May Day: A Reminder

TODAY IS MAY DAY, the international revolutionary holiday. It's a holiday whose origins are a bit obscure--it may have grown out of the battle of workers in Chicago for an eight-hour day--but which has become a symbol of hope for people throughout the world.

It hasn't been a great year for international revolution. The two countries whose apparent victories lit up last May Day have found their victories elusive. In Vietnam, the cease-fire won by almost three decades of struggle proved to be little more than a scrap of paper, as the dictatorship of Nguyen Van Thieu continued to hold tens of thousands of political prisoners and to attack liberated territories. And Chile's military, frightened by Popular Unity's movement toward true socialization of wealth and its rights--within the framework of traditional law and with full respect for traditional civil liberties--violently overthrew Salvador Allende's peacefully elected government and established a reign of terror, bloodshed and repression that still continues. Elsewhere in the world, most notably in Greece and Thailand, struggles for freedom have overturned governments, to this country's shame usually against American opposition, but with effects whose significance is nonexistent or problematic.

Even last week's military coup in Portugal--important though it was, for the prospect of earlier self-rule it raises for Portugal's rebelling African colonies and for the tremendous joy and revolutionary spirit it set off in Portugal itself--has ironies enough to make it a good symbol for the last year's limited advances. Antonio de Spinola, the country's new strong man, has no great democratic biography--his military service came as a Fascist volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, as an observer with the German army in World War II, and as a commander with Portugal's colonial army in Guinea-Bissau. He doesn't stand for independence of the colonies--just a vaguely defined "autonomy"--and he inaugurated his government by announcing that he believes in full political freedoms--within reason.

Radical change in Portugal, if it comes at all, will come because of action first by revolutionaries in its colonies and then by an aroused Portuguese people. But because these people have begun to act, they will celebrate today openly and without immediate fear of repression--something unheard of in Portugal for 45 years.

It's radical change, ownership of industry and politics alike by those who have always borne their burdens, the working people of the world, that May Day stands for. This is year when it's easy to lose sight of that vision--when it's all most people can do to fight a different vision, one of rigid totalitarian control like those of Chile's new and Portugal's's overthrown dictatorship, like (on a much smaller, milder, and more hesitant scale) the illegal tactics President Nixon liked to avail himself of. May Day is especially important this year, because it reminds is that we are after something more.