Did you know that we can win?

or: Happy May Day

This week is supposed to be an off-week, where I post a more personal, paid-subscriber-only post. But it’s May Day, so that’s not going to happen. Free post today.

Did You Know That We Can Win?

or: Happy May Day

Today is my favorite holiday. Well, besides Halloween. And Christmas. And Winter Solstice. And Summer Solstice.

I really like holidays.

Today is Beltane, by one account. The start of the pasturalist’s summer, when the cows are driven to the summer fields. The time of renewal and the may pole and bonfires and fucking.

Today is May Day, by other accounts. The international worker’s holiday, when we celebrate the unconquered and unconquerable lust for freedom that lives inside the heart of every exploited worker. May Day got its start when some immigrant anarchists in Chicago linked up with some US-born anarchists (many of whom, including the formerly enslaved Lucy Parsons, had gotten their start in the fight for Black rights in the wake of the civil war) and built an anti-racist, pro-immigrant militant anarchist organization. They were fighting not for the eight-hour work day, but for an end to the capitalist system.

They fought, and famously many of them lost their lives.

They also, less famously, won.

The Chicago anarchists won. See, in the middle of the 1880s, when as individuals they scarcely had pennies to their names, they worked together to live beautiful lives. They held picnics and plays, brought in speakers from around the world, and did all the things that only the rich were supposed to be able to do. They organized marches: the very first May Day in 1886, tens of thousands of workers marched in Chicago, with the black banners of anarchism at the fore, with children at the fore. They took up arms and paraded with rifles in defiance of the nativists who wanted to see them dead. They scared capital to the core.

Sometimes they would march on the avenues where the wealthy had their mansions to jeer at the people who had immiserated them. By one account, they brought a banner: “Behold Your Future Executioners.”

The day after several striking workers were killed by police on May 3rd, 1886, someone threw a bomb at the police, and the police opened fire into the crowd. Eight anarchists were rounded up and put into a farce of a trial, accused and convicted of a murder that no one, not even the prosecution, claimed they’d committed. (The man who threw the bomb escaped, and offered to come forward if by sacrificing himself he’d save his comrades on death row. Other anarchists said no, they would simply kill you too, and the bomb-thrower lived free the rest of his life.)

Five of the convicted anarchists died–one by his own hands in prison, four by the noose. The morning of the execution, the prison was guarded by hundreds of cops with machine guns, because they were afraid that the anarchists were going to storm the prison. Those fears were justified–the anarchists had, indeed, planned to storm the prison. Instead, the condemned men told their comrades to let them go, to let them die, rather than see so many others killed to save them.

So the anarchists died. And they won.

Because there is one thing I can promise every single person who reads this: one day, you too are going to die. You don’t win at life by living forever. Only the billionaires, who are spiritually lost, spend their time trying to “beat” death. You win at life by living lives of meaning. George Engel, the night before he was to hang, told the priest: “In the shadow of the gallows, as I stand, I have done nothing wrong. I have not done everything right during my life, but I have endeavored to live so that I need not fear to die.” And he said that he had “no religion but to wrong no man and to do good to everybody.”

The anarchists of Chicago had won by giving their lives theater and joy and meaning, and the anarchists who went to their death with nothing but condemnation for the state and capital managed to spark something that lives on to this day. August Spies, a noose around his neck, said “the day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you throttle today,” and when he went through the door that all of us will one day walk, something happened to him here in our world. An echo of him spread across the globe and across time. Everywhere now, on May Day, workers gather and celebrate, and immigrants march with pride, and anarchists can say with pride that we did this.

Thank you, Louis Lingg. Thank you, August Spies. Thank you, George Engel. Thank you, Adolph Fischer. Thank you, Albert Parsons.

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Not every anarchist in Chicago planned a rally in response to the death of striking workers. Some of them met in a beer hall with the anarchist militias, poring over maps of the city. They were prepared to, if necessary–or if possible–take over the city in the name of the workers and set up horizontal organizing structures so that people governed their own lives.

Everyone at the time was thinking about the Paris Commune, when in 1871 the people of Paris stole their own city back from the state. The anarchists were thinking about that possibility, sure, but so was the state. The state was fucking terrified that it would happen again, in Chicago. That maybe it would go differently this second time around, that the notion of liberty and equality would spread across the ostensible “land of the free.”

The state was right to be afraid. It could have happened. It’s easy in retrospect to say “of course that didn’t happen,” but it almost did, and it has happened, again and again throughout history. Because when I say we can win, I mean that in three ways. First, we can win by working collectively to live way better lives than we would if we stayed isolated and atomized by capitalism. Second, we can win just by fighting–just by working together to demand what we deserve, we win whether or not we are killed in the process. But third, it’s, well, possible for us to create a horizontally organized society where free individuals and communities collectively make decisions. It’s possible to live as anarchists here and now and to die as anarchists (in the fight or in our beds), sure, but it’s also possible to create an anarchist society.

We know that our method of organizing works–it has worked for countless societies throughout time and it has worked for multiple groups of millions of people for years at a time in the modern era. Neighborhood and workplace councils can federate with one another to create stable-but-dynamic structures that maximize both autonomy and solidarity between various groups and people.

Time and time again, we’ve proven that the way to build a better world is to just build it. To create and then defend structures of freedom. 

Along the way, we’ll celebrate when we can, we’ll fight when we need to. Which means we’ll win. And maybe, if we win often enough, we’ll win big.

Happy May Day. Happy Beltane.