GLASGOW MAY DAY.

    This year May Day in Glasgow was a quiet affair, no bands playing, no dancing in the street, no marching through the city centre. In Buchanan Street there was the usual anarchist stall with its band of bright, young, friendly individuals eager to engage the public and hand out their literature. There was a small contingent from the Communist Party, complete with flag and papers, then there was the Wobblies, (IWW), with their stall, eagerly pushing their wares. On the whole it looked like the local Glasgow folks, though eager to take the literature on offer, had forgotten their working class heritage.

       Of course there will always be those who say why bother with May Day, it's just another holiday, sorry, your wrong. This is not a day to celebrate some royal event, or some imperialist battle fought a hundred years or so ago, or some day to remember the butchers of Empire. This is a day to remember all those who have struggled to improve the lot of the ordinary people, a day to celebrate working class victories won through bitter struggle, and in some cases paid for by imprisonment and even death. There are innumerable reasons for turning out on May Day, it is a day of hope, of solidarity among the working class across the globe. What are my personal reasons for turning up, this extract from NOLA ANARCHA puts it better than I personally could.

Why March on May Day in the name of Anti-Capitalism?
Because Capitalism is the Dominant Moment of the existing system of Global Domination. Because Global Capital strives for institutional domination, ideological domination, domination of the social imaginary, and domination of the practice of everyday life. Because Global Capital utilizes the hollow rhetoric of "limited government," even as it employs monstrous coercive force to impose economic oligarchy on humanity, and as it strives toward a totalitarian order of technological surveillance and control. Because Global Capital poses itself as the putative end of history, as even Stalinoid STATE capitalism mutates finally into state CAPITALISM. Because Global Capital mumbles pious platitudes about "free markets," even as it generates neo-feudalism on an immense scale and creates more literal slaves than those who toiled under classic slave economies. Because Global Capital creates massive planetary climate disruption and biodioversity loss that have culminated in the Sixth Great Mass Extinction of Life on Earth. In short, because Global Capitalism is the Universal Culture of Death: the culture of genocide, of ecocide, and of the degradation and destruction of the human spirit. It is because of all this, and out of love for Humanity and the Earth, and a passion to defend both Humanity and the Earth, that on May 1 some of us abandon the Everyday March of the Undead and join instead a March for Life and Liberation.

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