International Workers' Day
133 comments
·May 1, 2025wolvesechoes
bawolff
One thing i find interesting is how rarely labour struggles are depicted in mainstream tv/movies.
We have every type of revolutionary tv shows, including some fairly rediculous ones (e.g. divergent) but almost never strikes. The only exception i can really think of is that one episode of battlestar galactica (maybe give star trek ds9 half a point because they treated it in such a silly fashion).
triceratops
I don't know if that's true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire_season_2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norma_Rae
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesar_Chavez_(film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Waterfront
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Exit_to_Brooklyn_(film)
But it's true the topic hasn't been en vogue for a while.
muxator
Kudos for mentioning the second season of The Wire. At first, when watching the season, the theme felt misplaced, but it ended up being a very well done sociological exploration on deindustrialization. Given the current geopolitical issues it seems relevant even in contemporary times.
Anthony-G
Cynical me suspects that the large corporations who get to decide which TV show or feature films get to be made are opposed to depicting workers organising and acting on behalf of their collective interest. This seems to be particularly true in America more so than Europe, e.g, Brassed Off, a British film from the mid-nineties realistically displays working class culture associated with labour unions at a time when the unions were struggling against the closure of the coal pits. Interestingly, according to its Wikipedia article¹, “In the United States, the film was promoted simply as a romantic comedy involving McGregor and Fitzgerald's characters.”
On the other hand, Season 4 of For All Mankind depicted a strike of private sector workers in such an unrealistic, ham-fisted way that it couldn’t be taken seriously – much like many of the other half-assed story-lines that were crammed into the show for Seasons 3 and 4.
arrowsmith
Hollywood is completely dominated by liberal progressives, wtf are you talking about?
lwo32k
It's a very very messy process and most of the time doesn't end well because of the power imbalance. Larger the worker group more the disagreements amongst them too. My Dad was a factory manager and I grew up running around the factory, playing with workers, they would help me on my school projects etc. The same guys beat my Dad up during one particular strike. Many of them got arrested and we had a cop outside our house for months.
philistine
The 2014 film [Pride](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_(2014_film)) is probably the best example of this reality you're describing; there are indeed few movies about workers' struggle.
moomin
DS9 episode is worth it just for “He was more than a hero, he was a union man.”
ta1243
I love the juxtaposition with the character Meaney played on Hell on Wheels
potato3732842
>One thing i find interesting is how rarely labour struggles are depicted in mainstream tv/movies.
Same reason all sorts of other stuff has gone nearly extinct.
Mainstream entertainment media is subject to the same eyeball-hour based economics as everything else and that content doesn't resonate with enough people.
bawolff
Given how every second piece of mainstream entertainment is about sticking it to the man, i find that reasoning a little uncompelling.
vkou
Are you sure the tail isn't wagging the dog?
evolve2k
Severance quietly covers the topic. The conversations in season 1 on the Macrodata refinement uprisings and that big painting of the event come to mind.
PsylentKnight
Labor struggles are a central theme of Disco Elysium
rvb
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
0max
I’m thankful that the career I’ve had helped me learn about the organizations that had an impact in that history and a new lens to see the world with.
nwhnwh
Still not good enough.
belter
The US minimum wage is at $7.25 per hour since..24 Jul 2009, that is 16 years ago. Taking into account cumulative inflation US workers enjoy now about 68 % of the 2009 purchasing power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...
lotsofpulp
The vast majority of US workers live in jurisdictions with higher minimum wages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_US_states_by_minimum_w...
In the biggest state with just the federal minimum wage, Texas, individual income percentile of $20k per year ($10 per hour/40 hour work weeks/50 weeks per year) is 20th percentile. That will capture all the part time workers too, so it seems the lowest priced labor in most US labor markets is disjoint from the federal US minimum wage.
https://dqydj.com/scripts/cps/2024_income_calculators/2024_i...
belter
So it should not be a problem to raise it...
"Scott Bessent believes federal minimum wage should not be increased" - https://www.nbcnews.com/video/scott-bessent-believes-federal...
palmotea
Discriminatory and biased! Why is so much attention lavished on workers? Where's International Shareholders' day? Where is a day to celebrate wealth and those who have it? Both of those things are far more important than lowly labor.
ks2048
> Both of those things are far more important than lowly labor.
That's why labor gets 1 day and owners get 364.
(Just realized that's roughly in the ballpark of CEO-to-worker wage ratio. ~290:1)
arduanika
That's a capital idea!
bawolff
In the united states, it is nov 18 (National Entrepreneur Day)
alabastervlog
It's truly under-appreciated how much the rich do for the economy, and indeed, for the workers, by having some database rows in some computers with their names on them.
TOGoS
But the numbers next to their names aren't big enough. We're gonna have to gut social services and environmental protections in an attempt to pump those numbers up. Oh and definitely everything we can to cast unions in a bad light. Who needs a union? All they do is eat your hot chip.
arbuge
Well you do get admission to the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting if you buy just a single share (and prepare your wallet for exorbitant Omaha hotel prices that weekend). Closest thing to that I can think of.
cratermoon
> exorbitant Omaha hotel prices
That phrase doesn't compute. Except for "during that weekend", when of course they all jack up their rates knowing who is coming to stay.
belter
Well... "National Shareholder Day" - https://www.nationaldayarchives.com/day/national-shareholder...
eli_gottlieb
>Where's International Shareholders' day?
The entire rest of the goddamn year.
MarcelOlsz
I'm celebrating by working all day.
kunley
Obligatory marching for everyone during commie period in some countries. Luckily that ended in 1989, the holiday stayed
nonrandomstring
I associate May 1 with getting mashed in Helsinki as for many years I spent it in Finland, with amazing parties in the park for Vappu [0] the Spring Festival. It's a celebration of Spring, labour day, and also "education and industry" since people proudly wear their school colours, company badges and graduation caps. Quite an atmosphere!
fullstackchris
Good thing we're all working here in Switzerland :/
pessimizer
According to the US, whose movements originated the May Day holiday, it's officially "Law Day," which is the day we celebrate obedience to the law (I assume by not celebrating May Day.)
The Voice of America is the only media outlet I've ever heard actually celebrating Law Day. An old job of mine had a poster on the wall for Law Day that VoA had actually printed and given away for some reason.
null
Neonlicht
All of Europe celebrated May day. All of Europe? No one village stood against the lazy commie legions!
user9999999999
[flagged]
tlogan
With all the “fascist” and “Nazi” labels being thrown around these days—often without much historical context—here’s a surprising fact I just learned: Nazi Germany was the first non-communist country to officially make May 1st, International Workers’ Day, a national public holiday.
rtkwe
Kind of. You have to ignore US Labor Day being established in 1894 which is essentially the same thing just Americanized by not sharing the day with the rest of the world.
vidarh
Note that the spread of Labor Day owed a lot to intentional efforts to counter May 1st as a commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre.
So US Labour Day is an intentionally captured, defanged, neutered version.
regularization
Mexico began celebrating May Day in 1923, before Germany.
nahuel0x
You can read a detailed analysis of the Nazi manipulation of the May Day and how it was totally anti-socialist here: https://jacobin.com/2021/05/nazi-may-day-hitler-socialism
cess11
This is such a bizarre lie.
No, the Reich did not make International Workers' Day a holiday. It made May 1st the Day of National Work and prohibited all celebrations except those arranged by the nazi state, especially celebrations by worker organisations.
GuinansEyebrows
So, how do you interpret that?
tlogan
My interpretation of the above fact is this:
Be cautious when you hear people loudly proclaiming “we’re for the working class” (Republicans) or “down with the oligarchs.” (Democrats)
This shows us that bad guys have used pro-worker language to gain public support, only to later strip away freedoms and centralize the power.
In short when a guy like Soros or Trump says they are for working class do not trust them.
Disposal8433
[dead]
ty6853
I mean the nazis were nominally socialist. And they had heavy price and wage controls and de facto government control of much of industry. They used communism-lite.
vman81
Much like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is nominally democratic.
alabastervlog
They broke the labor unions, and sent union organizers to the concentration camps—they were among the first to go. They employed mass slave labor. They collaborated closely with and enriched capital owners. Collectivism wasn't a feature of their government.
They weren't socialist at all. It's a common talking point from modern fascist apologists (I'm not accusing you of being one—this nonsense leaks out into the popular culture and just gets picked up by accident, too) but it has zero basis in reality if you run down a list of what they did. It doesn't remotely look like what an even lightly-socialist-leaning government would do. Such claims are always supported by pointing at the name (LOL. LMFAO.), making things up, and maybe cherry-picking a couple things that seem socialist-ish if you squint really hard and don't put them in context. There's some early rhetoric about it, but zero action, that was just a cynical appeal to populism, usually accompanied with attempts to redefine socialism itself to mean not-socialism—they wanted the word, but not the meaning.
ty6853
The 'communist' countries generally did these same things. The russians famously just straight up executed anarcho-communists and competing socialist factions and any union of persons associated with such. They employed essentially slave labor in the fields, taxing their grain to the point they could hardly survive. Party bosses were the 'capital' owners enjoying private cars, prime apartments, and de facto private ownership of the fruits of the working class.
Of course there is no real communism, there is no real socialism, and there is no real fascism. Nevertheless if I'm talking to some guy on a street I'll understand what he means if talks about com-bloc eastern europe or asia, and I understood OP was referring to communist countries in the way in which the term is typically used.
tlogan
The real labor unions were also banned in communist countries.
Labor unions in communist countries were directly controlled by the Communist Party.
Der_Einzige
I hate that all the bluster about "socialist or non socialist" doesn't bring up the evidence for each side.
It's very much a "it started socialist but they were used and quickly purged from the party" situation.
1. Evidence for socialism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beefsteak_Nazi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strasserism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_R%C3%B6hm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung
2. Evidence against socialism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mefo_bills
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Meeting_of_20_February_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrielleneingabe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freundeskreis_der_Wirtschaft
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_sector_participation_i...
sambeau
Incorrect.
Here's a large amount of reading matter to explain. Fill your boots.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/europe/#wiki...
standardUser
> One of the real problems with evaluating the ideological tenets of National Socialism is that they were often very ill-defined and fluctuating to meet the needs of circumstances.... The result is that National Socialist political philosophy was often incoherent
Not unlike the amorphous political movement plaguing America currently.
cenamus
Well it was a (total) war economy, not communism lite.
cmrdporcupine
They used the label "socialist" only early on for propagandistic purposes so they could destroy / substitute themselves for the socialist movement -- which was powerful and omnipresent across Europe. Germany had just gone through a failed socialist revolution and the largest force in civil society were social democrats and socialists, so using this language was useful for them, and early on they had people in their ranks who were trying to somehow fuse nationalism with some sort of socialism. Those people were exterminated.
All the NAZI leadership (after the knight of the long knives) openly spoke of their hatred of any kind of socialism -- philosophically and organizationally -- and of all socialists and socialists of all kinds were the first to be put in death camps. The entire moral and ethical framework -- the celebration of the nation and race above all else, the subservience to a singular leader, etc. reflect a hatred of socialist (internationalism, secularism, class solidarity instead of nationalism, helping the poor and weak, women's liberation) values which were considered "degenerate" and "Jewish"
(And unlike Stalinism/Maoism which also reflects similar outcomes in this case the goal is explicit and stated and propagandistically proclaimed rather than hidden under a layer of Bolshevik ideology)
So I'm not sure why libertarians etc (and recently Elon Musk) in the US keep repeating this assertion ("NAZIsm is socialism!) as some kind of fact. It only underscores a lack of knowledge of history, it's not some "gotcha", it's a self-own that only takes advantage of people who don't know the history.
vidarh
It's worth adding that the change of the name to NSDAP also happened before Hitler consolidated control and "Socialist" was added over his objections.
With respect to people repeating this idiotic claim, it dates at least back to the 70's in various places, seemingly as a counter for groups on the right that wanted to create distance from the nazis.
schmidtleonard
Ditto for the Niemoller poem. They love it so much as a template that most of them completely forgot what it said before they scribbled over it:
First they came for the Communists...
Then they came for the Socialists...
Then they came for the trade unionists...
Then they came for the Jewsdismalaf
Mussolini's definition of fascism (he's the one who popularly coined it, after all) isn't that far off from communism. In a fascist state, all corporations are loyal to the state and do it's bidding. It's basically communism but with private(ish) ownership of capital.
schmidtleonard
Socialism is collective ownership of capital. "Socialism but with private ownership of capital" is like "water but without wetness." So we call it something else.
Gallons of ink have been spilled talking about how the two types of populism are similar -- horseshoe theory -- but the reason why it's a horseshoe and not a circle is exactly the issue of capital ownership.
cmrdporcupine
Except Mussolini defines what he's doing explicitly in opposition to socialism, as a break from the socialist movement he had sort-of been a part of before his rise to prominence. Both he and the NAZIs saw themselves as trying to save the country from socialists & communists.
Just because the American education system defined "socialism" as "when the government does stuff" doesn't mean that's what it is, in, y'know, the actual real historical world.
Revolutionary socialism / communism = a working class movement trying to overthrow the dominance of the capitalist class. So putting the working class above all else.
Fascism = a nationalist movement trying to dissolve all class and other distinctions into the nation. So putting the nation above all else.
The role of the state may look effectually similar in the practices of both, but the reason and practice for doing so is entirely different.
peterhadlaw
National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazi)
amanaplanacanal
Well sure. It's like MAGA calling themselves conservative while throwing out all conservative values.
dragonwriter
MAGA don't throw out traditional conservative values (reinforcing the power of traditional racial, religious, and economic elites at the expense of other groups seeking a downward distribution of power), they throw out the libertarian values that got blended in and labeled as “conservative” values when a minimal winning coalition could not be formed purely around the overt embrace of actual traditional conservative values.
People died while trying to get better, more humane working conditions.
I tend to think we forget that things we enjoy today were won through, sometimes violent, struggle, and we take them for granted, what makes it easier to lose them.
To me this is one of the most important celebrations.