Left after Breakfast

May Day is our holiday. It it hasn’t been stripped of its meaning and commercialised by corporate interests. Indeed, the same spirit of struggle that emboldened the marchers in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, where May Day began over a century ago, inflames the spirit of the celebrations here in Melbourne and around the world.

All of the privileges workers enjoy today—a minimum wage, safety laws, an eight-hour day—came about only with the sacrifice and struggle of the workers who came before us. Bosses didn’t suddenly stop sending 6 year olds down mines and locking workers inside factories for 14 hours at a time. And they didn’t stop because of the essential goodness in their hearts. No, they stopped because workers fought, struggled and died for better wages and conditions.

Although the mainstream media gleefully feeds our collective amnesia, workers on this May Day should remember our past and realise that we too are part of an ongoing struggle to bring about an end to the exploitation of labour around the world.

Here in Melbouirne we celebrate the Eight Hour Day we fought for and won in 1856 – after a great struggle lead by the stoneworkers in Collingwood and, incidentally, including my great-great-grandfather, a quarryman in those passionate times.

Thirty years later in USA the Federation of Organised Trades and Labour Unions adopted a resolution stating that beginning from May 1, 1886, “eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s work” and workers would strike at companies that did not recognize the eight-hour day. By May 1, 1886, some 200,000 workers were on strike. An additional 340,000 workers in the industrial cities turned out for local parades and rallies.

One of the most militant campaigns occurred in Chicago. The syndicalist International Working People’s Association—promoting equal rights and an end to racism and the class system—had successfully organised huge numbers of workers.

50,000 workers went on strike, with tens of thousands attending the city’s May Day parade. The IWPA’s successful broad-based appeal worried businesses and the government alike. This fear resulted in the expansion of both the police and the militias. They were met, as we know, by brutal repression and eventually some were executed.

What the authorities and a stacked judicial system couldn’t kill was the legacy of resistance that they passed on to us.

On this May Day the struggle for peace – a struggle that has always been woven into the fabric of the class struggle – occupies a privileged place. It’s well that it does, for we are living in exceedingly dangerous times.

The use of immensely powerful conventional and non-conventional weapons is becoming the main instrument to resolve disputes in the world. Whole nations and peoples are demonised as a first step in preemptive war.

International politics is being cast as a struggle over moral absolutes that push the world into unending and, eventually, calamitous war.

Today we see a dangerous new turn in the world, with the horrifying ascendancy of the most right-wing sections of transnational capital. The extreme right wing grabbed all the main levers of power, culminating with the takeover of the US Presidency in 2000.

But we remember the message of May Day. Don’t mourn for me, organise