In 1886, the so-called "Chicago Martyrs," anarchists, workers, insurgents, were condemned to death for daring to imagine the impossible: that life should not be entirely captured by work. They fought for eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, and eight hours of leisure. They were, therefore, silenced by the State, the same State that protects property and punishes those who defy it. History, however, is not written with the verdict of the courts, but with the persistence of bodies that resist: the eight-hour workday was not granted, it was wrested from the bosses through organization, mourning, and collective struggle. What is celebrated is not a peaceful conquest, but an open wound that still throbs: a living memory that no right is born without conflict and that the struggle against exploitation and the State remains international, continuous, and unfinished.
The Chicago Martyrs died fighting for the workers' cause, and it is because anarchists lost their voices that we raise ours today. More than 130 years ago, the minimum was demanded: about 40 hours a week, when the norm was 80-hour workdays that devoured life. Today, what is presented as progress reveals itself as regression: the new labor package tries to take us back to the past, with the individual time bank extending the workday by two hours and stealing our time, pushing us towards 50-hour weeks. We remain crushed by exhausting routines, by time that does not belong to us.
That is why we return to the streets on May 1st. Not only to remember, but to insist: our time is not a commodity! We invoke the memory of the Martyrs because the struggle is not over and because knowing our history as oppressed classes is also a way of refusing to forget and affirming, once again, the right to life beyond work.
In recent decades, May 1st has been emptied of its meaning and reconfigured as a docile celebration of labor or as a day of rest "granted" by the State: a passive holiday that erases the memory of the struggles that made it possible. What began as conflict has been transformed into ritual; what was insurrection has become a calendar event. In this process, the institutional unions (CGTP-IN and UGT) have distanced themselves from the working class, confining the struggle to legal means and the negotiation of crumbs. The so-called "social concertation" is nothing more than a renewed form of the old authoritarian maxim of class collaboration, a mechanism that manages conflict instead of confronting it. Union action, focused on immediate objectives, has abandoned a radical transformation of living conditions, leaving behind the possibility of economic, social, political, and sexual liberation. Added to this is the bureaucratization of unionism and its instrumentalization as a control device, frequently directed against autonomous workers' movements. What is presented as representation often transforms into containment, a gesture that is more about surveillance than liberation, more about discipline than organization.
But the struggle cannot be delegated: it is built. It is built in the streets, in occupations, in strikes, in direct action that refuses to wait for permission to exist. It is not asked for, it is taken. It is therefore urgent to reclaim the forms of struggle that won rights in the past: direct action, boycotts, strikes, sabotage. Not as memory, but as living practice, as an active refusal of a system that insists on stealing our time, our bodies, and our lives.
While they try to erase the combative character of this date, we, anarchists, rekindle its revolutionary flame. We call on all insurgent people, workers and fighters, collectives, autonomous unions, social movements, to occupy the streets, break the silence and denounce capitalist and state exploitation and all forms of domination. We call upon those who refuse to delegate their own lives, those committed to direct action, autonomy, and the construction of a world without hierarchies.
We demand a self-organized May 1st, outside of reformism and authoritarian control. We want autonomy over our time, our bodies, and our lives, because what has been stolen from us will not be returned; it must be recovered.
We do not forget those who were left out of what they called the "working class." Those who never fit into that narrow definition, molded to recognize some and erase others. We do not forget the lives pushed to the margins, silenced as political subjects, made invisible by an idea of class that was never neutral an idea constructed to exclude.
The "working class" did not emerge as a simple description of reality: it was historically forged, inscribed within the colonial and patriarchal hierarchies that sustain capitalism. From the beginning, it drew boundaries between what counts and what is disposable, between work that produces value and that which is denied, between those recognized as a force for transformation and those condemned to invisibility. These distinctions were born from the racial, sexual, and economic violence that organizes the world.
For centuries, the figure of the wage laborer male, white, national was imposed as the norm, elevating him to a legitimate political subject. Everything else was pushed aside: devalued, criminalized, or romanticized as an exception. Other forms of work, resistance, and survival were systematically denied, despite sustaining life.
Rethinking class struggle requires more than abstract appeals to unity. It requires breaking with this legacy, dismantling the imposed boundaries, and rejecting an idea of class closed in on itself. Class is not a given: it is a field of dispute. It is on this terrain that we stand, alongside all existences that capitalism has attempted to discipline, exploit, and destroy. Because the struggle is not merely for inclusion in a category that has always excluded, but for its radical transformation.
We propose an anarchist, transfeminist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist May Day. A May Day that includes those pushed to the margins: the queer community, migrant, racialized, and precarious workers, sex workers, people imprisoned and forced to work in conditions of slavery. Because the society of work is patriarchal, ableist, and extractive; it values productivity above life and transforms bodies into resources.
We reject an education that trains us to obey and produce, that molds us to accept exploitation as our destiny. We want a May Day that rejects borders and affirms internationalism and the self-determination of peoples. A May 1st that acknowledges climate collapse not as an accident, but as a direct consequence of an industrial, colonial, and capitalist society.
We yearn for a life of leisure and pleasure, a life where free time is not a crumb granted by capital to fuel consumption, nor a functional rest that prepares us to be exploited again. We want time that belongs to us, time lived and not managed.
We want the abolition of wage labor and the end of all forms of domination because as long as work governs life, there will be no freedom. Let's transform this date into a space of agitation, solidarity, and popular organization. Occupy the space. Reclaim your time.
Because, like the "Chicago Martyrs," we carry in our hearts desires for social liberation, we occupy the streets on May 1st, starting at 3 pm, in Largo de Camões. This will be a space of agitation, solidarity, and organization against Capital and the State, and for a combative and autonomous May 1st. The march will end in a celebration at Largo do Intendente, a call for leisure and the reappropriation of public space.
Today, as yesterday, we do not resign ourselves!
Manifesto: https://tinyurl.com/1maio2026
https://colectivolibertarioevora.wordpress.com/2026/04/21/lisboa-manifesto-antiautoritario-para-um-1o-de-maio-de-luta-e-libertacao-2026/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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