Vienna, 30 April, 1890. The soldiers are alerted, the house doors are bolted, people are laying in stocks of food at home as though preparing for a siege. The shops are deserted, women and children are afraid to go into the streets, the spirits are oppressed by heavy anxiety. This is the picture of our city on the workers’ holiday.But for that give-away last sentence, this might well have read like a doomsday novel. In truth, this was the highly-regarded Viennese daily Neue Freie Presse providing a bird’s-eye-view of Austria’s capital city on the eve of Vienna’s first-ever May Day demonstrations. Many of the city’s elites had fled with their families to safer locations. Army cooks went shopping accompanied by armed patrols with bayonets on the ready. Some fearful factory owners had “heated their cauldrons and gathered the firemen and veterans of their parish around them, ready to respond to a possible attack on their factories by pouring boiling water on the rebels”.The governor of the Archduchy of Austria had put the ‘rebels’ on notice that “the arbitrary refusal to work on May 1 is legally impermissible and those [wilfully abstaining from work] will be faced with the consequences of their illegal conduct” including, the governor didn’t forget to add, arrest and immediate dismissal.In the end, how did May Day 1890 pan out in the great capital of the Habsburgs? Not quite like how the authorities would have liked it to, as this report in Victor Adler’s Arbeiter Zeitung tells us:The workers allowed nothing to stop them from celebrating May Day … Total abstention from work was almost general … A wonderful sight, that will never be forgotten by anyone present, was the procession of over one hundred thousand Viennese workers in the Prater … (I)n the bright beauty of the May Day, the celebrating workers streamed past … in endless enthusiastic hordes, their faces beaming with joy … Amid the loaded rifles and cannons, from one-hundred-thousand throats simultaneously, the Song of Work (Leid der Arbeit) rose to the sky. Every heart was filled with the glad knowledge that the workers had become a power, that a new era had begun. On that day Vienna was ruled by the proletariat.May 1, 1890 was the first workers’ May Day ever. As extraordinary as it may seem today, that first May Day had not been envisioned by its originators to look at all like what it eventually did. The founding Congress of the Second (Socialist) International in Paris in July 1889 – the hundredth anniversary of the great French Revolution – had, among other things, resolved on a synchronised world-wide demonstration the following year to press for a legalised eight-hour workday.The choice of the date for the demonstration was largely fortuitous. The American unit had already decided to demonstrate across the United States on May 1, 1890, to commemorate the victims of the Chicago Haymarket Massacre of May 1886 in which several striking workers had lost their lives to a police force gone berserk. The Congress agreed to time the planned demonstration to coincide with the American commemoration of May 1, 1890.Soviet May Day, 1929. Photo: Viktor Deni, Public domain, via Wikimedia CommonsBut no great importance appears to have been attached to the decision at that point. Even the report of the Congress’s proceedings made no more than a passing mention. At that point, at any rate, the International didn’t visualise the next year’s demonstration as anything but a one-off event.The effect of that first May Day on organised workers in many countries across Europe was electric, however, as the Austrian experience demonstrated. Even in traditionally circumspect Britain, an astonishing three hundred thousand workers congregated in London’s Hyde Park to demonstrate. With this, working-class power had clearly emerged as a force to reckon with.In its Brussels Congress of 1891, the International was obliged to review recent experience and make several important decisions about May Day. One: that it would hereafter be an annual event. Two: that May Day’s messaging would no longer focus on the eight-hour workday alone but would additionally take in demands for far-reaching labour reform as well as for peace. This was significant, because the new charter helped broaden the movement’s horizons by adding political demands to purely economic ones.Over time, the May Day marches in some countries also added the demand for universal adult suffrage to their charter. Perhaps most importantly, albeit unsure at that point of what this could mean, the Congress determined that, in the future, workers would celebrate – not merely observe – May Day: in other words, that May Day was to be partially repurposed as a workingmen’s festival or carnival. This last point profoundly changed May Day.A Yugoslav poster: Živeo prvi maj 1950 (Long live May Day 1950) Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.Henceforth, families and friends, including little children, would join the workers on their noisy marches, adding colour, music and good cheer to what essentially had been the serious business of workingmen agitating for their rights. We will consider important aspects of this makeover presently. For now, let’s note how, besides adding greatly to May Day’s popular appeal, this emendation helped to at least partially disarm the authorities’ opposition to and resentment of May Day. Official hostility to May Day didn’t evaporate, but it was certainly attenuated over time.But there were greater debates within the International’s ranks around how May Day should organise itself. Should workers stop or strike work on May Day, thereby precipitating confrontations with factory owners, or steer clear of such ‘provocative’ steps? The British and the German delegations were in favour of caution, but were voted down by some others, notably the Austrian, French and Scandinavian socialist parties. The British unit’s anxiety not to aggravate owners’ animus next prompted it to suggest that the first Sunday of May, rather than the first day of May, be identified as May Day (much as the first Monday in September came to be designated Labour Day in the US).Again, this proposal was turned down. A majority of the delegates wanted May Day to be both a symbol and an assertion of working-class power. And that power, they felt, could be forcefully affirmed only by defying the diktats of factory owners and choosing not to work on a workday. This would translate to wresting from capitalists a special holiday, a workers’ own holiday, in a manner of speaking. For a majority of the parties represented at the International, the deliberate choice of May 1 vested May Day with a special and unmatched sense of freedom and agency. The challenges could – they knew – be formidable, but organised workers’ movements were ready to rise to those challenges.May Day postage stamp photographed by Matsievsky from personal collection. Source: USSR Post, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.May Day as celebration, as festival, immediately struck a chord with many across Europe. Early May is when Spring is at its loveliest in Northern Europe while in the South, it’s the arrival of summer. So early May has been traditionally linked to countless secular festivals. A festive May Day tied in with the spirit of those festivities fairly unobtrusively, effortlessly. Spring flowers, mainly carnations but also roses, came to adorn May Day marches – care being taken that the flowers were predominantly, if not all, red.Families and friends of the workers, and of course armies of lively, frisky children – often turned out in their holiday best – marched and sang and laughed even as eager May Day slogans continued to be sent up to the sky and red flags vigorously waved, softening the otherwise rather dour contours of the demonstrations.This was more than a mere makeover for the working-class’s annual march: it verily transformed May Day. Spring signals nature’s renewal, and so Spring is about hope, about looking forward to abundance, to a fuller future. That sense of bright hopefulness now impregnated May Day. Writing in his News from Nowhere (1891), the great activist-poet William Morris captured the wonderful ambience of a May Day march in the following words:On that day we have music and dancing, and merry games and happy feasting on the site of some of the worst of the old slums … On that occasion the custom is for the prettiest girl to sing some of the old revolutionary songs … On the very spots where those terrible crimes of class-murder were committed day by day for so many years… (I)t is a curious sight to see some beautiful girl, daintily clad and crowned with flowers from neighbouring meadows, standing amongst the happy people on some mound, where of old time stood the wretched apology of a house, a den in which men and women lived packed amongst the filth like pilchards in a cask.The iconography of May Day is replete with sunny images of such rousing festivities. And it is images such as these that feed into what Eric Hobsbawm calls the May Day’s “rich cargo of emotion and hope”.May Day’s rising profile has had an interesting corollary. It obliged some far-right European states to try and co-opt the day into the establishment’s official almanac, hoping thereby to blunt the day’s original subversive message. Thus it was Hitler’s Germany that was the first state after the Soviet Union to make the 1st of May the official National Day of Labour.Adolf Hitler arrives at a state-organised May Day rally in the Lustgarten with vice-chancellor Franz von Papen on May 1, 1933, the day the Nazi government declared May 1 a national holiday. Photo: German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons.Likewise, the universally-abhorred Vichy government in occupied France embraced May Day as the Festival of Labour and Concord, apparently taking the cue from Phalangist Spain where the equally-reviled General Franco had made it state policy to celebrate May Day. In all these instances as in the European Union’s later embrace of May Day, the overriding motivation was to uncouple it from the labour movement and from class struggle.Across colonised Asia and Africa, May Day had a tortured but surprisingly long history. Under colonial rule, working-class movements were naturally joined at the hip with the wider struggle against colonialism. But ideological contestations within that broad national struggle, informed by contrasting visions of the future, were inevitably present nevertheless. A common feature of capitalist development in the colonies, though, was its unevenness. Local cultural traditions also played an important part in the shaping of the working-class psyche here.May Day unrest in Paris, 1951. Clashes in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine district led to hundreds of North African demonstrators arrested and about 80 police officers injured. Source: France-Soir, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.Unsurprisingly, therefore, May Day arrived in the colonies much later than its heyday in Europe. Across Asia, it was the Philippines that hosted the first May Day celebrations. That was in 1903. China (1908), Indonesia (1918), Japan (1920) and Korea (1923) followed suit. India, too, raised its May Day banner for the first time in 1923, thanks to the labours of Malayapuram Singaravelu Chettiar, the intrepid founder of the Labour Kisan Party of Hindustan. The venue for that historic event was Chennai’s (then Madras) storied Marina sea-beach.Soon, Chettiar was to join hands with S.V. Ghate, S.A. Dange, Muzaffar Ahmed, Shaukat Usmani and others to form the Communist Party of India at its founding conference in Kanpur. The Indian labour movement has had its crests and troughs ever since, but May Day continues to be a regular item on the industrial working-class’s calendar in our country.The CITU and AITUC celebrated the 131st Workers Day on May 1 at Saidapet, Chennai. Photo: Balogic, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.The first few marvellous May Days across Europe and the US seemed to suggest the possibility of almost limitless progress for organised labour and the political parties championing their cause. In turn, as labour and anti-war movements steadily built up momentum, May Day continued to flourish and gain in influence. Across Europe, countries had pretty much formalised the eight-hour working day by the early 1920s. That and the erupting of the October Revolution seemed signs that the gates to a brave new world were about to swing open before the working-class.The early Popular Front years in France and the Civil War in Spain further cemented working-class unity, as did the fall of fascism in 1945 – and together, these developments underpinned the centrality and relevance of May Day to organised class action. Over time, May Day entered a large number of countries’ calendars as a public holiday, one of the few secular holidays societies across the world recognise and treasure. Today, May Day is a holiday in no fewer than 160 countries.At the pinnacle of its influence, however, May Day began to shed its power as transformative political action and become institutionalised. Post World War II, while the economic power of the organised working-class in the West grew steadily until the 1980s, its politics became increasingly deradicalised. In the words of the historian Giovanna Ginex, May Day at that point mutated into “a collective rite which requires its own liturgies and divinities”. The meaning had gone out of the collective striving after a better tomorrow for all labouring men that May Day had come to betoken, and what remained of the day was not much more than an annual ritual.From the mid-1980s, neoliberalism began to chip away at the post-war economic gains, slowly at first but more decisively, more rapidly in the new century. But, now increasingly more fragmented and absent its earlier verve, on account of years of political inertia and ideological disorientation, the working-class in the West could hardly be envisioned as the agent of change any longer.In the Global South, on the other hand, an assortment of setbacks – rising authoritarianism, significant loss of agency and political autonomy, the unchecked ascendancy of the populist hard-right, and a general decline in political and moral culture – have combined to divest working-class formations of their power and influence in large measure. Inevitably as a corollary, May Day has not only lost its potency, it has also forfeited the high visibility it once commanded.Be that as it may, the history of the May Day will never fail to remind us of the power of grassroots activism. It will continue to show, in Eric Hobsbawm’s words, how ordinary humans, “…who, as individuals, are inarticulate, powerless and count for nothing can nevertheless leave their mark on history”. And while the hope for a better future for all humankind looks to be in full retreat in the 21st century, the journey of the lowly 19th-century May Day tells us that appearances are not necessarily fail-safe.Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com