30.04.1998

May Day

From The Call, paper of the British Socialist Party, May 2 1918

Shut tired eyes for a while. Forget the harsh, straight lines of the factory roof, its dirt-grimed, uncurtained windows, the noise of its machinery, and the sordid little houses of the exploited workers across the way.

Thrust these aside. The soft white clusters of the cherry blossom nod in the breeze, grey-white against the dazzling whiteness of the sunlit clouds driving across the blue. Sprays of young leaves half veil the tree trunks, making an ever changing tracery as the branches sway. Green grass, vividly poignant green, causing an almost painful pleasure after the city grey.

Forget the city and its politicians’ intrigues; dream of the golden age of equal comrades, the socialist epoch which we meet to herald on Labour Day. The spring threads her mantle all over Europe. The German valleys are now besprinkled with deep blue gentians and yellow cowslips. The lads will be wearing flowers in their Tyrolean hats, the girls in their velvet bodices, as they go to the great labour gatherings, to see the musterings of banners and hear speeches of hope delivered by labour’s greatest orators.

May Day will be a joyous festival graced by song and dance, flowers and the finest work of the painters and sculptors of the commonwealth when the socialist world is won, and the free, splendid men and women of the international fraternity meet for its celebration year by year. But today those who demonstrate are toil-warped and poverty-stunted. Instead of unity the workers are divided into hostile camps. Instead of helping one another they are slaying one another ...

Workers of the world, unite! The inspiring words of Karl Marx, the socialist prophet, whose centenary we celebrate this Labour Day, never sounded so imperative an appeal, so alluring a promise as now, in this dark hour ...

At the outbreak of war the socialist parties of the world were compelled to make a choice: either to hold to the International and to the socialist faith; or to fall apart and each support the capitalist government of its own separate country in the capitalist war. The majority of socialists failed at the time of testing. Because the workers discarded solidarity and independence, and became the willing tools of their capitalist masters, the workers of our time have been as impotent to affect or hinder the propaganda of this war as they were to stop wars which took place in Karl Marx’s day. But the Russian Revolution has come to prove to the workers of the world that their impotence is self-made and that they have the power as soon as they will it both to stop the war and to take the entire management of the world into their own hands.

As hunger causes unrest amongst the people, as their thoughts revolt against the war - this great fraud upon humanity - they will look for guidance to the socialists who have opposed the war and who have long told them that socialists possess the secret which shall bring peace and joy to the world. How will the socialists of the world meet this second great choice of our time which fate will place before them? Will they in this and other countries fear, as they did at the first choice, to steer a straight course in the hour of crisis; will they tell the old false story by which the people have been gulled themselves since the game of party politics began? ... Or will the socialists truthfully tell the people that in their solidarity they are the mightiest, that they alone can save themselves and bring peace to the world and that socialism is the only way?

... Let us pledge our faith this May Day to the independent organisation of the workers, to socialism and the International!

E Sylvia Pankhurst