May Day With The Dems

 Being a socialist, May Day has a bit of a different meaning for me than it does for many Democrats. For one thing, we socialists have been speaking up for immigrants far longer than the Dems though perhaps with too much of an edge. But that is because we have been aware of what immigrants have had to face long before both the Dems expressed concerned and Trump came to power.

However, not all of us socialists are the same. Some focus also on empowering workers at the workplace regardless of their ideologies while others are pushing an ideological agenda too hard. Stalinists are an example of the latter. 

Also, I got introduced to Antifa during a May Day event. I talked with them in person. Though Antifa can stand for being anti-fascist, there is an organized group called 'Antifa' some of whose members told me that they are reliving the street battles that communists were fighting in  Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

I was just celebrating my first May Day with the Dems and it was very laid back which was both good and bad. While the socialists I've celebrated May Day with have too much of an edge, the Dems have too little of one. 

Plus, the Dems have a more narrow view of the workers' needs than socialists do. What socialists see that Dems don't is that workers need to have power in the workplace in addition to unionizing which allows them to enter into collective bargaining to negotiate for both better pay and working conditions. And so unions are there to help prevent businesses from exploiting and abusing workers.

A protest sign at May Day rally. The quote is from the movie 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail'. It is response to King Arthur when he identifies himself as the King of England to a couple of peasants.

The Dems approach is to portray themselves as vanguards for workers. That means that the Dems will represent the demands and needs of the workers in government in exchange for their support. But it also means that the Dems are not empowering workers in the workplace. In addition, the Dems are heavily influenced by money from corporations. The result is that the Dems can have a conflict of interest when representing workers.

Socialists enable workers in multiple ways. Not only do socialists work to represent the concerns of workers, they also seek to empower them.  Socialists want workers to go beyond what unions do by adding to their collective bargaining rights, positions of power both in businesses and the government. An example of workers gaining power in the work place can be seen in Germany's codetermination laws that allow for a percentage of workers to be placed on a business's executive  boards depending on the number of employees a business has.

Without those positions of power, workers have no partial ownership of the businesses that employ them. Such workers have no say in how a business operates and treats its other stakeholders. Workers have no say as to the direction a business will take and where it locates or relocates. And unless workers are also included in Congress, they have less to say as to what regulations, which would protect people and the environment, will be written and passed. 

And so the approach taken by the Dems, who are already compromised by corporate money, cannot represent workers like socialists could if socialists were given a chance.

In addition, socialists have justice concerns that extend beyond the borders of their own nations. Socialists are concerned about the injustices that come with American imperialism. Unfortunately, some socialists are so focussed and American imperialism that they let the injustices practiced by other nations, such as Russia's invasion of Ukraine, fly in under the radar. The same occurs with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict where some socialists are so focussed on the injustices practiced by the Israeli government that they give hall passes to Palestinian terrorism. On the other hand, while, for the most part, the Dems are rightly reacting and responding to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, many of them overlook both the injustices that come with American imperialism and with those practiced by the Israeli government.

And so there is a difference between celebrating May Day with my fellow socialists than with the Dems. Both groups have contributions to make and faults to change. But if the Dems want to present a more contrasting and positive alternative to the Repubs, they will refuse to be influenced by corporate money and will keep what they rightly doing  while moving closer to how socialists analyze and approach problems and injustices.

In the eyes of many of my fellow socialists, I am slumming it when protesting with the Dems. That is because of the differences, some of which were mentioned above, that exist between socialists and the Dems. I agree with my fellow socialists that we feel significantly offended when the Repubs call the Dems 'Marxists' or 'socialists.' Obviously, the Repubs like to oversimplify life by overlooking the significant differences that exist between socialists and the Dems. The Repubs tendency to over simply things appeal to many of its followers. 

At the same time, we socialists will be promoting injustices if we believe, as how Martin Luther King Jr. described the West, while speaking against the Vietnam War, when he said that it believe it had everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them. And so we socialists, and we are a very diverse group,  need to look for what we can learn from the Dems, the traditional Repubs, and even from the Trump's Repubs if we wish to avoid being narrow-minded ideologues with very small audiences. Narrow-minded ideologies ming appeal to those of us who embrace authoritarianism, but it also sabotages our efforts to bring change.