May Day 2014

Here's my yearly inspirational post on May Day. This is crossposted from the Kasama website:

MAY FIRST: RAISE A RED BANNER!

It's May Day, the international workers' holiday, the communist holiday. (And you can read about the origins of the holiday here.)

It's not a holiday to give gifts, to eat a big meal with the family, to contemplate a trip to the beach. It's a holiday to remember what we're in this for, a holiday to go outside and shout about what's wrong with the world and what should be, can be, must be, fixed.

It's not a day to talk about which lying and cheating candidate to vote for in the next election: it's a day to talk about less voting and more revolution.

It's not a day to talk about begging the bosses for a few more crumbs: it's a day to talk about a world without bosses.

It's not a day to settle for a slightly higher minimum wage: it's a day to proclaim the principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.”

It's not a day to think about taxing the rich, it's a day to envision ending the system that perpetuates inequality once and for all, and shaking off that 1% for good.

It's not a day to be locked down by the pain of racism, of sexism, of heterosexism, of transphobia: it's a day to be proud of who we are, knowing that by struggling together we're building a better world in our own image; it's a day to treat each other with respect.

It's not a day to question the right of people to live where they want, on this day nobody is illegal. Or maybe, everybody is illegal: we're all rejecting the rotten terms of "citizenship" in this society together. It's a day to embrace our sisters and brothers regardless of documentation, to walk together in solidarity, to speak our many languages openly and equally, to demand a home for all.

It's not a day to fear the police and the government snoops and snitches. It's a day to remember our vast power as the majority, aware of our right to fight, conscious of the righteousness of our cause. It's a day for us to own the streets, a day for us not to fear the shadows behind us.

It's not a day to be locked inside: it's a day to talk about smashing open the prisons and freeing our loved ones, about re-imagining how a truly just world might wipe away injustice and heal selfish hearts.

It's not a day to listen to the words of our so-called leaders as they try to trick us into supporting — and fighting in — new wars. It's a day to call them on their bullshit, to openly oppose them, to denounce their plans for world domination. It's a day to talk about a different world free of imperialism.

It's not a day, here in the belly of the beast, to decorate with red, white and blue. It's a day to remember that the proletariat has no country — has all countries — and the troops we need to be supporting are the liberation warriors fighting in the forests and mountains of India, of Nepal, of the Philippines.

It's not a day to shoot down our dreams as unrealistic, it's a day to proudly proclaim our struggle for a just society liberated from capitalism once and for all. It's a day to unleash those dreams.

It's not a day to be silent, it's a day to talk about what we want and to plan how to get it; it's a day to demand what is right.

It's not a day to talk about hoping things get better, it's a day to fight to make things better.

It's not a day to be only a radical or a leftist, to moderate our language or worry about what people think: it's a day to be a communist, a red, a revolutionary fighter for human liberation.

It's a good day to raise a red flag. It's a good day to link arms with your comrades, to take the streets, to act like we own those streets, which, in fact we do. It's a good day to talk to your neighbor about what needs to be changed in the world. It's a good day to help open the eyes of a friend to the reality of the world we live in. It's a good day to recommit to the struggle's long haul, to remember the martyrs we have lost, and to remember the words of the brilliant thinkers who help us to make sense and strategy of the world and its challenges. It's a good day to be inspired and reinvigorated.

As the dawn breaks red on the horizon, wake up and celebrate. And may tomorrow be as good as today. It's right to rebel!

Happy May Day, 2013!

In honor of May Day, known as International Workers Day, here are the words of Jiang Qing, last wife of Mao Zedong, at her trial as a member of the "gang of four" in 1980: "Making revolution is no crime! It's right to rebel!"

This is appropriate for us in the U.S.A. where, in full Orwellian fashion, even though this country is the birthplace of May Day via the Haymarket martyrs, it's referred to as "Law Day," or even more grotesquely, "Loyalty Day."

Fuck loyalty. Fuck the law. Celebrate revolution!

In the words of two great revolutionaries, "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win." - Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

“Another World Is Possible” – May Day in New York

Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park banner. Photo by me.

After months of planning and hard work May Day was a great success for the Occupy movement in New York City. Though you wouldn't know it from reading any New York newspapers, thousands of people participated in hundreds of actions all over the city during the day, and the culminating march from Union Square to Wall Street saw many tens of thousands of exuberant protesters filling the streets. Confrontations between demonstrators and police were few until the final hours of the protest, when cops violently broke up an assembly by some of the protesters who kept things going after the officially tolerated time.

While it is true that the "general strike" calls generated by many in the movement proved only symbolic, the day marked the vibrancy and deepening of Occupy, which spent the winter building ties in neighborhoods and communities, and across networks of activists and organizations. Occupy is anything but moribund.

For me the day started in Brooklyn, as my local neighborhood Occupy assembly, Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park, gathered on the Avenue in front of two local branches of the big banks Citibank and Chase. We had planned a march/speakout that would go through one of the main drags of the neighborhood, stopping at various stations to address issues relevant to this multi-ethnic, working class community. So at the point of assembly we carried out a skit about the role of the banks and about income inequality. About 35 of us marched.

The next stop, shown above, was at the offices of May First People Link, the independent radical internet service provider that has recently been targeted and harassed by the FBI. The First Amendment from the Bill of Rights was read in English and Spanish, and May First People Link members read a statement to the gathered protesters.

From there we moved on to the site of a horrible incident of police brutality in the neighborhood a few years ago where several members of the Acosta family, including the grandmother of the family, were strip searched and brutalized right out on the street. Harassment by the NYPD in Sunset Park is a daily thing for the neighborhood's Hispanic residents, many of them immigrants. A member of the Acosta family thanked us and reminded us of our right to reject police mistreatment.

Reclaiming the courthouse. Photo by OSP.

We moved on to the Courthouse building on 4th Avenue, which we have previously targeted for a "People's Repossession." This time we had a ribbon cutting ceremony, and placed a sign promised the "Future Home of the Sunset Park Community Center," and the gathered folks yelled out all the things we'd like to see in such a desperately needed bit of community space. Everything from free daycare and cultural classes to a health clinic and legal aid clinic. Right now this beautiful landmark building is occupied by cops being warehoused to push pencils. We rejected the idea that any immigrants to our neighborhood are "illegal."

From there we stopped at the Dewey Middle School. The city is cutting back services in our neighborhood to working-class families, cutting back funding to daycare and after-school programs, and threatening schools like this one with union-busting turnaround or transformation into for-profit charter schools. Dewey was just saved from turnaround by community outcry, and we celebrated that fact while giving Mayor Bloomberg's corporatist Department of Education "F's" on a giant report card for its role in toying with the education of the children of our community.

Occupying the Subway. Photo by OSP's Krys M.

From there we marched to the Subway at 36th Street and 4th Avenue. Above ground we stopped to call for full employment jobs programs and, well, for an end to capitalism! A bunch of us went down into the subway together (above, and yes, that's me) to ride to Union Square for the big march. On the subway we met up with folks from Occupy Red Hook who are also engaged in organizing an assembly in their neighborhood, right near ours.

Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park is a really awesome group of people I'm incredibly proud to work with. We planned the day's event together and carried it out in a real spirit of collectivity.

"Everything for Everyone – Dream Dangerously" Kasama banner in Manhattan. Photo from Kasama.

So into Manhattan we went. I spent some of the time with my Occupy Sunset Park comrades, and some of the time with comrades from the Kasama Project with their wonderfully challenging banner shown above. From my end of the absolutely packed Union Square I couldn't hear the tail end of the rally, but I marched most of the way downtown until my middle-aged ankles started complaining about the day of walking. I missed the assembly at the very end; friends reported that it was incredibly empowering and almost magically beautiful.

It was hard from any one spot amidst the assembled thousands to get a feel for the whole crowd. There were people from every imaginable left group, from unions and community organizations, and thousands of Occupy activists displaying their nack for truly revolutionary creativity. I ran into all sorts of people I've gotten to know from the past few months of organizing.

The mood was high and celebratory, despite occasional minor harassment from the cops who kept trying to pen the marchers in. It's the first time I can remember where a march this size was seized with such absolutely revolutionary optimism. People sang, and chanted, laughed and smiled. And while "This is what democracy looks like" was a favorite, Occupy really showed its colors by chanting things like "Another World Is Possible." This is absolutely a moment when people are coming together to see things with fresh eyes, casting away old illusions and attachments, and bringing a real spirit of hope and real change.

It was not, in the end, a general strike. And millions of New Yorkers probably didn't notice what happened. But I know I feel energized by this May Day; it was a taste of what we can do. A reminder, for sure, of all the work to be done. But tens of thousands of people did see it, did participate in it, and together we can keep building and growing.

For me the day was full of the positive lessons of what real democracy looks and feels like. It's not elections and waiting for somebody else to save us, knowing they will mostly betray us, it's taking things into our own hands because, well, the world is ours, the world, is us.

We Are Many

It's not the final offensive. It's not the moment of insurrection. The revolution isn't here. But all journeys begin with single steps. And we know what happens if we do...nothing.

The time has come to rise like lions, indeed.

This Is What Democracy Looks Like

Happy May Day!

Tomorrow: Another World Is Possible

Here's the flyer from the citywide May Day coalition for tomorrow's historic rally and march. See you on the streets!

May Day Is Almost Here!

Saturday my local Occupy group, Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park, is going to hold an outdoor General Assembly in Sunset Park itself, instead of inside the church parlour we usually meet in. After the GA we'll be having a parranda, a kind of moving rally to build support for May Day action, down the main drag of the neighborhood. As the poster above shows, we have a full plan for May First, starting with a local march, and then a trip to Manhattan for the humungous city-wide rally and march starting in Union Square. Very excited about all of it, though I know the day after it will be time to take a deep breath and take a longer gaze ahead.

It's been an exciting month, and one of the things that surprises me is how despite the fact that I actually have quite a lot to say, I'm finding the responsibility of doing political organizing in the real world holds me back from casually engaging in too much story telling or polemicizing here. But as certain events unfold, the time will be right to present them here eventually.

Anyway, thanks for sticking with me. What are YOU doing on May First?

Yes, Helen Keller DID Nail It

I noticed that virtual NGO Moveon.org was passing around a Helen Keller quote. It's a nice quote about class, ("The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor, The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands are naught...we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights....") but it's an incomplete thought about the legacy of the legendary Helen Keller. Because the absolutely incredible Helen Keller was not just a social justice activist, she was a revolutionary socialist. First a member of the Socialist Party and later the Industrial Workers of the World, she had remarkable insight into the way the world worked, despite her disabilities. One might literally say that capitalism is such an oppressive system that even a blind person can see it.

A lot of the people in MoveOn.org are well-meaning, but the group has become a sort of shill for the Obama administration, and it's busy somewhat questionably muddying the waters between the Occupy movement and the Democrats through its "99% Spring" initiative. Somehow one doubts that MoveOn.org wants people to dig too deeply into Helen Keller's political legacy.


There was no nonsense or equivocation about the First World War from Keller. Like the wing of the socialist movement that broke from social democracy to form the communist movement, Keller refused to let her nationality get in the way of her solidarity with working people on the other side of a brutal, meaningless battlefield.

Here's a few ore choice quotes:

"I am no worshiper of cloth of any color, but I love the red flag and what it symbolizes to me and other Socialists. I have a red flag hanging in my study, and if I could I should gladly march with it past the office of the Times and let all the reporters and photographers make the most of the spectacle." — 1912

"The worker has nothing to lose but his chains, and he has a world to win. He can win it at one stroke from a world empire. We must form a fully equipped, militant international union so that we can take possesion of such a world empire. " — 1915

"In such a crisis the capitalist class cannot save itself or its institutions. Its police and armies will be powerless to put down the last revolt. For man at last will take his own, not considering the cost. When that day dawns, if the workers are not thoroughly organized, they may easily become a blind force of destruction, unable to check their own momentum, their cry for justice drowned in a howl of rage. Whatever is good and beneficent in our civilization can be saved only by the workers. And the Industrial Workers of the World is formed with the object of carrying on the business of the world when capitalism is overthrown. Whether the IWW increases in power or is crushed out of existence, the spirit that animates it is the spirit that must animate the labor movement if it is to have a revolutionary function." — 1918

"Men vanish from earth leaving behind them the furrows they have ploughed. I see the furrow Lenin left sown with the unshatterable seed of a new life for mankind, and cast deep below the rolling tides of storm and lightning, mighty crops for the ages to reap." — 1929

Find more of her socialist writings here. There is also speculation that Helen Keller was a lesbian.

Occupy May First

No work
No school
No chores
No shopping
No banking

Who couldn't get behind all that? If that's what a general strike looks like today, I'm all for it.

May Day plans for New York City are unfolding: Maydaynyc.org

Talking With Everybody in the Neighborhood

I'm absolutely thrilled to report working with my local Occupy group, Occupy Sunset Park, to produce three new posters for our ongoing May Day campaign in Arabic! Sunset Park is a remarkably diverse community, a microcosm of Brooklyn itself. It started out as a community built for immigrants from Northern Europe, developed largely in the early years of the twentieth century. But it has remained a entryway for newer immigrants. Today the neighborhood's largest groups are people from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and from Mexico and Central and South America, and people from various regions of China. While next-door Bay Ridge has larger Arab and South Asian Muslim communities, our neighborhood is home to many Arabic-speaking people as well. Hopefully Chinese=language posters are on the horizon.

The poster above is a translation of one of our English-language posters, reading roughly "We Are Many (99%) They Are Few (1%)." In the next month these posters will be put up around the neighborhood. They're already being shared all over facebook. Closer to May Day itself we'll produce new posters with a specific call for action on that day.

Another of our new Arabic-language posters is tailored to speak directly to another part of the community being targeted for repression by the NYPD.


This one reads, "Are You Only Innocent Until Proven Muslim?"

I'm proud that my fellow Sunset Park occupiers understand how important it is to build bridges to everybody in our community. It truly is a movement about fighting together for our common interests, common interests that can be achieved only if we do, in fact, stick together.

Without Comment: Williamsburg, Brooklyn 2012

Posted on a wall in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Get ready for May first. Spring is coming!

(Thanks David!)

Spring Is Coming: May Day 2012

These beautiful images are from Occupy May 1st General Strike! Los Angeles, part of the nationwide campaign from the Occupy movement to make a big showing this upcoming May Day. Across the country in both big cities and small neighborhoods, local assemblies are laying plans for actions to show the world that the Occupy movement is not gone or defeated, despite the successful repression of nearly all the physical "Occupy" encampments. Occupy Wall Street in New York has voted to stand in solidarity with the call for a day without the 99%, a general strike and more. "No work, no chores, no banking, no shopping, no school."


To be sure the General Strike on May Day is being organized by Occupy's more leftwing elements, but it rests on a solid tradition of activism by working people. Indeed it's the kind of action that anyone who is part of the 99% can participate in. From the May 1st website:

"How can I participate?

If you are part of unionized labor, and your contract is up for negotiation, you can officially strike on May 1st. If you are not – call in sick. Take a holiday. Don’t show up to school. March with us, or join in one of the many events that will be taking place on May 1st, either in the day or in the evening. Block parties, rallies, protests, marches, family BBQ’s – this is a day when we take a stand against the way the system has enslaved us and burdened us with unmanageable debt, incredibly long working weeks, unfeasibly expensive healthcare — by taking a day for ourselves, being human again, spending time with our families and friends. Our bosses dictate everything to us — but not our holiday. The holiday of the working class, the 99%."


I love the Queer Liberation poster for May Day that uses a classic image of the late Divine, the iconic heroine of 1970s underground alternative culture.

My local Brooklyn Occupy assembly is still discussing its plans for the day. I'm really excited about the possibilities.

May Day 2011

"Proletarians of All Countries, Unite! First of May, the Holiday of the Victory of Labor" reads this card from the early days of the Soviet Union in Russian and, I think, Turkish. It's really a shame that seventy years of Stalinism masquerading as socialism ruined the language of socialism, because even though words like that cause most people's eyes to blink and glaze over, it's really an admirable sentiment.

The point of May Day, the real labor day holiday, set to the date that was in Europe once reserved for a joyous spring holiday, was for regular people to celebrate their connections to other regular people across the borders of states and nations. The theory was that kings and princes and big businesses divided the world into countries jealously trying to get what the others have, pitting the working people of one country against the working people of another, usually in the end benefitting only the rulers and the war profiteers. But working people in all countries have more in common with each other than they do the parasites at the top of society, so why not put down the national colors and extend the hand of friendship, unity and equality? Socialist internationalism is really that simple. People just want to live their lives in peace. That would be a whole lot easier if the governments and politicians of the world were made to stop trying to control the population and made, to coin a phrase, to serve the people. That's what rational government is for: not to protect the profits of rich people.

The propaganda ideologues of capitalism have tried hard to turn words like "labor," or "workers" into scary-sounding special interests. But that's because there are more of us than there are of them. It's only by believing in their ideological prison that we give them power over us. It's the American dream, right? One day even you or I could be as rich as...Donald Trump? Or one day you or I could be eating catfood out of a garbage can too. It's a fucked up system that benefits the people at the top at the expense of the people at the bottom by design.

We, the American people, are not the ones bombing and invading countries. That would be They the government, doing so not in our interests but the interests of big business and their rules, their needs. We should be extending our hands in friendship with the sisters and brothers — just like us! — who just want to celebrate life.

Remember Chicago's Haymarket Martyrs

I took this photo 25 years ago in Managua, Nicaragua, at the 1986 May Day rally organized by Nicaragua's left parties separate from the much larger rally organized by the ruling Sandinista Front, the FSLN. This banner from the opposition Communist Party of Nicaragua reads "...Saluda a los Trabajadores Nicaraguenses este Primero de Mayo, Centenario de los Martires de Chicago." meaning "Salute to the Nicaraguan Workers This May First, Centenary of the Chicago Martyrs."

Exactly 125 years ago in 1886, anarchists organized a rally in solidarity with striking workers at Chicago's Haymarket Square. A pipe bomb was thrown at police, killing one. Chaos ensued, with cops shooting their weapons wildly. Although the anarchists had nothing to do with the pipe bomb — historians believe it was thrown by a provocateur — they were rounded up and arrested. Eight were tried, one died in prison, and four of them were executed. The persecution and murder of the anarchist martyrs was a blatant act of political repression even though none of the arrested men were proven to have anything to do with the bomb. The workers were on strike for the eight-hour day: all of us around the world today who benefit from that standard of fairness owe a debt to those activists of 125 years ago. How cool that people in Nicaragua remembered those long ago heroes when today I imagine precious few in Chicago itself nod in their memory.

(In the very early 1980s before I left Chicago for New York, the socialist group I worked with, the Revolutionary Socialist League, had its offices in what they called Haymarket Hall or Haymarket Books, an old loft building south of Downtown off Haymarket Square that was reputed to have been the former headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World. It was a beautiful old cast-iron building where public forums were sometimes held; freezing cold in winter thanks to its virtually prehistoric heating system. The RSL being long gone I'm imagining it's now someone's fabulously renovated yuppie loft.)

May Day! May Day!

May First is, of course, "Labour Day," in the un-American sense of the word, as in the revolutionary international workers' political holiday, the occasion for waving around red banners and yelling a lot, as opposed to our own labor day, which is good mostly for barbecues. It's also, of course, the Pagan fertility holiday of Beltane, which I've written about elsewhere, where copious seed is supposed to be spilt upon the earth to ensure the fruits of the future. Yes, Pagans, that's you being admonished in the Judeo-Christian Old Testament. I didn't know which to focus on for The Cahokian, so I've elected this beautiful photograph of a Maoist/Naxalite revolutionary in rural India that I found on the net. Take away the hammer-and-sickle flags and this woman could pass for a celebrant in a fertility festival so I thought it captured something about the moment. I'm not sure what it says about America that neither of these holidays are much celebrated here; well actually I am pretty sure what it says but I'm not too happy with the answer.

Either way you mark it, May Day is a celebration of optimism. Optimism that the have-nots can get together in solidarity and determination to one day have, and optimism that the winter is over and the seasons are spinning around properly as they should, that our efforts today will pay off tomorrow, that future generations will arise from our own, carrying on our traditions. (There's this sort of joke one of my Pagan friends told me once: it involved a group of Native American shamans who performed a seasonal ritual every year for return of the warm seasons. Some scientist sits down with the shamans and explains the science behind the rotating seasons, the earth on its axis, the scientific inevitability of the return of Spring, etc. etc. in an effort to to persuade these shamans to give up their quaint superstitious rite. The shamans listen carefully, aheming and ahahing. When the scientists had finished they talk among themselves and after extended deliberation return to the scientists. "Well, we have listened to what you said. Your evidence is very compelling, but frankly, it's just not worth the risk that you're wrong." And so they returned to their ritual.)

That optimism of the human spirit is a good thing, because it's sometimes very hard to maintain a sense of optimism for the mundane world. As I write, what some are calling potentially the largest man-made ecological disaster in American history is unfolding as untold quantities of crude oil are spilling out against the coasts of Louisiana. Drill, Baby, Drill, fuck YOU. As Gil Scott-Heron used to say, "America is in shock." In Arizona politicians are instituting a draconian and racist immigration law straight out of an authoritarian nightmare, where authorities are required to demand proof of citizenship from anyone they might suspect of not being a citizen, and citizens are required to demand that authorities enforce the law against their fellow citizens on the spot. And America is in shock.

There are crazy racist politicians and TV entertainers and bigoted religious fundamentalists running around in an orgy of lying delusion all enabling other to spout unbelievable ridiculousness. America is in shock. There're pointless wars costing billions of dollars and thousands of lives, and there are unbelievably rich people earning immoral sums of money trying to rewrite laws to make sure they get to make immoral sums of money more. America is in shock. There are men dying in coal mines because of their corrupt bosses just like there were a century ago. There are millions of people with no jobs, and no hope of finding one any time soon. Shock. Shock. "America leads the world in shock," to quote our friend Scott-Heron again.

In Brooklyn where I live it's supposed to be a beautiful weekend. The plants on my stoop are in bloom, and there's a freshness in the urban air. I'm gonna open my windows and let the breeze sweeten the air indoors. Maybe I'll clip some of the plants in the backyard already threatening to turn the garden into a jungle of thorns and blooms. I'll feed the herd of feral cats who visit every morning. I feel personally lucky to be reasonably healthy with some semblance of employment. We don't have marriage equality in New York, but then I'm not liable to want to get gay married tomorrow: it will be enough to have dinner with my boyfriend. For a day maybe I can focus on the joys and tasks of life and not the trouble of the world; fortunately there's no drone aircraft circling overhead trying to GPS my cellphone location; not yet anyway. In truth I'm probably not going to run around a maypole nor carry a red flag nor chant any slogans. But I sure hope somebody does. It's just not worth the risk that nobody will.