On May Day, Imagining A ‘Funeral March For Capitalism’

BOSTON — As the sun set last night, a couple hundred or so artists, musicians and rabble-rousers gathered near the Park and Tremont streets corner of Boston Common to present the second annual May Day “Funeral March for Capitalism.”

“The goal of this parade is to give hope to all the anti-capitalists in this world that a better world is possible,” Jeff Reinhardt, one of the organizers, told me. “And capitalism, while in reality is still there, but in our hearts and our minds exists something much more beautiful than that.”

The Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band played a dirge to open the mock eulogy for capitalism, which was organized by the Boston Radical Arts Troupe and Puppeteers Cooperative with backing from the Industrial Workers of the World.

Then pallbearers carried a casket, with a market bull inside, upon their shoulders. They were joined by mourners holding candles, a skeleton, a stilter, capitalists, suited goons and demons. They were followed by "The birth of the new world from the ashes of the old," symbolized by people dressed as birds, animals and giant flowers; people with brooms; and a lady wearing a Statue of Liberty crown and waving a sign reading “Sweeping away the miserable system."

They paraded down Tremont Street escorted by motorcycle police, onto Boylston Street, and off toward Faneuil Hall.