May Day is the time when we recall the struggles of the past, assess the situation of today and look with renewed hope at the possibilities of the futures It is above all the time when we reaffirm once again the internationalism of the world socialist movement; and when we lift our voice in suppor? of the oppressed and exploited the world over. It is the time when we dedicate ourselves once more to the ideals of a society no longer based on the expioitation of man by mane
The story of working class internationalism has a long history and it runs as a red thread through the life of the working-class movements in all countries of the world. In Britain the internationalism of radicals and socialists has always been integrally linked with the struggle against their own oppressors, and the movement in Britain has a long and honourable record of protest and support for socialist and national liberation movements abroad.
May Day in its modern form dates from the establishment of the Second International in 1889, The First International - the International Working~ Men's Association which was founded in 1884 ~ had effectively disappeared when its headquarters were moved to New York in 1872. There were a number of international conferences in the years which followed but it was not until the second half of the 1880s that a new International became possible. There were two Congresses in Paris in 1889 but it was the marxist one - attended from Britain by Keir Hardie, William Morris, the Avelings (Eleanor Aveling was a daughter of Marx) and the Scottish Radical, R.B. Cunninghame Graham - from which the second International developed.
It was this Congress which took the decisions to hold simultaneous demon= -strations in all countries on the first of May, 1890. The date was agreed by these Paris delegates because the American Federation of Labour had already decided, at their Congress held at St. Louis in December 1888, to choose May lst as the day for labour to demonstrate its will and purpose.
The British demonstration on the fourth of May. 1890, was an impressive manifestation of the power of the newly-organised unskilled workers and the growing militancy and understand f the movement as a whole. Frederick Engels, who was a close observer of English working-class politics, greeted the 200,000 who demonstrated in London's Hyde Park with immense enthusiasm. He wrote in a Vienna socialist papers
“And I consider this the grandest and most important part of the whole May Day festival, that on 4th May. 1890, the English proletariat, newly awakened from its forty years' winter sleep, again entered the movement of its class."
Engels was wrong about the "forty years' sleep" of the British workingclass movement because its life had been much more vigorous than he recognised, but he was right to underline the new possibilities that were developing. This first May Day of 1890 was organised in most countries around the slogan of the Bight-Hour Day; and at a later Congress the political slogans of the international movement were enlarged. At a Congress in August, 1891, it was decided £6°78° the international May Day around three main issues: the first, the Eight-Hour Day; the second, the spread of international labour legislation and the third, the maintenance of world peace,
This Congress also resolved that wherever possible the workers should abstain from work on May Day and this tradition has continued in many countries of Europe and elsewhere. But not, alas, in Britain where the trade union and labour movement has always demonstrated on the Sunday nearest to May Daye Could we not begin to insist that May Day is OUR day for demonstrating afresh our belief in the new society of socialism?