LALIT celebrates Labour Day
02.05.2023
LALIT yesterday 1 May celebrated “Labour”, which stands as a global force in its on-going conflict with privately owned global “Capital”. We celebrated one against the other.
This year LALIT chose the bold theme: “Against the Capitalist Class’s Dictatorship at Work: Towards Proper Democracy”. This theme was addressed by the two members ably presiding over the political and cultural event at Gran Rivyer Nord Wes, Rada Kistnasamy and Anne-Marie Joly, as well as by LALIT’s speaker for the day, Alain Ah Vee, who addressed all the challenges of the day, confronting the challenges with the importance of speeding up the transmission of class consciousness. The theme was also addressed in messages from organizations LALIT has political links with from all continents: Africa, Europe, the Americas, Asia and Australia. The background of coming out of a world pandemic while remaining in a worsened economic crisis, world-wide, was constantly referred to, as were the double threats to humanity, which were also addressed in poems read out: war and imminent environmental collapse through pollution. The whole event was up-to-the-minute, and also in part of the flow of the history of working people. Members and their families and friends of LALIT were present.
The dictatorship of the Capitalist class at the work-place was challenged, in particular, by the new concept of “Accelerated Transmission of Working Class Consciousness”, which the Muvman Liberasyon Fam and LALIT launched in the context of 2023 May Day. This involves working people with experience of past struggles on the shop floor – three years or 40 years, never mind, at the workplace – sharing in print form or by readings a few ideas that they would have liked to have known about on their very first day of work that they only learned through long experience. Four different women with work experience in the diverse fields of – ICT, server in a working class sandwich bar, nursing, and employee of an Non-Governmental Organization – contributed to the leaflet that was distributed at the LALIT gathering. Reference was also made, in homage to Serge Lebrasse, who passed away this year, to the words from the refrain of his song, Ti Paul Kuper Kann, “Me? If I don’t work hard? Well, the sugar estate falls on hard times”. Alain Ah Vee referred in his speech to the creation of a light rail Metro, which the Prime Minister speaks about as if built by himself and Prime Minister Modi, who contributed finance. But it is, of course, workers who built the Metro and who made every bit of every engine and carriage.
Similarly, the two films shown, as people gathered at Grand River, were on this same theme: challenging the dictatorship of Capital at work. One film was 20 minutes of excerpts from the recently re-stored 1979 film called “The Wobblies” about the Industrial Workers of the World, an international union founded in 1905, as told by old workers, who were in the union in its early days before the union was destroyed by the bosses and the US state. The second was about the history of the celebration of Labour Day, in particular its founding in the USA and its history in France. Speakers also spoke about the history of the celebration of May Day in Mauritius from the 1930’s.
The poems and prose readings were against war – Letter from Bagdad, read by Begum, and Peser Maybur Vizyonn Tablo Guernica, read by Gary, one Vizit Labalenn on the marine environment, and another, read by two young people Adelle and Rylé, was precisely on the subject of “accelerated transmission of working class consciousness”. One was the Brecht poem in Kreol, A Worker’s Look at History, the poem representing condensed class consciousness, itself. Another was Workers’ Control: Know Your Enemy, by Ken Coates and Tony Topham. References were made a number of times to the Henry Favori play, Tras, and the way workers imposed their own rules on the sugar bosses at one estate in 1971. Though the bosses lost not a sous, they sacked the entire workforce. The play, perhaps the finest play ever written in Mauritius, directed in 1983 by Henry Favori, himself, was then performed all over Mauritius. Mention was also repeatedly made to the August 1979 general strike movement, the highpoint in working class consciousness in the whole of Mauritian history.
The messages, read by Gary, were from Australia (Red Ant), from Namibia (Namibian Marxist Group), from Japan (Japanese Revolutionary Communist Party), from France (Lutte Ouvriere and NPA), and from the USA (Socialist Organizer and the humanist socialist network called News & Letters). Each message, in its own way, related an organization from a different part of the world to LALIT, and to the situation the world working class faces.
And, as usual there was music interspersed, too, deepening the collective experience. Rajni Lallah’s beautiful electric piano medley, steeped in Mauritian sounds as well as in traditions from all over the world, was then joined, as she accompanied Alain M’s voice resounding around the hall “Mo pase Larivyer Tanye”, and then two other lively songs that people sang along to. Denis played the Darbuka, also called the Arab Tabla, skillfully and with depth. He gave a short explanation of the instrument’s own history – as it is little-known in Mauritius. And the music ended on a fantastic note, singing that was both very moving and also lifted the roof off, with everyone standing singing the whole of The Internationale in Kreol, acapella, together – fists raised for the finale.
