Geoff Brown - A People's History of the Anti Nazi League (1977-1981)

In 1968 Enoch Powell made an odious speech in which he predicted "rivers of blood" if immigration to Britain was not halted. In the aftermath of the speech racist attacks grew dramatically. One of the chief beneficiaries of this was a small Nazi organisation called the National Front. After Powell they grew quickly. One NF organiser remembered:

Powell's speeches gave our membership and morale a tremendous boost. Before Powell spoke we were getting only cranks and perverts. After his speechs we started to attract, in a secret sort of way, the right-wing members of the Tory organisations.

The NF quickly began to establish itself. Its methods of operating were to target minorities, particularly black and Asian people and communities. But also to hold provocative and headline grabbing violent events. They stormed left events, protested at politicians and held intimidating marches through black and Asian areas. By the early and mid-1970s racist violence and attacks, including murders, were common. The NF could mobilise hundreds and often thousands to its ranks.

In opposition to this, as Geoff Brown's excellent history shows, a myriad of anti-racist groups began to organise. Some of these were liberal and soft, refusing to challenge the fascists and hoping to demonstrate that love might overcome hate. Others were more confrontational and still others saw oppressed communities fighting back to defend themselves. By 1976 the anti-racist movement was ready to go on the offensive. Increasingly militant anti-racists, often led by socialists and communists, were able to confront the fascists. Often this meant taking on the far-right and their friends in the police. In May 1976

two students Dinesh Choudhri from India and Ribhi Alhadidi from Jordan, were fattally stabbed by white youths while making their way to an East London restaurant. A fortnight later, a young engineering student Gurdip Singh Chaggar was murdered by two white teenagers in Southall, West London. Sick of racist and police violence and of their elders' passivity towards it, Southall's young Asians came out en masse. Some demanded 'Blood for blood', attacking white passers-by and stoning cars. When police made arrests among those leaving a meeting... hundreds marchesd without hesitation to the police station and sat down. Surrounded by a sea of protesters, the police got community leaders to pressure those arrested to come out of the police station with promise they wouldn't be charged.

It was on the back of such resistance that the Anti Nazi League was born, but perhaps the key event was the Battle of Lewisham which saw thousands of protesters smash a NF march off the streets. The event was a turning point. One anti-racist socialist activist remembered a NF member at his workplace in Salford taunting him before the protest. After Lewisham the NF member took down his posters and eventually left the fascist group.

Lewisham was a turning point, but it was definitely not the end. The launch of the Anti Nazi League saw the Socialist Workers' Party, together with left-Labour MPs, leading trade union figures and cultural icons come together in a loose leadership that was able to give a national shape to an anti-fascist response.

Brown's account of this process is fascinating. It demonstrates two things. Firstly that principled anti-fascism was key to the ANL - exposing the Nazis as Nazis, helped to discredit their violence. Secondly uniting people around these policies, while allowing participants to retain their individual politics created the space that would enable local groups to flourish. In fact what is remarkable about the ANL through this period is precisely how much it was organised from below. Thousands upon thousands joined, and local initiative was key. Brown repeatedly makes the point that it was local organisation, often, but not always, led by SWP members that created the space for anti-fascism to break free. There are many different examples of this. Take an example from the railways:

These [Anti Nazi League] bdages proliferated around King's Cross. It was really good because it connected you to people you didn't know. In the depot of 500 drivers, I knew them all but there were probabl another 500, maybe 600 guards and another 500 station staff so you couldn't know everybody. But once you saw someone wearing one of those badges, suddenly you hit it off and black workers in particular realised there were more anti-racists than racists around.

The ANL created a space where the NF could be marginalised. But it took more than just badges. The local groups were able to build networks that could, in turn, mobilise hundreds and thousands. Countless meetings, protests, pickets and counter-demonstrations helped to physically stop the Nazis. This often required self defence, but it was sheer numbers that undermined the Nazis and made it difficult for them to carry on.

Brown's book is remarkable for being a genuine "people's history". It is filled with memories, recollections, interviews and press cuttings. Readers get a real sense of how the movement built and how participants were shaped by it. A generation of radicals learnt their organising skills in the ANL and often generalised into wider arenas. Brown highlights, for instance, how the LGBT+ movement in the 1970s gained renewed energy from the anti-Nazi fight as did movements against sexism. Some of this deeply moving. Gurinder Chadha, the renowned film director who made Bend it like Beckham was at first Rock Against Racism carnival. She recalled being unconfident to go on the march, so waited near the park and hearing the approaching demonstration stood on a box to see:

When I looked down the street, what I saw changed my life forever. From that moment I became the political filmmaker I am today, hundreds and hundreds of people marching side-by-side in the display of exuberance, defiance and most importantl, victory. I couldn't believe my eyes, these were white, English people - many with long hair like the rockers I could never relate to - marching, chanting to help me and my family find our place in our adopted homeland.

Rock Against Racism was a key part of the anti-fascist struggle. It help shutdown the cultural spaces the Nazis were trying to take as their own. But it also made it easier for thousands of young people to become active politically. There were other off-shoots. One of the most fascinating chapters of Brown's book is on SKAN - School Kids Against the Nazis. A remarkable organisation that, with very little adult input, was able to shape politics in schools and among young people in fascinating ways. Starting with the fight against racism, it quickly took up issues like corporal punishment.

Brown's book is a brilliant read. One of its great strength is that it is not London focused, but tells us the stories of how the ANL organised across the country, not least in Greater Manchester where Brown was organising. But it is more than just a nice bit of history. It is a political manual for building a mass movement against racism. Brown, a long standing SWP member, is clearly proud of the role of the organisation and that of people like himself. Quite rightly. But he is also proud of the political clarity that made the ANL both possible and successful. The book doesn't hector in its politics - there are sections that look at historical struggles and take up theoretical discussions. But these are part of a wider story, and the real political lessons are in the reports of the hundreds of people that are interviewed and quoted in the book. Using the method of the United Front, the SWP was able to relate to wider forces and change British politics. The NF were smashed.

Today the far-right in Britain and around the world seems to be unstoppable. Yet if Geoff Brown's book teaches us anything, they are very much stoppable. Doing that requires mobilising the anti-racist majority in society, and particularly turning out the workers' and their organisations who bring numbers and collective power. Everyone who wants to see the end of the far-right in the 21st century should read this superb book. It is very much one for our time, and Geoff Brown has done our movement and our history a remarkable service.

Related Reviews

Hirsch - In the Shadow of Enoch Powell: Race, Locality & Resistance
Richardson (ed) - Say it Loud! Marxism and the Fight Against Racism
Aspden - The Hounding of David Oluwale
Dresser - Black and White on the Buses: The 1963 Colour Bar Dispute in Bristol

Sally Rooney - Normal People

I must admit that I picked up Sally Rooney's book Normal People because of the reaction from some quarters about her comments on supporting Palestine and the criminialisation of dissent. Rooney is very explicitly pro-Palestine and against Genocide. Some of her detractors, perhaps never having read her work, or even understanding where she was from, attempted to say they would bring the full force of British Law on her head. Hailing, as she does, from Ireland she was remarkably unbothered.

Normal People is very much a novel of its time and place. It is set in Ireland in the 2010s as the country is going through massive austerity and political convulsions. The story of two youngsters growing up has as its backdrop a sense of crisis. The system doesn't work. There's no future. Class differences between the two are important. Marriane is clever, solitary and from a rich background. Connell is popular, attractive and very clever. His mum cleans Marianne's family home. The book is about their love affair and how they come close, grow apart but never leave each other. But it can also be read as the story of two people trapped by a system that leaves them little room for manouvre. Perhaps the best example of this is how Connell abandons Marianne - their love affair is kept secret and in his anxiety for not being thought badly for dating Marianne he takes someone else to the prom. It is of course appalling. It is also exactly the sort of thing that student teenagers do to each other, and it destroys Marianne for sometime. It is also, as we find out, completely unnecessary and Connell carries that guilt for some time.

Sometime later they meet at university and have an on off relationship. Their friends are mostly superficial, though they clearly feel extremely important. Their love is by turns chaotic, painful and beautiful. They never quite get the balance though and neither knows what they want. They discuss politics - there's an early college kid discussion of the Communist Manifesto - and they're both on the left, but not the activist left. There's a certain middle class disdain from both of them towards protest and political action. The one demo they do join - ironically about Palestine - is described in lacklustre and performative turns. Despite the opportunities they have they are trapped - because going to Trinity College takes Connell out of his Working Class life and Marianne from her upper-middle class life and turns them into a classless student. Academia beckons. Or perhaps work in some NGO. Despite Marianne's deep interest in politics - she seems remarkably unengaged with the world. The book makes one focus on the relationship above all else. Perhaps this is Rooney's comment on that Irish decade? Perhaps it is also arguing that the personnal shapes all else. Perhaps its just because its a book about two young people fumbling through life, love and sex. It left me unsatisfied. But it mostly reminded me why university was such an obnoxious experience.

David Olusoga & Casper W. Erichsen - The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide

In the late nineteenth century Germany was straining at the boundaries of its borders. Most of the Global South had been carved up by European powers. Britain, France, Italy all had their Empires. German capitalists needed more markets and more natural resources. They too wanted an empire that they could subjegate and pillage, like the other industrial powers. Five thousand miles from Germany, Namibia was to become the African country were German empire building began, and it became an experiment in racist control, genocidal war and colonial rule. The consequences for the people of Namibia, tribes like the Herero, Tibooi Nama and Bethanie Nama was appalling. 

David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen's remarkable history is a study of this history. But they are making a wider argument. What happened in Nambia was a trial for the Holocaust and the Nazis. As the authors say:

What Germany's armies and civilian administrators did in Namibia is today a lost history, but the Nazis knew it well. When the Schutztruppe attempted to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples of Namibia a century ago, Hitler was a schoolboy of fifteen. In 1904, he lived in a continent that was electrified by the stories of German geroism and African barbarism emanating from what was then German South-West Africa.

Indeed Hitler was "closely associated" with one of the leading figures in the genocide. When Hitler joined the ranks for the far-right in 1922, it was "under the command of the charismatic Gerneral Franz von Epp, a violent, racist, military leader who firmly believed in "lebensraum". One of the startling things about this book is how words that readers will associated with the Nazi Holocaust during the Second World War were first used in Nambia in the 1900s. Lebensraum was a term coined to justify the need of Germany to expand and build colonies. Konzentrationslager, the German translation of the English term Concentration Camp - first used in the Boer War - was used to describe the slave-labour camps in Namibia.

When "war" broke out between the German military and the Namibian people, it took place on racial lines:

From the start, the outburst of intense fury againt the Herero was channelled and manipulated by an array of nationalist and pro-colonial societies. Along with the right-wing press, they set out to portray the Herero as savages, their uprising motivated by innate brutality. Ignoring the facts, they repeatedly claimed that the Herero had launched an indiscriminate racial war and that, as savages, they fought without restraint. Many newspapers also carried reports of atrocities - most exaggerated, some entirely fabricated - claiming that a number of German children had been killed, that white women had been raped and that some of the male settlers who had been killed had had their noses and testicles cut off.

The racial war against the Nambian people was carried out in the brutal fashion. Those in command were imbued with hardened nationalist and racist views. On his way to Africa, von Epp wrote, "The world is being divided... With time we will inevitably need more space; only by the sword will we be able to get it. It will be up to our generation to achieve this. It is a matter of existence." 

But least that we conclude this was only a German problem, note that another volunteer for action in Namibia, "regarded the recent history of the United States as a model of how Germany might transform her own colonial frontiers". Economic "development" in the colony went alongside the "extermination of the Herero and Nama peoples". The camps were sources of slave labour for the colony, including for industrial corporations as well as individual families. But, it is crucial to emphasise, they were not work camps. Writing about one of the colony's heads, von Lindequist, the authors contrast the British in South Africa with Germany in Namibia:

Von Lindequist's promise to the Herero - that their suffering in the concentration camps might come to an end if their 'compatriots, who are still in the bush' surredered - bears the hallmarks of Kichener's earlier strategy. Yet there was one crucial difference. In the Boer War the concentration camps had been part of a strategy aimed at ending an ongoing insurgency. In German South-West Africa, the Herero were defeated when von Linsequist took command. As he admitted in mid-1906, they had no ability and no desire to fight. The concentration camps were not part of a military strategy.

The "defeat" however of the Namibian tribes came at a cost for Germany. Indeed the most inspiring chapters of The Kaiser's Holocaust are the remarkable story of the extended, guerilla war that fought the German army to a standstill. A war that was not marked by atrocity on the part of the Nama and Herero people, but rather the opposite. The Namibian fighters in fact treated women and children with kindness and did not arbitarily kill or rape them. Their warfare was directed against the male settlers and the army sent against them. Its a remarkable story of rebellion and war, against a foe unable to imagine that poorly armed black people were able to fight them to a standstill.

But eventually, by subterfuge and starvation, the Namibians were defeated. Led into concentration camps while being promised peace and relocation, they were taken to brutal torture and death. The lessons from German South-West Africa taught a new generation of far-right nationalists. Events in African were a blueprint for the Nazis own behaviour:

Soldiers and scientists whose careers began on the pastoral deserts of South-West Africa or in the killing fields of East Africa, Togo and Cameroon were to play leading roles in the Nazi tragedy. 

and

When designing the lasws needed to create the 'racial state'... the Nazis found a number of definiations and legal precedents, along with a whole lexicon of racial terminology, in legislation passed in Germany's former colonies.

The authors also show how the pattern that led to the "Kaiser's Holocaust" was also repeated in Eastern Europe as the needs of their racist programmes clased with the military needs of the Nazi economy:

The desire to exterminate or expel their racial enemies ran counter to a growing and desperate need for labour and concerns for the well-being of the fighting men. Tese contradictions were never fully solved, but as in South-West Africa, one solution was the creation of forced labour camps in which labour becames a means of liquidation.

David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen's book is a remarkable piece of history. It rescues a forgotten period of colonialism from deliberate obscurity. It reminds us again of the bloody reality of colonial rule, and it shows how Nazi ideology has a long and terrible antecedent. But it tells us something else. Reading this book at the same time as the Israeli state continued its murderous assault on the people of Gaza, the book reminds us that settler colonialism always rests on racist ideas and can have genocidal conclusions. If there is one other thing to remember, with this in mind, it is that the resistance of the people of South-West Africa was brave and principled, and that in Germany at least a minority on the left did seek to highlight and stop the war. Tragically that was not enough to stop the Kaiser's Holocaust. This book is an essential read for anyone trying to understand twentieth, and twenty-first, century history.

Related Reviews

Achebe - An Image of Africa
Hamouchene & Sandwell (eds) - Dismantling Green Colonialism
Lindqvist - 'Exterminate All The Brutes'
Pakenham - The Scramble for Africa
Rüger - Heligoland
Davis - Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
Rodney - The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World

Samantha Shannon - A Day of Fallen Night

In my experience it is rare for a fantasy prequel novel to succeed quite as well as the original book. With A Day of Fallen Night Samantha Shannon has proved that this is not always the case. Her 2019 book The Priory of the Orange Tree was a massive seller. It's label of "feminist Game of Thrones" was I argued in my review a slight misnomer as it undermined some of the radical edge to the work. The prequel A Day of Fallen Night is set 500 years ago, and is a complex piece of world building that sets up the dynasties and factions which are still vying for power years later.

These competing nations are set on a world geographically much like ours. However there are sleeping dragons and dangerous beasts resting beneath volcanos waiting for the opportunity to wake and destroy humanity's world (though the reason for their anger is never explains - presumeably beasts under volcanos are just evil). From the start the novel focuses on several different groups of people. Queen Sabran is one of a long line of queen's who all look identical. Their daughters are the magical barrier that prevent the great "nameless" evil from waking and destroying the world. At the start of the novel Sabran has made a marriage of convenience with the King of Hróth (a society that is a thinly veiled viking north). Their daughter Gloria's destiny is simply to keep the line going and while doing so learn from her mother how to build alliances and strengthen the realm.

Elsewhere in the Priory, the focus of the earlier book, Tunuva Melim is a guard of the Orange Tree, but while she and her sisters are trained to fight monsters - none have appeared. There's tensions here as the youngsters chafe at the restrictions and society. Is it even real? 

Finally there's the dragon rider Dumai, or would be dragon rider (there are no dragons) whose realm is organised around the Gods - the dragons - and their awakening. 

The novels shifting viewpoints are gradually, as in all great epics,  brought together. The evil awakes (as do the dragons) and an appalling assault on humanity begins. The various different heroines each have a role or quest, as they bring together different strengths and powers to fight the evil monsters. One of Samantha Shannon's writing strengths is that she describes a bloody good battle - and there are some corkers here. Particularly ones where humans get beaten. The monsters win, rather a lot, and humanity is pushed back into tiny hideouts, barely surviving.

The book builds to a good climax setting the stage for the sequel. But what of the radicalism. Here I found that some of the edge of Orange Tree was blunted. Part of the strength of that novel was the (then) Queen Sabran grappling with her role as a mother just for the next generation of Queens. There was a tension between personal desire and the needs of the regal role. That's absent here because the story needs to set up volume two. As in her other work Shannon is good at writing LGBT+ and female characters and so there are some interesting points about gender and sexuality. For instance in Tunuva's realm all the fighters are women and men take on supporting roles. But these are the backdrop to the novel, they are not the core point - refreshingly.

Subversion, such as there is, lies in the challenge to the Tolkienesque fantasy tropes - the medievalist, white, hetrosexual males - rather than the "viewpoint of the proletariat".

As such I found A Day of Fallen Night was not quite as sharp as its follow up. In addition the multi-view points and many many characters often got confusing. That said, its a fun read - particularly if you like reading about humanity getting killed off - and brilliant world building for the stronger Orange Tree. 

Related Reviews

Shannon - The Priory of the Orange Tree 

 

Sarah Vogel - The Farmer's Lawyer: The North Dakota 9 & the fight to save the family farm

In the early 1980s rural America was devastated by economic crisis. Tens of thousands of small farmers were seeing loans called in, land values collapse and debts mount. Thousands of family farms were foreclosed, farmer suicides rose and rural communities were destroyed. It was the worst crisis for rural America since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But unlike the 1930s there was no support for the family farmer. Ronald Reagen, the new neoliberal US President was elected on the back of promising to cut the deficit and government funding. One way the government could save money was through calling in loans from farmers who had taken out multiple loans they could not afford. The line from Washington, and from the bureacrats at the Farmers' Home Association, was that these farmers were greedy, frivolous and lazy. The FmHA, the government body that was supposed to protect and support farmers, had become the vehicle for their destruction.

Of course the farmers were not lazy, stupid or greedy. Quite the opposite. They were hardworking families that had offered loans on the promise that the economy would not decline. Rather than greed driving their loans they were the only way to continue. Many had multiple jobs, worked all hours, had never had a holiday and lacked cash to buy food. Driven by policy from above, the heartless  FmHA bureaucrats were systematically driving farmers to the wall, selling their farms off to pay off debt and destroying communities.

Into this situation steps Sarah Vogel. She was a lawyer with pedigree. Her father and grandfather were also lawyers. The family's involvement in North Dakota agriculture had seen them support the Non-Partisan League, the 1920s left social movement of farmers which had fought hard for legal protection and the rights of farming communities. The NPL hadn't just lobbied. It organised thousands of farmers across the US, putting them on the streets to protest and, crucially, opposing auctions. The early chapters of Vogel's book celebrate a movement that refused to let farmers lose their farms at auction, collectively bidding pennies to keep the bankers away from their homes. Crucially though the NPL had won a series of legal victories that ensured government protection for farmers in hard times. When drought, storm, or economic crisis occured the government was supposed to step in. Now the opposite was happening.

The farmers who approached Vogel knew her as someone who would stand up for them. Vogel quickly realised that the processes that the FmHA was using to foreclose were morally repugnant, but crucially they also broke the regulations and the law. She was able to fight and win a class action that enshrined these rights and processes in law, blocked foreclosures and prevented the FmHA from continuing, returning it to a body that protected farmers.

The story of this case is told in detail in this wonderful book. Vogel is a remarkable woman. She fought the case with almost no money and no experience. A single parent she lost her home, her phone was cut off and she relied utterly on the kindness and support of others, including her father. She details how she constructed a case that would become a national action to protect thousands of farmers, while juggling being a parent and coping with the stress of little money. But what drives her is the sheer gall of the government, the lies and hatred of the FmHA bureaucrats and their lawyers and the injustice of what is happening to communities. She is also remarkably progressive. In the class action she makes sure that there are Native American plaintiffs, detailing the particular issues facing farmers of colour and those from indigenous communities.

I have no legal insights, so some of the processes Vogel describes are a little opaque. But this doesn't matter. The book reads like a John Grisham legal thriller - down to her luck in court, her opponents who are almost caricature's of evil lawyers and the support of the community. Her victory was a real boost for millions of people facing destitution from a cruel Republican government. The book is also full of amusing insights into North Dakota, the second smallest US state by population, and dominated by religious conservatism and small agricultural communities.

Vogel is able to win through perserverance and luck. Extraordinarily it was actually her first case - and the win changed US law. But she really wins because in this specific case the law was on the side of the ordinary person. As Vogel emphasises the laws were won threw the struggles of farmers and agricultural workers in previous generations. Without the fights of the NPL in the early 20th century, Vogel would not have had a case. It is an important point because our side cannot trust the law. We cannot rely on the state. But having knowledgeable and symapathetic lawyers can ensure that we can fight within the system as well as against it. This is, of course, a point that Vogel also seems to understand even if she is not quite so explicit: after their victory she sends a framed print of an old NPL poster to her fellow lawyers, linking their struggle back to the past.

But the story is more than a history lesson. Today in the US Donald Trump's tariffs and his economic policy threaten millions. In 1979 most farmers in North Dakota voted Reagen, who then turned on them. The same happened at the last US election when US farmers voted overwhelmingly for Trump. But the forces that were threatening the family farm in the 1920s and 1980s are returning. As Vogel explains, using an analogy of the whiffletree, the board on a ox team that is supposed to keep a plough on the right direction:

Today's whiffletree of agriculture policy is pulling too far toward the side of industrial-scale and corporate farm agriculture and too much in favour of massive seed, feed and chemical agribusiness. Further, the reings to the plow are being held by politicians who are okay with a crooked whiffletree because of the donations they get from those who benefit from it. As the Nonpartisan League farmers understood almost a century ago, the financial incentives of corporations providing "inputs" (patented seeds, ferilizers, pesticides, insecticides, credit and so on) do not necessarily align with farmers' well-being.

In the 1980s Vogel has to deal with the right-wing and neo-Nazis in rural America. Then they were a fringe, but a growing one. There's a satisfying moment when she disrupts a Nazi meeting for farmers. Now those forces are ever stronger and it will need more than legal arguments to deal with them. As Vogel says, "we can straighten the whiffletree by looking to the past... the shift to bigger and bigger farms and 'corporatised' farming is not inevitable."

It is a powerful argument, but one that will have to be relearnt in rural America (and there is a powerful if forgotten tradition of this). I expect that Sarah Vogel's book will be read widely among North Dakota farmers who owe her such a lot. Hopefully it can teach a layer of American farmers and agricultural workers that struggle can win. But that's not to downplay the incredible courage, dogged perseverance and self sacrifice of Sarah Vogel herself, who showed that if you fight, you can win - no matter how powerful your opponent.

Related Reviews

Carlisle - Lentil Underground: Renegade Farmers and the Future of Food in America
McDonald - The Red Corner: The Rise & Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana
Holleman - Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics & the Injustice of 'Green' Capitalism
Punke - Fire and Brimstone

Jairus Banaji - Theory as History: Essays on modes of production & exploitation

Jairus Banaji's Theory as History is a 2010 collection of essays that together are designed to encourage and stimulate a return to serious Marxist approaches to history - both in a theoretical sense and in a the sense of studying specific periods of history. Banaji is an important and long standing scholar whose determination to use Marxism as a historical tool is only matched by his refusal to let dogma go unchallenged. Unafraid of challenging existing Marxists his writing can, at times, be blunt. But nonetheless it is full of insight:

To take modes of production first, these, for Marx, comprised the 'relations of production in their totality' (as he says in Wage Labour and Capital), a nuance completely missd by Marxists who simple reduce them to historically dominant forms of exploitation or forms of labour, for example, positing a slave mode of production wherever slave-labour is used or ruling out cappitalism if 'free' labour is absent. The underlying assumpotion here is that Marx means by relations of production the relations of the immediate process of production, or what, in a perfectly nebulous expression, some Marxists call the 'method of surplus-appropriation'.

Some of the most useful parts of this collection are when Banaji challenges specific academic interpretations of historical eras in order to draw out the real relations of production by deep diving into historical times. This often displays an amazing understanding of source documents - as displayed for instance on the essays about land relations and ownership in colonial India.

While some of the essays display this "deep dive" into particular eras and geographical locations. Others are more theoretical, while being rooted in evidence. One of particular importance and insight is Banaji's writings on the Tributary modes of production, something that many Marxists have grappled with over the years. Take also his conclusins around modern slave society in North America:

The slave-plantations were capitalist enterprises of a patriarchal and feudal character producing absolute surplus-value on the basis of slave-labour and a monopoly in land. This heterogeneous and, as it appears, disarticulated nature of the slave-plantation generated a series of contradictory images when the early Marxist tradition, not equipped with the same abundance of material available today, attempted its first characteristations.

Here Banaji demonstrates two characteristics of his writing - his desire to neither deny that Marx made mistakes or didn't have full insights on occasion, and his commit to updating this. This is particularly noticeable in his writing on wage labour, which is, he says "not a product of capitalism specifically, unless there is a sense in which class itself is peculiar to capitalism, so that workers before capitalism fail to constitute a class in the same sense as workers under capitalism". He then continues:

Wage-labour strikes as a peculiarly modern institution, because the ancient world, indeed all periods of history before capitalism, are seen as intrinsically impervious to any of the institutions that characterise capitalism.

Then:

Labour-power can appear on the market as a commodity, indeed did, even when free labourers are scarce or non-existent. Appian [95-165] CE tells us that a major reason why the rich who had monopolised the public land and carved huge estates out of it preferred the employment of lsaves was that the peasantry was subject to conscription and the supply of labour unstable.

He concludes:

The point of these remarks is not to deny the centrality of 'free labour' to the accumulation of capital in the modern economy... but to undermine the particular way Marx attempts to constue the link between wage-labour and captial. 

Over the half dozen or so pages that cover this argument, Banaji explores multiple theoreticians 'approaches to wage-labour, capital and ancient/modern society, while clearing out a distinctive position of his own. It shows a remarkable command of the material, both sources and contemporary and a deep knowledge of Marx's own work.

However Banaji doesn't simply dismiss others claiming only he has the right line. His discussion of Chris Wickham's work is a case in point. He is both incredibly generous in praise of Wickham's historical writing and, on occasion, quite critical. But it is done with nuance and clarity. There's not a few Marxists who could learn from this.

All in all Theory as History is a remarkable work. But it is hard work. Some chapters were opaque because I had no wider knowledge of the period they covered. Other sections required repeated re-reading. But this is a serious work, that rewarded close reading and I'll undoubtably return.

Related Reviews

Perry - Marxism and History
Carr - What is History?
Callinicos - Making History
Marx & Engels - The German Ideology: A new abridgement by Tom Whyman
Harman - Marxism and History
Heller - The Birth of Capitalism: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective

Vanda Felbab-Brown - The Extinction Market: Wildlife trafficking and how to counter it

In the midst of the environmental led biodiversity crisis, there is another tragedy taking place for global flora and fauna: poaching and wildlife trafficking. While many of us will only be dimly aware of the problem, it takes place on a staggering scale. Vanda Felbab-Brown gives us a sense of the scale in the introduction to this book: 

Between 2010 and 2012, almost 100,000 elephants were killed for their tusks in Africa... African elephants have thus experienced a drastic net population declaine of some 111,000 since 2006, leaving a likely current poplation of 415,000... Between 2009 and 2015, Tanzania lost between 50 and 60 percent of its elephant population... in South Africa alone, 1,215 rhinos were killed for their horns in 2014.

The list goes on and on. A 171 of a global population of under 4,000 tigers were poached in India between 2010 and 2015. More than a million pangolins were poached in the decade prior to the book's publication. Millions of reptiles are poached every year. It is a grim story, and a difficult question to approach. As Felbab-Brown argues the drivers of poaching are complex - and are often rooted in economic instability and poverty. The solutions are not straightforward either, and in this nuanced book Felbab-Brown uses her knowledge of the global drugs trade to discuss various strategies to challenge poaching. 

While the story is grim, the discussion is nuanced. Felbab-Brown points out, for instance, that total bans don't always work, and can often have adverse effects. Indeed, the centrality of hunting to some communities means that bans should be carefully considered. This is not, of course, to follow the lead of the US National Rifle Association who oppose bans on ivory trading in order that their members can go on hunting safaris. But, she points out:

Under some circumstances, legal sales from hunting or farming crucially underpin and enable wildlife conservation in a way that bans, prohibition, and law enforcement will not [be] able to accomplish because they fail to give key actiors and economic stake in conservation. 

Having said this, Felbab-Brown does acknowledge that this is neither easy not automatic. While "the legal trade of farmed crocodilians also resulted in the recocver in the wild of several crocdilian species", there can also be a consequent increase in demand, or allow illegal hunting to insert animals into the legal supply chains. In addition to these nuances, Felbab-Brown is also aware of the way in which questions of poaching and conservation interact with wider political and historical issues. For instance she notes that the setting up of US National Parks such as Yellowstone saw the forced displacement of Native Americans. She also notes that because of how hunting was linked to colonial rule in parts of Africa:

Environmental policies thus came to be strongly associated and directly overlapped with colonial oppression in the minds of many African and Asian population. Not surprisingly they felt morally justified and economically empowered by illeagally hunting and exploiting protected areas. Poaching became not only a means of susbistance but also a form of rebellion against colonial rule.

Indeed the best examples that Felbab-Brown can offer in terms of "parks" and protection of animals from hunters are ones were the local populations are empowered to see the protection of the habitats and the animals as being in their interests. This might mean ensuring that wildlife guards are properly paid to ensure they don't become poachers at night to raise extra cash. But it might also mean ensuring that local communities have land to farm and adequate access to the natural resources they need.

What are the solutions? These must start from a clear understanding of the problem. Felbab-Brown summarises:

Althought global poaching and trafficking have become more organised, many poor individuals and communities willingly participate in them and do not embrace conservation. For them, hunting, sale and consumption of animals and the conversion of natural habitats to agriculture or resource exploitation are means of economic survival and social advancement. Ignoring this uncomfortable truth, as has become a fad in some parts of the consevation communityu, including many environmental NGOs, will produce unsustainable and ineffective policies.

Going further she points out that the "dominant narrative" over emphasises organised crime as a driver of poaching and downplays "corruption of government institutions and the wildlife industry" in affected countries.

The question really becomes one of economic wealth. What are the best ways to ensure that people and communities don't need to hunt animals to extinction? Some of this should be straightforward - making people feel a stake in the protection of plants and animals. Some requires removing demand. This is harder - some markets for animals parts are closely linked to countries' traditional beliefs, foods or practices. Though it is interesting to note that Felbab-Brown points out how much of these are recent inventions, and how "Chinese Traditional Medicine" is constantly reinventing itself as sources change. 

The strength of the book is its nuanced approach. That there is no "one size fits all" for every country, market or animal is a repeated mantra of Felbab-Brown's book. But despite this I was a little unconvinced by the general thrust of the author's argument. Part of the problem is that the generalised approach by capitalism towards nature is the commodification of nature. The "natural capital" approach which seeks to place a value on nature and embedded it in economic flows is one adopted by most governments, lots of NGOs and almost all global agreements on biodiversity. But once you do this you guarantee that there's a profit to be made. This is why Felbab-Brown argues that "Although it is vital to clean up the corruption that has permeated trohpy hunting in much of Africa, to suspend it indefinitely will hurt, not advance conservation". 

This surely is short-sighted - it assumes firstly that people will always want to hunt for trophies and secondly that conservation can only be helped by a uncorrupted hunting industry. I think it's entirely possible to imagine a world where animal hunting for trophies is inconceivable - but that requires a massive challenge to existing ideologies and power structures. A properly funded environmental approach that doesn't rest on "natural capital" would also release the cash needed for the sort of bottom up conservation that Felbab-Brown shows clearly works. But that again requires a challenge to existing global economic priorities.

So while Felbab-Brown has many helpful insights into how not to try and restrict poaching, because her outlook remains essentially bourgeois, I'm not convinced it offers a long term solution. It is why conservation cannot be separated from wider political and economic questions, particularly ones that are about lack of resources and wealth inequality. That's a big criticism, but in making it I want to emphasise that Vanda Felbab-Brown's book has a great deal to stimulate discussion about conservation and the protection of biodiversity loss. It also makes it clear that those who hold the key to protecting biodiversity are often those who are usually dismissed. The book challenges many assumptions and has a multitude of facts and figures that deserve to be widely known. 

Related Reviews

Bourgon - Tree Thieves: Crime & Survival in the Woods
Archer - 'By a Flash and a Scare': Arson, Animal Maiming & Poaching in East Anglia: 1815-1870