“What on earth is May Day?” you might ask. May Day is International Workers’ Day - a celebration of the organised trade union movement and working class-centred politics. But in New Zealand it’s pretty much a non-event. However, in many countries May Day is a public holiday, and rallies of unions and the left are held throughout the world. This is especially true with those nations of the Global South (Third World) which have a particular tradition of militant unionism and socialist politics. For example, in Manila in the Philippines, and Jakarta in Indonesia, tens of thousands of workers and representatives of the left will march today.
Is May Day an archaic event? And isn’t class politics dead, being replaced by the politics of identity with a focus on gender, sexuality, and race? Certainly, May Day - also known as Labour Day or Workers’ Day - was only a big deal in the West when class-centred politics was at the fore. During a large part of the early to mid-twentieth century, a mass working class movement existed, in the form of trade unions, class-centred labour parties, and a wider socialist and communist movement. However, in the later part of the twentieth century, working class politics was declared effectively moribund. And even today in countries with a strong tradition of working class politics, May Day rallies now only attract tens of thousands of workers and leftists, rather than the hundreds of thousands that would have attended such labour celebrations in the past. But despite years of academics in the humanities arguing that there is no longer a working class in post-industrial society, and that categories of subjugated groups are varied, particular, and never concrete, a universal form of class politics is making a bit of a comeback.
While labour-centred politics has been moribund for several decades, there is now a rebooted form of class politics on the rise. Even in places such as New Zealand, strikes and unions have become cool gain. And even socialism and communism are becoming increasingly trendy amongst politicised youth. As Marxists use to say, the dialectic of history inevitably pushes class politics and class conflict to the fore. Or to put it other terms, there’s only so long the Establishment can fuck over working people, in terms of declining living standards and lack of political representation, before an attempt is made to make working class politics great again.
In New Zealand, a wave of strikes and workers’ protests have reintroduced the politics of class in this country. And it’s not the “traditional” blue-collared and cloth-cap proletariat that are in engaging in militancy, but rather “middle class” groups of workers including teachers, public servants, nurses and even doctors. This will confuse many an old socialist, whose politics often amounted to a form of working class identity politics, where blue-collar proletarian culture and politics was celebrated and essentialized. However, anyone who has read the Communist Manifesto or other key Marxist texts, will know that even way back in 1840, Karl Marx predicted that capitalism’s drive for profits would lead to a general proletarianization of the population. That is, “middle class” groups such as teachers, doctors and even lawyers would be transformed into exploited workers.
So, perhaps May Day as a celebration of working class politics and identity is no longer as irrelevant and archaic as it seems. And maybe working class politics is becoming great again.
