May Day

 May 1, 2022

Despite the vociferous denials, today is May Day, perhaps the most officially denied holiday in Western history. There are two May Days, a “green” May Day and a “red” May Day, so to speak. Don’t let anyone convince you that today is really “Law Day,” or that we celebrate labor and the working class in September. This psyop against May Day must end. 

ಠ_ಠ

The edgy political humor. It grates on the refinement of the middle-aged, I presume. I can’t claim for you an exception to it. Yes, we were that social media generation, swapping essays with each other out of school. I’m still pretty young, but I’m sure I have written more essays out of school, than for school - and it’s not even close. My political views have long been shaped by long-ago-read social polemics, cryptic search suggestions spotted on various forums, and deep search-engine dives into the ‘net’s wealth of information. It’s a joy to know these things even if they upset the status quo. I can’t count the number of times I have heard/seen “you should look up ___” and actually done it, nor how many times I have seen someone belonging to some social minority hold forth on social media on a topic dear to them, and fallen into a martyrdom of their credibility, from which some have recovered and some are still struggling to rise. 

It’s not infrequent that Amanda Gorman’s poetry comes to mind to explain this phenomenon. From “We Write” there is a quote:

May those who have been laid to rest,

 Cause us to rise.

 We lived

 & that was more than we asked for.

 Those people whose old social media polemics have exceeded the bounds of polite society as it is currently constituted, are the base on which we stand, rightly or wrongly to the extent that we acknowledge them. They show us it’s not the end of history, nor the end of the American experiment; that there is a long way to go to reach the full ideals we strive for; and that the arc of the moral universe is long and bending towards justice, but has not reached it. There is an important sense that the meaning of the word Hope is that things have not yet become final. 

May Day gives an interesting case of how this process is long into the past, and despite the ancient nature of its various disputes, we can see where its history is going in the future, and see equally clearly why it isn’t there yet. The fact that there is a “green” and a “red” May Day is especially poignant in an era when the labor movement and the enviros just can’t get along enough to have a common project, or so it seems. 

The green May Day is older, certainly, but it is interesting to note that it was never the pastoral kumbayah that the subject of mid-century white suburban mom politics may have whitewashed it into. And neither was it this purely pagan spring festival that a certain New Age-y perspective would wish of it. Certainly the medieval British peasants had license to “act a little crazy” during spring holidays. Spring is a little bit of a crazy season if you live by the cycles of the Earth, and the Church, even in the Dark Ages, didn’t see an overwhelming need to oppress that, as a whole. The people got some license to turn social hierarchies upside down and backwards during some springtime festivals, and see how they liked that. The old medieval May Day festivals were, after all, the hosts of the Robin Hood plays, one of the earliest forms of the Robin Hood stories after the earliest ballads. The literary “hosts” of the Robin Hood tales were largely not the churchmen, but, rather, secular, including the incipient legal profession of the time. In a very dark and cruel and barbarous time, these stories and plays prompted people to think about what it would be like to live in a different social system, one where those who were made to be peasants by the present system had more dignity and agency, even free will.

Free will is of course a loaded philosophical term, even for those who have read Tolstoy’s War and Peace, because it is not easily understood in all its component contradictions. But suffice it to say, for peasants that were even a step up from being “bound to the land” the idea of having more freedom to choose the limits that bound them, even if those were still limiting, represented all the hope in the world. That was the kind of spirit that showed up when there was a Robin Hood play on a May Day. 

Even glossing the long history of May Day, it’s clear that the “green” is itself not without a hint of the “red”, even in the earliest days. It’s not hard to see why the labor martyrs of the Haymarket Massacre had begun their organization and political movement near the date of May Day. The “red” May Day doesn’t begin only with the Haymarket Affair; like with many workers’ movements, there were many precursors that coalesced in action at some point in time, and from that point on, the known point in time became known as the beginning of something. Something, that is, with shape and form and message; a touchstone for later moments. There was a huge and radical reform of the industrial economy that proceeded from this “red” May Day moment and its murkier precursors, and it ensured that industrialization did not result in a total hell for the salaried worker. But again, how different is the “red” from the “green”? At its core is the issue of the dignity of common folk. 

The “green” May Day can not even be written off as heroic adoration without praxis. In the barbarous circumstances that governed the time, the Robin Hood story was a defense of the commons, and therefore a defense of the common people’s right to subsist on the commons - which in extreme circumstances constituted their fundamental right to life. The ‘net provides some interesting notes about the importance of this story to common folk, including one whose source eludes me presently: a case in England’s Star Chamber about young men arrested for dressing up like Robin and his men, and getting rowdy. It’s not central to my point but interesting to note. How else might Robin Hood have inspired regular folks to criticize the tyranny of their temporal governments? Coke, in his Institutions, apparently makes a point of noting something about the historical Robin Hood, who, said he, was a Yorkshire man. 

Certainly there are legends and contended histories but it’s not difficult to show Robin Hood, the man and the legend, as a working-class hero. By the standards of his age, he was exemplary. Which gets me back to the point: what is so different about the “green” and the “red” May Day? 

It’s certainly a vexing question in the context of our day and age, given all our needs, both environmental and to improve the economic circumstance of the working class. Given the consequence of this “delay, delay, delay” that frustrates the young men to no end, and the consequence - possible - of “leaping without looking.” But, I say, you don’t have to leap, but you do have to look. Because, in the end, the circumstances of climate may cause you to have to leap. That one guy you probably know, the one who talks about this - imagine him saying that, and shrugging. It’s a shrug. Necessity. 

We need to upgrade the industrial economy to one that runs without fossil fuels. It’s not about retrogression. It’s about advancement. It is about self-preservation. It’s also weirdly sexy. I’ll spare you the whole commentary on Lorde’s song “Solar Power” and the music video thereof. (In short: good-ly-infuriating.) But it is, strangely enough, sexy. And any old working-class activist, and the enlightened new one, will tell you, that people are only not alienated from each other, from the world, and from its politics and economy when working in common. So it’s a social benefit, too. There’s no fundamental need for me to couch that argument in Enneagram psychology, but thereis one argument for ending this confused animosity between the “red” and “green”, on May Day, which is both “red” and “green”, and betwixt which, there is no uncrossable gulf.