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This article deals with European Nuclear Disarmament's (END) difficult positioning in the Cold War of the 1980s. Its vision was for a humanistic socialism from below that would be capable of breaking up the Cold War and unite a divided Europe that in turn could act as a possible "third way" between the liberal capitalism of the USA and the orthodox Communism of the Soviet Union. However, it proved difficult to build these alliances across the Cold War divide without talking, at the same time, to representatives of the "official" peace movements of the Communist states. END found itself between the Scylla of having no dialogue at all with Eastern Europe or the Charybdis of having a dialogue also with the Communist regimes which was seen sceptically by the dissidents. The article traces the difficulties of END of building humanistic socialist alliances for peace from below with special reference to END's Working Group on Germany.

This issue of Labour History is dedicated to the study of labour women's leadership. The topic is relatively unfamiliar to the pages of the journal, and even to academic scholarship.

Review(s) of: A Turbulent Decade: Social Protest Movements and the Labour Movement, 1965-1975 by Beverley Symons and Rowan Cahill, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Sydney Branch, 2005. pp. x + 94. $20.00 paper. Review(s) of: Uncharted Waters: Social Responsibility in Australian Trade Unions by Greg Mallory, Boolarong Press, Brisbane, 2005. pp. xx + 242. $35.00 paper.

This article studies the rise of the modern labour technocrat within the Amalgamated Metal Workers' Union, which developed in this period a large research, educational and publicity apparatus, a vibrant shop steward movement, and independence from the political parties of the labour movement. Intellectual work within the union at first aimed to encourage rank and-file intervention in industry. A series of defeats and changing political relationships altered the focus of intellectual work to an alliance with Labor in government. Thus the union's intellectuals took on a different role, that of technocratic expert. The rise of the modern labour technocrat- a new and dominant actor in the labour movement of the 1980s - was not inevitable. There was a contest over the place and role of the labour expert in the 'modern union' during the 1970s and 80s.

This article is a contribution to the ongoing dialogue concerning the relative virtues of culturalist Marxism and discourse analysis in the study of labour and social history. The dialogue has increasingly preoccupied more theoretically-minded historians over the 1980s and '90s, as the conceptual basis of much of labour history has been subjected to quite fundamental critique. Ann Curthoys has recently offered such a critique in Labour History, arguing that the search for structural explanations of events should be abandoned as 'authoritarian' and 'reductive', and that it should be replaced by an exploration of the 'diversity of meanings and perspectives' that history contains.1 This article responds to such a view. The argument proceeds in three broad sections. Firstly, it traces the theoretical underpinnings of Thompsonian labour history, and in particular the political and intellectual genesis of the central concept of 'working class experience'. Secondly, it explores the critiques of working class experience launched over the 1970s and '80s from the perspectives of structuralism and post-structuralism, and assesses the power and the implications of such critiques. Thirdly, it offers the beginnings of an attempt to adjust to the force of this attack from a materialist perspective, and to suggest a reformulated, and more aggressive form of labour history. It is a theoretical article, concerned with the discussion of approaches to the writing of history, rather than with the demonstration of such approaches, yet it remains intimately concerned with the future treatment of labour in actual historical scholarship.