CHESTER CITINGEN THE LANCASHRE BESTON CON! & CONTINGENT A YOUTH ACUNST STARVATION! THE TORY government is to abolish the official May Day Bank Holiday in Bntain, seeking to eliminate a relic of socialism.
The May Day tradition is a gift from the American working class, whose early struggles for trade union organisation ran almost simultaneously with the birth of trade unionism in Britain.
At the centre of the May Day tradition is the fight for a shorter working day - a demand championed as early as 1806 by striking US cordwainers, and taken 1820s and 1830s.
The eight hour day was a central objective embraced by the National Labour Union, formed by a delegate meeting of 60 unlons in Baltimore in 1866. EleLeadership of the NLU were politically sympathetic to the First International formed by Marx and Engels.
In 1867 the NLU voted to cooperate with the international working class movement, and in 1869 it sent a delegate to the congress of the international.
In October 1884 the embry. onic American Federation of Labor voted to endorse the demand for an 8-hour day, and the following year backed mass action to achieve the demand.
A new wave of militancy was sweeping through the US working class. Strikes for the 8-hour day were called for May 1 1886 in New York, Baltimore, Washington, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Detroit.
In Chicago, 25.000 marched on the Sunday before May 1. Some sections stayed out on strike, police were called in, savagely attacking pickets on May 3 at the MoCormick Reaper works.
A protest demonstration called for Haymarket Square on May 4 led to a pitched battle in which four workers and seven police were killed. Four Chicago militants were eventually senimprisoned.
in Paris, the Second International voted in 1889 to make May 1 an international day of struggle for the legal eight hour day. On May Day 1890. there were strikes and demonstrations or both sides of the Atlantic. Engels wrote optimistically:
"The spectacle we are now witnessing will make the capitalIsts and landowners of all lands realise that today the proletarians of all lands are, in very truth, united. If only Marx were with me to see it with his own eyes!"
In Russia, Leninpicked up on the May Day theme as early as 1896, and used it repeatedly as a focus for Bolshevik agitation.
As the ones move to crush what is left of the right to strike. hang on to the spirit of solidarity epitomised by May Day, and to grateful to the herolc American class fighters who pioneered it.