De-Sentimentalizing May

Dark and Radical Reflections on an at once Beautiful and Hideous Month

Radical Green, Red, and Black May

A Delicious Dialectical Convergence

I have long tended to over-romanticize the month of May.  It’s a very attractive month for anyone who combines a love of nature and the flowering of spring with an attachment to proletarian struggle, labor history, and socialist and communist movements past and present. 

May Day, May 1^st is the original and true workers day – a day when the ancient Western popular tradition of celebrating spring’s glorious emergence in the northern temperate zone merged with the early industrial working class’s struggle for a remotely human working schedule – the Eight Hour Day.

The convergence was a beautiful thing.

There’s a delicious and dialectical interplay between the ancient “green” May Day and the industrial-era “red and black” working class May Day. In the brilliant 27th chapter of his magnum opus, the first volume of Das Kapital, Karl Marx, born on May 5, 1818, detailed how the long capitalist “usurpation  of the common lands and the revolution in agriculture accompanying this” from the last third of the 15th Century through the 19th Century had created a vast swath of the miserably exploited British proletariat.  It was a “forcible expropriation” that had removed much of the English population from direct connection to the beauty, rhythms, and sustenance of nature and into the dark, dirty, dangerous, deadening, deafening and despotic mills, mines, and manufactories, and mines of Dickensian England, where children and adults toiled sadistically long hours for a pittance under the vicious, penny-pinching “time-work discipline” of capitalist overlords for whom they generated oceans of profit-fueling surplus value.

The great Western Enclosure of the Commons was both a giant propertied class assault on the earthly treasury and the creation of a mass of people with nothing left to keep themselves alive but the sale of their exploited, alienated and degraded labor power – the renting out of their devalued species being  –  to parasitic capital. Marx’s Capital was dedicated to Wilhelm Wolf, a brilliant son of Silesian peasants who fought to defend the commons against enclosure and was hailed by Marx as a “noble protagonist of the proletariat.”

The ancient plebian May Day (dating from Roman times) merged with the new industrial one was an opportunity to stream out and steer clear of the industrial revolution’s miserable means of capitalist profit production, into the blossoming splendor of Spring.

Chicago 1886

The biggest May Day of all came in Chicago in 1886, then the world capital of working-class radicalism (remarkably enough in retrospect). What followed took on world-historical significance.  As the Encyclopedia of Chicago reports:

“On May 1, 1886, Chicago unionists, reformers, socialists, anarchists and ordinary workers combined to make the city the center of the national movement for an eight-hour day. Between April 25^th and May 4^th, workers attended scores of meetings and paraded through the streets at least 19 times. On Saturday, May 1^st, 35,00 workers walked off their jobs. Tens of thousands more, both skilled and unskilled, joined them on May 3 and 4. Crowds traveled from workplace to workplace urging fellow workers to strike. Many now adopted the radical demand of eight hours' work for ten hours' pay. Police clashed with strikers at least a dozen times, three with shootings.

At the McCormick reaper plant, a long-simmering strike erupted in violence on May 3, and police fired at strikers, killing at least two. Anarchists called a protest meeting at the West Randolph Street Haymarket, advertising it in inflammatory leaflets, one of which called for ‘Revenge!’

The crowd gathered on the evening of May 4 on Des Plaines Street, just north of Randolph, was peaceful, and Mayor Carter H. Harrison, who attended, instructed police not to disturb the meeting. But when one speaker urged the dwindling crowd to ‘throttle’ the law, 176 officers under Inspector John Bonfield marched to the meeting and ordered it to disperse.

Then someone hurled a bomb at the police, killing one officer instantly. Police drew guns, firing wildly. Sixty officers were injured, and eight died; an undetermined number of the crowd were killed or wounded….

Inspired by the American movement for a shorter workday, socialists and unionists around the world began celebrating May 1, or ‘May Day,’ as an international workers' holiday. In the twentieth century, the Soviet Union and other Communist countries officially adopted it. The Haymarket tragedy is remembered throughout the world in speeches, murals, and monuments.”

(The McCormick plant churned out harvesting machines that pushed millions of working people off the land and out of the countryside, out from the sun, soil, and wind and into the teeming new urban factories, mills, and slums of the Age of Capital).  

“Remembered throughout the world” except in the United States, ironically enough.  Anti-communist propaganda tossed the original Labor Day – May First - down the US historical memory hole. The heavily propagandized capitalist dystopia that is the United States has long promoted instead a fake Labor Day (institutionalized in the wake of Haymarket as a counter to radical May First) marking the end of the summer and a return to toil rather than the flowering of spring and a release from wage slavery.

Mai 68

May is also the month in which the present communist writer was born and when (in my tenth year) France came close to being the first advanced core state capitalist-imperialist nation to have a socialist revolution. In May 1968, France fell or (depending on your world view) rose into a remarkable seven-week period of New Left social upheaval marked by demonstrations, general strikes, and university and factory occupations. At its peak, “Mai 68” – infused with romantic naturalist green as well as radical red and black energy – ground the French economy to a halt and the French ruling class seriously feared civil war and revolution. The national government briefly ceased to function after President Charles de Gaulle secretly fled France to West Germany on May 29^th. We can be certain that US imperial policymakers were considering methods of intervention.

May 1970, USA

May 4^th was also the day on which National Guard troops murdered four Kent State University students protesting the US War on Vietnam and most particularly Richard Nixon’s April 30^th invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970. The killings sparked a massive protest wave that shut down 450 campuses and caused so much beautiful disruption in Washington DC that the then US War Criminal-in-Chief Richard Nixon (who would have used nuclear weapons on Vietnam but for the power of the antiwar movement inside the USA) was taken to Camp David “for his own protection” while the US 82^nd Airborne was bivouacked in the US Executive Office Building.

Chicago May 1, 2012

One of my more poignant and personal May memories goes back to May 1, 2012, when I joined a mass protest against the holding of a NATO convention in Chicago. I will never forget a remarkable scene at Wabash and Cermak Streets in the Near South Side that day: dozens of anti-imperialist US military veterans climbing on a truck flatbed to dramatically tear off their military medals and toss them to the ground after telling stories of horrific crimes they and their fellow ex-soldiers had been ordered to commit in the name of the post-9/11 US Global War “on”/of Terror. Well more than a thousand antiwar rally participants beheld this moving scene in the menacing presence of hundreds of heavily armed riot police.   

Say His Name, 2020

Nine years later, May 26, 2020, marked the beginning of the largest mass protest movement in US History – the George Floyd Rebellion, sparked by the racist white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s sadistic and videotaped murder of the Black man George Floyd. Protests rapidly mushroomed nationwide, arising in 2,000 cities and towns in the name of Black Lives Matter. More than 25 million Americans demonstrated against racism and police brutality in the summer of 2020, making the George Floyd Rebellion the largest protest wave in US history. I joined more than a thousand young people who took tear gas and faced off with county and state riot police guarding Interstate 80 just north of Iowa City.   

May Repressions and Surrenders

“The Bloody Week”: Paris, 1871

There’s plenty for a communist environmentalist and former labor historian like the present writer to get mawkish about when it comes to the month of May. It doesn’t hurt that I share May as a birth month with three notable figures from whom I’ve long garnered intellectual, political,  and artistic inspiration: Marx (May 5), songwriter Bob Dylan (May 24), and the radical biologist and environmentalist Barry Commoner (May 28), who combined ecology and socialism in ways that richly informed my youthful radicalization during the mid-late 1970s.

Still, I have long been too sentimental about the fifth month in the Roman calendar. For the harsh truth of the matter is that May is also a month of horrific ruling class repression and – in May of 1968 – “left” capitulation, sell-out, and surrender.  My birthday, May 23^rd,  was a bloody day in the defeat and repression of the Paris Commune (March 26-May 28, 1871), the first glorious but doomed experiment in the seizure of state power by and for the proletariat.  As an excellent, richly annotated Wikipedia account reports:  

“The national French Army suppressed the Commune at the end of May during La semaine sanglante (‘The Bloody Week’) beginning on 21 May 1871. The national forces killed in battle or quickly executed between 10,000 and 15,000 Communards, though one unconfirmed estimate from 1876 put the toll as high as 20,000… The garrison of one [Commune] barricade, at Chaussee Clignancourt, was defended in part by a battalion of about thirty women, including Louise Michel, the celebrated ‘Red Virgin of Montmartre’, who had already participated in many battles outside the city. She was seized by regular soldiers and thrown into the trench in front of the barricade and left for dead. She escaped and soon afterwards surrendered to the army, to prevent the arrest of her mother. The battalions of the National Guard were no match for the army; by midday on the 23rd the regular soldiers were at the top of Montmartre, and the tricolor flag was raised over the Solferino tower. The soldiers captured 42 guardsmen and several women, took them to the same house on Rue Rosier where [Commune] generals Clement-Thomas and Lecomte had been executed, and shot them. On the Rue Royale, soldiers seized the formidable barricade around the Madeleine church; 300 prisoners captured with their weapons were shot there, the largest of the mass executions of the rebels.”

May 24 was bloodier still:

“As the army continued its methodical advance, the summary executions of captured Communard soldiers by the army continued. Informal military courts were established at the École Polytechnique, Châtelet, the Luxembourg Palace, Parc Monceau, and other locations around Paris. The hands of captured prisoners were examined to see if they had fired weapons. The prisoners gave their identity, sentence was pronounced by a court of two or three gendarme officers, the prisoners were taken out and sentences immediately carried out.”

During the "Bloody Week" (May 21-28, 1871), at least 10,000 communards died during combat with the bourgeois state or were summarily executed. It was the worst massacre in French history.

The United States’ First Red Scare and Blue Lives Matter Campaign, 1886-87

Fifteen years later, the Haymarket Bomb of May 4th was pretext for a massive wave of proto-fascist repression inflicted on radicals, trade unionists and ordinary workers across the United States:   

“A harsh anti-union clampdown followed the Haymarket incident and the Great [Eight Hour] Upheaval subsided. Employers regained control of their workers and traditional workdays were restored to ten or more hours a day. There was a massive outpouring of community and business support for the police and many thousands of dollars were donated to funds for their medical care and to assist their efforts. The entire labor and immigrant community, particularly Germans and Bohemians, came under suspicion. Police raids were carried out on homes and offices of suspected anarchists. Dozens of suspects, many only remotely related to the Haymarket Affair, were arrested. Casting legal requirements such as search warrants aside, Chicago police squads subjected the labor activists of Chicago to an eight-week shakedown, ransacking their meeting halls and places of business. The emphasis was on the speakers at the Haymarket rally and the newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung. A small group of anarchists were discovered to have been engaged in making bombs on the same day as the incident, including round ones like the one used in Haymarket Square…Newspaper reports declared that anarchist agitators were to blame for the ‘riot’, a view adopted by an alarmed public. As time passed, press reports and illustrations of the incident became more elaborate. Coverage was national, then international. Among property owners, the press, and other elements of society, a consensus developed that suppression of anarchist agitation was necessary while for their part, union organizations such as The Knights of Labor and craft unions were quick to disassociate themselves from the anarchist movement and to repudiate violent tactics as self-defeating. Many workers, on the other hand, believed that men of the Pinkerton agency were responsible because of the agency's tactic of secretly infiltrating labor groups and its sometimes-violent methods of strike breaking.”

The nation’s first mass Red Scare and Blue Lives Matter campaign began immediately after the bomb was thrown. Four leading Chicago anarchists and socialists were sadistically hanged to death at the command of the leading Chicago capitalist Marshall Field on November 11, 1887. No proof was ever presented to support ruling class claims of their responsibility for the Haymarket Bomb.

“Should Have Been Done Long Ago”: Four Dead in Ohio, Two Dead at Jackson State, and Hard Hat Patriots

Vicious repression and cold-blooded reaction followed the great protests sparked by Nixon’s Cambodia incursion and the Kent State killings on the day of the Haymarket bomb:   

“On May 8, eleven people were bayonetted at the University of New Mexico by the New Mexico National Guard in a confrontation with student protesters. Also on May 8, an antiwar protest at New York's Federal Hall National Memorial held at least partly in reaction to the Kent State killings was met with a counter-rally of pro-Nixon construction workers (organized by Peter J. Brennan, later appointed U.S. Labor Secretary by President Nixon), resulting in the Hard Hat Riot [a physical assault on antiwar protesters by blue collar workers]… A Gallup Poll taken the day after the shootings reportedly showed that 58 percent of respondents blamed the students, 11 percent blamed the National Guard, and 31 percent expressed no opinion… Students from Kent State and other universities often got a hostile reaction upon returning home. Some were told that more students should have been killed to teach student protesters a lesson; some students were disowned by their families…On May 14, ten days after the Kent State shootings, two students were killed (and 12 wounded) by police at Jackson State University, a historically black university, in Jackson, Mississippi, under similar circumstances – the Jackson State killings – but that event did not arouse the same nationwide attention as the Kent State shootings.”

The malevolent proto-fascist “law and order” President Nixon won re-election by a giant margin in 1972, putting him and Kissinger in place to help stage a fascist coup in Chile among other horrific domestic and imperial crimes that were omitted from the case for his impeachment in 1974.

“Communists Opposed Revolution”: The Sputtering Out of Mai 68

Two years earlier in France, late May saw the evaporation of very real revolutionary possibilities as unions and French Communist Party worked to maintain bourgeois rule:

“By late May the flow of events had changed. The Grenelle accords, concluded on 27 May between the government, trade unions and employers, won significant wage gains for workers. A counter-demonstration organised by the Gaullist party on 29 May in central Paris gave De Gaulle the confidence to dissolve the National Assembly and call for parliamentary elections for 23 June 1968. Violence evaporated almost as quickly as it arose. Workers went back to their jobs, and when the elections were held in June, the Gaullists emerged stronger than before…Revolution prevented: On 30 May, 400,000 to 500,000 protesters (many more than the 50,000 the police were expecting) led by the CGT marched through Paris, chanting: ‘Adieu, de Gaulle!’ (‘Farewell, de Gaulle!’). Maurice Grimaud, head of the Paris police, played a key role in avoiding revolution by both speaking to and spying on the revolutionaries, and by carefully avoiding the use of force. While Communist leaders later denied that they had planned an armed uprising, and extreme militants only comprised 2% of the populace, they had overestimated de Gaulle's strength as shown by his escape to Germany. One scholar, otherwise skeptical of the French Communists' willingness to maintain democracy after forming a government, has claimed that the ‘moderate, nonviolent and essentially antirevolutionary’ Communists opposed revolution because they sincerely believed that the party must come to power through legal elections, not armed conflict that might provoke harsh repression from political opponents.”

If the Mai 68 rebellion had occupied core government buildings in Paris, the government would have had to call in the military to retake Paris as in 1871, bringing casualties that might have sparked a political as well as a social revolution. Like their fellow revisionist “communist” party counterparts in other nations, the revisionist French Communist Party had no interest in a real revolution, in smashing the capitalist state and building a new and socialist one.

What a Police State Looks Like

May 2012 in Chicago was hardly a revolutionary situation, but the most remarkable thing about the NATO protest that day in the city of Haymarket was the extent to which metropolitan authorities acted as it if was: the city was saturated with multi-jurisdictional and militarized police state gendarmes and technology, replete with sound canons and more. Black Bloc anarchists had a nice hour-long tussle with the cops after the medal ceremony, but that was of little significance and ended with the usual mass arrests. The downtown area was literally crawling with the forces of repression.  As protesters chanted “this is what democracy looks like,” I reflected that it was much more like what a fascist police state looks like.

The Iowa City version of the I-80 occupation I participated in at the end of May 2020 concluded when the city’s neoliberal Black mayor was deployed to the highway to tell young people to leave the Interstate the day after the aforementioned confrontation with heavily armed gendarmes, who informed young people that “we’re not afraid to put you in body bags.”  

The George Floyd Rebellion led to the murder of a significant number of anti-racist protesters in the summer of 2020 (I wrote about 14 of these horrible killings here) and has brought about little if any significant change in police conduct towards people of color.  2022 saw the most killing of US-Americans by police since 2013 and a widely disproportionately share of these murders have as usual been disproportionately committed against Black people.  Last January, Atlanta-area police paramilitaries murdered the 26-year-old environmentalist and “Cop City” resister Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán in a fusillade that riddled the activist’s body with 57 gunshot wounds.  Teran was shot in his head, torso, hands, and legs. The local medical examiner has recently ruled the death a homicide. The official autopsy report found no trace of gunpowder residue on Tortuguita’s hands, contradicting the pigs’ claim that he had shot at them before they opened fire. “Cop City” is a $90 million police training center being built atop a vast section of the Atlanta forest. It is a monument to racist and eco-fascist police statism and late capitalist Enclosure. It is a domestic counter-insurgency camp meant to school law enforcement in the latest tools and techniques of repression.

When Does Macron Have to Leave the Country?

That’s what happens when people rebel and rise up without a revolutionary socialist and communist vanguard party and without seizing state power.  Like in France today, where months of remarkable left and labor protest and significant popular damage to property and police have been sparked by the noxious eoliberal president Emanuel Macron’s decision to raise the national retirement age by two years. The unrest included impressive turnout and rioting on Europe’s Labor Day – May First - this year:

“In Paris, radical protesters threw projectiles at police and broke windows of businesses such as banks and estate agents, with security forces responding with tear gas and water cannon…One policeman, hit by a Molotov cocktail, has suffered severe burns to the hand and face…Police had been given a last-minute go-ahead to use drones as a security measure after a Paris court rejected a petition from rights groups for them not to be used….Police deployed tear gas in Toulouse in southern France as tensions erupted during demonstrations, while four cars were set on fire in the southeastern city of Lyon….In the western city of Nantes, police also fired tear gas after protesters hurled projectiles, AFP correspondents said. The windows of Uniqlo clothing store were smashed…Protesters briefly occupied the luxury Intercontinental hotel in the southern city of Marseille, breaking flowerpots and damaging furniture. Some 782,000 people protested across France, including 112,000 in Paris alone, the interior ministry said. The CGT union said it counted 2.3 million protesters across France, including 550,000 in the capital.”

Super, mais et alors! (“Super, but so what?”). When does Macron feel compelled to leave the country like DeGaulle 1968? It’s fun, therapeutic, and perfectly legitimate to tear up bourgeois hotels and shops and break financial sector windows, but it’s not particularly revolutionary. The pension “reform” is going through despite all the mass anger and against majority French opinion since there is no revolutionary socialist t vanguard party of sufficient size, militancy, program and vision to scare the French ruling class into reversing the revolting retirement regression.

October:  Two Actual Revolutions

Let me suggest a much better month than May, historically speaking: October.  That’s the month when communist vanguard parties went beyond protest and resistance to actually seize state power in Russia in 1917 and China in 1949[1]. I have already written on this venue about the need to respect (without worshipping) the communist-led Russian Bolshevik and Chinese Maoist socialist revolutions, both of which held official state May Day celebrations in honor of the original Working-Class Labor Day – two imperfect but real examples of state power being taken and wielded on behalf of the proletariat and revolutionary socialism.

Proletarian revolution so far is a Libra, not a Gemini. Still, I’m for it under any Zodiac sign :)….

Capitalogenic Mayday! Mayday!

Prefer capitalism? It has brought us to another kind of Mayday, as in “Mayday! Mayday!,” what a pilot says when his plane is hurtling to the ground.  This Mayday[2], adopted from French for “help me” – “M’aidez” -  reflects a crime that would have horrified even Hitler (something of a naturalist who decreed a perverse faux-laborite May Day under the Third Reich): the fossil- capitalist conversion of the entire planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber. If the current environmental trajectory is not significantly reversed, impossible under the anarchic rule of capital, the fight for social equality and justice is reduced to a debate over how to more equitably share a poisoned pie. Who wants to “turn the world upside down” (the great proto-communist Enclosure opponent and commonser Gerrard Winstanley’s phrase) only to find out that it is a steaming pile of overheated toxic and pathogen-ridden waste? If the beautiful and bountiful Earth – Winstanley’s “common treasury for all” –  that is celebrated by the ancient Green May Day is irreversibly poisoned in a capitalogenic environmental and epidemiological Mayday!, then the radical social and political transformation of the industrial-era Red and Black May Day becomes sadly beside the point. The “common ruin of the contending classes” will have trumped the “revolutionary reconstitution of society-at-large.”

Notes

+1. The Russian Revolution occurred on what we know as November 7, 1917, but was called “the October Revolution” because it took place on October 25 according to the Julian calendar used in Tsarist Russia at the time.  Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949.

+2. My own first encounter with “May Day” was watching cartoons in the mid-1960s as a grade schooler and seeing Micky Mouse (or maybe it was Donald Duck) screaming “Mayday! Mayday!” as his damaged plane fell to the ground.  The second meaning I encountered, also as a grade schooler, was watching news reports of the big military May Day parades in Moscow’s Red Square.  I have vague childhood memories of the ancient green May Day but cannot pinpoint when I first heard of it. I learned about the proletarian May Day only as an undergraduate student of working-class social history. I have the distinct impression/memory that 19^th Century European and British Isles proletarians and artisans merged the naturalist/pastoral green and working-class May Days well before the 1886 Haymarket incident elevated May Day to international working class and Left significance. Perhaps there are serf, peasant, and tenant farmer May antecedents as well. Tracing the geographic and temporal contours of green and class struggle May Day’s fusion would be an interesting academic endeavor.  It’s probably already been done