By Maureen Wade, chair, Birmingham Unison retired members section
There will be fewer May Day demonstrations celebrating International Workers’ Day around the world because of the current lock-down. But at least the Covid-19 restrictions bring into focus what the first of May was all about: time.
In the lock-down countries, the heroes of the hour, the key workers, have been working all the hours they can; not out of personal greed for overtime, but in solidarity and defence of their communities, even though they face the possibility of illness or death.
But for the majority, we face enforced idleness. Certainly not for all, but for many, it has provided the chance to re-engage with our long-lost or buried talents, whether the arts, literature, crafts, music – everything that is normally ground out of us by the daily cycle of work, rents, mortgages, bills, credit: ‘all the old crap’ as Karl Marx succinctly put it.
Squeezing out every last drop
The early socialist movement understood how fledgling capitalism was treating the new working classes as no more than cattle, grinding them into an early grave, as it squeezed the last drop of energy out of them, to man the wheels of industry and grease the pockets of the factory owners. The impoverished masses were alienated, from not only wider society, but also their own personal potential. It was a cycle of work, sleep, die, and make way for the next unhappy labour unit.
The first to fight back were the carpenters in Philadelphia, who went on strike for the 10-hour day, way back in 1791. By the 1830s this had become a general demand of the US labour movement, under the slogan: “From 6 to 6, ten hours work and two hours for meals”. The movement exploded further after the American Civil War, with the demand now for the eight-hour day. A million people lost their lives in the war, leading to the emancipation of the slaves: the reasoning was, if we were expected to give our lives to free the slaves, the fight must be now to free us from the slavery of capital. In 1866, the General Congress of Labour in Baltimore declared: “The first and great necessity of the present, to free this country from capitalist slavery, is the passing of a law by which eight hours shall be the normal day in all States of the American Union.”
8-hour day strike rocks Chicago
They were still fighting for this 20 years later. On 1 May in 1886, a general strike for the eight-hour day rocked Chicago. At a rally in the Haymarket area, someone – never identified – threw a bomb, and the police responded by opening fire. Hundreds of labour activists were rounded up by the US state, and four were executed on trumped-up charges.
The incident sent shockwaves through the international labour movement. In Paris in 1889, at the first Congress of the Second International – to which the modern-day Labour Party is still affiliated – a call was made for international demonstrations to be held on the 1890 anniversary of the Chicago protests. May Day was born. The Congress also declared that the Red Flag should be the symbol of the international socialist movement, representing the blood of our ‘martyred dead’. This pleased the Russian delegates in particular, as the old Russian word for red is the same as that for something that is beautiful, good or honourable – krasni.
May Day in Dublin, 1918
May Day has since heralded key events in our history. The 1918 May Day general strike in Dublin and southern Ireland paralysed the British Army during the fight for national liberation. The 1919 May Day parade in Belfast – following the earlier general strike – saw over 100,000 Catholic and Protestant workers march together: such was the mood for solidarity rather than sectarianism, it was agreed that the many Catholic and Protestant marching bands would refrain from playing Nationalist or Unionist tunes, but instead play the popular music hall song of the moment, Yes, we have no bananas.
In 1926 in Britain, it heralded the nine days of the General Strike, while in 1968, May Day saw the following day unleash the ‘May Events’ in Paris.
May Day demonstrations are often a barometer of the consciousness of the labour movement. There have been some very forlorn events. I can remember a soggy march down the London Embankment in 1983, with a very poor turnout and a mood to match. Thatcher was in her ascendency, it was clear the Labour right wing were about to take control of the party, while academics like Eric Hobsbawm were telling us the working class was finished.
The following year was a very different picture – we were joined by thousands of angry miners, who swelled May Day marches across the country as the national miners’ strike of 1984-85 got underway. ‘A week is a long time in politics’ and 12 months even more. We must always keep a perspective.
Strikes and mass protests
Just as we need time for ourselves, the movement needs time to learn too. Our forerunners did, when they learnt that strikes and mass protests can win reforms for a temporary period, but permanent change needed a political solution, and a workers’ party to achieve it. The Haymarket protesters learnt this. After the 1886 strikes for the eight-hour day, ‘Labour’ Parties sprung up within only a few months. They won huge votes and, in some places, won seats. In New York, for example, the United Labour Party candidate came a close second in the race for the city’s mayor, pushing the Republicans into third place.
Engels defended US Labour Party
Their policies, however, were a confused mix of radicalism and reformism, which attracted scorn from some European socialists, who wanted a theoretically pure political party immediately. Frederick Engels came to the defence of the Americans. In a letter in 1886, he wrote:
“The first great step of importance for every country newly entering into the movement is always the organisation of the workers as an independent political party. And this step has been taken, far more rapidly than we had a right to hope, and that is the main thing. That the first programme of this party is still confused and highly deficient… these are inevitable evils but also only transitionary ones. The masses must have time and opportunity to develop and they can only have the opportunity when they have their own movement – in which they are driven further by their own mistakes and learn wisdom by hurting themselves” (Letter to Sorge, London 29 November 1886).
This May Day remember – it may not always feel like it, but time is on our side.
April 30, 2020
