Mayday reflections

 I want to say some words about Mayday and the proposed general strike.  What should be more widely known about May 1st, Mayday, is that it was a festival to celebrate those heroes of the past who protected economic and social justice.  In the classic Saturnalia fashion, where all societal order was decalcified and turned on its head, Mayday was the proof in those inegalitarian and repressive times that a more democratic and egalitarian society was possible.  If you can do it for one day, you can do it for two, then three, then a week, a month, a year; to the whole live long time.  Fast forward to now, and the times are slightly improved, but still, sure as can be, inegalitarian and repressive, but I say this about the general strike: if you can do it for one day you can do it for two, then three, then a week, a month, a year.  The only way to live in that egalitarian and just world we desire is to bring that feeling of labor strife and working class anger to further shaking loose the traditional social order which is positively medieval.  

The truly incisive critic would say that we live in a constant saturnalia that has disrupted injustice and created modernity.  The only way to further improve is to further disrupt.  

To further the goal of Mayday 2028 we need to embrace the dramatic side of labor action.  The Mayday plays provided the intellectual fuel to disrupt feudalism, however, we need to challenge and re-conceive the modern social order, by releasing its discontents,  and thus rekindling the spark of sympathy and solidarity amongst the victims of rapacious capital in as many places as it can go.  We need adept storytellers in words and language to either transcend technical jargon and eliminate the need for it in communication, or find ideas upon which we can think or work.  The spirit of the Mayday plays updated to modern times may therefore be encapsulated by that comment by Wendell Phillips: “Easy men dream that we live under a government of law.  Absurd mistake!  We live under a government of men and newspapers.”  

A government of men and newspapers.  Surely that couldn’t be the case.  But remarkably it is. And you will see from the history of the modern Mayday that a government of men and newspapers is what we want and the best safeguard against distress, labor distress or societal distress. Law is the scaffolding around the structure upon which these actors work.  Of course the word men is generic. Of course the word newspaper is broadly construed.  And of course it’s a government of men and newspapers.  Men of course can live anywhere and newspapers can be anywhere.  Why does that make it a government?  Of course it’s influenced by state action.  You have both a government of men and newspapers and you have a government of state action. So that leaves us an interesting question which is what is a government of men and newspapers going to do to push back against a government of state action?  Mayday exists in the spectrum of things that can be done about it.  

The long corruption of capital is a done question as far as Mayday is concerned.  Capital will find nothing for it here; on this day anarcho-syndicalism sets the rules but there are no rulers.  In London, a committee formed for the purpose revived Mayday over the year between 1998 and 1999.  On January 18th, 1999 the first Modern Mayday began.  A leaflet was distributed which named the problem as “endlessly repeating the same patterns” and stated in part: “Today we attempt to take over the tube, but we do so in solidarity with the tube workers.”  The first principle of Mayday is there shall be no collateral damage.  They created a worker-tube rider alliance that controlled the subway for the day.  And there’s no reason why that had to stop. The second principle is to build coalitions for solidarity and to go on strike, withholding your labor, which the pamphlet rightly named as the best course of action in all worker cases.  

• This is because of carried interest. The partners take a little off the top for to account for your labor, however those are your lost wages.  If you withhold your labor you can get back your carried interest as collateral and use it as leverage in the negotiating process. (As the Fifth International reminds us, “only when the bosses are scared of losing everything can a breach be made”).  
• However anyone going out on strike should know their Fourth Amendment rights. They can not seize or search you absent cause without a warrant. I want to comment on recent news of SEIU members in Nevada seized in a police van that pulled up right in front of their picket line.  It was a Fourth Amendment violation.  SEIU members deserve their wages and even more so they deserve fair recompense for their violated rights.  And I know the SEIU is working hard to make this right. 
• The fact that state action is backing up capital in a fight over carried interest shows how important it is to stand on the side of Labor in this fight, and how the very people we on the side of labor are calling out and challenging are feeling fear over the increasing power of organized labor. But they have only begun to feel the pain.  

The resistance and solidarity that are intrinsic to this holiday are reflected in its complex relationship to nature.  Having a meeting “on the green” was an old tradition on Mayday.  From the early 1770’s through the early 1900’s Jack in Green, dressed in wicker to make him appear as a tree, would present himself while milk maids or the chimney sweeps of London danced around him.  This was a reference to the Green Man, which often featured in church carvings from the time.  

In the Americas, when the first settlers erected a maypole in Quincy, Mass. and drank copiously of beer while dancing with the natives, the Puritans shut down the party with military force.  

However the spirit of saturnalia which remained in those revelries continued, and the revelry continued to draw repression from the authorities, until that repression stopped. The most effective way to suppress the riotous common folk on their day of jubilee was to build over the sites where they had held their meetings and celebrations and passed their messages.  In London the powers that be built houses over the green where the celebrations had been held and gentrified the neighborhood to stifle the people’s voice.  

Of course if you’re going to have a party you’re going to have one.  And there were some traditions that the state could never shut down. Taking group walks down the common paths was one example, because they by ancient law had to be kept open as long as they were used once per year.  That is still the law in most states and Michigan so far as I know.  It is where the common law right of way comes from, after all.  Well dressing or dressing of springs and water sources was another animal with ties to ancient laws and which has special modern relevance as citizens try to take back public control of water resources in an effort to stop climate change.  Navigable waters are common highways in the old Northwest Treaty states under the equal footing doctrine, so they would have to remain open so long as they are used once per year; however they are navigable by right in those states, at which point they become common paths, that is is to say legally they become trails.  As to what a trail is, the National Recreation Trails Program says “Definitions can be really broad or quite specific.”  And reminds us that it is “established either through construction or use and is passable”.  In Michigan any trail can be named a “Pure Michigan Trail” so therefore there must be something called a trail if there was a capacity to name it something.  It establishes the right of way through postulation.  For you never know if there is an ability to change the name, if there is a higher way.  

The American way is the will of the people and the people’s right to exist.  That is dogma.  

But the people used to ignite wooden wheels and roll them down the hills and crags into the fields to celebrate Mayday.  This practice was banned by the Catholic Church in the 1700’s but continued. 

What the people don’t understand is that the Robin Hood of the Robin Goodfellow plays wasn’t Robin Hood.  There was a criminal named Robin Hood, but Robin Hood wasn’t Robin Hood’s real name, it was a name he adopted after the crusades.  Was it Robin Goodfellow or was it Herne the Horned God that starred in the play and Diana was the Queen of May on Mayday?  I’m pretty sure Robin Goodfellow returned what was stolen to the people by becoming Herne the Horned God while the people gave flowers to the May.  And I remember that because someone said “flowers to the May” to me once, it was out in the street, I don’t remember remember that.  Although by the way I saw that there was a case in Star Court in the medieval year books that said men dressed as Robin Hood were arrested for being disorderly as a mob of men; this was a trend and it was struck off, it was a guilty verdict, they or men dressed like them had been disorderly in connection with Mayday; in any case Robin Hood was not Robin Goodfellow.  Robin Hood was an imitator of Robin Goodfellow, who was also a character in a complicated drama illustrating life.  How far back does this go?  As far back as he knows.  It is not his fault for wanting to act like Robin Goodfellow but he chose violence instead of class uplift and that was the trap he fell into.  Still he was one of many imitating the great mystery play.  And he was drunk and upset.  And so if you want to know the truth of the Robin Hood story it is that it ends at Mayday as merely the imitation of a greater truth so much more of which is revealed.  

Cernunnos, Cernach or Cunavalas, Saint Cornely, Esta Navi Wog, Amanai are the other names of the Horned God Herne who was mentioned by Shakespeare.  It is related to the horned serpent art cave in South Africa and possibly the dicynodont fossil.  It has been incorporated into education we all got in school. It teaches us to always be faithful to our God and our conscience in equal measure, and conscience is king.  This is a whole nother story but at Mayday someone was crowned King whether that was King of sawing boards or fixing drainpipes or what have you and anybody could be king and they stayed king, but that is another story.  It tells us that there has always been resistance to injustice among the people.  They satirized the king. We should focus on building movement power.  The medieval craft guilds paid peculiar attention to the Feast of St. John on the Summer Solstice and to Mayday which was a fun time, and they were both Quarter Days.  “To Peebles, to the play” reads a Scottish poem about the Mayday celebrations.  That’s why the UAW pays close attention to cultural power and should continue to build bridges with movement power: Labor has no shortage of stories to tell.  

But taking into account the historical instances of 8 year olds protesting for an eight hour day and safe working conditions and being beaten down by the police and other atrocities that have happened on Labor’s long walk, something has to be said about securing the power of the protest or picket.  The report from the year after J18, when the roses and flowers were planted, from the front lines was the police tactics deployed against protestors of all kinds in this new era that had been established by the anarcho-syndicalists would be to “pen protestors in”.  And that is why you always flank your maneuvers.  A picket line should take up two sides of a street for more than double the impact.  Not only does it command attention and the police are more likely to check it out, but the police themselves are bound to interpret situations that concern the movement of goods and services with an eye that is more favorable to our cause.  Some people operate in the vicinity of the police with exactly this objective so it is best to be skeptical of them as they might be involved in some deal with the police over lost wages.  We don’t go to the police about lost wages. They can’t get it back for us and we know better than to think so.  

Getting back to what I was saying about cultural power.  We have in this age a lot of capacity to reforge traditions in workers’ favor. There are some examples from history to illustrate this.  The King of France was offered a Lily of the valley as a gift on Mayday; he decided to then present lilies of the valley to the ladies of the court.  Workmen’s associations have sold them by the piece on Mayday in France since or pretty much since.  The conservative psyop to replace Mayday with Law Day or even Law and Order Day is just another example; it can be opposed by the narrative of a general strike.  They are doing psyops every day; we are opposing them with narratives and we are winning.  This is another game we can win.  

We win by taking the Men of government and newspapers on strike, to complete the catechism; this is the third principle of Mayday.  A general strike would awaken sympathies we couldn’t imagine.  One of the immortal Haymarket martyrs declared, “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle here today.”  Well that silence is here today and it is time for it to be silent no longer.  When a Haymarket era pamphlet read “War to the Palace, Peace to the Cottage, and Death to LUXURIOUS IDLENESS” that does mean something different for every age.  It is necessary to break with the continual adaptation to the logic of the bosses, says the Fifth International about organizing at Stellantis at Termoli.  It inevitably leads to overproduction and dismantling.  The age that we are in presently has something serious to say about the lost wage problem and I do believe it is the end of carried interest one way or another.  Men have fought, killed and died needlessly for carried interest and it has to be ended, and I don’t just mean the loophole but the entire corporate structure has to be changed because they are hiding your lost wages inside carried interest.  You have to withhold your labor to get it back.  When you withhold your labor you can get carried interest that really belongs to you as collateral to use at the bargaining table.  The other thing you can do with carried interest is if you really get it back, you can use it to pay off your loan on training, making you a better person.  Now, what I think happened in the Nevada picket line was that some workers got their carried interest back but they and it were seized before they could stake it as collateral in the negotiations.  So now we know what to fight.  Your Fourth Amendment rights should suffice to retake your collateral, thus police should not interfere in collective bargaining in order to repress workers any more.  We have to turn it to a rights-based discourse.  We live under a government of men and newspapers.  The Men of government and newspapers go out on strike and a new saturnalia begins to disrupt the old economic order.