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  • REASONS TO REBEL

    REASONS TO REBEL

    Published 24 September 2024.    The 1980s were a shock. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government battered left movements, painfully disrupted working-class peoples’ livelihoods...

    • Author: Sheila Rowbotham
    • Publisher: Merlin Press
    • Binding: Paperback
    • Price: £17.99
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    THE POLITICS OF SOLIDARITY

    The First International was founded with high ideals: ‘every individual or society joining it, will recognise morality, justice and truth as the basis of their conduct toward to all men, without...

    • Author: A.W. Zurbrugg
    • Publisher: Merlin Press
    • Binding: Paperback
    • Price: £25.00
  • A NEW GLOBAL GEOMETRY? SOCIALIST REGISTER 2024

    A NEW GLOBAL GEOMETRY? SOCIALIST REGISTER 2024

    In October 2022, President Joe Biden launched the United States’ new National Security Strategy, which warned that the world was at an ‘inflection point’, in which the ‘post-Cold War era is...

    • Author: Edited by Greg Albo
    • Publisher: Merlin Press
    • Binding: Paperback
    • Price: £20.00
  • ANARCHISM IN SPAIN

    ANARCHISM IN SPAIN

    Illustrations by Jacobo Pérez-Enciso    Translated by John Stewart    The Spanish anarchist movement of the early 20th century was, without doubt, the most powerful and ...

    • Author: Carlos Taibo
    • Publisher: Anarres Editions
    • Binding: Paperback
    • Price: £15.99
  • WOMEN IN BLACK

    WOMEN IN BLACK

    Published June 6    Women in Black is both a tribute to the feminist activist and scholar Cynthia Cockburn, and resistance to gendered violence, from Israel’s occupation of...

    • Author: Cynthia Cockburn & Sue Finch
    • Publisher: Merlin Press
    • Binding: Paperback
    • Price: £15.99
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    JAMES CONNOLLY

    This book offers a measured consideration of James Connolly, alive to his continuing political relevance. It concludes with a review of Connolly’s dramatic final years: the First World War, the...

    • Author: Liam McNulty
    • Publisher: Merlin Press
    • Binding: Paperback
    • Price: £25.00
  • NHS UNDER SIEGE

    NHS UNDER SIEGE

    Published 19 May 2022   The NHS is in crisis. The past 12 years of Tory real-terms cuts in funding have been disastrous.  John Lister and Jacky Davis look at the threat to the NHS...

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    • Publisher: Merlin Press
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  • THE SOCIALIST IDEAL IN THE LABOUR PARTY

    THE SOCIALIST IDEAL IN THE LABOUR PARTY

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    • Publisher: Merlin Press
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    • Price: £14.99
  • FROM SHARPEVILLE TO RIVONIA 1959 TO 1964

    FROM SHARPEVILLE TO RIVONIA 1959 TO 1964

    1959 was the year James Currey arrived in South Africa and found a nation in crisis. Hopes of change rose and foundered over the next five years. Letters and vivid conversations capture the...

    • Author: Clare & James Currey
    • Publisher: Merlin Press
    • Binding: Paperback
    • Price: £15.99
  • LONDON RECRUITS

    LONDON RECRUITS

    With an introduction by Ronnie Kasrils and a foreword by Z. Pallo Jordan The history of the Anti-Apartheid movement brings up images of boycotts and public campaigns in the UK. But another...

    • Author: Compiled and edited by Ken Keable
    • Publisher: Merlin Press
    • Binding: Paperback
    • Price: £17.99
  • MISBEHAVING

    MISBEHAVING

    Published by the Misbehavers in association with the Merlin Press Protests at the Miss World contest in 1970 attracted headlines around the world. This book portrays the new and vibrant women’s ...

    • Author: Edited by Sue Finch, Jenny Fortune, Jane Grant, Jo Robinson and Sarah Wilson
    • Publisher: Merlin Press
    • Binding: Paperback
    • Price: £15.99
  • CLIMATE STRIKE

    CLIMATE STRIKE

    Climate change is a product of the entire social and economic system within which we exist, in a word, capitalism. Challenging capitalism is essential to challenging climate change. We have...

    • Author: Derek Wall
    • Publisher: Merlin Press
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    • Price: £10.00
  • WILLIAM MORRIS: ROMANTIC TO REVOLUTIONARY

    WILLIAM MORRIS: ROMANTIC TO REVOLUTIONARY

    With a new foreword by Sheila Rowbotham 'Thompson's biography gives us the artist and the political fighter. Of the many books I have read on William Morris and his times, this is the one I...

    • Author: E.P. Thompson
    • Publisher: Merlin Press
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    • Price: £25.00

Merlin Press

Book of the Month

REASONS TO REBEL

  • Author: Sheila Rowbotham
  • Publisher: Merlin Press
  • Isbn: 9780850367911
  • Binding: Paperback
  • Pub. Date: 2024-09
  • Price: £17.99

Published 24 September 2024.

The 1980s were a shock. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government battered left movements, painfully disrupted working-class peoples’ livelihoods and pressed down on many groups who faced discrimination.

There was no shortage of reasons to rebel. Along with thousands upon thousands of others I opposed not just the repressive laws, but the fundamental tenets of the new right. Hanging on to visions of creative utopias, we strove for new ways of organizing and relating to others and we sought to connect a liberatory sexual politics with rebellions against many kinds of inequality. We argued wrote, campaigned, demonstrated, picketed.

We established alternative cooperative projects, secured reforms through local government and made direct international links. Resourceful resistance slowed down the onslaught but we were contending not simply with the doctrinal resolve of a right-wing government. We faced something larger, something that could not be voted out – a more ruthless global capitalism, geared to profits which was prepared to dump hard-won social provision and neglect to conserve even basic infrastructure.

‘Reasons to Rebel ‘ puts one woman’s experiences of radical resistance on record. It is written in resolute opposition to the fatalism that assumes that the power accrued by the right from the 1980s is irreversible. It testifies to the the hope that others will communicate theirs.

20 black & white photographs; index.


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