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May Day and the Reclamation of the Jewish Radical Tradition

This year’s demonstrations will be vast and infused with the politics of Jewish Labor Bund.

Pro-Palestinian protesters and laborers are gathered outside of the Federal Building to protest Israeli attacks on Gaza during May Day in Oakland, California, on May 1, 2024.

In most of the world, May 1, May Day, is a grand holiday to celebrate the power and unity of the international working class. But in the United States, the leading capitalist power, that’s not typically the case.

May Day was actually founded here in the United States, first sanctified on May 1, 1889 as a part of the fight for the eight-hour day. It also commemorated the third anniversary of a US general strike that began on May 1, 1886. May Day was then exported globally as a way to remember the Haymarket martyrs: eight labor leaders wrongly convicted for throwing a bomb in Chicago’s Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886. Of the eight, four were executed, one took his own life in prison, and three were eventually pardoned. Before being hanged for conspiracy to commit murder, August Spies memorably said, “If you think that by hanging us, you can stamp out the labor movement—the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil and live in want and misery—the wage slaves—expect salvation—if this is your opinion, then hang us! Here you will tread upon a spark, but there, and there, and behind you and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out.”

In other words, May Day is as American as apple pie. And yet, the unions, the media, and the government here either pay it little mind or have actively suppressed its history. This speaks to a country, as articulated so beautifully in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, that has an earthshaking history of class struggle but continues to suffer from the absence of a mass labor or social-democratic party as well as low union density. As a result, there is little public knowledge of the labor struggles that have periodically rocked this country.

And yet even without official sanction, mass organizations, or public celebration, activists in this country have kept the May Day tradition alive as an occasion for grassroots protest. This year, appropriate for these troubled times, May Day demonstrations will be particularly large. As labor reporter Mike Elk wrote in his PayDay Report newsletter, “We have now found that unions will be hosting walkouts in at least 65 [now up to 100, according to Elk’s latest] cities across the United States. Hundreds of unions are involved, and the list is........

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