The day is May Day — 1886. It is Chicago. All attempts at legislating a limited workweek in the U.S. have failed; workers are still forced to work up to sixteen hours a day.

Across North America, a general strike has been called for May 1 to fight for the right to an eight-hour workday. The workers of Chicago are among the most militant in the country: the Commerce Club has bought the Illinois National Guard a machine gun to help them control the strikers. May Day itself passes without violence, but on May 3, police fire on workers at the McCormick Reaper Works Factory, killing four and wounding many.

The next day, anarchists organize a mass protest in Haymarket Square. As it is winding up, 180 police order the dwindling crowds to disperse. A bomb is thrown at police. It kills one police officer and injures seventy. Police fire on the crowd, killing one worker and injuring others. The bomber is never identified, but eight anarchists are arrested and found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the bombing. Four are executed, and one commits suicide in jail; three are later pardoned.

Since then, May Day has been a day for workers around the world to commemorate the bloody fight for workers’ rights. (For more, see OttawaLabour.org, from which this account was adapted.)

I knew nothing of this history until recently. My childhood images of May Day were caricatures of the Soviet Union, vast military parades through Red Square, with the sullen Politburo leadership grimly watching, half-dead on Lenin’s tomb. I was never taught about the American roots of May Day. This day, with its commemoration of militant labour struggles, and its memory of their violent suppression, had long been eclipsed in mainstream North America by Labour Day, an apolitical picnic day before the school year begins. (For us kids in Toronto, the last day to go to the Ex.)

The memory of American labour militant was hidden from our consciousness like the American communists that led it. It was useful to promote the idea of May Day as a kooky Soviet ritual. It wasn’t just that the first May Day was an example too dangerous for capitalists to tolerate for long: some of the fiercest anti-militants came from within the labour movement, just as some of the fiercest opponents of the 1886 Chicago strike that won concessions on the eight-hour workweek were leaders of the mainstream unions.

It’s the 1960s in Sudbury. The United Steelworkers of America, a conservative union, have been organizing to wrest control of the Falconbridge and Inco locals from the militant, communist-led International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (Mine Mill). The battles are vicious and physical, dividing the community. Eventually, the Steelworkers win against a Mine Mill beleaguered on all sides. Inco workers affiliate to Steel, and, in 1967, the two unions merge across North America, except for Mine Mill Local 598 at Falconbridge, Sudbury, which remains defiantly independent until it joins Steel’s new arch-rival, the Canadian Auto Workers, in the 1990s.

Those days are over — except in the labour movement, where it seems old wars are still being fought. The anti-communist stream prevailed in the labour movement, and in the New Democratic Party. But ossified cultural divisions run deep and replay themselves in divisions like the labour split on Bob Rae’s social contract.

On the one side is a right-wing union culture that is often reflexively averse to protest — and fiercely loyal to the NDP as its primary political instrument. Mainstream labour leaders also opposed the 1886 general strikes that brought about the eight-hour work week. Those mainstream labour leaders were wrong. They didn’t understand social power — how to win it and how to win against the power of the factory owners. Only a credible threat to those factory owners could force concessions they were otherwise unwilling to make. And for many years, the credible threat to factory owners came not from conciliation but from militant labour and the global threat of communism, both of which were the source of labour’s power.

The Chicago Commerce Club understood the source of its power: it bought a machine gun for the National Guard. That collusion between owners and state has continued to this day. Absent the threat of communism and militant labour, the power of capital has extended around the globe, and the state has been thoroughly transformed to serve its interests. Here in Ontario, the Tory government has legalized the sixty-hour work week. What is the labour strategy for winning on globalization? What is the credible threat that will win concessions from the state?

On the other side is a left-wing that tends to fetishize militancy even where it is counterproductive; it romanticizes a concept of the “working class” that doesn’t correspond to the reality of most workers’ experiences. And this moral certainty is ultimately related to communism’s lack of respect for democratic pluralism that the anti-communist labour forces often unfairly used as their rallying cry.

It’s time for some certainties to be examined. The working class doesn’t exist the way it did 100 years ago. It’s not just a question of false consciousness. For many working people, the “working class” identity of the old labour left, with its many cultural biases, is experienced as oppressive.

Time’s arrow can’t be reversed. In the last century, our society has become vastly more diverse, while our identities have fragmented and splintered. Identity has become a much richer, more fluid, more complex space — for most newcomer Canadians or younger people, identifying themselves primarily as “working class” subjects seems like an impoverished or antiquated choice, even as more and more workers are exploited in their workplace without the protection of a union.

This is a reality that the labour movement can no sooner fight than it can the tides of the sea. Dismissing identity politics as destructive is not a solution. There is an identity politics that deserves to be dismissed: the kind that says we can only speak from personal experience of oppression, so that the most oppressed person can silence others. That is the death of empathy and the death of the left. Without the possibility of creating social knowledge, the leftist project is dead. But the truth in identity politics is that difference can’t all be translated into one kind of oppression or one kind of power relation. If labour is to grow again, it must come to terms with this. A good start would be a serious program of anti-oppression training in its ranks.

Left and right, the labour movement must reckon with its past and with its present. We need to build the social and political power of labour. This will mean, in part, rebuilding a militant culture. But while we keep the essential truths of our past, we must abandon its rigid ideologies. Just as we need a more creative, agile, flexible labour movement to cope with the increasing fragmentation and complexity of the Canadian workforce, we need to make room for a new, more complex working class subjectivity that reflects the diversity of our world. Part of that new “we” must be the brave worker militants we remember on this day.

After the first May Day, the red flag became the standard of labour militant, commemorated in the song of Irish labour activist Jim Connell. Let’s carry their red flag into the future.

The people’s flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts’ blood dyed its every fold.

(Chorus:)
Then raise the scarlet standard high,
Within its shade we’ll live and die,
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We’ll keep the red flag flying here.

It waved above our infant might,
When all ahead seemed dark as night;
It witnessed many a deed and vow,
We must not change its colour now.

It well recalls the triumphs past,
It gives the hope of peace at last;
The banner bright, the symbol plain,
Of human right and human gain.