The Lesson of May Day

140 years ago today, American workers launched a general strike. Their demand was simple: “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will.” In Chicago, New York, and Detroit, workers took to the streets and demonstrated to employers and police apparatchiks alike the power of organized labor. Two days after the general strike’s launch, police fired on a crowd and murdered two workers at a rally in Chicago’s West Side. Inflamed by this show of oppression, striking workers and their allies gathered in Chicago’s Haymarket Square before an unknown person set off an explosion which killed 11 people. The state seized upon this violent act to arrest and execute four anarchists on conspiracy charges held up by flimsy evidence. The message was clear: the exercise of workers’ power will be met with brutal violence. In 1889, the newly formed Socialist International met in Paris and resolved to celebrate International Workers’ Day on May 1st to commemorate that fateful event known as the Haymarket Affair.

140 years have passed, and we still carry the flame of our fallen comrades who sacrificed their lives to birth a better world. Our comrades dreamed of a world wherein the dispossessed and alienated workers are empowered to emancipate the masses from the political and economic bondage of capitalism. More importantly, this dream compelled them to organize—to act so as to make lasting change. The general strike which preceded the Haymarket Affair was not spontaneous. It was the result of years of labor organization, community-building, and political education. It was the product of hundreds of thousands of people who felt in their bones the immense injustice of the society they lived in and couldn’t bear to remain complacent.

Today, we feel that same burning injustice. We feel it when we see masked agents kidnap our neighbors off the street; we feel it when we see the current administration bomb schoolchildren in Iran without remorse; we feel it when we see bipartisan legislative support for continuing a genocide in the stolen land of Palestine; we feel it when we see an unelected Supreme Court strip away the rights of women and LGBTQ+ youth; we feel it when we see that the same 239 year-old Constitution which was devised to suppress popular liberatory movements still shackles us today.

But the lesson of May Day, its everlasting importance, is that this injustice must compel us to act. The eight-hour workday many of us currently appreciate was borne from hundreds of organized workers’ blood, sweat, and tears in the most literal sense. If we wish to fulfill the promise of an emancipatory future, we must take inspiration from the bravery of those nameless and faceless comrades. We must commit ourselves to organizing for the abolition of ICE, for the achievement of socialist society, and for the realization of America’s founding democratic promise: that it is the inalienable right of the people of any society to abolish a despotic government and institute a new one which secures for all the equal enjoyment of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.