Join Our Mailing List
Email:

Bookmark and Share

The Wonderful History of May Day

 

“May Day is about affirmation, the love of life, and the start of spring, so it has to be about the beginning of the end of the capitalist system of exploitation, oppression, war, and overall misery, toil, and moil.” So writes celebrated historian Peter Linebaugh in an essential compendium of reflections on the reviled, glorious, and voltaic occasion of May 1st.

It is a day that has made the rich and powerful cower in fear and caused Parliament to ban the Maypole—a magnificent and riotous day of rebirth, renewal, and refusal. These reflections on the Red and the Green—out of which arguably the only hope for the future lies—are populated by the likes of Native American anarcho-communist Lucy Parsons, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, Karl Marx, José Martí, W.E.B. Du Bois, Rosa Luxemburg, SNCC, and countless others, both sentient and verdant. The book is a forceful reminder of the potentialities of the future, for the coming of a time when the powerful will fall, the commons restored, and a better world born anew.

Check out the May Day Guide to Events Across the US & Canada from It's Going Down
Buy The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day


"... an excellent exploration of the world of pulp publishing..."

 

"All told Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, And Real Cool Cats is an excellent exploration of the world of pulp publishing. It remains readable throughout and the editors have done a fantastic job in keeping a consistent style across the various contributions. It’s fascinating to slip into these worlds full of switchblades, drugs, beatnik and hippy slang, motorbikes and electric guitars, and it’s fascinating also to marvel and shudder at the beatings, the gang warfare and the racism and sexism that the stories exploit and explore." — Paul Abbott, We are Cult

Buy Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980

The Bay Area's economic boom: who's been left behind?

 

On this edition of Your Call, UC Berkeley geography professor emeritus Richard Walker discusses his new book, Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Walker calls San Francisco the “jewel in the crown of capitalism, the tech capital of the world and a gusher of wealth from the Silicon Gold Rush.” But there is a dark side to success on the Left Coast: extreme inequality, displacement, underpaid workers, and a relentless housing crisis. Why has the tech boom excluded so many people, particularly people of color and immigrants? What will it take to tackle these issues?


Listen HERE
Sunday Show KPFA Interview
Buy Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area

"Setting Sights takes an intersectional approach to community armed self-defense..."


"Setting Sights flips the gun-control debate on its head, citing that even Martin Luther King Jr. had armed guards at times. The book also questions state violence; opens discussions on disarming police; analyzes gun laws, race and how to decentralize power; and diagnoses the macho-patriarchal ideology often associated and romanticized in gun culture.

Setting Sights takes an intersectional approach to community armed self-defense by examining Indigenous resistance in North America; women's suffrage; Black liberation movements; LGBTQIA movements; anti-racist, poor, white movements; and anarchist organizing..." —Chris Steele, Truthout


Read more
Interview: scott crow on Truthout
Buy Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense

Upcoming Events

Latest Blog Entries

 Subscribe to the PM Press Blog newsfeed

  • TRUMP, LYNCH, AND WHO WE CALL ANIMALS: A SAFETY ALERT Susie Day
    Did you hear Trump call undocumented immigrants animals? It's stirring up – rightly – a lot of concern. Among humans, "animal" is the essential, go-to word to deprive people of their humanity. It's the permission some people ...
  • Human Flow: a film by Ai WeiWei JJ Amaworo Wilson
    For a film with ‘flow’ in its title, the only surprise in this superlative documentary is that the most powerful images are those of stillness. An old refugee woman sits incongruously on a bench in the middle of nowhere. A young man...
  • Israel & The Labour Party - A Love Story Leon Rosselson
    In my last blog I suggested that Israel’s staunch supporters are infected with a brain disease called Zionusitis. It was, of course, a joke. Or maybe it wasn’t. Since then, there has been another enactment of the absurdist farce ca...
  • HERMAN BELL AND THE FUTURE OF NEW YORK PAROLE Susie Day
    Only a couple of years ago, the New York State Parole Board was a draconian gimmick to keep people in prison – regardless of how they had grown and changed over their years inside – until they died of systemic abuse or neglect or, if t...
  • Fifty Years After: The Sixties in historical perspective Richard Greeman
    Nineteen sixty-eight (sigh!)… What a wonderful year that was! Rebellions breaking out all over the f–king place. From Paris to Prague, from Berkeley to Berlin, from Mexico City to Chicago -- in the ghetto, on the campus, in the jungle...
  • 1968: 'What Did You Do in the Columbia War, Dad?' Richard Greeman
    Jenny: So, Dad, the 50th  Reunion of the Columbia University Strike is coming up, and it’s all over the papers again. A book of reminicences has just been reviewed in the Times, and the Columbia library is holding a three-day conferen...
  • On and On Do They Imprison the Strong Jon Curley
    The dynamic power of so many prison memoirs, acounts, and anecdotes is paradoxically reliant on the monotony and stasis of the prison environment. The fertile conscience keeps mobile despite the body forced to be stuck and remote.
  • Insurgent Supremacists -- a new book about the U.S. far right Matthew Lyons
    My book Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire is due out this May and is being published jointly by Kersplebedeb Publishing and PM Press. I want to highlight some of what’s distinctive about this b...
  • PEN America announces Writing for Justice Fellowship JJ Amaworo Wilson
    PEN America has run a prison writing program for over forty years. The program provides mentors, free resources and an audience for the incarcerated. This program benefits the prisoners, who get a chance to reflect on their lives through the wr...
  • HERMAN BELL GAINS PAROLE: CUOMO AND DE BLASIO LOSE ETHICS Susie Day
    Dear Bill De Blasio and Andrew Cuomo,      You, as governor and mayor – New York State's most powerful liberals – have argued constantly. I, along with millions of NY civilians, have endured years of your snark-att...
  • Standing with Kurdish Comrades of Mesopotamia Publishing House j. stephanie pasvankias
    Radical publishers Pluto Press have put out a statement standing in solidarity with Mesopotamia Publishing House (Mezopotamien Verlag) in Neuss City, Germany, whose offices were raided by the police on March 8. We here at PM Press are amplifying...
  • Against "Rigid Radicalism" Gabriel Kuhn
    A review of Nick Montgomery and carla bergman's "Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times".
  • Anarchism and Autonomous Marxism Gabriel Kuhn
    A review of Kevin Van Meter's "Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible".
  • Guilty of running like an Italian? Vilified Vanzetti! Jon Curley
    With this week's publication of Bartolomeo Vanzetti's EVENTS AND VICTIMS, I wish to share more pcis and history regarding our courageous, imaginative, and murdered author. Here are photographs taken yesterday in afternoon in my hometown of Bridgew...
  • Efforts to Decrease Prison Populations Are Leaving Women Behind Vikki Law
    By Vikki LawOriginally published on TruthoutFebruary 07, 2018Anastazia Schmid has spent the past 17 years behind bars in Indiana. During that time, she's seen firsthand the impacts of changes and trends within the state's prison system -- and th...
  • After Wakanda- 5 Black Sci-Fi Writers You Should Know Vikki Law
    Originally posted on BitchFebruary 26th, 2018 This story was originally published on October 30, 2014. It’s time to stock up your bedside table with titles by Black women authors who you can spend the next 11 months reading. Here’s m...
  • Lumpen/Proletariat Gabriel Kuhn
    A review of J. Sakai's "The 'Dangerous Class' and Revolutionary Theory: Thoughts on the Making of the Lumpen/Proletariat".
  • Critical Comments on The Politics of Cosmology John P. Clark
    The Politics of Cosmology is a thousand-page manuscript by social ecologist and political theorist Murray Bookchin, based on his study of the history of philosophy and his lectures on that topic.

 Subscribe to the PM Press Blog newsfeed

Search

Quick Access to:

Authors

Artists

New Releases

Featured Releases


PM Press 10th Anniversary T-Shirt

Archive That, Comrade! Left Legacies and the Counter Culture of Remembrance