Every year, with each new May 1st, the past events tied to this date slowly fade into oblivion. Of course, all the mainstream media outlets that bow to billionaires take great care never to explain the origin and meaning of this commemoration. They even go as far as calling this international day of struggle for workers’ rights a celebration of labor. As if getting exploited by capitalism was supposed to fill you with joy. You see the scam? Yay! It’s party time, I barely have enough money to pay my bills and my job is precarious. The whole thing is simply grotesque!

So at a time when capitalism is morphing into techno-fascism, we figured it would be really useful to remind everyone of what May 1st actually stands for. And above all, to put it back where it should never have left, namely an anarchist struggle for better living conditions which ended in the massacre of many demonstrators. In this article, we are going back to the origin of this tragedy. But also, and most importantly, we will try to understand what it can teach us in our current context.

Chicago 1886, the Haymarket Square massacre is the founding event of May 1st

To grasp what May 1st truly represents, you have to go back to Chicago in the spring of 1886. At that time, American workers were laboring between ten and sixteen hours a day under hellish conditions. In response to this insane pace, the labor movement had long been demanding eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, and eight hours for oneself. A union convention held in 1884 finally set a deadline for May 1st, 1886. If the bosses refused to give in, a general strike would follow.

Chicago was then one of the great strongholds of the American labor movement. No doubt because the city was home to an organized anarchist community, largely made up of German immigrants. Several social conflicts had already been simmering there for months. The McCormick Harvesting Machine plant was one notable hotspot, where management had locked out unionized workers since February and replaced them with strikebreakers. It was in this tense climate that bosses and their private militias were already openly clashing with workers as May 1st drew near.

When the day came, hundreds of thousands of workers walked off the job all across the country. Chicago alone gathered nearly forty thousand strikers and the city was completely paralyzed. But on May 3rd, a rally in support of the McCormick workers turned into a tragedy. The police opened fire on the strikers who were going after the strikebreakers in front of the factory. Several workers were killed and many others wounded. The crackdown was therefore extremely brutal, calibrated to break the movement.

On the evening of May 4th, a protest rally was held in Haymarket Square to denounce this massacre. The demonstration was peaceful. Several anarchist speakers took the floor, including August Spies and Albert Parsons, who were two leading figures of the Chicago labor movement. During the rally, rain was falling. And just as the crowd was dispersing, the police charged in to clear out the last few participants. That is when a bomb exploded in the middle of the police ranks. Seven officers and at least four workers lost their lives. No one ever found out who threw that bomb.

This unsolved mystery is no minor detail, because one name keeps coming up among historians of the American labor movement. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency was a private outfit that sold its services to the highest bidder and acted as the bosses’ armed wing in their fight against the unions. Its agents were deeply involved in Chicago’s social conflicts. They had already attacked McCormick workers as early as 1885. One of them would even later testify against the anarchists during their trial. But he was very far from convincing.

The Pinkertons’ logic was cynical and well practiced. The idea was to stir up trouble in order to justify their existence. Many historians today consider that the bomb may very well have been thrown by a provocateur on the payroll of the bosses or the police. The truth will never be known. And that is precisely what suits everyone on the side of those in power.

What followed was a political show trial, plain and simple. Eight anarchists were arrested without any serious evidence of their direct involvement in the bombing. In the end, the court convicted them for their ideas more than for their actions. Four of them were hanged on November 11th, 1887. In the wake of this tragedy, August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer and George Engel became the Haymarket martyrs. A fifth, Louis Lingg, took his own life in prison the day before his execution. The remaining three were pardoned in 1893 by Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld, who publicly denounced a rigged trial and the complete unreliability of the witnesses.

In 1889, the Second International, gathered in Paris, decided to make May 1st the international day of workers as an explicit tribute to the Chicago hanged men. That is the real origin of May 1st. A strike for the eight-hour day, a police massacre, a bomb most likely thrown by a provocateur, a political trial and four anarchists hanged to set an example. So we are very far indeed from the cheerful celebration of work that capitalism is trying to sell us.

How Labor Day erased working-class memory in the United States

All of this should have been forever etched into American collective memory. But just a few years after the Chicago hangings, the US federal government understood that workers absolutely had to be steered away from this May 1st date because it had become far too subversive for its taste. And the operation to take it over was pulled off with ruthless efficiency.

In 1894, in the middle of the Pullman strike that was paralyzing the country’s railroads, Democratic President Grover Cleveland rushed through a law establishing Labor Day. This new federal holiday was carefully placed on the first Monday of September. In other words, as far away from May 1st as possible. Officially, the goal was to honor American workers. Unofficially, the real goal was to make them forget Haymarket and to cut the American labor movement off from its internationalist and anarchist roots.

The operation worked perfectly. Because nowadays, the overwhelming majority of Americans celebrate their Labor Day in September around a barbecue and store sales, without the slightest idea that May 1st actually originates on their own soil. Meanwhile, the Chicago martyrs have been carefully erased from American school textbooks and the word “anarchist” remains to this day an insult in the country’s mainstream political vocabulary.

So there you have the sleight of hand. While the entire world commemorates each May 1st those American workers who were hanged for demanding shorter working hours, the United States itself has buried this story under a substitute holiday. It is quite simply one of the most effective memory-erasing operations in the modern history of capitalism.

Bullshit jobs and meaningful work are two opposite worlds

Before going any further, there is an absolutely fundamental distinction that is sorely missing from most debates about work. Not all work is equivalent and not all work has the same human value. On one side, you have meaningful activities. The kind of work that feeds, heals, builds, transmits, repairs and creates. And on the other side, you have what anthropologist David Graeber dubbed in 2018 “bullshit jobs”, meaning all those useless jobs that even the people doing them recognize as completely absurd.

When work has meaning, when it allows you to live decently and when it is performed under humane conditions, then it really does become an essential part of personal fulfillment. By the way, no one has ever argued that the ideal would be to spend your whole life doing absolutely nothing.

But when a job is pointless, badly paid, and performed under the constant pressure of toxic management, then it tips over purely and simply into torture. Especially when you add to those conditions the absolute precariousness of employment, with short-term contracts, repeated mass layoffs, and therefore the constant threat of being fired overnight without the slightest recourse. This is exactly what billions of workers around the planet are living through today.

Because they are paid to destroy the environment, to manufacture gadgets that are as useless as they are polluting, to mass-produce junk designed to break down, to lie to their customers, to club demonstrators or to push people out the door. They do all this knowing exactly what they are doing, but unable to opt out because the alternative is quite simply ending up on the street. At that point, the employment contract becomes a real contract of moral submission.

And to make all this go down smoothly, the system has long developed a real propaganda machine glorifying work. For example, by drilling into us in every possible tone that “the future belongs to those who get up early”, in other words to those convicts who rise at dawn to go get exploited. We are also told that a man or a woman “who works” is necessarily a good person, with the implication that anyone who does not work officially is necessarily a parasite. Except we should still remember that all the financial wealth in the world sits on the side of those who own the means of production. And those people, precisely, are the ones sleeping in late while everyone else wrecks their morale and their health performing thankless tasks. So the only real freeloaders of the system are the shareholders and the rentiers who produce strictly nothing and grow fat on the back of those who actually produce something.

The French humorist Pierre Desproges summed it all up rather well with his legendary line: “Work is good for your health? Then give mine to a sick person!” Behind the humor, there is a truth that all the managerial propaganda in the world will never be able to hide. Work as it is currently organized remains above all a tool of domination and value extraction, operating at the expense of those who do not own enough capital to tip the scales.

This distinction between meaningful work and torture work is central because it lets you escape the fake debate that pits “the brave who work” against “the lazy who refuse to work”. The real question has never been whether or not we should work, but rather which work deserves to be done, under what conditions, and in whose service.

Modern wage slavery, those millions of slaves who do not even know it

This analysis of work as a tool of domination is nothing new. The anarchist and socialist thinkers of the 19th century had already perfectly understood and put it into words. As early as 1845, Friedrich Engels wrote in The Condition of the Working Class in England that the modern worker only seems free because he is no longer sold once and for all like the slave of antiquity, but because he sells himself in small pieces, by the day, the week or the year. The result remains exactly the same. It is still a minority of wealthy exploiters who grab for themselves the wealth produced by the vast majority of those who actually work.

This modern servitude has a name in English-language literature. It is called “wage slavery”. And the term is not activist hyperbole at all. Because when a human being is forced to sell their labor power to a boss every single day just to be able to eat and have a roof over their head, on pain of ending up on the street, you can quite literally talk about slavery. The only difference with ancient slavery is that the master has changed faces. It is no longer one specific person who owns the worker, but the entire class of owners of the means of production who share the workforce among themselves.

The tragedy is that this system of exploitation is now so deeply internalized by populations that they no longer even realize how intolerable it is. As a result, today’s world is overwhelmingly made up of slaves who do not even know they are slaves, because they have been conditioned since childhood to consider this situation as normal and impossible to overcome. Within this scheme, the Western middle classes are the best-off slaves of the system because they are the ones to whom it has handed out the most crumbs of wealth, in order to make them accept their fate and defend the established order.

And it is precisely to those middle classes that the system best sells its big lying narrative. Because work is presented to them as a fulfilling activity, as a real personal development project and a path to social progress. Sure, workers will grind away their whole lives, but supposedly they will do it so that their children will not have to, thanks to their sacrifices. Except that with each generation, the very same promise is served up to the next. And with each generation, the children find themselves in turn trapped in the same exploitation machine, sometimes in conditions even more precarious than those of their parents. The promise of upward mobility is therefore the opium handed out to the system’s gilded slaves so that they keep turning the wheel like hamsters in a cage.

Across the rest of the planet, on the other hand, no one even bothers to dress up reality anymore. In the workshops of Bangladesh, in the mines of Congo, in the fields of West Africa, in the Chinese factories or on the Latin American agricultural estates, the real condition of the workers hardly differs from that of the slaves of old. Forced labor for poverty wages, inhumane living conditions and a complete absence of rights.

And you really have to understand who we are talking about here. Not a few marginal individuals, but the overwhelming majority of humanity. Which represents several billion human beings who populate entire continents, like Africa, almost all of Asia and a large part of Latin America. To put it bluntly, the largest portion of the world’s population lives in material conditions that even a poor Westerner would have a hard time imagining. Because we have to remember, a precarious worker in the West is still a privileged person on a planetary scale. Quite simply because the monthly salary of a Western worker is the equivalent of several months of income for billions of human beings who, in spite of that, produce the majority of the products that Westerners consume.

These billions of people do not even have the freedom of movement that the Western middle classes grant themselves. When a Westerner moves abroad, they are politely called an “expat”. Whereas an African or an Asian who tries to do the same thing will be labeled a “migrant”. Meaning a nobody who will be parked in camps with deplorable living conditions or left to drown at sea without anyone really getting upset about it.

On top of all that, in their countries of origin, these populations live with public services that are deliberately kept in ruins. Rotten schools, abandoned hospitals and non-existent social protection. And this entire structure of organized misery holds together with the complicity of corrupt and violent political regimes that the Western powers prop up with all their might as long as they serve their interests. The whole planet knows perfectly well how all this works. Because if you can buy yourself a two-dollar t-shirt or a cheap electronic device, you can pretty well guess that it is thanks to a set of mechanisms entirely based on large-scale modern slavery.

And the worst part of this story is that there is a huge change compared to slavery as it was practiced in antiquity. Because nowadays, slaves are pitted against one another. For example, if Indian workers demand better working conditions in the textile industry, the Western buyers no longer even bother to fight that demand. They simply answer “fine, we’ll relocate to Vietnam!”. And when the Vietnamese in turn ask for better conditions, off they go to Bangladesh, then to Ethiopia, then somewhere else again… It is a mechanism of absolute perversity, perfectly Machiavellian and totally cynical, that places every modern slave in the permanent position of being afraid to lose their slavery. Afraid of ending up with nothing at all, no roof, no food, no prospect whatsoever.

The worst thing in this machinery is probably the mental conditioning that comes with it. Because these slaves we call workers or laborers have been conditioned since childhood to no longer be able to think outside the capitalist prism. For them, no alternative is even imaginable anymore. So either you accept your wage slavery under the conditions imposed by the market, or it’s the street, social shame and disgrace. Whereas of course, other paths are perfectly possible. For example cooperatives, the commons, self-management, local economies, mutual aid, and free decentralized models. All of this already exists and works. But the system does absolutely everything it can to keep these alternatives invisible, marginalized, and above all ridiculed. Because it knows perfectly well that the day a critical mass of workers realizes there are other ways to live and produce, its entire structure of domination will collapse like a house of cards.

In his post-war essays, George Orwell wrote that the modern world’s drift was not toward anarchy as some like to claim, but on the contrary toward the pure and simple reimposition of slavery on a massive scale. Eighty years later, you have to admit he saw it coming. The techno-fascism being set up before our eyes, with its algorithmic platforms that monitor every single move of delivery riders and drivers, is nothing other than the 2.0 version of that servitude. After all of this, are there still people out there claiming we are heading toward social progress?

Orwell’s vision of work, prophetic and still relevant today

A quote attributed to George Orwell has been circulating massively on social media for several years: “If your salary is only enough to eat and sleep, it is not a job. In the old days, they used to call that slavery.” The line is unbeatable and sums up modern wage slavery to perfection. One small detail, however, Orwell never actually wrote those words. So this quote is apocryphal. But it does not really matter in the end, because this sentence is deeply Orwellian in spirit. And the British writer himself wrote things that were even sharper about the condition of workers.

In his book Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933, Orwell tells the story of his own time working as a dishwasher in the kitchens of the great Parisian hotels. He describes that condition without pulling any punches. He wrote, for example, that the dishwasher is nothing but a slave. A wasted slave who spends his life performing a dumb and largely useless task. In this book, he also denounces the whole mechanism of urban sub-proletariats that modern society carefully maintains to keep its pleasure and consumption machines running. Ninety years later, simply replace the hotel dishwasher with the Uber Eats delivery rider or the Amazon order picker, and the structure of domination remains exactly the same.

But it is probably in Animal Farm that Orwell came up with his most powerful line on the question of work. In the founding speech of Old Major that opens the book, the old pig explains to the farm animals the exact nature of their exploitation: “Get rid of Man, and the produce of our labour would be our own”. The line is crystal clear. As long as there exists a class of owners who appropriate the fruits of others’ labor, exploitation goes on relentlessly. Liberation can therefore only come from the abolition of this property relationship and not from a few marginal tweaks of the system.

Orwell was never a Marxist in the orthodox sense of the term. And he even fought Stalinism with fierce lucidity in his books. But he carried within him this deeply anarchist conviction that any property hierarchy mechanically produces domination, and that this domination is exercised first and foremost through the work relationship. That is what makes his vision of work as sharp and as relevant today as it was in the 1930s and 1940s.

No social right ever fell from the sky, every single one was won through struggle

Before wrapping up this article, we have to take a moment to salute those who fought before us. Because everything we now take for granted, like the eight-hour day, weekly rest, paid leave, the right to unionize, the right to strike, the ban on child labor and many other social gains… none of this fell from the sky. No boss, no government, no political party ever spontaneously handed workers the slightest right. Everything was won through hard struggle, and very often paid for in blood.

The Haymarket hanged men are the most well-known, but they are far from the only ones. All over the world, thousands of workers have died under the bullets of bosses and governments so that others after them could live a little more decently. Strikers were shot down in the mines, demonstrators were trampled by the cavalry, union activists were murdered by hired thugs, militants were tortured in police stations… The list is unfortunately very long and stretches across every century.

Today in the West, these gains are being methodically dismantled before our eyes by neoliberalism and techno-fascism. But despite all these attacks, there are still unions, collective bargaining agreements and social safety nets that at least cushion the fall when you lose your job.

The May 1st struggle has always been a global one, by its very nature and out of sheer necessity. Because the workers of Bangladesh, the miners of Congo, the dispossessed peasants of Latin America, the uberized delivery riders in major cities… all of these workers are our class sisters and brothers. Their cause is ours and ours is theirs. Without international solidarity, no lasting victory is possible anywhere.

And while we are talking about social models, as a European, I want to send a direct message to the Americans who are trying to export their forced individualism to the entire planet. We simply do not want your so-called amazing model of selfish jerks. Here in Europe, we are deeply attached to a society that offers real social protection worthy of the name, where schooling is fully free, where retirement is guaranteed for everyone, and where we do not let people die in the streets just because they cannot afford health insurance. In the end, on a global scale, if there is one social model worth adopting and improving everywhere, it is the European social model and not the American ultra-liberal steamroller that benefits only a handful of billionaires while tens of millions of their own fellow citizens sleep in tents on the sidewalks. Because yes, no one here is fooled by what is really going on in the United States. It is honestly nothing like a dream model.

Conclusion: Happy birthday NovaFuture!

Coincidence or not? Either way, May 1st 2025 was the birth of NovaFuture. So we just celebrated our first birthday 🙂 The takeaway from this period of setting up the project is, first of all, very positive. More and more of you are following us, and we regularly meet great people, which leads to collaborations that strengthen us mutually. Little by little, a synergy is building up, and that is precisely what we were after from the very beginning.

Another very important point, NovaFuture existed in other forms for many years before its creation. And we realize that until now we have barely communicated about our past actions in real life, nor about our big upcoming projects. So we are going to step up our game on that front. It will be the perfect opportunity to show that our 100% open source spirit goes well beyond the internet and free software. So stay connected to the site because the best is yet to come 😉

If you found this article useful, please remember to share it around you. Whether online or by printing it out. All that matters is for good ideas to circulate against the dominant narratives. Our action online is to put into words everything that is not running right in today’s world and to offer alternatives. In short, we are here to spark constructive debate, not to chase pointless buzz. Whether you appreciate our approach or not, we at least have the merit of existing without trying to please everyone. It’s also a good time to remind everyone that NovaFuture is an open and entirely volunteer project. It is always worth pointing out 🙂 Thanks for reading all the way down here, and see you very soon for new adventures.