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.
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| 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.
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.
