The Railway - An Adventure in Construction

The Railway - An Adventure in Construction is a reprint of an unjustly forgotten book edited by renowned historian E. P. Thompson, detailing the experience of socialist British youth volunteers working on constructing the railway from Šamac to Sarajevo in Yugoslavia in 1947.
Starting with the slogan of the youth labour activists, “we build the railway, the railway builds us”, the book is a testimony of genuine socialist ideas based on internationalist collectivism, subjectivity defying objective limits of capitalism, and solidarity of anti-fascist struggles.
As a document of optimistic and forward-looking solidarity, it deserves to be read today as a hope against pessimist cynicism of anti-humanist apocalyptic scenarios.
The book includes a lengthy text by E. P. Thompson, and contributions by notable British activists and writers such as Dorothy Sale, F. D. Klingender, Peter Worsley, and others.
We are publishing The Railway with a new introduction written by theoretician Slobodan Karamanić, for whom the book stands as a “solid proof that building another world is possible, even under extremely difficult conditions”.