February 20, 2024
Our talk about the organization of the working class in Seattle—including the tensions over organizing black and Japanese workers alongside white ones—explored the question of what it means when, for a little while, the working class runs the city. Because that’s what happens during a general strike. And it is happening now....
February 20, 2024
Historian and prolific author Gerald Horne--whose latest book The Dawning of the Apocalypse will be published in July--recently talked to Mimi Rosenberg and Ken Nash, hosts of WBAI's Building Bridges, the longest running labor and community affairs radio program in the New York Metropolitan area, about the history of inequality behind the current horrific impact of the coronavirus....
February 20, 2024
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....
February 20, 2024
“Trump,” says Horne, “is fueling the protests. He is a cornered beast right now and a beast is most dangerous when it is cornered….”
February 20, 2024
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....
February 20, 2024
The first volume of Michael Heinrich’s biography of Karl Marx, if any indication of the two volumes yet to come, signals a genuine event in the understanding of Marx and his work. With it, the terrain for understanding all aspects of Marx’s life has likely changed fundamentally....
February 20, 2024
This book is expressive of a new wave of scholarly reassessments of China’s transition from its socialist past to capitalist present. From a Chinese perspective, it has not much in common with the canonical CCP narratives widely circulated in printed media and Party phone apps, as Zhun Xu employs a “betrayal of the revolution” rhetoric that pinpoints ruptures between a socialist China under Mao Zedong’s leadership and a capitalist China headed by Deng Xiaoping and afterwards ...
February 20, 2024
Jaisal Noor, of The Real News Network, talks to Gerald Horne, historian and author of the forthcoming The Dawning of the Apocalypse about fighting for basic rights amid the coronavirus pandemic, and the increasingly catastrophic government response to it. Is there any reason to hope, given the dire economic outlook and two unappealing options at the ballot box in November?
February 20, 2024
This is a special book, bearing an almost sacred topic for all those interested in the history of the American labor and the Left. The vibrant, pre-1920 Socialist Party, waxing strong and confident until struck down for its resistance to the US entry into the First World War, stood for a larger and more diverse radicalism. including Wobblies, quasi-wobblies. labor and cultural radicals of no certain description and of several generations. They had in common the sense that dramatic change in society was possible, perhaps inevitable....
February 20, 2024
Capitalism has always been international in nature. Even reaching back to its earliest embryonic form, in the concentrations of industry and merchant capital in Renaissance Italy, capital depended upon a European-wide trading market. The system’s true emergence came in the context of the European conquest of the Americas, its trading outposts in Asia, and the establishment of the Atlantic slave trade. An international hierarchy enabled by atrocity, war and plunder has always been central to the functioning of capitalism...
