On May Day, we celebrate the historic victories of the labour movement, and honour those who continue to struggle for a better world today.
What began as a protest for an eight-hour workday in the 19th century has grown into a global force.
That movement would establish key pillars of the rights many enjoy today, from the five-day workweek to the minimum wage.
Labour has always been on the vanguard of social and political change — in creating our world, workers hold the seeds of its transformation.
Today, we honour all workers — from those who once broke the shackles of capital to construct new societies, to those fighting for dignity and rights in the face of brutal exploitation today.
"As long as the struggle of the workers against the bourgeoisie and the ruling class continues, as long as all demands are not met," Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1894, "May Day will be the yearly expression of these demands."
Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!
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🇵🇸 Today, the @ProgIntl delegation concludes its investigation of Israel’s systematic violations of international law with a clear and urgent call to governments across the globe: Now is the time for a total energy, economic and arms embargo against Israel.
Download the full report from the delegation: bit.ly/3CkHG0n
On 28 October 2024, an emergency international delegation landed in Palestine to amplify evidence of the Israeli regime’s systematic violations of international law since the start of its genocide in Gaza one year ago.
Over the course of a week in the field, our delegates found clear evidence of what Palestinian citizens have been telling the world for years: Israel relies on systematic violations of international law against the Palestinian people to advance its project of settler colonialism.
On 7 November 1917, the Russian working class sent shockwaves through the world by overthrowing the Tsar, dismantling Russia’s budding capitalism, and establishing history’s first proletarian state.
The October Revolution began months earlier, sparked by the women textile workers of Petrograd. They took to the streets with simple demands: bread, and the “return of our husbands from the trenches” of World War I.
Together with thousands of workers, they mobilized across the city in what became known as the February Revolution, launching a movement that would soon bring the nation’s workers to power.
On this day in 1952, the British colonial government in Kenya declared a state of emergency in response to the Mau Mau uprising.
During the eight-year crackdown that followed, 90,000 Kenyans were killed or injured and over one million were forcibly resettled into villages under military occupation.
The Pan-African journalist George Padmore described the British repression as “the biggest colonial war in Africa since the Boer war.”
The people of East London defeated Sir Oswald Mosley, the Blackshirts and their police protection on this day in 1936.
In what became known as the Battle of Cable Street, some 250,000 residents, trade unionists and communists banded together to halt Mosley’s fascist march into the heart of the capital’s Jewish community.
Sir Oswald Mosley was a British aristocrat and former Labour cabinet minister who founded the British Union of Fascists (BUF) after visiting Mussolini’s Italy in 1931. Amidst the depths of the Great Depression, soaring unemployment and rampant hunger, Britain’s ruling class fanned the flames of fascism to quell the threat of working-class insurrection.
On 30 September 1965, the Indonesian military, working closely with the US government, initiated a coup that would depose President Sukarno and install the brutal, 30-year dictatorship of General Suharto.
In the dark years that followed, the dictatorship massacred over a million Indonesian communists, with the CIA and US diplomats drawing up “kill lists” for the Indonesian military. The operation would become a template for the US’s regime change operations for decades to come.
In 1945, President Sukarno led Indonesia to independence from Dutch colonial rule. He championed the Non-Aligned Movement and hosted the historic Bandung Conference, a meeting of Afro-Asian states, in 1955.
On this day 65 years ago, Władysław Gomułka, leader of the socialist Polish People's Republic, announced the "1000 Schools for the Millennium" program — an ambitious plan, hatched in the ashes of WW2, to build one school for every year of Poland's existence.
When the program concluded, over 1400 new schools would be built — "for the benefit of the young generation."
The lack of schools was a burning question for post-war Poland. The country's reconstruction was accompanied by a rapid process of urbanization, and a dramatic demographic boom. In 1949-1959, over 700,000 children were born annually. By 1961, there were 74 children per classroom.