May Day was celebrated

In the art that holds societies together, there are sculptures; in literature, poems; and in social life, various ceremonies. It is said that the monuments in various areas of London are historical images representing the various triumphs of the British. Social commemorations, such as Women's Day or May Day, the International Workers' Day, are also seen—or rather, portrayed—as social festivities that hold societies together through mechanisms of implicit pressure and glorification.  

When we return to May Day celebrations, the first thing to note is that the value felt for almost every such celebration or commemoration diminishes as it is repeated over time. Indeed, the emotion and enthusiasm experienced in each period of commemoration gradually fade, and commemorative programs can turn into somewhat meaningless and irrelevant ceremonies. When we look at May Day celebrations with this thought in mind, it is a fact that, even if it is not easily noticed, there are crying eyes behind smiling faces, much like the symbol of theater. For what are workers celebrating on May Day, which is celebrated routinely every year? As workers, are they celebrating their production, their alienation from their production, or the exploitation that bosses impose upon them? The same situation applies to the issue of wages; while workers object to the minimum wage and the fact that the minimum wage is determined by the boss-state, why do they not realize that bargaining over the minimum wage is a surrender of workers' rights, a surrender of the true value of their production? 

This subject needs to be elaborated upon a bit. First of all, when the term “worker” (emekçi) is used, as Marx pointed out with extraordinary precision, the word “worker” does not refer to a human being, but to the labor that a person sells to a capital owner for a specific dimension of time for the purpose of working. In other words, when we use the word “worker,” we are implicitly involving the “boss” and expressing a system: capitalism. In short, the word “worker” points directly to the capitalist system without any need for circumlocution. How painful it is that in the capitalist system, the worker who sells their labor to survive—that is, the seller—does not produce for society, but to enrich the boss. In short, although labor is the true producer for society, the boss is seen as the producer on the stage. The person who produces for society deserves the title of “social labor” rather than “worker,” in the sense of someone who sells their labor. Wouldn't it be more meaningful to hold these discussions in halls and celebrate the results we achieve in the squares? Although this achievement requires long struggles, I think that at least ringing the ears of capital and the state mind with the concept of “social labor” and confusing their minds a little is worth the fatigue of May Day. 

The capitalist system, production, and the concept of the value of production lead us to that elegant opening sentence in Marx's work, Capital, which is as elegant as it is an implicit reproach to political economists: “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.” While defining the wealth of capitalism as an “immense collection of commodities,” Marx is reproaching political economists like Smith, Ricardo, and their peers, who had laid out capitalism about a century before him. Marx's reproach targeting political economists is, in essence, this: “You are the ones who define the system that is a commodity production. However, while you state that labor is what creates the commodity, you forget or neglect the workers while building the capitalist system.” Even Ricardo, at the pinnacle of the classical school of economics, could not lift the veil of the phenomenon of exploitation of labor; it was left to Marx to reveal the exploitation of labor that occurs in the face of wages.  

There was once a trade union organization founded under the name of the Faculty Members' Union, which later joined KESK. In this organization, we academics signed a decision. Without excluding the May Day celebration day, we proposed that the entire month of May be declared and accepted as “Labor Month,” and that during this month, we hold hall meetings with workers to discuss political topics such as “labor-capital opposition,” “wage-exploitation opposition,” and “labor-state-government opposition.” We reflected this view to some unions, but as might be expected, the project was not received warmly and it fell through.

As I write every time, there is a common thought that brings Marx and Freud together in the analysis of the individual and society. According to both thinkers, entities that appear calm and static on the surface are contradictory and conflicted in their internal textures. According to Marx, the “labor-capital conflict” in societies, and according to Freud, the “id-ego-superego conflict” in humans, express internally conflicted, diseased entities. 

One cannot help but think; if we didn't know every subject in depth, would we be happier? Who knows, perhaps!