One thing I love about reading older books is that often they were intended to be read immediately, to change the way people thought, and were not aimed at posterity. This is that kind of…Read more…
U.S. unions warn Trump: Don’t even think about it
A few days ago, the president of the AFL-CIO (the US’s national trade union centre) issued a powerful statement. The federation “categorically rejects all threats to the peaceful transition of power”…Read more…
Review: Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble, by Antony Beevor
The 1944 German offensive in the Ardennes forest “had brought the terrifying brutality of the eastern front to the west,” concludes Antony Beevor in this book. And “terrifying…Read more…
Ukraine: Miners’ protest goes underground
Hundreds of mine workers have spent weeks underground in a desperate attempt to win concessions from their employers in Ukraine. The protests began on 3 September at the Oktyabrskaya mine, where 29…Read more…
Review: Our Man in New York: The British Plot to Bring America into the Second World War, by Henry Hemming
Henry Hemming is a great story-teller — and this is a great story. In June 1940, during the ‘darkest hour’ in modern British history, when a German invasion of England seemed only…Read more…
Activists need better tools than Facebook, as they’ve learned in Belarus
When tens of thousands of people in Belarus decided to protest in the streets, they first of all needed a way to communicate with each other. With Internet being widely available, they chose to use…Read more…
Review: Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis
Go into a bookstore these days and often the only book you’ll find by Sinclair Lewis is It Can’t Happen Here, a satirical look at the rise of a fascist regime in America in the…Read more…
Review: Kill the Führer: Section X and Operation Foxley, by Denis Rigden
The revelation in the late 1990s that the British had seriously considered assassinating Hitler was a journalistic bombshell. Very quickly, the National Archives (then the Public Records Office)…Read more…
Victory in Korea: Teachers’ union wins 7-year fight for recognition
Almost seven years ago – in October 2013 – the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union (KTU) came to LabourStart with a problem. The national government had given the union an ultimatum: either…Read more…
“Pathetic clowns, lousy Trotskyists”: The Left responds to a solidarity campaign with Belarus
A week ago, at the request of independent trade unions in Belarus and supported by global union federations, LabourStart launched a campaign demanding an end to state repression in that country. The…Read more…
Review: A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway wrote this short collection of vignettes during the very last years of his life. And because of that, they are the mature reflections of a great writer looking back at the beginning of…Read more…
Review: It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis
I first read this book around 50 years ago and have read it several times since. When it was reissued in the late 1960s, the publisher touted it as being especially relevant to the political…Read more…
Review: Operation Foxley: The British Plan to Kill Hitler
This short book consists mainly of a long and very secret memorandum, illustrated with maps and photographs, prepared by the British in 1944. The document lays out a series of options for killing the…Read more…
Review: Cry Baby, by Mark Billingham
British crime writer Mark Billingham has written 16 novels in the DI Tom Thorne series, most of them set in North London in the present day, and all of them in sequential order — until…Read more…
Review: The Lockhart Plot: Love, Betrayal, Assassination and Counter-Revolution in Lenin’s Russia, by Jonathan Schneer
I first heard of the Lockhart Plot, as many others will have done, in the British television series from the 1980s, Reilly: Ace of Spies. That was a largely fictionalised version of the story, but…Read more…
Review: The Undiscovered Country, by Aidan McQuade
There is a sub-genre of crime fiction that is set in war-time. And most often the war is the Second World War. Len Deighton’s SS-GB, Robert Harris’ Fatherland and Philip Kerr’s…Read more…
Review: I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism, by A.M. Gittlitz
This is a wonderful book. People will read it because J. Posadas and the Trotskyist sect he led for decades were, for want of a better phrase, completely bonkers. A proponent of UFOlogy,…Read more…
Review: Under Cover, by John Roy Carlson
Imagine for a moment that in America there are millions of people who don’t like foreigners or people of colour, who are often fundamentalist Christians, who label all their opponents…Read more…
Review: The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin
Rightly considered a classic, this short book was published in the year of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. We should have been able to read…Read more…
Review: Hitler’s Third Reich in 100 Objects, by Roger Moorhouse
The danger of a book like this one is that it could encourage the fetishistic collection of Nazi memorabilia. There is already a fairly large community of people who collect such things, and some…Read more…