Labor Day was established by Grover Cleveland's 1887 suggestion, in order to keep working class from organizing around May 1st. The state of Oregon was the first to adopt it, and it was National policy by 1894. The idea was to distract attention from the much more frightening (to the yachting class) holiday, May 1st, International workers day, which around the world still celebrates the Haymarket Martyrs. Labor Day, today, is merely a sop to the working class, thrown by the Inheritance class.
But even so, it is more attenuated than that, because it doesn't apply to the entire working class; for example, today I was able to go to a local grocery store, one that used to have some Union representation. It was open, I didn't have to plan in advance, I knew that it would be open, because the lower working class doesn't get this day off. The banking class gets it off, the attorneys take it off, the CEOs and much of the managerial class take it off -- in fact, for them, it's part of a traditional two or three weeks of being off work--but for middle Management and the mere common workers, the worker bees, well, we're all there in the workplace, and Labor Day means absolutely nothing to us, and never has.
There are many of you listening to me right now, who have never had a Labor Day Off.
The presence of this Labor Day, dispensed to you as if in largesse, is to keep you from thinking of the structure of the society that you are in, specifically, that you are bound to a capitalist society, and your status is scarcely more than that of serfs. Your contribution in the work world is limited and defined by your employers, and your consideration, understanding and even knowledge of the direction and management of the firm that you work for is not at all welcome-- in fact, it would be considered criminal spying if detected; whereas if you worked in a Cooperative, a real worker owned cooperative, you would need to know at least the basics of everything that the firm was doing-- and would be to your advantage, because you would be able to vote on the direction, nature, frequency, and even intensity of work, and you would be able to distribute the fruits of your work equitably.
That's just basic human fairness, and the inheritance classes are so terrified of the idea that they try to co-opt it from time to time, as in the case when Walmart workers are called Associates. They are not Associates of course, they are in fact peons, to the degree that they are famously dependent on food stamps, which in turn provide a hidden State wage subsidy to the Walmart billionaire heirs.
The whole idea behind capitalism is drawing the true value of the work that you do away from you, returning only a portion of it arbitrarily designated as a wage ...all the rest, even if it is fifty times that amount, is taken by the capitalist, whose name comes from the fact his powert is derived from the capital-- in other words, from the fact that this person had the money first, and therefore has the right to rule you as a neofeudal serf. This arbitrary power devolves right down to what sort of clothing you get to wear,and what time you show up and go home, and even when you eat, or relieve yourself.
Take, for example, the workers in restaurants --they will be working extra hard today. The waiting staff and the cooks know that they will have to move as if in a race much of the day, hour upon hour, no matter how long it takes to get everything set up, cooked, distributed, taken down and cleaned. Food work can become intense. That reuben sandwich doesn't make itself; the forks, plates, knives, napkins and water and orders don't go to the tables by themselves (and in this particular industry the usage of robots is so far a joke). So there is a great deal of work done to bring in the cash. which then represents the payment for that work, but no matter how hard the cook works, nor how fast the wait staff works, nor how pleasant they manage to be, the income will go entirely to the owner of the restaurant, who may not even be present; and if that's a large amount of money, which it is likely to be on a day like today, then he or she keeps all of it --even the tips are likely to be distributed in part to the owner simply because the owner can get away with it.
That's extraction on a small scale, and certainly not the worst of it. I use it because it is familiar to almost all of us. If I had my way, all of the larger restaurants would be worker owned co-operatives. But if you look to an Amazon warehouse, or to workers assembling Apple phones or Nike shoes-- that is extraction on a grand scale, and the profits generated by all those stressing, aching working people's bodies go straight to the inheritance class-- people who are born with wealth, who did never work a day in their lives, who have other people to manage their vast investments, who are able to invest in those corporations and who are guaranteed a constant flow of money, all of which is extracted directly from the lives, the work, and ultimately the misery of the workers. Remember the famous nets that were placed around the Apple jobbers factories, to stop workers from leaping off in despair to their deaths, to the only relief they would ever know.
Capitalism is extraction. In the case of the medical plasma industry, it is literally sucking the blood out of the worker. It is extracted in the healthcare industry by denying people health, but also by employing an army of people to program computers, and answer phones, and manage the denial of medical care. Like penned livestock, we have become used to this, and say that it is the way of the world, but in reality, and in the sweep of human history, it is a relatively new form of extraction, and scarcely less brutal than feudalism. At least under feudalism the serfs had a right to exist on their land. Here we throw our excess and worn out workers onto the sidewalks, even if they are our grandmothers or our children.
It does no one any good to accept the capitalist system as normal and natural; in fact, it is a perversion of human relations.
Industrial manufacturing was moving forward pretty quickly in the United States in 1886, following the extremely long post-Civil War depression, and it was possible to get a job in a big city like Chicago, although you were expected to work ten hours a day, six days a week --and by doing so, one was dispensed only enough to live in a dunghill of a tenement. People organized--the Wobblies and others did--and had giant rallies, including the one at Haymarket Square, where the Chicago Police decided to violently confront them. It is long a legend,and now wrongly considered fact, that a bomb was thrown at the police at Haymarket Square. Maybe you've seen the drawing. But forensic evidence at the site showed that there was no bomb, simply because there was no shrapnel to be picked out of the nearby buildings and telephone poles; but there were hundreds of police bullets found there. There was an hysterical and loaded trial of several anarchists after that Massacre, and some of the arrested were sentenced to death, and one killed himself, but the rest were later pardoned, as it was generally recognized that the trial was performed to smear the labor activists and to obscure the all too common case of police pretending that they had been attacked, when they were in fact the attackers.
And yes, the demonstrators fired back, thereby winning your rights.
If that police tactic sounds familiar, that's because it is still effective; it works fine for the police, and for those portions of the population that value predictability and order above change and progress. Certainly in the United States today, police repression is preferred over any possible outbreak of democracy --the very idea of which is unfamiliar and frightening to nearly the entire population-- and that goes double for the inheritance class. The absence of an informed and participatory population has led to many horrors, not least the bloody and ongoing Imperial Wars, the mass incarceration Jim Crow state, and to global warming, to a frightening degree.
Today the masses are encouraged to go to oval tracks and watch vehicles hurl themselves around at a dangerous and often bloody rate, exactly as was the case for the Romans two thousand years ago. We need not fear the Visigoths, but the yachting class fears the outbreak of the very idea of socialism, to the extent that Fox News has accidentally and hilariously contributed to the hero status of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who after all has suggested only the most mild and basic reforms in the direction of socialism. In the context of this American society, in which everything has a price tag, even the most basic housing and access to water, food, and medical care, the importance of prosperity cannot be denied.
The demagogue president, presenting himself as the hero of the working class, has instead deliberately misdirected trillions of dollars to the inheritance class, while worsening the conditions of the people who produced that wealth. At the same time, he and his party direct a massive effort to deny the franchise to persons who cannot immediately prove their long-standing residence-- in other words, they are creating a class of non-voters and making certain that that class is kept down. The resulting ultra-capitalism is a reign of terror--terror that you will join the masses who stare at you from the curbs with imploring signs, begging for scraps in the richest land on this Earth. --Terror that you, too, will be arrested on some or no pretext, and brought into the courts only to discover that everyone is guilty until proven wealthy, terror that you too will eventually die alone, friendless, and in great pain.
We watch and laugh at the zombie movies and shows, but how different are the ragged zombies from the lumpenproletariat masses,the hordes that were once our friends, relatives, and co-workers, who now stumble through the streets without healthcare, food, clean clothing, privacy, dignity, comfort or even shade from the sun, and shelter from the elements? "They made poor choices," some will say, and I curse each one of you who repeats that pitiful brainwashed mantram. Better I should curse and offend you now, and that you should be stung by that, than that the day should come when that idiocy is applied to you. Because it will be, when you fall, when you break some part of your body or your mind, should your luck run out. It was the Haymarket Martyrs --and by that I do not mean the police--who gave you what is left, the ghost, the shadow of the eight-hour day, that still gibbers and whispers at employers when they think of the profits they could gather to themselves, if they could just make you work longer for less pay.
Without unions, without an understanding of our worker's history, without organizing, that is exactly what they will do. And the ultimate profits are to be made from the ultimate system of capitalism, that is, slave labor, which has been reconstituted in our prisons today, and which is, even as I speak, taking the human rights from our millions and millions of prisoners in this police state, as it takes away away productive work and wages from you.
So I ask you to take a defiant stance, and to remember that this day has, deep underneath the led screens, always been about socialism, and the right of the workers, and not about department store sales, and high-powered cars racing around tracks. It is the day that has been pushed to the other end of summer, just to keep you from thinking of your own rights.
That is the status of Labor Day as it stands in this year 2018. I am pleased to see that people are talking about socialism again, but even if we are again silenced, I'll remember the old stanzas:
So hold the workers banner high/ beneath its folds we'll live and die/though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we'll keep the red flag flying here....