Today I’m starting a new series of short posts on data I pull from things I’m reading, listening to, or watching online about history and politics. Right now I’m listening to the podcast Millenials Are Killing Capitalism where they interview Michael Hardt, who teaches at Duke here in Durham. Hardt has a new book out on the revolutionary movements of the 1970’s that seeks to challenge the notion that that decade was one of hedonistic retreat from the political advances of the more celebrated 1960’s. He says that the challenges movements faced then were more similar to the ones we face today and therefore we have much to learn from them, even though they were defeated. While many have bemoaned the decay of the “Unity” of Civil Rights movements of the ’60’s, Hardt argues that the rise of movements challenging hierarchies within those movements having to do with gender, race and sexual orientation is to be celebrated and learned from. 

Right now I’m at a part of the interview where they are discussing movements in organizing the auto industry that sought to challenge not only deadly workplace speed ups but also the entrenched union power structure that assumed, in Marx’s language, that auto workers can’t represent themselves, they must be represented. I had read about this era about 8 years ago in the great book, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, A Study in Urban Revolution, which was recommended to me by fellow post Lo fi rocker Peter Hughes when we took a walk to a local radical bookstore right before The Mountain Goats played a show at Cats Cradle in Carrboro.

The book made a point of drawing a contrast between the more local and workplace focused strategies of the movements it writes about – the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers – as compared to the more national and mass media oriented strategy of the Black Panther Party in Oakland of that time. Elaine Brown’s memoir A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story is a great document of the later efforts of the BPP to shift to a more local and electoral strategy in the Bay Area. For more on the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, I recommend two podcast episodes from the website Working Class History, in which “We hear from former members of the group including Herb Boyd, General Baker, Darryl “Waistline” Mitchell, as well as Dan Georgakas, co-author of Detroit I Do Mind Dying.“

In their discussion of the Detroit movement, the following statistic jumped out at me: the rate of death for auto workers on the job in the US in 1970 was 65 people a day, over half from heart attack, while the death rate for US soldiers in Vietnam was 17 per day. I remember learning from the book that auto work was very deadly back then, but that one statistic really jumped out at me. I didn’t know it was that deadly.

There is a lot of nostalgia in progressive circles for the relatively well paid union jobs in industrial sectors before deindustrialization, but this book taught me that grass roots union activists did not feel that mainstream unions were doing enough to challenge their bosses on the issue of worker safety. In the interview, Hardt says that the threat of bottom up organizing that aimed to slow down production to a safe pace and give shop floor workers a seat at the negotiating table was one of the motivations for industrial corporations moving factories overseas, or to anti-labor southern states, or to bring increased automation online to replace workers with robots.

Detroit: I Do Mind Dying is published by Haymarket books.

From their website:

Detroit: I Do Mind Dying tracks the extraordinary development of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers as they became two of the landmark political organizations of the 1960s and 1970s. It is widely heralded as one the most important books on the black liberation movement.

Marvin Surkin received his PhD in political science from New York University and is a specialist in comparative urban politics and social change. He worked at the center of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit.

Dan Georgakas is a writer, historian, and activist with a long-time interest in social movements. He is the author of My Detroit, Growing up Greek and American in Motor City.

The Subversive Seventies is published by Oxford University Press

From their website:

Progressive and revolutionary movements of the 1970s, which took place across the globe, provide an inspiring and useful guide for contemporary radical political thought and action, even more than those of the 1960s. The sixties were a crucial historical turning point and we can certainly learn from those movements, both the victorious and the vanquished, but, fundamentally, they marked the end of an era. The seventies, in contrast, herald the beginning of our time. In response to the insurgencies of the sixties, new structures of power, many of which are now grouped under the name “neoliberalism,” were tested and institutionalized, and are essentially the same ones that rule over us today. The progressive and revolutionary struggles of the seventies, then, constituted an initial set of experiments for confronting our current conjuncture, a first test of the terrain. Feminist and gay liberation movements, worker and anticolonial struggles, and antinuclear and antiracist projects, along with many other liberation efforts developed in the seventies, offer us not only initial analyses of today’s structures of economic and political domination but also forms of critique and resistance most effective against them.