La Rabbia (Anger) 
by Pier Paolo Pasolini 
Tenement Press, £17.50

WHEN La Rabbia (Anger) crossed my desk, a film script-commentary written by Pier Pasolini in 1963 to accompany archived newsreel footage assembled by Gastone Ferranti for Mondo Libro, I wasn’t sure how relevant it might seem to Britain’s current generation of left activists.

His comments on the montage of setbacks suffered by Western imperialism during the height of the 1950s to early ’60s cold war reflect both the extent and diversity of its defeats in Korea, Suez, Algeria, Cuba, Congo and Africa as well as in Vietnam and Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement which brought civil war to the streets and campuses of the US itself, and death to its citizens — King, Malcolm X and the Kennedy brothers — all viewed by capitalist US elites as “enemies within.”

Pasolini exposes the phony justifications of the cold war which combined McCarthyism with the military invasion of other people’s countries in the name of democracy and the almighty dollar, by celebrating the myriad victories of all these small wars and struggles for what they were: a people’s war against colonialism and a global front of resistance to US corporate capitalist hegemony by 90 per cent of the world’s population.