A Communist May Day: Win the Hearts and Minds of the International Working Class

May Day organizes for revolution to destroy capitalism. This commemorates a massive strike wave in the U.S. and the particular battle in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in 1886. The leaders of this movement demanded an 8-hour day but also advocated the “abolition of the wage system.”

Then and now the capitalists feared this revolutionary side to May Day. In 1848, Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, “A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.” By 1886, the rulers of Chicago saw this specter. “The newspapers and industrialists were increasingly declaring that May 1, 1886 was in reality the date for a Communist working-class insurrection modeled on the Paris Commune. According to Melville E. Stone, head of the Chicago Daily News…a ‘repetition of the Paris Communal riots was freely predicted’ for May 1, 1886” (P. 90, Labor’s Untold Story, by Boyer and Morais).

Strike Wave Beats Up Scabs

In December 1886, San Francisco transit workers joined this strike wave. They were working up to 15 hours a day, 7 days a week. They wanted a 3-hour daily reduction in hours and a daily pay increase from $2.25 to $2.50. “Strike-breakers were hired, and there was a great deal of violence. Cars were damaged, strike-breakers were beaten, and one person was killed.” Newspapers blamed eight instances of the use of dynamite on the striking workers. No doubt feeling threatened by the union and the worldwide strength and militancy of May Day, the Governor signed a bill in March 1887 “limiting gripmen, drivers, and conductors to a 12-hour day.” (“Transit In San Francisco,” published by SF MUNI R.R. Communications Department.)

By the 1920’s the now pro-capitalist AFL union leadership, fearing the growth of communist ideas in the working class, reversed its support for May Day and the latter’s openly declared communist ideas. Since then the AFL has collaborated with the U.S. government to subvert May Day and the revolutionary trend of workers here and abroad. At the 1928 AFL Convention, the Executive Council supported a Congressional resolution to make May 1 Child Health day. “May 1 will no longer be known as either strike day or communist labor day.”

During the peak of the communist organizing of the CIO unions, May Day was celebrated in the U.S. But business unionism and anti-communism soon triumphed after World War II, with organized labor only recognizing Labor Day in September.

From the Haymarket battle in 1886, revolutionary workers spread May Day around the globe. But history is written by the conquerors. Many workers born here know nothing of the contribution the U.S. working class made to the development of this revolutionary holiday. May 1st is the official Labor Day in most countries, but the leadership of these marches demands only reforms, and stresses the common goals of labor and capital.

PLP Reclaims May Day

However, after the U.S. “communist” party abandoned May Day in the 1950s, PLP resurrected it in 1971 and has organized communist marches and celebrations for the last four decades. We proudly raised the red flag among the workers in cities across the U.S. 

PLP has learned both from the triumphs of the communist movement in the USSR and China, and from their failure to fight directly for communism. We too advocate “Abolish the Wage System” as part of changing the relationship of workers and work in a new communist society.

The abolition of money, of production for sale or profit and of the wage system is absolutely necessary to establish communism. When, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the international working class wins and holds control over all economic, political and cultural institutions of society, it will unleash a creative power that will propel the human race to its highest accomplishments in all fields of endeavor. Only a mass revolutionary communist party advocating and leading such a struggle can achieve this. Only such a party can defeat the fascism that capitalism will use to oppose it.

Long live the 1st of May, the revolutionary international working-class holiday! Fight for communism!