A very merry May 1st to all workers.
Happy Int’l Workers’ Day !
Image of the day: Frida Kahlo’s El Marxismo Dará Salud a los Enfermos (Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick), a late work from 1954, on display at the Museo Frida Kahlo (better known as The Blue House, or La Casa Azul) in Mexico City.
I’m not generally a fan of her work, but workers everywhere deserve the consolations of Marxism: “But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” (Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chap. 10.)
A shoutout also to the pioneers of the labour movement, especially those good folk whose sacrifice bequeathed us the eight-hour workday. (“Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.”)
Thank you.
The May 1, 1977 celebrations in Istanbul, which resulted in the Taksim Square massacre.
Thank you for reminding me I shouldn’t be working today. The alternative, amassing wih my fellow workers in the Padang, shouting slogans, fists punching the air, seems rather beguiling. : P
delmonte
May 1, 2012 at 1:02 am
You, my friend, toil away in an air-conditioned environment. Also, I assume you’re your own boss, so the fruits of your labour are yours, so to speak. Not everyone’s as fortunate as you, y’know .. (Or me, I’ll be the first to admit that.) You can’t possibly claim that global capitalism has been too fair to, say, the foreign blue-collar workers in our midst ..
jusdeananas
May 1, 2012 at 1:14 am