May Day: celebration of the working class

MAY Day has long been celebrated as a turning point, the days expanding, warmer weather and trees in leaf again. Phew!

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Trade unionists and socialists celebrate May 1st for a very different reason. May Day is a celebration of the collective and organised power of the working class.

For most of us, on every continent since the very start of the system of capitalism, workers have had little to celebrate, condemned to precarious employment, wage-slavery and gross exploitation.

The rise of a new capitalist class, largely replacing the ruling feudal landlord class, saw peasants herded off the land into town slums and factories, with brutal 14-hour working days, heralding the global industrial revolution.

Workers were combined into the proletariat, the label an acknowledgment of the cruelly stratified system of the ancient Roman Empire within which the class of proletarii owned little or no property. Proletarian combination could overthrow imperial governments by stopping production then and now.

Still today, workers’ organisations are continually challenged and forcefully put down by the capitalist class who know the history of societies based upon class rule.