Faced with today’s continual crises and soaring social inequality, it’s easy to idealize the postwar decades as an era of “social-democratic consensus.” In much of Western Europe, these were the “thirty glorious years” in which labor and capital shared the proceeds of growth — with even center-right governments overseeing key welfare measures. Yet this narrative of a Fordist golden age often overlooks the deprivations that persisted and the pitched battles working-class parties fought to win a share of economic growth for labor.

One of the fastest-rising economies was Italy, whose northern industrial core drew in millions of migrants from poorer regions during the 1950s and 1960s. But working-class people who weren’t in the factories organized, too. Unemployed workers and farmhands even invented a new tactic, the “reverse strike,” in which they voluntarily filled in roads, fixed railway lines, and patched up dilapidated school buildings. Their protests showed that there were plenty of socially useful jobs to be done — it was just that Christian Democratic governments had chosen to leave them penniless and idle.

One such strike was immortalized by Brave New World author Aldous Huxley in a text he wrote about Sicilian popular educator Danilo Dolci. In a region with mass illiteracy and long-term unemployment, on January 30, 1956, Dolci joined hundreds of jobless men who began fixing a road. But, as with previous “reverse strikes,” the authorities reacted with repression — and police violently broke up the assembly a few days later. Dolci was jailed for “occupation of the public highway,” in a widely publicized trial that also rallied artists and intellectuals behind the workers’ demands.