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| A May Day demonstration in Vladivostok, 1917 |
Today, across the world, socialists, communists, anarchists, trade unionists and progressives of all stripes will come out onto the streets to celebrate workers, the labour movement and the working class. On this day, we celebrate the contribution of ordinary men and women to our society, the history of ordinary people's struggles and the ongoing class war that engulfs our island, our country and our world.
It's worth knowing a little about how May Day actually originated. The whole thing started in Chicago, on May 4th 1886, when a confrontation between demonstrating workers and police officers came to a head. Chicago in 1886 was a city that exemplified the contradictions of Gilded Age capitalism - the city was home to tens of thousands of migrant workers, working a 60-hour week in terrible conditions and earning about $1.50/day for their trouble. The city was a hotbed of labour unrest - immediately before the incident on May 4th, it's estimated that 30,000-40,000 Chicagoans were on strike. Their demands? An eight-hour day - a rallying cry that had been taken up by hundreds of thousands of striking workers across the USA in a series of strikes in New York, Milwaukee, Detroit and many other cities.
On May 3rd, 1886, an incident occurred at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company factory in Chicago. The plant's Irish-American workforce had gathered outside the building to demand an eight-hour day and protest the lockout of union officials from the premises, while the plant's owners had sent in strikebreakers to cross the picket lines. Although around half of the strikebreakers had defected to the side of the striking workers, the remainder continued to go to work - protected by a group of 400 armed police officers. As the day progressed, tensions boiled over - as the strikebreakers left the factory at the end of the day, a group of strikers attempted to confront them.
At this point, the police fired upon the crowd of striking workers. Two strikers died in the ensuing chaos.
Local organizers, particularly the local anarchist movement, seized on this massacre as a way to promote a rally the next day in Haymarket Square in the Fulton River district, and distributed fliers across the city that called the workers of Chicago to arms. Despite predictions from the police that the anarchists intended to start a riot, the gathering was initially so peaceful that the Mayor, who was observing the meeting, went home early.
At 10:30 PM, as British socialist Sam Fielden was finishing his speech, a large number of police advanced on the gathering and ordered that Fielden stop speaking and the meeting disperse immediately - Fielden's rhetoric had been more radical than that of the previous speakers. As the police advanced on the workers, someone - and, to this day, we have no idea who - threw a fragment bomb into the path of the advancing coppers. One policeman was killed immediately, and the police fired upon the crowd in response - the crowd, for their part, ran for their lives. Several of the workers were armed and shot back, but most of the 60+ police officers wounded in the shooting were shot by other police officers in the chaos.
Seven policemen died - it's unknown how many workers were killed by the police.
In the ensuing red scare, countless suspected anarchists and communists were subjected to mass arrests, illegal searches, spying and harassment by the police in Chicago. Eight men were put on trial for the bombing - although the evidence clearly proved none of the eight had thrown the bomb, they were all found guilty and all but one were sentenced to death. Two had their sentences commuted to life in prison, one committed suicide rather than face the rope, and the remaining for were hanged by the neck until they were dead.
August Spies, one of the four who were hanged, famously said that "The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today."
The trial was soon exposed for the sham it was, and Spies and his comrades were rehabilitated in the public eye as martyrs - political prisoners, condemned to death for a crime they obviously didn't commit. The Knights of Labour, a major union fighting for an eight-hour day, doubled its membership in the months after the riot, and, in 1890, the American Federation of Labour officially named May the 1st as the day for the commemoration of the Haymarket riot.
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| August Spies |
In the socialist bloc countries before and during the Cold War, May Day became an extremely important public holiday. In 1917, the Bolshevik government in the Russian SFSR recognized May Day as a public holiday, and this tradition was followed by all the other countries of the socialist bloc. In the USSR, it was often a day for massive military parades, showcasing the might of Soviet power as a counterbalance to imperialism - in the post-Cold War era, it's become a rallying point for radicals, particularly in the former East Germany and former USSR. Even outside the former socialist bloc, most countries recognise May Day as "Labour Day", "International Workers' Day" or some derivative thereof.
Remember - take it easy this International Workers' Day.
Workers built the world - why shouldn't they own it?
