To the superficial observer, hope can seem hard to come by. The working class has been on the receiving end of a decades-long offensive by our rulers. Unions, the most basic and powerful expression of working-class power under capitalism, are a shadow of their former selves in many countries, including Australia. The socialist parties, which once mobilised thousands or tens of thousands for May Day marches, have withered.
The idea of united working-class action across borders, demonstrated in the international strikes for the eight-hour day on May Day in 1890, can seem remote. The prospect of the working class winning liberation, perhaps, even more so. The horrors of the system are unrelenting.
And yet ...
As we take stock of our forces on May Day, the elements that were so essential to those original international strikes on 1 May 1890—working-class power, international solidarity and socialist politics—are still forces that can move the whole world. In fact, they are the only true sources of realistic hope.
Take international solidarity. Internationally coordinated or sympathetic action to challenge a world system of exploitation might sound like a tall order. But it’s been a regular feature of world politics in recent decades.
Enormous protests tipped the crisis-ridden Stalinist tyrannies of Eastern Europe into collapse in 1989. The largest coordinated protests in world history were not a hundred years ago, but in 2003—protesting against the murderous invasion of Iraq by the US, the UK and Australia.
And in January 2011, mass protests in Tunisia, sparked by soaring food prices and an economic slump following the global financial crisis of 2008, toppled the US-backed dictator Ben Ali. This eruption of hope and protest spread rapidly across the Arab world—and far beyond.
Protests and some strikes brought down the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt in February that year. Activists in Greece, also hard-hit by the aftermath of the GFC, took heart from this and launched the “movement of the squares”, inspired by the mass occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo.
Mass protests moved to the other end of the Mediterranean in the form of the Indignados movement in Spain. And from there, activists who worked between Spain and New York started a small encampment in an obscure park near the southern end of Manhattan. Occupy Wall Street was born, its slogan “we are the 99%” highlighting how the ruling 1 percent of society was living in luxury while the rest of us went backwards.
By the later months of 2011, what started as a protest against poverty and repression in Tunisia had bloomed into the global Occupy movement, with protest camps in 154 cities from London to Oakland to Tokyo to Melbourne.
The Occupy protests were dispersed. But as left-wing author Vincent Bevans records, in the decade that followed, there were more mass protests and uprisings in more countries than any other decade in the history of capitalism. There were eruptions in Chile, Iraq, Sudan, France, Hong Kong, and a swathe of other countries in 2019.
And in 2020, somewhere between 19 million and 26 million people across the US were part of the riots and protests following the brutal police murder of George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis. Black Lives Matter was the largest protest movement in US history, and sparked protests against racism and murderous policing across the world.
It’s not surprising that this international spread of protests and uprisings is a feature of the modern world. We live in a globally integrated economy and society, where the impact of wars and economic crises can spread across the planet at lightning speed—as can discontent, protest and resistance.
However, two weaknesses are clear from this brief survey of recent global waves of mass protest. And they represent the other two essential features of the whole concept and history of May Day—working-class power and socialist political forces.
Though many millions of workers were part of the historic protests from 2011, overwhelmingly they participated as individuals rather than as an organised body of workers who, through actions in their workplaces, could disrupt or even entirely halt capitalism’s “business as usual” and thus its toxic lifeblood of profits.
This is not because the working class has somehow disappeared or lost its power. The global working class is bigger than it has ever been. And by definition, we have as much potential power as we ever had: we still do pretty much all of the goddam work around here, after all.
But the history of capitalism is, in large part, a history of how the means of production have been constantly transformed, and the working class along with it. In any one city, the main employer might have shifted from textiles to auto manufacturing to education, health and tech. But whatever the industry, or combination of industries, nothing can function without workers.
Each phase in capitalism’s history produces new challenges for working-class activists. It’s not hard to find working-class militants who were veterans of the epic struggles of the English working class in the 1840s, bemoaning the depoliticised state of their fellow workers in the 1860s. The US labour movement of the 1920s was awash with gloomy prognostications about the new industries of cars and electricity being unorganisable. In both cases, it was a new generation of activists, drawing fuel from a renewed radical politics, who sparked the mass organising of the new industries.
Similarly, in the 1970s, it was a generation of radicalised young people, many of them former students, who shook up staid industries and their unions as they entered the workforce. Today, a new generation of radicals face the enormous task of reviving working-class struggle and recreating unions as fighting organisations, rather than the pathetic NGOs or lobbying organisations which so many have become.
This points to the third crucial ingredient of the historical tradition that created May Day: radical working-class politics. Waves of struggle come and go. Capitalist logic dictates the ever-evolving shape of capitalism and its productive forces. None of us has much control over any of this. But political radicalism, and specifically radical organisation, can be shaped by the actions of you and me.
Allow me a couple of personal anecdotes to illustrate.
The first May Day march I got to in Melbourne, in 1986, was an impressive affair at one level. Many thousands of working-class people with left-wing political traditions marched behind their banners. Migrants from Turkey, Greece and Chile were prominent. So were members and supporters of the Builders Labourers’ Federation, which was under daily assault from the state and federal Labor governments and their police forces. To my nineteen-year-old eyes, the whole thing was inspiring proof that some version of socialist politics could take hold among working-class people.
But the whole thing was built on rotten foundations. And within a few short years, the structure built upon that foundation would come crashing down. The march was led by an enormous banner featuring a picture, among others, of Stalin—the murderer of the Russian Revolution and of the revolutionary socialist tradition along with it. For decades, the politics of working-class revolution had been utterly marginal in the workers’ movement throughout most of the world.
Another part of the problem was the trade union bureaucracy. Surviving as a union secretary for years or decades necessarily involves compromises with the capitalist system. This fosters a politics of class compromise, expressed in Labor-style reformist politics. Many of these types were all too happy to paint themselves red—or at least pink—on May Day in the 1980s. But every other day was dedicated to helping Labor impose neoliberalism, or at best doing little to organise and politically arm workers to wreck Labor’s plans.
The Stalinist and soft-Stalinist wing of this left went into crisis and collapsed, gradually or not so gradually, in the years that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The reformist wing of the left is not in crisis in the same way, but has decayed as its failure to mobilise workers to fight has come home to roost.
All of this has created a political space in which a new left can be built. And for the first time in many years, many socialist organisations are growing around the world. So a new left is being born. The crucial question is, what sort of left?
Some are building on the same rotten foundations of Stalinism and reformism that, in their different ways, seek to manage some slice of capitalism rather than overthrow it. This is a dead end, at best. Governing a system which demands that the working class pay for wars, economic crises and climate destruction will turn you into someone who presides over and enables all that and more.
Building a revolutionary socialist alternative to all this is no easy thing, as any member of Socialist Alternative can tell you. But we’ve demonstrated in practice that it’s possible to build a serious revolutionary socialist group that can help organise our fellow workers to fight, make an impact on politics at the state and national levels, and create the basis for a bigger and even more serious organisation in the future.
So where does all this leave us?
The last year has shown us some wonderful examples of how quickly things can move, and how seemingly dormant traditions of working-class organisation, action and solidarity can be revived.
In August last year, it was easy to find scathing critiques of the timidity of Italy’s union movement. Yet in September and October, two one-day general strikes against Israel’s genocide in Gaza gave the whole world a glimpse of what working-class power and solidarity look like. Unsurprisingly, politicised militants in a key workforce on the docks played a crucial role. And in February, dock workers in 21 ports around Europe and the Mediterranean disrupted shipping in protest at the ongoing genocide.
Meanwhile, in the US city of Minneapolis, workers shut down whole sections of the city and the economy on 23 January. Their day of “no work, no school, no shopping” was an extraordinary display of power, in protest against the murderous terror of Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
It’s worth saying that again, slowly. The first city-wide strike in the US in decades was an act of defiance against a government crackdown on migrants. And not just any migrants: undocumented migrants. Migration was the issue that Democratic Party opinion-makers had decided was not a winner, and so shouldn’t be mentioned. Yet it was exactly this issue, and revulsion against the brutal police-state means used to terrorise migrants and solidarity activists, which sparked the Minneapolis uprising.
If any proof were needed that the working class is still able and willing to fight for ourselves and our whole class, alongside all those done over by capitalism, this is it. Despite decades of being right-sized, restructured, outsourced, algorithmically managed and variously fucked over—these stories show us that the working class, given half a chance, is still in the fight.
Some unions in the US are building on this with stoppages and protests on 1 May this year. Not all of us will be shutting down cities on that day, or even marching in the street. But anyone who is building working-class power, demonstrating working-class solidarity across the borders that are meant to divide us, and—crucially—building the organised politics of human liberation that can power our class to victory, is continuing the finest traditions of May Day.
