It’s May Day – Let’s Break Something

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Growing up in the 80s we were convinced the world would end in a sudden, cataclysmic nuclear holocaust. Over the eastern horizon loomed the Soviet giant casting its Chernobyl shadow, and to the west, over the Atlantic’s waves, was Uncle Sam singing ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ with more nukes and a star wars programme. As terrifying as this global stand-off was, it was exhilarating – exciting even – in a surreal doomsday kind of way. We all knew where we stood. Okay Protect and Survive let slip how it would all end up; with us being vaporised in braced positions under our school desks, but weirdly enough the blue and red tension gave us something like meaning.

Now we have to come to terms of the anti-climax of how it’s all really going to end. We’re going to go down in a hail of rising sea levels and fluctuating temperatures, food and water shortages, and a skinny, starving polar bear drifting to its death on a tiny iceberg off the coast of Portugal. See, it turns out in the end that war was only a symptom of the real disease. War, even thermonuclear war, is a product of an international politico-economic structure of raw greed and power that has exploited every possible human and natural resource to the point that now we have to live and die with the effects.

Neoliberalism, the globalised virus of capitalism on amphetamines, has become the source and root of almost all our woes. It has certainly drawn for us a clear picture of how its destructiveness is going to asphyxiate every last one of us. In our more sober moments we all know that this Prometheus has to be stopped, and stopped in the hope that it isn’t already too late. Globalised capitalism is the reason we have zero hour contracts, social spending cuts, and tax breaks for the rich here in the developed world, and it’s the reason for sweatshops, human trafficking, and toxic pollution almost everywhere else. This – the love of money – is the opium of the world, and, just like heroin, it kills.

Today is ‘May Day,’ International Workers’ Day, and it’s time we started breaking stuff. Seriously! We are in a very serious mess, and no one knows for sure if we have time to stop it or not. Either way, time is running out and we have to do something. There is nothing really to gain from breaking a McDonald’s storefront window, other than that it might relieve some of the tension. What needs to be broken is the whole goddamn monster, and we all need to organise to get the job done. Its money supply needs to be cut, and we have to deprive it of every resource that it consumes, human and material. We can do this or we can start rearranging the deckchairs and listen to the band playing ‘Near my God to Thee.’

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