1970s

Rising from a period of centre-left coalition that had been marked by a constant failure to bring promised reforms to Italian society, the struggles of the 1960s acted as a pressure gauge for many sections of the Italian working class, one which was to reach its climax during the mass strikes of 1968-1970.

Link to PDF of pamphlet.

Published by Red Notes, London, UK, late 1970s

Beginning on the morning of March 18, the strike had been precipitated by months of stalling by union leaders and government officials. With no rights to collective bargaining, and having not seen wages increase between 1967 and 1969, anger amongst postal workers had been simmering for years.

These notes are not revolutionary, they don't even claim to be radical,... I_just nicked them and adapted them from an old seventies cyclopedia I found in a charity shop!. But they do tell a story, and they illustrate a big process of change at a critical turning point.

From; The Whinger - Irregular journal of hysterical madterialism; No. 6, Oct 2007.

Published by Chris Shutes in Berkeley, CA, USA; May 1979.

"Everything is said about the spectacle except what it always & fundamentally is: the colonization of the point of view of the individual by the point of view of the collectivity." Daniel Denevert

Of particular interest is the observation that "in practice the [workers'] councils, due to their complete accordance with workers' direct and immediate exercise of power, won an indisputable victory vis-a-vis the unions. The few attempts at creating unions remained irrelevant to the real workers' movement."

BOX-FOLDER-REPORT: 46-4-214
TITLE: Polish Workers Commemorate their Past Struggles
BY: J. B. de Weydenthal
DATE: 1981-7-7
COUNTRY: Poland
ORIGINAL SUBJECT: RAD Background Report/192

--- Begin ---

RFE-RL

RADIO FREE EUROPE Research

RAD Background Report/192 (Poland)" 7 July 1981

Ending a war: Inventing a movement: Mayday 1971
Kauffman, L A

Instead of blaming the right and the CIA for the coup like most commentators on the left, Pointblank! point out the role that Allende and the parties of the left played in demobilising the powerful working class, undermining their strength and eventually signing their own death warrants by refusing to arm them

This text has been reproduced without most of the original pictures and their captions due to space. Some captions which were thought to be useful additions to the main text have been included in boxes.
Like a Summer with a Thousand Julys …and Other Seasons…

INFANT SORROW

"A disgrace before God"

TWENTY YEARS ON A KNIFE EDGE

'... the fate of the province [Northern Ireland] is still, as it has been for so long, poised on a knife- edge between a slow climb back to some form of ordered existence, or a swift plunge into unimaginable anarchy and civil war.'

30 years ago: Rita Ward and the Great Northampton Hospital ‘lie-in”
We hear a lot these days about the ‘creeping privatisation’ of the NHS. We have a Labour government committed to turning our free National Health Service into just another business along the lines of the American model, which sees poor people refused medical treatment because they can’t afford it.

The eight libertarian militants on trial in the Old Bailey in 1972 who were chosen by the British State to be the `conspirators' of the Angry Brigade, found themselves facing not only the class enemy with all its instruments of repression, but also the obtusity and incomprehension -- when not condemnation -- of the organised left.

LIP AND THE SELF-MANAGED COUNTER-REVOLUTION

from Negation, No. 3 1973

Table of Contents
• Publication Notes
• Négation Introduction
• I. The Workers' Movement and its Decline
• 1. The Expropriation of the Expropriators
• 2. Dead Labor
• 3. Variable Capital and the Unions
• a. The CGT and Devalorization

The factors that provoked the widespread stoppage of work by thousands of British workers in the winter of 1978-79 began with the Labour government of James Callaghan's attempt to enforce limits on pay rises to curb inflation. Inflation had reached a height of nearly 26.9% in August 1975.

Sam Dolgoff's notes, analysis and suggestions for re-building a fighting working class movement in the US in the 1970s. Extracted from a larger text, The American labour movement: a new beginning.

A situationist-influenced text decribing how a protest by Soweto school students in 1976 spread and became a country-wide revolt - involving mass workers' strikes and violent confrontations that shook the foundations of white South Africa. Written as a collaboration between an American and two South Africans, the text also deals with the rise and fall of the Black Consciousness Movement.

Originally published in August 1979

Francisco Serantini was born in Cagliari on Sardinia on 16th July 1951 and abandoned at birth. He was given both his names by an official of a literary bent or a priest or policeman who had seen in the paper recently mention of the Romagnol writer of the same name, an author of picturesque novels, one of which was I Bastardi.

Between "historic compromise" and terrorism
Reviewing the experience of Italy in the 1970s