(en) Brazil, Federation Anarchist Gauche FAG - The Tragic and Forgotten Origins of May Day (pt)

May have been a different month than any other. On the first day of the month the troops 
and police were on standby, employers were preparing to face problems and the workers did 
not know if the day had 2 jobs, freedom or even life. ---- Today, all that was forgotten. 
The historical memory of the people is worse than that of an octogenarian sclerotic, with 
rare moments of lucidity interspersed with long periods of amnesia. Few workers, or even 
union members, who know the origin of May 1. Many think it is a holiday decreed by the 
government, others think that it is a holy day in honor of S. Joseph, there are even those 
who think it was his boss who invented a special day for the company to provide a barbeque 
"their" workers. Also exist - or existed - those who called socialist countries, thought 
that May 1 was the day of the army, as always saw the troops march that day their military 
apparatus to prove the power of state bureaucracies and red.

The origins of May 1 relate to the proposal of organized workers in the International 
Workers Association (IWA) to declare a day of struggle for the eight-hour workday. But it 
was the events of Chicago, 1886, who came to give him the meaning of his final 
international day of workers' struggle.

was common in the nineteenth century (a situation which lasted until the early twentieth 
century) child labor, pregnant women and workers over strenuous working hours that 
reproduced the traditional journey of the sun-sun-farmers. Several social reformers had 
proposed at various times the idea of dividing the day into three periods: eight hours 
work, eight hours of sleep and eight hours of leisure and study, proposed that, as always, 
was seen as utopian, the realistic power.

With the development of workers 'associations, trade unionism and particularly autonomous, 
bid the maximum 8-hour day, has become a central objective of workers' struggles, marking 
the imagination and working class culture for decades it was important mobilizing factor 
but at the same time, because of the violent crackdown and widespread arrests and deaths 
of workers.
since the 20s of last century, strikes broke out in several places for eight hours, and 
British workers strike early to declare for this purpose . Gradually in France and across 
continental Europe, then the U.S. and Australia, the struggle for the eight hours has 
become one of the most frequent claims that the workers put the Capital and the State.

When thousands of Chicago workers as many other American cities took to the streets on 1st 
May 1886, following the appeals of unions, did not expect the tragedy that forever mark 
this date. On May 4, during new protests in Haymarket Square, an explosion in the middle 
of the demonstration served as justification for the brutal repression that followed, 
which caused more than 100 deaths and the arrest of dozens of labor activists and 
anarchists.

Alberto Parsons one of the speakers the Haymarket rally, known militant anarchist, 
typographer of 39 years who had been arrested during the events, presented himself 
voluntarily to the police and stated: "If it is necessary to also climb the scaffold for 
workers' rights, for freedom and to improve the lot of the oppressed, here I am. " Along 
with August Spies, typesetter 32, Adolf Fischer typesetter for 31 years, George Engel 
typesetter for 51 years, Ludwig Lingg, carpenter of 23 years, Michael Schwab, bookbinder 
34, Samuel Fielden, textile worker of 39 years and Oscar Neeb would be tried and 
convicted. Having the first four were sentenced to the gallows, Parsons, Fischer, Engel 
and Spies run on November 11, 1887, while Lingg committed suicide in his cell. Augustus 
Spies prophetically declared before dying: "The day will come when our silence will be 
more powerful than the voices in estrangulais today."

This remarkable episode of unionism, known as the "Martyrs of Chicago", became the symbol 
and March for a fight from then generalize it for the world.

Crime in the U.S. state, similar to many other states, which continued for many decades to 
repress workers' struggles, including demonstrations of May 1, was product societies where 
dominant interests did not require even be concealed. At the time, the Chicago Times said: 
"The arrest and forced labor are the only proper solution to the social question", but 
other newspapers were even more explicit as the New York Tribune: "These brutes [the 
workers] only understand force , a force that can remember for generations ... "

Six years later, in 1893, the conviction was overturned and recognized the political 
nature of the trial and persecution, and then released the defendants still attached, a 
common manifestation of late recognition of State terror, which would also repeat the 
famous episode of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Starting from the 90s, with the decision of Congress, 1888 American Federation of Labor 
and Congress Socialist Paris, 1889, declaring the first May as international day of 
struggle of workers, unionism around the world adopted this symbolic date, even if keeping 
up to our century as a holiday illegal, which always generated conflict and repression.

According to the historian of the labor movement, Edgar Rodrigues the first attempt to 
celebrate May 1 in Brazil was in 1894, in S?o Paulo, on the initiative of the Italian 
anarchist Artur Campagnoli initiative thwarted by arrests triggered by the police. 
However, in the following decade, began the celebrations of May 1 in several cities, with 
several newspapers published special day dedicated to the workers and special issues of 
class press commemorating the date. S?o Paulo, Santos, Porto Alegre, Pelotas, Curitiba and 
Rio de Janeiro are some of the urban centers where the nascent Brazilian unionism every 
year commemorated that day on the margins of legality dominant.

were decades of struggle of workers to strengthen the freedom of organization and 
expression, that the French Revolution had promised the citizens, but in practice there 
was only granted to the bourgeoisie, who wanted to keep for himself the privileges of the 
old regime.

One after another, countries have had to recognize the new shirtless their rights. The May 
1 became then one day longer than the civil calendar, under the innocuous title of 
national holiday, as if decades of struggles, arrests and killings became so a minor 
detail of a date given so benevolently at Capital and the State in the name of St. Jos? or 
day, not workers, but in a curious contradiction, as the work day. Today, looking at the 
history books and political speeches, it seems that the social rights of workers were one 
generous grant from the State of Social Welfare or, even worse, authoritarian "parents of 
the poor" like Vargas or Per?n

The to eight hours of work, that claim would give rise to the May 1, acquired the status 
of law, making official what had already proclaimed social movement against the law. But 
after more than a century, in a totally different world, with all the advances in 
technology and automation, which allowed larger labor productivity to unimaginable levels, 
the eight hours persist as workday of large sectors of employees! Without the goal of six 
or four hours of work to become a focal point of trade unionism, also a victim of 
irretrievable decay, a society where fewer workers will work and where the mutation to a 
post-pay will be essential as dilemma of the future. Requiring the distribution of work 
and wealth according to criteria of social equity that the labor movement and social 
pointed over more than a century of struggles.

Jorge E. Silva - Member of the Center for Culture and Citizenship - Florian?polis (Cecca)

Source:http://www.nodo50.org/insurgentes/textos/mundo/19origensprimeiromaio.htm