How workers build nations

ON MAY 1, 1886, Chicago’s streets pulsed with the fury of 40 000 workers demanding dignity: “Eight hours for work, eight for rest, eight for what we will!”

- YOGAN NAIDOO

For three days, the city teetered on the edge of revolt until May 3, when police gunned down strikers at McCormick Reaper Works, staining the cobblestones red. The next night, as rain drizzled over Haymarket Square, a bomb tore through the ranks of advancing police, igniting a massacre of wild gunfire and screaming men.

When the smoke cleared, seven officers and four workers lay dead, but the true horror came after. In a trial dripping with vengeance, eight anarchists were sentenced to death for their words, not deeds, their executions a warning to the working class. Yet from their gallows rose a global cry: May 1 would forever be a day of rebellion, baptised in the blood of Haymarket. The bomb’s echo never faded. The fight had just begun.

For centuries, the clash between capital and labour has shaped the modern world - a brutal dialectic between those who own the means of production and those whose sweat animates them. The Industrial Revolution birthed a new era of exploitation: factory owners, wielding steam-powered machinery like a weapon, extended workdays to 16 hours, while paying starvation wages. Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867) laid bare this systemic extraction - workers produced surplus value, while capitalists reaped rents through what David Harvey calls "accumulation by dispossession".

The 20th century offered brief respite through Fordist compromises and Keynesian mediation, but neoliberalism shattered this fragile equilibrium. Reagan and Thatcher's union busting, offshoring, and financialisation marked capital's counteroffensive - a ruthless reassertion of class power that persists today through platform capitalism's algorithmic domination and gig economy precarity. Yet Piketty's data reveals an ironic twist: our inequality now mirrors the very Gilded Age conditions that sparked labour’s original revolt.