In this excellent history of Latin America since 1959, the Colombian diplomat Clara Nieto surveys the continent country by country, showing how the US state has consistently intervened in their internal affairs.
The alliance of neo-liberalism and social democracy internally, the USA and the EU externally, has kept capitalism in power in Latin America. So half its people live in worsening poverty, a third are unemployed, and foreign debt totals $400 billion.
Nieto focuses on the Cuban revolution and its effects. In March 1959, President Eisenhower ordered CIA sabotage and terrorism against Cuba. Kennedy was worse: Nieto writes, "His policies opposing the Revolution were more aggressive than Eisenhower's." Two days before the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, US planes bombed Cuba's cities, under Kennedy's orders. Kennedy started the US policy of counter-insurgency in Latin America (and Africa and Asia), supporting death squads and military dictatorships. Nieto shows how the US state sponsored counterrevolutionary wars in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Guatemala and Chile.
Johnson carried on Kennedy's policies: he backed the generals' fascist coup in Brazil in 1964, and attacked the Dominican Republic in 1965. Nieto depicts Reagan's wars - occupying Honduras, arming the death squads of El Salvador, running the Contras' terrorist war against Nicaragua, attacking Grenada - and Bush's attack on Panama.
The US state has never ceased its illegal, terrorist attacks on Cuba. The New York Times reported in 1983 how the head of a Miami-based anti-Cuban terrorist group admitted in a US court that he had taken germs to Cuba in 1980, proving Cuba's accusations of CIA biological warfare against Cuba. The US state made Armando Valladares - a former Batista police officer and convicted terrorist - ambassador and president of its delegation to the UN Human Rights Commission.
But the Commission's 1989 report refuted all the US slanders about Cuba's torture and abuse of political prisoners. The world knows now who tortures and abuses political prisoners detained without charge or trial.
Nieto's final chapter examines how Cuba has survived and kept its revolution going. The key is that its people, determined to defend their democracy, independence and sovereignty, actively prevent the counter-revolution from organising.

John Dean was counsel to President Richard Nixon, so he knows a thing or two about dirty tricks and cover-ups. Having studied the current presidency, he concludes that George W. Bush is even worse than Nixon.

Bush and his cronies hide stuff because there is lots to hide: Bush's hidden early career - his draft-dodging and his business frauds and failures, Vice President Dick Cheney's health secrets, his dodgy Halliburton deals, his secret Council for National Energy Policy Development Group, his shadow security and intelligence outfit (the Office of Special Plans) and his covert operation for the executive's survival.

Dean points out that Bush illegally uses executive privilege to overrule US law, as when he ordered that his, and his father's, presidential papers be sealed, breaking the 1978 Presidential Records Act. (Blair similarly used an order from the Privy Council to overturn British law and rob the Diego Garcia islanders of their right to return home.)

Dean demonstrates how Bush is destroying civil liberties by enforcing repressive laws. For example, 5000 Arab Americans have been detained, mistreated, and denied lawyers for more than two years; only five have been charged, and only one convicted. Dean shows how Bush criminalises dissent and controls the media, and how "mendacity has become policy."

Dean observes how Bush exploited 9/11, while secretly scheming to scuttle all efforts to discover why the USA was so unprepared for the anticipated terrorist attack. He manipulated intelligence about Iraq's 'WMD', transforming guesses and estimates into 'facts'. Dean documents the nineteen distinct lies that Colin Powell told the UN, a key part of Bush's effort to trick the American people into the illegal attack on Iraq - an impeachable offence. Dean shows how Bush is implementing the US ruling class's plan to dominate the world.

Dean points out how this creeping fascism threatens what little remains of American democracy and its people's rights. To a British eye, it is striking how closely Blair resembles Bush, and how closely the Labour Party resembles the Republican party - the same slavering worship of wealth, the same contempt for democracy, the same arrogance of power.

By far the best part of this book is Hutton's expose of US capitalism's failure to provide for the American people. As he acknowledges, its 'model does not itself work.' He points to US workers' reduced wages, long hours (averaging 50 a week), fewer holidays, and record levels of debt, to the USA's minimal welfare, regulation and taxes, an all-too flexible labour market, worse productivity than Europe's, falling investment and de-industrialisation.

Yet the US state tries to impose this model worldwide through the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation, demanding balanced budgets, tight money, de-regulation, privatisation, anti-union laws and mergers. There is no need for privatisation: between 1980 and 1988, NHS hospitals increased in-patient treatment by 16%, emergency treatment by 19% and day surgery by 73%, without significant cost increases. And privatisation doesn't work: the Tube PPP promises only 12 new trains, in six years' time. The West Coast line upgrade will cost £16 million a mile, three times more than BR's upgrades; and the first 14 PFI hospitals will cost £1.3 billion, twice the original estimates. Mergers don't work either: a survey of 700 mergers showed that only 119 added value.

The worst part is his effort to promote the EU. Yet he realistically describes its workings: EU summits have acted 'in effect to Americanise Europe'. "The EU has allowed itself to define its task as 'liberalising' and deregulation' ... in accordance with the consensus view that there is little to be done in Europe except build a single market." The EU is 'developing as an engine of the conservative right' and is 'trying to import the American model'. The European Central Bank has 'a highly conservative monetary regime'; its 'entrenchment of monetarism' is 'grievously damaging the management of the European economy'.

Then wishful thinking takes over. He claims that the EU's high levels of long-term unemployment are just the short-term results of various shocks, not due to the ECB policy of deflation. All the EU's failings would magically vanish if only it would change and behave as Mr Hutton would like!

This extremely useful book concisely surveys the role that Euro-scepticism has played in recent British politics, focusing on the debates and decisions within the Conservative and Labour parties.

His Chapter 1 defines and explains Euroscepticism. Chapter 2 looks at the opposition to the idea of European union that developed between 1945 and 1969. Chapter 3 studies the years of Britain's entry into the EEC, 1970 to 1974. Chapter 4 investigates the 1975 referendum on Britain's continued membership of the European Community. Chapter 5 views how attitudes to the European Community changed between 1979 and 1990. Chapter 6 describes the struggle against Political Union from 1990 to 1993. Chapter 7 brings us up to date with the struggle against Monetary Union since 1992, and Chapter 8 outlines the patterns and trends in Euroscepticism. Each chapter presents the situation, analyses the opponents, explores the arguments, describes the arena in which the politics were played out, and sums up the period.

Forster looks at the recent arguments about Economic and Monetary Union, both political and economic, and he judges that ceding control to a monetarist, deflationary European Central Bank would indeed both end our sovereignty and damage our economy. He shows that the ECB has no mandate to take jobs or growth into account, unlike the USA's central bank, the Fed, but that it focuses solely on inflation, just as Thatcher did. He notes that there is no flexibility in the Maastricht Treaty that set up the ECB, and that there is no possibility of rewriting it. He points to the growing democratisation of the debate's arena, particularly since 1975, which saw the first-ever ratification referendum, to 1997's hard-won promises of our first-ever decision-making referendum.

He concludes that in the euro "national governments' capacity to launch independent policies of wealth creation, employment generation and welfare improvement would be removed." He judiciously sums up, "much as Britain in Europe sought to portray its opponents as such, the alliance against the euro was not extremist."

Weight opens by writing, "This is a book about why the people of Britain stopped thinking of themselves as British and began to see themselves instead as Scottish, Welsh and English who happened to belong to a state called Britain." Yet he then cites surveys that show that most of us still see ourselves as British. Later, he condemns 'the moral bankruptcy of Britishness': this is history-with-a-thesis.

There is a positive, post-empire, sense of Britishness, able to recognise diversity within the national unity. Weight cites a 1964 poll that showed that only 5% of us would be pleased to have a person of Asian or Afro-Caribbean origin as a colleague or neighbour; he fails to mention the 2000 poll in which 80% of us said that we would not be upset at this prospect.

Independence, even 'independence within the EU', would not benefit Scotland and Wales. Weight notes that in 1997, for instance, England paid Scotland an extra £6.6 billion. People in Scotland and Wales have well-justified worries that they would be worse off on their own, which is why moves towards independence have stalled.

On the EU, Weight acknowledges, "The fact that Britain's leaders were determined to join come what may revealed a disregard for the views of the majority that would become a running sore in British society." But he shares this undemocratic disregard, claiming that our "real problem was the deep and abiding scepticism of European integration at all levels of British society." His problem is that most of us dare to disagree with him! He ends his book by trying to promote the EU, presumably tongue in cheek, 'as a kind of social service providing counselling and alternative accommodation'!

Weight starts to provide an answer to Britain's real problem when he writes that we need to 'invest properly in the economy of the whole island'. But we cannot rely, as he suggests, on financiers to do this: capitalism cannot do what we need to keep Britain united. We the working class will have to do the job.

Wheeler's book investigates "how far states have recognised humanitarian intervention as a legitimate exception to the rules of sovereignty, non-intervention, and non-use of force." He studies seven cases: East Pakistan in 1971, Cambodia in 1978, Uganda in 1979, Iraq in 1991, Somalia in 1992, Rwanda in 1994 and Kosovo in 1999.

India attacked and dismembered Pakistan, claiming self-defence. Vietnam genuinely defended itself against Pol Pot's attacks, which had killed 30,000 Vietnamese. Tanzania replied, claiming self-defence, to Uganda's 1978 invasion.

Resolution 688 of 1991, used by NATO states to justify their postwar intervention in Iraq, did not authorise the use of force to protect human rights. If it had, the Soviet Union and China would have vetoed it. Wheeler writes, "the longer-term benefits of the intervention remain fundamentally ambiguous."

In Somalia, the Security Council authorised armed intervention not on humanitarian grounds, but by claiming, falsely, that 'international peace and security' were threatened. In Rwanda, the French government got the UN to authorise its intervention, but its troops only rescued its clients, who had killed a million Rwandans.

The UN did not authorise NATO's intervention in Kosovo: Russia and China would have vetoed any such resolution. Wheeler notes, "there were important US security interests at stake in the Balkans" and judges that this was 'not a good model of humanitarian intervention'.

In sum, Wheeler rightly asserts that claims for humanitarian intervention were not accepted in the 1970s. He argues that a new norm of UN-authorised humanitarian intervention developed in the 1990s, but, as we have seen, the UN only authorised intervention on humanitarian grounds once, in Rwanda, which discredits, not supports, the policy. As the Foreign Office admitted in 1998, "There is no general doctrine of humanitarian necessity in international law." A fortiori, there is no new norm of unilateral humanitarian intervention: NATO's unilateral intervention in Kosovo threatened the whole international security system founded on the UN Charter.

Sovereignty, non-intervention and non-use of force are barriers against international, imperialist wars, so hugely destructive of human life. A new NATO norm of humanitarian intervention would increase the dangers of such wars.

Holloway's book reflects the protest movement against globalisation. He calls for a 'shift from the politics of organisation to a politics of events'. He knows that capitalism does not work, but not that socialism does. His whole book attacks the revolutionary idea that workers can change society by seizing state power. So he has to attack those ideas that workers need to do the job, the ideas of class, nation and party. He insults revolutions as 'dreadful defeats' for the working class.
But this is not new thinking: it is a mix of the old ideas of anarchism and 'left' communism.
A study of revolution should start from understanding the working class. But instead Holloway takes it for granted that he already knows what it is; but he does not, since he writes of the working class being 'numerically on the decline'. In fact, the working class is growing worldwide, as peasants move into cities, and in Britain workers, whether secretaries or engineers, brain-surgeons or miners, are the vast majority of the population.
He denies the value of organizing nationally, preferring the series of demonstrations in Seattle, Davos, Washington and Prague. This airport anarchism changes nothing.
He tries to resurrect the faded ideas of the Hungarian philosopher George Lukacs, who wrote that the Party is the 'bearer of the class consciousness of the proletariat'. This denies that workers are thinking beings who develop their ideas from their experience. Workers do not need leaders to tell them what to do and think. Lukacs' ideas end up in the undemocratic nonsense that working-class parties have to think and act on behalf of the working class.
To this way of thinking, the process (or rather the pose) is everything, the issue and the result are nothing. This windy idealism dangerously confuses the clarity on class, nation and party that we need to defeat our enemy capitalism.

Steve McGiffen's book gives a clear yet critical introduction to the origins, development and current direction of the EU. He is a long-time critic of the EU who works for the United Left Group in the European Parliament.
His brief, well-organised chapters cover the EU's treaties, institutions, enlargement, Common Foreign and Security Policy, Justice and Home Affairs, the euro, the internal market, external economic relations, employment, social policy, the environment, the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies, transport, and regional and industrial policy. He includes an extremely useful and up-to-date survey of information available in books, articles and websites.
McGiffen shows that the EU is capitalist through and through, created by employers for employers, designed to leach power away from workers. The EU is not about democratic nations cooperating for peace, but about employers railroading Europe's nations into a single undemocratic 'superpower' (Blair's word).
Most importantly, he shows how the euro gives vast unaccountable powers to the European Central Bank, ending all democratic control over economic policy, and implementing an extreme monetarism. He shows how the euro strengthens capital's power to destroy European nations' welfare states, achieved by workers' struggles over the centuries. He cites the economist Melvyn Krauss: "Behind the euro's falling exchange rate is a life-and-death struggle between it and Europe's welfare state. Either the euro subverts the welfare state, or Europe's welfare state subverts the euro."
So the welfare state is at stake in the fight against the euro, but not only the welfare state. EU monetarism installs deflation as a permanent policy, cutting down jobs and industries across Europe: the EU mortally threatens manufacturing industry, so vital for our working class's very existence as a creative, world-making force. Without industry, there can be no independent, sovereign Britain.
So how do we stop the EU and the euro from destroying Britain? Not by rallying the forces of 'the left'. The idea of workers' nationalism alone has the huge potential of uniting all our class in the fight to save Britain. Renouncing the nation only weakens the class. As Ho Chi Minh always said, real internationalism begins at home.

In this thoroughly researched book, David Osler portrays Labour's swamp of lobbyists, inside dealers, fixers and spinners. He includes a 20-page list of donors, and notes that, purely coincidentally, Blair has created peers faster than any previous Prime Minister, and that he has given more than 2000 quango posts to businessmen. Not surprising then that 80% of us think that Blair gives special help to business donors!
For example, the Texas-based utilities company Enron gave the Labour Party £38,000: Ralph Hodge, CBE, its head in Britain, said bluntly, "in the current climate, sponsorship and donations are the most efficient ways of getting access." The company gave George W. Bush's election campaign $825,000. Enron had gained hugely from energy utilities privatisation and from energy price deregulation. It encouraged its workers to plough their savings and pensions into company shares. Just before the firm filed for bankruptcy with $55 billion debts, its top executives cashed in 17.3 million shares, while the workers were prohibited from cashing their shares! Chief Executive Officer Ken Lay, 'Kenny Boy' to his good ol' pal George W., got $101 million! Now 25,000 former Enron workers are without jobs, without pensions and without savings, but with lots of worthless shares.
Osler shows that Britain's economy is not working. As he writes, "British manufacturing has never been in worse shape, and Labour's macroeconomic policies must bear much of the blame." Manufacturing industry is being wrecked, not by the pound, but by its overvaluation. Much-vaunted, high-quality private sector management has ruined Marconi and bankrupted Railtrack. Inadequate investment, private and public, is damaging our future.
Osler is scathing about Labour's Private Finance Initiatives, which were driven by Economic and Monetary Union's demand to cut public spending. PFI is like paying off your mortgage over 30 years, and then the building society repossesses your house! Companies enter the public services not to put money in, but to get money out! They are obliged by law to prioritise shareholders' interests, not public needs. Inevitably, disasters result, like Railtrack, privatised under EU Directive 91/440, and the Private Public Partnership scheme for London Underground, recently endorsed by the EU.
Accountants Arthur Andersen produced a report saying that PFI worked, after it had advised the government on selling off air traffic control, Railtrack and the London Underground, but PFI did not work even for Andersen, which has had to be wound up. Even Labour's sad little thinktanks are sponsored, Demos, for instance, by British Gas, Cable & Wireless, NatWest, Shell and Tesco: so it is not likely to find, for instance, that democracy involves expropriating the expropriators!
In sum, Labour has embraced PFI, the World Trade Organisation, the euro and George W. Bush, advertising privatisation as public service, globalisation and Europeanisation as internationalism, and war as peace.
This appalling record explains why Labour lost three million votes between the 1997 and 2001 elections, and in 2001, it won the votes of only 25% of those entitled to vote. Why should trade unions contribute to a party that fights tooth and nail against all that our members want? Let's use the money to campaign for our interests, as the GMB is doing with its adverts against PFI.
Osler rightly argues that Labour is institutionally corrupt. It cannot be reformed, and it is not 'New'. The Labour Party always embraced capital, now it loves capital.

Don Young and Pat Scott have both worked all their lives in British manufacturing industry, and they have produced a startling analysis of the hardships that it is suffering.

They show in great detail how, "Finance markets ... are now causing more harm than good to the economy and society." Finance capital demands that firms focus only on maximizing shareholders' dividends, at whatever cost to their workers, customers or products. The authors describe how financiers and top management collaborate against the interests of industry and the wider society, and they connect the growing industrial and social destruction to "the age-old belief of the ruling class that money, land and property are more important than people."

In particular, finance capital promotes mergers. Who gains from these? Investment bankers, above all: "What a business - fees for putting Humpty on the wall, fees for pushing him off, fees for putting him back together again", as John Plender noted in the Financial Times. Who loses? Financiers claim that mergers increase production and profits, but most mergers slash jobs, productivity, profitability, investment and pension funds. The Economist noted that between 1992 and 2002 mergers in Britain destroyed £80 billion worth of manufacturing assets. Between 1995 and 2000, mergers in the USA destroyed more than $1 trillion in assets. As Keynes said, "When the capital development of a country becomes the by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill done."

As the authors write, "industry [is] more important than the vested interests of a privileged few" because industry is 'the only real source of economic independence'. Britain needs high-skill, high-investment, high productivity, R&D-intensive, knowledge-based industries. And, as the authors note, Britain already has 'a high-quality, skilled and potentially world-class workforce'.

But Britain's manufacturing sector is today only 23% of the economy. It is more than 60% in France and Germany, 52% in Japan, and 30% in the USA. The most dynamic sectors of industry are the physics- and chemistry-related industries, which need long-term R&D and investment. But only 10% of large British companies are in these knowledge-based industries, compared to 50% in Japan, France and Germany, and 30% in the USA. In the FTSE100 list of top firms, there are no British companies in the IT hardware, engineering and machinery, electrical engineering, and industrial manufacturing sectors.

What of the future? Between 1989 and 1999, R&D spending by British manufacturing firms fell by 14.2%. Without industry, we would not have a real economy at all, only a jumble of temporary, privatised services, whose workers would be relatively unskilled, low-paid and low regulation, and their jobs would be low-tech, low-productivity and low-investment.

What then is the Blair government's industrial strategy? As the Budget showed, it has none. For example, how has it treated BAE Systems, one of Britain's last world-scale manufacturers? The government removed the proviso that BAE Systems should have majority British shareholding, then refused to back the firm, saying that it was 'not British'. (Actually the Blair government is 'not British', because it always acts against Britain's interests.) The threatened takeover by Boeing would lose us all control over this vital manufacturer.

The authors write that the current system has a "malign momentum ... if the current situation does not change, even greater damage will be inevitable." This is accurately describing capitalism's absolute decline, which is destroying British industry. They write that the economy has been "hijacked by the selfish interests of an isolated, self-serving system ... controlled by networks of people who have a massive interest in keeping things broadly as they are", " a system that bestows huge benefits on a tiny minority and damages the interests of the huge majority of participants." This accurately describes capitalism, which, as Keynes observed, "represents the most astounding belief that the most wickedest of men, doing the most wickedest of things, will be for the good of everyone."

The authors have given us an excellent analysis: what do they advise us to do about it? They would allow the capitalist class to carry on doing what it wants. "We would not seek to outlaw or prevent current investment practice. In a free economy, investors, market makers and speculators should be free to behave, within reason, as their inclinations dictate."

Yet as they admit, "The history of the financial markets and management shows that self-regulation just doesn't work." And they vividly depict the financiers' vitriolic response to the modest Higgs proposals for changes in corporate governance. What Marx called 'the furies of private interest' will also dismiss the authors' sensible proposals for reform.

The authors recognise that the Blair government has not 'the faintest intent of seriously intervening in the system'. None of the parliamentary parties, no section of the ruling class, will act to stop the destruction that the authors describe so well. The only way to achieve the authors' aims is for the British working class to take control of where we work, to take responsibility for running the whole show, to kick out 'the tiny minority ... who have a massive interest in keeping things broadly as they are'.