15th May – Nabka Day – a day of shame for the world

Deir Yassin 1948

Deir Yassin 1948

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15th May – Nabka Day – a day of shame for the world

The 15th May in Palestine, and for Palestinians in the diaspora, is Nabka Day, the day following the unilateral declaration of independence by the State of Israel (on 14th May 1948) and the start of, now, 72 years of; persecution; murder; imprisonment; repression; theft of their land; denigration of their dignity; subjection to racist laws; ethnic cleansing; military occupation; and now, especially in Gaza, starvation.

The word ‘nabka’ can be translated as ‘disaster’, ‘catastrophe’ or ‘cataclysm’ – in the sense of 15 May all of them.

In fact, if you take all the sufferings of various peoples throughout the world, all the assaults that have been condemned by international bodies – principally the United Nations Organisation (UNO) – in those 72 years the cause of which, in the main, has been the attempts of the various imperialist powers to maintain or regain control in various parts of the world, and dump them on one nation, one group of people, then those people are the Palestinians.

This struggle between the imperialist powers didn’t start in 1948. In the modern era this issue was being played out before the fighting in the First World War was over and the guns on the Western Front went quiet. To keep the various Arab tribes on side in the war against the Ottoman Empire (an ally of Germany in the war and on the periphery initially but an important aspect of the main war nonetheless) promises were made but never kept.

Whilst to their faces the Arab forces were being told one thing behind their backs the British were making the promise of a Jewish State, with undefined borders, in the area which was known as Palestine and where the vast majority of the population were Arabs (90%). Although the British Government had been talking to Zionist representatives during much of the course of the war there was no consultation whatsoever with the Arab people’s who already lived in a thriving community on the land being given away.

In the same way the land that later became known as the United States of America wasn’t empty of people before the arrival of the European immigrants neither was the land of Palestine.

The Balfour Declaration

It might be worthwhile to briefly have a look at the wording of this short document, a mere 67 words but which has caused so much suffering and injustice to so many people for so many years.

His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

The main question to ask is; what right did the British have to assign someone’s land to another group of people – even if it was for the short term interests of the imperialist power – that is, Zionist/Jewish support and encouragement for United States involvement on the Western Front. Obviously the question is rhetorical – the British did because they could and as was their wont, the consequences of their decision on the local populace were not even considered.

For the Zionists then, and the State of Israel now, there’s nothing in the Declaration of any import after the second comma. They had achieved what they were after, the capitulation of a major imperialist power which various Zionist groups and organisations were able to play with in the years between 1917 and 1948.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s (and into the 1940s) there were constant conflicts between the Jewish ‘settlers’ and the indigenous population – from the very beginning the settlers assuming they had all the rights. At times the morally weak British forces were in the middle but after 1945 they also became the target of Zionist terrorist attacks, especially those organised by the Irgun and the Stern Gang – both organisations providing future Prime Ministers to the State of Israel.

On 29th November 1947 the plan for the partition of Palestine was taken to a vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations (which had been formed two and a half years earlier with the UN Charter, which includes fine words such as peace, security and human rights) and passed by 33 votes to 13 (with 10 abstentions and one member absent). To give a flavour of the ‘new world order’ after the defeat of Fascism the people most effected by this partition, the Palestinians, weren’t even consulted – let alone invited to argue their case.

For reasons I have been unable to discover the Soviet Union both voted for the partition and two days after Israel declared independence recognised the new ‘state’.

Immediately following the vote in favour of the State of Israel the armed Zionist gangs began to make sure circumstances were the most favourable for themselves in the event of an uprising of the Palestinians that would certainly follow the proposed declaration on 14th May – this included a systematic recording of any military material the British would leave behind and identifying those points of conflict which would be most crucial in the coming battle.

This included the process of ‘ethnic cleansing’ even before the term was even coined. One notorious example was the expulsion and massacre of the inhabitants of the village of Deir Yassin, a small Palestinian village a few kilometres to the west of Jerusalem, on 9th April 1948. The Zionist terrorist organisation, Irgun, boasted they had killed, in cold blood, 256 villagers, and far from being ashamed of this broadcast the fact far and wide and in so doing helped create the climate of fear that resulted in a mass exodus of Palestinians from their homes and land.

By March 1949 more than 750,000 Palestinians, who had once had reasonably secure livelihoods were made refugees by the Jewish settlers and invaders. Most of those who were forced to leave never returned home as has been the fate of the 3 generations (to date) of their descendants.

Deir Yassin wasn’t the only village to suffer massacre and destruction in 1948-49 or later, as at the time of the so-called ‘Six Day War’, of 1967, the villages of Zeita, Beit Nuba and Yalu suffered a similar fate.

This activity of the Jewish terrorist groups is reminiscent of the activities of the Nazis during the Second World War. There are examples where activities of Partisan groups fighting the fascist invaders led to retaliations, massacres and the razing of villages such as Lidice, in Czechoslovakia; Oradour-sur-Glane in France; Borovë in Albania and the hundreds of villages the SS wiped out in the eastern Soviet Union when they invaded in 1942.

It also reminds us of the destruction of the villages of My Lai, in Vietnam, on 16th March 1968, by the Americans. Coincidentally the numbers massacred in Deir Yassin and My Lai are very similar, 250 dead, including 30-50 babies.

It could be said the Zionists were even worse than the Nazis (and the American imperialists in Vietnam) as the Germans and the Americans carried out their slaughter as retaliation and revenge, the Zionists did it because they could and enjoyed it.

If it talks like a Fascist, if it acts like a Fascist, if it kills like a Fascist – then it’s a Fascist.

But it has to be said the Zionists have played it well in the intervening years since the establishment of their illegal state. In 1967 they were able to convince many they were the victim in the war against the neighbouring Arab countries. By being a willing tool of American imperialism they have proven their worth by destabilising the region and being a force which benefits the major oil companies and their various state sponsors. Whereas the Apartheid state of South Africa (with which Israel was on friendly military and trading terms prior to 1992) became an international pariah Israel gets away with following exactly the same policies. They’ve also been able to use the rantings of Holocaust deniers to use anti-Semitism to their own advantage and now criticism of the State of Israel has been classified as an act of anti-Semitism – the only state in the world which has been able to equate race to statehood.

Events subsequent to the Nabka of 1948-49, have only gone to prove that what the Zionist State of Israel learnt from the Hitlerite Nazis is to kill and oppress anyone you see as an enemy, that racism is the way forward, that ethnic cleansing is progress, that war is peace.

It is a stain upon the reputation of the world’s working class, and especially the International Communist Movement, the situation the Palestinians live under was allowed to last 72 days let alone 72 years.

Marx once said the British working class would never achieve freedom if the Irish remained enslaved. The same can be said about the Palestinians.

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5th May – Anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx

Karl Marx

Karl Marx

The Great ‘Marxist-Leninist’ Theoreticians

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5th May – Anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx

Karl Marx was born on 5th May 1818 in the German town of Trier. In his twenties he started to develop the political theory which is now known as Marxism, very soon developing his ideas with his life time companion, friend and collaborator Frederick Engels.

Within a hundred years of his birth the Russian Bolsheviks, under the leadership of VI Lenin and JV Stalin, succeeded in establishing the first socialist state, in what became known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) following the October Revolution of 7th November 1917.

Revolutionary Marxist ideas were also fundamental in the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, under the leadership of the Communist Party of China and it’s Chairman, Mao Tse-tung, and the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania, under the leadership of the Party of Labour of Albania and it’s General Secretary, Enver Hoxha.

‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.’ (Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, No. XI, in Frederick Engels,  Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of Classical German Philosophy, p61)

These two, simple sentences are the very essence of Marxism. And since the early 1840s, when Marx started to develop his ideas, there has been a continual struggle to keep that issue at the forefront of workers’ movements throughout the world.

In the 19th century workers who attempted to change the world were far in advance of some of the so-called ‘leaders’, intellectuals and demagogues who spoke well but were found to be wanting when it came to action. The Paris Commune of 1871 was the prime example of this where workers knew instinctively what had to be done.

VI Lenin, the great Marxist theoretician, who was the first leader to be able to lead a successful proletarian revolution, learnt – and implemented – the lessons, both positive and negative, from the Commune and ensured that the Russian workers, peasants and soldiers had a better chance of success against an even more powerful reactionary force. However, Lenin’s ideas were based on the solid bedrock of Marxism, which philosophy he developed into what is now known as Marxism-Leninism.

The significance of Marx’s ideas have never been underestimated by capitalist, imperialist and reactionary forces. In the, now, 173 years since the publication of The Manifesto of the Communist Party (in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Volume 6, pp477-519.) there have been countless occasions when those movements who have used Marxism as their ideological base have been attacked and vilified as being inappropriate to the circumstances or as being a ‘foreign import’. The danger that these ideas pose to the ruling classes in most countries of the world demonstrate the value they have for those who are oppressed and exploited – the majority of the population of the world.

But from its inception Marxism has not only had to contend with the attacks from capitalism and imperialism. Within the working class itself there have been those revisionists who have sought to emasculate Marxism of its revolutionary content and these cowards, traitors and renegades have caused incalculable damage to any advances in the conditions of the world’s workers and peasants.

However, those attacks only serve to make Marxism relevant in the present circumstances, where the people of the world are suffering during a health pandemic which has been made worse – and longer lasting – due to the fact that capitalism has no real interest in effectively dealing with such a situation that benefits the majority of people.

So far there’s been no indication that this crisis – caused by the political and economic situation under which all in the world live – has caused workers to rethink the old certainties (even if they did exist pre-2019). The negative effects of covid-19 will last for a long time and there’s no chance that the world will just change, taking into consideration the situation of the majority of the population, without them taking action to change their condition themselves.

Those ‘crumbs’ which capitalism have thrown to avoid the destruction of its rotten and moribund system are becoming harder to find and are getting scattered more widely.

Implementing the ideas of Marx – and how they have been developed by Lenin and Mao – is the only way there will be a long-term and sustainable future for the workers and peasants of the world.

Marxism is far from being dead.

Long Live Marxism!

As part of the commemoration of Marx’s birth we reproduce the interview below (first published on the 200th Anniversary) with David Harvey who has produced a series of video lectures which seek to make Marx’s most important work, Capital, (Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Capital Volunme 1, Capital Volume 2 and Capital Volume 3)   understandable and more accessible to those who might find the three, large volumes too daunting.

Why Marx Still Matters

An interview with David Harvey

This article originally appeared as an interview on Daniel Denvir’s podcast, The Dig, in 2018

On the second centenary of Karl Marx’s birth, global capitalism is stumbling from crisis to crisis. In the wake of the financial crash, interest in Marx’s ideas has blossomed once again. This should come as no surprise: they remain vital to understanding not only the dynamics of capitalism itself but the manner in which it structures our modern world.

David Harvey is one of the world’s leading scholars of Marx. His course on the three volumes of Capital became synonymous with Marx’s re-emergence in recent years, and has been viewed by millions online. This course has been condensed into the recently-published Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason, a companion to Marx’s magnum opus, which addresses its relevance today.

In this interview, David Harvey speaks with journalist Daniel Denvir about Marx’s work, his understanding of capitalism’s contradictions, and why his ideas endure so long after his time.

You’ve been teaching Capital for quite a long time. Can you lay out a brief overview of each of the three volumes?

Marx is very much into detail, and it’s sometimes hard to get a sense of exactly what the whole conception of Capital is about. But really, it’s simple. Capitalists start the day with a certain amount of money, take the money into the marketplace and buy commodities like means of production and labour power, and put them to work in a labour process that produces a new commodity. That commodity is sold for money, plus a profit. Then the profit is redistributed in various ways, in the form of rents and interest, which circulates back into money, which starts the production cycle again.

It’s a circulation process. And the three volumes of Capital deal with different aspects. The first deals with production. The second deals with circulation and what we call ‘realisation’ — the way the commodity is converted back into money. And the third deals with distribution — how much goes to the landlord, how much goes to the financier, how much goes to the merchant, before it is all turned around and sent back into the circulation process.

That’s what I try to teach, so that people understand the relationships between the three volumes of Capital and don’t get lost entirely in any one volume or parts of them.

You differ with other Marx scholars in that you pay a lot of attention to volumes two and three, in addition to volume one. Why is that?

It’s clear that in Marx’s mind, he had an idea of the totality of the circulation of capital. His plan was to break it down into these three component parts in the three volumes. So I just follow what Marx says he’s doing. Now, the problem of course, is that volumes two and three were never completed, and they aren’t as satisfactory as volume one, which is a literary masterpiece. So I can understand why, if people want to read Marx with a certain sense of joy and fun, that they would stick with volume one. But I’m saying, ‘No, if you really want to understand what his conception of capital is, then you can’t understand it as just being about production. It’s about circulation. It’s about getting it to market and selling it, then it’s about distributing the profits.’

One reason that it’s important is that we need it to understand this dynamic of constant expansion that drives capitalism.

You get this idea of a ‘bad infinity’ in volume one. The system has to expand because it’s always about profit, creating what Marx called a ‘surplus value’, and the surplus value then gets reinvested in the creation of more surplus value. So capital is about constant expansion.

And what that does is this: if you grow at 3 percent a year, forever, then you get to the point where the amount of expansion required is absolutely huge. In Marx’s time, there’s plenty of space in the world to expand into, whereas right now we’re talking about 3 percent compound rate of growth on everything that’s happening in China and South Asia and Latin America. The problem arises: where are you going to expand into? That’s the bad infinity coming into being.

In volume three, Marx says maybe the only way it can expand is by monetary expansion. Because with money there’s no limit. If we’re talking about using cement or something like that, there’s a physical limit to how much you can produce. But with money, you can just add zeros to the global money supply.

If you look at what we did after the 2008 crisis, we added zeros to the money supply by something called ‘quantitative easing’. That money then flowed back into stock markets, and then asset bubbles, especially in property markets. We’ve now got a strange situation where, in every metropolitan area of the world that I’ve visited, there’s a huge boom in construction and in property asset prices – all of which is being fuelled by the fact that money is being created and it doesn’t know where to go, except into speculation and asset values.

You’re trained as a geographer, and for you Marx’s account of capitalism is fundamentally about dealing with problems of space and time. Why are these two axes of space and time are so critical?

For instance, the interest rate is about discounting into the future. And borrowing is about foreclosing on the future. Debt is a claim on future production. So the future is foreclosed on, because we’ve got to pay our debts. Ask any student who owes $200,000: their future is foreclosed, because they’ve got to pay off that debt. This foreclosure of the future is a terribly important part of what Capital is about.

The space stuff comes in because as you start to expand, there’s always the possibility that if you can’t expand in a given space, you take your capital and go into another space. For instance, Britain was producing a lot of surplus capital in the nineteenth century, so a lot of it was flowing to North America, some through Latin America, some to South Africa. So there’s a geographical aspect to this.

The expansion of the system is about getting what I call ‘spatial fixes’. You’ve got a problem: you’ve got excess capital. What are you going to do with it? Well, you have a spatial fix, which means you go out and build something somewhere else in the world. If you have an ‘unsettled’ continent like North America in the nineteenth century, then there’s vast amounts of space you can expand into. But now North America has been pretty much covered.

The spatial reorganisation is not simply about expansion. It’s also about reconstruction. We get deindustrialisation in the United States and Europe, and then the reconfiguration of an area through urban redevelopment, so that cotton mills in Massachusetts get turned into condominiums.

We’re running out of both space and time right now. That’s one of the big problems of contemporary capitalism.

What do mainstream economists miss about all of this?

They hate contradictions. It doesn’t fit with their world view. The economists love to confront what they call problems, and problems have solutions. Contradictions don’t. They exist with you all the time, and therefore you have to manage them.

They get heightened into what Marx called ‘absolute contradictions’. How do economists deal with the fact that in the crisis of the 1930s or the 1970s or more recently, surplus capital and surplus labour sit side by side, and nobody seems to have a clue as to how to put them back together so that they can work for socially productive purposes?

Keynes tried to do something about this. But by and large, economists have no idea how to deal with these contradictions. Whereas Marx is saying that this contradiction is in the nature of capital accumulation. And this contradiction then produces these crises periodically, which claim lives and create misery.

In terms of that contradiction, you describe in your book ‘surplus capital and surplus labour existing side by side with seemingly no way to put them back together.’ How has capitalism attempted to resolve this?

The response to the 2007–8 crisis was to, in most of the world – except China – double down into a neoliberal austerity politics. Which made things worse. Since then, we’ve had more cuts. It hasn’t worked very well. Slowly, unemployment has come down in the United States, but of course it’s gone shooting up in places like Brazil and Argentina.

The neoliberal argument had a lot of legitimacy in the 1980s and 1990s as being liberatory in some way. But nobody believes that anymore. Everybody realises it’s a con job in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

But now we’re seeing the emergence of an ethno-nationalist protectionism-autarky, which is a different model. That doesn’t sit very well with neoliberal ideals. We could be headed into something which is much less pleasant than neoliberalism, the division of the world into warring and protectionist factions who are fighting each other over trade and everything else.

The argument of somebody like Steve Bannon is that we need to protect the working people of America from competition in the job market by limiting immigration. Instead of blaming capital, you blame the immigrants. The second thing is to say, we can also get support from that population by putting up tariffs and blaming Chinese competition. In effect, you’ve got a right-wing politics that is gathering a great deal of support by being anti-immigrant and anti-offshoring.

You’re well known for your scholarly work, but you’re perhaps known better as a teacher of Marx. Why do you think it’s important for leftists outside of the academy to engage with Marx’s work?

When you’re involved in political action and activism, you’ve usually got some very specific target. Let’s say, lead paint poisoning in the inner city. You’re organising around what to do about the fact that 20 percent of the kids in inner-city Baltimore suffer from lead paint poisoning. You’re involved in a legal battle, and in fighting with landlord lobbies and with all kinds of opponents. Most people I know who are involved in activist forms of that kind are so consumed with the details of what they’re doing that they often forget where they are in the overall picture – of the struggles in a city, let alone in the world.

Often you find that people need assistance from outside. That lead paint thing is much easier to handle if you’ve got all of the people who are involved in the educational system, who see kids in schools with problems with lead paint poisoning. You start to build alliances. And the more alliances you can build, the more powerful your movement could be.

I try not to lecture people about what they should think, but try to create a framework of thinking, so that people can see where they are in the totality of complicated relationships that make up contemporary society. Then people can form alliances around the issues they’re concerned with, and, at the same time, mobilise their own powers to help other people in their alliances.

I’m into building alliances. In order to build alliances, you have to have a picture of the totality of a capitalist society. To the degree that you can get some of that from studying Marx, I think that it’s helpful.

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The History of May Day

Workers of the World - Unite, May Day 1920

Workers of the World – Unite, May Day 1920

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This article by the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm was written in 1990 after the failure of the international labour movement to celebrate, in a special manner, the centenary of ‘their’ day.

The version below was originally published in The Tribune on 1st May 2019.

A garland for May Day - Walter Crane - 1895

A garland for May Day – Walter Crane – 1895

The History of May Day by Eric Hobsbawm

In 1990 Michael Ignatieff, writing about Easter in the Observer, remarked that ‘secular societies have never succeeded in providing alternatives to religious rituals.’ He pointed out that the French Revolution ‘may have turned subjects into citizens, may have put liberté, égalité and fraternité on the lintel of every school and put the monasteries to the sack, but apart from the Fourteenth of July it never made a dent on the old Christian calendar.’

My present subject is perhaps the only unquestionable dent made by a secular movement in the Christian or any other official calendar, a holiday established not in one or two countries, but in 1990 officially in 107 states. What is more, it is an occasion established not by the power of governments or conquerors, but by an entirely unofficial movement of poor men and women. I am speaking of May Day, or more precisely of the First of May, the international festival of the working-class movement, whose centenary ought to have been celebrated in 1990, for it was inaugurated in 1890.

‘Ought to be’ is the correct phrase, for, apart from the historians, few have shown much interest in this occasion, not even in those socialist parties which are the lineal descendants of those which, at the inaugural congresses of what became the Second International, in 1889 called for a simultaneous international workers’ demonstration in favour of a law to limit the working day to eight hours to be held on 1 May 1890. This is true even of those parties actually represented at the 1889 congresses, and which are still in existence. These parties of the Second International or their descendants today provide the governments or the main oppositions almost everywhere in Europe west of what was the self-described region of ‘really-existing socialism.’ One might have expected them to show greater pride, or even merely greater interest in their past.

The strongest political reaction in Britain to the centenary of May Day came from Sir John Hackett, a former general and, I am sorry to say, former head of a college of the University of London, who called for the abolition of May Day, which he appeared to regard as some sort of Soviet invention. It ought not, he felt, to survive the fall of international communism. However, the origin of the European Community’s spring May Day holiday is the opposite of Bolshevik or even social-democratic. It goes back to the anti-socialist politicians who, recognising how deeply the roots of May Day reached into the soil of the western working-classes, wanted to counter the appeal of labour and socialist movements by co-opting their festival and turning it into something else. To cite a French parliamentary proposal of April 1920, supported by forty-one deputies united by nothing except not being socialists:

This holiday should not contain any element of jealousy and hatred [the code word for class struggle]. All classes, if classes can still be said to exist, and all productive energies of the nation should fraternise, inspired by the same idea and the same ideal.

Those who, before the European Community, went furthest in co-opting May Day were on the extreme right, not the left. Hitler’s government was the first after the USSR to make the First of May into an official National Day of Labour. Marshal Petain’s Vichy government declared the First of May a ‘Festival of Labour and Concord’ and is said to have been inspired to do so by the Phalangist May Day of Franco’s Spain, where the Marshal had been an admiring ambassador.

Indeed, the European Economic Community which made May Day into a public holiday was a body composed not, in spite of Mrs Thatcher’s views on the subject, of socialist but of predominantly anti-socialist governments. Western official May Days were recognitions of the need to come to terms with the tradition of the unofficial May Days and to detach it from labour movements, class consciousness and class struggle. But how did it come about that this tradition was so strong that even its enemies thought they had to take it over, even when, like Hitler, Franco and Petain, they destroyed the socialist labour movement?

Italian Socialist Party - 1902

Italian Socialist Party – 1902

The Rapid Rise

The extraordinary thing about the evolution of this institution is that it was unintended and unplanned. To this extent it was not so much an ‘invented tradition’ as a suddenly erupting one. The immediate origin of May Day is not in dispute. It was a resolution passed by one of the two rival founding congresses of the International – the Marxist one – in Paris in July 1889, centenary year of the French Revolution. This called for an international demonstration by workers on the same day, when they would put the demand for a legal eight hour day to their respective public and other authorities. And since the American Federation of Labor had already decided to hold such a demonstration on 1 May 1890, this day was to be chosen for the international demonstration. Ironically, in the USA itself May Day was never to establish itself as it did elsewhere, if only because an increasingly official public holiday of labour, Labor Day, the first Monday in September, was already in existence.

Scholars have naturally investigated the origins of this resolution, and how it related to the earlier history of the struggle for the legal eight hour day in the USA and elsewhere, but these matters do not concern us here. What is relevant to the present argument is how what the resolution envisaged differed from what actually came about. Let us note three facts about the original proposal. First, the call was simply for a single, one-off, international manifestation. There is no suggestion that it should be repeated, let alone become a regular annual event. Second, there was no suggestion that it should be a particularly festive or ritual occasion, although the labour movements of all countries were authorised to ‘realise this demonstration in such ways as are made necessary by the situation in their country.’

This, of course, was an emergency exit left for the sake of the German Social Democratic Party, which was still at this time illegal under Bismarck’s anti-socialist law. Finally, there is no sign that this resolution was seen as particularly important at the time. On the contrary, the contemporary press reports barely mention it, if at all, and, with one exception (curiously enough a bourgeois paper), without the proposed date. Even the official Congress Report, published by the German Social Democratic Party, merely mentions the proposers of the resolution and prints its text without any comment or apparent sense that this was a matter of significance. In short, as Edouard Vaillant, one of the more eminent and politically sensitive delegates to the Congress, recalled a few years later: ‘Who could have predicted … the rapid rise of May Day?’

Its rapid rise and institutionalisation were certainly due to the extraordinary success of the first May Day demonstrations in 1890, at least in Europe west of the Russian Empire and the Balkans. The socialists had chosen the right moment to found or, if we prefer, reconstitute an International. The first May Day coincided with a triumphant advance of labour strength and confidence in numerous countries. To cite merely two familiar examples: the outburst of the New Unionism in Britain which followed the Dock Strike of 1889, and the socialist victory in Germany, where the Reichstag refused to continue Bismarck’s anti-socialist law in January 1890, with the result that a month later the Social Democratic Party doubled its vote at the general election and emerged with just under 20 per cent of the total vote. To make a success of mass demonstrations at such a moment was not difficult, for both activists and militants put their hearts into them, while masses of ordinary workers joined them to celebrate a sense of victory, power, recognition and hope.

Dutch May Day poster - Johan van Hell, 1927

Dutch May Day poster – Johan van Hell, 1927

And yet the extent to which the workers took part in these meetings amazed those who had called upon them to do so, notably the 300,000 who filled Hyde Park in London, which thus, for the first and last time, provided the largest demonstration of the day. For, while all socialist parties and organisations had naturally organised meets, only some had recognised the full potential of the occasion and put their all into it from the start. The Austrian Social Democratic Party was exceptional in its immediate sense of the mass mood, with the result that, as Frederick Engels observed a few weeks later, ‘on the continent it was Austria, and in Austria Vienna, which celebrated this festival in the most splendid and appropriate manner.’

Indeed, in several countries, so far from throwing themselves wholeheartedly into the preparation of May Day, local parties and movements were, as usual in the politics of the left, handicapped by ideological arguments and divisions about the legitimate form or forms of such demonstrations – we shall return to them below – or by sheer caution. In the face of a highly nervous, even on occasion hysterical, reaction to the prospect of the day by governments, middle-class opinion and employers who threatened police repression and victimisation, responsible socialist leaders often preferred to avoid excessively provocative forms of confrontation. This was notably the case in Germany, where the ban on the party had only just been revoked after eleven years of illegality. ‘We have every reason to keep the masses under control at the First of May demonstration,’ wrote the party leader August Bebel to Engels. ‘We must avoid conflicts.’ And Engels agreed.

The crucial matter at issue was whether the workers should be asked to demonstrate in working time, that is to go on strike, for in 1890 the First of May fell on a Thursday. Basically, cautious parties and strong established trade unions – unless they deliberately wanted to be or found themselves engaged in industrial action, as was the plan of the American Federation of Labor – did not see why they should stick their own and their members’ necks out for the sake of a symbolic gesture. They therefore tended to opt for a demonstration on the first Sunday in May and not on the first day of the month. This was and remained the British option, which was why the first great May Day took place on 4 May.

However, it was also the preference of the German party, although there, unlike Britain, in practice it was the First of May that prevailed. In fact, the question was to be formally discussed at the Brussels International Socialist Congress of 1891, with the British and Germans opposing the French and Austrians on this point, and being outvoted. Once again this issue, like so many other aspects of May Day, was the accidental by-product of the international choice of the date. The original resolution made no reference at all to stopping work. The problem arose simply because the first May Day fell on a weekday, as everybody planning the demonstration immediately and necessarily discovered.

Caution dictated otherwise. But what actually made May Day was precisely the choice of symbol over practical reason. It was the act of symbolically stopping work which turned May Day into more than just another demonstration, or even another commemorative occasion. It was in the countries or cities where parties, even against hesitant unions, insisted on the symbolic strike that May Day really became a central part of working-class life and of labour identity, as it never really did in Britain, in spite of its brilliant start. For refraining from work on a working day was both an assertion of working-class power – in fact, the quintessential assertion of this power – and the essence of freedom, namely not being forced to labour in the sweat of one’s brow, but choosing what to do in the company of family and friends. It was thus both a gesture of class assertion and class struggle and a holiday: a sort of trailer for the good life to come after the emancipation of labour. And, of course, in the circumstances of 1890 it was also a celebration of victory, a winner’s lap of honour round the stadium. Seen in this light May Day carried with it a rich cargo of emotion and hope.

Manchester and Salforn Council of Labour May Dat poster - 1945

Manchester and Salforn Council of Labour May Dat poster – 1945

Formalisation

This is what Victor Adler realised when, against advice from the German Social Democratic Party, he insisted that the Austrian party must provoke precisely the confrontation which Bebel wanted to avoid. Like Bebel he recognised the mood of euphoria, of mass conversion, almost of messianic expectation which swept through so many working classes at this time. ‘The elections have turned the heads of the less politically educated [geschult] masses. They believe they have only to want something and everything can be achieved,’ as Bebel put it.

Unlike Bebel, Adler still needed to mobilise these sentiments to build a mass party out of a combination of activists and rising mass sympathy. Moreover, unlike the Germans, Austrian workers did not yet have the vote. The movement’s strength could not therefore be demonstrated electorally as yet. Again, the Scandinavians understood the mobilising potential of direct action when, after the first May Day, they voted in favour of a repetition of the demonstration in 1891, ‘especially if combined with a cessation of work, and not merely simple expressions of opinion.’ The International itself took the same view when in 1891 it voted (against the British and German delegates as we have seen) to hold the demonstration on the First of May and ‘to cease work wherever it is not impossible to do so.’

This did not mean that the international movement called for a general strike as such, for, with all the boundless expectations of the moment, organised workers were in practice aware both of their strength and of their weakness. Whether people should strike on May Day, or could be expected to give up a day’s pay for the demonstration, were questions widely discussed in the pubs and bars of proletarian Hamburg, according to the plain-clothes policemen sent by the Senate to listen to workers’ conversations in that massively ‘red’ city. It was understood that many workers would be unable to come out, even if they wanted to. Thus the railwaymen sent a cable to the first Copenhagen May Day which was read out and cheered: ‘Since we cannot be present at the meeting because of the pressure exerted by those in power, we will not omit fully supporting the demand for the eight-hour working day.’

May Day poster, Israeli Communist Party, 1950

May Day poster, Israeli Communist Party, 1950

However, where employers knew that workers were strong and solidly committed, they would often tacitly accept that the day could be taken off. This was often the case in Austria. Thus, in spite of the clear instruction from the Ministry of the Interior that processions were banned and taking time off was not to be permitted; and in spite of the formal decision by employers not to consider the First of May a holiday – and sometimes even to substitute the day before the First of May as a works holiday – the State Armaments Factory in Steyr, Upper Austria, shut down on the First of May 1890 and every year thereafter. In any case, enough workers came out in enough countries to make the stop-work movement plausible. After all, in Copenhagen about 40 per cent of the city’s workers were actually present at the demonstration in 1890.

Given this remarkable and often unexpected success of the first May Day it was natural that a repeat performance should be demanded. As we have already seen, the united Scandinavian movements asked for it in the summer of 1890, as did the Spaniards. By the end of the year the bulk of the European parties had followed suit. That the occasion should become a regular annual event may or may not have been suggested first by the militants of Toulouse who passed a resolution to this effect in 1890, but to no one’s surprise the Brussels congress of the International in 1891 committed the movement to a regular annual May Day.

However, it also did two other things, while insisting, as we have seen, that May Day must be celebrated by a single demonstration on the first day of the month, whatever that day might be, in order to emphasize ‘its true character as an economic demand for the eight-hour day and an assertion of class struggle.’

It added at least two other demands to the eight-hour day: labour legislation and the fight against war. Although it was henceforth an official part of May Day, in itself the peace slogan was not really integrated into the popular May Day tradition, except as something that reinforced the international character of the occasion. However, in addition to expanding the programmatic content of the demonstration, the resolution included another innovation. It spoke of ‘celebrating’ May Day. The movement had come officially to recognize it not only as a political activity but as a festival.

Once again, this was not part of the original plan. On the contrary, the militant wing of the movement and, it need hardly be added, the anarchists opposed the idea of festivities passionately on ideological grounds. May Day was a day of struggle. The anarchists would have preferred it to broaden out from a single day’s leisure extorted from the capitalists into the great general strike which would overthrow the entire system. As so often, the most militant revolutionaries took a sombre view of the class struggle, as the iconography of black and grey masses lightened by no more than the occasional red flag confirms.

The anarchists preferred to see May Day as a commemoration of martyrs – the Chicago martyrs of 1886, ‘a day of grief rather than a day of celebration,’ and where they were influential, as in Spain, South America and Italy, the martyrological aspect of May Day actually became part of the occasion. Cakes and ale were not part of the revolutionary game-plan. In fact, as a recent study of the anarchist May Day in Barcelona brings out, refusing to treat it or even to call it a ‘Festa del Traball,’ a labour festival, was one of its chief characteristics before the Republic. To hell with symbolic actions: either the world revolution or nothing. Some anarchists even refused to encourage the May Day strike, on the ground that anything that did not actually initiate the revolution could be no more than yet another reformist diversion. The revolutionary syndicalist French Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT) did not resign itself to May Day festivity until after the First World War.

The leaders of the Second International may well have encouraged the transformation of May Day into a festival, since they certainly wanted to avoid anarchist confrontational tactics and naturally also favoured the broadest possible basis for the demonstrations. But the idea of a class holiday, both struggle and a good time, was definitely not in their minds originally. Where did it come from?

Polish May Day poster, Roman Cieslewicz, 1957

Polish May Day poster, Roman Cieslewicz, 1957

Holiday

Initially the choice of date almost certainly played a crucial role. Spring holidays are profoundly rooted in the ritual cycle of the year in the temperate northern hemisphere, and indeed the month of May itself symbolises the renewal of nature. In Sweden, for instance, the First of May was already by long tradition, almost a public holiday. This, incidentally, was one of the problems about celebrating wintry May Days in otherwise militant Australia. From the abundant iconographical and literary material at our disposal, which has been made available in recent years, it is quite evident that nature, plants and above all flowers were automatically and universally held to symbolise the occasion. The simplest of rural gatherings, like the 1890 meeting in a Styrian village, shows not banners but garlanded boards with slogans, as well as musicians. A charming photograph of a later provincial May Day, also in Austria, shows the social democratic worker-cyclists, male and female, parading with wheels and handlebars wreathed in flowers, and a small flower-decked May child in a sort of baby-seat slung between two bicycles.

Flowers appear unselfconsciously round the stern portraits of the seven Austrian delegates to the 1889 International Congress, distributed for the first Vienna May Day. Flowers even infiltrate the militant myths. In France the fusillade de Fourmies of 1891, with its ten dead, is symbolised in the new tradition by Maria Blondeau, eighteen years old, who danced at the head of 200 young people of both sexes, swinging a branch of flowering hawthorn which her fiancé had given her, until the troops shot her dead.

Yugoslav May Day poster, 1969

Yugoslav May Day poster, 1969

Two May traditions patently merge in this image. What flowers? Initially, as the hawthorn branch suggests, colours suggestive of spring rather than politics, even though the movement soon comes to settle on blossoms of its own colour: roses, poppies and above all red carnations. However, national styles vary. Nevertheless, flowers and those other symbols of burgeoning growth, youth, renewal and hope, namely young women, are central. It is no accident that the most universal icons for the occasion, reproduced time and again m a variety of languages, come from Walter Crane – especially the famous young woman in a Phrygian bonnet surrounded by garlands. The British socialist movement was small and unimportant. Its May Days, after the first few years, were marginal. However, through William Morris, Crane and the arts-and-crafts movement, inspirers of the most influential ‘new art’ or art nouveau of the period, it found the exact expression for the spirit of the times. The British iconographic influence is not the least evidence for the internationalism of May Day.

In fact, the idea of a public festival or holiday of labour arose, once again, spontaneously and almost immediately – no doubt helped along by the fact that in German the word feiern can mean both ‘not working’ and ‘formally celebrating.’ (The use of ‘playing’ as a synonym for ‘striking,’ common in England in the first part of the century, no longer seems common by its end.) In any case it seemed logical on a day when people stayed away from work to supplement the morning’s political meetings and marches with sociability and entertainment later, all the more so as the role of inns and restaurants as meeting places for the movement was so important. Publicans and cabaretieri formed a significant section of socialist activists in more than one country.

One major consequence of this must be immediately mentioned. Unlike politics, which was in those days ‘men’s business,’ holidays included women and children. Both the visual and the literary sources demonstrate the presence and participation of women in May Day from the start. What made it a genuine class display, and incidentally, as in Spain, increasingly attracted workers who were not politically with the socialists, was precisely that it was not confined to men but belonged to families. And in turn, through May Day, women who were not themselves directly in the labour market as wage-workers, that is to say the bulk of married working-class women in a number of countries, were publicly identified with movement and class. If a working life of wage-labour belonged chiefly to men, refusing to work for a day united age and sex in the working-class.

Somalian May Day poster, 1977

Somalian May Day poster, 1977

The Workers’ Easter

Practically all regular holidays before this time had been religious holidays, at all events in Europe, except in Britain where, typically, the European Community’s May Day has been assimilated to a Bank Holiday. May Day shared with Christian holidays the aspiration to universality, or, in labour terms, internationalism. This universality deeply impressed participants and added to the day’s appeal. The numerous May Day broadsheets, often locally produced, which are so valuable a source for the iconography and cultural history of the occasion – 308 different numbers of such ephemera have been preserved for pre-fascist Italy alone – constantly dwell on this. The first May Day journal from Bologna in 1891 contains no fewer than four items specifically on the universality of the day. And, of course, the analogy with Easter or Whitsun seemed as obvious as that with the spring celebrations of folk custom.

Italian socialists, keenly aware of the spontaneous appeal of the new festa del lavoro to a largely Catholic and illiterate population, used the term ‘the workers’ Easter’ from, at the latest, 1892, and such analogies became internationally current in the second half of the 1890s. One can readily see why. The similarity of the new socialist movement to a religious movement, even, in the first heady years of May Day, to a religious revival movement with messianic expectations was patent.

So, in some ways, was the similarity of the body of early leaders, activists and propagandists to a priesthood, or at least to a body of lay preachers. We have an extraordinary leaflet from Charleroi, Belgium in 1898, which reproduces what can only be described as a May Day sermon: no other word will do. It was drawn up by, or in the name of, ten deputies and senators of the Parti Ouvrier Belge, undoubtedly atheists to a man, under the joint epigraphs ‘Workers of all lands unite’ (Karl Marx) and ‘Love One Another’ (Jesus). A few samples will suggest its mood:

This is the hour of spring and festivity when the perpetual Evolution of nature shines forth in its glory. Like nature, fill yourselves with hope and prepare for The New Life.

After some passages of moral instruction (‘Show self-respect: Beware of the liquids that make you drunk and the passions that degrade’) and socialist encouragement, it concluded with a passage of millennial hope:

Soon frontiers will fade away! Soon there will be an end to wars and armies! Every time that you practice the socialist virtues of Solidarity and Love, you will bring this future closer. And then, in peace and joy, a world will come into being in which Socialism will triumph, once the social duty of all is properly understood as bringing about the all-round development of each.

Yet the point about the new labour movement was not that it was a faith, and one which often echoed the tone and style of religious discourse, but that it was so little influenced by the religious model even in countries where the masses were deeply religious and steeped in church ways. Moreover, there was little convergence between the old and the new Faith except sometimes (but not always) where Protestantism took the form of unofficial and implicitly oppositionist sects rather than Churches, as in England. Socialist labour was a militantly secular, anti-religious movement which converted pious or formerly pious populations en masse.

We can also understand why this was so. Socialism and the labour movement appealed to men and women for whom, as a novel class conscious of itself as such, there was no proper place in the community of which established Churches, and notably the Catholic Church, were the traditional expression. There were indeed settlements of ‘outsiders’, by occupation as in mining or proto-industrial or factory villages, by origin like the Albanians of what became the quintessentially ‘red’ village of Piana dei Greci in Sicily (now Piana degli Albanesi), or united by some other criterion that separated them collectively from the wider society. There ‘the movement’ might function as the community, and in doing so take over many of the old village practices hitherto monopolised by religion.

However, this was unusual. In fact a major reason for the massive success of May Day was that it was seen as the only holiday associated exclusively with the working class as such, not shared with anyone else, and moreover one extorted by the workers’ own action. More than this: it was a day on which those who were usually invisible went on public display and, at least for one day, captured the official space of rulers and society. In this respect the galas of British miners, of which the Durham miners’ gala is the longest survivor, anticipated May Day, but on the basis of one industry and not the working class as a whole. In this sense the only relation between May Day and traditional religion was the claim to equal rights. ‘The priests have their festivals,’ announced the 1891 May Day broadsheet of Voghera in the Po valley, ‘the Moderates have their festivals. So have the Democrats. The First of May is the Festival of the workers of the entire world.’

Greek Tade Union May Day poster, 1985

Greek Tade Union May Day poster, 1985

The New World

But there was another thing that distanced the movement from religion. Its key word was ‘new’, as in Die Neue Zeit (New Times), title of Kautsky’s Marxist theoretical review, and as in the Austrian labour song still associated with May Day, and whose refrain runs: ‘Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit’ (‘The new times are advancing with us’). As both Scandinavian and Austrian experience shows, socialism often came into the countryside and provincial towns literally with the railways, with those who built and manned them, and with the new ideas and new times they brought. Unlike other public holidays, including most of the ritual occasions of the labour movement up till then, May Day did not commemorate anything – at least for events outside the range of anarchist influence which, as we have seen, liked to link it with the Chicago anarchists of 1886. It was about nothing but the future, which, unlike a past that had nothing to give to the proletariat except bad memories. ‘Du passe faisons table rase’ (‘Of the past we make a blank slate’) sang the Internationale, not by accident. Unlike traditional religion, ‘the movement’ offered not rewards after death but the new Jerusalem on this earth.

The iconography of May Day, which developed its own imagery and symbolism very quickly, is entirely future-oriented. What the future would bring was not at all clear, only that it would be good and that it would inevitably come. Fortunately for the success of May Day, at least one way forward to the future turned the occasion into something more than a demonstration and a festival. In 1890 electoral democracy was still extremely uncommon in Europe, and the demand for universal suffrage was readily added to that for the eight-hour day and the other May Day slogans. Curiously enough, the demand for the vote, although it became an integral part of May Day in Austria, Belgium, Scandinavia, Italy and elsewhere until it was achieved, never formed an ex officio international part of its political content like the eight-hour day and, later, peace. Nevertheless, where applicable, it became an integral part of the occasion and greatly added to its significance.

In fact, the practice of organising or threatening general strikes for universal suffrage, which developed with some success in Belgium, Sweden and Austria, and helped to hold party and unions together, grew out of the symbolic work stoppages of May Day. The first such strike was started by the Belgian miners on 1 May 1891. On the other hand trade unions were far more concerned with the Swedish May Day slogan ‘shorter hours and higher wages’ than with any other aspect of the great day. There were times, as in Italy, when they concentrated on this and left even democracy to others. The great advances of the movement, including its effective championship of democracy, were not based on narrow economic self-interest.

South African May Day poster, 1994

South African May Day poster, 1994

Democracy was, of course, central to the socialist labour movements. It was not only essential for its progress but inseparable from it. The first May Day in Germany was commemorated by a plaque which showed Karl Marx on one side and the Statue of Liberty on the other. An Austrian May Day print of 1891 shows Marx, holding Das Kapital, pointing across the sea to one of those romantic islands familiar to contemporaries from paintings of a Mediterranean character, behind which there rises the May Day sun, which was to be the most lasting and potent symbol of the future. Its rays carried the slogans of the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, which are found on so many of the early May Day badges and mementoes. Marx is surrounded by workers, presumably ready to man the fleet of ships due to sail to the island, whatever it might be, their sails inscribed: ‘Universal and Direct Suffrage. Eight-Hour Day and Protection for the Workers.’ This was the original tradition of May Day.

That tradition arose with extraordinary rapidity – within two or three years – by means of a curious symbiosis between the slogans of the socialist leaders and their often spontaneous interpretation by militants and rank-and-file workers. It took shape in those first few marvellous years of the sudden flowering of mass labour movements and parties, when every day brought visible growth, when the very existence of such movements, the very assertion of class, seemed a guarantee of future triumph. More than this: it seemed a sign of imminent triumph as the gates of the new world swung open before the working class.

However, the millennium did not come and May Day, with so much else in the labour movement, had to be regularised and institutionalised, even though something of the old flowering of hope and triumph returned to it in later years after great struggles and victories. We can see it in the mad futurist May Days of the early Russian Revolution, and almost everywhere in Europe in 1919-20, when the original May Day demand of the eight hours was actually achieved in many countries. We can see it in the May Days of the early Popular Front in France in 1935 and 1936, and in the countries of the continent liberated from occupation, after the defeat of fascism. Still, in most countries of mass socialist labour movements, May Day was routinised some time before 1914.

Curiously, it was during this period of routinisation that it acquired its ritualistic side. As an Italian historian has put it, when it ceased to be seen as the immediate antechamber of the great transformation it became ‘a collective rite which requires its own liturgies and divinities,’ the divinities being usually identifiable as those young women in flowing hair and loose costumes showing the way towards the rising sun to increasingly imprecise crowds or processions of men and women. Was she Liberty, or Spring, or Youth, or Hope, or rosy-fingered Dawn or a bit of all of these? Who can tell? Iconographically she has no universal characteristic except youth, for even the Phrygian bonnet, which is extremely common, or the traditional attributes of Liberty, are not always found.

We can trace this ritualisation of the day through the flowers which, as we have seen, are present from the beginning, but become, as it were, officialised towards the end of the century. Thus the red carnation acquired its official status in the Habsburg lands and in Italy from about 1900, when its symbolism was specially explicated in the lively and talented broadsheet from Florence named after it. (II Garofano Rosso appeared on May Days until the First World War.) The red rose became official in 1911-12. And, to the grief of incorruptible revolutionaries the entirely unpolitical lily-of-the-valley began to infiltrate the workers’ May Day in the early 1900s, until it became one of the regular symbols of the day.

Nevertheless, the great era of May Days was not over while they remained both legal – that is, capable of bringing large masses on to the street – and unofficial. Once they became a holiday given or, still worse, imposed from above, their character was necessarily different. And since public mass mobilisation was of their essence, they could not resist illegality, even though the socialists (later communists) of Piana del Albanesi took pride, even in the black days of fascism, in sending some comrades every First of May without fail to the mountain pass where, from what is still known as Dr Barbato’s rock, the local apostle of socialism had addressed them in 1893. It was in this same location that the bandit Giuliano massacred the revived community demonstration and family picnic after the end of fascism in 1947. Since 1914, and especially since 1945, May Day has increasingly become either illegal or, more likely, official. Only in those comparatively rare parts of the third world where massive and unofficial socialist labour movements developed in conditions that allowed May Day to flourish is there a real continuity of the older tradition.

May Day has not, of course, lost its old characteristics everywhere. Nevertheless, even where it is not associated with the fall of old regimes which were once new, as in the USSR and eastern Europe, it is not too much to claim that for most people even in labour movements the word May Day evokes the past more than the present. The society which gave rise to May Day has changed. How important, today, are those small proletarian village communities which old Italians remember? ‘We marched round the village. Then there was a public meal. All the party members were there and anyone else who wanted to come.’

What has happened in the industrialised world to those who in the 1890s could still recognize themselves in the Internationale’s ‘Arise ye starvelings from your slumbers?’ As an old Italian lady put it in 1980, remembering the May Day of 1920 ‘I carried the flag as a twelve-year-old textile worker, just started at the mill: ‘Nowadays those who go to work are all ladies and gentlemen, they get everything they ask for.’ What has happened to the spirit of those May Day sermons of confidence in the future, of faith in the march of reason and progress? ‘Educate yourselves! Schools and courses, books and newspapers are instruments of liberty! Drink at the fountain of Science and Art: you will then become strong enough to bring about justice.’ What has happened to the collective dream of building Jerusalem in our green and pleasant land?

Turkish Trade Union May Day 2010 - commemorating 1977 Taksim massacre

Turkish Trade Union May Day 2010 – commemorating 1977 Taksim massacre

And yet, if May Day has become no more than just another holiday, a day – I am quoting a French advertisement – when one need not take a certain tranquilliser, because one does not have to work, it remains a holiday of a special kind. It may no longer be, in the proud phrase, ‘a holiday outside all calendars,’ for in Europe it has entered all calendars. It is, in fact, more universally taken off work than any other days except 25 December and 1 January, having far outdistanced its other religious rivals. But it came from below. It was shaped by anonymous working people themselves who, through it, recognised themselves, across lines of occupation, language, even nationality as a single class by deciding, once a year, deliberately not to work: to flout the moral, political and economic compulsion to labour. As Victor Adler put it in 1893: ‘This is the sense of the May holiday, of the rest from work, which our adversaries fear. This is what they feel to be revolutionary.’

The historian is interested in this occasion for a number of reasons. In one way it is significant because it helps to explain why Marx became so influential in labour movements composed of men and women who had not heard of him before, but recognised his call to become conscious of themselves as a class and to organise as such. In another, it is important, because it demonstrates the historic power of grassroots thought and feeling, and illuminates the way men and women who, as individuals, are inarticulate, powerless and count for nothing can nevertheless leave their mark on history.

But above all this is for many of us, historians or not, a deeply moving time, because it represents what the German philosopher Ernst Bloch called (and treated at length in two bulky volumes) The Principle of Hope: the hope of a better future in a better world. If nobody else remembered it in 1990, it was incumbent on historians to do so.

More on the ‘Revolutionary Year’

More on Britain …

View of the world

Ukraine – what you’re not told