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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

My latest book review is of Seán Mitchell's extraordinary study of Protestant & Catholic unity: "Struggle or Starve: Working-Class Unity in Belfast's 1932 Outdoor Relief Riots". Much to learn from the role of the left in the 1930s unemployed campaign. resolutereader.blogspot.com/2026/10/sean...

resolutereader.blogspot.com

Seán Mitchell - Struggle or Starve: Working-Class Unity in Belfast's 1932 Outdoor Relief Riots

By chance I began reading Struggle or Starve on the same weekend that, for the first time in nearly three decades , the Orange Order tried ...

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Upton Sinclair.

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

My latest book looks at Patrick Joyce's "Remembering Peasants: A personal history of a vanished world", a disappointing study of the "peasantry" which fails to explore how capitalism destroyed peasant society. Instead it ends up lamenting a lost world. resolutereader.blogspot.com/2026/09/patr...

resolutereader.blogspot.com

Patrick Joyce - Remembering Peasants: A personal history of a vanished world

Remembering Peasants is an intriguing book. It is a study of peasants and their culture, mainly through a sort of comparative study of Iris...

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Socialist Worker @socialistworker.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Restore Britain: a party on the road to fascism ⭐️Don’t wait for Restore Britain to become a fully-fledged fascist party to smash it off the streets socialistworker.co.uk/anti-racism/...

socialistworker.co.uk

Restore Britain: a party on the road to fascism

Restore Britain is not just a more racist version of Reform UK. Nor is it a fascist organisation as the British National Party (BNP) was—yet.

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

"No matter how you slice it, the new record is a sign of what experts say will be a brutal El Niño. “This is probably going to be the superlative El Niño event of our lives so far,” says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the Uni of California" www.scientificamerican.com/article/this...

scientificamerican.com

This year’s El Niño just broke another sobering record

“This is probably going to be the superlative El Niño event of our lives so far,” a climate scientist says

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

My latest book review, the remarkable account of Tété-Michel Kpomassie's incredible 1960s trip to Greenland from Togo: "Michel the Giant: An African in Greenland". Definitely one of my reads of the year. resolutereader.blogspot.com/2026/09/tete...

resolutereader.blogspot.com

Tété-Michel Kpomassie - Michel the Giant: An African in Greenland

As a young man in the 1950s in a small village in Togo, West Africa, Tété-Michel Kpomassie was bitten by a snake while climbing a tree for ...

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

This is a significant victory that other trade unionists should study and emulate. 17% average, but 52% wage rise for the lowest paid and other demands about working conditions also won. Well done to the ICR strikers. Let's learn their lesson on how to fight back.

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I am very excited to be speaking at the online Africa launch of the new edition of John Molyneux's book "The Real Marxist Tradition" More info 👉 eventbrite.com/e/africa-boo...

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Ian Angus curates a list of recent publications to help us understand the far-right in the 21st century. climateandcapitalism.com/2026/09/18/e...

climateandcapitalism.com

Ecosocialist Bookshelf: October 2026 | Climate & Capitalism

Eight left-wing books on the rise, ideas, and goals of the new far right…

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The Uprising, a Paul Greengrass film about the English Peasants' Revolt, comes out next month. Socialist journalist Paul Foot's classic talk on the 1381 revolt was republished as a booklet a few months ago by Redwords including a new introduction by me. bookmarksbookshop.co.uk/product/the-...

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I am very excited to be speaking at the online Africa launch of the new edition of John Molyneux's book "The Real Marxist Tradition" More info 👉 eventbrite.com/e/africa-boo...

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

The 1999 book Who Paid the Piper?, Frances Stonor Saunders’s exposé of CIA-funded cultural espionage during the cold war, “single-handedly established a new branch of sub-history”, according to the novelist Ian McEwan. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/s...

theguardian.com

Frances Stonor Saunders obituary

Author and documentary-maker best known for her 1999 book about CIA-funded cultural espionage Who Paid the Piper?

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

What can I say about tonight's movie? Laura (1944). Wild, but compulsive, not least due to the cast throwing themselves into the script.

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

"Many tinned mackerel products sold in British supermarkets no longer contain any of the oily fish, as concerns over sustainability have pushed retailers to replace it with a different species of lower nutritional value." www.ft.com/content/980a...

ft.com

UK canned ‘mackerel’ now contains no mackerel

Critics say switch to tins comprising more sustainable species risks confusing consumers

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Today I'll be remembering the thousands of Chilean victims of Pinochet's CIA backed coup which began on 9/11/73, and saw the murder of the democratically elected Salvador Allende.

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

My latest book review looks at Rebecca Wragg Sykes' (@lemoustier.bsky.social) "Kindred". A remarkable account of Neanderthals in all their varied lives & culture, across huge distances & 200,000+ years. A fantastic work of science and history that I loved resolutereader.blogspot.com/2026/09/rebe...

resolutereader.blogspot.com

Rebecca Wragg Sykes - Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death and art

One of the least interesting things about Neanderthal's is why they vanished. This is ironic because almost from the time when the first Nea...

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Fascists having a go at the Daily Mail. What would Lord Rothermere have said?

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Socialist Worker @socialistworker.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Alex Callinicos: The far right remains a dynamic force ⭐️If Andy Burnham dashes the hopes he raised to get into 10 Downing Street, Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe and Tommy Robinson will rush to capitalise 👇 socialistworker.co.uk/alex-callini...

socialistworker.co.uk

Alex Callinicos: The far right remains a dynamic force

If Andy Burnham dashes the hopes he raised to get into 10 Downing Street, Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe and Tommy Robinson will rush to capitalise

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

"A horse cannot be replaced bit by bit, but only by another horse." Marx, Capital II, Penguin, p250.

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

In 1990 the Canadian state attacked an Indigenous community resisting a golf course being built on their land. My book review looks at Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel's "When the Pine Needles Fall: Indigenous Acts of Resistance", an account of that struggle resolutereader.blogspot.com/2026/09/kats...

resolutereader.blogspot.com

Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel with Sean Carleton - When the Pine Needles Fall: Indigenous Acts of Resistance

In July 1990 the Canadian state laid siege to an Indigenous Mohawk community near the town of Oka in Quebec. The 78 day siege saw violent co...

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

In difficult times I often reach for my Serge.

The broad outlines of history now in the course of realisation are breaking clear from the chaos. It is no longer the revolutionaries who are making the world’s tremendous revolution; it is the tyrannies that have set it going, it is the actual technique of the modern world that is breaking brutally with the past and throwing the peoples of entire continents into the necessity for starting life afresh on new foundations. That these foundations must be of social justice, of a rational organisation, of respect for the individual, of liberty, is for me a wonderfully evident fact which, little by little, is asserting itself beyond the inhumanity of the present time. The future seems to me to be full of possibilities greater than any we have glimpsed throughout the past. May the passion, the experience and even the faults of my fighting generations have some small power to illumine the way forward!

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

My new introduction to the reprint of John Molyneux's book "The Real Marxist Tradition" has been translated into Danish. Thanks to the comrades. socialister.dk/ny-introdukt...

socialister.dk

Ny introduktion til bogklassiker: Molyneaux´s “Hvad er den virkelige marxistiske tradition”? | Internationale Socialister

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

The terrible disaster in Nepal isn’t a one-off event, but a harbinger of things to come. There will be more catastrophes of this kind as mountainous regions around the world continue to warm fast, researchers warn. www.newscientist.com/article/2587...

newscientist.com

Mountain warming means there will be more disasters like the Nepal flood | New Scientist

Mountainous regions across the planet are warming especially fast, melting the ice that glues rocky slopes and glaciers together

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Daniel Sugarman @danielsugarman.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

The world's most notorious custard-pie thrower is dead. What an obituary. He got Bernard-Henri Lévy seven times.

Known to his army of fans as L’Entarteur or Georges le Gloupier, Godin launched his career as a serial deflator of egos in 1969, when he planted a tarte à la crème on the face of the French novelist Marguerite Duras (“She has a kind of intelligence and cleverness that serves only her own vanity,” he complained), and he went on to “pie” a cast list of celebrities for sins ranging from pomposity to “choosing to function in the service of the capitalist status quo”.

The same could not be said of Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of France’s “new philosophers,” whose provocative views on sex, frequent appearances on television and penchant for white silk shirts unbuttoned practically to the navel, had made him a cult figure – and one of Godin’s most satisfying victims.

Levy once declared: “I am the most gifted writer of my generation,” and often boasted of his reasonableness and tolerance, but he was forced to endure footage being repeatedly shown on French television of himself, covered in cream, during a visit to the Belgian city of Liège, trying to strangle Godin and shouting: “Get up, or I’ll kick your head in.”

Noël Godin was born on September 13 1945 and came to pie-throwing after a rebellious youth in which he scandalised the priests in the confessional by speaking of his “horrible sexual life”, and was thrown out of Liège University after emptying a pot of glue over the head of a law lecturer who had helped write the constitution for the Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar.

He found work at Friends of Film, an obscure magazine published by the Belgian Catholic League. It had a tiny readership, which was just as well, as Godin made up most of his articles. In one he claimed that Louis Armstrong had once been a cannibal and had invested in a film called The Vegetables of Good Will in which Claudia Cardinale played a giant endive.

In another he conjured up a fictional blind Thai filmmaker named Vivian Pei, describing her film, The Lotus Flower Will Never Again Grow on the Edge of Your Island, in such convincing terms that an Asian film specialist travelled to Thailand in an effort to track her down.

“We’re very careful not to hurt people,’’ he explained. “Well, they are hurt, but always in their amour-propre.”

In 1995 Godin published an autobiography, Cream and Punishment. His other targets over the years included the New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard (who charmed his assailant by hailing the attack as a homage to silent film), the French politician Nicolas Sarkozy, the choreographer Maurice Béjart and the Ryanair chairman Michael O’Leary. He tended not to pick Belgian victims, he explained, because few would notice if he did.

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Socialist Worker @socialistworker.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Massive flood in Nepal is a warning of climate change’s consequences ⭐️Martin Empson explains how changing water levels threaten life as we know it 👇https://socialistworker.co.uk/environment/massive-flood-in-nepal-is-a-warning-of-climate-changes-consequences/

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Marv Scott @marvscott69.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Massive flood in Nepal is a warning of climate change’s consequences Martin Empson explains how changing water levels threaten life as we know it socialistworker.co.uk/environment/...

socialistworker.co.uk

Massive flood in Nepal is a warning of climate change’s consequences - Socialist Worker

The warming world will have unknown consequences on a planetary scale

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I know Christian's work well and this will be an amazing book. Looking forward to reading it.

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Marcus Rediker @marcusrediker.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

My blurb for a terrific book coming in Jan. 2027: "... Christian Hogsbjerg places revolt by enslaved people at the center of a creative and inspiring Atlantic-wide freedom story, renewing and going beyond CLR James’s classic *History of Pan-African Revolt*." www.bloomsbury.com/us/atlantic-...

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

My latest book review looks at @matthuber.bsky.social's book "Climate Change as Class War". It's quite a critical engagement, but it's a book that I nonetheless found a stimulating read as we watch fossil fuel capitalism destroy our planet. resolutereader.blogspot.com/2026/08/matt...

resolutereader.blogspot.com

Matthew T. Huber - Climate Change as Class War

I write this review the day news reaches us of a horrific tragedy in Nepal. Hundreds if not thousands of people have been killed by a glaci...

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

My latest book review looks at a brilliant new account of the Spanish Revolution of 1936, published for the ninetieth anniversary: Héctor Puente Sierra's "Revolution & Counter Revolution in the Spanish Civil War" resolutereader.blogspot.com/2026/08/hect...

resolutereader.blogspot.com

Héctor Puente Sierra - Revolution & Counter Revolution in the Spanish Civil War

In 1936 a revolutionary movement swept the Spanish state. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the German Revolution of 1918/1919 it was...

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

At least 35,000 more people died during Europe’s four record-breaking, back-to-back heatwaves this summer than would normally be expected, according to incomplete figures from barely half the continent. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

theguardian.com

At least 35,000 excess deaths recorded in Europe’s back-to-back heatwaves

Figure only covers about half of continent and does not include August totals

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Socialist Worker @socialistworker.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Britain dragged deeper into the long war over Ukraine ⭐️Prime minister Andy Burnham vows to keep supplying weapons—but arming Ukraine makes us all less safe. socialistworker.co.uk/internationa...

socialistworker.co.uk

Britain dragged deeper into the long war over Ukraine

Russia has threatened revenge against Britain after Ukraine used British-made drones to target Russian oil refineries and transport networks.

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule." Walter Benjamin, 1940

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

The Thames Barrier that protects Londoners from flooding may need to be replaced up to two decades earlier than anticipated and could cost at least £20bn... an increase in extreme weather has put the vital defence system under strain. www.ft.com/content/0a2d...

ft.com

Thames Barrier may need £20bn replacement far sooner than expected

Extreme weather has put London’s flood defence under strain, senior government officials warn

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

My book review today covers a sobering analysis of where climate change will take us via a deep dive into geological time. A brilliant read that'll arm everyone. @profbillmcguire.bsky.social's The Fate of the World: A history & future of the climate crisis resolutereader.blogspot.com/2026/08/bill...

resolutereader.blogspot.com

Bill McGuire - The Fate of the World: A history & future of the climate crisis

Bill McGuire is a respected geologist and climate scientist. His new book presents climate science, viewed through the prism of historical g...

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Racist witchhunting has led to this. Every journalist and social media name who jumped on this right wing bandwagon should hang their heads in shame. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

theguardian.com

Jason Arday found dead after resigning from Cambridge over plagiarism claims

Academic was pronounced dead at his home in south London after police called to address after 3pm on Friday

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

My latest book review looks at quite a complex theoretical text on anthropology, but one I found quite stimulating, even while being a bit lost in places! Emmanuel Terray's Marxism and "Primitive" Societies: Two Studies resolutereader.blogspot.com/2026/08/emma...

resolutereader.blogspot.com

Emmanuel Terray - Marxism and "Primitive" Societies: Two Studies

Emmanuel Terray was a French political activist and Marxist anthropologist whose work was enormously important in the development of anthrop...

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Something that gives me hope for humanity is the response to the eclipse. My lifelong love of astronomy means I obsess about these things. But seeing 100s of people yesterday sharing pinhole cameras made from cereal boxes, chatting to strangers & pointing at the sky was lovely.

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Socialist Worker @socialistworker.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

‘We are in a mobile greenhouse’ say bus drivers striking over heat 🌍🔥Arriva North London bus drivers will be on strike on 26 dates from August to October socialistworker.co.uk/trade-unions...

socialistworker.co.uk

'We are in a mobile greenhouse' say bus drivers striking over heat - Socialist Worker

Bus drivers in North London are demanding better air conditioning

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Martin Empson @resolutereader.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Tonight's film was Babylon (2020) which I really enjoyed. It's a tongue in cheek epic looking at the rise and fall of Hollywood's silent era stars. Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie are pretty good. Don't listen to the critics.

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