By RAY STEVENSON
During the many decades since the 1886 Chicago Haymarket struggle that gave rise to the eight hour day law, and international solidarity, and celebration of May Day as the international day of protest, demands and demonstrations for workers rights and needs, literally rivers of blood have been spilled by capitalism. It is almost redundant to speak of that unrelenting waste of human life in wars, industrial disease and accident, or at the hands of hired killers sent to uphold and advance the super exploitation and pillaging of working people world wide…all to benefit a tiny elitist Imperial capitalist class. No continent, no country has escaped the ghastly, never ending class war on working people.
Garbed in their gold-gilded resplendent garments of super-wealth, the parasite class of Imperialists and their gang of "highly acclaimed" gunslingers and killers have waged genocidal war, class dictatorship on the millions of workers and with special ferocity on the people of the colonial world since the Haymarket assaults. Guns, whips, gallows, dungeons…unlimited violence are "stock-in-trade". The people of Africa, Asia, Latin- America have borne the brunt of the brutal bloody stranglehold on their lives. For verification, consult the history burdened centuries of bloody conflict and oppression in those areas.
We point to India and the British destruction of standards of culture and life to become "the Jewel of Empire" by virtue of "superior fire-power" coupled with never ending corruption from the time of British Imperialist Pitt the Elder to the ghastly poisoned destruction of workers lives at Bophal by foreign super-exploitative monopoly Union Carbide. We cite the "Opium Wars" (so-called) and the destruction of the natural economic, cultural and social development of life in China. We mention the horrendous destruction of uncorrupted natural life that attended the shipment of tens of millions of "non-Caucasian" people into slavery from Africa…major to the development of capitalism both in the USA, and for Britain, France etc. etc.
We cite the British massacre of thousands of workers at Peterloo, and US Rockefeller inspired Ludlow massacre. In Canada there was the slaughter on picket lines at Estevan in 1931 and Ressor Siding in 1963, and Onion Lake in 1929, where all told eight striking workers were gunned down by police or were murdered by "hired assassins". The litany is too long to bear repetition here, but examination clearly thrusts to the fore such names as Jay Gould, the US Railway buccaneer who during the 1880’s strike said: "I can hire one half of the workers to kill the other half". Or take Al Capone, Mobster and Chicago gangster who repeatedly proclaimed that he would "save all the workers from Bolshevism"…while gunning down union organizers and union workers. Then there are the top level criminals such as Adolph Hitler of German monopoly Nazism whose death toll exceeds everything else…and whose cohorts, (not necessarily German, but invariably Imperialist monopoly political officials) aided and abetted in the ghastly plus fifty million death toll of World War II. But as suggested, the list is simply too long to recount. But the enormous toll of life and development created by monopoly capitalists of the Imperialist stripe is both historical and "headline news" today.
History should not be misunderstood…and of course the location of the participant as either worker or face-less capitalist weighs in the balance. Hitler’s backers in the monopoly capitalist supporting caste… Krupp Von Behlen, Siemens, I.G. Farben, Deutchbanke et al among the "top level" killers, saw him as "heroic" and a "paragon of excellence"…as long as he was winning. The millions of victims who died in his insufferable death camps or because of his militarized "superior fire power" and corruption would have never agreed. The numbing stench continues to this day and will hunt humanity forever.
The first historic and successful advance to eliminate the excruciating "rule by gun, garotte, whip" and the "Big Lie" of Imperialism came with the proletarian (read working class) Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917. That was why it became the foremost "enemy of Imperialism" That is also why for more than seventy years, anti-Sovietism prevailed, including the bestial Nazi war of 1941-45 that was smashed by the working class of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics… continuous Cold War followed with the Imperial Monopoly forces of the United States, Great Britain, France, Canada (and others) using every conceivable means to destroy the new socialist anti-monopoly, anti-Imperialist USSR. The world’s tragedy, and in particular for the world’s working class, their aim, aided and abetted by internal treachery and lies was able to succeed. The pendulum of power as a result shifted to the so-called "unipolar world" and into the hands of the "oil barons" led by the USA monopoly crowd who have decimated Iraq and its people.
The further aim of these oil stained and bloody 21st Century imperialists, inevitable demands and world dominance, is the control of all oil resources…including Canadian and peripheral America…north and south. If that means "militarized war," to effect such dominance… so be it. That is the lesson flung in the face of all humanity by the illegal, overt, totally reckless and unprincipled and militarized power, and thrust to "preemptive war", coupled with the decimation of Iraq, potentially the Middle East and the United Nations. The working class of the world must now be alert as never before for the simple reason that the banditry now with its hands on the levers and buttons of mass killing… as partly exhibited in Iraq…and with "high-tech" expenditures in the trillions of dollars for fantasies of its heralded Ballistic Missile Defense, appears on this May Day, 2003, to have lost contact with reality in its "world-gangster" role.
Included in their hellish plans is the century old dictum, of their predecessor Jay Gould who saw and enunciated the benefits to come his way from a corrupted and divided working class… "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half"… But nothing other than that is involved when a major section of the current working class, generally well paid and pampered in "high-tech" centers of arms and weapon manufacture of "high-tech" B-1 bombers, laser beams and any and all manner of "death weapons" to slaughter Iraqi or any other workers and their infant children. It can only be seen as Jay Gould wrote, and is a form of deep-seated corruption that has been central to the gut-wrenching and sick victories of monopoly capitalism. This May Day, tragically falls under the President George W. Bush doctrine of "pre-emptive" war, of the "might is right" and oil monopolies "Absolute Right or Regime Change!"… anywhere and when ever they please. To hear President Bush on CNN (24/04/03) congratulate a gathering that might have had workers present, where the Abrams tank is manufactured and he assured the workers there of "Americas gratitude and thanks" places him "cheek-by-jowl" with the noxious Gould of yesteryear…but carrying lethal poisoned death armaments of mass destruction.
On this most difficult and dangerous May Day since it was instituted, clarion warning bells are called for everywhere in the world where workers sell their abilities to work to whatever section of monopoly capitalism may dominate and exploit their lives. The half blind, hallucinating regimes of Imperialist monopoly are reeling in a quagmire of their own blind creation. The danger confronting with great immediacy all workers is emerging like ultra-poisoned emissions today from the increasing crisis of monopoly capitalism (Imperialism). It has arrived at the precise moment of history when avaricious, violent and bloody historical monopoly capitalist, Imperial development now hangs like a lowering tornado over the entire species in never before experienced ways. It is time to act…together. There is a World to win… by a united working class supported by the people. Alternatively, there is a world to lose if friendship, solidarity and peace among peoples of all colors, national heritage, cultures and economic and political history cannot find that road forward.
Such is the May Day, 2003 message from Northstar Compass. We extend our hands of friendship, solidarity and peace to all… in mutual struggle!
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