Monthly Review Press

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

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....

As the Earth Dies… CounterPunch reviews “The Robbery of Nature”

February 20, 2024

“The earth is dying and capitalism is to blame. Facing this, one can opt for hope, as Marxist ecosocialists do, or one can succumb to pessimism fed by dark thoughts on human nature and the intractable, deadly persistence of our economic system of exploitation. Human nature has a destructive and murderous side, while capitalism, expressing that side with its endless growth, endless greed, blights the planet like cancer...”

Gerald Horne on a Hidden Massacre: Black Anti-War Protestors Killed at Jackson State

February 20, 2024

Recently, commemorations took place across the country to mark the 50th anniversary of the Kent State massacre on May 4, 1970. But often left out of the history books is the Jackson State massacre. Two students were killed and 12 wounded eleven days later when, on May 15, 75 state and local policemen opened fire on a dormitory at the predominantly Black Jackson State College in Jackson, Mississippi. Police said there was a sniper on the roof of the dorm. That turned out to be a lie....

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

February 20, 2024

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

February 20, 2024

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….

This Is a Reckoning: Gerald Horne talks protests, reparations, & fascism on little cat feet

February 20, 2024

Radical historian and author of the forthcoming The Dawning of the Apocalypse Gerald Horne speaks with Bob Schlehuber and Jamarl Thomas, hosts of Political Misfits...

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

February 20, 2024

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?...

BELABORED: Cal Winslow talks to Michelle Chen and Sarah Jaffe about Radical Action–in 1919 and Now

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....

Gerald Horne: US Prof. asks Iranian friends to assist Americans in abolishing culture of slavery

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….”

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

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....