Today is May Day and tonight is the Grand Opening of our new CounterPULSE space at 1310 Mission Street. I hope all you thousands of readers will make it down there and join us for a great party. Doors at 7, show at 8, $10-20 donation requested at the door but no one turned away for lack of funds, or an unwillingness to pay! I’ll be briefly reprising Peter Linebaugh’s lovely essay “The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day”.
To the history of May Day there is a Green side and there is a Red side.
Under the rainbow, our methodology must be colorful. 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.
Yo Chris…sorry I couldn’t make the open house/hope it was successful. . .as it should be. I attended the Inkworks Press/Coop May Day here in Berkeley which was a bang up affair with music, kids activities and a wonderful mix of folks. The high point for me was the arrival of the crew from Argentina who are involved in the reclaimed factory movement. More about this at http://www.theworkingworld.org.
AFTERWARDS though I began thinking about the whole nature of May Day here at the beginning of the 21st C. Of what relevance is it really? I like that idea of taking it back to the so-called heathen origins, but how to catapult it into the future? Is it any wonder that the oldie left is now on board trying to resusitate it? I understand that the central labor council mayday in sf was a complete bore. The rival Berkeley mayday at Alliance Graphics/MECA was nostalgia writ large according to my brief drive by . . . sorry I never liked folk music and was pleased when Dylan electrified his guitar, though he could have gone further and added electronic do-dads to his performance, or just stopped performing after 1967 and opened up a beer and pizza parlor.
Just a thought here (since you have offered the space for this and I don’t have my own blog-spot just yet) but what might get us off on the right foot with mayday is a musical.
MAY DAY! . . . it would start with the pagan origins, move through the dark ages of christian repression and its subversive carnival, bacchanalian turn, slip through the late 19th C. resurgence and collapse headlong into the future where work is a distant memory and we are back with a celebration of Spring sans gmo crops/food but with a wonderous green technology providing us with the fruits of our labor so to speak on a world-wide basis. Of course to make this all dramatic there needs to be an apocalyptic fight with the forces of evil depicted as large puppets with no real substance.
OK I’ll get my OWN blogspot tomorrow and not take up your digital space with my ravings.
“Axel Ztangi”