Just read Werner Hamacher's essay "Working Through Working", on National Socialism and Work. Some of it covers Hitler's MayDay speeches, most of it is about how National Socialism pivots around the veneration of work -- specifically, work as "the being and life of our people". Creepy biopolitics at its finest.

Here's part of it: "In his address of 1 May 1933, he [Hitler] celebrates Labor Day in a natural-mystical sense as the 'day of life's becoming' and 'awakening nature,' and thereby at the same time, as the 'day of winning back our proper force and strength.' As the day of return, of coming back, of recovery, repetition, and winning back, as the day of restitution and reinstitution of this 'natural' and 'proper' 'force,' May Day is for Hitler 'thereby also and at the same time,' the day of 'that productive work that knows no narrow limits, that is not bound to the trade union, to the factory and the office--the day of a work that we want to recognize and advance wherever it is executed in the good sense for the being and life of our people'."

I forgot to add, but will now: at the last official/TU MayDay rally I went to, the TU slogan of the day was "No return to the 1930s, Full Employment Now". The troubling irony being that the 'solution' to the unemployment of the 1930s was forced labour, slaughter, destruction. There were some minor responses at the time, including a small bunch of black-clad kids who held a huge banner over the City Squ which read: 'Work Until You Die.' And a troupe which wove its way around chanting 'No Return to the 1930s, Colorise Films Now.'