WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
Renewing the traditions of May Day
By Sharon Smith | April 28, 2006 | Page 7
http://www.socialistworker.org/2006-1/586/586_07_MayDay.shtml
FOR THE first time in six decades, International Workers Day will be
celebrated on U.S. soil with mass working-class demonstrations on May
1. May Day, celebrated the world over, commemorates the seismic
upheaval inside the U.S. that launched the struggle for the eight-hour
workday in 1886, a time when native-born workers had few rights and
immigrants had still fewer, yet both united in a class-wide battle.
The decision to organize a national day of protest for immigrant
rights on May 1 this year is a conscious nod toward the traditions
embodied by this working-class holiday, in which immigrants have
played such a vital role historically.
Hear Sharon Smith speak at Socialism 2006, a political conference
scheduled for June 22-25 at Columbia Univerisy in New York City. For
more information, go to the Socialism 2006 Web site at
socialismconference.org.
May 1, 2006, holds the potential to begin to revive that tradition,
from America’s grassroots. The movement’s most powerful slogan, “a day
without immigrants,” is based upon a strategy of social struggle tied
explicitly to the power of workers to withhold their labor--which
successfully built the U.S. union movement in the first few decades of
the 20th century.
For the labor movement, the lessons of this new struggle, with
traditions rooted in its own history, could finally begin to reverse
decades of retreat and setback.
To be sure, there is a debate over strategy underway inside the
immigrant rights movement. Last week, Time magazine featured an
article, “The Immigrants' Dilemma: To Boycott or Not to Boycott? A
split is growing over how militant the upcoming ‘Day Without
Immigrants’ should be.”
Since hundreds of thousands turned out to protest in more than 100
cities on April 10, spurring several days of student walkouts from
Dallas to Los Angeles, congressional Democrats and their movement
minions have done their best to rein in workplace and school walkouts
on May 1.
Democrats have warned supporters that walkouts could create a
“backlash,” while dangling the promise of “comprehensive immigration
reform”--a misleading term denoting “legalization” rather than
“amnesty.”
Thus far, Democratic-sponsored proposals for legalization exclude the
vast majority of immigrants from the path to citizenship, instead
promoting guest-worker programs that offer immigrant workers no right
to workplace representation, to the delight of the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce.
Moreover, Democrats are carefully playing to both sides in the
national immigration debate, as Sen. Hillary Clinton demonstrated in a
recent New York Daily News interview, in which reporters described her
“embracing both conservative and liberal goals.”
In the interview, Clinton argued that U.S. borders should be secured
with a wall or “smart fence” before legalization begins.
In contrast to the moribund antiwar movement, however, Democrats have
not successfully derailed the militant wing of the immigrant rights
movement--and plans for a May 1 boycott continue in major U.S. cities.
The difference has been the strength of the immigrant rights movement
inside the working class and the growth of a committed left wing
willing to challenge the dominance of strategies that rely on
congressional Democrats.
While the catalyst for this movement has been the Sensenbrenner Bill,
HR 4437, criminalizing undocumented immigrants and anyone who assists
them, the sentiment among millions of immigrants is for full rights
and amnesty. And Democrats’ attempts at sabotage have begun to
embolden a self-conscious left wing within the movement.
New York City activists booed Clinton’s proposals at an April 22
planning meeting for a human chain protest. Los Angeles-based Nativo
Lopez, president of the Mexican American Political Association,
argued, “So what’s the ruckus about a boycott? We need to put the
focus of power with the worker and immigrants, not in the hierarchies,
to resolve the immigration reform debate.”
The fates of both native- and foreign-born workers are inextricably
tied, despite widespread claims to the contrary. As Julio Huato argued
recently in Monthly Review, “The working and living conditions of U.S.
workers don't have to be subject to a zero-sum game played by natives
versus immigrants (and this includes our thin and frayed social safety
net). But they will be for as long as we treat the interest of capital
as immutable and sacred.”
There is nothing new about the modern immigration debate except the
legal terminology. Immigrants have not been welcomed in the “land of
opportunity” since the first wave of Irish immigrants landed on U.S.
shores in the late 1820s. No distinction existed between documented
and undocumented immigrants before broad immigration controls were
imposed in the 1920s. All immigrant labor was used to compete with
white, native-born workers--as were disfranchised African Americans.
Corporations have traditionally used racism to encourage competition
between workers, in order to drive down wages for the entire working
class and weaken the labor movement. Yet all too often, union leaders
have betrayed workers’ interests by opposing the rights of immigrants
while failing to champion the rights of African Americans.
In 1867, when 10,000 Chinese workers staged one of the most important
strikes of the 19th century, they stood alone. They demanded higher
pay, shorter working hours (including an eight hour-day for tunneling
workers), a ban on whipping and the right of workers to quit their
jobs. Yet no unions came to their defense, and within a week the
strike was crushed--a setback for the entire labor movement, which
would not win the right to unionize until the 1930s.
Immigrant workers have performed another service for the U.S. working
class, long unacknowledged and broadly unappreciated. Since 1886, when
German immigrants incorporated the politics of anarchism and Marxism
into the struggle for the eight-hour day, immigrant workers have
brought radical politics with them when they migrate, pressuring the
U.S. labor movement from within to challenge the conservative ideology
U.S. rulers seek to impose.
In 1886, anarchists from the International Working People’s
Association (IWPA) led the struggle for the eight-hour day, and its
ground troops were overwhelmingly German immigrants. Forty thousand
workers struck for the eight-hour day in Chicago, including an
altercation with police on May 3 alongside strikers at McCormick
Harvester Works that killed four workers and injured many more.
A rally the next day at Haymarket Square to protest the police
brutality attracted just 1,200, dwindling to 300 when rain began to
fall. Just as the speeches were concluding, police entered the square
and ordered the rally to disperse. As the speakers were leaving, a
bomb was thrown into the crowd, killing eight and injuring 67 police.
In response to the bomb, police opened fire on the crowd, killing and
wounding civilians and police alike.
Without evidence, eight Chicago anarchists were tried and
convicted--not of actual murder, but of “conspiracy to commit murder”
and for “inciting,” rather than committing, violence in Haymarket
Square. The struggle culminated in the trial and execution of four of
the movement’s leaders, including anarchists August Spies and Albert
Parsons.
In 1893, Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld finally issued a pardon,
acknowledging that no evidence incriminated any of those convicted in
the bombing. Nonetheless, the Haymarket incident unleashed a wave of
antiradical and anti-immigrant hysteria. Newspaper headlines screamed
for revenge against “Dynamarchists” and “Red Ruffians.”
Because German immigrants provided the largest base for anarchism, the
Chicago Times described America’s “enemy forces” as “rag-tag and
bob-tail cutthroats from the Rhine, the Danube, the Vuistukla and the
Elbe.”
Today, Mexicans, El Salvadorans and other Latinos have brought with
them traditions of class struggle absent since McCarthyism excised
radicals from the U.S. labor movement in the 1950s. These traditions
hold the potential to revitalize the U.S. labor movement, if it
welcomes them.
Only in 2000 did the AFL-CIO finally reverse its longstanding
opposition to the rights of undocumented immigrants, making possible a
historic opportunity for uniting workers across racial and ethnic
barriers. But labor leaders must also reverse their long-standing
aversion to class struggle for the movement to succeed.
Far from creating a backlash, the return of struggle is the key to
U.S. labor’s survival.
--
"There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to
whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is
impossible." -- Jack Vance
"Civilizaton is the interval between Ice Ages." -- Will Durant.
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography" -- Ambrose Bierce
"Long term commitment in relationships is only necessary because it takes
so damn long to raise children. Marriage may well be some kind of trick
to keep the males around beyond sexual satiation." -- Captain Compassion
"Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
--Will Durant
Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@NOSPAMverizon.net
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