On to May Day

From a talk given by Workers World Party leader Larry Holmes at a March 25 meeting in New York.

Larry Holmes, left, in Harlem on March. 19.

The origins of May Day are in the struggle in this country in the 1800s for an eight-hour day, and the heroic struggle that led to Chicago’s Haymarket Square and the martyrdom of workers there. But it has its origins in the communist movement too. And itstill celebrated around the world.

It was the Second International, in one of its congresses in Paris in the 1800s, that declared May Day a day of solidarity with U.S. workers fighting for the eight-hour day. And since then it has become a communist occasion.

Why do we want to bring it back? For nostalgic reasons? That’s worthwhile, but that’s not it.

It is an effort, just like the Million Worker March, to pull and push the movement—its best elements, in the working-class organizations, in the community, in the anti-imperialist movement—in an internationalist direction.

May Day is International Workers Day. And since [its founding] it has come to mean more than solidarity between workers of the world, but also between workers and the liberation movements of the world. Therefore it incorporates the Vietnamese and the Haitians, the Arab struggle, the Iraqis, Cuba and Venezuela and Colombia, and throughout Africa, throughout all the oppressed world. It’s now workers and the oppressed.

And it’s time to talk about internationalism and the utter, dire, urgent necessity to revive it, and also to push the movement in a more militant, pro-worker, working-class-struggle direction as well. It is absolutely essential in order to face the demands of the coming period. And so this is what we’re committed to doing.

Onward to May Day—and beyond May Day. The revolution is coming. The revolution is coming because the crisis demands it, it begs it, and if it seems like there are tons of crust and cement that have covered up the notion of a revolution and made it seem ridiculous even to talk in terms of that—well, crust and cement will fall down. They will fall down in the midst of struggle and events.

And we’re going to see that happen. But we’re not just observers; we’re agents in this process.