THIS May Day let us first of all recall the words of Karl Marx who told the First International that “a new society is springing up whose international rule will be peace because its national ruler everywhere will be the same — labour!”
That new society has yet to prevail, although the world is ripe for it. But Marx’s understanding that the advance of labour is bound up with the cause of peace is as relevant as 150 years ago.
There are those who seek to reduce the working-class interest to simply matters of pay and working conditions. Life does not allow such a shrinkage of perspective, least of all today.
The first call on the solidarity of the workers of the world today must be the Palestinian people suffering a genocidal imperialist-backed assault in Gaza and aggressive, murderous, dispossession in the West Bank.
Israel’s actions have been armed and politically underwritten from the first by the US and British governments. Their determination to give Benjamin Netanyahu the freedom to carry out his campaign unimpeded has itself pushed the world closer to war.
And it should escape no-one’s attention that the same powers who have failed to press for a ceasefire in Gaza are also seeking to keep the war in Ukraine going by all means possible.
They are further pushing for huge increases in military spending at a time when the health service is crumbling, when there are no teachers to put in front of many school classes, when millions lack a decent home and when local authorities are facing bankruptcy across the country.
This is a trade union question, a working-class question. The global system of capitalism rests on exploitation maintained by force by the great powers.
The “world order” which is being sustained by the US, Britain and their endless wars depends on violence and the threat of it deployed against the oppressed everywhere.
The austerity and cuts which we endure here are the other side of the same coin. The British ruling class would rather fund aircraft carriers in the Pacific and missiles in the Middle East than hospitals at home.
So on May Day it is vital that the labour movement raises its sights and looks to comprehend the world as a whole, past considerations of borders and redundant juxtapositions of the “economic” or “industrial” on the one hand and the political on the other.
Solidarity is not a matter of philanthropy. It is the vital interest of workers everywhere. The victory of the Palestinian people against Israel will empower the mass movement for change here too.
And it is workers here that will be among the main victims if the drive to war against Russia proceeds unchecked and the still more dangerous provocations against China lead to conflict.
Against these dystopian perspectives, the labour movement must raise its own demands for international peace and social justice, and make them the property of the broad mass of the people.
Be capitalism ever so bad, it will never be superseded unless there is a social alternative to hand. That can only be the work of the labour movement, promoting a socialist perspective.
The period of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour brought these ideas in from the margins to which they had been confined over preceding decades.
They are still alive across much of the movement. And they animate the vast movement of solidarity with the Palestinians which dominates Britain’s streets.
Today, let us commit to spreading them still wider, and uniting that energy with the basic demands of all working people.
Workers of the world, unite!
