We recommend this interview by ABC Belarus with Evgeniy Rubashko, one of the many anarchist prisoners in Belarus:

https://abc-belarus.org/?p=14912&lang=en

He recounts how Food Not Bombs radicalized him, describes the horrific torture he experienced during his arrest, explains how Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince has helped him to survive in prison, and recommends an array of excellent Russian poetry and literature.

Congratulations to forest defenders in Atlanta, Georgia, who have won a victory in their struggle to preserve a forest from police who aim to destroy it in order to build training facility and film set.

For a full history of this inspiring movement:

https://cwc.im/CityintheForest

Here is the full statement about the victory from participants in the movement:

https://stopreevesyoung.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/UnnoscriptdPR.pdf

Fight capitalism! Keep the earth inhabitable!

La solidarité à l’ère de la guerre et des déplacements de populations

https://crimethinc.com/2022/03/29/la-solidarite-a-lere-de-la-guerre-et-des-deplacements-de-populations-les-anarchistes-face-a-linstrumentalisation-des-refugiees-a-la-frontiere-entre-la-pologne-et-la-bielorussie

La Biélorussie instrumentalise les réfugié·es pour faire pression sur l’Union européenne, laquelle répond avec brutalité. Nous avons échangé avec des anarchistes qui organisent la solidarité sur place.

30 years ago, Los Angeles rose up in response to the acquittal of the police who brutalized Rodney King, setting a precedent for the George Floyd Rebellion. In this photograph, a demonstrator uses a burning palm tree to set fire to an American flag over the 101 freeway.

https://cwc.im/LA92

A historic gang truce in South Central LA played a crucial part in setting the stage for this uprising. Fight the police—not each other.

May Day celebrates the fecundity of the earth, self-organized resistance, and a vision of a future in which all of us can fulfill our potential on our own terms without exploitation or oppression.

To this day, it remains a flashpoint of struggles around the world. Just as the biosphere renews itself every spring, we renew our struggles for liberation from all forms of domination, all destructive patterns and constrictive relations.

Here, we'll share a few scenes from May Day throughout the ages.

https://cwc.im/maydayhistory

🏴🔨📢❤️‍🔥🏴

People have celebrated the end of winter for millennia—it wasn’t until industrialization forcibly disconnected us from the land base that May Day came to be observed as a labor holiday.

Peter Linebaugh begins his history of May Day by recalling this:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-linebaugh-the-incomplete-true-authentic-and-wonderful-history-of-may-day#toc5

In 1627 and 1628, Thomas Morton and other rebels who rejected slavery outraged their Puritan neighbors by observing May Day with their Indigenous hosts:

"They also set up a Maypole, drinking and dancing aboute it many days together... like so many fairies, or furies rather..."

On May Day 1845, before the emergence of anarchism as a formal movement, Mikhail Bakunin wrote to his family from Paris, proposing women's liberation as a necessary condition of the freedom of all.

"Now I understand that freedom should not be only the abstract aim of aspirations; it must always be present in life and penetrate, animate, and elevate the smallest details of life. Women almost everywhere are slaves, and we ourselves are the slaves of their bondage; without their liberation, without their complete, unlimited freedom, our freedom is impossible; and without freedom, there is no beauty, no dignity, no true love. We love only to the extent to which we desire and call for the freedom and independence of the other—total independence in relation to everything and even and especially in relation to ourselves. Love is the union of free beings and only this love uplifts, ennobles us. All other love demeans oppressed and oppressor alike."

On May Day 1867, the Molders Union Local 23 in Chicago went on strike, helping to start the movement for an eight-hour workday.

In Chicago in 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions resolved that the workday be limited to eight hours by May Day 1886. The leadership of this organization, which later became the American Federation of Labor (AFL), resisted this rank-and-file initiative.

In 1888, Lucy Parsons went to England and encouraged English workers to make May Day an international holiday honoring labor resistance and calling for shorter labor hours. She spoke publicly with Peter Kropotkin and befriended William Morris, who wrote a poem called "May Day."

In December 1888, the American Federation of Labor called for a national day of demonstrations on May Day 1890. In July 1889 the international socialist conference in Paris echoed that call.

These are the origins of modern May Day: a day of action promoted by a Black Anarchist.

On May 4, 1890, hundreds of thousands of workers gathered in Hyde Park in London. The Russian revolutionary Stepniak and Paul Lafargue, author of "The Right to Be Lazy" spoke from one of seven platforms, as Friedrich Engels looked on.

https://pasttenseblog.wordpress.com/2019/05/01/today-and-yet-not-today-in-london-festive-history-the-first-workers-may-day-held-1890/

***

Determined to avenge the Haymarket martyrs and build a movement capable of abolishing capitalism and the state, Errico Malatesta secretly returned to Italy to prepare demonstrations for May Day.

On May 1, 1891, thousands of workers gathered in Rome and clashed with police.

Elsewhere in Europe, Belgian miners organized a strike on May 1, 1891, starting a tradition of organizing or threatening general strikes that eventually forced the ruling classes to grant universal suffrage and a variety of other palliative measures.

https://libcom.org/article/birth-holiday-first-may-eric-hobsbawm

Massive rioting swept Cleveland, Ohio on May Day 1894 in protest against unemployment stemming from an economic crisis.

The Pullman Strike began a few days later, on May 11, culminating with countrywide disruptions and the murders of many workers by police and other mercenaries.

In response, President Grover Cleveland announced that Labor Day in September would become a national holiday, attempting to coopt workers’ struggles without affirming the anniversary of the Haymarket incident. Samuel Gompers, a founder of the AFL and a virulent opponent of immigration, anarchism, socialism, and, later, the Industrial Workers of the World, supported the federal government in crushing the Pullman Strike and backed Grover Cleveland’s effort to undermine the momentum of May Day. Make no mistake: the official leadership of legalized labor organizations has largely aimed to tame and hobble them from the very beginning.

As anarchist historian Osvaldo Bayer recounts, on May Day 1909 in Buenos Aires, “After noon, the Plaza Lorea began to fill: lots of mustaches, berets, neckerchiefs, patched trousers, lots of fair hair, lots of freckled faces, lots of Italians, lots of ‘Russians’ (as the Jewish immigrant was called in those days) and quite a few Catalans. Along came the anarchists with their red flags.”

Police chief Colonel Ramón Falcón gave the order to attack. Police shot demonstrators and trampled them on horseback.

Anarchists called for a general strike demanding Falcón’s resignation. The Colonel responded by shutting down the anarchist press. On May 4, 33 years to the day after the Haymarket incident, 80,000 gathered to accompany their martyrs’ remains to the cemetery. Falcón’s police showed up again to shoot at the bereaved.

One of the anarchists impacted by the May Day massacre was Simon Radowitzky. Radowitzky used a homemade bomb to blow up Falcón’s carriage, killing the Colonel and his secretary Juan Lartigau.

On May Day, 1937, Emma Goldman spoke in Hyde Park in London about anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, displaying a massive banner supporting the CNT.

In Catalonia, between May 3 and 8, in what came to be known as the May Days, clashes erupted in Barcelona between anarchists and other grassroots participants in the Spanish revolution, on one side, and on the other, police, communist party members serving Stalin, and other members of the Republican government. This presaged the defeat of the Spanish revolution at the hands of Franco, betrayed by authoritarians within its ranks.


https://libcom.org/article/may-days-barcelona-1937

On May 5, 1945, Spanish antifascist prisoners celebrated their liberation from the Nazi death camp at Mauthausen by displaying a banner reading "The Spanish anti-fascists salute the forces of liberty."

As a teenager, the Spanish anarchist Antonio García Barón joined the Durruti Column to defeat fascism and advance the anarchist revolution during the Spanish Civil War. Thanks to the indifference of capitalist nations, Nazi support for Franco’s forces, and the communists’ betrayals of other anti-fascists, the revolution in Spain was defeated by 1939, but Barón himself never gave up. He made his way to the battle of Dunkirk, where he gave a hungry British soldier a much-needed lunch break by grabbing his gun and shooting down two Nazi warplanes, much to the soldier’s surprise.

Not long after, Barón was captured and sent to the Nazi death camp at Mauthausen. Even surrounded by mass executions and starvation, Barón carried his anarchist ideals with him. During a visit by Himmler himself, Barón managed to confront the SS leader. Spain had taken away Barón’s nationality when he entered the concentration camp; he never attempted to get it back. In Mauthausen, Barón was marked with a blue triangle and the letter “S”—the mark identifying prisoners who were deemed stateless.

The gas chamber executions at Mauthausen continued until just before Adolf Hitler committed suicide on May 1, 1945. On May 5, the Allied Forces liberated the Mauthausen concentration camp. They were welcomed with a banner that read, “The Spanish antifascists salute the liberating forces.” With the defeat of fascism and the liberation of the concentration camps, Antonio García Barón set out to live his life outside the reach of the state, capitalism, and most importantly the church. He settled down in the Bolivian jungle where, despite jaguar attacks and multiple assassination attempts, he lived on to be the last survivor of the Durruti Column.

Black workers in South Africa had participated in May Day demonstrations since 1928, when their march dwarfed the whites-only demonstration organized by the racist Labor Party. In 1950, the Communist Party of South Africa called for a May Day strike to protest against the Suppression of Communism Act. South African police retaliated with brutal violence, killing 18 people across Soweto. The young Nelson Mandela sought refuge in a nurses’ dormitory overnight to escape from the gunfire.

Following months of conflict between students and authorities at the Paris University at Nanterre, the administration shut down the university on May 2, 1968. Students at the Sorbonne University in Paris met on May 3 to protest in solidarity with students at Nanterre. On May 6, more than 20,000 students, teachers and supporters marched towards the Sorbonne to confront the police who were attempting to seal it off. Massive clashes ensue, precipitating a month of strikes and occupations that nearly toppled the French government.

On May 1, 1971, over 50,000 people attended an anti-war concert in Washington, DC organized in coordination with the May Day Tribe, a radical left formation including Yippie, gay, and feminist contingents. The government rescinded the permit and evicted the park in which the concert was taking place.

Nevertheless, at dawn on May 3, well over 15,000 anti-war protesters organized into affinity groups attempted to shut down the entire city of Washington DC by means of coordinated civil disobedience. An equal number of police, soldiers, and marines responded with tear gas and violent attacks, seizing and destroying property at random including two marked ambulances. Over 7000 people were arrested by 8 am, and the number approaches 13,000 by the end of the week—only 79 of whom were ultimately convicted. A federal court later awarded a total of $12 million to arrestees.