Amidst a rekindled interest in the efforts of student radicals of the 1960s to industrialize in workers’ movement as part of a larger social transformation, Jon Melrod’s Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War could not be more timely. Fighting Times recounts the thirteen-year journey of Jon Melrod to harness working-class militancy and jump start a revolution on the shop floor of American Motors. Melrod faces termination, dodges the FBI, outwits collaborators in the UAW, and becomes a central figure in a lawsuit against the rank-and-file newsletter Fighting Times, as he strives to build a class-conscious workers’ movement from the bottom up.

“An eloquent voice from the frontlines of the hard, bitter, exhilarating struggles for freedom and justice that have made the world a better place, and an inspiring guide for carrying the crucial struggle forward.”—Noam Chomsky

A radical to the core, Melrod was a key part of campus insurrection at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He left campus for the factory in 1972, hired along with hundreds of youthful job seekers onto the mind-numbing assembly line. Fighting Times paints a portrait of these rebellious and alienated young hires, many of whom were Black Vietnam vets.

Join Melrod and Barry Eidlin, author of Labor and the Class Idea, for a discussion about Fighting Times, the politics and strategies of the era, and the legacies still shaping today’s social movements.

Get Fighting Times from PM Press: https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1289

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Speakers:

Jon Melrod is a former student radical and rank and file militant, as well as a lawyer in San Francisco representing political refugees. He is the author of Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War.

Barry Eidlin is an associate professor of sociology at McGill University and the author of Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada.

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This event is sponsored by PM Press and Haymarket Books. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our important publishing and programming work.