The Collective for Anarchist Organization in Portugal - COPOAP organized the May 1st Anarchist Day at Espaço Gaia, in Lisbon, where more than 50 people gathered for an activity of remembrance and rebellion. During the event, there was a dramatic reading of a speech by Lucy Parsons, in which she recounted the events that gave rise to the date. ---- In addition, the collective read a manifesto in homage to the memory of the Chicago martyrs, relating current struggles to the historical accumulation of our people. There was also distribution of our newsletter and other anarchist materials. The celebration ended with a dinner, providing a moment of fellowship among the participants.
It had been many years since anarchist activities had taken place on May 1st in Lisbon, and the great tendency and interest in this activity demonstrates the need that the fighting population sees in this type of activity, where we can create conspiratorial spaces of rebellious coexistence and keep our memory of struggle alive. Long live the people's struggle! Long live the Chicago Martyrs! Long live the construction of Revolutionary Anarchism!
Below, the manifesto read at the event:
From the combative memory of May 1st, Revolutionary Syndicalism vs. State Co-optation
History
On this day in 1886, the Haymarket Riot took place, giving rise to the date of May 1st. At the height of the Revolutionary Syndicalist movement, the fight for the 8-hour workday dragged more than 400,000 workers into the streets, in a demonstration that ended with an explosion that killed a policeman and an attack by the state that murdered dozens of workers. After these events, a political trial condemned 8 workers to death: Parsons, Lingg, Fischer, Engel, Spies, Schwab, Fielden, and Neebe. They became known as the Chicago Martyrs, and demonstrations in their memory crossed all borders. Today, 137 years later, the demands and claims that were so hard-won through this struggle of the working class are threatened by the precariousness of work, the increased cost of living, and the demobilization and co-optation of the historical entities of our class. It is important for everyone to remember that the eight-hour workday, the right to retirement, and education were concessions wrested from the bourgeoisie with blood, and not given through a supposed humanization of the capitalist system.
The recovery of the memory of May 1st can only be complete through the daily practice of insubordination at work and popular rebellion in the streets. This cannot be fully understood by those who are absent from revolutionary practice. Because history does not advance mechanically, unilinearly, but dynamically, it is necessary to look at the past, envisioning the future, with our feet firmly in the present. To fit May 1st into the continuous effort of humanity's emancipation, it is necessary to see the world as something in constant interaction between all its parts. May 1st is not just a date to be memorized from a bourgeois history book; it's not merely a date to be decorated.
However, sadly in Portugal, the norm is to understand the May 1st march as an allegorical part of a State Holiday, erasing from collective memory the struggles that this march symbolized in the country over decades. Just like the march itself, May 1st has been reinterpreted as a celebration of employment, or a benevolent day off from the State. But we know that since its origin, and repeatedly, this is a day of mourning and struggle against the State and the elites.
The current situation
As a class, we find ourselves in a critical situation, accumulating defeats in all fields. The impoverishment of the population is reaching record levels, with inflation, a result of government policies and the financial market, eroding the purchasing power of the population. The housing crisis is already a global phenomenon, a direct result of speculation, hoarding, and the financialization of the real estate issue. While our people see land and houses as spaces where you live, the rich see them as spaces where you become even richer. And, from this contradiction, we are left homeless, or having to spend almost our entire salary to have a place to live.
What the rich call a financial crisis is actually a crisis of capital accumulation. They don't accumulate money as quickly as they believe they should. The rich are like the dragons in children's stories: for them, money is never enough, and having almost everything is not enough. They talk about a crisis at a time when the top of the pyramid concentrates more and more wealth. The numbers are terrifying. 2,153 billionaires concentrate more wealth than 60% of the world's population combined, that is, 4,600,000,000 people. At a time when food insecurity affects an increasingly larger percentage of the population, even in the central countries of capitalism, we reaffirm that what we see is a distribution crisis.
The escalation of inter-imperialist warfare for geopolitical control of resources puts increased military budgets and extractivism back on the table. Despite the current media focus on Ukraine, this conflict extends to many other parts of the world. The periphery surrounding Europe is gradually becoming a zone of permanent war - wars that lack clear objectives and viable short-term solutions. While Ukraine completes a year of war, the war in Syria has dragged on for more than 12 years, adding to other territories that remain in low-intensity wars. These issues, coupled with global impoverishment and the consequences of global warming, provoke large migratory waves, which encounter fascist reactions from the organized European right, essentially white supremacist. Anti-immigration laws and legislation that undermines the legal status of immigrants have a clear function: to diminish the value of migrant labor, making their existence precarious, and consequently diminishing the universal value of work.
These issues are fundamental when we recall the historical achievements of the working class. We have a corpse in our mouths if, when we talk about the accumulated rights of the labor movement, we ignore that an increasingly large portion of the population is not covered by absolutely any labor protection. It makes no sense to exalt the achievement of the eight-hour day if we ignore that there is a large number of app-based workers whose shifts easily reach 14 hours a day, earning little more than a minimum wage, without the right to vacations or sick leave. This total precarization of work is repeated in the most diverse sectors of the economy in the territory dominated by the Portuguese State, from civil construction to intensive agriculture, with the absolute complicity of the State.
The Left and Social Movements
The classic organizations built by the working class, associations and unions, are currently almost entirely committed to the liberal ideals of order and progress. The 20th century marked the defeat of our political field by statist paradigms, which uncritically accepted them, and which nurture a deep distrust in the political capacity of the popular classes. By controlling state apparatuses, they artificially financed their political lines, acquired privileges that isolated them from the reality of the people, and used the repressive apparatus and intelligence of some of the most powerful state machines in the world to crush any opposition from the left. The result was the channeling of all the effort and accumulated resources of the manipulated underclass for the benefit of the future project of the emerging bourgeoisie and bureaucracy. The class pacts and conciliations in the central countries of capitalism and the forced modernizations in peripheral countries, with red and orange dictatorships forcing the proletarianization of indigenous populations and their forced inclusion in the world-system, are not accidents, but logical consequences of the process engendered. The State will always be a repressive apparatus at the service of a privileged elite, politically or financially. It will always crush nascent popular power and its organizations of struggle and self-defense.
Truth be told: the hegemonic currents of the left were veritable factories of defeat for our people. Even major victories, such as the decolonization processes, were only partial, because formal decolonization occurs while maintaining the political organization within the nation-state and the market economy dictated by Europe and the United States. Today, in the first fifth of the 21st century, we are still confronted with glaring inequality worldwide, and wealth and resources flowing to the same territorial nodes as before.
Currently, we see this process repeating itself, as if trapped in a loop from which there is no escape, leading many comrades to fatalism, and many capitalists to identify their project as the "end of history." However, there is a force growing daily from the peripheries of capital. Wildcat strikes, occupations, and uncoordinated class conflicts are spreading and becoming increasingly common. Independent unions are gaining strength, challenging the plantation system sustained by the old Communist Parties and their derivatives. We see that these dissident movements are currently being contested by sectors of the populist right, with little contestation on the left. It is therefore necessary to have a coordination that demonstrates a break with the existing order, offering new imaginative horizons, proposing new values based on class solidarity, mutual support, and internationalism.
Anarchism
The anarchist field as a whole has unfortunately not yet managed to confront its mission of reorganizing the popular movements from below for class warfare. Individualist and reformist currents dispute and erase the history and accumulated knowledge of our movement, rejecting revolutionary organization, theory, and discipline. Countless times, the idea of "progress," which infects us from the hegemonic left, is used both to delegitimize the accumulated achievements of the anarchist past or the experiences of our class, and to impede innovation, placing individualism and idealism as the final and complete forms of anarchism. Too often, anarchists remain completely detached from the processes of popular struggle, which unfold mainly in social housing neighborhoods, peripheral communities, and some unions. Stifled by culturalist action or even a lack thereof, anarchist identity becomes a form of escape from the feeling of alienation that capitalism forces upon us, but nothing more than that. It is clear to us that the problem is not about claiming a lifestyle or doing educational and cultural work with the people; however, by putting the cart before the horse, we will never surpass the State and capital. Therefore, resuming the social insertion of anarchism and reorganizing our political field into a revolutionary political organization is our current priority.
What to do
We must reclaim the memory of our people's struggle, of all those who fought and died before us, not out of nostalgia, but by appropriating them as tools for struggle and overcoming the current state of affairs. Capital acts to erase our collective memory, to deterritorialize us, and to deny our ancestry. Just as the various indigenous peoples in struggle do, we build ourselves upon our martyrs and ancestors, as tools that point to the future, that provide us with the collective accumulation necessary to efficiently wage the class war. History has shown us that we will not defeat capitalism and build a new world through conciliation and reforms. This path necessarily involves a process of simultaneous, not phased, destruction and creation. The struggle to negate the State is consistent with the daily construction of this world, and in fact, they are interdependent. Our task is to build popular power structures, a power parallel to the State that reverses the centralizing and elitist logic of statism. This will be both our strategy and our model of an egalitarian society.
To this end, we face three major tasks. The first, drawing directly from the May 1st movement, is that our struggles should be seeds for a large, combative trade union federation, as this demonstrates the strength of popular unity through Revolutionary Trade Unionism. A trade unionism that historically connects workers of all conditions, employed and unemployed, with greater, lesser or even no capacity for work, students and pensioners, prisoners, or those with any other condition restricting their freedom.
Secondly, recognizing the many achievements that have been made since then, create in each advocacy organization, union, collective, as soon as they have a considerable number, youth, women's, racial and LGBTQIA+ committees, so that they can address their particular problems. And finally, build autonomous organizations that act under a common strategy from the revolutionary field and the anarchist political organization, as COPOAP proposes, with a greater degree of discipline and theoretical unity, dedicating our lives to the struggle!
On this date and always, the home for those who live in it and the land for those who work it!
Long live May 1st!
https://embate-copoap.weebly.com/blog/1-de-maio-anarquista-relato-e-manifesto
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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