While the U.S. celebrates Labor Day (another telling instance of the ideological meaning of American ‘exceptionalism’) on the first Monday in September, May 1st is recognized around the world as a workers’ holiday, a global (or international) day of solidarity between workers of all nationalities. It was bound up with the struggle for the shorter workday – a demand of major political significance for the working class: “Eight hours for work —eight for rest—and eight for what we will.” Thus, in many parts of the world today is the true “Labor Day.” The auspicious nature of this date goes back to celebratory spring festivals and is still an excuse for Morris dancing: in the words of Emma Goldman, “If I can’t dance, I won’t be part of your revolution!” Eric Hobsbawm writes that
“From the start the occasion attracted and absorbed ritual and symbolic elements, notably that of a quasi-religious or numinous celebration (‘Maifeier’), a holiday in both sense of the word. […] Red flags, the only universal symbols of the [socialist labor] movement, were present from the start, but so, in several countries, were flowers: the carnation in Austria, the red (paper) rose in Germany, sweet briar and poppy in France, and the may, symbol of renewal, increasingly infiltrated, and from the mid-1990s replaced by the lily-of-the-valley, whose associations were unpolitical. Little is known about this language of flowers which, to judge by the May Day poems in socialist literature also, was spontaneously associated with the occasion. It certainly struck the key-note of May Day, a time of renewal, growth, hope and joy (we recall the girl with the flowering branch of may associated in popular memory with 1891 May Day shootings at Fourmies). Equally, May Day played a major part in the development of the new socialist iconography of the 1890s in which, is spite of the expected emphasis on struggle, the note of hope, confidence and the approach of a brighter future—often expressed in metaphors of plant growth—prevailed.” — Eric Hobsbawm, “Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870-1914,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1983)
“An ancient holiday marked by celebrations in praise of spring and by symbolic evocations of fertility, this day perhaps inevitably became revolutionary holiday of the nineteenth-century workers’ movement. As in British artist Walter Crane’s famous May Day drawings (much reprinted in the U.S. Socialist press), the vision of socialism seemed to speak at once to the natural yearnings of emancipation from the winter season and from the wintery epoch of class society.
In May 1886 several hundred thousand American workers marched into international labor history when they demonstrated for the eight-hour day. An unusual and informal alliance between the fledgling AFL [American Federation of Labor], local assemblies of the Knights of Labor, and disparate tendencies within the anarchist movement ignited a pent-up demand for shorter working hours. The social and labor ferment that crested in 1885-86 also marked the maturing of the Knights of Labor into the first meaningful national labor organization in the United States. The leadership of the Knights, however, envisioned the eight-hour day as an educational, political, and evolutionary achievement rather than an agitational and revolutionary one. On the other hand, the infant AFL, soon to molt from the impotent Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, tied its star to the militant eight-hour actions. The third grouping in the labor triad comprised that section of the anarchists, mainly European immigrants, who emphasized trade union work as a vehicle to social revolution.
The uneasy and unsettled coalition targeted May 1, 1886, as the day of industrial reckoning. In Boston, Milwaukee, New York City, Pittsburgh, and especially Chicago, tens of thousands of workers rallied and struck for ‘eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, eight hours for what we will.’ The nation’s newspapers warned that the spirit of the Paris Commune was loose in the land and pointed to specific personalities among the anarchists to prove the point. [….]
Whether the May day would have been a one-time workers’ holiday or ‘forever be remembered,’ in the words of Samuel Gompers, ‘as a second Declaration of Independence,’ is a moot point. The events of a few days later projected it into an international framework and seared the conscience of labor activists ever since. A rally by striking lumbermen near the scene of a labor conflict at the McCormick-Harvester works in suburban Chicago led to a clash with scabs at the famous farm-implement company. Chicago police, already seasoned in labor brutality, mortally wounded several demonstrators.
The Chicago anarchists, who only a few days earlier had organized the peaceful eight-hour parade locally, called for a protest demonstration against the killings. The following night, on May 4, a thousand rallied at Haymarket Square in the city. The mayor of Chicago listened warily in the crowd until a thunderstorm sent His Honor and most of the throng home for the evening. Inexplicably, a large contingent of police seemingly waited for the mayor’s departure to forcibly disperse the remaining 200 demonstrators. As the officers rallied into the depleted group, a bomb was thrown into their ranks. Dozens of policemen were injured and eventually seven died, although some may have perished from their comrades’ panicked shooting. That response led to widespread but undocumented wounding of many nameless protesters.
The media’s failed predictions of violent upheaval for the May Day rallies three days earlier were readily transferred to the ‘Haymarket Affair.’ The forces of law and order understood that the carnage at Haymarket, regardless of who threw the missile, could discredit the labor movement and eradicated its more radical European appendages through a nascent Red Scare. The ensuing show trial in Chicago blessed the miscegenation of May Day and the Haymarket bombing in the popular mind.
The concept of May Day had meanwhile spread rapidly to the international workers’ movement, one of American labor’s (and radicals’) most important innovations. In 1889 the International Socialist Congress in Paris, with full knowledge of the American precedent, designated May 1 as an eight-hour holiday for workers of the world.” [….] — Scott Molloy, in Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, eds. Encyclopedia of the American Left (Garland Publishing, 1990).
“The international May Day, which dates back to 1889, is perhaps the most ambitious of labour rituals. In some ways, it is a more ambitious and generalized version of the annual combined labour demonstration and festival which we have seen emerging for one highly specific group of workers and confined to single regions in the miners’ demonstrations and galas of two decades earlier. It shared with these the essential characteristic of being a regular public self-presentation of a class, an assertion of power, indeed in its invasion of the establishment’s social space, a symbolic conquest. But equally crucially, it was the assertion of class through an organized movement—union or party. It was the labour army’s annual trooping of colours—a political occasion unthinkable without the slogans, demands, speeches which, even among the self-contained pitmen, increasingly came to be made by national figures representing not the union but the movement as a whole. At the same time, since the class as such was involved, it was also like subsequent gatherings of the same kind—one thinks of the national festivals of L’Humanité in France or Unità in Italy, a family occasion and a popular festival—though one which, in spite of an ample supply of beer and skittles, prided itself on its demonstration of self-control. Just as the Durham miners in 1872 were proud to disappoint the respectable who trembled at the invasion of the black barbarians—we recall the white gloves of the marchers—so a few years ago the Neapolitans took pride in a rather more startling achievement. Nothing, they claimed, had been stolen and nobody cheated during the national festival of Unità, when it took in that notoriously ingenious and light-fingered city.
But the miners’ galas were planned as annual occasions and even at the first tentative one in Durham in 1871 three prizes were offered for the band contest and ‘liberal money prizes for various athletic sports.’ May Day was planned simply as a one-off simultaneous international demonstration for the Legal Eight Hour Day. How much of its force, like that of the red flag, was due to this sense of internationalism, we can only speculate, but certainly a good deal. Annual repetition was imposed on the parties and the International by public demand from the grassroots. Moreover, it was through public participation that a demonstration was turned into a holiday in both the ritual and the festive sense. Engels only came to refer to it as a Maifeier or celebration instead of a demonstration in 1893. On the contrary, the ideologically purer revolutionaries were actually suspicious of merrymaking as politically diversionary, and of folkloric practices as a concession to the spirit of superstition [this sort of puritanical ideological fervor persists in some quarters of the Left to this day]. They would have preferred more glum and militant protest marches [so much for prefigurative revolutionary praxis!]. Leaders with a better sense of the masses, like Adler, Vandervelde and Costa, were better tuned to the wavelength of the masses. As Costa said in 1893, ‘Catholics have Easter; henceforth workers will have their own Easter.’ [In other words, a ritual and festival shorn of the deleterious psychological and ideological effects that come in the narrative wake of vicarious substitutionary atonement which is an integral part of the Passion part of the Easter story.] The Italians, mobilizing a traditional and largely illiterate class, tended to be unusually sensitive to the force of symbol and ceremony. What is more, the specific demand of the original May Day soon dropped into the background. It increasingly turned into an annual assertion of class presence—most successfully so where, against the advice of cautious socialist and union leaders which prevailed in Britain and Germany, it underlined the presence by a symbolic assertion of the fundamental power of workers, the abstention from work by a one-day strike. In many Latin countries it came to be seen as a commemoration of martyrs—the ‘Chicago martyrs,’ and is still sometimes so regarded [the resurgence and transformation of Christian mythology?].
The ritual element in the workers’ May Day —which was, as someone observed, even among radical and revolutionary anniversaries the only one associated exclusively with the proletariat—was immediately recognized by the artists, journalists, poets and versifiers who, on behalf of their parties, produced badges, flags, posters, May Day periodicals, cartoons and other suitable material for the occasion. Their iconographic language echoes the imagery of spring, youth and growth which was spontaneously associated with the day. Flowers were an important part of this imagery and immediately came to be worn, we hardly know how: the carnation in Austria and Italy—eventually became the flower of May Day—the red (paper) rose in Germany, sweet briar and poppy in France, as well as the may; but not the lily-of-the-valley which later came into non-political symbiosis with May Day in France.” — Eric Hobsbawm, Workers: Worlds of Labor (Pantheon Books, 1984): 76-78
A short list of suggested reading for May Day:
- American Social History Project (Herbert G. Gutman, Director, and Stephen Brier, Editor) (various contributors). Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. One: From Conquest and Colonization through Reconstruction and the Great Uprising of 1877 (Pantheon Books, 1989).
- American Social History Project (Herbert G. Gutman, Director, and Stephen Brier, Editor) (various contributors). Who Built America? Working People and the Nations’s Economy, Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. Two: From the Gilded Age to the Present (Pantheon Books, 1992).
- Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton University Press, 1984).
- Brecher, Jeremy. Strike! (Straight Arrow Books, 1972).
- Foner, Philip S. May Day: A Short History of the International Workers’ Holiday 1886-1986 (International Publishers, 1986).
- Green, James. Death in the Haymarket.... (Pantheon Books, 2006).
- Hobsbawm, Eric. “The Transformation of Labour Rituals,” from his book, Workers: Worlds of Labor (Pantheon, 1985): 66-82.
- “May Day” at the Marxist Internet Archive
- “May Day,” by Scott Molloy, in Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, eds., The Encyclopedia of the American Left (Garland, 1990): 455-457.
- Roediger, Dave and Franklin Rosemont, eds. Haymarket Scrapbook (Charles H. Kerr, 1986).
Sundry Reflections in Honor of May Day (International Workers’ Day)
“Once again the time has come to take Marx seriously.”—Eric Hobsbawm
“In the Marxist tradition, self-realisation is the full and free actualisation and externalisation of the powers and the abilities of the individual. [….] Under suitable conditions, both [political democracy and economic democracy] can be arenas for joint self-realisation.”—Jon Elster
“We have gone so far as to divorce work from culture, and to think of culture as something to be acquired in hours of leisure; but there can only be a hothouse and unreal culture where itself is not its means; if culture does not show itself in all we make we are not cultured. [….] Industry without art is brutality.”—Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
Eleven Criticisms of Capitalism
- Capitalist class relations perpetuate eliminable forms of human suffering.
- Capitalism blocks the universalization of conditions for expansive human flourishing.
- Capitalism perpetuates eliminable deficits in individual freedom and autonomy.
- Capitalism violates liberal egalitarian principles of social justice.
- Capitalism in inefficient in certain critical respects.
- Capitalism has a systematic bias towards consumerism.
- Capitalism is environmentally destructive.
- Capitalist commodification threatens important broadly held values.
- Capitalism in a world of nation-states fuels militarism and imperialism.
- Capitalism corrodes community.
- Capitalism limits democracy.
—From Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias (Verso, 2010)
“I have argued that economic Democracy, as a system, will be less alienating than Laissez Faire. To summarize the reasons: Workers will have more participatory autonomy under Economic Democracy, because the degree of workplace democracy will not be restricted by the capitalists’ need to keep open all options for profit. The labor-leisure trade-off should be more in accordance with the general interest under Economic Democracy, because workers will have a greater interest in promoting more flexible, less frantic, more meaningful working arrangements, as well as shorter hours and longer vacations, than do capitalists, who bear the costs and risks of such changers (under Laissez Faire) but do not receive the full benefits. Workers are likely to be more skilled under Economic Democracy, because neither competitive pressures nor the need for control will push so hard toward deskilling.”—David Schweickart, Against Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996)
America the Possible: The Values
[….] “Many thoughtful Americans have concluded that addressing our many challenges will require the rise of a new consciousness, with different values becoming dominant in American culture. For some, it is a spiritual awakening—a transformation of the human heart. For others it is a more intellectual process of coming to see the world anew and deeply embracing the emerging ethic of the environment and the old ethic of what it means to love thy neighbor as thyself. But for all, the possibility of a sustainable and just future will require major cultural change and a reorientation regarding what society values and prizes most highly.
In America the Possible, our dominant culture will have shifted, from today to tomorrow, in the following ways:
- from seeing humanity as something apart from nature, transcending and dominating it, to seeing ourselves as part of nature, offspring of its evolutionary process, close kin to wild things, and wholly dependent on its vitality and the finite services it provides;
- from seeing nature in strictly utilitarian terms—humanity’s resource to exploit as it sees fit for economic and other purposes—to seeing the natural world as having intrinsic value independent of people and having rights that create the duty of ecological stewardship;
- from discounting the future, focusing severely on the near term, to taking the long view and recognizing duties to future generations;
- from today’s hyper-individualism and narcissism, and the resulting social isolation, to a powerful sense of community and social solidarity reaching from the local to the cosmopolitan;
- from the glorification of violence, the acceptance of war, and the spreading of hate and invidious divisions to the total abhorrence of these things;
- from materialism and consumerism to the prioritization of personal and family relationships, learning, experiencing nature, spirituality, service, and living within limits;
- from tolerating gross economic, social, and political inequality to demanding a high measure of equality in all these spheres.
We actually know important things about how values and culture can be changed. One sure path to cultural change is, unfortunately, the cataclysmic event—the crisis—that profoundly challenges prevailing values and de-legitimizes the status quo. The Great Depression is the classic example. I think we can be confident that we haven’t seen the end of major crises.
Two other key factors in cultural change are leadership and social narrative. Leaders have enormous potential to change minds, and in the process they can change the course of history. And there is some evidence that Americans are ready for another story. Large majorities of Americans, when polled, express disenchantment with today’s lifestyles and offer support for values similar to those urged here.
Another way in which values are changed is through social movements. Social movements are about consciousness raising, and, if successful, they can help usher in a new consciousness—perhaps we are seeing its birth today. When it comes to issues of social justice, peace, and environment, the potential of faith communities is vast as well. Spiritual awakening to new values and new consciousness can also derive from literature, philosophy, and science. [….]
Education, of course, can also contribute enormously to cultural change. Here one should include education in the largest sense, embracing not only formal education but also day-to-day and experiential education as well as the fast-developing field of social marketing. Social marketing has had notable successes in moving people away from bad behaviors such as smoking and drunk driving, and its approaches could be applied to larger cultural change as well.
A major and very hopeful path lies in seeding the landscape with innovative, instructive models. In the United States today, there is a proliferation of innovative models of community revitalization and business enterprise. Local currencies, slow money, state Genuine Progress Indicators, locavorism—these are bringing the future into the present in very concrete ways. These actual models will grow in importance as communities search for visions of how the future should look, and they can change minds—seeing is believing. Cultural transformation won’t be easy, but it’s not impossible either.” [….]—From James Gustave Speth’s “America the Possible: A Manifesto, Part II,” Orion magazine (May/June 2012)
A Civic Minimum: A Reform Programme
Making work pay: “All those who are expected to satisfy a minimum work expectation must receive a decent minimum income in return for doing so. This includes not only a level of post-tax earnings sufficient to cover a standard set of basic needs, but also a decent minimum of health-care and disability coverage…. The model of a minimum wage combined with in-work benefits for the low-paid, including child-care subsidies for low earners, is certainly one credible approach to this task.”
From a work-test to a participation-test: “Work-tests within the welfare system are…legitimate in principle. But in order that different forms of productive contributions can be treated equitably, social policy must be structured in a way that acknowledges the contributive status of care work. This implies a need to offer some public support for care workers, relieving their need to do paid work to maintain access to the generous basic needs package described above. Relevant policies here might include payment of a decent social wage to those engaged in looking after the elderly or the handicapped on a full-time basis and publicly subsidized paternal leave from paid employment. In other words, access to the generous basic-needs package should be conditional not on satisfying a work-test, narrowly construed in terms of paid employment, but on satisfying a broader participation-test, where participation is understood to include paid employment and (at least in addition) specified forms and amounts of care work.”
Towards a two-tiered income support system: “[T]he debate over ‘welfare reform’ is often polarized between supporters of an unconditional basic income that is not subject to any work- or participation-test, nor to any time limit, and supporters of time-limited workfare. An alternative approach…looks to establish a two-tiered system of income support. The first tier, which we may call conventional welfare, would be contractualist in kind. It would offer support through a mix of income-related and universal benefits, but support that is also linked to, and conditional on, productive contribution. While work- or participation-tested, support at this level would not be time-limited. [….] The second tier might then consist of something like the time-limited basic income…. This would be an additional income grant, not subject to any work- or participation-test, but which would be time-limited. Citizens could trigger the entitlement for a fixed amount of time over the full course of their working lives, but would not enjoy it indefinitely.”
Universal capital-grant or social drawing rights: “[We previously] set out the case for instituting a generous capital endowment as a basic right of economic citizenship. … [A] scheme of universal capital grants might in part incorporate the time-limited basic income mentioned above. Otherwise, the grants could be linked to activities that are related to productive contribution in the community, such as education, training, setting up a business, and, perhaps, care work….
Accessions tax: “[We have also made] the case for heavy taxation of wealth transfers (inheritances, bequests, inter vivos gifts). Such taxation is important to help prevent class inequality and violation of reciprocity. There is a strong case for hypothecating the funds from taxation of wealth transfers to the funding of a universal capital-grant scheme.”
“[T]his short list is not, by any means, exhaustive of the policies and institutions that might be necessary, or helpful, [in order to] reform the terms of economic citizenship so as to meet the demands of fair reciprocity (in its non-ideal form).”— Stuart White, The Civic Minimum: On the Rights and Obligations of Economic Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2003).
Relevant Bibliographies (i.e., lists with varying degrees of family resemblance) on my Academia page:
- Salvador Allende and the Quest for Socialism
- Samir Amin (3 September 1931 - 12 August 2018)
- Anarchism: Philosophy & Praxis
- Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
- Beyond Inequality: Toward the Globalization of Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
- Blacks on the (Radical) Left
- The Black Panther Party
- César Chávez & the United Farm Workers
- Communism in India
- Democratic Theory and Praxis
- Detroit: Labor & Industrialization, Race & Politics, Rebellion & Resurgence
- Global Distributive Justice
- The Great Depression & The New Deal
- Health: Law, Ethics & Social Justice
- The History, Theory & Praxis of the Left in the 1960s
- Human Rights
- Ethics, Law, and Politics of Immigration & Refugees
- L.R. James: Marxist Humanist & Afro-Trinidadian Socialist
- Marxism
- Marxism (or ‘the Left’), Art & Aesthetics
- Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law
- Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, & Black Cosmopolitanism
- Social Security & the Welfare State
- Toward Green Democratic Socialism (Ecosocialism)
- South African Liberation Struggles
- Utopian Imagination, Thought and Praxis
- Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law
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