May I

Sunday mornings are typically quiet. After a noisy Saturday night, Sunday mornings in Campbellville are very easy on the ears. Folks would either be sleeping in or praying. Even kids, up and about, know enough to be as quiet as a mouse. Across sleeping policemen sprawling dogs lie. It is as if, on Sunday mornings, there is a collective agreement that every noise be prefaced, politely, with may I? But the quiet on this particular Sunday morning is altogether different; it feels like more than quiet. That’s because today isn’t just any other Sunday. It is May 1: Labour Day; International Workers’ Day. This Sunday morning’s quiet feels like silence. Not of a place of worship or of even a graveyard. This May Day silence is something else all together: it is a mayday of another kind; a call waiting for its own answer.

In “The History of May Day,” published on May Day 2019, the British Marxist historian of industrial capitalism Eric Hobsbawm recounts the long march of May Day from ‘demonstration’ to ‘holiday’. As he reminds readers, “the Second International, in 1889 called for a simultaneous international workers’ demonstration in favour of a law to limit the working day to eight hours to be held on 1 May 1890.” Why May 1st specifically was the chosen date, Hobsbawm explains: “since the American Federation of Labor had already decided to hold such a demonstration on 1 May 1890, this day was to be chosen for the international demonstration.” Since then 1st of May has continued to mark Labour Day or International Workers’ Day (IWD) in many countries. Others, however, do so using dates that are significant to them. For example, the first Monday in September is celebrated as Labour Day in the United States of America and Canada. In countries like Guyana, when May 1st falls on a Sunday, as it does in 2022, the subsequent Monday, the day after, is a national, public holiday.

The question of demonstration versus holiday, strike versus celebration, arose in early discussions about May Day. Again, as Hobsbawm put it:

The crucial matter at issue was whether the workers should be asked to demonstrate in working time, that is to go on strike, for in 1890 the First of May fell on a Thursday. Basically, cautious parties and strong established trade unions – unless they deliberately wanted to be or found themselves engaged in industrial action, as was the plan of the American Federation of Labor – did not see why they should stick their own and their members’ necks out for the sake of a symbolic gesture. They therefore tended to opt for a demonstration on the first Sunday in May and not on the first day of the month. This was and remained the British option, which was why the first great May Day took place on 4 May [a Sunday].

Hobsbawm’s argument is that “it was the act of symbolically stopping work which turned May Day into more than just another demonstration, or even another commemorative occasion.” That argument needs to be extended further. As he notes, “the European Economic Community which made May Day into a public holiday was a body composed not, in spite of Mrs Thatcher’s views on the subject, of socialist but of predominantly anti-socialist governments. Western official May Days were recognitions of the need to come to terms with the tradition of the unofficial May Days and to detach it from labour movements, class consciousness and class struggle.” If the act of stopping work turned May Day into more than just another demonstration, then turning May Day into a national, public holiday has turned the day into a means to an anti-worker end, a mere event in the ongoing process of mass commodification.

That “the European Community’s May Day has been assimilated to a Bank Holiday” is one step in the dehumanising process of unrestrained commodification – “bank holiday” refers to the fact that banking institutions typically close for business on such holidays. May Day’s shift from demonstration to holiday, from workers’ assertion to employers’ pacification is not unlike the shift in the meaning of the word ‘bank’ itself: from “natural earthen incline bordering a body of water” to “the moneylender’s exchange table”. Bank is also cognate with bench, which explains the saying susurrated in courtrooms across the globe, justice is sold to the highest bidder. Altars make you wonder, being as they are, where bank meets bench. As Hobsbawm would have it, May Day “is perhaps the only unquestionable dent made by a secular movement in the Christian or any other official calendar,” forgetting to ask, at what price and was it worth it?

Capital’s appropriation of language once reserved for the natural, legal and religious worlds extends further. For instance, ‘dear’. It is not uncommon in Campbellville to speak of commodities as being ‘dear’. Sapodilla dear in the market these days! And governments respond in some places by increasing or decreasing employees’ “dearness allowance” – Dearness Allowance is the cost-of-living adjustment allowance which the government pays to the employees of the public sector as well as pensioners of the same. Dear, a term of human endearment, equally applies to emotions as it does to inflation – to the point that ‘sapodilla dear’ makes as much sense as ‘dear sapodilla’ in a world where not just exit, as Banksy illustrated, but entry is also through the Duty Free Shop.

The other day I was gyaffing with a man about his experience in the political economy of gold mining in Guyana – the entry and exit nature of it. You go into the bush, pork-knock an ounce, come back out and spend then go back in. The shifting nature of the work and people engaged in it doesn’t lend itself to settling down, setting up shop, so to speak. The best you could do is net-off an area and mine some tilapia in the river or some chicken on the land. Because the conversation was about mining, it was easy to and at the same time very disturbing to confuse the verb to mind – to give heed to, pay attention to – with to mine – to lay explosives, to dig in the earth in order to obtain minerals, treasure, etc. Then there are the nouns. Which is more valuable? In a world that prefers verbs, which can I afford to lose? Where mine meets plantation, interchangeability is matter-of-fact; possession, an acceptable answer to dispossession.

The 2022 May 1 rally in Georgetown witnessed in wonderment and awe as one haemorrhaged into two: the teachers’ union breaking off in the opposite direction from the other workers – see video below. Reminiscent of the miracle of loaves and fishes, one became two which then further multiplied into a series of Is – possessed, as if in a trance. May I? Should I? Where am I? And bam! all of a sudden there were more questions than workers marching on May 1. Swirling, moving through in different directions yet still arriving back at the elephant-in-the-room question: should workers demand the withdrawal of May Day, Labour Day from the list of bank, national, public holidays? What will it take for I to become 1?