May Day: Some Necessary Reflections

This morning we celebrate peasants and workers and all struggling men and women in our country and around the world. They are the salt of the earth. It is May Day today. It is time to recall the inherent dignity of struggling masses around the world and through the multiple stages of history.

On this day we celebrate the struggling masses who have through the generations inherited the earth and yet are not permitted to be owners of its resources. It is a time when the have-nots of the world must remember that they need to have it all, in terms of morality and legitimacy.

On May Day, therefore, it is a whole lot more than a remembrance of Chicago 1886 that I go into. I go beyond that Haymarket tragedy, the same that today symbolises the struggle of what we know as the toiling masses for a happier, better future for themselves. And I remember the Soviet Union as it used to be before perestroika and glasnost led it down the road to ruin. When you speak of human rights today, when you feel the urge for a world based on the rights of everyone to its resources, you remember with a certain touch of pride the sweeping psychological and political changes that the republic proclaimed by Lenin in 1917 and so solidified by Stalin subsequently caused around the globe. 

You and I may have been put off by Nikita Khrushchev’s shoe-banging at the United Nations in 1960. The tired men, Brezhnev and company, who led the Soviet Union into a disastrous war in Afghanistan in the late 1970s have never been our heroes. But the Soviet Union was, when it was around, a model for the future. In our collective memory, it remains an idea we can recreate out of its ashes. It is thus that we understand the yearnings in Vladimir Putin for a powerful and assertive Russia.

That is how my thoughts run on May Day. It is a time when I miss Che Guevara, the dedicated socialist who could have changed the face of our world had he not been done to death by the wolves in the Bolivian jungles more than fifty years ago. Guevara was one socialist who combined in him all the best that leftwing politics had to offer. He was charismatic, he was educated and he had faith. Like Fidel Castro, he knew that the most compelling argument in defence of rights was the power and the willingness of the masses to change their fate. I have been impressed by the rise of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. 

It felt good to see the Sandinistas back in power after Reaganite machinations put them out of office years ago, but there do not arise in us the feelings that the Sandinistas once epitomised. When pragmatism supplants idealism, you often lose something important. And you call that conviction. But conviction sometimes is revived through the arrival on the scene of men like Hugo Chavez. Venezuela’s late leader held out hope for his nation’s poor. He could have done the job better had he been a little less fiery in his approach to the neo-conservatives in the United States. And there was Salvador Allende, the socialist elected President of Chile in 1970 but then ejected, from both life and power, by Washington’s Nixon-Kissinger combine in September 1973.

Some years ago, here in Dhaka, a young Chinese woman told me with a straight face that her generation had a poor opinion of Mao Zedong because in his time people were poor. Today, she said with a smile that spread from ear to ear, everyone in China was happy because there was a lot of money to go around. I listened to her, stunned into near silence, for here was a woman who clearly did not remember her history or respect it. And her history was the tale of a people who had struggled resolutely and mightily to cause a change in their fortunes. 

The Long March, the political will of Mao, Zhou En-lai, Chu Teh and Liu Shaoqi are historical episodes that will remind us of the glory that socialism was meant to be. Of course, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution turned out to be disasters. Of course, the repeated purges of men like Deng Xiaoping did not exactly endear Chinese socialism to many. But can you really agree with Deng’s proposition that it did not matter if a cat was white or black as long as it caught mice? Socialism has always been about the means justifying the ends. Or the ends justifying the means? It has not just been about ends or means. It has been about principles.

On May Day every year, I have recalled with pain the passing of good men like Afghanistan’s Nur Mohammad Taraki. There was D.N. Aidit who disappeared on a night of brutality in Indonesia long ago. Had Brezhnev not come in the way, Alexander Dubcek would have caused wonders in Czechoslovakia through his Prague Spring in 1968. Would Bangladesh have taken the rainbow-brightened road to socialism had there not been a parting of the ways between Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Tajuddin Ahmad?

But my pain comes coated in a gentle sliver of optimism, in the belief that there will be time someday for the poor and the dispossessed to reclaim the world for themselves. There will be time for the hungry and the angry and the subjugated to take charge of their lives and their universe and build, brick by patient brick, the structure of socialism that will take us a little closer to the creation of a better, prosperous and educated society for ourselves. 

There will be time to inform ourselves that globalization is not what we need. Internationalism is what will give nations dignity, around the world.

There are the dark Bastilles that must be stormed, in order for our children and for their children to live happy, prosperous and responsible lives.

Let that be the spirit and the conviction in which we observe May Day today.

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Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics, diplomacy and history