Originally a pagan holiday celebrating the changing seasons and fertility, the modern day celebration of May Day grew out of the militant struggle for the eight-hour workday. After four anarchist labour organizers were executed in Chicago for a crime they didn't commit, May Day was declared an international working class holiday in 1889 to commemorate the "Haymarket martyrs" and the struggle for worker's rights and working class power.

From thousands in the street burning effigies and waving red, black, and red/black flags to sedate, sparsely attended parades hosted by labour bureaucrats, May Day celebrations remain a barometer of the state of working class movements. In North American cities, the sorry state of May Day celebrations, especially over the past decade, reveals the disorientation of organized labour and the left more generally.

But something's in the air this Spring. In the spirit of other days of action like the one that ended with the "Battle in Seattle" last November, "May Day 2K" has been endorsed as a global Day of Action Against Capitalism by a range of groups including the People's Global Action (PGA) at an International Conference in India in August 1999. Against a backdrop of increased local and global class polarization, May Day "Carnivals Against Capitalism" are being organized through out the world and in cities across Canada, including Victoria, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Ottawa.

Not your traditional May Day parade, Carnivals Against Capitalism bring together historical red (socialist/communist), black (anarchist), and green (environmentalist/rites of spring) traditions of May Day using highly visual street theatre and direct actions to express resistance and solidarity. Vancouver's Carnival Against Capitalism called by the Vancouver Direct Action Network will rally at 10am at Victory Square on Monday, May 1st and proceed with a march, street theatre, and non-violent direct actions through the city's downtown financial district (see Calendar of Events: Actions).

The Canadian Labour Congress and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions have also endorsed May 1, 2000, as a global Day of Action for International Working Class Solidarity, with plans to organize world-wide actions to promote labour rights and international solidarity. In response to this call, the BC Federation of Labour and the Vancouver and District Labour Council along with Trading Strategies and End the Arms Race are organizing a "Walk for Democracy and Against Corporate Rule" on Saturday, April 29, beginning at noon at the Peace Flame Park (see Calendar of Events: Actions).

his year marks the 12th annual Mayworks Festival in Vancouver and like May Day, it is being reinvented. An alliance of community and labour activists and activist artists have come together to produce the "Mayworks Festival of Working Class Culture and Politics." Its a do-it-yourself community festival of 50 events over 34 days - featuring cabarets, film + video, workshops, theatre, posters, radio, poetry and music - blending red, green, and black traditions of May Day.

Winning the eight-hour workday no doubt gave workers more time to be creative, but art and culture have always been powerful forces, reflecting back working class imagination, resistance, and aspirations for a better world. All kinds of cultural expressions come out of the daily lives of diverse working class communities and struggles. Its only recently that marketeers have begun mining working class cultures, taking everything from inner city music and clothes to revolutionary icons - using them, in turn, to sell everything from software, t-shirts, and soft drinks.

By the mid-1980s, Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney were also proving remarkably adept at using popular culture to transmit their New Right ideas. Labour and the left looked around and saw management soft-selling their control of the workplace with videos and artsy marketing gimmicks. Bosses were buying up radio and television stations, sponsoring arts festivals, donating funds to museums, and commissioning artists' works. The ruling class was getting its message out, shaping the way working class people saw themselves and their problems at work, in their communities, and in the world. Culture - including labour - sponsored arts festivals - became a weapon in the battle for the hearts and minds of the working class.

Drawing on the example of the 1940s Labour Arts Guild in BC - an alliance of professional artists and worker - artists that designed floats for labour parades, sang on picket lines, set up art classes for workers, and organized annual exhibits at the Vancouver Art Gallery - unions initiated and funded the first "Mayworks Festival of Culture and Working Life" in 1988. Envisioned as an alliance between workers and artists to produce "labour positive art" for union and non-union audiences, Mayworks was to go beyond the traditional methods of buttons, postcards, banners and union papers to get the union message out.

From 1988 to 1996, Mayworks Festivals in Vancouver were primarily funded and given direction by unions within the BC Federation of Labour and the Vancouver and District Labour Council. At its peak, the Festival was produced by a staff of eight, a crew of volunteers, and a board of directors that began planning in December. The week-long festival of theatre, poetry, concerts, cabarets, art exhibits, and workshops had several aims: to provide a positive image for unions; to provide work at a union-wage for artists; to challenge high brow notions of art and present the works of professional artists alongside art by worker-artists; to take art out of galleries into non-traditional spaces like union halls and schools; and to create "labour positive art."

A select group of deserving artists did get the chance to earn a decent pay cheque for a change. But what exactly is "labour positive art" and was this the best way to foster progressive cultural work and workers?

Events like a 1988 Mayworks Songs of Work and Protest Songwriting competition sparked early debate on these questions. Some argued that this method - and the whole idea of labour commissions to produce "labour positive art" - did not ensure any more working class content in popular culture. Nor did it address the appropriation and commodification of working class culture or questions of ownership and control in the media, recording industry, publishing houses, theatres, art galleries, or film industry. Others wondered why organized labour didn't do more to support those working class artists that were already active, the life blood of struggles year round.

By the mid-1990s, Mayworks in Vancouver had lost steam. Volunteers and board members attempted to keep it going, often taking on debt after organized labour lost interest in funding the project. In 1997, the same year that Mayworks disappeared off the radar entirely, Under the Volcano (UTV) Festivals was in its 8th year of independently producing and programming community festivals and youth art projects in the Lower Mainland and the Kootenays. Back in 1993, UTV's ARTEST Magazine had produced its own Mayworks all-ages cabaret, "Dish Pigs and Wage Slaves," aimed at non-unionized youth working low-wage, service sector jobs. In 1998, UTV approached former Mayworks organizers and offered to breath life back into the project. The suggestion was welcomed.

Three years later, Under the Volcano's role has been that of initiating meetings for a very different kind of Mayworks. Rather than commission art and programs, Mayworks volunteers put out a call for proposals inviting progressive groups and individuals to organize their own events on the theme of working class culture and politics. It was hoped that groups would grab the opportunity to bring class culture and politics to a wider audience. Organizers also hoped that progressive groups and artists in general would be provoked into assessing the importance of class in their own work and analysis. The proposals soon started flooding in, culminating in a 34-day festival with over 50 events! A Mayworks working group meets weekly and helps work out venues, artists, volunteers, and fundraising ideas with independent events producers. Mayworks also produces a 16-page Festival Guide, distributing 30,000 copies to promote the Festival. There has been some fundraising, but it's anticipated that most funds will be generated through festival events and donations.

ts got a new name, more events on a smaller budget, new funding sources, and its produced in a new way. But there are more fundamental changes behind Vancouver's new Mayworks Festival.

Since NDP welfare reforms began in 1995, over 100,000 people have disappeared from the welfare rolls in BC - this during a period of high unemployment, especially for youth. Meanwhile, employment in BC has been falling in the heavily unionized forestry and mineral industries and those jobs that have been created tend to be part-time and in the non-unionized service sector, most often taken up by youth, women, people of colour and immigrants.

A growing underclass of chronically unemployed, underemployed, or low paid workers has been created in BC, a development mirrored in capitalist economies all over the world. This segment of the working class - its politics and aspirations as well as its cultural expressions and organizational innovations - has shaped this year's Mayworks Festival.

This year's events reflect a broad international vision of working class culture beyond the shop floor from workers in the growing service sector to those in welfare, unemployment, and immigration lines, from working class households and communities to class on the reserve and in youth cultures. Class struggle issues of housing, sexism, racism, transit, immigration, mental health, workplace control, wages, sexuality, clean air and water, access to welfare, education, and medical services, policing - and more - hit the Mayworks stage.

ayworks as a "Festival of Working Class Culture and Politics" differs from Mayworks past and Canada's largest and oldest labour-sponsored Mayworks "Festival of Working People and the Arts" held annually in Toronto. For present day Mayworks organizers, the tag "working people" - while favoured by some unions and the NDP - misses the point. May Day is a day to recognize the ongoing struggles of workers, whether employed or unemployed, as a class - no less for its differences - with common experiences and interests, and with common opposition to bosses and their control over production, investment, finances, and communications in the workplace and beyond. As a recent Canadian Auto Workers Taskforce on working class politics in the 21st century states, behind the language of "working class politics" is the idea of developing the working class into a political force to be reckoned with.

This year's Mayworks goes beyond an "arts festival" celebration of working class culture and "getting the message out" to events that look at the state of working class politics and questions of independent left organizing in Vancouver and farther afield. At a time when the left in BC is clearly disoriented and the union movement is openly questioning its traditional relationship with the NDP, Mayworks hopes to provide a forum to rethink working class politics in BC, making room for independent left thought, imagination, and action.

The pro-union message is still strong and unions like the CAW that are actively interested in reaching unorganized sectors have continued to support this year's festival in various ways. Key themes for this year's Festival are emerging: creative organizing in working class communities; and issues and possibilities for community/labour alliances. For example, Mayworks will be showcasing through video, film, and workshops (see calendar), the work of the 18-year old Labor/Community Strategy Centre in Los Angeles. The Strategy Centre is known for its successful on-the-ground campaigns including its beginnings as an independent coalition of workers and community activists that kept the GM Van Nuys auto plant open in LA for a full decade, and its Bus Riders Union, a multiracial working class community fight for truly mass transit, featured in a newly-completed documentary (see Calendar of Events: Video). Just in time for Translink transit fare increases announced for June 1st, two Bus Rider Union organizers will be in town to do workshops on environmentalism and independent left organizing relevant to working class communities.

For Vancouver's new Mayworks Festival, it will be a year of experimentation, learning opportunities (ie. mistakes), and alliance building as audiences and problems are shared by all the producers of the Festival. In the process, it's hoped that community and labour activists and activist artists begin to explore the possibilities of collaboration beyond the production of the Festival to strengthen and energize working class politics and organizing in Vancouver.

By Suzanne Baustad