Today is the first of May, 2021; May Day, otherwise known as International Workers’ Day. It’s a holiday dedicated to celebrating working people and the international labour movement, often accompanied by marches and parades. We here at On Second Glance will be among those celebrants, cracking open a cold one or two six. An international holiday, there are naturally celebrations the world over; with official recognition in the majority of countries worldwide. One notable absentee from this celebration is the United States, which does not recognize May Day and celebrates its Labor Day in September. The great irony of this, of course, is that it is because of an event in American history that we now celebrate May Day.
Let’s set the scene: it’s May 4th, 1886 in Chicago, Illinois. Workers, union leaders, socialists and anarchists, and other non-radical labour organizers have packed into Haymarket Square. Why are they here? For the past 3 days, hundreds of thousands of workers had been demonstrating across the US, with 80,000 people demonstrating in Chicago alone. They were demanding better wages and the institution of an 8-hour workday; in their words, “Eight Hours for work. Eight hours for rest. Eight hours for what we will”. As is often the case, this was not done without pushback, with the military, police and strikebreakers harassing the demonstrators at every turn. As such, another demonstration is called for in Chicago in response to the harassment, with people to gather at Haymarket Square.
What follows is a well-known tragedy, the Haymarket Massacre. When police arrive at the ~3000 person strong demonstration, an unknown person throws a dynamite bomb at the police. The police open fire wildly on the crowd, killing four demonstrators and injuring hundreds more, with several policemen injured by friendly fire in the chaos. This provokes a red scare in the US, with intense suppression of union and leftist organizations. In Chicago itself, what is widely understood as a kangaroo court was held, in which eight demonstrators were accused of being the bomber. All were found guilty despite a lack of evidence, one of the accused being demonstrably not at Haymarket Square at the time. With one exception, they were all sentenced to hang, a verdict which was criticized only a handful of years later by the next governor of Illinois, John Atgeld.
In response, the Second International declares the first of May to be a commemoration of the Haymarket martyrs and a celebration of the wider labour movement. The US government responds to this by declaring May 1st to be Loyalty Day and the first Monday in September to be Labor Day, hoping to keep American labourers from linking up with the wider international worker’s movement.
So here we are, almost 150 years later, still celebrating May Day. Much ink has been spilled on the holiday; what it means, what its significance is or was, etc. And I’m sure we’ll give it a more thorough treatment at some point in the future. But rather than a lengthy, theoretical analysis of the holiday or the wider movement or what have you, we thought we’d take a slightly different tack. Today we thought we’d present a set of quotations from figures in the wider labour movement that we’ve found to be influential or inspiring (or even entertaining). We wish all of our readers a happy May Day!
Ask for work. If they don’t give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.
We here at On Second Glance are in the business of theory; reading it, explaining it, making the case for it. We do this both because we enjoy it, but also because we think these ideas are worth investigating. But simple declarations, like Goldman’s, can sometimes do more to clarify principles and inspire than even the most cogent of theory.
Private property has crushed true individualism, and set up an individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road, and encumbering them … Nothing should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has, is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance. With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
When one hears “socialism”, “the labour movement”, or the countless other terms associated with the left, seldom do artists come to mind. But let us not forget that socialism has been called the “beautiful ideal” for a reason, a beauty that naturally appeals to the artistically-inclined. This particular quotation comes from Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism. As the name suggests, this piece argues that capitalism perverts man’s development (generally and artistically) and that true artistic development can only be achieved under a more equitable system, namely socialism.
In his private life he is a highly disorderly, cynical human being and a bad manager. He lives the life of a gypsy, of an intellectual Bohemian, washing, combing, and changing his linen are things he does rarely. He likes to get drunk. He is often idle for days on end, but when he has work to do, he will work day and night with tireless endurance. For him there is no such thing as a fixed time for sleeping and waking. He will often stay up the whole night and then lie down on the sofa, fully dressed, around midday and then sleep till evening, untroubled by the fact that the whole world comes and goes through his room … None of this embarrasses Marx or his wife. You are received in the friendliest of fashions; pipes and tobacco and whatever else there might happen to be are offered to you most cordially. Intellectually spirited and agreeable conversation makes amends for the domestic deficiencies, at least in part. One even grows accustomed to the company, and finds this circle interesting, even original. This is the true picture of the family life of the communist chief, Marx.
– A Prussian officer’s report on Karl Marx
There’s something comforting in knowing that even The Greats™, like Marx, didn’t have it all together. We have to push back against this idea that you have to have everything in your own life fixed before you can work on improving the outside world. Because nobody has it all together.
When the palace is magnificent, the fields are filled with weeds, and the granaries are empty, some have lavish garments, carry sharp swords and feast on food and drink, they possess more than they can spend. This is called the vanity of robbers. It is certainly not the Way.
– Lao Tzu
Let us not forget that the ideals that we on the left stand for are not new. While the theoretical understandings have certainly changed, egalitarian ideals have existed since the dawn of history. We see that demonstrated here in the Tao Te Ching, a text attributed to the semi-mythical Lao Tzu, written sometime in the 6th century B.C.E in China.
As to whether Marcos is gay: Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains. Marcos is all the exploited, marginalised, oppressed minorities resisting and saying “Enough”. He is every minority who is now beginning to speak and every majority that must shut up and listen. He is every untolerated group searching for a way to speak. Everything that makes power and the good consciences of those in power uncomfortable — this is Marcos.
On the flipside, there’s also a tendency to frame “the left” and the worker’s movement as an artifact of the 20th century. But this is certainly not the case. And there is no better evidence for this than the Zapatistas, as led by Subcommandante Marcos, a left-wing group governing much of modern Chiapas. The group formed to protect the indigenous Mayans from Mexican state repression and are a potent rebuke to this framing of the left as a thing-of-the-past. In different forms and with different actors, the emancipatory work of the left continues.
It’s also just a badass quote.
There was no one to guide my footsteps to the paths of the Spirit, and everything I read turned me away from it. The call to my youth was the call of Kropotkin, and the beauty of his prose, the nobility of his phrasing, appealed to my heart … [quotation from Kropotkin’s An Appeal to the Young] … This was Kropotkin, to me at that time a saint in his way. Whatever I had read as a child about the saints had thrilled me. I could see the nobility of giving one’s life for the sick, the maimed, the leper. Priests and Sisters the world over could be working for the littlest ones of Christ, and my heart stirred at their work. Who could hear of Damien – and Stevenson made the whole world hear of him – without feeling impelled to thank God that he had made man so noble? But there was another question in my mind. Why was so much done in remedying the evil instead of avoiding it in the first place?
To say that the relationship between the left and organized religion has been contentious at times is … an understatement. It’s a tension with innumerable factors behind it, one that you could spend lifetimes researching and writing about (and something I’m sure we will write about). But for as many times as people have seen the left and religion as in contradiction, just as many have found their leftist principles to be a reflection of their faith. Nowhere is that better seen than in Dorothy Day, who founded the incredibly influential Catholic Worker Movement.
You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future!
The goals of the worker’s movement or the left generally are sometimes dismissed “utopian” or “impractical”. And I understand why, it’s difficult to imagine a new system when one has only ever lived in the old system. But I’m sure similar dismissive statements were made when some uppity American farmers and French peasants started talking about a future without a king!
If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn’t be worth living.
I mean, is he wrong?
Well-being for all is not a dream!
It’s a quote we always come back to. In a movement that has been riddled with setbacks and disappointments, we sometimes have to remind ourselves this. Things can be better and we can make them better. We just have to do it.