Truthdig
The Many-Sided, Overlapping Meanings of May Day
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_many-sided_overlapping_meanings_of_m
ay_day_20170429/
Posted on Apr 29, 2017
By Paul Street
A 2012 May Day poster in New York City. (Poster Boy
(https://www.flickr.com/photos/posterboynyc/6851036210/in/photostream/) /
CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) )
May Day, or May 1, has many meanings, in my experience. When I was a
grade-schooler in Chicago, it was the day on which the officially
Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union paraded
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21S5_PuoEfs) its military might in
Moscows Red Square. It was a reminder that there was another military
superpower on the planet besides the United States.
The Workers Day: Red and Black
Only later did I learn that May Days real left origins were in the older
revolutionary socialist- and anarchist-led struggle of the U.S. working
class for an eight-hour day. Targeting May 1 as the day for the introduction
of shorter hours, activists brought the issue to a boiling point in Chicago
in the spring of 1886. The fight culminated in the fateful tossing of the
Haymarket bomb
(https://www.amazon.com/Death-Haymarket-Chicago-Movement-Bombing/dp/14000332
25) , the savage execution of four of the citys great radical leadersthe
Haymarket Martyrsand a great wave of anti-union and anti-left repression
across the nation.
May 1 became an international day of working-class and left protest in
subsequent years. Well into the 20th century, leftist May Day speakers and
banners would repeat Karl Marx and Frederick Engels maxims
(http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61) : The working men have no country.
Workers of the world unite.
The Soviets and other communist nations in the post-World War II era
appropriated the international proletarian tradition, marking May 1 an
official holiday to demonstrate the power of their nationally specific
arsenals and troopsmarshaled to keep U.S.-led capitalist imperialism at
bay.
It might at first seem odd that radical anarchists and Marxists placed such
strong emphasis on a day formed largely around a struggle for reform under
capitalisma shorter workday with no reduction in income. But left
working-class militants in the late 19th century knew that overwork robbed
workers of the time and energy to engage in critical reflection and join
movements for resistance to what was then commonly understood to be wage
slavery. They reasonably saw a reduction of workers time spent under the
bosses lash as an essential step toward the building of anti-capitalist
consciousness and struggle. Shorter hours also were meant to force employers
to hire more workers and thereby to raise workers bargaining power and
reduce profits.
The high level of collaboration and ideological cross-fertilization evident
between Marxists, left anarchists and trade unionists (what the left
historian and lawyer Staughton Lynd has called the Haymarket Synthesis
(http://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=56) ) in Chicagos
eight-hour-day movement would not often be replicated in the 20th century.
As the radical historian Bruce C. Nelson showed in his masterful 1986 volume
Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicagos Anarchists, 1870-1900
(https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Martyrs-Chicagos-Anarchists-1870-1900/dp/0813
513448) , the multiethnic (if largely German-American-led) Chicago left of
that time was remarkably eclectic, intellectually fluid and nonsectarian.
Such are the red (Marxist) and black (anarchist) industrial-era roots of May
Day, the working-class holiday.
Pre-Modern Roots: Green
May Day has different and older green roots in a time-honored pagan
celebration of natures beauty and fertility amid springs full flowering
and the onset of summer in northern temperate zones. Dating to ancient Rome,
this May Day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Day) is rooted in the
seasonal rhythms of Mother Earth and agriculture. It reached across the
Atlantic with the European conquest of what became known as the Americas. It
is a day of leisure, to be spent outdoors, dancing and wearing flowers.
While rooted in custom (http://secure.pmpress.org/?l=product_detail&p=748) ,
it was an official holiday in the British Tudor monarchy by at least the
early 16th century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_May_Day) . (The
bourgeois-revolutionary Puritan Parliaments of 1649-1660 suspended the
holiday, which was reinstated with the restoration of Charles II.)
Red and Green Common Ground
It is not hard to imagine the ancient green May Day merging with the modern
red and black proletarian May Day. Eight Hours for What We Will, union
banners proclaimed in 1886. For what we will included time out of doors,
in the free-flowing presence of nature, beyond the dirty, dangerous and
depressing mills, mines and factories of Dickensian and Gilded Age
capitalismand away from the rigid time-work discipline (a term coined by
British historian E.P. Thompson
(https://www.jstor.org/stable/649749?seq=1#fndtn-page_scan_tab_contents) )
imposed by despotic employers in what Marx called the hidden abode of
production (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch06.htm) .
It was an era when many, perhaps most, wage-earners retained connections to
pre-industrial and more communalist and rural ways of life.
The workers movements of 19th century North America drew on the rolling,
recurrently immigration-fed tension
(https://www.amazon.com/Work-Culture-Society-Industrializing-America/dp/0394
722515) between pre-industrial agricultural and artisanal ways of life on
one hand and the authoritarian, speeded-up and nonstop jungle (detailed by
American author Upton Sinclair
(https://www.gutenberg.org/files/140/140-h/140-h.htm) ) of industrial
capitalist modernity on the other.
One delicious connection
(https://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/29/historian_peter_linebaugh_on_the_inc
omplete) is that the eight-hour-day struggle in Chicago was particularly
focused on the citys McCormick Harvesting Machine Co. plant, manufacturer
of a farm technology that famously displaced millions of laborers from
agricultural work while helping industrialize
(https://www.amazon.com/Natures-Metropolis-Chicago-Great-West/dp/0393308731)
the North American and global countryside.
Consistent with this melding of the red and green May Days, modern
capitalism assaulted nature and created the wage-dependent proletariat at
one and the same time through the long enclosure of the commons. The
commons are the vast swaths of land, stream and forest in which
pre-capitalist people found sustenance, insulating them from having to rent
out their labor power to capitalists to garner the money required to
purchase lifes necessities as commodities. As the brilliant left historian
Peter Linebaugh notes
(https://www.amazon.com/Stop-Thief-Commons-Enclosures-Resistance/dp/16048674
77/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1493236841&sr=1-1&keywords=stop+thief) in
his book Stop Thief! A single term, the commons, expresses, first, that
which the working class lost when subsistence resources were taken away,
and, second, the idealized visions of liberté, egalité, fraternité,
Rooted in a vast human history that long predated the ascendancy of the
commodity with its individualism and privatization, the commons, Linebaugh
writes, is antithetical to capital. The Protestant radical group known as
Diggers and others with roots in the village commons who opposed capitals
rise to supremacy understood that expropriation leads to exploitation, the
Haves and the Have Nots.
The Diggers, the first modern communists
(https://www.amazon.com/500-Years-Revolution-European-Radicals/dp/0882862413
/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1493236927&sr=1-2&keywords=charles+h.+george
+and+revolution) , were led by Gerrard Winstanley
(https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/winstanley/) . They sought to
pre-empt the coming new soulless wage, money and commodity slavery of the
capitalist order (the bourgeois regime that Marx and Engels would justly
accuse of resolv[ing] personal worth into exchange value) by claiming
earth as a common treasury for all
(https://www.versobooks.com/books/479-a-common-treasury) . Writing as
England was becoming the first fully capitalist nation where most of the
adult working-age population toiled for wages, Winstanley and his followers
practiced what Linebaugh calls commoning, the merging of labor and
natural resources in the spirit of all for one and one for all.
May Day is an official holiday now in many European nations, with its
meaning generally understood to combine the pre-modern folk roots and,
however diluted, the modern labor and left origins.
Loyalty and Law Day
The green-red May Day has been considered threatening enough to capitalist
interests for U.S. presidents to intercede against it. In 1894, Grover
Cleveland tried to take the steam out of the spring workers day and, more
importantly, to de-escalate class tensions
(https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/09/labor-day-may-first-american-labor-movem
ent-haymarket/) after that years nationwide Pullman Strike by proclaiming
the first Monday in September Labor Day, wrote Jonah Walters, a researcher
at Jacobin magazine.
In 1958, during the Cold War, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a
resolution naming May 1 Loyalty Day
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalty_Day) to discourage any hint of
solidarity with the workers of the world. The resolution declared May 1 a
special day for the reaffirmation of loyalty to the United States of America
and for the recognition of the heritage of American freedom.
That same year, Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 Law Day
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Day_(United_States)) to honor the rule
of law over and against the rule of force. To this day, many local bar and
legal educational associations use the day to educate students about the
virtuous power of bourgeois law.
Springtime for Hitler
Speaking of the rule of force, the ultimate reactionary appropriation took
place in Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler found an interesting use for May Day in
a May 1, 1933, speech (http://der-fuehrer.org/reden/english/33-05-01.htm) ,
establishing it as a paid holiday for the celebration of workers and work
across Germany. In his address, then-German Chancellor Hitler cleverly
pitted the ancient green May Day against the modern red May Day to trump
class conflict with common allegiance to the iron fist of the volk-based
national state. Hitler sought to move Germany off the tired dogma of
Marxism and into national superproductivity on behalf of a properly
class-ranked fatherland, rooted in the glorious traditions of the great
Nordic volk:
German Volk, you are strong when you are one.
For many centuries, the
first day of May was
symbolic of springs arrival in the countryside; it
was also a day of joy, of festive spirits and sentiments.
There came a time
when this day was enlisted [by Marxists] for other purposes, and the day of
new life and hopeful joy was transformed into a day of quarrel and internal
strife. A dogma which had seized hold of our Volk
this day seemed more and
more destined to document the division and disunity of our Volk. But there
finally came a time of reflection
for German people to come together
again.
And today we can once more join in singing the old folk song: Der
Mai ist gekommen. Our Volks awakening has come to pass. The symbol of
class conflict, of never-ending strife and discord, is now becoming once
again the symbol of the great unity and uprising of the nation. And thus,
for all time to come, we have chosen this day when nature awakens as the day
of regaining our own power and strength and, at the same time, the
productive work which knows no limits, which is not bound to unions or
factories or offices; work we wish to recognize and promote wherever it is
performed in a positive sense for the very existence and the life of our
Volk.
Perhaps the virulent white nationalist Congressman Steve King
(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/whats_the_matter_with_iowa_dark_news_fr
om_red-state_america_20170318) would like to update this speech for
delivery Monday to his 95 percent white constituents
(http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/323796-rep-steve-kings-district-is-
dying) in western Iowa.
Immigrant Rights2006
Eleven years ago, U.S. immigrant rights activists picked May 1 for mass
protests on behalf of the nations mostly Mexican-American immigrant
workers. This remarkable day enlisted millions from coast to coast. I spoke
at one such gathering at Northern Illinois University, where Bruce C. Nelson
wrote the dissertation that became Beyond the Martyrs in the once
Marxist-led history department.
There, in DeKalb, Ill., hundreds of Latino workers employed at the local
General Electric plant and in other local industries showed up seemingly out
of nowhere in the middle of a workday. These brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking
workers lived in the same neighborhoods once inhabited by my white-skinned,
May Day-celebrating, Finnish ancestors (the Luhtalas), who migrated
hassle-free to work in the towns steel wire plants a century before.
I was struck by the irony of Mexican and Central American immigrants
carrying on the May 1 tradition in a nation that no longer knew about the
holiday, even though it had hosted red May Days emergence in Chicago. The
irony was unsurprising. As the brilliant Australian critic of thought
control Alex Carey noted, the United States is historical ground zero for
the amnesia-inducing power of corporate propagandathe art and science of
taking the risk out of democracy
(http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/32amb6ff9780252066160.html) .
Historical deletion and distortion is a key part of that, as British author
George Orwell knew.
Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!
A final meaning of the phrase Mayday deserves mention. It was familiar to
any American from movies, literature, television and/or comic books when I
was a grade-schooler. I am referring to what a pilot says into his radio as
his plane plummets to earth
(http://huckkonopackicartoons.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/MAYDA
Y-500x389.jpg) : Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!
The Hour Is Getting Late
Looking back on these many-sided and overlapping meanings of May Day, I am
struck by their essential interrelation and interdependence. We need to work
this and coming springs for a radically many-sided May Day, one that takes
an all of the above approach to these different yet intimately interwoven
and dialectically inseparable meaningsrather than the reactionary
appropriations, of course.
If I had to choose one of the meanings above all others, I suppose it would
be the one that celebrates and venerates nature. This is for the simple
materialist reason that if the global environmental catastrophe created by
anthropogenic (really, capitalogenic) climate change isnt averted soon,
then, as social critic Noam Chomsky has warned
(http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175539/) , in a generation or two,
everything else were talking about wont matter.
Spaceship Earth is on exterminist path that is rapidly accelerating, as the
latest findings on melting Arctic ice cover, rising global temperature and
looming permafrost release regularly tell us. So let us not talk falsely
now, to quote Bob Dylan, the hour is getting late
(https://genius.com/Bob-dylan-all-along-the-watchtower-lyrics) . Check out
the latest configuration of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Doomsday
Clock (http://thebulletin.org/clock/2017) .
Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Indeed. If the current environmental trajectory is
not significantly reversed, the lefts long-standing struggle for equality
and democracy is reduced to a debate over how to more equitably share a
poisoned pie. Who wants to turn the world upside down (Winstanleys
phrase) only to find out that it is a steaming pile of overheated toxic
waste? Theres something for workers to control.
A Green Door Painted Red, Black and Brown
But the choice between a green and a red May Day is a false dichotomy.
Capital is antithetical to the commons. The capitalist system is addicted to
endless chaotic accumulation and to economic growth as the false solution
to the endemic poverty, inequality and joblessness it chronically generates.
It is hard-wired for exterminism. It is the enemy of nature, says American
author Joel Kovel, and can never be reconciled with the species-wide
planning and commoning of Linebaugh required to save livable ecology.
Transcending commodity rule and private, profit-addicted ownership in the
means of production and investment is a prerequisite for saving the
environmental basis for a decent future.
It should never be forgotten that capitalism relies on the exploitation of
the natural environment every bit as much as it does on the exploitation of
labor power. As sociology professor Jason Moore and others have shown, its
whole long history of expansion, crisis, retreat and re-expansion is
intimately bound up with its recurrent search for new, commons-defiling
planetary/geographic frontiers of cheap nature: free or cheap energy, raw
materials, food and labor power (human nature). That has always made
imperialism, capitalisms evil twin, reminding us that anti-imperialism
remains an essential project for those who would rescue a world worth
turning upside down.
One of Stalinist Russias real accomplishments was to set some spatial
limits to the global reach of capital. You dont have to be aligned with an
authoritarian and commons-assaulting entity like the onetime Soviet Union to
fight meaningfully to set limits to the now- and long-U.S.-led imperial
agenda of endlessly expanding the global open door capitalism.
Organizing against capitalist and imperialist ecocide takes time and energy,
things that are in short supply for untold millions of heavily overworked
and overcommuted Americans. Ask any community organizer about the barrier to
activism posed by the exhaustion of many theyd like to enlist in the
struggle for a decent and democratic future. The struggle for shorter
working hours and for more leisure time for what we willincluding time to
participate meaningfully in political lifecontinues to hold relevance
today. Time is a big democracy issue, something that was very well and
centrally understood by the United States earliest trade unions.
The 2006 meaning of immigrant rights is also highly pertinent. The
stigmatization and oppression of immigrants undermines the working-class
solidarity and power that meaningful resistance to capitalism requires. At
the same time, nativist scapegoating of immigrants and foreigners
functions in no small part to divert the native white populations of the
U.S. and Europe from focusing on the real source of their economic and
political discontent: the profits system. Thats a key function that the
Nazis demonization of the Jews provided for the German bourgeoisie in the
1930s, with epically disastrous consequences.
Speaking of brown, red and green meanings, this May Day, we might want to
recall that North Americas First Nations people were highly civilized,
unscathed by capitalist and other forms of class rule and harmoniously
connected to the natural environment. As the Native American author and
activist Ward Churchill wrote two decades ago:
On October 12, 1492. The day Christopher Columbus first washed up on a
Caribbean beach, North America was long since endowed with an abundant and
exceedingly complex cluster of civilizations. Having continuously occupied
the continent for at least 50,000 years, the native inhabitants evidenced
environmentally sound farming procedures which originated well over half the
vegetal foodstuffs now consumed by peoples the world over. By and large, the
indigenous societies demonstrating such attainments were organized along
extremely egalitarian lines, with real property held collectively and
matrifocality a normative standard. War ... in the Euro-derived sense in
which the term is understood today, was unknown.
Also unknown was economic inequality and poverty on anything remotely like
the scale of early modern Europe, which gestated the capitalist order that
would spill its surplus onto North American territory, including what would
become the United Statesa nation where the top tenth of the top 1 percent
currently owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent.
Pre-conquest North American civilization comprised what Churchill described
as large-scale societies which had perfected ways of organizing themselves
into psychologically fulfilling wholes, experiencing very high standards of
living, and still maintaining environmental harmony. It was a form of
not-so-primitive communism, where commoning was common civilizational
sense.
The Europeans conquest and enclosure of the New World commons spelled
genocidal tragedy for the continents original inhabitants.
Today, it is clear that the capital-led failure to common is civilizational
suicide. We either transcend our various single-issue and sectarian silos
(Haymarket Synthesis anyone?) and radically merge our struggles around the
multiple and interrelated meanings of a many-sided May Day, or it is truly
Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!what Marx (born on May 5) called the common ruin of
all the contending classesfor one and all.
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