SOLOMON HUGHES recommends Sunjeev Sahota’s recent novel set in a trade union election campaign for its fresh approach to what unites and divides workers, but wishes the union backdrop was truer to life
NO SERIOUS person, certainly no socialist, would disagree that the first world war was an inter-imperialist conflict between “great powers” in pursuit of markets, resources, and hegemony.
Isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing. At the time, one hundred and nine years ago today, the majority of socialists, trade union leaders and prominent “Marxists” abandoned international class solidarity, capitulated to war fever, embraced national chauvinism, effectively endorsing the industrialised slaughter of millions of workers of all combatant nations.
Socialists who opposed the war and exposed its real cause — imperialist profiteering — were marginalised and victimised. In Britain, John MacLean and other socialists were imprisoned under the Defence of the Realm Act.
Western nations’ increasingly aggressive stance is not prompted by any increase in security threats against these countries — rather, it is caused by a desire to bring about regime changes against governments that pose a threat to the hegemony of imperialism, writes PRABHAT PATNAIK
In the first half of a two-part article, PETER MERTENS looks at how Nato’s €800 billion ‘Readiness 2030’ plan serves Washington’s pivot to the Pacific, forcing Europeans to dismantle social security and slash pensions to fund it
Speaking to a CND meeting in Cambridge this week, SIMON BRIGNELL traced how the alliance’s anti-communist machinery broke unions, diverted vital funds from public services, and turned workers into cannon fodder for profit



