1971
January: Idi Amin comes to power in Uganda via a coup supported by Israel and tacitly by Britain; a few years later – especially just after the Angolan liberation and Soweto in 1976-77, the Western media will make a great deal of fuss about his brutal rule. (NLR #156; Black Scholar October 1977)
January: Twelve members of the National Student Association, denied entrance to South Vietnam, go to Hanoi and sign a “People’s Peace Treaty” with representatives of student groups from North and South Vietnam. The Treaty becomes a widely used organizing tool for subsequent antiwar mobilizations in the U.S. (Wall Flyer; Weather)
February 8: South Vietnamese troops heavily backed by U.S. air power cross into Laos in an attempt to “cut the Ho Chi Minh trail”; it’s a dismal failure, with heavy ARVN casualties, a huge number of supporting helicopters shot down and rapid retreat; quickly organized protests within the U.S. turn out 50,000 in cities across the country. (Spoke; Fact Sheet)
Spring: Eldridge Cleaver publicly declares that there is a split in the BPP, terming the other wing reformist. Tensions between the Cleaver and Newton factions (the New York 21 are in the Cleaver faction) have been escalating for months; the decisive rupture comes when a February 1971 phone conversation between Cleaver in Algeria and Huey Newton – intended to be broadcast and serve as part of the buildup for a rally – becomes an occasion for Cleaver to criticize BPP actions. Violence now breaks out between the two sides; Huey moves into guarded penthouse in Oakland. BPP Newspaper distribution coordinator Sam Napier is murdered, allegedly by the Cleaver faction. Elaine Brown becomes editor of the BPP newspaper. Huey begins to talk about “revolutionary intercommunalism.” The Newton-faction Panthers begin to pull back from nationwide work, consolidate in Oakland and emphasize “survival programs” such as breakfast for children, and from about this time the BPP declines as an ideological influence on the nationwide left. (Brown; Boyd; Guardian April 17 & June 16, 1971)
March 8: Small group of Catholic leftists break into the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania (outside of Philadelphia), steal and then leak to the press documentation of the FBI’s counterintelligence program against the movement; COINTELPRO is “officially” ended in April. (Spoke)
March 25: Pakistani dictator Yahya (Ayub) Khan unleashes his military in East Pakistan, killing up to 600,000 Bengalis and driving millions of refugees into India. This step broke off negotiations that had been underway since just after December 1970 elections had been won by the Awami League in East Pakistan under the banner of regional autonomy. The elections were won by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party in West Pakistan. The repression and massacres set off armed resistance, some under the leadership of the bourgeois Awami League and some under the leadership of various left and communist groups. (Century; Unite the Many; China Alliance; MR September 1971, October 1971 and March 1972)
March 28: Republic of New Africa (RNA) “consecrates” “the first African capitol in the northern hemisphere since Columbus” on some land in Hinds County, Mississippi; the RNA’s president, Imari Abubakari Obadele (Richard Henry) is arrested on August 18, 1971 stemming from a police raid and shoot-out at RNA headquarters on that date in Jackson, Mississippi; he is imprisoned for many years and finally released on parole January 18, 1980. (Black Scholar February 1972 & October 1978; COINTELPRO; Burning Spear February 1980)
March 29: Lt. William Calley is found guilty of murdering 22 Vietnamese civilians on March 16, 1968 at My Lai 4, sentenced to life imprisonment; he serves very little actual time in prison – he is released on bond and his sentence is reduced – and he is finally released on parole in September 1975. (Spoke)
March: Conference initiated mainly by El Comité brings together close to 1,000 people to demand freedom for the Five Nationalist Prisoners; from then until their release September 10, 1979 (see below) the campaign to free the Five is a central issue on which the entire Puerto Rican left unites, and also wins support from many non-Puerto Rican groups. (Torres)
March: First issue of Amerasia, journal to disseminate social science research relevant to Asian Americans, which will serve as a resource for Asian American Studies Departments now being established at various universities. Bridge magazine, also focusing on Asian American issues, is also launched in 1971 out of the Basement Workshop, an important community institution in New York’s Chinatown. Bridge lasts to 1985 and Amerasia is still being published, by UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center. (Wei)
April 5: Unsuccessful insurrection led by revolutionary organization JVP in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) begins, government follows with severe repression, U.S., USSR, Britain and India all send support to the government, China also sends a message congratulating the government and denouncing “foreign spies” among the rebels. (Unite the Many; MR January 1972)
April 11: The U.S. table tennis team is warmly welcomed in China: “ping-pong” diplomacy breaks the public ice in relations between the two powers. On June 10 Nixon ends the 22-year embargo on trade with the People’s Republic. On July 9, Henry Kissinger flies secretly from Pakistan to Beijing and holds 20 hours of talks with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai; the groundwork is beginning to be laid for a U.S.-China rapprochement and, later, informal alliance. On July 15 Nixon announces that he has accepted an invitation to visit China before May 1972. (Century)
April 22: Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, dictator in Haiti for 14 years, dies, and is succeeded by his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc,” 19 years old. (Century)
April 24-May 5: Half a million attend antiwar rally in DC jointly sponsored by NPAC and PCPJ. During the week leading up to the march, Vietnam Veterans Against the War conduct “Operation Dewey Canyon III” in D.C., which included Lt. John Kerry (later a Senator) testifying before Congress and culminated Friday April 23 with nearly 1,000 veterans throwing their medals over the Capitol steps. By this time VVAW has 11,000 members and 26 regional coordinators. In the ten days following the joint march there are further actions sponsored by PCPJ, constituent groups and the “Mayday Tribe.” The main event is the Mayday attempt to “shut down the government” through civil disobedience, which results in the largest number of arrests (many improper) in U.S. history, 12,614. Years later a class action suit brought about $10,000 in damages to each improperly arrested person. (Spoke; Goines chron; Ramparts July 1971; Almanac; Guardian May 5, 1971)
April: Meetings between U.S. and Vietnamese women in Toronto and Vancouver. (Douglas and Moira in Underground; Guardian April 17, 1971; Wei)
May 1-2: First of the many annual May Day Rallies organized by RU in Bay Area (Hamilton).
May 11: Three dozen protesters arrested for trespassing as they sat atop the last unbulldozed house in rural Kalama Valley on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. The attempt to defend the land rights of local people was the spark that ignited the modern Hawaiian movement of land struggles which, by 1980, becomes a full-scale struggle for native Hawaiian autonomy. (Hawaii)
June 7: Armed Forces Journal publishes Col. Robert D. Heinl’s article “The Collapse of the Armed Forces.” After conducting a month-long tour of U.S. military bases in Vietnam, he reports “by every conceivable indication, the U.S. army in South Vietnam is approaching a state of total collapse, with individuals and units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited, where not near mutinous.” He adds that “the morale, discipline and battle-worthiness of the U.S. armed forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly the history of the United States.” See also April 1969 entry above. (Gitlin; Fact Sheet says this report is in August) This is also a record year for desertion rates in the U.S. armed forces: during 1971, nearly 100,000 servicemen and women desert (MR October 1988)
June 7: New York City bridge workers leave 28 of 29 drawbridges locked in an open position when they walk off their jobs Monday morning, “a few thousand striking workers did what 15,000 demonstrators had failed to accomplish in Washington a few weeks before: immobilize all traffic in and out of the city.” The strike by District Council 37 of AFSCME is settled two days later. (Guardian June 16, 1971)
June 13: New York Times begins publishing the Pentagon Papers exposing the governments secret deliberations over Vietnam policy; other newspapers follow; Attorney General Mitchell tries to halt publication but on June 30 the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 for the Times and publication resumed. A month after publication of the Pentagon Papers, in August, a majority of Americans in a Harris poll said the war was “immoral” and in a Gallup poll 61% favored complete withdrawal. Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, who had taken the Papers from the Rand Corporation and leaked them, were indicted but eventually freed on a mistrial because of government misconduct. June 30 was also the day the 26th amendment to the Constitution took effect, giving 18-year-olds the vote. (Spoke; Reunion)
June: First issue of Kalayaan newspaper, published by the Kalayaan collective of Filipino activists in the Bay Area, which initiated and led the process towards creation of the KDP in 1973. Period of Filipino youth conferences, first Pilipino People’s Far West Convention (August 1971), and formation of Filipino collectives and left groups in San Jose, New York, San Diego, Seattle and other cities and college campuses. (Toribio)
August 11: The National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) is founded at a DC conference drawing 300. (Guardian, August 11, 1971)
August 15: Nixon announces his “NEP” with 90-day wage, price and rent freeze, and also frees the dollar from its tie to gold effectively ending the “Bretton Woods” world financial system set up after World War II. Many commentators see this as a watershed, marking (or recognizing) a downshift in U.S. ability to dominate other capitalist powers – an increasingly assertive and united European Community, and a rapidly developing Japan, and unleashing an era of greater inter-imperialist rivalry: “the end of U.S. hegemony…the end of one phase of postwar global capitalist history and the beginning of another.” Related: in 1971 the U.S. faced its first trade deficit in the 20th century. (MR, October 1971; Viewpoint Vol. 1. No. 2; Boyte; Second Cold War says at this time Nixon only devalued the dollar vs. gold, and suspended convertibility of the dollar to gold in March 1973)
August 21: George Jackson murdered in San Quentin. The next morning, at least 700 inmates at Attica prison in New York, most wearing black armbands, refused to eat breakfast out of respect for Jackson. A few weeks after Jackson is killed, six prisoners – the “San Quentin Six,” Fleeta Drumgo, Johnny Spain, Hugo Pinell, Willie Tate, Luiz Talamantez and David Johnson – are indicted for the deaths of two inmates and three guards during the episode; a major defense campaign is conducted on their behalf. They – like Drumgo and Cluchette in the Soledad Brothers Case, who are acquitted March 27, 1972 – are acquitted. This was a period of prison rebellions (at least 16 in 1970, including a one-day rebellion August 10, 1970 in the “Tombs” – Manhattan House of Detention – by Black and Puerto Rican prisoners), a large prisoners rights movement and the formation of revolutionary political organizations by some prisoners. (Abron in Underground; Freedom; Bennion; Burning Spear January 1980; Guardian, April 5, 1972; Torres)
August 23: Another product of U.S.-Soviet detente, the Four Power Agreement on Berlin is reached, which allows unhampered Western traffic to the city and ends one of the original issues at stake in Cold War I. (Second Cold War)
Labor Day Weekend: Conference of southern organizers, mostly white, in Greenville, South Carolina draws 100; presentations made by the CPUSA, NCLC and Georgia communist League. (Southern Patriot, October 1971)
September 9: Attica uprising, 1,281 inmates seize control of half the prison and take hostages; negotiations are unsuccessful, Governor Rockefeller refuses to come to Attica, and on September 13 state troopers and corrections officers begin their assault on the liberated prison yard. 29 inmates and 10 hostages are killed, all by gunshot wounds inflicted by the attacking police. The McKay Commission later concluded: “With the exception of Indian massacres in the late nineteenth century, the State Police assault which ended the four-day prison uprising was the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War.” (Freedom; Bennion; Torres)
September 11: Nikita Khrushchev dies, the CPSU/government announces his death but offers “no obituary, no blame, no praise.” (Nove; Century)
September: Founding national meeting of Black Workers Congress (BWC) in Gary, in preparation since late 1970, 400 delegates attend, with the concept of Black including all peoples of color within the U.S. The LRBW and United Black Workers from Mahwah New Jersey, expected at one time to be the pillars of the group, do not affiliate; Ken Cockrell, Mike Hamlin and John Watson had resigned from the League earlier, as of June 12, 1971. By the end of this year many of the members who were left in the League, including key leader General Baker, had joined the Communist League (Georgakas; self-published material in BNCM-1).
September: Fall of Lin Biao; after supposedly trying an unsuccessful coup, he is killed in a plane crash September 12 perhaps trying to flee to the USSR. The context is the developing relationship between Washington and Beijing and specifically plans for welcoming Nixon to Beijing. Mao and Zhou are apparently winning the internal CPC fight to decisively move China toward alliance with the U.S. against the USSR. An editorial in the CPC’s People’s Daily on August 17, 1971 indicates that the CPC now regards the Soviet Union as its principal enemy. (Trial; Century; Schurmann).
September-October: The Third World Women’s Alliance, which had formed earlier in the year (or in late 1970) when the Black Women’s Alliance (see December 1968 entry above) expanded to include non-Black Third World women, issues Vol. 1 No. 1 of Triple Jeopardy newspaper. (TWWA; CrossRoads No. 29; Beal in Sisterhood; Carson; Triple Jeopardy Vol. 1 No. 1)
October 9-11: First national meeting of the New American Movement held in Chicago, after a more than a year period of organizing by a national interim committee. A national conference on program is held in November, and the formal Founding Convention in June 1972 (SR No. 8; SDHx)
October 25: U.N. seats People’s Republic of China and expels Taiwan regime. (Almanac)
October: Formation of the Third World Front Against Imperialism, a coalition of New York area Third World organizations to work against the Vietnam War and U.S. intervention in the Third World generally. Participating organizations include Asian Americans for Action, Asian Coalition, Asian Women’s Coalition, Black Organization of Students at Rutgers, Black Panther Party, Black Workers Congress, Black Workers Council, El Comité, Republic of New Africa, SNCC, Third World Women’s Alliance, Third World Youth Movement and Union Latina. Similar formal and informal coalitions take shape in other areas, at least for a brief period. This is also the period of active Asian American antiwar coalitions in several cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento and elsewhere. (Triple Jeopardy Vol. 1 No. 3; Wei)
November 19: Opening of the Founding Convention of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP), the group is formed mainly out of the earlier Pro-Independence Movement (MPI), amid a rise of new, militant trade unionism. (Puerto Rico; Mari Bras in Black Scholar December 1976; Guardian December 1, 1971 in BTr-5; Torres)
November 28: Elections in Uruguay: the Broad Front (Frente Amplio), which groups the Uruguayan left, including the Tupamaros, sees its presidential candidate Gen. Liber Seregni get 19% of the vote; the Colorado party’s Jose Maria Bordaberry wins the presidency. (MR Feb. 1972; Frontline March 18, 1985; NACLA Nov-Dec 1984 & Sept-Dec 1986; Almanac)
Late November-December 16: After months during which resistance in East Bengal had grown steadily against the West Pakistani occupation, regular Indian troops begin to enter East Bengal in late November. India and Pakistan are at war officially by December 4, by mid-December Indian troops control East Bengal and turn over power on December 16 to a new government they install led by the Awami League – the new independent nation of Bangla Desh is born. The Indian troops also carry out repression against the left in both Bangla Desh and West Bengal, an area of considerable left strength in India. In the aftermath of Pakistan’s defeat Yahya Khan is forced to resign and Bhutto forms a new government. The U.S. had backed Pakistan (and doesn’t recognize Bangla Desh until April 4, 1972, after 50 other countries already had), the Soviets supported India, there was considerable controversy over China’s role. (Century; Unite the Many; China Alliance; MR September 1971, October 1971 and May 1972)
November-December: Workers at the Lordstown, Ohio GM plant, the company’s most productive plant in the U.S. – mostly young and white, with many Vietnam veterans – react to intense speed-up with slowdowns and what amounts to an “in-plant strike.” In February 1972 the battle becomes more open and the workers vote 97% to go out on a strike which lasts 23 days and receives nationwide publicity. Many in the emerging New Communist Movement take the strike as another indication of the spread of radicalism within the working class. Reinforcing the mood, Studs Terkel’s book Working, in which many workers recount their experiences of alienation on the job, comes out about this same time. (False Promises; Green; Guardian, March 22 & April 5, 1972)
December: Jesse Jackson leaves SCLC to establish his own organization, Operation PUSH, along the lines of the SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket, which he had headed. (Marable)
Georgia Communist League formed out of RYM II remnants there. (Costello; O’Brien says 1970)
I Wor Kuen formed as a national organization out of merger of Bay Area Red Guard Party (or sections of it) with New York I Wor Kuen collective (IWK Journal No. 2; Costello; Louie)
Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC) is founded (self-published material in BTr-1; BAWOC Political Reports in BTr-6)
Guardian newspaper, continuing the political trajectory that provoked the breakaway of the Liberated Guardian, identifies more and more with the left tendencies in the international communist movement. The main tilt is to support the positions of the Chinese Communist Party in the Sino-Soviet split, but the paper does not fully follow the Maoist line as it strongly supports the Cuban party, continues to refer to the USSR as a socialist country, and calls for a world united front, including “the socialist countries,” against the main enemy, U.S. imperialism. (Guardian issues throughout 1971, especially editorials in August 4, 1971, September 22, 1971, and then May 17, 1972 issues in BTr-5)
Workers World Party takes a more working class emphasis, setting up local groups under the name Center for United Labor Action (O’Brien)
Formation of the “People’s Party” alignment, a loose affiliation of some 25 state and local electoral-oriented socialist and radical parties, including Peace & Freedom in California, Liberty Union of Vermont, Human Rights Party of Michigan. The People’s Party ran Benjamin Spock for President in 1972 and in 1976 ran Margaret Wright; published Grass Roots newsmonthly. (Strategy; People’s Party sheet in SDHx; Grass Roots in D-9)
Los Tres, three activists working to stop drug pushers in a Los Angeles barrio, are sent to prison for the alleged shooting of an undercover police agent posing as a pusher. A major campaign to “Free Los Tres!” is conducted. (Chicano)
In the wake of the Attica uprising and upped repression within prisons, a campaign is mounted against New York State’s effort to introduce behavior modification programs complete with electric shock treatments. Leading the campaign within the prisons is Martin Sostre, a Black Puerto Rican who managed a radical bookstore in Buffalo and was imprisoned on false drug charges. The Sostre case is a focus for many left activists who campaign for his freedom. (Left-Encyclopedia; Guardian April 24, 1971 & June 19, 1974)
The first issue of Asian Women journal appears, published by a group of women who met at UC Berkeley. (Wei)
I. F. Stone’s Weekly ceases publication at the end of the year, with a circulation of 70,000, the highest it ever reached. (Guardian, December 22, 1971)
Reconstruction of the French non-communist left in the new Socialist Party (PS, successor to the former SFIO) under Francois Mitterand’s leadership. In 1973 legislative elections the PCF slightly outpolls the new PS, but not by much and for the last time. (NLR #171)
Publication of influential article in Radical America Vol. 5, No. 2 (March-April 1971) by Harold Baron: “The Demand for Black Labor: Historical Notes on the Political Economy of Racism”; also issued as a pamphlet by New England Free Press.; Also The Pentagon Papers (in several book forms as well as in the New York Times); John Kerry and Vietnam Veterans Against the War, The New Soldier, edited by David Thorne and George Butler (New York, Macmillan); Away with All Pests: An English Surgeon in People’s China, 1954-1969, by Dr. Joshua S. Horn (Monthly Review Press, New York); The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China, by Mark Selden (Harvard University Press, Cambridge); The Enemy: What Every American Should Know About Imperialism, by Felix Greene (Vintage Paperbound, Random House cloth may have been out in 1970); Bruce E. Franklin, From the Movement Toward Revolution (Van Nostrand Reinhold Co./Litton Educational Publishing, New York, Cincinnati); Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge (Alfred A. Knopf); Mass Communications and American Empire, by Herbert I. Schiller (Beacon Press, Boston); Richard M Scammon and Ben J Wattenberg, conservative Democrats, publish The Real Majority (Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, New York); Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson (New York, Popular Library); Rules for Radicals, by Saul Alinsky (New York, Random House);
Also published: first of four radical textbooks in political science – “the most conservative of the social sciences” -where “up to then there had been none” (see MR October 1977). Kenneth Dolbeare and Murray Edelman, American Politics: Policies, Power and Change (D.C. Heath, 1971, 1974, 1977); Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few (St. Martin’s, 1974, 1977); Ira Katznelson and Mark Kesselman, The Politics of Power (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975); and Edward Greenberg, The American Political System, a Radical Approach (Winthrop 1977).
Release of Melvin Van Peebles film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.
January 28: Anti-Radical Decree jointly proclaimed by the West German Chancellor and provincial (“lander”) premiers banning “extremists” from public service, known in popular usage as the Berufsverbot. Chancellor Willy Brandt of the SPD later admits the measure, enforced against the left but not against ex- and neo-Nazis, was a mistake. (Socialist Register 1984)
January 30: Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland, 13 unarmed Catholic demonstrators shot and killed by British troops; one more dies later.(Student Generation). On March 24, Britain dissolves the Northern Ireland government and takes over direct rule. (Almanac)
January: The Furies lesbian feminist collective begins published The Furies newspaper, carrying articles by collective members Rita Mae Brown (“who probably did more than any other individual to raise feminists’ consciousness about lesbianism”-Echols) and Charlotte Bunch. During 1970-73, the women’s movement is wracked by conflicts around sexuality (the “gay-straight split”), class and elitism, and, to a lesser extent, race. (Echols)
February 15: Edgar Snow, author of Red Star over China, dies in Geneva at 66. (Century)
February 21: Nixon arrives in Beijing for eight-day visit to China. Final communiqué promises a gradual increase in U.S.-China contacts and includes the Chinese formula “Countries want independence, nations want liberation and the people want revolution.” Nixon also admits that “Taiwan is part of China.” The trip is hailed as a victory for China and anti-imperialism by the forces of the emerging New Communist Movement, even those like the Guardian that do not fully agree with every aspect of the CPC’s international line. While China maintains its support for Vietnam, on a global scale Beijing is now maneuvering to form an at-least-tacit alliance with Washington against the USSR. (Karnow; Century; Schurmann; Guardian, March 8, 1972; Peck on China)
February: Raymond Yellow Thunder from the Pine Ridge Reservation dies after being beaten and thrown into the cold by whites in Gordon, Nebraska. A mass protest by Pine Ridge residents, assisted by AIM which they invite to help, ensues, and the campaign begins to make a dent in the pattern of racism in the towns around Pine Ridge. AIM gains prominence as well as links with traditionalists on the reservations. (Hurricane)
March 10-12: National Black Political Convention in Gary draws 8,000, forms National Black Assembly (or National Black Political Assembly/NBPA) whose first “seating” is October 21/22 in Chicago. Amiri Baraka is Secretary General of NBPA until 1975. Gary convention approves a National Black Political Agenda, among other things to be taken to the Democratic and Republican conventions to obtain as much commitment to its principles as possible. One week after the Agenda is released, in May, the Congressional Black Caucus, dissatisfied with its anti-busing and anti-Israel provisions, issues its own document, the Black Declaration and the Black Bill of Rights which Ron Walters called “a watered down version of the Agenda.” Marable terms the Gary Convention “the high point of Black nationalist agitation in the post-World War II period.” The second convention, much smaller with 1,700 present, is held March 14-17, 1974 in Little Rock. (Freedom; Forward No. 3; Walters in Black Scholar October 1975; Marable; Guardian, June 21, 1972 & April 3, 1974)
March: Monthly Review publishes a major article, “Imperialism in the Seventies,” for the first time the editors use and emphasize the term social-imperialism to refer to the USSR, though the article is “soft-Maoist” in overall thrust, in that it mainly focuses on U.S. and Western imperialism and does not take a “two superpowers are equal dangers” position. (MR March 1972)
March: Vietnamese students in the U.S. take over the Vietnamese Consulate in New York for an afternoon to protest the war and the South Vietnamese government; the occupiers are arrested but all charges are dropped to avoid further bad publicity for the Thieu government. (Triple Jeopardy April-May 1972)
March: Congress approves the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and it is sent to the states, where it eventually dies after a major anti-ERA campaign by the right, despite a priority focus given to passing the ERA by NOW, which is widely criticized as too narrow an agenda by more radical forces in the women’s movement. (Echols)
April 13-15: Conference of 200 in Madison, Wisconsin forms the Committee of Solidarity with Chile to oppose increasing U.S. de-stabilization attacks on the Allende regime. (Guardian, April 26, 1972)
April: Conference of students/activists from Asia, Africa and Latin America who are living in the U.S., held at Princeton, forms the anti-imperialist Third World Peoples Coalition. (self-published material in “Reports to NY 1973” folder in DTW-1)
April-May: Large-scale offensive by NLF in South Vietnam scores major gains as many units of the South Vietnamese Army desert or defect. The Nixon administration escalates its bombing of both the South and the North, and on May 8 Nixon announces he had ordered the mining of all North Vietnamese ports. U.S. planes then launch the most massive raids in years against North Vietnam, hitting dikes in the Red River Delta. There are widespread protests in the U.S., including a campus strike April 21 called by the NSA and many student governments and demonstrations April 22 drawing a total of 120,000 in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco; in the latter city the Anti-Imperialist Coalition, with emerging NCM forces in the center, is the prime sponsor. An Emergency Moratorium follows on May 4 and then a nationwide demonstration in Washington, DC May 21 follow. The protests are broad-based and significant, but do not bring out nearly the numbers of the huge April 24, 1971 action the year before or the November 15, 1969 mobilization. Despite the escalation, preparations for the U.S.-Soviet Summit two weeks away are still proceeding. (Century; Fact Sheet; Guardian, April 26, May 3, May 10 & May 17, 1972)
Spring: George McGovern antiwar & reform candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, which he wins. McGovern had chaired the commission on reform of Democratic Party delegate selection process and other rules following 1968, and the inner-party reforms instituted by his commission made an insurgent candidacy possible. These reforms are a major response to the movements of the 1960s and play a pivotal role in pulling many of the protesters and activists of the 1960s movements – especially the white activists – back into “traditional channels.” At the same time, they are an opening to greater women’s participation, peace activist participation and to some extent greater participation by people of color in the Democratic Party and official political life. These reforms are resisted and eventually largely reversed by the party hierarchy in alliance with the more conservative elite Democratic elements and the AFL-CIO and its Coalition for a Democratic Majority (via the Winograd Commission in 1976 and the Hunt Commission in 1981). The McGovern nomination, and four years later Carter’s winning the nomination and then the presidency, are at least in part the result of the temporary ascent of the new party rules. Re: the 1972 elections, there is a reasonable amount of debate on the left, and even within parts of the emerging NCM over what stance to take toward this campaign (see Should the Left Support McGovern? pamphlet in BNCM-1, reference in Hamilton to thinking in RU, and Guardian; also, see interesting viewpoint in Monthly Review September 1972). Note: this is also the year of Shirley Chisholm’s bid for the presidency, the first such effort by an African-American woman in a major party (by the first Black woman to be elected to Congress). (Davis in NLR #143 & 155; Black Scholar October 1975; Reunion; Frontline, July 18, 1988)
Spring: Strike by 210,000 public and semi-public workers in Quebec by a common front of different labor federations, big impact on the Quebec and Canadian left. (Guardian, February 28, 1973)
Spring: A group of gay men from Argentina, Cuba and Puerto Rico begin a literary magazine Afuera, and around the same time a group of working class and poor gay Latinos form Hispanos Unidos Gays Liberados (United Liberated Hispanic Gays) but the two groups do not cross paths. (Torres)
May 2: J. Edgar Hoover dies (Spoke)
May 3: Beginning of a walkout by 4,000 mainly Chicana women at Farah Co. in Texas and New Mexico; Farah was at the time the largest U.S. manufacturer of men’s and boy’s pants. The RU takes up strike support as a major priority and the Farah Strike Support committees it established in many cities are able to have a substantial impact. This campaign was a key effort for the RU, and the NCM generally and broader left forces as well. The strike ends with the workers winning union recognition, their main demand, in February 1974. (O’Brien; Red Papers 6; Triple Jeopardy September-October 1972; Chicano; Bob Farah obit from NYT 3/12/98 in D-3; The Call, March 1974; Guardian, March 6, 1974)
May 22: Nixon arrives in Moscow – the first visit by a U.S. President to that city. On May 26 the SALT I agreement is signed, for the first time putting limits on strategic nuclear warheads. The treaty is the first U.S. recognition that the Soviets have achieved strategic nuclear-military parity – which they accomplished some time in the late 1960s/early ‘70s – though the U.S. retains a big technological and also a quantitative edge, having at the time of the treaty 6,500 warheads to the USSR’s 2,200. This is the major public sign of the opening of the “detente” period in the Cold War, which came to an end in 1979. In the Nixon-Kissinger view, detente involved “linkage” with Soviet “good behavior” in the Third World, and an informal “code of conduct” calling for “mutual restraint” in the Third World was signed in Moscow along with SALT I. The U.S. actual interpretation of “mutual restraint” was immediately indicated when Nixon flew from Moscow to Tehran where he reached a secret agreement with the Shah on covert action, using Kurdish guerrillas against the Soviet-supported government of Iraq. (Medvedevs in NLR 130/Nov-Dec 1981; Century; Goines chron; Second Cold War)
May 27: 60,000 demonstrate at African Liberation Day marches, 30,000 in D.C. The action is initiated following a summer 1971 trip of Black activists, including Owusu Sadauki, then director of Malcolm X Liberation University in Greensboro and later chair of ALSC, to Mozambique in 1971. Following the first ALD, the African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC) is launched by the organizers and others at a Detroit conference in September. (SalesJr., Forward No. 3; FM January 1982; ALSC)
May: October League (OL) founded as national organization via merger of the October League (Los Angeles) and the Georgia Communist League. In October 1972 the OL publishes the first issue of its monthly newspaper, The Call/El Clarín. (Costello; OL-TU; self-published material in BNCM-6).
June 4: Angela Davis is acquitted on charges of aiding Jonathan Jackson’s effort to free prisoners in 1970. The extensive campaign to free Angela had been a major boost to the CPUSA, and the party launches the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARP) coming out of the Committee to Free Angela Davis; its founding meeting is May 11-13, 1973 in Chicago, drawing 700-800; Angela Davis, Burt Corona, and Carl Braden of SCEF are chosen co-chairs. (Fighting; Weather; Southern Patriot, April and June, 1973; Guardian, May 23, 1973).
June 17: The Watergate burglars are apprehended by police. (Karnow; Almanac)
June: Official Founding Convention of the New American Movement (NAM) in Minneapolis, with 300 delegates from 30 chapters. (SDHx)
June 22-23: Labor for Peace conference in St. Louis, convened and led by the antiwar forces in labor including ILWU and 1199 leaderships. (Guardian viewpoint May 17, 1972; personal recollection; background of Labor for Peace network in Aronowitz)
June 30-July 3: Young Lords Party holds Congress, sums up its history, adopts Marxism-Leninism Mao ZeDong Thought and changes its name to the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization (PRRWO). The RU-centered National Liaison Committee of RU, PRRWO, BWC and IWK is formed by delegates from these organizations to the Congress. During 1972, the Puerto Rican Student Union merges with the Young Lords/PRRWO. (Costello; IWK Journal No. 1 & No. 3; Palante July 21, 1972; Communist/RCP Vol. 2 No. 1; Torres)
June: Amid rising protests against the death penalty, especially its role in perpetuating racism and its racially unequal application, the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the death penalty for its “inconsistent application” by a narrow 5-4 vote. As the legal fight unfolded, no one has been executed in the country since 1967. State legislatures in 20 states quickly pass new statutes to restore the death penalty that they hope will gain the Court’s approval. (Guardian, November 7, 1973; Almanac)
Summer: Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda and other activists form the Indochina Peace Campaign (IPC) to “take the antiwar message into the mainstream” because they believe there is an opening up going on: “the system is beginning to respond.” They barnstorm the country through the summer and fall, and conduct a 25 city tour beginning September 16, 1973, and IPC remains active through 1974. Just prior to this initiative Fonda had been attracting large crowds of GI’s at bases in the U.S., Okinawa and the Philippines with the FTA Show, whose troupe features liberal and radical performers and a strong antiwar message. She also visits North Vietnam – in July 1972 – where among other things she was photographed wearing a helmet and looking at an anti-aircraft gun, sparking immense hostility from many sectors in the U.S. (Reunion; Gitlin; Guardian, June 21, 1972 & October 10, 1973)
July: Volume 1, Number 1 of Ms. Magazine appears, featuring a “Wonder Woman for President” graphic and a sign “Peace and Justice in ‘72” on its cover. A preview issue had been issued at the end of 1971/January 1972. (Ms. Magazine July/August 1997)
July: Associated Press exposes the facts of the now infamous “Tuskegee Study” a syphilis experiment started in 1932 by the Public Health Service in which Black men were denied treatment with at least 28 dead as a result. (Guardian November 1, 1972)
August 18-October 5: Seven-week wildcat at Mead Packaging Corp. in Atlanta, with most of the Black workers (who were two-thirds of the workforce) staying out and extensive community support. Sherman Miller of the OL is head of the strike committee, and retains the position with near-unanimous worker support in face of furious red-baiting campaign promoted by the Atlanta Constitution among others. The strike wins limited gains. The experience is crucial in building the OL internally and projecting it nationally. For example, Sherman Miller is a key speaker, and a film about Mead a main feature, of a conference on “Communist Work in the Factories (drawing 100) sponsored by the OL in Atlanta over Thanksgiving Day weekend 1972 (a second such conference drawing 250 is held Thanksgiving weekend 1973 in Chicago); and Miller goes on a nationwide speaking tour in late 1972 and early 1973. (O’Brien; OL-TU; Guardian, October 18, 1972, December 13, 1972 & December 5, 1973; Southern Patriot, November 1972; The Call, January 1974)
August 21-22: Several thousand people protest the war at the Republican Convention in Miami which nominates Nixon for re-election. (Guardian, August 30, 1972)
August: Asian Law Caucus is founded. (Wei)
September 1-4: First national convention of La Raza Unida party in El Paso with 3,000 in attendance. The party is divided and declines shortly afterwards, however, all but ceasing to exist by 1975. (Muñoz; The Call, October 1972; Guardian, September 5 & October 17, 1973)
September 5: Eleven Israeli athletes killed at Olympics in Munich. (Almanac)
September 21: Facing a growing insurgency led by the CPP and NPA, Ferdinand Marcos declares martial law in the Philippines. A month later the National Coalition for the Restoration of Civil Liberties in the Philippines (NCRCLP) is formed by Filipino activists in the U.S. Despite increased repression, Martial Law does not halt the spread of the insurgency in the Philippines; in April 1973 the CPP-led Preparatory Commission for the National Democratic Front in the Philippines issues a manifesto with a draft program; (Toribio; Next Vietnam; People’s War and other self-published material in BREV-2)
October 1: Japan and the People’s Republic of China establish diplomatic relations and Japan severs relations with Taiwan. The same day the CPC’s People’s Daily publishes an editorial clearly signaling that the CPC regards the Soviet Union as its principal enemy. (Trial; Century; Schurmann)
First week in October: Caravans launching the Trail of Broken Treaties campaign leave Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles, arriving in St. Paul Minnesota October 23. The caravan continues to Washington, D.C., arrives there on November 1, and after a series of confrontations and misunderstandings with government officials, occupies the Bureau of Indian Affairs building and renames it the Native American Embassy. The occupation ends November 8, the day after the presidential election, without the bloody violent confrontation that had threatened to occur several times during the stand-off. (Hurricane)
October 18: Key editorial statement published by the Guardian on the occasion of beginning its 25th year of publication explicitly stating that “the major task before us is to assist in bringing to birth a new revolutionary political party, based in the working class, armed with the science of Marxism-Leninism…”. The paper compares its taking up the fight against revisionism with other unpopular but principled stances taken in the past (on the Rosenbergs, the Middle East). Sending an unmistakable signal that it intends to play a more overtly ideological role in laying the groundwork for a new party, the paper also begins two new columns in this issue: “Fan the Flames” by Irwin Silber and “From the Bottom Up” by Earl Ofari, both taking an explicit Marxist-Leninist posture – and starts the Jack Smith series on China’s foreign policy which will later be published as a pamphlet. Issues just before and after this one put forward the same theme: in the September 20 issue a polemic with the CPUSA stated that the “last two years has seen the growth of anti-revisionist, Marxist-Leninist consciousness among certain sectors of the U.S. left. The Guardian has been part of this process.” The October 25 issue reprinted an article on the La Raza Unida Party conference from the first issue of The Call, which had just been launched by the OL, giving a boost to that new publication; and in the same issue Carl Davidson, in another new column titled “Which Side Are You On?,” sharply criticizes the RU’s position on busing. November 1 issue offers a Marxist-Leninist critique of NAM and one of Michael Harrington’s views. And “Fan the Flames” November 29 reiterated the idea that the newspaper had identified building a new party as the primary political task. (Guardian September 20, October 18 in BTr-5 & November 29, 1972 in BTr-4)
October 26: Vietnamese issue a statement that a draft peace agreement was agreed to by the U.S. on October 20, to be signed on October 31, but Washington reneged on October 23 citing “difficulties encountered in Saigon.” (Fact Sheet)
October: RU publishes Red Papers 5, “National Liberation and Proletarian Revolution in the U.S.” arguing that Black people in the U.S. constitute a “nation of a new type.” (Red Papers 5, Hamilton)
October: First issue of The Call/El Clarín newspaper published by the October League. (The Call, October 1972)
October: Grailville (Cincinnati) Ohio conference of 200-300 “independent” Marxist-Leninist activists and collectives – Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) in Chicago played a leading role – that is unsuccessful at forming a national organization; some remnants from this conference form the short-lived “Federation” or “Midwest Federation” later, about 1974. (Dowling in CW#3; O’Brien)
October: Ben Chavis and the other members of the Wilmington 10 are convicted on charges of firebombing a grocery store and conspiring to shoot police and firefighters responding to the blaze in February 1971 in Wilmington, North Carolina. They are sentenced to lengthy prison terms which, after a major campaign which is a priority of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARP), are reduced by North Carolina Governor James Hunt. Ben Chavis, the last of the 10 released, comes out of prison December 14, 1979. (Southern Patriot, June & November 1972; Black Scholar January-February 1975; Burning Spear February 1978 and January 1980; Guardian, May 10, 1972)
November 4: Antiwar demonstrations in a dozen cities sponsored by coalitions with New Communist groups at the center; the first coordinated nationwide actions in which NCM folks took this kind of initiative. Largest turnout is 5,000 in New York, a few hundred to a couple of thousand gather in other areas, the march in the Bay Area is November 5. (Guardian November 15, 1972)
November 4: Max Schachtman dies. (Guardian, November 22, 1972)
November 7: Nixon swamps McGovern in presidential race. (Almanac)
November 21: Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturns the Chicago Conspiracy convictions and the government announces it will not retry the case. After several years of political trials on conspiracy charges the government fails to win a single case, being defeated each time by a jury or on appeal. (Reunion)
December 12: Teamsters President Frank Fitzsimmons attacks the UFW as a “revolutionary movement” and two days later the Teamsters end their two-year truce with the UFW and “renegotiate” earlier sweetheart agreements with growers instead of following the truce agreement which would have meant those farmworkers would have joined the UFW, which is in the midst of a lettuce boycott and sharp struggle. The confrontation between the UFW and the Teamster-grower alliance heats up the next summer, when on July 29, 1973 the largest Delano grape growers break off negotiations with the UFW and move toward agreement with the Teamsters. (Guardian, February 7 & August 8, 1973)
December 15: Arnold Miller wins presidency of the United Mineworkers on a reform Miners for Democracy platform, MFD candidates for vice-president and secretary treasurer win as well. (Green; Guardian, December 27, 1972; Southern Patriot, September 1972 & January 1973)
December 18-29: Nixon’s “Christmas bombing” of Hanoi and Haiphong, with extensive damage to hospitals, schools, densely populated areas and thousands of people killed. 81 U.S. aircraft including 34 B-52s were shot down. Heavy losses and worldwide condemnation forces a halt to the bombing. The attempt to intimidate the Vietnamese into accepting changes in the October 20 draft peace agreement fails. (Karnow; Fact Sheet)
December: Socialist Party Convention changes its name to Social Democrats-USA, the even-further-rightward shift of the SP has been accelerated by the merger into the SP in March 1972 of the Democratic Socialist Federation (needle trades labor leaders headed by David Dubinsky). About this time the remaining “Debs Caucus” folks and Harrington-led Coalition Caucus folks leave – Harrington resigned his post as co-chair in October and left the SP a few months later – and begin concrete steps toward reconstitution of SP and formation of DSOC in 1973 (which see). (SDHx; Guardian, November 1, 1972)
I Wor Kuen adopts Marxism-Leninism Mao-ZeDong Thought. (IWK Journal #3)
Only issue of Proletarian Cause ever published appears, with Bill Epton – who had been expelled from PL in 1970 – as a central figure. (Epton/BLM)
A new crop of rank-and-file worker-oriented radical papers appears, most at the initiative of the RU or smaller, local Marxist-Leninist collectives; these include The Bay Area Worker, Rocky Mountain Workers Voice, Strike Back! (New York), Movin’ On Up (Cincinnati), The Insurgent Worker (Chicago) and at least a dozen others. (Guardian, September 6, 1972)
People’s Translation Service founded, had to cutback operations in 1974 and folded somewhat later. (Berlet in Underground)
Jack Barnes assumes the post of National Secretary of the SWP after being groomed for leadership for five years by the older generation of party leaders. Along with Barnes a broader team of ‘60s generation activists take central roles, marking a major generational shift in the SWP’s core, in sharp contrast to the CP’s approach to its younger recruits. (Inside the SWP)
African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) is formed by three Florida groups with the core coming from the state’s Junta of Militant Organizations (JOMO); APSP restarts The Burning Spear newspaper (started in 1969, folded 1971) in 1974. (Burning Spear, January 1978)
Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU) is founded “to enhance Black power and influence in the labor movement.” (Green)
Antonio Gramsci’s work begins to become widely accessible to the U.S. left: extensive English translation of his Prison Notebooks appears in 1971: Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited, translated and with an introduction by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Lawrence and Wishart in Britain, International Publishers in the U.S.); articles in SR No. 11 & 12 by Carl Boggs, conference on Gramsci’s Marxism at Washington University draws 100-plus in February 1973. A smaller and less widely circulated selection of Gramsci’s writings had appeared in 1968: The Modern Prince and Other Writings (New York, International Publishers) (Cboggs; NLR #176/July-August 1989)
The Business Roundtable is formed, with over 160 of the largest corporations as members, to influence government policy. It plays a key role in shaping the pro-business agenda and rightward backlash of the 1970s. See also note on conservative groups taking initiative in 1974 below. (Viewpoint Vol. 1 No. 2; Boyte)
Anwar Sadat expels the Soviet military presence from Egypt, which at the time was the only substantial Soviet deployment outside of the Warsaw Pact states. The expulsion is hailed by the Chinese as a blow to Soviet social-imperialism, and the Chinese begin talking about the USSR as the “more dangerous” superpower in the Middle East. (Second Cold War; Disney)
Michael Manley and the People’s National Party (PNP) win election in Jamaica on a left-social democratic program. (NLR #128)
The Situationist International, having undergone many splits since its formation in 1957 and declining after its short prominence in 1968, is dissolved. (NLR #174/March-April 1989)
West Germany’s Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang after founders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, conducts violent actions against U.S. military installations in Germany, and through the 1970s more general armed actions. The RAF is eventually broken up by fierce, often illegal government repression; Meinhof is executed in her prison cell in 1976, Baader is killed along with two other RAF members in 1977 in actions the government labels “suicides.” (Breakthrough Vol. 2, No. 1)
Publication of James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (New York, Macmillan); China! Inside the People’s Republic, by the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (Bantam Books, New York); Daily Life in Revolutionary China, by Maria Macciocchi (Monthly Review Press, New York); Joseph Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957 (University of California Press); To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton, (New York, Random House); Frances Fitzgerald Fire in the Lake (New York, New American Library-Signet); David Halberstram, The Best and the Brightest (New York, Random House); Vietnam Veterans Against the War, The Winter Soldier Investigation, (Boston, Beacon Press); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, London & Tanzania Publishing House, Dar es Salaam); Anchor Books edition of International Communism in the Era of Lenin: A Documentary History, edited by Helmut Gruber; originally published in 1967 by Cornell University Press and Fawcett Publications (paperback); The Essential Stalin: Major Theoretical Writings, 1905-1952, edited by Bruce Franklin (Anchor Books, Doubleday, Garden City New York); Strictly Ghetto Property: The Story of Los Siete de la Raza, by Marjorie Heins (Ramparts Press, Berkeley); Guitar Army, by John Sinclair (New York, Douglas Book Corporation); In the Name of Profits, by Robert Heilbroner et al (New York, Doubleday); War Without End: American Planning for the Next Vietnams, by Michael T. Klare (Alfred A. Knopf, New York); The Love of Possession Is a Disease with Them, by Tom Hayden (Holt, Rinehart and Winston); Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power, The World, and United States Foreign Policy, 1945-1954 (New York, Harper & Row); The Disinherited, Fawaz Turki (Monthly Review Press); Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do; Sheila Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Revolution (New York, Pantheon Books); Strike! The True History of Mass Insurgence in America from 1877 to the Present, by Jeremy Brecher (Straight Arrow Books, San Francisco);
January 20: Assassination of Amilcar Cabral, founder and leader of the African Party for the Liberation of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands (PAIGC), by agents of the Portuguese colonialists in front of his home in Conakry, Guinea. (Cabral; Return; MR March 1976; Triple Jeopardy Jan-Feb 1973)
January 20: Hundreds of thousands protest the war on inauguration day in many cities despite rumors of an impending peace agreement. (Guardian, January 31, 1973)
January 22: Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling that a woman’s right to choose abortion was protected by the U.S. Constitution. (Guardian, January 31, 1973; Line of March No. 9)
January 27: Paris Peace Agreement signed, on paper ending the Vietnam War, longest war in U.S. history. The Agreement is essentially the same as the October 20th draft, and for that matter essentially the same as the Vietnamese have pressed for since the 1950s. The U.S. and South Vietnamese regime immediately begin systematic violations of the agreement. In Laos, a cease-fire agreement calling for a new coalition government and an end to U.S. bombing of that country, which had gone on since 1964, was signed February 21; again, Washington violated the accord and continued bombing. (Almanac, Karnow; Fact Sheet; MR various; Guardian, January 31, February 7, March 7, April 11 & April 25, 1973). The same day, the Draft is ended and U.S. goes to an all-volunteer armed forces. (Karnow)
January: Publication of Guardian Pamphlet on China’s foreign policy, Unite the Many, Defeat the Few by Jack A. Smith, which had run as a series in the Guardian from October 1972 to January 3, 1973 issues. Prime example of a carefully-threaded “soft-Maoist” line: pro-China, but avoids dealing with the capitalist restoration thesis or the Cuban or Vietnamese positions, and takes criticisms around China’s policy toward Pakistan/Bangladesh (and others) seriously even if refuting them. Written before the coup in Chile. Later in the year (beginning March 28) the Guardian publishes a series by Carl Davidson on Trotskyism, which in late 1973 is issued as a pamphlet entitled Left in Form, Right in Essence: A Critique of Contemporary Trotskyism. (Unite the Many; Guardian, January 17, March 28 & December 19, 1973)
January: Monthly Review now says “The New Left, which grew so rapidly in the second half of the 1960s, collapsed and practically disappeared in the last two years,” along with disparaging remarks about old and new sects, with “no reason to believe that any of them is on the way to acquiring mass influence, let alone a mass following.” Contrast with May 1969 exuberance about the advanced elements of the New Left. (MR January 1973) But despite the decline of the New Left, enough rebelliousness is underway inside and outside the U.S. for the New York Times to run a series on its op-ed page through the spring titled “Capitalism, for Better or Worse”; the articles, plus additional ones including a contribution by Paul Sweezy, are published by Quadrangle in 1974 as a book, Capitalism: The Moving Target (MR February 1974)
January: A lesbian couple in Kansas City, Barbara Grier and Donna McBride, launch Naiad Press, which by the 1990s becomes the country’s largest, most successful and oldest lesbian publisher. Part of the initial base for Naiad is the subscription list of The Ladder, which had folded in 1972. (BAR January 1, 1998 in BMOV-1)
February 27-May 8: 71-day siege of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota; Oglala Sioux assisted by AIM members – an alliance of Indian youth with traditional elders who had been the militants of the 1930s and ‘40s – resist troops, tanks, helicopters and planes. The struggle catapults AIM into the center of public attention and leadership of the mass Indian movement. (Hurricane; Dunbar; Guardian, March 14, 1973 and following issues)
March 8: New Communist groups initiate International Women’s Day actions in many cities for the first time, Guardian headline is “March 8 actions see entrance of new forces.” (Guardian, March 21, 1973)
March 11: Peronism returns to power in Argentina after the military steps aside and the Peronist candidate wins presidential elections. Perón himself becomes president in September after new elections; he dies July 1, 1974 and his wife Isabel becomes president. (MR January 1976; Guardian, May 9 & June 6, 1973 & July 10, 1974)
Late March: At the Academy Awards ceremony, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather wins the Best Picture Award for 1972, also Best Actor for Marlon Brando, which he refuses, sending Native American actress Sacheen Littlefeather to the podium to protest “the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry.” Brando had planned to be at the Wounded Knee occupation then underway during the ceremony, but his effort to get there failed. (Hurricane; Academy)
March 23: Third and largest in a series of six forums sponsored by the Guardian newspaper entitled “What Road to Building a New Communist Party? draws 1,200 in New York City to hear Michael Klonsky of the October League, Don H. Wright of the Revolutionary Union, Mike Hamlin of the Black Workers Congress (BWC) and Irwin Silber of the Guardian. Besides the large crowd at the event the tape and transcript of the evening are heard and read by thousands of activists around the country. The event marks the height of optimism about uniting the various groups of the New Communist Movement in a single party. Earlier forums had drawn 500 each (February 9, “The Role of the Anti-Imperialist Forces in the Antiwar Movement” and February 23, “The Role of the People’s Republic of China in World Affairs”); other forums followed on the “Women and Class Struggle,” “The Question of the Black Nation” and “Roads to Building a Workers Movement,” also drawing 500 each. Speakers in the series included leaders from additional NCM groups, including Harpers Ferry (linked to STO), PRRWO and IWK, and also two revolutionary but non-NCM groups, the Third World Women’s Alliance and PSP, as well as individuals such as William Hinton and Sidney Peck of PCPJ. But by the end of the forum series differences rather than unity had come to the fore. (Guardian April 4, 1973 and following issues, in BTr-4; February 21, 1973)
March 29: The Steelworkers (USW) under I.W. Abel sign the Experimental Negotiating Agreement (ENA) which prohibits industry-wide strikes and promises productivity increases, it fuels the existing rank and file opposition – groups such as the Ad Hoc Committee of Concerned Steelworkers (a Black caucus movement formed in the mid-1960s), RAFT/Rank-and-File Team, and National Steelworkers Rank and File Committee, leading later to the 1976-77 Ed Sadlowski reform campaign for the union presidency; on the regional level, Sadlowski won election for director of District 31 in October 1974. (Green; Fighting; Guardian, April 18, 1973 & November 27, 1974)
March 30-April 8: First U.S. Congress of the PSP draws 2,000-plus in New York City. (The Call, April 1973; Guardian, April 18, 1973; Torres)
March-August: Height of Nixon’s “secret” and illegal bombing of Cambodia, with densely populated zones subject to bombardment almost equal to the total bombardment used in World War II. The bombing had begun in March 1969 while Sihanouk was still in power. (Cambodia; Mandel in NLR 141; Coates in NLR #145; Gitlin)
April 1-8: Nationwide consumer meat boycott protests rising meat prices. (Guardian, April 11, 1973)
April 30: Watergate crisis heats up, Nixon accepts resignations of top aides H.R Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, and fires John Dean as counsel. (Almanac)
April 24: James Forman is expelled from BWC, charged with elitism and resisting the process of consolidating the organization with working class politics in command. The BWC now accelerates its movement toward an orthodox version of Marxism-Leninism Mao-ZeDong Thought. (Georgakas; self-published material in BNCM-1).
April: Bobby Seale, chair of the Black Panther Party, runs for mayor of Oakland getting 43% of the vote (36% according to Marable), registering large numbers of Blacks and paving the way for the victory of Oakland’s first Black mayor, Lionel Wilson, in 1977. (Abron in Black Scholar Nov-Dec 1986; Abron in Underground; Marable)
April: Vietnam Veterans Against the War adds Winter Soldier Organization to its name becoming VVAW/WSO, and becomes an explicitly anti-imperialist organization. (VVAW/WSO)
April: National Caucus of Labor Committees launches “Operation Mop-Up,” physical attacks on CPUSA activists and others on the left which continue until the early part of 1974. A key step in the shift of NCLC from a nominally left (if cult-like) organization into an openly right-wing group, with internal psychological terror, cooperation with police agencies, propagation of anti-Semitism and racism, etc. During late 1973 and through August 1974, members of the Centers for Change group led by Fred Newman ally with LaRouche and join the NCLC. Newman’s group had started as the “If…Then” collective in 1968; after leaving NCLC they formed the International Workers Party and, in 1979, the New Alliance Party, which remained nominally on the left while using psychological-control methods and operating as a cult. A third group allied with NCLC during the Operation Mop-Up period was led by Gino Perente. It too late split and, using various names including the National Labor Federation (NATLFED) and Communist Party Provisional Wing, operated as a cult with nominally left politics. (King; Berlet; “Shadow Politics” Express article in BMIS-1; Guardian, April 25, May 2, May 9 & May 16, 1973)
May Day: Anti-imperialist coalitions initiated by New Communist forces hold May Day celebrations and rallies (mostly on Sunday April 29) in over a dozen cities, the largest in New York draws 2,000. (Guardian, April 25 & May 9, 1973
May 2: Assata Shakur (Joanne Chesimard) linked to the BLA is arrested following a shoot-out on the New Jersey turnpike in which Zayd Malik Shakur and a New Jersey State Trooper were killed. She is convicted of murder on March 25, 1977. Sundiata Acoli, also in the car, initially escapes but is captured two days later and subsequently convicted of murder and imprisoned. (Black Scholar April 1978; Breakthrough Vol. 1 No. 2)
May 24: CL-centered National Continuations Committee/NCC formed at “Conference of North American Marxist-Leninists” that issues resolutions published under the title Marxist-Leninists, Unite! For a time the NCC included BWC, PRRWO and ATM. (see Costello, Chart, Refutation; self-published material in D-4)
May 26: ALSC marks African Liberation Day with demonstrations in more than 30 cities, mobilizing 100,000. In June 1973 it holds the Frogmore (South Carolina) Conference – its “First International Steering Committee Meeting” – which adopts a statement of principles as an “anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist Black United Front” and “encourages Black workers to take the lead.” (Guardian, June 6, 1973; ALSC; SalesJr., Forward No. 3; FM January 1982)
May: Former Debs Caucus people reconstitute the Socialist Party USA at a conference in Milwaukee. (SDHx)
June 15: Massive demonstration supporting French workers at the Lip watch factory who had taken over the factory rather than see it close down. It is the high point of a struggle that concludes with a substantial though not complete workers victory in 1974. (Guardian, March 13, 1974)
June 17: Earl Browder dies (Jaffe)
June 27: Military dictatorship in Uruguay imposed by President Bordaberry; in the mid-1970s Uruguay had more political prisoners per capita than any other country. (MR Feb. 1972; Frontline March 18, 1985 – says coup is in March; NACLA Nov-Dec 1984 & Sept-Dec 1986; Guardian, July 11, 1973)
June: Brotherhood Caucus at the Fremont, California GM plant, within which the OL works, sweeps local union elections, with the caucus’ leader winning the shop-local presidency and then distancing himself from left supporters. Another widely publicized and analyzed workplace experience for the NCM. (O’Brien; OL-TU; the Call, March & July 1973; Guardian, August 29, 1973)
July 9-11: Al Richmond and Dorothy Healey resign from the CPUSA, Healey soon becomes a leader of NAM and Richmond also joins that organization. (Dennis; Healey; Guardian, September 19, 1973)
July 18: The SWP files its suit against government surveillance, leads to release of thousands of pages of evidence of the government’s COINTELPRO activities. Ruling in favor of SWP issued August 25, 1986, and government drops appeal in March 1988, there is a large cash settlement for the SWP. (O’Brien; interview with John Durham. Nov. 12, 1997; Guardian, January 23, 1974; The Militant, March 22, 1999; Pathfinder Book The FBI on Trial)
July 24: Most dramatic of many wildcats that take place in Detroit this summer, when Isaac Shorter and Larry Carter, two Black workers, one a member of CL (check), seize an electric power control cage and shut down the assembly line; they are protected by fellow workers, Chrysler capitulates, and the picture of the two of them being carried out of the factory on the shoulders of workers is widely published, including in the mainstream press. (Georgakas; Guardian, August 8, 1973)
July 27-28: Founding Congress of the Union of Democratic Filipinos/Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP) as a revolutionary mass organization supporting national democratic revolution in the Philippines and socialism in the U.S. KDP begins publication of Ang Katipunan newspaper (AK) in October 1973, replacing Kalayaan which ceased publishing in August. (Toribio; self-published material in BREV-2)
July: Founding meeting of the Trilateral Commission, a Rockefeller-initiated “forum/pressure group” of “transnationalists” largely organized as a response to Nixon’s “economic nationalist” moves when he initiated the NEP in August 1971. The Trilateralists (who get accused of being some kind of grand anti-American conspiracy by the far right) do play a large role in U.S. politics in the next few years, especially in the election of Jimmy Carter and his administration. (MR December 1977)
August 13-28: Rival “Conference of North American Marxist-Leninists” to the CL-sponsored version forms the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists (COUSML). (Chart; Refutation; O’Brien)
August 24-29: Tenth Congress of the CPC, dominated by central cadre led by Zhou Enlai. Officially, CPC still puts forward united front against the two superpowers line, and hits the “collusion and contention between the two superpowers,” but fighting “hegemonism” (that is, the USSR) is increasingly the more prominent point. Zhou Enlai and Wang Hungwen (later of the Gang of Four) give the main reports. (Trial; Tenth) Deng is back in a high post. According to the NYT2/20/97 and Deng, Deng first appeared in public again at a banquet for Sihanouk in April. (NYT2/20/97; Deng; Guardian, September 12, 1973)
August 31: Jury acquits 8 VVAW members and supporters in Gainesville, Florida – the Gainesville 8 – on charges of conspiring to stage on armed attack on the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami. (Guardian, September 12, 1973)
Summer: Conference of the “underground” press in Boulder changes the names of the Underground Press Syndicate to the Alternative Press Syndicate, a “watershed” in two eras of non-mainstream journalism. (Berlet in Underground)
September 11: Bloody CIA-organized coup in Chile topples the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende, who is killed while resisting the military assault. Thousands of leftists are rounded-up, disappeared and executed. Large-scale protests in the U.S. and around the world. China quickly recognizes the new Pinochet dictatorship and at a U.N. meeting in Geneva is the only government (except for the U.S.) to abstain from voting for a resolution to aid Chilean refugees. Generally China develops warm relations with the junta and does not join the widespread international protests. A substantial movement in solidarity with Chilean resistance takes shape in the U.S., including groups such as Non-Intervention in Chile (NICH) and others. (Maitan; China Alliance; solidarity material in NACLA various issues and BMOV-4; Guardian, September 19, 1973).
September 21-23: UFW holds first convention, approves a constitution, elects director César Chávez president, amid new grape boycott and lettuce boycott. On April 8, 1974 the AFL-CIO backs the grape and lettuce boycotts April 8, 1974. (Guardian, October 3, 1973 & April 24, 1974)
September 23: Pablo Neruda dies in a hospital in Santiago Chile, reportedly of heart collapse resulting from cancer, amid the Chilean coup and its murderous aftermath. (Guardian, October 3, 1973)
September: The Fourth Non-Aligned Summit meets in Algiers, with 75 participating nations (up from 53 in Lusaka in 1970); the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam and the Royal Government of National Union of Cambodia are included as full members, having been accepted at the Non-Aligned Conference in Georgetown, Guyana August 8-12, 1972. The meeting formulates a proposal for a “New International Economic Order” – adopted by the U.N. special session in May 1974, see entry below – and takes initial steps toward a proposal for a New Information Order. Fidel Castro of Cuba plays a large role, among other things explicitly opposing the tendency to “lump the Soviet Union together with the U.S.” in the “Superpowers Thesis.” (Black Scholar December 1976; Fact Sheet; Guardian, April 24, 1974)
October 1: Celebrations of China’s National Day in two dozen cities sponsored by the U.S.-China Friendship Association, with 5,000 attending programs in New York and San Francisco. (Guardian, October 10, 1973)
October 6: Beginning of “Yom Kippur War” in Middle East. Israel briefly runs short of planes and ammunition; U.S. rushes supplies but European countries do not allow U.S. planes to use European airfields in the effort, except for Portugal, and the supplies are sent via the Azores. And, to intimidate the Soviets and prevent them from aiding Egypt, the U.S. puts its worldwide military on Defcon III alert on October 24, high readiness involving deployment of nuclear weapons. An outpouring of support in the Third World for the Arab side. (Black Scholar November 1973; Almanac; MR May 1975; Hobsbawm; Coates in NLR #145; Guardian, October 17 & 24, 1973)
October 8-15: Week of Solidarity with Chile sees actions in 35 cities across the U.S. (Guardian, October 24, 1973)
October 10: Spiro Agnew resigns as vice-president and then in federal court in Baltimore, pleads no contest to charges of evasion of income taxes, fined and given three years probation, He is replaced by Gerald Ford. (Almanac; Guardian, October 24, 1973)
October 10: USSR changes position and officially recognizes the Sihanouk-led Royal Government of National Union in Cambodia. (Guardian, October 24, 1973)
October 12-14: Official founding conference of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee-DSOC in New York City under the leadership of Michael Harrington, Irving Howe, Jack Clark among others; 200-300 members. (SDHx)
October 15: Trial of Karl Armstrong, admitted participant in the bombing of the Army Math Research Center in Madison in 1970 in which a researcher was killed, begins; it will be a week of testimony by antiwar activists explaining Armstrong’s motives in acting against the war. On November 1, Armstrong is sentenced to 23 years in prison. (Guardian, October 31 & November 14, 1973; personal papers in D-1)
October 16: Nobel Committee announces it had awarded the 1973 Peace Prize jointly to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho; a week later Le Duc Tho declined the prize saying “peace has not yet really been established in Vietnam. (Spoke)
October 20: “Saturday Night Massacre” firings of top officials, a turning point in the Watergate scandal. enveloping the Nixon administration. Following the Massacre, the grassroots National Campaign to Impeach Nixon is founded. (Almanac; Glick)
November 16: Unsuccessful popular uprising against the Greek junta, suppressed by violence and declaration of martial law. (MR February 1974)
December 14: U.N. votes 104 to 5, with 19 abstentions, to “reaffirm the inalienable right of the Puerto Rican people to self-determination and independence”; there is a virtual news blackout on the vote in the U.S. press. (Triple Jeopardy September-October 1974; Guardian, December 26, 1973)
Second half of the year: National Liaison Committee collapses; IWK leaves in the fall (IWK Journal #3); BWC and PRRWO break some time later, and many RU members quit the RU as well. During 1973 the RU launched its nationwide monthly newspaper, Revolution. (Hamilton, Costello; Chart; IWK Journal No. 1 & No. 3; Communist/RCP Vol. 2 No. 1; Revolution May 1974).
Late in the year: China ends all aid to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman which had been fighting the feudal Omani regime and its main backer, the Shah of Iran. Throughout this year and the ensuing ones China supports Iran “strengthening its defenses” and opposes the slogan “No Arms to the Shah,” which is advanced by the Iranian left and the activist Iranian Student Association in the U.S. The October League in the U.S. also opposes the slogan “No Arms to the Shah” in The Call October 1974. The Omani guerrillas are essentially defeated by Anglo-Iranian forces in 1975 (China Alliance; Second Cold War; Disney says support for the PFLO is dropped in 1972)
Late in the Year: “Energy Crisis”: Following the 1973 Arab-Israeli war the Arab oil-producing nations cut back production and conduct a “selective embargo” of the U.S. and a few other countries; OPEC (which had been founded in 1960) raises prices. These acts are partly responsible – but not as much as manipulation by major oil companies – for the “energy crisis” which hits headlines and gas pumps in winter 1973-74, and is also a factor in the big recession of 1974-75 (see below). The left and NCM groups conduct extensive propaganda in relation to the “energy crisis,” e.g. RU’s United Front Press pamphlet on the topic. There is also a large “citizen movement” response around utility rates and other issues, and a 1974 Ralph Nader-initiated “Critical Mass” conference focusing on the issue of nuclear power, a gathering which is a factor in the anti-nuclear power movement’s rise later in the decade – see Clamshell/Seabrook entry June 1976 below. (CrossRoads No. 23; MR January 1974 and April 1974; Seventh Summit; reference to RU pamphlet in self-published material in D-10; Black Scholar November 1973; Second Cold War; Boyte)
Asian Study Group formed by Jerry Tung, who had left PL in 1971 (Road; Communist/RCP Vol. 1 No. 2; Wei)
By early 1973 the RU is organized in 15 cities; by late 1974, it has collectives in about 25. Beginning in 1972 the RU also initiated the formation of the Attica Brigade as an anti-imperialist student organization – specifically to fill the vacuum left by the demise of SDS – under its leadership, an Eastern regional conference drew 250 from 31 campus chapters to New York March 31-April 1, 1973. The group changed its name to the Revolutionary Student Brigade at a national conference June 15-17, 1974 and officially became the RCP’s youth group after the RCP founding congress in September 1975, at a November 8-10, 1975 national convention. During this time RU also initiated local worker monthly papers in about 20 cities and tried to build “intermediate workers organizations,” including Unemployed Workers Organizing Committees. (O’Brien; self-published material in D-10; Revolution May & July 1974 & November 15, 1975; Guardian, April 11, 1973 & June 12, 1974)
Open Letter calling for a Mass Party of the People by Arthur Kinoy appears in the December issue of Liberation magazine, after circulating in various forms since its initial drafting in summer 1972. A “National Interim Committee for a Mass Party of the People” – later the Mass Party Organizing Committee (MPOC) – was also formed and several regional and national meetings about the proposal were held through 1973. The group continued through the 1976 Hard Times Conference and July 4 Coalition and then de facto dissolved into the newly formed “People’s Alliance.” (see below) though MPOC is still listed as Arthur Kinoy’s ID tag at least through the 1979 meetings that gave rise to the Coalition for a People’s Alternative. Also, the “Revolution and Democracy” article by Harry Boyte and Frank Ackerman appears in issue No. 16 of Socialist Revolution (late 1973 or early ’74), also published as a pamphlet by NAM. (Open Letter; R&D; People’s Alliance folder in D-9)
Jamaica Plain Tenants Action Group (TAG) formed, one of the most successful of the small Marxist but not-party-building collectives of ex-student activists. TAG changed its name to City Life in December 1978. (RA January-February 1979)
Young activists mobilize to help build Agbayani Village in Delano; the Village is a UFW-sponsored project that will house retired farmworkers, especially veterans of the 1965 Grape Strike that launched the UFW. KDP coordinates the activist mobilization. The formal dedication of the Village is June 15, 1974. (Agbayani; TWWA Report 1974 in DTW-1)
A Grain of Sand cultural group releases A Grain of Sand: Music for the Sturggle by Asians in America, the first Asian American album. The trio of Chris Kando Ijima, Nobuko Joanne Miyamoto and “Charlie” Chin frequently sang at demonstrations and activities around the country. (Wei)
The National Black Feminists Organization (NBFO) is founded in New York but does not survive long. Smaller collectives, such as the Combahee River Collective, were more successful. (Radical America, Vol. 18, Nos. 2 & 3)
First issue of Working Papers on the Kapitalistate issued by an international group of “Marxian theoreticians and researchers studying the advanced capitalist and imperialist state.” (Kapitalistate 2/1973)
Wages for Housework campaign/organization makes its presence felt in the women’s movement, taking its theoretical inspiration from Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s article “Women and the Subversion of the Community” in The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James (Falling Wall Press) which is published this year. (Fragments)
The Heritage Foundation is set up by Joseph Coors. (Second Cold War)
Reflecting the new congressional aggressiveness in trying to put limits on unilateral presidential conduct of foreign policy, as well as sentiment which will become the “Vietnam Syndrome,” Congress passes the War Powers Act trying to limit the President’s ability to unilaterally commit troops and wage war. The following year, 1974, it passes the Hughes-Ryan Amendment limiting the power of the CIA. (Reunion; Second Cold War)
Hip Hop – including break dancing, rap and graffiti – begins to take shape as a street movement in the heart of the Bronx ghetto. The most immediate influences on the new style-genre-subculture-movement include Gil Scott-Heron, the Last Poets and James Brown’s hard-core funk; key figures in the new movement are Afrika Bambaataa, Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash. The movement soon spreads to Puerto Rican as well as Black youth, but is not “noticed” by the mainstream until the very late 1970s and early ‘80s – see 1979 entry below. (RA Vol. 18, No. 6; CrossRoads No. 13).
The height of post-war prosperity (seen only in retrospect of course): in 1973 real wages reach their highest level post-World War II and have been declining ever since. Median household income, corrected for inflation, is also no higher in the early 1990s than in 1973, despite the fact that almost 60% of families rely on two incomes in the ‘90s compared to just over 40% of families in the early ‘70s. The GNP begins to fall in the first quarter 1974 (see below). In historical retrospect, 1973 is generally seen as a “turning point” year in post-war history, and it is worldwide: from 1960 to 1973 industrial output in the OECD states rose by 6% per year, from 1973 to 1980 it rose by only 2% a year. (For the list of the 21 OECD member states, see Hobsbawm page 361) Stanley Aronowitz opens his 1996 The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism “since the great break in the world economic and political environment in 1973”; Eric Hobsbawm (The Age of Extremes) divides the “short 20th century” into three periods, 1914-1945, 1945-early 1970s, and “early ‘70s-1991, and most often uses 1973 as the dividing line between the last two periods, as in “the decades since 1973 were to be once again an age of crisis.” (CrossRoads No. 23; Hobsbawm; Aronowitz; Second Cold War)
The Polisario Liberation Front is founded to fight for the independence of the Western Sahara, first against Spanish colonialism and after 1975 against Morocco. (Frontline, November 24, 1986 & January 18, 1988)
Publication of Al Richmond, A Long View from the Left: Memoirs of an American Revolutionary (Houghton Mifflin, Boston) – issued in 1975 as a Delta paperback; The Puerto Rican Papers: Notes on the Re-Emergence of a Nation by Alfredo Lopez (New York); Ramsey Clark and Roy Wilkens, chairmen, Search and Destroy: A Report by the Commission of Inquiry into the Black Panthers and the Police (New York, Metropolitan Applied Research Center, Inc.); Revolutionary Suicide, by Huey P. Newton (Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, New York); Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York, Random House) – issued as a Vintage paperback the next year; Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises; The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (New York: McGraw Hill); Them and Us: Struggles of a Rank-and-File Union, by James J. Matles and James Higgins (Prentice-Hall); Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York, Vintage); Robert F. Williams, Negroes With Guns (Chicago: Third World Press); The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, by Alfred W. McCoy (New York, Harper Colophon Books); My War with the CIA: The Memoirs of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, by Norodom Sihanouk as related to Wilfred Burchett (Pantheon Books, New York); The Consumer and Corporate Accountability, edited by Ralph Nader (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich); Corporate Power in America, by Ralph Nader and Mark Green (New York, Grossman); Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, by Eduardo Galeano (Monthly Review Press, New York); The New Socialist Revolution, by Michael Lerner (Delacorte Press, New York); The Marxism of Che Guevara: Philosophy, Economics and Revolutionary Warfare, by Michael Lowy (Monthly Review Press, New York); Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London, New Left Books); James O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (St. Martin’s Press, New York); A Theology of Liberation, Gustavo Gutiérrez (Maryknoll, N.Y., Orbis) – first published in Peru in 1971, and considered the “classic presentation of Liberation Theology” – see MR July-August 1984) and related, The Cry of the People put out by Brazilian Bishops (see NLR #154); Cleveland Sellers, with Robert Terrell, The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC (New York, Morrow); Nicholas von Hoffman, We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against (Greenwich, Connecticut, Fawcett Publications); Donald Freed, Agony in New Haven: The Trial of Bobby Seale, Ericka Huggins and the Black Panther Party (New York, Simon and Schuster); Africa Information Service (Editors), Return to The Source: Selected Speeches by Amilcar Cabral (Monthly Review Press, New York & London, with Africa Information Service);
Publication also of two important “Marxist Feminist” books, by British authors, which have a strong influence on the development of U.S. socialist-feminism over the next few years: Women’s Estate, by Juliet Mitchell (Vintage Books, New York) and Women’s Consciousness, Man’s World, by Sheila Rowbotham (Penguin Books, London). Other later books in the largely non-U.S. Marxist Feminist current include Michele Barrett’s Women’s Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist-Feminist Analysis (Verso, London, 1980). (Source: “The Impossible Marriage: A Marxist Critique of Socialist Feminism,” Line of March No. 17, Spring 1985)
Release of Constantin Costa Gavras film State of Siege, based on the Tupamaros’ struggle in Uruguay (NACLA May-June 1974 says the film opened in 1972), and Perry Henzell film The Harder They Come.
January 3: Ron Kovic and others found the American Veterans Movement, call for Nixon’s impeachment and increased benefits for veterans. (Guardian, April 17, 1974)
January 6: Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siquieros dies at age 77. (Guardian, January 16, 1974)
January 21: Landmark unanimous Supreme Court decision in Lau v. Nichols, a suit filed by San Francisco non-English speaking Chinese students against the S.F. School Board, mandating bilingual education to ensure equal educational opportunity under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (Wei)
February 1-3: ALSC Steering Committee Conference in Greensboro with 51 local committees in 27 states and 6 countries represented. The meeting reaffirms a Marxist-oriented Statement of Principles. The influence of Marxism in the organization had risen especially after several ALSC members visited Africa in 1973 and held extensive discussions there with Marxist-Leninist-oriented militants from FRELIMO among others; they returned and began the study of Marxism-Leninism. Over the next period political differences heighten within the organization between Marxist and nationalist-oriented tendencies. A pivotal event in the struggle is the conference held at Howard University May 23-24 – see below. Meanwhile, just the month before the Steering Committee meeting, in January 1974, many of the leading activists in ALSC from Malcolm X Liberation University, People’s College, Youth Organization for Black Unity and others secretly formed the Revolutionary Workers League (RWL) as a cadre organization. (ALSC; SalesJr; Forward No. 3; Hutchings; Alkalimat/Johnson; Bolshevik No. 1; Baraka in Black Scholar January-February 1975 and Black World July 1975; Debate in Black Scholar in various issues of Vol. 6)
February 4: Patty Hearst is kidnapped by Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), which had earlier (November 6, 1973) assassinated Marcus Foster, Black Superintendent of the Oakland public schools. On May 17 (Weather incorrectly says May 4) authorities besieged most of the SLA at a house in Los Angeles and killed six people in a fiery shoot-out. Patti Hearst, who had apparently gone over to her captors and participated in several bank robberies, and other SLA members were captured on September 18, 1975. (Bennion; TWWA 1974 report in DTW-1; Almanac; Rolling Stone)
February 13: Soviet Union strips Alexander Solzhenitsyn of his citizenship and deports him. The most immediate cause seems to have been publication at the end of 1973 of his book The Gulag Archipelago in Paris, it is issued in spring 1974 in the U.S. by Harper and Row. Among other things, the Solzhenitsyn affair kicks off the rightist,, anti-Soviet crusade of the “new philosophers” in France, largely ex-Maoists and former participants in the upheaval of 1968; reaching its height in the late 1970s, the campaign transforms the political contours of the French intelligentsia. (Guardian January 30, 1974 and February 27, 1974; NLR #171)
February: Huge British miner’s strike – following the successful nationwide strike in 1972 which had been the first since 1926 (“1972-74 marked a high tide of trade union élan within the British working class”/NLR #161) – is the concentration point of several years resistance to the anti-labor policies of the Tory Heath government. Heath calls elections and the Tories are ousted in the balloting on February 28, these elections being “more clearly a class confrontation than any previous elections since the Second World War”; essentially the British miners brought down the Heath government. (Radical America Vol. 8 No. 5/Sept-Oct 1974; Aronson in NLR No. 152/July-August 1985)
February: Fourth World Congress (since reunification in 1963) of the Fourth International. (Fourth)
February: Abbie Hoffman goes underground to avoid drug bust charges, becomes an organizer on environmental issues in upstate New York under the name Barry Freed. He turns himself in September 4, 1980 after being interviewed on Barbara Walters the night before. (Jezer)
February: Four groups of Latin Americas armed left – the MLN-Tupamaros of Uruguay, the National Liberation Army (ELN) of Bolivia, the MIR of Chile and the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP) of Argentina – announce the formation of a joint revolutionary council – the Junta for Revolutionary Coordination – to coordinate the struggle against imperialism throughout Latin America. (NACLA March 1974)
March 24-25: Founding meeting of the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) with 58 unions officially represented. (O’Brien; Southern Patriot, April 1974)
April 10: Deng Xiaoping’s speech at the United Nations putting forward the “Theory of the Three Worlds.” (Mao Makes 5; Speech Text in BICM-5; Viewpoint Vol. 3 No. 1; Deng)
April 25: Portuguese Armed Forces Movement overthrows Portugal’s fascist regime led by Marcello Caetano, who succeeded Antonio Salazar on his death July 27, 1970. Period of mass struggle and upheaval follows, with the working class and left-wing of the AFM often having significant initiative. After internal struggles within the immediate post-April 25 regime, a reorganized government announced August 4 that it was recognizing the independence of Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique. Left especially has some initiative after defeating rightist coup attempt in March 1975. The pro-China Portuguese Maoists side with the right and the pro-Western “Socialists” against the left and the strong CP, a more divisive issue in European Maoism than in U.S. Maoism. Unfolding revolutionary process is stopped by November 25, 1975 declaration of martial law and crackdown on the left by the Socialist Party’s Mario Soares. (Burchett in Guardian May 5, 1976, reprinted in Background; NCM-MS; MR September and October 1975; CRSP; Century; Revolution June 1975; Guardian, May 8, 1974 & August 14, 1974)
April 27: Rallies calling for Nixon’s impeachment organized by the left-led National Campaign to Impeach Nixon occur in several cities, 10,000 turn out in D.C., there is significant New Communist Movement participation – others on the left are active in the coalition as well. In the buildup to the demonstrations, on April 19, 21 members of the Attica Brigade took over the Statue of Liberty for a weekend and attract substantial press coverage. (Guardian, May 1 & May 8, 1974)
May 23-24: ALSC Conference at Howard University on “Which Way Forward in Building the Pan African United Front?” (sometimes referred to as “Which Way For the Black Liberation Movement?,” or “Conference on Racism and Imperialism”) draws 700-800 people. The conference is a key point in the ideological struggle between Marxist-oriented and nationalist-oriented activists, with the Marxist position argued by Abdul Alkalimat, Owusu Sadauki, Nelson Johnson, Amiri Baraka (who announces a change in his previous ideology to the surprise of many) and others prevailing over the nationalists led by Stokely Carmichael and the AAPRP. The day after the conference, on May 25, over 10,000 march on ALD in Washington, D.C. (ALSC; SalesJr; Forward No. 3; Hutchings; Alkalimat/Johnson; Bolshevik No. 1; Baraka in Black Scholar January-February 1975 and Black World July 1975; Debate in Black Scholar in various issues of Vol. 6; Triple Jeopardy Summer 1974)
May 22: 6,500 Alabama coal miners walk off their jobs to protest imports of South African coal; UMW says it is opposed to the imports from the apartheid regime. (Guardian, June 12, 1974)
May: RU announces that “the communist movement and the mass movement” have “come to the end of a period in their development; the central task is no longer “building the struggle, consciousness and revolutionary unity of the working class and developing its leadership in the anti-imperialist struggle.” Rather, “for a brief period” Party Building is now the central task. Major national speaking tour of leadership is organized that summer to promote this position; work to put together a “Draft Party Programme” and circulate it is begun. (Hamilton; May 1974 issue of Revolution reprinted in Red Papers 6)
May: August Twenty-Ninth Movement (ATM), a mainly Chicano Marxist-Leninist organization, is founded at a Unity Congress. (Costello; Revolutionary Cause January 1978 in NCOBD file in BLM-4)
May: Sixth Special Session of the U.N. General Assembly adopts Declaration and Programme of Action on the Establishment of a New Economic Order. The “New International Economic Order” concept is pressed by Third World countries at the U.N. and through the Non-Aligned Movement, where it had been formulated at the Fourth Summit in Algiers in 1973, see above. (Seventh Summit; MR May 1978)
Spring: Issue No. 1 of Latin American Perspectives: “Dependency Theory: A Critical Reassessment” (Ad in MR November 1980)
Spring: National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case is set up. (Guardian, June 5, 1974)
June 1: First nationwide strike of clothing workers in 53 years when 110,000 members of ACW walk out in 30 states. The strike ends with some wage gains after one week. (Guardian, June 12 & June 19, 1974)
June 15-17: About 450 students from 80 campuses and form a nationwide student anti-imperialist organization, changing the name of the sponsoring Attica Brigade to the Revolutionary Student Brigade. (Guardian, June 26 & July 3, 1974)
June 18-21: Sixth Pan-African Congress (Six-PAC), the largest ever and the first held since 1945, is held in Tanzania, U.S. African-American delegation is the largest. (SalesJr; Forward No. 3)
June: International Indian Treaty Conference convened by AIM – which has been the target of severe repression since the Wounded Knee siege – at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Several thousand Indians from North America, along with representatives from Latin America and Hawaii, form the International Indian Treaty Council. (Dunbar)
July 1: Isabel (Evita) Perón becomes Argentine president after the death of her husband. Government moves rightward, right-wing death squads kill hundreds, the beginnings of what later will be called the “dirty war” – see March 24 1976 entry below, the aboveground left is being decimated, guerrilla groups still operate. (MR January 1976)
July 4: 8,00 rally against racist and political repression in Raleigh, North Carolina is an action called by the NAARP, Angela Davis and Ralph Abernathy are main speakers. (Guardian, July 17, 1974)
July 15: Jung Sai garment workers in San Francisco go out on six-month strike, IWK and Wei Min She, linked to RU, are active in strike support and have sharp conflicts with one another. (Wei; IWK Journal No. 2)
July 23: Resignation of the “colonels” right-wing junta in Greece, followed by the first civilian government since 1967. (Second Cold War; Almanac)
July 24: Weather Underground Organization issues Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism; copies “mysteriously” appear at the doors of bookstores and left institutions, within a year or two, 25,000-35,000 copies are in circulation. In the wake of PF’s publication, the Prairie Fire Distribution Committee, later the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, is formed as an “aboveground” organization; and in Spring 1975 WUO puts out the first issue of Osawatomie magazine. (self-published material in BREV-3; Weather; Guardian, October 9, 1974)
July 31: Issue of El Malcriado, the UFW paper, says that “illegals must either be granted full democratic rights, or they must go.” UFW position, which in practice often emphasizes the call to deport “illegals,” is a source of major controversy within the Chicano movement and the left during this period. (Guardian, August 21, 1974)
Summer: Study group of women in the Bay Area take the initial steps in forming a Marxist-Leninist group first named the Workers Party for Proletarian Socialism, later to become the Democratic Workers Party/DWP. (Lalich; DWP History; DWP Dissolution)
August 8: Nixon announces he will resign effective noon the next day; succeeded as president by Gerald Ford, who pardons Nixon on September 8. (Almanac)
August 19-23: AFT Convention elects Albert Shanker President over incumbent liberal David Selden. (Guardian, September 4, 1974)
August 27: White guard at the Beaufort County Jail in North Carolina is found dead, naked from the waist down; eight days later Joann Little, a Black woman inmate who had fled, turns herself in saying she had killed the guard in self-defense as he attempted to rape her. A major national defense campaign for Little is launched and she is acquitted in August 1975. (Triple Jeopardy January-February 1975; Guardian August 27, 1975 in BTr-5)
August 28: After 11 years of efforts to get a foothold at J.P. Stevens, the Textile Workers of America wins its first representation election at a Stevens mill, in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, the company’s largest single plant. Along with the Harlan County victory the next day, this victory seems to herald a new union upsurge in the South, but from there little progress is made, despite a long campaign against and boycott of J.P. Stevens (Guardian, September 18, 1974; Democratic Left September 1979)
August 29: Duke Power Co. signs agreement with UMW, ending bitter 13-month long miners strike in Harlan County, Kentucky with a miners’ victory. New Communist activists have been active in strike support work and among the miners. (Guardian, September 4 & 11, 1974; Democratic Left September 1979).
August: Police charge Huey Newton with assault on Preston Callins, a tailor, and murder of prostitute Kathleen Smith; Newton flees to Cuba, Elaine Brown becomes Panther Party chair – Bobby Seale having been driven out of the party by Huey Newton before he fled – and the BPP concentrates all its work in Oakland. After Lionel Wilson is elected Oakland mayor in 1977, with Panther support, Huey returns to Oakland and faces trial, the results are mistrials and charges are eventually dropped. But Huey quickly clashes with Elaine Brown as he reassumes power in the party and she flees Oakland. (Abron in Underground; CrossRoads No. 53; Brown)
August: CIA begins sending aid to FNLA in Angola led by Holden Roberto. (Second Cold War)
August 31-September 2: 250 delegates meet in Los Angeles and found the National U.S.-China Peoples Friendship Association, already more than 35 local Friendship Associations have been organized since the effort began in summer 1971. (Guardian, September 11, 1974 in BTr-4; and Guardian August 4, 1971 & October 10, 1973)
September 9-10: Guinea-Bissau declares independence from Portugal after many years of armed struggle; the PAIGC, which had been founded in 1956, assumes power. Cape Verde declares independence later on July 5, 1975 and joins with Guinea-Bissau. Sao Tome becomes independent July 12, 1975. (Guardian July 7, 1975 in BTr5; MR December 1975; Almanac; Second Cold War)
September 12: Following devastating drought and famine, worker and student strikes and mutinies in the armed forces, and the outbreak of revolution in February, the Haile Selassie regime crumbles in Ethiopia – Selassie is deposed September 12 – and the self-proclaimed Marxist military council known as the Dergue assumes power and declares a “socialist revolution.” Many industries are nationalized in December 1974 and a land reform program announced in March 1975. There is also repression against popular leaders and critics on the left, which reaches its height in a “red terror” of 1977-78. The Dergue allies with USSR and Cuba, fighting between regime and Eritrean ELF-EPLF continues despite various (including Cuban) attempts to mediate. (MR June 1978; Second Cold War)
September 16: Judge Fred Nichol dismisses all charges against Wounded Knee defendants and AIM leaders Dennis Banks and Russell Means after an 8-month trial on grounds of government misconduct. There are a large number of trials of activists as the government persecutes those who had participating in the 1973 uprising; Washington’s strategy is to bring as many people to trial as possible irrespective of the possibility of conviction, in order to keep the Indian movement politically on the defensive and attempt to bankrupt it financially. Four insurgents are convicted of conspiracy October 17. (Guardian, October 2 & October 30, 1974; Hurricane)
September: CL and other smaller groups in its National Continuations Committee hold the Founding Congress of the Communist Labor Party (CLP) of North America, Nelson Peery is selected chair. (self-published material in D-3, Costello; O’Brien)
October 7: A white student is shot and killed during one of many confrontations surrounding desegregation of a high school in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. A Black youth, Gary Tyler, is framed and convicted of murder (his appeal goes to the U.S. Supreme Court and is denied January 24, 1977), and a “Free Gary Tyler” campaign is a focus of anti-racist activism in the South for the next several years, especially taken up by both revolutionary nationalist and NCM activists. Prominent among the NCM activists are members of MLOC and of SCEF, which during 1975-76 comes under the control of the OL – see entry for September 4-5, 1976. (Unite! Vol. 2 No. 4; Greensboro; Southern Patriot, February, September & November 1975 & June-July & September 1976, January & November 1977)
October 11: RU leads a delegation of 50 to “meet with” the Guardian staff but overloads the building elevator, which sinks to the bottom of the building; they set up a picketline instead. The Guardian staff terms the action a “strong-arm” tactic and attempt at physical intimidation. The incident, the same month as RU’s “Smash the Boston Busing Plan” headline in Revolution, marks a definitive break between the RU and the Guardian, as well as many others in the NCM. (Guardian, October 23, 1974 in left folder, BTr-4; Guardian, November 20, 1974)
October 27: Day of Solidarity with Puerto Rico, massive 20,000-plus rally at Madison Square Garden organized principally by the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP), which from 1974 to 1976-77 has substantial influence within the Puerto Rican community and also in the broad U.S. left. There is controversy within the New Communist Movement over the event and the September 5-8, 1975 conference in Havana on international solidarity with Puerto Rican independence (see below) with the main Maoist organizations attacking the prominence of “revisionists.” At the Madison Square Garden rally, Jerry Tung of Workers Viewpoint Organization puts forward this line by calling for “superpowers out of Puerto Rico” and is drowned out by the crowd’s shouts of unidad. (MINP; Puerto Rico; Guardian September 24, 1975 in BTr-5, November 6 & November 13, 1974)
October: CAP adopts Marxism-Leninism Mao-Zedong thought at its General Assembly. (Forward No. 3)
October: Congress limits campaign donations by individuals and opens the door to the surrogate system of Political Action Committees (PACs) with passage of the Federal Election Campaign Act. (Second Cold War)
October: Publication of Red Papers 7 by the RU, How Capitalism Has Been Restored in the Soviet Union and What This Means for the World Struggle. This was one of the two main attempts by U.S. Maoist groups to prove the capitalist restoration thesis; the other is Martin Nicolaus’ book published by OL in 1975. Also see Bettleheim’s writings on the subject, which appear in various works (Red Papers 6; Myth, page 101.)
November 13: Karen Silkwood is killed in a mysterious automobile “accident” on the way to a meeting with a union official and New York Times reporter to reveal safety violations at the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant near Oklahoma City. The long lawsuit over the contamination of her home ends May 18, 1979 with a huge jury verdict against Kerr-McGee. (Organizer, July 1979; Green; Rolling Stone)
November 13: PLO chair Yasir Arafat opens the U.N. debate on Palestine with a speech to the General Assembly after the U.N. had voted 106-4 to invite the PLO to speak “as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” At the conclusion of the session the Assembly votes to affirm Palestinian rights “to a national independence and sovereignty” and to give the PLO Permanent Observer status at the U.N. (Triple Jeopardy January-February 1975; MINP; Shots; Roots; Guardian, November 27, 1974)
November 14: Jane Alpert surrenders to authorities four-and-a-half years after going underground, her lawyer announcing her “renunciation of radical activities and her conversion to the feminist movement” and the FBI announcing that she was cooperating fully with them. One of the activists she had been underground with, Pat Swinton, was captured by the FBI March 12, 1975. A sharp debate over Alpert’s actions breaks out within the women’s movement, whose radical feminist wing is at this point in decline in favor of a far less activist “cultural feminism.” The women’s movement controversy is further heightened when fugitive Susan Saxe, who participated in a 1970 bank robbery in which a policeman was killed and became lesbian while underground but refused to renounce the “male left,” is captured on March 27, 1975 and not supported by many of the feminists who supported Alpert. (Echols)
November: First issue of Dollars and Sense, initially a monthly bulletin on economic affairs published by URPE. Between September 1974 and mid-1975, URPE chapters and collectives organize nearly 100 “teach-ins and teach-outs” on the U.S. economic crisis. (URPE/Crisis)
Fall: Boston busing crisis, which continues through 1975. Judge Garrity’s initial desegregation order – won after a decade-plus struggle over segregation and inferior education – is issued June 21, 1974; demonstrations and confrontations begin in September just before school opens on September 12; after schools open there are boycotts by whites and violence against Black students. Haitian Andre Yvon Jean-Louis is beaten October 7, with much publicity. There are sharp differences within the NCM over what approach to take to the controversy, with the RU particularly isolating itself: the October issue of RU’s newspaper Revolution carried the headline “People Must Unite to Smash Boston Busing Plan.” December 9, 1975 Judge Garrity puts South Boston High in receivership. (Freedom; It’s Not the Bus; RU material in D-10; Hunter-Green; Guardian, October 2 1974 and following issues through the fall)
Second half : Official onset of the worst economic downturn in the U.S. since the great depression, as all four quarters of 1974 show a drop in GNP. This follows mounting inflation through the early ‘70s. (President Ford held a summit conference on inflation in September). Drop in the GNP in the last quarter of 1974 is the steepest of any quarter in 16 years. Official unemployment hits 9.2% in May 1975, the highest since the 1930s. Official recovery begins when the GNP starts to go up for the second quarter of 1975 after five consecutive quarters going down. This recession is especially important in connection with the point made in 1973 above: that 1973 was in fact “the height of post-war prosperity” with real wages at their highest level post-World War II. On the left, this recession, and the capitalist attacks on workers’ wages and benefits that preceded it (for example, Nixon’s 1971 NEP “wage-price freeze”) and accompanied it, are frequently referred to as marking “the end of the post-war social contract” or the “end of the post-war labor-capital informal agreement.” (O’Brien; Guardian articles in National Politics set in BTr-5; CrossRoads No. 23; Davis in NLR #149/Jan-Feb 1985; Line of March No. 5)
The military and executive proclaim “counter-force” (use of nuclear weapons to win a war, in this case particularly “tactical” nukes, as opposed to “massive retaliation”) as a major option of U.S. strategy; not the first time the idea had been ballooned, but in the wake of Vietnam and amid detente and rough parity with the USSR, it assumes a new significance. (Second Cold War)
Campaign to free Inez García, a Chicana who is sentenced to prison for killing a man for rape. (Chicano)
The Haymarket Peoples Fund is started by radicals with inherited wealth in Boston. During the early 1970s a number of similar funds are launched across the country, Vanguard Public Foundation in San Francisco is among the first. In 1979 six of these foundations joined together to form the Funding Exchange, which by the early 1990s has some 15 member Funds. (Haymarket Fund Website; North Star Fund 1991-92 Annual report in DCR-3)
The Committee on the Present Danger, a group of 141 anti-detente Republicans and Democrats first established during Cold War I and growing out of the “traditional right” is reassembled. Hooking up with this motion is the rising “neoconservative” group of Democrats and former Democrats (Henry Jackson, Daniel Moynihan, Norman Podhoretz, Jeanne Kirkpatrick et al), some of whom were dovish during the Vietnam War but all of whom are intensely hostile to the USSR and focused on the issues of Israel and Soviet Jewry. This current is a major force behind the 1974 passage of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment linking trade with the USSR to the Soviet’s allowance of Jewish emigration. Note also that top AFL-CIO leaders were prominent members of the Committee on the Present Danger, consistent with the Federation’s longstanding support of Cold War policies not least through direct anti-left action via its American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD). At the same time, the New Right Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress Committee is founded by Joseph Coors, Paul Weyrich and direct-mail wizard Richard Viguerie). Meanwhile, prodded especially by the downturn of 1974, the “business community” makes a major turn right, typified by Business Week October 12, 1974: “Some people with obviously have to do with less…it will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow, the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more….Nothing that this nation, or any other nation has done in modern history compares in difficulty with the selling job that must now be done to make people accept the new reality.” A host of other business publications and organizations attack the “explosion of expectations” and preach the “era of limits” theme between 1974 and 1976. (Second Cold War; Boyte)
Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) formed in San Antonio by Alinsky-model IAF organizer Ernie Cortes; by 1976 it is the largest urban community group in the U.S., its fall ’76 convention drawing 6,000 delegates. Cortes then goes to East L.A. (Boyte)
Anwar Sadat initiates “open door policy” and further moves Egypt out of a pro-Soviet alignment into a pro-U.S. stance, abrogating Egypt’s treaty with the USSR in 1976 and consummating the shift with the essential entry of Egypt into the U.S. military alliance through the Camp David Accord in 1978. Egypt’s shift to a pro-U.S. stance, along with China’s, is one of the two main U.S. gains regarding the “world balance of forces” vs. the USSR and national liberation revolutions during the 1970s. (Storm; Second Cold War; Magri in MR 131/Jan-Feb 1982; Hobsbawm; Disney)
Publication of Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the 20th Century (Monthly Review Press, New York); Weather Underground, Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism (see above); Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, James and Grace Lee Boggs (Monthly Review Press); Charles Bettleheim, Class Struggles in the USSR, First Period, 1917-1923 (Paris, Seuil/Maspero); Comrade George: An Investigation into the Life, Political Thought and Assassination of George Jackson, by Eric Mann (New York, Harper & Row, Perennial Library; published earlier, in 1973, by the Red Prison Movement and Hovey Street Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts); Lessons from the Damned, Class Struggle in the Black Community, by “The Damned” (Times Change Press, New York); All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, by Theodore Rosengarten (Random House); The Modern World-System, by Immanuel Wallerstein (Academic Press, New York); Joyce Kolko, America and the Crisis of World Capitalism (Boston, Beacon Press); Arlene Eisen-Bergman, Women of Vietnam (Peoples Press, San Francisco); Soviet Russia Masters the Comintern, documents, edited by Helmut Gruber (New York); The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks (New York, Dell); Working Women and Their Organizations: 150 Years of Struggle, 33-page booklet from Union Women’s Alliance to Gain Equality/Union WAGE, (Berkeley); Paul Cowan, Nick Egleson and Nat Hentoff, with Barbara Herbert and Robert Wall, State Secrets: Police Surveillance in America (New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston);
Also, especially important in analyzing the Sino-Soviet split: Franz Schurmann, The Logic of World Power (Pantheon, New York), and John Gittings, The World and China, 1922-1972 (London),
Revolution in the Air 