John J Simon
Biographic Data
| ID | 5580149 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John J Simon |
| GIVEN NAMES | John J |
| FAMILY NAME | Simon |
| SIGNATURE | SIMON J J |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Sweezy v. New Hampshire: The Radicalism of Principle
In this reprise from April 2000, John J. Simon explored the consequences of the landmark Supreme Court case Sweezy v. New Hampshire, which saw MR founding editor facing off against the state of New Hampshire after refusing to respond to questions concerning his political activities. While the case is often seen as marking the waning of McCarthyism, MR editors had a different view: the decline was due to the successful ascension of capitalist inte…
A Portrait of Gil Green
Gil Green was a revolutionary who became J. Edgar Hoover's "most wanted man in America" until voluntarily surrendering to authorities in February 1956. He lived a life of integrity and courage
Pete Seeger, Socialist Songster: Introduction
Our friend and comrade Pete Seeger died a year ago this month, on January 27, 2014. Pete was a long-time reader of Monthly Review and, occasionally, a writer for this magazine. Harry Magdoff used to say that when a letter arrived from Pete, nearly always handwritten and often pages long, responding to an article or suggesting a topic to be covered or a book to be reviewed, it would go right home with him, to be pondered, considered, answered, and…
Aimé Fernand Césaire (1913-2008): The Clarity of Struggle
The poet, dramatist, and politician, Aimé Césaire, who died on April 17, aged ninety-four, saw this work, indeed all his work, as a weapon, perhaps best exemplified in Une Tempète. In his introduction to it, Robin G. D. Kelley, wrote "the weapon of poetry may be Césaire's greatest gift to a world still searching for freedom."This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here t…
The Death and Life of Che
By the time Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–67) was executed on October 8, 1967, in La Higuera, Bolivia by soldiers under the direction of an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, he had become a kind of ideological “fetish” for his Washington adversaries. For them Guevara was not simply some “terrorist” or “insurgent”—words used to describe him and his Cuban revolutionary comrades then, just as they are used to describe those who resist Western im…
Socialism on the Ground
Harry and Paul—but especially Harry—were occasionally criticized by some on the left for a seeming contradiction between their advocacy of socialism and their support for what were thought to be reformist measures like single-payer universal health insurance, something that MR has supported for at least a quarter century. For Harry socialism was not only a theoretical construct or merely a tool for the analysis of the iniquities of capitalism. It…
Rebel in the House: The Life and Times of Vito Marcantonio
Vito Marcantonio was the most consequential radical politician in the United States in the twentieth century. Elected to Congress from New York's ethnically Italian and Puerto Rican East Harlem slums, Marcantonio, in his time, held office longer than any other third-party radical, serving seven terms from 1934 to 1950. Colorful and controversial, Marcantonio captured national prominence as a powerful orator and brilliant parliamentarian. Often al…
The Achievement of Malcolm X
The life of Malcolm X, who was murdered forty years ago this month, spanned a trajectory from oppression and victimization to inchoate rebellion and revolutionary autonomy. His was a voyage from resistance to an informed radicalism. It was a journey from which he ultimately gathered political and historical insight which, combined with his tools of persuasion and skills at leadership, made him at the time of his death arguably the most dangerous …
Albert Einstein, Radical: A Political Profile
2005 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Albert Einstein and the centennial of the publication of five of his major scientific papers that transformed the study of physics. Einstein's insights were so revolutionary that they challenged not only established doctrine in the natural sciences, but even altered the way ordinary people saw their world. By the 1920s he had achieved international popular renown on a scale that would not become…
Leo Huberman: Radical Agitator, Socialist Teacher
This month marks the centennial of the birth of Leo Huberman, who, with Paul M. Sweezy, was founding coeditor of Monthly Review. Arguably without Huberman's editorial and publishing skills, his radical imagination, and his indefatigable commitment to the idea of an independent, clear-sighted socialist clarion, MR might well have been stillborn. Instead, the magazine—and Monthly Review Press—became a leading voice of independent Marxian socialism …
Unacknowledged Legislators: Poets Protest the War (Introduction)
Earlier this year, Sam Hamill, poet and co-founder of the prestigious literary publisher, Copper Canyon Press, was invited to a White House literary symposium. Incensed by President Bush's war plans, Hamill wrote in an open letter to his colleagues "I believe the only legitimate response to such a morally bankrupt and unconscionable idea is to reconstitute a Poets Against the War movement like the one organized to speak out against the war in Vie…
Remembering Nora Sayre
What follows is a chapter from Nora Sayre's Running Time: Films of The Cold War (The Dial Press, 1982). We reprint it here not only to mark the untimely death of its author on August 8, but because it is a good example of a kind of radical cultural analysis distinguished by incisiveness as well as clarity, and, unfortunately, not often seen. In this selection, Sayre not only provides a critical examination of films that resisted the post-blacklis…
Palestinian Geography and the Peace Process: A Cartographic Addendum
These maps add a graphic dimension that will help readers understand just what has, and has not, gone on in the Middle East peace process. In the years since the Oslo process began in 1993, Israel has claimed to adhere to a "land for peace" principle, asserting, in effect, that in return for secure national borders it would relinquish control over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Implicit was the idea that in those territories a Palestinian stat…
Variations on “P.C.” in the movies
Ella Baker, Who Would Not Rest for Freedom
Review of Ella Baker: Freedom Bound by Joanne Grant.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
Albert Einstein, Radical: A Political Profile
2005 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Albert Einstein and the centennial of the publication of five of his major scientific papers that transformed the study of physics. Einstein's insights were so revolutionary that they challenged not only established doctrine in the natural sciences, but even altered the way ordinary people saw their world. By the 1920s he had achieved international popular renown on a scale that would not become…
Leo Huberman: Radical Agitator, Socialist Teacher
This month marks the centennial of the birth of Leo Huberman, who, with Paul M. Sweezy, was founding coeditor of Monthly Review. Arguably without Huberman's editorial and publishing skills, his radical imagination, and his indefatigable commitment to the idea of an independent, clear-sighted socialist clarion, MR might well have been stillborn. Instead, the magazine—and Monthly Review Press—became a leading voice of independent Marxian socialism …
Ella Baker, Who Would Not Rest for Freedom
Review of Ella Baker: Freedom Bound by Joanne Grant.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
Variations on “P.C.” in the movies
Remembering Nora Sayre
What follows is a chapter from Nora Sayre's Running Time: Films of The Cold War (The Dial Press, 1982). We reprint it here not only to mark the untimely death of its author on August 8, but because it is a good example of a kind of radical cultural analysis distinguished by incisiveness as well as clarity, and, unfortunately, not often seen. In this selection, Sayre not only provides a critical examination of films that resisted the post-blacklis…
Palestinian Geography and the Peace Process: A Cartographic Addendum
These maps add a graphic dimension that will help readers understand just what has, and has not, gone on in the Middle East peace process. In the years since the Oslo process began in 1993, Israel has claimed to adhere to a "land for peace" principle, asserting, in effect, that in return for secure national borders it would relinquish control over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Implicit was the idea that in those territories a Palestinian stat…
Leo Huberman: Radical Agitator, Socialist Teacher
This month marks the centennial of the birth of Leo Huberman, who, with Paul M. Sweezy, was founding coeditor of Monthly Review. Arguably without Huberman's editorial and publishing skills, his radical imagination, and his indefatigable commitment to the idea of an independent, clear-sighted socialist clarion, MR might well have been stillborn. Instead, the magazine—and Monthly Review Press—became a leading voice of independent Marxian socialism …
Unacknowledged Legislators: Poets Protest the War (Introduction)
Earlier this year, Sam Hamill, poet and co-founder of the prestigious literary publisher, Copper Canyon Press, was invited to a White House literary symposium. Incensed by President Bush's war plans, Hamill wrote in an open letter to his colleagues "I believe the only legitimate response to such a morally bankrupt and unconscionable idea is to reconstitute a Poets Against the War movement like the one organized to speak out against the war in Vie…
The Achievement of Malcolm X
The life of Malcolm X, who was murdered forty years ago this month, spanned a trajectory from oppression and victimization to inchoate rebellion and revolutionary autonomy. His was a voyage from resistance to an informed radicalism. It was a journey from which he ultimately gathered political and historical insight which, combined with his tools of persuasion and skills at leadership, made him at the time of his death arguably the most dangerous …
Albert Einstein, Radical: A Political Profile
2005 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Albert Einstein and the centennial of the publication of five of his major scientific papers that transformed the study of physics. Einstein's insights were so revolutionary that they challenged not only established doctrine in the natural sciences, but even altered the way ordinary people saw their world. By the 1920s he had achieved international popular renown on a scale that would not become…
Socialism on the Ground
Harry and Paul—but especially Harry—were occasionally criticized by some on the left for a seeming contradiction between their advocacy of socialism and their support for what were thought to be reformist measures like single-payer universal health insurance, something that MR has supported for at least a quarter century. For Harry socialism was not only a theoretical construct or merely a tool for the analysis of the iniquities of capitalism. It…
Rebel in the House: The Life and Times of Vito Marcantonio
Vito Marcantonio was the most consequential radical politician in the United States in the twentieth century. Elected to Congress from New York's ethnically Italian and Puerto Rican East Harlem slums, Marcantonio, in his time, held office longer than any other third-party radical, serving seven terms from 1934 to 1950. Colorful and controversial, Marcantonio captured national prominence as a powerful orator and brilliant parliamentarian. Often al…
The Death and Life of Che
By the time Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–67) was executed on October 8, 1967, in La Higuera, Bolivia by soldiers under the direction of an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, he had become a kind of ideological “fetish” for his Washington adversaries. For them Guevara was not simply some “terrorist” or “insurgent”—words used to describe him and his Cuban revolutionary comrades then, just as they are used to describe those who resist Western im…
Aimé Fernand Césaire (1913-2008): The Clarity of Struggle
The poet, dramatist, and politician, Aimé Césaire, who died on April 17, aged ninety-four, saw this work, indeed all his work, as a weapon, perhaps best exemplified in Une Tempète. In his introduction to it, Robin G. D. Kelley, wrote "the weapon of poetry may be Césaire's greatest gift to a world still searching for freedom."This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here t…
Pete Seeger, Socialist Songster: Introduction
Our friend and comrade Pete Seeger died a year ago this month, on January 27, 2014. Pete was a long-time reader of Monthly Review and, occasionally, a writer for this magazine. Harry Magdoff used to say that when a letter arrived from Pete, nearly always handwritten and often pages long, responding to an article or suggesting a topic to be covered or a book to be reviewed, it would go right home with him, to be pondered, considered, answered, and…
A Portrait of Gil Green
Gil Green was a revolutionary who became J. Edgar Hoover's "most wanted man in America" until voluntarily surrendering to authorities in February 1956. He lived a life of integrity and courage
Sweezy v. New Hampshire: The Radicalism of Principle
In this reprise from April 2000, John J. Simon explored the consequences of the landmark Supreme Court case Sweezy v. New Hampshire, which saw MR founding editor facing off against the state of New Hampshire after refusing to respond to questions concerning his political activities. While the case is often seen as marking the waning of McCarthyism, MR editors had a different view: the decline was due to the successful ascension of capitalist inte…
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