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Five Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
with Photos
by Allan Sekula
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Published on April 11
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THE FAKE FIGHT ON CAMPAIGN
FINANCE REFORM
McCain and Feingold
Sit Still as Their Bill
is Ravaged
US BULLIES JUDGES TO FALSE
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Published on February 28
THE PARDONER'S TALE
Liberals Kick Bill,
Dance with Bush
TED TURNER'S
GOLDEN SHOWERS
America's Land Lord
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Electroshocks Wolves
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May 1, 2001
A May Day Meditation
by Peter Linebaugh
Comrades and Friends, May Day Greetings!
Here is 'the day.' The day
we long to become a "journee'," those days of the French
Revolution when a throne would topple, the powerful would tumble,
slavery be abolished, or the commons restored.
Meanwhile, we search for a
demo for the day, or we gather daffodils and some "may"
for our loved ones and the kitchen table. We greet strangers
with a smile and "Happy May Day!" We think of comrades
around the world, in Africa, India, Russia, Indonesia, Mexico,
Hong Kong. With our comrades we remember recent victories, and
we mutter against, and curse our rulers. We take a few minutes
to freshen up our knowledge of what happened there in Chicago
in 1886 and 1887 before striding out into the fight of the day.
So during this moment of studying
the day, I'm going to take a text from Frederick Engels, Socialism:
Utopian and Scientific, and I'll ask you to take it down
from the top shelf of the spare room where you stuck it when
Reagan came to power, or to go down into the basement and dig
it out of a mildewed carton whence you might have disdainfully
put it during the Clinton years. No where does Engels mention
the slave trade. No where does Engels mention the witch burnings.
No where does Engels mention the genocide of the indigenous peoples.
He writes, "A durable reign of the bourgeoisie has been
possible only in countries like America, where feudalism was
unknown, and society at the very beginning started from a bourgeois
basis."
Dearie me. Dear, dear, dear!
He has forgotten everything,
it seems. He has swallowed hook, line, and sinker the whole schemata
of: Savagery leads to Barbarism leads to Feudalism leads to Capitalism
which, in turn, with a bit of luck, &c., &c., will be
transformed, down the line, in the future, when the times are
ripe, &c. &c. into socialism and communism. He has overlooked
the struggle of the Indians, or the indigenous people, of the
red, white, and black Indians. The fact is that commonism preceded
capitalism on the north American continent, not feudalism. The
genocide was so complete, the racism so effective, that there
is not even a trace or relic of memory of the prior societies.
So we fling him away as another Victorian European Imperialist
and white male, to boot.
But, wait. Look again. Check
out the essay at the back. He called it "The Mark."
It's only a few pages. Perhaps you are misled by its German localism
- its Gehferschaften and its Loosgter. The former term is the
way the commoners of the Moselle valley practiced the jubilee
and the latter term is a land distribution system based on periodical
assignments by lot. Engels is describing the Commons of his neighborhoods.
It is as substantial as Maria Mies in The Subsistence Perspective.
You can smell the barnyard as you walk down the lane arm in arm
to pick berries in the commons. Engels becomes a scholar of that
"feudalism" which we thought he was discarding. But,
no, in describing the pigs, the mushrooms, the turf, the wood,
the unwritten customs, the mark regulations, the berries, the
heaths, the forests, lakes, ponds, hunting grounds, fishing pools,
he has quite forgotten his polemic against the economics professors
(which is what inspired his tract) and he is relishing, shall
we say? his very own indigenous self. I dare say he has had a
few encuentros himself among the Germans. And we'll never forget
that it was the criminalization of customary access to the commons
which first drove Karl Marx to the study of political economy.
No, Engels is full of contradictions.
I say get him back from the mildew and air our your copy. He
has a political purpose. Engels is not that theorist we tossed
off as hopelessly politcally incorrect, and, taking all in all,
a bad case for tenure. Part of his book he wrote for the professors
of the SPD, but another part he wrote for the commoners and indigenous
people - the peasants - who fled to the industrial towns. Moreover,
he listened to them. They had lost their commons. Engels records
the "traces," the "relics". These survive
because of the French Revolution and the German one which once
again produced a free peasantry. "But how inferior is the
position of our free peasant of today compared with the free
member of the mark of the olden time! His homestead is generally
much small, and the unpartitioned mark is reduced to a few very
small and poor bits of communal forest. But, without the use
of the mark, there can be no cattle for the small peasant; without
cattle, no manure; without manure, no agriculture." That
is the living commons. Engels knew of it. Engels is a free man;
he knows that communism is possible. Engels is a revoutionary;
he knows that it is not scheduled.
I say this not to rehabilitate
Engels. I personally am less interested in him that I am in Tecumseh
who refused to enter the house of Governor W.H. Harrison in August
1810 insisting on meeting in the open air. "The earth was
the most proper place for the Indians, as they liked to repose
upon the bosom of their mother." Having thus reposed himself,
he asserted the society of the commons: "The way, the only
way to stop this evil is for the red men to unite in claiming
a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first, and
should be now - for it was never divided, but belongs to all.
No tribe has the right to sell, even to each other, much less
to strangers ... Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great
sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them
all for the use of his children?"
But Engels had a global class
politics, that is why we are interested in him again. What destroys
the commons in Europe is what destroyed the commons of Tecumseh.
Engels writes in 1880 "the whole of European agriculture,
as carried on at the present time, is threatened by an overpowering
rival, viz., the production of corn on a gigantic scale by America
... The whole of the European agricultural system is being beaten
by American competition." It is true that Engels recognizes
the commons in Germany but not in America. However, having said
that, Engels also recognizes that the preservation of the commons
depends on an international struggle.
Now, we return to May Day.
What was responsible for that productivity of American corn?
First, it was the fertility provided by a millennium of native
American corn culture on the common land (remember the mound-makers
who made thousands of tumuli, learn about the Hopewell people
who brought corn from the Maya one thousand years ago, visit
the fabulous serpent mound of Ohio during your summer travels).
Second, it was the members of the Moulders Local 23 at the McCormick
mechanical reapers' works of Chicago who went on strike for the
eight hour day in 1867 and whose struggle directly resulted in
the Haymarket demo of 1886. And then the hangings.
So, now as they gather in Seattle and
Windsor and Prague and Brazil and Quebec, precisely to sell the
air, the water, the earth, we pose the common alternative, under
many names, untheorized and common, oh! how so, very, very common,
common to the slaves, common to the indigenous peoples, common
to the women, common to the workers. Here is the light and the
heat of the day.
I shall miss you, dearest comrades, at the launchings in New
York and Boston of the Auroras of the Zapatistas.
Peter Linebaugh is the author (with Marcus Rediker)
of The
Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden
History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.
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