MILLIONS of workers took to the streets on May Day in countries throughout the world, from Los Angeles to London, Havana to Harare.
Several May Day demonstrations took place in Los Angeles, with 2,000 workers joining the MIWON (MultiEthnic Immigrant Workers Organising Network) march under the slogan: ‘Workers First’. They called for a halt to deportations of illegal immigrants.
A similar march took place in San Francisco and there were large May Day demonstrations in Chicago and New York.
In the rest of the Americas, there were huge marches on May Day. Tens of thousands demonstrated in Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires.
More than 350,000 people filled Antonio Maceo Revolution Square in Havana, with delegations from 70 countries taking part in a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution.
In Europe too, there were huge May Day demonstrations.
In France, 1.2 million workers marched in 300 cities, with the largest May Day march since World War II, 60,000-strong, making its way through the streets of Paris.
The country’s eight largest union groupings united with left-wing political parties on the march to ‘defend jobs, purchasing power and social services’, with calls for a general strike to follow the one-day May Day holiday.
Nearly half a million people joined May Day demonstrations and rallies in Germany, with tens of thousands of workers and youth marching through Berlin.
A spokesman for the May Day Alliance there said: ‘In our view this crisis is not a single event; it is part of the capitalist system and we shall overcome it.’
Riot police went into action against groups of youth and 49 ‘anti-capitalist’ protesters were arrested.
As 6,000 workers and students marched through the Greek capital Athens, 4,000 police were mobilised to control them. The GSEE banner at the rally declared: ‘We won’t pay for their crisis’.
It was not merely workers in the Americas, Japan and Europe who mobilised on May Day in the struggle against the impact of the world capitalist crisis. Workers in the semi-colonial countries and the degenerate and deformed workers’ states also took to the streets.
The Zimbabwe Congress of Trades Unions (ZCTU) President Lovemore Matombo told a rally in Harare that there would be street demonstrations against low wages and he demanded that the government raise salaries from US$100 to US$454.
From Russia, it was reported that about two million people had taken part in May Day marches and rallies in over 1,000 towns.
In Moscow, 40,000 took part in May Day events, with both the government party, One Russia, and the main opposition Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) organising marches.
In Vladivostok, 50,000 were on the streets, but the CPRF demonstrators found themselves surrounded by riot police, before they were able to intervene in the regional march and proceed through the city centre.
Communist parties and left-wing movements organised a 2,000-strong march and rally in the Ukrainian capital Kiev, outnumbering many times over the counter-revolutionary ‘Orange’ forces.
The millions of workers on the march on May Day are the appearance of the movement of World Socialist Revolution.
They are aware that it is the world capitalist crisis which is the source of the attacks on jobs, pay and essential services.
They are determined that they will not pay for the crisis of the bankers’ and bosses’ system.
As the protesters in Berlin made clear, the working class can only have a future by overcoming the capitalist system and, in the tradition of International Labour Day, workers are united in struggle internationally to establish socialism, a planned economy producing for people’s needs.
The mobilisations of workers throughout the world on May 1, 2009 revealed the necessity of building parties of the Fourth International in every country to lead the struggles for workers’ power and to complete the World Socialist Revolution.
