In his second round-up, EWAN CAMERON picks excellent solo shows that deal with Scottishness, Englishness and race as highlights
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Bay Area Reds
PAUL BUHLE recommends a thorough and necessary history of communist organisation and the difficulties it faced in California
(L) Manzanar Relocation Center, California, May 29 1942. A group of Block Leaders who are drawing up the Constitution for this War Relocation Authority center - front row (L to R) Karl Yoneda [communist], H. Inouye; back row, (L to R) Bill Kito, Ted Akahoshi, Tom Yamazaki, and Harry Nakamura; (R) Dorothy Healey, chair of the CPUSA in Southern California, standing before jail cell in Los Angeles, California, June 29 1949
[Francis Stewart/War Relocation Authority/Public domain; Los Angeles Daily News/Los Angeles Times photographic archive UCLA Library/Public domain] 
Fiery words from the Bard in Blackpool and Edinburgh, and Evidence Based Punk Rock from The Protest Family
MATTHEW HAWKINS is mesmerised by a performance that dissolves the line between audience and performer
MATTHEW SHARPE recommends the essays of a Renaissance politician that instruct and unnerve after 400 years
GAVIN O’TOOLE welcomes the reissue of a seminal work of revolutionary theory that have genuine relevance in the current context
RON JACOBS rides shotgun with a member of Black Bloc on the wave of anti-capitalist protests of the 1990s and early 2000s
San Francisco Reds: Communists in the Bay Area, 1919-1958
Robert W. Cherny, University of Illinois Press £22.05
THE story of the US left has been pretty much ups and downs, something hardly surprising in world capitalism’s leading nation with a working class historically divided by race and ethnicity.
Among the most startling cases is surely the California Story.
The California Socialist Party of pre-1920 days elected mayors, guided at least some craft unions, had quite a following among displaced Yankees and a scattering of ethnic groups. The rough conditions of what would one day become known as the Left Coast meanwhile prompted IWW-like, semi-anarchist labour activism.
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PAUL BUHLE agrees that a grassroots movements for change in needed in the US, independent of electoral politics
HELEN MERCER welcomes an account of how US labour leadership collaborated with the state and betrayed their membership
PAUL BUHLE recommends an exhaustive guide to the grand ambition of bringing revolutionary workers together in a global unitary body
JOHN GREEN marvels at the rediscovery of a radical US photographer who took the black civil rights movement to her heart