Gabriel Carlyle
Last year, the UK economy lost an estimated 2.52 million working days, as postal workers, nurses, railworkers and others went on strike to resist real-term pay cuts and defend the essential services we all depend on.
Long absent from both the media and public awareness, trade unions were suddenly news again.
Yet this was very far from being an historic high.
Indeed, as Holgate points out, 23.9mn working days were lost in 1972 (mainly due to a strike by coalminers) and 29…
Longtime PN readers will know that I’ve long been a fan of Norman Finkelstein’s work. Nonetheless, I almost didn’t read this book.
I’d seen Finkelstein online recently, defending the moral (if not the legal) ‘right’ of Russia to invade Ukraine and raging about pronouns (‘Whenever I see he/ him or she/her, I think fuck/you’). And, frankly, I wondered if he’d lost the plot.
But I’m glad that I tracked his new book down and (with some qualifications that I’ll come to)…
This book explains how we could use existing technologies, such as wind turbines and heat pumps, to create a worldwide energy system based entirely on wind, water (tides and waves) and solar power (WWS).
Such a system would help solve three major crises: the air pollution crisis (which currently claims some seven million lives a year); global warming (overwhelmingly caused by fossil fuels); and energy insecurity (dramatically illustrated in the fallout from Russia’s invasion of…
For the last few months, I’ve been getting up early to join striking nurses as well as postal, BT, rail and ambulance workers on their picket lines in Hastings. Here are some of the things I’ve learned:
1) Claps don’t pay the bills
These groups are all essential workers. And now is the moment that they really need our support.
They are all being asked to take real-term pay cuts, at the same time as corporations are paying out vast sums to shareholders (or even – as in…
At the outset of this short book, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies note that the complex nature of the conflict in Ukraine has ‘made it particularly confusing and difficult for the Western peace movement’ to respond to, with many citizens of NATO countries ‘largely oblivious to their own governments’ share of responsibility for the crisis and the carnage’.
Moreover, according to former US assistant secretary of defence Chas Freeman, the war in Ukraine is also now ‘the most intense…
Staughton Lynd, who died last year, aged 92, may be one of the most important US activists you’ve never heard of.
A historian by training, Lynd played important roles in both the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, before spending decades nurturing grassroots labour organisations and working in solidarity with prisoners locked up in so-called ‘supermax’ prisons.
“Perhaps the only person who could unite the New Left and Old Left, speak truth to power, and also be a…
Adam Hochschild’s latest book tells the story of the extraordinary wave of repression that took place in the US during the years 1917 – 1921.
Brilliantly told, it’s ‘a story of mass imprisonments, torture, vigilante violence, censorship [and] killings of Black Americans’, kickstarted by the USA’s formal entry into the First World War in April 1917.
But it’s also the story of incredible bravery and resilience on the part of those who resisted this madness.
Then-US…
Should the peace and climate movements be trying to work more together and, if so, how?
These were two of the key questions posed at the recent ‘War and the climate emergency’ dayschool in Oxford that brought climate and peace campaigners together to learn and reflect in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It’s not hard to find common ground shared by the two movements.
For example, as PN’s editor, Milan Rai, has noted, Russia’s criminal invasion of…
‘The trouble with you people is that you target ordinary people’s lives!’
The man with the white beard was angry. It was 3.50pm and he’d just showed up to his local branch of Barclays bank, only find it closed ‘due to unforeseen circumstances’.
‘Unforeseen circumstances! That’s you, isn’t it?’ he raged.
Barclays is Europe’s largest financier of fossil fuels, having provided over $166bn to the oil, coal and gas industries since the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. So, as…
For the last few months, I’ve been getting up early to join striking postal, rail and BT workers on their picket lines in Hastings. Here are some of the things I’ve learned:
1) Claps don’t pay the bills
Like the nurses, who will be striking this December, all these groups are essential workers. And now is the moment that they really need our support.
They are all being asked to take real-term pay cuts, at the same time as corporations are paying out vast sums to…
Among the first books I read when I got involved in the peace movement in the late 1990s, three were by Michael Randle: Civil resistance (on the history, theory and practice of nonviolence), How to defend yourself in court (a useful instructional) and The Blake Escape (co-authored with Pat Pottle, their thrilling account of how and why they helped to break superspy George Blake out of Wormwood Scrubs prison and smuggle him out of the country).
Unhappily all…
Sometimes you discover a book which you just can’t believe slipped past you when it was published.
Marcus Rediker’s 2002 book The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (co-authored with Peter Linebaugh) has become a modern classic. So how could anyone with an interest in radical history fail to spot the publication of a new book by him – let alone one with this book’s subtitle?
Fortunately, it’s not too late to correct this oversight.…
‘The sky is a cornucopia – heaven, not so far from earth. We have to guard that cornucopia against industries and interests that would make it scarce.’
Thus writes anthropologist David McDermott Hughes, on the final page of this enthralling book. It’s simultaneously a call for a new ‘socialism of the wind’ and an in-depth exploration of the social, political and cultural challenges facing the renewable energy revolution.
Two ideas underlie this book.
Firstly, we urgently…
Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Insulate Britain co-founder Roger Hallam has been touring the UK recently, recruiting for his latest nonviolent direct action project: Just Stop Oil. Among other things, he’s been telling audiences that we’re looking at experiencing a 7 ºC temperature rise by 2042 (possibly sooner) – and that solving the climate crisis ‘is not complicated’.
These claims deserve examination. Hallam expressed them, for example, in a talk in Hastings on 10 January. (I’m…
In 1895, Mohammed Abduh – later the grand mufti of Egypt – claimed: ‘We Egyptians believed once in English liberalism and English sympathy; but we believe no longer, for facts are stronger than words. Your liberalness we see plainly is only for yourselves, and your sympathy with us is that of the wolf for the lamb which it deigns to eat.’
The ‘bland fanatics’ of Pankaj Mishra’s title are those advocates of ‘western civilisation’ who, in the words of the US theologian Reinhold…
