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May Day protests, Portland, Oregon. Photo: Bette Lee.
Ever since I moved to Chicago in 1993, May Day has progressively degenerated throughout the years, despite moving into the mainstream in a herky-jerky fashion. For many years, it wasn’t celebrated much beyond the very marginal radical left, but its move into the mainstream has been at a political cost—losing its revolutionary politics. The International Socialist Organization (ISO), for example, which I was a member of for four decades, held a yearly celebration with food and political talks on the revolutionary traditions in the U.S. working class.
Many other groups held similar events. Anarchist comrades used to do an annual event in Forest Park/Waldheim cemetery, where the original Haymarket Martyrs monument is located and many comrades, famous or not, are buried. I remember organizing a radical history walking tour of Forest/Waldheim Park for the ISO, where many comrades gave presentations on the many persons buried there. Despite the wide gulf that separated the revolutionary political traditions commemorated in Forest Park/Waldheim Cemetery. We all saw ourselves as part of the same movement to rid the world of capitalism and all forms of oppression.
May Day was revived as a living holiday again by the immigrants’ rights movement beginning in 2006-07, a great development since many of the Martyrs were immigrants and revolutionaries. Yet, we find that today the May Day march was led by the actual boss of Chicago’s public sector workers, Mayor Brandon Johnson. Would this have been acceptable to the Haymarket Martyrs and their legacy? I doubt it. Before he was hanged, August Spies shouted, “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.” Yet, I feel their collective voices are being throttled again.
I asked a group of Fire Department Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs), who were assembled on Ashland Ave. in event of a health emergency in the gathering crowd, if they got the 18 new ambulances they were asking for in their last contract from Brandon, they laughed and said no. So much for the boss leading the May Day march, despite all the hype and the Fox News attacks on it. The Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL) and its affiliated unions have always been uncomfortable caretakers of the Haymarket Martyrs’ legacy. We need a May Day without the Democratic Party and Labor Bosses.
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