What May Day is and What it is Not #
We republish the following article, originally published by The Worker in June 2023.
May 1st, International Workers Day, passed by this year in the US with no significant or notable workers marches, a fact which expresses a low level of class consciousness among the working class as well as a state of disorganization for the left.
May Day arose from the fight for the 8 hour work day in the late 19th century, which was the most pronounced and developed in the United States. International Workers Day was thus born as a proletarian holiday of militant class struggle.
The US could not generate an independent working class movement until the abolition of slavery was realized, leading Karl Marx to state that “Labor with a white skin cannot emancipate itself where labor with a black skin is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new vigorous life sprang. The first fruit of the Civil War was an agitation for the 8-hour day—a movement which ran with express speed from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.”
The First Congress of the Second International—under the leadership of Marx’s closest comrade-in-arms Frederick Engels—set May 1st as the international day to fight for the 8-hour work day. This decision was based on a resolution by American labor unions in the US and Canada to make their rules recognize 8-hours as the legal working day beginning May 1st, 1886. The recognition of the 8-hour day by the unions was not shared by the boss. The ruling class expected workers to adhere to at least a 10-hour day. This escalated the fight in the mills, mines, shipyards, and fields. Striking for 8-hours was now endorsed by the major unions, and the strikes typically went longer than the single day of May 1st.
As the demand for the 8-hour day spread and gained momentum, the labor unions themselves grew with equal intensity. The growing numbers of unemployed thrust out by cyclical economic crisis joined the ranks of the striking workers, and everywhere militancy was increasing. The bureaucratic and guileless leadership of the unions lamented that the Pandora’s Box of the 8-hour day had been opened, but they failed in their efforts to reel in the working class militancy. There was no stopping the fight for the 8-hour day. The unskilled, unorganized workers drawn into the struggle as well as the union rank and file led the most militant charge, rushing ahead of the bureaucrats and aristocrats of labor.
Although politically immature and confused on many issues, the movement around the 8-hour day in Chicago was the most left-wing, the most militant, and the most openly opposed to capitalism. Revolutionary labor groups, left-wing Socialists, the left-wings of the unions, and unemployed workers came together in a united front for the 1886 May Day strike, amassing over 25,000 workers in a militant demonstration, becoming one of the most significant and important actions ever taken by the US working class. The strike in Chicago was the culmination of political tensions boiling over—it was not reduced simply to working less hours, thus representing a leap in the class consciousness of the workers.
The May 1st strike in Chicago was not without blood as the masses of workers fought against the combined forces of the capitalists and their state. By May 3rd, the combined forces of reaction unleashed brutal repression against the continuing strike—six working men laid down their lives in class combat on this day. On May 4th a demonstration was called in their honor and to protest the reactionary violence; this would go down in history as the “Haymarket Affair”, named after the square where the demonstration took place. Just before the conclusion of the demonstration the police attacked the assembled workers and the workers responded with revolutionary violence. 7 police were annihilated and 4 workers gave their lives in the glorious combat. The speakers at the demonstration were shamelessly sentenced to death while other leaders were sent to long prison terms. Thus the forces of capital signaled with blood their guard dogs in the state to crush and destroy the fight for the 8-hour day in Chicago and beyond. However, the fight for the 8-hour day was not crushed. It began anew the very next year. This is how the revolutionary day of protest and resistance was born as International Workers Day, which was specified as a day of demonstrations and strikes.
While Engels envisioned the Second International as a Communist International and led it in this direction, the right-wing of the International had other intentions and sought to treat it as a loose association instead of a fighting organization. The right-wing would accomplish the degeneration after Engels’s death, turning it into a social-chauvinist organization. The right-wing sought to treat May Day as a reprieve, as a day of leisure to “honor” and “celebrate” the contributions of the working class to capitalist society instead of a day of militant class combat which struggles to end capitalist society. For these cretins, May 1st should not mean workers strikes and demonstrations, but picnics and relaxation. They even attempted to move the day itself to the nearest Sunday after May 1st so that striking and walking off the job would not be options.
There are those in the tradition of the revisionists of the Second International who still hold this position of avoiding class struggle. They provide all manner of rationalization for their cook-outs, games, and gatherings—neatly fit in the chains of capitalist legality and taking place safely outside of working hours. For them it is enough to celebrate the past by avoiding the class struggle at the present moment and merely talking about labor without fighting for workers. This type of inaction does nothing to keep May Day alive in the US. The pressure from Communists made May 1st a day of glorious combat; the ruling class in most of the world adopted it as a memorial day for labor, a day in which the working class is abstractly “celebrated” but class struggle is left out. Meanwhile, the US ruling class was unable to stomach the combative and red roots of the day and moved labor day to the first Monday of September. They hoped to further distance the workers from their history in class struggle, and, by giving some workers the day off, to discourage walk-outs. This move was backed by the same union bureaucracy which from the start was dragged along by workers in the ranks.
It is critical to understand this—May Day is not simply to mark the past, but to fight for the future.
In 2023, nearly half of the full-time workforce is compelled to work mandatory overtime for 10 or 12-hour days. It would seem that we have lost not only the memory of the glorious lessons of May Day, but also many aspects of the conquest of the 8-hour day. Revisionism and reaction have been temporarily successful, and many on the so-called “left” are content to sit with their hands in their pockets and avoid the question altogether, and there are others who—still not daring to brandish the workers’ Red Flag in the streets—warm themselves over fine meals and watch movies, thinking they are doing something when in reality they have not taken a step forward. They have stepped back to the leash of the old-union bureaucrats and their capitalist masters.
May Day is a trench of combat. Every street action, every march and demonstration which dares step outside bourgeois legality, every worker who calls in sick or walks off the job and especially every strike action is worth ten million cook-outs. Even when these actions are small and composed of a few dozen or a few hundred, the Red Flag can be raised aloft on May 1st and the true meaning of International Workers Day can be more and more grasped by the workers in the US, workers who have here the most honorable heritage in service to and part of the international proletariat.
It is critical to understand this—May Day is not simply to mark the past, but to fight for the future. May Day is the day of the international proletariat and the most significant day of the working people. Proletarian revolutionaries, the class conscious workers, must regenerate united fronts and form May Day Committees as they have before, and they must rely on the most profound and deepest masses who toil to do it.
If they do it, if they overcome the general state of disorganization with greater organization, then the working class movement in the US can catch up closer to the objective conditions and take one step closer to realizing the dreams and ideals of the workers revolution, a world where human beings are not worked to death and thrown away, a world without exploitation, a world without rich and poor, without racial chauvinism and oppression, a world where the darkest nightmares of the past have been suffocated by the light of forever-luminous communism.
Let the May Day of 2024 consecrate itself in the growing crisis of 2023 and the class struggle of the proletariat by taking the first step in resumption of raising the Red Flag, emblazoned with the hammer and sickle, raising and brandishing it on the streets where workers lived and died fighting for the 8-hour day and the realization of International Workers Day. This is what May Day is, and the revolutionaries will be successful in their aims to teach the working people and amass them more and more under a single flag.
LONG LIVE INTERNATIONAL WORKERS DAY!
Our May 1st Collection! #
In celebration of International Workers’ Day, we are proud to present a special collection of works that highlight the history, theory, and practice of workers’ struggles around the world. These titles from our Classics and Other Works sections provide valuable insights into the labor movement, class struggle, and revolutionary politics.
Featured Titles: #
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A History of May Day by Alexander Trachtenberg - A concise history of International Workers’ Day that traces its origins and significance in the labor movement.
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On Strikes by Vladimir Lenin - An insightful analysis of how strikes function as a “school of war” that educates workers and builds class consciousness.
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On the Road to Bolshevization by Communist Party USA - An overview of the CPUSA’s efforts to prepare for major class battles during a period of capitalist crisis.
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The Great San Francisco General Strike by William Dunne - A powerful firsthand account of the momentous 1934 San Francisco General Strike that transformed American labor relations.
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Wage-Labor and Capital & Value, Price, and Profit by Karl Marx - Classic introductory texts to Marxist political economy that explain the fundamental relationship between labor and capital.
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General Political Line by Communist Party of Peru - The defining document of Maoism, forged under the leadership of Chairman Gonzalo and the first eight years of the People’s War in Peru.
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On Practice & On Contradiction by Mao Zedong - Two essential essays that develop the Marxist theory of knowledge and the essence of dialectics, written to expose subjectivist errors in the Communist Party of China.
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Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy by Friedrich Engels - A work tracing the origins of Marxism to the combination of Hegel’s dialectical method with Feuerbach’s materialism, raising both to a new and higher level.
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Economic Doctrines of the Capitalist Epoch by Economics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR - A concise summary of important bourgeois political economists and their doctrines, alongside explanations of Lenin and Stalin’s contributions to Marxist political economy.
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Twenty Years in Underground Russia by Cecilia Bobrovskaya - Memoirs describing life as an underground revolutionary in Tsarist Russia, from the early years of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party through the Revolution of 1905.
Prairie Fire Publishing is offering 20% off all books in our collection until May 1st! This discount is automatically applied at checkout.