Written: 1973. Speech at a public forum hosted by the Freedom Socialist Party
Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "The Meaning of May Day for the '70s Generation." In Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 360-368). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
Comrades, Sisters, Brothers:
We meet this May Day to pay respects to our working class and revolutionary heritage by commemorating the labor martyrs of the Haymarket Massacre.
On that famous first of May 1886, an intense national movement for the eight-hour day was launched in the U.S. In the industrial jungle of Chicago, strikes and protests went on day after day and the cops reacted with murderous assaults. On May 4th, 1,200 workers gathered in Haymarket Square to denounce the violence against the 8-hour mobilizations. The rally was peaceful until, as it was ending, an agent provocateur threw a bomb into a group of police. The cops opened fire, killing several people and wounding hundreds.
In the days that followed, police and city government waged a campaign of terror against workers, immigrants and radicals. On the basis of their politics alone, eight anarchist labor leaders— Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, Samuel Fielden, Louis Lingg, Adolph Fischer, Oscar Neebe, and Michael Schwab— were convicted of “inciting” the bombing. Four of the men were hanged and one committed suicide in his cell. Six years later, a powerful international defense movement freed the remaining three men and gained legal exoneration for all the frame-up victims.
On May Day, therefore, we remember labor’s victories and labor’s sacrifices. We meet tonight to lend our voices to a global chorus, for May Day was proclaimed by the international socialist movement as a day of unity and solidarity with the exploited and oppressed of the entire world. The police attack on workers in Haymarket Square happened symbolically to the whole international working class of that time—and is still happening in our time. The solidarity and internationalism at the heart of May Day illuminate not only the magnificent accomplishments of the past, but also the outlines of the revolutionary future.
May Day is an integral part of our history as U.S. radicals. May Day is us; and our tribute to it is a decisive step in our lifelong effort to seek, discover and maintain our identity and, thereby, our political and personal course of action.
August Spies said on the gallows: “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”
Their “silence,” their murder, became an international cause célèbre, their courage a moralizing force, and their story a tremendous weapon of education for the generations that came after them. Their silence, their corpses, paid mute testimony to the monster that had destroyed them—the capitalist system of production for private profit, revealed in all its stark hideousness. If you ever start thinking that it might be possible to make peace with capitalism, just remember Haymarket and recognize its ashes in all the conflagrations and confrontations around us today. It is the same system.
Mother Jones, the great woman labor organizer, had this to say about Haymarket:
The workers asked only for bread and a shortening of the long hours of toil. The agitators gave them visions. The police gave them clubs. . .
The city was divided into two angry camps. The working people on one side—hungry, cold, jobless, fighting gunmen and police clubs with bare hands. On the other side the employers. . .supported by the newspapers, by the police, by all the power of the great state itself.
Substitute for “working people” the word “Blacks,” or “Native Americans,” or “Chicanos,” and this is a description of America today. Substitute for “working people” the word “women,” and we can see vividly the place of women in today’s society. Substitute the word “poor,” and the spectre immediately appears of the law, the mayor, the police department, the media and the bosses arrayed against them.
But soon, we will not have to substitute any words for “working class,” because one day in the very near future we women, minorities, and the poor will be marching and demonstrating together as a proud and recognized part of that class.
This will happen without the loss of anybody’s special identity. On the contrary, the self-awareness and selfidentification of the vanguards of today’s many separate movements will lend new richness and meaning to the concept of working class.
Just as internationalism is a concept and a practice that incorporates all nations and yet rises above individual countries and narrow patriotism—just as feminism recognizes many different strata and types of women yet supplies a philosophy for them all—just so does working class express a totality of diverse parts, a totality that doesn’t crush everything into an unrecognizable hodgepodge, but which brilliantly reveals the uniqueness and importance of all its components.
The prolonged sway of capitalism and imperialism, coupled with the prolonged sway of trade union corruption and conservatism, has brought about a broadened and deepened consciousness in many layers of the oppressed. And they are bringing to the fore new issues of struggle and resistance.
When for instance, a worker discovers that the union is useless in a grievance, the worker may realize this is because the union is also crippled by racism, sexism, opportunism, or political backwardness. To change the union requires a fight on many planes against all forms of prejudice and discrimination. Such experiences show the interrelations of class, sex, race, age, politics, lifestyle, and sexuality in life.
People forced to fight on many fronts begin to wonder about the reasons for having to struggle so often, so hard, and against so many enemies. Like American workers in the 1880s, they say, “We ask only for minimal improvements in our conditions of life and you give us jails, and insults, and threats.” Something obviously must be wrong with the entire system; our separate struggles have a common enemy, and we must find a common focal point and mutual solidarity if any of us is to forge ahead, if any of us is to survive.
So we arrive at the answers: The problem is capitalism. The solution is socialism, the only antithesis to capitalist property relationships. The methodology is solidarity and internationalism. And the most dynamic forces within this entire process of creating the American Revolution are the super-oppressed—women and minorities, whose high and varied consciousness simply reflects their deep and varied victimizations.
Our beautiful, incredible, ever-reborn movements for social justice and human rights have come a long, long way since Haymarket. They were anarchists, with no concepts, plans or concerns about how to change the system. Today we have the stronger philosophical weapon of socialism, which stands for intervention into the class struggle, the building of a revolutionary party geared to take the power, and the transformation of society through workers power and a workers state. In addition, new human forces have emerged as participants and leaders in the social struggle—minorities, women, students and youth, sexual minorities. We have witnessed a flowering, an incredible profusion, of political awareness on dozens of fronts.
Since Vietnam, internationalism has jumped from the pages of theory into the maelstrom of daily life. In the wake, and I mean wake, of George McGovern’s sound defeat as a liberal Democrat running for president, socialist instead of capitalist politics are again the order of the day for many social movements. Women’s leadership and initiative in every movement, not just the women’s movement itself, is spiraling upwards, and the Nixon Administration’s war on the poor has revitalized the Black struggle.
The one force connecting all these movements, the one force existing in all of them, is the force of women. Oppressed as a worker, oppressed as a racial/ethnic minority, oppressed as a sex, suffering additional levels of oppression if she is a lesbian or aged—she stands objectively as the worldwide image of subjugation and in life, subjectively, she is coming to terms with the leadership role she will have to play.
As Louis XIV could say, “L’état c’est moi,”—the state is me—woman can truly say, “Misery and suffering and anguish, that is me.” But this must be said in a political sense, not in the traditional weepy, wailing and bitching way of self-pity and boring martyrdom. Woman as Les Miserables must become Woman as Fighter, Woman as Organizer, Woman as Theoretician, Woman as Political Leader. And to the extent that she becomes this, to that extent will she avenge all the labor martyrs of the past, fulfill their dreams, and create the new society.
In 1886, there was only one Lucy Gonzalez Parsons, the fearless revolutionary orator and organizer, who was the widow of Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons. Today, millions of women around the world are fighters, radical politicians and government figures, organizers and theoreticians and spokespersons and leaders. And in this fact alone lies the potential for basic revolutionary change.
The great revolutionaries were well aware of this fact. Lenin made it clear that there could be no socialist revolution unless working women played an important part. And he also paid tribute to women’s capacity for leadership:
There is no doubt that there is far more organising talent among the working women and peasant women than we are aware of, people who are able to organise in a practical way and enlist large numbers of workers, and a still larger number of consumers, for this purpose without the abundance of phrases, fuss, squabbling and chatter about plans, systems, etc., which our swelledheaded “intelligentsia” or half-baked “Communists” always “suffer” from. But we do not nurse these new shoots with sufficient care.Unfortunately, today we are inundated with the halfbaked intelligentsia type too often.
Trotsky also looked to women for leadership:
Opportunist organizations by their very nature concentrate their chief attention on the top layers of the working class and therefore ignore both the youth and the woman worker. The decay of capitalism, however, deals its heaviest blows to the woman as a wage earner and as a housewife. The sections of the Fourth International should seek bases of support among the most exploited layers of the working class, consequently among the women workers. Here they will find inexhaustible stores of devotion, selflessness and readiness to sacrifice.
Down with the bureaucracy and careerism! Open the road to the youth! Turn to the woman worker! These slogans are emblazoned on the banner of the Fourth International.
The problem is that women still underestimate their own potential, their own capabilities, their own responsibility for leadership. And it is kind of scary to some women to be informed that they are the key to social change, the key to socialism, the key to revolutionary internationalism, the thread and connecting link to the masses of impoverished and desperate and angry all over the world.
The new, bold woman leader will find that the hardest burden of all she will have to bear will not be hatred and contempt from threatened men, because she expects that. It will not be persecution from the system, because what else is new? It will not be the furious and sometimes vicious political disputes within the radical movement, because ideological debate is meat and drink for a living radical. No, the hardest burden will be imposed by some of her “sisters” who expect single-issue reforms for women to be won within this system as a result of practicing ladylike and feminine tactics.
But it was ever thus. Rosa Luxemburg was considered “not a feminist” because she was always debating and writing and organizing with and against men at the pinnacles of party leadership. Nonsense. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were constantly criticized for their involvements in “other” issues—”male oriented” is the epithet today—which is nonsense. War, racism, poverty, police brutality, and class struggle are indeed women’s issues, they’re just not middleclass ladies’ issues.
The indefatigable Emma Goldman took on everybody over her right to address any and every question of human liberation:
My [1915] tour. . .met with no police interference... although the subjects I treated were anything but tame: anti-war topics. . .freedom in love, birth-control, and the problem most tabooed in polite society, homosexuality...
Censorship came from some of my own comrades because I was treating such “unnatural” themes as homosexuality
.In Los Angeles I was invited by the Women’s City Club. Five hundred members of my sex, from the deepest red to the dullest grey, came to hear me speak on “Feminism.” They could not excuse my critical attitude towards the bombastic and impossible claims of the suffragists as to the wonderful things they would do when they got political power. They branded me as an enemy of woman’s freedom, and. . .stood up and denounced me.
The incident reminded me of a similar occasion when I had lectured on woman’s inhumanity to man. Always on the side of the underdog, I resented my sex’s placing every evil at the door of the male. I pointed out that if he were really as great a sinner as he was being painted by the ladies, woman shared the responsibility with him. . . She idolizes in him the very traits that help to enslave her—his strength, his egotism, and his exaggerated vanity. . . When she has learned to be as self-centred and as determined as he, when she gains the courage to delve into life as he does. . .she will achieve her liberation, and incidentally also help him become free. Whereupon my women hearers would rise up against me and cry: “You’re a man’s woman and not one of us.”
Yes, we need to be a “man’s woman,” if that means being strong and aggressive and outspoken. We need to be a woman’s woman, to be sensitive and compassionate. We need to be feminist women, to seek freedom for all women. We need to be socialist women, because until we change the institution of private property ownership and the transmission of that property through the bourgeois family, no woman will be free. We need to be internationalist women, because this is one world and sexual oppression has no national boundary lines.
We need, in short, to be the kind of women who are the kind of people who will firmly establish as their lifetime purpose and practice the emancipation of humanity.
And brothers—you are cordially invited to join us. Feminism, socialism, and internationalism should be the qualities of men as well as women. Let us struggle together as equals, co-leaders and comrades in this most rewarding and fulfilling of battles.
Happy May Day!