Testing for the drones also takes place at Aberporth in Wales, where a movement of the local community has been growing in opposition.

Follow the you tube link to view the film of the demonstration.

http://youtu.be/4hHV4UUxt-I

PCA Salute to the MinersMargaret Thatcher was Prime Minister from May 4, 1979, to November 28, 1990. She became a prominent ideologue of the anti-social trend when the social welfare state was going into severe crisis and the times demanded that the working class go for socialism. However, Thatcher promoted the illusion that capitalism can be reformed and saved from its basic contradictions through the reduction of state investments in social programmes, and an increase in the amount given directly to finance capital from the state treasury and the privatisation of public services. Thatcher launched a vicious offensive against the working class in the early 1980s to break the organised resistance to the anti-social trend, and she and her circles developed the fraudulent ideology of "people's capitalism" or "share-owning democracy". On this ideological basis, in the early 1980s she launched a vicious state offensive against the working class.

Her privatisation programme included the selling off of British Aerospace, British Leyland, British Telecom, British Gas and other public services. Her offensive against the working class saw the government preparing to take on the miners, and reverse the situation whereby Edward Heath had lost the 1974 general election when he posed the question of “who rules Britain?”. It saw the offensive against the steel workers and the steel industry, and against the print workers, all in order to undermine the organise resistance of the working class, taking advantage of any illusions that the crisis of the social welfare state was a temporary phenomenon.

Her ideology that "there is no such thing as society" only individuals and “family values” denied that there is any such thing as the interests of a collective, only the pursuit of individual self-interest. It was a feature of her premiership in the 1980s that the general interests of society were not defended, and this began the wrecking of the society itself and a denial of the reality of the modern socialised economy.

Contention over the role of Europe was also a feature of her premiership. But the contention was not over the “independence” of Britain, but of how the domination of British finance capital could best be served. The conception of a “people’s Europe”, taken over and developed by Blair, represents in essence a supra-state of a Europe of the monopolies. It represents the subjugation of the weaker by the stronger in Europe, and a bloc for the re-conquest by imperialist Europe of Asia and Africa, as the stepping stone to complete global hegemony.

Thatcher’s defence of “British interests” ran counter to upholding the sovereignty of the British people, or for that matter of the peoples of Europe and globally. Her stand reflected the striving of British monopoly capitalism to dominate the world. Tony Blair took up the same social chauvinist and imperialist path where Thatcher and Major left off, raising it to a new level of neo-liberal wrecking.

Margaret Thatcher was implacably opposed to the struggle of the Irish people for their sovereignty and to end the annexation of the north of their country. Under her rule, from May to August 1981, ten Irish hunger strikers died when Thatcher refused to accede to their just demands. It was not until Britain needed to have its troops free to move elsewhere in the world that John Major brokered the Downing Street agreement.

Thatcher presided over the period during the late 1980s that ushered in the retreat of the revolution. Her project was to have Britain dominate a Europe of powerful monopolies, with the working class thoroughly enslaved as its reserve. Throughout the eighties, the straightforward plan of robbing the state through privatisation was implemented, favouring the private interests which took over the public assets. As a result of the economic crises of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Thatcher herself suffered a rebellion within the Tory Party itself. The Labour Party gained support as Tony Blair created "New Labour" based on promises to succeed where Margaret Thatcher failed.

St James Hospital Workers Support the Miners Since the time of Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the US, neo-liberal ideologues have been busy inventing new ways to rob the state treasury in pay-the-rich schemes. They are confident that the retreat of revolution will be there for them and that the working class will not respond with independent politics and theories of its own. Their arrogance and incompetence and failure rate is such that they no longer bother to provide much in the way of explanations or theory of how their schemes are supposed to work. The working class must be willing to provide modern definitions for the important problems the world is facing and build a future on this basis. The modern definitions must recognise that all human beings have certain inviolable rights by virtue of their being human.

The anti-social trend is justified based on the perverse logic of the bourgeoisie that there is no alternative. This theory is self-serving through and through, premised as it is on the consideration that to keep the capitalist system going, the only alternative is to be anti-social.

According to the ideologues of this anti-social trend, there is no such thing as society. These ideologues only recognise the family as the be-all and end-all of life. An ideal individual is one who is completely devoted to the family.

In their fiscal and budgetary policy, governments based on this anti-social trend determine a course that is detrimental to the general interests of the society. Such a course is justified under the pretext that this anti-social trend will be beneficial in the long run. Everything which is quite clearly harmful to the interests of the vast majority of the people is justified merely by asserting that it will be in their interest in the long run.

A number of ideas designed to achieve the anti-human factor/anti-social consciousness are pushed in the working class. They include the one that claims the only problem workers face is the mismanagement of the economy or the unfair distribution of its resources and production. The idea is pushed that the economy could be managed better if the right policies were implemented. Far from calling for the end of wage slavery and the exploitation of persons by persons, workers are to be embroiled in endless debates over policy objectives that may or may not ever materialise and over which they have no control. They are further caught up in calling for economic resources to be distributed more fairly diverting attention from who decides the direction of the economy and why the actual producers exercise no control over those decisions no matter what those decisions may be.

The working class and all working people are fighting this anti-social trend in the objective sense as they are resisting the shifting of the burden of the crisis onto their backs and advancing the pro-social programme to Stop Paying the Rich! Increase Investments in Social Programmes! and, For An Anti-War Government. The necessity is to turn things around and go for a socialist Britain. The historic aim of the fight for the alternative is the end of the total enslavement of the working class and all humanity.