May Day Means DIRECT ACTION!

On May 1, 1886 hundreds of thousands of workers struck to back up their demand for an 8-hour workday. Their DIRECT ACTION, withdrawing their labor power from the machines owned by the capitalists, met with success in dozens of shops. Many more bosses would have capitulated had it not been for the explosion at Haymarket Square in Chicago and the witch-hunt that followed.

The workers the bosses’ singled out for punishment (known as the Haymarket Martyrs) were not simply advocates of the 8-hour day, they were proponents of a more fundamental solution to the “labor problem”. They sought to organize workers on the job to take control of the means of life and to collectively decide what to produce, how to produce it and how to distribute the product, without regard for capitalist bosses or parasitic politicians. They intended to do this through DIRECT ACTION. This is why they had to be eliminated.

In recent years May Day has once again come to symbolize the struggle against injustice and exploitation, but it has not actually become a struggle against exploitation. Street demonstrations, with puppets, banners, chants and the occasional confrontation with the police, while important in advertising our “rage against the machine”, cannot bring that machine to a halt. This is because the power of the working class is not in the street, but on the job! Our daily activities as working people reproduce the capitalist system. Our labor creates the profits that the capitalists use to expand their business; the taxes withheld from our wages buy the guns the bosses’ government use to protect their profits.

We of the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies) have a simple proposition: if we workers organize at the point of production and stick together in solidarity (ONE BIG UNION), we have a power that “is greater than their horded gold.” It only makes sense that if it’s our labor that keeps this system going then withdrawing our labor can bring the system down. “Without our brain and muscle, not a single wheel could turn”, as the song goes. We can have shorter working hours, a healthy and safe working environment, more environmentally friendly production methods, equality, freedom and a peaceful world if we stop doing what we are told to do by bosses and politicians and begin to do what we collectively decide to do. That’s DIRECT ACTION!

A new world is possible. It begins by taking charge of our daily lives, most importantly, our working lives. If you want to put an end to this rotten system, organize where we have the POWER – ON THE JOB. This is the source of the masters’ profits and the masters’ power. To eliminate his power we only have to assert our own. Join the One Big Union!

Chicago General Membership Branch
Industrial Workers of the World
P.O. Box 465, Evanston, IL 60202