Thread by @MackamanThomas

1/ May Day, international workers’ day, had US origins in the Eight Hour Day movement that emerged after the Civil War. This Marx had predicted. “The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class…

2/ “…so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes,” he wrote to Lincoln in congratulation for the latter’s re-election in 1864, in the midst of the Civil War. Just three years later, in 1867, Marx was able to see his prognosis vindicated…

3/ …In his brilliant “The Working Day” section of Capital, in which he explained how capitalists extract surplus value, Marx wrote, “Out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation….

4/ “…that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.” The American capitalists quickly retreated from the heady days of the Second American Revolution—the Civil War—they now feared a Third…

5/ …They abandoned the land demands of the freed slaves. The New York Times warned in 1867 “An attempt to justify the confiscation of Southern land under the pretense of doing justice to the freedmen strikes at the root of all property rights in both sections…

6/ “… It concerns Massachusetts quite as much as Mississippi.” The Times feared that if a challenge to property is “begun in the South, it will find its way into the cities of the North.” Rightly so. A powerful impulse toward industrial organization gripped the working class

7/ Then the Paris Commune of 1871 made incarnate the worst fears: working class revolution. The media blamed Marx and the First International. Marx told an American reporter that the growth of socialism in the working class “was the natural outcome of the country’s development..

8/ “… caused by the concentration of capital and the changed relations between workmen and employers.” The bourgeois readers of the Chicago Tribune could not have been comforted! Their city had grown from about 100,000 in 1860 when Lincoln won nomination to 500,000 in 1879.

9/No other city so epitomized the colossal growth of American capitalism—and with it, the working class. Chicago’s, and America’s, was and is an international working class. In the 1880s, its population was 80% foreign-born or the children of foreign-born.

10/In 1886 the call went up among these “workers of the world” in America: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will!” Strikes and protests were held across the country on May 1. In Chicago, a march drew 80,000.

11/On May 4 police attacked a follow-up rally in Haymarket Square. A bomb went off. In the explosion and police melee, seven officers and four civilians were killed. Authorities railroaded leaders of Chicago’s working class through a sham trial.

12/Four Haymarket Martyrs were executed: Engel, Fischer, Parsons, and Spies. Spies last words at the gallows were “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today." A fifth martyr, Lingg, was murdered or committed suicide in jail

13/In 1889, the Second International was founded in Paris, 100 years after the great French Revolution. A French delegate motivated a resolution for “a great international demonstration” of May Day to mark the American events, to take place the following year.

14/Demonstrations were held throughout Europe and North America in 1890. The anniversary was marked each year thereafter. Russian workers first observed in 1891, Chinese workers in 1927.

15/On May 11, 1894, eight years after Haymarket, the Pullman rail strike erupted in Chicago, led by Eugene Debs. The strike had the railroad firms beat—until Pres. Grover Cleveland sent in the US army to crush it. Debs read Marx in jail. He was won to socialism.

16/ Fearful that May Day would be a rallying point for American workers, Cleveland signed into law the federal holiday known as Labor Day in the US, which takes place in the first week of September. Cleveland’s name was hissed at its first observance in Chicago!

17/ The nationalist A.F.L. turned on May Day in 1903, rejecting a proposal from a worker at its annual convention. He had proposed May 1 be marked as “a day of protest against the present obnoxious system of exploitation and the dawn of the emancipation of the Proletariat."

18/ Yet in spite of the wishes of union officials and US presidents, workers continued to celebrate May 1 until the vicious anticommunism of the post-World War II McCarthy period. Anti-communism was state religion imposed top-down. It has not helped US workers one bit.

19/It is high time to revive the socialist and internationalist traditions! Join the WSWS on May 1 wsws.org/en/special/pag…

#MayDay #MayDay22 #MayDay2022 #MayDayOnlineRally