At the occasion of May First, the Argentina-based group La Oveja Negra (‘The Black Sheep’) draws up a balance sheet of past struggles against capitalism and finds a perspective of the future in the present ones.
A new commemoration of May Day, 1886, allows us to remember, share, inspire, debate, reflect and agitate.
We commemorate another anti-capitalist May Day struggle many years ago for which five comrades were executed at the hands of the State and another three sentenced to life imprisonment, later known as the “Chicago Martyrs”.
The anti-capitalist struggle is as necessary today as yesterday for those of us who suffer the consequences of Capitalism in our everyday life: every working day, whether inside or outside of where we live, with or without wages, with or without fixed hours, every time we look for work we suffer the deficiencies, every time our relations with other human beings are mediated by money which turns them into relations between things.
For centuries the proletariat has been waging battles; however, those May days in Chicago were part of a struggle for which proletarians organized with an emancipatory perspective. George Engel, a typographer and anarchist hanged in 1887, expressed it this way: “I do not fight the capitalists individually; I fight the system that gives rise to privilege.
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