By Freedom Socialist Party
The May Day holiday that is now celebrated all over the world, known as International Workers’ Day in many places, was born in the struggle of U.S. anarchists, socialists, and other radicals for the eight-hour day, a fight that often cost these brave workers their lives. The campaign was led largely by European immigrants to the U.S., fleeing poverty and persecution in countries like Germany, Ireland, and Italy.
Many of the fiercest and most important working-class battles today are also led by immigrants and refugees. They come from every corner of the globe, displaced by war, oppression, ruinous “free trade” policies and neoliberalism, and climate change. Many bring a radical perspective with them; others are radicalized by the experience of being a stranger in a strange and often hostile land.
Their fights for dignity and justice lift the prospects for all working people everywhere, and for that they are owed solidarity and support. From destitute villages in Africa to the battleground streets of Syria and the shantytown favelas of Brazil, there is no such thing as a local or national struggle any longer. Global capitalism ties us all together, for good and for ill.
Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the imprisonment of Mexican-born indigenous leader Nestora Salgado, a naturalized U.S. citizen, and the international fight to free her. Salgado was arrested in Mexico because she headed a community police force defending the people from corrupt politicians, deadly drug-runners, and exploitation by foreign mining companies. The movement for her release is gaining steam on several continents.
In a May Day article in 1941, the “Rebel Girl” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn wrote:
“Only workers are forbidden to be internationalists. It’s perfectly proper for J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford; for the bankers, the munitions trusts, the chemical companies. … Only the clasped hands of the workers across the boundaries are struck down in every country.”
On May Day this year, the Freedom Socialist Party, in common cause with lovers of freedom all around the world, recommits ourselves to defying that injunction against international solidarity and to striking forward in pursuit of an end to exploitation everywhere. .....
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