 Peter Linebaugh received a PhD in early modern British history from the University of Warwick in 1974, where he studied under E.P. Thompson, one of the most important and influential historians of the 20th century, and a pioneer of history from below. Linebaugh has built upon this tradition with many hugely important articles and books, among which are the London Hanged, Magna Carta Manifesto, and Stop Thief. Linebaugh is co-author of my favorite book, The Many-Headed Hydra, and his latest volume is the subject of today's interview, The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day. This is Liberty Chronicles, a project of Libertarianism.org. I'm Anthony Comegna. As we record here today, it's the 4th of May. It's three days after May Day. And it's the, if my math is correct, the 131st anniversary of the Haymarket Square bombing. So during an eight-hour day demonstration, I don't need to go over the details for you, Professor Linebaugh, but an unknown person threw explosives into police lines and perhaps even a false flag operation, as the phrase goes. I wasn't sure to anybody in particular who actually did it. But nonetheless, several people were injured and sort of an ensuing melee, police and civilians. And Haymarket and May Day have been linked ever since then. And before we get into the details really of the book here, is there anything you want to say in commemoration of the Chicago martyrs and the events at Haymarket? Which I'll remind my Libertarians in the audience, by the way, these were anarchists who were pinned with the crime. Yes, thank you for asking. There are two things that I would like to add. The first is, while it's true that the Haymarket demonstration was in the context of the eight-hour a day movement, the specific demonstration was called to object to the police killing of four iron molders at the McCormick works that took place on the 1st of May, just a few days earlier. So that's the addition number one. And the addition number two is that the McCormick works themselves produced a threshing machine, or a reaper, rather, a reaper, that was a machine and it was made of iron. That's why iron workers were on strike on the 1st of May. And what this machine did was to transform world agriculture. So the world market of grains was really made possible by the mechanization of what formerly had been done by hand with either a sickle or a scythe. And this, I think, from our viewpoint in the 21st century, as we consider the earth and the growth of food and the food sovereignty movement, makes a significant detail to Haymarket. And finally, a third thing I'd like to add is just for us to pause for a second and remember why it was called a Haymarket. It is where horses obtained their food. So since transportation was by horses, teamsters who drove wagons and carriages and single riders all depended on a healthy horse, which depended in turn upon hay. This is why there's a hay market in the middle of an industrial city. This is a world before the internal combustion engine and a world before the petroleum economy. Yes, Anthony, those are, I guess, three things I'd like to add about the Chicago martyrs of 1886. Well, let's go back to the very beginning of May Day then. Now, it's not as though it was stamped on the calendar in, say, 5000 BC. So what are the earliest origins of May Day? How did this holiday develop? Yes, it developed in the Neolithic period of history when it became essential to know what time of year, to be able to predict the time of year to plant domesticated grains, especially barley for drink, that would be beer, or wheat for bread. And this ability to predict the time of year depended on knowledge of the sun and to understand the cycle of the seasons. This was far more important than in a Paleolithic time when human life depended principally on hunting and gathering. Therefore, the first great river civilizations, you know, of the Tigris and Euphrates or in China or along the Nile River, these depended on this knowledge and May Day became in different forms a time of festivity, a time of fertility, anticipating the budding of the earth. So my particular knowledge is not anthropological in that sense, going back to Neolithic times, but going back to classical times, say to the Mediterranean and the Roman Empire, already we see that it's celebrated as Floralia. And May itself gets its name from a Greek god or goddess, Maya, who was the mother of Zeus. So even monotheism and pre-monotheistic religions celebrated this day. And it's always been, you know, throughout human history since a day which has been significant. It sounds like those early celebrations of May Day are really rooted in what you call the green side of May Day. And then you say there's a red side of May Day, too. So this is a red and a green holiday. To expand on the green aspects of May Day, and we can maybe pick up on the red afterward, you make a reference several times to what you call the woodland epic of history. Could you tell us exactly what you mean by that concept? Could you place it in a single geographic location? Or is it a widespread phenomenon? What point in time does it come to be significant in the celebration of May Day? Yeah, very good question. It goes back to me to Thoreau and also to Marsh. You know Marsh, the 19th century environmentalist. He explained how once and found the evidence, how once the great Sahara Desert was covered with forest. So that much of the earth for a very long time was wooded. And I think with the development of the agrarian field, that those woods began to diminish. And even now the sound of the chainsaw ringing through the forest in Chiapas is in my ear. Whether it's in the La Condon jungle of Mexico or in Sumatra in Indonesia or of course the Great Forest of the Amazon. The trees are coming down. And for us, for me, thinking of England, which I've largely studied and I grew up in England. This is a highly significant time, 2017, because it's the 800th anniversary of the Charter of the Forest. And this Charter of the Forest was one of the Charters of Liberty of the 13th century, the other one being the Magna Carta. That means the big Charter, but the Charter of the Forest was the little one. And it provided protection for common people to be able to enjoy the riches of forest life, to be able to pick berries, to be able to put a cow into the forest or forest lands for herbage, which means grazing, or panage, which means nuts and bark for pigs. And very significantly, the Charter of the Forest, I think we should remember it for even yet another reason, which is it withdrew the death penalty from killing a deer. So here are deep reasons from the woodland epoch of history, if you'll permit the phrase. Deep reasons for commemorating it on this 800th anniversary. And perhaps we can work toward that, because the Charter of the Forest was rediscovered on the 11th of September, 1217. A date which, of course, we Americans are familiar with. Well, actually the whole world. And that Charter anticipates the struggle of commoners on the one hand, and the privatizers on the other hand. And so it is a treaty, as it were, within the class differences of British society from the Middle Ages to, I would argue, the present. And it's all interesting, especially to me, because these are ideas, herbage and so on, that people conceived of them as their rights, correct? In the same way that we're often like to think about rights today, that it's something nobody can take away from you, and you have it by virtue of simply existing. That nobody can impede your behavior in this regard. So people had every equal right and entitlement to use these common areas as everyone else. Well, I would, I'd want to add to that two cautions. The first, I myself would rather not use the term rights. These were referred to as customs or as powers. In the era of rights, that is, let's say after the French Revolution, or the same time as the American Bill of Rights, perhaps they are translated or transformed. In some ways into rights. But for historically speaking, it's more accurate to refer to custom. And the second caution I would have is to say that wasn't available for everyone, but for the community of users. That is, you couldn't just wander into some forest anywhere and willy nilly take what you wanted. You had to belong to a community which had its own customs of how it used the forest, how much windfall you could take. Very much the way, you know, if you look at the great public parks of the United States, they were formed by by law of Congress. But a great many people who lived in them lost their abilities to to survive from the resources there in. And we need to understand what were their rules of usage, because their rules will be different from those who just wish to say exploit the forest. So let's let's dig a little bit into who these folks using the commons were. First of all, so this is this is in medieval England, an age of feudalism. This does extend, I presume England's woodland epic properly extends past the Norman conquest and into, you know, the era of Magna Carta and so on. So how did the commons exist side by side with feudalism? Where did they operate in tandem? What were the the ruling elites reactions to the uses of the commons? How did they try to constrain them? Were there any problems with the operation of the common? Oh, definitely. I would say there are more problems there than with private privatization. That is commoners are constantly quarreling with one another. You know, just as when you go to the movies or sit on an airplane, your elbow is is gaining is trying to look for for elbow room with a person next to you. And and so and this means this can lead to conversation or it can lead to a kind of silent equilibrium where you both learn to share the arm rest. And so it is with the commons. The people are always talking and always quarreling always negotiating. And this is unlike nowadays where where everything is with commodity production is supposed to run so smoothly, you can go and fill up your car with gasoline and, you know, have no conversation whatsoever. Or, you know, do your grocery shopping without conversation or interaction beyond putting your money down or running your plastic card through a slot. No, commoning was filled with a human interaction. It was a very lively period of history. And my own thinking is that it's not part of feudalism, but it's part of the way poor people or common people lived right into the 19th century. And of course, there is difficult to find out about this for the simple reason is that commoners don't want others to know about it. You know, unlike, again, unlike the ideologies of privatization, which are all about publicity and marketing. Let's let's go to New England, though. Can you tell us the story of Thomas Morton and Marymount? Sure. Sure. Well, Morton came over to Quincy Bay in in Massachusetts in 1626 in a ship called The Gift, captained by Walliston. And in the following year, Thomas Morton, having been so impressed by the tremendous fertility of the earth in North America, where fish and fowl game and fruit was just there for the taking. He celebrated a May Day along with Native Americans, gay people, runaway servants and slaves. Around an 80 foot maypole. They're at Marymount in in Quincy, Massachusetts, as I say. And they drank beer. And as I say, their enemies say they frisked with their native consorts and worse. They're there. I'm quoting Governor Bradford, who came down from Boston, not very far away and killed a number of people. Knocked down the maypole and pretty much put an end to the happiness in North America. If I can quote Nathaniel Hawthorne. Well, I was I was going to ask, do you agree with Hawthorne's interpretation of the situation that this was more or less the moment when what exceptionalism there was in American life died. And the old world fully transplanted onto the new. Certainly the regime of constant work and private property was brought in by the Puritans and by Bradford, for sure. And history, Nathaniel Hawthorne thought could have taken another road. And I don't know whether Hawthorne was right or not. But what I do know is that we human beings can take different roads than just that of iron and gloom and profiteering and the creation of misery by ever larger numbers of. Poor people. So that a few very rich can thrive. There are other ways of life. And whether Thomas Morton. I had found another way I don't know, but certainly he pointed to other ways. And so I think what's instructive about May Day at Mary Mountain 1627 is this notion of of human agency of human liberty of freedom that we. Yes, and that's so that I think is the ideal that I would share with Hawthorne. But how do you know, for example, that there were open homosexuals in Mary Mount or that there were interracial relationships? I didn't say that open homosexuals were active at Mary Mount. I said gay people. That's my my interpretation of what the sources call a ganymede. And if you look into the history of homosexuality, at one point, a ganymede was a youth, a male youth who served a master drinks and other kinds of pleasure. So it's that term of ganymede that permits me and its associations with homosexuality in the classical world on that permit me to say gay people. I'm really interested in the interactions between those two populations, the sort of white settlers and the Native American population. What were the differences in the ideas those two populations had, especially about property rights and the delineation of who gets what? Oh, well, the main difference was, yeah, here, Anthony, I can't answer the question with specific time and place. I mean, the 19th century and the work of anthropologists there like, like Morgan gives us one answer. The 18th century with the work of the Moravians gives us another answer. Roger Williams in the 17th century gives us yet a third as way of approaching this. Generally, I've looked at it as, and perhaps your audience does too, as a triumph of the commodity and private property over these last 500 years. As far as indigenous people are concerned around the world, private property was not foreign, but it was very carefully restricted to the household or to the margins of the community. Otherwise, it let loose rapacious and avaricious instincts which were destructive to community well-being. So that, I would say, is the way I have tended to approach the relation between Native American history and European imperialism. From the Native viewpoint, the people are not called white people, but are called long knives or town destroyers at the time of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. The long knives and the town destroyers were not heralded as people who brought in agricultural improvement or clean water. They were instead those who burned the village and destroyed the orchard. And history, romantic or not, but factual history sees the justice in that point of view. So I think it's also important what I've learned from Richard White's work on the middle ground is that in North America, certainly in my region of the country, the Great Lakes, the Indian village was not the population, as you call it, of just Native people, but was a population that we might say was hybrid or consisted of runaway servants and runaway slaves, as well as different tribal groupings who, through complex kinship organizations, had quite a lot of people, people with various origins. That's what I've learned from Richard White's work. He calls it the middle ground. When I grew up, they called it the frontier, a place that was constantly on fire. Now I understand why it's on fire, and that's to prevent the indentured servant or the abused woman from fleeing to the safer hospitality of the middle ground of the Indian village. Well, so let's go back to Mayday then. Can you take us through after the maypole was burned in Marymount and joy was snuffed from New England, at least for a time? What happened with the history of Mayday between Thomas Morton and Haymarket? We find mechanization, enslavement, and further and deeper, swifter enclosures. And those enclosures of the North American continent are anticipated by the great surveys of the 1790s, which turned the North America into a land of squares and rectangles that you see once you fly over it. This was done to remove the green possibilities of some other form of life in North America than that of mayhem et tuum, to use the Latin phrase for mine and vine, or of private property, of competitive individualism. Whereas the community is lost and destroyed, and that's necessary for the capitalist mode of production, to create a new type of cooperation which is done in the factory, a new type of cooperation which is done on this cotton plantation, a new type of cooperation that's done in the mines. And here, it's no longer a community, but it becomes class war. And I think this culminates, of course, with the great American Civil War, which showed that working people, especially agrarian workers, i.e. slaves, could fight for emancipation. And this lesson was not lost on industrial workers or new immigrants from China or from Eastern Europe or the Mediterranean after the Civil War, or for those who've been disabled by the Civil War. So we get a women's movement, a disabled movement, and then the eight hour movement among working people that culminates in the red story at Haymarket in 1886. And today we have Americanism Day, Law Day, USA, or actually, literally today, we have Loyalty Day under our grand new chief executive. Could you make some final comments to listeners about the history of these alternative May days, these statist alternatives to May Day? Yeah, they're fig leaves. You remember Adam and Eve, when they were enclosed from paradise? They suddenly felt shame. And so it is with the 1%. They feel shame. And these terms that you use, Loyalty Day, Law Day, Americanism Day, they're fig leaves, indication of shame and weakness on the part of the ruling class, or 1%. Now, I suppose to leave with one other question. I'm curious to know about your thoughts on how... What would you place some sort of particular political label on yourself? It's very hard to do that. I'm a commoner, definitely. I'm a people's remembrancer and a commoner. I believe that with all things in common, Omnia Sund Kamuna, but I don't think yet this has reached a political form. And I'd say with many others, we're searching for a political form for this. Communism, socialism, anarchism, these are isms of the past. There might be something... Certainly, there's things to learn from each of them and things to avoid from each of them. But I think the future for a green and just planet has not yet reached a political form. But we're struggling. We're searching for that form. And we will go to the streets to attain it. Do you think that libertarians, especially let's say anti-political individualist libertarians, would you consider them a sort of hard and fast class enemy calcified into some sort of hopelessly ideological position in our current state of affairs, too wrapped up in the Constitution or whatever it might be? I don't know libertarians. So I think you're the first I've met and I'm very grateful and impressed by your tone and intelligence of your questions. I certainly don't wish myself to be calcified or to be or seem ideological. I certainly am passionate and have ideals, but this doesn't mean that I'm unable to listen to others or engage with them in human courteous debate and discussion. If force is involved, then of course force will always be met with force unless you are a saint. Lineball's work builds on the examples set by scholars like Thompson demonstrating the idea that class is something which is made and sustained through deliberate action both from above and below. Liberty Chronicles is a project of Libertarianism.org. It is produced by Test Terrible. To learn more about Liberty Chronicles, visit Libertarianism.org. If you've been enjoying the show, we very sincerely ask that you subscribe, rate the show on iTunes, invite your friends and family to listen, and tweet us your questions at libcron, or email Liberty Chronicles podcast at gmail.com.