Andrew Bradstock - Faith in the Revolution: The political theologies of Müntzer and Winstanley

This is a fascinating little book. Its author is a Christian radical whose purpose in exploring the ideas of the German radical Thomas Müntzer and the English revolutionary Digger Gerrard Winstanley is to try and understand the role of Christianity in the struggle for revolution. Whether you have an opinion on that or not, Andrew Bradstock's summary of both these fascinating figures is very useful and interesting for radicals today. 

Bradstock begins with Müntzer. On this blog I've reviewed many books about Müntzer and the German Peasants' War that provided the context for his revolutionary ideas. Müntzer's starting point was, in the words of Bradstock, a "commitment to a transformation of the world", but he cautions that Müntzer 

takes up the cause of the poor and oppressed as much from a concern about the spiritual consequneces of such oppression as anything else. Indeed, his main worry is that, because the people have to work day in and day out to survive, they have no time to attend to the health of their souls, and are forced to reply for spiritual guidance upon the learned scholars and priests; and thus they never get to hear about the possibliilty of receiving a revelation from God.

This is an important point about Müntzer (and also, I think about Winstanley). He was a religious thinker before he was a social activist, but in becoming a social revolutionary Müntzer was not breaking from his revolutionary politics, but extending his religious activity and thinking. Müntzer "never envisaged fighting the last battle alone" - he did not see himself as a the person who was the vessel for God's actions. He say an enlightened minority the "elect" as being the people who would change the world and humanity. The non-elect were "destined for eternal damnation" and the elect would be saved. Who was who? 

The key to such knowledge... is to be found in the concept of urteyl, judgement, a gift of God to the elect by which they are enabled to know themselves to be among the chosen, and to recognised those who are the ungodly. This concept is essential for Müntzer and vital for an understanding of his leagues [his organisations], his apocalyptic, and his participation in the peasants' struggle.

Bradstock points out that Müntzer's thinking on the elect developed. But towards the end of his life he was seeing the elect as being the same as "the poor and materially oppressed common folk".  He made "the peasants' cause his own". It is tempting to draw an analogy here between Müntzer's concept of the enlightened few changing the world and Anarchist ideas of a minority changing the world for the masses. It's also possible that Müntzer was better than the average Anarchist in this sense because he understood that the elect were a mass social force. Though he doesn't seem to have abandoned his "two-tier conception of humanity".

How does this compare with Winstanley's thought? Winstanley was also shaped by the struggle around him, though England in the 17th century was much more economically developed than Germany in Müntzer's time. Winstanley was writing during and following a revolutionary movement that had beheaded a King, so his revolutionary policies in some ways are closer to modern revolutionary ideas than Münzter's. But Bradstock writes that:

Had Winstanley's millenarianism not been geuine - had he, in other words, truly been a secular thinker - it is at least arguable that he could have produced a more revolutionary programme than he did, since by interpreting the political struggle in which he was egaged religiously he failed to see it in a true historical perspective. Hi millenarianism, in other words, made it 'unnecessary' for him to demonstrate how it was possible for his programme to be realised.

I've written elsewhere on the brilliance of Winstanley's "vision of utopia". Here I think Bradstock is right. Müntzer understood that the, and the rest of the elect, had to fight. Winstanley didn't grasp that there were barriers to the implementation of his vision, so he tried to simply go out an enact it - digging on St George's Hill. Both leaders were however defeated because they underestimated their opponents and the historical context of what they were trying to win.

How does Bradstock's analysis fit with other revolutionary thinkers? He is at pains to criticise Engels' "analysis of Müntzer". This he says is basically an argument that religion is irrelevant to their struggles. He does this on a reading of Engels on the Peasants' War where Engels says that "the class struggles of that day were clothed in religious shibboleths... [but] this changed nothing and is easily explained by the conditions of the time." Bradstock here concludes that Engels (and thus all Marxists) are saying that "the presence of religious language in the revolutionary programme of a Müntzer or a Winstanley is politically insignificant". 

But this is a strange conclusion to come too, as neither Marx nor Engels thought this. They understood that religion arose in an material circumstance, and their writings on the Reformation, Luther and Müntzer reflect this analysis. So it's a strange to critique Engels for making an argument that is at the root of their materialist theory of history. Nonetheless, nowhere does Engels or Marx argue that the religious language of Münzter doesn't matter. Indeed quite the opposite. Both would have understood the centrality of Reformation thinking to the programme of Müntzer, while understanding that these ideas emerged from the economic and social context. 

Indeed despite Bradstock's clarity on some of the ideas of both the revolutionary figures he is discussing, he underplays the differences in economic, social and political development of the two contexts, which weakens his analysis somewhat.

The final section of the book is Bradstock's attempt to grapple with the issue that is central for him. What can Christianity offer revolution? Here he rightly emphasises the way that religion can be a force that encourages, inspires and offers guidance. He notes the importance of Christian thinking to radical forces in Nicaragua in the 1979 revolution as well as libertion theologists in South America. Too often though he falls back on radicalism being something brought from outside - just as Winstanley and Müntzer tried to do:

The relationship between scientific analysis and utopian visions is broadly dialectical: the former, by exposing the reality of the situation and the real possibilities for change, opens up new horizons for revolutionary activity, while utopian thinking, with its overarching vision of new people in new relationships, serves to stimulate science to explore new fields of possibility.

I think this is wrong. No mass revolutionary movement has been built because it started from utopian visions. Rather, in the case of the most successful of those movements, the visions have emerged out of the concrete reality of mass struggle. The Soviets and Workers Councils of the 1905, 1917 and 1919 revolutions in Russian and Germany were not pre-planned. They emerged because they were organs of struggle that did, or might have, become the basis for a new way of organising society. 

Unsurprisingly, as a Christian, Bradstock concludes that his religion makes revolutionaries better because they have "the certainty that neither they nor their effort will ultimately be meaningless or lost". It is, in my opinion, a little patronising to assume that non-religious, or non-Christian, revolutionaries might not feel the same. In either event, the belief in an afterlife shouldn't be some sort of get out clause for revolutionaries. What really matters is people's concrete engagement in the struggle, and the politics and theory that emerges from the testing of their ideas in practice. While Faith in Revolution is a book that I enjoyed reading this was more so for the author's penetrating insights into the ideas of two key radical figures, and less for his musings on Christianity and revolution.

Related Reads

Klaassen - Michael Gaismair: Revolutionary and Reformer
Stayer - The German Peasants' War and the Anabaptist Community of Goods
Drummond - The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer

Larry McMurtry - Comanche Moon

In chronological order Commanche Moon is the second book in the series that Larry McMurtry wrote about the Texas Rangers Woodrow Call and Agustus McCrae. In the order of writing though, it was the fourth. This is in itself interesting, because it means that the book is both a prequel to the pulitzer winning Lonesome Dove, and also a full stop at the end of the stories of the two characters.

But it is as a prequel to Lonesome Dove that the book will be mostly judged. Here I found the work slightly wanting. This isn't because it is badly written, but rather that the plot is hung less around the story and more around the need to manouevre the characters (both major and minor) into the positions they occupy at the beginning of Lonesome Dove. So obvious is this, that the Texas Rangers have a brief hiatus at the eponymous settlement to show it at a slightly earlier stage in its limited development.

Because of this the book sometimes crams in some story arcs. Characters die off rather rapidly, and not always because of murder. Some of the stories seem unfinished. It's unclear what Ahumado's disappearance is all about - there's certainly no closure in these pages - which means that main arc of the first third of the book is left hanging. There's no purpose to this part of the story other than to introduce characters later. If, when reviewing Lonesome Dove, I could say I was impressed by the strength and centrality of the female characters, here they are mostly there as foils for the men. The exception is the portrayal of how surviving female victims of Native American attacks are shunned by white society afterward.

Unlike earlier works there is more focus on Native Americans, though unfortunately like earlier works, most Indians are depicted as bloodthirsty savages. At least Buffalo Hump a Commanche chief in this book has his violence given context, and the depiction of the actual raid he led is rather well done - even if there is a little too much lingering on violence against the Whites.

McMurtry is, to be fair, more sympathetic to the Native Americans here than I was used too. Though the main characters are either violent sadists (also true of Ahumado) or eccentric wanderers. Not great really.

Looking at the book as the end of the story, despite its position chronologically, makes the book somewhat more satisfying. Its easy to read this and find Lonesome Dove just around the corner, which makes the reader feel the ending is merely a pause. The love/hate relationship of the two characters, scarred by battle, love and loss, positions them well for their roles in Dove. But the novel was undermined for me by its transitional nature. Read in chronological order would be my advice - but understand that Dove is by far the better, and more rounded novel.

Related Reviews

McMurtry - Lonesome Dove
McMurtry - Dead Man's Walk

Philip Marfleet - Palestine, Imperialism and the Struggle for Freedom

As the genocide in Gaza continues, millions of people around the world are trying to understand the reason for Israel's continued assault on the Palestinians. If my personal experience is anything to go by, there can be few workplaces, coffee shops or trade union meetings were there have not been discussions about the causes of the occupation and the possibilities of peace. So the publication of Philip Marfleet's new book Palestine, Imperialism and the Struggle for Freedom should be welcomed because it seeks to explain the current conflict in the context of a century of "colonial occupation, displacements and dispossession". Crucially, and unusually for even left-wing books on the subject, Marfleet's book puts Palestinian action and resistance at the heart of the history.

Marfleet begins with the Zionist "vision" of a "public project for colonisation by Zionist settlers". He writes:

As the Ottoman Empire went into rapid decline Britain became the focus of Zionists' attention. Now the movement's leading figure was Chaim Weizmann, who was convinced that it must win support from within the British ruling class on the baiss that a Jewish state could serve the best interests of Britain's emprie. Weizmann was able to deal directly with members of the British government. During the First World War, as Britain advanced on German-Ottoman forces in Palesinte, he lobbied decision-makes in London, allying with the most aggressive imperial stategists - ministers who sought to extend British control across the Middle East.

These close historic links between Zionism, colonialism and imperialist interests are crucial to explain the modern actions of the Israeli state and the close relationship it has with Western powers. Marfleet shows how the Zionist state that was created in 1948 did not invent repression of the Palestinian people, instead it "learnt from the British". He writes:

Britain's ideologues of empire and those who administered it colonial territories were not only racial supremacists but also designed and implemented policies that involved savage represion. As Zionist settlement in Palestine accelerated, Britain was crushing resistance in neighbouring Egypt and Iraq. 

In Egypt in 1919, a rebellion involved "members of all the country's ethno-religious communities: significantly, Jews joined Muslims and Christians in the uprising". But the British "colonial regime used all means against the movement". Thousands were killed.

The point here is that there is no automatic divide between the religious peoples of the region. In fact, as Marfleet shows, Jews, Muslims and Christians lived side-by-side for centuries. One of the lessons the British taught the emerging Israeli state was how to divide and rule.

But it is the resistance of the Palestinians that is central to Marfleet's account. This began long before the creation of the Israeli state in 1948. In 1936 there was a massive revolutionary movement in Palestine. This history is seldom told, and much of it was new to me. It is one of the most fascinating parts of Marfleet's book. This revolution was incredible. Zionist militias were violently assaulting Palestinian villages, British colonial rulers were oppression and restricting Palestinian freedoms and resistance exploded. Marfleet places the revolution in the context of a developing industrial capitalist economy:

Change accelerated during the 1920s as Britain established the Mandate regime and Jewish settlement intensified. More and more peasants were forced from the land but - as Britain favoured industrial and infrastructural defvelopment for the Jewish sector and Jewish organisations impements the policy of Hebrew labour - many were rapidly impoverished.... by 1936 the majority of workers in Jaffa, a key industrial centre, were living below subsistence level. Industrial workers, semi-proletarians of the countryside, the peasants and the urban poor not only faced a European power and an emerging colonial-settler regime but also the reality of immiseration. It was in these circumstance that the uprising 'spread like wildfire, gripping the cities and country alike and giving rise to an unprecedeted armed insurrection'.

Space precludes any further summary of Marfleet's account of this extraordinary rebellion. But here we see one of the first examples of a theme which Marfleet returns to time and again - the way that Palestinian resistance sparks rebellion elsewhere. The 1936 "Palestinian intifada also stimulated solidarity across the Arab region. In Egypt there were demonstrations of support and the Muslim Broptherhood declared backing for the uprising".

Marfleet tells how the establishment of the Israeli state required the systematic displacement and violent oppression of the Palestinian people, as well as confrontations with the Arab states. In doing this Israel became a crucial ally of Western Imperialism, particularly of the US, post World War II. 

Importantly Marfleet shows how the failure of the leaders of the Arab world to build real solidarity with the Palestinians, and the limitations of the Palestinian leadership which became focused on the creation of a Palestinian state, undermined the wider struggle for freedom. But while Marfleet is rightly critical of some of the Palestinian leadership, he also notes how the cause of Palestinian oppression remains the Israeli state. He quotes Martin Shaw, a "pioneer figure in Genocide Studies" who said in 2010:

We should view Israel's destruction of large parts of Arab society in Palestine in 1948 not simply through the perspective of settler-colonial genocide, but as an extension of the exclusivist nationalism which had recently brought about extensive genocidal violence in the European war. 

This is, tragically, an ongoing process. Marfleet quotes from the genocide historian Mark Levene's work in 2024:

The target of Israel's offensive could not realistically be Hamas, said Levene, for the organisation 'will redeploy from underneath the rubble at will'. Referencing the pioneering work of Rafael Lemkin, [Levene] saw Israel's war as 'a conscious, wilful effort to destroy the integrity of a society'. Levene concluded: 'The charge of genocide is legitimate.'

But as Marfleet shows this genocide arises out of global imperialist interests and the nature of the settler-colonial state. It means that the solution, in terms of peace in the region, cannot be one with two states side by side, but rather a single state were people of all faiths, Jews, Muslims, Christians and none, live together. This has been the case in the past and could be in the future. The importance of Palestinian resistance is thus in part their ability to inspire and shape to mobilise and encourage resistance elsewhere in the world. In particular that of the massive working classes of the region. These, Marfleet argues are the force that can fundamentally transform the region. 

Palestine, Imperialism and the Struggle for Freedom is thus a book that stands out from among many other books about the history of the region, because it has an emancipatory vision of the struggle to liberate Palestine. It locates Israeli's oppression of Palestine in a historical process and argues that struggle from below is the force that stop it.

Marfleet is a long standing socialist and has written and studied the Middle East for many years. An earlier book of his on the 1987 Intifada became a crucial text for a generation of socialists. This new book ought to play the same role for new generations of radicals.

Related Reviews

El-Mahdi & Marfleet - Egypt: The Moment of Change
Sand - The Invention of the Jewish People
Masalha - Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History
Molavi - Environmental Warfare in Gaza
Pappe - Ten Myths About Israel
Gluckstein & Stone - The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, resistance fighters & firebrands
Hamouchene & Sandwell (eds) - Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region

David Humphreys Miller - Custer's Fall: The Native American Side of the Story

There have been plenty of accounts of the Battle of the Little Bighorn that range from general discussions of "General" Custer's strategy to microhistories of individuals or specific areas of the battlefield. Few accounts however discuss the Native American experience in all but the most general terms. One of the most famous of these is David Humphreys Miller's Custer's Fall. It is a remarkable piece of work because it is based on Miller's personal interviews with Native American survivors of the Little Bighorn. Miller learnt multiple Native American languages (including sign languages) and befriended many survivors. He also produced extraordinarily personal portraits of those he talked to as well as images of Western scenes, some of which are reproduced for this book.

What emerges from these accounts is a sometimes contradictory, but always fascinating story of the battle. Readers will, of course, have to be cautious. Some of these memories are those of old men, thinking back decades. In addition oral history is also at risk of distortion from either faded memories or the desire to change the narrative. However readers must also be cautious not to apply their own prejudices to this form of history. Native Americans thrived on oral history. Accounts were told, and retold. Indeed one of the interesting things about this book is it tells how the victorious Sioux told their war tales on the evening of the Battle. The memories of the day were already being cemented on the very evening of the victory.

The accounts here are made with the desire to remember and tell a story. Indeed Miller does tell a story - the book reads like a novel, and the reader will be hardpressed to work out exactly what is memory. What emerges however is a slightly different narrative of the day of the battle. The Native American story begins the conflict earlier, with an attack on small groups of Indians early in the day by Custer's forces. That said the rough outlines of the battle follow those told in countless other stories. There is one significant difference. Several of Miller's sources tell that Custer was likely killed, or injured, very early on in an attempt to ford the stream at Medicine Tail Coulee. It is then suggested that his troops carried his body with them as they tried to regroup. In his counter-revisionist study of Native American accounts of the battle Gregory F. Michno is emphatic in his argument that this is a myth, and that Custer did not get killed or injured early. That said Michno's rejection of this specific part of the Native American oral history is in part because his whole book is designed to place the "Last Stand" back at the centre of the history of the Little Bighorn, and the "Custer myth".

The truth of the matter is that no one really can tell. Not least because no one at the time knew that Custer, or "Long Hair", was at the Little Big Horn. In addition several other individuals worse buckskin on the day, Custer's characteristic outfits. But what matters for Miller's account is that many Indians believed that this is what happened. There are always different tellings of history, and the story that Custer was killed early on is a central part of the Indian account of the day. The story is important though, because for many Native Americans it explained why the troops behaved as they did. As Miller recounts, something "seemed completely to demoralise the soldiers - something that occurred within their own ranks".

There are plenty of other pieces of information here that will readers. The behaviour of the Native Americans after the battle, the actions of Custer's Native American scouts, the way the news spread among the Native Americans faster than it could have been communicated by the Whites. There is even a fascinating account of Finds-Them-And-Kills-Them who "normally wore woman's dress, but changed to warrior's clothing before riding into battle. Finds-Them-And-Kills-Them was a Crow who fought as part of General Crooks command against the Sioux at the Battle of the Rosebud before the Little Bighorn. Miller uses the term "hermaphrodite" to describe Finds-Them-And-Kills-Them. The term is incorrect and very dated, as Finds-Them-And-Kills-Them was a badé, or Two-Spirit person, "a male-bodied person in a Crow community who takes part in some of the social and ceremonial roles usually filled by women in that culture." The story of how Finds-Them-And-Kills-Them fought at the precussor to the Little Big Horn (albeit on the side of the Whites) is important as it shows how Miller places Native American culture at the heart of the story of these conflicts. Crucial to this was the democratic decision making processes of the tribes.

One final thing is worth recounting to illustrate this. Its the story of how at the "last great Indian Council on the Little Big Horn" in 1909, a wealthy businessman offered very large financial reward to the tribes for definitive information on "who killed Custer". For several tribes the chiefs debates this, mindful of the benefits of the cash reward. Not being able to decide, not least because no one actually knew, the tribes elected Chief Brave Bear to be the person who was given the honour of killing Custer. Chief Brave Bear had, after all, been "on th Washita when Custer had destroyed Black Kettle's village" and had "spilled pipe ashes on Custer's boots" at a later peace conference. Chief Brave Bear fully expected to be killed by the Whites after accepting the cash for his impoverished kin. He wasn't, but as Miller points out his only statement afterward before his death in 1932 was to say that "I was in the Battle of the Little Big Horn. The Indians called the General 'Long Hair'. It is a fight I do not like to talk about."

While the Whites continued to celebrate Custer's defeat and alleged heroism, the Native Americans were magnanimous and subdued in the aftermath of their victory. Their accounts here are not celebratory, but tell of a battle fought and won, of bravery and solidarity. It is well worth a read if you ever want to visit the Greasy Grass.

Related Reviews

Hämäläinen - Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power
Donovan - A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn
Philbrick - The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
Stevenson - Deliverance from the Little Big Horn: Doctor Henry Porter & Custer's Seventh Cavalry
Brown - Showdown at Little Big Horn
Michno - Lakota Noon: The Indian Narrative of Custer's Defeat
Cozzens - The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

Graeme Macrae Burnet - His Bloody Project: Documents relating to the case of Roderick Macrae

His Bloody Project tells the story of a horrific murder in 19th century rural Scotland. It purports to tell a true story based on found documents and archives. While these aren't real, they have been meticulously constructed by Graeme Macrae Burnet and, having read a number of histories of the crofting communities they certainly feel genuine.

The first substantial document is the account of the murderer himself. Supposedly written by Roderick Macrae in his prison cell before the trial, it is a story of his family's life in the small village of Culduie. The village is remote from the big cities and immersed in traditional practices and social relations. Superficially it is more feudal than anything else, Macrae's family use their land on sufferance from the landowner, and mediated through the control of the local authority figure - the constable Lachlan Broad. While Roddy's account is not necessarily truthful, it is shot through with the slights and abuses that these social relations engender. Roddies' father is abused and put upon by the all powerful constable. Following the death of Roddy's mother, their land is reduced and other attacks - such as refusing to allow the family to gather seaweed without permission are symbols of oppression - and Broad's personal victimisation.

Roddy's account is also a coming of age story - as he enters adolescene he is learning about the wider world, relations and sex. Broad is having sex with Roddy's sister, and clearly its a coercive relationship. Roddy's father steadfastly ignores this violence.

Roddy tells all this matter of factly, including the story of how he falls for, and then is rejected by Broad's own daughter. But he then also tells the story of how he murders Broad, and his two children, including the girl who rejected him in order to stop the oppression of his family. Its violent, unpleasant and Roddy is unrepentent. The reader will be torn between the satisfaction of the violent settling of debts with Broad, and simulatneously horrified by the wider killing.

But. Is Roddy telling the reader everything? The documents that follow cast a different light on the story, and Roddy's motivations. The transcript of the trial details the prosecutions desire to portray Roddy as a violent criminal, and the defenses' attempt to paint him as mentally distressed at the time of the killing - distress caused by the oppression and the shock at his mother's death.

Mixed in with this are other stories, including the pompous and unpleasant account of the doctor sent to study Roddy, and the village, in order to better prepare a defence. The doctor, immersed in the latest anthropological studies, sees savagery, stupidity and ignorance everywhere, except among the wealthy and the landowners. Similarly the media reporting of the trial sees the anger by Roddy's family and the wider community at losing land as due to their fondness for outdated and inefficient farming - rather than the despair at the threat to their livelihoods.

Burnet has done a magnificent job of using the "documents" to tell both a story and make a comment on the horrors and difficulties of croft life in a rigid and violent class society. I was pleased, but not surprised, to see that the books he used as source material included works by the wonderful historian James Hunter who has documented similar cases in his own work. 

Ultimately however, this is a novel about truth. Who is telling the truth? What are the real facts? Was Roddy right to kill Broad? Or was he actually commiting a different crime? And can someone take the law into their hands when the law is clearly geared towards protecting the wealthy and powerful. A very good, if painful read.

John Rees (ed) Essays on Historical Materialism

This book is a product of a particular moment in history. I purchased it after attending the conference at which most of the essays were given as papers. It was organised in 1998 by the International Socialism Journal, and reflected a number of ideological dynamics that were engaging the Marxist left. The first was the legacy of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Eastern European states. While the Socialist Workers Party, the tradition to which most of the contributors in this book, were undemoralised by this as they had theorised those regimes as State Capitalist, much of the rest of the left was. In addition the iedological right was riding high and confident. One consequence of this was attempts to undermine totalising approaches to history, and in academia particularly this meant the rise of post-modernism. The other, linked, consequence was a right wing assault on approaches to history that were based on Marxist, or even "history from below". 

The essays take up this ideological challenges in a number of ways. The first two probably stand the test of time the best. They are by Chris Harman on History, Myth and Marxism and the other is by Alex Callinicos and considers Post-modernism and its encroachment into the field of history. Callinicos' essay is perhaps one of the best short introductions to post-modernism I've read and repays a read, even if the immediate target of his writing is not as important as it was nearly thirty years ago. Another essay, by Mark O'Brien, on post-modernism and British history is also very useful - a solid defence of the importance of class through a study of the class forces and tensions within the Charist movement. In doing so O'Brien shows how the centrality of class undermines the post-modern rejection of continuity in history and the any sense of radical change. 

I was also particularly taken by Mike Haynes's article on Social History and the Russian Revolution. Here he traced the way that the collapse of Stalinism was leading to a retreat by left historians of the Revolution, and an assault of Marxist histories. One thing that struck me here, was that Haynes is more explicitly critical of "Western socialists" in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution than other writings. He writes: Western intervention [against Revolutionary Russia] was only able to have the effect it did because the revolution did not spread to the West as the Bolsheviks hoped and expected and because too little opposition was developed by  western socialists to the actions of their own governments in Russia."

But perhaps the best historical essay in the collection is Brian Manning's on Labour and the English Revolution, which defends a Marxist approach to the Civil War period, by closely studying the class dynamics of the revolutionary movement. He draws out who was arguing and fighting for what, and why, to demonstrate the importance of class. The question of the diverging intersts of "small producers" and "wage workers" within the Revolution is surprisingly important. He concludes:

In a bourgeois revolution, wrote Trotsky, 'that class which sacrifices most for the success of the revolution and hopes the most from it, receives the least of all... The disappointment of the masses follows quickly' and could lead to a second revolution, but 'more than once in history' this disappointment has 'become the starting point of a victorious counter-revolution'. The latter happened in the English Revolution. The disillusionment of plebeians with the immediate results of the revolution did not provoke them to further revolutionary acvitity but to the abandonment of revolutionary activity. The counter-revolution, however, was only partly successful.

Mannings article demonstrates how, and why this happened - relating the different interests of the participatory classes, to their struggles and actions and the failure to unite to move forward. Its an exemplary piece of writing, and one that many students could benefit from emulating. 

John Rees' concluding article on the differences between academic and revolutionary Marxism points out that the defeats of the left and the working class movement from the 1980s onward and opened the door to a generation of Marxists who divorved their Marxism from the struggle. This, Rees points out, undermines the basis of Marxism itself and weakens the approach of the Marxists to their history. But it also makes for a Marxism that is unable to deal with new challenges and ideas. There is much food for thought here for those Marxists who both restrict themselves to academia and refuse to soil themselves by engaging in the struggle, as well as those Marxists whose ideas are ossified and are no longer developing in engagement with new and emerging struggles from below. 

Related Reviews

Harman - Marxism and History
Harman - Selected Writings
Callinicos - Imperialism and Global Political Economy
Callinicos - The New Age of Catastrophe
Perry - Marxism and History

Lyndal Roper - Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War

Lyndal Roper is one of the most prominent historians of Germany in the Reformation era. Her books include an excellent biography of Martin Luther, which I reviewed here. Just in time for the 500th anniversary her monumental history of the German Peasants' War has been published. It has been eagerly anticipated by me and many others interested in the period. 

Roper argues that understanding the Reformation, and its "possiblities, as well as its limits" cannot be done without an understanding of the German Peasants' War. But likewise the War cannot be understood without knowing "the heady atmosphere of religious excitment in which it took place". The book begins with the context for the rebellion - the religious turmoil and the conditions of oppression and exploitation of the peasants. It was a very different world. One where

animals such as oxen, horses, cows, pigs, sheep and poultry lived closely with people, and where the vagaries of the weather mattered in a way that modern generations have often forgotten. The relationship between labour, harvest, and food was obvious, rather tahn mediated by powerful firms and complex industrial processes. The energy to drive machines came from water, from wood and from charcoal and it was clear who owned these resources and evident when they restricted access to them.

Roper casts peasant life (and struggles) in its ecological context - referencing the way they relied on, understood and shaped their landscape. She understands that their relationship to the land was more than a negative one, and she criticises contemporaries, even radicals such as Michael Gaismair, when they don't grasp the peasant ecological reality. 

Roper also shows how the context for the rebellion, and the Reformation, was a slowly changing world. Referring to the rebels' grievances she says: 

The sense of exploitation is unmistakable in these grievances, as is the sheer drudgery of agricultural labour. And yet the precise cause of the misery remains intangible, a fact that may well have increased the peasants' anger, while also making it harder to negotiate in the time honoured way, becamse more than just specific practices were at stake. Though they doubtless idealised a golden age that had never existed, peasants were complaining that relationships which had formerly been based on mutual respect had become matters of compulsion. The entire system had become more complex because of its growing entanglement in an economy where many owned rural rights.

The close links between exploitation of the peasants' labour, their ecological context and the rebellion's demands are drawn out well. As Roper writes in an illuminating sentence "for the peasants, the land was a working environment; for the lords it was a locale of peasure - and a resource to be exploited for profit." 

The rebellion condensed all the anger and frustrations that the peasants' were experiencing. Roper's book explores these well, but its strength is her understanding that the rebellion arose out of the context of the Reformation and a changing economy, but then went on to pose alternatives. The Reformation, she writes, "provided a set of ideas shown that such [existing] arrangements were 'not Christian'. They had to be transformed." In the early weeks of the rising, "lordship was exposed as a bond not of affection but of domination". Consequently, the "whole social structure therefore fissured under the impact of the peasants' revolt."

What was the alternative? Much is made, rightly in my opinion, of the politics of the more utopian minded of the radical leaders - Thomas Müntzer and Michael Gaismair in particular. But running through the peasant demands from 1524 and 1525 is a vision of a world turned both upsidedown - there would be no serfs, priests would be elected, taxes would be raised locally and controlled demoncratically. But it would also be a world that functioned in a new way. The vision was not of an anarchist utopia with no leaders, but one of a "new kind of authority in which men of respect, locally known and chosen, would have power". But what was this power? Roper suggests it would have been very different to the power known from feudalism:

It took imagination to conceive of a world without the lordship that the peasants knew. They probably did not want to overturn the entire system of authority, or at least not at first, nut merely to change the system of landlordship. And yet their slogn, "We want to have no lords". addressed everyone - peasants, miners and townsfolk alike - because everyone had some experience of lordship in its different forms or could tell a story about the overbearing behaviour of some lord or other. In its place they wanted a society based on mutuality, brotherhood and trust... they began to envision a world without the familiar semifeudal structures, with a new kind of rulership that would give them agency and the power to decide.

It was a great vision, and the ruling class had to destroy it by drowning it in blood. In her grasp of this, and other key dynamics of the period and the rebellion, Roper's book is exemplary. 

Roper writes from a feminist viewpoint,and she does her best to highlight the central role of women in the rebellion. While we know only a few names of women involved in the rebellion, Roper does give us many examples of their anonymous involvement. I didn't always agree with the conclusions that arose from this viewpoint, such as her suggestion that the anonymous author of the remarkable revolutionary pamphlet To the Assembly of the Common Peasantry is writing an explicity "male vision" of revolution. Here the problem is partly language. "Brotherly love" and "brother" in the context of mass rebellion, may well be meant to include women. But it might simply not have mattered to the ordinary women and men who were engaged in a revolutionary struggle and were constructing their own "vision" and challenging those who were holding on to older stereotypes and prejudices. 

Roper makes some important points about sexual violence in the conflict. She notes that the threat of such violence was used by some of the peasants against the wives and daughters of the lords, their enemies. But she concludes "the peasant armies do not appear to have used rape as a tool of domination". The counter-revolutionary forces on the other hand, did use such violence on a large scale. Given the accusations levelled against the peasants by their contemporary enemies, and ones since, this is an important corrective. 

Roper's argues that the peasants' "ideal of brotherhood created potential kinship even with the lords, constraining the wish to make the enemy's women bear one's children." I think this gets closer to an understanding of the Peasants' War as a revolutionary movement, motivated by ideals. The discipline of its participants in the peasant armies arises out of common radical visions and politics.

But its on the question of revolution that Roper is less clear. This is particularly obvious in her critique of Marx and Engels. 

She goes so far as to say that "an unwillingness to theorise how peasants engaged in revolution was one of Marxism's great failures". This is a unhelpful, and inaccurate, generalisation. In fact Marx's analysis of the peasantry is remarkably useful for understanding the failure of the peasants to achieve their aims in 16th century Germany. Roper dismisses Marx's comment that the peasantry is a "sack of potatoes". She does this because she understands it as meaning that "peasants are all the same". But Marx was actually discussing the economic reality of a peasant economy,  that it is made up of multitudes of independent producers. Following the "potato" quote, Marx wrote:

Insofar as millions of [peasant] families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. 

The differing interests of the peasant households would inevitably lead to tensions and contradictions that would undermine any victory over the feudal lords, unless there could be a breakthrough elsewhere in society. But in 16th century Germany, the economic base in the urban areas was insufficiently developed to allow the urban producers to build a society based on collective production. Thus the best that the peasants could hope for was to win some temporary space and defeat particular lords, but they could not hope to defeat feudalism and institute a new social order. This is the source of Engels' powerful passage about Thomas Münzter being a leader ahead of his time. He could imagine the future, but not be in a position to win it, but nevertheless be compelled to fight for it. 

Marx and Engels' argument that the peasants could not win in 1525, was not because they were "mesmerised by industrial production", but because he and Marx understood that it would take further economic development at the base of European society before a system of general abundance and sustainability could be created. Roper's attacks on Marxism here felt like they were responding more to the crude economistic Marxism of the East German historians than the actual ideas of Marx and Engels.

When I set out to write this post I hoped that I wouldn't end up writing the sort of review that just denounces an author for getting Marx completely wrong. I have probably failed in that ambition. So I want to emphasise that how remarkable I think that Lyndal Roper's book is. Even for those of us who have spent years reading about the subject she has found a wealth of new material. I read and re-read sections with great excitement and found fresh insights in every chapter and learnt a great deal. I should also add that I think the book is beautifully produced and illustrated. If I disagree with her I do share Roper's inspiration at the peasants' desire to fight for a better world. So while I disagree with Roper's theoretical framing I hope people will read and enjoy Summer of Fire and Blood. 

Related Reviews

Roper - Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet
Scribner & Benecke - The German Peasant War 1525: New Viewpoints
Bak (ed) - The German Peasant War of 1525
Blickle - The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants' War from a new perspective
Bax - The Peasants War in Germany
Engels - The Peasant War in Germany

Franz Mehring - Absolutism & Revolution in Germany 1525-1848

Franz Mehring was one of the most fascinating characters to come out of the great period of central European Marxist thought in the early 20th century. Initially an social democrat, he developed into a serious Marxist thinker and historian. When I originially picked up this book I assumed it was a single work, but in fact it is an edited volume of works about the history of Germany, written as educational booklets for the Marxist schools that were part of German Social Democracy in the 1900s. 

I was particularly interested in his writing on the German Reformation, "and its consequences", which built upon the insights and approach taken by Friedrich Engels in his writing on the German Peasants' War. Disappointingly for me, this is the shortest section, but nonetheless it is packed with insights. Especially around the consequences of the counter-revolutionary defeat of the peasantry. 

Mehring writes about the defeat, in a characteristicly colourful way, "the blood of the peasants flowed in rivers on German soil... and yet, in the long run, this fearful defeat did not worsen the position of the peasant class." He continues by explaining how all the other classes, "the clergy, the nobility and the towns" were victims of the revolution and its defeat, and continues:

Thus only the princes had any real advantages from the pesasants war. They seized the property of the Church; a gertaer or a lesser part of the nobility had to recognise their authority, and the fines from the towns flowed into their coffers. Apart from the secular principalities there were still, it is true, ecclesiastical rulers, town republics, and sovereigh Counts and Lords. But in gernal historical development in Germany was driving towards provincial centralisation and the subordination of all other estates of the empre by the princes.

He then goes on to say, "the German Reformation, after the revolutionary fire had been extinguished with the blood of the peasants, became a campaign of robbery and plunder by the German princes and their ever growing emancipation from Imperial authority". It is this that shapes the following centuries of politics for Germany, and these then form the basis for Mehrings remaining accounts in the book.

Some of this is difficult for readers not seeped in Germany history. I found the chapter on the evolution of the "Brandenburg-Prussian State" interesting, but hard work. This looks at the series of rulers of that crucial German state, such as the "enlightened despot" Frederick II, who was trapped in a situation where the economic evolution of his state did not match that of comparable monarchs across Europe. The importance of the French Revolution for Mehring is that it both demonstrates a way forward for the masses, and is the hammer that smashes upon the German anvil transforming Germany and shaping the outlook of its rulers. It was the French Revolution that "restored the vitality of a Germany that had defenerted in the swap of feudalism". By the 1830s, the situation was smoothering for the German bourgeoisie who were trapped by the older fetters of feudal relations, and by the realities of wider European politics. Mehring writes:

It was the renown, and the undoing, of this class [the German bourgeoisie] that it could win itse revolutiion gloriously enough in the cloudy heights of literature and philosophy, but never on level ground with bare fists and cold steel.

That said, the beginnings of capitalism within Germany at this time were seeing immense fortunes made for a tiny minority on the backs of hard labour for the masses. Mehring documents these realities, and the early struggles of the German proletariat. "The original accumulation of capital was only carried out in Germany in blood, misery and shame." 

The final section, and probably the most important, of Mehring's book deals with the 1848 revolution and the class struggles within. Again, this will introduce many names and events that the non-German reader might be unfamiliar with, but the chapter can be read as a sweeping introduction to the class tensions within the 1848 revolution as it evolved in Germany. But betraying its origin in works presented to students of the Social Democratic Party's internal schools, the book fails to really teach the modern reader the events and how they concluded. I found it useful and interesting, but intend to go away and study the period more, before returning to Mehring's analysis. I suspect that his detailed study of the class conflict and tensions within the revolution will help readers understand more general history's of the period. That said, there's much here, and this is an excellent example of the Marxist method in history.

Related Reviews

Mehring - Karl Marx: The Story of his Life

Austin Fisher - Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema

As an avid watcher of westerns, and a particular fan of the Spaghetti Western, I was drawn to Austin Fisher's book on radical politics and the genre. It is primarily an academic read, developed from Fisher's PHd thesis. Nonetheless it is readable, interesting and politically quite sharp. Fans looking for a history of the genre, or accounts of the making of particular films, will be disappointed. This is primarily a book about the politics and the political context of the development of the Spaghetti Western.

Some 500 such westerns were made at the height of the influence of Italian filmmaking, and Fisher notes a number of reasons for this. The Italian government was more liberal in its attititudes to violence on screen, costs were lower, there was also huge investment and involvement from US film companies that saw in Italian cinema an opportunity to make a lot of money. In addition US cinema was waning slightly under pressure from television, while in poorer Italy it was still massively popular. Fisher repeatedly warns however, that understanding Italian cinema in general, and the western's in particular, means placing them in their wider context. Discussing the 1969 film Sono Sartana, il vostro becchino (I Am Sartana, Your Angel of Death) Fisher describes it's "comic-book facade... a sinister film with assassins hiding in every shadow, working for a conspiracy run by society's guardians and using the law as cover."

However Fisher continues:

It is true that many of the films cited here... use this moral universe as a backdrop for eccentric action and physical comedy, and should not be mistaken for committed Marxist expositions. Nevertheless, narratives which unambigulously assert that the forces of law and order in an outwardly liberal society amount to an authoritarian conspiracy must, in the volatile political arena of the late 1960s, be appraised in their full historical context. This trend of Westerns spans the very period during which the international student movement and some of its attendant extra-parliamentary groupings emerged, flourished, and descended into armed insurgency.

There are several important issues that Fisher brings to the fore here, and in the book. The first is the wider context if radicalism of the late 1960s, the anti-Vietnam war movement, US imperialism, the Cold War and so on. The other is the limited politics of the Italian left which saw some groups descending into terrorist and violent actions. Another issue for Fisher is a key strategy of the Italian Communist Party to develop (and highlight) Italian culture as contrary to the spread of capitalist ideas and culture from the US and US cinema. As an aside I think Fisher under develops this interesting point, failing to see the Italian CP as tied to the Soviet Union, and thus part of a global strategy against the US.

The involvement of Marxists and revolutionaries in filmmaking and many (but by no means all) Spaghetti Westerns is striking. How successful was it in spreading radical ideas. It would seem that it was limited. Fisher argues:

Italian Westerns oer se were by no means received in mainstream circles - countercultural or otherwise - as films with a capacity for radicalism at all. The amoral nihilism of Leone (and of the majority of Spaghettis) most certainly resonated with the zeitgest at a time when Vietnam was dismantlying what Engelhardt dubs 'victory culture;' and a perceived social breakdown was devilling conceptions of the American Draeam. Such a representation of a broken society... was by no means one with appeal exlusively to the radical Left. Possible the single most visible influence from the filone in mainstream Hollywood cinema of the arly 1970s... advocated nopt a countercultural but a reactionary response.

Indeed it would seem that ahistorically, Westerns do not lend themselves to radical ideas of mass collective action, strikes, protests and anti-war action. Their heroes are usually individuals, their violent revenge is usually outside the law etc. Nonetheless at the time of My Lai, killings of students, the Civil Rights movement and Nixon, as Fisher points out, "films depicting corrupt corporations, sadistic military institutiosn and deceitful governments" were "inextricably tied to the parochial concerns of the Nixon era".

They were also, sometimes, overtly political and revolutionary. Two stand out for me: Bullet for the General and A Fistful of Dynamite. Both of which centre on the radical politics of the Mexican Revolution (the later also involving Irish liberation struggles). Others, such as Faccia a faccia (1967) chart how individuals politics change in the context of wider struggles. For Fisher's "pivotal" year of 1968, when insurrectionary resistance in the Global South, was combining with the explosive development of radical politics in the US and Western, these were powerful themes.

But perhaps the most important point that Fisher is making is that the political westerns he celebrates develop in three way tension with European left politics, the global political situation, and also a "fascination with US culture" and film. For every explicitly radical film such as A Fistful of Dynamite, there is also a highly political, but less obviously one such as, The Great Silence, and countless films that aren't political in an overt sense at all, even if they reflect wider contexts admirably. It is, as he says, viewers who "create 'meanings' through the artefacts of popular culture" and in the political Western, it is "one such audience" that engages with such a process of "negotiation, appropriation and reformulation".

Radical Frontiers is required reading for every left fan of the genre. I am sad I didn't get round to this earlier, though my to watch list is now three times its old length. Other films are getting a rewatch. 

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Eric Ambler - Journey into Fear

In 1940, during the "phoney" years of the Second World War, the conflict looked very different. Bombs had yet to fall on British or Germany cities. France was still uninvaded, and undefeated, and most people thought the war would probably end up like the First - bogged down in trenches. This entertaining spy thriller written during that period, thus lacks the knowledge of what would come next, and it makes for a surprisingly low key, if tense novel that lays the foundations of thrillers to come.

Eric Ambler's Journey into Fear features Graham - an unassuming military engineer who is in Turkey to sell weapons to a country that many hoped would become an early ally of Britain and France against Germany. (Spoiler: It didn't). As such these arms sales are vital to British interests, and the Turkish government. Graham survives two assassination attempts and the authorities put him on a ship as the train to France and on to England is too dangerous. Graham quickly realises that the assassins are with him on the ship. The crew think him paranoid, and he has only a nightclub dancer and an assortment of eccentric travellers to assist him. 

Its an unusual combination of espinoage thriller and locked room mystery. Who is exactly who is as important as the build up to the action packed ending. There's little here of the military details and sex that bedevils those who came after. But there's some brilliant period background and an exciting plot. You can see shades of Len Deighton, John le Carre and others here. Entertaining and nostalgic. I'm delighted to discover it was made into a Orson Welles' film in 1943.

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Daniel Mason - North Woods

Ever wonder what happened in the house you live in before you did? Or on the land it stands on? North Woods is an entertaining, if disappointing, exploration of this intriguing concept which follows a small plot of land in Massachusetts from roughly the time of European colonisation onward. The people who live there, from a couple whose illicit love affair means they must flee a tyrannical puritan colony, to twin sisters who succeed their father in the house and grow one of the most beautifully tasting apples in an orchard on the land to modern times when families, isolated individuals and lovers make the place their own. The land, and the house on it, grows and shrinks over time as people make adjustments removing beloved orchards, neglecting (or loving) the land or even digging a swimming pool.

It is an intriguing idea, but the author is trying too hard to be epic. The book feels like a loose collection of interconnected stories tied together by the land and the supernatural elements that mean many of the characters remain in the house and influence those that come after. The problem is the supernatural element doesn't quite work - it is too unclear how and why the ghostly remains influence the world and why - and the ending just doesn't work. Some reviewers have enjoyed what they see as an ecological story in the book - but this is just window dressing. The woods are cleared, they regrow, and some species arriving on American shores from elsewhere, having an impact through the book. But if anyone expects this to produce a metaphor for humanities' impact on nature, or even something deeper, they'll be disappointed.

North Woods is not a particularly bad novel. But I struggled to be that enthusiastic. It's a one trick pony.  

Adrian Tchaikovsky - Service Model

Readers who enjoy Adrian Tchaikovsky's innovating and often surprising science-fiction may find themselves surprised by Service Model. Normally Tchaikovsky's books are set in worlds with exotic alien flora and fauna, with humans grappling with the complexities of world's outside their experience. Service Model however deals with intelligence of a different form, grappling with the complexities of a world outside their experience.

Meet Charles. Charles is a robot valet, an AI with a clever enough brain for it to perform complex tasks such as laying out clothing and managing its human's appointment diary. Deviation from these tasks means following a somewhat limited decision tree, further restricted by Charles' limited experience of a world beyond the household of its master. When something goes badly wrong with the human Charles' is supposed to valet for, a combination of Charles' limited programming and problems with what passes for authorities forces Charles into the outside world.

Here's the interesting thing. We as the reader can appreciate things Charles' cannot. The robot has entered a world in collapse. Human society has broken down. Charles' home may have been one of the last bastions of society. Outside its chaos. Service robots continue to try to maintain the systems - mowing lawns or keeping deliveries going, even when there's no fuel or part, or even things to deliver. We can appreciate the horror. Charles just goes searching for the next stage in it's to-do list.

While we might be used to Tchaikovsky's books showing humans wandering through a dark, dangerous and incomprehensible world, in this case, its a robot in an incomprehensible, but still oddly human world. Will Charles' find someone to serve? Will he find a role? Or will he break free of the constrains of his programming - these are the central questions.

Service Model is a darkly humourous story. I enjoyed it a lot, and I appreciated the unexpected ending. It's a good read, but probably not one I will return too. An interesting take on questions of AI and what it is to be conscious - big questions for the 21st century.

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Tchaikovsky - Alien Clay
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Moudhy Al-Rashid - Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History

Ancient Mesopotamia, the "land between the rivers", sits between the Tigris and Euphrates. An incredibly fertile region, its agricultural food surplus permitted an amazing civilisation to flourish with associated art, military power, royal luxury and monumental buildings. In the 1920s archaeologists excavating a palace building in the pyramid of Ur found a remarkable room filled with items from Mesopotamia's history. The odd thing was that these seemed to be in a place that was built much more recently. In other words these older objects had been moved to a newer room. The headline grabbing speculation was this was an ancient museum.

The pyramid of Ur is old and survived for thousands of years. Its most recent inhabitants, far in our own past, would also have been aware of their own history stretching back thousands of years. In fact, as Moudhy Al-Rashid says:

History, memory and antiquity were important in ancient Mesopotamia and it was not unusual - or even problematic - to blend history and myth. The older a thing or person or event was, the more important it was. Kings regularly sought to root their royal activities and even identities in bygone ages. The Sumerian King List, as a record stretching into a past so distant no sources even survive to corrobaorate it, allowed later kings to associate themselves with such a long list of greatness. The people who wrote the list were attempting the very same thign I am in this book - a history of their ancient past.

The centrality of history, and myth to the Mesopotamian view of themselves is what makes the idea of an ancient musuem so intriguing. So in her exploration of ancient Mesopotamia, Al-Rashid takes the objects found in the "museum" and discusses them in detail to interogate both the ancient history and what history means to us. Its an entertaining exploration of a part of history that I knew little about. 

Part of what makes this point in history so fascinating is that it is so well documented. This is, in no small part, due to the myriad of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform writing. These tablets document everything from orders by shopkeepers to instructions to the king's personnel. There are also letters between sisters, tables of school children who are practising their letters, together with sketches of their teachers. With these, sometimes very dull and sometimes very moving, documents we see both how the people of the region organised their economies and the things they were interested in. Al-Rashid's expertise is these cuneiform tablets and her enthusiasm shines through. Sadly there are no pictures of the tablets she discuses, so its hard to imagine them. But Al-Rashid's descriptions of the tablets, and crucially, the evolution of the writing form is detailed. This is how we begin to see these objects as parts of an evolving history that has shaped our own.

But in describing the objects and tablets Al-Rashid gives us further insights. The history of the past, as the "king lists" suggest is often the history of a wealthy few. But Al-Rashid digs through this to try and draw out more about who made up the majority of society, and how they lived and worked. She writes:

Some of the earliest cuneiform texts from two of the oldest Mesopotamian cities, Uruk and Jemdet Nasr, record lists of workers whose sexes were labelled in the same way as those of cattle using signs that resembled genitalia. They were counted and accounted for like animals.... Other qualifications also appeared alongside people's names, including the combinations of the signs for 'head' and 'rope' to refer to a person led by a noose, and one sign that simply means 'yoke'.

The wealth of places like Ur and its palaces rested on the hard, and often forced, labour of tens of thousands of workers. As Al-Rashid says these people are barely recorded and remembered apart from a few passing cuneiform references. The rich however are memorialised, and "took their stories into death, along with their many privileges, proppsed up by an economic system that concentrated wealth, for the most part, in the hands of palaces and temples for partial redistribution to a wider population of dependents."

Indeed for those at the bottom of Mesopotamian society somethings were horrific. Some cuneiform records record how parents were forced to sell their own children, even babes in arms, into slavery. Al-Rashid is careful to explore the way the ancient texts demonstrate the reality of the past's class societies:

Cuneiform preserves the stories of people whose work in many ways made life in ancient Mesopotamia possible. The agricultural labrouers who harveted grain, factory workers who made textiles, and the runaway slaves (and perhaps even their bounty hunters) live on in the tiny triangles from ancient Mesopotamia and provide a glimpse of what life might have been life for those whose stories were wtitten down by and for others. 

It is unusual to find a book about the ancient past that takes serious questions of class, gender and power. Mesopotamia was a system that produced great wealth, but we rarely hear about those who created it. As Brecht wrote so memorably:

Who built Thebes of the 7 gates?
In the books you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished,
Who raised it up so many times?
In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live?
Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?

Al-Rashid's book does its best to rescue those forgotten lives and place them in the context of their wider world. Its a great book whose only fault in my view is that it lacks a map and any illustrations. A few pictures of the objects described, and a few images of cuneiform tables and their translations would have made all the difference. But don't let this stop you getting a copy and devouring it.

Related Reviews

Scott - Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
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Margaret Mead – Coming of Age in Samoa

Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa is one of the most well-known books of anthropology ever written. Mead was in her 20s when she took the audacious trip to Samoa, and then on to the smaller island of Taʻū to live with the Samoan community there. Her account of the lives of the people there, and her focus on the lives of young women was extremely unusual for the time. First published in 1930 the book carries with it some contemporary prejudices, though it must be said that at the same time the book is remarkably progressive for the time – simply taking issues such as female sexuality and gender issues seriously was radical.

The book was written explicitly as a popular work, and is devoid of the complex anthropological classifications and relationship diagrams that bedevil other, similar works. The book is also written as a polemic, aimed at a Western audience (primarily in the United States), about education and development of young people. As Mead writes in her original introduction,

this tale of another way of life is mainly concerned with education, with the process by which the baby, arrived cultureless upon the human scene, becomes a full-fledged adult member of his or her society. The strongest light will fall upon the ways in which Samoan education, in its broadest sense, differs from our own. And from this contrast we may be able to turn, made newly and vividly self-conscious and self-critical, to judge anew and perhaps fashion differently the education we give to our children.

The opening chapter describes daily life in Samoa, a mix of work, play and rest, centred on the production of food (through fishing and agriculture) and the various roles that people play. While Samoa is not a pre-class society, in fact it is heavily hierarchical on a regional and very local scale, it is a society where class differences matter much less than in capitalist society. Chiefs and heads of households have more of a role in terms of managing and organising, at least at the time that Mead visited, village life. The collection of a surplus allows more for the functioning of ceremonial, religious and celebratory life, than the maintenance of a position of power and wealth.

There are strict gender roles as well. However gendered labour is also shaped by differences related to age. Women, and girls, primarily focus on the home, though some girls and women also fish and collect food and some boys work in the home cooking. Age also plays a role in determining hierarchy in a way that is far more than just who is more important than others. For instance, children, including very small children often look after younger children. But all children understand that older people have authority to order them about. This means children are central to Samoan production, but they are also more collectively looked after and developed. They are also freer, at least as they become teenagers, to change households and move about. Meads explorations of the way age, class and gender inter-relate and sympathetic and detailed and make for real insights into a society very different from ours. Indeed this forms the very basis for her points about shining a light on our own education systems.

One important aspect to Samoan culture however was its close nature. Children were much more exposed to the realities of human life – death, birth and sex – than Westerners, especially in Mead’s era. As such children where not sheltered from sex, death and birth. Sex in particular is part of getting older. Children clearly experimented more in Samoan culture, and were prepared and protected. There is also a curious difference between the sexuality of young people before marriage and that after. Young people seemed to have frequently sexual encounters, both hetro and homosexual, and it seems that their first sex was usually with an older person. This latter part feels uncomfortable and it is not clear to me from Mead’s writing exactly how this works unless it is abusive. Some of the sexual realities of Samoan society are, however, much more progressive than our own. The acceptance of homosexuality as a natural part of life for younger people is very different, though again Mead does recount a case of “deviance”, to use her word, where an older male Samoan who might be considered transsexual and/or homosexual is treated with disdain by the community and, indeed the author. Despite Mead’s own possible bisexuality, her comments about homosexuality in Samoan society imply it is merely a childhood distraction, or “deviance”. with hindsight this seems either naïve, a mistake or perhaps Mead recognising that Western society would not accept a truthful account.

Mead also shows that rape, in a particular form, seems to have been relatively common. She writes:

Between the unmarried there are three forms of relationship: the clandestine encounter, “under the pam trees,” the published elopement, Avaga, and the ceremonious courtship in which a boy “sits before the girl”; and on the edge of these, the curious form of surreptitious rape, called moetotolo, sleep crawling, resorted to by youths who find favour in no maiden’s eyes.

These relationships and realities belay the idea that Samoan society in this period was a Utopia. While there were clearly more open and relaxed attitudes to sex, and young people did seem to enjoy and have freedom to explore their sexuality before marriage, it is also true that there were some violent and unpleasant traditions and beliefs. The focus, within the community on "deflowering" of young women and the moetotolo that is related to this, imply a structural problem within Samoan society's approach to women. It demonstrates that for all its positives in its approach to sexuality, Samoan culture had, at the time, an unequal setup between men and women, and consequent unequal power relations. 

Nonetheless Mead's work does remind us that societies can be organised very differently. For instance, Mead reports that her Samoan friends laughed at the story of Romeo and Juliet, believing the idea of lifelong romantic monogamy hilarious. This was not because marriage and love did not happen, or that lifelong love between partners did not occur, but because the idea of a couple only having sex with one another for their whole lives was impossible to understand.

Indeed adultery and consequent punishment did happen. But it punishment was usually about the offended party being paid a fine, such as some well-made mats.

Mead’s discussion of the economic life of Samoan people tells us much about different approaches to life. She tackles questions that remain extremely relevant – how does a differently organised society change approaches to things like Mental Distress, loneliness and love. One interesting point is that the role of the immediately family is much less significant to Samoan people. Mead says: 

It is interesting to note that a larger family community, in which there are several adult men and women, seems to ensure the child against the development of the crippling attitudes which have been labelled Oedipus complexes, Electra complexes and so on.

The Samoan picture shows that it is not necessary to channel so deeply the affection of a child for its parents and suggests that while we would reject that part of the Samoan scheme which holds no rewards for us, the segregation of the sexes before puberty, we may learn from a picture in which the home does not dominate and distort the life of the child.

These are interesting points. The central role of the “bourgeois” family in Western society is remarkably constraining. Leaving aside Mead’s dated psychiatric comments and her framing from her own, much more segregated society, the point that an extended family allows much wider child development still stands.

There are, of course, problems. Mead’s work is often shaped by her own times and as such some of the language and analysis absolutely jars. She also knows that she is seeing Samoan society in a period of rapid change, as US influence is changing things dramatically. She notes, for instance, that the recent compulsory attendance of children at school by the authorities is quickly destroying traditional society which relies heavily on child labour to care for the youngest children and prepare food. This would only be exacerbated in the decades after the period when Mead was writing.

It is also clear that Mead’s approach to certain key questions relies too heavily on a belief that adult behaviour develops just from conditioning in childhood. Yes the differences between Samoan and Western societies are important and the different approach to education is tremendously important. But the organisation of the “economic base” in Western society shapes these factors, rather than simply a desire to educate differently.

These problems aside this is a tremendously influential and significant work. The attacks on Mead’s work by later anthropologists seem, in no small part, to stem from a belief that young women were not, and could not, be the independent, sexual and confident people that Mead described. It is also likely that dismissal of Mead herself, due perhaps to her gender, lay at their root. Mead’s youth, sexuality and liberal politics, no doubt made her a more insightful scientist than many of her peers. The book she wrote reminds us that humans have constantly found new and varied ways to organise their lives. While we should not pretend that Samoan society in the 1920s was a perfect utopia for all, Mead's account should give those of us trying to change the world renewed confidence that things do not need to be like they are. 

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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.

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