Class Struggle
Not warfare,
struggle
(Jeremiah was stoned in Egypt by those he reproached for their evil deeds)
We have no right to take a life
George Bush has no right to take a life
“There had been a war fought and won and the great city of the conquering people was crossed with triumphal arches and vivid with thrown flowers of white, red, and rose. All through the long spring days the returning soldiers marched up the chief highway behind the strump of drums and the joyous, resonant wind of the brasses, while merchants and clerks left their bickerings and figurings and, crowding to the windows, turned their white-bunched faces gravely upon the passing battalions.”
Old Winnie Churchill pulled a fast one on the people of the USA.
Chomping down on that Stogey and wiggling his eyebrows like Groucho Marx
We can say the name of Marx now, acknowledge his existence
Harpo, Zeppo, Chico, Gummo
Adolph Marx, Herbert Marx, Leonard Marx, Milton Marx, and the inimitable Julius Henry
Marx
Winnie was a pale imitation, a cheap fraud, catch his act at the Rivoli
But he fooled old Harry S. Truman with his jive talk about metallic window treatments in eastern Europe.
Paranoid Harry the Haberdasher,
to this day the only world leader
the only world leader ever to order the melting of 100,000 eyeballs
in their sockets, the blistering, the boiling away of the blood of two cities
20,000,000 Soviets died to defeat Hitler
Harry and Winnie liked to say we won the war
Harry and Winnie took their act on the road
Sold the world on the Iron Curtain
Sold the world on the Cold War
Divided the world between the organized economies and the rapacious economies
Gordon Gekko Marx
Disinformed us all, commie in every closet,
Machinery and the profit motive,
Land, labor, capital
Power, politics, and greed
On May Day workers around the world celebrate…
The first of May:
When the flowers break through the earth,
When the sap rises in the trees,
When the birds come back from the South.
Workers:
Be like the flowers,
Bloom in the strength of your unknown power…
So sang Langston Hughes, an uncommon man, rare.
May First, Loyalty Day… it took an act of congress in 1958
to set aside
a special day
for the reaffirmation
of loyalty
to the United States
and for the recognition of the heritage of American freedom.
Mission accomplished?
Not yet.
Now it is time to lay bare the class struggle
the American class struggle with roots in blood
the deaths inflicted by a private army of Pinkertons in the 19th century
the deaths inflicted by the Colorado National Guard up at Cripple Creek
the deaths inflicted by the US Army in the Chicago Pullman Strike
the American class struggle finessed by the fear of the might of the Soviet army
undermined by McCarthyism
redefined by the Nobel Prize in Economics year after year
rightist perspectives projected with the clarity of revealed truths
all of the victories from 1880 to 1968 have been reversed
bread, circuses, NASCAR, and tits
what happened to the 40 hour week
what happened to collective bargaining
what happened to the regulation of businesses driven by greed
what happened to progressive tax models
what happened to the wealth of America, the wealth of the world
who has it
how shall we redistribute it
LISTEN to Jeremiah
do not reproach him
I see a red banner against a deep blue dawn, a Maxfield Parrish sunrise –
Happy May Day, Happy Labor Day, Celebrate the unity of working people around the world
