May 1, 1886: a strike for the eight-hour working day. “Un pueblo por deber y por amor reunido,”1 a people united by love and necessity, only to be met with terror and executions. At stake was the question: From where does the value of labour emerge? What is the source of a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work? In Capital, Marx proves that labour is the source of all value, yet the value of labour-power is forged in the fire of war, through a struggle as old as civilization itself. A fight over the right of exploiters to rob the exploited. Since the advent of class societies, wages are set through the ongoing battle over control of the labour process. Wages are not linked to the value of the products of labour; they are set by how much a worker needs to reproduce their ability to labour the next day. A slave does not share in the profits of their labour but is given enough to survive and be able to labour for another day. Such is the law of our society, the law of value, set by capital and its demands on us all.
“Between equal rights, force decides.”2 Between the rights of capital and labour, only force decides. When capitalists make more money, there is no rise in wages; when they lose money, the labourers are laid off. The working day is therefore not settled by morality or law alone; it is settled by class struggle. But the readers of this statement are not unsettled by this fact.
May Day is, for some, a romantic tragedy over the eight-hour working day—an ossification of the working class as innocent victims of capital. The situation looked very different in May 1945. The workers had won themselves a state, an industrial superpower. The Soviet Union defeated the greatest army ever amassed in Europe; since Napoleon, no army had set foot on German lands. With the old world trembling, Marx had returned to Germany, victorious. The Soviet victory over fascism was no accident; it was the working class in its immortal spirit, organized through party and state, achieving decisive victory. The workers were no longer the meek, who shall be slaughtered in Chicago streets; they were the terrifying force that liberated the whole of humanity. If we celebrate May Day, we must remember the historical meaning of May 1, from 1886 to 1945: the working class appeared not merely as a suffering and exploited class, but as a ruling force.
There are those who see centralized power as an unfortunate deviation from emancipation. Since the days of the Paris Commune, for any serious Marxist, state power is not optional. A revolution that cannot defend itself will be crushed. Lenin’s argument against Kautsky was precisely that the working class cannot simply leave the bourgeois state intact. The state is a machine of class rule, and the proletariat must create its own form of state—a dictatorship of the proletariat, a state that is at the service of the nation, a state that ends the need for states. But most importantly, a state (power) that can endure against the enemy of the people, a power that can bring the revolution to its completion.3
May 1945 was the death of a Europe in its colonial splendour. The defeat of fascism weakened the aura of imperial inevitability. If Césaire argues that fascism was colonialism brought back to Europe,4 the Soviet victory in Berlin was the shot heard around the world to inaugurate a retreat of the old colonial forms. It opened space for national liberation struggles in Asia, Africa, and the colonized world. The old empires did not disappear overnight, but they were no longer invincible. By 1949, the people of Asia and Africa had behind them two communist titans, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. No longer would the imperialists reign with a free hand. Since 1945, imperialism is confronted not by the sob stories of Western leftists looking for innocent victims of capitalist terror to venerate; they were now an armed people in Vietnam, Cuba, and Korea. This brave new world asked for no pity and made no apologies for building a state that not only fights exploitation, but builds a system that can make exploitation a thing of the past. May 1, 1945 gave historical proof that the oppressed could organize at scale and confront capitalism on the geopolitical stage.
The post-1960s Western left has a selective memory of May Day. It elevates 1886 while disavowing 1945, for in that victory they see their own inadequacy. Emancipation requires building and wielding state capacity under conditions of war and imperial pressure. What is a revolution in Canada going to do, if not confront American capitalism in all its military power? That is precisely what is refused. In place of strategy comes metapolitics, or a politics at a distance from the state. Alain Badiou recasts the sequence: the nineteenth century asked how to seize power, the twentieth how to maintain it, and the present should move beyond the “fetish” of power.5 But this is not an advance. It is to take two steps back after taking a step forward in confronting imperialism. What presents itself as ethical clarity becomes political disarmament. If we disarm after the revolution, will the enemy do the same? If we dismantle the state, will the enemy do the same?
A May Day politics confined to 1886 can protest, commemorate, and demand, but it cannot answer the question of survival. We must restore the continuity: without 1945, May Day is sentiment; without power, it is surrender.
Bibliography
Althusser, Louis. Machiavelli and Us. Verso, 1999.
Badiou, Alain. Metapolitics. Verso, 2005.
Badiou, Alain. “The Communist Hypothesis.” New Left Review 49 (January–February 2008).
Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Monthly Review Press, 2000.
Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. Progress Publishers, 2015.
- In Pablo Neruda’s poem Los Enemigos, Neruda depicts a massacre of protestors in Chile and calls for castigo (punishment). In the first stanza, he writes: “Here, they found a people singing, a people reunited by necessity and love.” There has been debate over the meaning of the phrase “por deber y por amor reunido.” The word deber, often translated as duty, can also be interpreted as historical necessity in a materialist sense. ↩︎
- From Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 2015), 164. The quote appears in this passage: “There is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchange. Between equal rights, force decides. Hence it is that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working day presents itself as the result of a struggle—a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working class.” ↩︎
- Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us (Verso, 1999), 40. ↩︎
- Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (Monthly Review Press, 2000), 36. ↩︎
- In “The Communist Hypothesis,” Badiou presents his conception of two sequences of the communist hypothesis. The first runs from the French Revolution to the Paris Commune; the second from 1917 to 1976, ending with the Cultural Revolution. He argues that the left’s overemphasis on seizing state power contributed to the decline of the communist movement. His proposed alternative is to “put the State at a distance,” a position often taken up by his followers as the claim that politics should be conducted at a remove from the state. See Alain Badiou, “The Communist Hypothesis,” New Left Review 49 (2008); also, Alain Badiou, Metapolitics (Verso, 2005), 145. ↩︎