Today (and over the next few days) working class people will be celebrating our holiday, May Day.

Throughout the world May Day is recognised by the labour and trade union movement as the day on which we celebrate workers and their struggles for justice. But the story of how socialists fought to make May 1st in to a holiday is one that isn’t well known by most people, because it’s part of the hidden history that you don’t get taught in school

May Day is an ancient festival, known by the Celts as Beltane and by Germanic peoples as Walpurgis. It marked the end of Winter, and the return to life and fertility for crops and for people. People were celebrating the end of the cold, hard months, and they did it by getting spectacularly pissed, dressing up in funny costumes, dancing about and shagging. Unsurprisingly, when Christianity came along, the Church took a dim view of all this, but May Day was the one festival they found it virtually impossible to ban or take over.

During May Day parades there was often a Jack in the Green, a man who would be covered in a costume made of plants and foliage. Jack in the Green was a symbol of nature, of the power of life to overcome death, and the fertility of agriculture that came back after the long winter.

For ancient peoples the fertility of the land and the fertility of people were inseparable. May Day was a time for couples to get together. May sex led to June weddings, and June was historically the most common month for weddings. They often did it while off in the woods to find a tree for the Maypole. The symbolism of dancing round the Maypole itself isn’t hard to work out.

Life in a feudal peasant village was hard. Ordinary people had to work hard throughout the year to produce their crops, and the lords and church mercilessly exploited them, taking the products of their labour. Winter was a tough time to live through every year, and there was always the threat of crops failing, which spelled disaster. The success of crops in spring, and new life in the form of babies to carry on the work, really was a miracle for people.

What May Day represented for them was a day where the world got turned upside down. Another figure in May Day parades was the fool, the king for a day. The fool mocked authority, and May Day was one day when people were free from the strict control of the lords and the church, and could laugh at their oppressors, get pissed and enjoy themselves. It was a common festival, where the common people celebrated their use of the common land together.

From the 17th century onwards this traditional order in Europe began to change, as capitalism started to develop. The lords began to enclose the land, building fences and taking common lands that had belonged to the common people and using them for profitable farming. The people, forced from the land, began to move to the cities to work in the new factories.

In the new capitalist workplaces in the city the traditional cycle of life was broken. People worked 12 hour days or more. factory owners regarded their workers as just parts of the machines that produced the profits they lived from. Child labour was common, and conditions of work could often be deadly. If you were injured at your dangerous workplace there was no kind of welfare state to protect you, and you depended on your family and friends or starved.

In the 19th century, when working people came together to form the first trade unions, their key early demand was for shorter working hours, so that they could have more time to themselves. People forget today just how hard our ancestors had to fight to get Saturdays off, or for an 8 hour working day. It was the long, hard battle to win an 8 hour day that led to the modern celebration of May Day.

It might surprise some people to learn that this battle started in the USA, where today socialists and trade unionists are so weak. But it wasn’t always that way. At its national convention in Chicago, held in 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions proclaimed that “eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s labor from and after May 1, 1886.” Of course, there was no way that the bosses were going to recognise this proclamation, and so they vowed to back up the demand with strikes and protests.

The International Working Men’s Association, which today we know as the First International, was an international alliance of socialists, communists and trade unionists which counted Karl Marx among its leading members. The International drew the attention of European workers to the demand for an 8 hour day, and vowed to take the fight from the US to a worldwide level.

At this time Socialism and Anarchism were extremely attractive ideas for workers who could see the oppression they faced first hand. The defeats and difficulties for socialism in the 20th century had not started yet, and the bosses were yet to develop the kind of mass media and propaganda control they use today to control the ideas of working people. Socialists were at the forefront of leading the fight for an 8 hour day.

On May 1, 1886, more than 300,000 workers in 13,000 businesses across the United States walked off their jobs in the first May Day celebration in history. In Chicago, the center of the 8-hour day agitators, 40,000 went out on strike. Over the next few days this number swelled to 100,000. On May 3rd, strikers and their supporters at the McCormick steel works were attacked by cops, and at least two were killed as they were beaten with clubs. Enraged, the strikers called for a mass protest meeting in Haymarket Square the next day.

Unfortunately, the next day bad weather and short notice conspired to make sure there weren’t as many demonstrators as there could be, and again the police mounted a brutal attack on the strikers. The cops fired their guns indiscriminately into the crowd, which included many families with children. At least seven people were killed, as well as several cops who died from the wild shooting of their fellow officers.

Eight organisers were arrested on trumped up charges of having provoked the police violence and murder. Only three of them

had even been in Haymarket Square, and they had been clearly visible to the crowd as not having taken part in violence. But they were subjected to a show trial, where the jury were businessmen who were greatly threatened by the rise of radicalism. On November 11th Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel and Adolph Fischer were hung. Another of those convicted, Louis Lingg, took his own life in a final protest. The others, Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe and Michael Schwab, were imprisoned.

The murder of working people conducted by the cops and the justice system, at the behest of the bosses, gave new power and fury to the fight, and year on year the strikes and protests gathered strength. May 1st came to be the day every year when workers came out out on to the streets on strike, both to remember the Haymarket martyrs and to demand the fulfillment of their demands. Gradually workers around the world won the right to an 8 hour day, and as socialist parties grew stronger and more powerful, the governments of country after country was forced to recognise May Day as a holiday for the celebration of workers and their movement.

Although today many don’t know this history of how May Day came to be a holiday celebrated around the with marches and parties, it’s important that socialists remember that this is our day, dedicated to revolution and a better future. For centuries, May Day was the one day of the year where working people got freedom to party and celebrate, to change the world if only for day. When those same people became industrial workers, they began to fight again for time for ourselves, free from the burdens of work.

What May Day represents is a toehold, a beachhead, in the fight for full freedom. What we celebrate on May Day is the fight to make every day of the year a day of freedom for everyone, once we are free from exploitation by bosses, and we work for ourselves rather than to make someone else rich.

As soon as I’ve posted this I’m heading to Argyle Street in Glasgow for the celebration of May Day. Tomorrow the STUC and trade unions are organising a march at 11 from George Square. It’s ending up in the Old Fruitmarket for stalls and entertainment from 12.

In Edinburgh the SSP has played a key role in keeping May Day celebrations going. Socialists, anti war activists and trade unionists are marching from 11.30 from East Market to a rally at the Ross Bandstand under the slogan Stop the War Stop the Cuts.

If you’re in Newtongrange in Midlothian there’s a May Day social in the Dean Tavern 7.30 til late.

In Irvine marchers are heading to the Woodlands Centre for a rally.

If I’ve missed anything out, say so in the comments and I’ll add it in. For the benefit of anyone reading from outside Scotland, I’ll finish with a clip of a documentary about what May Day is actually like here every year, honest.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 1st, 2010 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.