What you need to know about May Day
Leo Panitch
The B u l l e t Socialist Project - home
Socialist Project E-Bulletin No. 213 May 1, 2009
http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet213.html#continue
For more than 100 years, May Day has symbolized the
common struggles of workers around the globe. Why is it
largely ignored in
part in American labour's long repression of its own
radical past, out of which international May Day was
actually born a century ago.
The seeds were sown in the campaign for the eight-hour
work day. On May 1, 1886, hundreds of thousands of
North American workers mobilized to strike. In
the demonstration spilled over into support for workers
at a major farm-implements factory who‘d been locked
out for union activities. On May 3, during a pitched
battle between picketers and scabs, police shot two
workers. At a protest rally in
next day, a bomb was tossed into the police ranks and
police directed their fire indiscriminately at the
crowd. Eight anarchist leaders were arrested, tried and
sentenced to death (three were later pardoned).
These events triggered international protests, and in
1889, the first congress of the new socialist parties
associated with the Second International (the successor
to the First International organized by Karl Marx in
the 1860s) called on workers everywhere to join in an
annual one-day strike on May 1 -- not so much to demand
specific reforms as an annual demonstration of labour
solidarity and working-class power. May Day was both a
product of, and an element in, the rapid growth of new
mass working-class parties of
forced official recognition by employers and
governments of this 'workers' holiday.'
But the American Federation of Labor, chastened by the
'red scare' that followed the Haymarket events, went
along with those who opposed May Day observances.
Instead, in 1894, the AFL embraced president Grover
would be the annual Labor Day. The Canadian government
of Sir Robert Thompson enacted identical Labour Day
legislation a month later.
Ever since, May Day and Labour Day have represented in
tradition, one symbolizing its revolutionary potential,
the other its long search for reform and
respectability. With the support of the state and
business, the latter has predominated -- but the more
radical tradition has never been entirely suppressed.
This radical May Day tradition is nowhere better
captured than in Bryan Palmer's monumental book,
Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of
Transgression [From Medieval to Modern] (Monthly Review
Press, 2000). Palmer, one of
labour historians, has done more than anyone to recover
and analyze the cultures of resistance that working
people developed in practising class struggle from
below. He's strongly critical of labour-movement
leaders who've appealed to those elements of working-
class culture that crave ersatz bourgeois respectability.
Set amid chapters on peasants and witches in late
feudalism, on pirates and slaves during the rise of
mercantile imperialism, on fraternal lodge members and
anarchists in the new cities of industrial capitalism,
on lesbians, homosexuals and communists under fascism,
and on the mafia, youth gangs and race riots, jazz,
beats and bohemians in modern
chapters that brilliantly tell the story of May Day.
One locates Haymarket in the context of the Victorian
bourgeoisie's fears of what they called the 'dangerous
classes.' This account confirms the central role of the
'anarcho-communist movement in
blessed with talented leaders, dedicated ranks and the
most active left-wing press in the country. The
dangerous classes were becoming truly dangerous.'
The other chapter, a survey of 'Festivals of
Revolution,' locates 'the celebratory May Day, a
festive seizure of working-class initiative that
encompassed demands for shorter hours, improvement in
conditions, and socialist agitation and organization'
against the backdrop of the traditional spring calendar
of class confrontation.
Over the past century communist revolutions were made
in the name of the working class, and social democratic
parties were often elected into government. In their
different ways, both turned May Day to the purposes of
the state. Before the 20th century was out the
communist regimes imploded in internal contradictions
between authoritarianism and the democratic purpose of
socialism, while most social democratic ones, trapped
in the internal contradictions between the welfare
state and increasingly powerful capital markets,
accommodated to neoliberalism and become openly
disdainful of 'old labour.'
As for the
repression of its radical labour past is an
increasingly de-unionized working class mobilized by
fundamentalist Christian churches.
and 30-per-cent unionized labour force, looks good by comparison.
Working classes have suffered defeat after defeat in
this era of capitalist globalization. But they're also
in the process of being transformed: The decimated
industrial proletariat of the global North is being
replaced by a bigger industrial proletariat in the
global South. In both regions, a new working class is
still being formed in the new service and communication
sectors spawned by global capitalism (where the eight-
hour day is often unknown). Union movements and
workers' parties from
to
more book out of Monthly Review Press -- Ursula Hum's
The Making of a Cybertariat (2003) and the late Daniel
Singer's Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours? (1999) --
don't deal with May Day per se, but capture
particularly well this global economic and political
transformation. They tell much that is sober yet
inspiring about why May I still symbolizes the struggle
for a future beyond capitalism rather than just a
homage to the struggles of the past.
Leo
political economy at
The Socialist Register and author of Renewing Socialist
Democracy, Strategy and Imagination.
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