Trotsky - First 5 Years of the Comintern: Vol.1 (1924)

THE CHARACTER of the entire workers movement during the era of the SecondInternational is reflected in the history and the fate of the May Day holiday.

May 1 was established as a holiday by the Paris International Socialist Congress in 1889.

The purpose of designating it thus was, by means of a simultaneous demonstration by workers ofall countries on that day, to prepare the ground for drawing them together into a singleinternational proletarian organization of revolutionary action having one world centre and oneworld political orientation.

The Paris Congress, which had taken the above decision, was treading the path of theInternational Communist League and of the First International. For the Second International toadopt the pattern of these two organizations was impossible from the start. In the course of the 14years which had passed since the days of the First International class organizations of theproletariat had grown up in every country which carried out their activity quite independentlywithin their territory and were not adapted to international unification on the principles ofdemocratic centralism.

The celebration of May Day should have prepared them for such a unification and therefore thedemand for the eight-hour working day was introduced as its slogan, which was conditioned by thedevelopment of the productive forces and was popular among the broad working masses of allcountries.

The effective task which was assigned to the May Day holiday consisted of facilitating theprocess of transforming the working class as an economic category into the working class in thesociological sense of the word, into a class, conscious of its interests in their totality, andstriving to establish their dictatorship and the socialist revolution.

From this point of view demonstrations in support of the socialist revolution were mostappropriate to May Day. And the revolutionary elements at the congress achieved this. But at thestage of development through which the working class was then passing the majority found that thedemand for the eight-hour working day provided a better answer for carrying out the task in frontof them. In any case this was a slogan capable of uniting workers of all countries.

Just such a role was also played by the slogan of universal peace which was subsequently putforward.

But the congress proposed and the objective conditions of the development of the workersmovement disposed.

The May holiday gradually turned from the means of struggle of the world proletariat into ameans of struggle of the workers of each separate country for their local interests. And this wasmade more possible by putting forward the third sloganuniversal suffrage.

In the majority of states May Day was celebrated either just in the evening after work wasfinished or else on the following Sunday. In those places where the workers celebrated it by astoppage of work as in Belgium and Austria it served the cause of realizing local tasks but not thecause of closing the ranks of workers of all countries into one world working class. Side by sidewith progressive consequences (as a result of bringing together the workers of a particularcountry) it had therefore a negative conservative sideit linked the workers too tightly withthe fate of a particular state and in this way prepared the ground for the development ofsocial-patriotism.

The task which had been placed on the order of the day by the Paris Congress has not beenrealized. The formation of an International as the organization of international revolutionaryproletarian action, with one centre and with one international political orientation, had not beenachieved. The Second International was merely a weak union of workers parties which wereindependent of each other in their activity.

May Day turned into its opposite and with the war its existence came to an end.

Such were the consequences of the inexorable logic of the dialectical process of development ofthe workers movement.

Wherein lies the cause of this phenomenon? What guarantee is there against its repetition? Whatis the lesson for the future from this? Of course the basic cause of the failure of the May Dayholiday lay in the character of the given period of capitalist development, in the process of itsdeepening in each separate country and the struggle conditioned by this process for thedemocratization of the state system and for the adaptation of the latter to the needs of capitalistdevelopment. But even in the development of a capitalist or of any other type of system there existtendencies of two sorts the conservative and the revolutionary.

With the working class, which is the active participant in the historical process, its vanguard,the socialist parties, is destined to go ahead of this process and counterpose its revolutionarytendency to the conservative trend at every stage of the workers movement and to put forwardand defend the overall interests of the whole proletariat in its totality independent ofnationality. This is the very task which the socialist parties during the period of the SecondInternational did not fulfil and this had a direct influence on the fate of the May Dayholiday.

Under the influence of the party bosses made up of intellectuals and the labour bureaucracy, thesocialist parties in the period described concentrated their attention on very useful parliamentaryactivity which was in its essence national and not international or of a class character. Theorganizations of workers looked on their activity not as a means of class struggle but as an end initself. It is sufficient to recall how the leaders of German Social-Democracy argued fortransferring May Day to the following Sunday. They said that one could not expose an exemplaryparty organization, parliamentary activity and numerous rich trade unions to danger merely for thesake of a demonstration.

The present epoch is directly contrary in character to the past epoch. Opened by the war, and inparticular by the Russian October Revolution, it reveals itself as the epoch of the direct struggleof the proletariat for power on a world scale.

Its character is favourable to May Day fulfilling that role to which the revolutionary elementsat the Paris Congress of 1889 attempted to assign it. It is presented with the task of facilitatingthe formation of a Third Revolutionary International and of serving the cause of the mobilizationof proletarian forces for the world socialist revolution.

But to assist in the carrying out of this great role the lessons of the past and the demands ofthe present epoch powerfully dictate to socialists from all countries:

• a radical change in their policy,
• putting forward appropriate slogans for May Day.

In the first instance the following steps are necessary:

• concentrate efforts on the formation of the Third Revolutionary International;
• subordinate the interests of each country to the general interests of the internationalproletarian movement and subordinate parliamentary activity to the interests of the struggle of theproletarian masses.

The main slogans of May Day in the present epoch should be:

• The Third International.
• The Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
• The World Soviet Republic.
• The Socialist Revolution.

Izvestia VTsIK, No.87 (351), May 1, 1918

DEAR COMRADES! We are following your struggle and actions under the banner ofrevolutionary socialism with the greatest joy. It so happens that you are waging a struggle inunusually difficult conditions.