[Editorial note: The Partisan is translating and publishing an article by Peruvian revolutionary José Carlos Mariátegui on the importance of struggle on the occasion of May Day. Mariátegui was the founder of the Communist Party of Peru who outline the path of revolution in semi-colonial, semi-feudal countries of Latin America, and one of the most important socialist thinkers in the Americas. This article was first published in Labor No. 8, May 1, 1929.]

The commemoration of May 1 has, in the process of the struggle for socialism, been acquiring an increasingly profound and precise meaning. For a long time now, it has not been reduced to the commemoration of the Chicago martyrs. That was its starting point. Since 1888, when the Congress of Paris instituted this commemoration, the world proletariat has traversed a considerable part of the path leading to the realization of its class ideals. During this time, many days of mourning and also many days of glory have followed one another in its history. The working class has come of age. The chronicle of its economic and political ascension always records great events, which prevent the proletariat from limiting the significance of May 1 to a single anniversary. The experimentation, the implementation of socialism has begun since 1918. The most difficult and longest battles are yet to be won. But in the struggle, the working class incessantly increases its capacity to create a new order: the socialist order.

May 1 affirms every year the international solidarity of workers. It is the international, universal date par excellence. In its celebration, the vanguards of the proletariat from the five continents coincide. In this fact resides its greatest revolutionary significance. Reactionary nationalisms feel this clearly when, like Fascism in Italy, they strive to proscribe this date from the sentiment of the working class. A futile endeavor, because nothing will give a more religious and profound character to the commemoration of May 1 in the spirit of every worker than reactionary persecution and condemnation. Fascism is resurrecting the heroic age of the catacombs in Italy. This day passes today in Italy without rallies, without strikes, without revolutionary hymns, without red flags; but in a thousand hidden homes, faith in socialism is sworn with more fervor and resolution than ever.

Everything that May 1 has had, and still has, of the mechanical rite of a simple anniversary must be banished. The struggle for socialism is not nourished by sorrowful or angry evocations, nor by exalted hopes. It is, above all else, concrete action; present reality. Those who work for the advent of a new society are those who, throughout the year, disciplinedly and obstinately fight for socialism; not those who, on this or another date, feel a momentary impulse for riot or uprising.

For our workers’ vanguard, each May 1 would represent very little if it did not mark a stage in its own struggle for socialism. Year after year, this date raises concrete, current questions. What have been the results and the experience of the action developed? What are the tasks of the future? The problem presented today in the foreground is, without a doubt, a problem of organization. The workers’ vanguard has the duty to promote and direct the organization of the Peruvian proletariat—a mission that demands a sense of responsibility, to which it is not possible to rise except to the extent that one breaks with anarchoid individualism, with the explosive and intermittent utopianism of those who previously, at times guiding the masses, imagined they were leading them toward a new order by the sole virtue of negation and protest. Let us reclaim entirely, absolutely, the workers’ right of association, their freedom of legal organization in the cities, the mines, and the plantations. And let us assume the task that the claiming of this right be the affirmation of a capacity. Here is the work to be fulfilled; here is the mission to be discharged. Let May 1 serve this time so that, by understanding it, we affirm, without useless declamation, the will and the aptitude to realize them.