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Title: The First of May Author: Errico Malatesta Date: 1 May 1893 Language: en Topics: May Day, history Source: The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader, edited by Davide Turcato, translated by Paul Sharkey. Notes: The Commonweal (London) 1, new series, no. 1 (1 May 1893).
For the third time the thinking proletariat of all countries affirms by
means of an international demonstration, true solidarity among the
workers, hatred of exploitation, and the will, which from day to day
grows more determined, to bring the existing system of things to an end.
Governments and the classes tremble, and they have good reason. Not
because on this day the revolution will break out—for that is an event
which may happen on any day in the year—but because when the oppressed
people begin to feel the weight and the shame of oppression, when they
feel themselves brothers, when they forget all the historic hatreds
fomented by the governing classes, when they clasp hands across
frontiers and feel solidarity in the struggle for a common emancipation,
then is the day of deliverance close at hand.
What matters it that men and parties give various reason now-a-days as
to their immediate ends, and according to the profit that they hope to
derive from them? The main fact remains that the workers announce that
they are all united, and are of one accord in the struggle against
masters. This fact remains, and will remain, as one of the most
important events of the century, and as one of the signs heralding the
Great Revolution—a revolution which will bring to birth a new
civilisation founded on the welfare of all, and the solidarity of
labour: It is a fact, the importance of which is only equalled in the
present day by that other proletarian announcement of international
association among the workers.
And the movement is the most significant as being the direct work of the
masses, and quite apart from and even in opposition to the action of
parties.
When the State Socialists in the Paris Congress of 1889, called the
1^(st) of May a day of international strike, it was merely one of those
platonic definitions that are made at congresses just to state a
principle, and which are forgotten as soon as the congress is over.
Perhaps they thought further that such a decision might help to give
importance to their party, and to be useful to certain men as an
electoral top; for unhappily these people seem to have hearts that can
only beat with enthusiasm for election purposes. In any case it remains
certain that from the moment they perceived that the idea had made
headway, and that the demonstrations became imposing and threatened to
draw them into revolutionary paths, they endeavoured to check the
movement and take away from it the significance with which popular
instinct had endowed it. To prove this, one need but recollect the
efforts that have been made to shift the demonstration from the first
day of May to the first Sunday in May. Since it is not the rule to work
at all on Sunday, to speak of suspension of labour on that day is simply
a farce and a fraud. It is no longer a strike, no longer a means of
asserting the solidarity of the workers and their power of resisting the
orders of the employers. It remains nothing but a fête or holiday—a
little marching about, a few speeches, a few indifferent resolutions,
passed with applause from larger or smaller meetings—that is all! And in
order still more effectually to kill the movement which they
unthinkingly started, they have got so far as to want to ask the
Government to declare the 1^(st) of May an official holiday!
The consequence of all these lulling tactics is that the masses who at
first threw themselves into the movement with enthusiasm are beginning
to lose confidence in it, and are coming to regard the 1^(st) of May as
a mere annual parade, only different from other traditional parades as
being duller and more of a bore.
It is for revolutionists to save this movement, which might at some time
or other give occasion for most important consequences, and which in any
case is always a powerful means of propaganda which it would be folly to
give up.
Among Anarchists and Revolutionists there are some who take no interest
in the movement, some who even object to it because the first impulse,
in Europe at least, was given by the parliamentary Socialists who used
the demonstrations as a means of obtaining public powers, the legal
eight hours day, international legislation with regard to labour, and
other reforms which we know to be mere baits, serving only to deceive
the people, and divert them from putting in substantial claims, or else
to appease them when they menace the Government and the proprietary
classes.
These objectors are wrong in our opinion. Popular movements begin how
they can; nearly always they spring from some idea already transcended
by contemporary thought. It is absurd to hope that in the present
condition of the proletariat the great mass are capable before they stir
of conceiving and accepting a programme formulated by a small number to
whom circumstances have given exceptional means of development, a
programme which can only come to be consciously accepted by the great
number through the action of moral and material conditions which the
movement itself must supply. If we wait to plunge into the fray until
the people mount the Anarchist Communist colours, we shall run great
risk of remaining eternal dreamers; we shall see the tide of history
flow at our feet while scarcely contributing anything toward determining
its course, leaving a free field meanwhile to our adversaries who are
the enemies, conscious or unconscious, of the true interests of the
people.
Our flag we must mount ourselves, and we ought to carry it high wherever
there are people who suffer, particularly wherever there are people who
show that they are tired of suffering, and are struggling in any way
good or bad against oppression and exploitation.
Workers who suffer, but who understand little or nothing of theories,
workers who are hungry and cold, who see their children pine and die of
starvation, who see their wives and sisters take to prostitution,
workers who know themselves to be marching straight to the workhouse or
the hospital—these have no time to wait, and are naturally disposed to
prefer any immediate amelioration no matter what—even a transitory or an
illusory one, since illusion so long as it lasts passes for reality.
Yes, rather this than wait for a radical transformation of society which
shall destroy forever the causes of wretchedness and of man’s injustice
to man.
This is easy to understand and to justify, and it explains why the
constitutional parties who exploit this tendency by speaking always of
pretended reforms as “practicable” and “possible,” and of partial but
immediate improvements generally succeed better than we do in their
propaganda among the masses.
But where the workers make a mistake (and it is for us to set them
right) is in supposing that reforms and improvements are more easy to
get than the abolition of the wage system and the complete emancipation
of the worker.
In a society based upon an antagonism of interests, where one class
retains all social wealth and is organised in political power in order
to defend its own privileges, poverty and the subjection of the
disinherited masses always tend to reach the highest maximum compatible
with the bare existence of man and with the interests of the ruling
class. And this tendency meets with no obstacle except in the resistance
of the oppressed: oppression and exploitation never stop till that point
is reached at which the workers show themselves determined to endure no
more of it.
If small concessions are obtained instead of great ones, it is not
because they are easier to get, but because the people content
themselves with them.
It has always been by means of force or of fear that anything has been
won from the oppressors; it has always been force or fear that has
hindered the oppressors from taking back what they have granted.
The eight hours’ day and other reforms—be their worth what it may—can
only be obtained when men show themselves resolved to take them by
force, and will bring no improvement to the lot of the workers unless
these are determined no longer to suffer what they are suffering to-day.
Wisdom then, and even opportunism, requires that we do not waste time
and energy on soothing reforms, but struggle for the complete
emancipation of all—an emancipation which can only become a reality
through the putting of wealth in common, and by the abolition of
governments.
This is what Anarchists have to explain to the people, but in order to
do so they must not disdainfully hold aloof, but join the masses and
struggle along with them, pushing them forward by reasoning and example.
Besides, in countries where the disinherited have tried for a strike on
May 1^(st) they have forgotten the “8 hours,” and the rest, and the
1^(st) May has had all the significance of a revolutionary date, on
which the workers of the whole world count their forces and promise one
another to be unanimous in the approaching days of decisive battle.
On the other hand, governments work hard to remove all illusion which
anyone may cherish, as to the intervention of public powers in favour of
the workers; for instead of concessions, all that has been obtained up
to the present time have been wholesale arrests, charges of cavalry, and
discharge of firearms!—murder and mutilation!
Then LONG LIVE the 1^(st) May!
It is not, as we have said, the revolution day, but it remains all the
same a good opportunity for the propagation of our ideas, and for
turning men’s minds towards the social revolution.