Nations build memorials to the Unknown Soldier. A militarized imagination in which the glory  of the Nation is embodied in a nameless and faceless  figure who courts death. This  faceless Unknown Soldier must die so that the myth of the nation can live, and a mythical National Interest devastate the everyday lives of the powerless.

This May Day, let us sing to the memory of the Unknown Worker – celebrated by no one, not even in abstraction!  The faceless figure on whom rest our lives of luxury, our ‘growth’ and the profits of the bourgeois. I borrow the the term ‘unknown worker’ from  Susie Madrak.

Let us, we who have no nation – antinationals, postnationals, aliens, refugees, immigrants, undocumented workers, development refugees – sing the strains of the Internationale. Let us recall the days when the poetry of the International truly belonged to the ‘wretched of the earth’, the time when the Internationale was not yet taken over and made into the official anthem of nations, parties and governments. The long winter of party-state-nation appropriations of the voices of struggle, that set in more than a century ago, and once again imprisoned them, may be nearing its end.

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