Tag Archives: May Day

MAY DAY – The International Labor Day

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Source: The Anarchist International

May 1st, International Workers’ Day, commemorates the historic struggle of working people throughout the world, and is recognized in most countries. The United States of America and Canada are among the exceptions. This despite the fact that the holiday began in the 1880s in the USA, linked to the battle for the eight-hour day, and the Chicago anarchists.

The struggle for the eight-hour day began in the 1860s. In 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada, organized in 1881 (and changing its name in 1886 to American Federation of Labor ) passed a resolution which asserted that “eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s work from and after May 1, 1886, and that we recommend to labor organizations throughout this district that they so direct their laws as to conform to this resolution”. The following year the Federation repeated the declaration that an eight-hour system was to go into effect on May 1, 1886. With workers being forced to work ten, twelve, and fourteen hours a day, support for the eight-hour movement grew rapidly. In the months prior to May 1, 1886, thousands of workers, organized and unorganized, members of the organization Knights of Labor and of the federation, were drawn into the struggle. Chicago was the main center of the agitation for a shorter day. The anarchists were in the forefront of the Central Labor Union of Chicago, which consisted of 22 unions in 1886, among them the seven largest in the city.

During the Railroad strikes of 1877, the workers had been violently attacked by the police and the United States Army. A similar tactic of state terrorism was prepared by the bureaucracy to fight the eight-hour movement. The police and National Guard were increased in size and received new and powerful weapons financed by local business leaders. Chicago’s Commercial Club purchased a $2000 machine gun for the Illinois National Guard to be used against strikers. Nevertheless, by May 1st, the movement had already won gains for many Chicago workers. But on May 3, 1886, police fired into a crowd of strikers at the McCormick Harvester Machine Company, killing at least one striker, seriously wounding five or six others, and injuring an undetermined number. Anarchists called for a mass meeting the next day in Haymarket Square to protest the brutality.

The meeting proceeded without incident, and by the time the last speaker was on the platform, the rainy gathering was already breaking up, with only about two hundred people remaining. It was then a police column of 180 men marched into the square and ordered the meeting to disperse. At the end of the meeting a bomb was thrown at the police, killing one instantly, six others died later. About seventy police officers were wounded. Police responded by firing into the crowd. How many civilians were wounded or killed from police bullits never was ascertained exactly. Although it was never determined who threw the bomb, the incident was used as an excuse to attack anarchists and the labor movement in general. Police ransacked the homes and offices of suspected radicals, and hundreds were arrested without charge. A reign of police terror swept over Chicago. Staging “raids” in the working-class districts, the police rounded up all known anarchists and other socialists. “Make the raids first and look up the law afterward!” publicly counseled the state’s attorney.

Anarchists in particular were harassed, and eight of Chicago’s most active were charged with conspiracy to murder in connection with the Haymarket bombing. A kangaroo court found all eight guilty, despite a lack of evidence connecting any of them to the bomb-thrower, and they were sentenced to die. In October 9, 1886, the weekly journal Knights of Labor published in Chicago, carried on page 1 the following announcement: “Next week we begin the publication of the lives of the anarchists advertised in another column.”

The advertisement, carried on page 14, read: “The story of the anarchists, told by themselves; Parsons, Spies, Fielden, Schwab, Fischer, Lingg, Engle, Neebe. The only true history of the men who claim that they are condemned to suffer death for exercising the right of Free Speech: Their association with Labor, Socialistic and Anarchistic Societies, their views as to the aims and objects of these organizations, and how they expect to accomplish them; also their connection with the Chicago Haymarket Affair. Each man is the author of his own story, which will appear only in the “Knights of Labor” during the next three months, – the great labor paper of the United States, a 16-page weekly paper, containing all the latest foreign and domestic labor news of the day, stories, household hints, etc. A co-operative paper owned and controlled by members of the Knights of Labor, and furnished for the small sum of $1.00 per annum. Adress all communications to Knights of Labor Publishing Company, 163 Washington St., Chicago, Ill.“ Later this journal and the paper Alarm published the autobiographies of the Haymarket men.

Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolf Fischer and George Engel were hanged on November 11, 1887. Louis Lingg committed suicide in prison. The authorities turned over the bodies to friends for burial, and one of the largest funeral processions in Chicago history was held. It was estimated that between 150,000 to 500,000 persons lined the route taken by the funeral cortege of the Haymarket martyrs. A monument to the executed men was unveiled June 25, 1893 at Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago. The remaining three, Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe and Michael Schwab, were finally pardoned in 1893.

On June 26, 1893, the governor of Illinois, John Peter Altgeld, issued the pardon message in which he made it clear that he was not granting the pardon because he believed that the men had suffered enough, but because they were innocent of the crime for which they had been tried, and that they and the hanged men had been the victims of hysteria, packed juries and a biased judge. He noted that the defendants were not proven guilty because the state “has never discovered who it was that threw the bomb which killed the policeman, and the evidence does not show any connection whatsoever between the defendants and the man who threw it.”

International Workers’ Day is the commemoration of the Haymarket Event in Chicago in 1886. In 1889, the first congress of the Second International, meeting in Paris for the centennial of the French Revolution and the Exposition Universelle (1889), following an initiative from the American Federation of Labor, called for international demonstrations on the 1890 anniversary of the Chicago protests. These were so successful that May Day was formally recognized as an annual event at the International’s second congress in 1891.

It is not surprising that the state, business leaders, mainstream union officials, and the media would want to hide the true history of May Day. In its attempt to erase the history and significance of May Day, the United States government declared May 1st to be “Law Day”, and gave the workers instead Labor Day, the first Monday of September – a holiday devoid of any historical significance.

Nevertheless, rather than suppressing the labor and anarchist movements, the events of 1886 and the execution of the Chicago anarchists, spokesmen of the movement for the eight-hour day, mobilized many generations of radicals. Emma Goldman, a young immigrant at the time, later pointed to the Haymarket affair as her political birth. Instead of disappearing, the anarchist movement only grew in the wake of Haymarket.

As workers, we must recognize and commemorate May Day not only for it’s historical significance, but also as a time to organize around issues of vital importance of today for the working-class broadly defined, i.e. the grassroots – the people seen as a class in contrast to the superiors in income and/or rank – economically and/or political/administrative.

The May Day Manifestos of the International Workers of the World affiliated to the Anarchist International, from the latest years are published on its Webpage, click here!

May Day

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May Day has a long history of being a culturally significant day for a number of reasons. In ancient Europe it was a time of Pagan festivities celebrating the first day of summer. It’s the day the Illuminati was founded by Adam Weishaupt in 1776 and happens to be the birthday of radical labor activist Mother Jones (in 1830) and mystical Christian theorist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (in 1881). May Day continues to be celebrated around the world as a day of struggle for worker’s rights. More facts about the importance of May Day to Labor history and our current situation are presented in the following article:

What’s Left of May Day?

By Nathan Schneider

Source: Al Jazeera

On May 1, 1933, the Catholic journalist and activist Dorothy Day went to New York’s Union Square to distribute copies of the first issue of her newspaper The Catholic Worker. As she made her way through the crowd, she had a ready audience of thousands: men in coats, ties, and hats — as low-wage workers and radicals apparently used to dress — gathered around a maze of signs for labor unions, fraternal societies, and parties representing the various varieties of socialism then on offer. These groups disagreed in every way they could think to, but they shared the square regardless. For decades, in the U.S. and around the world, May Day was International Workers’ Day, commemorating protesters killed in Haymarket Square, Chicago, during the 1886 strike for an eight-hour workday. It also had earlier roots as a spring holiday of maypoles and flower baskets.

Dorothy Day was only one among many at Union Square trying to suggest a way out of the economic crisis of the time. This was well into the Great Depression, when the breadlines and the legions of unemployed people posed an existential threat to American capitalism; skirmishes between fed-up workers and abusive employers were common and often bloody. Day proposed a synthesis of Christian love and communist solidarity, militant pacifism in pursuit of “a society where it is easier to be good.” The Catholic Worker quickly became the script for a new religious and political movement. Within months, circulation grew from a first run of 2,500 copies to 10 times that, and it reached 150,000 before Day’s pacifist convictions caused subscriptions to drop during the lead-up to World War II. Each May Day, New York’s Catholic Workers still celebrate the birth of their movement with a communal supper and singing.

May Day to Law Day

Since the presidency of Grover Cleveland, authorities have made a point of replacing May Day with the more innocuous observance of Labor Day in September — a time for barbecues, sales and last-ditch beach trips. Dwight Eisenhower declared May 1 to be Law Day, an almost universally ignored opportunity to celebrate the rule of law. But immigrants, who still have connections to countries where May Day is celebrated, continue to use the first of May to claim their rights. In 2006, millions took part in the “day without an immigrant” strikes, and it is immigrants — impatient for meaningful reform from Washington — who will rally at Union Square today. But as May Day comes and goes each year, many in the United States don’t even notice.

Two years ago was an exception. In the fall of 2011, Occupy Wall Street captured the world’s attention with its village-like encampments in public squares and slogans against economic injustice. After a wave of police raids evicted nearly all of the encampments in late fall, Occupy activists started planning for the following May Day. They even started talking about a general strike.

The idea of a mass strike was something of a novelty: most of the core Occupy activists, like most young people nowadays, had never had the chance to join a union at work. The fierce kind of labor organizing visible at Union Square in 1933 was long ago repressed or domesticated during the Cold War’s witch hunts. The Occupiers, therefore, had to rely on their imaginations. They studied the history of May Days past and debated what a general strike in the 21st century could look like. The kind of strike they discussed in those meetings in New York was only partly a matter of pickets and labor songs; what they really wanted on the “day without the 99%” was to turn the city (and the Internet) into a canvas, a gigantic work of art painted by everybody — causing chilling economic disruption alongside proof that a better world is possible. “I’m totally in love with the general strike,” one organizer said during a planning meeting in January 2012. “To me, it’s analogous to seeing the face of God.”

Out of reach

When May Day came, pickets swarmed around midtown in the morning by the dozen. They merged with hundreds of guitarists marching south from Bryant Park, playing and singing in unison as an “Occupy Guitarmy,” past the classes of the “Free University” at Madison Square Park. They arrived at Union Square to find fellow activists dancing around a maypole, weaving together ribbons inscribed with the grievances from one of the movement’s early documents. Throughout the square, union members and immigrants’ groups rallied together, thanks to months of marathon planning meetings led by Occupiers. Around 30,000 people marched from Union Square to the financial district, chanting into the exhaust of the NYPD scooters hemming them in on either side. Four police helicopters hovered overhead.

I walked part of the way with an elderly nun, one who’d been going to protests since Dorothy Day was leading them. “When did it become like this?” she kept asking as she marveled at the level of police intimidation at a peaceful march. The day amounted to more than what May Day has typically been, but far short of what the Occupiers had dreamed of. The march did not repeat itself the year after. The world remained untransformed. There was no measurable general strike.

But perhaps there should have been.

The eight-hour day that the Chicago strikers sought in 1886 is still out of reach for many Americans. Many of us are forced to work overtime or multiple jobs just to make ends meet. The economist Thomas Piketty has revealed how profoundly wealth inequality is widening and deepening; a recent study, meanwhile, documents the vastly outsize influence of a wealthy few on U.S. politics — which we see reflected in the absence of policies to confront crises from mass incarceration to climate change.

Replacing May Day with Labor Day was part of a decades-long effort to stifle the vibrancy of populist movements. And Labor Day is not enough. As inequality widens and our democracy weakens, we are losing the spirit of May Day, and suffering the consequences. Occupy’s May Day didn’t catch on as some hoped, but what it aspired to was right: an organized population powerful enough to confront an entrenched elite, and hopeful enough to celebrate democracy in the streets.

 

Nathan Schneider is the author of “Thank You, Anarchy: Notes From the Occupy Apocalypse” and “God in Proof: The Story of a Search From the Ancients to the Internet.” He has written about religion and resistance for Harper’s, The Nation, The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education and elsewhere, and is an editor of two online publications, Killing the Buddha and Waging Nonviolence.