A-Infos (en) Portugal, Lisboa, Manifesto: May 1st is a day of mourning and struggle for the working class worldwide. (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

In 1886, the so-called "Chicago Martyrs," anarchists, workers, 
insurgents, were condemned to death for daring to imagine the 
impossible: that life should not be entirely captured by work. They 
fought for eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, and eight hours of 
leisure. They were, therefore, silenced by the State, the same State 
that protects property and punishes those who defy it. History, however, 
is not written with the verdict of the courts, but with the persistence 
of bodies that resist: the eight-hour workday was not granted, it was 
wrested from the bosses through organization, mourning, and collective 
struggle. What is celebrated is not a peaceful conquest, but an open 
wound that still throbs: a living memory that no right is born without 
conflict and that the struggle against exploitation and the State 
remains international, continuous, and unfinished.

The Chicago Martyrs died fighting for the workers' cause, and it is 
because anarchists lost their voices that we raise ours today. More than 
130 years ago, the minimum was demanded: about 40 hours a week, when the 
norm was 80-hour workdays that devoured life. Today, what is presented 
as progress reveals itself as regression: the new labor package tries to 
take us back to the past, with the individual time bank extending the 
workday by two hours and stealing our time, pushing us towards 50-hour 
weeks. We remain crushed by exhausting routines, by time that does not 
belong to us.

That is why we return to the streets on May 1st. Not only to remember, 
but to insist: our time is not a commodity! We invoke the memory of the 
Martyrs because the struggle is not over and because knowing our history 
as oppressed classes is also a way of refusing to forget and affirming, 
once again, the right to life beyond work.

In recent decades, May 1st has been emptied of its meaning and 
reconfigured as a docile celebration of labor or as a day of rest 
"granted" by the State: a passive holiday that erases the memory of the 
struggles that made it possible. What began as conflict has been 
transformed into ritual; what was insurrection has become a calendar 
event. In this process, the institutional unions (CGTP-IN and UGT) have 
distanced themselves from the working class, confining the struggle to 
legal means and the negotiation of crumbs. The so-called "social 
concertation" is nothing more than a renewed form of the old 
authoritarian maxim of class collaboration, a mechanism that manages 
conflict instead of confronting it. Union action, focused on immediate 
objectives, has abandoned a radical transformation of living conditions, 
leaving behind the possibility of economic, social, political, and 
sexual liberation. Added to this is the bureaucratization of unionism 
and its instrumentalization as a control device, frequently directed 
against autonomous workers' movements. What is presented as 
representation often transforms into containment, a gesture that is more 
about surveillance than liberation, more about discipline than organization.

But the struggle cannot be delegated: it is built. It is built in the 
streets, in occupations, in strikes, in direct action that refuses to 
wait for permission to exist. It is not asked for, it is taken. It is 
therefore urgent to reclaim the forms of struggle that won rights in the 
past: direct action, boycotts, strikes, sabotage. Not as memory, but as 
living practice, as an active refusal of a system that insists on 
stealing our time, our bodies, and our lives.

While they try to erase the combative character of this date, we, 
anarchists, rekindle its revolutionary flame. We call on all insurgent 
people, workers and fighters, collectives, autonomous unions, social 
movements, to occupy the streets, break the silence and denounce 
capitalist and state exploitation and all forms of domination. We call 
upon those who refuse to delegate their own lives, those committed to 
direct action, autonomy, and the construction of a world without 
hierarchies.

We demand a self-organized May 1st, outside of reformism and 
authoritarian control. We want autonomy over our time, our bodies, and 
our lives, because what has been stolen from us will not be returned; it 
must be recovered.

We do not forget those who were left out of what they called the 
"working class." Those who never fit into that narrow definition, molded 
to recognize some and erase others. We do not forget the lives pushed to 
the margins, silenced as political subjects, made invisible by an idea 
of class that was never neutral an idea constructed to exclude.

The "working class" did not emerge as a simple description of reality: 
it was historically forged, inscribed within the colonial and 
patriarchal hierarchies that sustain capitalism. From the beginning, it 
drew boundaries between what counts and what is disposable, between work 
that produces value and that which is denied, between those recognized 
as a force for transformation and those condemned to invisibility. These 
distinctions were born from the racial, sexual, and economic violence 
that organizes the world.

For centuries, the figure of the wage laborer male, white, national was 
imposed as the norm, elevating him to a legitimate political subject. 
Everything else was pushed aside: devalued, criminalized, or 
romanticized as an exception. Other forms of work, resistance, and 
survival were systematically denied, despite sustaining life.

Rethinking class struggle requires more than abstract appeals to unity. 
It requires breaking with this legacy, dismantling the imposed 
boundaries, and rejecting an idea of class closed in on itself. Class is 
not a given: it is a field of dispute. It is on this terrain that we 
stand, alongside all existences that capitalism has attempted to 
discipline, exploit, and destroy. Because the struggle is not merely for 
inclusion in a category that has always excluded, but for its radical 
transformation.

We propose an anarchist, transfeminist, anti-racist, and 
anti-imperialist May Day. A May Day that includes those pushed to the 
margins: the queer community, migrant, racialized, and precarious 
workers, sex workers, people imprisoned and forced to work in conditions 
of slavery. Because the society of work is patriarchal, ableist, and 
extractive; it values productivity above life and transforms bodies into 
resources.

We reject an education that trains us to obey and produce, that molds us 
to accept exploitation as our destiny. We want a May Day that rejects 
borders and affirms internationalism and the self-determination of 
peoples. A May 1st that acknowledges climate collapse not as an 
accident, but as a direct consequence of an industrial, colonial, and 
capitalist society.

We yearn for a life of leisure and pleasure, a life where free time is 
not a crumb granted by capital to fuel consumption, nor a functional 
rest that prepares us to be exploited again. We want time that belongs 
to us, time lived and not managed.

We want the abolition of wage labor and the end of all forms of 
domination because as long as work governs life, there will be no 
freedom. Let's transform this date into a space of agitation, 
solidarity, and popular organization. Occupy the space. Reclaim your time.

Because, like the "Chicago Martyrs," we carry in our hearts desires for 
social liberation, we occupy the streets on May 1st, starting at 3 pm, 
in Largo de Camões. This will be a space of agitation, solidarity, and 
organization against Capital and the State, and for a combative and 
autonomous May 1st. The march will end in a celebration at Largo do 
Intendente, a call for leisure and the reappropriation of public space.

Today, as yesterday, we do not resign ourselves!

Manifesto: https://tinyurl.com/1maio2026

https://colectivolibertarioevora.wordpress.com/2026/04/21/lisboa-manifesto-antiautoritario-para-um-1o-de-maio-de-luta-e-libertacao-2026/
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