Charlie Chaplin in a still from Modern Times.

May Day is no more than a forgotten sentiment for the burgeoning-middle classes and whatever be the discourse of change in Bengal, the working classes are unlikely to find much mention in its political rhetoric, writes Sayandeb Chowdhury

“Ten thousand times the labor movement has stumbled and bruised itself. We have been enjoined by the courts, assaulted by thugs, charged by the militia, traduced by the press, frowned upon in public opinion, and deceived by politicians. But not withstanding all this and all these, labor is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission is as certain of ultimate realisation as is the setting of the sun.”

This quote, full of the brio and the sentimental overreach that reflects a Soviet era certainty about the centrality of labour, comes not from any leader of the Comintern but from the writings of Eugene Victor Debs, a noted American union leader who also co-founded the International Labour Union (ILO) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Debs was also several times the candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the US. The above is a small and symptomatic reference to a lifelong preoccupation of his, his party and peers and a generation of writers, musicians and statesmen: from Paul Robeson to Malcolm X and WEB DuBois to Martin Luther King Junior for whom uses and abuses of labour, American or otherwise, was central to their thought, action and occupation. Yes, America, the free market Utopia had once had a robust socialist strain in its politics and Labour was once a major concern. But not anymore.
Consider May Day. We know it’s the International Workers’ Day because the resident local comrade has babbled its definition loudly to us every year without fail for the past few decades. May Day, for good or for worse, “commemorates the historic struggle of working people throughout the world”. We know this part but perhaps we do know that the day is recognised in every country except the US, Canada, and South Africa. Knowing this our known comrade, would inevitably mutter, “Down with American imperialism”. Perhaps yes. Or may be no. Because the story of May Day and the triumph of the working classes is a story long forgotten, not just in the US but everywhere across the globe.

But did we mention that the holiday actually began in the 1880s in the United States itself, with the fight for an eight-hour work day? Yes, as a popular manifesto distributed by a radical US group states, “In 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions passed a resolution stating that eight hours would constitute a legal day’s work from and after May1, 1886. The resolution called for a general strike to achieve the goal, since legislative methods had already failed. With workers being forced to work ten, twelve, and fourteen hours a day, rank-and-file support for the eight-hour movement grew rapidly, despite the indifference and hostility of many union leaders. By April 1886, 250,000 workers were involved in the May Day movement.”

That movement has surely fizzled out and how!

As Communism spread across the world and labour concerns proliferated, May Day became a rallying point, a day of radical protests, announcements and loud deliberations on labour and working-class concerns and rights issues. For much of the 20th century, May Day meant, in one part of the globe, an occasion to breast thump achievements in the working class struggle for equality and rights. On another part it meant the spectre of a Communist takeover, the march of the Red Brigade, though in most cases, the rights were uniformly and successfully negotiated only with the unions.

Till even that was not necessary. Since WWII, with the rise of large corporations on one side and the domination of politics by Cold War repartees on the other, labour as a cause in democracy has seen a gradual erosion in appreciation. “The deification or hagiography about the glory of the working classes and the rhetorical platitudes about labour across the Communist states meant that Western democracies, apprehensive of so called proletarian backlash, often relegated it as a concern only of the unions”, says political scientist Dwaipayan Roy.

Unions were a way of boxing dissent, if any, though much of the real concern actually found expression in the arts and cinema. “The culture and the arts in the West have of course been more sympathetic to the cause of labour and across the West as in America, cinema and theatre have, for better or for worse, gone back to the one of the touchstones of socialism again and again. A generic working class cinema may not have evolved as a bonafide classification but working class narratives played an essential part in the gradual evolution of motion pictures into modernity”, says cinema researcher Abhik Moitra.

Not that the Soviet was doing much either. For in the Stalin era, like all else, real concern about labour as an economic subject was systematically disregarded to ensure a collective submission to the all-pervasive authority of the (police) state. “The damage done by Stalin and his successors to the cause of labour, an idea that was central to the Leninist vision, was irretrievable. Across the world, trampling on the rights of the working classes, once considered full of revolutionary risk, was now considered de jure”, says Roy.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, labour as a concept was relegated as unimportant as long as the unions were part of the ruling political faction, both in the democracies and single-party systems in the West. And since the onset of globalization, as the market friendliness became the index of well-being and worthiness of social and political subjectivity, labour is all but a necessary distraction of the industry.

As for the general public, the working class is just another faction of the population. In fact, economists are no more concerned about working class factors except that the more benign of them now think of ways that will make the bargains or wages, working hours and working conditions agreeable to governments and corporations. In fact, labour is now all about the ways of participation in the global economy and how that can contribute to growth and development.

The issue is not about right but about collective bargaining. As authors Susan Hayter write in their new volume of essays on the future of labour , “Collective bargaining is often seen as either an impediment to the smooth functioning of markets, or as ineffective. But on the other side of the story is the positive contribution that collective bargaining can make to both economic and social goals. No one size fits all and the various contributions examine how this fundamental principle and right at work is realized in different country settings and how its practice can be reinforced across borders.”

What is now considered essential as part of a globalising economy is what was once considered fundamental for the labour classes. “In fact the gradual erosion of the idea labour from political discourse, not just in emerging democracies but also mature democracies is one of the most poignant histories of alienation in the twentieth century”, says Roy.

So much so that in an always-in-the-making urban conglomerate like Calcutta, working, sweating men and women in construction, real estate, transport, carriage and other omnipresent menial jobs, who toil endlessly, day in and day out, are actually invisible to our sight, are perpetually below our line of vision. Ditto for the casual and child-labour who are here, there and everywhere but no one really cares about them as long as they are not up to some disruption.

Every May Day, as we spread our sedentary selves across our Italian sofas and press the remote for another dose of breaking news we are happily engulfed in a false sense of well-being, while someone out there is working endlessly, sine qua non, to see that we have a good night’s sleep tonight.

Bengal is now tantalisingly poised between two political cultures and it would be sufficient to say that none have bothered to venture more than skin-deep into the issues concerning the working class. The Trinamool Congress does not have any such compulsion because it’s a party that feeds on the morsels that are left after the Communists have left the meal, shouting hoary about the leftovers. The Communists, for all their organizational skills, rhetorical showmanship and choicest coinages from Marxian manifestos, have done little to improve the means and ends of the state’s working classes. In fact, it is the Left that has presided over the dismemberment of Bengal’s once robust working class by systematically destroying the state’s industrial culture and climate. In brief, it has thrown the baby of labour away with the bathwater of self-aggrandizing ethic of protest.

What TMC inherits is a dead horse and it is neither keen nor is it enabled to bring it back to life. So much for change. So much for continuity. As Marx said, “Communism deprives no man of the ability to appropriate the fruits of his labour. The only thing it deprives him of is the ability to enslave others by means of such appropriations”. Wish our political class understood what it meant. Because in that case, they would have not laboured on the contrary; they would not have laboured to prostitutionalise change.