TODAY is May Day. To some, this simply denotes that a Monday bank holiday is just around the corner.
For many in the socialist and trade union movement, however, May Day is International Workers’ Day – an occasion for commemoration and celebration. That belief in the continued importance of the day will be reflected in the various marches, rallies and celebrations that take place across Scotland today.
Some of those who are looking forward to a Monday off work might overlook the political and historical significance of May Day. However, there’s no question that those on the political right feel May Day as an affront.
The late Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher, for example, despised the occasion. One of her loyal backbenchers, Robert Atkins, proposed abolition of the May Day bank holiday to parliament in 1982 (the motion lost, narrowly).
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A brief consideration of the history of International Workers’ Day makes it pretty clear why it has been so hated by the likes of Thatcher and Atkins. May Day began in the United States as a commemoration of the Haymarket massacre in Chicago on May 4, 1886.
On that day – in response to the alleged throwing of a dynamite bomb by an anarchist (following the death of a striker at the hands of police the previous day) – the police fired indiscriminately into a protest of workers who were striking for an eight-hour day. Eight workers are believed to have been killed, with dozens more injured.
In the pitched battle that ensued, seven police officers were also killed. The court case that followed only added to the sense of injustice and martyrdom within the workers’ movement.
Five anarchists were sentenced to death, with a further two having death penalties commuted to life imprisonment. One of those given a capital sentence managed to commit suicide in prison and the other four were hanged. The entire legal process was considered widely to be a miscarriage of justice.
Significantly, in an effort to disconnect the workers’ movement from the Chicago events, the US government, in 1894, designated the first Monday in September as a federal holiday to mark “Labor Day”.
Ever since the bloody Chicago events, the workers’ movement internationally has held May Day rallies to commemorate the sacrifices made by their forebears and to celebrate the achievements of the trade union and socialist movement. The first International May Day was proclaimed by the socialist Second International in 1889.
IN the countries of the UK, miners’ galas have historically emphasised both working-class self-education and having a good day out. Historian Keith Flett writes: “There were political speeches, and there was also eating, drinking and games. This is what the social historian Peter Bailey has termed ‘thinking and drinking’.”
The great revolutionary socialist – and famous friend and collaborator of Karl Marx – Friedrich Engels (left) attended the first ever May Day event in London on Sunday, May 4, 1890. Seeing the 300,000 mobilisation in the context of Chartism (the mid-19th-century movement for the vote for working-class men), he commented: “The English working class joined up in the great international army… The grandchildren of the old Chartists are entering the line of battle.”
Engels addressed the massive crowd in London’s Hyde Park that day. “I can assure you,” he wrote, “I looked a couple of inches taller when I got down from that old lumbering wagon that served as a platform after having heard again, for the first time since 40 years, the unmistakeable voice of the English working class.”
As the world was plunged into war in 1914, the internationalism of May Day became all the more important. In states like Germany and Britain, the dominant political parties of the working class – the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Labour Party – dropped the red flag in favour of the national flags of their respective nations.
THE support of these electoral socialists for the nationalism of their countries’ war efforts caused a massive schism within the workers’ movement. In the UK, this split was exemplified by the distinction between the Labour Party’s Glaswegian leader Arthur Henderson (who joined a wartime coalition government with the Liberals and the Tories) and the anti-war socialist John Maclean (who also hailed from Glasgow).
Arrested numerous times, and imprisoned twice, for his opposition to the war, Maclean was rotting in Duke Street prison in Glasgow when May Day came around in 1918. The Glasgow May Day Committee called a one-day strike for peace on May 1.
In her famous biography of her father, Maclean’s daughter Nan Milton writes: “One hundred thousand Glasgow workers took the day off to march in procession, and thousands more lined the streets to cheer the demonstrators as they passed by.
“Glasgow was on fire with red banners, red ribbons and red rosettes. The air was alive with the sound of revolutionary songs and with the blare of bands…
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“This great celebration finished up with a huge crowd marching to Duke Street prison. Three times a tremendous shout arose from thousands of lusty throats: ‘John Maclean! John Maclean! John Maclean!’”
Eight days later, on May 9, 1918, Maclean, who was facing charges of sedition, would give his famous 75-minute oration from the dock of the High Court in Edinburgh. The Glasgow teacher had already been appointed as the newly created Soviet Union’s consul in Scotland by the Bolshevik government (which had pulled Russia out of the war following the revolution of October 1917).
Railing against the imperialist slaughter, Maclean told the court: “I am not here, then, as the accused; I am here as the accuser of capitalism dripping with blood from head to foot.”
In 1923, the year of his death, at the age of just 44 (his health having been destroyed by his periods of imprisonment), Maclean put out the call for a “Scottish Workers’ Republic”. This May Day, many in the Scottish workers’ movement will be carrying forward Maclean’s tradition, opposing both Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and the threat of Nato escalation of the conflict, and calling for an independent socialist Scotland.
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