MAY DAY: NEW YORK CITY

“Get up! Get down! There’s revolution in this town!” As a communist in PLP it was special to loft this chant on my union bullhorn above the march through the insurance towers and cathedrals of commerce of lower Manhattan. 

“Get up! Get down!” is an Occupy chant, not from our Party but expresses the best fresh new impulse in Occupy. This impulse wants to sweep away racist capitalism not with reform demands, but with good old, traditional revolution, even if the nature and methods of that revolution are not yet spelled out. 

I walked with two of my family alongside young grad students with a half-self-mocking giant sign “Five Theses on the Student Strike,” whose language, though not communist, was dead serious about revolutionary theory. We chanted with a dynamic group of Filipina left-wing nationalists, whose cause was domestic workers, trafficked workers, undocumented workers—“We are the workers!  The mighty, mighty workers!” 

While they had many nationalist ideas, they were organized and militant, great partners for the moment. These mostly young women were oriented to the working class, unlike most of Occupy. They could be won to, and help develop, PL’s revolutionary communist politics, as can everyone on this march in this moment. 

And the moment was a mass May Day! Since I had just been to PL’s May Day, I may have let my feelings there spill over into a too-optimistic view of Occupy May Day. But maybe not.

Near us was a small multiracial group with signs against racist police brutality.  I borrowed a sign with two photographs, comparing police commissioner Ray Kelly to Bull Connor, the Alabama sheriff who turned dogs and firehoses on multiracial marchers in the 1960s. Since my delegation at a teacher union convention had just been working hard for two resolutions against “Stop-and-Frisk” and the mass incarceration of young black men, and since my own politics, like many other Party veterans, began in the ‘60s civil rights movement, this was my sign! 

Communists in our day must be known to others in the mass movement for our emphasis on fighting the key class issue of racism, as the PL May Day main speaker kept hammering home. This group had taken those antiracist politics to heart.

Occupy May Day was the world we have to win. We, and they, won’t succeed without masses of these marchers joining PLP. We won’t do that in a day, but we will do it together. They don’t know it yet, but they are waiting for our line — not to accept passively as the gospel, but to grasp, to debate, to develop, to carry out in practice and see how it illuminates every effort. Get up! Get down! Build the Party in this town!

NYC PL’er