For a couple of years in the mid-70’s, my husband and I lived in Berlin, Germany.
On May first of each year, we rode the subway into East Berlin to witness a pageant of pretend strength as Soviet heavy armaments were rolled-out for display in the May Day parade. In sharp contrast to the bellicose message of the parade, a visit to any of the meager shops along the way revealed just how poor were the life-style choices available to the average East German.
The “East Mark” had so little real buying power that tourists were required to purchase roughly the equivalent of $10.00 in face value of the worthless currency in order to even be admitted to East Berlin. It used to be a standing joke that, try as you might, you never could find anything worthwhile on which to spend your compulsory East Marks.
One year we arrived late, a little after the crowd had already lined-up along the parade route. The other streets, leading from the train station to the center of town, were never bustling even on ordinary days. On that morning they were completely deserted; and the quiet felt electrified.
As we strolled up Unter den Linden to reach the parade route, the cobblestones beneath our feet began to vibrate. Then, the entire cityscape shook as if from an earthquake, as an enormous tank rumbled down the deserted boulevard toward us. We fled the street to huddle by a building until the thing passed us, but that sensation of utter powerlessness in the face of overwhelming military strength put a sober face on our experiences that day.
Of course it was popularly known by then that all the commercial vitality of East Germany had been sapped by corruption within the Communist Party bureaucracy, leaving nothing but this gaudy pantomime every year and a thriving black market economy.
Nowhere was there a better demonstration of the fact that, even where officially abhorred, the principles of capitalistic enterprise will assert and prevail, in a Darwinian manner, without any protections whatsoever. The collapse of the Soviet empire was already in the cards.
That’s why I bristle every time someone gets all sanctimonious about the capitalistic “system.” It’s not really a system at all, it’s a primal instinct.
Setting aside, for the moment, the mechanics of the thing; “capitalism” is based on the primeval desire to serve one’s own interests, whereas “communism” is based on a more elevated observation that fairly distributed effort and wealth benefits all who engage in a pursuit equally. The fatal flaw in “communism” is, of course, a return to the primal, when the temptation to cheat inevitably becomes overpowering.
Rather than glorying in capitalism, I have just accepted it as the natural state of human greed on which we must constantly endeavor to impose curbs so that it doesn’t result in exploitation of the weakest members of society, nor pull the whole economy down on top of its over-grasping corpus.
Even though we tend to associate International Worker’s Day, with twentieth century European-style social activism, the history of May Day as a celebration of workers’ solidarity began as a commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre in 1886 Chicago.
My home town was a brutal place to labor at the end of the nineteenth century; and rather like now, the working class were the principle victims when reckless speculation among the moneyed-class brought the general economy to its knees. The Industrial revolution had cheapened the value of human labor and begun a race to the bottom as wealthy industrialists exploited an over-abundance of desperate immigrants and failed farmers to keep the engines of automated production turning round the clock.
Labor was squeezed to work longer and longer hours, and on May 1, 1886, workers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in Chicago had finally had enough and went on strike for a shorter work day.
Strikebreakers were brought in and the striking workers clashed with police. Responding to a peaceful demonstration on May 4, the mayor sent police to disperse the crowd forcibly. One thing led to the next and someone threw a pipe-bomb which killed seven policemen. The police then fired into the crowd, killing four people.
In the anti-labor hysteria that followed, all reason was suspended:
A period of panic and overreaction followed in Chicago. Hundreds of workers were detained; some were beaten during interrogation and a number of forced confessions was obtained. In the end, eight anarchists were put on trial and seven were convicted of conspiracy to commit murder. Four were hanged in November 1887, one committed suicide and three were later pardoned by Illinois governor, John Peter Altgeld… no evidence was provided at the time, nor has any been discovered since, which connected the eight convicted workers to the bomb-throwing. Widespread fear of unionism and other radicalism influenced most of the public to support harsh treatment of the accused.
The incident ushered in an era of hostility to labor reform and suspicion of socialism that, despite later achievements of U.S. labor unions, continues to feed the right-wing myth machine.
So we find ourselves in the first decade of the twenty-first century, once again facing a social and political climate in which the rich and powerful right, not content with gutting the middle class, are finding new excuses for unpinning the social safety nets that were carefully constructed in an era of greater self-knowledge to prevent exactly the kind of desperation that led to the Haymarket riots and similar acts of revolution in the early days of the Twentieth Century.
We never seem to learn. “Communism” or “capitalism;” sooner or later all economic models descend to the lowest common denominator…unbridled greed and selfishness. And when that happens, it is just a matter of time before revolution rears its ugly head.
