By the East Bay Syndicalists Group
May First is a labor holiday that originated in the anti-labor repression and violence in the USA in the Gilded Age of the late 1800s. That was the era when Social Darwinism was the dominant ideology of the Republican Party — an ideology that is revived in a neo-fascist form in the MAGA movement. That ideology opposed use of the government to aid disadvantaged groups, and defended the absolute private power of capitalists and landowners to do whatever they want with their assets — exploit workers and the environment as fiercely as they wish. The Musk-Trump wrecking operation is designed to slash services such as biomedical research, Medicaid, Social Security, assistance to poor school districts (often predominantly black or Latino). A section of the capitalist elite wants to destroy the concessions to mass working class protest won over the past century, privatizing services and breaking unions.
In the 1880s — with capitalist power riding high — the Knights of Labor emerged as a mass movement that threw down a challenge to that regime. The Knights proposed a vision of a “cooperative commonwealth” — replacing the workplace autocracy and exploitation of capitalism with generalized worker self-management of industry. The Knights surfed the mass movement for the eight-hour day to build their organization — culminating in the national general strike on May 1, 1886. Newspapers throughout the country screamed in outrage at the strike. They saw strikes as illegal insubordination against the employers. Police repression came down in various places — eventually destroying the Knights of Labor. After Chicago police killed three strikers, an evening protest meeting was called for Haymarket square. As the meeting was ending in a peaceful way, police attacked with guns blazing and people were killed on both sides. The local authorities used this as a pretext to hang four men, based on their anarchist political views. They were leading figures in the Chicago labor movement — organizers, labor orators, newspaper editors. The world-wide solidarity movement in defense of the Haymarket martyrs led to May First becoming a labor holiday in most countries.
The revolutionary goals of the Knights, the mass solidarity expressed through the general strike. and an international solidarity campaign in defense of the condemned men helped to build revolutionary consciousness among countless workers in many countries. At the same time, anti-labor violence in the USA by the government and corporate private armies continued for the next fifty years along with propaganda campaigns against revolutionaries.
That repressive and violent tendency in American society was eventually defeated through the vast strike wave and anti-eviction struggles of the 1930s. There were thousands of strikes per year between 1933 and 1937 — including two regional general strikes and a thousand workplace takeovers. In 1932 a poll found that a quarter of the population thought a revolution was needed. With owners and managers fearing a general assault on the capitalist system, the Democratic Party politicians mediated between the masses and the owning elite to offer a series of concessions. This was the beginning of the thin American welfare state with Social Security, unemployment benefits, a legal minimum wage, and legal recognition of the right of workers to “mutual aid and concerted activity” and forming unions in workplaces.
The New Deal recognition of labor unions and creation of the National Labor Relations Board to settle disputes “would channel the workers’ insurrectionary energy into contracts, negotiations, union meetings, and try to minimize strikes, in order to build large, influential, even respectable organizations” as Howard Zinn wrote. After World War 2, a paid bureaucratic layer consolidated its hold at the top of the national unions, and was focused on avoiding direct clashes with the state or other risks to their solvency. The purging of left-wing elements from unions also contributed to the conservative tendency in unionism after World War 2.
The conservative and bureaucratized unions inherited from the post-World War 2 era poses a problem for rising to the challenge faced by a neo-fascist movement in power in the federal government. Nonetheless, a number of local and national unions are rising to the challenge to resist the MAGA autocracy. Polls show a very high level of support for unionism and there’s a growing trend of workers building unions through their own efforts. Moreover, workers can also build committees and networks of active people parallel to the official structures of the unions, where necessary. Both Railroad Workers United and the Federal Unionist Network are examples of this.
The victory against a violent and powerful capitalist system in the 1930s should underline the importance of disruptive mass action as the source of working-class power to push back and gain concessions — and to set the stage for greater changes through the building of greater cohesion — through mutual support for the struggles of different segments of the working class population. A majority of Americans in recent polls find the neo-fascist turn of the Republican regime “scary.” Opposition is growing and the extremism of the MAGA regime may contribute to increased radicalization.
The vicious assault of the Trump regime on all aspects of the movement fighting global warming points to the key fault line that this webzine has focused on — the growing threat of global warming and environmental devastation created by the normal workings of the capitalist regime. This is where building greater working-class power — through direct worker building of unions and building a labor/community/environmentalist alliance — is for us the key strategy to build towards the potential for a shift from capitalist devastation to self-managed eco-socialism. For us the strategy is for the working class to eventually coalesce its forces into a Class Front that has the power to challenge the capitalists and their hangers-on for control of the society.