THE PARADOXES OF LABOR DAY MEMORY, AMNESIA AND THE DRIFT OF THE COMMON

Severino Ngoenha"

May 1st returns every year as a ritual laden with memory. But, like all rituals, it risks becoming a mere performance: a repetition of gestures whose profound meaning no longer fully resides in those who perform them. In Mozambique, marches, songs, demands, and institutional speeches coexisted in the same symbolic space. However, this space revealed a fracture that is not only political but ontological: the dissociation between what is proclaimed and what is lived. The first paradox is structural. The party that embodied the struggle for liberation, that made equality an absolute horizon, finds itself today, to a large extent, situated in the position of those against whom it once fought. This is not a simplistic moral accusation, but a profound historical mutation: the shift from a revolutionary position to a position of managing economic power. The problem is not that former combatants have risen socially; the problem is that this rise has not been accompanied by a structural transformation of social relations. Thus, the old promise of collective emancipation becomes a selective redistribution of power within the same system of inequality. This phenomenon is not unique to Mozambique. It is part of a global trend. In Brazil, for example, the rise of working-class sectors to the middle class during certain political cycles produced a paradoxical effect: social mobility did not consolidate a collective consciousness, but often dissolved it. The transition from the condition of being excluded to being included was accompanied by a form of forgetting—not only of one's own origins, but of the collective process that made this rise possible. Social memory was replaced by an individualized identity. The same process occurred in postwar Europe. The institutionalization of social rights—minimum wage, social security, paid holidays—was not only a historic victory for the labor movement; it was also the beginning of a silent transformation. By improving living conditions, capitalism not only integrated workers but also reconfigured their identity. The worker ceased to see himself as part of a class in struggle and began to see himself as an individual on the rise. Solidarity was progressively replaced by consumption. Collective struggle gave way to individual mobility. It is in this context that "The Internationale" disappears—not as a song, but as a horizon. Its disappearance results not only from the collapse of socialist ideologies, but from a deeper transformation: the dissolution of the collective subject that sustained it. The working class, as a historical subject, fragmented. The worker became a consumer, the citizen became a user, and the community was replaced by aggregates of individual interests. However, this disappearance of the subject did not mean the disappearance of the reality that produced it. Exploitation did not disappear. On the contrary, it intensified and became globalized. What disappeared was the capacity to name it collectively and to organize a common response. Here emerges the second paradox: there has never been so much inequality and, at the same time, there has never been so little capacity for collective action to combat it. In Mozambique, this paradox takes on a particularly acute form. The widespread presence of poorly paid domestic work, often rendered invisible, reproduces historical structures of domination that date back to slavery and colonialism. The difference is that, today, this relationship is mediated by subjects who were themselves historically dominated. The exploited becomes the exploiter. Not through individual perversion, but through insertion into a system that normalizes these relationships. This phenomenon can be understood as a form of structural amnesia. It is not simply a psychological forgetting, but a social process of disencoding collective memory. History ceases to operate as critical consciousness and becomes an inert archive. The result is the reproduction of forms of domination under new guises. Contemporary capitalism triumphs not only through its capacity to produce wealth, but also through its ability to reorganize subjectivity. It shifts the place of belonging, dissolves collective identities, and replaces memory with aspiration. The promise of individual mobility becomes the main mechanism for legitimizing a system that, structurally, continues to produce exclusion. This is why the seemingly simple observation — “one cannot be rich in a poor society” — contains considerable philosophical depth. It points to a structural truth: the individual condition is intrinsically linked to the collective condition. Wealth, when isolated in a sea of poverty, is not only ethically problematic; it is ontologically unstable. It cannot guarantee security, dignity, or a future. This recognition leads to a fundamental requirement: the need for a new metanoia, a transformation of consciousness. Not an abstract transformation, but a concrete reconfiguration of social relations. It is about re-inscribing the individual within the collective, about reconstructing the common good as a condition of possibility for any human project. The central problem of our time is not just inequality; it is the absence of structures capable of thinking about it and combating it collectively. Traditional parties have lost their mobilizing capacity, unions have been weakened, and new forms of organization have not yet managed to establish themselves as consistent alternatives. The result is a fragmented social space, where struggle becomes diffuse and negotiation impossible. In this context, May 1st reveals itself less as a celebration and more as a symptom. It exposes the distance between a memory of struggle and a reality of dispersion. It shows that the symbols remain, but the subjects who gave them life have disappeared or transformed. The challenge, therefore, is not only to recover the past, but to reinvent the future. It is not about returning to the "Internationale" as a historical form, but about rediscovering the possibility of a common horizon. A horizon that recognizes the radical interdependence between individuals and that is capable of producing new forms of solidarity. Without this, the paradoxes we observe today will tend to intensify: liberation movements that become structures of domination, emancipated classes that forget their origins, societies that produce wealth while deepening poverty, individuals who rise while the collective fragments. The real risk is not the persistence of inequality, but the normalization of this inequality as an inevitable condition. When injustice ceases to be perceived as a collective problem, it ceases to be fought. And when it ceases to be fought, it becomes destiny. This is where the philosophy of history becomes indispensable. Not to offer immediate solutions, but to restore to society the capacity to think about itself. To think of time not as a succession of events, but as a field of possibilities. And to recognize that the future is not given—it is instituted.

2025/12/3