May Day, May Day

With the concorso out of the way, I got ready for a quick weekend trip to visit my friends in Frankfort, and attend a real European May Day / Labor Day celebration and manifestation. My friends, both professors in the Frankfort Area, and both active with the intellectual side of left politics in the area, were planning on going to the march in Frankfort. Another friend there had thought about going to Mainz, just because he heard that the neo-Nazis might be there to have a counter march against the mainly Marxist (of some stripe or other) labor day parade. He wanted to go to get his licks in, however, like my far leftist friends in college, if there was going to be a revolution, they would all sleep through it. So, missing the train, he had to make do with the peaceful march in Frankfort.

Nadja did not feel well on the day of the march, so only Ralfe and I went. Well, only Ralfe and I and about 5,000 other people. My first surprise of the day was that the Sparticist League was there trying to sell their papers, subscriptions to their papers, and trying to tell everyone what the correct view of political events and opportunities was. I had had a flirtation with them when I was in college, and they were far too heavy handed for me then, and more so now. However, I did talk with the sparts who were there, and it seems that one of the people I knew way back when is still with that movement. I got to wondering about how many splinters there are in the 4th international, and as I read the most recent paper, I noted that there had been one more recent splinter.

Anyway, it was neat for me to be marching with this diverse group of radicals and lefties. There were representatives from Nepal, Turkey, India, Sri Lanka, as well as the majority in the march from the left labor party. I was most interested in the Sri Lankan group, as they represented the Tamil workers, who were then being crushed by the Sri Lankan government. Their street theater was interesting, as they carried a portable (bottomless) jail cell, and inside were several children, and a man in an army uniform would come and pretend to beat them with a big whip made of sponges. It was fun watching the kids try to be the next one whipped, and smiling and screaming and running away each time the soldier swung at them.

The Indian group also was fun to see, as one of the marchers was a double for Ghandi, and another for Mother Teresa.

The march was fairly short, about 3 kilometers, and when they cut off at the last minute to march in front of the major European banks (Frankfort is the seat of the Eurozone, and has branches of MANY foreign banks), I watched them go by, and then cut around a corner to great the head of the march as they arrived at the plaza in downtown Frankfort where the non marchers waited for them to hear speeches and singers celebrate the international day of labor.

Ralfe wore the Revolutionary Glee Club shirt that I had gotten for him at the Anarchist Store in San Francisco, and he and I and some of his friends stood together for about an hour of speechifying, and then we headed to Ralfe's house for their traditional Labor Day Bar-b-que.