30.04.2003

A day of celebration and hope

Mary Godwin takes a look at the history of May Day

For over a hundred years, May Day has been our most important working class festival, marked by demonstrations celebrating the strength of the workers' movement and demanding better wages and conditions for working people.

Originally a pagan celebration of the start of summer, May Day is possibly the most ancient religious festival in the northern hemisphere, marked in different cultures by a variety of ritual practices. Human sacrifice to a death/fertility goddess was practiced until the1st century BC. As nature became less fearsome, and more cultivated, the nature goddess became less powerful and the rites became less bloodthirsty.

Although it was chosen by the early christian authorities as a day to honour Philip and James - two saints who it was thought might appeal especially to the lower orders, who celebrated May Day - unlike other special days in the pagan year May Day was never incorporated into the official calendar by being reinvented as a major christian feast.

Nevertheless in medieval times May Day remained the favourite holiday of many English villages. No work was done, authority was mocked and ignored, and temporary sexual liaisons unsanctioned by church and state were enjoyed, along with much drunkenness and revelry. People gathered spring flowers to decorate their homes and danced around a maypole or 'totem', holding the ends of ribbons that streamed from its top. The earliest known picture of a maypole is taken from a drawing of a window in Betley Hall, Staffordshire, England, erected in the mid-1460s during the rule of Edward IV.

Other European countries had their own May Day customs. In Italy, youths serenaded their sweethearts. In Switzerland, a May pine tree was placed under a young woman's window. A German man would secretly plant a May tree in front of the window of his heart's desire. In the Czech lands, youths placed maypoles before their valentine's home at night.

As capitalism emerged in Britain, the ruling class abolished large numbers of feast and holy days as a way of increasing the amount of work done, and thus the absolute surplus value extracted from the producers. They also strove to impose the disciplines of timekeeping and their 'work ethic' on their labourers.

As early as 1550 an act of parliament demanded that maypoles be destroyed, and outlawed games. Philip Stubs, in Anatomy of abuses (1585) wrote: "and then fall they to banquet and feast, to leape and daunce about it, as the heathen people did at the dedication of their idolles." In 1644 the puritans in England abolished May Day altogether. For them the festival was an obnoxious example of paganism and worldliness. One of them wrote a propaganda work called Funebria Florae, or the downfall of the May games. He attacked "ignorants, atheists, papists, drunkards, swearers, swashbucklers, maid-marians, morrice-dancers, maskers, mummers, maypole stealers, health-drinkers, together with a rapscallion rout of fiddlers, fools, fighters, gamesters, lewd women, light women, contemmers of magistracy, affronters of ministry, disobedients to parents, mis-spenders of time, and abusers of the creature, etc."

May Day continued to be celebrated by the common people in defiance of church and state authority and, when the industrial revolution began to concentrate them in factories, the focus of May Day resistance shifted from opposition to enclosures and other encroachments on ancient rights to a struggle for better working conditions, higher wages and a shorter working day.

The association of the international workers' movement with May Day began in the USA in 1886, when the revolutionary Knights of Labour organisation and socialist trade unions called for a strike on May 1 to fight for an eight-hour day. Two years earlier, in 1884, the convention of the Federation of Organised Trades raised a resolution that was to act as a beacon to the whole working class: "That eight hours shall constitute a legal days labour from and after May 1 1886".

This call was taken up by the labour movement with the creation of Eight Hour Leagues, which won significant concessions out of the bosses, and produced a doubling of trade union membership. On May 1 1886, the American Federation of Labor declared a national strike to demand an eight-hour working day and 350,000 workers across the country responded. In particular, the city of Chicago was virtually paralysed: railroads, stockyards, and other businesses were forced to close. Thousands of migrants, many from Germany, had poured into Chicago after the American Civil War, and by the 1880s it was already a focus of industrialisation, and a hotbed of class struggle. In 1855 the Chicago police used Gatling guns against the workers who protested against the closing of the beer gardens.

In the Bread Riot of 1872 the police clubbed hungry people in a tunnel under the river. In the 1877 railway strike, federal troops fought workers at the 'Battle of the Viaduct'. Workers employed by Cyrus McCormick, who manufactured mechanical reapers, started the movement for an eight-hour day when they went on strike on May Day 1867.

During the May Day 1886 strike Chicago police fired randomly into crowds of strikers. Four molders whom McCormick locked out were shot dead. Angry workers began to call for armed retaliation. On May 4 1886 several thousand people gathered near Haymarket Square to hear August Spies, a newspaperman, speak about the shootings at the McCormick works.

Albert Parsons, a typographer and labour leader, also spoke. (Later, at his trial, he said: "What is socialism or anarchism? Briefly stated it is the right of the toilers to the free and equal use of the tools of production and the right of the producers to their product.") He was followed by 'Good-Natured Sam' Fielden, who as a child had worked in the textile factories of Lancashire. He was a methodist preacher and labour organiser. By the time he finished speaking the numbers had dwindled.

Nevertheless 176 policemen were ordered in to scatter the crowd. A stick of dynamite was thrown, killing seven policemen and injuring 10 times as many. The police responded by shooting at the demonstrators, killing several and injuring over 200. In the following weeks, the police carried out systematic raids on strikers and trade unionists, breaking up meetings with violence. With no clues as to the source of the bomb, police arrested eight revolutionary labour leaders, seven of whom had not even been present in Haymarket at the time. In the absence of any evidence linking them to the bomb, the 'Chicago Eight' were tried solely on the basis of their political beliefs. Four were hanged on Black Friday - November 11 1887.

Lucy Parsons was the widow of one of them. She set out to tell the world the true story of her husband, "whose only crime was that he lived in advance of his time". She went to England and encouraged English workers to make May Day an international holiday for shortening the hours of work.

Her friend, William Morris, wrote a poem around this time: "Workers, They are few, we are many: and yet, O our mother, Many years were wordless and nought was our deed, But now the word flitteth from brother to brother: We have furrowed the acres and scattered the seed. Earth Win on then unyielding, through fair and foul weather, And pass not a day that your deed shall avail. And in hope every spring-tide come gather together That unto the Earth ye may tell all your tale."

The Second International was founded in 1889, under the banner of workers' internationalism. A key resolution of the first congress, proposed by the American labour federation, was that in memory of the Chicago martyrs, workers in every country would strike and demonstrate for the eight-hour day every May 1, which would become known as international workers' day, a day of international working class solidarity.

On May Day 1890 workers struck all over Europe, with 100,000 demonstrating in Barcelona, 120,000 in Stockholm, and 8,000 in Warsaw. Thousands stayed at home in Austria and Hungary, where demonstrations were banned. Strikes spread throughout Italy and France. Ten workers were shot dead in northern France.

In the words of the Austrian social democratic leader, Adler, "Entire layers of the working class with which we would otherwise have made no contact have been shaken out of their lethargy." In Britain and Germany, huge demonstrations were held on the Sunday following. Although they had not all taken place on May Day itself, the importance of these demonstrations was not lost on Frederick Engels, who had witnessed the political lull in the British labour movement since the great Chartist days of the 1840s: "More than 100,000 in a column, on May 4 1890, the English working class joined up in the great international army, its long winter sleep broken at last. The grandchildren of the old Chartists are entering the line of battle."

In Europe in the early years of the 20th century May Day demonstrations were often the scenes of violent clashes between workers and state forces. 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, 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.

Tsar Nicholas II was forced by the revolutionary situation in Russia to grant some of these demands in October of that year. Thus May Day was highly significant for the Bolsheviks. Lenin had penned an important May Day pamphlet for the Russian factory workers in 1896, and in response to the May Day demonstrations in Kharkov in 1900 he wrote about the need for a revolutionary organisation to lead the workers.

In the early years of Soviet power May 1 was seen as symbolising the triumph of the working class, and it became a big national celebration, second in importance only to the anniversary of the revolution of November 7. Subsequently May Day was transformed into an official holiday.

Naturally the outer trappings of May Day were usurped by the Stalinite regime and became a celebration of state power and military might. This kind of May Day was observed in the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991. 'Official' communists yearning for the good old days still march in Moscow and other Russian cities on May Day. Tragically since the 1920s the working class movement has suffered a worldwide setback. Class independence was subsumed by pro-capitalist social democracy on the one hand and pro-Stalin 'official communism' on the other.

May Day became less and less a demonstration of working class independence and the fight for human liberation. More and more a contest between the competing anti-working class ideologies. This was not a straightforward process. After all 'official communism' was a highly contradictory phenomenon. Programmatically it dreamt of reproducing the USSR's bureaucratic socialism, often through some kind of parliamentary road.

At the same time its militants organised and gave leadership to political struggles, not least in the field of trade unions. May Day reflected this contradiction. Once again the USA led the way. President Grover Cleveland tried to separate off US workers from the international working class by announcing that the first Monday in September would be Labour Day in America, a date selected to reject any identification with socialism and communism.

However, neither labour militancy nor public interest in May Day celebrations in America showed any signs of abating in the 1920s and 30s. May Day rallies were still held, for example, in New York City's Union Square every year. Clearly then the simple displacement of Labour Day to September was not sufficient for the US ruling class: conservatives began renaming May Day in an effort to finally erase this unsettling symbol of working class consciousness.

In 1947, amidst the anti-communist cold war hysteria, the US Veterans of Foreign Wars renamed May 1 'Loyalty Day' and a joint session of Congress later made the pronouncement official. Loyalty Day was explicitly designed as a weapon against labour, and specifically the Communist Party of USA, by encouraging citizens to reaffirm their commitment to the state. During the 1950s, Loyalty Day flourished at the expense of traditional May Day events.

For example, the Loyalty Day parade in New York City, one of the largest in the country, was designed to lure citizens away from the long-standing Union Square rallies and to distract attention from the Communist Party-sponsored march on the same day. Ten years later, however, the association of such parades with support for the American war in Vietnam led to a drastic decline in public participation across the USA.

Nevertheless, despite this waning interest, these conservative holidays actually succeeded in their objective; for, if Loyalty Day has now been all but officially forgotten, so has the meaning and American origin of International Workers' Day.