A-Infos (en) Portugal, EMBAT: May 1st Anarchist Day: Report and Manifesto (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The Collective for Anarchist Organization in Portugal - COPOAP organized 
the May 1st Anarchist Day at Espaço Gaia, in Lisbon, where more than 50 
people gathered for an activity of remembrance and rebellion. During the 
event, there was a dramatic reading of a speech by Lucy Parsons, in 
which she recounted the events that gave rise to the date. ---- In 
addition, the collective read a manifesto in homage to the memory of the 
Chicago martyrs, relating current struggles to the historical 
accumulation of our people. There was also distribution of our 
newsletter and other anarchist materials. The celebration ended with a 
dinner, providing a moment of fellowship among the participants.

It had been many years since anarchist activities had taken place on May 
1st in Lisbon, and the great tendency and interest in this activity 
demonstrates the need that the fighting population sees in this type of 
activity, where we can create conspiratorial spaces of rebellious 
coexistence and keep our memory of struggle alive. Long live the 
people's struggle! Long live the Chicago Martyrs! Long live the 
construction of Revolutionary Anarchism!

Below, the manifesto read at the event:

From the combative memory of May 1st, Revolutionary Syndicalism vs. 
State Co-optation

History
On this day in 1886, the Haymarket Riot took place, giving rise to the 
date of May 1st. At the height of the Revolutionary Syndicalist 
movement, the fight for the 8-hour workday dragged more than 400,000 
workers into the streets, in a demonstration that ended with an 
explosion that killed a policeman and an attack by the state that 
murdered dozens of workers. After these events, a political trial 
condemned 8 workers to death: Parsons, Lingg, Fischer, Engel, Spies, 
Schwab, Fielden, and Neebe. They became known as the Chicago Martyrs, 
and demonstrations in their memory crossed all borders. Today, 137 years 
later, the demands and claims that were so hard-won through this 
struggle of the working class are threatened by the precariousness of 
work, the increased cost of living, and the demobilization and 
co-optation of the historical entities of our class. It is important for 
everyone to remember that the eight-hour workday, the right to 
retirement, and education were concessions wrested from the bourgeoisie 
with blood, and not given through a supposed humanization of the 
capitalist system.

The recovery of the memory of May 1st can only be complete through the 
daily practice of insubordination at work and popular rebellion in the 
streets. This cannot be fully understood by those who are absent from 
revolutionary practice. Because history does not advance mechanically, 
unilinearly, but dynamically, it is necessary to look at the past, 
envisioning the future, with our feet firmly in the present. To fit May 
1st into the continuous effort of humanity's emancipation, it is 
necessary to see the world as something in constant interaction between 
all its parts. May 1st is not just a date to be memorized from a 
bourgeois history book; it's not merely a date to be decorated.

However, sadly in Portugal, the norm is to understand the May 1st march 
as an allegorical part of a State Holiday, erasing from collective 
memory the struggles that this march symbolized in the country over 
decades. Just like the march itself, May 1st has been reinterpreted as a 
celebration of employment, or a benevolent day off from the State. But 
we know that since its origin, and repeatedly, this is a day of mourning 
and struggle against the State and the elites.

The current situation

As a class, we find ourselves in a critical situation, accumulating 
defeats in all fields. The impoverishment of the population is reaching 
record levels, with inflation, a result of government policies and the 
financial market, eroding the purchasing power of the population. The 
housing crisis is already a global phenomenon, a direct result of 
speculation, hoarding, and the financialization of the real estate 
issue. While our people see land and houses as spaces where you live, 
the rich see them as spaces where you become even richer. And, from this 
contradiction, we are left homeless, or having to spend almost our 
entire salary to have a place to live.

What the rich call a financial crisis is actually a crisis of capital 
accumulation. They don't accumulate money as quickly as they believe 
they should. The rich are like the dragons in children's stories: for 
them, money is never enough, and having almost everything is not enough. 
They talk about a crisis at a time when the top of the pyramid 
concentrates more and more wealth. The numbers are terrifying. 2,153 
billionaires concentrate more wealth than 60% of the world's population 
combined, that is, 4,600,000,000 people. At a time when food insecurity 
affects an increasingly larger percentage of the population, even in the 
central countries of capitalism, we reaffirm that what we see is a 
distribution crisis.

The escalation of inter-imperialist warfare for geopolitical control of 
resources puts increased military budgets and extractivism back on the 
table. Despite the current media focus on Ukraine, this conflict extends 
to many other parts of the world. The periphery surrounding Europe is 
gradually becoming a zone of permanent war - wars that lack clear 
objectives and viable short-term solutions. While Ukraine completes a 
year of war, the war in Syria has dragged on for more than 12 years, 
adding to other territories that remain in low-intensity wars. These 
issues, coupled with global impoverishment and the consequences of 
global warming, provoke large migratory waves, which encounter fascist 
reactions from the organized European right, essentially white 
supremacist. Anti-immigration laws and legislation that undermines the 
legal status of immigrants have a clear function: to diminish the value 
of migrant labor, making their existence precarious, and consequently 
diminishing the universal value of work.

These issues are fundamental when we recall the historical achievements 
of the working class. We have a corpse in our mouths if, when we talk 
about the accumulated rights of the labor movement, we ignore that an 
increasingly large portion of the population is not covered by 
absolutely any labor protection. It makes no sense to exalt the 
achievement of the eight-hour day if we ignore that there is a large 
number of app-based workers whose shifts easily reach 14 hours a day, 
earning little more than a minimum wage, without the right to vacations 
or sick leave. This total precarization of work is repeated in the most 
diverse sectors of the economy in the territory dominated by the 
Portuguese State, from civil construction to intensive agriculture, with 
the absolute complicity of the State.

The Left and Social Movements
The classic organizations built by the working class, associations and 
unions, are currently almost entirely committed to the liberal ideals of 
order and progress. The 20th century marked the defeat of our political 
field by statist paradigms, which uncritically accepted them, and which 
nurture a deep distrust in the political capacity of the popular 
classes. By controlling state apparatuses, they artificially financed 
their political lines, acquired privileges that isolated them from the 
reality of the people, and used the repressive apparatus and 
intelligence of some of the most powerful state machines in the world to 
crush any opposition from the left. The result was the channeling of all 
the effort and accumulated resources of the manipulated underclass for 
the benefit of the future project of the emerging bourgeoisie and 
bureaucracy. The class pacts and conciliations in the central countries 
of capitalism and the forced modernizations in peripheral countries, 
with red and orange dictatorships forcing the proletarianization of 
indigenous populations and their forced inclusion in the world-system, 
are not accidents, but logical consequences of the process engendered. 
The State will always be a repressive apparatus at the service of a 
privileged elite, politically or financially. It will always crush 
nascent popular power and its organizations of struggle and self-defense.

Truth be told: the hegemonic currents of the left were veritable 
factories of defeat for our people. Even major victories, such as the 
decolonization processes, were only partial, because formal 
decolonization occurs while maintaining the political organization 
within the nation-state and the market economy dictated by Europe and 
the United States. Today, in the first fifth of the 21st century, we are 
still confronted with glaring inequality worldwide, and wealth and 
resources flowing to the same territorial nodes as before.

Currently, we see this process repeating itself, as if trapped in a loop 
from which there is no escape, leading many comrades to fatalism, and 
many capitalists to identify their project as the "end of history." 
However, there is a force growing daily from the peripheries of capital. 
Wildcat strikes, occupations, and uncoordinated class conflicts are 
spreading and becoming increasingly common. Independent unions are 
gaining strength, challenging the plantation system sustained by the old 
Communist Parties and their derivatives. We see that these dissident 
movements are currently being contested by sectors of the populist 
right, with little contestation on the left. It is therefore necessary 
to have a coordination that demonstrates a break with the existing 
order, offering new imaginative horizons, proposing new values based on 
class solidarity, mutual support, and internationalism.

Anarchism
The anarchist field as a whole has unfortunately not yet managed to 
confront its mission of reorganizing the popular movements from below 
for class warfare. Individualist and reformist currents dispute and 
erase the history and accumulated knowledge of our movement, rejecting 
revolutionary organization, theory, and discipline. Countless times, the 
idea of "progress," which infects us from the hegemonic left, is used 
both to delegitimize the accumulated achievements of the anarchist past 
or the experiences of our class, and to impede innovation, placing 
individualism and idealism as the final and complete forms of anarchism. 
Too often, anarchists remain completely detached from the processes of 
popular struggle, which unfold mainly in social housing neighborhoods, 
peripheral communities, and some unions. Stifled by culturalist action 
or even a lack thereof, anarchist identity becomes a form of escape from 
the feeling of alienation that capitalism forces upon us, but nothing 
more than that. It is clear to us that the problem is not about claiming 
a lifestyle or doing educational and cultural work with the people; 
however, by putting the cart before the horse, we will never surpass the 
State and capital. Therefore, resuming the social insertion of anarchism 
and reorganizing our political field into a revolutionary political 
organization is our current priority.

What to do

We must reclaim the memory of our people's struggle, of all those who 
fought and died before us, not out of nostalgia, but by appropriating 
them as tools for struggle and overcoming the current state of affairs. 
Capital acts to erase our collective memory, to deterritorialize us, and 
to deny our ancestry. Just as the various indigenous peoples in struggle 
do, we build ourselves upon our martyrs and ancestors, as tools that 
point to the future, that provide us with the collective accumulation 
necessary to efficiently wage the class war. History has shown us that 
we will not defeat capitalism and build a new world through conciliation 
and reforms. This path necessarily involves a process of simultaneous, 
not phased, destruction and creation. The struggle to negate the State 
is consistent with the daily construction of this world, and in fact, 
they are interdependent. Our task is to build popular power structures, 
a power parallel to the State that reverses the centralizing and elitist 
logic of statism. This will be both our strategy and our model of an 
egalitarian society.

To this end, we face three major tasks. The first, drawing directly from 
the May 1st movement, is that our struggles should be seeds for a large, 
combative trade union federation, as this demonstrates the strength of 
popular unity through Revolutionary Trade Unionism. A trade unionism 
that historically connects workers of all conditions, employed and 
unemployed, with greater, lesser or even no capacity for work, students 
and pensioners, prisoners, or those with any other condition restricting 
their freedom.

Secondly, recognizing the many achievements that have been made since 
then, create in each advocacy organization, union, collective, as soon 
as they have a considerable number, youth, women's, racial and LGBTQIA+ 
committees, so that they can address their particular problems. And 
finally, build autonomous organizations that act under a common strategy 
from the revolutionary field and the anarchist political organization, 
as COPOAP proposes, with a greater degree of discipline and theoretical 
unity, dedicating our lives to the struggle!

On this date and always, the home for those who live in it and the land 
for those who work it!
Long live May 1st!

https://embate-copoap.weebly.com/blog/1-de-maio-anarquista-relato-e-manifesto
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en