British May Day has proved, yet again, to be a disappointment for the workers and students of the North East. Not only was the same thing attempted as every year, a march from Exhibition Park to Monument followed by a rally, but this year a current Labour Party MP was invited to speak – seemingly specifically because of her record on LGBT issues, whatever is meant by that. Comrades from the Revolutionary Communist Group led an intervention which was met with predictable hostility from the alleged trade unionists gathered, including rather funnily from a person wearing a Green Party badge – new liberal-democratic bloc led by the labour aristocracy, anyone?
All in all, it was a sad and sorry sight for the workers’ movement in Britain. What isn’t these days, when the established, bureaucrat unions are involved? It was a day of embarrassment, after embarrassment, after poorly planned embarrassment. Every Saturday in the centre of Newcastle, there has been a demonstration held by the bloodthirsty Iranian monarchist-fascists at midday at Monument. When the Tyne and Wear May Day committee announced they would be having their rally at Monument, as they had last year, there seemed a bit of hope that the workers’ movement might take on these ghouls calling for the further slaughter of Iranian schoolgirls. This did not take place and on the day of, the announcement went out that the May Day rally would be held in Old Eldon Square on the grass instead.
We all know who is to blame for this, of course. It is the fault of the institutional, compatible left: you’ve seen them disgracing the hammer-and-sickle wherever they go and they all have their own newspapers for the low, low solidarity price of upwards of £5. It is the RCP, CPB, the Socialist Party, the Socialist Workers’ Party, and the ‘mass’ organisations (like the Palestine Solidarity Campaign or Stand up to Racism) who represent an ossified, labour aristocratic left who are at fault. Further, there were some notable absences from Tyne and Wear May Day: any form of insurrectionary left (apologies to the RCG) or, for that matter, any of the unions doing the work of actually going to the people – the IWW or IWGB, for instance. Tyne and Wear May Day proved a simpering, masturbatory acquiescence to capitalism-imperialism.
There exists another model for May Day however. We didn’t even have to look to the continent this year. The Anti-Imperialist Front and Young Struggle led the parts of the insurrectionary left in clashes with the Metropolitan Police in London, seeing three arrests and thusly besieging the Charring Cross Police Station. If we wanted to look further afield, we could look to what I consider the ur-example of the spirit of May Day: Berlin. Entire neighbourhoods take to the streets to clash with the forces of the bourgeois state, often
winning and, more importantly, getting away with it year after year. May Day in Kreuzberg, a neighbour in former East Berlin, is famous the world over and I would recommend anyone look into May Day 2026 in Berlin. From Kreuzberg is where I get the title of this bulletin: ‘Ins Herz der Bestie Voran!’ or ‘Onwards into the heart of the beast!’. Berlin puts their fellow workers and students in the west to shame. May Day is a celebration that the fight is not yet done, not a day for us to sit on the grass in the warm, warm sun and listen to a playwright speak – that is our future after the fight. There is a ways to go yet, and we won’t get anywhere sat down.
In 2005, the invisible committee penned ‘The Coming Insurrection’ and I would like to share a quote to keep in mind: ‘Let’s stop denouncing repression and rise to meet it’. We are facing down the barrel of fascism in Britain today and we are failing to meet it as it comes to us. May Day 2026 is a symptom of the sickness of opportunism and the lack of revolutionary, insurrectionary consciousness in the workers’ movement in Britain. There is no willingness to engage in what amounts to political street fights because the possibility is not there in most people’s minds. Law and order is the ideology of the bourgeoise and ofthe labour aristocracy, and all the business unions are ill and feverish with it. This means that until we can smash the business union bureaucrats, we will never see a May Day like Berlin or Paris or Manila or Havana.