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This column takes its bow on May Day and hardened cynics in the bull markets might well ask what International Workers' Day has to do with the world of money. The answer perhaps is everything since the workers after all constitute the opposite pole to the money men, the captains of commerce and the moguls of industry and it was perhaps no accident that the very practice of commemorating May Day originated in the United States of America when once the streets of Chicago became awash with the blood of militant workers.

The point is that the money men need the workers just as the workers need their capitalist masters although the relationship between the two has necessarily undergone a dramatic change since the days of the 'Das Capital'. Today the worker in an advanced capitalist country is likely to constitute a new middle class quite different to the workers in the under-developed world who still rally to the call of the red banner. Similarly the capitalist is quite likely to be a sober-suited manager, who is himself a cog in the giant wheel of a multi-national company rather than the old rapacious capitalist of Marxist demonology. It was again after all another American, James Burnham who predicted the advent of a managerial revolution in time to come.

That, however, is also the crunch. Third World countries will take a long time to catch up with the esoteric West so that the call of the red flag will still be valid in our part of the world. However, the Left egg-heads and leaders will have to concede that it is a new kind of capitalism which confronts them today. The capitalist will be an anonymous manager doing the bidding of a soulless company in some western capital or even an Asia neighbour. Similarly the worker will not be an artisan of the old school or a manual worker but will increasingly be of that sub-class of garment workers while the present concentration on computer technology can create an entirely new class of workers who are neither manual nor intellectual.

Those then are some of the realities which both the nabobs of commerce and the ideologues of the Left are confronted with this May Day. The former no doubt are undergoing a sense of resurgence with the advent of the new Government to the same proportion as the latter might feel a draining away of all their old beliefs. However both sections will be foolish if they do not examine their most cherished articles of faith in the face of the new domestic and global conditions.

Ajith Samaranayake

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