29.04.1999

May Day is workers’ day

The celebration of May Day as a spring festival is an ancient tradition in many parts of the world, and probably originated in pagan rituals dating back thousands of years.

However, the association of May Day with the international workers’ movement began in the USA in 1886, when the revolutionary Knights of Labour organisation and socialist trade unions called for a strike on Friday May 1 to fight for an eight-hour day. Over 100,000 workers across the USA joined the strike, and on May 3 police killed six strikers at a harvester factory in Chicago. Since then, socialist groups and trade union organisations around the world have marked May Day as the day of international solidarity of the workers of the world.

In the early years of the 20th century May Day demonstrations were often the scenes of violent clashes between workers and the police forces of bourgeois states. In Poland in 1905, 100 people were killed when tsarist troops opened fire on a Warsaw demonstration. Polish nationalist-socialist leaders immediately called a general strike, although a few days later they urged workers to return to work, claiming that conditions were not yet ripe for revolution.

The May Day massacre, and suppression of workers’ protests in Russia itself, spurred on seven east European socialist parties, including those of Poland, Georgia, Finland and Armenia, to unite in a fighting committee based in Switzerland, to work cooperatively for workers’ rights, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and association, universal suffrage and constituent assemblies in Poland and Armenia as well as Russia itself. Tsar Nicholas II was forced by the revolutionary situation in Russia to grant some of these demands in October of that year.

In Paris, 3,000 workers were arrested during a May Day demonstration in 1906, and in 1919 90 policemen were injured in May Day battles between police and workers. During the revolutionary situation in Germany in 1929, eight people died in May Day clashes between communists and the social democrat-commanded police in Berlin. Conflict went on for days and the city was placed under curfew. This revolutionary upsurge in Germany was ultimately defeated and the crisis resolved negatively by the triumph of Nazi fascism.

In the early years of Soviet power May 1 was seen as symbolising the triumph of the working class, and May Day became a big national holiday, second in importance only to the anniversary of the revolution of November 7. Subsequently, it was usurped by the bureaucratic regimes of the USSR and Eastern Europe as a means of incorporating workers behind a façade of communist slogans.

In the US, nationwide demonstrations to mark May Day continued into the 1920s, but the US government cleverly diminished public support for May Day by establishing the first Monday in September as a public holiday honouring workers, Labor Day. May 1 has long been a public holiday in most European countries, although demonstrations have often been taken over by reformists and channelled into support for reformist parties and governments.

The importance of International Workers Day in Europe is shown by the fact that for the second time, as it had done with the original pagan festival, the Catholic Church has attempted to ‘christianify’ May Day by declaring it the feast day of Saint Joseph the Worker.

The Wilson government acceded to the long-standing demand for a bank holiday in Britain in 1975, but it chose the first Monday in May, rather than May Day itself. Even this was too much for rightwing sections of the establishment and ever since they have called for this alien, socialist holiday to be abolished and replaced by a holiday in the autumn - perhaps Winston Churchill’s birthday or even Margaret Thatcher’s. In 1995 the Tory government moved the bank holiday to May 8 and declared that it was a holiday to commemorate VE day, the liberation of Europe from Nazi occupation in 1945. Veterans of World War II were granted cut-price train tickets to get to London for celebratory events.

The motive force and backbone of May Day mobilisations in Britain has traditionally been supplied by the CPGB. For the last couple of decades the Turkish and Kurdish communities have taken the lead in London. The annual May Day demonstrations act as a barometer of the class struggle, drawing in many strands of the working class movement and allowing particular struggles to be seen in the context of the fight for world socialism. Because of this, as well as mirroring day-to-day changes in the political climate, May Day also gauges the strength of the politically organised working class - the vanguard. As the strength, both in terms of numbers and consciousness, of the vanguard changes, so does the size of May Day demonstrations. The steady decrease in the number of trade unionists mobilised on May Day during the 1980s and 1990s reflected the decline of the revolutionary left, and the ideological and organisational weakness of the working class as a whole.

This year represents a significant change. Through the Reclaim Our Rights campaign Arthur Scargill is seeking to assert his leadership of the militant working class. Nine national unions and over 150 other union bodies have sponsored the campaign. There is certainly a political space. New Labour’s ‘Fairness at work’ leaves almost the full panoply of anti-union legislation enacted by the Tories intact. Blair has proved beyond doubt that he serves the bosses, not the trade union bureaucracy.

Of course Scargill is a would-be labour dictator. He wants to capture May Day in London not as an expression of international working class solidarity but to further his own vaulting ambitions. The only way to beat this danger is to build working class self-confidence and self-activity. The best start here is uniting the left to challenge both Blair and Scargill. Next year’s May Day will be a test for us all.

Join the May Day demonstration in London this Saturday. Assemble 12 noon at Clerkenwell Green. Rally in Trafalgar Square 3pm.

Mary Godwin