by Billmon
posted at the Whiskey Bar
in two installments on May 1, 2003
May Day
My slightly tongue-in-cheek greeting card drew some interesting
comments — including the complete text of the Internationale from one of
our German friends.
Actually, I’m not really a communist with a corporate day job —
although I do play one on the Internet.
You’d probably have to put me down as a revisionist Kautskyite Menshevik, or
maybe a rightist deviationist with extreme petty bourgeois tendencies. Either
way, I’ve never been a big fan of Lenin and the Bolsheviks — much less of
Stalin or the faceless Soviet bureaucrats who succeeded him.
My sentimental loyalty isn’t to communism, or even socialism per se, but
rather to the quaint old 19th century notion of the solidarity of working people
everywhere. May Day has been the symbol of that sentiment since 1889, when it
was designated as the international workers’ holiday by the First Socialist
International, K. Marx and F. Engels, founders.