Why May Day? Why the General Strike? (Includes PDF)

May 1st, 2012, is a global general strike. Every year millions of people around the world celebrate May 1st as a dignified day of revolt against this system. May Day is an international holiday that commemorates the 1886 Haymarket Massacre, when Chicago police defending, as always, the interests of the ruling class attacked and murdered workers participating in a general strike and demanding an 8-hour workday. Five anarchists, known as the Haymarket Martyrs, were framed and sentenced to death as a result.

Occupy Seattle has chosen to stand in solidarity with the international call. We urge everyone to skip out on school and work to take to the streets. This general strike will not be comparable to the 1919 Seattle General Strike because the general strike is not what it used to be. In this current era of extreme social cuts, anti-immigration racism, and massive predatory financial speculation the number of unionized workers in the US stands at only 11.8% of the population.

Therefore, we are calling out to a population of largely unorganized workers as well as the growing millions of people who are unemployed or underemployed. We are calling on those who are never mentioned in the statistics; the undocumented and manual workers drawn largely from immigrant communities as well as those whose work at home through unwaged gendered labor. We are calling on the youth, college students, and the retired to meet in the streets with the employed, the undocumented, and the homeless. The general strike in this century is a day of generalized rebellion for the exploited.

As students and youth we walk out against the ongoing attacks reflected in education cuts, juvenile detention center expansions, police harassment,and racist murders.

As workers we walk out against selling our time and energy to a boss or owner that profits from our labor. We walk out because we would rather be with our friends, family, and comrades creating and working with each other not for a system we never agreed to be a part of.

As the exploited, excluded, and working classes we walk off the job, out of the school, and into the streets because we see standing up together in the streets as the first step toward dismantling this system that oppresses all of us.

On May Day 2012, Occupy Seattle will act in solidarity with people from all walks of life in all parts of the world in a Global General Strike to shut down the global circulation of capital that every day serves to enrich the ruling classes and impoverish the rest of us. There will be no victory but that which we make for ourselves.

REVOLT FOR A LIFE WORTH LIVING!
STRIKE / BLOCKADE / OCCUPY

MAY 1ST 2012
9AM-12NOON-3PM-5PM-7PM
Rallies, Marches, Speakers, Music, Food, Assemblies
WESTLAKE PARK (4TH & PINE)
may1stseattle.org
#M1GS

For print quality of the above flyer (Why strike? Why May Day? General flyer with Tony the Tiger front):

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?rkorkp8h0vhu7fu


http://pugetsoundanarchists.org/node/1579