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May 1st is May Day, which is also known as International Workers Day. This holiday recognizes the achievements of the working people and it is celebrated in locales and countries all around the world.
May 1st also marks the anniversary of the beginning of the 1886 nation-wide strike in support of the eight-hour workday. In Chicago, a mass meeting in support of the workers' movement ended tragically with the "Haymarket Massacre" on May 4.
"Over the heads of the capitalist robbers, over the heads of their
predatory governments, we extend a hand to the workers of all countries,
and cry:
Hail the First of May!"
Selection from "The Worker's Maypole" by Walter Crane (1894)
Be ye many or few drawn together,
Let your message be clear on this day;
Be ye birds of the spring, of one feather
In this--that ye sing on May-Day.
Of the new life that still lieth hidden,
Though its shadow is cast before;
The new birth of hope that unbidden
Surely comes, as the sea to the shore.
Stand fast, then, Oh Workers, your ground,
Together pull, strong and united:
Link your hands like a chain the world round,
If you will that your hopes be requited.
When the World's Workers, sisters and brothers,
Shall build, in the new coming years,
A lair house of life--not for others,
For the earth and its fullness is theirs.
Signifying a sharp turn in working class movement in Sri Lanka, the plantation workers of Balmoral Estate in hill country recently took a bold step forward to establish an action committee. After weeks of preliminary strike actions which were, in turn, met with numerous betrayals by reactionary trade unions, Sri Lankan workers are still engaged in an important struggle.
The Balmoral Estate Action Committee recently published an appeal to all workers which includes a bold vision statement and call to action:
We, the workers of the Balmoral Estate in Agarapathana, have formed our own Action Committee to fight for our rights and call on workers throughout the plantations and other sections of industry to do the same.
We have taken this step because we have no faith in any of the trade unions that have sold us out time and time again. All the plantation unions are working with the employers and the government to force us to accept another two years of poverty-level wages.
The organization of the Balmore Estate labor force constitutes an important development not only within Sri Lanka but on an international scale as well. Working people and students everywhere can learn from the bravery and vision of these plantation workers. Their struggle exemplifies the vision of Indian political theorists like D.D. Kosambi who captured the very essence of workers' movements in the conclusion to his 1939 piece The Kanpur Road:
My place was not with the heroes, but with the rabble, with the men who had been pressed into the ranks by force of arms, or force of hunger, with nothing to fight or work for and little to gain; whose function in the epics was to be slaughtered by the heroes; whose role, according to the historians, was to provide a mere background for the deeds of great men. The heroes of a money-making society rose from the people, at the expense of the people; I could rise only with the common people.
May 1st is May
Day, which is also known as International Workers Day. This
holiday is observed in many countries and locales, in
recognition of the achievements of the working people of the
world.
May 1st
also marks the anniversary of the beginning of the 1886 nation-wide
strike in support of the eight-hour workday. In Chicago, a
mass meeting in support of the workers' movement ended tragically with
the "Haymarket Massacre" on May 4.
From 1880 on, I became wholly engrossed in the labor movement. In all the great industrial centers the working class was in rebellion. The enormous immigration from Europe crowded the slums, forced down wages and threatened to destroy the standard of living fought for by American working men. Throughout the country there was business depression and much unemployment. In the cities there was hunger and rags and despair. Foreign agitators who had suffered under European despots preached various schemes of economic salvation to the workers. The workers asked only for bread and a shortening of the long hours of toil. The agitators gave them visions. The police gave them clubs.
Particularly the city of Chicago was the scene of strike after strike, followed by boycotts and riots. The years preceding 1886 had witnessed strikes of the lake seamen, of dock laborers and street railway workers. These strikes had been brutally suppressed by policemen’s clubs and by hired gunmen. The grievance on the part of the workers was given no heed. John Bonfield, inspector of police, was particularly cruel in the suppression of meetings where men peacefully assembled to discuss matters of wages and of hours. Employers were defiant and open in the expression of their fears and hatreds. The Chicago Tribune, the organ of the employers, suggested ironically that the farmers of Illinois treat the tramps that poured out of the great industrial centers as they did other pests, by putting strychnine in the food.
The workers started an agitation for an eight-hour day. The trades unions and the Knights of Labor endorsed the movement but because many of the leaders of the agitation were foreigners, the movement itself was regarded as “foreign” and as “un-American.” Then the anarchists of Chicago, a very small group, espoused the cause of the eight-hour day. From then on the people of Chicago seemed incapable of discussing a purely economic question without getting excited about anarchism.
The employers used the cry of anarchism to kill the movement. A person who believed in an eight-hour working day was, they said, an enemy to his country, a traitor, an anarchist. The foundations of government were being gnawed away by the anarchist rats. Feeling was bitter. The city was divided into two angry camps. The working people on one side hungry, cold, jobless, fighting gunmen and police clubs with bare hands. On the other side the employers, knowing neither hunger nor cold, supported by the newspapers, by the police, by all the power of the great state itself.
The anarchists took advantage of the widespread discontent to preach their doctrines. Orators used to address huge crowds on the windy, barren shore of Lake Michigan. Although I never endorsed the philosophy of anarchism, I often attended the meetings on the lake shore, listening to what these teachers of a new order had to say to the workers.
Meanwhile Vile employers were meeting. They met in the mansion of George M. Pullman on Prairie Avenue or in the residence of Wirt Dexter, an able corporation lawyer. They discussed means of killing the eight-hour movement which was to be ushered in by a general strike. They discussed methods of dispersing the meetings of the anarchists.
A bitterly cold winter set in. Long unemployment resulted in terrible suffering. Bread lines increased. Soup kitchens could not handle the applicants. Thousands knew actual misery.
On Christmas day, hundreds of poverty stricken people in rags and tatters, in thin clothes, in wretched shoes paraded on fashionable Prairie Avenue before the mansions of the rich, before their employers, carrying the black flag. I thought the parade an insane move on the part of the anarchists, as it only served to make feeling more bitter. As a matter of fact, it had no educational value whatever and only served to increase the employers’ fear, to make the police more savage, and the public less sympathetic to the real distress of the workers.
The first of May, which was to usher in the eight-hour day uprising, came. The newspapers had done everything to alarm the people. All over the city there were strikes and walkouts. employers quaked in their boots. They saw revolution. The workers in the McCormick Harvester Works gathered outside the factory. Those inside who did not join the strikers were called scabs. Bricks were thrown. Windows were broken. The scabs were threatened. Some one turned in a riot call.
The police without warning charged down upon the workers, shooting into their midst, clubbing right and left. Many were trampled under horses’ feet. Numbers were shot dead. Skulls were broken. Young men and young girls were clubbed to death.
The Pinkerton agency formed armed bands of ex-convicts and hoodlums and hired them to capitalists at eight dollars a day, to picket the factories and incite trouble.
On the evening of May 4th, the anarchists held a meeting in the shabby, dirty district known to later history as Haymarket Square. All about were railway tracks, dingy saloons and the dirty tenements of the poor. A half a block away was the Desplaines Street Police Station presided over by John Bonfield, a man without tact or discretion or sympathy, a most brutal believer in suppression as the method to settle industrial unrest.
Carter Harrison, the mayor of Chicago, attended the meeting of the anarchists and moved in and about the crowds in the square. After leaving, he went to the Chief of Police and instructed him to send no mounted police to the meeting, as it was being peacefully conducted and the presence of mounted police would only add fuel to fires already burning red in the workers’ hearts. But orders perhaps came from other quarters, for disregarding the report of the mayor, the chief of police sent mounted policemen in large numbers to the meeting.
One of the anarchist speakers was addressing the crowd. A bomb was dropped from a window overlooking the square. A number of the police were killed in the explosion that followed.
The city went insane and the newspapers did everything to keep it like a madhouse. The workers’ cry for justice was drowned in the shriek for revenge. Bombs were “found” every five minutes. Men went armed and gun stores kept open nights. Hundreds were arrested. Only those who had agitated for an eight-hour day, however, were brought to trial and a few months later hanged. But the man, Schnaubelt, who actually threw the bomb was never brought into the case, nor was his part in the terrible drama ever officially made clear.
The leaders in the eight hour day movement were hanged Friday, November the 11th. That day Chicago’s rich had chills and fever. Rope stretched in all directions from the jail. Police men were stationed along the ropes armed with riot rifles. Special patrols watched all approaches to the jail. The roofs about the grim stone building were black with police. The newspapers fed the public imagination with stories of uprisings and jail deliveries.
But there were no uprisings, no jail deliveries, except that of Louis Lingg, the only real preacher of violence among all the condemned men. He outwitted the gallows by biting a percussion cap and blowing off his head.
The Sunday following the executions, the funerals were held. Thousands of workers marched behind the black hearses, not because they were anarchists but they felt that these men, whatever their theories, were martyrs to the workers’ struggle. The procession wound through miles and miles of streets densely packed with silent people.
In the cemetery of Waldheim, the dead were buried. But with them was not buried their cause. The struggle for the eight hour day, for more human conditions and relations between man and man lived on, and still lives on.
Seven years later, Governor Altgeld, after reading all the evidence in the case, pardoned the three anarchists who had escaped the gallows and were serving life sentences in jail. He said the verdict was unjustifiable, as had William Dean Howells and William Morris at the time of its execution. Governor Altgeld committed political suicide by his brave action but he is remembered by all those who love truth and those who have the courage to confess it.
Those of you who are regular visitors to greeklish.org have probably noticed that these days I don’t post articles as frequently as I have in years past. This is certainly not for lack of interest or because things are boring at our end. In fact, things have been pretty busy here, as we have been hard at work launching our new project, Erythrós Press and Media.
The following article was written for publication by WPI in the early January 2009 edition (issue number 98) of their official Farsi-language magazine, Kargare Kommunist.
The continuing struggle in Greece
On the night of December 6, 2008 at around 9:00 PM, 15 year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos was gunned down in the Exarchia district of Athens, Greece. He was murdered in the street without mercy and without cause, the victim of a government which regularly exercises wanton force with relative impunity in an effort to suppress dissent and maintain the prevailing social order of the day. The executioner in this case was a police officer, 37 year-old Epaminondas Korkoneas, who, with the aid of one or more accomplices, arbitrarily and unilaterally imposed a death sentence on an unarmed and defenseless boy. Perhaps Korkoneas and his cronies thought his position as a cop placed him above suspicion and outside of the bounds of human decency. It’s possible that he believed that the death of one free-spirited teenager would be lost among the cumulative brutality of everyday life on the streets of one of Europe’s most populous cities. Maybe he thought his actions would be well-concealed by the nighttime darkness. But people would soon know the truth of the matter. The police on the scene tried to justify the shooting by claiming they were defending themselves against an attack. But the witnesses on the scene contradicted the claims made by the cops in their cover story and as the witnesses came forward to tell the truth of the matter, a grieving and angry public took notice.
Alexandros "Alexis" Grigoropoulos (1993-2008)
The gun blast that killed young Alexis was truly a shot heard ‘round the world.
As news of the murder of Alexis spread throughout Athens, the righteous anger of the Greek people gave way to collective opposition and mass action. On December 7, students took to the streets to demonstrate against police and government abuses. The murder of Alexis was the breaking point for thousands upon thousands of students who were already angry about government corruption, budgetary excesses and a campaign to privatize higher education. The massive outcry against all sorts of new and old repression in Greece was met with fear and aggression on the part of the Greek government, who acted quickly in their attempts to suppress dissent. Through the use of provocation and extreme force, the police forces hounded and attacked demonstrators, escalating the conflict and inciting violence in the streets of Athens.
The Greek people showed their solidarity with the students in Athens by taking to the streets throughout the country. In Thessaloniki, Naupolio, Patras and numerous other cities, students and workers engaged in empathetic demonstrations against a government which has marginalized itself through its own incompetence and arrogance. Such expressions of support were not just confined to Greece, as citizens marched in solidarity with the Greek people through the streets of Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands. Even the people of Turkey – whose government is historically at odds with that of Greece – organized demonstrations in support of the people of Greece in their struggle against injustice.
The bourgeois media has been all too selective in their coverage of the events in Greece. Mainstream television newscasts are certainly happy to show buildings and cars ablaze, but they seldom show footage of the police conduct which precipitates such events. Even on the day of the funeral of Alexis Grigoropoulos, police harassed mourners as they walked peacefully in the boy’s funeral procession. Moreover, recent photographic evidence suggests that police agents – some armed with truncheons – have infiltrated demonstrations posing as students on more than one occasion, subsequently inciting unrest and violence from within the demonstrations themselves, thus providing the government the opportunity to portray demonstrators as reckless and unruly.
The real story unfolding on the streets and in the universities of Greece is being told through progressive and independent media outlets and through user-generated Internet forums and networks. It is, of course, unfortunately true that violence has occurred in the streets of Athens since the murder of Alexis, but whenever people rise up to challenge their oppressors, it is seldom an orderly or gentle affair. It has been said time and again with complete accuracy that “a revolution is not a dinner party.”
Contrary to the wishes of government officials, the demonstrations in Athens and throughout Greece have not subsided even in the face of police suppression and a government-sponsored anti-student propaganda campaign. A general strike against police and government abuses was initiated on December 10, allowing workers across the country to show solidarity with the students in defiance of the floundering Greek government. The student unions acted as a vanguard in this particular area, taking on the effort to plan and organize the strike. Teachers struck for two days and university lecturers for three days. Even the union of white-collar workers at the Commission of Competition (a service of the Finance Ministry) staged a three-hour strike on December 9. As of December 18, protests continue with sustained fervor throughout Athens, from the historic Acropolis to the gates of the Greek Parliament.
Over the course of the last century, the Greek people have endured repression and brutality in the most extreme forms imaginable, and in each instance they have triumphed through indomitable spirit and resolute determination. From the brutal years of the Metaxas dictatorship to the invasions and occupations by fascist armies during the Second World War to the draconian rule of the Military Junta, the Greek people – led by workers and students – have resisted tyranny, meeting force with force and fighting injustice and exploitation at every turn. The present situation, which originated in Athens and has spread throughout Greece with the might of a prairie fire, is a bold new chapter in the ongoing struggle of the Greek people.
Mike B. resides in the Midwestern United States. He maintains regular contact with many family members and friends throughout Greece. Mike has been an administrator for the Marxists Internet Archive (http://www.marxists.org) since 2001.
Thousands of protesters have attacked banks and shops in Athens and Greece's northern city of Thessaloniki, angered by the police's killing of a teenager.
[...]
After a lull in the fighting on Sunday morning, youths left the National Technical University of Athens, known as the Polytechnic, and joined thousands of leftist demonstrators and anarchists on a march towards the police headquarters on Alexandras Avenue.
They passed close to where 15-year-old Andreas Grigoropoulos was shot dead on Saturday. One banner called the police "murderers".
One protester told the BBC he had been greatly angered by the actions of the police.
"It's not the first time. They always kill people - immigrants, innocent people - and without any excuse," he said. "They murdered him in cold blood."
The unrest, the worst in several years, has spread throughout the country
"I think [the violence] is justified. Peaceful demonstrations cannot get a solution to the problem."
The scene inside a long, low-slung factory on this city’s North Side this weekend offered a glimpse at how the nation’s loss of more than 600,000 manufacturing jobs in a year of recession is boiling over.
The company, which was founded in 1965 and once employed more than 700 people, had struggled in recent months as home construction dipped, workers said.
Workers laid off Friday from Republic Windows and Doors, who for years assembled vinyl windows and sliding doors here, said they would not leave, even after company officials announced that the factory was closing.
Some of the plant’s 250 workers stayed all night, all weekend, in what they were calling an occupation of the factory. Their sharpest criticisms were aimed at their former bosses, who they said gave them only three days’ notice of the closing, and the company’s creditors. But their anger stretched broadly to the government’s costly corporate bailout plans, which, they argued, had forgotten about regular workers.
“They want the poor person to stay down,” said Silvia Mazon, 47, a mother of two who worked as an assembler here for 13 years and said she had never before been the sort to march in protests or make a fuss. “We’re here, and we’re not going anywhere until we get what’s fair and what’s ours. They thought they would get rid of us easily, but if we have to be here for Christmas, it doesn’t matter.”
[...]
At a news conference Sunday, President-elect Barack Obama said the company should follow through on its commitments to its workers.
(M)ore than 4000 students protested at Tehran University. Their chants included "Ahmadi-Pinochet, Iran will not become Chile!", "Death to the dictator", "Free all political prisoners!", "University is the last barricade", "Students die but will not be humiliated" and "Mr. President, the student movement will stand until the end!" A large number of students from other universities and colleges in the capital, including Polytechnic (Amirkabir), Industrial University, Abbaspour, Science and Technology and Rajai joined the protest.
Read more: "Students Rally For Democracy In Iran" from CBS News This link is especially for the American "progressives" who have asserted to me that Students' Day doesn't exist because they have never seen the mainstream media cover it.
The Islamic Republic of Iran executed 10 prisoners earlier this week, once again underscoring both the brutal nature of the current regime and the need for continued international attention to the plight of scores of political prisoners who remain under threat of long-term incarceration and the imposition of death sentences. Farzad Kamangar is one of those political prisoners.
Please join with the thousands of trade unionists and human rights defenders around the world who are mobilising in defence of Farzad Kamangar, an Iranian Kurdish teacher and trade unionist who is at risk of execution.
Education International received information from reliable sources that on 26 November Kamangar was taken from his cell 121 in ward 209 of Tehran's Evin prison in preparation for execution by hanging. However, the latest information is that he is still alive and was able to meet with his lawyer on 27 November for the first time in over two months. His situation remains precarious nonetheless.
Kamangar, aged 33, was sentenced to death by the Iranian Revolutionary Court on 25 February 2008 after a trial which took place in secret, lasted only minutes, and failed to meet Iranian and international standards of fairness. His lawyer, Kahlil Bahramian, said: "Nothing in Kamangar's judicial files and records demonstrates any links to the charges brought against him." Indeed, Kamangar was initially cleared of all charges during the investigation process.
Education International, the International Trade Union Confederation, the International Transport Workers Federation, Amnesty International and LabourStart are appealing to the Iranian authorities to commute the death sentence and ensure his case is reviewed fairly.
Click here to send a message of support for Farzad Kamangar.
"I think what motivates people is not great hate, but great love for other people." -- Huey P. Newton
Folks who know me very well know that I don't have any love for the America's two-party political system. Moreover, to say that I'm not terribly fond of the Democratic Party is to put things rather lightly. I have never regretted my vote for Ralph Nader in the 2000 elections and I think the Democrats who still bear a grudge against Ralph and the Greens to this very day have obviously failed to see things in a much broader perspective for all too long. I have been an admirer of Cynthia McKinney for years and I was absolutely thrilled with her decision to run for President on the Green Party's ticket this year. I shared my enthusiasm for Cynthia with many others, including our 9 year-old daughter who watched the television coverage of the Green Party's convention with me a few months ago. But at the end of it all, I felt like I had to cast my vote for Barack Obama. And equally – if not more importantly – I knew that I had to vote against John McCain.
Huey P. Newton
The right-wing rhetoric of the campaign season reached a disturbing level very soon after the primaries wrapped up. The McCain camp and its cohorts leveled some of the most divisive attacks in the history of American politics. The bitter climate created by McCain's negative-ad blitz undoubtedly soured and disenchanted voters already weary from the infighting of the primary races. The word "socialism" returned to our political discourse, but solely as a pejorative and people were encouraged to fear and resist all forms of new ideas and reform.
I know I was just as frustrated as many others. But over the course of the last few weeks before the election, I noticed an amazing and unexpected change in what had been a long, depressing period of anger and indignation: On both television and radio, I started to notice that a few brave voices here and there were invoking names that don't often make it into today's mainstream media. I heard folks talking about Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton and Ida B. Wells – people who are real heroes to me – and along with these names followed all but forgotten terms like "working class," "movement" and "unity". These names and words came from the minds and mouths of people like Bernie Sanders, Michael Moore, Roland Martin, Cornell West and other important voices for change in America. And I started to feel...hope.
There is no question that the election of Barack Obama is a pivotal event in the history of America. But it is also not a cure in and of itself for the many problems facing the American people. Racism and all sorts of prejudices persist in today's America just as sure as they did in the days of Jim Crow and George Wallace. There's no doubt that certain elements will seek to exploit these antagonisms in an effort to preserve America's old and broken social order. As my friend Mitch observed last night as he looked at the election map, "Those states where people were killed 45 yrs ago so blacks could vote all went for McCain. Those people, those un-reconstructed Confederates, are still there." True enough. But some early praise goes to Barack Obama for making the effort to bridge the longstanding gaps perpetuated by prejudice and ignorance. He accepted the results of the election by expressing these sentiments:
It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled – Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.
It is particularly telling that in just the third sentence of his speech last night – less than a minute into his historic address – Obama sought to address not only the political, racial and class-related tensions which have divided Americans for so long, but he also touched upon the sensitive matter of individual sexual orientation, implicitly and effectively welcoming the thousands and thousands of gay and lesbian Americans into the fold of the American political arena. It is a moment like this that suggests that Obama's respect for diversity and his committment to reform are genuine. The right-wing hate machine, which is already seething and chomping at the bit to pick apart the Obama presidency, would be well-served to have more than a bit of concern over what appears to be a new direction in American thinking. They will surely fight to keep a choke-hold on the imagination of working-class America. And their politics of division must be opposed and resisted at every turn.
It is improbable that any simple reform and optimism will serve to salvage an destitute economic system that was founded on class antagonism, elitism and privilege, but the short-term yields of a progressive Obama administration are certainly attractive. For one thing, it would be nice to get some "breathing room" back when it comes to civil liberties, debate and dissent. The very idea that we now have the potential for real health care reform is an exciting prospect which is long overdue. The fact that the current administration (with the support of Congress) has spent close to $1 trillion this year alone to fight an unnecessary war and to pay for Wall Street's worthless assets provides clear evidence that we can afford a national health care system which guarantees the best of care for every man, woman, and child in the nation, regardless of socioeconomic status. The notion that America will finally have a Commander-in-Chief who will seek to avoid unnecessary militarism and adventurism in favor of real and direct diplomacy presents the opportunity for America to regain some degree of integrity internationally, after years of relative indifference by our current leadership.
It is Barack Obama's moderate but palpable grass-roots collectivism which empowers Americans, providing the motivation to support these efforts and continue to struggle for change. And struggle we will.
We have received word from Hooman K. of the site "Nothing Can Stop Us!" that Peyman Piran was released on bail on May 1. Again, this is some relatively good news. However, we should remember that Ali Kantouri remains in jail and many DAB members await trial on very serious charges.
We will provide more information as it becomes available.
May 1st is May Day, which is also known as International Workers Day. This holiday is observed in many countries and locales, in recognition of the achievements of the working people of the world.
May 1st also marks the anniversary of the beginning of the 1886 nation-wide strike in support of the eight-hour workday. In Chicago, a mass meeting in support of the workers' movement ended tragically with the "Haymarket Massacre" on May 4.
Written: 1894, First published in Polish in Sprawa Robotnicza; Published: From Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, tr. Dick Howard, Monthly Review Press, 1971, pp. 315-16; Online Version: marxists.org April, 2002;
The incomparable Rosa Luxemburg
The happy idea of using a proletarian holiday celebration as a means to attain the eight-hour day was first born in Australia. The workers there decided in 1856 to organize a day of complete stoppage together with meetings and entertainment as a demonstration in favor of the eight-hour day. The day of this celebration was to be April 21. At first, the Australian workers intended this only for the year 1856. But this first celebration had such a strong effect on the proletarian masses of Australia, enlivening them and leading to new agitation, that it was decided to repeat the celebration every year.
In fact, what could give the workers greater courage and faith in their own strength than a mass work stoppage which they had decided themselves? What could give more courage to the eternal slaves of the factories and the workshops than the mustering of their own troops? Thus, the idea of a proletarian celebration was quickly accepted and, from Australia, began to spread to other countries until finally it had conquered the whole proletarian world.
The first to follow the example of the Australian workers were the Americans. In 1886 they decided that May 1 should be the day of universal work stoppage. On this day 200,000 of them left their work and demanded the eight-hour day. Later, police and legal harassment prevented the workers for many years from repeating this [size] demonstration. However in 1888 they renewed their decision and decided that the next celebration would be May 1, 1890.
In the meanwhile, the workers' movement in Europe had grown strong and animated. The most powerful expression of this movement occurred at the International Workers' Congress in 1889. At this Congress, attended by four hundred delegates, it was decided that the eight-hour day must be the first demand. Whereupon the delegate of the French unions, the worker Lavigne from Bordeaux, moved that this demand be expressed in all countries through a universal work stoppage. The delegate of the American workers called attention to the decision of his comrades to strike on May 1, 1890, and the Congress decided on this date for the universal proletarian celebration.
In this case, as thirty years before in Australia, the workers really thought only of a one-time demonstration. The Congress decided that the workers of all lands would demonstrate together for the eight-hour day on May 1, 1890. No one spoke of a repetition of the holiday for the next years. Naturally no one could predict the lightninglike way in which this idea would succeed and how quickly it would be adopted by the working classes. However, it was enough to celebrate the May Day simply one time in order that everyone understand and feel that May Day must be a yearly and continuing institution [. . .].
The first of May demanded the introduction of the eight-hour day. But even after this goal was reached, May Day was not given up. As long as the struggle of the workers against the bourgeoisie and the ruling class continues, as long as all demands are not met, May Day will be the yearly expression of these demands. And, when better days dawn, when the working class of the world has won its deliverance then too humanity will probably celebrate May Day in honor of the bitter struggles and the many sufferings of the past.
