The Meaning of May Day

BY DOUG LORIMER

This week we commemorate May Day — May 1, 1890 — when the socialist workers in western Europe staged an internationally coordinated day of street demonstrations to demand the legislative restriction of work-time to no more than eight hours a day.

That first May Day expressed a conception of working-class struggle that intertwined three cardinal ideas.

First, that the struggle to free labour from capitalist exploitation can only be achieved through workers' own, organised, self-activity.

Secondly, that for this organised self-activity to even begin to free labour from capitalist exploitation it must take the form of a movement that champions the interests of labour as a whole, as a class, against the interests of the capitalist class. That is, it must be a political movement, a movement against the political policies and the political power of the capitalists, against the governments and laws that protect the capitalist private-profit system.

And, thirdly, that the struggle to free labour from capitalist exploitation is not a national, but a social problem, embracing all countries that are dominated by the capitalist private-profit system, a system that is by its very nature an international system, and, therefore requires solidarity between the workers of all nationalities.

Marxism and reformism

These three crucial ideas, embodied in that first May Day, express the conception of the working-class movement that Karl Marx first set forth in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 and again, in more abbreviated form, in the preamble to the general rules of the first international organisation of labour, the International Working Men's Association, founded in London in 1864.

This, of course, should come as no surprise, because that first May Day was organised by the Marxist-led workers' parties of western Europe upon the initiative of an international labour congress held in Paris in July 1889.

This congress was convened as one of 69 international congresses held in connection with the International Exhibition arranged by the French government to commemorate the centenary of the beginning of the Great French Revolution.

In fact, there were two labour congresses held in Paris in July 1889. One was arranged by the British trade unions and the French reformist socialists, or "Possibilists" as they were then called. The other was called by the German Marxists and arranged by the French Marxists, or "Impossibilists" as they were called because they rejected the reformist illusion that labour could be freed simply through trade union action or parliamentary reforms.

It was the congress of the Marxists which issued the call for May 1, 1890 to be an international day of struggle for an eight-hour day law.

Ironically, it was also the congress of the Marxists in Paris in July 1889 that later came to be regarded as the founding congress of the second international labour association, the Labour and Socialist International. Within a generation of this congress, the conception of the working-class movement expressed by the Possibilists — that labour could be freed from capitalist exploitation solely by gradual and piecemeal reforms — had come to dominate the Socialist International, an organisation which still exists and which is officially represented in this country by the Australian Labor Party.

The choice of May 1, 1890, as the day on which to hold an international demonstration in favour of an eight-hour work day came at the initiative of the American Federation of Labor. On May 1, 1886, 200,000 workers organised by the AFL staged a one-day strike to demand that their employers individually agree to an eight-hour work day. Two years later, the AFL decided to repeat the action on May 1.

The 400 delegates at the international congress of Marxists in Paris in 1889 decided to designate May 1, 1890, as an international working-class holiday in solidarity with the US workers' action.

The AFL later dissociated itself from this international day of working-class solidarity and instead promoted the idea of a purely national holiday — Labor Day — to celebrate the achievements of trade unions through the reformist social partnership of labour and capital.

Origins in Australia

The idea behind May Day goes back even further. Rosa Luxemburg, the great German Marxist who was murdered in 1919 by soldiers acting on the orders of a government headed by the German "Possibilists", or Social-Democrats as they were officially called, explained it like this:

"The inspired thought of introducing a proletarian holiday as a means of obtaining the eight-hour working day first originated in Australia. As early as 1856, the workers there resolved to call for one day of complete work stoppage; the day to be spent in meetings and entertainment instead — as a demonstration for the eight-hour day. The 21st of April was designated as this holiday.

"In the beginning, the Australian workers thought of instituting such a holiday but once, in the year 1856. But even this celebration made such an impression on the proletarian masses of Australia that it was decided to repeat the holiday annually.

"... the idea of a proletarian holiday was accepted very quickly and began to spread from Australia to other countries ...

"The first to follow the example of the Australian workers were the Americans. They designated the first of May as the day of general work stoppage in the year of 1886."

Unfortunately, the Australian labour movement also later followed the US movement in abandoning May Day as a day of working-class struggle in favour of a Labour Day celebration of "pure" trade unionism or, as it has become today, a capitalist-sanctioned nationalist celebration of business unionism.

Throughout the world class-conscious workers observe May Day as a day on which we commemorate the battles fought and the sufferings endured not simply in the struggle for the eight-hour day, but in the struggle to free labour from capitalist exploitation everywhere in the world.

Solidarity and struggle

On this coming May Day, class-conscious workers in Australia can take pride in the fact that since May Day 1999 we have undertaken actions that embodied each of the three themes of the original May Day.

Through the organised self-activity — the trade union bans and street demonstrations — that we carried out in September last year in solidarity with the workers and labouring farmers of East Timor, we built a political movement that forced the Australian government to end its 24-year policy of supporting the Indonesian capitalist elite's enslavement of East Timor. As a result of that political movement, labour in East Timor has more freedom to struggle against capitalist exploitation.

Of course, freedom to struggle against exploitation does not guarantee success in the struggle to be free.

Workers in Australia long ago won the freedom to politically struggle against capitalist exploitation. They used that freedom to win reforms that improved their living standards and working conditions far above those of their forebears and of most people in the world.

But they have lacked the class consciousness and organisation required to use this freedom to build the sort of political movement needed to free themselves from capitalist rule and capitalist exploitation.

And today, this is a failing which, saddled with leaders who think that labour can only achieve what capital says is possible within the private-profit system, is leading to the rolling back of those working conditions and to the steady lowering of their living standards.

If the working-class movement in Australia is to reverse this situation it will have to adopt the conception of working-class struggle that inspired the first international May Day 110 years ago.

In 1924, when the NSW Labor Council was, for a brief time, inspired by that conception, it issued the following appeal, which has lost none of its relevance today:

"The Australian movement desires not only that the [labour] day [celebration] be fixed for May 1, but that the whole character and purpose of the demonstration should be changed. Dinners, sports, picnics — these are not good enough. The movement is worth more than this. Let our May Day certainly be a day or rejoicing, but let it also be a day in which all active elements of the movement take stock of the work of the last year, of the prospects ahead, and the program required. Let it also be a day of demonstrations which express a growing class-consciousness of the working class and a declaration of war upon capitalist society. We want a labour day which will give the movement a chance to unite for a real move forward on the basis of all the more pressing interests of the workers. Forward to a new battle! Forward to world revolution!"

[Abridged from a speech presented on behalf of the Democratic Socialist Party to the Worker Communist Party of Iraq and Iran's May Day dinner in Sydney on April 29.]

