Describing the working day in Capital, Karl Marx wrote, “Capital is dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by draining living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”

There are few places where this cold truth was made more concrete, more bloody, than in the Haymarket Massacre—the event that inspired May Day.

Direct challenge to capitalism

In the spring of 1886, the American working class was moving. Hundreds of thousands struck across the country for a simple demand: the eight-hour day.

The struggle for a shorter workday was a direct challenge to the capitalist’s right to consume a worker’s life.

In Chicago, the struggle reached a breaking point. On May 3, police opened fire on striking workers, killing at least four. The next day, a protest was called at Haymarket Square. Around 1,500 workers gathered. Showing incredible restraint in the face of repression, the rally was peaceful. Even Chicago’s mayor, Carter Harrison Sr., attended and later reported there was no danger.

As rain fell and the crowd thinned, only a few hundred remained. At that moment, Captain John “Black Jack” Bonfield marched 125 police into the square, ordering the workers to disperse.

Then, a bomb exploded.

Pandemonium followed. Police fired wildly into the crowd. Seven officers died. An unknown number of workers were killed or wounded.

Kangaroo court

What followed was not an investigation, but the state declaring open season on the working class. Police raided homes, arresting hundreds. They targeted known militants—anarchists, socialists, and communists alike. The bourgeois press howled for blood.

Seven men were selected as scapegoats, including the editors of two anarchist newspapers, Albert Parsons and August Spies, and Samuel Fielden, a labor activist and Methodist lay preacher. Not one of them was proven to have thrown the bomb.

The trial was a farce. Judge Joseph E. Gary consistently sided with the prosecution. The jury was packed with businessmen and clerks hostile to the labor movement. Cook County State’s Attorney Julius S. Grinnell made his aim explicit: “Protecting society and government against enemies bent on their destruction.”

Evidence was distorted, or simply invented. Political beliefs were treated as crimes. Books the defendants may or may not have read were entered into evidence as proof of their guilt. Prosecution witnesses contradicted themselves. It did not matter. The verdict had been decided in advance.

On November 11, 1887, Parsons, Spies, Adolph Fischer, and George Engel were hanged. A day earlier, Louis Lingg had died in his cell from an apparent suicide. Fielden and Michael Schwab had their sentences commuted to life.

“Till the crimson banner waves in triumph”

The state is not a neutral arbiter. It is an instrument of class rule. When the working class begins to move independently, the ruling class responds with force.

The police who fired on workers, the newspapers that whipped up hysteria, the courts that delivered death sentences—acted as one.

The courage of the Haymarket martyrs is beyond question. In the face of certain death, they stood firm. The week before his execution, Parsons wrote, “To other hands are now committed that task which was mine … the standard—the press—which my hands bore aloft in the midst of the struggle is caught up by other hands, and will be again and again … till the crimson banner waves in triumph over the enemies of peace, brotherhood, and happiness.”

The standard is now in our hands. The political work of the Haymarket martyrs continues in our movement today, which must, yet again, take up the demand for a life outside of work. More than half of workers in the US work over 40 hours a week, and 40% work more than 50.

Our demands cannot be won through isolated acts of revenge or defiance. Our goals require a class-conscious movement, rooted in the organized working class and politically independent of the capitalist parties. It requires leadership that understands the capitalists and their state not as institutions to appeal to, but forces to be overcome.

In other words, it requires communists.

We remember Haymarket not only as a tragedy, but as a warning and a guide. The working class in the United States has a proud, militant history. It has faced down bullets, prisons, and gallows. It has learned hard lessons and paid the price for these lessons in blood.

Today, the RCA fights to fuse that tradition of struggle with clear, revolutionary leadership.