Just thought I'd add a bit more information so that everyone can see what a militant, participatory and original action this will be. The speakers are great, lots of MPs and other famous people. You can listen to them and clap and stuff. Here, from the website:

"Rally speakers will include Tony Benn, Barry Camfield (T&G), Ruth Winters (FBU), Mark Serwotka (PCS), Diane Abbott MP plus other MPs. trade unionists, environmentalists and anti-capitalists."

In case anyone thinks we are a bunch of servile bureaucrats, oh no, we are so dynamic we've forced the mayor into letting us march, even though it's normally forbidden! And the police are going to let us too! They know where the real threat is! Good old red Ken!

"Marches to Trafalagar Square are forbidden on days when Parliament is in session, under a Sessional Order dating from 1829. Despite this, the Mayor of London has made the Square available to us and the Metropolitan Police have agreed to the march, on the uderstanding that this does not set a precedent and that the march will be disciplined and orderly."

And it WILL be very disciplined and orderly! They don't call us the most revolutionary section of the working class for nothing, you know. We'll steward the capitalist police out of a job!

"The London May Day Organizing Committee has welcomed into membership Globalise Resistance and the rally in the Square will be a joint trade union/GR event, with speakers and a wide variety of cultural acts."

Our chums at GR are coming with us this year, it's not that they didn't enjoy last years thing, that new fangled "anti-capitalist" malarky, it's just they know where direct action against capitalism is really at! That's what the steering group said anyhow.

"This year’s slogan reflects the historic opportunity which the waiving of the Sessional Order provides - UNITED FOR MAY DAY."

Pretty fucking good, no? Thought that one up myself

"Please spread the word and make Wednesday 1st May an enormous celebration of working class unity and an expression of collective opposition to privatisation and capitalist globalisation."

I know what you're thinking, how come there are still people like us alive? I'm a little curious about that myself. Stale politics, the very opposite of real activity, failed hierarchical bureaucratic, 19th century dogmatic, tedious shite. You would think we'd all have killed ourselves by now. But seriously, come along, it will be great, hold the placard, shout the slogan, buy the paper, build this, build that, hear the speech, vote good old Red Ken, buy another paper, fuck off home... Do it all again next year...

Just thought I'd add a bit more information so that everyone can see what a militant, participatory and original action this will be. The speakers are great, lots of MPs and other famous people. You can listen to them and clap and stuff. Here, from the website:

"Rally speakers will include Tony Benn, Barry Camfield (T&G), Ruth Winters (FBU), Mark Serwotka (PCS), Diane Abbott MP plus other MPs. trade unionists, environmentalists and anti-capitalists."

In case anyone thinks we are a bunch of servile bureaucrats, oh no, we are so dynamic we've forced the mayor into letting us march, even though it's normally forbidden! And the police are going to let us too! They know where the real threat is! Good old red Ken!

"Marches to Trafalagar Square are forbidden on days when Parliament is in session, under a Sessional Order dating from 1829. Despite this, the Mayor of London has made the Square available to us and the Metropolitan Police have agreed to the march, on the uderstanding that this does not set a precedent and that the march will be disciplined and orderly."

And it WILL be very disciplined and orderly! They don't call us the most revolutionary section of the working class for nothing, you know. We'll steward the capitalist police out of a job!

"The London May Day Organizing Committee has welcomed into membership Globalise Resistance and the rally in the Square will be a joint trade union/GR event, with speakers and a wide variety of cultural acts."

Our chums at GR are coming with us this year, it's not that they didn't enjoy last years thing, that new fangled "anti-capitalist" malarky, it's just they know where direct action against capitalism is really at! That's what the steering group said anyhow.

"This year’s slogan reflects the historic opportunity which the waiving of the Sessional Order provides - UNITED FOR MAY DAY."

Pretty fucking good, no? Thought that one up myself

"Please spread the word and make Wednesday 1st May an enormous celebration of working class unity and an expression of collective opposition to privatisation and capitalist globalisation."

I know what you're thinking, how come there are still people like us alive? I'm a little curious about that myself. Stale politics, the very opposite of real activity, failed hierarchical bureaucratic, 19th century dogmatic, tedious shite. You would think we'd all have killed ourselves by now. But seriously, come along, it will be great, hold the placard, shout the slogan, buy the paper, build this, build that, hear the speech, vote good old Red Ken, buy another paper, fuck off home... Do it all again next year...

The TUC and the entire ideology of Trade Unionism is completely reactionary.
1)it upholds the present situation of domination by sustaining the Capitaist structure through keeping us the workers in line. this has always been its traditional role. A role which Unionism has never shirked from.
2) Unionism sees us (humanity) as 'resources', cogs in the machinery of industry. Our role as 'workers' must be sustained at all costs. While the Union works to maintain the disempowerment and alienation of technoindustrial society through the concept of 'representation'.
3) the Union's main concern is the continuance of industry, thus the present state of affairs. The question of the destruction of the planet and the destruction of what makes us human are dismissed in the race to sustain industrial society at all costs. The Unions must keep the workers in line because if the workers rebel against work there is no union.
4) The majority of the population realised this years ago and that it why the Unions where abandoned. Should it be the 1920's General Strike or the 1980's the Unions reacted with time honoured tradition of stabbing the workers in the back to please the owners of industry.
5) The Unions, the Owners and the State are part and parcel of the same triangle that work diligently to sustain the staus quo (allowing changes here and there to keep trouble to a minimum). If there was a revolution tomorrow these forces would be out doing their utmost to crush it, as they have done consistently since the onset of the Capitalist phase.
If humanity is to stop the continued deterioration of life on this planet then we must fight against all these forces and make no compromise with any.

Jolly well get your proletarian bottoms down to Trafalgar Square on May Day. Top speakers will include real live Labour Members of Parliament and maybe the odd Union leader.
I'll be there along with Tarquin Swain-Richards, my old prep school chum. Do stop and say hello, and don't forget to buy the latest Socialist Worker from either of us. Theres a spiffing article by John Rees on all you need to know about May Day. I'm glad to say he's removed all references to the Haymarket bomb and those truly awful anarchist martyrs who are in no way to be compared to the angry and very sincere students at the L.S.E.

Following the march and rally, out Central Commitee will be retiring to The Savoy Grill to plan our next revolutionary action. Roll on the May local elections.

If you wanna bore your arse off for 3 hours, and attempt to inspire labour party backbenchers to revolt and return to the good old days of old labour, go there.

If you wanna challenge the all the exploitation, domination and oppression of the capitalist system, and have a fucking god time, go here:

This is the text published a couple of days after May Day 2000 by the trade union may day organising committee. The fact of the matter was the cops were determined to stop the two crowds meeting up. This should still be online on a few union sites, I got it off indymedia:

THE FACTS ON THE STOPPING OF THE MAY DAY RALLY IN LONDON

The London May Day March, which had long been agreed and negotiated with the police (who had referred to us as a good example of how to ensure maximum co-operation in the lead up to May Day), had reached within 50 yards of Trafalgar Square before being stopped by the police. They claimed it was unsafe to continue to our planned rally in Trafalgar Square. However, our stewards were in the Square at the time having secured the speaking area and PA system, and there were no problems in the Square at that time. The 'anti-capitalist' demonstrators were still down at the Parliament Square end of Whitehall and all was quiet in and around Trafalgar Square.

The police held the March for a long time and then allowed the 'anti-capitalist' demonstrators to come up Whitehall to the junction with the Square. (They could easily have prevented this if they felt it was a potential problem, as they showed later in the day particularly by using the police and vans to prevent us from entering the Square). However, we had received clear indications that the bulk of these demonstrators wished to support our rally and the car workers - as they had the RMT anti-tube privatisation campaign. Preventing them coming to our rally led to confrontation that could be exploited by those set on conflict.

The police held up the May Day March for over 40 minutes during which time we could have easily held our rally as nothing was happening in the Square. The blunt blockage of our March was itself the sort of thing that can lead to friction and it was to the credit of our organisations and stewards that this did not happen. The police 'suggested' we could go to another venue for our rally but it would mean we would not have our PA system or arranged platform and many organisations saw no reason why we could not go to Trafalgar Square. We maintained a process of continuous consultation with the organisations on the March to decide on courses of action and after the long impasse the bulk of organisations agreed that the best response was to disperse under protest. We wished to maintain the unity of the March and avoid any possibilities for provocations. After the bulk of the March had dispersed, the March head with the Longbridge car workers decided to leave as a group and go to Temple for a short rally before dispersing there.

There has been widespread concern that the police did not ensure our rally could go ahead and our long co-operation seemed to count for nothing. We need to stress that no problems occurred in the Square until we had left and only then because police forced some of the anti-capitalists into the Square. Some key questions need to be answered about the circumstances and should be pursued with MPs and the new London police authority for future arrangements.

The London May Day March has been organised for over 100 years and is the united march for international workers day. It brings together trade unions, organisations from the international communities in London, campaigns, pensioners, socialists and others. It takes place every year on May 1st.

Roger Sutton
Organiser
London May Day Organising Committee
2-5-00

There is some truth in what you say; unions have sometimes played a reactionary role: leaders are bought off, and minor gains are used by the ruling classes to defuse drastic changes.

But they have also been a valuable tool of the working class in organising to fight capitalism. Without unions workers in many past struggles would simply have been picked off one by one. And fighting for minor reforms isn't always a dead-end fight - provided we always make it clear that the cause of the problems is the capitalist system, and that we must ultimately overthrow.

The bottom line is, the working class needs ways of organising themselves on a mass scale, in order to ever manage to smash capitalism. What trade unions have taught us is that this needs to be done with less hierarchy, so that people can take things into their own hands, instead of trusting to leaders who may at any point sell them out.

You should spend more time outlining such alternatives, instead of spouting bullshit about how unions are purely reactionary.

Unions aren't purely reactionary; they have plenty of faults, but have been an invaluable tool for workers to organise themselves over the years.

And fighting for short-term gains isn't a mistake in itself - provided we keep making it clear that the capitalist system is the problem, and that it must ultimately be smashed.

sorry, only meant to post once :P

Roger, that's so unfair, after they said you could march and everything. Anyway, was that leaflet issued before or after the soiree at the millenium dome?

Everyone knows trade unionists are bourgeois sell-out Nu-Labour Trotskyist liberal Nazi middle class student wankers.

Let's really scare them and their corporate state allies by rejecting the whole boring old-left concept of May Day. We could instead shake the system to its very foundations by staying at home and watching telly.

yeah unions are really reactionary - fire brigade strikers, teachers on strike, railworkers on strike, caterpillar workers on strike, postie wildcats - all engaged in collective action because first they have gone a step beyond being individuals to having a collective class organisation - a union. to fail to see that, and see only the bureaucracy and reformism that masks and suppresses taht (but can be overthrown by it), is to miss the other half of the picture - the workers.

And all those workers - along with kurdish and turkish textile and factory workers - will be represented on that Mayday demo partly because socialists are in the unions working away to organise and agitating for direct action, real strike action, against the counsel of teh bureaucrats at the top.. Doesn't mean that's all you have to do, but to write off unions and demos like this is just being up-your-own-arse.

Any anarchist-led strikes lately? nope. Have a nice football game in mayfair. Yawn. Bye.

Ps take our free sheet! don't buy that paper! open your mind! liberate yourself! join our elitist circle! change your life to be more like us!

a lot of anarchists are okay, but you lot are patronising fucks

"The police held the March for a long time and then allowed the 'anti-capitalist' demonstrators to come up Whitehall to the junction with the Square"

That is so true.

I was in the Square, everything was peaceful, and virtually every side street was sealed off, except Whitehall. Virtually no police in Whitehall at all. So the war memorial and McDonald's were left completely unprotected, just 'begging' to be attacked. I can't help but think this was done on purpose. I watched from a distance as the restaurant was smashed up, *then* police encircled us and drove us onto Trafalgar square. Again, every side street was sealed off. I thought that the cops might be planning to hold us there for a long time and so I quitely found a gap in the police line and wandered through to Charring Cross - were I met the Trade Union marchers demanding to be let through. I hung around for a while, but no joy. Then, in the tube station, more riot police were massing, so I left while the going was good.