Libertarian Struggle Special: May Day (1973?)

Special May Day issue of Libertarian Struggle, with articles on the economic crisis, inflation and the Industrial Relations Act, and histories of the May events in Barcelona 1937 and France 1968.

Submitted by R Totale on March 30, 2020

Files

LS MD.pdf (12.3 MB)

Comments

R Totale

3 years 12 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by R Totale on March 30, 2020

Slightly confused about whether this would have been '73 or '74 - it talks about a tory government, which makes me think 73, but there's an IR act that was introduced by the Labour government in 74, and it also mentions the Liverpool rent strikes, which I thought of as being from the very end of 73 onwards - any advice?
Edit: the other clue I had to go on was the mention of hospital workers' strikes and demonstrations, but it sounds from this like there were disputes in both 73 and 74 so that's not much help.

Reddebrek

3 years 12 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Reddebrek on March 30, 2020

If it was published for Mayday 1974 it could've been written during the overlap when there was still a Tory government but the rest of it written slightly later, the Wilson IR was brought into law in July 74 but that's still a lot of time for it to be debated and pushed for in the commons during May.

On the other hand it references the Pentonville 5 dockers as being arrested "last July" so that would put it at 1973 since that dispute was part of the dockers strikes in 72 http://libcom.org/history/1972-dockworkers-strike

I'm also confused. Could it be referring to the Tory 1971 Industrial relations act? Most of the opposition to that came from the shopfloors and the small leftist groups, the main Union leaderships were lethargic at best to that. I do believe the Amalgamated Engineers were fined for contempt over some protests over that one which the article mentions.

R Totale

3 years 12 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by R Totale on March 30, 2020

Yeah, I think it must mean the 1971 act then. Actually, looking into it, I think wikipedia misled me about the date of the Liverpool rent strike, this source says it started in October 1972, which means it's totally possible that it would've been mentioned in a '73 paper.