CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

May Day Should be a Day Without the Bosses, Yet…

Ever since I moved to Chicago in 1993, May Day has progressively degenerated throughout the years, despite moving into the mainstream in a herky-jerky fashion. For many years, it wasn’t celebrated much beyond the very marginal radical left, but its move into the mainstream has been at a political cost—losing its revolutionary politics. The International Socialist Organization (ISO), for example, which I was a member of for four decades, held a yearly celebration with food and political talks on the revolutionary traditions in the U.S. working class.

Many other groups held similar events. Anarchist comrades used to do an annual event in Forest Park/Waldheim cemetery, where the original Haymarket Martyrs monument is........

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