Shourideh C. Molavi - Environmental Warfare in Gaza

This short book tackles an aspect to the Israeli war on Gaza that is often neglected. Shourideh C. Molavi is a researcher with Forensic Architecture and in this book she studies the way that the Israeli state has used environmental changes to consolidate and facilitate its war against Palestine. The book was written and published in the midst of the latest genocidal war, which has now raged for over a year, and it should be said it is not a study of the environmental impacts of that (or earlier) wars. It does not cover, for instance, the pollution, emissions, or destruction to infrastructure and environment that arises out of the bombing or the use of military vehicles. It is rather, a more detailed study of the environmental aspects to Israel's method of warfare.

The book begins with Palestine's oranges. Illustrated by many colour maps, it explores how citrus cultivation, once a staple of Palestinian agriculture, has almost completely disappeared in Gaza. Instead a variety of non-traditional crops, such as strawberries or even pineapples and broccoli have been used. Molavi explains that this is because the methods of warfare that Israel uses have systematically destroyed Palestinian agriculture, both as a result of their dislocation of the Palestinian people and their land, and as a result of the destructive nature of war. In the introduction she writes:

This layered colonialty and the ways in which apartheid and occupation policies are activiated in Gaza become visible when weobserve the historical transformation of its agricultural lands, the forced transtions in cultivation practices adopted by Gazan farmers, and their relation to the stifled urban development of Palestinian cities within the strip... Far from an understanding of the environment as a passive landscape - or a mere setting for conflict - we consider how Israeli settler-colonial practices make use of environemal elements as an active tool of military warfare.

In 1951, the Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion made a speech which famously said that the new state would "make the wilderness bloom". It was an explicit statement of a core idea of settler colonialism, that the land was empty or, indeed, it had been used wastefully and destructively. The new "Israeli landscape" Molavi says "was largely cultivated through the multifaceted and by now well-documented eco-colonial practices of the quasi-governmental Israeli organisation, Keren Kayemet L'Yisrael, the Jewish National Fund". While the JNF claimed to be acting in a positive way, its policies actively displaced, destroyed and deforested enormous areas. The destruction of the Gazan citrus industry was a major consequence of policy in this era. Indeed the JNF actually chose trees that emphasise a particular image of the landscape:

The JNF's preference for European-looking pine is not surprising given the historical matrix of European colonialism within which the Zionist movement emerged. Cultivating trees that conform to the Picturesque Western ecological sensibilities further demonstrates Israel's European-style environemntal values, while also pushing forward a new historical narrative on the landscape that naturalises a more 'civilised' colonial presence. 

Forests she says are "weaponised" to "erase Palestinian presence in strategically important spaces, providing camouflage for military objectives".

Moving to more recent times, Palestinian farmers have experienced repeated destruction of their lands and crops. At the core of Molavi's book is a study of how the Israeli state uses herbicides to clear areas. This is done to ensure that "line of sight" exists for military incursions. Farmers frequently must deal with the loss of their crops as the herbicide blows onto their fields, in addition to the risks of sniper bullets and explosions. Molavi shows how the timing of the flights that drop the herbicides is done when winds blow towards the land and people of Gaza. No warnings are issued, despite the State's obligation to protect civilians under occupation.

At times the book feels more like an academic study. This is, of course, important. It matters that researchers like Molavi document the methods by which Palestine has been erased and attacked. The scientific rigour at the centre of the book is bleak testimony to a forgotten aspect of oppression. This changes in the afterword where Molavi documents the very personal loss of a Palestinian journalist Roshdi Yahya al-Sarraj, killed during an Israeli airstrike, in October 2023. This tragic episode reflects the disregard for life that is emblematic of the Israeli occupation and its "environmental warfare". But Roshdi's life, work and indeed that of all those who contributed to the research, and all those who continue to resist and farm in Palestine, are testiment to the resiliance of the Palestinian people. As Molavi concludes, "as long as this desire... to create a settler ecology out of the ecology of Palestine continues, novel and subversive frontiers of resistance to confront it will also continue to blossom."

Related Reviews

Masalha - Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History
Pappe - Ten Myths About Israel
Englert - Settler Colonialism: An Introduction
Sand - The Invention of the Jewish People
Alexander - 'Revolution is the Choice of the People': Crisis & Revolt in the Middle East & North Africa

Karen Joy Fowler - Sarah Canary

Sarah Canary is a strange and disconcerting book. Its titular character, the anonymous woman who appears in a Western railroad camp as if from nowhere, never speaks. Her very existence, however, draws around her a network of unusual characters - a Chinese railroad labourer, a escapee from an asylum and a feminist sex rights campaigner, - who find themselves compelled to protect and look after her. Sarah Canary is so named because almost the only noises she makes are musical - though there are no recognisable words, and despite the love and protection some of those around her display, she never seems to respond. The central question provided by this living enigma is never answered. The reader has to fill in the gaps.

The picaresque adventures that follow Sarah's arrival in the US show different aspects of the tough frontier life in the US west. Racism, lynching, mob violence and drunken abuse and fighting, as well as attempted sexual assault on the feminist. Through this Sarah Canary seems to float, walking off into the wild lands, or being carried off by unscrupulous people who want to exploit her, displaying her "uglyness" for all to see as an exotic attraction.

There's a lot to unpick here. It is easy to read the book expecting some great twist, or unmasking, whereby Sarah Canary is revealed to be a visitor from outer space, or some other character on an important quest. Reading the book like this will leave the reader unfulfilled for two reasons. Firstly there is no explanation. Secondly, it would mean missing some wider themes. In particular I was struck by how the ugly woman at the centre of the story, badly dressed and out of place in the violent frontier "male" world, is used to provoke a discussion about women themselves. The feminist Adelaide Dixon, who's speeches on the rights of women to enjoy sex, and have equality politically and economically, go down like a lead balloon, also finds herself without a hearing from Sarah Canary. Despite this Dixon sees Sarah as an asset, not least because she mistakes her (or does she) for a woman who has recently gained notoriety for killing her abusive husband. 

But the most interesting character is Chin, the Chinese labourer, sent out into the US to make his fortune, who escapes from debt bondage, finds work and a lot of racism, whose loyalty to Sarah is unchallenged. He follows her, like a sort of terminator, never giving up and never waving. Yet is unclear on exactly why he is doing this. Until her disappearance becomes the reason he returns to China. There he remembers her, and perhaps loves her, till the end of his days.

Sarah Canary is a lovely book. The adventures are over the top, comical and dark. The distinct episodes have the feel of one of those dark Netflix series that dwell on human suffering, but also remind us of the love and kindness out there. It is a classic. But it is not an easy read, nor does it offer any straightforward conclusions.

Related Reviews

Talabi - Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon
Grossman - The Bright Sword
Moore - Northwest of Earth
Le Guin - The Word for World is Forest

Alex Callinicos - Trotskyism

Published in 1990 by the Open University this book on Trotskyism seems a surprisingly choice for academic publishing. The author, Alex Callinicos, is a long standing Marxist and Trotskyist activist in the British Socialist Workers' Party. This then, is not a frustrating academic study, but one that starts from the point of view that despite its seemingly small scale, the Trotskyist movement is both important and significant, as well as being a valid revolutionary position. Readers will be pleased not to have to wade through some ivory tower denunciation of Leon Trotsky, the Russian Revolution, or indeed revolutionary politics in general.

Callinicos begins his study of Trotskyism by placing it in the context of Leon Trotsky's life and revolutionary work. Trotsky was a leading figure in the Russian Revolution, an experienced revolutionary activist and a Marxist author. The key question for Trotsky, and his followers, was the nature of the Soviet Union in the era after the rise of Stalin (and by implication the defeat of Trotsky). Trotsky's argument that the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers state shaped both theory and practice. In the aftermath of Trotsky's death and the expansion of the Soviet Union's sphere of influence into Europe this posed a question for the movement. How to reconcile this with the central tenet of Marxism, which Trotsky himself had fought for to the end - that socialism was about workers' self-emancipation. As Callinicos says:

The post-war transformaton of Eastern Europe by the USSR in its own likeness presented Trotsky's heirs with the following dilemma: to abandon his identification of the overthrow of capitalism with state ownership of the means of production or to revise the classical Marxist conception of socialist revoution as 'the self-conscious indpedent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. 'Orthodox Trotskyism', as [US Trotskyist James P.] Cannon was the first to call it, consisted in taking the second horn of this dilemma.

Attempting to grapple with the implications of this led to a process of disagreement and then division among the revolutionary movement. As Callinicos notes one of the features of the Trotskyist movement is its tendency to split, but he argues that this arises out of the nature of the movement's politics. About the early post-war decades he writes:

This process of fragementation... should not conceal the fact that the parties ot the various disputes shared certain crucial assumptions, in particular the belief that the USSR, CHina and Eastern Europe had broken with capitalism and begun, albeit in a bureaucratically deformed manner, the transition to socialism. These assumption give orthodox Trotskyism certain essential features which underline, and help explain, its infinite sectarian differences.

But, "by seeking to preserve the letter of Trotsky's theory, [orthodox Trotskism] deprived the latter of much of its substance". History would repeatedly demonstrate that the USSR, China and Eastern Europe were not socialist, and certainly didn't act in the interests of the working class. This in itself was enough to derail many individuals and groups. More problematic was the problems it caused for understanding "the agency of socialist revolution". For some Trotskyists, Callinicos argued, the contradictions led them to abandon revolution, with Marxism and Trotskyism becoming a realm of academic debate or historical books. Isaac Deutscher being a prime example of this problem.

For other Trotskyists the failure to be clear on the historic role of the working class led to them championing other movements, or other non-working class revolutions as being the alternative. Still other Trotskyists moved to the right and became their own enemies. A minority of Trotskyists however took the brave path of trying to take the core revolutionary ideas of Trotsky and reintegrate them with a new analysis of the Soviet Union. First and foremost among these, for both myself and Callinicos, was Tony Cliff's approach which culminated in his theory of State Capitalism. Cliff's break with orthodox Trotskyism began after doubt was cast on Trotsky's idea of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state. It was able to develop and flourish because Cliff held onto that central Marxist idea of workers' self-emancipation. The rest is, Trotskyist history.

Callinicos' book remains an interesting and important study of the movement. It is, nonetheless, a product of its time. Today Trotskyism is in many senses weaker than in 1990. Written in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the hope for a renewed revolutionary politics untainted by Stalinism remains in these pages. But the development of the organisations that could lead that has been stunted. In part this is because of the lack of working class struggle during the intervening years. Its hard to orientate a political organisation on the working class if that class is only fighting intermitently. Nonetheless there are some signs of life, and the clarity of Trotskyist analysis remains far superior to that of other left, and Stalinist groups. That said one of the key ideas of Trotsky - that of the United Front - which remains a crucial tactic even during periods when there are limited workers' struggles, does not feature much in the book. Perhaps this is a reflection of the period, but it is perhaps something that contemporary readers will find missing.

Callinicos points out in his introduction that the book is coloured by his own knowledge and experience, which means that there are areas of the Trotskyist movement (in Asia and South America for instance) that aren't covered in enough detail. However this short book remains of great interest and, with its central discussion on Trotsky's legacy and what it means for revolutionaries, I has a lot to offer comrades today.

Related Reviews

Draper - Socialism from Below
Callinicos - Imperialism and Global Political Economy

Callinicos - Making History

Callinicos and Simons: The Great Strike: The Miners' Strike of 1984-5 and its Lessons

McGarr & Callinicos - Marxism and the Great French Revolution
Callinicos - The New Age of Catastrophe

Rachel Kushner - Creation Lake

I read Creation Lake while off sick from work, devouring it in a couple of days. Two parallel news events however seemed apposite. The first was the killing of US healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which seemed, at least on initial evidence, to be linked to the way that privatised healthcare denies insurance claims, leaving poor people to suffer. The second was the ongoing British inquiry into Spycops, the infiltration of leftwing and environmental groups during the 1970s, 80s and 90s by police, which often "destroyed lives".

Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake deals with just such a spy, a covert agent, sent into environmental groups to discredit them by encouraging acts of violence. It is hard not to imagine that Kushner didn't have the British Spycops in mind when she wrote it. Indeed her own spy, a freelance operative rather than a state agent, Sadie Smith, refers to similar events were cops fathered children. She herself is prepared to use sex and love to manipulate her targets, dividing her opponents and creating false ideas of loyalty.

Set in France in the recent past, Sadie is trying to undermine a group of harmless, if eccentric, communalists in the rural countryside concerned, alongside the nearby farming communities, about the draining of aquifers by multinational corporations. Sadie's infiltration is aimed at discrediting the movement by encouraging it to go further than any individual members want to go - toward violence.

Entering the movement though means Sadie has to assimilate the movement in part. Since this is France, the movement's politics are shaped by the heirs of Guy Debord, those influenced by his situationalist films and ideas. Sadie hacks the emails of one Bruno Lacombe, the ideological leader of the movement, whose abstract thoughts on human nature, evolution, geology and society's construction are highly influential. As she obsessively reads these emails, Sadie is drawn to their rarified nature - pulled into Lacombe's world, even as she despises those who follow him.

There's a lot of exposition here, and I lost some patience with Kushner's use of Lacombe's emails to tell a wider story. But Sadie is well drawn, and her descent into obsessiveness, even while she doesn't become a member of the movement is fascinating. You get a real sense of the way living secret lives messes you up. Nonetheless she remains an unpleasant, manipulative, and emotionless person. There's no love for anyone else - in the movement or indeed within the opposition. All of which leads to a rather satisying ending for the activists's side, and an ambiguous one for Sadie. Creation Lake has a lot in it for leftists looking for an unusual take on the spy novel that reminds us that spy's don't have the glamour of James Bond, but are dirty, backstabbing thugs who care little for ordinary people.

Andrew Chaikin - A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts

Despite developments and commitments from various space agencies to return humans to the moon, over fifty years after the first moon landing in 1969, it seems such explorations are a long way off. The achievements of the US state in putting men on the moon between 1969 and 1972 seem, today, somewhat perplexing. They by many different metrics incredible achievements. Yet today they seem out of time. Even futuristic. When we think of them today, particularly in the light of commitments to return to the moon, the landings themselves seem solely technical achievements. Few people can name more than one of the men who landed on the moon. Even in the 1970s Neil Armstrong and Alan Shepherd were usually the only names that the public could remember.

Andrew Chaikin's book tells the history of the moonlandings with an attempt to move beyond the technical story. It is based on a myriad of interviews with astronauts, ground crew, scientists and their partners. While many of these stories have been told previously, and there are only a certain number of anecdotes that can be told from a Space Race that was barely a decade long, there is still much of interest. Those who remain fascinated by space programmes in general and Apollo in particular would be advised to read Chaikin's book, even if you think you know the stories. What he does with the book is to rescue the humanity of the process, and place that at the front of what is essentially a techincal story.

He beings with the horror of Apollo 1's launchpad fire and the deaths of its three astronauts. It is a moment that shocked the world, and reshaped the space programme itself. In some respects it professionalised the Nasa machine, turning it into a safety conscious, self aware programme. The shock, and bad publicity, was both a spur and a warning. Chaikin's account of Apollo 1 links it to the growing awareness among Nasa and the astronauts themselves of the uniquenes of the moon landing process. While the accident of Apollo 13 had the world watching as the astronauts and mission control fought to bring the ship home, it was not an accident that led to a massive transformation. Apollo 1 personified the risks and costs of going to space.

But, Chaikin's theme really develops with a scientific issue that he places front and centre of the story - the question of geology. While going to the moon was always supposed to be about the science, in effect it was never about the science. The "contingency sample" that Neil Armstrong was badgered about by mission control in the first minutes of his landing was needed, because something had to be brought back. But the science was secondary, especially in the minds of the astronauts. This was transformed for Apollo 15 as key personnel fought to include proper geology training, and Apollo 15's crew were highly trained to know what to look for. In some ways Apollo 15 was the key mission. Forgotten in many regards today, Apollo 15's moon walkers looked at the landscape in a completely different way to their predecessors. Their ability to make informed guesses about rocks and materials was a significant step forward and transformative to the mission.

Arguments about whether or not humans are needed to explore were put to rest with Apollo 15. The final two missions took this to further extremes. Though it seems remarkable that the only true "scientist" to land on the moon did so with the final mission. Harrison "Jack" Schmitt's contribution was unique, and his inclusion was a massive boon for scientists even today.

Chaikin's account of the centrality of the geology to the moon flights is illuminating, because it is the one of the few ways in which human emotion becomes part of the story. The excitement of the astronauts on Apollo 8 to see Earthrise, is not really about exploration. It's about them comprehending the Nasa's achievement. The excitement of the latter moon walkers at a coloured rock, or the absence of volcanic debris, is telling because it comes from a shift away from the moon trips as being purely about achievement and more about exploration.

This then makes Chaikin's wider story - of the eventual budget cuts to the space programme even more tragic. As Apollo was really becoming something "for all mankind", it was stopped. Sadly Chaikin doesn't explore this enough. With Vietnam the backdrop, and protests demanding funding for social programmes, health and education, Chaikin could have used the opportunity to explore whether or not Apollo was a valid use of scant resources. It is interesting to know that Nixon considered cutting the programme after Apollo 11, the first landing, and almost chopped everything after Apollo 15. Happy to parade with the astronauts or invite them to dinner, he was also concerned to ensure that budget cuts didn't affect Vietnam, falling on the space programme instead. In fact the US could have gone to the moon, and provided healthcare and education for all. They didn't want to because that was not their priority. Cutting Apollo made it look like they cared. When in effect they didn't.

There are other absences in Chaikin's book. He doesn't enquire, even in passing, why no women or non-white people went to the moon - or were even considered. He also fails to explore some of the more personal stories. Duane Graveline, for instance, a doctor who was one of six scientists including Schmitt, selected for possible moon exploration, dropped out for "personal reasons". These reasons aren't discussed by Chaikin. It was actually because he was going through a divorce and that would tarnish Apollo's "all American" image. Graveline turned out to be a deeply flawed and unpleasant character - married six times, accused of violence, sexual abuse of minors and losing his medical license - so he was no loss at all. But Chaikin could have used this event to discuss more about the nature of Nasa's choices for missions and the pressures on the astronauts.

While the book centres on the astronauts and to a lesser extent their families and mission control, other figures are only there in passing. Many are not mentioned at all. Though we do learn about hundreds of workers losing their jobs as the budget cuts bite. Chaikin's focus on the Apollo astronauts and their voyages illuminates their individual careers, and their life after the moon. But it doesn't really help the reader understand Apollo within wider American society. There are hints of this though. Chaikin reports that Frank Bormann, commander of Apollo 8, which circled the moon in late 1968 received a telegram out of the blue on this return. The author, now doubt refering to Vietnam, to the Civil Rights movement and perhaps the growing counter-culture movements as well, simply saud "You saved 1968". Apollo in this sense was served to reassert US self-identity. To demonstrate that the nation was powerful and unassailable. 

This is perhaps best illuminated by a comment that Chaikin makes right at the end of the book. He says that the Apollo missions were the "last great act undertaken by the United States out of a sense of optimism". This is, in fact, entirely inaccurate. Apollo was undertaken precisely because the US was in imperialist competition with the Soviet Union. This was why the cuts were made so quickly, why only a single scientist was sent to the moon, and why neither the US nor anyone else has returned. Apollo was undertaken with great cynicism. The despair of workers, scientists and astronauts was the result of that. 

But read Andrew Chaikin's book for a different reason too. For the joy of the astronauts on the moon. For what they learnt about the moon. And most importantly because it reminds us that humanity can achieve a great deal. Let's hope that future generations can solve Earth bound problems and then take our questioning and inquisitive selves back to the moon.

Related Reviews

First on the Moon - A Voyage with Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Edwin Aldrin
Wolfe - The Right Stuff
Shetterly - Hidden Figures
Collins - Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys
French & Burgess - In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquillity 1965-1969
Swift - Across the Airless Wilds
Rubenstein - Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race

Richard J. Evans - Hitler's People: The faces of the Third Reich

In his preface to Hitler's People noted historian Richard J. Evans asks, "Who were the Nazis?" What motivated them, and why did people follow them? Most importantly perhaps, he asks "What made otherwise normal people carry out, or approve, terrible and murderous atrocities against Nazism's real and supposed enemies?" This is not just a historical question for Evans. He argues that such questions have "gained new urgency and importance" as democracy is once again under threat from "strongmen and would-be dictators".

Understanding fascism in general, and Nazism in particular, benefits from a detailed study of history, and as the far-right and fascists gain ground, Evans is write to draw parallels to try and understand what is happening today. So how does Hitler's People do this?

Evans begins with a good, and lengthy, account of Hitler's own life, particularly his rise to power. In this he dismisses simplistic and crude reasoning behind his dictatorial policies. He concludes that it was "Hiter's ideological obsessions that provided the essential foundation for everything that happened in the Nazi movement and the Third Reich". Importantly this was not just Hitler's antisemitism. The Nazi leader's obsession with the "stab in the back" narrative, his hatred of the German Revolution and Communist politics and his racist beliefs in German "race" supremacy, directed his activity. But he could not have done it without "a close circle of immediate subordinates to sustain him, bolster his public image, boost his self-confidence and carry out his ideological programme."

The first section of the book looks at the closest of these, figures like Goring, Himmler, Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg. Later sections look at lower levels of the Nazi machine and government - from those who planned the Holocaust, to Generals and individual figures who ran the Concentration Camps. There are many similarities. Many of the figures, including key Nazi leaders, had authoritarian fathers. And it is interesting to see how abusive and bullying parents shaped their later behaviour. Evans however doesn't narrow down the Nazi regime to such simple arguments: "When there were millions of people... who grew up in families dominated by an authoritarian father, did only some of them become Nazis?"  Too much "stress" has been put on these factors by historians like Joachim C. Fest, argues Evans. Instead, he says:

Individual murderers in all countries, whatever the political system that governs them, commit their crimes in violation of punishments on them, while Nazi murderers and fanatical supporters of Hitler were legitimated by the Nazi movement and the Third Reich. Nazism released people from the normal constraints that society imposes on the violent and abusive desires that exist to a degree among all of us, and actively encouraged people to act them out. Ideological and historical context in the end was more important that individual psychology.

This can help explain how people were freed up to behave as they did. But it is not enough to explain why the Nazis gained support and eventually power. Understanding this requires looking deeper. One key point that Evans repeatedly notes is that the majority of the people who he describes have a deep-seated hatred toward the left, and Marxism/Communism. This hatred rests in the fear of revolution, and the anger at the German Revolution that they saw as ending Germany's ability to fight in WW1. This affected even those who didn't join the Nazis, but were around them. The far-right German Chancellor in 1932, Franz von Papen who helped bring Hitler to power, but never joined the Nazi Party, despite playing a key role in the government demonstrated this well. Evans writes, "conservatives like Papen put the destruction of democracy and the extirpation of 'Marxism' above any lingering conern for humanity, legality or decency."

But combined with this hatred and fear of Communism is the class basis of the support for the Nazis. As Evans explains:

Most Germans who belonged to the educated middle classes, the so called Bildunsbürgertum, comprising people with university degress and professional status, welcomed the coming of the Third Reich and collaborated with the Nazi regime to the end.... Under the Bismarckian Empire they had enjoyed a secure and respected place... a position they lost with Germany's defeat in World War I, the Revolution of 1918, the creation of the Weimar Republic with its enthronement of democratic rights ... and the advent of the feared and hated (and largely working-class) Social Democrats. If relatively few of them were Nazi fanatics, the great majority still openly or tacitly supported Hitler because they saw in him the guarantor of social order, national pride, economic stability and cultural tradition.

For some, the Nazis offered more - they offered work and stability in difficult economic times, as well as a chance to express their abhorrent ideas. The "solidily middleclass" Paul Zapp "served Nazism... because it offered a way out of career problems". But Evans is careful to point out that Zapp's prior politics meant that "he had no difficulty in executing [the regimes] decrees in the most murderous and brutal possible way." Zapp was head of a Sonderkommando that followed the German army into Eastern Europe killing hundreds of Jewish people in mass shootings.

Evans concludes that

Neither a concentration on individual pathology on the one hand, nor a sweeping account of national identity on the other, can explain how hundreds of thousands of Germans committed unspeakable atrocities behind the Eastern Front and elsewhere, as camp guards, SS killers, ghetto officers and others, and beyond that, remotely, sitting at their desks in Berlin. An explanation has to be found at an intermediate level between these two extremes.

It is notable that few of those whom Evans discusses abandoned their support, acknowledged wrongdoing, or the horrors that they had been party to. This is because those functionaries of the Holocaust came to the Nazis from "a right-wing familial and social milieu, in which antisemitism was common and German nationalism a given."

But as Evans says, understanding the Nazis rise to power means also understanding how a section of German society was driven wild by the threat to their very existence posed, even abstractly, by the left and the Communists. The economic crisis of the late 1920s, the defeat of Germany in WW1 and the German Revolution meant that a generation of middle class people felt their whole worldview threatened. To most of them Hitler offered salvation. They formed the ranks of the Nazis, and many went on to become part of the Holocaust that murdered millions of Jews, opponents of the regime and many millions of others the Nazis deemed unfit. Some, from higher class positions, were also attracted to Hitler, and not a few of these were also attracted by his promises.

Perhaps the only other thing to add, however, is that the book reminds me that the Nazis almost did not succeed. At crucial points before their coming to power, they were divided and weak. Had the left not failed to unite, and had it offered a radical alternative to Hitler, history could have been very different. Understanding the Nazis is one task for the current period. But another is remembering how they could, and can, be defeated. As Richard J. Evans concludes:

Only by situating the biographies of individual Nazi perpetrators, with all their idosyncracies and peculiarities, in these larger contexts, can we being to understand how Nazism exerted its baleful influnce. By doing this, we can perhaps start to recognize the threats that democracy and th eassertion of human rights are facing in our own time, and take action to counter then.

This excellent book is part of that fight.

Related Reviews

Evans - Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial
De Jong - Nazi Billionaires
Kershaw - Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris
Kershaw - Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis
Roseman - The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution
Mazower - Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe
Browning - The Origins of the Final Solution

John Gribbin - The Universe: A Biography

John Gribbin is one of the longest, and best regarded, popularisers of science. His multiple books have spanned biological subjects and scientific biography, but he is perhaps best known for his books on physics and astronomy. This "biography" of the universe claims to be constructed along the lines of a classical biography, and is recommended as a good introduction to the historical development and possible futures of the universe.

Before he begins at the beginning, with a chapter on the "Big Bang" and associated ideas, Gribbin outlines how we understand the universe - this is less about the technology scientists use to explore and examine the universe, rather its about the conceptual ideas that humans have developed to understand physics at their most basic level. In particular there are outlines of Newtonian and Einsteinian physics, before Gribbing tackles the question of whether there might be a theory of everything.

Exploring the early development of the universe in the immediate aftermath of the Big Band Gribbin has to tackle two complex questions that can be difficult for people new to the concepts outlined here. The first is the question of universe expansion and the second the question of dark energy and matter. These topics are explained simply and accessibly, though its notable that some of Gribbin's writing is slightly dated. He writes before the proof that the Higgs Boson exists, which underlines a central tenet of physics as we have it. There are also references to space missions and experiments that have since got underway.

I found the book most of interest in its chapters on the development of more mundance and closer to home subjects. Despite my intense interest in the structure of the universe, I found myself more entranced by Gribbins exploration of how elements form, and then the processes of planetary formation. In the section on the development of life in our solar system, Gribbin offers a good overview of theories, though he himself is clear he is most convinced that life originated in the "GMCs [Giant Molecular Clouds, in the material from which stars and planets then formed". He argues that the more common place idea that life began in "warm ponds" on Earth, "where complex organic molecules brought to Earth by comets" formed the basis for life, is a "conservative" idea.

I'm not sure that this is entirely fair, and it probably depends on the definition of life in this context. Amino acids certainly do exist in GMCs, but whether that was the place were life as most people understand it began seems open to discussion. 

John Gribbin's book The Universe is a very fast read, a good overview of really big history, and a nice starting point for further reading. It's accessible and interesting, and where it is dated it is only because the author is writing on subjects were research is very cutting edge.

Related Reviews

Prescod-Weinstein - The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime & Dreams Deferred
Winterburn - The Quiet Revolution of Caroline Herschel: The Lost Heroine of Astronomy
Poskett - Horizons: A Global History of Science
Miller - Empire of the Stars: Chandra, Eddington and the Quest for Blackholes
Moore - What Stars Are Made Of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Sarah Glynn & John Clarke - Climate Change is a Class Issue

In January 2024, the World Economic Forum predicted that by 2050 climate change will cause 14.5 million deaths and $12.5 trillion in damage. In addition there will be billions of people injured, made sick, and displaced by floods, heatwaves and weather crises of all types. The vast majority of these people will be poor - both in the Global South and the developed world. A significant number of them will be working people.

The centrality of workers, and the working class, to the question of climate change and its impacts is frequently ignored or downplayed. It is important then, that some writers and activists take the question of class seriously in their analyses of the environment threat. Here in the UK I, for instance, with many other trade union and climate activists have participated in the Million Climate Job reports which discuss the role of trade unions in creating sustainable jobs and the fight for a climate service to manage a Just Transition.

Activists Sarah Glynn and John Clarke's important new book places the question of class, specifically the working class, central to its manifesto for an alternative strategy to the climate crisis. In its introduction they emphasise how workers, and their class, are not privileged in their discussion because of their increased likelihood of being victims, nor the disproportionate impact of their lives on the environment compared to the wealthy, but "because the system that exploits the planet to destruction is the same that depends on class exploitation: the system that sees everything in
terms of profit – which is what capitalism is."

As an exploited class, whose labour is central to the production process that powers capitalism, workers have the most powerful position in society when it comes to winning and enacting change. 

This change, the authors argue, must be revolutionary. Capitalism has proven itself unable to enact real change. It is not able to confront the centrality of fossil fuels and the short-termism inherent to production driven by competitive accumulation. The authors write:

Survival demands revolutionary change to the economy, and the backbone of the economy is its  workers. When workers take action together, including planned and strategic withdrawal of their labour, they have the power to make continuation with existing practices impossible: the power to force change. They also have knowledge and skills that can be turned towards creating a different way of doing things.

This is a crucial understanding. Workers' power is not just in their ability to stop the economy. But also in their ability to conceive and construct alternatives to the status quo. Indeed I would go further. The struggles of workers, even the shortest strike, prefigure a new way of organising society as they demonstrate the ability of workers' to control and organise their own way. The heights of revolution, as I have written elsewhere, show this a million times more as workers create new institutions of workers' power to lead their struggles and organise their world.

Drawing on recent work by John Bellamy Foster, the authors suggest a strategy to go forward:

Foster’s book puts forward the notion of an initial ‘ecodemocratic phase’ in the struggle that would  ‘demand a world of sustainable human development.’ This would then go over to a ‘more decisive,  ecosocialist phase of the revolutionary struggle’. Taking this perspective as a starting point, we can consider how we might organise and what our goals might be as the scale and intensity of the climate disaster intensifies.

They continue:

We must develop and apply the forms of mass action that can lead to the curtailing of emissions and the transition to renewable energy sources. In this regard, we are hardly starting from nowhere because a  vital struggle for climate justice is already well and truly underway.

This is, obviously true. Socialists have frequently been caricatured, and often for good reason, as suggesting that humanity must "wait for the revolution" before solving environmental crisis. As Glynn and Clarke point out, there are crucial immediate struggles to be fought over mitigation and to reduce emissions. These must be fought for. But the danger I think is that we see to great a delineation between the two "phases" as suggested by Foster. The first will likely flow over into the second, and indeed contain elements of the second as the struggle ebbs and flows. Building workers' power organizationally and economically is a process, not a defined series of steps.

In addition the struggles that workers will need to engage in, may not be just over climate issues. Workers' fighting to defend climate refugees from state racism, striking to defend jobs (even in fossil fuel industries) or protesting against austerity are engaging in a struggle that will increase their confidence to resist and fight over wider and bigger issues - including climate justice.

The importance of Glynn and Clarke's analysis is, however, to argue that workers are the agency of change: "Workers are not victims needing protection, as portrayed in some writing about the ‘green transition’. They are subjects who can and must play a proactive role in building a genuinely sustainable future." This is an analysis lost on too many in the environmental movement who when faced with the power of the capitalist state lack an understanding of the force to challenge that.

This brings me to a couple of minor criticisms of Climate Change is a Class Issue. While the authors' depict a democratic and sustainable post-capitalist future I felt the book lacked any link between the struggles of today, and the revolutionary overturn of society. A couple of paragraphs that linked struggle today, with the process of workers' struggle creating revolutionary institutions that form the basis of a socialist society that can enact the fundamental changes needed would have been helpful. A couple of lines on the state as a barrier to this transition and workers' power as the strength to challenge it would have been helpful.

I also thought the authors' formulation of nature as being "exploited" by capitalism unhelpful. For Marxists "exploitation" has as specific meaning, that refers to the way that workers under capitalism sell their labour power to enable the bosses to extract surplus value. This is not the way capitalist production relates to nature. The authors argue, "Capitalism exploits nature in the same way that  capitalism exploits the working class. How both are treated depends only on their potential to make money."

It is true that natural resources are embedded within the capitalist production process, but this is only in as much as they are tied to the capital-worker relationship. This is not Marxist nit-picking, but important if we are to understand precisely why workers do have the power to overthrow capitalism.

These minor criticisms aside, I cannot help but agree with the authors' conclusion:

The class struggle that we take up must be based on an active solidarity for survival and the goal of a  rational and just society. In the face of the existential crisis that we are now confronting, there is simply no other way forward.

Activists in the socialist, trade union and environmental movement would do well to get hold of a copy of this short book and read and discuss it. It's freely available for download at the authors' website here.

Related Reviews

Foster - Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution
Saito - Slow Down: How degrowth Communism can save the Earth
Malm - Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the 21st Century
Malm - How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Ivan Doig - Winter Brothers: A season at the edge of America

James Gilchrist Swan was a remarkable individual. Born in 1818 he spend most of his life in the Pacific North West, now part of Washington state in the US. Having travelled widely before arrival there, he took on a number of roles for the US government and other interests, becoming an Indian Agent, a temporary representative of a railroad company, and other such frontier roles. He was also a collector for the Smithsonian Institute, buying Native American art and tools for their collections. In addition Swan was a politician, a hunter, a painter and above all a writer. Today he would likely be called an anthropologist (indeed that is how he is described in his current, all to brief, Wikipedia entry). 

Swan lived among the Makah tribal group for many years, learning their language and customs, and documenting almost every aspect of their lives - from religious beliefs and mythology, to fishing practices and art. His book on the Makah was eventually published by the Smithsonian and remains an important account of their history and culture. But Swan was also a prolific writer in two other regards - his letters to all and sundry, and his diaries, which he kept for decades. These he filled daily recording in detail his life, work and internal thoughts.

Ivan Doig's Winter Brothers is Doig's study of these diaries, written while spending a winter season in the North West, visiting places and sites related to Swan's life. Doig is a magnificent writer, his own personal history, and the travelogue, expertly intertwined with extracts from Swan's diaries. At times this can be a little hard to follow as the reader has only italics to separate contemporary from historic. But it is worth pushing through as both illuminate each other.

Doig is a great novelist and biographer. But it is Swan that shines through the book, his love for life and people is wonderful. His respect for the Native Americans and their way of life, even if he is driven to distraction by some individuals, seems remarkable for the time. The closeness of his life with them, and the documentation of their culture is made with scientific rigour, but also honesty. 

But the diaries are also very touching. Swan's struggles with alcohol, his love for food and the way that life, death and love affect him through decades are moving. Doig's interaction with these aspects, as well as the insights he brings from his own youth in Montana make this a remarkable work. 

On finishing I noticed that my copy of the book has the name and number of a hotel scribbled on the inside back cover. This hotel, it turns out, is on one of the many islands in the Salish Sea, a place that Swan explored in detail and the location of his last, expedition. One of the previous owners was clearly enjoying the insight into the area offered by Doig's book while visiting the region. I can't imagine a better introduction to the place, it's people and history.

Related Reviews

Doig - This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
Doig - Bucking the Sun

Hal Draper - Socialism from Below

The US Marxist Hal Draper is perhaps best remembered for his monumental, multivolume study of the revolutionary thought of Karl Marx. But socialists usually first encounter him in a less grandious way by reading his well known pamphlet The Two Souls of Socialism. That pamphlet, and the work is was originally based on, where an attempt by Draper to grapple with the "crisis" of socialism in the period after World War Two. Then, Stalinism was triumphant, poisoning the very idea of Communism by become stipping it of any sense of revolution from below. As Draper explains:

The crisis of socialism and socialist ideas today, brought about by the aftermath of the Second World War and the rise of Stalinism against the background of the decay of world capitalism, has pinpointed one fact without possibility of dispute: The basic question for socialists is precisely this one of the conception of socialism.

Socialism from Below is a collection of Draper's essays (together with one criticial essay) that explore these crucial concepts. The first essay is the aforementioned Two Souls, which serves as a jumping off point for the discussion, even though most of the other essays have no direct connection in terms of publications. The opening essays explore the arguments of several US thinkers against socialism as a emancipatory mass strategy. These criticisms come in a variety of forms, but the dominant ones for Draper writing in the 1960s were "state control" of the means of production and managerialism. He writes of the US socialist and academic, Maynard C. Krueger that he "equates tendencies toward socialism with any tendency toward increased state controls". Draper's criticisms of these arguments are important because they have their parallels with arguments today, though modern readers will rarely have heard of some of those he is critiquing.

As with Draper's other writing, one of the things that shines through is his deep knowledge of the lives and work of Marx and Engels. In his discussion of Karl Marx and Simon Bolivar, for instance, he explores precisely how Marx and Engels understood Bolivar through a discussion of them writing a encyclopedic entry on the South American radical. He notes that unlike many radicals of the time, and indeed of today, Marx and Engels did not accept Bolivar's strategy, or the vision of some who supported him at the time and later, that the masses had to fight for a dictatorship that could then gradually introduce democracy at some later point, when the masses "were ready". As Draper says, "[Marx] does not accept the rationalisations for dictatorship" and continues:

There seems to be a contradiction: if there is no way for people to become 'ready' for democracy except by fighting for democracy, then it follows they must begin fighting for it before they are certified to be 'ready.' And in historical fact, this is the only way in which democracy has advanced in the world. The continuous solution to the contradiction lies in the process of revolution itself. This is a dialectic which will always be jeered at by those mentalities which know how to celebrate revoluitonary struggles only after they have been straijacketed by a new oppressive establishment.

If Draper here draws on lessons from the 19th century about revolution and the fight for liberation. Modern readers can draw on Draper's lessons from the struggles he was involved in. These include the radical years in the 1960s at Berkeley in California, when Draper was part of student struggles for democracy and against corporate influence on campus. Draper has written elsewhere of these in detail. But what again shines through is his commitment to struggle from below, and a sharp analysis of the limits of movements that do not put their trust in the masses.

A later essay explores the role of trade unions. This was an educational for socialists that Draper spoke at, to encourage a non-sectarian approach to trade union work, inspired by his idea of socialism from below. In it he explores what a trade union is, its limits and its potential and encourages the idea that socialists would be active within such a body. While socialists in Britain today might be frustrated by our union leaders, Draper has to engage with a much more right-wing, corporate trade union burearcacy. Nonetheless he does not right off these unions. I do think that here he gets it slightly wrong however. For Draper the union leaders are figures who can be pulled by mass action from below. He argues, "One function of the union leadership is to provide the organisational leadership of our class." [Draper's emphasis]. This, I think, is mistaken. It is better to understand the TU leaders, as Tony Cliff did, as a class of themselves, positioned between the workers and the bosses, and pulled by their own interests. Cliff's analysis arose out of his understanding of the economic seperation of the TU bureacrats from the shop-floor. 

Draper's position muddies his understanding of the role of revolutionaries within the trade unions. It is, he writes, "their specialfunction to organise that other pressure against the leadership". The idea of "disciplining" the trade union leaders by rank and file feels like a self-limiter on the movement itself. Surely the idea is that revolutionaries should be developing rank and file leaders to provide an alternative source of power to the trade union bureacrats. Consequently in this essay I wasn't convinced of Draper's criticisms of Rosa Luxemburg and the German Spartakist League towards the Revolutionary Shop Stewards during the German Revolution. Draper seems to think that Luxemburg should have abandoned the Spartakists for the RSS which seems to ignore the very constraained position her and Liebknecht found themselves in as counter-revolution raised its head.

Draper can be forgiven these errors in my opinion, because they do stem from having the right original position - the belief that workers action is key to their self emancipation. Indeed, the collection of essays in Socialist from Below, is a detailed reminder of what is lacking on the US left in general. Draper himself is a brilliant writer and polemist. His essays are barbed and full of humour, as his essay Vladimir Ilyich Jefferson and Thomas Lenin brilliantly demonstrates. 

But, as the world faces Trump's second rise, and the US left lacks a serious revolutionary organisation. New generations ought to dig out Hal Draper's work. This collection is expensive and academic, and the editor ought to have put more notes to give context to the articles (such as dates!) and so on. But there's a lot here the left desperately need to relearn. As Draper points out, "Marxism, as the theory and practice of the proletarian revolution, therefore also had to be the theory and practice of the self-emancipation of the proletariat. Its essential orginality flows from this source."

Related Reviews

Draper - Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution Volume 1: State & Bureaucracy
Draper - Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution Volume 2: The Politics of Social Classes
Draper - Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution Volume 3: The 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat'
Draper - Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution Volume 4: Critique of Other Socialisms
Draper & Haberkern - Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution Volume 5: War & Revolution
Draper - The Dictatorship of the Proletariat from Marx to Lenin

Wole Talabi - Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon

Wole Talabi is a well known Nigerian author, but this is their first foray into fantasy. Set in a universe where the spirit and human worlds coexist side-by-side, Shigidi is a low ranking nightmare god, who as with other Nigerian gods suffers from a lack of faith. Worshipers are few and far between. The Christian and Muslim faiths have hoovered up their followers, and with the loss of followers comes a consequent loss of power.

The idea that gods are only as powerful as the number of worshippers they have is an old trope in fantasy. My first recollection of it was in Terry Pratchett's Small Gods. The idea likely predates that. But its a neat idea and in the hands of Wole Talabi it becomes a mechanism to discuss power, colonialism and the modern world. Instead of religion, the gods organise through corporations. The boards of these argue about advertising campaigns designed to drum up new followers. The Nigerian patheon of gods, organised through the Orisha Spirit Company, has just come out of a relatively unsuccesful attempt to increase income by funding films in Nollywood.

More problematically for Shigidi, is that he is in love and is on the run. He's falled for the succubus Nneoma, and together they've fled his corporation. Going freelance enables them to live off the spirits of humans that they steal - requiring Nneoma to seduce them with her beauty, and then steal their spirit at the point of orgasm. But it also leaves them with some serious obligations that they finally have a chance to break free of when they are offered a deal: steal a powerful artifact from the heavily magically guarded British Museum, and bring it to the Nigerian Embassy, and they'll both be free of debt, obligations and much more powerful than they can hope for.

The book is pitched as a love story, as Shigidi falls for Nneoma, and she struggles with her own past, her issues preventing her committing to Shigidi. The book opens as she finally does so, as the two escape in a London Black cab through London spirit world. The book then jumps back in time multiple times to give the reader the full back story.

As I said. An intriguing idea, and interesting for the way it brings in serious issues that are being discussed today, namely why all that stuff is in the British Museum anyway. Unfortunately the book is weakened because of its emphasis on sex and violence. There are several long fight scenes and a variety of sex scenes (as well as the violence of Nneoma's stealing spirits from humans who can't escape). These undermine the more intriguing and subtle story of colonialism and post-colonial rule. The metaphor of decling religious power due to the rise of Western ideas and religions gets lost. In fact the best bit, when Shigidi is in the British Museum trying to steal the artifact is disappointinly short. But it offers some moments: 

The gallery walls were painfully white and sterile, arrayed with an assortment of colorful masks, cloths, pottery, weapons and all manner of items displayed atop plinths in transparent cases. Some of the items were works of art. Others he recognised as totems of gods, deities and spirit entities from his and other spirit companies he had worked with in the past, now all displayed - hung, bound, or in locked glass boxes like prisoners. He stared, shocked.

Some of the items Shigidi remembers from his life when the Nigerian gods were all powerful. That they were stolen and hidden in the Museum, filled "him with heat at what the sight before him represented". It was he thinks, "a certain kind of savagery to keep these once purposeful items for no other purpose than display, as trophies in memorian of a colonizer's self-given right to take." 

It's a powerful moment - fantasy becoming real. But I felt that these bits were lost in the fights, chases and the sex. 

Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon benefits from a brilliant world construction. It needed a bit more depth to fully explore it. I hope that there are sequels as I'd really like to see what Wole Talabi does next with these characters and ideas.

Chantal Lyons - Groundbreakers: The return of Britain's wild boar

Until I picked up Chantal Lyons' Groundbreakers I had no idea that there were parts of the British Isles that had hundreds of wild boar. Native to Asia, Europe and North Africa wild boar are a significant part of European cultural identity. Think of the boar hunts in medieval romances and the boar on various regal coats of arms. But boar disappeared from many parts of their "natural" habitat, and entirely vanished from Britain as the woodland that they live in was cut back and they were hunted down. Now, the boar are back. In the Forest of Dean where Lyons studies boar there have been perhaps 800 individual boar, though numbers have decreased due to hunting and control by poachers and authorities in recent years.

Groundbreakers is Lyons' celebration of the boar. It is simultaneously a study of the boar, their nature, and their place in the environment. But the book is also a look at how humans relate to wildlife in general, and boar in particular. How these animals are perceived, and how that perception changes. But the boar's return is not, in itself natural. As Lyon writes:

Their rise has been abetted by our own environmental damage, because an organism is more likely to become destructive – and therefore invasive – in a foreign ecosystem if we have erased the native species that might otherwise have stopped it gaining a foothold.

In other words, the boar have been returned to a place that is not the one they used to occupy. It is one transformed in time and space. Indeed the boar themselves are different, some of them carrying the genes that result from their breeding with domestic pigs.

The comeback of wild boar in mainland Europe has been blamed largely on the decline in human hunters and bountiful food in the form of maize and other crops. With their undiscerning diet, their large litters and their sheer adaptability, wild boar are evolved to catapult themselves towards the slightest opportunity.

The return of the boar, some released deliberately by animal liberation campaigners, others released by hunters and still more escaping from domestic confines, has led to an interest in their role within the wider ecology, and a discussion about their potential as part of wider rewilding efforts. Rewilding is often simply understood as the release of animals and plants into areas that have been denuded by human induced change. A return to a past nature. It is, in my opinion, a environmental that is much more complex - not least because it rewilding enthusiasts often hope for a return to an imaginary past, neglecting to understand the role of human influence on nature. As I noted in my recent review of Sophie Yeo's recent book Nature's Ghosts, there is no natural world. Rewilding must take account of the complex interactions between animals, environment and humans. 

Lyons' book supports this. She explores the way that boar change the environment, shaping aspects of the Forest of Dean, digging, turning and breaking ground in ways that have important impacts on flora and fauna. These are fascinating chapters, exploring as they do the way that boar fit into an ecosystem, changing it and being changed by it in turn. The experience of boar in the Forest of Dean is, Lyons says, the "biggest unintentional field experiment in Britain’s nascent rewilding history."

Wherever boar root through the earth, we’re told, we’ll see volcanic eruptions of green growth, and all manner of other life will swarm and flock. Which does happen. Sometimes... But while the time that the boar has been gone is, in ecological terms, just an eye-blink, we have still forced much change on our landscapes in the interim. We can’t be certain of what would happen if boar were allowed to return to the entire country and in significant numbers.

But Lyons' book is perhaps most remarkable in her study of the effect of boar on humans. Some people living in areas where the boar have returned are excited; celebrating them, enjoying them, photographing and sharing their pictures. Others are scared and threatened. Lyons is certainly in the first category. Her excitement for these giant creatures shines through the pages, and we're drawn into her adventures. But Lyons is not the sort of author who only looks for positive reinforcement for her own opinions. She travels with people who hunt the boar, trying to understand their perspective, and finding some real insights. She also talks to those terrified of the animals.

Some of them are fearful for their personal safety, though there are scarce any examples of injury from boar in Britain. Some fearful for their animals, or personal property, though again few examples. Some are caught up in tabloid fearmongering, or simply don't like the animals.

Boar might number a few thousand in Britain. But there are an estimated ten million across mainland Europe and this makes for an interesting comparison. Why are the experiences and attitude to boar to wildly (!) different in Britain and Europe?

Here Lyons examines the different approaches to nature. One expert in the Spanish state, hired to monitor the boar living in the rural-urban interfaces in Barcelona argues that ‘The wild boar is not a problem... The problem is caused by people’s lack of experience with wildlife.’ It is certainly a good point. The fear of the unknown, hyped up by click-bait newspaper headline writers, is certainly a factor. But perhaps more deeply Lyons argues that the way that nature is approach in Britain arises out of a particular separation between nature and human. As Lyons says:

I fear that the sole use of farmed animals is helping to reinforce the mindset that ‘human’ and ‘nature’ are, and should always be, separate realms. We have erected fences and other hard barriers to keep nature (including people) in or out. Yet so many wild lives depend on the ability to move through landscapes, to take part in ecological cycles of disturbance, rest and renewal. We’ve forgotten this. And just as we deny the movement of individual animals and of species by creating artificial boundaries, so we deny ourselves permission to belong to the rest of the world. We absorb our fences into our minds.
Maybe that’s a core part of why rewilding raises hackles. If your thoughts are constructed using the nature versus human binary, then rewilding can only mean wildlife, and never wildlife and people.

This I think is a particular problem in Britain. While it isn't restricted to Britain, there has been a particularly intense experiment with neoliberal nature by successive governments in the UK that has placed prices on nature and commodified the landscape. Lyons quotes Virginia Thomas of the University of Exeter who says "rewilding in England has itself been domesticated; it sacrifices some of its ambitions for ecological restoration in order to retain more human control." 

Rewilding has become trapped by an approach to nature marked by the idea that prioritising capital accumulation is the only way for society to function. Nature is simply another aspect to this. This is not to say that neoliberalism hasn't also affected France, Spain or Italy. But to argue that so called Natural Capital approaches haven't gone as far. That won't last.

Thus the rewilding conundrum cannot be answered simply. It is not enough, as Lyons book explains, to simply restore an individual animal or plant to an area. Boar on their own won't halt Britain's biodiversity crisis. On the other-hand, rewilding as an approach that ignores humanity and our own position within ecological systems, is also doomed. The people who quietly shoot boar, or try to restrict them to certain fields and woodlands, are making the same mistake from the other direction.

The only solution can be a transformative approach to humanity's relationship to nature, one that recognises the complexity of nature's interactions and the place of boar (or beaver or any other animal) within that. And whose introduction involves a transformation of our own understanding of nature as well as our understanding of particular species. Such a revolutionary rewilding would be something else indeed.

Groundbreakers reminds us of what we stand to lose. Its not simply that we might not see boar, and their litters, living in the Forest of Dean, but that we might lose it all. Chantal Lyons' celebration of boar, and her thoughts on the meaning of rewilding make for a lovely and stimulating read. As such Groundbreakers is a book for our times.

Related Reviews

Dawson - Extinction: A Radical History
Rawlence - The Treeline: The last forest and the future of life on earth
Shrubsole - Who Owns England?
Yeo - Nature's Ghosts: The world we lost and how to bring it back
Pearce - The New Wild: Why Invasive Species will be Nature's Salvation
Lymbery - Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were

Lee Child - Die Trying

This, the second Jack Reacher novel, follow a pattern that I suspect will become common place in the series. Jack Reacher randomly finds himself in a violent and unusual situation, which requires him to use his skills to violently escape. In his way will be a succession of dangerous enemies and their less than able henchmen. At various times Reacher will utilise his military knowledge, brawn and brains to defeat these enemies, while the reader gets to learn about a variety of military hardware.

It's all, remarkably satisfying, and Die Trying is perhaps apposite this week, given that its "bad guys" are far-right, Nazi, American militas living in the backwoods of Montana. Reacher finds himself kidnapped alongside a young woman, who turns out to be with the FBI and an important target for the Nazis. The Nazis aim to use her in their elaborate, and completely unfeasible plan to secede from the United States, and build a new country on the lines of the US constituion as they interpret it. It's all very Make America Great again.

Luckily Reacher is no proto-Trumper and he blows up, machine guns, and fights his way back to a vision of liberal America that never really existed either. Along the way he has sex after burying the crucifed corpse of someone who defied the milita - which proves that it takes all sorts really. It also has the least exciting cross-America road trip in literarture. Die Trying's a classic thriller packed full of silliness and escapism - perhaps not as polished as the first one. But that doesn't really matter.

Related Reviews

Child - Killing Floor

Rhian E. Jones - Rebecca's Country

The "Rebecca Riots" were one of the most striking examples of rural rebellion during the 19th century. Today they are mostly remembered, when they are remembered at all, for being against tollbooths and involving men dressed in female attire. But they were much more than this, they were a mass uprising against the way capitalism was destroying communal relations, and transforming traditional Welsh life to  maximise profits for landowners, and diminishing the lives of the lower classes.

Rhian E. Jones' important new account of the Rebecca riots fills a gap in recent studies of the period. Few recent books have covered Rebecca and this work has benefited from contemporary approaches to class and gender. This means that Jones' tells the history of this struggle in a fresh way to a new audience, and takes up issues that have often been ignored about the struggle itself.

The Rebecca movement was initially aimed at tollbooths. But it arose out of the appalling conditions that working people experienced in 1843. Low wages, low crop prices, high rents and unsympathetic landowners contributed to a massive crisis among ordinary people. The toll booths were a symptom of this, as their owners sought to raise cash ostensibly to pay for road repairs, but actually for pure profit.  Hundreds of tolls were imposed, and farmers found themselves paying multiple times on a single journey, essentially being taxed for trying to do their work. Conditions were awful, as Jones says, some houses "built of mud or stone with thatched roofs, had minimal furnishing, often a single room with one or no windows, packed-earth floors and bedding of straw mattresses and homemade blankets".

The rebellion against the tollbooths encapsulated the anger at these conditions. But the tollbooths represented something much more - the literal commodification of the Welsh landscape. It was this that meant the rebellion went much further than an outpouring of anger at the tollbooths, and spilled into a generalised revolutionary movement.

In 1843 the rising was so great that it drove the landowners away from their country estates, saw thousands of troops billeted in the countryside, and pitched battles between protesters, their supporters and the authorities. One contemporary report said, that Wales was experiencing "a formidable insurrection, overawing the law, invading the most sacred rights of property and person, issuing its behests with despotic effrontery, and enforcing them by the detestable agents of terror, incendiarism and bloodshed."

The destruction of tollbooths was a key part of the rebellion. Jones unpicks what took place, which tended to follow a known pattern. At night, a group of dozens of people, led by a figure on horseback would arrive at a tollbooth. Many of the leading figures, and certainly the "leader" on the horse would be dressed up, often in female clothing, and usually addressed as Rebecca. The protesters would expel anyone living in the toll houses, allowing them to escape safely and usually remove their belongings. Then the booth and its gate would be destroyed. The destruction seems to have had an air of ritual to it. Buildings were systematically destroyed, brick by brick. Gates would be sawn into pieces. Fire would consume the rest. Almost as if the protesters were erasing the building from memory, rather than just destroying it. 

The protesters would act quickly and were frequently supported by many onlookers. One thing that struck me was the similarities with the arson and rick-burning that characterised the Captain Swing movement just over a decade before. That too was enormously popular and attacks were often communal events, with local people supporting and watching in great numbers. Rebecca and Swing were both characterised by the mass support, if not complete participation, of the greater part of the labouring rural poor. They were both rebellions that went beyond mere economic demands.

Jones shows how this went further. The mass attack on the Carmarthen Workhouse was in part a rage at the authorities' approach to poverty. But it was also driven by a punishing approach to women who had had children out of marriage, including as a result of rape or abandonment by wealthy men. One of the great successes of Rebecca was a change in the law around the support for women in this situation. But Rebecca also took direct action on this. I was inspired to read how Rebecca protests on occasion confronted men who had abandoned women and their children, demanding financial restitution and support. On another occasion Rebecca rioters installed a poor family in more suitable accommodation, somewhere they were still living many decades later.

One of the things about Jones' book is that it covers womens participation in the movement. Because male rioters dressing in women's clothes was a key part of the rebellion's most public expressions, histories have often focused on male participation. But in fact, as Jones' shows, women were central to the protests, to supporting them, and to the wider discontent. Frances Evans, who was charged as a result of her leading role in the attack on the Carmarthen Workhouse, was accused of "having incited and led the mob... urged on the rabble to proceed upstairs, and otherwise grossly misconducted herself."

Jones' gives a great sense of the political breadth of Rebecca's revolutionary movement:

The targets of Rebecca were evolving to encompass more than tollgates. They now included the enclosure system: near Ammanford, a newly built wall that cut off a section of formerly common land to form a private field... was torn down and the field thrown back open to public use. Meanwhile a vicar at Penbryn received a threatening letter for having forced local Nonconformists to donate to the cost of a Church school.

The Viscount Melbourne wrote to the Queen, fearing a "general rising against property". Ruling class fears of revolution ran through their response to Rebecca. As a result military violence was common place and the stationing of thousands of troops held hold down south-west Wales. There was a general concern anyway that the British working class was on the move. Fear of Chartism had the government on edge already.

But Jones also picks apart the internal debates that helped undermined Rebecca, and how these were reflected in the wider movement. Leading Chartists, themselves riven by debates about violence, were often contemptuous of Rebecca, not least because they saw it as a cross-class movement that involved both workers and their farmer bosses. There was some truth to this. Farmers in fact did pay people to destroy the tollbooths. But ordinary people don't simply take to arson and destruction because they are paid too. There has to be a level of general discontent within society to make it worthwhile, and, as the support and sympathy for the Rebecca makes clear, this certainly existed in southern Wales in 1843.

The movement was broken by a combination of heavy repression and internal division. But, it is important to point out, it was remarkably successful. Jones notes that many of Rebecca's demands were won, toll houses disappeared, roads improved and there were changes made to support those in poverty. Many of those captured and imprisoned by the authorities were let off, either by symapthetic jurors or by the authorities who were fearful of making martyrs. 

Jones concludes that Rebecca's real legacy however, was to inspire others - even today. As she says:

The original Rebecca movement was composed of ordinary men and women who, finding their circumstances intolerable, used what they had to hand - from petticoats to petitions, and fom mass meeetings to sledgehammers - to challenge and change their world. The extent of their success is perhaps less important than the fact they made the attempt.

This new history of Rebecca fills an important gap in the history of rural radicalism. Written by a socialist it addresses key questions about class, gender and social movements that remain important today. It will teach new generations about our history of struggle, and reminds us all that the modern countryside is the consequence of violent class struggle.

Related Reviews

Williams - The Rebecca Riots
Jones - Before Rebecca
Dunbabin - Rural Discontent in Nineteenth Century Britain
Boyce - Imperial Mud: The Fight for the Fens
Griffin & McDonagh - Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500