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Autonomous Workers Bloc - text

Aut | 01.05.2007 06:53 | Mayday 2007 | London

Mayday Tuesday May 1st

In Struggle In Solidarity


AUTONOMOUS WORKERS BLOC @ Mayday March
12noon Clerkenwell green, London

MAYDAY is International workers day, born out of the struggle for an 8 hour day in 1886. Over 100 years later our lives are still taken up by the world of work and exploitation. Capitalims continues, the wars, the poverty, the boredom. We also continue knowing that for us to choose a quiet life under capitalism is to live in ignorance and on a time bomb which will ulitmately mean that the spector of disaster and destruction will arrive at the doors of even the most unconcerned person. we may choose to wait it out, to see if capitalsim can deliver a solution to climatic change, that it can be restructured to the point where our economy bears similarities with our libertarian dream of self-management - we could on the other hand learn that the very heart of capitlist existence is its ability to managed and manufacture the appearance of solutions, that things will get better. We see no future if capitalism maintains its dominance over humanity. We see only a techno-repressive nightmare where all areas of our lives from cradle to grave are monitored and supervised, with the state and private institutions personalised to serve our needs not as human beings but of exploitable workers capable of increasing their profits. Our cages are getting a little bigger and our chains a little longer but what we are offered can not compare to the freedom we are after.

This Mayday we march under the banner of the Autonomous Workers Bloc as we are increasingly alienated from the trade union structures where they exist and have grown to find that these very structures are more to do with the management of efficient, disciplined workers for exploitation rather than the liberation from work and the destruction of capitalism and state machinary. No trade union or political party which seeks power can represent the desires of our existence. We are autonomous because we seek as a pre-requisite to any struggle the disengagement from hierarchical structures. We are autonomous as a way of struggle which are the lessons of over 200 years of working class history. We march with red and black flags, the flags of the CNT, the flags of the anarchist social fighters which have fouhgt not only against fascism in the earliar period of the 20th Century but also against police, politician, judge, stalinist and capitalists and in these days are at the frontlines of social and civil insurrection from the streets of Oaxaca, Mexico to the univeristy campuses of Greece and France and who attempt as we do in the harsh realitties of the urban jungles to develop and widen social antagonisms against this barbaric system.

We march on the streets as a show of our resistance, as an appeal for action and as a celebration with working class people across the globe who struggle for a better world.


Aut