Proposal to hold a General Strike on May 1st

Proposal to hold a General Strike on May 1st
Proposal for O.O. to endorse a General Strike on May 1st, International Workers Day, to fight for greater economic equality, immigrants rights, healthcare and education for all, and an end to the repression of the occupy movement.
The general strike is back, retooled for an era of austerity. Last November 2, Occupy Oakland called for and carried out the first general strike in the US since the Oakland general strike of 1946, shutting down the center of the city and blockading the Port of Oakland. This was a direct attack on the mechanisms of our oppression and offered a new direction for the occupy movement based on the recognition that our struggle must not only build a new society that can provide for our needs—we must also attack the system of social reproduction that locks us into an increasingly miserable and alienated life of exploitation, debt, and precarity.
 
May Day is an international holiday that commemorates the 1886 Haymarket Massacre, when Chicago police—defending, as always, the interests of the 1%—attacked and murdered workers participating in a general strike and demanding an 8-hour workday. This and other victories eventually won by workers have improved the material conditions of their lives, but they are increasingly being rolled back and correspond to an ever-shrinking number of people. The class war against all of us—workers, students, people of color, un- and underemployed, immigrants, homeless, women, queer/trans folks, prisoners—  continues, and it’s time we fight back. On May Day 2012, Occupy Oakland will join with occupiers, anarchists, and anticapitalists around the world in a global general strike to shut down the global circulation of capital that every day serves to enrich the ruling classes and impoverish the rest of us. There will be no victory but that which we make for ourselves, reclaiming the means of existence from which we have been and continue to be dispossessed every day.