I wrote this overview of EuroMayDay activities, because I wanted an english language overview that links some of the places where this movement mobilises, reports and reflects. The starting point is the EuroMayDay website. But other online places can be hard to find, especially since they come in many languages and images. Since most groups have the odd person that speaks english, here is a collection of english language resources. I didn't find a EuroMayDay for this year in the UK. However, struggles around casual labour and precarious lives are happening in the UK just like everywhere else. Maybe some in the UK might recognise their own struggles in the EuroMayDay activities.
EuroMayDay Geneva Poster 2010
Since 2005 the EuroMayDay parades of the precarious are part of the mayday celebrations in many cities. EuroMayDay Parades 2010 are announced so far in Bremen (de | en poster), Dortmund (poster), Geneva (poster), Hamburg (splashpage poster), Hanau, Lisboa (poster), Lausanne (poster), Milano (see Italy blog; poster), Palermo, Tübingen (poster), Zurich and Toronto.
As power- and colourful processions, as mini maydays, actions, flashmobs, labs or parties, precarious MayDay celebrations have appeared in more than 40 european cities so far. In these public assemblies, people are outing themselves as precarious. Converging, communicating, organising, and creating, they bring the distress signal of the precarious out into the public: MayDay! MayDay!
EuroMayDay was conceived as an upgrade of the traditional rallies and marches of the traditional labour movement (article). In many cities, EuroMayDay activists maintain connections with trade unions - sometimes as collaborations, sometimes as mutual support and participation, sometimes as co-existence and sometimes conflictuously. At the same time, the form of the EuroMayDay parades and accompanying actions, their incessant production of mediated imageries and their focus on precarity marks a distance and a search for more adequate ways to organise under conditions of precarity.
For the first MayDay Parade of the precarious in Milan 2001, media activists, a social center and a radical trade union joined forces. The EuroMayDay Parade 2004 took place in Barcelona and Milan. At beyond ESF, one of the autonomous events around the ESF in London 2004, groups involved in the protest movement against neoliberal globalisation decided to have EuroMayDay Parades all over Europe.
Images, videos, reports and photos from the parades are circulating between cities, and also online, for instance on youtube, flickr, facebook and of course indymedia. Information and reflections about Euromayday and what the movement means by precarity and precarisation are spread widely on the internet. Here are some starting points:
euromayday.org | eipcp, issue precariat 2004 | eipcp.net [1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | (...)] | methodologies [1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | (...)] | academic research | (...)
EuroMayDay is many things: a search, an experiment, a process, a public space for communicating, organising and socialising, a representation, a tool for struggle. The Milan-based group chainworkers described the EuroMayDay Parade 2005 as a social medium:
"Mayday is a "social media" and for this represents a way to put and put oneself in relation, cooperate and conspire. It's a communication tool that enables social subjects to represent and participate relations, unwilling to be victim of the reproduction of the goods. Its result goes beyond any definition and constantly exceeds itself. And really it's a network of individualities more than political organisations that has created the parade, each with his own story, with his own load of desires, passions and demands."
As each city has its own stories, questions, struggles, interpretations and methodologies, this is where this overview stops. And if anyone has something to add, comment or ask, it's all welcome.
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