Since more than a hundred years the first of may has been a significant day of struggle for the labour movement – it started out as the day of those people who finally wanted to achieve a better life for everyone and did no longer want to accept that they were forced to live in poverty in spite of doing their job in capitalism and working for the wealth of the society.
Despite the achievements workers have been fighting for since the beginning of industrialization, the fundamental principles of society worldwide, which are inherent to capitalism, have not changed. Still society is arranged in a way that forces the majority of people to sell their labour power to survive – a conceivably precarious situation, which even in case of success lets workers participate merely in a small part of their produced wealth. Plenty unemployed have no possibilities to earn their living besides wage labor. They suffer most under the effects of our performance-oriented society.
Still those who work as employees are clearly worse off than those who command and let the workers work for them. Still long working hours steal pmost of the worker’s leisure time which itself is more and more threatened by the terror of daily drudgery. And still the wages are barely enough for our daily needs of reproduction and a few little things, even-though the productivity and the amount of produced goods increase every year. The objective wealth of human societies keeps rising into boundless measures, but the capitalist matter of course – bitter poverty and filled shop-windows not excluding each other – stands firm as always.
Caused by societal realtions of dominance apart from capitalism, men and white people receive more money in the same jobs or achieve better working positions in general than women and racistically stereotyped people. In addition to the omnipresent burden of gainful employment, women are patriarchally expected to execute reproductive work such as household, care and communication for free.
The political right wing utilizes the increasing crisis of capitalist economy in order to further spread the anyhow existing racism, antisemitsm and resentments against other minorities. We on the other hand know that the liberation from these conditions can only happen by tumbling the entire state of society. We certainly do not need new leaders or more hateful agitation against minorities. Instead, the consciousness of humankind needs to change, so that false conditions can be declared war on as a whole and we can take our lives in our own hands.
The countless contradictions of society might be ideologically hidden quite well, however they are no place as obvious as in the state’s daily violence. Received as self-evident by citizens, this violece is indeed a manifestation of the daily necessities which keep up our society.
To a self-determined life and the emancipatory abolishment of work, capitalism, state and patriarchy!
Libertäres Forum Bonn
Join the demonstration on May 1st, 2pm at Kaiserplatz, Bonn and our street festival at Frankenbadplatz (about 4pm).
