Thoughts on May Day

This working-class holiday never caught on in the USA as elsewhere in the world. Instead, Americans have 'Labor Day' in September where people use the holiday(if they are excused by their employers from working) for cook-outs at most instead of any working class celebration, sense of solidarity with the 80% laboring class. Just the very idea of such is repulsive to some people, even amongst the traditional blue-collar hardhat.

'Class' has long become the unmentionable C-word in American jargon. A few pundits would deny that class division even exists;we are either 'Producers' or 'Consumers' or both. The schucksters for the Corporate overclass, such as you hear daily on 'RightRadio', would have us all believe that there exists a cavernous window of opportunity for everyone with the Protestant Work Ethic to get as wealthy as Bill Gates. Those who admit the reality of class divisions & the leveling class warfare conducted by those on the top are dismissed as Marxists or envious losers too lazy to get rich or are living off of trustfunds. Even many of the post-modernist globalist liberals in the USA believe that the 'world is flat' and anyone not getting ahead in the 1st World economic sphere are either lazy or intellectually challenged and need to go back to school. Class strife is a thing of the past, such bipeds like Thomas Friedman claim. What Friedman and his clique do not mention is that few have the time or resources to further their education and why bother getting it when the jobs related to it have been outsourced or are in the process of being sent to the developing world?

Conservative neoclassical/ Vienna School devotees have their "hidden hand" market gnosticism, as the people who call themselves liberals join in and talk about the inevitability of Globalism; Globalism is the Zeitgeist,Deus ex machina, beyond the control of humanity. Hegel has returned to be the guiding philosopher with neocons and neolibs alike, when he was previously the pet of orthodox Marxists. Both factions presently entertain in their own way the myth of "the end of history" and the end of class divisions. Conservatives tell the poor to work harder - liberals tell them that they are daft and need night schooling.

I won't pick on the neocons too much here on this topic. We always knew that the conservatives are toadies for the overclass and many have been quite open about their allegiance. The liberals in the USA surrendered economics to the predators long years ago and exchanged the Social Market for' laissez-faire lite' and took a big heaping stinky shit on the Blue Collar Joe in process. As the consensus of the New Deal used to be the Democrats crown jewel, it is remarkable that the only DEM in the '08 race paying homage to the New Deal is Dennis Kucinich;he has about as much chance of getting the nomination as it would be to have sex with three supermodels, winning the lottery and getting struck by lightning twice in the same spot in a brief moment of time. The Democrats have been conned into believing TINA - There Is No Alternative - to globalization as they give the corporate overclass carte blanche to rape the common working person with regressive tax rates, union busting, and putting the dwindling manufacturing employees in competition with Third World wage earners. Also, many Democrats supported the Credit Card lobbyist sponsored Bankruptcy Bill denying Americans who have fallen hopelessly in debt the opportunity to wipe their slate clean. These lawmakers are the same people who got the country $9,000,000,000,000 in debt and they tell the common people that "they need to learn to be more responsible with their money". Also, the post-Social Market economy encourages people to get into debt in the first place. Spending and debt is what drives the bubble economy; if just one-quarter of Americans would be frugal, debt-free, saving citizens, the entire system would collapse like a stack of cards. If just 10,000 people had a May Day credit card burning ceremony, Wall Street would tank like the Titanic. But too many are brainwashed by that whore, TINA.

Liberals/social-democrats are the political Laodiceans of the 21st Century. Neither cold nor hot. Even in Europe, that has a long tradition of socialism in various forms, the mainstream 'left' parties wax increasingly like their conservative free-market counterparts in both word and deed. Now does anyone seriously think that Tony Blair is a 'socialist' in the Labour Party tradition? Labour has out -Thatcher'd Margaret Thatcher,as Bill Clinton out- Reagan'd, Reagan. In Germany, the SPD formed a grand-coalition with the CDU. And so on.

The Left rained out the May Day parades with their infidelity with TINA.