Don’t Let Royal Mail Die
Postal workers have played a vital role in communities for centuries – but now that's under existential threat from a corporate leadership hell-bent on turning Royal Mail into another Uber. We can’t let that happen.
Blog
Red Library: Korean Fiction
Amid a global wave of interest in Korean culture, Korean writers have created some of the most striking politicised fiction of the last few years.
Forwards, Not Forgetting
Newly reissued, Bertolt Brecht and Slatan Dudow’s 1932 film Kuhle Wampe is one of the true classics of socialist cinema, offering a glimpse of the last moment before the German left were crushed by Nazism.
Let’s Not Cancel Tolstoy
Not for the first time, Russian imperialism is casting a shadow over the country’s literature. But the last work of Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murad, provided both a mirror and an indictment.
The War Against Noise
Despite doomed patrician attempts to shut it out, noise can never entirely be avoided — and a level of ‘social noise’ is part of convivial life.
A Letter from Los Angeles
Immediately after World War Two and just before McCarthyism, ten Communists commissioned a modernist, racially integrated housing co-operative in the Silver Lake neighbourhood of L.A.
Tribune’s Alternative to the Cold War
During the tumultuous years after the end of World War Two, Tribune’s editorial team advocated an alternative to both American and Soviet domination: a democratic socialist ‘third force’.
The Ministry of Nurseries
Britain’s childcare system is appallingly expensive, complicated, and neglected – but for a time in the Second World War, public nurseries were considered part of the new welfare state.
To Infinity and Beyond
A new film depicts the story of a Soviet architectural ‘UFO’ in Kyiv, which still stands as both a resistance to Stalinist philistinism and wild capitalism.
Coming Up For Air
A new speculative fiction about a revolutionary near future takes the form of an oral history project with inhabitants of the New York Commune, and imagines how abolitionist theories might play out in practice.
‘I Was So Dissatisfied When Pulp Got Famous — It Didn’t Cause a Revolution’
Owen Hatherley interviews Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker about his upbringing, his politics — and what he kept that others might have thrown away.
A Workers’ Hero: Avtar Singh Jouhl
Avtar Singh Jouhl, the former president of the Indian Workers' Association, passed away in October. He was a committed anti-racist and trade unionist, inviting Malcolm X to Britain and sending coaches of IWA members to support the miners' strike in 1984.