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<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message -----
<DIV style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A
title=dlj725@hughes.net href="mailto:dlj725@hughes.net">David Johnson</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=dlj725@hughes.net href="mailto:dlj725@hughes.net">david
johnson</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Saturday, April 28, 2012 7:34 PM</DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> May Day's Radical History: What Occupy is Fighting for This
May 1st </DIV></DIV>
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<H2 class=itemTitle>May Day's Radical History: What Occupy is Fighting for This
May 1st </H2><SPAN class=itemDateCreated>Saturday, 28 April 2012 09:57
</SPAN><SPAN class=itemAuthor>By Jacob Remes, <A
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target=_blank>AlterNet</A> | News Analysis </SPAN></DIV>
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<P><SPAN
style="DISPLAY: inline-block; MARGIN-BOTTOM: 5px; FLOAT: right; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px"
class=wf_caption><IMG style="MARGIN: auto" alt="Occupy Spring"
src="http://truth-out.org/images/042812-4.jpg" width=308 height=340><SPAN
style="TEXT-ALIGN: left; MARGIN-TOP: 3px; WIDTH: 308px; DISPLAY: block; CLEAR: both">(Photo:
<A href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/fleshmanpix/6995499341/"
target=_blank>Mike Fleshman / Flickr</A>)</SPAN></SPAN>American general
strikes—or rather, American calls for general strikes, like the one Occupy Los
Angeles issued last December that has been endorsed by over 150 general
assemblies—are tinged with nostalgia.</P>
<P>The last real general strike in this country, which is to say, the last
general strike that shut down a city, was in Oakland, California in 1946—though
journalist John Nichols has suggested that what we saw in Madison, Wisconsin
last year was a sort of general strike. When we call a general strike, or talk
of one, we refer not to a current mode of organizing; we refer back, implicitly
or explicitly, to some of the most militant moments in American working-class
history. People posting on the Occupy strike blog <A
href="http://howistrike.tumblr.com/" target=_blank>How I Strike </A>have
suggested that next week's May Day is highly symbolic. As we think about and
develop new ways of "general striking," we also reconnect with a past we've
mostly forgotten.</P>
<P>So it makes sense that this year's call for an Occupy general strike—whatever
ends up happening on Tuesday—falls on May 1. May Day is a beautifully American
holiday, one created by American workers, crushed by the American government,
incubated abroad, and returned to the United States by immigrant workers.</P>
<P>The history of May 1 as a workers' holiday is intimately tied to the
generations-long movement for the eight-hour day, to immigrant workers, to
police brutality and repression of the labor movement, and to the long tradition
of American anarchism.</P>
<P>Perhaps the first nation-wide labor movement in the United States started in
1864, when workers began to agitate for an eight-hour day. This was, in their
understanding, a natural outgrowth of the abolition of slavery; a limited work
day allowed workers to spend more time with their families, to pursue education,
and to enjoy leisure time. In other words, a shorter work day meant freedom. It
was not for nothing that in 1866, workers celebrated the Fourth of July by
singing "John Brown's Body" with new lyrics demanding an eight-hour day.
Agitating for shorter hours became a broad-based mass movement, and skilled and
unskilled workers organized together. The movement would allow no racial,
national or even religious divisions. Workers built specific organizations—Eight
Hour Leagues—but they also used that momentum to establish new unions and
strengthen old ones. That year, the Eight Hour Movement gained its first
legislative victory when Illinois passed a law limiting work hours.</P>
<P>The demand for an eight-hour day was about leisure, self-improvement and
freedom, but it was also about power. When Eight Hour Leagues agitated for
legislation requiring short hours, they were demanding what had never before
happened: that the government regulate industry for the advantage of workers.
And when workers sought to enforce the eight-hour day without the
government—through declaring for themselves, through their unions, under what
conditions they would work—they sought something still more radical: control
over their own workplaces. It is telling that employers would often counter a
demand for shorter hours with an offer of a wage increase. Wage increases could
be given (and taken away) by employers without giving up their power; agreeing
to shorter hours was, employers knew, the beginning of losing their arbitrary
power over their workers.</P>
<P>The Illinois eight-hour law was to go into effect May 1, 1867. That day, tens
of thousands of Chicago's workers celebrated in what a newspaper called "the
largest procession ever seen on the streets of Chicago." But the day after,
employers, en masse, ignored the law, ordering their workers to stay the
customary 10 or 11 hours. The city erupted in a general strike--workers struck,
and those who didn't leave work were forced to by gangs of their colleagues
roaming through the streets, armed with sticks, dragging out scabs. After
several days of the strike, the state militia arrived and occupied working-class
neighborhoods. By May 8, employers and the state they controlled had won, and
workers went back to work with their long hours. The loss of the eight-hour-day
movement led also to a massive decline in unions, and the labor movement would
not pick up in such numbers for almost two decades.</P>
<P>The Illinois law and its defeat, however, were not forgotten. By the 1880s, a
new labor movement had grown up in Chicago. This one was more radical and was
dominated by immigrant workers from Germany. They remembered 1877, when a strike
by railroad workers spread around the country. For a brief moment, as strikers
took control of St. Louis and Pittsburgh, staring down the national guard and
local police, nobody knew what would happen. But President Rutherford B. Hayes
called out the army and brutally repressed the strike. They also remembered the
state was rarely if ever on the side of the worker. Yet they also remembered the
brief shining moment when it appeared that there might be an eight-hour day.</P>
<P>So in 1886, the Chicago Central Labor Union again demanded an eight-hour day.
Led largely by anarchists like August Spies and Albert Parsons, this renewed
movement demanded "eight for 10"--that is, eight hours' work for 10 hours' pay.
Throughout the winter of 1886, they successfully organized and won a series of
small victories, largely in German butchers' shops, breweries and bakeries,
where owners agreed to recognize unions and grant shorter hours. Then they
issued a new demand: that again on May 1, Chicago would go on a general strike
and not return to work unless employers agreed to an eight-hour workday.</P>
<P>The demands of the militant Chicago anarchists coincided with a massive
upswing in other militant movements. Workers and Texas farmers were rebelling
against a monopolistic railroad system. The Knights of Labor were rapidly
organizing and spreading their vision of a cooperative, rather than
capitalistic, society. "What happened on May 1, 1886," writes<A
href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9781400033225-0" target=_blank> James
Green, the most recent and most accessible historian</A> to have written about
it, "was more than a general strike; it was a 'populist moment' when working
people believed they could destroy plutocracy, redeem democracy and then create
a new 'cooperative commonwealth.'"</P>
<P>Four days later, it all came crashing down. On May 3, police had shot to
death six strikers at the McCormick Works, where a long-standing labor dispute
had turned the factory into an armed camp, and beaten dozens more. On May 4,
anarchists held an outdoor indignation meeting at a square called the Haymarket
to protest the police murders. Anarchist leader Samuel Fielden was wrapping up
his speech when the police, led by the same inspector who had led the charge at
McCormick the night before, moved in to disperse the crowd. "But we are
peaceable!" Fielden cried, and just then somebody wasn't. Somebody threw a bomb
at the police, the police open fire, and the course of American history
changed.</P>
<P>To this day we do not know, nor will we likely ever know, who threw the bomb.
Some say it was an agent provocateur. Some say it was an anarchist. If it wasn't
an anarchist, it surely could have been, since there were indeed anarchists who
made bombs and would have thrown one given the opportunity. But we also know
that many of those who died that night, including police, were felled by the
police bullets.</P>
<P>We also know that the effect of the Haymarket bombing was far greater on the
labor movement than it was on the police. Eight anarchist leaders were rounded
up and put on trial for the murder of a police officer. No evidence was ever
given that any of them threw the bomb, and only the flimsiest evidence was
presented that any of them were remotely involved. All eight were convicted, and
seven were sentenced to hang. Two of these had their sentences commuted, and a
third—Louis Lingg, undoubtedly the most radical and militant of them—cheated the
hangman by chewing a detonator cap and blowing off his jaw. The remaining
four—August Spies, Albert Parsons, Samuel Fischer, and George Engel—were hanged
on November 11, 1887. They went to their deaths singing the Marseillaise, then
an anthem of the international revolutionary movement, and before he died, Spies
shouted out his famous last words: "The time will come when our silence will be
more powerful than the voices you strangle today."</P>
<P>Before that happened, the state ensured more silence. The strike collapsed.
Police around the country raided radicals' homes and newspapers. The Knights of
Labor never recovered. In the place of the radical industrial labor movement of
the mid-1880s rose the American Federation of Labor, the much more exclusive and
conservative organization that would dominate the labor movement until the
1930s. Meanwhile, it would take until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to
finally enshrine the eight-hour day into federal law.</P>
<P>May 1 would live on, mostly abroad. In 1889, French syndicalist Raymond
Lavigne proposed to the<A
href="http://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/index.htm"
target=_blank> Second International</A>—the international and internationalist
coalition of socialist parties—that May 1 be celebrated internationally the next
year to honor the Haymarket Martyrs and demand the eight-hour day, and the year
after that the International adopted the day as an international workers'
holiday. In countries with strong socialist and communist traditions, May 1
became the primary day to celebrate work, workers and their organizations, often
with direct and explicit reference to the Haymarket Martyrs. May Day remains an
official holiday in countries ranging from Argentina to India to Malaysia to
Croatia—and dozens of countries in between.</P>
<P>Yet in the United States, with some exception, the workers' tradition of May
1 died out. Partially this was because the Knights of Labor had already
established a labor day in September. Opportunistic politicians, most notably
Grover Cleveland, glommed onto the Knights' holiday in order to diminish the
symbolic power of May 1. In 1921, May Day was declared "Americanization Day,"
and later "Loyalty Day" in a deliberately ironic attempt to co-opt the holiday.
Even that was not enough, though, and in 1958 Dwight Eisenhower added "Law Day"
to the mix, presumably a deliberate jibe at the Haymarket anarchists who
declared, "All law is slavery." Today, few if any Americans celebrate Loyalty
Day or Law Day—although both are on the books—but the origins of May Day are
largely forgotten. Like International Women's Day (March 8), which also
originated in the U.S., International Workers' Day became a holiday the rest of
the world celebrates while Americans look on in confusion, if they notice at
all.</P>
<P>Yet May 1 lives on, and indeed has been rejuvenated in the United States in
the past few years. In 2006, immigrant activists organized "a day without an
immigrant," a nationwide strike of immigrant workers and rallies. It was perhaps
the largest demonstration of workers in United States history. These immigrants,
mostly from Latin America, had brought May 1 back to its birthplace, and in so
doing they resurrected its history as a day specifically for immigrant
workers.</P>
<P>It is appropriate that when the Occupy L. A. first issued its call for a
general strike this May 1, it said the strike was "for migrant rights, jobs for
all, a moratorium on foreclosures, and peace." The order was significant, for
migrants in the United States have been the ones who have made sure that the
voices the state strangled that November day have remained so powerful. And
regardless of what happens on Tuesday—and of course an actual general strike, in
which cities grind to a halt and workers control what activities occur, is
unlikely—we can, through a national day of action for the working class, work
toward a new cooperative commonweath. We have a opportunity now to create and
renew the labor movement, through new tactics, but ones that pay homage to the
generations that preceded us.</P></DIV></DIV></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>