A World in the Streets: The International History of May Day
On the first of May, something remarkable happens. In Paris, unions march down the Boulevard du Temple. In Berlin, anarchists and trade unionists gather beneath red and black banners. In Havana, a million people fill the Plaza de la Revolución. In Istanbul, workers congregate in Taksim Square. In Mumbai, Nairobi, Buenos Aires, Seoul and elsewhere the day is marked with the same defiant assertion – the people who produce the wealth of the world have not yet received their fair share of it, and they have not stopped demanding it.
International Workers’ Day is observed in over 160 countries. It is the most widely commemorated labour holiday on earth, and one of the few genuinely global expressions of working-class solidarity.
Labour Day celebrations had existed in parts of Europe since the late eighteenth century. But the decisive moment came across the Atlantic. On 1 May 1886, American workers launched a general strike demanding an eight-hour working day. For most labourers of the era, the working day stretched to ten, twelve, sometimes fourteen hours. The demand for a limit on working hours was not merely practical. It was a moral and philosophical claim as well.
By 1891, International Workers’ Day had been formally recognised as an annual event. The message was clear. This was not a national holiday – it was an international act of class solidarity, a collective refusal, repeated every year, to pretend that the interests of capital and the interests of labour were the same.
What May Day represents, at its irreducible core, is a refusal to accept that the logic of capitalism, the reduction of living beings to units of economic productivity, is either natural or inevitable. May Day asks us to sit with that struggle, and to extend its logic, honestly and rigorously, to those who remain exploited.
The Invisible Workforce: Animals as Forced Labourers
Too often, when we speak of labour on May Day, we speak only of humans. But there is another workforce, vast beyond easy comprehension, legally invisible, utterly without recourse, that is rarely included in the conversation. It is a workforce measured not in millions but in billions. It is a workforce whose exploitation is not merely tolerated but enshrined in law, celebrated in commerce, promoted through culture, and subsidised by governments of every political stripe.
It is the workforce of animals.
The scale of animal labour exploitation is so enormous that it defies simple quantification. Unlike human labour, tracked through payrolls and employment statistics, animal labour is typically categorised in economic accounts as livestock (put more accurately – living stock), a linguistic sleight of hand that erases the individual from the balance sheet entirely. At any given moment, hundreds of millions of animals are engaged in forced labour of one kind or another. The combined global market value of farmed animals and their primary outputs – meat, milk, eggs – is estimated to be as much as $3.3 trillion annually. The livestock sector contributes roughly 40% of global agricultural GDP.
These are not abstract numbers. Behind each figure is a sentient being, capable of feeling pain and fear, of attachment and loss, compelled to produce without rest, without consent, and without the possibility of refusal.
Labour Until Collapse
In the Global South, approximately 300 million draft animals, oxen, donkeys, horses, mules, and camels, provide the primary power source for roughly 50% of the world’s cultivated land. In India alone, some 70 million animals plough approximately 65% of agricultural land. Their mechanised replacement value has been estimated at $6 billion, which shrinks when compared to India’s 2025 projected GDP of $4.15 trillion. The opportunity to automate may not be in the individual farmer’s grasp, but it is easily within the country’s reach. Affordability to change is not the problem, it’s the prevailing ideology of exploitation that is the hurdle.
What these figures conceal is the lived reality of the animals themselves. Draft animals typically work until physical collapse. They receive no retirement, no recognition that their bodies have limits. Veterinary care in many regions is minimal or non-existent. When an animal can no longer work, it is slaughtered or abandoned. There is no end-of-career, only the point at which the body gives out and the instrument is discarded. Because animals cannot own the value they produce, 100% of their labour constitutes surplus value for their human owners – a more total extraction than even the most brutal forms of wage labour.
The Factory Inside the Body
In the industrial animal complex, exploitation takes a different and arguably more intimate form – the forced extraction of biological output. Billions of dairy cows and laying hens are, in the language of industry, ‘productive units.’ Their labour is not muscle or movement but the ceaseless biological production of milk and eggs, cruelly achieved through cycles of forced impregnation, intensive confinement, and the systematic removal of their offspring.
A dairy cow in a high-intensity system is kept pregnant for the majority of her productive life. Her calf, the biological reason for her milk production, is taken from her within hours or days of birth. The distress this causes in both mother and calf is well-documented. The cow is then milked mechanically, her body treated as a fluid-producing machine. When her milk production falls below a profitable threshold, she is killed at a fraction of her natural lifespan.
Laying hens in battery cage systems spend their entire lives in spaces smaller than an A4 sheet of paper. They cannot spread their wings, dust-bathe, or perform any of the behaviours natural to their species. Their beaks are often partially removed without anaesthetic to manage the aggression that emerges from extreme confinement. Like the dairy cow, they are slaughtered as soon as their productivity declines. The animal’s very biology, her reproductive system, her hormonal cycles, her body’s capacity to produce is commandeered for human profit. Let that sink in.
Stolen Labour: The Parallel with the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved People
To compare animal exploitation with the transatlantic trade in enslaved people is, for many, an instinctively uncomfortable move. It can feel reductive of human suffering, or worse, like a rhetorical trick designed to shock rather than illuminate. It is neither. It is a structurally precise comparison that reveals the shared architecture of two systems both built on the same foundational premise – that certain living beings can be classified as property, and that property has no interests the law is obliged to respect.
Between roughly 1500 and 1800, an estimated 12 million African men, women, and children were forcibly transported across the Atlantic to labour on plantations in the Americas. Their work produced the sugar, tobacco, cotton and indigo that underwrote the prosperity of European empires. They received nothing in return – not wages, not legal standing, not the recognition that they were persons rather than possessions. They were, in the language of the era, ‘human capital’ – beings whose value was purely instrumental, measured in their capacity to produce.
The parallels with the condition of animals today are not superficial. They are structural, legal, and economic. Consider the following:
- Property status. The foundational legal instrument of chattel slavery was the classification of enslaved people as property, things that could be owned, bought, sold, and disposed of at the discretion of their owners. Animals today occupy exactly this legal category in virtually every jurisdiction on earth. They are classified as property, not persons. Their owners may do with them as they see fit.
- Total labour appropriation. Enslaved workers received no share of the value they produced. Every calorie of sugar, every bale of cotton, every brick they laid was taken entirely by their owners. Animals today are subject to the same total appropriation. As the research published in Capital & Class has framed it, animals represent a form of ‘absolute surplus extraction’ – 100% of their productive output is taken, and nothing is returned. The economic structure is identical to that of the plantation.
- Forced reproduction. One of the most brutal features of chattel slavery was the systematic exploitation of enslaved women’s reproductive capacity. Enslaved women were forced to bear children who were immediately classified as their owner’s property – additional units of human capital produced at no additional cost. The parallel in animal agriculture is exact. Dairy cows are kept in a permanent cycle of forced impregnation – their calves are taken at birth and classified as the farmer’s property. Breeding sows are impregnated repeatedly throughout their productive lives. The reproductive system of female animals is not incidentally exploited, it is the primary mechanism of production.
- The separation of families. Accounts of enslaved people consistently record the anguish of family separation, with parents sold away from children, couples divided, kinship networks deliberately destroyed as a mechanism of control. In animal agriculture, family separation is not incidental but industrial. Calves are removed from their mothers within hours of birth, piglets are weaned at three to four weeks rather than the natural twelve to seventeen.
The abolitionists who fought to end the slave trade did not argue that enslaved people should be better treated within the system of slavery. They argued that the system itself was wrong, that no amount of reform could make the ownership of human beings morally acceptable. That argument prevailed, eventually, after enormous struggle. The abolitionist case for animals rests on the same logic – that the wrong is not in the conditions of exploitation but in the exploitation itself. No welfare reform, no larger cage, no gentler restraint, no marginally improved slaughter method, addresses the fundamental injustice of treating sentient beings as property.
Animal auction (clip by Sul Nowroz)
The Largest Unaddressed Labour Crisis in History
On this May Day, an uncomfortable question demands an answer. If exploitation means the use of a being’s body and labour for another’s benefit, without consent and without fair return, then what is the world’s largest ongoing act of exploitation?
It is not the exploitation of garment workers in Bangladesh, though that is real and demands attention. It is not the exploitation of agricultural labourers in California or fruit pickers in southern Spain, though those too require urgent redress. The largest, most systematic, and most legally protected form of labour exploitation in human history is the exploitation of non-human animals.
Approximately 80 billion land animals are killed for food every year. At any given moment, tens of billions more are alive in conditions of total confinement, their biological output being extracted around the clock. Marine animals are killed in the hundreds of billions – invertebrates, potentially in the trillions. This exploitation is legal in virtually every jurisdiction on earth. It is state-subsidised. It is, in many countries, the single largest recipient of agricultural support. The suffering it inflicts is staggering in scale.
What makes this the most pressing unresolved crisis in labour history is not merely its scale but its normalisation. It is embedded so deeply in everyday consumption, cultural habit, and economic infrastructure that it rarely registers as exploitation at all. The cow whose milk sits in your refrigerator, the chicken whose eggs were your breakfast, the horse whose labour ploughed the field that produced your bread – these animals are economically indispensable and morally unacknowledged. They are the workers who built the world, and were never once invited to march.
Confined, Brutalised, Indentured: No Right to Resist
What distinguishes animal labour from even the most brutal forms of human labour exploitation is the complete structural impossibility of resistance. Human workers, however oppressed, have always retained the theoretical capacity to organise, to speak, to coordinate, to make collective demands, to withdraw their labour. This capacity, even when suppressed, even when punished with imprisonment or death, was the foundation upon which every labour right was eventually built.
Animals have no such capacity. A dairy cow cannot decline to be milked. A hen cannot opt out of the laying cycle. A pig cannot refuse to be fattened. A horse cannot choose not to be ridden. These are not merely practical observations, they describe a legal and physical reality in which an animal’s body, time, and biological output are permanently and unconditionally at the disposal of their owner. The animal’s preference, distress, or suffering is legally irrelevant. It has no right to refuse, no right to organise, no access to courts, no political representation, and no voice in the systems that determine every aspect of its existence.
The physical conditions of animal labour amount, by any objective standard, to what we would call torture if the subject were human. Battery cages, gestation crates, veal crates, and farrowing stalls eliminate an animal’s ability to move, socialise, or express any natural behaviour. A sow in a gestation crate, a standard feature of industrial pig farming, lives in a metal enclosure so small she cannot turn around, for months at a time, throughout her reproductive life. Broiler chickens grow so rapidly that their legs frequently cannot support their own weight. Physical mutilation is routine – beak trimming, tail docking, castration without anaesthetic and dehorning – performed not for the animal’s benefit but to manage the behavioural problems created by the confinement itself.
Unconditional Solidarity
The owners of enslaved people resisted abolition with every legal and political instrument available to them. The factory owners of the industrial revolution resisted the eight-hour day. The mine operators resisted safety legislation. In every case, they argued that the economy depended on the exploitation they were defending, that the beings demanding liberation were not capable of directing their own lives, and that the reformers were naive idealists who did not understand the real world. They were wrong on every count. They are wrong again.
The anti-capitalist tradition has always insisted that the dignity of a person cannot be reduced to their economic utility, that to treat a living being as a means to someone else’s ends is a violation of something fundamental. That tradition is correct. But it is inconsistent. It condemns the exploitation of human labour while underwriting, every day, the far more total exploitation of billions of non-human animals. The resolution of that inconsistency is not to water down the principles. It is to extend them.
The natural order of things has a habit of changing. The measure of this generation’s commitment to justice is whether it has the moral courage to look at the billions of beings who cannot march and cannot speak, and to extend to them the same recognition it took human workers centuries to win for themselves – that no sentient being’s life belongs to someone else.
— © 2026 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer – Insta: @TheAfghanWriter
