This May Day, I feel deeply unsettled.
For many years, my favorite holiday has served as a moment of reflection, to consider how life is made possible through the labor, visible and invisible, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of many people around the world. To recognize this is both emotional and spiritual. When asked, what makes the you of yesterday into the you of today, possible? We are taught to claim all the honors ourselves – that we are a product of our own making. Yet the truth runs much deeper. Capitalist societies that operate on the myth of meritocracy to reproduce generational wealth and justify racialized class divisions, refuse to acknowledge the invisible labor, physical, emotional, mental and otherwise, that make it possible. The contributions of others have to be obscured and erased. Through AI, we are told to celebrate the algorithm unflinchingly; through the stock exchange, the illusion that it is only strategic speculation that gets one wealth. What is erased, is the fact that these entities thrive off colonial domination, stolen knowledge and violent, bloody extraction of everyday peoples’ labor.
The power of May Day lies in the affirmation that labor is crucial for life. Nature is too, as we witness the catastrophes that arise from climate change. Look at every corner of the globe, from the workers in the oil fields in Egypt, to the farmers in India and miners in Chile, and one will see workers on strike, withholding their labor to prove exactly that wealth is generated by workers and that we deserve more. These bold assertions and refusals to be docile, are often met with violence in the form of police attacks, and hefty prison terms.
Our lives are made possible by many whom we will never meet. Many hands have touched the same objects that sustain our lives in the belly of the beast. In my living space, quite literally, products of labor from the prisoners in places I will never know, meet the products of labor of Chinese factory workers and Congolese miners, that meet the products of labor of Mexican farmers, and the list goes on. Yours does too. None of us can truly escape the global supply chain.
To speak of labor that sustains life, is then, to speak of the global working class, of workers around the world. To speak of what makes life possible, is also to speak of the feminized labor that sustains the livelihoods of these workers.
The billionaires of the world – whose hands would never have touched the furniture you set your morning coffee cup on, or the phone you read this piece from – tell us that we can survive without each other. Against all science, all existing reality, we are told that our well-being and sustenance should be premised on the disenfranchisement, and sometimes even destruction, of the other.
And so on May Day, we are bombarded with images of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and their unmarked cars and uniformed men barging into homes kidnapping workers deemed foreign, and criminal. We are filled with the images of faceless bodies and shaved heads jam packed in rows upon rows in a mega-prison in El Salvador. Who are these people and who are their families? We are shocked into horror by the stories of 4 year-old cancer-stricken children deported and cut off from life-sustaining medical care, or of toddlers separated from their parents. Are these children even done nursing yet?
Every now and then, as if to offer some reprieve from the horror, my instagram algorithm generates the innocuous smile of a young child in a refugee camp in Gaza who gives the viewers a tour of the tent she lives in. The caption says she is grateful. I don’t know her name. Her smile is adorable, but hardly a reprieve.
The world as we know it has changed, and many of us are still tailspinning from the Trump administration’s campaign of shock and awe. Endless new laws granting more power to the police, that narrow the parameters of political expression and dissent are generated everyday. These laws will be enforced, while others will be violated. Selective enforcement of laws is not arbitrary however. The logic is clear however, that power will not stop at squashing dissent, before it can materialize into meaningful opposition.
“Law and Justice are not the same,” I recall chanting during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2015. Michael Brown had been shot, not long ago, by the Ferguson police, and before him, Eric Garner had been killed in a chokehold by New York police. This was shortly before Sandra Bland had died under unaccounted circumstances in a Texan jail after being arrested at a traffic stop. The deaths of Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, Philando Castillo, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott within that short period, drove the message home. The Black movement taught me then, how deeply American white supremacy was embedded into its legal structures. These lessons hit closer to home now as immigrant communities are specifically targeted.
History can teach us the schema and logic of racial capitalism and its attacks on workers and poor people here in the belly of the beast, and also globally. History can also teach us the language of resistance and hope, and how we need to adapt our strategies to meet the challenges of the moment.
Amidst the deep sense of unsettledness and horror, this May Day asks also that we dig deep into the courage, vision and tenacity that our freedom-fighting ancestors embodied. Each generation has given birth to its tradition of resistance. Harriet Tubman and her underground railroad liberating slaves from the deep South; Mother Jones and her agitational speeches, unafraid to be brazen and bold; Lucy Parsons who founded the revolutionary union that organized multi-racially against the segregationist principles that many labor unions of her time inhabited.
This May Day asks of us, what will our generations’ legacies of resistance look like?
