STEVE JOHNSON recommends a protest album with a harder edge than many in the genre
The Great Unrest, then and now
ANDREW MURRAY applauds a thorough history of the great pre-WWI strike wave, and the resonances it has with the present day
Contemporary satirical cartoon The Demon of Death by Dublin Metropolitan Police break up a union rally on Dublin's Sackville Street, August 1913; Ernest Kavanagh of William ‘Murder’’ Murphy preying over Jim Larkin, September 6 1913 in Irish Worker
[Public Domain/CC] 
DENNIS BROE finds much to praise in the new South African Netflix series, but wonders why it feels forced to sell out its heroine
CARL DEATH introduces a new book which explores how African science fiction is addressing climate change
In his second round-up, EWAN CAMERON picks excellent solo shows that deal with Scottishness, Englishness and race as highlights
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
Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14
Ralph Darlington, Pluto Press, £19.99
THIS survey of one of the greatest upsurges in labour action in Britain’s industrial history appears at an opportune time, amidst another significant wave of strike action. The struggles of 110 years ago have, the author concludes, features “which remain of considerable relevance for contemporary union activists and socialists.”
Indeed, it is tempting to read this outstanding historical survey with one eye on the present throughout. Yet the strikes, large and small, that Darlington describes are also of an industrial and political period long left behind.
His heroes are coal miners, dockers, textile workers, Midlands metal workers, Cornish clay workers, and other trades now either dead or, at any event, radically diminished in number and social impact. Railway workers do provide a common thread between the two centuries of struggle, but this serves to draw attention to the central part played by railway transport in the production and realisation of surplus value for large sections of capital a hundred years ago, which is no longer the case.
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