May 1st is not a holiday. It is neither a day graciously granted nor a breather offered between two weeks of toil. It carries within it a raw, unyielding memory, born in the dust and clamour of Chicago’s streets, when in 1886, workers stopped obeying. The Haymarket Affair is not a mere anecdote from the past: it is an explosion that continues to reverberate through the present.
They demanded time. Eight hours to live, to love, to think. Nothing excessive: merely to reclaim a part of their lives from those who profited from them. And yet, it took repression, bullets, unjust trials, and the noose. Among those convicted were anarchists—Albert Parsons, August Spies—whose crime was less an act than an idea: that life should not be entirely devoted to work.
Since then, attempts have been made to obscure this memory. To polish it, to soften it. To turn it into a harmless ritual. A “Labor Day”—as if work needed to be celebrated, as if one could honor, without irony, that which wears us down, constrains us, damages us, and all too often destroys us. Behind the words, there is always a battle. And this one is not over.
For nothing has disappeared of what was at stake back then. Work continues to impose itself as a given, an indisputable necessity—even as it orchestrates the exhaustion of bodies and the devastation of the world. It does not merely take our time: it shapes ravaged territories, depleted soils, fragmented lives. What the Chicago insurgents foresaw is now unfolding on an unprecedented scale. The exploitation of humans and that of living beings stem from the same act, obeying the same logic.
In this breach, another way of thinking persists—tenacious, unyielding. That of a social ecology, which voices like Murray Bookchin’s have rigorously championed, and which refuses to separate the question of labor from that of the world we inhabit. It is no longer just a matter of improving conditions: it is a matter of breaking with a logic that transforms everything—our actions, our environments, our relationships, our bodies—into resources to be extracted, exhausted, and discarded.
Then May 1st regains its true meaning. Not a celebration: a fissure. A refusal. An invitation to desert what destroys us and to invent what might connect us. To refuse that our lives be reduced to mere utility. To refuse that production justifies destruction. To refuse that the order of the world be one of silent coercion and learned resignation.
At the Atelier, we choose not to forget. Better yet: we choose to carry on. For what those at Haymarket stood for is not a matter of memory—it is an unfinished task. To regain control over our lives, our actions, our ways of inhabiting the world. To make the common good not a slogan, but a daily, stubborn, concrete practice.
This May 1st, we are not celebrating anything. We are asserting.
That our lives are not for sale. That our time is not for sale.
And that other worlds will not be born from a management of disaster—but from a clear, collective, irreversible refusal.
From the right not to be exploited… to the right, at last, to take care of ourselves and the world.
Rebound: