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| ISBN-13: | 9781633194205 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Triumph Books |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 144 |
| File size: | 205 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day
By Peter Linebaugh, Sasha Lilley
PM Press
Copyright © 2016 Peter LinebaughAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63319-420-5
CHAPTER 1
The May Day Punch That Wasn't
Introduction and Acknowledgements (2015)
Freight Train sprang up from the crowded picnic bench. Sputtering and dumbstruck he stared the professor in the eye, then leaned across the table ready to throw a punch. Our May Day discussion came to an abrupt conclusion.
Freight Train was over six feet in height and 220 pounds in weight. Professor Elwitt, his senior by two or three decades, was a diminutive and unathletic man. As a possible fistfight it was a mismatch.
"They didn't die for me," the professor had said, his lips curling in malice. It was a well-targeted provocation.
Freight Train had just concluded his discourse to the comrades by saying, "they died for us." He was being courteous, restrained in his choice of words, but nevertheless direct and to the point. He recited the names of the martyrs, the leaders of the struggle for the eight-hour day. He told of those who fell to the hysterical violence that the government let loose upon the anarchists of Chicago. He spoke of the call for a general strike on May Day 1886, of the meeting on Haymarket Square a few days later when a stick of dynamite was thrown and a cop killed, of the trial of eight anarchists, of the hanging on "Black Friday," November 11, 1887, when four were hanged — Albert Parsons, George Engel, Adolf Fischer, and August Spies. These were the Haymarket martyrs, los mártires, who died for us, as Freight Train said.
We affectionately nicknamed Robert Harmon, the Chicago grad student, "Freight Train," because once he got going you couldn't stop him. He loved the IWW and liked to cast himself in a role familiar to young radicals, "the last of the Wobblies." He had deep loyalties to the Italian American community of Cicero, Illinois, and he'd explain how a combination of the Catholic Church and gangsterism during the 1920s extinguished the hot flame of Italian anarchism. Freight Train's personal mission was to keep that flame alight.
He loved Renaissance history and affected a nonchalance called sprezzatura, described in Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (1528). Elwitt had been on his PhD oral examination. Freight Train wanted to explain the birthing stool. So he nonchalantly slid off his chair, spread his arms and legs out wide, starfish style, and from a position nearly on the floor, the heels of his shoes grasping the edge of the examining table and supporting his weight, he illustrated to the astonished examiners the posture of parturition as he imagined it to have been during the Italian Renaissance. "This was the way," he explained, "that Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the rest came into the world."
At the examining table and the picnic table alike Freight Train could make history come alive.
In the dimming of the day and the onset of evening, Professor Elwitt, the Marxist, made his way over to the table where we were listening to Freight Train. The professor was a socialist, the student was an anarchist, and they each claimed May Day. Elwitt offered fighting words. At a temporary loss for words himself, the anarchist could only act, and he lunged. It was the Red versus the Black.
A storm in a teacup? Or a near-ritual moment, like a wedding or a funeral, worthy of García Lorca? It was something of both. There was much to it of the academic spat, worthy of a novel of manners, except that to the participants much more was at stake, the weight of history. Or you could see it in another way: it being springtime there were sexual and generational as well as political energies coursing wildly about, not to mention Dionysus with his overflowing cups. The green budding force of winter's end combined with political antagonism of at least a century or two, and the tension was ready to burst. Testosterone bubbled madly in that witch's brew.
Maybe it was the Red and the Green?
We celebrated May Day under a picnic shelter we had rented for the day in the ample and peaceful Ellison Park, Rochester, NY. It was a strictly bring-your-own, potluck affair. We played Capture the Flag across the meadow. Someone with a guitar led us in singing those old labor ballads and civil rights hymns. Beer and wine flowed easily. It was generally laid back, chill. Everyone was usually happy enough. Among the students and workers was the dyer and designer Bethia Waterman, the artist and athlete Joe Hendrick, the brakeman "Disco," and arriving on the back of a motorcycle driven by a lesbian physician, the fierce public health advocate, Michaela Brennan, with whom I was to fall in love. We professors had to put aside our theories and abstractions to speak in a way that even children could understand, so another year we organized a skit for them (as theatre it could hardly be called a play). That was the seed that grew into The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day, as a flyer, a song, and a pamphlet found useful from Boston to San Francisco.
One year we had speeches. Christian Marazzi, a Swiss, all dressed in black leather pants and a black shirt to go with, stood and spoke. His accent and costume were memorable and maybe something too about his analysis of the mysteries of finance capitalism left an impression even if it was incomprehensible to many of us.
In the mid- and late 1970s, having suffered defeats of various kinds, young organizers, activists, radicals, reformers, and revolutionaries heeded the call to study. Back in those days people from all over gravitated to the Rochester History Department to study with its soi-disant Marxists and leftists. If the university was not exactly at the commanding height of the ideological superstructure as the professors imagined it to be, it was certainly one of the sites in the battle of ideas.
In the wake of the great municipal rebellions of the 1960s, led by African Americans, the racist nature of the American university — its curriculum, research, and personnel alike — was clear to all. Some of the professors at the University of Rochester tried to do something about it. Christopher Lasch, Herbert Gutman, Betsy Fox-Genovese, Eugene Genovese, Stanley Engerman were there to teach theory and practice, ideas and action, as we expected. At last these people, these white scholars, made academic contributions to Afro-American history. Important book reviews were published, and academic conferences were held for the books. But Marxism, not revolution, was their thing. They were not connected with the workers in the automobile plants, or the welfare mothers of public housing estates, or specific organizations like the League of Revolutionary Black Workers or the Wages for Housework campaign.
A key moment was when Herbert Aptheker, a distinguished member of the Communist Party of the USA, came to campus. He spoke in the Welles-Brown Room. Nobody was willing to introduce him, so they asked the most junior faculty member of the history department without even a PhD to do it, and that was me. Aptheker was running for the U.S. Senate in New York State. He understood what was going on within a pusillanimous history department, and he made the best of a bad situation. He took me aside and told me exactly what to say in my introduction. I was to begin by calling him "doctor," Dr. Herbert Aptheker, and then proceed by naming his major books. I was unfamiliar at the time with his scholarly work, including the classic American Negro Slave Revolts (1943). To rectify my own ignorance I began to teach in the maximum-security prison, Attica, at the invitation of its African American Study Group.
Sanford Elwitt was the professor specializing in French labor history, and (what was more relevant) he was the chairman's right-hand man (some said hatchet man) in the department. The chairman was Gene Genovese. These folks had a pretty grandiose idea of themselves. As "revisionists" they were proud not to be stuck with economic determinism. Instead, Genovese had sought to struggle for "hegemony," the buzzword of the Marxist underground of the 1960s, becoming by the 1970s a cross-disciplinary shibboleth of university departments.1 These Marxists, "Gucci Marxists" we called them for their expensive shoes, were not prepared to treat American slavery as part of the working class.
Yet the truth will out, and it did at that picnic in 1979. A fight in the department had been brewing for a while. Across the table there may have been a partial lunge but certainly the student did not swing. I know because I was in between them at the foot of the table while Freight Train and the professor were on opposite sides. To be sure, tempers flared and faces crimsoned, but flesh did not touch flesh, blood was not spilt. Consequently assault charges were never made, but later the history department met and voted to expel Freight Train. It was the beginning of the end for me too.
But not before another May Day when I sang an old English Labour Party song I had been taught as a child in England: to the tune of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic,"
We will make the Dean of Canterbury Speaker of the House (3 times)
When the Red Revolution comes!
"The Red Dean" of Canterbury was Hewlett Johnson (1874– 1966), a Church of England priest and a Stalinist through and through. The problem came with the chorus, which was belted out with a full ironic, beery shout:
Arson, rape, and bloody murder
it went, and then the line was repeated, only louder and even more obnoxiously. "Political correctness" had not yet been formulated as a devastating phrase but the thing itself was alive and healthy. This led later to an informal gathering among feminists to raise my consciousness and explain that such a sentiment could not be uttered even in jest given the realities of violence against women. Humbled if not humiliated, I learned my lesson and have not sung it since. It is a foolish line even as a beer-driven music-hall shout.
What is to be our relationship to the Red or the Communist and Socialist traditions? Some things we want to keep from the past, and others to discard. Our class has a tradition of arson — think of the fire of the sugar plantations, think of the arson in the English agrarian, "moral economy," riots, and during some periods of history assassination or execution has been employed against class enemies — Robert Frost even has a poem about it, but rape, as I have learned from Andrea Smith, has always been a tool, an initial and necessary tool she would argue, of imperialism. Political principle can be strengthened by knowledge of the sacrifices in the past. This didn't mean we had to think exactly as they did, or sing with the same rough humor.
Later I moved to Boston. I wanted to preserve a tradition, to carry forward the lessons I had learned from the feminists of Rochester, from the African Americans of Attica, as well as the labor history of the Marxists, and the anarchist history of Freight Train. At Tufts University I met wonderful comrades in the antiapartheid struggle such as John Roosa, Bryn Clark, and Dan Coughlin. Dave Riker as part of Somerville Community Television had me talk about May Day. In Boston I wrote "The Silent Speak." In 1986 we organized the first ever University of Massachusetts celebration of May Day. I want to describe the persons and places because they became part of the global awakening to May Day. These are the people of the movement that I thank directly as inspiration for the essays below.
I invited George Rawick to speak at Law Day, as May Day was officially called. I invited him because a) he edited about two dozen volumes of the American slave narratives, and b) he was closely associated with the anticapitalist projects of C.L.R. James and the former Facing Reality group. He was fantastic because he reminded us how people can change. His example was Albert Parsons, who had been a Confederate cavalry officer defending the slave South, and then became husband to Lucy Parsons and an abolitionist of chattel slavery and wage slavery alike. Politically, Parsons was a socialist, an anarchist, and a trade unionist all rolled into one. So who's normal, Rawick wanted to know.
We had some local Morris dancers, the Black Jokers, with bells on their ankles and ribbons from their hats, do that English folk dance dating back to 1458. Named after Moors! They danced "to wake up the earth." A Somerville blues band, the Wicked Casuals, provided music. Soon everyone was shouting. We rented a small motor launch and sailed over to Quincy where the first Maypole in North America was erected in 1626.
On board our little ship a Brazilian band, El Echo, supplied gentle music. Dieri from Haiti came along. Teodros Kiros of Ethiopia joined us. Our indigenous comrade, Johnny Mañana of Peru, and his partner, Nancy Kelly, joined us. Sal Salerno had copies of The Haymarket Scrapbook for distribution. Randall Conrad embarked along with Christine and their child, Pete. Randall made a terrific film called 3,000 Years and Life about the time when the prisoners ruled the maximum-security prison in Walpole, Massachusetts. He made another one too, A Little Rebellion Now and Then, about Shays' Rebellion of 1786–87.
Margot Fitzgerald spoke on behalf of the work-study students whose pay "had run out." She called for a one-day work stoppage. Charlie Shively, the historian and gay rights advocate, read a poem about death row, and in words from Walt Whitman expressed our duty to "Cheer up slaves, Horrify despots!" Monty Neill gave a terrific speech explaining the rainbow coalition of Merry Mount. Noel Ignatiev, who used to work at International Harvester in Chicago, gave us the inside story of the Haymarket bombing.
That year there was a boycott of Shell Oil, a parade to the shantytown against apartheid up on Harvard Yard, and a sit-in in Cambridge as well. By late afternoon news came to us, even at sea, that millions of people in South Africa were on strike. We sent greetings to them and to the people near Chernobyl in Ukraine. The art students at Massachusetts College marched to Boston Common chanting praises for the Nicaraguan revolution while Duncan Kenney lectured the Harvard Economics Department on "the fetishism of commodities."
May Day is about affirmation, the love of life, and the start of spring, so it has to be about the beginning of the end of the capitalist system of exploitation, oppression, misery, toil, and moil. Besides full affirmation May Day requires denunciation: the denunciation of capitalism, of patriarchy, of homophobia, of white supremacy, of war. For me Rochester had been about receiving this knowledge, and Boston about transmitting it.
The essays in this book are all occasional essays (of course), and most were written the night or week before the occasion. They were written during decades of conservative repression when celebrations of Haymarket were few and far between. The title essay was published under the imprimatur of Midnight Notes, an anticapitalist collective that was also struggling to express itself during those leaden times. "May Day Meditation" referred to the Auroras of the Zapatistas, a book by Midnight Notes. I printed "X" in a miniscule format and passed it out willy-nilly on street corners and at sporting events. Six of these essays were published in the online magazine CounterPunch, so I thank especially Jeffrey St. Clair. Special thanks also to Jeff Clark, who published "Ypsilanti Vampire May Day." "Obama May Day" was republished in the second edition of Dave Roediger and Franklin Rosemont's indispensable Haymarket Scrapbook.
The essay following this one ("The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day") was first published as a pamphlet, some copies having a green and others having a red cover to indicate its two themes, nature and labor. The Green is presented as Robin Goodfellow, the subversive spirit of the land at the time of the giant enclosures when state-sponsored monotheism sought to root out pantheism and capitalism destroyed the commons. The last essay, "Swan Honk," also has the Red theme of labor. Otherwise the Green theme is replaced by a geological rather than an agrarian perspective. It thus includes eons of time prior to the agrarian or the Neolithic with its empires and the religions of the "axial age." It is dated April 30, not May Day, because bureaucrats wouldn't let me date my retirement on May Day; it had to be the day before.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day by Peter Linebaugh, Sasha Lilley. Copyright © 2016 Peter Linebaugh. Excerpted by permission of PM Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
ONE The May Day Punch That Wasn't,TWO The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day,
THREE X2: May Day in Light of Waco and LA,
FOUR A May Day Meditation,
FIVE May Day at Kut and Kienthal,
SIX Magna Carta and May Day,
SEVEN May Day with Heart,
EIGHT Obama May Day,
NINE Archiving with May Day Rooms,
TEN Ypsilanti Vampire May Day,
ELEVEN Swan Honk May Day,
INDEX,