They buried May Day in a swamp of class collaboration!

Only with the resumption of the class struggle can this day be revived and become the exclusive day of the proletariat!

May Day, as the day on which the proletariat celebrated its struggle for the eight-hour working day, had its origins in America, at a time when waves of emigration from Europe, especially from Germany, Bohemia, Italy, Greece and the countries of Eastern Europe, were flooding the industrial cities of the United States, Chicago being foremost among them.

In the 1880s and 1890s, Chicago was called “the slaughterhouse of the world” (because it produced the largest amount of meat in the world) and also “the breadbasket of America” because of the endless Midwestern prairies that sprawled on the periphery of the city. Contributing to these primacies was the huge mass of migrant wage workers from Europe who were exploited in working 12 to 16 hours a day, without any security and in working conditions bordering on miserable existence. Against this super-exploitation, and based on the experience of the struggles that had already taken place in European countries (1830 in France, 1848 which shook most European capitals, 1871 with the Paris Commune), the first strike movements and the first workers' unions began to emerge in the United States.

The drastic reduction of the working day to eight hours and an increase in wages were the two main demands around which the workers united and for which they fought tenaciously and without fear of repression from the big capitalists and the ruling bourgeoisie. In 1884, the Federation of Organized Professional and Labor Unions gave the proletarian struggle a historic goal: from May 1, 1886, workers would work only 8 hours a day for the same wages they received for a 12–16 hour working day, and if the bosses did not accept this daily schedule, they would go on strike and organize pickets until this demand was acceded to.

As the date approached, the atmosphere in Chicago began to grow tense: on the one hand, the proletarians and the unions were promoting the struggle and organizing themselves to carry out what had been announced two years before, while on the other hand, the factory bosses, the city administration and the police were escalating the tension of the situation by trying to intimidate the proletarians by all means. As early as February 1886, the workers of one of the city's most powerful companies, the harvesting machine manufacturer McCormick, went on strike. McCormick responded with a lockout and the organization of scabs to be smuggled into the plant. The effort to break the unity of the striking workers was obvious. Thus, it came about that on the first of May a mass of 30–40,000 Chicago workers took to the streets demanding an eight-hour working day while pickets continued outside McCormick; inside the plant, scabs that managed to get inside continued to work under the protection of hundreds of police officers. The protests and demonstrations lasted for three days. Clashes between strikers and scabs trying to get into the factory were inevitable; police intervened, and some strikers were shot and killed. The reaction of the workers was not long in coming; an anarchist association organized a peaceful protest in Haymarket Square, in the centre of Chicago's major business district. However, the police moved to crack down on the protesters to disperse the gathering; someone threw a bomb at the police, killing seven people and injuring about sixty. The police responded by shooting, killing three more protesters. This marked the beginning of a systematic repression against anarchists, and the person responsible for throwing the bomb was never identified (it might have been someone paid by McCormick or the police…). Although there was no evidence to suggest that anarchists were responsible, eight of them, many of whom had not even attended the demonstration, were charged with conspiracy and murder and death penalties requested; two were given life sentences, one 15 years, one “mysteriously” died in prison, and the others were hanged.

In 1889, at the Socialist Congress of the Second International in Paris, May 1 was proclaimed International Day of the Proletariat in Struggle in honour of the Chicago proletarians and their struggles; it quickly spread to Europe and several other countries such as Mexico, Cuba and China. However, the Haymarket massacre, the death sentences on anarchists who were not guilty of the bombing, and the memory of the extraordinary militancy shown by the Chicago proletarians to achieve the eight-hour workday, were too great a burden for the American bourgeoisie; it was also a danger because the celebration of May Day could revive the memory of these struggles in the American proletarians and carry on a tradition that every bourgeoisie has always fought against. In fact, in America, the day commemorating the workers' fierce struggles has been moved to the first Monday in September (hence it is never the same day), while in Europe and many other countries May Day has been turned into a public holiday called Labour Day; the opportunist activity of the trade unions and parties committed to social peace, class collaboration and the permanent subjugation of the proletariat to the vital needs of capital has contributed substantially to this transformation into a peaceful day accepted by all bosses and every state.

The powerful drive for industrialisation in the United States has created in much of the country a large and concentrated working class, which objectively could pose a great danger to the bourgeois government, as it has done in Europe, especially in England, France and Germany, where revolutionary communism has had a great resonance among the working masses since the publication of the Manifesto of Marx and Engels, and on whose ideological and programmatic foundations the workers' parties and their International Associations have organised themselves. The fact that the American working class was resolutely militant is evidenced by the fact that it continued to fight for wage increases and the reduction of the working day to eight hours for at least another thirty years, right up to the threshold of the First World Imperialist War. Most famous was the strike at the Chicago Pullman Company, a railroad car and equipment factory, which broke out in the spring of 1894 against layoffs and wage cuts resulting from the economic depression of the previous year; it sparked a nationwide railroad boycott that lasted from May 11 to July 20, 1894, involving at least 250,000 workers in 27 states and disrupting much of the freight and passenger traffic. Such decisive actions of struggle were opposed, of course, not only by Pullman but also by the federal government: with the support of the American Federation of Labor-AFL, the main labor organization in the U.S. with a collaborationist leadership, it sent in the army to break up the strikes and boycott, and arrested and prosecuted the American Railway Union-ARU unionists (led by the socialist Debs) who had called and directed it. Police violence claimed thirty lives in Chicago alone, while an investigation by historian David Ray Papke found that forty more people were killed in clashes in other cities.

The history of proletarian struggles in the United States is full of similar episodes, from the Molly Maguires society to the Industrial Workers of the World-IWW, with miners, especially those of Irish and German descent, always in the forefront. However, along with European immigrant proletarians with their experience of struggle and organization, European capitalists and politicians also immigrated to America; they brought their experience of repressing workers' struggles but also a considerable package of opportunist politics to be used, along with repressive violence, to influence and divert workers' organizations and workers' political movements from the terrain of frontal struggle against the bourgeoisie to the terrain of class collaboration through the classical corruption of union and political leaderships.

These brief reminiscences of the past of workers' struggles in America that gave rise to proletarian May Day do not serve to celebrate the memory of a glorious past that will not return due the development of an ever richer and more powerful capitalism not only in Europe and North America but also in the rest of the world: it serves to remember that class struggles are not part of a history whose glory has passed, but part of a reality that capitalism itself is constantly giving rise to anew through its economic and social contradictions, which are increasingly acute and far-reaching on an international scale.

FOMENTING COMPETITION AMONG THE PROLETARIANS: THE FUNDAMENTAL OBJECTIVE OF EVERY BOURGEOISIE

While the bourgeoisie has become immensely wealthier thanks to its worldwide system of exploitation by wage labour and in many countries with advanced capitalist economies an average standard of living has been achieved that is undoubtedly higher than it was a century or two ago. But the proletarians not only remain in conditions of absolute dependence on capital, owing their lives to the capitalist bourgeoisie; they are also exposed to a gradually widening gap and social inequality between the classes, reaching a level of life insecurity never before experienced. Thus, even though in both advanced and underdeveloped capitalist countries the proletarian impulses to struggle have never ceased, and in certain periods they have turned into outright social revolts, the proletariat, due to the decisive action of opportunist forces, has been plunged increasingly into impotence, even when it comes to defending its immediate living and working conditions.

It is true that since the end of the Second World War, the proletarians in the advanced capitalist countries have been able to rely on the social policies that the dominant bourgeoisies have filled with social shock absorbers. Such social policies were attained by the workers through proletarian struggles, revolts and revolutions in the hundred years before the fateful year 1939, but also due to the political intelligence of the dominant bourgeoisies: they were able and willing to use a small part of the vast mass of profits from the bestial exploitation of their own proletarians and those of the colonies and backward countries, to devote it to social shock absorbers which benefited corruption at the trade union, political and social level within the wage-earning masses themselves. It is the obvious aim of quieting the most pressing needs of the proletariat from an economic point of view, as well as the aim of stirring up competition among proletarians by creating within the masses at the national level a better paid and more “secure” stratum (that famous workers' aristocracy), which will be more and more tied to the defence of the bourgeois economy and society and will oppose the other proletarians. In this way, the bourgeoisie more easily dominates all the other proletarian strata, among whom it sparks off a daily war for jobs, however precarious or illicit, and for wages, however hungry or episodic.

Into this massive economic and social operation, whose aim is to maintain a manageable level of social peace in each country despite the inevitable struggles caused by crises that the bourgeoisie itself cannot avoid, has also entered the phenomenon of immigration, which is as time goes on becoming much more numerous and illegal.

The more the economic and social contradictions of capitalism provoke crises and wars, the more the phenomenon of the migration of ever larger proletarian masses to richer and at least temporarily more stable countries takes on a global dimension. Thus, migrants against their will become another card used by the bourgeoisie to boost competition among proletarians. On the one hand, the bourgeoisie, which wages war against “illegal” immigration, represses it, imprisons it, tries to block it at the borders of every country, pushes it back to the countries from which it came, where the fate of migrants is marked by torture, bestial exploitation and violence of all kinds, or leaves them to die crossing the seas or deserts, striking with all the cynicism of which it is capable, even at humanitarian organisations; on the other hand, it extends the marginalized and precarious living conditions of migrants as conditions into which the native proletarians can sink if they do not collaborate with the bosses and the state, if they do not accept the sacrifices that the bourgeois ruling class demands so that its economy does not collapse.

It is increasingly evident what the 1848 Manifesto of Marx and Engels argued, namely that the existence of capital rests not only on wage labour, on the bourgeois exploitation of the labour power of the workers, but that wage labour rests exclusively on the competition of workers with each other.

Competition between workers strengthens capitalist domination of the economy and bourgeois rule over society. Therefore, the proletarian struggle in defence of its immediate class interests must include the struggle against competition between proletarians! This struggle, which is universal in character and applies to all proletarians, whatever country they come from, whatever age and sex, and whatever religious or political affiliation, is a struggle that includes a whole long list of immediate demands, be they wages, the working day, safety measures at work, health risks, etc.

THE CLASSIST STRUGGLE OF THE PROLETARIAT REQUIRES OBJECTIVES, MEANS AND METHODS OF STRUGGLE INCOMPATIBLE WITH BOURGEOIS INTERESTS

The immediate demands of the proletariat and the struggle to achieve them, if they are achieved, do not in themselves change the balance of forces between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie; capitalism remains in place, the proletarians continue to be exploited as before, with some small positive changes from the previous situation; but the proletarians know from experience that these changes are temporary and will sooner or later be nullified or reversed. What really turns out to be positive from the class point of view, and therefore more generally for the proletarians, concerns the struggle: the means and methods of struggle, its organisation, its direction.

Decades of the policy of class collaboration with the bourgeois ruling class at the trade union and political level have created a thick overlay on the traditions of the proletarian class struggle; the present generations of workers have forgotten the irrepressible power stunning of the proletarian struggle when it is carried out with the means and methods of the class struggle, i.e. the means and methods which, by corresponding to the general class orientation of the struggle – that is, incompatible with the immediate and historical interests of the ruling bourgeoisie – contribute to the formation among workers of the experience of struggle which the proletarian class in general absolutely needs to feel itself to be a real social force capable of breaking its submission to the capitalists and their political power.

The proletarians can once again become such a powerful social force if they succeed in breaking the bond which tie them to the defence of the interests of the bourgeoisie. This bond consists in particular of the organisational and political network of opportunist forces, both trade union and political, which the bourgeois ruling class nourishes and supports because it knows that their service in defending the established order is vital to it. There are situations where democracy, the “rule of law”, “civil liberties” with all their specially implemented apparatuses are no longer so effective for the defence of the political and social power of the bourgeoisie, whether because the proletariat has reached the point where it concretely threatens to overthrow the bourgeois power by its insurrection and revolution (in the 1920s, the bourgeoisie's answer was fascism), or because the bourgeoisie does not have the economic and social power to make the proletariat obediently submit to its interests (which is the case with military dictatorships in the style of Pinochet or Al-Sisi). The fact remains that in the long decades after the Second World imperialist slaughter, the proletariat of the advanced countries was deeply intoxicated by reformist opportunism, which fed democratic illusions, and by Stalinism, which fed illusions of a socialism that existed only on paper, when in reality it was a less elitist and more “popular” national capitalism. This political and social influence has always relied on the very crumbs of profits that the ruling bourgeoisie has chosen to grant to the proletariat in general, to keep it obedient and to continue to delude it about the miraculous qualities of parliamentary democracy, thanks to which the door to power has been opened even for parties that defined themselves as “socialist” and “communist”.

The development of capitalism in its imperialist phase, as well as the shift in the concentration of the economy to previously unprecedented monopolistic level, has at the same time pushed the competition on the world market to an ever sharper level of antagonism, to the extent that the bourgeoisies of all countries are forced to privilege their military and political apparatuses over and against the democratic and parliamentary institutions they have used and continue to use today. The tendency of the state to move from the “rule of law” – pretending to be “at the service of society” – to the police state is evident today in all great imperialist countries, which in effect have set and are setting the path for other countries. Moreover, what the US inherited from imperialist Europe is returning to it with a confirmation that this is the direction that the imperialist states must take; and moreover it shows how the US proletariat has been corrupted and trapped in a network of collaboration between the classes.

The proletariat today finds itself in a very particular situation: it has grown in numbers throughout the world and constitutes the overwhelming majority of the population even in capitalistically backward countries; and in the capitalistically advanced countries, strata of the petty bourgeoisie, ruined by economic crises, have ended and are inevitably ending up in the living conditions of the proletariat. These strata of the petty bourgeoisie, however, carry with them the aspirations, habits and prejudices characteristic of these semi-classes, which constantly oscillate between the big bourgeoisie and the proletariat; these aspirations, habits and prejudices , alongside democratic and reformist illusions, inevitably reinforce in the layers of the proletariat the nationalist and racist sentiments which are characteristic of the petty bourgeoisie in particular in periods of prolonged economic and social crisis.

Against the direct influence of the dominant bourgeois class, against the ancillary influence of the petty bourgeoisie, and against the opportunist tendencies with the help of which the bourgeoisie tries to envelop the proletarian masses in a paralysing web difficult to escape from, the proletarian class can only defend itself and counterattack by breaking out of class collaboration with the exploiting class and the social strata that support it. The proletariat must break the democratic-national-patriotic bonds that bind it to the gears of the bourgeoisie, with whose help the bourgeoisie is preparing it a future in which it will not only be forced to make even greater sacrifices than those it already has to endure as a result of the economic crises, but above all to become cannon fodder in the war that is already under way in Europe and on its borders (as it was in the past in the former Yugoslavia and as it is today in Ukraine and Gaza) and which is about to turn into a world war.

The proletariat of the imperialist countries has a great historical responsibility for its own future, as well as for the future of the world proletariat: its class struggle is the only one that can deliver the fate of the world proletariat from the crushing domination of imperialism. The lesson of the glorious revolutionary struggle of the Russian proletariat, which rose up in the midst of the first world imperialist war and, thanks to the firm and prescient leadership of the party of Lenin, was victorious in its revolution against both Tsarism and the bourgeoisie, and was able to sustain the international organisation of the proletarian struggle for almost a decade without the decisive contribution of the proletariat of the advanced capitalist countries – Europe and America –, is a historical lesson that must not be forgotten. If the international revolution which began in Russia in 1917 failed to gain ground in Europe, and thus to create an invincible bulwark against the world bourgeoisie, despite the enormous militancy of the German workers, which were at that time the reference point for the world proletariat, it is because the then still dominant influence of the reformist and democratic opportunism of social democracy practically paralysed the proletarian movement throughout the civilised world. Workers' opportunism is based on concrete material foundations, the dominant bourgeoisie knows it and the revolutionary communists know it. The material foundations are the reforms, the concessions that the bourgeoisie makes so that the proletarian struggles does not take on the class character, that is, a specifically anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist character. The bourgeoisie knows from historical experience that it has no chance of burying the class struggle of the proletariat for good; it cannot make it disappear because it is its own mode of production that engenders the contradictions of a society divided into antagonistic classes, contradictions that are the cause of the class struggle. The bourgeoisie does not rule, but is ruled by the capitalist mode of production: this, once put into motion through the development of the productive forces and once anchored in the relations of private property, the commodity production of enterprises and in the relations of private appropriation of social production, has escaped from the previous control of the bourgeois class. It is for this reason that the bourgeoisie is unable to resolve once and for all its economic crises, especially the crises of overproduction, which cyclically endanger the stability of the whole of society. However, the class struggle which the bourgeoisie itself has waged since its appearance, and which it continues to wage against the proletariat, has taught it that it must respond to the tendency of the proletariat to unite its forces against the increasingly intolerable capitalist demands, by intensifying the precarization of the life of the proletarian masses and by aggravating competition among proletarians. The intensifying precarization of life and the aggravated competition among the proletarians are social weapons which the bourgeoisie in every country uses without ceasing.

Therefore, the proletarians must struggle on these two levels, which are not contradictory; on the contrary, it is necessary for the proletarian struggle to take place on both if it is to succeed on the road to emancipation from wage labour: (a) on the terrain of the defence of its immediate interests, concerning wages, the length of the working day, working and living conditions, the conditions of struggle which inevitably break out at the level of individual factories or individual sectors, and in which the proletarians experience and recognise the strengths and weaknesses of their action and their organisation; (b) on the broader terrain which concerns the general living conditions of the proletarians, the terrain of the struggle against competition between proletarians, in which the class solidarity which is the real driving force of the anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist class struggle develops.

Then the proletariat of the whole world will have a reason, a real, class-based reason, to revive May Day as the international day of proletarian struggle against capital, a struggle set in the perspective of real, pure, effective class emancipation from all capitalist oppression, from all economic and social contradictions, from all social and individual degeneration caused by the mercantile society par excellence, the bourgeois society.

The future which the bourgeois class undoubtedly offers to the proletariat throughout the world is a future of wage slavery, growing misery, oppression and repression, crisis and war. The future to which the proletarian class is historically destined is a future in which commodities, capital and the class that appropriates everything with all the violence at its disposal will be eradicated, buried definitively. In their place, in place of an economy that, like a cancer, exhausts, eats away and ruins the vital energy of the productive forces, and subjugates living labour to the domination of dead labour, the means of production and capital, the revolutionary proletariat – once it has overthrown the dictatorial political power of the bourgeoisie and established its class dictatorship – will bring into being a genuine social economy, an economy that responds exclusively to the social needs of humankind and not to the capitalist market and profit. This economy does not need a society divided into classes, does not need division of labour, money; and when the bourgeoisie will be completely defeated internationally it will not need, a class state, a Red Army to defend it against the restoration of the bourgeois domination and the laws of capital and capitalist production.

Communist society is the historical future not only of the proletariat but of the whole human species: the proletariat, as a social class created by capitalism, precisely because of its historical characteristic of being a class with no reserves, without property, and thus no country, the producer of all wealth, is the only revolutionary class in bourgeois society; it is the only class that has nothing to lose in this society because it owns nothing, but have a world to win; it is the only class that fights for the achievement of a classless society, for the disappearance of the classes, and therefore for the disappearance of all oppression, of all class violence, of every state that is the embodiment of the violence of the class which  dominates all the others. The revolutionary communist party is fighting today for this future!

April, 23d 2025

Il comunista - le prolétaire - el proletario - proletarian - programme communiste - el programa comunista - Communist Program

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