Scottish Labour's leaders cannot keep blaming Westminster for the collapse at the ballot box, says VINCE MILLS
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Two great ‘state of the nation’ summer reads
SOLOMON HUGHES recommends two novels that offer a social panorama on the way we live now
Over 30 years since apartheid was abolished, nasty anti-migrant rhetoric sweeps the corporate media. The Commnunist Party is ready to fight back, says ROGER McKENZIE
Over 100,000 people are expected on Brussels’s streets today. Ben Chacko speaks to Belgian Workers Party’s PETER MERTENS on wage and pensions attacks that have united the fightback
FRED BAYER says the cuts to the congress cycle could be disastrous for the Scottish trade union movement
Berlin’s Soviet war memorials are becoming the latest front in a political struggle to ‘de-Sovietise’ German history. NICO POPP reports
Western Marxism is a particular version of Marxist theory developed in – and acceptable to – the capitalist nations of Europe and North America and largely divorced from political action, argues the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY
I’M ALWAYS on the lookout for what get called “State of the Nation” novels, so was pleased to have come across two of them in the wild recently.
A full-on State of the Nation novel is the kind of social panorama that takes in many levels of society and shows up social issues, a fiction that exposes social exploitation, like Dickens, or describes “The Way We Live Now,” like Trollope’s satire on corruption in Victorian Britain.
A lot of fiction has a very narrow focus on the personal lives of the comfortably off, so fiction doesn’t really have to be a “panorama” to get called “State of the Nation” — it can just present some view of people who worry about how to pay the bills as well as how to live their emotional lives.
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KEN COCKBURN relishes the memoir of a translator, but wonders whether the autobiography underlying the impulse would make a better book
At the very moment Britain faces poverty, housing and climate crises requiring radical solutions, the liberal press promotes ideologically narrow books while marginalising authors who offer the most accurate understanding of change, writes IAN SINCLAIR
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility