May Day – International Workers’ Day

 I don’t have much time to write; I have to finish a reading, keep preparing for my official conversation tomorrow about my final project, do some last writing on my master’s essay, and go to class tonight. The temperature has dropped from the 70s to the 40s in one day. I won’t be marching today. I have no time to, I am sorry to say. Saturday, I will finally be at a picket action in the afternoon, if all goes well. But today is May Day – International Workers’ Day.  

It’s sadly unsurprising that so many people in the U.S. don’t know about or think much about this day. Here’s a bit of Wikipedia history on the day:

International Workers' Day is the commemoration of the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago. The police were trying to disperse a public assembly during a general strike for the eight-hour workday, when an unidentified person threw a bomb at them. The police reacted by firing on the workers, killing four demonstrators. "Reliable witnesses testified that all the pistol flashes came from the center of the street, where the police were standing, and none from the crowd. Moreover, initial newspaper reports made no mention of firing by civilians. A telegraph pole at the scene was filled with bullet holes, all coming from the direction of the police."

In 1889, the first congress of the Second International, meeting in Paris for the centennial of the French Revolution and the Exposition Universelle, following a proposal by Raymond Lavigne, called for international demonstrations on the 1890 anniversary of the Chicago protests. May Day was formally recognized as an annual event at the International's second congress in 1891.

“International Workers' Day: History”

Isn’t it amazing that International Workers’ Day commemorates what happened in Chicago, and yet it is in the U.S. that the holiday goes uncelebrated in any official sense?  But of course, it has been important for the dominant powers to obscure this history and to de-radicalize people in doing so.

I presented a paper at a conference last Friday that was about our disappeared history – the roots of the mass expansion of our public college systems in the U.S.  

During the Depression, the Roosevelt administration created the WPA (Works Progress Administration) arts projects to create jobs. Many proletarian writers – worker-writers on the Left who were part of movements to transform the country into something far more participatory, democratic, and economically just – went to work for the WPA.  The WPA did not outlive the Depression, but it was a major predecessor to the mass expansion of the college and university systems. Thus, an effort for all to rise became something complicated and at odds with itself – a means for individuals to rise if they got a college education. 

Yet that radical heritage has never been eliminated in academia. Our college systems were also a kind of ‘commons’ – something available to all, at least in some places, such as in California, where they were free for a while. And they became a place in which education can help create critical consciousness. At the same time, there was a kind of deal made in which individuals could blame themselves or be blamed for not getting a college education, so that it would somehow be their own fault if they were poorly paid for their labor and worked in lousy conditions. Thus, individual ascension vies with collective ascension as a goal in our educational systems. 

This is what a big part of my work has been about – my final project as well as some of my other work. I have been trying to understand my own condition, our society, education, and what is worth working for.

I struggle with depression, insecurity, panic attacks, and personal situations with no easy resolutions. I mourn lost loved ones and those who suffer most egregiously under this system. I get upset when I talk with my cousin Johnny and listen to him struggling to catch his breath because he caught Valley Fever during his 17 years in California State prisons, where the disease is most rampant – 17 years for nonviolent crimes. But I am fortunate in many ways. I love my life, and I love the many awesome people I am bound to in many ways. And I agree wholeheartedly with radical educator Myles Horton when he said:

I think that we all may be mixed up psychologically, but I don't think that we are going to solve our personal problems just by searching our souls or by getting a professional therapist to help us work out our internal, individual problems.  I think these problems get resolved much faster in action, preferably in some kind of social movement.  (The Long Haul 93-95). 

And I agree with him when he said:

I think if I had to put my finger on what I consider a good education, a good radical education, it wouldn't be anything about methods or techniques.  It would be loving people first.  If you don't do that, Che Guevara says, there's no point in being a revolutionary.  I agree with that.  And that means all people everywhere, not just your own family or your own countrymen or your own color.  And wanting for them what you want for yourself.  And then next is respect for people's abilities to learn and to act and to shape their own lives.  (We Make the Road by Walking 177)

Be proud of your labor, paid and unpaid, and stand with other workers.

Solidarity,

Lucy