wrote this essay in 1994 about the culture and practice of May Day as an International holiday and how it developed over a number of years.
Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm's account of the international celebration of Mayday.
In 1990 Michael Ignatieff, writing about Easter in the
Observer,
observed that 'secular societies have never succeeded in providing
alternatives to religious rituals'. And he pointed out that the French
Revolution 'may have turned subjects into citizens, may have put
liberte, egalite and
fraternite
on the lintel of every school and put the monasteries to the sack, but
apart from the Fourteenth of July it never made a dent on the old
Christian calendar'. My present subject is perhaps the only
unquestionable dent made by a secular movement in the Christian or any
other official calendar, a holiday established not in one or two
countries, but in 1990 officially in 107 states. What is more, it is an
occasion established not by the power of governments or conquerors, but
by an entirely unofficial movement of poor men and women. I am speaking
of May Day, or more precisely of the First of May, the international
festival of the working-class movement, whose centenary ought to have
been celebrated in 1990, for it was inaugurated in 1890.
'Ought to be' is the correct phrase, for, apart from the historians,
few have shown much interest in this occasion, not even in those
socialist parties which are the lineal descendants of those which, at
the inaugural congresses of what became the Second International, in
1889 called for a simultaneous international workers' demonstration in
favour of a law to limit the working day to eight hours to be held on 1
May 1890. This is true even of those parties actually represented at the
1889 congresses, and which are still in existence. These parties of the
Second International or their descendants today provide the governments
or the main oppositions or alternative governments almost everywhere in
Europe west of what until recently was the self-described region of
'really existing socialism'. One might have expected them to show
greater pride, or even merely greater interest in their past.
The strongest political reaction in Britain to the centenary of May
Day came from Sir John Hackett, a former general and, I am sorry to say,
former head of a college of the University of London, who called for
the abolition of May Day, which he appeared to regard as some sort of
Soviet invention. It ought not, he felt, to survive the fall of
international communism. However, the origin of the European Community's
spring May Day holiday is the opposite of Bolshevik or even social
democratic. It goes back to the anti-socialist politicians who,
recognizing how deeply the roots of May Day reached into the soil of the
western working classes, wanted to counter the appeal of labour and
socialist movements by co-opting their festival and turning it into
something else. To cite a French parliamentary proposal of April 1920,
supported by forty-one deputies united by nothing except
not being socialists:
Quote:
This holiday should not contain any
element of jealousy and hatred [the code word for class struggle]. All
classes, if classes can still be said to exist, and all productive
energies of the nation should fraternize, inspired by the same idea and
the same ideal.
Those who, before the European Community, went furthest in co¬-opting
May Day were on the extreme right, not the left. Hitler's government
was the first after the USSR to make the First of May into an official
National Day of Labour. Marshal Petain's Vichy government declared the
First of May a Festival of Labour and Concord and is said to have been
inspired to do so by the Phalangist May Day of Franco's Spain, where the
Marshal had been an admiring ambassador. Indeed, the European Economic
Community which made May Day into a public holiday was a body composed
not, in spite of Mrs Thatcher's views on the subject, of socialist but
of predominantly anti-socialist governments. Western official May Days
were recognitions of the need to come to terms with the tradition of the
unofficial May Days and to detach it from labour movements, class
consciousness and class struggle. But how did it come about that this
tradition was so strong that even its enemies thought they had to take
it over, even when, like Hitler, Franco and Petain, they destroyed the
socialist labour movement?
The extraordinary thing about the evolution of this institution is
that it was unintended and unplanned. To this extent it was not so much
an 'invented tradition' as a suddenly erupting one. The immediate origin
of May Day is not in dispute. It was a resolution passed by one of the
two rival founding congresses of the International - the Marxist one -
in Paris in July 1889, centenary year of the French Revolution. This
called for an international demonstration by workers on the same day,
when they would put the demand for a Legal Eight Hour Day to their
respective public and other authorities. And since the American
Federation of Labor had already decided to hold such a demonstration on 1
May 1890, this day was to be chosen for the international
demonstration. Ironically, in the USA itself May Day was never to
establish itself as it did elsewhere, if only because an increasingly
official public holiday of labour, Labor Day, the first Monday in
September, was already in existence.
Scholars have naturally investigated the origins of this resolution,
and how it related to the earlier history of the struggle for the Legal
Eight-Hour Day in the USA and elsewhere, but these matters do not
concern us here. What is relevant to the present argument is how what
the resolution envisaged differed from what actually came about. Let us
note three facts about the original proposal. First, the call was simply
for a single, one-off, international manifestation. There is no
suggestion that it should be repeated, let alone become a regular annual
event. Second, there was no suggestion that it should be a particularly
festive or ritual occasion, although the labour movements of all
countries were authorized to 'realize this demonstration in such ways as
are made necessary by the situation in their country'. This, of course,
was an emergency exit left for the sake of the German Social Democratic
Party, which was still at this time illegal under Bismarck's
anti-socialist law. Third, there is no sign that this resolution was
seen as particularly important at the time. On the contrary, the
contemporary press reports barely mention it, if at all, and, with one
exception (curiously enough a bourgeois paper), without the proposed
date. Even the official Congress Report, published by the German Social
Democratic Party, merely mentions the proposers of the resolution and
prints its text without any comment or apparent sense that this was a
matter of Significance. In short, as Edouard Vaillant, one of the more
eminent and politically sensitive delegates to the Congress, recalled a
few years later: 'Who could have predicted ... the rapid rise of May
Day?'
Its rapid rise and institutionalization were certainly due to the
extraordinary success of the first May Day demonstrations in 1890, at
least in Europe west of the Russian Empire and the Balkans. The
socialists had chosen the right moment to found or, if we prefer,
reconstitute an International. The first May Day coincided with a
triumphant advance of labour strength and confidence in numerous
countries. To cite merely two familiar examples: the outburst of the New
Unionism in Britain which followed the Dock Strike of 1889, and the
socialist victory in Germany, where the Reichstag refused to continue
Bismarck's anti-socialist law in January 1890, with the result that a
month later the Social Democratic Party doubled its vote at the general
election and emerged with just under 20 per cent of the total vote. To
make a success of mass demonstrations at such a moment was not
difficult, for both activists and militants put their hearts into them,
while masses of ordinary workers joined them to celebrate a sense of
victory, power, recognition and hope.
And yet the
extent to which
the workers took part in these meetings amazed those who had called upon
them to do so, notably the 300,000 who filled Hyde Park in London,
which thus, for the first and last time, provided the largest
demonstration of the day. For, while all socialist parties and
organizations had naturally organized meets, only some had recognized
the full potential of the occasion and put their all into it from the
start. The Austrian Social Democratic Party was exceptional in its
immediate sense of the mass mood, with the result that, as Frederick
Engels observed a few weeks later, 'on the continent it was Austria, and
in Austria Vienna, which celebrated this festival in the most splendid
and appropriate manner'.
Indeed, in several countries, so far from throwing themselves
wholeheartedly into the preparation of May Day, local parties and
movements were, as usual in the politics of the left, handicapped by
ideological arguments and divisions about the legitimate form or forms
of such demonstrations - we shall return to them below - or by sheer
caution. In the face of a highly nervous, even on occasion hysterical,
reaction to the prospect of the day by governments, middle-¬class
opinion and employers who threatened police repression and
victimization, responsible socialist leaders often preferred to avoid
excessively provocative forms of confrontation. This was notably the
case in Germany, where the ban on the party had only just been revoked
after eleven years of illegality. 'We have every reason to keep the
masses under control at the First of May demonstration,' wrote the party
leader August Bebel to Engels. 'We must avoid conflicts.' And Engels
agreed.
The crucial matter at issue was whether the workers should be asked
to demonstrate in working time, that is to go on strike, for in 1890 the
First of May fell on a Thursday. Basically, cautious parties and strong
established trade unions - unless they deliberately wanted to be or
found themselves engaged in industrial action, as was the plan of the
American Federation of Labor - did not see why they should stick their
own and their members' necks out for the sake of a symbolic gesture.
They therefore tended to opt for a demonstration on the first
Sunday
in May and not on the first day of the month. This was and remained the
British option, which was why the first great May Day took place on 4
May. However, it was also the preference of the German party, although
there, unlike Britain, in practice it was the First of May that
prevailed. In fact, the question was to be formally discussed at the
Brussels International Socialist Congress of 1891, with the British and
Germans opposing the French and Austrians on this point, and being
outvoted. Once again this issue, like so many other aspects of May Day,
was the accidental by¬product of the international choice of the date.
The original resolution made no reference at all to stopping work. The
problem arose simply because the first May Day fell on a weekday, as
everybody planning the demonstration immediately and necessarily
discovered.
Caution dictated otherwise. But what actually made May Day was
precisely the choice of symbol over practical reason. It was the act of
symbolically stopping work which turned May Day into more than just
another demonstration, or even another commemorative occasion. It was in
the countries or cities where parties, even against hesitant unions,
insisted on the symbolic strike that May Day really became a central
part of working-class life and of labour identity, as it never really
did in Britain, in spite of its brilliant start. For refraining from
work on a working day was both an assertion of working-class power - in
fact, the quintessential assertion of this power - and the essence of
freedom, namely not being forced to labour in the sweat of one's brow,
but choosing what to do in the company of family and friends. It was
thus both a gesture of class assertion and class struggle and a holiday:
a sort of trailer for the good life to come after the emancipation of
labour. And, of course, in the circumstances of 1890 it was also a
celebration of victory, a winner's lap of honour round the stadium. Seen
in this light May Day carried with it a rich cargo of emotion and hope.
This is what Victor Adler realized when, against advice from the
German Social Democratic Party, he insisted that the Austrian party must
provoke precisely the confrontation which Bebel wanted to avoid. Like
Bebel he recognized the mood of euphoria, of mass conversion, almost of
messianic expectation which swept through so many working classes at
this time. 'The elections have turned the
heads of the less politically educated [
geschult]
masses. They believe they have only to want something and everything
can be achieved,' as Bebel put it. Unlike Bebel, Adler still needed to
mobilize these sentiments to build a mass party out of a combination of
activists and rising mass sympathy. Moreover, unlike the Germans,
Austrian workers did not yet have the vote. The movement's strength
could not therefore be demonstrated electorally as yet. Again, the
Scandinavians understood the mobilizing potential of direct action when,
after the first May Day, they voted in favour of a repetition of the
demonstration in 1891, 'especially if combined with a cessation of work,
and not merely simple expressions of opinion'. The International itself
took the same view when in 1891 it voted (against the British and
German delegates as we have seen) to hold the demonstration on the First
of May and 'to cease work wherever it is not impossible to do so.
This did not mean that the international movement called for a
general strike as such, for, with all the boundless expectations of the
moment, organized workers were in practice aware both of their strength
and of their weakness. Whether people should strike on May Day, or could
be expected to give up a day's pay for the demonstration, were
questions widely discussed in the pubs and bars of proletarian Hamburg,
according to the plain-clothes policemen sent by the Senate to listen to
workers' conversations in that massively 'red' city. It was understood
that many workers would be unable to come out, even if they wanted to.
Thus the railwaymen sent a cable to the first Copenhagen May Day which
was read out and cheered: 'Since we cannot be present at the meeting
because of the pressure exerted by those in power, we will not omit
fully supporting the demand for the eight-hour working day. However,
where employers knew that workers were strong and solidly committed,
they would often tacitly accept that the day could be taken off. This
was often the case in Austria. Thus, in spite of the clear instruction
from the Ministry of the Interior that processions were banned and
taking time off was not to be permitted; and in spite of the formal
decision by employers
not to consider the First of May a holiday - and sometimes even to substitute the day
before
the First of May as a works holiday - the State Armaments Factory in
Steyr, Upper Austria, shut down on the First of May 1890 and every year
thereafter. In any case, enough workers came out in enough countries to
make the stop-work movement plausible. After all, in Copenhagen about 40
per cent of the city's workers were actually present at the
demonstration in 1890.
Given this remarkable and often unexpected success of the first May
Day it was natural that a repeat performance should be demanded. As we
have already seen, the united Scandinavian movements asked for it in the
summer of 1890, as did the Spaniards. By the end of the year the bulk
of the European parties had followed suit. That the occasion should
become a regular annual event mayor may not have been suggested first by
the militants of Toulouse who passed a resolution to this effect in
1890,but to no one's surprise the Brussels congress of the International
in 1891 committed the movement to a regular annual May Day. However, it
also did two other things, while insisting, as we have seen, that May
Day must be celebrated by a single demonstration on the first day of the
month, whatever that day might be, in order to emphasize 'its true
character as an economic demand for the eight-hour day and an assertion
of class struggle'.It added at least two other demands to the eight-hour
day: labour legislation and the fight against war. Although it was
henceforth an official part of May Day, in itself the peace slogan was
not really integrated into the popular May Day tradition, except as
something that reinforced the international character of the occasion.
However, in addition to expanding the programmatic content of the
demonstration, the resolution included another innovation. It spoke of
'celebrating' May Day. The movement had come officially to recognize it
not only as a political activity but as a festival.
we have already seen, the united Scandinavian movements asked for it
in the summer of 1890, as did the Spaniards. By the end of the year the
bulk of the European parties had followed suit. That the occasion should
become a regular annual event mayor may not have been suggested first
by the militants of Toulouse who passed a resolution to this effect in
1890, but to no one's surprise the Brussels congress of the
International in 1891 committed the movement to a regular annual May
Day. However, it also did two other things, while insisting, as we have
seen, that May Day must be celebrated by a single demonstration on the
first day of the month, whatever that day might be, in order to
emphasize 'its true character as an economic demand for the eight-hour
day and an assertion of class struggle'.19 It added at least two other
demands to the eight-hour day: labour legislation and the fight against
war. Although it was henceforth an official part of May Day, in itself
the peace slogan was not really integrated into the popular May Day
tradition, except as something that reinforced the international
character of the occasion. However, in addition to expanding the
programmatic content of the demonstration, the resolution included
another innovation. It spoke of 'celebrating' May Day. The movement had
come officially to recognize it not only as a political activity but as a
festival.
Once again, this was not part of the original plan. On the contrary,
the militant wing of the movement and, it need hardly be added, the
anarchists opposed the idea of festivities passionately on ideological
grounds. May Day was a day of struggle. The anarchists would have
preferred it to broaden out from a single day's leisure extorted from
the capitalists into the great general strike which would overthrow the
entire system. As so often, the most militant revolutionaries took a
sombre view of the class struggle, as the iconography of black and grey
masses lightened by no more than the occasional red flag so often
confirms. The anarchists preferred to see May Day as a commemoration of
martyrs - the Chicago martyrs of 1886, 'a day of grief rather than a day
of celebration', and where they were influential, as in Spain, South
America and Italy, the martyrological aspect of May Day actually became
part of the occasion. Cakes and ale were not part of the revolutionary
game-plan. In fact, as a recent study of the anarchist May Day in
Barcelona brings out, refusing to treat it or even to call it a 'Festa
del Traball', a labour festival, was one of its chief characteristics
before the Republic. To hell with symbolic actions: either the world
revolution or nothing. Some anarchists even refused to encourage the May
Day strike, on the ground that anything that did not actually initiate
the revolution could be no more than yet another reformist diversion.
The revolutionary syndicalist French Confederation Generale du Travail
(CGT) did not resign itself to May Day festivity until after the First
World War.
The leaders of the Second International may well have encouraged the
transformation of May Day into a festival, since they certainly wanted
to avoid anarchist confrontational tactics and naturally also favoured
the broadest possible basis for the demonstrations. But the idea of a
class holiday, both struggle and a good time, was definitely not in
their minds originally. Where did it come from?
Initially the choice of date almost certainly played a crucial role.
Spring holidays are profoundly rooted in the ritual cycle of the year in
the temperate northern hemisphere, and indeed the month of May itself
symbolizes the renewal of nature. In Sweden, for instance, the First of
May was already by long tradition almost a public holiday. This,
incidentally, was one of the problems about celebrating wintry May Days
in otherwise militant Australia. From the abundant icon-ographical and
literary material at our disposal, which has been made available in
recent years, it is quite evident that nature, plants and above all
flowers were automatically and universally held to symbolize the
occasion. The simplest of rural gatherings, like the 1890 meeting in a
Styrian village, shows not banners but garlanded boards with slogans, as
well as musicians. A charming photograph of a later provincial May Day,
also in Austria, shows the social democratic worker-cyclists, male and
female, parading with wheels and handlebars wreathed in flowers, and a
small flower-decked May child in a sort of baby-seat slung between two
bicycles.
Flowers appear unselfconsciously round the stern portraits of the
seven Austrian delegates to the 1889 International Congress,
dis-tributed for the first Vienna May Day. Flowers even infiltrate the
militant myths. In France the
fusillade de Fourmies
of 1891, with its ten dead, is symbolized in the new tradition by Maria
Blondeau, eighteen years old, who danced at the head of 200 young
people of both sexes, swinging a branch of flowering hawthorn which her
fiance had given ber, until the troops shot her dead. Two May traditions
patently merge in this image. What flowers? Initially, as the hawthorn
branch suggests, colours suggestive of spring rather than politics, even
though the movement soon comes to settle on blossoms of its own colour:
roses, poppies and above all red carnations. However, national styles
vary. Nevertheless, flowers and those other symbols of burgeoning
growth, youth, renewal and hope, namely young women, are central. It is
no accident that the .most universal icons for the occasion, reproduced
time and again m a variety of languages, come from Walter Crane -
especially the famous young woman in a Phrygian bonnet surrounded by
garlands. The British socialist movement was small and unimportant and
its May Days, after the first few years, were marginal. However, through
William Morris, Crane and the arts-and-crafts movement, inspirers of
the most influential 'new art' or art nouveau of the period, it found
the exact expression for the spirit of the times. The British
iconographic influence is not the least evidence for the
internationalism of May Day.
In fact, the idea of a public festival or holiday of labour arose,
once again, spontaneously and almost immediately - no doubt helped along
by the fact that in German the word
feiern
can mean both 'not working' and 'formally celebrating'. (The use of
'playing' as a synonym for 'striking', common in England in the first
part of the century, no longer seems common by its end.) In any case it
seemed logical on a day when people stayed away from work to supplement
the morning's political meetings and marches with sociability and
entertainment later, all the more so as the role of inns and restaurants
as meeting-places for the movement was so important. Publicans and
cabaretieri formed a significant section of socialist activists in more than one country.
One major consequence of this must be immediately mentioned. Unlike
politics, which was in those days 'men's business', holidays included
women and children. Both the visual and the literary sources demonstrate
the presence and participation of women in May Day from the start. What
made it a genuine class display, and inci¬dentally, as in Spain,
increasingly attracted workers who were not politically with the
socialists, 30 was precisely that it was not confined to men but
belonged to families. And in turn, through May Day, women who were not
themselves directly in the labour market as wage-workers, that is to say
the bulk of married working-class women in a number of countries, were
publicly identified with movement and class. If a working life of
wage-labour belonged chiefly to men, refusing to work for a day united
age and sex in the working class.
Practically all regular holidays before this time had been religious
holidays, at all events in Europe, except in Britain where, typically,
the European Community's May Day has been assimilated to a Bank Holiday.
May Day shared with Christian holidays the aspiration to universality,
or, in labour terms, internationalism. This universality I deeply
impressed participants and added to the day's appeal. The numerous May
Day broadsheets, often locally produced, which are so valuable a source
for the iconography and cultural history of the occasion - 308 different
numbers of such ephemera have been preserved for pre-fascist Italy
alone - constantly dwell on this. The first May Day journal from Bologna
in 1891 contains no fewer than four items specifically on the
universality of the day. And, of course, the analogy with Easter or
Whitsun seemed as obvious as that with the spring celebrations of folk
custom.
Italian socialists, keenly aware of the spontaneous appeal of the new
festa del lavoro
to a largely Catholic and illiterate population, used the term 'the
workers' Easter' from, at the latest, 1892, and such analogies became
internationally current in the second half of the 1890s.32 One can
readily see why. The similarity of the new socialist movement to a
religious movement, even, in the first heady years of May Day, to a
religious revival movement with messianic expectations was patent. So,
in some ways, was the similarity of the body of early leaders, activists
and propagandists to a priesthood, or at least to a body of lay
preachers. We have an extraordinary leaflet from Charleroi, Belgium in
1898, which reproduces what can only be described as a May Day sermon:
no other word will do. It was drawn up by, or in the name of, ten
deputies and senators of the Parti Ouvrier Belge, undoubtedly atheists
to a man, under the joint epigraphs 'Workers of all lands unite (Karl
Marx)' and 'Love One Another (jesus)'. A few samples will suggest its
mood:
Quote:
This [it began] is the hour of spring
and festivity when the perpetual Evolution of nature shines forth in its
glory. Like nature, fill yourselves with hope and prepare for The New
Life.
After some passages of moral instruction ('Show self-respect: Beware
of the liquids that make you drunk and the passions that degrade' and so
on) and socialist encouragement, it concluded with
a passage of millennial hope:
Quote:
Soon frontiers will fade away! Soon
there will be an end to wars and armies! Every time that you practice
the socialist virtues of Solidarity and Love, you will bring this future
closer. And then, in peace and joy, a world will come into being in
which Socialism will triumph, once the social duty of all is properly
understood as bringing about the all-round development of each.
Yet the point about the new labour movement was not that it was a
faith, and one which often echoed the tone and style of religious
discourse, but that it was so little influenced by the .religious model
even in countries where the masses were deeply religious and steeped in
church ways. Moreover, there was little convergence between the old and
the new Faith except sometimes (but not always) where Protestantism took
the form of unofficial and implicitly oppositionist sects rather than
Churches, as in England. Socialist labour was a militantly secular,
anti-religious movement which converted pious or formerly pious
populations
en masse.
We can also understand why this was so. Socialism and the labour
movement appealed to men and women for whom, as a novel class conscious
of itself as such, there was no proper place in the community of which
established Churches, and notably the Catholic Church, were the
traditional expression. There were indeed settlements of 'outsiders', by
occupation as in mining or proto-industrial or factory villages, by
origin like the Albanians of what became the quintessentially 'red'
village of Piana dei Greci in Sicily (now Piana degli Albanesi), or
united by some other criterion that separated them collectively from the
wider society. There 'the movement' might function as
the
community, and in doing so take over many of the old village practices
hitherto monopolized by religion. However, this was unusual. In fact a
major reason for the massive success of May Day was that it was seen as
the
only holiday associated
exclusively with the working class as such, not shared with anyone else,
and moreover one extorted by the workers' own action. More than this:
it was a day on which those who were usually invisible went on public
display and, at least for one day, captured the official space of rulers
and society. In this respect the galas of British miners, of which the
Durham miners' gala is the longest survivor, anticipated May Day, but on
the basis of one industry and not the working class as a whole. In this
sense the only relation between May Day and traditional religion was
the claim to equal rights. 'The priests have their festivals,' announced
the 1891 May Day broadsheet of Voghera in the Po valley, 'the Moderates
have their festivals. So have the Democrats. The First of May is the
Festival of the workers of the entire world.'
But there was another thing that distanced the movement from
religion. Its key word was 'new', as in Die Neue Zeit (New Times), title
of Kautsky's Marxist theoretical review, and as in the Austrian labour
song still associated with May Day, and whose refrain runs: 'Mit uns
zieht die neue Zeit' ('The new times are advancing with us'). As both
Scandinavian and Austrian experience shows, socialism often came into
the countryside and provincial towns literally with the railways, with
those who built and manned them, and with the new ideas and new times
they brought. Unlike other public holidays, including most of the ritual
occasions of the labour movement up till then, May Day did not
commemorate anything - at all events outside the range of anarchist
influence which, as we have seen, liked to link it with the Chicago
anarchists of 1886. It was about nothing but the future, which, unlike a
past that had nothing to give to the proletariat except bad memories
('Du passe faisons table rase,' sang the Inter-nationale, not by
accident), offered emancipation. Unlike traditional religion, 'the
movement' offered not rewards after death but the new Jerusalem on this
earth.
The iconography of May Day, which developed its own imagery and
symbolism very quickly, is entirely future-oriented.What the future
would bring was not at all clear, only that it would be good and that it
would inevitably come. Fortunately for the success of May Day, at least
one way forward to the future turned the occasion into something more
than a demonstration and a festival. In 1890 electoral democracy was
still extremely uncommon in Europe, and the demand for universal
suffrage was readily added to that for the eight-hour day and the other
May Day slogans. Curiously enough, the demand for the vote, although it
became an integral part of May Day in Austria, Belgium, Scandinavia,
Italy and elsewhere until it was achieved, never formed an
ex officio
international part of its political content like the eight-hour day
and, later, peace. Nevertheless, where applicable, it became an integral
part of the occasion and greatly added to its significance.
In fact, the practice of organizing or threatening general strikes
for universal suffrage, which developed with some success in Belgium,
Sweden and Austria, and helped to hold party and unions together, grew
out of the symbolic work stoppages of May Day. The first such strike was
started by the Belgian miners on 1 May 1891.40 On the other hand trade
unions were far more concerned with the Swedish May Day slogan 'shorter
hours and higher wages' than with any other aspect of the great day.
There were times, as in Italy, when they concentrated on this and left
even democracy to others. The great advances of the movement, including
its effective championship of democracy, were not based on narrow
economic self-interest.
Democracy was, of course, central to the socialist labour movements.
It was not only essential for its progress but inseparable from it. The
first May Day in Germany was commemorated by a plaque which showed Karl
Marx on one side and the Statue of Liberty on the other. An Austrian May
Day print of 1891 shows Marx, holding
Das Kapital,
pointing across the sea to one of those romantic islands familiar to
contemporaries from paintings of a Mediterranean character, behind which
there rises the May Day sun, which was to be the most lasting and
potent symbol of the future. Its rays carried the slogans of the French
Revolution: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, which are found on so many of
the early May Day badges and mementoes.Marx is surrounded by workers,
presumably ready to man the fleet of ships due to sail to the island,
whatever it might be, their sails inscribed: Universal and Direct
Suffrage. Eight-Hour Day and Protection for the Workers. This was the
original tradition of May Day.
That tradition arose with extraordinary rapidity - within two or
three years - by means of a curious symbiosis between the slogans of the
socialist leaders and their often spontaneous interpretation by
militants and rank-and-file workers.It took shape in those first few
marvellous years of the sudden flowering of mass labour movements and
parties. when every day brought visible growth, when the very existence
of such movements. the very assertion of
class.
seemed a guarantee of future triumph. More than this: it seemed a sign
of imminent triumph as the gates of the new world swung open before the
working class.
However, the millennium did not come and May Day, with so much else
in the labour movement, had to be regularized and institutionalized,
even though something of the old flowering of hope and triumph returned
to it in later years after great struggles and victories. We can see it
in the mad futurist May Days of the early Russian Revolution, and almost
everywhere in Europe in 1919-20, when the original May Day demand of
the Eight Hours was actually achieved in many countries. We can see it
in the May Days of the early Popular Front in France in 1935 and 1936,
and in the countries of the continent liberated from occupation, after
the defeat of fascism. Still, in most countries of mass socialist labour
movements, May Day was routinized some time before 1914.
Curiously, it was during this period of routinization that it
acquired its ritualistic side. As an Italian historian has put it, when
it ceased to be seen as the immediate antechamber of the great
transformation. it became 'a collective rite which requires its own
liturgies and divinities', the divinities being usually identifiable as
those young women in flowing hair and loose costumes showing the way
towards the rising sun to increasingly imprecise crowds or processions
of men and women. Was she Liberty, or Spring, or Youth, or Hope, or
rosy-fingered Dawn or a bit of all of these? Who can tell?
Iconographically she has no universal characteristic except youth, for
even the Phrygian bonnet, which is extremely common, or the traditional
attributes of Liberty, are not always found. We can trace this
ritualization of the day through the flowers which, as we have seen, are
present from the beginning, but become, as it were, officialized
towards the end of the century. Thus the red carnation acquired its
official status in the Habsburg lands and in Italy from about 1900. when
its symbolism was specially explicated in the lively and talented
broadsheet from Florence named after it. (II Garofano Rosso appeared on
May Days until the First World War.) The red rose became official in
1911-12. And, to the grief of incorruptible revolutionaries the entirely
unpolitical lily-of-the-valley began to infiltrate the workers' May Day
in the early 1900s, until it became one of the regular symbols of the
day.
Neverthelesss, the great era of May Days was not over while they
remained both legal - that is, capable of bringing large masses on to
the street - and unofficial. Once they became a holiday given or, still
worse, imposed from above, their character was necessarily different.
And since public mass mobilization was of their essence, they could not
resist illigality, even though the socialists (later communists) of
Piana del Albanesi took pride, even in the black days of fascism, in
sending some comrades every First of May without fail to the mountain
pass where, from what is still known as Dr Barbato's rock, the local
apostle of socialism had addressed them in 1893. It was in this same
location that the bandit Giuliano massacred the revived revived
community demonstration and family picnic after the end of fascism in
1947. Since 1914, and especially since 1945, May Day has increasingly
become either illegal or, more likely, official. Only in those
comparatively rare parts of the third world where massive and unofficial
socialist labour movements developed in conditions that allowed May Day
to flourish is there a real continuity older tradition.
May Day has not, of course, lost its old characteristics everywhere.
Neverthelesss, even where it is not associated with the fall of old
regimes which were once new, as in the USSR and eastern Europe, it is
not too much to claim that for most people even in labour movements the
word May Day evokes the past more the past than the present. The society
which gave rise to May Day has changed. How important, today, are those
small proletarian village communities which old Italians remember? 'We
marched round the village. Then there was a public meal. All the party
members were there and anyone else Who wanted to come.’ What has
happened in the industrialized world to those who in the 1890s could
still recognize themselves in the internationale's 'Arise ye starvelings
from your slumbers'? As an old Italian an lady put it in 1980,
remembering the May Day of 1920 'I carried the flag as a twelve-year-old
textile worker, just started at the mill: 'Nowadays those who go to
work are all ladies and gentlemen, they get everything they ask for.'
What has happened to the spirit of those May Day sermons of confidence
in the future, of faith in the march of reason and progress? 'Educate
yourselves! Schools and courses, books and newspapers are instruments of
liberty! Drink at the fountain of Science and Art: you will then become
strong enough to bring about justice. What has happened to the
collective dream of building Jerusalem in our green and pleasant land?
And yet, if May Day has become no more than just another holiday, a
day - I am quoting a French advertisement - when one need not take a
certain tranquillizer, because one does not have to work, it remains a
holiday of a special kind. It may no longer be, in the proud phrase, 'a
holiday outside all calendars', for in Europe it has entered all
calendars. It is, in fact, more universally taken off work than any
other days except 25 December and 1 January, having far outdistanced its
other religious rivals. But it came from below. It was shaped by
anonymous working people themselves who, through it, recognized
themselves, across lines of occupation, language, even nationality as a
single
class by deciding, once a
year, deliberately not to work: to flout the moral, political and
economic compulsion to labour. As Victor Adler put it in 1893: 'This is
the sense of the May holiday, of the rest from work, which our
adversaries fear. This is what they feel to be revolutionary.
The historian is interested in this centenary for a number of
reasons. In one way it is significant because it helps to explain why
Marx became so influential in labour movements composed of men and women
who had not heard of him before, but recognized his call to become
conscious of themselves as a class and to organize as such. In another,
it is important, because it demonstrates the historic power of
grassroots thought and feeling, and illuminates the way men and women
who, as individuals, are inarticulate, powerless and count for nothing
can nevertheless leave their mark on history. But above all this is for
many of us, historians or not, a deeply moving centenary, because it
represents what the German philosopher Ernst Bloch called (and treated
at length in two bulky volumes)
The
Principle of Hope: the hope of a better future in a better world. If
nobody else remembered it in 1990, it was incumbent on historians to do
so.
Originally published in 1994.
