Chronology of
Political Events, 1954-1992
Part Three,
1971-1974
Part Six,
Source Reference Guide
Chronology
Part Three, 1971-1974
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)
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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.
1972-
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);
1973-
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.
1974-
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)
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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);
End of Part Three
Part Six,
Source Reference Guide