THE
MAY DAY MESSAGE
“Rise like Lions after slumber / In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew / Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few” – quoting these spirited lines of Percy Bysshe
Shelley, Marx’s daughter Eleanor Marx-Aveling had explained to and exhorted the
workers gathered at the momentous May Day meeting at Hyde Park, London on 4 May
1890 – on which Marx’s close comrade-in-arms Engels was later to comment that “The grandchildren of the old Chartists are
stepping into the line of battle” –
she was not speaking just as a trade unionist but as a socialist and that
workers should not stop at demanding an eight-hour working day on this occasion
but have to close ranks and struggle to the end to achieve the goal of
socialism. A decade later Lenin would comment that May Day is not just for the
achievement of eight-hour working day, but for the political liberation of the
working class as a whole. The Second International had given a call to workers
of the world to celebrate it as the struggle day of the laborers. Nowadays
sundry governments of various countries around the world are themselves declaring
it a public holiday in order to lull the people into a false sense of
satisfaction and security, which in fact is quite far from the truth. Be it America or India ,
China or Russia , Africa or Europe ,
everywhere it is only the rule of capitalists and oligarchy, and still in many
countries the more antiquated monarchic, feudal coteries that are trampling
over the will of the people. Though the workmen, especially the organized
sector in various countries with democratic facades, have got some important
rights and facilities in contrast to the wretched state of their predecessors
of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, everywhere the
shadows of misery, indigence and inhumanity are not waning but darkening all
the more with gory atrocities committed by neo-cons/neo-colonials for the joy
and powers of just 1% of the populations with the 99% deprived of their
legitimate share in the assets, opportunities and privileges in the economies
and polities. And so, it has become incumbent on the toiling people everywhere,
including our country, to struggle to achieve the main goal of socialism by taking
a vow to fight to end for the sublime cause in the context of this glorious
festival cum fighting day of the proletariat. §§§
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