May Day Socialism
Hundreds of people rallied together in Leicester on Monday to celebrate May Day, helping strengthen the links between local workers who are determined to unite in the fight-back against all the political parties of cuts.
On the same day The Guardian newspaper somehow managed to find the space to write a useful article about the positive role played by the Socialist Party’s US-based sister party, Socialist Alternative, in the campaign for a minimum wage of $15 an hour (“Seattle to debate $15 minimum wage law amid warnings of ‘class warfare’”).
This report was interesting because The Guardian, like most of the British media, has demonstrated its ability to be under-awed by the fact that a member of a revolutionary socialist party (Kshama Sawant) recently obtained just short of 100,000 votes to become a city councillor in Seattle.
On the context of The Guardian’s latest offering, Socialist Alternative campaigner Ty Moore made the following comment on Facebook:
Excellent Guardian article on Kshama Sawant and $15 fight in Seattle. It presents a far more accurate portrayal of the real dynamics of this class battle in Seattle than the similar New York Times piece on Friday. The role of the NYT’s, especially when independent working class movements are exposing the corporate character of the Democrats, is always to provide political cover for the establishment, even at the expense of accurate storytelling. The UK-based Guardian, while often playing a similar role for the sold-out Labour Party there, doesn’t feel a similar obligation to defend the image of the Democratic Party here, and so its editorial staff have no issue with providing an accurate report of the role socialists are playing in winning the highest minimum wage in the country in Seattle now against the resistance of the Democratic Party establishment in that city.
Back in Leicester, Drew Walton has just penned the following ditty (“We’re on the side of the workers“) to help unite the campaign in Britain for building an alternative to the mainstream political un-options. An alternative that takes the form of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition whose existence is regularly ignored by The Guardian, and which can now boast of standing 560 candidates in the forthcoming elections… but don’t hold your breathe to hear much about TUSC’s working-class policies in the national media.
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