Kate Braun : Beltane is a Time of Great Magick

May Pole. Image from deviantART.

A time of Great Magick:
Celebrate Beltane on April 30 or May 1

By Kate Braun / The Rag Blog / April 23, 2013

“All things ripen and grow... Abundance in Eternal Flow/ As one the Lord and Lady...”

Either Tuesday, April 30, or Wednesday, May 1, is a good time to celebrate Beltane, also known as Roodmas, Walpurgisnacht, and May Eve. This is a time of Great Magick, second only to Samhain in power.

The powers of elves and fairies are growing and will reach their peak at Summer Solstice, so be nice to them! One way to do this is to decorate a living tree or bush with bells and ribbons. When these elementals are happy, they will protect your outdoor spaces.

All colors are acceptable to use in your decorations, but be sure to use white, dark green, and red. This is a Fire Festival, a Wedding Feast honoring the union of God and Goddess, a time to take action on the activities and projects planned at the Vernal Equinox. As it is the last of the three springtime fertility festivals, plan to generate energy centered on growth of all kinds: growth in spiritual awareness, growth in the garden, growth in your bank accounts.

Serve your guests dairy foods, sweets of all kinds, red fruits, green salads, and cereals. A menu incorporating these elements would be a buffet of: an assortment of breads, crackers, and cheeses; apple slices; strawberries and yogurt; salad of lettuces, baby spinach, sprouts, and parsley; honey-vinaigrette salad dressing; ice cream and oatmeal cookies; red velvet cake; sweet muffins; sangria; mint-hibiscus tea.

May Pole: Life emerging.

Your decorations should include braiding of some sort. May Poles are a traditional sight at Beltane, the red and white streamers a manifestation of the life emerging in the Planet Earth. A small pole with red and white ribbon woven around it would make an appropriate centerpiece. If your hair is long enough, braid it. The intertwining represents the union of God and Goddess.

You could also provide the materials for you and your guests to each make a May Basket: small woven baskets, greenery (real or artificial) to fill the baskets, flowers and sprigs of herbs (real or artificial) to add to the greenery, red and white ribbons to make bows for the finished basket.

When choosing flowers to use in the May Baskets, keep in mind that roses can represent spirituality as well as the goddess, red carnations will attract fairies who enjoy healing animals, clover is wildly attractive to fairies, lobelia helps attract winged fairies, heliotrope is enjoyed by fire elementals, morning glory repels unwanted night fairies, and rosemary protects from baneful fairies. But do not use mistletoe, as it can attract unpleasant tree fairies and be aware that fairies tend to not like the smell of dill.

Another activity associated with Beltane is to make a joyful noise. Encourage your guests to bring wind instruments and use them at some point in your festivities. Trumpets, recorders, whistles, flutes, and ocarinas fit the category, as do many other breath-powered instruments. Be creative.

Above all, make it a joyful and joyous event. This is a time to celebrate life, love, and vitality!

[Kate Braun's website is www.tarotbykatebraun.com. She can be reached at kate_braun2000@yahoo.com. Read more of Kate Braun's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Greg Moses : Occupy May Day: Life, Labor, and Liberty

Occupy posters by Eric Drooker.
Life, labor, and liberty:
May Day then and now

By Greg Moses / The Rag Blog / May 1, 20112

Counting in reverse through the great Theses on Feuerbach, we pass by the iconic eleventh, which demands that we quit describing the world and start changing it, in order to re-visit the lesser-known tenth.

"The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society;" says the Smith-Cuckson translation of the tenth thesis, "the standpoint of the new is human society or social humanity." In plain English we recognize the warning already sounded in 1845 that normalized uses of "civil society" bring with them bureaucratic retinues, orders of articulation, credentials, and border-sweeping technologies of lethal effect.

In the author's German original, the term for the old society is not "civil" but "burgerliche," which is usually translated into "English" as bourgeoise. Therefore on this May Day 2012 we ask how far from a bourgeoise society have we traveled and what are the prospects of ever realizing our "social humanity" (oder die gesellschaftliche Menschheit)?

This May Day question is born from the robust and passionate vision expressed by the twenty-something German author when he dashed off the tenth thesis as a prelude to his life's work. It reminds me of a slightly older Thoreau, who wrote in his great "Civil Disobedience" of 1849 that "when men (sic) are prepared for it" they will be governed by no government at all.

Together these authors sing lyrical sentiments worthy of May Day, a calendar occasion for marking human celebrations of life, labor, and liberty.

As Rosa Luxembourg tells the modern history of May Day, it was born in Australia by workers -- the stonemasons of Melbourne University, says Wikipedia -- who in 1856 won their struggle for an eight-hour work-day. In the radical Republican aftermath of the U.S. Civil War, the eight-hour day was adopted for federal employees and proclaimed as a presidential principle by Ulysses S. Grant.

Deploying the eight-hour policy into "private" employment became a bloody struggle for several decades more, validating the sorts of things that Marx liked to write about revolution, and solidifying the modern association between May Day and labor struggle.

And still, the story of May Day goes back into archaic traditions of human responses to springtime. Dancing around maypoles, people enact a sense of participation in the joys of natural renewal and growth won back from winter's death. Even in the "Official Eight Hour Song," we hear a human demand to experience the things of spring. "We want to feel the sunshine, and we want to smell the flowers, for surely God has willed it and we mean to have it ours."

In the accumulated history of factory work, the cruelty of long hours would become ever more unbearable in proportion to April's lengthening light.

"Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" asked Emerson, anonymously, in his essay "Nature" of 1836. "Our hands and hearts are weary and our homes are heavy with dole," rejoined the singers of the eight-hour song, "if our lives are filled with drudgery, what need of a human soul?"

In some parts of Texas especially this year spring has gushed from the soil like a trillion geysers of greening promises. Landscapes that last year groaned under dehydrations the color of burnt toast this year have sprung into unbelievable thickness of life. Just add water, and up from underground it comes dressed for dancing in the sun.

"All social life is practical," declares thesis number eight, as our countdown continues. "All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice."

May Day 2012 promises to revive the greening energies of general strike, when people declare for themselves a day to stand apart from everything they do in the name of "civil society" and posit the experience of a more social humanity.

The global Occupy movement inspired by Tahrir Square is this spring beginning to makeover vacant lots and abandoned bookstores into gardens and museums. People are seeking new ways to practice their social humanity. Dead spaces, dehydrated by a "capital strike" are being renewed through social labor, which is the only source that capital can come from in the first place. People are exploring human practices and comprehending possibilities in the best ways they know how.

"There is no doubt," wrote the wise Jane Addams, "that the great difficulty we experience in reducing to action our imperfect code of social ethics arises from the fact that we have not yet learned to act together, and find it far from easy even to fuse our principles and aims into a satisfactory statement."

There is no royal road to the new, but that has never stopped life from moving forward. We don't have to live out other people's gridlock as our own.

So when I hear that San Francisco activists have ploughed under idle land the better to grow their own food, or that people in East Lansing have transformed an abandoned book store into a museum, I think of Henry George scanning his beloved bay area and recognizing the absurd contradiction of a system that would enforce monopoly over idle property even as it grinds out longer lines of joblessness and poverty.

Throw property open to anyone weary of idle hands, and you practically eliminate idleness altogether. "It is not the relations of capital and labor," said George, "not the pressure of population against subsistence, that explains the unequal development of society." No. "The great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land."

We don't know if Henry George was right. In the end it will be a practical question answered in practice, not theory alone. But we do have some acquaintance with the practical absurdity of "civil society" reacting with brutality to the social, human occupations of idle spaces. Pardon us please if we are well reminded of Hawthorne's immortal account of what happened to Thomas Morton.

A general strike would at least emphasize an insight that unifies both ancient and modern histories of May Day. It is through our sheer participation in life itself that we find any shred of value whatsoever. By dedicating a day each year to the dancing practices of our social humanity and their comprehensions, we remind ourselves of a proper standard for evaluating everything in between.

[Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence. His entries on King and Racism appear in the Encyclopedia of Global Justice. He can be reached at gmosesx@gmail.com. Read more articles by Greg Moses on The Rag Blog.]

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Sue Katz : May Day in Vermont

Poet Verandah Porche (left) and author Sue Katz. Photos from Sue Katz, Barry Hock, and Consenting Adult.
May Day in Vermont

By Sue Katz / The Rag Blog / May 10, 2011

I think you'll get some enjoyment from reading this by Sue Katz, one of my friends from the "old days," a contributor to the anthology Out of the Closets, and a woman with a lovely checkered past and present (and future!).

I was present at this gathering, too, on April 30, a day short of May Day.

What Sue doesn't mention is that this is the Packers Corners commune, founded in 1968, one of the pioneering "back to the land" places in our region (about 30 miles from my house in Massachusetts). Many people present resided at the former LNS-MA (Liberation News Service) commune in Montague, Massachusetts, birthplace of the modern no-nukes movement.

The founders were mostly friends from Boston University, only a few years out of college. This is the place made somewhat famous by one of its former residents, Ray Mungo, who wrote about it in a book he titled Total Loss Farm. (His name for the farm, not the farm's actual name.)

So many wonderful people, and a joyful atmosphere. Sad moments, too, remembering people who have died, including the most recent death (from brain cancer) of Tony Mathews, hippie carpenter extraordinaire of Gill, MA, [LNS founder] Marshall Bloom (I called out his name), Fritz Hewitt, Marty Jezer, and others.

-- Allen Young / The Rag Blog / May 10, 2011

May Day gathering at Packers Corners. Allen Young is third from the right.
PACKERS CORNERS, Vermont -- Although I do not have the time for this, what with trying to get all my work done before my trip abroad, I am unable to deprive myself of my annual trip to Vermont for May Day. The event is held at The Farm, founded by my college posse in 1968, and overseen to this day by my poet darling Verandah Porche. (She's in the red blouse and long skirt in the photos.)

I arrive on Friday afternoon in time to help unravel the silk streamers still wound tight around our May Pole since last year. We sit outside under the welcome sun hoping for a good day tomorrow, when people will come from all over the surrounding countryside and others, like us, from Boston.

Our main task completed, I take a temporary departure from Verandah to go just down the road to the 1840 home of my book binder friend Susan and my antiques expert friend Gilbert. They are putting me up and feeding and watering me.


“Feeding” is too pale a term for what goes on. We’re talking about delicious cheeses and dips to get the juices going and then a dinner of onion-stuffed roasted moist chicken, rich mashed potatoes, for which Gilbert is famous, asparagus that has been kept on ice until it is time to be cooked to an uncanny perfection, eggplant wraps smothered in tomato (from the garden) sauce, all followed by an exquisite apple pie (with ice cream), the top of which is swollen with crispy deliciousness.

Susan stands up to start to clear the table and freezes. “Everyone,” she says to us in a low voice, “stand up and be still.” We obey, looking out the windows overlooking the rear deck. They keep a bird feeder there, feeding to the tune of 10 pounds of black oil sunflower seeds per week, attracting an ornithologist’s wet dream’s array of birds.

But tonight that is not all the feeder is attracting. On its hind legs, a 300-pound black bear is sucking its dinner from one of the feeders. It sits on the deck on its fat butt, a luxurious fall of shimmery long fur cascading around its back, satiating a big case of the munchies. I am frozen. What do I know? I’m from Pittsburgh, for gawd’s sake. “Camera!” I yell, “someone get a camera.”

Gilbert meanwhile runs outside to have words with the bear, who does not seem to welcome confrontation. The bear returns to four well-padded feet and reluctantly, having been shoo’d loudly a few more times, ambles around the back to the side of the house and then up the lawn to cross the road. No one gets a photo in time.

Susan is unhappy that this beautiful creature has been chased away, while inside the house we follow our precious sighting of the bear by switching from window to window, circling the walls for the best view as the animal gracefully distances itself from us.

We sit outside on the deck around a fire pit on steel legs into which Gilbert feeds board after board to warm us up. Susan cannot get over the bulky beauty of the glorious animal and she and Gil reminisce about the time another black bear came right into their living room. Or was it this same one when it was younger? If so, she is so glad it has survived hunting season.

We turn in around 10 p.m. and sleep in the intense darkness that one only gets in deeply rural settings -- and maybe dungeon cells. In the middle of the night there is a screaming crash of glass. I am startled awake and think that it must be a kerosene lamp and perhaps kerosene is all over the floor.

Within seconds the light comes on. It is Susan. I have figured out that some tossing and turning has shifted one of the four pillows sideways, knocking over what used to be a kerosene lamp and what is now an electric lamp, as I know so well, having turned it off when it was sleep-time. In bare feet, Susan tiptoes through the hunks of frosted glass, lifting what is left of the shade to a sideboard. She says that she and Gil were afraid that it was the bear, making its way back in.

We leave the glass with the intention of cleaning it up in the morning light.


Saturday

I wake early and sweep up the glass with a hand brush and dust pan. Gilbert is already preparing a scrumptious breakfast of eggs, sausage, sautéed potatoes and challah. Susan is dressing for her morning climb up the mountain with Verandah and I am checking my email.

Just before one we make our way to The Farm bearing contributions to the pot luck that precedes the annual May Day ceremony. Happily I meet up with my dear niece, nephew, and grandniece Sadie (otherwise known as Verandah’s daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter, respectively). Out of my little bag of treats, the beach ball is the biggest hit -- once poor Matt depletes himself of oxygen blowing it up, and I actually get to play with Sadie, a rare treat for me.

The morning had started foggy but the sun clearly wants to participate in this day of joy and is now burning down on flesh made vulnerable by an endless winter. It is a glorious day -- sunny but not scorching. As I explain to one new guest, a young guy, this particular May Day celebration combines three themes: the international day of worker solidarity; the pagan festival of Spring; and the celebration of the end of a harsh Vermont winter that can cause isolation as folks hunker down around their stoves.

I see old friends (like from the '60s) and newish ones and once the many dozens of guests have cleaned their plates it is time to mount the mountain overlooking our once-and-future commune. One friend hoists the May Pole and many others grab one of the colorful streamers and up we go, followed by music makers and stragglers.

At the top, the May Pole is inserted into its usual hole and propped up until stable, so that the rest of us can wind around and around, weaving in and out, both clockwise and counter, to the tunes of Peter Gould’s hand accordion.


Once done, we stand and sit in a circle while the singing commences. The scope of talents and the range of union, worker, and sentimental tunes is startling, and the support of the amateurs by the professionals -- like Patty Carpenter and Melissa Shetler -- and Verandah Porche -- is emblematic of the kind of supportive, collaborative community these folks have constructed.

As always, Verandah asks us to invite in those who have died -- and people around the circle call out names of mutual friends and then individual loved ones. One guy calls out, “My parents!” -- and dozens of echoes of “and mine!” reverberate from around the circle. We are orphaned, but we have each other and the generations behind us.

[Sue Katz is an author, blogger, journalist, unionist, and rebel whose rants and reviews are posted on her blog, Consenting Adult.]

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In a Changing World : Workers on the Move

Workers in Paris join in massive May Day demonstration. Photo from AFP.
As the nature of work evolves...
A week of worker militancy

Those who proclaimed May Day as the workers’ day over a hundred years ago understood the need for global solidarity to achieve justice.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / May 4, 2010

This was a week of worker militancy. Wednesday, April 28, in large cities and small towns, workers rallied in support of improved health and safety at the workplace. [See "Austin Construction Workers: No los Vamos a Olvidar'" by Alice Embree.] This was the fortieth anniversary of the establishment of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. In the minds and hearts of these workers were the recent deaths in mines in West Virginia and Kentucky and oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

On April 29 masses of workers assembled, thousands in Manhattan, to protest Wall Street’s robbery of the American people, particularly for its creation of an economic crisis that has cost workers all over the globe millions of jobs.

And finally on Saturday, May 1, the international day of workers’ solidarity, inspired by the protests in support of the eight-hour day movement in Chicago in 1886, millions of workers mobilized everywhere; from Hong Kong, Istanbul, Athens, Berlin, Hamburg, Manila, Moscow, Seoul, Tokyo Taiwan, Bangkok, to Havana. In the United States huge throngs marched in support of immigrant rights in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Dallas, Austin, and many other cities.

I just finished teaching a course called “The Politics of Capital and Labor in the United States.” We read texts that analyzed the development of capitalism as the dominant mode of production. We discussed its various stages from competitive to monopoly capitalism to today’s era of finance capital. I highlighted the post-World War II period in U.S. and world history emphasizing the establishment of a permanent war economy, deindustrialization, financialization, and neo-liberal globalization.

We then concentrated on the changing nature of the circumstances of work and workers over the last 60 years drawing upon the collection from Dollars and Sense magazine called "Real World Labor." By way of summary, I prepared a list of the impacts of systemic economic and political changes on workers derived from the various essays in the book. The list, in no particular order, suggests the ways in which the lives of workers have been transformed over the last 60 years and why the mass mobilizations of workers, such as those this week, are so desperately needed.

The list only touches the surface. It includes dramatic increases in state and employer mechanisms to obstruct union organizing. Union density in the United States has declined from a peak of 33% in the early 1950s to 15% today (half in the public sector). Employers skillfully use workplace policies to destroy the potential for worker solidarity, from encouraging racism, and inter-ethnic hostilities, to creating two-tier salary schedules.

Work has been increasingly sub-contracted and outsourced, shifting manufacturing and service employment from once higher paid industrial capitalist countries to poor countries whose traditional economies have been disrupted to accommodate new factories of outsourced work. Sweatshops, initiated in textile mills in Britain and the United States 200 years ago, began to be transferred to countries of the Global South in the 1960s and now, with declining real wages in the United States, are returning to domestic venues.

Work has been casualized. Job creation is increasingly characterized by part-time, contingent, and seasonal work, with significant portions of the work force defined as “illegal.”

For those with jobs, whether in manufacturing or service, modern forms of Taylorism are imposed on work processes. Originally Taylorism inspired efforts to control all the physical movements of workers to maximize their productivity at all costs. Now such techniques are applied in the service sector as well, programming what workers say to customers and the appropriate physical space prescribed for interactions with them. Generally, techniques have been created to maximize the productivity (but not wages) with which all work is performed.

Workplace harassment has been rising in recent years, including demeaning treatment of workers, targeting workers with seniority so that they will be forced to retire, and encouraging racism and sexism on the job.

Similarly, the initiating of workplace regulations in the past has been reversed. Taking occupational health and safety as an example, systems of rules, regulations, and inspections led to a significant decline in workplace deaths and injuries during the 1970s. Those changes that benefited workers have been reversed since the 1980s.

It is estimated that a shop floor or workplace can be expected to be inspected only once every 83 years. The tragedies in mines and on oil rigs this year remind workers that their jobs have become as dangerous again as they were 50 years ago.

And of course real wages, benefits, and jobs have all declined. Economists still debate what should be the “natural unemployment rate.” Everywhere, from U.S. cities to most of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, life-sustaining remunerative activities involve creative street hustling, what economists call “the informal sector.” Good paying secure jobs -- as a percentage of all the work in the world -- are declining. In factories and service jobs “wage theft” has become common; that is, employers find ways to avoid paying workers what they have earned.

State policies have enforced increasing exploitation of workers. Old fashioned repression, that is using the police and armies to crush union-organizing drives, occurs from time to time. In the United States, business lobbyists pressure state legislatures to pass “right to work” legislation limiting the ability of workers to form unions. Dilatory procedures for certifying union recognition, impediments to elections, prohibitions on strikes, and administrative decisions to prohibit categories of workers from unionizing have become instruments of state policy. Of course, in every country where organizing campaigns occur, leaders are targeted for dismissal and sometimes death squads.

In addition to this modest list, the transforming global economy has created millions of migrant workers who are forced out of their jobs and from their land to become a pool of reserve workers who desperately seek work in other countries. Masses of Latin Americans come to the United States to find low paying jobs while they are threatened by state repression, most immediately illustrated by the new draconian Arizona law.

Mobility also occurs from and to countries of the Global South. A million Bolivians have migrated since 1999 to work in sweatshops in neighborhoods of Buenos Aries, thousands of Nicaraguans pick pineapples in neighboring Costa Rica, and Central Americans work in Mexican factories.

So this week workers everywhere were on the move. Their campaigns and rallies are about worker rights, jobs, benefits, and the capacity to be treated, wherever they live, with human dignity. The annual May Day events suggest that workers’ struggles are truly global. Capitalism in the era of neo-liberal globalization is truly global and in the end organization and resistance must be global.

In one of the essays in the Real World Labor reader Bill Fletcher suggests what is necessary for the U.S. labor movement to participate in the struggle for global justice. The labor movement must “...understand the problem of empire, or if one prefers, imperial ambitions... the American working class resides in a world where corporate/government connections are strengthening, and with them increased repression of progressive and democratic forces in the face of unfolding globalization.”

Those who proclaimed May Day as the workers’ day over a hundred years ago understood the need for global solidarity to achieve justice. Workers need to build off this week’s dynamism to create a movement of global solidarity.

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

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Marc Estrin : M'aidez! M'aidez!

Cartoon by R. Crumb from Motor City Comics.
M'aidez! M'aidez!
The revolutionary and the stinking idol

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / May 2, 2010

SOS was the Morse Code signal requesting aid. Mayday became the oral radio code, probably a corruption of the French m’aidez, “help me." And “help me” was what political Mayday has traditionally been about -- a day of international workers’ solidarity. This notion was eventually too much for capitalist, fortress America, which don’t need no help from nobody, and in 1961 (yes, under JFK), Congress passed a bill creating May 1st as “Law Day." That’s right, as you watch all those nice blue flowers come up, you can let your mind drift to the men in blue who protect and serve, if you are white and middle or upper class.

A quick web search of “Law Day” sites shows an interesting evolution of the custom. Many are now maintained by lawyers’ and law school organizations, and are dedicated to the notion that lawyers are essential to “freedom under the law." This may be, if you are rich enough to retain the right one. But there are enough people who remember the political origins of May Day to be using the calendrical energy to combat the oppression of corporate globalization and U.S. imperialism.

You know what? It’s a beautiful, sunny afternoon in early spring, and it thus occurs to me that there was once -- and still is -- more to Mayday than just politics. Or maybe not. Our Puritan forefathers spent much vituperation on Mayday -- and Christmas -- (see Hawthorne’s great story “The Maypole of Merrymount”) -- which they felt to be superstitious and idolatrous. Here is Philip Stubbes in 1583 railing against a “stinking idol” of a Maypole:

Against Maie Day, Whitsunday, or some other time of the year, every parish, town, or village assemble themselves, both men, women and children; and either all together, or dividing themselves into companies, they goe some to the woods and groves, some to the hills and mountaines, some to one place, some to another, where they spend all the night in pleasant pastimes, and in the morning they return, bringing with them birche boughes and branches of trees to deck their assembles withal. But their chieftest jewel they bring from thence is the Maie-pole, which they bring home with great veneration, as thus -- they have twentie or fourtie yoake of oxen, every oxe having a sweet nosegaie of flowers tied to the tip of his horns, and these oxen draw home the May-poale, their stinking idol rather, which they cover all over with flowers and herbes, bound round with strings from the top to the bottome, and sometimes it was painted with variable colours, having two or three hundred men, women, and children following it with great devotion. And thus equipped it was reared with handkerchiefs and flagges streaming on the top. They strawe the ground round about it, they bind green boughs about it, they set up summer halles, bowers and arbours hard by it and then fall they to banquetting and feasting, to leaping and dancing aboiut it, as the heathen people did at the dedication of their idols.

O, well. There is always incorruptible nature:

Im wunderschönen Monat Mai
In the wondrously lovely month of May
Als alle Knospen sprangen,
when all the buds sprang forth
Da ist in meinem Herzen
there, in my heart
Die Liebe aufgagangen.
Love also broke out.

Im wunderschönen Monat Mai
In the wondrously lovely month of May
Als alle Vögel sangen,
when all the birds were singing
Da hab’ ich ihr gestanden
then I confessed to her
Mein Sehnen und Verlangen.
my longing and desire.

-- Heinrich Heine/Robert Schumann

These are also Laws.

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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'We Are All Immigrants' : 10,000 at Austin May Day March

An estimated 10,000 May Day protesters gathered at the Texas State Capitol for a rally and then marched through downtown Austin in support of immigrants' rights. Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.

Profile this:
Arizona awakens a sleeping giant

Provided with a hefty kick start from Arizona’s outlandish new immigration law, hundreds of thousands of May Day protesters in at least 80 cities around the country hit the streets yesterday, with as many as 50,000 in Texas alone.

In Austin, 10,000 people filled the Capitol grounds -- a large majority of them Latino -- for a spirited rally on the steps of the statehouse, and then formed a six-block-long parade down Congress Avenue to City Hall. The biggest crowd in Texas was in Dallas, where Bishop Kevin J. Farrell of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Dallas, led 20-25,000 marchers through downtown streets. 7,500 marched in Houston.

The largest demonstration was in Los Angeles, with a throng estimated as high as 100,000. Singer and Cuban emigrant Gloria Estefan, speaking from a flat bed truck, reminded the massive crowd that we are a nation of immigrants, while LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told the marchers, "We need to write laws that appeal to our better angels."

In Washington, a demonstration turned to civil disobedience, as U.S. Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill) was one of 35 arrested for sitting down in front of the White House fence, and refusing to “move on.” Gutierrez said he decided to be arrested “to escalate the struggle.” 20,000 marched in Chicago and thousands participated in other cities from coast to coast.

Labor organizer John Delgado told thousands in Manhattan, “I want to thank the governor of Arizona because she’s awakened a sleeping giant.” Meanwhile, anti-immigrant zealot and commentator Lou Dobbs, dismissed it all as a bunch of “political theater.”

-- Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog

'Si se puede.' May Day demonstrators in Austin. Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.
'Estamos en la lucha'
May Day in Austin

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / May 2, 2010

For the first time, my unprofessional crowd estimates were lower than those reported by the Austin American-Statesmen. “Almost 10,000 gather at Capitol to protest controversial Arizona law.”

Austin’s first May Day demonstration focused on immigrant rights was in 2006. I was stunned then by an Austin crowd as large as any I had ever seen -- 30,000 -- massive numbers, snaking through downtown streets to the federal building. That was the year of the first national mobilizations for comprehensive immigration reform. There were unprecedented turnouts occurring in every major U.S. city, including Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Other Texas cities -- Houston, Dallas, El Paso and San Antonio -- had large demonstrations that year.

Those national mobilizations met with considerable blowback. There were rants on cable television about Mexican flags. Vigilante Minute Men got publicity for assembling on the border. More important, there were raids on places of employment, deportations, and jailings. Along with repression, the collapsing U.S. construction sector and increased violence associated with Mexican drug cartels made for a perfect storm of declining participation in subsequent years.

Arizona’s law changed all that. The broad strokes of that recent legislation make the mere suspicion of undocumented status cause for questioning and detention. The potential impact on Latinos ignited Austin’s community as well as communities across the nation.

Organizers at the Austin Immigrant Rights Coalition (AIRC) -- www.airc.org -- had been holding their meetings in a small office. They moved to a church hall to accommodate the growing interest. AIRC describes itself as a grassroots, action-oriented coalition of immigrants, students, and allies including labor, faith, and community organizations. That is who they turned out for a spirited rally at the state Capitol and a march down Congress Avenue to City Hall.

Conchero dancers reminded those attending of the real non-immigrants in this country -- Native Americans. Linda Chavez, former union organizer and Democratic candidate for Lieutenant Governor, addressed the crowd. Marchers chanted:

Si se puede
[Yes, we can]
Obama, escucha, estamos en la lucha
[Obama, listen, we are in the struggle]
El pueblo unido, jamas sera vencido
[The people united will never be defeated]

Like it or not, President Obama, comprehensive immigration reform demands have moved from the shadows onto center stage.

Not sure. Let's see your profile. Photo by Alice Embree / The Rag Blog.


Speakers, in Spanish and English, singers, and Aztec conchero dancers highlighted the Austin rally. The Rag Blog's David Holmes Morris has the final word. Photos by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.
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Kate Braun : Beltane Seasonal Message

Beltane. Image by Janna / deviantArt / Kuoma-stock.
Fire and fertility:
The Goddess is receptive to Lord Sun

By Kate Braun / The Rag Blog / April 23, 2010

“O doo not tell the priest our plight,
For he would call it sin,
For we’ve been out in the woods all night,
A’conjuring summer in.”

Friday, April 30, 2010, closely following the Full Planting Moon on April 28 is Beltane, aka Roodmas, May Day, Walpurgisnacht, and May Eve. Lady Moon starts her 3rd Quarter, in Scorpio, a Fixed Water Sign. Friday is Freya’s day and Freya is a goddess of fertility, among other things, so the emphasis on planting and generation is interesting.

In the Long Ago, Beltane traditionally marked the beginning of Summer. “Bel” is an ancient Sun God name and “Tan” means Fire. This is a fire festival as well as a fertility festival. If possible, celebrate outdoors. The Goddess is now Matron, ripe and receptive to Lord Sun’s attentions, and as we celebrate the changing season we also celebrate the new life to come from their union.

Decorate with flowers, especially roses. Use mirrors to reflect Lord Sun’s light. Representations of honeybees will indicate the fertility aspect of your festivities. Braid your hair and/or beard and wear braided ribbons or cords as part of your attire. Macrame work is also acceptable: the joining of two strands to create a third is another way to represent the union of God and Goddess. Dress yourself, your table, and your altar primarily in white, dark green, and red; use other colors of your choice for accent colors. At this celebration, all colors are appropriate.

Let your menu include dairy foods, sweets of all kinds. breads, cereals, all red fruits, green salads, and honey. As it is taboo to give away fire or food on this day, if you host a pot-luck party, please ask that any leftovers be taken home by whomever brought the dish.

If you have an outdoor fire, when it is reduced to embers toss healing and protective herbs and incense such as rosemary, frankincense, and vanilla on the embers and use a feather or a feather fan to direct the smoke around all your guests. If this is not possible, light a charcoal disc and put it in a safe container such as a cauldron, adding the herbs and incense to the charcoal when it is ready, then fanning the smoke around the room and all those present.

As at Samhain, Beltane is a time when the veil between worlds is very thin. It is a time of Great Magick, The powers of elves and fairies are growing and will reach their peak at the Summer Solstice. Keep these entities content and happy by planting (or allowing to grow) clover, lobelia, red carnations, heliotrope, foxglove, and mushrooms.

Creating a garden shrine by decorating a living tree or bush with bells and ribbons will please fairies and nature spirits who, in turn, will protect your garden and outdoor spaces. This is an activity in which both you and your guests can participate; leftover ribbons and bells may become party favors your guests may take home and use to decorate their own gardens.

[Kate Braun's website is www.tarotbykatebraun.com. She can be reached at kate_braun2000@yahoo.com.]

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Ron Ridenour Reports on May Day in Cuba

On May Day Havana is a melting pot of labor solidarity. Photo: Bill Hackwell.
May Day 2009 in Cuba
By Ron Ridenour / The Rag Blog / May 2, 2009

Seventeen days after the first May Day of the revolution, May 17, 1959, Fidel Castro proclaimed the first radical land reform to an outburst of great popular joy, as well as a violent reaction from the national landowners and their ally in the United States, the latter continuing its merciless revenge against the revolutionary government of Cuba.

On that day 50 years ago, Fidel said, “A wonderful future awaits our country if we dedicate ourselves to work with all our might.”

The historic and indelible advantages Cubans earned from forging an incipient socialism following the nation’s real independence, with its ensuing products and services for all, was supported by the vast majority of the population, especially in the early years. Just to mention some benefits: free and ample health care and education for all; clothing and food for all babies and school children; free or inexpensive access to all sports and cultural events; the assurance that no resident go without minimal nutrition and a residence; the right for all to obtain work. And the spirit, the spirit of idealistic Don Quixote, and that of the thoroughly dedicated revolutionary guerrilla, El Che.

However, today, fifty years later, there is still a long ways to go to advance the interests, energies and the wisdom of Cuba’s working people. It is a sad fact of reality, which must be confronted today, that many Cubans have not worked “with all our might.”

The nation is fraught with passivity, poor production in quantity and quality. I believe this is so in large part because people lack the real power to make decisions at their work centers, schools, and even in their local governments and provincial and national legislatures.

Cuban Workers March on May Day. Photo: Bill Hackwell.

They are not in control of their work, their production, or of product distribution. Too many people are not contributing to society’s needs; too many people are skimming off the enticing plate of foreign capitalism; too many people have lost their morality, their solidarity and have succumbed to their thirst for the tinted silver plate.

Today, half a century after the great victory, its no secret that many people are tired and discontent. The four main areas of dissatisfaction, as I see it, are: a) low salaries and the two currency system, which separates people; b) shortages of sufficient foodstuffs and other basic goods; c) perpetual lack of sufficient housing made worse by last year’s hurricane destruction; d) insufficient improvement in worker empowerment, with few exceptions.

And then, for many -especially the revolutionary conscious people who linger in the days of Che enthusiasm for creating the new man and woman- there is the crippling effect that the government continues to limit the access to ample information and real debate, hampering an exchange of ideas necessary for them to become empowered.
This has led to a sizeable segment of the population, especially youth, to be disbelievers of what they are told by the government and its mass media. They hunger for more and open information.

There are a few signs of movement, not least among some university students and professors. On this May Day 2009, let us listen carefully and join those voices.

Source / Havana Times

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May Day in Europe : Protesters Clash with Riot Police

Protesters throw stones at riot police during a May Day rally in Istanbul. Photo by Osman Orsal / Reuters.
Giant demonstrations in France; battles with police in Turkey, Greece and Germany

Protests reflect growing anger in Europe over unemployment and handling of economic crisis

By Robert Tait [in Istanbul] and Angelique Chrisafis [in Paris] / May 1, 2009

May Day protesters clashed with riot police in Turkey, Greece and Germany yesterday while French unions led their biggest ever Labour Day demonstrations amid growing public anger in Europe at unemployment and the handling of global economic crisis.

Turkey's May Day demonstrations were marred by violence for the third year running as police battled to stop protesters reaching Istanbul's landmark Taksim Square. Riot officers fired water cannon and teargas canisters in clashes with leftwing demonstrators, some of whom hurled stones and Molotov cocktails and smashed the windows of banks and shops. There were at least 26 arrests and 11 police officers were reported injured.

Some of the worst violence took place in side streets. In the fashionable Cihangir neighbourhood near Taksim, protesters were seen placing large plant pots on the road to use as barricades against police vehicles.

The protesters had been seeking to join an estimated 2,000 trade unionists who had been given permission to hold a rally in Taksim for the first May Day since 1977, when 37 people died after unidentified gunmen opened fire on demonstrators. That event triggered political violence and was seen as a turning point that led to a military coup three years later.

The Turkish government last week bowed to pressure to declare May Day a public holiday and allow limited access to Taksim Square following criticism that police heavy handedness aimed at cordoning it off had been responsible for violence at last year's event.

In Greece, police clashed with anarchist demonstrators, firing teargas on protesters at Athens Polytechnic.

In Berlin and Hamburg, scattered violence erupted in the early hours of the May Day holiday. More than 50 ­people were detained in Berlin after demonstrators chanting anti-capitalism slogans threw bottles and stones at riot police and torched five cars, 48 police were injured.

France saw a record number of almost 300 street demonstrations with union leaders marching as a united front for the first time since the second world war.

Public support for the marches was over 70% as tension rises over unemployment, factory closures and mass lay-offs. The demonstrations were France's third national protest over the handling of the economic crisis in four months. Unions will meet on Monday to decide whether to organise a further general strike.

As civil unrest by workers becomes more radical, with gestures such as "bossnapping" and vandalism, the former prime minister Dominique de Villepin has warned of a "revolutionary risk" in France. In one poll yesterday for Challenges magazine, 66% people felt there was a risk of "social explosion" in France over the coming months.

Source / Guardian, U.K.

Thanks to CommonDreamsThe Rag Blog

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May Day Special : Carl Davidson on Socialism in Today's Society

May Day poster from Holt Labor Library.

...in light of the faux 'socialisms' bandied about in the headlines and sound bytes of the mass media in the wake of the financial crisis, especially the absurd claim in the media of rightwing populism that the Obama administration is Marxist and socialist, I felt something a little more rigorous might be helpful.

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / May 1, 2009

The current discussion around socialism in left and progressive circles in the U.S. needs to be placed in a more substantive arena. This is an effort to do so. I take note in advance of the criticism that the following eleven working hypotheses are rather dry and formal. But in light of the faux "socialisms" bandied about in the headlines and sound bytes of the mass media in the wake of the financial crisis, especially the absurd claim in the media of rightwing populism that the Obama administration is Marxist and socialist, I felt something a little more rigorous might be helpful. Obviously, criticism and commentary is invited.

1. Socialism’s fundamental building blocks are already present in US society. The means of production, for the most part, are fully developed and in fact are stagnating under the political domination of finance capital. The US labor force, again for the most part, is highly skilled at all levels of production, management, marketing, and finance. The kernels of socialist organization are also scattered across the landscape in cooperatives, socially organized human services, and centralized and widespread mass means of many-to-many communication and supply/demand data management. Many earlier attempts at socialism did not have these advantages.

2. Socialism is first of all a democratic political system where the interests and organizations of the working class and its allies have attained and hold the preponderance of political power and thus play the critical leading role in society. It is still a class society, but one in a protracted transition, over hundreds of years, to a future classless society where exploiting class privileges are abolished and classes and class distinctions generally wither away, both nationally and globally.

So socialism will have classes for some time, including some capitalists, because it will be a mixed economy, with both public and private ownership, even as the balance shifts over time. Family farmers and small proprietors will both exist and flourish alongside cooperatives. Innovative 'high road' entrepreneurial privately-held firms will compete with publically-own firms, and encouraged to create new wealth within an environmentally regulated and progressively taxed system. Past efforts to build socialism have suffered from aggravated conflict between and among popular classes and lack of emphasis on building wide unity among the people.

3. Socialism at the base is a transitional economic system anchored in the social mode of production brought into being by capitalist development over several centuries. Its economic system is necessarily mixed, and makes use of markets, especially in goods and services, which are regulated, especially regarding the environment. But capital markets and wage-labor markets can be sharply restricted and even abolished in due time. Markets are a function of scarcity, and all economies of any scale in a time of scarcity have them, even if they are disguised as 'black' or 'tiered' markets.

In addition to regulated markets, socialism will also feature planning, especially on the macro level of infrastructure development, in investment of public assets and funds, and other arenas where markets have failed. Planning will especially be required to face the challenges of uneven development and harsh inequalities on a global scale, as well as the challenge of moving from a carbon and uranium based energy system to one based on renewable green energy sources. The socialisms of the last century fell or stagnated due to failure to develop the proper interplay between plans and markets.

4. Socialism will be anchored in public and worker ownership of the main productive forces and natural resources. This can be achieved by various means: a) buying out major failing corporations at penny stock status, then leasing them back to the unions and having the workers in each firm—one worker, one vote—run them, b) workers directly taking ownership and control over failed and abandoned factories, c) eminent domain seizures of resources and factories, with compensation, otherwise required for the public good, and d) public funding for startups of worker-owned cooperative businesses.

Socialism will also require public ownership of most finance capital institutions, including bringing the Federal Reserve under the Treasury Department and federal ownership. Lease payments from publically owned firms will go into a public investment fund, which will in turn lend money to community and worker owned banks and credit unions. A stock market will still exist for remaining publically traded firms and investments abroad, but will be strictly controlled. A stock transfer tax will be implemented. Gambling in derivatives will be outlawed. Fair trade agreements with other countries will be on a bilateral basis for mutual benefit.

5. Socialism will require democracy in the workplace of public firms and encourage it in all places of work. Workers have the right to independent unions to protect their social and daily interests, in addition to their rights as worker-owners in the governance of their firms. In addition to direct democracy at the plant level, the organizations of the working class also participate in the wider public planning process and thus democratically shape the direction of ongoing development on the macro level as well. Under socialism the government will also serve as the employer-of-last-resort. Minimum living-wage jobs will be provided for all who want to work. Socialism is committed to genuine full employment. Every citizen will have a genuine right to work.

6. Socialism will largely be gained by the working class and it allies winning the battle for democracy in politics and civil society at large, especially taking down the structures and backward laws of class, gender and racial privilege. Women have equal rights with men, and minority nationalities have equal rights with the majority. It also defends equal rights and self-determination among all nations across the globe; no nation can itself be fully free when it oppresses another. Socialism will encourage public citizenship and mass participation at every level, with open information systems, public education and transparency in its procedures. It will need a true multiparty system, with fusion voting, proportional representation and instant runoff.

Given the size and diversity of our country, it is highly unlikely that any single party could adequately represent all popular interests; working class and progressive organizations will need to form common fronts. All trends are guaranteed the right to speak, organize, petition and stand for election. With public financing as an option, socialism can restrict the role of wealth in elections, moving away from a system, in effect, of “one dollar, one vote” and toward a system more reflective of “one person, one vote.” These are the structural measures that can allow the majority of the people, especially the working class and its allies, to secure the political leadership of government and instruments of the state by democratic means, unless these are sabotaged by reaction.

Some socialisms of the past used only limited formal democracy or simply used administrative means to implement goals, with the failure of both the goals and the overall projects. Americans are not likely to be interested in systems with elections where only one party runs and no one can lose.

7. Socialism will be a state power, specifically a democratic political order with a representative government. But the government and state components of the current order, corrupted with the thousand threads connecting it to old ruling class, will have to be broken up and replaced with new ones that are transparent, honest and serve the majority of the people. The US Constitution and Bill of Rights can still be the initial basic organizing principle for a socialist government and state. The democratic rights it has gained over the years will be protected and enhanced. Government will also be needed to organize and finance the social development benefitting the people and the environment already mentioned; but the state power behind the law will be required to compel the honest use of resources and to protect people from criminal elements, individual and organized.

Forces who try to overturn and reverse the new socialist government illegally and in violation of the Constitution will not be able to do so; they will be broken up and brought to justice. Our society will need a state power for some time to come, even as its form changes. Still, government power has limits; under socialism sovereignty resides in the people themselves, and the powers of any government are necessarily restricted and subordinate to the universal and natural rights of all humankind. Attempts to ignore or reject these principles have severely harmed socialist governments and movements in the past.

8. Socialism will be a society in harmony with the natural environment, understanding that all economies are subsets of the eco-system and ignore it at their peril. In its economics, there are no such things as “externalities” to be pushed off downstream or to future generations. The nature of pending planetary disasters necessitates a high level of planning. We need to redesign communities, promote healthier foods, and rebuild sustainable agriculture—all on a global scale with high design, but on a human scale with mass participation of communities in diverse localities.

Socialism will treasure and preserve the diversity of nature’s bounty and end the practice of genetic modification to control the human food supply. We need growth, but intelligent growth in quality and wider knowledge with a lighter environmental footprint. A socialism that simply reproduces the wasteful expansion of an earlier capitalism creates more problems than it solves.

9. Socialism values equality, and will be a society of far greater equality of opportunity, and far less economic inequality. In addition to equal rights before the law, all citizens and residents will have equitable access to a “universal toolbox” of paid-up free public education for all who want to learn, for as far as they want and are able to go; universal public pre-school care; a minimum income, as a social wage, for all who create value, whether in a workplace or otherwise; our notions of socially useful work, activity that creates value, has to be expanded beyond market definitions.

Parents raising children, students learning skills, elders educating and passing traditions to younger generations--all these create value that society can in turn reward. Universal single-payer health care with retirement benefits at the level of a living wage is critical to start. Since everyone has access to employment, the existing welfare system can be abolished; individuals will be free to choose the career path and level of income targets they desire, or not. There are no handouts for those able to work, but there are also no irrational barriers to achievement.

10. Socialism is a society where religion can be freely practiced, or not, and no religion is given any special advantages over any other. Religious freedom remains a fundamental tenant of socialism, but naturally neither its practitioners nor anyone else can deny anyone the benefits and protection of civil and criminal law, especially to women and children.

11. Socialism will require an institution of armed forces. Their mission will be to defend the people and secure their interests against any enemies and help in times of natural disasters. It will not be their task to expand markets abroad and defend the property abroad of the exploiting classes. Soldiers will be allowed to organize and petition for the redress of grievances. Armed forces also include local police, under community control, as well as a greatly reduced prison system, based on the principle of restorative justice, and mainly for the protection of society from individuals inflicted with violent pathologies and criminal practices. Non-violent conflict resolution and community-based rehabilitation will be encouraged, but the need for some coercive means will remain for some time.

[Carl Davidson, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is webmaster for SolidarityEconomy.net, where this article was also posted. He also blogs at Keep On Keepin On. Together with Jerry Harris, he is author of Cyber-Radicalism: A New Left for a Global Age.]

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