Until We Fall – Long Distance Life on the left
By Helena Sheehan, Monthly Review Press, £18.99

FOLLOWING on from her riveting first autobiographical volume Navigating the Zeitgeist, which captured 1950s cold-war America, the 1960s new left, and 1970s social movements, Helena Sheehan now gives us a follow-up of her extraordinary life. Until We Fall begins in the late 1980s and offers vivid accounts of her encounters with fellow socialists around the world, while still attempting to navigate the zeitgeist. 

From a conservative, Catholic Irish-US family background, Sheehan became deeply involved in the feminist, peace and civil rights struggles in the US, before settling in Ireland, where she continued her political development, becoming involved with Sinn Fein, socialist and communist parties.
 
Sheehan is an ideal partner to accompany in an exploration of the zeitgeist. She is a renowned Marxist philosopher and has written an insightful book on Marxism and the Philosophy of Science and more recently a perceptive analysis of the Syriza phenomenon in Greece, among others.
 
She begins this volume in the late 1980s, with the rise of Gorbachev and the helter-skelter process of socialist disintegration in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. She knows these countries intimately and also many of the leading figures in the academic and political world with whom she engages, as well as chatting to ordinary citizens.

She is a keen observer and listener and is a regular participant at conferences where socialist issues are debated. She reveals the polarisation between many of those attendees from the former communist countries and their counterparts in the West. The former often accuse Western leftists of being idealists and only knowing the theory, whereas they have experienced the practice of “real existing socialism” and know its deficiencies first-hand. Some of those from Eastern Europe view socialism as a system only needed by the poor and see “social market” capitalism as a better alternative for their own nations. Another example of being determining consciousness!