Our First May Day

May Day is International Workers’ Day. Our first May Day was celebrated in Hyde Park in 1890. Eleanor Marx spoke to the throng.

Eleanor Marx - speech on the First May Day
Hyde Park, 4 May 1890, abridged

 We have not come to do the work of political parties, but we have come here in the cause of labour, in its own defence, to demand its own rights. I can remember when we came in handfuls of a few dozen to Hyde Park to demand an Eight Hours' Bill, but the dozens have grown to hundreds, and the hundreds to thousands, until we have this magnificent demonstration that fills the park today. We are standing face to face with another demonstration, but I am glad to see that the great masses of the people are on our side.

Those of us who have gone through all the worry of the Dock Strike, and especially the Gasworkers' Strike, and have seen the men, women and children stand round us, have had enough of strikes, and we are determined to secure an eight hours' day by legal enactment; unless we do so, it will be taken from us at the first opportunity. We will only have ourselves to blame if we do not achieve the victory which this great day could so easily give us. There is in the park this afternoon a man whom Mr. Gladstone once imprisoned– Michael Davitt; but Mr. Gladstone is now on the best of terms with him. What do you suppose is the reason for the change? Why has the Liberal Party been so suddenly converted to Home Rule? [They bowed to pressure.]

We must kick these Liberal and Radical members out if they refuse to support our programme. I am speaking this afternoon not only as a Trade Unionist, but as a Socialist. Socialists believe that the eight hours' day is the first and most immediate step to be taken, and we aim at a time when there will no longer be one class supporting two others, but the unemployed both at the top and at the bottom of society will be got rid of. This is not the end but only the beginning of the struggle; it is not enough to come here to demonstrate in favour of an eight hours' day. We must not be like some Christians who sin for six days and go to church on the seventh, but we must speak for the cause daily, and make the men, and especially the women that we meet, come into the ranks to help us.

"Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you–
Ye are many–they are few." 

Friedrich Engels explains the background to the huge May Day demonstration that Eleanor addressed.

The May Day celebration of the proletariat was epoch-making not only in its universal character, which made it the first international action of the militant working class. it also served to register most gratifying advances in the various countries.

But on May 4 Vienna was thrown into the shade by London. And I hold it to be the most important and magnificent in the entire May Day celebration that on May 4, 1890, the English proletariat, rousing itself from forty years’ winter sleep, rejoined the movement of its class. To appreciate this, one must look into the events leading up to May 4.

Towards the beginning of last year the world’s largest and most wretched working-class district, the East End of London, stirred gradually to action. On April 1, 1889, the Gas Workers’ and General Labourers’ Union was founded; today it has a membership of some 100,000. Largely with the cooperation of this partner union (many are gas workers in winter and dock workers in summer), the dockers’ big strike started on its way and shook even the bottom-most section of the East London workers out of stagnation. As a result, trade union upon trade union began to form among these, mostly unskilled workers, while those already in existence there, which till then had barely kept themselves going, now blossomed forth quickly.

The new “unskilled” unions, on the other hand, admit every fellow-worker; they are essentially, and the Gas Workers even exclusively, strike unions and strike funds. And while they are not yet socialists to a man, they insist nevertheless on being led only by socialists.

Last autumn the Gas Workers won an eight-hour working day here in London, but lost it again, after an unhappy strike, in the southern part of the city, acquiring sufficient proof that this gain is by no means safe in the northern part either. Is it surprising, then, that they readily accepted Mrs. Aveling’s [Eleanor Marx’s] proposal to hold the May Day celebration, decided on by the Paris Congress, in favour of a legalised eight-hour working day, in London? In common with several socialist groups, the Radical clubs and the other trade unions in the East End, they set up a Central Committee that was to organise a large demonstration for the purpose in Hyde Park. As it turned out that all attempts to hold the demonstration on Thursday, May 1, were bound to fail this year, it was decided to put it off till Sunday, May 4.

Around the seven platforms of the Central Committee were dense, immense crowds, marching up with music and banners, over a hundred thousand in the procession, reinforced by almost as many who had come severally; everywhere was harmony and enthusiasm , and yet order and organisation.

What the numerous onlooking bourgeois politicians took home with them as the overall effect was the certainty that the English proletariat, which for fully forty years had trailed behind the big Liberal party and served it as voting cattle, had awakened at last to new, independent life and action. There can be no doubt about that: on May 4, 1890, the English working class joined the great international army. And that is an epoch-making fact. The English proletariat has its roots in the most advanced industrial development and, moreover, possesses the greatest freedom of political movement. Its long slumber — a result, on the one hand, of the failure of the Chartist movement of 1836-50 and, on the other, of the colossal industrial upswing of 1848-80 — is finally broken. The grandchildren of the old Chartists are stepping into the line of battle.

From the Marxists Internet Archive: www.marxists.org