AFTERTHOUGHT TO MAYDAY 2012

By Mauro Gia Samonte

I should write this now. I could not move on if I didn’t.

We are into the 125^th year from the time those workers were massacred in Illinois in 1886, still what we are shouting now are the very same shouts those workers did. A century and a quarter after, we have not progressed beyond just that, shout. May Day in, May Day out. Shout. Once in a while, we rejoice at dole outs here, concessions there, but have we ever paused and pondered that those we have the predilection to pass off proudly as prized premium gains precisely perform the primary purpose of programming perpetual plunder of the proletariat.

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We work to eat just enough to live and go on working the next day to earn our food to eat just enough to live and go on working the next day again, from day to day, again and again. When will this ever end! It will not, I dare say now. Unless, and mark this, unless we come to terms with the fact that we who dare pretend to take the brunt of the proletarian struggle have been doing it all wrong.

 Okay, we march. Okay, we rally. Okay, we picket. Okay, we strike. And in all of the marches, rallies, and pickets and strikes, we demand with all our might, in many a time even shedding our blood fighting for  remedies for ending the oppression and exploitation of the working class, but how much do we realize that in so fighting we actually advance the very interest of those we are demanding remedies against.

Marches, strikes, rallies, demonstrations, pickets – they don’t become revolutionary all because we call them so. All these concepts, if we care enough to throw back in history, came about as fruits of the French revolution: the storming of the Bastille, the Jacobin uprising, the Paris commune. Mass protest actions were a concept endemic in the takeover by the bourgeoisie of feudal rule the world over. Necessarily, they constituted the revolutionary methodology in the period of the bourgeois revolution.

Now, after over a century of bourgeois supremacy, are we to persist in calling that mythodology revolutionary? What is endemic in a reactionary class must be reactionary. Logic dictates that. And yet I certainly don’t invoke logic in pushing the argument that marches, strikes, rallies, pickets, etc. won’t work against the class that had invented them in the first place. What I invoke is practice. What mass protest action has there been that overthrew bourgeois supremacy anywhere in the world? I can point to not one.

The Gandhi passive resistance did succeed in driving away the British colonizers from India, and the colonizers were bourgeois. Yes, and so were the ruling class that took over after they went; it merely passed on the bourgeois rule in India, from the left hand to the right, at any rate from one hand to another.

On the other hand, the Perestroika in the Soviet Union in 1991 witnessed a massive outpouring of protesting masses that in one fell swoop overthrew the Soviet socialist regime. And what was the Perestroika? The democratization, nay, bourgeoisification, of the Soviet Union – the restoration of bourgeois rule in Russia.  

In 1989, the world was shocked by the Tiananmen Square protests known as the June 4^th Incident whereby students in their hundreds of thousands advancing the cause of socialist hardliners in China were violently dispersed with gunfire and tanks attacks. Charged mainly as responsible for the carnage (which by estimates numbered thousands killed) was China  Communist  Party chief Deng Shiao Peng, author of China’s treading now the path of capitalism, what else but bourgeois rule.

In warfare, there is such a thing as using the enemy’s resources against himself, but there has never been an instance of one using the enemy’s strategy against himself. Mass movement is a bourgeois methodology. Use it against bourgeois rule, you’re done.

So in pushing the proletarian struggle, what’s to be done? Lenin asked the question in the struggle of the Russian proletariat, answered it with building a Party that strategized the whole scheme of bringing down the Tzarist regime of Nicolas II, accommodating itself deep into the succeeding bourgeois Kerensky government, till in one brilliant maneuver, it arrested the entire Kerensky cabinet, got Kerensky running away and the Bolsheviks proclaiming: “All power to the Soviets.”

The trouble with us is that seized with romantic notions of past glories, we tend to replicate the methods of victorious predecessors in the world proletarian struggle. Mao Tse Tung was successful with protracted people’s war in China, Sison pays tribute to dogmatism by applying it in the Philippines, So what has become of the people’s war? Still protracted after more than four decades! By golly!

Or has he, in fact, been playing, wittingly or unwittingly, into the machinations of the CIA for perpetuating US imperialist hold on the country?

Sun Tzu is quite clear on this: never repeat what has been done successfully in the past. If Lenin was successful in organizing the people’s soviets in Russia’s public squares to overthrow Nicolas II, never try the trick by Occupying Wall Street in trying to defeat the 1%, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, in UK down to  0.0000161%., as cited by Adam Ford in his blog, Infantile Disorder. The soviets were the effective mechanism for bringing about the final downfall of the Romanov dynasty. OWS is a mechanism for holding even higher the guarantees of civil liberties in a bourgeois democratic system. So who do you hold high in OWS, the 99%? Naah, that’s rhetoric. You hold high the bourgeoisie who are entrenched on such democratic pedestals as freedom of speech, press, assembly and the bill of rights.

So long as we invoke any right whatsoever under the democratic system, we invoke that same right also for the bourgeoisie, and inasmuch as in control of the armed forces is the bourgeoisie, not us, it is the bourgeoisie, not us who gets that right implemented in its favor. Our rally turns unruly, our pickets get violent, our marches and demonstrations get to disrupt peace order, who calls in the police and the military to shield itself? Not us, the bourgeoisie. We think we are aggrieved in our wages, miserable in our working conditions, short-changed in our welfare benefits, etc. Who fixes the terms for addressing these grievances? Not us, the bourgeoisie. But we can always go on strike, right? Right, precisely where the bourgeoisie wants us to fight them – where we can never win.

No strike anywhere in the world has ever won in terms of gaining political power  for the workers by which alone to end their oppression and exploitation by capitalists. The bottom line: in fighting the bourgeoisie, workers are not to wield weapons that are built-in defenses for the bourgeois class – are in fact integral to the state as an instrument of class oppression.   

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