Tag: communism

May Day (2018)

may day

I’m old enough to remember when May Day smelled of wool socks and carried a hammer.  The marchers wore clean clothes back then, carried red banners and were awkwardly polite.  Around the world, Brezhnev strutted his missiles and Castro raged volumes into the bright Caribbean sun.  In those days, “The Internationale” still had those goofy lyrics.  Yes, I’m older than Billy Bragg, but once, he and I — and maybe a hundred other people — stood stock-still and sang his new version of that old song.  Most of them had clenched fists.  This was in the way-back- time when communism still had a future and not just an imaginary past.

Those of us who grew up in the cause de jour 60s remember when communism went from industrial worker in a soft cloth hat and baggy pants to celebrity outlaw in camo-green and black beret.  Somewhere between the Gulf of Tonkin and the Tet Offensive, communism became cool again.  Academics sprouted beards and spouted doctrine.   Marx and Lenin fought it out with Trotsky and Mao in college pubs and coffee shops.  Workers marched, and students told them why.  Those were heady days: late-night basement meetings and manifestos.   Old, boot-faced men who had worked on the Dnieper dam or fought in Spain spoke in mildewed halls.  Grey-haired girls who had given their youth to the movement went first into the police barricades.  “They won’t hit me; I’m a grandmother!”  But they did.  And all the young, smooth-faced converts were eager to worship their newfound economic religion.  They were all together then.  Yet, with all the talk and more talk, the workers of the world never did unite under anything more than their national flags.  Communism was cool, but it wasn’t very effective.

May Day was special, though.  Ideological differences were put aside, and for one brief, shining moment, the workers did march shoulder to shoulder — their grievances with each other forgotten in the face of a common enemy.  Normally, they ended up at the old Cambie pub for a pint after the speeches were done.  Doctrine be damned: walking was thirsty work!  These were the folks who took the early bus, ate their lunch out of metal kits and bought sturdy shoes at the Army and Navy store.  Office staff and salespeople might get a three-day Labour Day long weekend in September, but May the First was the sore shoulder workers’ day, and they kept it sacred.

May Day, like much of the Western communist movement, came out of a combination of American action and European philosophy.  It commemorates the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886.  During a labour demonstration, everything went horribly wrong when somebody (who has remained nameless to this day) tossed a bomb at the police.  The cops opened fire.  Several people were killed, and there have been serious accusations ever since.  Three years later, at the Second International in Paris, the French delegation read a letter from Samuel Gompers.  (Sam was the head honcho of the newly-formed American Federation of Labor.)  It outlined American Labour’s plans to organize rallies and marches for the third anniversary of the massacre.  The French proposed that on May 1st, European workers march in solidarity with their American brothers (Sisters didn’t really count yet.)  The motion was passed, and organized labour has been taking to the streets on the first day of May ever since.  Actually, May Day is an official holiday in over 80 countries.

In the 21st century, May Day, like communism, has fallen on hard times.  There are still the big rallies in all the European capitals.  But Moscow doesn’t parade their missiles through Red Square anymore, and Fidel is gone.  God only knows what the workers in Pyongyang have been forced to do, and whatever happened in Beijing … well… that’s just false advertising, isn’t it?

In North America, May Day has always been more about organized labour than labour itself.  Union members come out to listen to their nabobs try their best to resurrect the 19th century, when the battle lines were clearly drawn.  However, it’s getting harder and harder for union leaders to convince the rest of us that organized labour is in a life-and-death struggle with capitalist greed.  These days, union dues buy sports franchises, and pension plans are used to fund hotels and tourist destinations.  Organized labour carries stock portfolios worthy of JP Morgan Chase and BNP Paribas.

May Day has come a long way from the Haymarket in Chicago, and so has communism.  Both were born as a downtrodden backlash against the Industrial Revolution; both rose to become an emblematic certainty of a better future, and both have faded away as their usefulness declined.  A few people still march, but they will be carrying Smart phones, not lunch buckets.  Their brand-name jeans will be made in Asia, and when it’s over, they’ll drive away in Toyotas and Kias.  It isn’t Animal Farm yet, but it’s getting pretty close.

_______________________________

Originally written in 2012 with a few minor edits.

The Tale of the Bulgarians’ Levis

Bulgarians not exactly as shown

Many years ago, when there was still an Iron Curtain and most thinking people were very much aware of Brezhnev’s missiles, I met a Bulgarian (several of them, actually.)  He was on a cultural exchange program to America with some other bureaucrats and a phalanx of stoic minders who loomed large getting off the plane.  Several people and I were supposed to show our Communist visitors the wonders of the West — without pissing off the minders, who looked like they weren’t about to be trifled with.Before we go any further, you must understand I was never a diplomat.  The only reason I was even there is the guy from the Chamber of Commerce, who was one of the hosts, blew out his appendix the night before.  I was a serious third-string, emergency replacement, so my Bulgarian was young and nobody special, and his minders were definitely not members of the A Team.

We were given a list of “approved” places to take our new friends, but after the first morning of dull and boring, I thought “What the hell!  I’ve got a week off, a pocket full of government money and I’m driving.”  So we broke away from the group and went to Eddie Basha’s grocery store for Pepsi and Doritos.  It’s amazing how quickly solid walls of sugar and sodium can thaw a Cold War.  It was as if I’d given mis nuevos amigos the keys to snack food heaven, and they were going to stock up before it was all gone.  I had to explain to them — more than once — that we could come back tomorrow and get more.  They didn’t believe me.  Even at the end of the week, after we’d been shopping many times, I’m sure they still thought it was all a capitalist scam that they’d been clever enough to take advantage of.  Anyway, on the first day, we ended up with Camel cigarettes, Miller beer, a bag of assorted candy bars, pantyhose, and band aids, and three boxes of Froot Loops™.  From then on, the four of us got along famously.  Every morning, we’d follow the group to the designated snooze fest, and every afternoon we’d mysteriously get lost.  As long as they were back at the hotel in time for the nightly “We’re all friends here” reception, nobody seem to care.  I don’t think the folks running the show realized that the two minders were in on the plot.  My Bulgarians found the America that never makes it into the Anti-American Instruction Manual, including a video arcade, Go Kart Racing, Whataburger and a trip to the barrio for authentic chicken, chitlins and greens, courtesy of my friend Sam who had filial connections to the street gang that ran things down there.  All things considered, I think my guys quite liked the Land of Milk and Money.  They certainly got comfortable enough to laugh at the Wild West’s attempts at culture and make fun of the beer.  They maintained that someone drank it first — before Miller put it in the bottle.  I, for my part, genuinely liked those guys, had a great time, and even in the full flush of arrogant youth learned a little bit about how wrong I was about life on the Black Sea of communism.  The only discordant note was when it got to be good-bye time and everyone was getting on the plane.  Suddenly, the more senior minders stopped everything and made a big show of taking away the blue jeans I’d helped my buddies buy.  My Bulgarians dutifully gave up their prize possessions.  Interestingly, in all the huffing and puffing, nobody but me wanted to notice that the mucky-muck babysitters weren’t making them leave those Levis in the decadent West; they were confiscating them.  It was a sad reminder that no matter how much sugar coating you sometimes get, real life eventually intervenes.

Of course, the moral of the story should be that even the most antagonistic strangers are just one box of Froot Loops™ away from being friends, but it isn’t.  It’s a lot deeper than that hackneyed homily.  The real moral is that the world is full of self-righteous bastards who, given an opportunity, will use their power to steal our metaphorical Levis or anything else they can get their mitts on.  They are the most dangerous among us because they have convinced us that they do this in the name of some esoteric common good.  I learned a valuable lesson that day at the airport.  Capitalism may very well be a brutal system that allows man’s exploitation of his fellow man, but under communism, the opposite is true. At least we get to keep our Levis.

May Day: A Contemporary View

I’m old enough to remember when May Day smelled of wool socks and carried a hammer.  The marchers wore clean clothes back then, carried red banners and were awkwardly polite.  Around the world, Brezhnev strutted his missiles and Castro raged volumes into the bright Caribbean sun.  In those days, “The Internationale” still had those goofy lyrics.  Yes, I’m older than Billy Bragg, but once, he and I and maybe a hundred other people, stood stock-still and sang his new version of that old song.  Most of them had clenched fists.  This was in the way-back time when communism still had a future and not just an imaginary past.

Those of us who grew up in the cause de jour 60s remember when communism went from industrial worker in a soft cloth hat and baggy pants to celebrity outlaw in camo-green and black beret.  Somewhere between the Gulf of Tonkin and the Tet Offensive, communism became cool again.  Academics sprouted beards and spouted doctrine.   Marx and Lenin fought it out with Trotsky and Mao in college pubs and coffee shops.  Workers marched, and students told them why.  Those were heady days: late night basement meetings and manifestos.  Old, boot-faced men who had worked on the Dnieper dam or fought in Spain spoke in mildewed halls.  Grey-haired girls who had given their youth to the movement went first into the police barricades.  “They won’t hit me; I’m a grandmother!”  But they did.  And all the young, smooth-faced converts were eager to worship their newfound economic religion.  They were all together then.  Yet, with all the talk and more talk, the workers of the world never did unite under anything more than their national flags.  Communism was cool, but it wasn’t very effective.

May Day was special, though.  Ideological differences were put aside, and for one brief, shining moment, the workers did march shoulder to shoulder — their grievances with each other forgotten in the face of a common enemy.  Normally they ended up at the old Cambie pub or the Drake for a pint after the speeches were done.  Doctrine be damned: walking was thirsty work.  These were the folks who took the early bus, ate their lunch out of metal kits and bought sturdy shoes at the Army and Navy store.  Office staff and salespeople might get a three-day Labour Day long weekend in September, but May the First was the sore shoulder workers’ day, and they kept in sacred.

May Day, like much of the Western communist movement, came out of a combination of American action and European philosophy.  It commemorates the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886.  During a labour demonstration, everything went horribly wrong when somebody (who has remained nameless to this day) tossed a bomb at the police.  The cops opened fire.  Several people were killed, and there have been serious accusations ever since.  Three years later, at the Second International in Paris, the French delegation read a letter from Samuel Gompers.  (Sam was the head honcho of the newly formed American Federation of Labor.)  It outlined American Labour’s plans to organize rallies and marches for the third anniversary of the massacre.  The French proposed that on May 1st, European workers march in solidarity with their American brothers (sisters didn’t really count yet.)  The motion was passed, and organized labour has been taking to the streets on the first day of May ever since.  Actually, May Day is an official holiday in over 80 countries.

In the 21st century, May Day, like communism, has fallen on hard times.  There are still the big rallies in all the European capitals.   But Moscow doesn’t pull out all the stops in the march through Red Square anymore, and Castro is too sick to do anything but write letters to the editor.  God only knows what the workers will be forced to do in Pyongyang, and whatever Beijing comes up with … well… that’s just false advertising, isn’t it?

In North America, May Day has always been more about organized labour than labour itself.  Union members come out to listen to their nabobs try their best to resurrect the 19th century, when the battle lines were clearly drawn.  However, it’s getting harder and harder for union leaders to convince the rest of us that organized labour is in a life-and-death struggle with capitalist greed.  These days, union dues buy sports franchises, and pension plans fund hotels and tourist destinations.  Organized labour carry stock portfolios worthy of JP Morgan Chase and BNP Paribas.

May Day has come a long way from the Haymarket in Chicago, and so has communism.  Both were born as a downtrodden backlash against the Industrial Revolution; both rose to become an emblematic certainty of a better future, and both are fading away as their usefulness declines.  A few people will still march tomorrow, but they will be carrying Smart phones, not lunch buckets.  Their brand-name jeans will be made in Asia and when it’s over they’ll drive away in Toyotas and Hyundais.   It isn’t Animal Farm yet, but it’s getting pretty close.