May Day Started Here

[Dan Clore]

News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
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http://www.countercurrents.org/chomsky010512.htm
May Day Started Here
By Noam Chomsky
01 May, 2012

People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here
in the United States of America. That’s because those in power have done
everything they can to erase its real meaning. For example, Ronald
Reagan designated what he called, “Law Day”—a day of jingoist
fanaticism, like an extra twist of the knife in the labor movement.
Today, there is a renewed awareness, energized by the Occupy movement’s
organizing, around May Day, and its relevance for reform and perhaps
eventual revolution.

If you’re a serious revolutionary, then you are not looking for an
autocratic revolution, but a popular one which will move towards freedom
and democracy. That can take place only if a mass of the population is
implementing it, carrying it out, and solving problems. They’re not
going to undertake that commitment, understandably, unless they have
discovered for themselves that there are limits to reform.

A sensible revolutionary will try to push reform to the limits, for two
good reasons. First, because the reforms can be valuable in themselves.
People should have an eight-hour day rather than a twelve-hour day. And
in general, we should want to act in accord with decent ethical values.

Secondly, on strategic grounds, you have to show that there are limits
to reform. Perhaps sometimes the system will accommodate to needed
reforms. If so, well and good. But if it won’t, then new questions
arise. Perhaps that is a moment when resistance is a necessary step to
overcome the barriers to justified changes. Perhaps the time has come to
resort to coercive measures in defense of rights and justice, a form of
self-defense. Unless the general population recognizes such measures to
be a form of self-defense, they’re not going to take part in them, at
least they shouldn’t.

If you get to a point where the existing institutions will not bend to
the popular will, you have to eliminate the institutions.

May Day started here, but then became an international day in support of
American workers who were being subjected to brutal violence and
judicial punishment.

Today, the struggle continues to celebrate May Day not as a “law day” as
defined by political leaders, but as a day whose meaning is decided by
the people, a day rooted in organizing and working for a better future
for the whole of society.

Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher,cognitive scientist,
and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in
the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked
for over 50 years.


--
Dan Clore

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"From the point of view of the defense of our society,
there only exists one danger -- that workers succeed in
speaking to each other about their condition and their
aspirations _without intermediaries_."
--Censor (Gianfranco Sanguinetti), _The Real Report on
the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy_