Its Gravediggers Can’t Resurrect May 1

April 26, 2026

In cities around the country, union leaders signed onto the call for a May Day demonstration.

It’s true the working class needs to return to its roots, like the general strikes in the 1870s which shut down big cities. Out of that struggle, workers began to impose their demands on capitalist society. They also began to forge their own history. In 1886, May Day, the workers’ holiday, was born.

For decades, workers who struggled paid tribute to May Day, that is, to the struggles their class had carried out before.

In 1905, a new fighting organization was born, the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW was in part a union, in part a political party whose goal was to organize all workers into one, big organization, irrespective of their trade, independent of their nationality or race. The IWW was based on this conviction: “the working class and the employing class have nothing in common.… Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the earth.” It was a call for revolution.

At the same time, a working-class party developed—the Socialist Party, which declared that it would not “conciliate the capitalist class, but organize to fight against it.”

The SP was represented by Eugene Debs, who had led the great railroad strike of 1894. That strike brought Debs to understand that a union was not enough, that a working-class party was needed.

Debs may have been a candidate in elections, but he also understood that elections could not do away with capitalism, that revolution had to be the aim toward which the working class worked. But Debs used his election campaigns to cross the country, speaking to the working class about its own power, its capacity to build a humane society. And he used his campaigns to denounce the wars into which capitalism was dragging the peoples of the world.

Speaking about the push of capitalism for war, Debs was arrested and thrown into federal prison. While in prison in 1920, he won nearly a million votes. His votes reflected the workers’ growing realization that they had a special role to play. Their class could build another world, one without war, one without exploitation.

The next big movement of the working class, that of the 1930s, flooded into massive struggles. Workers took over the factories where they worked. They shut down whole cities in general strikes that went far beyond any single trade or skill. Out of those struggles, revolution could have developed.

But in that movement, a destructive idea took hold—that it was enough to have a union, that politics was a diversion. The unions that grew up were based on that idea.

Instead of workers building their own political parties, the workers’ energies went into support for the Democrats (or in some cases, the Republicans). It was a terrible mistake. It robbed the working class of its own political perspective. And the unions shed much of their readiness to organize their struggles as a class.

The leaders of the new unions supported the move of the two big parties to engage in the massive slaughter of World War II, and the U.S. wars that came afterward, in Korea and Viet Nam.

The unions did not do what the IWW had done, confront the wars, the racism and the anti-immigrant nationalism endemic to capitalism.

Today, the latter-day leaders of those same unions pretend to resurrect May Day. But they use it to campaign for the Democratic Party.

Yes, workers need to return to May Day, to its history of struggle, its opposition to capitalism, and opposition to capitalism’s wars.

But that won’t come from the kind of bureaucrats who worked for decades to bury May Day. It will come from the working class itself.