A writer tells the story of his left wing family. Reviewer Scipes takes us on a tour.
A writer tells the story of his left wing family. Reviewer Scipes takes us on a tour.
According to Anatole, Sam knew everyone in the Left world for decades. One memorable anecdote about his father was when they went to see the movie Reds together. Sam couldn’t keep quiet during the film, as he maintained a running commentary on nearly every major character, whom he had known personally.
If we are to look beyond the next four years, we must create a movement that is not simply anti-Trump, but that presents left politics as a compelling alternative. In preparing to fight the anti-labor, anti-immigrant, racist, and misogynist policies of a Trump administration, history can help us understand how activists and radicals in previous eras of social turmoil fought for a better future.
In reviewing two new books on the 20th Century's intertwined histories of labor, the Democratic Party, the Civil Rights movement, and the African American people, Rich Yeselson offers a nuanced and deeply informed assessment of this complicated tale.
Well over 150,000 miners lost their lives in the late 19th and early 20th century, more than in most wars in US history. Mother Jones would have argued that the problem was that the needs of the industry are prevailing above the needs of the earth and its people. For her and radicals of her generation, thinking of natural resources as belonging to the public was the great collective objection to the plunder for private gain.
It's been an open secret for almost two years that something important was buried next to the historic Haymarket Martyr's Monument in Forest Park. On Oct. 3, archaeologists and volunteers dug up an object they think may be an 1892 time capsule containing letters, trial documents and other artifacts from Chicago's Haymarket Affair.
Open Source Radio has produced a three-part series about American work: what it is, what it could be, and where we’re all going together. Follow the link to hear the show and to read more about the content. The show features guests Steve Fraser: labor historian and author of The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power; and Hamilton Nolan: writer, editor, and union organizer at Gawker.
During the time of the mine wars, you had mine guards. Well, now, you have mind guards, They don’t have to use strong-armed tactics anymore. They control the radio. They control the news. They control the schools. When a region or a country doesn’t know its own history, it’s like a person with Alzheimer’s.
The book under review examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts by workers to resist and the housebreaking of a long-running anti-capitalist ethos from imaginative, frenzied opposition to diffuse, angry, but ultimate accommodation. While a residual 19th century fight-back culture built the CIO and defended the New Deal into the 1960s, it lacked the same emancipatory charge it had earlier, and unions shifted to cautious monitors of the working class
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