<HTML><HTML>In a message dated 5/1/05 6:35:09 PM Eastern Daylight Time, lbo-talk-request@lbo-talk.org writes: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">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 </BLOCKQUOTE> The sixties were an exceptional period in the capitalist history. The rebellion of middle-class students undoubtedly spilled over for a short time into the working class (much more so in France, Italy and Portugal than in the US). Some real gains did result. But it was a strange kind of sixties half-way militancy. Workers were dissatisfied enough with their lot to keep the bosses at bay for a time, but not enough to engage in sustained and difficult struggle (the miners in 1978 being a notable exception). When the bosses began to hit back hard in the mid-seventies, victory came to them much more easily than they expected. Part of the responsibility for this belongs, of course, to the bureaucrats and the Democrats. But I can't help but think that part of it also had to do with a generalized mentality that exalted pleasure and scorned sacrifice or methodical effort. The rebellion simply wasn't as profound or serious as the rebellion of the thirties.  (This isn't simply revolutionary ascetic scolding. I am very much a child of the sixties, and consider many of its weaknesses to be my weaknesses as well.)   </HTML>