And, Toward That Same End ...

Next Monday is Labor Day.  Around the world, Labor Day is observed on May 1.  But not in America.  In America, we fear doing or saying anything that might smack of Communism.

Maybe, just maybe, it's time we were a little less afraid.

Because, while good American workers (union and non-union alike) have been reluctant to inconvenience their corporate masters and ask for living wages and better working conditions, those corporate masters have been showing their gratitude toward those workers in a most peculiar way.

They've been shipping jobs overseas.  By the thousands.  Propping up sweatshops around the world, and the corrupt governments that make the sweatshops possible.

And,when you use your substandard wages to buy the goods that come out of those sweatshops, guess what?  You join the corporate masters and the corrupt governments as enablers of the corruption.  Slaves that recruit move slaves, leading the rich and corrupt to ask you to give even more of the less you already have.

Labor Day shouldn't be a day for a picnic, or a parade.  It should be a day to get off your rapidly diminishing assets and tell the corporate masters and the corrupt governments that you're mad as hell, and you're not going to take it anymore.  Don't make it a day of rest.  Make it a day of action.  That's what they're doing in New York, and that's what everyone should be doing from coast to coast.

And don't limit your work to political drives.  Strike.  Sometimes, it's the only way to get the attention of the pickpockets on Wall Street and in foreign capitals.  You know those wonderful folks who serve the fast food you eat?  They're willing to do it.  Why not you?

Finally, network.  It's called the World Wide Web; use it to organize labor action around the world.  When the corporate masters run out of sweatshop nations, they'll finally have no choice but to do the right thing.  We'll never know, until we try.

I hold no brief for Communist governments.  But not everything Marx said or wrote deserves to be condemned.  The last three sentences of "Das Kapital" are words that should resonate, and be heeded, by the exploited all over the earth:

"The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.  They have a world to win.  Workers of all countries, unite!"