Greetings, dear reader, you beautiful, chaotic individualist, you renegade of the soul, you glorious misfit who’d rather chew glass than salute a hammer and sickle – May Day is upon us, and it’s time to rip the mask off this festering boil of a holiday.  May 1st, that annual orgy of red flags and clenched fists, has become a psychic assault, a collectivist con job dressed up as liberation, and I’m here to torch it.

Let’s start with the raw, unfiltered gestalt of May Day.  It’s a holiday born in the blood-slicked gutters of 19th-century labor struggles, sure, but don’t let the sob stories fool you.  The Haymarket riots, the eight-hour workday fight – noble in isolation, maybe, but hijacked faster than a narc’s stash at a Hell’s Angels rally.  By the time the Second International got its claws in, May Day was less about workers’ rights and more about the slow, suffocating creep of Marxist dogma, that intellectual tapeworm that promises utopia then delivers gulags.  It’s a bait-and-switch so blatant it’s make a used-car salesman blush.  The proletariat’s big day?  Please.  It’s an altar to the State, where individuality gets fed into the woodchipper of “the common good.”  And if you’re not outraged by that, you’re either comatose or waving a red flag yourself.

Now, let’s get semiotic for a second, because symbols matter, and May Day’s got a visual vocabulary that screams oppression louder that a CCP propaganda reel.  The red banners, the raised fists, the earnest chants of “solidarity” – it’s a pageant of conformity, a chromatic middle finger to anyone who dares think for themselves.  Red, that arterial hue, is a warning…the shade of blood spilled by every regime that ever promised equality and delivered body counts.  Mao’s Cultural Revolution?  Stalin’s purges?  Pol  Pot’s killing fields?  Add ’em up, and you’ve got a century-long abattoir, all sanctified under the same crimson banner that flaps on May Day.  And don’t give me that “but socialism’s different” dodge – same church, different pew.  The math doesn’t lie: collectivism’s body count dwarf’s anything the capitalists ever dreamed about, and May Day’s the anniversary party.

But oh shit, the irony, the skull-cracking, Kafkaesque absurdity of it all!  May Day’s supposed to celebrate the worker, right?  The noble laborer, toiling for dignity?  Except under every communist regime, the worker’s the first to get screwed.  Look at the Soviet Union, where “equality” meant bread lines for the masses and dachas for the apparatchiks.  Or China, where the proletariat’s “liberation” looks like sweatshops and censorship so tight you can’t sneeze without a permit.  The worker’s not the hero of May Day; they’re the sacrificial lamb, duped into worshipping the very ideology that chains them.  It’s like throwing a parade for the cow on its way to the slaughterhouse.  And yet, every May 1st, you’ve got earnest undergrads and tenured radicals marching in lockstep, waving manifestos they haven’t read, chanting slogans they don’t understand, all while congratulating themselves for “resisting.”  Resisting what?  Freedom?  Prosperity ?  The right to not have your soul nationalized?

I want to grab their own megaphone and scream: Wake the hell up!  May Day isn’t liberation; it’s a leash.  It’s the siren song of a system that hates everything that makes you human – your quirks, your ambitions, your right to tell the State to fuck itself.  Communism doesn’t just fail economically (though, sweet Jesus, does it ever – cf. Venezuela’s dumpster-fire GDP or Cuba’s time-capsule cars).  It fails morally.  It’s a philosophy that sees you as a cog, a statistic, a faceless drone in the hive.  And May Day?  It’s the day they try to sell you on that prison, wrapping it in the language of justice like a turd dipped in glitter.

So what do we do, you ask, you magnificent bastard who’d rather die than trade your freedom for a ration card?  We reclaim May 1st.  We turn it into grenade to every collectivist fantasy that ever tried to smother the human spirit.  Here’s my proposal: call it Individual Day.  Wake up, crank some Billy Idol (because “Rebel Yell” is the opposite of a five-year plan), and do something gloriously, defiantly you.  Paint a mural.  Start a business.  Tell a bureaucrat to eat shit.  Hell, just sit on your porch with a whiskey and revel in the fact that you’re not saluting a politburo.  And if you see a May Day parade, don’t just ignore it – mock it in whichever way you deem best.  Because the only “collective” worth a damn is the one you choose, not the one that drafts you.

In closing, let’s be clear:  May Day’s a scam, a red-washed relic of a failed experiment that keeps limping along because people love the aesthetics of rebellion without the brainpower to question it.  It’s not about workers; it’s about control.  It’s not about justice; it’s about erasure.  So this May 1st, spit on the red flags, laugh at the manifestos, and live like the untamed, unapologetic individual you were born to be.  Because in the end, the only revolution worth fight for is the one that keeps you free.

Postscriptum: If you’re still clutching your copy of Das Kapital and muttering about “late-stage capitalism,” I invite you to spend a week in North Korea.  Then we’ll talk.  Until then, keep your dogma out of my liberty.

N.P.: “Dancing in the Street” – The Struts