Uniting call

May 1 marks the celebration of workers’ day in several countries across the world. Drawing on a left-wing tradition in politics, from socialist and communist to anarchist ideological platforms, it was established to celebrate the struggles of the working class, somewhat against the driving mill of capitalist forces.
Worker’s day harks back to one of the first organized responses to structural changes in working relations ensuing from the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth and nineteenth century England. The world was bound to never be the same after British hegemony.
A new form of global capitalism, drawing mainly on the separation of craft from family, has spread its roots. In Marxist terms, this means that workers would, arguably, be irreversibly separated from their means of production, upon which remuneration would therefore depend.
We have come a long way since the Industrial Revolution. Global connectedness is embedded in the ways trade and industrial production are pursued and attained, with the de-localization of manufacturing being only one of them. We have reached another stage in globalization, after the modern European states launched their overseas enterprises, and after the Italian and Flemish city-states developed incipient forms of financial capitalism – in many ways, a blueprint of current banking and stock trade practices.
Physical mobility of goods and people has developed accordingly. Advancements in technology, from early boat construction to monetary exchange, communications, and logistics, have made the world a smaller and yet more complex place.
As companies have sought commodities and cheap labour abroad, so too have workers started seeking employment outside their home countries.
It is a common fact today that cities have an extremely diversified population stratum. Migrants from poorer, often previously colonized countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, are on the move. But so are workers from the so-called developed countries in Europe, North-America, or Australia, although it is more likely they are channelled to high-skilled job positions.
As a fact of contemporary working relations, cultural diversity in cities such as Macau is structuring. While the Second International back in the old communist days called for uniting workers across a spectrum of countries, present day workers’ celebrations have another collective issue to tackle: millions of workers are foreigners, immigrants in search of better life opportunities outside their home base. Calls for expulsion and discrimination of late are not a uniting call proper, only deepening the divide. Whatever happened to class solidarity?