This Labor Day, remember the martyrs

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When China's State Council announced this year's Labor Day holiday would be a four-day break, I and many others were pleased — and not just for the long weekend.

International Labor Day, or May Day, commemorates the working people of the world and their protracted fight for essential rights and freedoms. Many countries have made it an official holiday, but it's held in especially high regard by socialist and communist parties, whose foundational mission is the seizure of political power by the working class. Places with successful workers' revolutions like China and Cuba value the day tremendously.

So it's a celebration that's near and dear to my heart. But Labor Day isn't just for countries with communist parties in leadership. It carries great significance for the people of the United States — though you'd never know that based on how our government treats it. The holiday was established specifically to honor the victims of the 1886 Haymarket Massacre, where Chicago police shot workers demonstrating for an eight-hour workday. An unknown party, possibly an agent provocateur, disrupted the peaceful protest by throwing a bomb, and police responded by wildly firing into the crowd. Well over 100 workers were injured or arrested, and at least four died.

Haymarket became an instant cause célèbre for pro-labor forces all over the country. Support for the martyred was matched, however, by vengeful zeal from law enforcement. Arrests, beatings and unlawful searches were common in the weeks following the massacre, and an aura of xenophobia against immigrant workers permeated every aspect of life.

The atmosphere around the anniversary was so heated, in fact, that by 1894 the US government chose to enshrine its own Labor Day in September — an act previously taken by several states. This served a dual purpose: Establishing a federal labor holiday while sapping May 1 of its radical context. Socialists defiantly observed the international day, but their capacity for action was severely diminished by state repression.

Decades later in 1958, the US Congress made another play against rising pro-worker sentiment by decreeing May 1 "Loyalty Day". A product of Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union, this change was only one salvo in a widespread campaign to suppress leftist activity throughout the 20th century. As communists, socialists, anarchists and labor activists were thrown in jail and stripped of their livelihoods during the Red Scares, their holiday was twisted into something wholly unrecognizable — one extra indignity at a time of extreme paranoia and fear.

While the US criminalized workers' movements and called them unpatriotic, other places saw those movements win massive, earth-shattering victories. The October Revolution of 1917 and the founding of the Soviet Union showed a socialist experiment was more than a distant dream, and other countries soon followed suit. The Communist Party of China established its own workers' state in 1949 after decades of fierce anti-colonial resistance, and the People's Republic of China proudly waves the red banner to this day. Though there have been setbacks in the global movement since those initial triumphs, historical examples continue to inspire — just as the Haymarket martyrs did so many years ago.

Labor Day remains an extremely important time of year across the globe. Its status as a public holiday has never changed over the PRC's long history, for example, because its spirit never dies. It's a reminder of the sacrifices by those who fought and died for liberation in China and elsewhere, as well as those still building workers' power in countries without a communist party at the helm. Every accomplishment guided by these values and the struggles that produced them is proof a people united are truly unstoppable.

I'd say that deserves a nice long break. Wouldn't you?

The author is a copy editor with chinadaily.com.cn.