Remembering May Day, from the Chicago anarchists hanged to today’s modern slaves
Every May Day that goes by, the events tied to that date slip a little further out of memory. Then again, every media outlet taking orders from billionaires makes sure never to explain where this day came from or what it means. They even go so far as to call this international day of struggle for the rights of working women and men a celebration of work. As if getting exploited by capitalism were supposed to turn into joy. You see the trick? Woohoo! Party time, I can barely cover my bills and my job’s hanging by a thread. It’s just grotesque!
So in an era where capitalism is turning into techno-fascism, we figured it was time to spell out exactly what May Day stands for. And above all to put it back in the frame it should never have left: an anarchist fight for better living conditions that ended with a lot of protesters massacred. This piece goes back to the root of that tragedy. And more than that, it tries to work out what it still has to teach us right now.
Chicago 1886, the Haymarket Square massacre is where May Day was born
To get what May Day really means, you have to go back to Chicago in the spring of 1886. Back then American workers put in ten to sixteen hours a day in hellish conditions. Against that insane pace, the labor movement had long been demanding eight hours of work, eight hours of rest and eight hours for yourself. A union convention in 1884 finally set a deadline of May 1, 1886. If the bosses didn’t give in, it would be a general strike.
Chicago was one of the great hubs of the American labor movement back then. Probably because the city had an organized anarchist community, largely made up of German immigrants. And several labor fights had been simmering there for months. At the McCormick Harvesting Machine plant especially, where management had locked union workers out since February and brought in strikebreakers to replace them. In that tense climate, the bosses and their private militias were already going after workers out in the open as May 1 came closer.
When the day came, hundreds of thousands of workers walked off the job across the country. Chicago alone had close to forty thousand strikers and the city was completely shut down. Then on May 3, a rally supporting the McCormick workers turned deadly. Police opened fire on strikers who were going after the scabs outside the plant. Several workers were killed and many more wounded. The crackdown was brutal and calibrated to break the movement.
On the evening of May 4, a protest rally gathered at Haymarket Square to denounce the killings. It was peaceful. Several anarchist speakers took the stage, among them August Spies and Albert Parsons, two leading figures of the Chicago labor movement. It rained that night. As the crowd was breaking up, the police charged to clear out the last few people. That’s when a bomb went off in the middle of the police ranks. Seven cops and at least four workers died. Nobody ever found out who threw it.
That blank spot is no small detail, because one name keeps coming up among historians of the American labor movement: the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, a private outfit that rented itself out to the highest bidder and served as the bosses’ armed wing against unions. Its agents were deep in Chicago’s labor conflicts. They had already attacked McCormick workers back in 1885. One of them would even show up later to testify against the anarchists at their trial. He wasn’t remotely convincing.
The Pinkerton playbook was cynical and well practiced: stir up trouble to justify your own existence. Plenty of historians now figure the bomb could very well have been thrown by a provocateur on the payroll of the bosses or the police. Nobody will ever know the truth. And that suits everybody on the side of power just fine.
What followed was a political trial, plain and simple. Eight anarchists were arrested with no serious evidence tying them to the bombing. The court convicted them for their ideas more than their acts. Four were hanged on November 11, 1887. August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer and George Engel became the Haymarket martyrs. A fifth, Louis Lingg, killed himself in his cell the night before his execution. The last three were pardoned in 1893 by Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld, who publicly called out a rigged trial and testimony you couldn’t trust at all.
In 1889 the Second International, meeting in Paris, made May 1 the international workers’ day, an explicit tribute to the Chicago hanged. That’s the real origin of May Day. A strike for the eight-hour day, a police massacre, a bomb that most likely came from a provocateur, a political trial and four anarchists hanged to set an example. A long way from the cheerful labor holiday capitalism keeps trying to sell us.
How did Labor Day erase worker memory in the United States?
All of this should have stayed burned into American collective memory. But barely a few years after the Chicago hangings, the federal government figured out it had to pull workers away from May 1, a date that had gotten far too subversive for its taste. And the hijacking was pulled off with frightening efficiency.
In 1894, in the middle of the Pullman strike that was shutting down the country’s railroads, Democratic president Grover Cleveland rushed a bill through creating Labor Day. The new federal holiday landed carefully on the first Monday in September. As far from May 1 as you can get. Officially it honored American workers. Unofficially it was there to make them forget Haymarket and to cut the American labor movement off from its internationalist and anarchist roots.
It worked perfectly. These days the overwhelming majority of Americans mark their labor holiday in September around a barbecue and a round of store sales, with no idea that May Day started on their own soil. Meanwhile the Chicago martyrs got quietly wiped from American textbooks and the word “anarchist” is still an insult in the country’s mainstream political vocabulary.
So there’s the sleight of hand. Every May 1 the rest of the world commemorates American workers hanged for asking to work fewer hours, while the United States buried the story under a replacement holiday. It’s flat out one of the most effective memory-erasing operations in capitalism’s modern history.
Bullshit jobs and work that means something are two opposite worlds
Before going further, we absolutely need a fundamental distinction that most debates about work are badly missing. Not all work is the same and not all work has the same human value. On one side sits work that actually means something. Work that feeds people, heals them, builds, teaches, repairs and creates. On the other side sits what anthropologist David Graeber named in 2018 the “bullshit jobs,” all those useless jobs so pointless that the people doing them admit they’re completely absurd.
When a job means something, pays enough to live with dignity and gets done in humane conditions, it really does become a core part of a person’s fulfillment. And honestly, nobody ever claimed the ideal was doing nothing your whole life.
But when a job is useless, badly paid and done under constant pressure from toxic management, it slides straight into torture. Especially once you add total job insecurity on top: short contracts, layoff rounds one after another and the permanent threat of getting fired overnight with no recourse. That’s exactly what billions of workers around the planet live through today.
They get paid to wreck the environment, to build gadgets as useless as they are polluting, to mass-produce junk designed to break, to lie to customers, to club protesters or to push people out the door. All of it knowing exactly what they’re doing, with no way out, because the alternative is ending up on the street. At that point the employment contract turns into a contract of moral submission.
And to get all that down our throats, the system built itself a whole propaganda machine glorifying work. Drilling into us, for instance, that “the early bird gets the worm,” meaning the convicts who drag themselves up at dawn to go get exploited. We also get told that a man or a woman “who works” has to be a good person, the implication being that anybody without official employment is a parasite. Except that all the financial wealth in the world sits with the owners of the means of production. And those people sleep in while everybody else wrecks their morale and their health on thankless tasks. So the only freeloaders in this system are the shareholders and the rentiers who produce absolutely nothing and fatten themselves on the backs of people who actually produce something.
French comedian Pierre Desproges summed it all up with his legendary line: “Work is good for your health? Then give mine to somebody who’s sick!” Behind the joke sits a truth no amount of management propaganda will ever cover up. Work as it’s organized right now is above all a tool of domination and value extraction, and it runs at the expense of everyone without enough capital to weigh in the balance.
The split between work-that-means-something and work-as-torture matters because it gets us out of the fake debate pitting “hard workers” against “lazy people who refuse to work.” The real question was never whether to work. It’s which work deserves doing, under what conditions and for whose benefit.
Modern wage slavery, millions of slaves who don’t know it
Reading work as a tool of domination is nothing new. Anarchist and socialist thinkers in the nineteenth century had it figured out and written down. Back in 1845, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels wrote that the modern worker only looks free because he isn’t sold once and for all like the slave of antiquity. He sells himself piece by piece instead, by the day, the week or the year. The result is exactly the same. A minority of rich exploiters still grabs the wealth produced by the huge majority who do the work.
This modern servitude already has a name in English: wage slavery. And the term is no militant exaggeration. When a human being has to sell their labor day after day to a boss just to eat and keep a roof overhead, or else end up on the street, slavery is the literal word for it. The one difference with slavery in antiquity is that the master changed faces. No single person owns the worker anymore. The whole class of people who own the means of production shares him.
The tragedy is how deeply people have swallowed this setup, to the point where they don’t even register how intolerable it is. So the world today runs mostly on slaves who don’t know they’re slaves, conditioned since childhood to treat the whole thing as normal and permanent. Western middle classes are the best-off slaves in the system, since they got the biggest share of crumbs, handed over so they’d accept their lot and defend the established order.
And the system sells its big lie to those middle classes better than to anyone else. Work gets pitched to them as fulfilling, as a personal growth project and a path to social progress. Sure, they’ll grind their whole lives, but supposedly so their kids won’t have to, thanks to all that sacrifice. Except every generation gets served the same promise. And every generation the kids end up caught in the same machine, sometimes on shakier ground than their parents were. So the promise of moving up is the opium handed to the system’s gilded slaves to keep them turning the wheel like hamsters in a cage.
Everywhere else on the planet, nobody bothers sugarcoating anymore. In the workshops of Bangladesh, the mines of Congo, the fields of West Africa, the Chinese factories or the farms of Latin America, what workers actually live through barely differs from slavery of the old kind. Forced labor for starvation pay, inhuman living conditions and zero rights.
And get clear on who we’re talking about here. Not a handful of people at the margins. The overwhelming majority of humanity. Billions of human beings filling entire continents: Africa, nearly all of Asia and a big chunk of Latin America. To be clear, most of the world’s population lives in material conditions a poor Westerner would struggle to picture. Remember, a worker scraping by in the West is still privileged on a planetary scale. One month of a Western worker’s wages equals several months of income for billions of people who are the ones making most of what Westerners buy.
Those billions don’t even get the freedom of movement Western middle classes claim for themselves. A Westerner who moves abroad gets called an “expat,” politely. An African or an Asian who tries the same thing becomes a “migrant.” Meaning a nobody, to be penned in camps under filthy conditions or left to drown at sea without stirring much of anything.
On top of that, back home these populations live with public services deliberately kept in ruins. Rotting schools, abandoned hospitals and no social safety net at all. And the whole structure of organized misery holds up thanks to corrupt, violent regimes that Western powers prop up as long as they serve their interests. The entire planet knows exactly how this works. If you can buy a two-euro T-shirt or a cheap piece of electronics, you know full well it runs on large-scale modern slavery.
And the worst part of the story is one huge shift from slavery as antiquity practiced it. These days the slaves get set against each other. If Indian garment workers ask for better conditions, the Western brands placing the orders don’t even fight the demand anymore. They just answer “fine, we’re moving production to Vietnam!” And when the Vietnamese ask for better conditions in turn, off to Bangladesh, then Ethiopia, then somewhere else… An absolutely perverse, perfectly Machiavellian and completely cynical machine that keeps every modern slave permanently afraid of losing their slavery. Afraid of ending up with nothing at all, no housing, no food, not the faintest prospect.
The worst piece of this machine is probably the mental formatting that comes with it. The slaves we call workers get conditioned from childhood to stop thinking outside the capitalist frame. For them no alternative is even imaginable anymore. So either you take your wage slavery on the terms the market sets, or you get the street, social shame and ruin. When other roads are obviously wide open. Cooperatives, the commons, self-management, local economies, mutual aid, free and decentralized models. All of it exists and already works. But the system does everything it can to keep those alternatives invisible, sidelined and above all ridiculed. Because it knows perfectly well that the day a critical mass of workers sees there are other ways to live and produce, its whole structure of domination collapses like a house of cards.
In his postwar essays George Orwell wrote that the modern world was drifting toward the flat-out return of large-scale slavery, and not toward anarchy the way some like to claim. Eighty years later, he called it. The techno-fascism building up in front of us, with its algorithmic platforms tracking every move a delivery rider or a driver makes, is that same servitude, version 2.0. After all that, anybody still want to tell us we’re headed toward social progress?
Orwell’s vision of work, prophetic and still current
A quote attributed to George Orwell has been all over social media for years: “If your paycheck only covers eating and sleeping, that isn’t a job. People used to call it slavery.” The line is airtight and it nails modern wage slavery. Small detail though, Orwell never wrote those words. The quote is apocryphal. Doesn’t matter much in the end, because the sentence is deeply Orwellian in spirit. And the British writer did put down things even harsher about what workers go through.
In Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933, Orwell tells his own story from the inside as a dishwasher in the kitchens of the big Paris hotels. He describes the job without dressing it up. A plongeur, he wrote, is nothing but a slave. A wasted slave who spends his life doing stupid and largely pointless work. The book also goes after the whole machinery of urban sub-proletariats that modern society keeps around carefully to run its pleasure and consumption machines. Ninety years on, swap the hotel dishwasher for the Uber Eats rider or the Amazon warehouse picker and the structure of domination is exactly the same.
But Orwell probably found his strongest line about work in Animal Farm. In Old Major’s founding speech that opens the book, the old pig lays out for the farm animals the exact nature of their exploitation: “Get rid of Man, and the produce of our labour would be our own.” Crystal clear. As long as a class of owners takes the fruit of everyone else’s work, exploitation keeps running. So liberation can only come from abolishing that property relation, not from a few marginal tweaks to the system.
Orwell was never a Marxist in the orthodox sense. He even fought Stalinism in his books with ferocious clarity. But he carried a deeply anarchist conviction: every hierarchy of property mechanically produces domination, and that domination shows up first and foremost in the relation to work. His view of work stays as sharp and as current today as it was in the 1930s and 1940s.
No social right fell from the sky, every one of them was forced through struggle
Before wrapping this up, take a moment for the women and men who fought before us. Everything we treat as settled today, the eight-hour day, the weekly day off, paid vacation, the right to unionize, the right to strike, the ban on child labor and plenty more… none of it fell from the sky. No boss, no government, no political party ever handed workers a single right on its own. All of it was won the hard way and very often paid for in blood.
The Haymarket hanged are the best known, nowhere near the only ones. All over the world, thousands of working men and women died under bullets fired by bosses and governments so the people coming after them could live with a bit more dignity. Strikers shot down in the mines, demonstrators ridden over by cavalry, union organizers killed by hired muscle, militants tortured in police stations… The list runs painfully long and it crosses every century.
In the West right now, neoliberalism and techno-fascism are methodically picking those gains apart in front of us. But through all the attacks, unions, collective agreements and safety nets still exist, and they soften the fall a little when you lose your job.
The May Day fight has always been a global fight, by nature and by necessity. Bangladeshi garment workers, Congolese miners, Latin American farmers pushed off their land, gig delivery riders in the big cities… all of them are our class sisters and brothers. Their cause is ours and ours is theirs. Without international solidarity, no victory anywhere lasts.
And while we’re on the subject of social models, as a European I want to send a direct message to the Americans trying to export their rabid individualism to the whole planet. We just don’t want your so-called great model built by selfish assholes. Here in Europe we care about a society with real social protection, where school costs nothing, where retirement is guaranteed for everybody and where we don’t let people die in the street because they can’t afford health insurance. If one social model on this planet deserves to be adopted and improved everywhere, it’s the European one, not the American free-market steamroller that only pays off for a handful of billionaires while tens of millions of their own fellow citizens sleep in tents on the sidewalks. Nobody here is fooled about what’s actually going on in the United States. It’s honestly not a dream to aim for.
Conclusion: happy birthday NovaFuture!
Coincidence or not? Either way, NovaFuture was born on May 1, 2025. So we just turned one 🙂 Looking back at this setup phase, the balance sheet reads very positive. More and more of you are following us and we keep meeting good people, which turns into collaborations that make all of us stronger. Bit by bit a real synergy is building, and that’s exactly what we were after from the start.
Another big point, NovaFuture existed in other forms for many years before it was founded. And we’ve noticed we’ve said almost nothing so far about what we did in the real world before, or about the big projects ahead. So we’re going to fix that. It’ll be a chance to show that our 100% open source spirit goes way beyond the internet and free software. So stay tuned to the site, because the best is still ahead 😉
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