The Brief Origins of May Day: the Reflections on Industrial Workers of the World

In 1889, May Day was chosen as the date for International Workers' Day by the socialists and communists of the Second International, as well as anarchists, labor activists, and leftists in general around the world, to commemorate the Haymarket affair in Chicago and the struggle for an eight-hour working day. International Workers' Day is also called "May Day", but it is a different celebration from the traditional May Day. An essential compendium of reflections on the reviled,...
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In 1889, May Day was chosen as the date for International Workers' Day by the socialists and communists of the Second International, as well as anarchists, labor activists, and leftists in general around the world, to commemorate the Haymarket affair in Chicago and the struggle for an eight-hour working day. International Workers' Day is also called "May Day", but it is a different celebration from the traditional May Day. An essential compendium of reflections on the reviled, glorious, and voltaic occasion of May 1st, the international May Day holiday. May 1st is a day that once made the rich and powerful cower in fear and caused Parliament to ban the Maypole-a magnificent and riotous day of rebirth, renewal, and refusal. This book's reflections on the Red and the Green-out of which arguably the only hope for the future lies-are populated by the likes of Native American anarcho-communist Lucy Parsons, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, Karl Marx, José Martí, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Luxemburg, SNCC, and countless others, both sentient and verdant. The book is a forceful reminder of the potentialities of the future, for the coming of a time when the powerful will fall, the commons restored, and a better world born anew.