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Today we offer a very special Global Capitalism special in honor of “May Day”
Today's May Day Special, a collaborative effort with long-time contributor Charles Fabian, opens with the major causes for why May Day 2024 is so special. These include the fact that the great crash of global capitalism in 2008-2009 shook the world in ways that include shocking a declining US labor movement back to life and growth.
We saw that in 2011 when the Occupy Wall Street movement shook the US and beyond again. Then the "Fight for $15" swept across low-wage America as it still does. Then a socialist named Bernie Sanders rose to prominence and changed how millions of Americans viewed the economy and could see the need to vote for a direct challenge to capitalism. Nor did the pandemic slow down the growth of an anti-capitalist left that shows up these days as a 70% approval rating for unions in the Gallup poll and for hugely successful unionization drives in low-wage areas like Amazon and Starbucks, in auto plants in the US south, in militant new union leaderships elected in the Teamsters and the UAW.
May Day - the international celebration of the working class - has much to cheer for in 2024. And the international context is special too. The US-led, formerly dominant G7 no longer presides over world capitalism unchallenged. The BRICS - China and its allies - are a new alternative leadership of the world economy with a much more ambiguous relationship to capitalism. May Day 2024 welcomes nothing less than a new world economy and one far more favorable to working-class struggles than we have seen in years.