May Day and the International¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter, written on 1 May 1918, offers a Marxist analysis of the May Day holiday as a mirror of the Second International’s historical trajectory and ultimate failure. The core argument is that May Day was established by the 1889 Paris Congress to serve as a revolutionary instrument for forging a unified international proletarian organisation, modelled on the Communist League and the First International, with a single world centre and political orientation. However, the objective conditions of capitalist development and the conservatism of the socialist parties transformed the holiday into its opposite.
The chapter identifies a dialectical process: the Paris Congress intended May Day to transform the working class from an economic category into a class conscious of its total interests, striving for dictatorship and socialist revolution. Revolutionary elements at the congress pushed for demonstrations explicitly supporting socialist revolution. Yet the majority, reflecting the stage of working-class development, adopted the slogan of the eight-hour working day as a more practical unifying demand. Subsequently, slogans of universal peace and universal suffrage were added. These slogans, while popular and capable of uniting workers nationally, had a conservative effect. In most states, May Day was celebrated after work or on the following Sunday, or, as in Belgium and Austria, with a work stoppage that served local tasks rather than international unity. This national focus, the chapter argues, tied workers too tightly to their particular states, preparing the ground for social-patriotism. The Second International itself was merely a weak union of independent national parties, not a centralised revolutionary organisation. May Day thus turned into its opposite, and with the outbreak of war, it effectively ended.
The chapter’s polemical target is the leadership of the socialist parties of the Second International, particularly the German Social-Democracy. It accuses party bosses—intellectuals and the labour bureaucracy—of concentrating on parliamentary activity, which was national and not international in character. They treated organisations as ends in themselves, not means of class struggle. The chapter cites the German leaders’ argument for moving May Day to the following Sunday, claiming one could not expose an exemplary party organisation, parliamentary activity, and rich trade unions to danger for a mere demonstration. This encapsulates the conservative, nationalistic deviation that betrayed the internationalist revolutionary purpose.
The chapter concludes by contrasting the past epoch with the present, opened by the war and the Russian October Revolution, which is an epoch of direct proletarian struggle for power on a world scale. This new epoch demands a radical change in policy, subordinating national interests to the international proletarian movement and parliamentary activity to mass struggle. The appropriate May Day slogans for this epoch are: The Third International, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, The World Soviet Republic, and The Socialist Revolution. The chapter thus uses the history of May Day to argue for the necessity of a new, genuinely revolutionary International.