Mayday: A Promise So Hopeful

In 1889, the Paris Congress of the International Socialist movement designated the first of May the eight-hour holiday for workers of the world. Within a few years, May Day became the veritable symbol of class contestation. The occasion for sometimes violent clashes between marching workers and police (especially in Rome), it offered socialists and anarchists world-wide their own holiday. They seized it with gusto. Elaborate ceremonies quickly evolved, with songs, banners, uniforms, even moving dioramas symbolizing the hopeful dreams of a socialist Spring.

Just about a century ago, British socialist artist Walter Crane’s May Day drawings echoed the writings of Crane’s favorite writer, socialist, and poet laureate of England, William Morris. The garlands of Spring, the May Pole, tender feelings and tender blossoms symbolizing fertility and rebirth, all took on fresh but not so altered meaning in the May Day holiday. Amazingly, it all re-started in Chicago.

May, 1886: several hundred thousand American workers of the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor, and socialist and anarchist groups all demonstrated for the Eight Hour Day. It was the center of a world-wide movement for shorter working hours. Even the song lyrics of the American movement, “Eight hours for work/eight hours for sleep/eight hours for what we will,” argued for a “natural” pace of life in tune with the seasons, rather than the long hours and miserable conditions imposed by the capitalists.

The catastrophe of the day, a police riot in Chicago against anarchists and a subsequent murderous frame-up of their leaders for bomb-throwing, could not entirely overshadow the excitement of the moment. Working people had spoken. For many anarchists but not only for them, the day also retained the special significance of martyrdom, the occasion to mourn the great heroes of Haymarket who had died from the hangman, unrepentant in their revolutionary fervor.

Several melancholy trends later set in. The steady drift of the AFL rightward after 1886 toward exclusionism (and racism) was symbolized by Samuel Gompers’ zeal for Labor Day instead of May Day as labor’s holiday. Launched independently by several local central labor federations, Labor Day, coming at the height of summer heat and holidays, was perceived as less confrontational. At the height of the Cold War, the US Congress gave its blessings to May 1st as Law Day, for a few years encouraging high schools to stage imaginary “Communist takeovers” associated with compulsory atheism. This was mirrored by a steady downward drift into bureaucratic military displays in the Soviet Union from Stalinization onward, and mirror offerings in Eastern Europe and Asia: the veritable Law Day over there.

May Days have been pretty modest in recent years, here and abroad. Public rallies are attended mostly by aging radicals and interested youngsters, private testimonials to good deeds done long before. But May Day isn’t over by a long shot. Perhaps, in the face of capital’s globalization and the exciting recent progressive response, and renewed visions of eco-socialism, its celebration this Spring has only just begun.

Paul Buhle is author of Taking Care of Business (Monthly Review Press), and editor of The Encyclopedia of the American Left (Garland). He is a member of the editorial committee.