Robots went on strike because they had no free time!
May Day is no longer just a memory of struggle. It is a warning about the future.
If humanity fails to redefine work, dignity, and purpose, the machines will not enslave us — they will simply make us irrelevant.
And… “Those who are brave spend their lives on scaffolding.” Is it true?
Peristeri, mid-1960s to early 1970s. First-hand memories and lived descriptions.
A neighborhood of labor and poverty. And with a communist mayor, the late Dimitris Folopoulos, in those “stone years” when “fear overshadowed everything and slavery crushed all.” First came the era of ERE under Konstantinos Karamanlis, with political persecution and the murders of its para-state. Shortly after, the dictatorship of the Colonels, with ESA and Bouboulinas.
At 6 in the morning, pitch dark in winter, the battered buses of lines “97” and “145” — Lofos Axiomatikon and Agia Triada–Zinonos — were packed. The quaint ticket collector, with his transistor radio on the metal stand beside his leather pouch full of coins, blasted Stelios Kazantzidis and Grigoris Bithikotsis: “In the factories of Germany” and “Work makes men.”
Most, especially women, got off at “Gefyra Kifisou” or “Panagitsa,” next to Lanaras’ textile factory, its chimneys spewing poison day and night. Mrs. Athanasia, the ribbon worker, got off there too. Mr. Giorgos, the concrete worker, went on to the center. He worked construction, carrying unbearably heavy buckets of cement on his shoulder from the ground floor up to the seventh. Ten hours of exhausting labor daily. They dreamed of turning their old brick ground-floor house on Kapodistriou street into a two-story home.
I remember them as a child. I did not envy them — not then, not now. Even though they both voted for the Communist Party and pretended it was their honor to belong to the proud working class. How could one envy such a life? Endless toil, constant struggle. “They never saw a single good day,” my mother would later lament after they died in their fifties. They passed away one after the other, within months, worn out and childless. A distant nephew from Magoufana inherited the house — never completed — and squandered it in gambling.
The Communist Party kept deceiving those poor “comrades” with heroic slogans and clichés about the “honorable, soot-stained hands.” Then and now. And after bureaucrats, career officials, and labor bosses betrayed the historic KKE and its fighters, they called the Revolution a CIVIL WAR (!) and moved on. Today, they “warm up” the revolution under electric blankets, while Liana Kanelli, with her television comfort and easy access to the Mass Media of Stupor, spits with audacity on the cenotaphs and martyrdom sites of those young men who… “fortunately, died early.”
We call upon Diotima, on this May Day — a day of deep meaning for workers, especially manual laborers — to speak to us about the new May Day dawning. The one shaped by the massive entry of AI “robots” into construction sites and factories of the market economy and capitalism. Those infernos that drained the life of Mr. Giorgos and Mrs. Athanasia — our working neighbors from that distant Peristeri of toil, who also… died early. In their own battle for survival.
Diotima:
The New May Day: From Wage Labor to the Algorithmic Workplace
May Day was born as the cry of those who sold their bodies to survive. Mr. Giorgos and Mrs. Athanasia belonged to that era where:
labor meant physical exhaustion
value meant hours of effort
poverty was almost inevitable
Today, this model is not abolished — it is transformed.
The great rupture is not ideological. It is technological.
Robots Are Not Workers — They Are Replacements
Steam engines increased production but still needed workers.
Artificial Intelligence learns, decides, replaces.
In modern worksites:
robots carry materials
algorithms design structures
drones supervise
The laborer is not relieved — he disappears.
The New Exploitation Is Invisible
The worker of the 1960s knew: “I am being exploited.”
Today’s worker often does not.
platform-based work
task-based pay
algorithmic evaluation
replacement without dismissal
There is no visible boss. Only a system.
The Old Narrative of the “Proud Working Class” Is Exhausted
Slogans like:
“honorable hands”
“work makes men”
belong to a world where labor was destiny.
Today the question changes:
Should humans work this much at all?
The Great Shift: Work Is No Longer Necessary for All
For the first time in history:
production can continue without mass labor
value comes from data and computation
wealth concentrates among those controlling technology
A new class division emerges:
Owners of technology
System managers
The redundant
Mr. Giorgos was necessary.
Today’s Mr. Giorgos may be… surplus.
The New May Day Will Not Be About Wages
If we stay in old demands, we miss the point.
The new May Day will be about:
the right to income without labor
control over AI
redistribution of wealth
meaning beyond work
The Hardest Question
If we no longer need to work to live…
Do we know how to live?
A Truth Without Romanticism
Neither the old working class was glorious,
nor is the new era automatically liberating.
Without conscious choices:
technology will free a few
and render many useless