May Day Parade in Cork - Photos

cork | history and heritage | news report

Wednesday May 02, 2007 00:44

by Ray - Cork WSM - pers. cap.

corkwsm at gmail dot com

While others canvass to gain entry to the Rich Man's Palace....

While others canvass to gain entry to the Rich Man's Palace, there were others that remembered that every May the 1st is the day to remember workers' and working-class communities' struggles across the world and throughout history. The electoral Left can go play with Bertie, Inda, Pat, and Trevor 'the sustainable capitalist'. The rest of us will make do with a small, yet determined and vibrant parade this Tuesday evening, starting shortly after seven at Connolly Hall (the most pointless building in the city, methinks) and finishing with speeches at Daunt Square. This was followed by by music from Intinn and DJs, which was still going when I left at 11.

This year, with the electionbollocks called on May Day weekend, the absence of large contingents from Labour (well, to be true nobody misses them), the SP, & so on was indeed noticable (some comrades may say refreshing!) at the march was sad but somehow predictable. It was as if two hours of knocking on doors of empty houses (out of a possible total of 576 hours to May 24th) was too much of a sacrifice to make in common cause with other socialists, communists, anarchists and trade unionists in proudly expressing our shared identity and celebrating our long history of struggle, little of which was bound up with those beguiling ballot boxes.
Another sad note was the absence of the Congress trade unions in the Cork march. Are they having their own 'celebration of Partnership' on another day? Answers, if any, to this thread.
To paraphrase James Connolly from the essay 'The Axe to the Root', "You may have the One Big Union, and you may be successful in getting candidates returned to the bourgeois assemblies, but without fighting spirit across our class,and the will to confront our class enemies in open industrial conflict, then these organisations and parliamentarians will serve only to manage us workers in agreement with the bosses." There are those on the Left who find Bertie's mind games more alluring than building for revolution and reminding our class of the very real power we hold - we make everything, tend everything that grows and no arse remains unwiped by us. We even do all the thinking (yes we do! Have you ever seen Deirdre Clune? Inbred toff if ever there was one, and surprisingly low-wattage!), dreaming and consuming. That is our real power, not the State's false deal on that polling card.