Take May Day Back!

May Day is more than just a celebration of the victories of the working class, it’s also a day of reflection. It’s an opportunity to gaze into our collective past, to consider what we have lost, to reckon with the heights from which our class has fallen. From the Paris Commune through the German Revolution to the Fall of the USSR, our history is one of ultimate defeat. This can be a sobering realisation to face, particularly on a day one would rather be anything but. Nonetheless, it is in our shared past that we find the seeds of our collective future. 

It was the founding congress of the Second International in 1889 which first called for international demonstrations to take place on the 1st May. This was a congress which laid out demands as radical as the “abolition of standing armies” and declared openly that the “history of the workers’ movement shows that appeals by the workers to the bourgeoisie have no effect, and only work to the political advantage of the ruling class”. 

The first Irish demonstration took place in Dublin on the first Sunday of May 1890. May Day would eventually become a public holiday in 1994 with the centenary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. Coalitionist Labour threw workers the bone of a celebration of May Day while joining a rainbow coalition which would continue the austerity and privatisation agenda of its predecessors, overseeing the gutting of public services and the embedding of social partnership. It was a world away from the strident commitment to radical opposition and internationalism that was seen in the halls of the second international one hundred years previous.

Our history, the history of the working class’s struggle for Socialism is neither something to be dismissed as a dead past nor fossilised through uncritical appraisal. It is the collective story of our class’s sometimes inconsistent development into the revolutionary subject of our present era, and through this, the tale of the lengthy birth pangs preceding the new world we so desperately wish to see born. It is a living history, with all the baggage that comes with it, and only through discarding rose-tinted lenses and engaging in honest critical review can we hope to truly understand and learn from it.

So today, we celebrate, we commemorate, we review, but most importantly, we look forward. We are but one link in a long chain that unites every struggle, every battle for freedom, justice, independence, peace and socialism. In a world that seems to be marching ever more steadily towards war, it remains evident that our fight is not over, but in fact is only beginning. One small front of that fight is recapturing the revolutionary spirit of May Day.

“The Revolution is the everlasting peace, whether it comes before the threatening war or follows upon it. Whoever desires the peace of the nations must strengthen the revolutionary proletariat. And there is no more impressive demonstration in favour of the peace of the world than the grand review of the flower of the Revolutionary Proletarian army on the First of May.” – Karl Kautsky