A discussion of Peter Linebaugh, The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day (Oakland: PM Press, 2016). It was
first published online on Labour History Melbourne,
29 April 2016.
riting in 1896, not long before his death, indefatigable
socialist thought-maker and dreamer William Morris wrote that May Day is “above
all days of the year fitting for the protest of the disinherited against the
system of robbery that shuts the door betwixt them and a decent life” – and that
system was capitalism. On another matter, the previous year he published a
letter trenchantly criticising ‘experts’ and their plans to cull, tame and ‘manage’
the remnants of Epping Forest. This letter reflected an ecological awareness
well ahead of the time, Morris cognizant of the complex unities of nature, the need
to protect rare and threatened species, the subtle relationships between
species, tall growths, undergrowths, thickets and space, the mutually supportive
roles of different species for the life of the whole. In Morris, the Red and
the Green were one.
Those coming to Linebaugh’s Incomplete history of May Day expecting some sort of linear ‘total’
narrative history of May Day will be disappointed. For it is not this sort of
history. Sure, the history of May Day is a constant presence in the book, but the
word ’incomplete’ in the title is an accurate description of the contents. For
this is not a total/complete history, and ‘incomplete’ is also Linebaugh’s way
of saying that May Day is a work in progress, and, as originally a festival
celebrating the start of Spring and attendant rebirth, is constantly being reshaped,
recast, reimagined, reborn. Linebaugh
simply and robustly puts it thus in his introductory chapter: “May Day is about
affirmation, the love of life, and the start of spring, so it has to be about
the beginning of the end of the capitalist system of exploitation, oppression,
misery, toil, and moil. Besides full affirmation May Day requires denunciation:
the denunciation of capitalism, of patriarchy, of homophobia, of white
supremacy, of war”.
riting in 1896, not long before his death, indefatigable
socialist thought-maker and dreamer William Morris wrote that May Day is “above
all days of the year fitting for the protest of the disinherited against the
system of robbery that shuts the door betwixt them and a decent life” – and that
system was capitalism. On another matter, the previous year he published a
letter trenchantly criticising ‘experts’ and their plans to cull, tame and ‘manage’
the remnants of Epping Forest. This letter reflected an ecological awareness
well ahead of the time, Morris cognizant of the complex unities of nature, the need
to protect rare and threatened species, the subtle relationships between
species, tall growths, undergrowths, thickets and space, the mutually supportive
roles of different species for the life of the whole. In Morris, the Red and
the Green were one. |
| News From Nowhere |
So why begin a discussion of Peter Linebaugh’s latest book, The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day (Oakland:
PM Press, 2016), here? Simply, and humour me, I’ve recently revisited Morris’
writings, in particular travelled with Guest through News From Nowhere, and Jack Lindsay’s fine biography of Morris
(1975). Linebaugh writes in the tradition of Morris’ May Day, against the same
system Morris railed against. Reading his book is like taking a radical ramble
with Morris through the Epping Forest he sought to defend, if with a huge
imaginative leap the ‘Forest’ is recast metaphorically as the vast human
history of protest by the disinherited. Asked in 1991 by his wife, Dorothy Thompson,
if he still described himself as the Marxist he once was, historian E. P. Thompson
unhesitatingly replied “that he preferred to call himself ‘a Morrisist’”.
Linebaugh studied under Thompson, and this book is a wonderful blend of many
things, resonating with echoes of Marx and Morris and Thompson.
For readers unacquainted with Linebaugh, some background is relevant.
Born in 1943, he is described in biographical notes as ‘a child of empire’,
with the UK, US, Germany, Pakistan sites of his schooling; this is not
unimportant, as a feature of his scholarly/historical work is an
internationalist/transnational awareness and perspective. He was a student of
British historian E. P. Thompson, hence the significant Thompsonian influence
in his work, and has primarily taught in American universities. Variously as author,
co-author, editor, he has produced five substantial studies of British and
Atlantic social history in the ‘history from below’ genre, notably The London Hanged (1992), a groundbreaking study of 18th century
England, crime and punishment and the development of capitalism, and the
game-changing study of Atlantic/Caribbean maritime rebellion, and radical
political thought and action in the late 18th /early 19th
centuries, The Many-Headed Hydra (with
Marcus Rediker, 2000).
Linebaugh’s style of writing is accessible, and his books
reach audiences beyond niche academia. A radical historian, he aims to write
with social purpose and as a political act, his scholarship alerting readers to
the possibilities for action in their own time and situations. A great deal of
his work has been published in freely available non-academic journals, online,
and in pamphlet form, often having multi-platform/outlet publication. This is a
scholarly historian who wants to be read, and who makes himself available to
readers, at home in the academy and on the barricades. Overall, Linebaugh’s writings
range widely across sources and disciplines, ignoring/defying the tendency for
neoliberalised academia to stay within narrow and highly specialised intellectual
enclosures. If in his life and work one discerns echoes of Thomas Paine and
William Morris, it is not coincidental, for he has written authoritatively and
sympathetically on both.
Those coming to Linebaugh’s Incomplete history of May Day expecting some sort of linear ‘total’
narrative history of May Day will be disappointed. For it is not this sort of
history. Sure, the history of May Day is a constant presence in the book, but the
word ’incomplete’ in the title is an accurate description of the contents. For
this is not a total/complete history, and ‘incomplete’ is also Linebaugh’s way
of saying that May Day is a work in progress, and, as originally a festival
celebrating the start of Spring and attendant rebirth, is constantly being reshaped,
recast, reimagined, reborn. Linebaugh
simply and robustly puts it thus in his introductory chapter: “May Day is about
affirmation, the love of life, and the start of spring, so it has to be about
the beginning of the end of the capitalist system of exploitation, oppression,
misery, toil, and moil. Besides full affirmation May Day requires denunciation:
the denunciation of capitalism, of patriarchy, of homophobia, of white
supremacy, of war”.
Morris in his end-days wrote of May Day as a metaphoric/symbolic
occasion for the celebration and renewal of anti-capitalist resistance and
struggle, the opportunity to bring the past, present, and future together in
focus and to rebirth/recharge anti-capitalist fervour, determination,
organisation. So too does Linebaugh in this ‘incomplete’ history, with May Day the focus for ruminations on anti-capitalist
radicalism, and socialist imaginings.
A short book (192 pages), Incomplete comprises eleven essays/ruminations authored by
Linebaugh over the last thirty years, drawing on his immense scholarship, and salted
with autobiographical intellectual/political fragments. Aside from the
introductory chapter, these were written in association with public events/occasions,
the majority published in the American online magazine CounterPunch, some published and distributed as pamphlets. The concluding
chapter is his retirement speech from the University of Toledo in Ohio (2014),
reflecting on radical history and being a radical/activist historian, and
railing against the capitalist control of universities under which
“universities are dying as commons of knowledge, as sites of social regeneration,
even as places to read a book”.
It is difficult to summarise this book simply, because it is
about the radical/revolutionary spirit and experience, populated with people
and crowded with events, the focus both sides of the Atlantic, but globally
too, the time-frame the present back to early geological times in a discussion
of the agency of anarchist quarry workers in 19th/early 20th
century Vermont. Ambitious yes, but Linebaugh has the scholarship, background,
ability, spirit and wit to confidently, and joyously, traverse the terrain,
exploring patterns and influences within diversities. Linebaugh brings the
likes, for example, of William Morris, Marx, Malcolm X, the Shelleys, Joe Hill,
William Blake, W. E. B. Du Bois together, alongside struggles diverse as those against
the enclosure of the commons in Europe and those of the recent Occupy Movement,
and movements diverse as the Mau Mau and SDS.
It is a tour de force underlining and endorsing the right to rebel
against capitalism, and the imperatives to imagine and to work for socialist
alternatives.
The art of Linebaugh is the ability to look backwards across
diversities and detect and trace flows of radical thought, legacies of radical actions,
and unexpected influences. His achievement is the development of an ecology of
protest/dissent/rebellion, teasing out and demonstrating relationships and
links and influences over time and across geographies, spaces, and diversities,
between events and ideas and people in a way akin to the ecological
understanding of nature. It is, in his hands, a political and historical
understanding enabling one to see hope and achievement and worth when more
rigid teleologies might only see inadequacies, shortfalls, and failures.
Further, and importantly, he privileges that radical/socialist past, in effect
mounting a counter-attack on hegemonic attempts by the current neoliberal stage
of capitalism to render that past irrelevant and useless, to “silence
alternatives” as Linebaugh puts it.
One can read history and the past in a nostalgic way, as a
catalogue of what has been lost - the commons enclosed, the eight-hour day
disappearing or never having appeared in the first place, the cancerous growth
globally of repressive legislations, the militarisation of contemporary
democracies eroding long held rights and freedoms - or one can read the past
and take heart from it, and through solidarity, collectivity, and cooperation
work for a better world and future.
If heart is taken, then renewed struggle, Linebaugh insists,
has to be anti-capitalist, and Red and Green: Red, the socialist anti-capitalist
struggle; Green the environmental struggle, because capitalism is a two-faced
system, not only about the exploitation of human beings, but also about the
exploitation of nature. The way forward, Linebaugh argues, is through
solidarity forged in collectivity, of alliances, coalitions, the movement of
movements, amongst people defined by, and aware of, their lack of control/power in the capitalist
system, metaphorically “all toilers, not just the hands at any moment gripping
the plough”, and by dissolving the “‘I’ into the ‘We’”.
No doubt each reader will take something different from this
book, but for me it is important for demonstrating a number of things: how a
radical historian can write in a scholarly, enjoyable public way without
dumbing down either erudition or scholarship; how a radical scholarly/academic
historian can engage, and have agency, outside of the academy. It is also a
demonstration of how to write history that is alive, and how to reflect on the
past, and learn and adapt from it. In short, Linebaugh goes a long way towards
encouraging and fanning radical socialist dreaming and scheming in the present,
dreaming not as escape but as opening a door to possibilities, and creating a
light on the hill for the future.
