-
The passing of a troublemaker
Frank Emspak, anti-war activist and labor leader, spent his life advancing workers’ rights.
-
Today’s Lenin
The Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, based in Berlin, recently issued a bulletin entitled, “Seven Reasons Not to Leave Lenin to Our Enemies.” This was intriguing because Rosa was one of Lenin’s sternest critics, and during the Cold War era, her works found print in the United States as vindication of current U.S. policies against the Soviet Union.
-
The GI Life in “The One We Had to Win”
Veteran Cleveland writer and photographer Scott MacGregor recovered a manuscript written by his uncle Hugh O’Neill, which turned into Captured! A World War II Memoir. In it, O’Neill weaves a real-life tale of his life as a prisoner of the Germans in the last year of the Second World War and Cleveland comic artist Gary Dumm, who has worked with the best of the genre, Harvey Pekar in particular, provides vivid illustrations.
-
The Communist Women’s Movement in Retrospect
Paul Buhle reviews “The Communist Women’s Movement,” a collection of documents of a global women’s communist movement.
-
Amílcar Cabral remembered
“Return to the Source”, a condensation of Amílcar Cabral’s developing ideas until his assassination by Portuguese agents in 1973, reveals an astounding intellectual sophistication expressed in formulations clear enough for even the less educated among his audience of fellow Africans.
-
A Singular Reality, or Not
John Bellamy Foster, John Ross, Deborah Veneziale, and Vijay Prashad, Washington’s New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023), 108 pages, $15. The “singular reality” (my phrase) on display here is the imagined reality in the mind’s eye of Beltline/Pentagon global strategists. Few readers will be surprised at the cravings of […]
-
A Wisconsin story
Jon Melrod brings back to us a vital moment in the history of the U.S. labor movement, a moment in which the demographic transformation the workforce but also the lingering memory of 1960s social movements and unrest, raised the possibility of radicals racing to the front of class conflicts.
-
Colonialism: a cancer on the planet
The acuity of Hunton’s insights, seen in retrospect so many decades later, offers astounding reading. Throughout, he has one clear aim: to let the peoples of the struggling masses in the emerging nations seize their own destiny.
-
The Visionary Marxist
Is fundamental, revolutionary change possible from within a social and economic system so shaken that questions of dual power are not likely to be raised?
-
Vintage comics against war
The next phase of rebellious art, I have thought all this time, belonged to the rise of the Underground Comix of the later 1960s, with one tip of the hat to the campus satire magazines that in some places gave artists like Austin’s Gilbert Shelton a start, and another to Harvey Kurtzman’s failed magazines after Mad, especially Help! (1961-65).
-
The IWW saga in new light
Frank Little and the IWW is a family story—Jane Botkin’s own family story, as she rightly says. It is hers because she did not know anything about her great uncle growing up. She puts the story together, piece by piece, before our eyes, and that is large part of the pleasure of this text.
-
Herbert Marcuse remembered
We are, the 1960s radical generation, now once more marching, marching, sometimes it seems mostly with the Millennials by our side. And here comes the ghost of Herbert Marcuse, who was so much with us the first time around.
-
E.P. Thompson: A Giant Remembered
It is surely difficult now to grasp, for young people in the UK let alone the US and elsewhere, that thirty years or so ago, radical historian-activist Edward Thompson was by opinion polls intermittently the second or third most popular Englishman or Englishwoman, shortly after the Queen Mother. After all, the British establishment, to say nothing of American Cold Warriors (liberal or conservative) had slandered him for decades and why not?
-
“Mother Goose Marx” and Other Kids’ Stuff
“Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English. We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history. Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we put […]
-
Feel the Real Cost of Prisons
“Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English. We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history. Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we put […]
-
Sixties Rebel Undaunted (Maybe Just a Little Daunted)
Kendall Hale. Radical Passions: A Memoir of Revolution and Healing. Bloomington, Indiana: iUniverse, 2007. 225pp. $18.95 (pbk). Radical memoirs of 1960s veterans seem to be coming out in considerable numbers now, and that’s no surprise. The veterans are getting old and summing up their lives’ experiences, just at the moment when the Iraq war […]
-
Visions of Peace & Justice
Visions of Peace & Justice: San Francisco Bay Area, 1974-2007: Over Thirty Years of Political Posters from the Archives of Inkworks Press. Berkeley: Inkworks Press, 2007, 150pp, oversized color, $30 pbk. The history of colorful political art on the US Left goes back, arguably, to black and white versions of the socialist cartoons borrowed from […]
-
What Does It Take to Stop a War?
Harvey Pekar and Heather Robertson, Macedonia: What Does It Take to Stop a War? Illustration by Ed Piskor (New York: Villard Books, 2007), 121pp, $17.95, pbk. Readers who haven’t watched the award-winning 2003 film American Splendor may still recall a younger Harvey Pekar on the Tonight Show, attacking network-owner General Electric and being banished for […]
-
A Red in the House
Stephen Fleischman, A Red in the House: The Unauthorized Memoir of S.E. Fleischman. New York: iUniverse, 2004. 366pp, $24.95 paperback. This review is late in coming because it has taken a couple of years for me to understand who this Fleischman fellow is, with the tough, brilliant commentaries on various issues in CounterPunch and elsewhere. […]
-
Labor Educator as Labor Radical
Harry Kelber, My 70 Years in the Labor Movement. 379pp, $20 pbk. Labor Educator Press, 25 Washington St., Suite 302, Brooklyn NY 11201. This is a revised edition of an underappreciated 1996 self-published classic by one of the most remarkable figures in the last half-century of American labor. What makes Harry Kelber still tick, at […]