Books and films

공공의료 공공돌봄을 향해 / Toward Public Healthcare and Public Care

The Medical Solidarity Division emerged from unions that left the Korean Health and Medical Workers’ Union in 2004 in pursuit of a new industrial union movement. Following the Hospital Trade Union Council and the Medical Solidarity Union, it was launched on September 1, 2006.

Britain’s Revolutionary Summer: The General Strike of 1926

Midnight, 30 April 1926. Mineowners lock out a million miners.

A Spirit of Revolt: Conrado Alvillar and the Rank-and-File Wobblies of the 1927–1928 Colorado Coal Strike

“A deeply researched, innovative, and passionate history of the rank-and-file activists behind one of the most important labor strikes of America’s ‘roaring twenties.’ Gonzales unearths the lives and struggles of a generation of long-forgotten men and women in Colorado’s coal fields who revolted against intolerable conditions to demand a better world.”…

Capturing Labor: A History of Unfree Work in the Southwest

A collection of essays grappling with the many, often overlooked, forms of unfree labor in the West. When Americans think of unfree labor—coerced, extracted from workers unable to freely enter and exit contracts—what comes to mind is Black slavery and peonage in the South.

Matewan: Blood and Coal

One of the latest releases from Hardball Press, Matewan is a new fictionalized take on the events of Matewan, West Virginia, in the coal wars of the 1920s—one of America’s most explosive labor conflicts, where, the publisher writes, “courage is measured in sacrifice, and history is written in blood.” Corley, a history teacher, says of the book, based on…

Unions, Race, and Popular Democracy: Building a Progressive Labor Movement

In Unions, Race, and Popular Democracy, Kim Scipes dives deep into the historical intricacies of labor organizing, focusing on the struggles against white supremacy and racism in the workplace, union, and respective communities in and around Chicago, including Northwest Indiana. Comparing unions in the steel and meatpacking industries during the critical…

Aro berria / A New Era

With ecstatic sequences reminiscent of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, this complex portrait of new-age commune life is a striking feature debut. It’s 1978, and Spanish society is struggling to find a post-dictatorship identity in the wake of Franco’s death.

Workers and the State. Workers’ Struggles and Reform of the Capitalist State from the October Revolution to the New Deal / Operai e Stato. Lotte operaie e riforma dello Stato capitalistico tra Rivoluzione d’Ottobre e New Deal

First published in the early 1970s, Operai e Stato is a classic of radical and workerist thought that shaped a generation of political activists. Its essays examine class composition, political organization, Keynes and the New Deal, and workers’ struggles in Britain and the United States, connecting European and American labor history.

Workerism in the 1960s. From “Quaderni rossi” to “classe operaia” / L’operaismo degli anni Sessanta. Da «Quaderni rossi» a «classe operaia»

A documentary history of Italian workerism, from Quaderni rossi to classe operaia. Edited by Giuseppe Trotta and Fabio Milana, it brings together mostly unpublished documents from 1959–1968, thirteen participants’ testimonies, images, a chronology and bibliography, with an introductory essay by Mario Tronti.

The Workerists. Autobiographies of the “Bad Teachers” / Gli operaisti. Autobiografie dei cattivi maestri

First-person autobiographical interviews trace Italian workerism from Quaderni rossi through the student and workers’ struggles of 1968–1969, new political and union organizations, and later international movements. Edited by Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi and Gigi Roggero, the collection explores its participants’ ideas, political practices and methods of…

Troublemakers

A documentary about the organization of New Left. In the film, Tom Hayden and a group of students from the Students for a Democratic Society movement are being followed.