>I don't take the 60's much into account in trying to understand the
>phenomenon of mass protest under capitalism. That decade impresses me mostly
>a period of student cultural rebellion, very progressive in its own way but
>also very different from typical class struggles.
But this underestimates the importance of black and feminist struggles in the 1960s - and there was enough popular militance of the class sort around to give us Medicare, minimum wage increases, more generous welfare grants, etc. Carrying this into the early 1970s, we had Nixon giving us food stamps and proposing a guaranteed annual income. The 1970s were also a time of labor militancy - not always formal, but there were wildcat strikes, sabotage on the line, and from the South, demands for a new economic order. (They had to call out the National Guard to deliver the mail during a postal strike. Christian Parenti has a great article on the forgotten militance of the 1970s in a Baffler from five or so years ago.) The bourgeoisie was rightly alarmed, and pressed for recession in the early 1970s, and ultimately Reagan in the 1980s.
Doug