How May Day was Co-opted: Labor Day Undermines Working Class Solidarity
A protester on a bicycle waving a flag depicting Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara during an International Workers’ Day demonstration in Strasbourg, France, on 1 May 2024
The history of how May Day was co-opted is a story of America’s organized labor struggles against the capitalist class. While a simple Google search of May Day will yield results of ancient festivals to commemorate the arrival of spring and warmth, International Workers’ Day as it’s actually known around most of the world was originally an American “holiday” – not a holiday in the usual sense of the word, but rather a strike against the bosses that yielded one of the greatest gains the American working class saw in decades. It inspired working people all over the world for more than a century that they too could stand up collectively for what they believe in and what they deserve.
Chicago was, undoubtedly, the largest city affected by the strike on May 1st, 1886. The strike extended across most of the nation and was celebrated in cities like New York, Baltimore, Washington, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and especially Cincinnati. Over 32,000 workers in Cincinnati alone, alongside over 300,00 workers nationwide, joined in a national strike action coordinated a mere year and a half prior by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions in the United States and Canada (what would later become the American Federation of Labor [A.F.L]). They set as their goal,
that eight hours shall constitute legal day's labor from May First, 1886, and that we recommend to labor organizations throughout their jurisdiction that they so direct their laws as to conform to this resolution by the time named.
While this body said nothing directly about the methods with which they wanted their constituent locals and organizations to carry out this goal, it’s evident by their membership numbers resting around the 50,000 mark across the whole of the US and Canada that if they wanted to achieve their aim, they would need to continue organizing within all of the shops, mines, and factories they already had and expand to those they had never organized with before. This lofty goal was only possible due to a natural growth of the labor movement in the 1880’s and the end of commercial slavery in the US only a few decades earlier (which would be replaced by the carceral slavery that the US continues to use and abuse to this day). As Karl Marx remarked in the first volume of Capital, in the chapter on “The Working Day,”
In the United States of America, any sort of independent labor movement was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labor with a white skin cannot emancipate itself where labor with a black skin is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new vigorous life sprang. The first fruit of the Civil War was an agitation for the 8-hour day – a movement which ran with express speed from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.
The ability for organizers to effectively coalesce their struggles into a united front was held back by the reality of the other social and economic movements of the 19th century. This included a half-hearted reconstruction following the American Civil War that led to Jim Crow legislation and a liberal and largely ineffective women’s suffrage movement. A white male chauvinist culture dominated union structure and stunted the revolutionary capacity of the labor movement in the US. Workers across the country were fed up with the capitalist status quo of the 10-hour workday and the continued use of child and carceral labor, and were looking for anybody who would lead them into battle against the bosses over these rightful grievances. However, these conditions would simultaneously stimulate its growth as more and more people became educated not only in newly established institutions across the country, but also through the practical experience with the capitalist system of exploitation and through the use of wage labor on an increasingly mass scale.
Alexander Trachtenberg, in his piece The History of May Day, highlighted this exceptionally well when he wrote:
The best way to learn the mood of the workers is to study the extent and seriousness of their struggles. The number of strikes during a given period is a good indicator of the fighting mood of the workers. The number of strikes during 1885 and 1886 as compared with previous years shows what a spirit of militancy was animating the labor movement. Not only were the workers preparing for action on May First, 1886, but in 1885 the number of strikes already showed an appreciable increase. During the years 1881-1884 the number of strikes and lockouts averaged less than 500, and on the average involved only about 150,000 workers a year. The strikes and lockouts in 1885 increased to about 700 and the number of workers involved jumped to 250,000. In 1886 the number of strikes more than doubled over 1885, attaining to as many as 1,572, with a proportional increase in the number of workers affected, now 600,000. How widespread the strike movement became in 1886 can be seen from the fact that while in 1885 there were only 2,467 establishments affected by strikes, the number involved in the following year had increased to 11,562. In spite of open sabotage by the leadership of the K. of L. (Knights of Labor), it was estimated that over 500,000 workers were directly involved in strikes for the 8-hour day.
Even without union support or endorsement, workers around the country agitated in their workplaces and pushed for better working conditions for their fellow workers and their families. This dynamic and organic growth of the movement fuelled the energy that would lead into the May Day of 1886 and the infamous Haymarket Affair in Chicago. This strike, planned for the workday on May Day (compared to the modern, revisionist tradition of planning May Day actions for the weekend before or after May Day, or even just after the work day), was intended to halt the wheels of production in the country and make those in power take a step back and listen to the workers.
Following the show trials of Parsons, Spies, Fischer, and Engel, and the imprisonment of the other militant Chicago leaders, the counter-revolutionaries began the process to dismantle and co-opt the unions that led the massive continental action. The Knights of Labor (K. of L.) faded into obscurity until the Great Depression when the very last local voted for dissociation. The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions in the United States and Canada would see its membership grow through the decline of the K. of L., taking in much of its former leadership and membership. This led to the A.F.L. becoming less militant and revolutionary through the decades until they eventually merged with C.I.O. (Congress of Industrial Organizations) in 1955. The A.F.L and the C.I.O. were bitter rivals during the Great Depression. The C.I.O. gained many disillusioned and revolutionary members from the A.F.L., while the A.F.L. pursued a path of class collaboration. Eventually, with the Red Scare and McCarthyite purges of the government and federally recognized unions and parties, even the C.I.O. would be co-opted by counter-revolutionaries and class collaborationists. It’s important to remember that, to this day — more than 130 years later — the eight-hour workday is still not a legal requirement for bosses to recognize in this country except in certain states and jobs.
Alongside the plan to slowly dissipate the revolutionary energy and mass power of the major labor unions, there was a simultaneous campaign against the socialist and revolutionary agitation that consistently began to crop up year after year around May Day and the historic Haymarket Affair. In his preface to the fourth German edition of the Communist Manifesto, which he wrote on May 1st, 1890, Friedrich Engels, reviewing the history of the international proletarian organizations, called attention to the significance of the first International May Day:
As I write these lines, the proletariat of Europe and America is holding a review of its forces; it is mobilized for the first time as One army, under One Bag, and fighting One immediate aim: an eight-hour working day, established by legal enactment.... The spectacle we are now witnessing will make the capitalists and landowners of all lands realize 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!
This international united front against the capitalist system scared many of those in power as capitalism continued its growth from colonial systems of exploitation (which Engels and Marx witnessed) to imperialism — what Lenin would coin as the “highest stage of capitalism,” characterized by the dominance of finance capital (bankers and shareholders) over those of the rest of the national and international bourgeoisie.
There was a concerted effort by the gendarmes of the bourgeois state to confine and suppress this movement and the leaders who inspired it. The A.F.L. and other increasingly reactionary labor organizations of the time advocated for the observance of Labor Day on the first Monday in September of each year. Labor Day was adopted first on a local scale in 1885, and later was “granted” to the workers by various state governments as a watered down alternative to May Day celebrations. The push for Labor Day accomplished only a single day off for the workers each year rather than encouraging them to continue agitating around the goal of an eight-hour workday for all. By the time Labor Day became an official federal holiday in 1894, 30 states in the U.S. had already officially recognized it as a holiday.
The creation of Labor Day isolated trade unions from their allies in the socialist and revolutionary movements. This also began the long process of political isolation between these entities that we see to this day in the U.S. It may be hard to imagine in modern times, but for a large majority of capitalism's existence, it wasn’t Republicans and Democrats marching arm in arm with the workers; it was the socialists and revolutionaries. Democrats and Republicans alike, both then and now, represent the same class interests: those of the bourgeois class. Likewise, unions and socialist organizations and collectives fundamentally represent the same class interests: those of the wage laborers and impoverished masses. Similarly to how Republicans use different strategies to look out for bourgeois interests than Democrats’ strategies, trade unions, socialists, anarchists, and many other groups utilize varying tactics to achieve the aims and goals of the working class.
If the various forces representing the working class’s interests engaged in the same cooperation that we see between Democrats and Republicans (with their “bipartisan consensus” and lack of real resistance outside of critiquing each others’ agendas), we would once again be able to effectively challenge the power of the capitalist system. However, if we continue to bicker and brush off each other, we will achieve nothing. It’s important to be critical and critique each other, but it’s equally important to work together when common ground can be found in order to foster working class unity and strength. Our struggle against capitalism is not isolated; there is immense intersectionality between our individual struggles, and the only solution is collective — not individual — action. We must work together for a better world for ourselves and for future generations of humanity on this planet.