A rich exploration of the contexts in which George Bernard Shaw penned some of his most enduring commentaries on capitalism and his proposed road to socialism, this book is a rewarding read. Bernard F. Dukore provides a compelling new analysis of Shaw and his times, not only for the Shaw scholar, but perhaps more particularly for the labor historian or the student seeking a better sense of Shaw’s perceptive thoughts on labor relations. What is more, unusually for such a volume, this book speaks to the present. It widens its conceptual and historical scope to consider what Shaw’s understanding of the battle between capital and labor can tell us about industrial disputes over the past century in Britain, America, and elsewhere. Here, the book is both fascinating and perhaps overstretched, yet it is never short of being entertaining and informative. Some of the strains of the book’s process of becoming are, however, apparent in its ambitious expansiveness: what started out as a long article was coaxed, Dukore tells us, into a short book, and “Shaw’s voice is not present throughout” (2). While his remark that “Shaw—who spent the first half of his life in the Victorian era—is also our contemporary” (2) is very true, the attempt to apply Shaw to a very wide range of contexts often leaves the playwright himself aside for substantial passages of the writing. That the author’s discussions of those contexts are, however, nonetheless always interesting, is sometimes more a tribute to his own analysis than to what is presented of Shaw’s.Unions, Strikes, Shaw provides compelling analysis of Shaw’s own journey to trade union membership, however. Shaw’s urging of young clerks to unionize, in his 1919 preface to Trade Unionism for Clerks, was founded in his own experiences of clerking and his observations of how the intensification of ownership in capitalism since then (he worked as a clerk from 1871 to 1876) made union membership more compelling. Dukore guides us through Shaw’s characteristic witticisms and conundrums in this and other passages of prose. He considers, furthermore, Shaw’s dedication to the writers’ union, the Society of Authors, and his sense that—despite his own spectacular success and consequent wealth—white-collar workers of all standings ought to combine. Yet as chapter 3, which considers the topic of unions in Major Barbara (1905), advises, Shaw was also paradoxically known to use “unions as whipping boys,” making him “an unconventional and odd advocate of unions” (15). Shaw saw union activism as a stage in capitalism rather than the means to end it—trade union consciousness was never equivalent to socialism. The book considers how Shaw’s dialectical dramaturgy scrutinized and problematized such matters of theory and praxis. Dukore provides an intriguing account, not least of the tensions in Shaw’s beloved Fabianism.The book is at its best in its later chapters. Chapter 7 considers views contemporaneous and retrospective on Shaw’s Fabianism, and then how we can read Major Barbara for evidence on where Shaw really stood. Dukore teases out the Dubliner’s relative radicalism (at least among the Fabians), which has largely been forgotten since—not least because the Fabian movement has been associated with timidity and tokenism, or indeed because, as Dukore shows, some of Shaw’s works have been misread in this light. The reading here is fascinating, but authoritative more because it is the considered analysis of a seasoned and respected Shaw scholar than because it is granular in its probing of the play: we get surprisingly little of the play itself.Shaw’s two-act Depression-era play, On the Rocks: A Political Comedy (1932), and its discourse on nationalisation, is the subject of chapter 8. This play, which features a British prime minister whose politics transform from right to left during his tenure, is fertile ground for Dukore’s core concerns. He explores Shaw’s sophisticated and strikingly idiosyncratic views on what those with the obligations of power ought to do for the poor. Shaw’s opinions on compulsory labor for the “idle” might make both a Stalinist and a Tory blush, and Dukore enlists Shaw’s sister’s view that her brother’s “luxurious life . . . must influence his mental vision” (78) to rightly question if some of the playwright’s pronouncements were the mark of a man who had simply lost touch. More of the play itself, or indeed its reception in relation to the matter of nationalization in 1930s Britain, would have been welcome, however. Chapter 4’s detour into nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century trade unionism, while fascinating, suggests something of the challenges of extending a long essay into a monograph: what might have been minor points in the Shaw story are expanded upon here to the extent that Shaw and his works fade into the background. Dukore’s discussion of the histories of general strikes and trade union organization in 1890s Idaho are no doubt compelling for students of working-class radicalism, but less so for those expecting extensive close readings of Shaw’s oeuvre. Dukore proceeds to consider the pivotal year of 1913 and its global wave of general strikes in Colorado, Belgium, the Antipodes, and of particular importance to Shaw, the Lockout in Ireland. Shaw met with Irish revolutionary James Connolly in November that year at a meeting to protest against the jailing of his fellow trade unionist Jim Larkin for seditious libel. The playwright was outraged at the Catholic hierarchy blocking the passage of Lockout workers’ children (who, as Dukore reminds us, were facing starvation and rampant disease) to homes in England. The scheme would see the children cared for during the the Lockout, but Catholic clerics feared that care would be provided in Protestant homes. The “great Christian Church to which they belong[ed]” was being “made the catspaw” (Dukore, 38) of ruthless employers, Shaw blasted. Dukore’s discussion is especially fascinating here, in considering the context of Draconian measures locally, under British rule, along with the broader trans-Atlantic climate in which employers and governments were determined to see off the challenge of organized labor. It is especially striking to consider the vehemence of Shaw’s response here, as he urged workers faced by a violent state to “arm yourselves with something that would put a decisive stop to the proceedings of the police” (39). Ireland’s most renowned playwright was inciting armed rebellion.Dukore, however, parses the complexity of Shaw’s position: the Dubliner may have been supporting the working class of his city to the point of breaking the law, but he was also adamantly against what he viewed as the strategic folly of general strikes. As Dukore’s detailed analysis shows, there was evidently some merit in this view, given the global failure of contemporaneous general strikes. He also shows that Shaw’s sagacity wasn’t born of sheepishness on the matter—he simply discerned that industrialists were better prepared than strikers were for such confrontations. We might ask, however, if Shaw made enough of the changed circumstances of revolutionary fervor in the post-Russian Revolution world.Given, as the book notes, that Shaw was by the 1920s “a global celebrity whose views newspapers frequently solicited” (64), it seems odd that he had so little to say during Britain’s 1926 General Strike. In his sixth chapter, Dukore considers this matter along with Shaw’s more considered views of two years later, in The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928), where he argued strongly in favor of nationalization as a means of ameliorating the problems of wealth inequality and industrial unrest, particularly in the coal industry. Dukore ruminates on Shaw’s core argument that “Trade Unionism is not Socialism: it is the Capitalism of the Proletariat” (65), in that unions really only seek to do for workers what employers seek to do for themselves—get as much as can be extracted from the industry, with as little labor, without damaging the industry itself. This didn’t denote that Shaw was “anti-union,” Dukore cautions; rather that while he believed unions “necessary for workers to resist submitting to salary cuts without losing their jobs” (66), his ultimate answer was a more socialist society; unions could only extract so much—the working class needed democratic control to win. Dukore’s discussion of how, for Shaw, the mining industry and its troubles presented an excellent example of this dilemma, is particularly fruitful.Shaw simply doesn’t feature enough in some of the book’s chapters. Chapter 5 doesn’t feature his views at all; in its summary of the General Strike of 1926, it concedes that it “virtually excludes Shaw’s observations and assessments”, which—as he said “uncharacteristically little” of the strike, instead “form the subject of Chapter 6” (48). Notwithstanding that the commentary here is interesting (Chapter 5 provides a compelling and nuanced discussion of the failure of Britain’s General Strike of 1926), it doesn’t give us enough of a sense that we’re on a journey with and through Shaw and his writing.Unions, Strikes, Shaw draws attention to the echoes of anti-communism in Shaw’s time in the language and deeds of Trumpism in our own. It considers, too, the legacies of coal mining and strikes in other industries, in both Britain and the USA, long after Shaw’s thoughts on the matter were published. There is a wide-ranging debate in the book’s conclusion (which links figures as diverse as William Martin Murphy and Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill and Donald Trump), in which Dukore considers the merits and demerits of various approaches to industrial relations, along with the responses from trade unionists. His discussion of Thatcher’s war on the coal mining unions may not be new, but it is worth returning to. Dukore compares the vast disparities in wealth in Shaw’s time with those in our own, discussing the failures of “trickle-down” economics in recent decades. The book concludes with Shaw’s advice of 1914 that ordinary people take ownership of society and “impose a common ideal for the whole community” (93). The point of the book is that Shaw’s vision of over a century ago is still compelling for those of us who want a better world. This is an important point, of course, but at the book’s end the reader might have expected more of Shaw. That said, Dukore’s motivation stands: “The anti-union and anti-working-class statements and activities of the last decade almost continually reminded me of the words and deeds of Shaw’s time, by him and others” (2). This contribution, from an esteemed Shaw scholar, will resonate with many who are both appalled and called to action by this grim state of affairs. It is wise to seek the counsel of Shaw and his contemporaries in pursuing a future that is better than this new Gilded Age, as it is characterized in the book: “The issues of unions, strikes, and efforts by those in power to break them are as much a part of our lives as they were of Shaw’s” (5). As Dukore argues, Shaw’s writings on these matters have not received enough attention, and this monograph is a significant contribution in this regard. It will certainly help inform debates in the classroom, most particularly of Major Barbara, which so often leaves students perplexed, searching for the real Shaw.