Helena Sheehan’s autobiography “Until We Fall: Long Distance Life on the Left” (Monthly Review Press 2023) delivers a firsthand account of world-historic events such as the fall of the former Soviet Union and its impacts from the eastern bloc to the UK and US. Her book doesn’t stop there, as she also travels to South Africa to participate in the fight for justice there.
For readers who did (not) live through this era, Sheehan offers a unique perspective of Soviet communism’s demise, a disorienting arc to progressive tendencies and trends in the West. The shadows of this history continue to cast a dark cloud over the planet. Take the new US Cold War against China and Russia. We see the slow motion train wreck of US economic power power in decline and its military drive to dominate the world.
A university professor of philosophy, Sheehan dives deeply into the practices and thoughts of the parties and people, East and West, as the Soviet Union dissolved, and produced demoralized and disoriented working classes on both sides of the Berlin Wall. The attractive myths and harsh realities of capitalism have exacted a terrible toll on the past social order in the USSR and its former eastern bloc. The impacts on capitalist democracies are no less striking, especially left political formations. She brings decades of political activism distilled into the book’s six chapters.
Two intellectual trends Sheehan wrestles with are positivism and postmodernism. I think of the latter as a pernicious force that underscores identity politics. Its logic facilitates social fragmentation, anathema to a class analysis. The results encourage a rightward shift in politics, linked to the widening income and wealth gap between the prosperous few and everyone else.
Sheehan prefers the works of Marx as an analytical tool to understand world historic events such as the demise of the former USSR and expansion of capitalism globally. NATO’s expansion eastward and subsequent Russian invasion of Ukraine is an outcome of this capitalist counterrevolution that requires war and the threat of thermonuclear war. Sheehan notes the role of war in the downfall of the USSR, eventually “crashing into a brick wall in its war in Afghanistan.”
Her foray into the struggle against apartheid in South Africa is a gripping narrative. How did apartheid end in ways that strengthened capitalism? Suffice it to say that it is a complex tale that Sheehan illuminates as an active participant.
The struggle for justice is a marathon. Sheehan shows and tells of the steps and missteps along the way.
Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2024
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