PI Briefing | No. 17 | Labour makes our world

On Monday, we joined the world in celebrating International Workers’ Day.

Dear friend,

This past Monday, we joined workers around the planet in celebrating the historic victories of the labour movement — and honoring those who continue to struggle for a better world today.

International Workers’ Day is a celebration of history — the living, breathing history that is made and remade every day by working people. It was the revolutionary aspirations of workers that brought us the eight-hour workday, the weekend, the minimum wage, and the great processes that, from Petrograd to Yan’an to the Sierra Maestra, took the first bold steps towards socialism and left a permanent mark on our world.

International Workers’ Day protests began in 1886. In the United States, mass protests of working people led to a general strike that mobilized 300,000 workers spanning 13,000 businesses across the country. These demonstrations lasted for days. In Chicago, police attacked picketing workers at the McCormick Reaper Works, killing six and injuring many more. The following day, during protests in Haymarket Square against this brutality, a bomb was thrown into the crowd by a suspected industrialist provocateur. In response, the police massacred scores of civilians and later executed prominent leaders of the labor movement.

Today, as then, labor remains at the vanguard. From India to Britain, the Republic of Korea to the United States, workers are rising up against the ravages of neoliberalism and reactionary authoritarianism. The struggle is existential. As Workers’ Memorial Day — commemorated today around the world — reminds us, many people never come home from work. In fact, more people are killed at work each year than at war. From the lithium mines of Zimbabwe to the garment factories of Bangladesh, capitalism’s untraceable, global supply chains force workers to risk their lives in the service of bosses, shareholders, and empires.

But it is the unemployed and underemployed, the healthcare workers and peasants, the fast food workers and cleaners, the textile weavers and delivery drivers, the sanitation workers, and others who, in their struggles for dignity, democracy, and peace, are history’s motor force. As Karl Marx wrote in the?Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: “The entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labor.” Labor makes our world — and struggle makes us human.

Last Monday, across the Progressive International family, we honored all workers — from those who broke the shackles of capital to construct new societies, to those fighting for dignity and rights in the face of brutal exploitation today.

"As long as the struggle of the workers against the bourgeoisie and the ruling class continues, as long as all demands are not met," Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1894, "May Day will be the yearly expression of these demands."

Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!

In solidarity,

The Progressive International Secretariat

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At least 110 lawyers, journalists, activists and officials of the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) and the Green Left Party have been arbitrarily detained in house and workplace raids across a dozen Turkish provinces — just days before the 14 May election.

The mass detention this is the latest escalation by Erdo?an’s embattled regime against oppositional and progressive forces in Turkey. After de facto banning HDP, Turkey’s progressive forces have fielded candidates under the banner of the Green Left Party.

Now, the Erdo?an regime wants to prevent journalists, lawyers, social leaders and officials from monitoring the integrity of the elections on 14 May. A massive international mobilisation will be necessary to defend Turkey’s democratic process. That’s why the Progressive International is preparing an international delegation to travel to Turkey and observe the elections on the ground.

Sign up now to receive breaking news from the delegates as they bring the eyes of the world to Ankara:?https://bit.ly/41UMfWS

Rana Plaza ten years on

On Monday, the world remembered one of the deadliest industrial ‘accidents’ in history that occurred ten years ago in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The collapse of the 8-story Rana Plaza garment factory killed over 1,000 and injured many more. Far from an ‘accident’, the workers were murdered for profit and globalisation's race to the bottom.

10 years on, global unions UNI Global and IndustriAll have succeeded in getting fashion brands to sign up to a legally binding International Accord on factory safety in their supply chains in Bangladesh and Pakistan. But Amazon, one of the world’s biggest clothing retailers still refuses to sign.

On Monday, workers and their allies around the world came together to demand Amazon sign the Accord and to Make Amazon Pay for worker safety.

You can read more about the disaster?here, share the Make Amazon Pay campaign video?here?and add your name to the call for Amazon to sign the accord?here.

Latest from The Internationalist

Coming up next week: Gabriel Winant on the relationship between the politics of class and the politics of identity, in the context of struggles for socialism "But neither capital nor labor exists in abstraction. They meet each other in specific contexts, which are shaped on all sides by long histories of empire, the racial formations that arose through colonialism and developed in its wake, the fluctuating organisation of the family and the forms of gender that it requires of individuals, and so on. Capital and labor never meet each other outside such histories—as if under false names on a moonless night on the outskirts of town."

Sign up for The Internationalist:?https://act.progressive.international/theinternationalist/

Art of the Week

"Funerali di Togliatti" (Togliatti’s Funeral) (1972) by Renato Guttuso depicts the funeral of the leader of the Italian Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti. In the painting, figures from throughout the history of the workers’ movement look toward Togliatti’s flower-laden body: Vladimir Lenin, Angela Davis, Antonio Gramcsi, Ho Chi Minh, Carlo Levi, Dolores Ibarruri Gomez, Georgi Dimitrov, Rosa Luxemburg and Luchino Visconti, among others. Togliatti was instrumental in setting up a joint venture between Fiat and the Soviet Union. The factory he helped establish once employed over 100,000 people. To this day, the city where the factory is based is called Tolyatti.

International Workers’ Day sale: For the month of May, we are offering a 25% discount on all the art sold through our Workshop. You can click?here?to apply the discount automatically, or type in the discount code at checkout: WorkersOfTheWorldUnite. Everything we sell through our Workshop helps power our campaigns around the world.

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