May Day is International Working Peoples’ Day
There are multiple calls for a General Strike, as well as Rent Strikes and other manifestations on Friday May 1, May Day. Here are a few, and we appreciate hearing from you about others.
Here’s a call, from Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi, which has had dozens of organizations around the US on weekly planning calls in response to the COVID crisis and its consequences, but looking forward from May Day to an ongoing struggle for a new world. Their call is for Peoples’ Strike actions on the first of every month, starting May 1.
https://cooperationjackson.org/announcementsblog/peoplesstrikecallstatement
People’s Strike: Fighting for Our Lives, Forging Our Future
Take Action Friday May 1st, 2020 – May Day
The COVID-19 pandemic has starkly revealed the inequalities and injustices that daily plague the world. The triple crisis of viral plague, systemic economic breakdown, and the failure and/or unwillingness of governments to provide necessary protection, especially for the poor and people subjected to white supremacy, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and misogyny, has thrown us into a fight for our lives.
The “Free Markets” that right-wing political figures like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro and others are seeking to protect and rely upon to address the COVID-10 pandemic will continue to produce chaos and needless suffering for millions of people. The economic nationalism and imperial rivalry we see on full display in the midst of this pandemic magnify the threat of war.
In the U.S. we are fed a steady stream of lies and authoritarian posturing. From Palestine to South Africa to Brazil to the U.S. and beyond, ooppressive regimes are actively sacrificing vulnerable peoples and communities and treating frontline workers as uttlerly disposable.
We say ENOUGH! It is time to stand up! It’s Time To Strike Back – For Our Lives and Our Futures
Contact Us: mayday2020generalstrike@gmail.com
Here’s another national call for a May 1st general strike:
We started this organization after we saw working class people launch a wave of labor strike and rent strike actions across the world in response to the severe negligence of our “leaders” as the pandemic has emerged. We were inspired into action by the workers and tenants and debtors who have already begun fighting and the hundreds of mutual aid systems which have spontaneously popped up everywhere.
We do not own this movement.
Working class individuals and organizations own this movement. Workers who are frightened about the future and ready to start empowering themselves own this movement. Labor unions and tenant unions and worker groups own this movement. If you are suffering right now, we want you to own this movement. We’re just here to help.
We are not leaders.
Our goal is to help guide individuals to organizations, tools, and strategies they can use to self-organize and self-empower. We are here to signal boost, fund raise, and coordinate established groups. We are here to bolster and reinforce collective action and mutual aid networks that already exist, and to get all these entities coordinated so we can maximize the effectiveness of the working class.
Ready to get involved? https://www.genstrike.org/contact/ Contact us now
And here’s an international anarchist and syndicalist oriented call that has being holding world-wide on-line chats, with a lot of participation from Europe:
https://globalmayday.wordpress.com/
Although the current crisis creates more challenges various feminist, grassroots and revolutionary labor unions within the GMD network call for a Global May Day 2020! Do send an email to the GMD mailing list, if you decide to join the call below.
Worldwide we, the wage-related workers, are set in competition to support the additional value production. Regardless where we live, our gender / sex, nationality, we are interwoven in the same fight, if we want to or not. Budget cuts in social services, outsourcing, depressing wages, privatization, increasing costs of living as well as tuition fees and the destruction of natural recourses are just a few of the symptoms of the global economic system. A system that is based on exploitation and competition leads to commercialization of all aspects of our lives. We suffer from growing pressure to perform, separation, as well as the alienation of our needs and people, which we are working and living with. Be it at the workplace, university or increasingly even during childhood and youth. The logic of the market economy and the corresponding nation-state structures require that adaption to the dictate of competitiveness and the value-added production take priority over the development of emancipatory capabilities.
We do not intend to simply disrupt; we seek to overcome.
Given the transnational nature of the capitalist system, it is necessary for workers to connect on the global level. By networking across borders, the global interconnections that shape our local conditions can be made visible. Furthermore it opens up new potentialities and scopes of action within the struggle against exploitation as well as precarious working and living conditions. The bargaining power of workers would increase tremendously, if we were to unite within the same value-added chain.
Especially in times of nationalism and racism, we seek the common struggle and resist being played off against each other.
For a better life for all – across all borders!
#1world1struggle
One last resource for May Day actions and beyond:
