Lyndal Roper - Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther's World and Legacy

2017 saw the five hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther beginning the Reformation. By lucky coincidence, rather than design, it was also the year that Lyndal Roper's epic biography of Luther was published. As a result Roper was asked to speak at numerous debates, lectures and events that marked the Reformation and this book, is the result of that experience. In her preface Roper recounts speaking in Wittenberg, the town where Luther was based and were the Reformation was centred. She was in St Mary's Church, where Luther preached and was married, but the Church is also the site of a hideously racist antisemitic sculpture. This then was the occasion for much debate and discussion, and in particular how she thought about Luther himself, and his antisemitism.

But the book then is not another biography of Luther. Rather it is an attempt to understand Luther's life and ideas in a deeper context. It is, she writes to be taken in the spirit of Lutheranism that she admires, "its profund anti-authoritarianism, its political engagement, and its insistence on argument, discussion, and critical appraisal of its own history". At the same time Roper is open that she is critical and prepared to highlight unpleasant and "less comfortable" aspects of Luther's ideas and life.

The book opens with a study of Luther's image. Luther's Reformation ran on image and ideas. He was the first figure in history to make use of the printing press in a systematic way. But the use of the press was for more than producing large quantities of sermons and printed texts. It was also, as Andrew Pettegree has pointed out in his book Brand Luther to create a Brand. Pamphlets had a style, and as Roper shows, Luther's image was carefully curated for "instant legibility". She points out that:

There is Luther the monk, and image which had run its course by 1524; Luther in the Wartburg; Luther as a marrid man; the standard portrait; the full-body Luther; and dead Luther. Each of these was made famous by the Cranach workshop. Finally there is a type I shall term 'Luther and Co.' which was produced only after Luther's death.

This curation of Luther's image created in a time before mass media, an instantly recognisable figure and thus helped propel Luther to leadership of the Reformation itself. But Roper continues, these images went further, "gave rise to a whole new material culture of images.... Indeed, Cranach's portrait proved so successful that it escaped the bounds of Luteranism altogether and became a signifier not just for the Lutheran Church, but for German-ness itself". Luther came to stand in for the religious changes and the society they helped create.

Another chapter looks at the role of dreams in Luther's life and those of his religious contemporaries. How particular dreams are understood was important, but I mostly refer to them because while Roper says that "Luther... wa scharacteristically sceptical about the significance of dreams", she places a some importance on them in understanding Luther himself. Indeed this includes her analysis of Luther's antisemitism. Here she writes:

In contrast to medieval anti-Semitism, Luther's was linked to a set of fantasies surrounding circumcision and the Jews as the Chosen People. Psychologically, in Freudian terms, such fears would be connected with the Oedipal stage and with castration... The infant feels rivalry towarsd the father, and fears that the father will take revenge on him by castrating him. Jews, so the irrational fear would run, have undergone a kind of symbolic castration ... The circumcised Jew would therefore function as a nightmare vision of what might happen to oneself. Anti-Semitism would consequently be connected to issues about sexual difference, power and parents. It would be fundamentally concerned with identity.

This is, I think, a remarkably weak analysis of Luther's antisemitism. It should be said that Roper's account of Luther's antisemitism is incredibly important. She notes herself that it was rarely acknowledged, often ignored, and only recently have books studied it closely. This acknowledgement of Luther's antisemitism by historians, biographers and scholars has been important. But Roper's own explanation of why Luther was an antisemite here, removes Luther, his ideas, and principly the Jewish people from their historical context. Rather than seeking to explain Luther's antisemitism in Freudian terms, we need to locate it in both his own developing religious ideas and the way that Jewish people were the victim of oppression and racism due to their economic and religious positions in 16th century Europe. This chapter was disappointing and inadequate.

Roper, it must be emphasised, does not in any way diminish or excuse Luther's antisemitism. Indeed she notes how it has been both exposed, and forgotten in the final part of her study of Luther's impact - Luther Kitsch. Here she highlights the Luther Playmobil figure, the most popular such plastic figure of all time, and one that was initially made with a version of a Bible that essentially emphasised Luther's antisemitic beliefs. This was hurridly corrected, but the kitsch continues. Even today, many years after the 500th anniversary, Wittenberg's shops are full of socks, ornaments, pictures and even honey, that celebrate the image of Luther.

The essays in Living I was your Plague are interesting, but the book felt disjointed and directionless. I have found Lyndal Roper's work stimulating and enjoyable, and her biography of Luther is unparalled. But this book was weak and in places flawed.

Related Reviews

Roper - Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet
Roper - Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War
Treu - Katherine von Bora: Luther's Wife
Stanford - Martin Luther: Catholic Dissident
Pettegree - Brand Luther

Douglas Adams - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Revisting a favourite book from many years ago can be like finding a long lost friend. So it was with Douglas Adam's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. I must have read this half a dozen times in the 1990s. But that means that there's a gap of nearly quarter of a century since I last opened it, and while I remembered it well, I think I had forgotten just how funny it is. I also had not remembered, or perhaps hadn't appreciated, the novels depths and the intricacies of the plot.

One of the amusing things about the book is that Dirk Gently, who appeared in one further complete novel, a radio play and a couple of TV series, doesn't appear until a third of the way through this, the first novel. The opening third of the novel is a series of apparently random and disconnected events. A robotic priest, programmed to believe everything it is told, rides a horse in an alien landscape. An absent minded history professor amazes a young girl at a Cambridge dinner, and Gordon Way (I am assuming this is a caricature of Clive Sinclair) a multi-millioniare software company founder, is murdered.

These stories will be connected. In fact they are connected through time and space with other, lesser events. Everything in the book matters, and readers will find on repeated readings that they notice more and more. All this, of course, goes with Dirk Gently's central idea - everything is connected. The universe links everything and solving mysteries is simply a matter of following everything to its conclusion - no matter how unrelated and random stuff appears. 

All of this is, of course, done within the framework of Douglas Adam's typical absurdist, chaotic and occasionally farcical story telling. It is what made me laugh thirty years ago, and what made me laugh again, and again, this time around. But I was also struck by something else. Adam's own fascination and embracement of new technology means that some parts of the novel would have seemed outlandish. One character downloads information from the internet (we assume a bulletin board of the time) and there's a good joke about the US militaries use of software. While none of the characters have mobile phones, in some ways this is a very modern novel.

When I first read this I used to joke that this was a convoluted novel that was really about how a sofa gets stuck in a stairwell. It is that. But there's so much else, and its made me very keen to reread the sequel and seek out the final, unfinished story that's collected in Salmon of Doubt. Douglas Adam's untimely death robbed us of so many great stories.

Related Reviews

Pratchett - Snuff
Pratchett - Moving Pictures
Pratchett - A Stroke of the Pen

Ralph Darlington - Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-1914

The great "Labour Unrest" or "Labour Revolt" that exploded across Britain from 1910 to 1914 is little known to most trade union and left activists in Britain today. It was an extraordinary period that saw "one of the most sustained, dramatic and violent explosions of industrial militancy and social conflict" in the history of the country. Those great figures of Fabian social democracy Sidney and Beatrice Webb were horrified, writing that the strikes were

designed... to supersede collective bargaining - to repudiate any making of long-term agreements, to spring demand after demand upon employuers, to compel every workamn to join the Union, avowedly with the view of building up the Trade Union as a dominant force. The spasm of industrial 'insurrectionism' was [only] adruptly stopped by the outbreak of the war.

If we can detect a barely concleaed relief from the Webbs in that quote at the ending of the unrest, it was nothing compared to the relief in Westminster and the offices of employers everywhere else. Others understood exactly what had taken place, the Irish radical trade unionist Jim Larkin commented that "Labour has lost its old humility and its respectful finger touching its cap." Still others quoted by Ralph Darlington thought the movement was heading in a very radical direction. George Dangerfield saidit "took a revoutionary course and might have reached a revolutionary conclusion."

One of the great strengths, and most enjoyable aspects to this book are Darlington's detailed accounts of the strikes, and those involved. From transport to docksand sewing machine manufacturers to motor cab drivers and tailors and tailoresses and groups as diverse as Cornish clay workers and furniture makers. Tens of thousands of men and women went out on strike. On occasion the strikes were massive and quickly won, on others they were small and slow. But the "diversity of struggles" was huge. One example will suffice. 

In December 1911 in the Vale of Leven, West Dunbartonshire, 2,000 women went on strike at the United Turkey Red Combine dye company. On the first day 7,000 people blocked the gates and shut the works down. Their banners, as they marched through the town read, "White Slaves, Vale of Leven, No Surrender". Their partial victory on Christmas Day saw recognition of the two (male and female) unions and a weekly pay rise of 1 shilling for men and 6 pence for women. This, it should be noted, was a sell out by the mens union which reneged on the plan for equal pay rises for men and women. But the real step forward perhaps was that the unions quickly merged, with the Amalgamated Society of Dyers accepting a merger from the National Federation of Women Workers branch. 

The NFWW itself had been founded by Mary Macarthur in 1906, it grew to 20,000 when war broke out. In fact, the rapid growth of trade unions and the emergence of new unions was a key consequence of the strike wave. 

Darlington's account stresses the breadth of the struggle. But he also draws out how new groups were being brought into the conflict. As the example above shows, he has an excellent focus on women's trade unions, strikes and political struggles. There is also a detailed look at the surprising wave of strikes by schoolchildren. Here I simply must include the acount from Manchester when school strikers came out, and "appointed pickets who, labelled with papers pinned to their caps bearing the wod 'picket' marched in a body to the Holland Street municipal school to induce... a sympathetic strike... the strikers... having on the way secured sticks which they brandished fiercely." Others brandished their toy pistols.

Sympathy strikes among school children was a tactic clearly learnt from watching the other strikes. Solidarity walkouts and the picketing out of other workplaces was one of the most powerful weapons that the workers had, and whole towns were brought to a halt by the tactic. These were rarely violent, in fact:

Strikers invariably endeavoured to engage in peaceful dialogue, reasoning and persuasion with those workers who refuesed to join strikes and undertood to cross pickets lines. Even contemporary hostile press reports concerned with the problem of alleged 'intimidation' frequently let slip that the act of respecting picket lines was often done voluntarily. The culture of respecting picket lines, combined with the wider degree of solidarity generated by strikes, was at least as important in building trade union power as the more dramtic large-scle confrontation, with other workers sometimes influenced and swayed by the pickets, even if highly reluctantly. 

What was the cause of the revolt? One answer is poverty and inequality which had reached enormous levels in the pre-War period. In 1910 ten percent of the population owned 92 percent of the wealth. But it was more than this. According to one study by George Askwith of the Board of Trade, a great cause of discontent was the "flamboyant lifestyle" of the wealthy, contrasted with workers' poverty. Changes in British society were also having an impact, mass education was, according to Darlington, "sharpening critical faculties and encouraging a rising standard of expectation". These factors were combing to end a situation where workers "knew their place" and going further, the strikes reflected the desire "to achieve a greater amount of economic equality... [and] demands for for shorter working hourse, more pay and more power, both over industry and in the government of the country."

Pertinent to readers today one other important factor was the "widespread perceived failure of the Labour Party the ineffectiveness of Parliament". According to Darlington the "significance of the period precisely lay in the polaristaion that developed between constitutional Labour politics of gradualist reform from above and the notion that the working class could achieve its goals through industrial militancy from below." Industrial militancy was a rejection of both parliament and "orthodox trade unionism".

But there were flaws in the struggle, and Darlington, as he has done in his other books, explores both the limits of radical trade unionism and the far-left political parties of the time. Notably he argues, "a characteristic feature of the radical left [at the time] was its failure to connect industrial struggles with political ideas, organisation and leadership". While the syndicalist trade unionists rightly "insisted that society's revolutionary transformation necessarily had to come from below" they also subordinated "ideological and political questions". This meant that at times struggles were weakened as for instance in the 1911 Liverpool transport strike, when "sectarianism between Catholic and Protestant workers was not explicitly challenged".  Darlington concludes that these weaknesses meant:

The leadership vacuum was filled by default by trade union and Labour Party leaders, whose conciliatory and parliamentary reformist strategy of working within the system and accommodating to it ultimately predominated, notwithstanding considerable challenge.

Ralph Darlington's account of the Labour Revolt is an stimulating and important read. It is both inspiring and politically sharp. It reminds us of the power of workers when we act and demonstrate solidarity in practice, and of the need for clear trade union and socialist leadership. The potential demonstrated in 1910-1914 is desperately needed again, and this book is an excellent guide for learning from the past. While little known today 1910-1914 was an important era in shaping the trade union terrain on which we must organise today. All militants can learn a lot from this excellent book.

Related Reviews

Darlington & Lyddon - Glorious Summer: Class Struggle in Britain 1972
Darlington - Radical Unionism: The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Syndicalism
Newsinger - Them and Us: Fighting the Class War 1910-1939
Cliff & Gluckstein - Marxism and Trade Union Struggle: The General Strike of 1926

Leon Trotsky - The First Five Years of the Communist International (Vol. II)

Volume one of this collection of Trotsky's essays on the early Communist International was dominated by excitement as revolution swept Europe in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the First World War. In contrast the second volume is dominated by the various radicals attempting to grapple with a new context - the seemingly temporary retreat from revolution and the remergence and growing confidence of the bourgeoise. This poses two challenges for the Communist International. The first is trying to understand the dynamics of the new order, and what this means for Revolutionary Russia. The second is trying to find ways of solidifying the newly emerged Communist Parties of Europe and finding ways for them to connect to the masses in a time when revolution is not on the immediate horizon. The book thus has perhaps more material that is pertinent to the current situation than the earlier volume.

The first thing that Trotsky takes on is the theory of the offensive. This was, essentially, the idea that a Communist Party could declare a revolution without the base and prepardness that was required. It is one that proved disastorous in Germany in March 1921 when a Communist led insurrection failed to secure the support of the mass of the working class. This "theory" dovetailed with a crude economic vision of many of the left that worsening economic situations would inevitably drive workers to revolution. By contrast Trotsky says:

The mere idea that the commercial-industrial crisis could give way to a relative boom was regarded by the conscious and semi-conscious adherents of the theory of the offensive almost as centrism. As for the idea that the new commerical-industrial revival might not only fail to act as a brake upon the revolution, but on the contrary gave promise of imparting new vigor to it [as workers gained self confidence in improved conditions for a capitalism that needed them] - this idea already seemed nothing short of Menshevism.

You get a real sense of the best elements of the revolutionary movement trying to desperately teach a new generation of radicals core ideas and strategy from their own experience. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the discussion around the United Front. The United Front was conceptualised by the Communist International in the early 1920s as a way of revolutionaries relating to the masses when the masses were not yet revolutionary. In short its explored as a strategy whereby Communist Parties would attempt to relate to other organisations over short term demands that could demonstrate in practice that their tactics were the best and at the same time expose the limitations of the social democrats and the reformists. The sharp and repeated arguments that Trotsky and the leadership of the Comintern have with the French Communist Party are where this argument is played out in this collection. The French CP is dominated by socialists wedded to the old way of doing things. It is far from a unified revolutionary party and the Comintern has to step in several times to expel right-wingers, or even demand that members of the FCP who are also Freemasons leave. But it is over the United Front that they battle the hardest. For many in the FCP the United Front is a capitulation to reformism. Trotsky repeatedly talks through the reality, using the case of a strike in Le Harve which saw the state kill four strikers. The FCP immediately called a general strike, but did not have the networks, support or base for this, and a minority followed their call. Trotsky explores how the United Front tactic could have pulled the masses towards a strike that would have been successful:

Attempts should have been made in each factory and plant or each neighborhood, district and city to set up provisional protest committees, into which the Communists and the revolutionary sundicalists shold have drawn representatives of local conciliationist organistaions. Only a campaign of this type, systematic, concentrated, all-sided, intense and tireless - could have been, within a week or more, corwned by major success... such a campaign would have brought as its lasting result an increase in the mass connections, prestige and influence of the party and the CGTU alike.

Interestingly Trotsky is able to use the experience in Germany of temporary success with this tactic as a way of demonstrating proof of the United Front tactic. The inclusion of a report by Clara Zetkin on this is a real highlight of this collection.

Two other themes stand out. The first is what's happening in Russia. As the immediate prospect of revolution in Europe fades slightly, there's a corresponding need to strengthen the Russian economy. This means the introduction of the New Economic Plan, an attempt to strengthen the economy by permitting a minority of the economy to operate on the basis of capitalist relations. Some of the delegates to the Comintern see this as a retreat in the face of capitalism, and the Comintern's enemies predict this will mean the restoration of capitalism in the country. Trotsky outlines the reality, and shows how this decision is rooted in the realities of Civil War and the backward nature of the economy captured by the Russian Revolution. Its a fantasticly honest discussion, and one that demonstrates how the young Soviet Republic was struggling at the same time as being honest and open about the realities they faced. Later Trostky is able to celebrated increased food production and predict that when the European revolution came it would be supported by Russian food in the face of their own counter-revolutionary blockades.

But counter-revolution is real. It is tragically shocking that it is as early as 1920 in this collection that the word fascism is first used and the triumph of Mussolini in 1923 means the first attempts to theorise what fascism was. In the face of this new threat, and learning the lessons of the previous few years, Trotsky reiterates a key point, one that socialists today need to remember - the need for a revolutionary party.

Without our party the 1917 overturn would not, of course, have taken palce and the entire fate of our country would have been different. It would have been thrown back to vegetate as a colonial country; it would have been plundered by and divided among the imperialist powers of the world. That this did not happen was guaranteed historically by the arming of the working class with the incomparable sword, our Communist Party. This did not happen in postwar Europe.

That failure did not end revolutionary hopes. If this collection is not filled with the excitment of immediate revolutionary potential, it nonetheless shows a real attempt to grapple with the failure of revolution outside Russia and how to build the sort of organisations that could develop and embolden the working class of the world. Circumstances meant this was not to happen. But the lessons and arguments have much too teach revolutionaries today.

Related Reviews

Trotsky - The First Five Years of the Communist International (Vol. I)
Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution
Trotsky - The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany
Trotsky - On Britain
Trotsky - Lessons of October

Lee Child - Tripwire

There is a certain satisfaction to one of Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels. As the reader you know, after the first two or so, that you are going to encounter some sort of unsavoury, unequal and violent scenario which impacts vulnerable ordinary people, and that Jack Reacher will come along and fix things by killing all the bad people and releasing the good people from whatever obligation they are trapped in. In Tripwire this pattern is barely altered, though Child has constructed a particularly odious bad guy in the form of the violent Victor "Hook" Hobie who enjoys violence, rape, torture and murder, but who has made himself very rich through loan sharking. Hobie entraps a businessman whose legitimate company is on the rocks as technological innovation has pushed his product to the margins. Hobie's greed destroys the company and allows him to physical trap the businessman and his far cleverer and able wife in a violent spiral. Having dispatched American Nazis in the previous book, this time its loan sharks. One can only hope Reacher continues to rip through the nasties of US capitalism for the rest of the series.

So that's the background. The plot hardly matters in some senses, because Jack Reacher gradually finds out what's going on as he investigates a seeminly unrelated issue passed on to him by his former military superior. Along the way, Reacher falls in love and appears to settle down with Jodie, his boss's adult daughter.

Before we dwell on the problematic aspects of that relationship. It's worth noting that Tripwire's main themes are surprisingly political. The basis to both Hobie's rise to power and Reacher's quest to fix a seemingly unrelated disappearance are rooted in the Vietnam War, or more specifically, the chaos engendered by the war, and the way that the US fought it. There's a deep cynicism within the novel, expressed through the military personal, about the way - Reacher thinks it was wrong. So do many of the military figures he encounters. More importantly, there's a sort of Ramboesque debate about whether or not the Vietnamese still have captured US troops imprisoned. The conclusion is that they don't, and there's no great conspiracy. But the very idea of this hangs over the novel and the characters. Is this representative of what America thinks today? Probably not, and probably not when the book was first published in the late 1990s. But it allows Child to portray Reacher not as a violent miltiary protagonist, but as the seeker of untruth, the helper and the supporter of the innocent that Child would prefer him to be. By making him a Military Policeman and not a combat veteran Child allows Reacher to be the hero the public wants, specifically knowing lots about guns, and not be tainted by US imperialisms failures.

But there's a problem with the central relationship in the book. Reacher knows Jodie as a child. She develops a crush on him. They are close, and when Reacher and Jodie finally get together as adults there is an implication that they have finally consumated something that was around in the past. The whole thing feels completely inappropriate, unnecessary and unpleasant to read. Oddly few people reviewing Tripwire seem to think this is inappropriate. I understand that Child drops the character in the next novel. It really undermined the book, the character and the series.

Related Reviews

Child - Killing Floor
Child - Die Trying

Owen Rees - The Far Edges of the Known World: A new history of the ancient past

The premise of The Far Edges of the Known World is demonstrated best with the quote that opens the book. The Greek hero Jason (of the Argonauts fame) says to his wife (whom he has taken on his voyages from far away, that "all the greeks consider you to be wise, and you are held in high regard. But if you still lived at the far edges of the world, there would be no talk of you". The Greeks knew that there were placesbeyond the borders of their own lands, but they held them in low regard. They were places of fear, monsters, cannibals and chaos. Home was culture, stability and religon.

The book then is a study of how ancient cultures dealt with the fringes of their influence, and how the places and people of the periphery influenced wider Empires. For most ancient people,"the further away you were from the core of that society, the further away you were from civilisation itself". But the reality was that those people did not see themselves in that way, and their own place was the centre of their universe.

Owen Rees looks at a number of examples of this. Olbia in modern Ukraine was a Greek city on the Black Sea. This was, says Rees, the "outermost reach of the Greek world". Nonetheless the Greek world did reach there. But it was an outpost of Greece among the legendary and violent Scythian nomads who fought on horseback and who might turn themselves into wolves. The city itself "almost absorbed that muthical mustique, that sense of unknown truths, rumours and misunderstandings". But the city wasn't a tiny outpost. It was a thriving city, an economic powerhouse and the centre of trading for a whole region. The people of Olbia, trading salted fish,

which could be transported throughout the Greek world as a luxury item. But they also exported leather, salt, grain and enslaged people, possiblity supplied by the surrounding Scythian communities... Olbia imported wine, olive oil and fine pottery from further south... as far afield as Egypt.

The Greeks believed that the Scythian's rejected their culture but in reality Olbia represents the coming together of culture and the exchange of ideas, as well as trade goods. The Greek myths of Olbia were just that. The city was not a "carbon copy" of other Greek places, but had a "flair all of its own". The edges of Greek influence were ragged and merging elsewhere.

We see the same elsewhere, in multiple examples. The blending and merging of cultures and ideas at the fringes of ancient empires but ones were sometimes the blurring goes much further in to the heart of that culture. Perhaps the most unexpected, and fascinating example, is one from Bais, in Madhya Pradesh, northern India. Here a monument commerates the Greek ambassador who came there and met with Bhagavata, the son of Dion, from Taxila (in modern Pakistan). Rees explores this remarkable and unexpected event - an ancient Greek ambassador in India. Not just that, but one who appears to have gone native. It demonstrates, says Rees, that Taxila was:

a city filled with learning and cultural exchange, where religious innovation and novelty was embraced and given space to thrive. It was a place where no one language superseded another, but where different languages sat side by side.

This might, perhaps, not seem to controversial. But Rees is tackling a problem whereby we tend to see history through the prism of a few, local, examples. Ancient Greece and Rome are the societies by which others are judged, and allegedly form the bedrock for modern culture and politics. Instead, Rees points out, they are also assimilations of other cultures, influenced, shaped and changed by much wider and less well known civilisations. Rees says, "by focusing out minds on the narrow, traditional narratives of history we do not appreciate just how many stories, innovations and shared histories we inadvertantly eradicate". 

I enjoyed Owen Rees' book, but at times I found his central argument was lost in overwhelming detail. At times I also felt it was obscured and needed drawing out more. But the central idea - that cultures are not monolithic and are shaped by interaction and exchange, is one that we could do well to remember today.

Related Reviews

Beard - Emperor of Rome
Al-Rashid - Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History
Balter - The Goddess & the Bull: Çatalhöyük An Archaeological Journey to the Dawn of Civilisation

Ken Macleod - The Cassini Division

About forty pages into The Cassini Division I realised that this was not the first book in the series. I then found a review that suggested it was NOT a good place to start the series. That said, occasionally you find yourself without alternative reading material, and so I ploughed onward. If this was an inauspicious start it was not a disastorous one. This is an engrossing read and I am determined to find the actual start so I can enjoy the books in series.

There is a long, fine, tradition of radicals writing books about visitors to, or from, utopian societies to capitalist ones. William Morris' splendid fantasy News from Nowhere is perhaps the best of these, though Iain M. Bank's Player of Games ranks high for me. Ken Macleod's The Cassini Division is clearly inspired by these, and others. His chapter titles are all examples of the genre, though many are realtively obscure.

But in Macleod's version, our protaganists come from an advanced future Communist society that has emerged from a complete economic and technological collapse. This is the sort of utopia that I've discussed in many Socialist Worker meetings. Or perhaps more often in pubs and cafe's after those meetings. Here people organise to help and satsify needs, rather than labouring for someone else's accumulation. There's a wonderful moment when Ellen May Ngewthu visits an airport in a capitalist society, and contrasts the chaos, advertising and shops with the relaxed environment of her normal travel hubs, were people help with luggage, look after each others kids and relax. 

There are plenty of moments like this as Ellen builds a team to confront an existential threat to Earth, and this involves a travel to that alternative world. For the purposes of this review, the nature of that threat doesn't particularly matter - though things would likely have been much clearer if I'd read books one and two first. The point is that Macleod contrasts the chaos (and greed) of a world that puts profit before people, with the choices made by a world where decision making is made in the interests of all. Even if those decisions can lead the death and destruction. 

For socialist activists reading The Cassini Division there is fun to be had at spotting in-jokes and self-referential material. But I was charmed by how Macleod demonstrated democracy in practice, as well as how life might work in an affluent society, albeit one constrainted by ecological and physical realities. Decisions here are made that give a framework to those implementing them. And those who have ideas are expected to try and lead on then. No elected leaders sending other people's children off to fight here.

This doesn't feel like the preaching that characterises some of the 19th century utopian works. But there is a certain smugness to it all - not unlike the smugness our socialist heroes feel when they arrive in a world where people haven't overthrown class society. All that said this isn't just a political novel. It's a great bit of Space Opera, with starships firing heavy weapons, adventure and some classic jokes. I really enjoyed it. But I am, perhaps, it's target audience.

Related Reviews

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Leon Trotsky - The First Five Years of the Communist International (Vol. I)

The setting up of the Communist Third International in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution was a conscious attempt to use the authority and experience of the Bolsheviks in Russia to spread and develop revolution and revolutionary organisation around the world. The leaders of the Russian Revolution, principly Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin had always made it clear that unless revolution spread, Russia's would be left isolated and die. The founding of the International in 1919 took place in a situation when revolution beyond Russia was real. Workers' soviets and revolutionary councils were a reality in countries like Germany, Hungary and many other places.

As one of the most authoritative figures of the revolution, Leon Trotsky's writings from this period, and specifically the writings, speeches and polemics that are part of this collection, are particularly important. They cover an intoxicating moment, when the Russian Revolution was a few years old and in the midst of Imperialist intervention, and when serious debates about revolutionary strategy are taking place. As part of the debates at successive conferences of the Commintern, Trotsky intervenes sharply in the internal discussions of three countries in particular - France, Italy and Germany. In the former there is a real debate about the need to break with the Reformist, opportunist, leaders of social democracy. 

In France's case Trotsky writes two letters to leading figures using his personal connections to urge them to come over to the Communist cause. But, the main thrust of his polemic is to challenge the best elements of the working class movement - the anarcho syndicalists - on the need to break with their non-political practices. It is a sharp discussion that challenges the genuine revolutionaries to break with their past, and join the emerging Communist movement in France. It is also urgent, and the speeches drip with the pressure of events. Similar discussions, in slightly different contexts, take place with German and Italian comrades. Both of whom are grappling with the experience of Reformists in their ranks - the sell outs of 1914 and those in their ranks who are more concerned with revolutionary purity over and above the messy business of engaging in struggle.

In Italy in 1920 the revolutionary movement was inspired by the radical pronouncements of the Socialist Party, but these opportunists immediately backtracked when faced with a powerful working class movement leading strikes and occupying workplaces. In Germany similar groups of socialists had diverted the revolution of 1919 into Parliamentary channels, after murdering its best leaders. Some of the discussions at the meetings of the Communist International grapple with the nature of Reformism - a force that had little representation in Russia in 1917, but was a significant force in central and Western Europe based on the history of the Second International. Trostky says:

This epoch of proletarian reformation gave birth to a special apparatus of a labor bureaucracy with special mental habits of its own, with its own routine, pinch-penny ideas, chameleon-like capacity for adaptation, and predisposition to myopia. Comrade Gorter identifies this bureaucratic apparatus with the proletarian masses upon whose backs this apparatus has climbed. Hence flow his idealistic illusions. His thinking is not materialistic, non-historical. He understands the reciprocal relations neither between the class and the temporary historical apparatuses, nor between the past epoch and the present. Comrade Gorter proclaims that the trade unions are bankrupt; that the Social Democracy is bankrupt; that Communism is bankrupt and the working class is bourgeoisified. According to him we must begin anew and start off with – the head, i.e., with select groups, who separate and apart from the old forms of organization will carry unadulterated truth to the proletariat, scrub it clean of all bourgeois prejudices and, finally, spruce it up for the proletarian revolution.

Such debates are hampered by some wrong-headed thinking. In particular there are several early refences to the question of the labour aristocracy. Here Trotsky and others argue that a layer of workers are bought off by super profits from imperialism, and act as a break on the revolutionary movement. Though these workers were some of the most revolutionary in Petrograd in 1917, Germany in 1918-1919 and Britain in 1919. There is some truth though, but the Communist International, at least in this period, doesn't seem to get to grips with the real problem which is the trade union bureacracy who are a conservative brake on struggle due to being removed from the work force.

Perhaps the most interesting speech in this book however is the one that marks the transition from a period of immediate revolution to one where some economic revival in the capitalist nations has seen growing confidence on behalf of the capitalists. This Report on the World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Communist International is a remarkable text. Trotsky grapples with both the (hopefully temporary) retreat of the revolution and the changing economic circumstances. In particular he analyses the growth of American capitalism and what that means for the dynamics of global struggle. It's a striking discussion of the impact of World War One, the changing global picture and things like anticolonial movements. In particular Trotsky is discussing whether capitalism "is it either restoring or close to restoring capitalist equilibrium upon new post-war foundations?" His answer was very much that any stability that capitalism was experiencing in 1921 was temporary, and that there were deep seated problems for the system. A prediction that would prove terribly prescient by the end of the decade, and which anticipated the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, even in 1921 he could note the threat of a destabilised middle class hit hard by economic crisis. In the 1930s this class would form the basis of the European fascist movements:

The reformists pinned great hopes upon the so-called middle estate. Engineers, technicians, doctors, lawyers, bookkeepers, accountants, functionaries, civilians and government employes alike, and so on – all these constitute a semi-conservative stratum which stands between capital and labor and which must, in the opinion of reformists, reconcile both sides, while directing and at the same time supporting democratic regimes. This class has suffered even more than the working class during the war and after, that is, its living standards have deteriorated to an even greater degree than the living standards of the working class. The main reason for this is the decline in the purchasing power of money, the depreciation of paper currency. In all European countries this has given rise to sharp discontent among the lowest and even middle ranks of functionaries and the technological intelligentsia.

Trotsky argued that:

America’s productive capacity has grown extraordinarily but her market has vanished because Europe is impoverished and can no longer buy American goods. It is as if Europe had first done everything in her power to help America climb to the topmost rung and then pulled the ladder out.

What would be the consequence? Instability and war. Take this prediction from later in the same 1921 conference: 

The last great war was – in its origin, its immediate causes and in its principal participants – a European war. The axis of the struggle was the antagonism between England and Germany. The intervention of the United States extended the framework of the struggle, but it did not divert it from its fundamental course. The European conflict was settled by the resources of the whole world. The war, which in its own way settled the contest between England and Germany and to that extent also the conflict between the United States and Germany, not only failed to solve the question of interrelations between the United States and England but has, for the first time, posed it in its full scope as the basic question of world politics, just as it posed the question of interrelations between the United States and Japan as one of the second order. Thus, the last war was a European prelude to a genuine world war which is to solve the question of who will exercise the rule of imperialist autocracy.

It is a remarkable prediction of war, and war on a far greater scale. What was the answer? That was the question posed by all the early conferences of the Communist International: the building of revolutionary organisation. How to do this, and how that changed as the situation evolved provides some of the clearest and most useful parts of this volume. In The Main Lesson of the Third Congress Trotsky reiterates how the Social Democrats had stopped the revolution in the critical aftermath of the Russian Revolution:

In the most critical year for the bourgeois the year 1919, the proletariat of Europe could have undoubtedly conquered state ower with minimum sacrifices, had there been at its head a genuine revolutionary organizatiom, setting forth clear aims and capably pursuing them, i.e., a strong Communist Party. But there was none. On the contrary, in seeking after the war to conquer new living conditions for itself and in assuming an offensive against bourgeois society, the working class had to drag on its back the parties and trade unions of the Second International, all of whose efforts, both conscious and instinctive, were essentially directed toward the preservation of capitalist society.

Had their been genuine revolutionary organisations that could have been avoided. The failure to do this was not the end of the revolutionary opportunity. The next volume deals with the critical period and the grappling of the Communist International with further threats to revolutionary Russia, and tactics for Communist Parties with significant memberships in periods of low levels of struggle. 

There is much in this first volume though, and the clarity of Trotsky's analysis, the honesty of the debate among attendees of the meetings, and the serious attempts to learn how to develop the struggle are fascinating. While these collections are only Trotsky's contributions, and other volumes contain more, we can learn a great deal from them all. I look forward to the second volume.

Related Reviews

Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution
Trotsky - The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany
Trotsky - On Britain
Trotsky - Lessons of October