If you can remember them you just weren’t there. Now Wally Dean will help to fill in the gaps. Firm fixtures on the counter-cultural calendar since the 1960s, free festivals had their heyday between the first Glastonbury Festival in 1970 and the police ambush of the Stonehenge Festival convoy at the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985. However the spirit continued and was much revitalised by the early rave scene. Free festivals functioned as autonomous spaces in which to celebrate, resist and […]
Peter Crump was a member of Street Farm, a London-based collective of anarchist architects and designers working in the early 1970s. They published Street Farmer, an underground paper that, alongside mutating tower blocks, cosmic tractors and sprouting one-way signs, put forward manifestos for the radical transformation of urban living. They offered a powerful vision of green cities in the control of ordinary people (and ordinary sheep), not capitalist, statist, socialist or any other kind of […]
A short "affixing ceremony" to fit a plaque to mark the grave of Thomas Beddoes. Present will be Mike Jay, author of The Atmosphere Of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiments of Dr Beddoes and His Sons of Genius and members of the Beddoes family. There will be gathering at the Rodney Hotel (4 Rodney Place, Clifton, off Clifton Down Road) at about 1.00pm. There will be a small display to put up in the bar and some of Mike Jay's books for sale. At 3.00pm there will be a stroll around Clifton with a few […]
Film: Despite The Sun The Wapping print dispute was one of the last large set-piece battles between the labour movement and the Thatcher regime and had ramifications that are still being felt today - in the working conditions of millions and in the way in which the mass media operates. On January 24, 1986, Rupert Murdoch's News International group with the support of the Thatcher government moved production of its four national newspapers to Wapping in London's Docklands. Over 5,000 production […]
The League of Revolutionary Black Workers was formed in 1969 in Detroit, Michigan. The organisation united a number of different Revolutionary Union Movements (RUMs) that were growing rapidly across the auto industry and other industrial sectors. The formation of the League was an attempt to create a more cohesive political organ guided by the principles of Black liberation and Marxism-Leninism in order to gain political power and articulate the specific concerns of Black workers through […]
In the 1970s, Italy came to the brink of revolution, the most widespread assault on state power Western Europe had seen since the Spanish revolution. Every aspect of the state’s functioning was aggressively challenged. Millions of people were actively imposing their demands - workers, students, women. New ways of doing politics were developed including strikes, wildcats, student revolts, armed struggle and people having fun. These are all part of the story. The history of Italian radicalism in […]
What lessons can we learn from how the Left related to workers and industrial struggles of the 1970s and how should the Left relate to workers today? How should our methods of relating to workers differ between a workplace which is experiencing a high level of class conflict and shop floor organisation, from one which conflict occurs within the framework of union control, from one which is non-unionised and there is little overt conflict and a fairly passive, quiescent and fragmented workforce? […]
A showing of the influential Arena documentary (1995), which takes a different angle to the more widely known 'The Filth and the Fury'. From the suburban backgrounds of the first '100 punks' to a movement which spanned the globe, Punk and the Pistols examines the anger, ideas and inspiration which led to a movement that shook Britain and spanned the globe. Includes interviews with Jordan, John Lydon, Malcolm McLaren, Siouxsie Sioux and Vivienne Westwood. Introduced by director Paul Tickell. […]
The student rebellion in America in 1968 was fuelled by revulsion against the Vietnam War. It gave momentum to previously existing anti-nuclear and anti-racist movements on the campuses. The difference between the anti-war movement then and now is that the students were being drafted to serve as junior officers in Vietnam. Mike Levine provides an eyewitness account of the student revolt illustrated by contemporary newspaper pictures. Roger surveys the hidden history of resistance to the war […]
