Monthly Review Press

A retrospective view of Ireland from the far Left: The Irish Catholic considers “Navigating the Zeitgeist”

A retrospective view of Ireland from the far Left: The Irish Catholic considers “Navigating the Zeitgeist”

Dr Helena Sheehan is a well-known left-wing intellectual. Her book, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: Critical History, published in 1985, became a classic work on its subject. ¶ She has now written her autobiography, and this is the first volume, covering her life from the 1940s to the 1980s, a book which is full of interest for a particular view of Ireland and the world today....

Cal Winslow reflects on the Seattle General Strike of 1919

Cal Winslow reflects on the Seattle General Strike of 1919

Cal Winslow, author of Radical Seattle: The General Strike of 1919, talks to Sasha Lilley, host of KPFA’s Against the Grain:
While the United States is in the throes of upheaval over police murders, we take a historical look back at another time of great social ferment: a century ago, when the workers of Seattle shut that city down. The first major general strike in the United States coincided with the last widespread pandemic — the Spanish influenza….

Gerald Horne: Political crisis deepens as Trump threatens military crackdown on protest movement

Gerald Horne: Political crisis deepens as Trump threatens military crackdown on protest movement

Protests are nothing new in American society. And protests for racial justice are certainly nothing new. But has America not learned any lessons from the civil rights movement? Have we learned nothing from decades of the police clashing with peaceful marchers? Why is this still happening in America in the year 2020? Why are our police departments militarized and so willing to use violence against citizens?...

Lifting The Shroud: Pandemic Capitalism & the Uprisings of 2020–Gerald Horne

Lifting The Shroud: Pandemic Capitalism & the Uprisings of 2020–Gerald Horne

Gerald Horne, radical pundit and prolific author, talks to Patrick Farnsworth, creator and host of Last Born in the Wilderness, examining “the material conditions that have precipitated the uprisings across the United States the past week, in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25th.... Dr. Horne frames the wave of uprisings across the nation within a deeper and broader context of previous uprisings (e.g. the Watts Riots of the 1960s in Los Angeles and the nation-wide uprisings that occurred after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.), and points to the impacts the ‘Long Sixteenth Century’ had in the formation of white supremacy, as explored in his book The Dawning of the Apocalypse....

General Strike 100 Years Ago Shows Us Hope for Today: Labor Notes reviews “Radical Seattle”

General Strike 100 Years Ago Shows Us Hope for Today: Labor Notes reviews “Radical Seattle”

For five days in 1919, union members took control of the city of Seattle. They arguably ran it better, and certainly more justly, than it had ever been run before. ¶ The strike began when waitresses, laundry workers, streetcar workers, and more—65,000 union workers in all—walked off the job on February 6, 1919, to support striking shipyard workers. ¶ Thousands of workers volunteered to keep Seattle’s essential services operating. People were fed at 21 different locations; on February 9, volunteers served more than 30,000 meals....