by Rhyd Wildermuth
Gods and Radicals
April 18th, 2016
Karl Marx and Fredrich Engles claimed, in The Communist Manifesto, that the history of all societies has been that of class struggle. In a later edition, however, Engels inserted the following footnote:
“That is, all written history.”
What led to that clarification? Specifically, the discovery by anthropologists that pre-literate societies in Russia and elsewhere had held land in common. While all written histories of the world were founding narratives for the right-to-rule of the upper classes, unwritten histories told a different tale: stories not of hierarchies and class, of propertied rulers and priests, but of ways of being where property belonged to everyone and no-one.
In the footnote, Engels adds:
“with the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes.”
It’s tempting to call these primeval societies ‘pagan’ and perhaps we should. As Oscar Wilde suggested, the best way to overcome a temptation is to give in to it. Besides, much of modern Paganism draws from the myths and relationality of less hierarchical societies, borrowing from the later-recorded oral histories of gods and spirits–with very liberal applications of imagination and dreaming—to create a New/Old way of being.
Likewise, Paganism can be said to be reaction to Civilisation, or at least a certain understanding of it. The alienation of modern workplaces, the vapidity of technological distraction, and the apparent emptyness and Authoritarian nature of major religious forms compel many of us to look elsewhere for our meaning. For most of us, Paganism as we currently create it provides exactly that alternative.
If our desire to live according to Pagan forms of being is compelled by more than mere dissatisfaction with what’s on offer from the marketplace, churches, malls, televisions, cubicles and burger stands–that is, if it isn’t only a matter of consumer preference, but actually a resistance to those things—then no day embodies that desire, that compulsion, that celebration of the body and the natural world like Beltane, or May Day
But May Day doesn’t just belong to Pagans. While perhaps hundreds of thousands celebrate Beltane, many millions more in cities across the world have enacted a different sort of ritual, the revolt of worker against boss, renter against landlord, marcher against cop, of world-time against clock-time.
Are these May Days so different?
History From Below
Ask that question to Peter Linebaugh, and one imagines he would laugh, and then give you some very wild–and dazzling–history lessons.
In The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day, a new collection of his essays published by PM Press, Peter Linebaugh explores both threads of May Day, the Pagan threads (what he calls “The Green”) and the anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist threads (“The Red”).
The Incomplete, True, Authentic and Wonderful History of May Day is a collection of 11 essays, each written about and for May Day (and, as he cheerfully notes in the introductory essay, sometimes written ‘the night before’ the occasion) which dance and weave into each other like the ribbons of a maypole.
Linebaugh doesn’t tell history in lines, and that’s a good thing. Linear history is the story of the machine-age, the mechanistic world of the factory and the skyscraper, the narrative of progress and the line-up to the gas chambers. Such a history wheels along, unstoppable along iron tracks past the present. Through its windows we might catch a glimpse of the ‘great men’ of earlier times, the generals and warlords, men of religion, men of industry, men of science; if, that is, the black smudge of coal and petrol smoke does not obscure our view.
Peter
Linebaugh doesn’t tell the story of those people, he tells ours, the
‘History from Below,” and he recounts it not in lines but in webs, nets,
drawing threads and throwing cables across vast distances to connect
the people who actually live history, rather than watch it parade by.
For
Linebaugh, the worker and the witch, the coal miner in Appalachia and
the prisoner in London, the dead Sioux and the Italian anarchist, the
daughter of an African slave and the German philosopher are all part of
the same dance, each holding a coloured ribbon about the pole which
unites us.
The Dance of the Red & The Revolt of the Green
The Green of Beltane and the Red of May Day are interwoven through their shared acts of resistance against Authority and the demands of the bosses. As he explains in the title essay (originally written as a tract in 1986):
Green is a relationship to the earth and what grows therefrom. Red is a relationship to other people and the blood spilt there among. Green designates life with only necessary labor; Red designates death with surplus labor. Green is natural appropriation; Red is social expropriation.
Green is husbandry and nurturance; Red
is proletarianization and prostitution. Green is useful activity; Red
is useless toil. Green is creation of desire; Red is class struggle. May
Day is both.
(p.11)
The essay opens with a history of the Green, the pagan and irreligious celebrations from which most modern witches and pagans reconstruct the holiday. That it needed to be reconstructed at all further entwines the red and green threads together:
The farmers, workers, and child bearers (laborers) of the Middle Ages had hundreds of holy days which preserved the May Green, despite the attack on peasants and witches. Despite the complexities, whether May Day was observed by sacred or profane ritual, by pagan or Christian, by magic or not, by straights or gays, by gentled or calloused hands, it was always a celebration of all this is free and life-giving in the world. That is the Green side of the story.
Whatever it was, it was not a time to work.
Therefore,
it was attacked by the authorities. The repression had begun with the
burning of women and it continued in the 16th century when America was
“discovered,” the slave trade was begun, and nation-states and
capitalism was formed.
(p.14)
As Authority and the needs of
Capitalists sought to form humans into machine-workers, festival days
during which no work was to be done (as he points out, hundreds, and all
of them sacred) became sites of battle. The celebration of May Day was
banned, but as Linebaugh shows, this only made the celebrations more
anti-authoritarian. In England, the May Day games were thereafter called
the “Robin Hood Games” by the peasants, initiating the ‘Red’ current.
Of
course, May Day is better known to the world not as an ancient European
tradition, but a day of mass strikes, revolts, and marches to
commemorate the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago. The events that day came
about as part of a workers movement to reduce the length of the workday
to 8 hours and to protest State repression and murder of labor
activists. For Linebaugh, this is both the Red thread (leftist
organisation against Capital) and the Green thread (the demands of the
people for time to actually live life, rather than toil).
The Great Tapestry of Resistance
Other essays in the collection explore more of the modern class struggle centered on May Day. His essay X²: May Day In Light of Waco and LA explores the relationship between class struggle and social justice through the lens of Exploitation and Expropriation (the source of the X²).
1992 saw the Rodney King Riots in Los Angeles, during which 55 people were killed, thousands of people injured, and millions of dollars of property destroyed after a jury found the police officers who had severely beaten Rodney King not guilty of excessive force.
A common trick of Authority and the media is to de-legitimize the political anger in such uprisings, particularly amongst Black folk. Because much of the damage to business occurred not to white-owned establishments but to Asian-owned shops, the Rodney King Riots were written off as blind rage or even racist.
But Linebaugh sees in these events (which occurred during the few days before and few days after May Day that year) the same repeating form which led to the Evil May Day Riots in 1517.
Artisans in London attacked foreign merchants and bankers who had been brought in by the King to undercut wages and destroy the organising power of the guilds. Manipulating immigration policy has always been a trick of the powerful against the lower classes.
It’s in such places that Linebaugh’s historical narrative becomes most powerful and truly international. Linebaugh is particularly adept at showing the relationship between events in Europe and events in North America, a transatlanticism unfortunately rare in most histories.
Europe and North America are not the only continents where Linebaugh finds the spirit of May Day. Africa, the Middle East, and Asia all birth the repeating form of resistance. The threads intertwine fast and taut: anti-colonial struggle in Kenya connects to the Black Panthers, the struggle for the commons in Indonesia to student movements in the United States, striking soldiers from England to Ghandi and displaced Arabs, and eastern European vampire myths connect to privatisation and austerity moves in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
By the final essay (his retirement speech from the University of Toledo), the world of the Red and Green, the histories from below, have become a great tapestry of resistance which, like the title of the book, is True, Wonderful, Authentic….and Incomplete.
Like his other works, Peter Linebaugh leaves you dazzled, full of great optimism and the sense that the world is much smaller and an end to Capital much closer than you ever dared hope. But just as quickly, the stories end, the tapestry seems to fade away and you are left holding the colored cords, unsure what comes next.
His history of May Day is indeed incomplete. There are many, many more May Days to write about, including the one approaching. Will the Green and Red finally win this time? Will they twine together, braiding with all the other colors of the earth’s fecund life? The Black threads are there too, as are the Asian, the First Nations (see particularly his earlier work on Tecumseh in Stop, Thief!.) the Arab and the white, great ribbons all suspended from the top of a great tree.
Will we dance the world Peter Linebaugh shows us into existence around that pole this year? Or will it be the next? Either way, in his final lines Linebaugh invites us to that dance:
We have the world to gain, the earth to recuperate. M’Aidez! M’Aidez!
