SOCIALIST OUTLOOK sends the warmest May Day greetings and solidarity to the countless thousands of working people in struggle against exploitation and oppression in 1998.
The history of May Day as a landmark in the calendar of the working class movement is bound up with the campaign that grew in the final quarter of the last century for a restriction of working hours and a legal eight-hour day.
This led in the USA to the call by the trade unions for a strike on May | 1886. The strong response to this - especially in Chicago -led to brutal repression, and a further demonstration in Haymarket Square, where a bomb was thrown, killing a policeman. Four union militants were subsequently hanged and others jailed, on frame-up charges. In response, the newly formed Second International, in solidarity with the American unions, decided to designate May | 1990 as an international workers' day, with simultaneous strikes and demonstrations "according to conditions prevailing in each country".
The tradition has been upheld by class fighters ever since, celebrating for at least one day a year continued support for values which Rosa Luxemburg summed up as "the 8-hour day, world peace and socialism." In Britain, it is ironic that May Day 1997 ushered in a "Labour" government which has deliberately broken from these proud traditions. The fight for socialism continues BANER CRON DCIALINT OUTLOOK liberation!
sclers SAVE OUR SCHOOLS! Worker cialist NE CANT ILLOW THESE CUTS