> 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
-----------------------------------------
My last on this subject.
We used to get much talk of rising working class militancy in the excited annual line documents ("Tasks and Perspectives") we received at every convention, always promising "big openings" for our tiny vanguard groups. It's true there was a rising incidence of wildcats and other forms of spontaneous labour militancy during the 70s, but, unless my recollection is faulty, these struggles were mostly episodic and localized, and in response to soaring inflation and the refusal (and inability) of the bosses in a stagnating economy to cut catch-up deals with the union leaderships. Some of these struggles, I think, were also defensive in nature against plant closures and layoffs and takebacks.
This is not to denigrate those struggles, which seem almost revolutionary by today's standards, but I guess I have in mind a broader, more sustained and organized movement by the working class which extends industrial militancy into the political arena and aims to substantially alter the existing property and power relationships in the society as a whole. I don't think we've really seen that since the 30's. But I take your point, and wouldn't want to get too dug into my position; there are no algebraic laws governing social trends and relations, and you've helped demonstrate that while the nature of historical periods can be broadly understood, the fact that they are also contradictory has to be taken into account.
Marv G