In 1990 Michael Ignatieff,
writing about Easter in the Observer, remarked that “secular
societies have never succeeded in providing alternatives to religious rituals.”
He pointed out that the French Revolution “may have turned subjects into
citizens, may have put liberté, égalité and fraternité 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 almost everywhere in Europe west of what 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 labor 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:
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. [Hillary Clinton. Timothy
Snyder. Mark Zuckerberg & Sheryl Sandberg.]
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 Labor. Marshal
Petain’s Vichy government declared the First of May a “Festival of Labor 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 labor 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 labor movement?
The Rapid Rise
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 labor, 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 labor 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. Finally,
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 labor 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 labor 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 labor 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 labor. 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.
Formalization
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 may or 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: labor 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 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
labor 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?
Holiday
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 iconographical 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, distributed 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 fiancé had given
her, 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. 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 labor 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 incidentally, as in
Spain, increasingly attracted workers who were not politically with the socialists,
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 labor
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-labor belonged chiefly to men, refusing to work for a
day united age and sex in the working-class.
The Workers' Easter
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 labor terms, internationalism. This
universality 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. 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:
This 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 socialist encouragement, it concluded
with a passage of millennial hope:
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
labor 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 labor 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 labor 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.”
The New 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 labor 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 labor movement up till then, May Day did not commemorate anything – at
least for 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” (“Of the
past we make a blank slate”) sang the Internationale, not by accident.
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. 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 labor 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 labor
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 labor 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 labor 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.
Nevertheless, 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 illegality, 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 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 labor movements developed in conditions that allowed May Day to
flourish is there a real continuity of the 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 labor
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 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 labor. 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 occasion for a number of reasons. In one way it is significant
because it helps to explain why Marx became so influential in labor 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 time, 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.
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