Devin Thomas O’Shea’s writing has appeared in the Nation, Protean, Current Affairs, Boulevard, and elsewhere.
St Louis organizer Bill Sentner led some of the most successful labor battles in Midwestern history by uniting workers across race and gender lines. He won a string of major victories against corporate giants — before McCarthyism put a target on his back.
The solidarity group Noraid raised millions of dollars to support the Irish republican movement during the Troubles. Although Noraid attracted lots of hostile media coverage at the time, the group’s true history remains largely unknown and misunderstood.
The ghostly emptiness of capitalist realism obscures the potential for collective joy and abundance. Mark Fisher’s writing offers a glimpse of the possibilities that lie beyond the seeming inevitability of the present.
Wesley Bell, who’s challenging Cori Bush in Missouri, dropped out of a race against Republican Josh Hawley to take on the Democratic congresswoman. Apparently, punching left with AIPAC’s support is a more appealing career booster than challenging the Right.
In Indiana, “hoosier” is a badge of honor. In St Louis, it’s the nastiest insult around. The reason for the difference can be found in labor history, and it reveals the intraclass prejudice that breaks worker solidarity.
Activists are often held up as exemplars of personal morality — but in every social struggle, ordinary people with complex lives rise up as leaders. Ivory Perry was one of these who waged a relentless war for racial and economic justice.
Veterans of the 1848 German revolution immigrated to America with three passions burning in their hearts: barbells, beer, and socialism.
England’s Luddites are often dismissed as kooky technophobes. In reality, theirs was a gutsy pre-Marxist workers’ movement that prioritized people and nature over private property.
During the Great Depression, St Louis’s Funsten Nut Factory was racially divided. Black workers, mostly women, worked harder and made less than their white counterparts. So they went on strike — and got their white coworkers to join them on the picket line.
The United States has forgotten the radical German American immigrant socialists who spilled blood for antislavery and other liberatory causes.
At the height of his fame, Mark Twain schmoozed with robber barons like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. But he remained sharply critical of the unequal system they presided over.
Heir to the Busch family fortune, Trudy Busch Valentine was once crowned queen of St Louis’s Veiled Prophet Ball, an annual event at which wealthy good old boys made toasts to racism and strikebreaking. Now she wants to join another elite club: the Senate.
In July 1877, workers in St Louis waged a general strike that saw them briefly take the reins of power. Frightened elites compared it to the Paris Commune — and we should celebrate this extraordinary moment of radical democracy today.