Meltdown Expected: Crisis, Disorder, & Upheaval at the End of the 1970's
Revolutionary Left Radio
Breht O'Shea
4.8 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 17 June 2024
⏱️ 88 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Aaron J. Leonard returns to the show to discuss his newest book "Meltdown Expected: Crisis, Disorder, and Upheaval at the End of the 1970s". The final years of the 1970's were a moment of crisis and transition for the United States, both at home and abroad. Today, in 2024, we are also in a moment of crisis and transition - though without the benefit of hindsight we struggle to see where this transition might lead; moreover, we still have the ability to learn from the past and influence this transition through political struggle. Aaron not only writes about this period as a historian, but also lived through this period as a Marxist and an organizer and has personal as well as professional reflections on it. Together, Aaron and Breht talk about the end of the 70's, the imperial crisis in the middle east (specifically regarding Iran) which still shapes regional politics to this day, The opening up of China and its consequences, Jimmy Carter and the rise of neoliberalism, de-industrialization inside the US, the shifts in and around the FBI, the changes in music and culture, and much more.
Check out all of Aaron's previous interviews on Rev Left HERE
Get 15% off any book in the Left Wing Books Library HERE
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode we have |
| 0:10.0 | back on the show Aaron Leonard to talk about his newest book |
| 0:13.8 | Meltdown expected crisis disorder and upheaval at the end of the 1970s. |
| 0:18.4 | Aaron writes about the history of radicalism and state repression in 20th century America. |
| 0:24.0 | He's been on the show many times. He's the author of Heavy Radicals, the FBI's |
| 0:27.8 | secret war on America's Maoists, the folk singers in the Bureau, the |
| 0:31.4 | FBI, the folk artists and the |
| 0:33.0 | artists and the suppression of the Communist Party USA |
| 0:35.1 | and whole world in an uproar, music, rebellion, and repression from 55 to |
| 0:39.8 | 1972 all of which we have wonderful episodes with Aaron, on Rev Left, if you're interested |
| 0:45.9 | in any of those, you can go and check those out. |
| 0:48.1 | I'll link to those in the show notes. |
| 0:50.2 | And I also wanted to mention that we have an ongoing collaboration with our comrades and friends over at leftwingbooks.net |
| 0:56.0 | who are offering Rev Left listeners 15% off any book in their library, their ever growing library. They have lots of great work on |
| 1:04.8 | theory, on history, on autobiographies of important historical figures on the left, |
| 1:09.6 | etc. They're just good comrades offering good resources to people who want to dive deeper into these topics and we're happy to be working with them. |
| 1:19.0 | So in the show notes I'm going to link to left-wing books with the code already embedded so when you click on that |
| 1:25.1 | link and you go to check out you're automatically going to get 15% off whatever |
| 1:31.7 | you order and so that's just a way to make these books a little bit more |
| 1:34.4 | accessible to people particularly in tough economic times like the ones |
| 1:38.0 | we're living through now so shout out to left-wing books I'm really happy to be in |
| 1:42.4 | collaboration with them. We share a spirit, we share a goal, which |
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