May Day and Abolition – By Peter Linebaugh (Counterpunch) / April 28, 2023
“Murther, murther, murther, murther …” shouted Free-born John Lilburne from prison. “M’aidez, m’aidez,” says the international distress signal. Murder is the crime, and help is the need. That is the dynamic of the day, May Day. It’s methodology therefore requires answers to two questions: Who? Whom?
We remember los martiros, that is the martyrs who were hanged for their support of the Eight Hour Day and the police riot at Haymarket, Chicago. That struggle commenced on May 1st 1886. Who? Whom? The bosses hanged the workers. Their names were August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer, George Engel. Their hanging was judicial murder or state sponsored terror. “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.” Their last words, our prologue. The Haymarket hangings were preparation for mass murder at Wounded Knee (1890). Who? Whom? The army massacres the Lakotas.
The tendency of capitalism is the global devaluation of labor, an abstraction covering over the four-fold murders of war, famine, pestilence, and neglect that characterize our neo-liberal, incarcerating, planet-wrecking times. It is the widespread whisper, the secret thought, the unindicted accusation as more and more are shot, gassed, get sick, starve, drown, burn, or have to move out so that entrepreneuring gentry may move in. Call it expropriation, call it exploitation, combine them and you have X squared; add extraction and you have X cubed, or the formula of capitalism. No matter what you call it, we live in murderous times
CONTINUE > https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/28/may-day-and-abolition/
