The Virtual Stoa

And here’s the banner that was unveiled at G. A. Cohen’s Valedictory Lecture here in Oxford, photographed by Chris Bertram:

He also got one of me being the Warm-Up Guy over here.

Here’s the dramatic hammer-and-sickle effect that appears on the campus of the University of Chicago round about noon on May Day, photographed by Abbi Eichhorn:

[thanks! PM]

Happy May Day, everyone!

Here’s the Internationale scene from Bertolucci’s Il Conformista, which was playing in Oxford last week:

[Older Stoa May Day coverage is here.]

Happy May Day!

I’m still in a far-too-busy-to-be-posting-much-of-anything kind of state right now, but the old May Day-themed Stoa posts are on this page, and Dave Osler’s got a suitable joke for us all to enjoy.

In several years of recording Dead Socialists, I still haven’t come across one who died on May Day. I hope this is not accidental (comrade).

And, Americans!, for you, as ever, it is Loyalty Day!

(Actually, “as ever” doesn’t seem to be quite right: wikipedia tells me that in 1921 it started out as Americanization Day, which is even funnier.)

Here in Oxford, of course, we have our own reactionary invented traditions.

UPDATE [11.30pm]: Americans! Here is your annual Loyalty Day Proclamation!

If you’re in London, why not join the March for Workplace Justice?

There’s historical background to the holiday here and here.

Americans! For you, today is Loyalty Day!

Over at Sharon’s Place.

Remember that today is Loyalty Day. I haven’t found this year’s executive proclamation on-line yet, but it can’t be too long in the pipeline. So go on, all of you: pledge yourself to that flag and (more importantly, since this isn’t Flag Day) to the Republic For Which It Stands.

The comments thread will do just fine as a place to deposit your protestations of allegiance. Go for it.

Four years ago, PM told me about this custom and practice over at the University of Chicago:

In front of our building [Pick Hall: which used to house the Economics Department] is a lovely abstract sculpture which, at precisely noon on May 1st each year, casts the shadow of a hammer and sickle on the ground in front of the building. As if that weren’t enough, large crowds of students — including anti-communist demonstrators carrying full-sized American flags — gather at noon at the sculpture, to protest its shadow, I suppose.

Re-enactment should take place in a few hours’ time…

May Day falls on Sunday this year. The UK Bank Holiday will be marked in the UK on Monday 2 May. But we should remember that the celebrations should always take place on 1 May, regardless of what day of the week it falls on.

This was a demand of the Brussels Congress of the Second International in 1891, which stressed the holiday’s “true character as an economic demand for the eight hour day and an assertion of class struggle”.

So take tomorrow off work, by all means, but remember that today’s the day.

Here’s the estimable Leo Panitch - professor at York University, Toronto, and one of the editors of the Socialist Register writing in yesterday’s books section of the Toronto Globe and Mail. The piece isn’t online, but it’s been scanned, and comes via PB:

What you need to know about May DayFor more than 100 years, May Day has symbolized the common struggles of workers around the globe. Why is it largely ignored in North America? The answer lies in part in American labour’s long repression of its own radical past, out of which international May Day was actually born a century ago.

The seeds were sown in the campaign for the eight-hour work day. On May 1, 1886, hundreds of thou-sands of North American workers mobilized to strike. In Chicago, the demonstration spilled over into support for workers at a major farm-implements factory who’d been locked out for union activities. On May 3, during a pitched battle between picketers and scabs, police shot two workers. At a protest rally in Haymarket Square the next day, a bomb was tossed into the police ranks and police directed their fire indiscriminately at the crowd. Eight anarchist leaders were arrested, tried and sentenced to death (three were later pardoned).

These events triggered international protests, and in 1889, the first congress of the new socialist parties associated with the Second International (the successor to the First International organized by Karl Marx in the 1860s) called on workers everywhere to join in an annual one-day strike on May 1 — not so much to demand specific reforms as an annual demonstration of labour solidarity and working-class power. May Day was both a product of, and an element in, the rapid growth of new mass working-class parties of Europe — which soon forced official recognition by employers and governments of this “workers’ holiday”.

But the American Federation of Labor, chastened by the “red scare” that followed the Haymarket events, went along with those who opposed May Day observances. Instead, in 1894, the AFL embraced president Grover Cleveland’s decree that the first Monday of September would be the annual Labor Day. The Canadian government of Sir Robert Thompson enacted identical Labour Day legislation a month later.

Ever since, May Day and Labour Day have represented in North America the two faces of working-class political tradition, one symbolizing its revolutionary potential, the other its long search for reform and respectability. With the support of the state and business, the latter has predominated — but the more radical tradition has never been entirely suppressed.

This radical May Day tradition is nowhere better captured than in Bryan Palmer’s monumental book, Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression (From Medieval to Modern) (Monthly Review Press, 2000). Palmer, one of Canada’s foremost Marxist labour historians, has done more than anyone to recover and analyze the cultures of resistance that working people developed in practising class struggle from below. He’s strongly critical of labour-movement leaders who’ve appealed to those elements of working-class culture that crave ersatz bourgeois respectability.

Set amid chapters on peasants and witches in late feudalism, on pirates and slaves during the rise of mercantile imperialism, on fraternal lodge members and anarchists in the new cities of industrial capitalism, on lesbians, homosexuals and communists under fascism, and on the mafia, youth gangs and race riots, jazz, beats and bohemians in modern U.S. capitalism, are two chapters that brilliantly tell the story of May Day. One locates Haymarket in the context of the Victorian bourgeoisie’s fears of what they called the “dangerous classes”. This account confirms the central role of the “anarcho-communist movement in Chicago [which] was blessed with talented leaders, dedicated ranks and the most active left-wing press in the country. The dangerous classes were becoming truly dangerous”.

The other chapter, a survey of “Festivals of Revolution,” locates “the celebratory May Day, a festive seizure of working-class initiative that encompassed demands for shorter hours, improvement in conditions, and socialist agitation and organization” against the backdrop of the traditional spring calendar of class confrontation.

Over the past century communist revolutions were made in the name of the working class, and social democratic parties were often elected into government. In their different ways, both turned May Day to the purposes of the state. Before the 20th century was out the communist regimes imploded in internal contradictions between authoritarianism and the democratic purpose of socialism, while most social democratic ones, trapped in the internal contradictions between the welfare state and increasingly powerful capital markets, accommodated to neo-liberalism and become openly disdainful of “old labour.”

As for the United States, the tragic legacy of the repression of its radical labour past is an increasingly de-unionized working class mobilized by fundamentalist Christian churches. Canada, with its NDP and 30-per-cent unionized labour force, looks good by comparison.

Working classes have suffered defeat after defeat in this era of capitalist globalization. But they’re also in the process of being transformed: The decimated industrial proletariat of the global North is being replaced by a bigger industrial proletariat in the global South. In both regions, a new working class is still being formed in the new service and communication sectors spawned by global capitalism (where the eight-hour day is often unknown). Union movements and workers’ parties from Poland to Korea to South Africa to Brazil have been spawned in the past 20 years. Two more books out of Monthly Review Press — Ursula Hum’s The Making of a Cybertariat (2003) and the late Daniel Singer’s Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours? (1999) - don’t deal with May Day per se, but capture particularly well this global economic and political transformation. They tell much that is sober yet inspiring about why May I still symbolizes the struggle for a future beyond capitalism rather than just a homage to the struggles of the past.

May Day greetings!More soon.

Today’s the May Day Bank Holiday in the UK. But far from celebrating it in suitably socialist fashion, I’m going to draw attention to the proclamation of the Brussels congress of the Second International in 1891, which insisted that the celebrations always take place on 1 May itself, rather than on, say, a nearby weekend (or on the following Monday), in order to emphasise the holiday’s “true character as an economic demand for the eight hour day and an assertion of class struggle”.

Americans! This year’s Loyalty Day proclamation is here!

I’ll keep it short, as I don’t think I have anything in particular to say this time around about the history of the holiday, etc., after my various posts last time around, and there are other bloggers who have managed more detailed posts than I’m going to manage today.

Do go and take last year’s Guardian Revolutionary Authors May Day Quiz, if you haven’t already.

And a reminder to American readers that they aren’t to enjoy International Workers’ Day at all, since it’s red, communist, socialist, foreign, &c., but should celebrate Loyalty Day instead.

And, still on the subject of May Day, Patchen told me this time two years ago about the very odd May Day commemoration on the University of Chicago’s campus. He wrote [1.5.2201]:

In front of our building [Pick Hall: which used to house the Economics Department] is a lovely abstract sculpture which, at precisely noon on May 1st each year, casts the shadow of a hammer and sickle on the ground in front of the building. As if that weren’t enough, large crowds of students — including anti-communist demonstrators carrying full-sized American flags — gather at noon at the sculpture, to protest its shadow, I suppose.

This is one counter-revolutionary May Day celebration. I think that the Morris Dancers here in Oxford may be another.

And, while on the subject of May Day, take the Guardian’s May Day Quiz. I scored seven, getting the answer to the first question wrong. (A couple of my right answers were intelligent guesses, though). (Via Dave, who is embarrassed only to have scored six).

One of the things people do when annual festivities come inexorably around is to retell the stories about why we celebrate what we celebrate. Christians retell the Christmas and Easter narratives; Americans have some odd stories accompanying their Thanksgiving holiday, and it’s good for leftists likewise to re-narrate the story of May Day every year, to continue to reclaim the holiday from the Soviet bloc states’ celebrations of Stalinist power and remember the origins of the May Day hoiday as a mass international movement from below which very suddenly transformed this particular bit of the (Gregorian) Calendar. It’s particularly appropriate to do this this year, the year of the 15 February expression of worldwide wrath against American aggression in the Middle East.

The ever-informative, ever-entertaining Daily Bleed has a good presentation of the American side of the May Day story.

Hundreds of thousands of American workers, increasingly determined to resist subjugation to capitalist power, poured into a fledgling labor organization, the Knights of Labor. Beginning on May 1, 1886, they took to the streets to demand universal adoption of the 8-hour day. Chicago was the center of the movement. Workers there had been agitating for an 8-hour day for months, & on the eve of May 1, 50,000 were already on strike. 30,000 more swelled their ranks the next day, bringing most of Chicago manufacturing to a standstill.

Fears of violent class conflict gripped the city. No violence occurred on May 1 � a Saturday � or May 2. But on Monday, May 3, a fight involving hundreds broke out at McCormick Reaper between locked-out unionists & non-unionist workers McCormick hired to replace them. The Chicago police, swollen in number & heavily armed, quickly moved in with clubs & guns to restore order. They left four unionists dead &many others wounded.

Angered by the deadly force of the police, a group of anarchists, led by August Spies & Albert Parsons, called on workers to arm themselves & participate in a massive protest demonstration in Haymarket Square on Tuesday evening, May 4. The demonstration appeared to be a complete bust, with only 3,000 assembling. But near the end of the evening, an individual, whose identity is still in dispute (possibly a police agent provocateur), threw a bomb that killed seven police & injured 67 others.

Hysterical city & state government officials rounded up eight anarchists, tried them for murder, & sentenced them to death.

On 11 November 1887, four, including Parsons & Spies, were executed. All of the executed advocated armed struggle & violence as revolutionary methods, but their prosecutors found no evidence that any had actually thrown the Haymarket bomb. They died for their words � not their deeds.

250,000 people lined Chicago’s street during Parson’s funeral procession to express their outrage at this gross miscarriage of justice.

For radicals & trade unionists everywhere, Haymarket became a symbol of the stark inequality & injustice of capitalist society. The May 1886 Chicago events figured prominently in the decision of the founding congress of the Second International (Paris, 1889) to make May 1, 1890 a demonstration of the solidarity & power of the international working class movement. May Day has been a celebration ever since.

This is the traditional story of the American events — which prompts, as ever, the traditional observation that it is a comic irony of history that the USA is one of the only countries which does not celebrate May Day, preferring to celebrate its own “Labor Day” in September. (Perhaps we will be able to talk of an “international community” when America finally does fall into line with the rest of the world and learns to give May Day its due).We turn to Eric Hobsbawm for a useful presentation of the European end of the story, which he gave in the first annual Bindoff Lecture, “Birth of a Holiday: The First of May”, delivered at the College formerly known as Queen Mary and Westfield, 3 May 1990.

To summarise his account: May Day was not so much an invented tradition, as the popular eruption of a new tradition: in July 1889, during the centenary year of the Great French Revolution, representatives of European workers’ parties gathered in Paris for the founding congress of the Second International. That congress resolved that rest of the world’s socialists should join in with the American protests on 1 May 1890, again lobbying for an eight-hour day. This was intended as a one-off expression of the international reach of the workers’ movement, and on the day itself thee were widespread demonstrations and festivals across Europe: 300,000 workers in London converged on Hyde Park.

The enthusiasm from below which these rallies generated led to the demands for repeat performances the following year, and to the rapid institutionalisation of May Day as an annual event, with the Brussels congress of the International in 1891 committing the movement to a regular May Day celebration, insisting that the demonstration take place on the first of the month (rather than at the nearest weekend, and so on), in order to emphasise “its true character as an economic demand for the eight hour day and an assertion of class struggle”. The rest, as they say, is history.

(An often interesting history to be sure: the Bolshevik regime was unsurprisingly the first regime to mark the day as a public holiday; and by the 1930s the symbolism of May Day was sufficiently intense that the Nazis became the second. All this, and more, in Hobsbawm. I think it’s still true to say that it’s the holiday that is celebrated in more countries around the world than any other, whether or not you count the UK May Day Bank Holiday, which is always on the following Monday…)

It is a quite splendid festival, and one which I always enjoy, whether or not I end up going on anyone’s march. (Not this year, although the Oxford trade unions did rally in Bonn Square earlier in the day). Happy May Day, everybody!