Every movement needs its calendar, its rituals, its origin story. In Britain, every child used to dance around the Maypole, at least we did, forty-odd years ago. Nobody explained why. In black plimsolls on the polished floor of the school hall, we moved around the pole, weaving the ribbons in and out, circling each other in a pattern older than we knew. There was no talk of Beltane, of the commons, of the Haymarket martyrs. It was tradition, which meant it was stripped of meaning, made safe. But something stayed, the rhythm, the spiral, the sense that beneath the tidiness was something older, more unruly. Peter Linebaugh’s The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day restores that buried current. Not as folklore, but as insurrection.
Linebaugh’s voice moves like an orator drunk on history and spring wine. His May Day, threaded through woods and factories, blood and blossom—is not a single origin story, but a patchwork. He starts at Haymarket, but also in the forests before Caesar. He writes as someone who has lived these pages: as witness, pamphleteer, comrade. There’s no real distinction between anecdote and analysis here, and that’s the point. Capture the Flag and Gramsci belong in the same paragraph. Joy, like theory, should be collective.
The Puritans, of course, appear early. They always do. The story of May Day in Linebaugh’s hands is the story of what the Puritans tried to destroy. The Maypole, the commons, sex without shame, labour without bosses. At Merry Mount in 1627, they cut the pole down and exiled the man who raised it. They brought not just repression but the moral scaffolding of extraction. The whole thing’s there in miniature. Property, patriarchy, enclosure. Though not yet in its final form.
It’s not hard to trace the line forward. Trumpism, Linebaugh helps us see, is Puritanism without the Bible. All discipline, no doctrine. All walls, no heaven. The United States didn’t abandon its founding ideology; it secularised it, stripped it for parts, gave it a gun and a border badge. “Law Day USA” replaces May Day on the calendar. Obedience replaces solidarity. What survives of Christianity is the cross as threat. The rest is bosses.
“Red designates death with surplus labour,” Linebaugh writes. “Green is life with only necessary labour.” The point is not poetic. It’s political. We live in a moment where both are back with a vengeance, the forced work of ecological collapse, the Green washed clean of its history, the Red painted over in blue and white. Linebaugh’s terms cut through the fog. Green without Red is just middle-class gardening. Red without Green is Stalinism in a drought. May Day insists on both.
“To the history of May Day there is a Green side and a Red side… May Day is both.”
His tone may not be to everyone’s taste. There’s myth in here, and folklore, and more than a touch of mischief. But there’s steel underneath. May Day has always frightened power. That’s why the state rebrands it. Why it gets purged from textbooks. Why its martyrs are remembered only in passing, if at all. What Linebaugh does. What this book insists. Is that these stories matter. Not because they’re pure. Because they’re ours. And because forgetting them makes us weaker.
“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.”
I am a Marxist; Linebaugh is, unmistakably, an anarchist. His prose spills over with Puckish delight, a kind of literary sprezzatura. But the historical instincts are sound. The emphasis on land and labour, the long afterlife of enclosure, the insistence that we begin with the commons and work outward. If May Day teaches anything, it’s that the Red and the Black don’t need to be the same to march in step. Argument is not disunity. Some of the best fights are the ones had with friends. And the best friendships are those forged in struggle.
He brings Beltane into the same breath as the eight-hour day. Robin Goodfellow dances next to Lucy Parsons. Linebaugh isn’t trying to settle the matter. He’s trying to expand the field. There’s something worth recovering here, especially now, when the language of politics is so technocratic, so dried out. We don’t need to give up myth to be materialists. We just need to know what the myth is doing. What it hides, and what it reveals.
The book’s strongest moments are its loosest: the picnic in Rochester, the fight that almost was, the gay motorcyclist doctor, the bad song sung too loudly. These fragments linger. They are what a living history looks like. Messy, unfinished, partial. Students, prisoners, Morris dancers, Haitian migrants, Attica rebels. It’s all in there. And that’s the point. May Day isn’t about one tradition. It’s about what happens when traditions collide and something else gets born.
Even Engels gets his reckoning. Linebaugh, never reverent, doesn’t let him off the hook. Engels forgot the witch burnings. Forgot the slaves. Forgot the Indigenous dead. But he remembered the commons, and that’s not nothing. It’s enough to start from. And Linebaugh, in his own roundabout way, does what Engels once did. Names the enemy, calls the question, and dares us to remember what’s been stolen.
“No more dreams without responsibility, no birth without labour, no Green without Red.”
Let the rich go empty away. Let the humble rise. Let us take the day back. Not as folklore, not as sentimental ritual, but as collective insurrection. May Day is not a memory to be preserved but a future to be fought for. Against Trump’s police state and Starmer’s managed decline, against every border and boss and boot, we answer not with obedience but with refusal. Refusal to forget. Refusal to obey. Refusal to work ourselves to death while the planet burns and the billionaires laugh.
Linebaugh’s history is incomplete because the struggle is incomplete. The Maypole still waits to be raised. The commons still wait to be reclaimed. Our task is not to commemorate May Day but to live it. To bring its promise into the heart of empire and strike where it hurts. This is our day. Let’s not mark it. Let’s make it.
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