In the 1970s Villa Road in South London was a squatted street. Behind these doors anarchists mixed with hippies and communists … This was a generation who wanted to change the world. Lefties I: Property is Theft, BBC 2006
They believed in collective living and collective action. ibid.
This rejection of the nuclear family was born of an intellectual analysis which saw the family as an essential unit of the capitalist society. ibid.
By the mid-70s there were about 5,000 squatters in Lambeth. ibid.
1976: under threat of eviction the squatters on Villa Road decided to defend the houses by barricading themselves in. They were now living behind their own iron curtain in a state of siege. ibid.
‘We had plenty to be angry about; we still do.’ Lefties II: Angry Wimmin
In the late ’70s politics in Britain became more extreme. As the state moved dramatically to the right, the left began to fragment. The women’s movement was already an established political force. ibid.
The Revolutionary Feminists advocated what they called political lesbianism. ibid.
As well as marching there were other forms of direct action like defacing sexist posters. ibid.
‘We were not successful … It’s extraordinary we achieved what we did.’ ibid.
By the mid ’80s the Left in Britain was on its knees. Thatcher was riding high having swept to power for a second term. The miners had been defeated after a year-long strike. Lefties III: A Lot of Balls
Faced with a tabloid press as right-wing as the government committed left-wingers began to wonder whether they could rally support for their cause if only they could publish their own newspaper. ibid.
The News on Sunday was the extreme left’s first attempt to enter mainstream public life. ibid.
One of the most high-profile and violent industrial disputes of the mid ’80s was Wapping. Rupert Murdoch had sacked 5,000 of his workers and moved production of the The Sun, The Times & The Sunday Times to a new high-tech plant in Wapping, East London. ibid.
Having walked out, Pilger went public and penned a series of articles attacking the paper. ibid.
‘It wasn’t even left-wing: that was the betrayal.’ ibid. Pilger
In the absence of a big topical story the paper led with an article about a man in Brazil who was selling his kidney. ibid.
‘Unexciting and pretty bland.’ ibid. employee
In May 1937 she [Dorothy Healy] was called in to help by striking cotton pickers in Southern California: ‘It was a constant struggle … As I looked out on that audience there was a kind of joy. There were people in most desperate living conditions who had discovered what unity meant. What solidarity meant.’ Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists, 1983, Dorothy Healey, interview
The summer of 1973 was one of the roughest we’ve had. Two of our strikers were killed. Dozens of our people were beaten. Thousands were arrested and thrown in jail. And all because we dared to stand up to the growers when they made one more desperate attempt to crush our union. Fighting for Our Lives, 1975
Some of the complaints the workers were making … forcing workers to sign cards … ‘We believe in justice for farmworkers’ … Our union was the United Farm Workers. ibid.
The effort of farmworkers to unionise themselves is not a recent effort – it’s been going on for 85 years in this state. ibid.
When we tried to reach the workers from outside the fields they drowned out our loudspeakers … Once we were in the labor camps they’d kick us out. ibid.
The growers called in the Teamsters … A whole group of Teamsters attacked our picket line. ibid.
58 different court orders … the arrest of 3,538 of our brothers and sisters. ibid.
They [police] beat the hell out of them. ibid. union guy
And take our cause to the people. ibid.
40th anniversary of the Great GM Sit-Down Strike: ‘… faced the buckshot, faced the tear-gas, this armband still has the tear-gas on it. The Women’s Emergency Brigade of Flint, Michigan, made American history …’ With Banners & Babies: Story of the Women’s Emergency Brigade, conference speaker, 1979
We were the pioneers of the labour movement. ibid. striker
The more you produced, the more likely you would keep their job. ibid.
The foremen were using the girls and holding it over their heads that if they didn’t do what they wanted to do, they wouldn’t have a job. ibid.
That’s all we had in Flint, Michigan – churches and bars. ibid.
We met in a little coalshed. ibid.
They would have done anything to turn one against the other. ibid.
That’s when we decided to form the Women’s Auxiliary. ibid.
General Motors’ goons – our lives were in danger – they actually prepared with guns. ibid.
First they turned the heat off on ’em, then they turned the water off on ’em. ibid.
The victory was won and the UAW was born. ibid.
‘My father … was a skilled roofer and he was a union man, and he said, If you go to work and there’s a union, join it, no matter what kind it is. Any union is better than none, and if there isn’t one, organise one.’ Union Maids, 1976
This is the story of three women who were part of the rank and file labor movement during the tumultuous 1930s. Their lives were like many other young working women. But all three rose to the demands of their time and became militant organizers for their class. ibid. caption
‘People took what ever little work they could get … Hoover told us that prosperity was just around the corner.’ ibid.
‘The whites and blacks did different kinds of work and made different kinds of pay also.’ ibid.
By the mid-1930s workers saw they could not make gains without the strength of a union. But the American Federation of Labor refused to organise the growing number of unskilled workers. The A F of L was made up of many separate trade unions. ibid. caption
‘The most exciting meetings were those that were called at the shop gates.’ ibid.
‘I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.’ Plutocracy: Political Repression in the USA I: Divide and Rule, Jay Gould, 19th century American railroad developer, 2015
Each mining town was a feudal dominion with the company acting as lord and master … The laws were the company’s rules. ibid.
1907: The most deadly mine disaster in US history occurred when an explosion killed 361 men and boys in a West Virginia coal mine. ibid.
Accidents in American mines were double that of Germany, three times more than England. ibid.
‘Freedom from industrial feudalism … freedom from the terrorism inflicted by hired gunmen … and the struggle for liberties promised in the Bill of Rights.’ ibid. 2003 American Labor History Theme Study
In 2012 coal miners in Kanawha Country in West Virginia issued a list of demands including a shorter workday, the right to organise, recognition of a worker’s constitutional rights to free speech and assembly, an end to the blacklisting of union organisers, and alternatives to company stores. The requested pay raise would have cost the company fifteen cents per miner per day. Instead of negotiating, the company hired a private militia to break the strike. ibid.
[Mother] Jones had been declared the Most Dangerous Woman in America. ibid.
Union organisers were blacklisted and beaten. ibid.
The West Virginian mine wars were part of a broader conflict between the forces of labor and the forces of capital. A struggle that claimed the lives of thousands of American workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; thousands more were beaten, maimed, imprisoned, tortured and sent to early graves due to poor working conditions and dismal safety standards. ibid.
‘In all civilised countries the people fall into different classes having a real or supposed difference of interests … There will be particularly the distinction between rich and poor.’ ibid. James Madison
The ability of the wealthy to buy their way out of military services caused rage among the poor. ibid.
Irish immigrants were mocked for their accents, their religion and their overall impoverishment. They were also amongst the first ethnic groups in the United States to form labour unions. ibid.