The Two Nations : A May Day Message

 The Two Nations; A May-day Message.

NOTE: This is one of the four speeches which Guy Aldred recorded on tape. It was not the first to be recorded, though it is the first to be printed. The other three speeches are being transcribed and printed. The publication date will be announced shortly. Donors and Subscribers will receive these pamphlets as they appear. Please order extra copies, and help the circulation.

Printed and published in United Kingdom by The Strickland Press, Glasgow C. 1.

GUY A. ALDRED

THE TWO NATIONS

A May-Day Message

The text of a Speech delivered on May 5th 1963 in Central Halls Glasgow.

First Published 1968

Guy Aldred, November, 1962

We do change the world. One generation merges into another. The hopes of yesterday’s heroes and martyrs become the inspiring slogans of the martyrs and heroes of today, and by them are passed on to the heroes and martyrs that will be tomorrow. An unchanging yet changeless logic of development.

—The Word; January 1961

Foreword

This speech was recorded at Guy A. Aldred’s home address on the afternoon of Friday, 3rd May, 1963. It had been his intention to speak in person at the May Day meeting which would be held in the Central Halls on the following Sunday; but his doctor, and his close associates, prevailed upon him to make a recording instead.

Commenting on this, Guy Aldred said: “I am opposed to doing so, as it seems to me that a recorded speech lacks the verve and originality of a speech spoken direct from the platform. I feel this very much as a restriction, because I believe in extemporary speech—not in prepared speeches. I am afraid, however, that my strength may not permit me to speak with the vigour and the continuity that is necessary to the successful meeting. So I have prepared this recorded speech as a possible alternative to the original speech. In any case, I will attend the meeting, and if I am unable to speak I will hear it played to the audience. I will then answer questions as they arise. The audience can depend upon my reply to questions.”

In the event that is what happened. Guy Aldred sat on the platform while the speech was relayed; then he answered questions and replied to discussion.

He delivered several more public speeches, both by tape and in person, before he died on the 16th October, 1963.

This speech has been transcribed from the tape by Ben Mullin who has also written an Introduction.

JOHN TAYLOR CALDWELL.

Introduction

This speech, recorded by "Guy Aldred close to the end of his life, represents a contribution to the general discussion on the fundamental problem facing the working class movement, namely, that of unity. That there is need for such discussion goes without question. Unless the conscious elements within the working class movement make some attempt to come to a general understanding, we will make no progress.

Guy Aldred was an uncompromising Anti-Parliamentarian, and this speech does reflect the Anti-Parliamentary position. Anti-Parliamentarism has been systematically misunderstood by the whole left-wing movement. We. of the left-wing movement," are broken into innumerable sects and groups. Each group conducts a hate campaign against comrades in other groups, at times our activity of slander against our comrades exceeds our activity against the system. It does not matter now how this has come about. it is a fact and it is a fact that must be overcome. This short speech sets out to tackle this problem of division within the working class movement.

When we come to consider that, regardless of what group or party we belong to, we are members of the working class movement and that the working class movement has a tremendous history stretching back as far as we can go, we get some perspective of our own position in relation to the working class struggle. We should realise that our group is but a dot against this greater background. Groups and parties have passed away, and will pass away, but the struggle will go on. Our loyalty should not be to the group. right or wrong. our loyalty should lie with the working class movement and with the overall struggle of the workers. The working class struggle has passed through every chapter in history, it has adopted many names and causes, it has been used by power-seeking groups, but it does represent a continuous history of struggle. There are many similarities between the early Christians in their "struggle against the ruling hierarchy of their time and the present day socialist movement in their struggle against current State and Monopoly Capitalism.

The early Christian movement was destroyed by the Deification of Jesus. It was destroyed when it turned its discussion to Theology and Mysticism. It was destroyed by fragmentation as a result of theoretical differences between this or that individual who then created his own little sect. It was finally destroyed when it was adopted by the ruling hierarchy and absorbed into the ruling class culture. All this has happened to the socialist movement.

The fact that the early Christian movement was destroyed did not mean that the working class movement had ended, indeed, it went on to blaze even more dramatic episodes across the pages of history. It is not my job here to retell the brilliant episodes in the history of the working class movement, but it is essential to stress that there is a connecting link between all the chapters in history, between all groups, they all represent an expression of the overall working class movement. The working class struggle encircles the globe. As I have already pointed out, its history goes back to earliest times. Against this broad background our group, or our party, is really a tiny fragment of the whole picture. This is essentially the Anti-Parliamentary position.

Anti-Parliamentarism is not a mania about the British Parliament. The term was first used to emphasise the difference between the traditional socialist struggle and the breakaway groups who became orthodox and concentrated their efforts and their resources on getting into Parliament. Many of the groups who went over to Parliamentarism became so involved in that activity they lost sight of the struggle. They became so involved in becoming respectable, in becoming accepted by the ruling class; in electioneering; in raising funds; in becoming ‘fit’ to govern, that they created a breed of people who know nothing of the original cause of the struggle. The final development in this line of thought is to be found in the fact that the Labour Party now employs professional advertising agencies to sugar their palliative pills.

Anti-Parliamentarism is in reality the whole struggle of the working class movement. It believes in keeping the cause of the struggle well to the forefront of our activity. It is determined that we do not substitute the struggle between groups, for power or popularity, for the real struggle for working class emancipation. Anti-Parliamentarism does not confine its activity to one particular sphere or one particular area. The working class will fight on every front, this gives rise to the various groups. But we must be loyal to our comrades, it does not matter what faction they belong to. We must be loyal to our comrades in industry, we must be loyal to our comrades who work at the political level, we must be loyal to our comrades who concentrate on propaganda and we must be loyal to our comrades who are imprisoned or executed, who are ill-treated at the hands of the Capitalist State.

This is the message of this speech, which I ask you to read fairly with an open mind. Do not approach it from a sectarian position with a view to finding faults. You will find faults. Guy Aldred recorded this speech at the end of his life during a period of great suffering. It is remarkable that he still grappled with working class problems and was not overcome with personal anguish. I ask the reader to be as impersonal, and as impartial, in his consideration of this speech. And I further urge him to make its subject-matter a topic for discussion in his own group or party, or in any circumstance where such an important matter may be considered.

BEN MULLIN.

Glasgow, 1967.

MAY DAY

Preliminary Note

May Day is an expression of pure nature worship. Its celebration connects up, naturally. with the class struggle and the economic interpretation of history; Without doubt. its traditions are those of working class struggle and celebration. They support the call of Spring to those who toil, they relate the harmony of nature to the toil and suffering of those who dwell on the Earth and suggest the need for escape. Hence the May month is one of inspiration to break free from bondage. "Slavery gives way to freedom. and a new atmosphere comes into the lives of the people. Much of the inspiration is mystical--but it is also a very real and true harmony that makes for battle and the struggle for justice. Finally, the tendency towards social freedom is established.

Thus May begins a new dance for the slaves, the dance of the apprentices. The old fashioned dance of a half-hearted and a half-witted sense of joy gives way to a true joyous exaltation in" social freedom. Men and women become adult in an atmosphere of true youth, and so the new social system is born. The very name of the month suggests the purpose of the month. May is so called from the goddess Maia. The name under which the Earth was worshipped at this season of the year. The first of the month has always been an important date in the religion of nature-worship. The famous 17th century poet, Spenser, salutes May as the sovereign month of man’s happiness. the “fairest maid of all the year.” It is characteristic of the enthusiasm with which the arrival of the month was welcomed. Yet the symbolism seems to have been a little overworked, and man, dwelling in slavery, must have found the joy extremely transient.

G. A. ALDRED.

Glasgow, May Day, 1963.

THE TWO NATIONS

A May-Day Menage

It is fifty-nine years since I mounted the public platform on May Day, in London, as an avowed socialist. I called myself a Social Democrat, but the Social Democratic definition was very temporary. I used more often the term--Socialist, and I thought as a socialist and I considered that I belonged to the great socialist movement. I did not differentiate between Social Democrats, Communists or Anarchists. Indeed, at that time I did not know very much about Anarchism. It is true that at that very moment I was not actually a member of ' the Social Democratic Federation. I did not join that organisation till a few months later, but I was very active in its ranks and very active among its comrades and I looked upon the S.D.F. as a great socialist body. In a way I dare say it was, particularly in London, where it seemed to have most root.

The Social Democrats differed from the I.L.P. and from the Labour Party. despite what the members of , either of these parties would have you believe to-day, and despite the fact that -some of the Social Democrats of that time became leading members of the Labour Party. They differed in this great respect, the chief characteristic of the Social Democrats was their proletarian language, their proletarian bearing and their proletarian association. I was a strong total abstainer and non-smoker, but I look back with amusement to the fact that the Social Democrats always met above public houses and usually had a drink of beer on the table at their branch meetings. The I.L.P. usually met in very careful coffee rooms, what we now term and what we termed in some places then-cafes. Their fare was always tea or coffee and cakes, not so that of the Social Democrats. I. of course, only took lemonade, but at the same time the proletarian atmosphere of the Social Democrats pleased me much more than the respectable atmosphere of the I.L.P. meeting. I think this difference between assumed intellectuality and a bogus respectability, and the fustian. rustic attitude of the Social Democrats, represented the difference between socialism, whether correctly understood or not, and the respectable parliamentarism of the other factions.

I very soon broke with parliamentarism and began my activities as an anti-parliamentarian. My sympathies were with those who stood for direct-action, though I did not always agree with their protest. I remember speaking once for an S.D.F. branch in Regents Park. It was about the time of some direct-action activity, an act of assassination in Europe, by some alleged anarchist. It does not matter now whether the person was actually an anarchist or not he claimed to be. His act represented a protest by the very poor, the very downtrodden, against those who are established in wealth and in high position. I do not agree, and I did not agree, when a person sets himself up as prosecutor, jury and public executioner, as obviously the man who engaged in political assassination sets himself up to occupy all three positions in one person. To me, that savours of dictatorship. I remember this meeting, because the speaker before me went out of his way to denounce the Anarchist. He never analysed the position that made for this protest. He never analysed the economic condition that pervaded the misery of the man who was guilty of the act. He never analysed the position of the people who were responsible for judging him, nor the journalists who condemned him merely for the sake of their bread and butter. He merely went all out to denounce this representative of the poor who had been guilty of this action. While I did not sympathise with this action, I sympathised still less with the cant and the humbug of the condemnation, and when I mounted the S.D.F. platform I said so plainly and directly.

The result was a furor, and a great antagonism to me for daring to express this point of view. Nevertheless, I thought that an explanation of why a person commits an get of direct action was due. Also, I thought the action was less reprehensible than it seemed to be, though it was reprehensible. because the poor who are guilty of such acts of condemnation, by direct action, by assassination, were after all defenders of their own rights, protesting against some great injustice. Their enemies took the chance of using an entire state machinery. an economic power to destroy them, and smilingly went their way feeling how good they were, because they had killed nobody. Nevertheless. the evidence is there of the existence of this method of killing and crushing the lives of the people. When war comes they rejoice in the thousands they send to their deaths. Such humbug I do not understand and such humbug, as a socialist, I condemn.

I remember that before I spoke as a Social Democrat in favour of May Day, on May Day itself-that the previous May Day I spoke as a boy preacher. My concept of Christianity did not bother very much about whether Jesus was god or not, indeed it resented the idea, My approach historically towards this theological question was that of Unitarianism, although the first Unitarians were aristocrats and too respectable for my liking. I felt that original Christianity represented the revolt of the slaves and that it represented the uprising of the masses against the masters. From that point of view I viewed May Day before I became an actual socialist. There was a great deal of mystical error in my approach and I don’t suppose I said much about the immediate class struggle, but I do remember that I spoke historically about the struggle of the common people and I co-related that speech to the struggles of the peasants and to the struggle of some of the historic events of the great reformation and to the renaissance period.

Subsequently, I found myself mixing among the anarchists. Here I found a note that gives birth to tonight’s speech, and that has played a part in my thinking ever since. I found myself among a small group of sectarians, mostly non-English speaking, in the East End of London. Many of their ideas I agreed with and much of their courage I admired, but their great anti-Marxism, their severe criticism of the materialistic conception of history, I did not understand. These people were more anti-Marxist than they were anti-capitalistic. They certainly preached direct action, but even direct action can be reformist and tends to lead to trade unionism, just as trade unions tend to become the basis of parliamentarism. This fact in both stages of its development was well illustrated in the case of John Turner of the Shop Assistants’ Union. He organised the shop assistants and rendered them a great deal of service. As a member. he became the leader of his union and as the leader of his union he had to support parliamentarism and the idea of representatives of the shop assistants sitting in Parliament. It is true that he refused to stand himself and could easily have got a seat. but he did support parliamentarism because the economic interests of his union compelled him to do so. That seems to me to point to the fact that. within class society, you have the workers themselves divided economically because there are different economic interests. The workers serve under the social system of capitalism and are controlled by it. Inevitably, politically, they were controlled by the division into nations; and you had born a patriotism that found working class support, and it found this working class support down to the very period of the first world war. That division seemed to me to be fatal to the working class struggle.

During the years since then. I have still realised that the method of anti-parliamentarism-even when it boycotted the ballot box. a natural thing to do, or when it made some such protest at the ballot box like those I have made on several occasions. criticised by my comrades and ridiculed by the capitalist press-never acted as a definite anti-parliamentary activity but acted purely and simply as a parliamentary activity. Even although anti-parliamentarism has tended to destroy a great deal of the call of parliamentarism and the actions of the parliamentarians has brought home. again and again. the great truth of anti-parliamentanism. The right to vote means the right not to vote. Not voting under capitalism is, after all, taking a part just as much as voting under capitalism. In the end it has to accept. on certain occasions, the conclusions supported by the parliamentary state. Hence, you have parliamentarism still triumphant even although it is destroyed by the voice of the people and is not supported outside parliament by the people. except at times of elections. My puzzle has been how this should be overcome.

When I first became a socialist there was a body in existence which still exists (somewhat different from what it was then. in my opinion) called the Socialist Party of Great Britain. That was a very small party and it certainly has not grown as a party. That party believed in pure parliamentarism. It rejoiced in being a Marxist party, but its Marxism really consisted in supporting the theories and the publications of Karl Kautsky. In 1904, I remember three pamphlets published by Kautskv and translated from the German. in which Kautsky puts forward his particular views on social democracy and in which the S.P.G.B. praised him as being a Marxist. Lenin afterwards destroyed the Marxist claims of Kautsky and pointed out that Kautsky was really anti-Marx and in many respects anti-socialistic. He was a reformist and certainly not a revolutionary. Ignoring this fact, the S.P.G.B. still pretends to be a Marxist party. still speaks in a narrow little sectarian way and will still not bring the workers anywhere near their social emancipation.

About the same time as the S.P.G.B. was born in Britain. the S.L.P. was imported from America. Its great founder was Daniel De Leon, who was in many respects a great propanandist. He hated the anarchists because in many ways he supported the same ideas and preached the same ideas. He claimed to be a Marxist and the S.P.G.B. ridiculed his alleged Marxism. Daniel De Leon's criticisms of the social system were excellent very often. and he must have had played a tremendous part as a socialist educator of the people. but nevertheless he has built no organisation, his organisation is in its death throes and all that remains is the classical education left behind by his pamphlets. There is no doubt about the sincerity, no doubt about the vigour of Daniel De Leon, but at the same time there is no doubt about the failure of his propaganda. We have today the spectacle of a few groups of S.P.G.B. supporters and a few groups of S.L.P. supporters attacking each other, sometimes slandering each other but each claiming to be the true Marxist party.

Actually it does not matter what Marx taught. It is absurd for any party to claim to be the true Marxist party, we do not know what Marx would have done on a certain occasion, we can only speak in the terms of his general education, his general concept and his general knowledge. What specifically Marx would have done on this particular occasion or that particular occasion it is absolutely impossible to say.

In addition to these two socialist groups we have the anarchists, divided into individualists and communists. Let us take the communists as being the true expression of anarchism for, alter all, that does represent the working class approach. The Communist Anarchists spend more time hating Marx and admiring Bakunin than they do in preaching actual socialism or trying to organise the working class. Their one cry is direct action, but direct action cannot represent the action of all the people or cannot represent affective action on the part of a minority that will effect all the people and bring all the people into action against the system, it is, after all, very indirect action and a failure. Now that means we have three left wing groups divided into sectarian organisations thoroughly opposed to a united working class movement.

Against this we have brought into existence by the Russian Revolution. the Communist Party. This party is a ‘yes-man’ party. It sometimes tells the truth, it sometimes does not tell the truth. It does not function really and truly as a party in Britain, arising out of British conditions or the economic conditions of the workers here. It functions purely and simply as a satellite of the Russian Revolution, and whoever happens to be in power in the Kremlin. the Communist Party hails and supports that particular individual, or that particular group, as being the last word. In turn, it has supported Lenin who, after all, is outstanding. It has supported Trotsky, a lesser man to bruit. It has supported Stalin who, after the triumph of the revolution and after the successful activity of Lenin, turned his attention to destroying his own group for the sake of power. The Communist Party today supports Khurschov, who represents an entirely different policy from that of Stalin and, to my mind, really represents the struggle towards peace and communism. However, it is not because Khruschov may be right, it is not because his policy tends to be the policy towards freedom with the minimum of suffering, it is purely and simply because he is in power in the Kremlin that the Communist Party in this country supports him. That is a ‘yes-man’ policy and it can no more be tolerated than a ‘yes-man’ policy under Stalin, who, after all, destroyed his own comrades and certainly was responsible for bogus trials.

Now we have the Labour Party. The Labour Party represents parliamentarism arising from the ranks of the working class, carrying on the traditions of the great struggle for parliamentary representation and, really the trader and the merchant style, for the control of finance so that there should be no absolute monarchy. At the same time, this parliamentarism represents, not the organisation of the working class, for the working class can have no power under the parliamentary system, but merely a control of the working class elements by the state system of capitalism. It never intends to get beyond that system, it never intends to inaugurate-—really and truly—socialism, its aim is purely and simply to organise the nationalisation of industry and of credit, etc., at the very highest. This is not socialism, this does not give emancipation to the working class. Unless you have emancipation coming from and directed by and controlled by the workshops, you have no emancipation of the working class.

The point is, what can we do? This May Day I want to direct my thoughts to the question of what can we do to emancipate the people from the thralldom of economic partisanship, economic domination and political subsideriness to the interest of the capitalist state. That is the problem before all of us today. Let us analyse what we are. The capitalist state speaks about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, this claim is not quite correct but it makes a show of believing in it and its laws seem to suggest it on certain occasions. But why is the capitalist class able to talk about freedom of speech and freedom of the press, yet at the same time speak about sedition, speak about treason and shoot and execute people from time to time for alleged offences of treason—very often high class patriotism ——and also imprison them for offences of freedom of speech which goes too far. I he explanation is quite simple, it is because we live under a capitalist state and because the capitalist class constitute the political expression of the nation. Therefore, we have got to see what we can do to bring about the control of the political expression of the working class movement by the working class movement. We have to define accurately and impartially and scientifically the working class movement, we have to define directly and scientifically the working class nation and we have to understand exactly what socialism stands for.

THE KEY TO THE SOLUTION

I think that the key to the solution of this problem of working class organisation for genuine and effective social action is to be found in a statement made by Lord Beaconsfield. He defined the two nations that existed within every so-called nation. He defined the struggle between these two nations as the real struggle. He spoke of the nation of the rich and the nation of the poor, and I think that in our approach to the question we have to bear in mind this definition. The nation of the rich and the nation of the poor, and from this angle we must create our concept of loyalty and disloyalty. The nation of the rich being in power, has a right to impose upon us from the standpoint of power and from the standpoint of power only, its definition of sedition and its definition of treason. We must elevate the nation of the poor to the position of the nation of the rich, we must make it the supreme nation and we must define sedition and treason as offences against the unity of the nation of the poor as distinct from the nation of the rich. This is a true political expression of the class struggle, one to be remembered and one to be put into effect.

In the international field today we have loyalty to sects —not loyalty to nations, loyalty to parties--not loyalty to class, but it is the class loyalty we have to consider. The working class must create its own nationhood. It must accept the fact that so long as we live under the capitalist system we are divided into economic classes or subdivisions. We are carpenters. we are joiners, we are electricians, we are labourers, we are motor drivers, etc., and we think in the terms of our own particular trade or industry, particularly in times of threatened unemployment. This is why among compositors we deprive women of the right to act as compositors or linotype setters, even though they are quite capable of doing such work. It is a restriction on labour supply because of the economic condition. All this must be wiped out—but it has to be accepted at the moment. Above all this class distinction and craft division or industrial division within the nation of. the poor, we have overhead the one great economic fact that there is a nation of the poor that lives in insecurity, lives in misery, lives by selling its labour power--by whatever shape or form it does so—and does not live as the possessor of the wealth or the right to control wealth. Against them is the other class who live on their backs, who live as the controllers of wealth produced by the poor and who constitute the nation of the rich and the governing class in society. Between these two nations there exists an interminable conflict, a conflict that can only be ended by the triumph of the poor and the utter defeat of the rich. Our business is to ring about an end to this division, and an end to this struggle within the working class movement, and bring about a unity which will utterly defeat the ruling class movement.

This unity is defeated by the faction of schism[1] as well as heresy,[2] and by schism much more than by heresy. The schism consists in all these political parties fighting against each other in the name of labour. The schism consists in the economic struggle which again divides the workers on the industrial field, thinking it is right for one section of the workers to go without whilst another section should occupy a position of superior control of wealth and superior share of wealth. The schism consists in the distinction between the skilled and the unskilled worker, forgetting that there is no such thing as skilled and unskilled workers but that there is only such an institution as the worker. In this great struggle, particularly in its political expression and in the tendency towards careerism created by the economic division, you have this question arising of who splits the vote, who divides the worker?

It is assumed that the majority movement is the right movement of the working class and that in the majority movement there is no such thing as schism, no such thing as treachery. It is assumed that the only people who have no right to exist are those who belong to the smaller groups and sects and that they play no useful part in the struggle. This is sheer nonsense, pure sectarianism of the worst description. Sometimes the smaller groups are useless, and they act in a useless fashion and they do tend to destroy the unity of the working class, but let us remember that when they do, in the main, except from some standpoint of vanity, they do so from a sincere belief in the cause of the struggle. The larger groups, the groups that arise from the trade unions—the group that arises from the economic interest within the struggle—the groups that find their expression in the Labour Party, also have their tendency towards schism. Its members are moved not by a desire to serve the people, not by a loyalty to abstract principles, but by a loyalty to their own personal interests and their own status under capitalism. Quite definitely, whilst they arise from the ranks of labour, whilst their base is in the workshops, whilst their feet are in the mire of the slums and the mire of suffering, they belong—so far as their heads are concerned— to the capitalist class and they think in terms of the capitalist class. This is treason—and this is the one treason we must destroy. This treason can only be destroyed by establishing, somehow or other, a fundamental nation of the poor to which all power should belong. It should be our anti-parliamentary task, whether we are aroused by anti-parliamentarism or not, to create this definite organised nation of the poor, including all sections of the poor and creating free speech among the poor—just as the ruling class have established a nation of the rich.

Now our nation of the poor should enjoy the same right of free speech, governed by a loyalty to its own class interests and a loyalty to the economic struggle of the workers, as the nation of the rich has a right to create a state governed by its loyalty to the ruling class interests of the rich. Once this is understood, we have then two definite nations confronting each other throughout the world and standing for the great struggle for working class emancipation and finally for a free world everywhere.

We have another problem—the problem of recognising the place that theory and education has in this struggle. Education should be taken away from the hands of the rich and placed in the hands of the poor. Only complete working class organisation—technical as well as educational. technical as well as prophetic, technical and scientific as well as visionary—can bring this about.

In mv opinion the Russian Revolution has represented a tremendous change in the history of the world, and also the great Chinese Revolution has represented a tremendous change. I think when we come to analyse the Russian Revolution we will discover the great importance of Lenin. Not merely as a disciple of Marx, but as a practical disciple of Marx and as a practical scientific socialist. It may be that history will place Lenin in an even higher position than Marx is placed, because Marx, after all, although he laid the basis of scientific socialism, destroying utopian socialism, was but a kind of John the Baptist. Lenin was far more probably the Christ of the movement than Marx. Because Lenin did try to put into practical effect the ideas of Marxism, and the idea of scientific socialism and created a state which, despite its errors—its terrible errors—did tend towards the new social order and historically belonged to the social order of socialism. Stalin can pass out of the picture. Trotsky, despite his brilliant writing, was a much inferior man to Lenin and I do not think he would have hesitated to have agreed to that himself.

In Khruschov, it seems to me, we have a man next great in importance to that of Lenin, but certainly a man of our time who has made a stand politically and diplomatically for the establishment of socialism. Accepting defeat and moving forward to victory, moving with his times, moving in front of his times, determined to save the world from slaughter, determined to make the world possible for revolution. What I have said about the ‘yes-men’ of the Russian Revolution. what I have said disparaging these people who claim to be the disciples of Khruschov and who now applaud Khruschov as they once applauded Stalin, is not meant to represent any degradation of Khruschov. I have a tremendous respect for Khruschov and a tremendous respect for the work he is doing—this is not a ‘yes-man’ respect. I am quite prepared to criticise Khruschov, as I am quite prepared to criticise Marx, as I hope others will be prepared to criticise me, and as I am prepared to criticise myself. Nevertheless, the great debt that history owes, the great debt that the working class owe as regard their future development. to the work of Khruschov—to my mind can never be over-estimated. This May Day I believe in mentioning this as a part of my tribute to the importance of May Day.

There are two other things I want to say. First of all. I have drawn attention already to the fact that this May Day should be celebrated with particular energy and enthusiasm because it was on 5th May that Karl Marx was born. It is not merely a celebration of May, the vernal month of working class emancipation. it is also a celebration of the birth and the struggle in poverty of a very great pioneer of socialism, a very great pioneer of liberty——Karl Marx.

May Day. I believe my memory serves me rightly and I speak only from memory at the moment without any notes, May Day really came into importance about the year 1889. It was really established as a day of labour by the French labour movement and it did not include or exclude any particular branch. it was the movement of all the working class factions. May Day used to be like that in Glasgow, but the Labour Party with the connivance of various factions, some of whom later went to the Communist Party, succeeded in destroying the universal aspect of May Day and made it more and more just a parliamentary celebration. We have evidence of that in the last meeting addressed in Queen’s Park by the late Mr. Gaitskell when, obviously, the Labour Party platform was captured and the whole spirit of May Day was destroyed by the interests of one party, that claimed because it was the majority party to be the party of the entire working class and very little protest was made against this seizure and usurpation.

THE CHICAGO ANARCHISTS

In any case, May Day, 1889, was established under the shadow of the May Days that had more or less been celebrated in the past, but not with universal acclamation, in various parts of the world but dissociated from each other. In May Day, 1886, we had the demonstration in Chicago for the Chicago martyrs. They were arrested for what took place and a year later they were executed as the martyrs of the working class movement. Their spirit overshadowed for a number of years the celebration of May Day and, as you know, we had an outstanding governor of Illinois who departed entirely from his class and proclaimed that they were victims of a police frame-up and he brought about the release of those still in prison, regretting that he could not give back the lives of those who had already been executed. In the shadow of that great tragedy, the working class May Day was celebrated and held for a number of years. It came down to the time when we introduced the recognition of the suffering of Ferrier in Spain, and then today we meet under the shadow of the murder, by Franco, of Grimaud.[3]

Grimaud has been murdered for his loyalty to communism and to the working class. His murder should be remembered by all of us and it should unite the entire working class movement. Division by sectarian grouping will destroy that possible stand that can overthrow this “man of no mercy,”[4] this enemy of the working class, Franco. It is no use telling me that we must be loyal to abstract principles of socialism, after all I have walked the fools’ parade in prison, I know what it is like to be suffering imprisonment and, understanding that, I know how important it is to have a united movement to bring about one’s release. Apart from the terrible, shocking and disgraceful execution of Grimaud, we have the terrible suffering of Ambatielos in Greece and we witness the scene in connection with the heroic defence of Tony Ambatielos by his wife Betty. This should call us to strong protest against fascism, which after all is the extreme and last word of reactionary capitalism. This should call us to extreme unity and bring about a practical unity as well as make for theoretical discussion and understanding. Therefore, I am for a working class movement that should be open to a discussion of all. But a working class movement should not just end in discussion, it should try to take definite steps forward towards a complete unity of its anti-parliamentary and parliamentary factions and bring about one great working class movement for action and for working class emancipation.

I say comrades—unite, rally round and think, above all think for yourselves, and in thinking for yourselves we will develop a richness of unity and a richness of understanding which will give power and classic authority to the working class nation. The nation of the poor will soon become the nation of the free in a richer and a freer world.

About Guy Aldred

He served a total of eight years in prison for his beliefs, and, true "to his principle, died in poverty.

Guy Aldred was a materialist in philosophy. He had no belief in the supernatural. To him “the mortal soul of Man is the only intelligent lord of matter.” Yet many of his writings and speeches were imbued with a spirituality that raised them .above the ephemeral utterances of most political speakers. What he had to say had relevance, not merely to the moment, but to the epoch. He edited many socialist papers, among them: “Herald of Revolt,” “The Spur,” “The Commune,” “The “Council,” “The New Spur,” and “The Word.” His autobiography, “No Traitors’ Gait!” was issued in supplements and was unfinished at the time of his death.

[1] A schism ‘is a division, or breach of unity among people of the same beliefs.

[2] A heresy is a doctrine or set of principles at variance with the accepted ideas of a group or sect.

[3] Julian Grimaud: A member of the Spanish Communist Party. He was executed by Franco in May, 1963, for his part in the Civil War 25 years earlier. The sentence of death was carried out despite world-wide protests.

[4] “Man of No Mercy." The Sunday Citizen description of the Spanish dictator, Franco, 1n its report of the “judicial murder” of Julian Grimaud.

Birth of a Holiday: The First of May - Eric Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm, Marxist historian of Daily Mail fame 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.

A short history of May Day

The history of the world holiday on the 1st May - May Day, or International Workers Day, held in commemoration of four anarchists executed for struggling for an 8-hour day.

Originally a pagan holiday, the roots of the modern May Day bank holiday are in the fight for the eight-hour working day in Chicago in 1886, and the subsequent execution of innocent anarchist workers.

In 1887, four Chicago anarchists were executed; a fifth cheated the hangman by killing himself in prison. Three more were to spend 6 years in prison until pardoned by Governor Altgeld who said the trial that convicted them was characterised by "hysteria, packed juries and a biased judge". The state had, in the words of the prosecution put "Anarchy is on trial" and hoped their deaths would also be the death of the anarchist idea.

The anarchists were trade union organisers and May Day became an international workers day to remember their sacrifice. They were framed on false charges of throwing a bomb at police breaking up a demonstration in Chicago. This was part of a strike demanding an 8 hour day involving 400,000 workers in Chicago that started May 1st 1886 .

It began over a century ago when the American Federation of Labour adopted an historic resolution which asserted that "eight hours shall constitute a legal day's labour from and after May 1st, 1886".
In the months prior to this date workers in their thousands were drawn into the struggle for the shorter day. Skilled and unskilled, black and white, men and women, native and immigrant were all becoming involved.

Chicago
In Chicago alone 400,000 were out on strike. A newspaper of that city reported that "no smoke curled up from the tall chimneys of the factories and mills, and things had assumed a Sabbath-like appearance". This was the main centre of the agitation, and here the anarchists were in the forefront of the labour movement. It was to no small extent due to their activities that Chicago became an outstanding trade union centre and made the biggest contribution to the eight-hour movement.
The Chicago anarchist movement was also strong. In 1884, they produced the world’s first Anarchist daily newspaper, the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, plus a weekly, Fackel, and a Sunday edition, Vorbote. By 1886, these newspapers had a circulation of over 26,000 - read by the large German immigrant working class community of the city. There were also newspapers for English, Bohemian and Scandinavian speakers. As well as this, Chicago anarchists were active in the unions and organised picnics, lectures, dances, libraries and other events for workers. These helped forge strong bonds of class solidarity, which was worrying to the bosses who were keen to break the workers' organisations.

When on May 1st 1886, the eight hour strikes convulsed that city, one half of the workforce at the McCormick Harvester Co. came out. Two days later a mass meeting was held by 6,000 members of the 'lumber shovers' union who had also come out. The meeting was held only a block from the McCormick plant and was joined by some 500 of the strikers from there.

The workers listened to a speech by the anarchist August Spies, who has been asked to address the meeting by the Central Labour Union. While Spies was speaking, urging the workers to stand together and not give in to the bosses, the strikebreakers were beginning to leave the nearby McCormick plant.

The strikers, aided by the 'lumber shovers' marched down the street and forced the scabs back into the factory. Suddenly a force of 200 police arrived and, without any warning, attacked the crowd with clubs and revolvers. They killed at least one striker, seriously wounded five or six others and injured an indeterminate number.

Outraged by the brutal assaults he had witnessed, Spies went to the office of the Arbeiter-Zeitung and composed a circular calling on the workers of Chicago to attend a protest meeting the following night.

The protest meeting took place in the Haymarket Square and was addressed by Spies and two other anarchists active in the trade union movement, Albert Parsons and Samuel Fielden.

The police attack
Throughout the speeches the crowd was orderly. Mayor Carter Harrison, who was present from the beginning of the meeting, concluded that "nothing looked likely to happen to require police interference". He advised police captain John Bonfield of this and suggested that the large force of police reservists waiting at the station house be sent home.

It was close to ten in the evening when Fielden was closing the meeting. It was raining heavily and only about 200 people remained in the square. Suddenly a police column of 180 men, headed by Bonfield, moved in and ordered the people to disperse immediately. Fielden protested "we are peaceable".

Bomb
At this moment a bomb was thrown into the ranks of the police. It killed one, fatally wounded six more and injured about seventy others. The police opened fire on the spectators. How many were wounded or killed by the police bullets was never exactly ascertained.

A reign of terror swept over Chicago. The press and the pulpit called for revenge, insisting the bomb was the work of socialists and anarchists. Meeting halls, union offices, printing works and private homes were raided. All known socialists and anarchists were rounded up. Even many individuals ignorant of the meaning of socialism and anarchism were arrested and tortured. "Make the raids first and look up the law afterwards" was the public statement of Julius Grinnell, the state's attorney.

Trial
Eventually eight men stood trial for being "accessories to murder". They were Spies, Fielden, Parsons, and five other anarchists who were influential in the labour movement, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Michael Schwab, Louis Lingg and Oscar Neebe.

The trial opened on June 21st 1886 in the criminal court of Cooke County. The candidates for the jury were not chosen in the usual manner of drawing names from a box. In this case a special bailiff, nominated by state's attorney Grinnell, was appointed by the court to select the candidates. The defence was not allowed to present evidence that the special bailiff had publicly claimed "I am managing this case and I know what I am about. These fellows are going to be hanged as certain as death".

Rigged jury
The eventual composition of the jury was farcical; being made up of businessmen, their clerks and a relative of one of the dead policemen. No proof was offered by the state that any of the eight men before the court had thrown the bomb, had been connected with its throwing, or had even approved of such acts. In fact, only three of the eight had been in Haymarket Square that evening.

No evidence was offered that any of the speakers had incited violence, indeed in his evidence at the trial Mayor Harrison described the speeches as "tame". No proof was offered that any violence had been contemplated. In fact, Parsons had brought his two small children to the meeting.

Sentenced
That the eight were on trial for their anarchist beliefs and trade union activities was made clear from the outset. The trial closed as it had opened, as was witnessed by the final words of Attorney Grinnell's summation speech to the jury. "Law is on trial. Anarchy is on trial. These men have been selected, picked out by the Grand Jury, and indicted because they were leaders. There are no more guilty than the thousands who follow them. Gentlemen of the jury; convict these men, make examples of them, hang them and you save our institutions, our society."

On August 19th seven of the defendants were sentenced to death, and Neebe to 15 years in prison. After a massive international campaign for their release, the state 'compromised' and commuted the sentences of Schwab and Fielden to life imprisonment. Lingg cheated the hangman by committing suicide in his cell the day before the executions. On November 11th 1887 Parsons, Engel, Spies and Fischer were hanged.

Pardoned
600,000 working people turned out for their funeral. The campaign to free Neebe, Schwab and Fielden continued.
On June 26th 1893 Governor Altgeld set them free. He made it clear he was not granting the pardon because he thought the men had suffered enough, but because they were innocent of the crime for which they had been tried. They and the hanged men had ben the victims of "hysteria, packed juries and a biased judge".

The authorities has believed at the time of the trial that such persecution would break the back of the eight-hour movement. Indeed, evidence later came to light that the bomb may have been thrown by a police agent working for Captain Bonfield, as part of a conspiracy involving certain steel bosses to discredit the labour movement.

When Spies addressed the court after he had been sentenced to die, he was confident that this conspiracy would not succeed:

"If you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labour movement... the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil in misery and want, expect salvation - if this is your opinion, then hang us! Here you will tread on a spark, but there and there, behind you - and in front of you, and everywhere, flames blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out".

Public holiday
In 1889, the first congress of the Second International, meeting in Paris for the centennial of the French Revolution and the Exposition Universelle, following a proposal by Raymond Lavigne, called for international demonstrations on the 1890 anniversary of the Chicago protests. May Day was formally recognized as an annual event at the International's second congress in 1891.

Subsequently, the May Day Riots of 1894 occurred. In 1904, the International Socialist Conference meeting in Amsterdam called on "all Social Democratic Party organizations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on May First for the legal establishment of the 8-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace." The congress made it "mandatory upon the proletarian organizations of all countries to stop work on May 1, wherever it is possible without injury to the workers."

In many countries, the working classes sought to make May Day an official holiday, and their efforts largely succeeded. May Day has long been a focal point for demonstrations by various socialist, communist and anarchist groups.

In the United States and Canada, however, the official holiday for workers is Labor Day in September. After the Haymarket Square riot in May, 1886, US President Grover Cleveland feared that commemorating Labor Day on May 1 could become an opportunity to commemorate the riots. Thus he moved in 1887 to support the Labor Day that the anti-anarchist union the Knights Of Labor supported.

Right-wing governments have traditionally sought to repress the message behind International Workers' Day, with fascist governments in Portugal, Italy, Germany and Spain abolishing the workers' holiday, and the Conservative party in the UK currently [2011] attempting to abolish the UK's annual May Day Bank Holiday.

This article was pieced together from an article on anarkismo.net, edited and added to by libcom
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