Why We are "Reds"
Just give me one thing I can hold onto.
To believe in this livin' is just a hard way to go.
John Prine, "Angel from Montgomery"
Humans do not live by bread alone.
Jesus of Nazareth
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Langston Hughes
Throughout this 1st of May, ActivistGuy has been bringing us pictures of joyful celebrations around the world on International Workers' Day, more popularly known as May Day. We see in these photographs the old and the young and those in between, of many different nationalities, wearing the Red and waving the Red Flag.
In a country that deliberately set an alternative "Labor Day" in September to avoid May 1 and the color red, a country where several states outlawed red flags, the origins of this international holiday remain vague to many. Ironically, May Day's origins trace back to Chicago where workers organized an 80,000 person march on May 1, 1886 in support of a nationwide general strike involving as many as half a million workers across the country who were demanding an eight-hour work day. Three days after that march, in Haymarket Square, workers gathered to protest the killing of at least two of their comrades by Chicago police at an otherwise peaceful rally on May 3. As the Haymarket rally ended, a pipe bomb went off, killing a Chicago policemen.
Eight organizers of the rally, all anarchists and a majority of them immigrants, were arrested and charged with murder. While the defendants tried to present evidence that their efforts had all been peaceful and that the bomb had actually been thrown by Pinkerton agents provocateur, the jury convicted all eight and sentenced seven to death. The Governor of Illinois commuted two of the sentences to life imprisonment, and one inmate committed suicide. Wikipedia describes the hanging of the remaining four:
The next day (November 11, 1887) Spies, Parsons, Fischer and Engel were taken to the gallows in white robes and hoods. They sang the Marseillaise, then the anthem of the international revolutionary movement. Family members including Lucy Parsons, who attempted to see them for the last time, were arrested and searched for bombs (none were found). According to witnesses, in the moments before the men were hanged, Spies shouted, "The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!" Witnesses reported that the condemned men did not die immediately when they dropped, but strangled to death slowly, a sight which left the spectators visibly shaken.
(In 1893, another Illinois Governor, John Altgeld, concluded that all eight defendants were innocent, and he posthumously pardoned three of the hanged.)
In 1889, Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) wrote to the Second International of socialist and communist parties, asking that a worldwide rally in support of the eight-hour day be held on an upcoming May 1 to honor the Haymarket martyrs. The Second International agreed, and May Day was born.
But why all the Red and red flags? The association of Red and the Left goes back at least as far as the French Jabobins who adopted a red flag in honor of revolutionary martyrs' blood. The old Labour Party hymn, written by an Irishmen and adopted before Labour became the neoliberal New Labour, captures the significance of the color well:
The people's flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyr'd dead
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts' blood dyed its ev'ry fold.
Then raise the scarlet standard high,
Within its shade we'll live and die,
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We'll keep the red flag flying here.
We are Reds in honor of those who have given their lives for the cause in the past. We gather for marches and parades on May 1 to remember specifically those martyrs from Haymarket Square who died bravely for what they believed.
What Can Be Worth Dying For?
Don't mourn. Organize.
Joe Hill, IWW member, in anticipation of his execution by Utah firing squad
Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
Jesus of Nazareth
Talk of sacrifice and martyrs has no place in reformist politics. After all, who's going to lay down their life for a "public option," or a "Frank-Dodd Bill," or "Lily Ledbetter?" Such total commitment is usually limited to the realm of religious fervor, but that's at least partly because religions attack the Big Problems like Death, the seeming heartlessness of Nature and general human misery.
Political movements can tackle Big Problems too, but without resorting to a deus ex machina ploy. In the history of the United States, there is no better example than the Civil Rights Movement. While that movement focused on reformist demands like equal accommodations and voting rights, those were stepping stones along the way to something much greater: an attack on racism itself. No statement of the movement's purposes and goals illustrates this better than Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech that evoked and quoted the ancient Hebrew prophets against injustice, Amos and Second Isaiah.
We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until "justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream." (Amos 5:24)
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together." (Isaiah 40:40-5)
Those Hebrew prophets had Dr. King's courage to condemn the greed and callousness of the rulers of their day, but as representatives of the weakest of a tiny and weak nation, they usually looked to their god YHWH to right the wrongs on some future, supernatural day. King quoted them, but he was not about to wait for some divine being to come and set things straight in racist America. Instead, he would rely on direct action, non-violence, solidarity, litigation and electoral activity that would call a nation to account for its past wrongs and demand a moral war against the scourge of racism.
I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
Dr. King, like the Haymarket martyrs and Joe Hill, was willing to die for that dream. In Memphis to aid a workers' struggle not so different from those for which Reds had given their lives in the past, King said:
And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?
Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
What Are Reds Willing to Die--and Live--For?
The world is about to change its foundation
We are nothing, let us be all
The Internationale
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Working Men of All Countries, Unite!
The Communist Manifesto
The movement celebrated by the Red Day in May is not focused on Big Problems as ancient as Death or even Racism per se. The Big Problem for which Reds have always been determined to find a solution is that of the exploitation of Producers by Owners in the Capitalist system that arrived with what we call "modernity:"
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
The Communist Manifesto
The bourgeoisie and their Capitalist system pushed aside not only the old feudal classes but also the traditions and mores that had bound feudal society together and replaced them with nothing more than the profit motive:
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
Mankind split into two factions, one with no need for productive work and in control by virtue of its hold on capital and political power it buys, and the other producing society's wealth but struggling just to survive and with no real control over its work, its lives or its communities.
Reds have also recognized that Capitalism, by turning everything on earth into a commodity to be bought and sold, has turned humanity against the world that nurtures it. As humanity's technological powers have increased, this war against nature has reached the point where it threatens our very existence.
As Reds have sought to foster the unity of the great mass of workers, they have also learned how Capitalists use ancient divisions to divide workers and keep them weak. Racism, sexism, heterosexism, ethnocentrism, while having sources that far predate Capitalism, have all been appropriated by Capitalists and the media they own to prevent worker solidarity.
The new world toward which Reds strive is radically different from the current one. Rather than a world of Producers and parasitic Owners, everyone would contribute to the social welfare according to their abilities in a Red world, and each would receive whatever they needed. Rather than a natural world that exists only to be exploited for the Capitalists' insatiable lust for profit, humans would live in harmony with the earth. Rather than a society ripped apart by various forms of oppression based on our inherent differences, we would live in peace, celebrating our unique and varied characteristics.
"Pragmatists" ridicule such a vision, and attribute our current miseries to humanity's inherent and immutable flaws. The system of exploitation and inequality which we now endure, they claim, is inevitable and eternal. There is no hope for fundamentally better, they declare, only for some amelioration of our pain to the extent that's allowed by the powerful who ran things yesterday, still are in charge today, and will be in control forever. Amen.
But Reds say no to that hopelessness, even more fervently now that Capitalism's dangers have become more apparent than they were even in Marx's time. We refuse to acknowledge either the legitimacy or the inevitability of such an anti-human, anti-nature system, and we continue to demand its overthrow.
A New World in Our Hearts
The system under which we live in turn checks the growth of the social sentiment. We all know that without uprightness, without self-respect, without sympathy and mutual aid, human kind must perish, as perish the few races of animals that live by rapine, or the slave-keeping ants. But such ideas are not to the liking of the ruling classes, and they have elaborated a whole system of pseudo-sciences to teach the contrary.
Peter Kropotkin, "The Conquest of Bread (PDF)"
A perfect personality, then, is only possible in a state of society where man is free to choose the mode of work, the conditions of work, and the freedom to work. One to whom the making of a table, the building of a house, or the tilling of the soil, is what the painting is to the artist and the discovery to the scientist,--the result of inspiration, of intense longing, and deep interest in work as a creative force. That being the ideal of Anarchism, its economic arrangements must consist of voluntary productive and distributive associations, gradually developing into free communism, as the best means of producing with the least waste of human energy. Anarchism, however, also recognizes the right of the individual, or numbers of individuals, to arrange at all times for other forms of work, in harmony with their tastes and desires.
Emma Goldman, "On Anarchism"
We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth, there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world, here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute.
Buenaventura Durutti
Is there a need for the same level of fervency and dedication among us Reds as those Haymarket martyrs exhibited in their lives? If anything, there is an even greater necessity. Capitalism's promise that we could enter into an Esau's bargain for an ever-increasing portion of porridge in return for surrendering control of our own work and suppressing humanity's inborn tendency for mutual aid and cooperation has now been exposed as a lie. Workers must sacrifice and societies must practice austerity in order for Capitalism to even survive, we are told. Our children will grow up in a harsher, poorer world, it is explained by our masters, as part of a "New Normal."
Beyond that, we are increasingly aware of a new Big Problem, an environment that is changing in ways that will make fundamental human survival more difficult. The Capitalists who are charge of the industries that are producing this catastrophe have no real solutions. All they do is to buy media and scientists to repeat the lie that they are not to blame.
The question is not one of preference for a different system but of survival, and not of a few individuals or even a class but of our species. Change--radical change--must come and soon. But YHWH will not be bringing it in a rushing torrent of justice. "More and better" Democrats will not deliver it anytime in this millennium. It must be us, doing what must be done, risking what must be risked.
In the end, we will win. We must.
Happy May Day.