We’re happy to share another past episode, this time from May Day 2016, about 4 months before the start of our rss feed for our podcast. I feel it’s notable that this show approaches it’s 13th birthday on the May 9th of this year.
To friends we’ve met, and to those we have yet to meet, I’d like to wish everyone a happy May Day. As we’ll hear in the following hour, this day has a long celebrated history. From its many European pagan roots as a celebration of fertility as the fruits of the spring planting season began to… uh, spring forth. Then on to the repressive winter that fell early on May 3rd and 4th of 1886 in Illinois with, first, the killing of workers striking for an 8 hour work day at the McCormick Works and then the repression of anarchist and socialist workers and organizers following the bombing at Haymarket Square in Chicago of that same year. From there to the taking up of May 1st as International Workers Day by struggling groups around the world and the U.S. adoption of a sanctioned Labor Day in September of the year.
To divide an international working class, The U.S. government, oppressors of that May Day 1886 sanctioned a Labor Day to be celebrated in September, declared the first of May both Law Day (an obvious testament to Irony in respect to the Haymarket 8, all jailed and 4 executed) and, for some, it’s celebration as Americanism Day. Whatever that means. In 2006 & 2007, immigrants rights marches were seen on and around May Days that, for many, re-sparked the importance of this day. The protests and festivals swelled to numbers nearly unmatched in the history of protest on Turtle Island, and were accompanied by school and work walkouts and boycott days.
Whether you’re out there today taking direct action, in repose from the horrors of wage slavery, resisting the carceral state, gardening, dancing around a May Pole or otherwise celebrating the possibilities of this year to come when, hell, we might as well end this system of exclusion and extraction: We wish you a fire on your tongue, love in your heart and free land beneath you.
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Featured Tracks:
The International by Ani DiFranco & Utah Philips
The Earth Is Our Mother by Oi Polloi from Fuaim Catha
Surrounded by Matador from Taken
I Wish That They’d Sack Me by Chumbawamba from The Boy Bands Have Won
Addio a Lugano by Pietro Gori (performed by Gruppo Z on Canti Anarchici Italiani)
In the first Bursts spoke with two organizers of the Asheville Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair (ACAB2018) taking place the 22-24th of June. To link up with this project and for aaall the information, you can visit the website here! To follow on social media, you find @acab.2018 on Instagram, and for email it’s acab2018@riseup.net. This segment begins at [11:46]
Then Bursts spoke with Tristan, an anarchist living in Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia, about the riot that took the streets for 3 hours there on May Day. They talk about anarchist in Java, the feudal Sultanate they suffer under, the New Yogyakarta International Airport threatening to displace a village and more. This segment begins at [40:02]
As Tristan says in the interview, much of the resistance of the Committee Against Feudalism that raged against the police on May Day in Yogyakarta was in order to damage government facility as well as to undermine trust of local and international investors in the building of a New Yogyakarta International Airport, or NYIA. The airport has already lead to the displacement of people in the farming village of Kulon Progo, destroying trees & livelihoods, and authorities cut power supplies to intimidate residents into selling their ancestral lands in this southern coastal village. In place of the farmlands where 11.5 thousand people live, cultivating peppers, eggplants and watermelons, the state would destroy the erosion and flood-defending dunes around this area with a 2,000 hectare “airport city” containing hotels, industrial zones, shopping centers & other tourist ventures. Here is a chronology of resistance up to late 2017.
The airport would be operated by Angkasa Pura (state-owned Airport Operator), and constructed by the U.S. company Landrum & Brown, with offices in NYC, Orlando, SF, Tampa, Cincinnati, Bogota, Boston, Chicago Alongside L&B is the India-based megaproject conglomerate, GVK. GVK is named for it’s founder, Gunupati Venkata Krishna Reddy, and is also active in the Australian coal mining sphere. A Czech corporation involved in designing the NYIA is AGA-Letiště, s.r.o. (based in Prague). Mott McDonald, an employee-owned consultancy firm, also plays a role in this mess. Finally, the Rajawali Corpora (a heavy hand in five star hotels and media ownership) is involved and is owned by https://www.forbes.com/profile/peter-sondakh/.
The Sultan, Hamengkubuwono X, the second in his lineage to be given official governorship of Yogyakarta, is grabbing public and communal lands for sale and gifts to investors, selling it off for megaprojects like the NYIA and personally profiting, claiming a Feudal ownership. The real losers in this situation are the people of Yogyakarta, the real winners are the Sultan, the global rich and these megaproject proliferators who choose short-term profits over community autonomy and ecological health.
Since we didn’t get to it, I’d like to touch on what I understand of some of the racism that Tristan references. Among other things, the Sultan’s continued use of a 1975 law that is now in conflict with Indonesian national law against discrimination, is another tool at grabbing land and fueling ethnic populism. The law excludes ethnic-Chinese Indonesians (despite many having been in Indonesia for generations) and other non “pribumi” (or ethnically Indonesian) people from owning land and has been used to repress ethnic minorities in the archipelago in the past. This law also serves the Sultan, by denying property rights it allows his government (therefore him as feudal lord) to retain the rights to the land.
A few articles on resistance in Indonesia can be found at Agitasi, a site for Indonesian Counter Information and Analysis. If you can’t read it, learn Indonesian (or babelfish or googletranslate it). Some photos of solidarity can be found on InsurrectionNews. An article on resisting the airport from EF!Newswire, with more links inside. Indonesian embassies in the Americas can be found listed here.
Here is an update from the Appalachians Against Piplelines social media, which was posted two days ago:
Earlier this morning, on day 12 of the skypod on Pochahontas Road in the Hellbender Autonomous Zone (aka the Jefferson National Forest), fern was extracted and arrested.
Law enforcement began arriving to join the skypod’s existing 24 hour watch before 6am. For a couple hours, they discussed extraction, suited up in climbing gear, and attempted to coax fern down – but she refused to give in to their intimidation. Shortly after 8 am, a cherry picker drove up the road, by 8:30 fern was on the ground, handcuffed, and arrested.
Although the blockade of this pipeline access road has been removed, the fight is far from over. The Mountain Valley Pipeline remains a dangerous project, installed by force, and part of a network of dead end disasters for water, climate, communities, and ecosystems.
So before MVP and law enforcement even begin to breathe a sigh of relief, thinking they are one step closer to their goal of padding the pockets of executives at the expense of this forest and the lives of all along the route, let’s show them that they have not won.
Let’s remind them that this pipeline is not yet built, that it is not a foregone conclusion. Let’s prove that they have not extinguished the flame of resistance.
If you’ve been watching the efforts and sacrifices of the people confronting the MVP, if you’ve been grateful to know that this pipeline isn’t getting through without a fight, now is the time to move forward with actions of your own! None of us can do this alone.
And you can follow them on social media by searching Appalachians Against Pipelines on any platform you can think of.
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Following the recent murder of Roxsana Hernandez at the hands of ICE agents, the organization Familia TQLM (Trans and Queer Liberation Movement) is organizing a national day of action against ICE, to end trans detention, and to call attention to the dangers forced upon trans, gay, and queer people in detention on Wednesday June 6th. Roxsana Hernandez was a 33 year old trans woman from Honduras, and her passing is one of the most recent examples of the specific threats that Immigration and Customs Enforcement pose to LGBTQ people. A recent study found that LGBTQ people are 97 times more likely to face sexual assault and sexualized violence at the hand of ICE agents while imprisoned, as well as facing conditions akin to torture: being held in freezing cells, or ones that are dangerously hot, and being denied life saving medication, as in the case of Roxsana Hernandez.
If you would like to connect with this action on June 6th, you can follow the hashtag JusticeForRoxsana, or email info@familiatqlm.org
To read the full article on conditions facing LGBTQ detainees, you can visit the link here.
This week I had the chance to speak to Ricchi, who is a Puerto Rican anarchist, about an autonomous squatted community center in Borique called Valle Garita. In this episode, we talk about the squatted space and the intentions of the organizers, plus the cultural context of squatting, reactions of the police, landlord, and bank, and some concrete asks for solidarity and support from non locals. We end the show with a brief report back and analysis of what went down on May Day in San Juan and all over Puerto Rico, so stay tuned for that!
On the social media, you can follow the Valle Garita squat by following @vallegarita or following that same hashtag, you can also search for them on Facebook. You can also follow Urbe Apie on Instagram @urbeapie.
For sending cards and letters of support you can address envelopes to:
Urbe Apie
Paseo Gautier Bénitez #16
Caguas Puerto Rico 00725
Letters can be written in Spanish, English, or any other language!
A brief correction from our last show where I interviewed Nutty about the monopod blockade at the Hellbender Autonomous Zone, I stated that the MVP was overseen by Dominion Resources and Duke Energy, and that is not the case, I was thinking of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. The MVP is in fact owned by EQT Midstream Partners and NextEra Energy, Inc. EQT has a history of fracking and is now trying to get into transport. Thanks to all the people who set me right on that! If you have any questions or corrections, don’t hesitate to email us at thefinalstrawradio@riseup.net
Shoutout to Nutty, Red, and Minor, and all those who are protecting and defending the land and water from predatory corporate pipelines!
For regular listeners of The Final Straw, the sound quality might not be what you are used to from us. We are continuing to experiment with our audio set ups, please bear with us through these experiments!
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Josh Gerdts Memorial Fund
In some very sad news, Josh Gerdts, an anti-racist skinhead, was murdered two days ago in Chesterfield County just south of Richmond VA. He leaves behind a family, including a very young child. The family has set up a gofundme to help pay for the funeral and to help raise the child, which you can find at http://www.gofundme.com/joshgerdts
Rest in power, Josh. You will be missed.
Vendenga Rojava: a New Radio Show out of Rojava, Mesopotamia
VEDENGA ROJAVA – ECHOES OF THE RESISTANCE An internationalists radio project bringing an inside look into Afrin resistance. Revolutionaries from different parts of the world organized in different collectives and organizations in Rojava found and importance to come together and launch an audio project focused on the peoples resistance against an invasion of Afrin canton carried by the fascist state of Turkey and its jihadist proxies. Our aim is to spread an awareness of this historical event and inspire English speaking folks all over the globe by ongoing struggle and revolutionary organizing in Afrin, Rojava and beyond. Listen and share our reports, updates, analysis, interviews, stories about life of fallen comrades, music and more. This radio show is a limited project and will have only three issues. For more tune us up on May 16th on soundcloud.com/vedengarojava.”
No More Deaths
From nomoredeaths.org: “On January 17, Scott Warren – a humanitarian aid provider from the group No More Deaths – and two individuals receiving humanitarian aid were arrested by US Border Patrol. Scott was preliminarily charged with felony harboring and could face five years in prison.
We need your support to fight these charges and resist the dangerous, divisive claim that sharing food and water with undocumented immigrants is a criminal offense.”
We are well into our preparation for the next Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair, happening June 22nd-24th, and we want to invite you to participate in shaping the themes and helping gear up for this exciting weekend!
We are holding an interest meeting to ask for volunteers and discuss possible contributions folks can make:
Monday May 7 at 7pm Firestorm Books 610 Haywood Road
Our main items where we need help are:
Street Team Promotion, Online/Social Media Promotion, Arranging Housing for Out of Towners, Fundraising, Cook Food, DAY OF (biggest Need)
If you have other ideas, we welcome your input!
For this May Day episode William had the chance to speak with Nutty, who has been holding down a monopod blockade which is blocking the construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline in the renamed Hellbender Autonomous Zone. She has been without the ability to reup her food and water supplies for over 21 days due to cop and forest ranger interference. We get to speak about the monopod and her experiences participating in this struggle, as well as her views on resisting the MVP, some ideas on the future of this struggle, some actionable items, and direct asks for support.
On the very first day of this blockade as some listeners will remember, Nutty’s direct support was arrested while trying to explain the rigging of the blockade to the police. Monopods rely on a series of rigs to support a platform where resisters typically sit. The Mountain Valley Pipeline, which is a massive 303 mile proposal by the company Dominion Resources in partnership with Duke Energy and Piedmont Natural Gas, is proposed to span land from northwestern West Virginia to southern Virginia and would disrupt and destroy countless habitats and complex interconnected water supplies, as well as the human communities it would likewise destroy. To hear an in depth podcast about this issue, I recommend End of the Line broadcasting out of Richmond, which you can find at http://pipelinepodcast.org/ and on https://soundcloud.com/pipelinepodcast/
Our guest will mention in the interview that the MVP’s proposal just got amended to go through a 70 mile stretch of North Carolina. For those who are concerned by this, we’d recommend looking into the Atlantic Coast Pipeline which would span a 600 mile track of land over WV VA and NC. Opposition to this pipeline is already gaining steam, so keep an eye on your favorite news sources for updates on that.
Next up is a conversation Bursts had with two community organizers in Sonoma County, California, named Sebastían and Mara. These two folks do organizing around immigrant communities and are helping to organize May Day festivities in Santa Rosa this year. Sebastían and Mara share about past years organizing around May Day, immigrant struggles against ICE and community efforts in the follow up to the devestating fires that raged through Northern California last year. Mara also shares about last year’s workplace organizing initiatives of Sonoma County waste workers that won them a contract, agricultural workers who won a contract from Gallo Sonoma Vinyard, and current struggles of employees at the Hyatt Vinyard Creek Santa Rosa. Sebastían also talks about the student walkouts he helped to organize on March 5th and plans for similar walkouts on May Day alongside the “Day Without An Immigrant.”
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Finally, we’ll hear from Jack and Quinn, two local Wobblies helping to plan a May Day rally and march in Asheville meeting at 4pm at Pritchard Park in downtown. Later that evening Blue Ridge Anarchist Black Cross will be hosting a benefit concert at Fleetwoods on Haywood rd in West Asheville. The show starts at 8pm and will feature the music of Poor Excuse, WRHCKD, Earth Collider & Nomadic War Machine and the moneys will go to the local efforts to release black mothers from the Buncombe County Jail via the Black Mama Bail Fund effort on May 10th. More info on Black Mama Bail Out at https://nomoremoneybail.org/
For a longer version of the chat with the Asheville Wobblies, check out the podcast version. There you’ll also find announcements about Herman Bell and Mumia Abu-Jamal.
If you care to, you can send us a letter at our new address:
The Final Straw
P.O. Box 6004
Asheville, NC 28816
There is no Sean Swain segment this week due to scheduling errors on our part, but don’t worry we promise to have him back on next week’s episode. If you miss the sound of his voice, you can his website, SeanSwain.org and easily find his segments going back to 2014.
Announcements:
Herman Bell leaves prison!!!:
We’re happy to announce that former Black Panther, BLA soldier and elder Herman Bell walked free from prison this week. From his support crew:
On Friday, April 27th, Herman Bell, a 70-year old respected elder, was released after serving nearly 45 years in prison. Herman was one of thousands of incarcerated older people who was repeatedly denied parole for over a decade after completing his minimum sentence.
“His release is a result of important and urgent changes in the criminal legal system and parole regulations that are part of nationwide efforts to end mass incarceration. Let us hope that Herman’s release brings inspiration for more change.
“Herman is deeply humbled and grateful for the broad expressions of trust and support, but out of respect for the feelings of the victims’ families, he will not be making any public statements. We welcome him home.
And so do we at The Final Straw.
Pack The Courtroom for Mumia:
In other political prisoner news, Mumia Abu-Jamal has a court appearance tomorrow, April 30th in Philadelphia and his support crew is asking folks in the area to show up and pack the courthouse. Show up in courtroom attire to support Mumia at 8am at room 1108, Criminal Justice Center at 13th and Filbert St in Philadelphia. In this hearing the Judge will consider the argument that former PA Supreme Court Judge Castille should have recused himself from considering Mumia’s appeal because Castille had been working with the Philly DA’s office at the time of Mumia’s prosecution and during later appeals. A similar situation was deemed unconstitutional in the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2016 Williams v. Pennsylvania.
There is also a call for supporters of Mumia to call current Philly DA Larry Krasner and request that he release the files on Mumia from the Philadelphia District Attorney office and Philadelphia Police Department. You can call Larry Krasner at 215-686-8000. More ideas of how to help out Mumia can be found at mobilization4mumia.com.
Correction from the scott crow interview from Bursts:
On last week’s episode of our show, in which I interviewed scott crow about his new book “Setting Sites”, I asked a question about toxic masculinity and gun culture by using the term “male socialized” to describe men. I misspoke. What I meant to communicate in the question was masculine expectation and performativity and not to lump people who’ve been coercively assigned male by society based on a doctor’s childhood assessment. I should have said “men”. Sorry for the misspeak and thanks to the folks who gave us feedback.
Download This EpisodeThis week Bursts spoke with Rhyd Wildermuth. Rhyd is a co-editor and founder or the website Gods & Radicals, which also publishes periodical journal entitled “A Beautiful Resistance”. For the hour, we speak about paganism, anti-capitalism, race and whiteness in the context of ethical approaches towards earth-based religions as white people in a Settler Colonial society, May Day and more. You can find his projects at https://godsandradicals.org
We also repeat our announcement of the upcoming anarchist bookfaire in Asheville:
If you’re in the South East (or wherever), you are cordially invited to attend the 1st Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfaire, also known as ACAB2017 from May 5-May 7th in Asheville, North Carolina. The weekend of events kicks off with an a welcome table at firestorm books at 610 Haywood Rd from 3pm until 6pm with a schedule of events and ways to plug in. There are multiple musical events Friday and Saturday night. Featured speakers include Shon Meckfessel, Jude Ortiz of Tilted Scales Collective, members of the crimethInc collective as well as from the Water Protectors Anti-Repression Crew and a special appearance by author and activist Ward Churchill. Vendors over the weekend will include PM Press, AK Press, Little Black Cart, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, Combustion Books and many more. Consider the daytime events to be all ages. Check out http://acab2017.noblogs.org for updates and info.
More up-to-date announcements and episodes will pick up along with audio from our participation in the International Anarchist Gathering in Athens, Greece, starting up mid-May, 2017. Check out our social media feeds to see and hear elements of it, including the live broadcast on April 30th from Athens.
To friends we’ve met, and to those we have yet to meet, I’d like to wish everyone a happy May Day. As we’ll hear in the following hour, this day has a long celebrated history. From its many European pagan roots as a celebration of fertility as the fruits of the spring planting season began to… uh, spring forth. Then on to the repressive winter that fell early on May 3rd and 4th of 1886 in Illinois with, first, the killing of workers striking for an 8 hour work day at the McCormick Works and then the repression of anarchist and socialist workers and organizers following the bombing at Haymarket Square in Chicago of that same year. From there to the taking up of May 1st as International Workers Day by struggling groups around the world and the U.S. adoption of a sanctioned Labor Day in September of the year.
To divide an international working class, The U.S. government, oppressors of that May Day 1886 sanctioned a Labor Day to be celebrated in September, declared the first of May both Law Day (an obvious testament to Irony in respect to the Haymarket 8, all jailed and 4 executed) and, for some, it’s celebration as Americanism Day. Whatever that means. In 2006 & 2007, immigrants rights marches were seen on and around May Days that, for many, re-sparked the importance of this day. The protests and festivals swelled to numbers nearly unmatched in the history of protest on Turtle Island, and were accompanied by school and work walkouts and boycott days.
This hour we’ll be hearing Peter Linebaugh, author of the recently printed book “The Incomplete, True, Authentic & Wonderful History of May Day” to present some of his meditations from the last 30 years but covering ancient times, through the first May Pole on Turtle Island, through to today.
The rest of the hour will feature songs that made myself and William, cohost of The Final Straw, feel a bit in the spirit of the day. Whether you’re out there today taking direct action, in repose from the horrors of wage slavery, resisting the carceral state, gardening, dancing around a May Pole or otherwise celebrating the possibilities of this year to come when, hell, we might as well end this system of exclusion and extraction: We wish you a fire on your tongue, love in your heart and free land beneath you.
TFSR: I’m speaking with Peter Linebaugh. Mr. Linebaugh is a Marxist, a historian, and an author. His most recent book is a compilation of essays called The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day, out from PM Press. Peter, thanks for taking the time for this chat.
Peter Linebaugh: You’re welcome.
TFSR: So May Day is this coming Sunday, when we’ll be airing this episode of the show. For listeners that are out there who may not know can you sketch some of the history of this great and widely celebrated day?
PL: Yes! I like the way you say that it’s great and widely celebrated because for so many American years, it was never celebrated. The ruling class just hated that day. Because it was a day of no work. It was a day to enjoy the springtime. It was a day to go outside. Hooray, hooray! The first of May! Outdoor loving begins today. That’s the spirit of the day. It goes back to the first agricultural civilizations around the great rivers, the Neolithic Revolution. It’s springtime. It’s a time for fertility. I’m speaking from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the whole world is budding and flowering right now. I imagine that’s somewhat past in North Carolina.
TFSR: It’s a very sexy place here in North Carolina. There’s there’s pollen in the air and a lot of people are suffering from it, but…
PL: So anyways, it was a major pagan festival and survived through years of dominant religions. The State of England, under the Tudors, they forbade it. They made it criminal to hoist a maypole because people would dance around the maypole as part of community celebration and fertility, as you say.
For us in North America, the date to remember is 1627 when Thomas Morton set up a maypole in Quincy, MA, and Native American people and runaway servants and former slaves and antinomians from England, they danced around that maypole. The first poem ever made in the USA was there. I’ll quote it “with the proclamation that the first of May, at Marymount shall be kept a holy day.”
So that’s 1627. The Puritans from Boston came down and shut it down with force of arms. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a wonderful story about it, thinking it was the crossroads of American history. We could have gone one way and been happy with the maypole and the spirit that it represented among different kinds of people. Multicultural we’d say today. Or it could have gone the other way, the way of domination, hierarchy, endless war, and endless work.
That brings us to the second major aspect of the day, which we need to celebrate with a different kind of seriousness, and that’s the struggle for the eight-hour day and the massacre of socialists, anarchists, white, indigenous and African Americans in Chicago, back in 1886 at the famous scene at Haymarket. That came as a direct result of a police shooting of workers at the McCormick works. McCormick made the mechanical reaper that brought industry and machines to the earth, to the plains, to cutting grass, cutting grain. Those workers had gone on strike for an eight-hour day, and the police shot them and killed one. In response, the people of Chicago called for a meeting to discuss the issue at Haymarket, where farmers brought in hay for the horses. At that meeting, just a few days after May Day, 1886, a stick of dynamite was thrown. To this day, no one knows whether it was a police provocateur or a misguided anarchist or what. But anyway, there was casualties, including demonstrators, as well as the policemen.
As a result, tremendous repression came down all across the US, not just in Chicago. Seven people were found guilty after a kangaroo trial, and four of them were actually hanged on the 11th of November 1887. We should remember their names: Albert Parsons, we know him especially because of his wife, Lucy, who went on living and carrying the message of the eight-hour day and a workers struggle right into the 1930s. August Spies, before he hanged, he said, “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangled today.” That’s been the case. Their silence is powerful, and all of us around the world celebrate and remember those workers, those martyrs, as they’re called in Mexico.
The ruling class of the United States tried to put an end to the celebration right away. They made made an into Law Day. Eisenhower did that. Then they made the workers’ holiday, Labor Day, in September to get it far away from May Day, when workers all over the world celebrated. They wanted to divide US workers from world workers.
I have to admit that they succeeded. People forgot May Day except for a few anarchists in the 1920s. Then in the ‘30s and ‘40s, the Communist Party kept up the tradition of May Day. But the Communist Party, worldwide anyway, associated the day with militarism, and it became something in the Cold War. This gives another reason why, in the United States, we’ve tended to forget that day. Until 2006, when tens of thousands of undocumented workers, most Spanish speaking, flooded the streets of Chicago again, and of Los Angeles and other towns, calling for justice for this new underclass of people denied basic rights as workers or citizens.
While I should also say, my book is called incomplete, because the hope of May Day has not been realized. We still are fighting not only for the eight hour day, but for equality, not equality of opportunity, but equality of economic conditions. I think we should fight this year to own the whole economy, not leave it just to the 1%. It should belong to us all, and we need to reconstitutionalize ourselves, reconstitute ourselves. But now I’m going off on my own views. I hope that gives your listeners some idea of the importance of May Day in the past, especially as it concerns North America.
TFSR: That was a really lovely outline that you just offered. I love the way that in the book you connect themes such as the displacement of indigenous people prior to the period, the Gilded Age of the Haymarket, when the Haymarket affair occurred, the clearing of the pastures, the killing off of buffalo and other residents of the great grasslands of the Midwest, then the connection to the McCormick works creating the reaper that just decimated the grasslands themselves.
PL: Yeah, just produced a buzz cut, didn’t it? Then as a result, we had the Dust Bowl because it was so bad for the soil: monoculture.
TFSR: The essays in the book range from 100 years after the Haymarket, basically 1986 to 2015. From the oldest to the newest, you make the claim a few times that May Day has both a green and a red side. What do you mean by this, and why do you think it’s important to remind people of that?
PL: Well, the green side now, as we’re talking in 2016, with the melting of the ice caps, the pollution of the Pacific Ocean, the destruction of species has a greater meaning, I think, than it did when I first conceived of the idea in the ‘80s. The notion of the green is the notion of photosynthesis, now that I think about it, the relationship of the sun to vegetation. Of course, vegetation is the basis of animal life, so really, all of life depends on… Well, I’m not a biologist, but a great deal of life depends on the green, depends on photosynthesis and chlorophyll. So there’s a literal meaning of green, but there’s also a symbolic meaning of green, which is the joy of living, the joy of life. In contrast to the red. Red I used signify blood and to signify struggle, especially class struggle, and thinking of the red flag of battle.
May Day is a holiday that spans both these notions. It can be both a family day of picnicking, outdoors preferably, and of dancing, and it can be a day of marching and a day of militants, a day of taking back the world that has been dis-commoned and dis-greened (if I can use that phrase), turned into asphalt, turned into concrete. So it’s had both the green and the red. I mean, the green has led to the Anthropocene. It’s led to geological changes of the planet. I think we can restore it, not to the way it was, but to the way it could be, only by a red struggle, only by a mass struggle. I believe people are are interested in that and see the necessity of it all over the world.
Anyway, so that’s kind of the red and the green, but I think it’s up to your readers and listeners to give to these symbols their own meanings from their own experience.
TFSR: Yeah, definitely you leave it with a lot of space for interpretation but draw out some lovely conclusions of your own.
How have you seen the celebration of the day change throughout your lifetime? You mentioned that the through the ‘20s it was remembered by a number of anarchists activists, and through the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s communists in the United States… Just to interject right here, my first May Day that I celebrated was in San Francisco in 2000 during the anti-globalization era, as people call it. There was a giant maypole that was raised and a number of speaker and at the same time a big open-ended pagan celebration and picnic that led to a march eventually. It was really beautiful tying together what you seem to describe as the green and the red. And the marches of 2005 and 2006, as you mentioned.
Can you talk a little bit about how you’ve seen May Day in the popular imagination during your life?
PL: Yeah, I just know my own part of it. I love to hear about that San Francisco May Day. That sounds grand and beautiful. And I love to hear about the immigrant ones, the undocumented worker ones in 2005 and 2006. For me, May Day, an important day is always May 2nd because then I tune into the radio or read the newspaper, or now I guess we have the internet, to see who else in the world has turned out. May Day was so important in bringing down apartheid in South Africa and is still a major day of struggle in South Africa. It’s that way in so many parts of the world. On May 2nd it’s just a good time to check in and see what’s going on.
But for me, it began as a historian in Rochester. We thought let’s try to have a picnic and make it a family day and have some speeches and then sing songs. That’s the way it worked there. Then later, I moved to Boston, and we had different forms of May Day. I remember in Jamaica Plain on May Day we joined a festival called Wake Up The Earth. So on all these occasions I would meet people, old timers who had participated in Union Square in New York, for instance, and in May Day celebrations of the ‘40s. Then here in Washtenaw County, in Southeast Michigan, ever since I’ve lived here, we try to have a picnic, or we have a commons, or we teach children how to dance around the maypole. This year, I think, folks for Black Lives Matter and folks from other social change outfits will probably go to Detroit to join a picnic and march in so called Motor City, which now I guess is known, not as a rust belt, but as a place of urban gardening.
It’s important to do that because the powers that be have been poisoning the waters, as you perhaps have heard of, up in Flint, MI. It’s just a crime what the rulers of our country are doing. We need to bring them to justice to pay for their crimes. Not by long prison sentences. I’m certainly not in favor of that because we need to open the prisons, if anything. But we need to find other ways of making them pay. That is, we need reparations. The main reparations that must come must restore equality. So the riches, the ill gotten gains of the 1%, either they must voluntarily turn them over, or they must be made to do it. That can only be done I think with justice and mass mobilization.
At the moment our mobilizations can’t be that great, but it’s growing. It’s growing bursts. People are wondering, “What is anarchism? What is socialism? What is the political revolution?” These are questions raised by Bernie Sanders, and not to support him, but the questions are important. The discussion that results from them is important, and May Day should be a day to have those discussions. May Day is a day when we need to think deeply about this and to do it with our neighbors. To do it with all kinds of folks, everybody, all workers, all working people who belong to our class of the precariat, students, servers need to be involved in this discussion, as well as farmworkers and undocumented workers. Undocumented workers are so important because they bring the experience of other countries, and they bring also revolutionary experience from other countries. So we have a lot to learn from them.
Anyway, so I’m hoping to learn something myself by meeting some new friends this coming Sunday in Detroit. By the way, I was asking you about the lunch counter sit-ins in North Carolina. I asked you that for a purpose because I think there was an earlier lunch counter sit-in for the same goal of integrated lunch counters here in Ann Arbor, MI, in the 1920s led by Lenore Smith from Mississippi. We learned this by studying May Day in our own locality. I urge all your listeners to study May Day in your locality, to talk to old timers, to search out the old records, even to consult the occasional historian and see what they know and what they remember to bring this back to life.
One way of doing this is a wonderful book by Dave Roediger called the Haymarket Scrapbook, which I recommend. James Green wrote a very good book too called Death in the Haymarket. These are essential readings for those who want to go back to that, those crimes at Haymarket, when the police and the state came down so heavily on the workers, their press, their leaders, and their families, and jailed and hanged so many. In some ways, it’s a sad day.
TFSR: In the Ann Arbor experience that you’re talking about, in the second to last essay you wrote between 1923 and 1928, the Negro Caucasian Club was involved in some of these strikes, right? If listeners want to pursue further.
PL: Right, just get a friendly competition going between your state and Michigan.
TFSR: Competing for who gets the title of first lunch counter sit-ins?
PL: Yes, against segregation. Because of course, the North is so full of Jim Crow, even worse in many ways.
TFSR: Yeah, just kind of a different accent…
PL: They’re not poisoning the waters down in North Carolina, as far as I can see.
TFSR: Well, I don’t know, when you get coal ash ponds that are overflowing into the rivers, or the leaking of chemicals from coal production. Or in Louisiana with cancer alley. I mean, they’re doing it to us everywhere.
PL: Yes, thank you.
TFSR: As a historian, much of your written work has focused on the idea and the history of the commons, or at least that’s an idea that you seem to have played with a lot and documented, from which we draw May Day is a pagan holiday in the European context. Can you talk a bit about what the commons were and the enclosure of that and what you think May Day opens up in terms of the opportunity of the commons?
PL: Yeah, the basic thing about what May Day opens up is that the earth belongs to all. I talked about skipping and dancing on May Day, but the Earth as our sacred habitat, the Earth as Turtle Island, the earth as a place of abundance and joy to share with all kinds of creatures. The way to celebrate that is to climb over the fence, or to go under it or around it or through it, because the enclosures, the privatization of the earth, to produce the incredibly weird fiction that a person can own the earth, or part of it, this needs to change. It’s only in the United States, really, that private property is like this and is enforced with weapons. “Keep Off” and “No Trespassing” signs. Anyone who’s flown, you look down from the air, you see that the whole land is turned into squares or rectangular grids. This is what the founding fathers did. They privatized the common, they privatized the free land where people had lived, hunted, farmed, and gathered for for centuries.
That is the commons in terms of North America, in terms of Europe, and especially England, which which I studied carefully because, well, I grew up in England, and thats what I studied and taught. The enclosure of the village commons, the enclosure of common field agriculture, became the basis of the capitalist mode of production, as we say. It began under Henry the Eighth, who everybody knows because he killed his wives. But he’s the one who took a fifth of English land and sold it off, privatize it, just the way George Washington and them did several hundred years later in the 1790s to North America. They surveyed it with a theodolite and the tools of the surveyor, laid down their lines, and said, “This is mine,” and threw off everyone else who had lived on it. Thus creating the proletariat, as well as agribusiness.
But the commons are a basis of community. People long for community, they long for useful work, so they long for the commons, to share the earth and to share the means of subsistence, the means of production. This is what I meant earlier, when I said, “We demand the whole economy.” Because we really need to rest, to stop being quite so busy, to stop driving for profit, stop driving for “development,” to stop driving for “progress.” Progress for whom? Progress for the 1%. The rest of us need to rest. This is why Sunday and May Day is so important. There used to be hundreds of holidays every year, but the capitalist enterprise and puritanical beliefs shut down those holidays. We’re lucky to have… I was gonna say one a weeK——Sunday, but that’s not even true anymore.
So, community, time of work, is all tied to the commons. It’s not an accident that Henry the Eighth was a wife beater, wife killer. According to documents of his own age, he killed 78,000 people on the gallows. This isn’t the demonize him particularly, but it’s to show at the birth of the modern British state, its project was misogynist, it was enclosing, and then it became slaving. These are the basis of capitalism as we know it. Misogyny, or patriarchy, enclosure, or destruction of the commons, and privatization and slavery. I hope everyone has a great May Day.
TFSR: I really hope so too. Well, thanks for the inspiring conversation. I guess we should maybe get out there and start commoning, right?
PL: Well, people are doing it all over. We have to do it just to survive. Whether we like it or not, whether it’s ideological or not. Poverty requires us to. Either that or suicide. On that happy note… [laughs]
TFSR: Well, Peter, thanks a lot for talking. I enjoyed the book and look forward to reading more of your stuff. Have a great time up in Michigan.
This week’s episode of the Final Straw features a conversation on a divisive and spectacular tactic that for many outside of the movement defines what an anarchist is: the black bloc. We speak to a comrade who was present in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin on May Day of 1987 when thousands of autonomous activists (of the Autonomen movement of which our guest was and is a member) and erected burning barricades while physically resisting the state. This date is pointed to by many as the beginning of the tactic as it’s practiced in it’s modern form. We also talk about beginnings of the Autonomen, how it differed from other movements before and after, gender and class in the inflammatory May Day riots in Berlin and more.
This episode was made possible by the comrades at A-Radio Berlin who translated our questions, conducted the interview and sent us transcripts and even overdubbed the audio. Much thanks. Check out their project, as they do at times produce content in English, Spanish and French in addition to their work in German.
This week we speak with Ukrop, an anarchist, antifascist activist, and maker of the documentaries “Antifascist Attitude” & “Actions vs. Repressions”. This is part 1 of a two part interview, in which they talk about the history and context of Nazi influence in formerly-Soviet Russia and the rise of radical anti-fascism. Ukrop also discusses how the internet effected punk and anarchist subculture in Russia in the 1990’s and the first decade of the 21st century. In the conversation we cover overlaps between police and prisons and nazi’s as well as how the education system in that country feeds into nationalism and capitalism.
To keep updated about ongoing things in Russia, check out the following websites:
This week’s show will be a conversation with Saro Lynch-Tomason and Kila Donovan, members of the Asheville May Day Choir about music, resistance, history and the upcoming May Day celebrations in Asheville. Saro and Kila are also members of the band, Red Wind. The show features in-studio renditions of some beautiful resistance songs that we’ll be hearing this year. The two jamboree shows will be a benefit for Blair Pathways.
This week’s show features a conversation with Gail Stevens. Gail is the mother of imprisoned activist and anarchist, Connor Stevens, who is one of the four anarchists that the FBI is accusing of attempting to blow up a bridge outside of Cleveland, Ohio. Connor and two other defendants, Brandon Baxter and Doug Wright, have taken a non-cooperating plea deal in the case and face their sentencing hearing on November 5th & 6th of 2012. Joshua Stafford is currently undergoing psychiatric testing to see if he can stand trial. Anthony Hayne took a cooperating plea.
During the interview Gail talks about her son, Connor, and offers a different story than what the FBI and even Rolling Stone Magazine have proposed as to what happened leading up to the arrest of the 5 on April 30th of this year. Gail also rips into the poor journalism involved in “The Plot Against Occupy” and tells us what Sabrina R. Erdely got wrong.
