Mayday Festival of Alternatives

This Mayday we are responding to the frequently asked question ‘ What are you for? What do you actually want?’ We aim to show our goals of creating a society based on solidarity, autonomy and co-operation – in practice. We want to show that there is a future beyond capitalism, wage-labour and the state; that we can create our own alternatives and that our land, time, resources, entertainment, and ultimately, our lives, can be reclaimed from a system that has disempowered us from realising our individual and collective potential for centuries.

The Mayday Festival of Alternatives is inspired by a month of dissident art/culture events in France, held last year in response to the irrelevance and media saturation of the General Election 2001. It is also a model used world-wide to encourage political awareness and expression, e.g. Festival Des Pueblos in Boston, USA - May 2002.

The Festival will consist of around 10 days of community-based events aiming at celebration, subversion and DIY liberation; and to demonstrate the diversity of our movement, with the intention of building long-range, sustained alternatives and opposition. We hope that as many people as possible will organise events.

Actions & Events: Film showings, gigs, raves, street parties, mass picnics, bicycle rides and art exhibitions. Week-long reclaimed social centre offering infoshop, café, & workshops. Other events might explore radical history, theory and practice.

Workshops will take place throughout London, in both reclaimed and permanent spaces.

To find out more see events>>> or look at the timetable>>>
If you are thinking of organising an event for the Mayday Festival of Alternatives, see 'get involved'>>>