'Now 'tis the spring, and weeds are shallow-rooted;
Suffer them now, and they'll o'ergrow the garden
And choke the herbs for want of husbandry'
- Henry VI

In Solidarity 242 (18 April 2012), we began publishing a series of recollections and reflections from activists who had been involved with the “third camp” left in the United States — those “unorthodox” Trotskyists who believed that the Soviet Union was not a “workers’ state” (albeit a “degenerated” one), but an exploitative form of class rule to be as opposed as much as capitalism. They came to be organised under the slogan “neither Washington nor Moscow.”

The permanent exhibitions at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green (East London) are basically collections of children's toys from over the last hundred and fifty years. By themselves they are well worth a visit.

John Brown, "Father of the Second American Revolution" hated slavery, and he believed that it could not be destroyed by peaceful means. He
thought the North was playing around with the question and had no intention of conducting a real struggle for the liberation of the

Eighty million Americans visit the cinema every week, and in the course of the next year or so, perhaps ninety million will see the film Gone With the Wind. Millions will get from this film their most powerful impression of the greatest civil war in history and one of the decisive turning points in modern history.

Eighty million Americans visit the cinema every week, and in the course of the next year or so, perhaps ninety million will see the film Gone With the Wind. Millions will get from this film their most powerful impression of the greatest civil war in history and one of the decisive turning points in modern history.

Two reviews of the important 950-page collection of documents on the classic pre-1914 Marxist debates on imperialism recently published by Daniel Gaido and Richard Day.

• Lenin's laboratory, by Paul Hampton
• The historic debate in full daylight, by Martin Thomas

[Note: Evno Azef was head of the military section of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. That party waged a war of systematic individual terrorism against the leading bureaucrats of the Tzarist State. In 1909 Azef was exposed as a long time police agent.

Cleaning workers at the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) in London are balloting for strikes to win an improved pay offer and better sick pay after they rejected a deal from their employer, ISS, which they called “insulting”.

ISS and SOAS are engaging in the kind of buck-passing typical of outsourced working, with both claiming that it is the other’s responsibility to guarantee decent terms and conditions for the employees.

D. A. Santillan has written a tragic, very significant book* to tell the “real role” of the F.A.I. (Anarchist Federation of Iberia), the “only influential mass organization that remained incorruptible in the face of new loves” and to place the blame for the victory of Franco where he thinks it really falls – at the door of the “democracies,” Russia and the Popular Front government of Spain.