May Day can be used as a gauge to measure the pulse of the working class worldwide.
In Italy workers’ participation to May Day demonstrations has been low, reflecting a passive mood that can also be seen in the lack of generalized struggles to defend wages, whose purchasing power is lower than 35 years ago, and the lack of mass opposition to the security legislation curtailing the right to protest and to strike, and to the Meloni government’s rearmament policy and support to wars from Ukraine to Palestine. Only small combative sections of the working class have participated in May Day demonstrations – as in Turin, Milan and Naples, many of them immigrant workers. The next test will be a general strike called on May 29 by rank-and-file unions to raise wages and against rearmament and wars – we’ll do our best for it to be successful at least in combative sectors like logistics, railways and local transport.
Although in the whole of Europe there have not been large and combative internationalist May Day marches, the Greek working class appears to be more lively, as our Communist Liberation comrades report. Also Turkish workers have confirmed their combativeness on May Day to protest against the Erdogan government, like Argentinians against Milei’s.
As it has been happening for many years, in the Western world it is the US youth and working class people that have taken to the street with most vigour and in larger numbers, against the ICE anti-immigrant repression and the war policies of the Trump Administration.
The picture is still different for the working class in Asia, now by far the largest section of the wage-earning workforce in the world, as a result of capitalist accumulation still in an expansionary phase. Here, millions upon millions took to the streets to demonstrate in defence of their rights under attack by capital and its governments, which take different political forms, but all have enacted laws that liberalise the labour market, encourage the precariousness of employment, flexible working hours, restrictions on trade union rights and on the freedom to strike, and the lowering of wages.
A lot of work is to be done, and struggles are to be fought, for the working class in all continents to become aware of its historical interest not only to reduce working hours but to put an end to exploitation and capitalism – together with its wars.
Here are links to some articles about May Day in the world that we published on our website “Il Pungolo rosso” [The Red Goad] as a tool for internationalist information and education.
In SRI Lanka, in contrapposizione alle manifestazioni ufficiali indette dal nuovo governo “di sinistra” di Dissanayake, il Front Line Socialist Party (FLSP) ha organizzato a Colombo la marcia e il comizio del Primo Maggio all’insegna dello slogan «Il potere ai lavoratori contro la brutalità imperialista e il governo fantoccio». Gli slogan riportati su striscioni e cartelli riflettevano numerose questioni, quali l’intervento dell’India, del FMI e delle forze imperialiste in Sri Lanka, oltre alla guerra contro l’Iran, al genocidio a Gaza e alle minacce imperialiste contro il Venezuela e Cuba, ecc. Il comizio si è tenuto a Hyde Park. Gli slogan erano contro il programma anti-popolare del FMI, per l’abrogazione delle leggi che erodono i diritti dei lavoratori e intensificano la repressione, per la parità dei diritti contro l’oppressione nazionale e le divisioni etniche, per la tassazione dei profitti e per l’internazionalismo proletario contro la barbarie imperialista e la catastrofe del capitalismo.
