May Day

May Day, an old celebration of spring (in the northern hemisphere) has progressed through to a day for radicals to stick it up the bosses and conservative governments. Once, all of society took part in the celebrations with Maypoles and their promise of new love and fertility being enjoyed by all. This enjoyment being enhanced when the Catholic Church, amongst other social engineers, banned the day.

Rosa Luxemburg claims the modern idea of May Day and anarchy all started in Australia The happy idea of using a proletarian holiday celebration as a means to attain the eight-hour day was first born in Australia. The workers there decided in 1856 to organize a day of complete stoppage together with meetings and entertainment as a demonstration in favor of the eight-hour day. The day of this celebration was to be April 21. At first, the Australian workers intended this only for the year 1856. But this first celebration had such a strong effect on the proletarian masses of Australia, enlivening them and leading to new agitation, that it was decided to repeat the celebration every year.

Don’t you just love the proletarian masses of Australia? If it started in Australia, the Americans, in their more robust approach to anarchy. took the eight-hour day and broadened it to include mayhem. The new idea of Mayday, captured by radical workers, was celebrated in the US in 1886 when someone, most probably a radical worker, exploded a bomb amongst the crowd, killing eight. The modern May Day was born as both a legitimate ideal (the eight hour day) and as a platform for radicalism. At Socialist Worker On Line they brazenly discuss how the bomb was most probably thrown by a radical, killing and maiming cops but it was OK because, after all they were cops and represented the mongrel bosses. I might add the cops had ‘without warning, … opened fire at the workers, killing four and injuring many more’ Maybe the fact that literally thousands of workers were busy attacking them had some bearing on this. At The Green Left Weekly they conveniently forget to mention the bomb thrown by the more radical of the workers but hey, I’m not surprised.

On May 1, 1886, Chicago workers led by the American Federation of Labor struck for an eight-hour working day. The capitalist response was to have the police harass the workers, trying to intimidate them. Three days later, workers peacefully rallied in Haymarket Square in defiance of the harassment, only to be fired upon by the police with several killed. Four of the workers’ leaders were executed by the capitalist courts on November 11, 1887.

It was anything but a peaceful rally. May Day has long been a focal point for demonstrations by various communist, socialist, and anarchist groups culminating in the USSR rebadging it as Workers Solidarity Day and parading millions of men and a stupifying amount of miltary hardware every year to put the wind up the Western World. I often wondered what the grumpy old men on the balconies were discussing. Maybe their Gulag figures…stats are good, Joe told me he has murdered over a million this year And in Berlin, for example;

…the Berlin May Day rioting has become less overtly political and more oriented towards generally destructive behavior by individuals with little interest in politics, though political demonstrators are still a factor.

The socialists in London rebadged May Day as the International Workers Day and they claim the first such event was held in London in 1890. Everybody claims to be first to be the most radical In Australia, thousands of workers (out of a workforce of 10 million) flocked to May Day rallies across Australia on Sunday to protest against the Howard government’s planned industrial relations reforms. May Day has come a long way from the hopes of new growth and love in springtime to the anarchy it generally offers today. Still, it gives the ABC something to work on for their anti-Howard programme.