Robert Wooster - The Military & United States Indian Policy 1865-1903

This short book is an important, if relatively unknown, study of the way the US military related to, and shaped, government policy toward the Native Americans. It is not an account of troop movements, campaigns and battles, though these do make an appearance. Rather Wooster studies the evolution of ideas that would culminate in a genocidal policy.

Wooster makes some specific points. Firstly, military policy toward the Native Americans was shaped by the battle and campaign experiences most of the US commanders had from the Civil War. This led them to conceive of military engagements being based on columns of armed forces, that would overwhelm the enemy in pitched battles. This led them to be illequiped, logisitically and tactically for the type of combat that they would experience against the various Indian tribes. Secondly, the policy of the US army was often shaped by the ideas of its leading figures. In particular Generals Sheridan and Sherman. This meant that prejudices and racism often undermined the miltary's attempts to subdue the Indians. Wooster makes this point regarding the use of Indians in the army itself:

In addition to scouting, native auxiliaries were by the 1880s performing valuable services as reservation policemen, freeing regulars for other duries and prevening unnecessary army-Indian collisions. Later officials... favoured more direct measures, sponsoring new policies that added Indian companies to most of the army's regiments. This last step never gained full favor among line officers. Some opposed it on racial grounds; others... argued that language problems would demoralise Indians and strip them of their individuality, which had been there greatest asset in servving the army [as scouts]. Although the Indian enlistment program failed to meet expectations, it was a logical culmination of continued efforts to assimilate Indians into society as a whole through the miltiary.

It was also the culmination of a deliberate policy of "divide and rule" that saw the US miltiary turn various tribes against each other, or exacerbate differences, in order to undermine them both. The most obvious example of this were the Crow scouts who accompanied Custer to the Little Big Horn and fought on the wrong side. This in turn flowed from the idea that there were good and bad Indians. 

Throughtout  the period however the Army faced a difficult task. It was undermanned, under-equipped and under resourced. The period immediately after Custer's defeat aside, this was an army that couldn't actually easily do its task and subdue the "enemy". It was also at the whim of politicians whose desire for a military presence in their areas was often more about the jobs and profits that a fort might bring, than any need to subdue the Native Americans locally. As Wooster points out "The military thus influenced the econoimic, social and political structure of the states, territories and communities it protected". 

But it was government genocidal policies that eventually succeeded where military organisation was unable. 

Although the army was plagued by strategic failures, the near extermination of the American bison during the 1870s helped to mask the mlitiary's poor performance. By stripping many Indians of their available resources, the slaughter of the buffalo severely reduced the Indians# capacity to continue an armed struggle against the United States. 

While Sheridan and Sherman "recognised that eliminating the buffalo might be the best way to force Indians to change their nomadic habits", the actual massacre of the animals was mostly done by non-military people. While some officers opposed the killing of the bison, the government actively encouraged it. As the Secretary of the Interior said in 1874, to Congress:

The buffalo are disappearing rapidly, but not faster than I desire. I regard the destruction of such game as Indians subsist upon as facilitating the policy of the Government, of destroying their hunting habits, coercing them on reservations and compelling them to begin to adopt the habits of civilisation.

It is worth remembering that the lessons learnt by the US government and Army in this period were genocidal. Settler Colonialism was always based on mass murder. In conclusion Wooster argues that US Army policy was often confused and contradictory toward the Indians as a whole:

A wide range of political and cultural factors influenced the formulation of that policy. The policy-making process itself was woefully lacking. Neither the federal government nor the army representing it organised institutions to examine Indian affairs in any comprehensive and systmatic manner. The absence of detailed contemporary analysis sowed confusion, mistrust, and disinterest among those involved in making policy.

Where policy was decided it tended to be a response to events - either Indian resistance, or economic - such as the discover of gold in the Black Hills, or the decision that the central US was not "a great desert" but rather an area that could be profitably farmed. These failures led to a brutal and violent experience for the Native Americans, one that the US has yet to redress properly.

Related Reviews

Estes - Our History is the Future
Hämäläinen - Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power

Nigel Harris & John Palmer (eds) World Crisis: Essays in Revolutionary Socialism

That World Crisis exists at all seems remarkable from this standpoint. Published in 1971 by a well known mainstream publisher, it is essentially a theoretical statement of the politics of the then, very small, International Socialists group. The IS was to become the Socialist Worker's Party, having grown significantly during and after the 1968 rebellion. But it was nontheless still a relatively small organisation. More importantly its socialist politics were minority one - even if they were thought through and clear. The rejection of the State Capitalism of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc by the IS put them at odds with almost all the radical left at the time. For this book to come out seems quite extraordinary.

Over fifty years after World Crisis was published how does it stand up? Is it worth reading? I would argue that it is worth reading, and that it has much to offer beyond just historical curisosity for those interested in the history of the British left and the origins of the SWP. While some chapters are necessarily dated, there are others that are fascinating and retain their use today.

In the introduction Jim Higgins and John Palmer restate some orthodox Marxist ideas. The main reason for this is to highlight how much of the left, under the pressure of the existence of the Soviet Union, had abandoned central tenets of Marx's concept of workers' self-emancipation. They write:

And implicit in the struggle of a group of workers against a single employer is the struggle of all labour aginst all capital. The rise of working-class parties based on trade unions, directly or indirectly, is not accidental. Nor is it an accident that in times of fierce economic struggle workers are more receptive to political ideas. It is because of these structural and necessary features of capitalism that Marxists have identified the working class as the revolutionary class par excellence; not because it has some mystical quality of goodness, but because the nature of capitalist production and the relations within it make it so. 

Writing this in 1971 is also a polemic directed at new layers of radicals, aiming to win them to a Marxist view that places working class self-activity at the heart of organisation. This book certainly does this. But the book also asks, what is changing in the world. The opening chapter is "A Day in the Life of the 'Fifties" by Peter Sedgwick and is an amusing, and insightful look at a demonstration "against German rearmament" in Parliament square. The protest is attacked by the police, and Sedgwick uses it as a way to contrast the staid life of the old left: "Almost without exception all the elements which came togehter so hopefully on that late day in January [1955], a decade and a half ago, have been probed, stripped, revealed as nothing by the merciless challenge of the years." Later however Sedgewick notes that at the time of writing workers were less likely to be on the streets, and protests are more often by groups of middle-class radicals in their "brief hour of rebellion". The workers he points out "cannot graduate... but its consciousness is slower to ignite tha that of the Instant Left." Written in a time before student life became something that masses of workers engaged in, this comes across as somewhat sectarian, especially in the aftermath of 1968. But there is a point. The workers did need to link up and develop their struggles. The limitations of this in Britain in 1968 was the weakeness of the whole movement.

Chapter two is somewhat depressingly called "The Decline of the Welfare State". Reading it one is tempted to shout out to the author Jim Kincaid, "you ain't seen nothing yet!". But Kincaid does trace the way that attacks on welfare are rooted in a capitalist approach to the economy. It's must have been a depressing read then. Now it feels like fortune telling. But Marxism as a tool is nothing if insightful, and some of the chapters here give a real sense of debates to come. Here, for instance, is Nigel Harris pointing out that capitalist development does not benefit everyone, and early discussion of topics that would become central to degrowth theory in the 21st century:

But 'growth' may not mean 'development'. The statistics may show a rising national income, even a rising average income per head, at the same time as unemployment is increasing, there is no change int he distribution of the occupied population between agricultural and non-agricultural employment and in the distribution of non-agricultural employment between manufactuing and other sectors. In human terms nothing very much may have happened, and things for the majority may even have got worse.

Paul Foot's chapter on the origins and limitations of the Labour Party is fascinating, beginning as it does with the early betrayals. Written at a time when Labour still had mass membership and considered itself a socialist organisation it is clearly a polemic designed to arm readers for individuals breaking from Labour. But it has some fascinating material that readers today who want to argue against a Parliamentary Road to Socialism will find useful. Similarly Chris Harman's brilliant essay traces the limitations of these countries as "socialist" and puts a clear argument for the importance of State Capitalism as a theory. Its importance, as Harman writes, is in clarifying the left's politics:

A clear analysis of these regimes is a necessary precondition for renewed growth of the Left in the West. Only a theory which centres on the basic problem for the rulers of these countries - that of accumulating capital - and sees this as forcing them into collision with each other and with the working class can comprehend the forms their rule takes and the policies they pursue at each historical point.

Such an analysis proved important for both building a new revolutionary left in the 1970s and developing a critique of the limitations of Stalinist parties in the same period. It also helped ensure that the SWP survived the collapse of State Capitalism in 1989. Characteristically, Tony Cliff's chapter "The Class Struggle in Britain" is an argument about what socialists should do. A couple of things stand out. One is his comment that "a declining interest in the traditional reformist organisations (the Labour Party, Communist Party, etc) does not mean the overcoming of reformist ideology." This is true, though while Cliff probably overestimated the declining interest, he was right that even when this comes, it does not necessarily mean reformism is also dispensed with. However one part of his chapter could very well be written today for socialists in Britain:

The weakness of revolutionaries in Britain at present is quite obvious. Small in number, often isolated because of their social composition - white collar and student - from the main sections of the working class, split into a number of groups, and above all lacking experience in leading mass struggles. But these weaknesses can be overcome. Readiness to learn, readiness to experiment systematically, above all readiness to try and translate the general theories into practical activities - this is what is necessary. In a complex and rapidly changing situation, readiness to move from simple tasks to more difficult ones, above all readiness to overcome one's own mistakes is crucial.

For some socialists reading World Crisis would be an act of navel gazing. Dreaming of past battles. I'm not sure of the value of that. But the clarity of the theory its authors have, their determination to root this theory in struggles, and learn and develop the theory offers much. Some of the chapters are reminders of central revolutionary ideas. Michael Kidron's article on Imperialism and the permanent arms economy is perhaps the most useful in this regard. Foot's chapter on Labour and Harman's on East Europe also offer insights and ideas that remain useful. But standing out all of them display a Marxist method essential to furthering the basis of our theory today. As Cliff reminds us:

The greatest defect of revolutionaries who have been isolated for years from the mass movement is their inclination to make a virtue out of necessity, and concentrate on theories to the exclusion of practice, forgetting that above all the duty of a revolutionary is to raise theory to the level of practice.

Related Reviews

Birchall - Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time
Harman - The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After
Harman - Selected Writings
Harman - Class Struggles in Eastern Europe 1945-83

Ismail Kadare - The General of the Dead Army

Twenty years after the end of World War Two, a General is sent from Italy to Albania to find and bring back the bodies of the soldiers killed there. He leaves with a fanfare, carrying with him the hopes and expectations of hundreds of people whose sons, husbands and fathers died, and never came home. In particular the General hopes to find Colonel X, a senior soldier whose body was never found, and whose wealthy and influential family want it returned.

Travelling with the General is a priest and the two form a bond which is more than professional, but not quite friendly. Their world views clash, as the General approaches the task with a mechanical eye - a professional job that needs to be done, and measured out in lists of names, measurements of skeltons and careful identifications. 

But the land itself is full of ghosts. The official international trip is hardly welcomed by the peasants who fought off the fascist invaders, and the long days, the difficult terrain and the tension take their toll on the General who begins to fantasise as his stress develops, that the dead soldiers are an army of his own, manouvering on some old battlefield. The priest questions him - does he think it would have been better if he had led them? Its a poignant question because the General clearly does think so. The reality of war is not something he really knows - though the diaries and stories he hears of the dead soldiers teach him that the war, and the Italian troops, were not the brave heroes of his imagination.

Into this tangle of emotions and stress comes and added problem. A German general is here too. Removing their own bones. Inevitably the two clash. But really want causes the General to finally break down, and indeed brings out his contempt for the host nation and its people, his failure to really understand the nature of his task, and the impact upon the Albanians who were the victims, is the reality of the work. Despite the pomp and circumstance of his initial journey, there's little glory or thanks here.

Its a terrific novel, which says alot about Albania in the post war period, and its attitude to its "fascist" enemies of the past. 

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels - The German Ideology: A new abridgement by Tom Whyman

In his introduction to his new abridgement of Marx and Engels' The German Ideology,Tom Whyman makes a point about the text itself. It is actually unclear whether it is a coherent work in itself. Whyman points out that there are two stories about it. The first is that its a 1846 text by Marx and Engels were they flesh out their thoughts and come to a "final reckoning with the 'philosophical tradition'" before leaving it to "the gnawing criticism of the mice", in Marx's words, and moving on. 

The second is that none of this is actually true. Rather the German Ideology was never really finished, and the bits that were, were a amalgam of Marx, Engels and other of their socialist friends, and then it was all "constructed" by Soviet Researchers in the 1920s. Whatever the reality, Whyman points out, The German Ideology is "a text of rare power: the rare sort of philosophical tract that, when you read it, can make you feel ecstatic with the rush of thinking, the bright brilliant naming and unlocking of the reality which is otherwise stuck inchoate all around you."

This is absolutely true. Re-reading the book I was struck by the absolute brilliance of Marx and Engels' insights as they, in contradiction to Hegel and the other thinkers they are critiquing, state their own positions on what we might today call Historical Materialism. It repays a re-read. 

I've reviewed The German Ideology before on this blog, the CJ Arthur abridgement, and I am interesting to note that I've highlighted many of the same passages. This work includes much more from the sections of the book that assault the ideas of Max Stirner. This poor fellow, similarly to Eugen Dühring is destined to go down in history as being remembered mostly as someone that Marx and Engels used to mercilessly attack in their exploration of their own ideas. But this is well deserved, as they say early on:

It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the realtion of their criticism to their own material surroundings. 

As the authors point out:

Life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself... Therefore in any interpretation of history one has first of all to observe this fundamental fact in all its significance and all its implications and to accord it its due importance. It is well known that the Germans have never done this, and they have never, therefore had an earthly basis for history and consequently never an historian.

A damning criticism of German philosophy.

Writing about the German Peasants' War and the Reformation recently, I was struck by the relevance of Marx and Engels' criticism of history in this format. So much writing about the 16th century begins from the premise that the Reformation took place, simply because Martin Luther had a brilliant idea and this idea mysteriously propagated. Luther did, of course, have an idea. As Marx himself said, the Reformation was "born in the brain of the monk". But why was it born then, and why did the idea take root in ways that similar ideas had not before? Not accepting the economic basis to the ideological superstructure in society means that one cannot comprehend how things change. As Marx and Engels say in The German Ideology this leaves historians without a materialist understanding adrift:

Thus, history becomes a mere history of illusory ideas, a history of spirits and ghosts, while the real, empirical history that forms the basis of this ghostly history is only utilised to provide bodies for these ghosts; from it are borrowed the names required to clothe these ghosts with the appearance of reality. 

In fact, even when someone like Stirner tries to be more specific, their failure to examine the actual reality of society, casts them adrift. As Marx and Engels say, for example:

He identifies first of all 'owning' as a private property-owner with 'owning' in gernal. Instead of examining the definite relations between private property and production, instead of examining 'owning' as a landed proprietor, as a rentier, as a merchant, as a factory-owner, as a worker - where 'owning' would be found to be a quite distinct kind of owning, control over other people's labour - he transforms all these relations into 'owning as such.'

This remarkable paragraph, which simultaneously skewers Stirner's crude comments and restates Marx and Engels' idea of capitalism as a system of class relations that determined by economic relations is a good example of the real value of The German Ideology, whether or not it exists as such!

Whyman claims that in making a new abridgement, he has felt confident, given the text's possibly history, to rearrange and reassemble to give new insights. He concludes:

This is first and foremost a popluar edition of The German Ideology, intended for interested students and lay people, as well as academics distant enough from Marx scholarship to feel able to simply dabble in his wriings: people who can feel free not to be completionist about a text, or to take some other authoritity's word for what is really important about it.

It should be said that Whyman has not just abridged the work. He has done so twice, abridging the work and then compressing it again for an even shorter and more accessible work. This permits him to make a neat dialectical joke about the most famous passage in the work.

Related Reviews

Marx - Value, Price and Profit
Marx - The Civil War in France
Engels - The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
Perry - Marxism and History
Carr - What is History?
Harman - Marxism and History

David Reynolds - Slow Road to Brownsville

One day, while in Swan River, Manitoba, Canada, David Reynolds learns that road 83, "goes to Mexico". On enquiring further he learns that this is actually true, the road eventually leaves Canada and becomes Route 83, which makes its way south through North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, the Oklahoma panhandle, and Texas, before arriving in Mexico at the US town of Brownsville on the Rio Grande. Reynolds is in Swan River because his grandfather ended up there - an immigrant from the UK looking for work, and he has written an autobiography about the man he never knew.

But Route 83 gives him another idea. How about driving the whole length of it and writing about what he sees and who he meets. He isn't the first. It turns out that lots of people have made the journey, and indeed many Canadians made a habit of travelling south for holidays, and the people they befriended down in Texas used to come north for meet ups. Along the route he finds plenty of people who have travelled some of 83. But he also meets many people who haven't, and sometimes they haven't really left the immediate area they were born in.

North-South roads in the US are not quite the same as the East-West ones. Those, Reynolds points out, are routes to carry lots of travellers long distance. The vertical routes don't have the same need, and thus aren't quite as well supplied in terms of rest stops. Much of 83 is actually two lane road, and it makes for a quiet, if slightly cliched, road trip. For this is small town America, but it is a trip through a small town rural coutnryside filled with history. Reynolds muses on the colonial expansion of the US, racism and the treatment of indigenous people and the nature of rural America itself.

Reynolds is a classic English liberal. He shys away from confrontational politics, but he does meet plenty of people prepared to talk about the things you might expect. Racism, Indians, Guns, Democrats and liberal themselves. Everyone who has been to middle America, or its adjacent states will know that they are friendly and welcoming. Interested and suprised to receive visitors from far away, and proud of their areas. Reynolds however was travelling in what feels like a different time - Obama was just into his second term - and to Reynolds at least, the right feels isolated and on the retreat. Reynolds finds plenty to shock and worry him - not least the open racism he experiences in several places. But his diary of the trip feels a very different place to the United States in the first year of Trump's second presidency.

Like all road trip books, readers will find themselves wishing that the author didnt have to move on quite so fast. There's plenty of stories that we only scratch the surface of, and it feeds this readers on desire to return to this part of the world. But Reynolds is an honest enough writer and observer of people to give his readers a real feeling of the places he travels through. The book is also filled with references and quotes to the books that Reynolds reads about the places - a goldmine for future travellers. One this did irk though. Reynolds is unnevering in his physical descriptions of the people he meets. I'm not sure there is any real need, even when discussing the obesity epidemic, to talk quite so much about how people (and if we're honest it's mostly the women) look.

That said, this is an enjoyable read that has a lot to say about America before Trump.

Related Reads

Estes - Our History is the Future
Zinn - A People's History of the United States: 1492 - Present

Michael Christie - Greenwood

In 2038 the last forest survives on a remote island off British Columbia. The world's woodlands have been destroyed by a cataclysmic disease, that has destroyed huge swathes of humanity and undermined the global economy. The forest, private land, is tended by scientists and forest guides who maintain it for the wealthy tourists to visit to be "regenerated in the humbling loom" of the last trees. Jake Greenwood shares her name with the billionaire owner of the island, a timber tycoon whose wealth was based on the ravaging of North America's woodland. Now Jake is heavily in debt and desperate to cling on to her job.

The Greenwood island is at the epicentre of this multigenerational story. Jake is the latest of a long line of people, who have an association with the land and the forests, and after the opening chapters that detail her place on Earth, the story skips back 150 years to tell how the rich got rich and destroyed the land, woods and people along the way. Its an epic tale, much of which centres on an itinerant veteran of World War One who makes his living tapping maple trees for syrup, and comes across an abandoned baby. Persuded by the powerful and wealthy agents of the millionaire father, Everett carries the baby through a North America wracked by economic depression. This story forms the centre piece for the remaining links to Jake, and the modern world - the story of an abandoned baby and a world gone chaotic around her.

Its an amazing tale, and Michael Christie has done wonders to weave countless threads together. From the 1930s depression era railroad cars to Earth First style direct actions against logging equipment, the book is filled with fully drawn characters, who constantly force the reader to ask themselves why we live in a world with so much beauty at the same time as hunger and destruction surround us. But this is no crude political tract, its a story that links future dystopia to a chain of events - both human and economic. The powers unleashed by a handful of billionaires in search of yet more wealth, draw countless others into the swirling maw. The trees that are stripped and destroyed and burnt along the way, merely fuel for the accumulation of wealth, yet poignant reminders of what we stand to loose. Great novel.

George Edwards - From Crow-Scaring to Westminster

George Edwards was born in rural Norfolk in 1850, the child in a "miserable" cottage of "two bedrooms, in which had to sleep father, mother and six children." At the time his father's wage "had been reduced to 7s. per week". Such poverty, and the appalling working and living conditions that were imposed on agricultural workers at the time, shaped Edwards' life and thought. His father had been a soldier, and an agricultural worker, thgouh his exemplary service bore him no long term benefit. Having protested against unemployment with others in the parish of Marsham, George Edward's father found himself unable to get work.

The punishment for organising against unemployment, low wages and poverty were severe, and as Edwards relates throughout his autobiography the only way to successfully do this was through trade union organising. There were two great periods in Britain of agricultural trade unionism. Edwards was part of the first, which saw the leadership of Joseph Arch and a wave of strikes that shifted the bosses massively. But he was central to the second, and by then was an established trade union leader, and on occasion, paid official. 

As the title of the book demonstrates, Edwards very much saw his most important trajectory as being from the poor beginnings to Parliament. A similar path was trodden by Arch, and both of them - the first and second agricultural workers to become MPs, fell easily into the trap of finding in Parliament the establishment recognition they craved. Arch, is must be said, comes out of it far better than Edwards. Both of them however, end up blaming the workers who cheered them on for their failures. Edwards, however, is far more of a cynic than Arch, the latter of whom retained faith in workers' struggle till the end of his life.

Edwards, by contrast, despises workers' struggle. For him it was the last choice representing failure of negotiations. At one point, in describing the battles of the 1910s, Edwards rights, "I was... determined that I would do everything that was humanly possible to prevent a strike of this magnitude". He continues:

I can't explain it, but I always had, I took a leading part in the trade union movement, the greatest horror of a strike, and would go to almost any length to prevent it, so much so that many of my friends used to say that I went too far in my peace-loving methods.... I have made many mistakes, but that is not one of them.

Edwards' revulsion of strikes stems, in part, from the position he found himself in, as a local trade union leader with an economic interest in avoiding actions that challenged the union. But also from his own weak politics. Edwards' came from a Methodist background. His socialism was not that of Marx and Engels. It was that of the pulpit and Christian socialism. An avid reader, taught to read by his beloved wife, Edwards lists many of obscure books that inspired him. Few of them would be recognisable to socialists today. His politics lacked an understanding of class and power, even though he sided with the lower classes - he is clearly unable to see that struggle is the only way to challenge the entrenched reality of capitalism. Reformism for Edwards flows from his faith and his politics.

That said when battles did happen, Edwards took his side - both on the pickets and in the union. The Norfolk union was built through hundreds of meetings, arguments and discussions. Edwards' training as a Methodist preacher served him sell here. One cannot fail to recognise that it was Edwards' hard labour (and thousands of miles of cycling) that built the trade union, and it was he who was punished by the union itself when the St Faith's strike of 1911 was sold out so that there would be no struggle to distract from the General Election. Edwards' discussion of this period in his book is in part a settling of accounts. The tiresome reproduction of motions aside, it is clear that Edwards' at least held on to a principled defence of the strikers' right to continue and their democratic decisions. Edwards was right. Fifty percent of the strikers did not get taken back, despite the union leadership's compromise.

Nonetheless historian Reg Groves is no doubt right when he wrote of Edwards:

George Edwards tells the stroy from the standpoint of one who was an active worker for the Liberal Party. He saw the growth of the union rather in terms of his own development, of his own slow passage from mesmbership of the Liberal Party to membership of the Labour Party. His opinions change little, if at all: he aw things much at the end of his life as he had done in the early days, and he remained for a long time coparatively indifferent to the changing opinions of the workers themselves, who were hearing and responding to the message of socialism.

Much of the latter half of the book is taken up with somewhat tiresome anecdotes and reprints of speeches and motions that detail the struggles inside the union as the movement went into decline. Then Edwards' election campaigns see reprints and extended quotes from favourable news reports and speeches. As a result there is very little of interest to those interested in rural history or agricultural trade unionism. The book becomes more and more about Edwards, and less and less about the conditions around him. In fact, it is noticeable, that even when describing strikes and protests that he was central too, Edwards is rarely speaks about the struggles, or those struggling. Despite the huge scale of the trade union movement at times, there's little flavour here of the strikes or the movement itself. It makes for a dry read.

One other thing that comes through is how Edwards' loyalty to the British state manifests itself against his better principles. The worst example of this is how he becomes a cheerleader and recruiter for the First World War. The horrors of those battles means he becomes determined to ensure those who returned get treated decently. But he never wavers from the idea that it was right for thousands of agricultural workers' to be sacrificed in the trenches for British capitalism. No doubt this approach is why he had such a fine time in Parliament.

Tiresome and dry though this book is, it confirms on almost every page the essential limitations of socialism without class struggle. Most readers will find in it an interesting insight into the way that Methodism and reformism found in themselves appropriate partners in the British Labour movement. It helps illuminate the way that British Labourism was born tied to the coattails of Imperialism, and how it has failed ever since to break. If you can suffer through the terrible Methodist hymns you might find something of interest. 

Related Reviews

Arch - From Ploughtail to Parliament: An Autobiography
Horn - Joseph Arch
Ashby - Joseph Ashby of Tysoe: 1859-1919
McCombs - The Ascott Martyrs
Groves - Sharpen the Sickle! The History of the Farm Workers' Union

Greg Steinmetz - The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The life and times of Jacob Fugger

In 1526, the Tyrolean radical Michael Gaismair, wrote a remarkable document known as The Landesordnung. In it, he outlined how a radicaly democratic society could function, based on social justice, religious freedom, equality and, through curbing the actions of the rich and powerful. In it, he demanded that the mines, an important part of the Austrian economy, be bought under democratic control and taken off the likes the Fugger bankers. They, and their kin, had

forfeited their right to them for they [bought] them with money acquired by unjust usury in order to shed human blood. Thus also they deceived the common man and worker by paying his wages in defective goods…raised the price of spices and other products by buying up and hoarding stocks. They are to blame for the devaluation of the coinage, and the mints have to pay their inflated price for silver. They have made the poor pay for it, their wages have been lowered in order that the smelters can make some profit after buying the ore. They have raised the prices of all consumer goods after they gained a monopoly, and thus burdened the whole world with their unchristian usury. 

Sadly this quote doesn't appear in Greg Steinmetz' account of the life and times of Jacob Fugger. But having read it, one can certainly sympathise with Gaismair and the rebellious peasants and miners who flocked to his call. Fugger was indeed one of the richest men ever to have lived, and as Steinmetz's account makes clear Fugger was uniquely for his time, adept at seeing business opportunities and using his existing wealth and power to get further wealth and power. He counted among his clients kings, monarchs and popes, and he played politics like a giant game of chess across Europe all in order to further his own ambitions.

Unfortunately Steinmetz's book suffers from superficial analysis and simplistic comment. Writing of the great German radical Thomas Müntzer, Steinmetz says that he "was the most dangerous to Fugger. It was not because he had the most guns but because his populist agenda held enormous appeal". Müntzer did indeed rail against "the profiteering evildoers", but then so did many others. Müntzer was a threat because his brand of radicalism was linking up with a mass movement - not because he was uniquely radical. The revolutionary movement of 1525 was, after all, a massive challenge to all the powerful and weathly. 

Steinmetz charts Fugger's rise to power, and in particular highlighting the way he was able to extract wealth from labourers and use that to strengthen his hand. It is notable, and Marxists might appreciate knowning it, that the world's first capitalists and bankers were as ruthless as others. Despite the lack of serious competitors, Fugger seems personally driven to accumulate wealth for the sake of it. Even Steinmetz who is clearly sympathetic to the banker's lot is forced to acknowledge that Fugger's methods were devious and nasty. In the case of the repression of the peasantry and their allies, Steinmetz notes that Fugger "sponsored" "savagery".

Despite these insights, Steinmetz tends to give Fugger far more credit than he is due. He is portrayed as the figure who personally drives forward key moments in central European history. Steinmetz doesn't appear to be engaging in hyperbole when he improbably claims, that Fugger

roused commerce from its medieval slumber by persuading the pope to life the ban on moneylending. He helped save free enterprise from an early grave by financing the army that won the German Peasants; War, the first great clash between capitalism and communism. He broke the back of the Hanseatic League... He engineered a shady financial scheme that unitnetniotnally provoked Luther to write his Ninety-Five Theses... he most likely funded Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe.

Like Brecht, we might wonder who else built Thebes of the Seven Gates? The problem is that this account fails to acknowledge the very real changes taking place within the economic base of European society in the early 16th century. The changes that were driving all sorts of economic, political and theological changes and opening up a space for others. By placing these changes in the hands of one individual (to be fair Steinmetz does say "helped") the authors is simply engaging in that favourite bourgeois fantasy of the individual discontected from society and the wider world. 

Tragically there are no modern biographies of Jacob Fugger, and Steinmetz has at least written one that covers the key moments of Fugger's life. Sadly its not without fault. It also has some annoying mistakes. Fugger claims that Müntzer was finally defeated in battle at Mühlhausen "a small city Müntzer gad seuzed and sought to run as a communist utopia". But this is wrong. The battle took place at Frankenhausen, and is today marked by a significant museum.

Greg Steinmetz's biography of Fugger will likely have a renewed readership as a result of the anniversary of the Peasants' War. It is perhaps most charitable to say that it is the sort of biography you would expect "a securities analyst for a money management firm in New York" to write, and use it as a jumping off point for more serious studies elsewhere.

Related Reviews

Klaassen - Michael Gaismair: Revolutionary and Reformer
Blickle - The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants' War from a new perspective
Baylor - The German Reformation & the Peasants' War: A Brief History with Documents
Drummond - The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer