A Tale of Two Maydays
Illustration of the first American Labor parade held in New York City on September 5, 1882 as it appeared in the September 16, 1882 issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.
Mayday is a holiday dedicated to international working-class solidarity.
Born in the United States on May 1, 1886, during a time of intense class conflict, Mayday became the recognized labor holiday worldwide. However, it has rarely been celebrated in the US since the beginning of the first Cold War. The largest Maydays in recent history were organized not by unions but by the peace movement in 1971, by immigrant workers in 2006, and the Occupy movement in 2012.
The original May Day was created by a huge mass movement and coordinated strike wave aimed at winning the eight-hour day — at a time when 60- to 80-hour workweeks were both common and deadly. Over 300,000 went on strike across the country. In Chicago, the center of the movement, anarchists, socialists, and union activists organized more than 40,000 to strike. Albert and Lucy Parsons led the Knights of Labor and 100,000 in a peaceful parade marking the first Mayday march.
A few days later, on May 4, a much smaller rally was organized to protest police violence. As the cops rushed the stage, a bomb exploded. Those responsible for the blast have never been identified. The best-known leaders were rounded up, and four, including Albert Parsons, were hanged for a crime they did not commit. The anarchists were murdered for their ideas and leadership.
During the late 19th Century, big ideas were widely discussed among everyday people. The biggest question they raised: Was capitalism the best system for running society, or was the new idea of socialism or anarchism a better alternative?
This is the tradition of Mayday, and it’s worth defending.
Mayday 2025
2025 was easily the largest Mayday in my lifetime, and the people prevailed, making it the best as well. Thousands of marchers remained true to its traditions as an international day of labor solidarity.
The peace movement and calls to end the genocide in Palestine easily outnumbered the pro-war forces, which were quite visible in earlier “Hands Off” marches. ICE and its police state infrastructure were roundly condemned. The Vermont AFL-CIO urged labor to become “Strike Ready” to resist fascism. The rank and file raised positive issues — health care being the most popular. The opposition was there. The rank-and-file marchers made it a May Day to be proud of.
Most importantly, immigrant workers played a leading role in the streets. The last time Mayday was really big was in 2006, when Latino immigrants led a one-day general strike called the “Great American Boycott.” Approximately one million people in 50 US cities participated in one of the largest days of protest in American history. The voices of that Mayday are still heard today.
Mayday and the Machine
Mayday was so large, in part, because it was sanctioned by the Democrats through their loyal organizations. This carefully permitted event was without a disruptive police presence, let alone the kind of brutality student protesters faced on Mayday 2024. Perhaps that allowed people to feel safe and was part of the reason the people, including the most vulnerable, showed up in such large numbers.
The size of the protest is all the more remarkable because most US unions rarely celebrated Mayday, sticking instead to the parades and picnics of Labor Day in September. To point to Trump’s very real threat against workers is obvious, true, and certainly speaks to the motivation of the rank and file. But does this embrace of Mayday mean a new, more class-conscious labor movement is being born? Time will tell, but the long, steady love affair between most labor officials and the Democrats casts that into serious doubt. This would hardly be the first time that the rank and file have run ahead of the official leaders.
The Democratic Party’s support for Mayday is truly unprecedented. Does it mean that the day to celebrate international working-class solidarity was actually organized by a political party dominated by big-money oligarchs and guilty of an ongoing genocide? Are we to believe that something historic is afoot, or is this a replay of the Democrats’ embrace of MLK Day — while undermining everything King ever stood for? Are the Democrats really going for the billionaires’ throat, or is this just get-out-the-vote?
Mayday 2025 was partly the work of loyal Democratic groups, such as 50501 and Indivisible. Maybe that is why some of the Mayday events seemed to vary little from the early Hands-Off rallies—all anti-Trump without a systematic critique or a positive program, but with a leadership hiding Palestine and supporting NATO and the war machine.
The Democratic Party’s version of Mayday was most famously represented by its evangelist extraordinaire: Senator Sanders. His ongoing attempts to redeem the Democrats are a self-described move to “strengthen American Democracy where faith in both the Democratic and Republican Parties is extremely low.” Now, would a leader true to the tradition of Mayday make it a day to challenge the system or prop it up?
All Sanders has to do to reclaim Mayday is say the following words: “The Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people could not have happened without the support and consent of the US government. I urge you to do everything you can to bring an end to genocide.” And, “We will never have leverage against the Democrats or Republicans until we create a real opposition and a credible threat of exit. I urge you to support and join the third party of your choice.”
The redemption of the party of war, genocide, and austerity is not a price we have to pay for resisting Trump’s fascism. Genocide is fascism at its most evil. Redeeming the Democrats is just pushing lesser evil thinking to its final, lowest possible point — the lesser of two evil fascisms. Has it really come to that? Not if the tradition of Mayday holds.
What Are Workers To Make Of Dual Maydays?
The great Black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois and Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci helped us to unlock the secrets of our collective mind with the concept of dual consciousness. We all have to contend with a volatile blend of ruling-class and oppositional ideas that make up what we believe to be “reality” or “common sense,” and even our sense of ourselves.
“It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of the world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”
– W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks
This contradictory common sense allows for, and sometimes even encourages our resistance— just so long as we understand ourselves “through the eyes of others,” just so long as we accommodate ourselves to the established order in the end.
The trap is set, and it will lure us in as long as Marx’s observation remains true: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” The idea that the problem is far greater than Trump—that a system of corporate power and empire managed by both ruling parties produced him and his fascism—bursts the bounds of ruling class thinking.
The loyal left serves the existing order by diluting working-class consciousness with partisan loyalty, disciplining the movement to the machine. More than that, the loyalists who tried to steer Mayday into safe channels had one overriding effect: to make independent action by the working class seem inconceivable. But is it?
The Mayday marchers might just be harbingers of a real opposition. They hinted at what we should all know deep in our bones: the ruling class is neither pre-ordained nor eternal. Their rule is historical, and history is far from over. As we build a genuine opposition, our goal is to learn to think and act for ourselves. Mayday was a success not because of the intention of its leaders but because it may have helped unleash the forces of change. I double-dog dare the same leaders to call a general strike.
On Mayday, we recognize ourselves as a class of the vast majority who, through our labors, produce all wealth. We are aligned against Capital in whatever form big money takes. In our time, corporations and their merger with the state is the nursery for all oligarchs and all forms of fascism.
Only by our actions can we legitimately claim to represent the aspirations of all people for a better life, from the concrete demands of daily life to the lofty goal of liberation.
