Greg Grandin - Fordlandia

In the 1920s Henry Ford decided to build a city in the Amazon. He was not the sort of person who was shy of self-promotion so he named it after himself. The purpose was to ensure a safe, cheap supply of rubber for Ford's car factories in North America, but Ford's real dream was the transformation of a section of the Amazon into a recreation of a highly stylised small town America. Doing this required a few things. Firstly it needed an enormous amount of money, something that the Ford corporation had in vast quantities. Secondly it needed land that could be transformed into rubber plantations and urban areas and, most importantly, it needed a large number of people who would work for Ford.

Ford famously built his empire by paying workers much more than the competitors. In theory they were paid enough to be able to purchase the cars they made. But Ford also made sure that his workforce conformed to a very strict set of standards. Alcohol was frowned upon, and often forbidden. Trade unions were strictly banned and Ford's hired thugs were prepared to use the utmost violence to prevent any hint of workers organising. Inspectors were sent to workers' homes to quiz the family on propreity and behaviour, even their sex life came under examination. While Ford liked to argue that he was the epitome of the good capitalist, at home and in the workplace he strictly controlled his workers' labour.

Ford has gone down in history for a number of things. He is credited with the transformation of factory work. Everything that could be done to improve efficiency was done. Today workers in call centres have their toilet breaks timed. In Ford's factory's workers had every movement calculated and analysed. The pay might have been good, but the relentless hard work meant turnover was high. Ford took his beliefs to all the logical, and illogical, extremes. According to Grandin he once sacked 700 orthodox Christians for taking a day off to celebrate a holiday. He believed that cow's milk was unhealthy and forced soy milk and food made from soy substitutes on his guests. Gardin writes, and  quotes one contemporary journalist, Walter Lippmann:

The industrialist's conviction that he could make the world conform to his will was founded on a faith that success in economic matters should, by extension allow capitalists to try their hands "with equal success" at "every other occupation." "Mr. Ord is neither a crank nor a freak," Lippmann insisted, but "merely the logical exponent of American prejudices about wealth and success." 

Importing this to the Amazon was fraught with peril. The rubber trade had brought capitalism to the rain-forest. But Ford brought it on an enormous scale. The heart of this book is the story of the consequent clash. Nature and people had to be shaped in Ford's image, and both resisted!

Firstly the people. Many of those that Ford's employees wanted to work for them in the Amazon had little or no experience of working to the regimes that Ford wanted. Some had no experience (or need) for money and wanted goods in kind - Ford refused to allow this, and so the workers refused to work for him. Others didn't want to work continuously, just enough to earn some money before returning to their own land. Still others wanted to bring their whole families with them. A year or so into the project, when Fordlandia was beginning to work, a huge riot destroyed nearly the whole complex. The trigger was management's insistence that workers had to queue in a canteen for food, rather than being served by waiters, behind this though was intense anger at the regime, the strict clocking in and out, and so on. One of the notable pictures in the book is of a clocking machine destroyed by the rioters.

Secondly nature. Like so many capitalists before and after Ford believed that he could simply force nature to do what he wanted. There's a famous quote from Fredrich Engels where he warns, "Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us..." This was very much true in the Amazon. The stripping of the land required far more work and money than Ford expected and, because he ignored local advice and refused to hire experts, his operations were repeatedly beset by problems. In particular, he and his managers, did not understand that rubber plantations cannot work in South America because of the native pests and diseases. This is why Henry Wickham had to steak Brazilian rubber seeds for plantations in Asia which were free from these threats. Ford's plantations repeatedly failed, costing millions. As Grandin explains, "The Ford Motor Company, with the endorsement of a well respected pathologist with experience on three continents, had in effect created an incubator" for disease.

Today Ford's plans seem unbelievable. He wanted to strip bare a massive area of the rain-forest and build a huge plantation, serviced by a town modelled on his vision of small-town America. Building an electric plant and a dock is one thing, but cinemas, bandstands and an 18 hole golf course seem utterly bizarre. But behind this, as Grandin explains, was Ford's own vision of society. He believed that men like him could transform the world into a system that would provide peace and prosperity through the control of workers and nature. Ford's pride and arrogance failed. Fordlandia was a disaster and as it declined, the aged Ford retreated further and further into his own artificial world populated with antiques and fake town life.

Ford, it should be emphasised, was not some benevolent eccentric. He was a ruthless capitalist, who drove his workers hard and held some extremely offensive views - particularly his Antisemitism, though his racism also affected his (and his company's) attitudes to the Brazilians. His attempts to shape people and nature where of course celebrated by Hitler's Nazis, a group that Ford famously courted.

In the Communist Manifesto Karl Marx and Engels wrote about capitalism's globalising vision:

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

With Fordlandia, Henry Ford literally wanted to create the Amazonian world into the very image of an imagined America. At the same time he wanted to entrap the people into his factories and transform nature into something that could readily guarantee his profits. The story of his failure is brilliantly told by Greg Grandin, and I highly recommend this well-written, gripping history.

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Emily Winterburn - The Quiet Revolution of Caroline Herschel: The Lost Heroine of Astronomy

When Caroline Herschel was born in 1750 no one would have imagined that she would have become lauded throughout Europe as one of the most important astronomers of the 18th century. Women simply did not do that sort of thing.

As Emily Winterburn says "nothing about Caroline's early life suggested she would grow up to become a pioneering female astronomer". In fact quite the opposite. She grew up in Hanover in a male dominated household. Her father was an accomplished professional musician and her brothers were expected to follow in his footsteps. Caroline was "taught to cook, clean, spin and make clothes, and was required to look after younger children... Caroline and her older sister Sophia were trained to run a household and to be useful and agreeable to her family".

However when her older brother William found a musical job in Bath, England she joined him there and soon became a close partner with him in his astronomical work. William Herschel was catapulted into fame when he discovered the planet Uranus and received a (relatively low paid) job as a royal astronomer. Caroline is often portrayed as William's able assistant. Yet she was a skilled a diligent observer and scientist, and while he was away on a journey delivering a telescope he had sold, she made the first of her discoveries. Her own notes from 1786 detail it:

1st August: I have calculated 100 nebulae today, and this evening I saw an object which I believe will prove to-morrow to be a comet.
2nd August: Today I calculated 150 nebulae. I fear it will not be clear to-night; it has been raining throughout the whole day, but seems now to clear up a little. 1 o'clock; the object of last night is a Comet. I did not go to rest till I had wrote to Dr Blagden and Mr Aubert to announce the comet.

It was a brilliant discovery. Her paper announcing the comet at the Royal Society was read by her brother because women could not be members. Winterburn explains how Caroline carefully neutralised her announcement and had it backed up by others to ensure that it was taken seriously. It began, "In consequence of the Friendship I know to exist between you and my brother I venture to trouble you in his absence with the following imperfect account of a comet." At the end of the paper, her brother and a (male) friend both add their confirmation of the discovery leaving no room for excuses.

Winterburn explains that Caroline's careful wording was not the result of meekness but a calculated way of making sure she had to be taken seriously. She was using all the social skills she had been taught to make sure that she could not be sidelined. As a result of this, and her other work, Caroline became the "first high-status woman paid for her science [in England], and almost certainly the first to receive royal patronage". It was an amazing achievement and gave her unprecedented financial independence to continue doing what she loved. She continued to make discoveries and fight to ensure that she was recognised for them, including an amazing horse-ride through the night to announce a different comet discovery (though on this occasion she wasn't quite the first).

Caroline Herschel made many further discoveries and did some incredibly important other work. She became famous as the "Lady Astronomer" and while well known for the comets she found, her cataloguing work was much more mundane but perhaps more important. Winterburn explains:

Caroline's real skill, her gift to astronomy, was being able to see the importance of what she was doing, even as she meticulously sifted through observation after observation searching out the occasional error, omission or duplication. It was a job that not even William could bring himself to do. It took a very specific set of very much undervalued skills.

But Caroline's class and gender in 18th century English society meant she also had to play all the other roles demanded of her. Her brother's eventual marriage and the pressures that this put upon Caroline as she became responsible for two households, in a complicated social hierarchy with Williams wife Mary Pitt, form a core part of Winterburn's book as she explores Caroline's life.

But slowly society was changing. Not everyone believed women could not be part of the scientific establishment. Her brother in particular promoted and supported her. Incredibly, because she was his sister and working with his equipment, it would have been perfectly acceptable for him to claim her discoveries as his own; yet he did the opposite. In fact their relationship was much closer to that of a equal partnership. Winterburn writes:

In writing about women in science... we often tend to get bogged down in trying to extract work that was purely theirs from the record. We try to find something tangible that we can connect with their name so they can be returned to history. What we lose when we do that, however, are the ephemeral stories of process, unminuted discussion, teaching as a way of learning and companionship.

There were other male scientists who were keen to work with and promote women scientists. Caroline was included in an updated edition of Jerome Lalande's Astrronomie des Dames and the scientist and mathematician Nevil Maskelyne was a close friend and supporter of Caroline. He was also one of the first scientists to employ women to work as "computers" doing the complicated calculations that astronomy required.

Caroline had her own way of promoting her scientific work, which would not have met approval from all those arguing for greater equality. Winterburn quotes Mary Wollstonecraft, a pioneer of the fight for women's rights, who attacks those who used "pretty feminine phrases" to make it difficult for men to dismiss them. But Caroline was trying to find a way to fight for her position using the weapons she had, and was remarkably successful, and as Winterburn points out, if Wollstonecraft was criticising the strategy it must have been widespread.

By the end of her life Caroline Herschel had been celebrated across Europe, and won awards of scientific bodies across the world. Still unable to become a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, she, along with Scottish scientist Mary Somerville, was made an "honorary" fellow in 1835. More importantly she became an important "icon" for generations of later women scientists.

If all Emily Winterburn had done in this book was to tell the amazing biography of Caroline Herschel it would have been a great read. But she puts that story in the context of a society undergoing dramatic changes. Firstly, and most obviously, there is the scientific revolution that is opening up new views of the universe and new areas for study. Secondly society itself was changing dramatically, most obviously with the French Revolution which was raising all sorts of questions of equality, freedom and democracy. For a growing number of women (and some men) this meant a belief that women should not be subordinate to men and a small minority of women were beginning to challenge their position in society. How this played out for individuals like Caroline Herschel was complicated and nuanced. Emily Winterburn's biography explores this brilliantly, and I have no hesitation in recommending this brilliant book.

Related Reviews

Holmes - The Age of Wonder
Jardine - Ingenious Pursuits
Sobel - Galileo's Daughter

Fred Archer - A Distant Scene

Fred Archer was a celebrated author and farmer who documented the lives of the people of the small village of Ashton in the Vale of Evesham. This, his first book, sparked a large number of others until his death in 1999. Born in 1916 the backdrop to Archers' life was the enormous changes that overtook the English countryside between the wars and in particular after World War Two. His books are somewhat whimsical - they deal mostly with the personalities of the village and how Archer remembers them. As such its easy to read the books as accounts of old-fashioned sayings, humour and advice; or to focus on Archers' complaints about the decline of rural skills, the replacement of horses by engines, and the wider social changes in the village.

The danger is, of course, that the reader ends up romanticising of the countryside and the lives of those that live there. 20th century rural life was much better for the working population of the countryside. But it was still a life dominated by low pay and poverty. Reading between the lines of Archers' book you get a sense of a strict hierarchical life, and on occasion you get hints of the poverty behind the characters. Archer himself was a hardworking man who turned his hand to all of the agricultural labour there was. Readers looking for descriptions of how haymaking proceeded or the art of ploughing with horses, will find plenty of that here.

There are the occasional hints of wider subjects. For instance, Archer recalls (probably in the late 1920s) older labourers reminiscing about the arrival of Joseph Arch to speak to them, from the back of a waggon, about the need for a trade union - this would likely have been between 1872 to 1875. These moments left a lasting impression on communities dominated by poverty and long hours of work.

I was also struck by the chapter detailing the workers who came from Birmingham and other towns and cities to pick peas every year. These weren't itinerant labourers, though those did exist, but workers from the industrial towns whose "holiday" in the sun was a weak picking peas and drinking in the local pub.

Archer himself was from a better off family, his dad working closely with Mr. Carter, the big farmer. In fact Archer refers on occasion to going away on holiday, which must have been remarkably unusual for the majority. A Distant Scene then is worth reading, not just for its humour and carefully written descriptions. But also because it portrays a wider agricultural community in transition.

Related Reviews

Thompson - Lark Rise to Candleford
Kerr Cameron - The Ballad and the Plough
Whitlock - Peasant's Heritage
Bell - Men and the Fields

Pamela Horn - Joseph Arch

The life of Joseph Arch, agricultural labourer, Methodist preacher, trade union leader and liberal MP, is a fascinating one that Pamela Horn tells with her usual readable and engaging style. Horn notes that Arch was prone to over emphasise his own importance, particularly in terms of the founding and development of the National Agricultural Labourers Union that he helped found. So it is useful that Horn provides a good account of the pre-history of rural trade unionism, and the struggles of agricultural labourers.

The NALU and rural trade unionism in general was a central part of Arch's life. These arose out of necessity - the appalling poverty of rural life, in particular the low wages of agricultural workers. Horn had two strategies for dealing with this. The first was trade unionism, so that workers could come together to struggle for higher wages, particularly through strikes. Secondly, the extension of the voting franchise to male agricultural workers. There were some secondary strategies, one of which was emigration, particularly the United States and Canada. The other was migration within the United Kingdom, usually to urban industry.

Arch was sceptical of socialism as outlined by the Webbs in the late 19th century, but his politics were generally on the left. Like his hero, Gladstone, he was a champion of Irish Home Rule, even when this put him at odds with his core supporters. He was, like most at the time, however more backward about issues such as the women workers, believing they should remain in the family home. He never abandoned the trade union cause, though late in his life he became extremely cynical about workers, feeling they had abandoned him. When Arch was elected an MP he was frequently extremely poor, as MPs were not paid and he had no independent income save a small, irregular wage from the union.

But the main story here is that of the NALU. This rose rapidly, growing on the major outbreak of class struggle - the Revolt of the Fields, that is forever associated with Joseph Arch's leadership. The union grew rapidly and quickly took on a national importance. It's newspaper was read by tens of thousands, even being sold by WH Smiths in the train stations. The NALU won some initial wage rises, though it was part of some bitter strikes. Arch however was prone to personal feuds and sectarianism, both of which helped undermine his position. He was frequently accussed of living a high-life at the expense of his poverty stricken union members. There was some truth to this, particularly as Arch clearly loved being in the lime-light - he was also, in later years, very pleased with the friendship of the Prince of Wales.

The NALU declined with membership falling from a peak of around 86,000 in 1874 to 1,100 in 1894. The decline hurt Arch enormously, though he clearly had no strategy for turning this around other than exorting labourers to join. The decline of the union is clearly related to the decline in class struggle, alongside slight improvements in the economic situation.

Arch's career in parliament was relatively lacklustre. During his first period in office he made an excellent maiden speech (reproduced by Horn) on the condition of the agricultural labourer. Yet in his latter years following his second election, he was remarkably quiet, speaking on only a few occasions. Despite his earlier temperance, Arch became known for heavy drinking in London, and though he clearly loved the limelight and the acquaintance of famous figures, he remained relatively tied to his roots. Only ever appearing in his famous brown suit. Following retirement, Arch lived on a small income from a fund setup by his liberal friends. He was able, probably unlike most of those who had been his union members, to survive to a ripe old age, and his death was in 1919, by which time the English countryside had been transformed once again.

Arch's story is of interest because he, almost by accident, found himself at the head of a mass movement. To his credit he threw his enormous energy and talents into building and strengthening the union movement in difficult conditions. Horn celebrates this, while acknowledging the weaknesses of Arch's personality and politics. We should remember him as a pioneer from whose life we can learn much.

Related Reviews

Horn - Life and Labour in Rural England 1760 - 1850
Horn - The Rural World - Social Change in the English Countryside 1780 - 1850

Francis Parkman, Jr. - The Oregon Trail

This fascinating account of North America in the mid 19th century is a description of Francis Parkman's expedition into lands remote from the eastern "settlements". Parkman initially accompanies the settlers' heading west towards Oregon, and his accounts are fascinating insights into how the settlers viewed the world, and how they themselves were seen. It's notable, in this description how Parkman sees the settlers as only being interested in personal gain:

Yankee curiosity was nothing to theirs. They demanded our names, where we came from, where we were going and what was our business. The last query was particularly embarrassing; since travelling in that country, or indeed any where, from any other motive than gain, was an idea of which they took no cognisance. Yet they were fine-looking fellows, with an air of frankness, generosity and even courtesy, having come from one of the least barbarous of the frontier counties.

That said, he is scornful of them at times:

On visiting the encampment we were at once struck with the extraordinary perplexity and indecision that prevailed among the emigrants. They seemed like men totally out of their element; bewildered and amazed, like a troop of schoolboys lost in the woods.

Parkman's trek did actually have a purpose. It was, in part, simply about a young man with money wanted to see the wilderness. At the same time, it was the opportunity to hunt as many animals as possible, particularly buffalo.  Ironically, he, like many of his contemporaries shared a belief that these animals were so numerous that they could be killed without consequence - "Thousands of them might be slaughtered without causing any detriment to the species".

But it for Parkman's commentary on the Native Americans which this book shall likely be chiefly remembered. Parkman went to live with one of the tribes he encountered for a number of months. He rode with them, ate with them, hunted with them and watched their preparations for war. His accounts are frequently sympathetic, though he essentially sees them as a backward, savage race with childlike simplicity. The Native Americans, are, in Parkman's eyes untrustworthy, bloodthirsty, and prone to robbery. He also understood that things were changing:

These men were thorough savages. Neither their manners nor their ideas were in the slightest degree modified by contact with civilisation. They knew nothing of the power and real character of the white men, and their children would scream in terror at the sight of me. Their religion, their superstitions and their prejudices were the same that had been handed down to them from immemorial time. They fought with the same weapons that their fathers fought with, and wore the same rude garments of skins.

Great changes are at hand... With the stream of emigration to Oregon and California, the buffalo will dwindle away, and the large wandering communities who depend on them for support must also be broken and scattered.The Indians will soon be corrupted by the example of the whites, abased by whisky and overawed by military posts.

There's no doubt that Parkman sees this as a good thing. White civilisation was to be emulated and aspired too - its reality was to be contrasted with the barbarism of Native American life. Sadly, while Parkman's book is full of interesting observation about Native American life in this period and with the tribes he encounters, its tempered by his racism and white supremacy. So read this book for the descriptions and the account of a country in the process of huge transformation, but do so knowing that opinions like Parkman's would help destroy the lives of tens of thousands of people, and the environment they depended on.

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Cronon - Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
Cronon - Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
Tully - Crooked Deals and Broken Treaties

Andrew Norman - The Story of George Loveless and the Tolpuddle Martyrs

This short and readable account of the Tolpuddle Martyrs focuses on the life of the key figure in their struggle, George Loveless. Loveless was a Methodist minister and Andrew Norman locates his radicalism in the context of that branch of Christianity's break from the staid, pro-government, pro-system approach of the Anglican Church. But whatever George Loveless' religious beliefs he was motivated to try and organise his fellow agricultural workers to counter the appalling rural poverty that they experienced.

Drawing heavily on Loveless' own writings, we see how the Tolpuddle struggle was rooted in earlier, more radical protests. In particular, the Captain Swing rising of 1830, a few years before the Martyrs set up their union. Loveless and several other of the martyrs were part of this movement and its decline led them into the trade union movement. It's also notable that James Frampton, the magistrate who made it his personal crusade to prosecute the Tolpuddle trade unionists was himself a key figure in repressing the earlier struggles. Norman doesn't mention this, but Frampton was zealous in this earlier action, and the Dorset historian Barbara Kerr credits this central role in suppressing Swing as in part shaping his determination to foil the new trade unions.

It is arguable how much of a break this was with the past, particularly as several members of Loveless' wider family were involved in the union movement. But what is clear, is that the fledgling movement terrified the establishment. Of great interest in this book is how Norman highlights the correspondence between Frampton and Lord Melbourne in London, which shows how Tolpuddle was seen as a key case in challenging trade unions across the country. It's clear that there was a conspiracy to frame the Martyrs, and they were victims, not of the law, but of a system designed to protect the wealthy.

Andrew Norman's book focuses on the individual lives and experiences of the Martyrs, including the later lives of five of the six in Canada. I was disappointed that there wasn't more on how the trade union movement mobilised nationally in their support. Norman points out that a few days after they were found guilty, 10,000 attended a protest meeting in the capital. It would have been fascinating to know more about this. Norman attributes the freeing of the Martyrs to the way that the government found itself exposed by allegations of "illegal oaths" by the Orange Order, and downplays the mass movement outside Parliament. The problem with this, is that it ignores the fact that without the mass movement there would have been no pressure on the government to bend under over the wider question. In fact, it's doubtful it would ever have received prominence, without thousands protesting and signing petitions.

That said, this is an decent introduction to the story of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and the struggle that got them returned from transportation. This is, of course, in contrast with those who were deported as a result of Captain Swing. Hobsbawm and Rudé could only find two people who managed to return from exile in that case, but they didn't have a mass movement in England demanding justice. Such are the lessons of history.

Related Reviews

Griffin - The Rural War: Captain Swing and the Politics of Protest
Hobsbawm & Rudé - Captain Swing
Hammond & Hammond - The Village Labourer
Thompson - The Making of the English Working Class

Robert Leckie - Helmet for my Pillow

Having recently read Ian W. Toll's excellent histories of World War Two in the Pacific, I decided to seek out some of the personal accounts that he uses as material for his accounts. One of these is this classic book by Robert Leckie, which forms some of the source material for the TV series Pacific.

Viewers of that will recognise many of the scenes from the Leckie's account. Leckie begins with his training for the Marine Corp and then their deployment on Guadalcanal. Understanding exactly what was taking place is difficult without the wider military context, because Leckie writes from his position as an individual soldier, and rarely gives any wider context.

As a result this, like I imagine the conflict itself, is a claustrophobic experience, focusing on individuals. Leckies' comrades come and go, the action is limited to particular foxholes and patrols. Unusually the author is not afraid of describing personal weaknesses, fear and cowardice by him or others. His first "kill" involves shooting someone in the back and he describes the way that his comrades have to kill the injured enemy in cold-blood for fear of bobby traps and suicide bombs. One comrade, Souvenirs, removes gold teeth from the Japanese dead, until his own death on Peleliu. Leckie is forthright about how the war, and the stress of waiting for battle to begin preyed on the mental health of him and his comrades.

I was also struck by Leckies' insubordination - he, along with others, go AWOL during their recuperation period in Melbourne, an event that is as riotous and drunken as described in Toll's The Conquering Tide. Drink plays a big part of this escape following Guadalcanal, but not as much as sex does, and Leckie's descriptions of his own encounters with women in Melbourne are very different to those portrayed in the TV dramatisation. Not least because it proves that women were as forward as men in the 1940s. Sex clearly didn't begin in the 1960s.

The book after Leckie's experiences during the Battle of Peleliu. This was a brutal experience that involved heavy casualties and brutal sustained conflict between soldiers low on water, food and ammunition. Unsurprisingly Leckie is transformed by his experiences. Indeed his final meditation on the nuclear attacks on Japan poignantly makes it clear how he feels about war. This is certainly not a John Wayne's film full of heroism and clean deaths, but dirty, brutal, real and tremendously sad.

Related Reviews

Toll - Pacific Crucible
Toll - Conquering Tide
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Antony Hamilton - A Rebel's Guide to Malcolm X

Millions of words and hundreds of books have been written on Malcolm X and the struggle for Civil Rights in the United States. In an era when #blacklivesmatter is an essential rallying cry for hundreds of thousands of people sick of institutional racism and the routine killing of black people by the American police, the lessons of the Civil Rights movement remain crucial.

Of all the introductions to Malcolm X few are as succinct and accessible as Antony Hamilton's new Rebel's Guide. He brilliantly covers the Civil Rights era, showing how Malcolm X's life was intertwined with the changes that were taking place. From Malcolm's early life in a poor black ghetto, where he experienced the violence of the racist state, to the growing Civil Rights movement which exposed the limitations of those who saw change coming from the US state itself, this book expertly captures the political changes that Malcolm went through as he first joined, then broke with the Nation of Islam.

There is no doubt that Malcolm's membership of the Nation of Islam was a key part of his life. But Hamilton shows how Malcolm's revolutionary politics led first to a break with the NOI and then, in the few months he had left before his assassination, a rapid development in his revolutionary ideas.

Central to this were his trips abroad, in particular his experiences of the anti-colonial and pan-African movements that were shaking Western Colonial rule in Africa and elsewhere. Despite the limits of these travels - Hamilton points out that "[Malcolm] was always in the company of national leaders or royalty and separated from ordinary people. His various  speeches and addresses were to academics in universities or governments" - Malcolm was exposed to new united movements that brought together many different people. This helped challenge his black-separatism, at the same time as fuelling his belief in the revolutionary transformation of society.

I hadn't realised the extent to which, in this period, the US left had helped with this. Malcolm frequently spoke on platforms with socialists and trade unionists, though it seems his understanding of socialism was shaped mostly by the idea of strong state ownership.

Swept up in a victorious atmosphere of African nationalism, Malcolm was propelled towards seeing socialism as the key to freeing Black people. He stated that 'you can't have capitalism without racism' and those who opposed racism and capitalism were usually socialists. However, the socialism which was promoted in the newly independent nations was a convenient way to describe their alliances with the Soviet Union in opposition to US imperialism... This guided Malcolm's idea of socialism and gave greater attention to the actions of new governments rather than to the heroic struggles of the working class.

Nevertheless, towards the end of his life, Malcolm was clearly moving in a more direction that was even more threatening to the US state. One of the great strengths of this book is that it shows how individuals like Malcolm X were shaped by the period they were in, and were constantly changing. Hamilton points out,

There is a common tendency to place Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jnr in opposition to each other, one violent an the other peaceful. But this is too simplistic a view. Neither was static. The tactics and determination of both King and Malcolm were necessary components of the movement and both changed depending on the circumstances. 

Had Malcolm X lived he would have continued to play a central role in the struggle against racism, but also one that linked this closely to the fight against capitalism, the system that breeds racism. As such his ideas and his life are very important to the struggles today, and this little book is a wonderful introduction to these.

Related Reviews

Younge - The Speech
Richardson (ed) - Say It Loud! Marxism and the Fight Against Racism
Fryer - Staying Power

Reviews of other Rebel's Guides

Mitchell - A Rebel's Guide to James Connolly
Brown - A Rebel's Guide to Eleanor MarxCampbell - A Rebel's Guide to Rosa Luxemburg
Orr - Sexism and the System; A Rebel's Guide to Women's Liberation
Choonara - A Rebel's Guide to Trotsky
Bambery - A Rebel's Guide to Gramsci
Birchall - A Rebel's Guide to Lenin
Gonzalez - A Rebel's Guide to Marx

Ralf Hoffrogge - Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement

Ralf Hoffrogge's newly translated study of Richard Müller and his role in the development of the German revolutionary movement during and after the First World War is extremely important for students of this period. Hoffrogge argues that historical studies of the period have been dominated by the role of the precursors of the German Communist Party (KPD), the Spartakist League, which was led until 1919 by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The domination of the KPD on the left from the 1920s onward and then the centrality of it to the story of East Germany meant that historians had every reason to emphasis its role.

Another aspect of this, was that those revolutionaries who did not fit into the narrative, or were critical of the KPD were written out of history. Richard Müller was one of these. Müller was an able and articulate trade union militant organising within the Berlin metal workers. A lathe operator within a crucial war industry he was able, together with his comrades, to build a powerful syndicalist movement. Initially not taking a position on the war, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards rapidly became the heart of growing discontent with the progress of the First World War, leading a number of strikes and protests.

By the end of the war, with the outbreak of the Revolution in Germany, Müller was a central figure in the revolutionary movement in Berlin. So much so, that with the creation of a network of workers and soldiers councils, Müller effectively became (briefly) head of the revolutionary state. Müller was a talented individual, and Hoffrogge ably documents his central role in the heady days of revolution and the months that followed. Müller fought to strengthen the role of the workers councils in the face of domination and betrayal by the "reformist" Social Democrats.

What becomes clear while reading this excellent book, is how unprepared revolutionaries were for events. While acknowledging the very real difficulties, one of the great criticisms of Luxemburg and Liebknecht was their failure to build an independent revolutionary party in the years before the German Revolution. Hoffrogge's book makes it clear how the lack of a clear-sighted party, rooted in revolutionary politics, was lacking. The author quotes a revealing account of the Revolutionary days, when revolutionary soldiers seized a large quantity of cash:

I found Comrade Vogtherr, the secretary of our caucus in the USPD, in distress. A group of soldiers had commandeered a whole truckload of banknotes and dumped the money in the USPD caucus room. Comrade Vogtherr asked me, "What should we do with it?" We didn't know either and finally we decided to put all of the money in a safe in the central bank. My job was then to ensure that the money was transported safely. So we brought the money to the Reichsbank and I would like to say now that we were absolute idiots for giving all of that wonderful money back to the capitalists. At the time we thought that we had the power and the bank belonged to us. That was a colossal mistake. Nothing belonged to us and - as before, the capitalists had the power.

This failure of revolutionary politics was a real limit for the movement, but it was also a failing for Richard Müller. For instance, he for "fear of economic collapse, energetically opposed so-called 'wild socialisation', and not only limited the powers of workers' councils to 'audit' their employers but also failed to give them a means to actually implement even that limited power against the inevitable resistance."

In the months following the failure of the January 1919 uprising, Richard Müller spent much time detailing out how a system of workers' councils might operate. While he emphasised the role of workers, from the bottom up, he was also guilty, as the above examples show, of not really understanding the role of the capitalist state, though Muller's politics were took much from Marx and others, including Lenin.

Muller's close links to the organised working class made it hard for the Communist Party to challenge him when he was critical. Muller even went to a meeting of the Communist International were Lenin helped broker a deal to heal the growing rift between Muller and others in the leadership. Sadly the distortions on the international Communist movement caused by the victory of Stalin sealed the fate for many of the best revolutionaries of Muller's era.

In his later life, Muller drifted eventually becoming a major Berlin landlord and living until 1943. Hoffrogge shows that Muller's actions as a landlord were hardly progressive and the KPD, rather gleefully, attacked him for his behaviour. In his later life Muller appears to have abandoned his revolutionary politics, perhaps though, this reflected the defeats he had suffered as well as his occasionally limited politics.

Hoffrogge's book is a detailed examination of how individuals make a real difference. He has rescued an individual who up until now was barely a foot-note in some of the best histories of the German Revolution, and that is reason enough to read, and learn from this book.

Related Reviews

Broue - The German Revolution 1919-1923
Fernbach - Selected Writings of Paul Levi
Reissner - Hamburg at the Barricades
Trotksy - Lessons of October
Hippe - And Red is the Colour of Our Flag

Oskar Hippe - ...And Red is the Colour of Our Flag

The life of Oskar Hippe is a fascinating one for Marxists and revolutionary socialists today. As a young worker in German during World War One, he became a socialist, becoming involved in anti-war protests as early as 1916. Later he would join the Spartakist League, the organisation setup by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, but not being based in Berlin for much of the period, following his conscription in the latter stages of the war, he missed some of the key debates and battles of the early German Revolution. Nonetheless his eyewitness accounts are unique,

On the eve of 1 May 1916, my brother-in-law told me that we would not got to work the next day, since the workforce would all be joining an anti-war demonstration on the Potsdamer Platz. We went there at the specified time. Ten thousand workers had gathered in the square, and Karl Liebknecht spoke to them from the platform of the Potsdam local station. I do not know how long Liebknecht had been speaking when the police arrived. They could not do anything at first; the crowd prevented them from getting up to the platform. More and more detachments were sent in, including mounted police who rode into the crowd with enormous brutality. For a time, the demonstrators put up resistance, and many policemen were knocked off their horses. 

Along with his unit, Oskar Hippe effectively mutinied and went home were he became centrally involved in the revolutionary movements in his home area of Halle. The book describes the scale of the revolution and the impact of the deaths of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, as well as the rapid emergence of the counter-revolutionary troops of the Freikorps.

As the 1920s developed, Hippe became an important activist in the German Communist Party (KPD). He was often targeted by the right and the authorities. Frequently blacklisted for trade union activity, the period becomes dominated by the struggles within the Russian organisation. Hippe describes the failure of the 1923 movement when revolution was perhaps on the cards, but the inexperienced Communist Party sounded the retreat on orders from Moscow. From then on his narrative becomes increasingly shaped by the battle with the Stalinist wing of the KPD.

The post-revolutionary period is also marked by the growth of the fascist movement. One thing that struck me reading the autobiography was that violence, or the threat of violence, was a daily reality for socialists. The socialists responded by arming themselves and being prepared to fight back, but it is notable that this violence was very much about defending and protecting the organisation, it's activists and allowing their planned activity to continue. This wasn't fighting for the sake of fighting, but in the interests of building socialist organisation. At the end of the 1920s Hippe breaks with the Stalinist KPD, and with many others works to build a new "Trotskyist" party. For some readers this may seem like a part of the book dominated by arguments among the left, but Hippe explains that this was about trying to keep the revolutionary tradition alive in a period where the rise of fascism is a real prospect, but with a huge and powerful German working class still unbroken.

With Hitler's victory, Hippe's group is forced underground and eventually he is imprisoned, serving many years of brutality and violence. Eventually he is let out and works on the northern coast of Germany, trying to make a few contacts with workers and discussing politics with captured prisoners of war. Hippe and his comrades bravery is outstanding in this period of difficult, dangerous underground work. This is no manual for this activity, but you get a sense of the dangers and difficulties, as well as the frustrations. Interestingly Hippe and his comrades believed that Fascism could not be over-thrown by German workers, who were now to weak, but would be over-thrown by defeat in a World War. It was an accurate, if pessimistic outlook.

Hippe then faced renewed persecution under the Stalinists. Initial hopes that a new mass socialist organisation could be built after the end of the war lead to a further period of splits, internal arguments and eventually underground work. Hippe once spent years imprisoned for being a "Trotskyist counter-revolutionary", and had to watch as others, including collaborators with the Nazi regime became senior figures in the East Germany state.

At the end of the book, Hippe's hope for the revolutionary over-throw of capitalism remain undiminished. It ends in 1979, though Hippe lived long enough to see the fall of the Berlin Wall. Hippe was an activist through the 1960s and early 1970s, saw the birth of a new movement and the emergence of a new left. Throughout he remained loyal to the central tenets of Marxism, and the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky, believing that the overthrow of capitalism had to be the act of the entire working class.

For those interested in the history of the left, as well as the German Revolution and the International Communist Movement this is a fascinating book, perhaps marred by what seems like a clunky translation. Hippe's account is perhaps unique and its worth trying to find this book.

Related Reviews

Pierre Broué - The German Revolution 1917-1923
Fernbach - In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings of Paul Levi

Flora Thompson - Lark Rise to Candleford

Flora Thompson's account of her childhood and early adult years in the semi-fictionalised hamlet of Lark Rise and then the village of Candleford is considered a classic of that peculiarly English book, that celebrates the countryside of yesteryear. But unlike much of that genre, Thompson's book is has much to recommend it. Firstly it is beautifully written. More importantly, while unashamedly sentimental, Thompson is not afraid of discussing the darker aspects of rural life. In this she is shaped by her father, whose political liberalism was unusual for Lark Rise. Take for instance, a near throwaway comment by Thompson when describing the celebrations as Lark Rise's labourers complete the harvest, they sang and shouted

Harvest home! Harvest home!
Merry, merry, merry harvest home!

Thompson comments "The joy and pleasure of the labourers in their task well done was pathetic, considering their very small share in the gain". Later when discussing the elaborate (and extensive) feast given by the farmer to those who'd laboured on the harvest, a celebration that was even extended to any passing "tramp", Thompson has her father comment that

the farmer paid his men starvation wages all the year and through he made it up to them by giving that one good meal. The farmer did not think so, because he did not think at all, and the men did not think either on that day; they were too busy enjoying the food and the fun.

Running through all three books collected within Lark Rise to Candleford is a sense of change. This manifests in many ways. The death of the old vicar of Candleford and the arrival of a new man with modern ideas and sermons. The coming and going of fashions, a little behind the larger villages and towns with their more immediate connections to the cities, new names for babies and "wages rose, prices soared and new needs multiplied". This is the coming of the modern world, though its continuities are perhaps greater than Thompson suggests. Most importantly for the author  are the changing attitudes to women and work, and as she secures her first job working in the post office, she is overseen by a woman with a very modern attitude. Had this been a major town, her mentor would have been a suffragette, and probably a socialist. As it stood she was a individual woman with advanced ideas who ran the post office and managed the village smithy.

Thompson's story is fascinating, though I was more taken by the incidentally details and given small insights into rural life at the turn of the 20th century. Take this demonstration that the class struggle is sometimes hidden and sometimes open:

A new field had been thrown open for gleaning... Bob Trevor had been on the horse-rake when the field was cleared and had taken good care to leave plenty of good ears behind for the gleaners. 'If the foreman should come nosing round, he's going to tel him that the ra-ake's got a bit out of order and won't clear the stubble proper. But that corner under the two hedges is for his mother. Nobody else is to leaze there.'

Class differences run through this book. Thompson makes clear that the gentry are admired by the majority, forelocks are touched repeatedly. But the gentry are not part of village life. They are separate and keep themselves aloof. Its summed up well at the huge party thrown at a nearby country house for Queen Victoria's jubilee. The gentry show themselves, then quickly retreat from the fun and games and the ordinary labourers and their families show barely disguised relief when released from the need to mind their manners and behave properly.

There's  no open class struggle here. But it is indicated with resentment over low wages a common complaint. Thompson repeatedly suggests that no-one really starved because the village looked after each other, but frequently she mentions charity from the church and on occasion the workhouse.

Thompson's book remains popular no doubt because it is beautiful. Published in the midst of World War Two, its passing references to those (including her beloved younger brother) who died in the First World War must have helped its popularity. Reading it today I can't but help think that its precisely because it covers an era of enormous change in English society that it is so fascinating. Though ironically as she was writing it 75 years ago, this was precisely what Flora Thompson was noting too.

Related Reviews

Cameron - The Ballad and the Plough
Whitlock - Peasant's Heritage
Bell - Men and the Fields
Berger - Pig Earth
Mingay - Rural Life in Victorian England

Tamás Krausz - Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography

In recent years there has been a intense discussion about the ideas of the Russian revolutionary Lenin. Some of this has its roots in the class struggle - the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement both threw up questions about the nature of revolutionary organisation. Others have attempted to re-examine Lenin to critique existing organisations and ideas. There have been some excellent books, articles and events debating these questions.

Tamás Krausz's important new biography must be seen as part of this debate. His work is very much an attempt to re-examine Lenin's ideas as part of a resolute defence of Lenin and his work. Krausz is clear that this is intended to take forward the revolutionary movement that can challenge and defeat capitalism.

The Lenin that comes through on these pages is far from the mechanical, doctrinal individual, whose personal single-mindedness somehow embodied the future authoritarian Stalinist state. Rather he rigorously applied the ideas of Marxism to the concrete situation, confident to update and alter his viewpoint depending on circumstances, and ever open to learning from workers. Indeed, Krausz highlights Lenin's own celebration of the importance of the workers' own spontaneity and self-organisation

Lenin considered the workers' soviet as the political arm of the uprising and an institution of the revolution. The soviets and similar popular organizations... were the product of the workers' autonomous agency. As Lenin wrote about the uprising of December 1905, 'It was not some theory, not appeals on the part of someone, or tactics invented by someone, not party doctrine, but the force of circumstances that led these non-party mass organs to realize the need for an uprising and transformed them into organs of an uprising.'

That said, Lenin's Marxism began with the concrete situation and ended with the need for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. This comes through clearly throughout the book, but I found the discussion of Lenin's attitude to the National Question, particularly illuminating. Krausz says

Lenin always approached the role and character of national movements from a historical and class perspective. He did not support the struggle of each and every small country fighting the great imperialist powers. He also had a strictly imposed condition: the uprising of any class more reactionary than the bourgeoisie of the center countries is not to be supported. 

It is precisely this approach that allowed Lenin to become the leading revolutionary critic of war and capitalism during the First World War. Those who supported the war ended up siding with their own ruling class. But those who did not get the question of national liberation also failed the revolutionary movement. "Lenin considered national self-determination a fundamental issue of democracy that revolutionaries 'may not undercut!'." These debates continue to have a resonance today. Lenin, for instance, opposed the slogan of "No Borders", not because he wasn't for a world without borders, but because in the concrete situation, demanding the self-determination for oppressed countries meant the defacto creation of borders.

Another excellent chapter is on the nature of the early Soviet regime. Here Krausz describes how Lenin again saw everything through the lens of the defense of the revolution. "To Lenin, mass terror counted as the most extreme instrument of struggle against the enemy and was to be applied (and often demanded by him in vain) on a case-by-case basis". Given the way that under Stalin the Soviet Union's peasantry were forced into collectivisation, its interesting to read that

In April 1919, some peasants in certain parts of the country were going to be forced to join the collectives, rather than doing so of their own free will - a behavior categorically prohibited by Lenin in the name of the Council of People's Commissars. The peasant base formed the backbone of the Red Army, and 'Compulsory measures of any kind to make the peasants pass over to the communal working of the fields are impermissible. Non-observance of this will be punished with all the severity of revolutionary law'.

Krausz's treatment here of the Civil War and the suppression of the Constituent Assembly is refreshing - seeing Lenin (and the early Soviet state) actions through the question of the defence of Revolution. Lenin is often accused of celebrating revolutionary violence. But his approach was very different, Krausz notes how in the aftermath of the defeated 1905 revolution Lenin advocated the use of political terrorism if it took the movement forward, however, he quickly changed his mind after seeing how terrorist actions in response to counter-revolution made the situation worse.

Later, as it becomes clear that the Russian Revolution was isolated, Lenin was forced down even more pragmatic roads. Krausz explores in detail the years of War Communism and the NEP, seeing these as steps along particular routes attempting to deal with particular situations. Lenin and the leadership of the Bolsheviks had always been clear that without international revolution, the Russian Revolution would become isolated. The end of the First World War did lead to revolutionary upsurges elsewhere, and real hope in Russia that countries like Germany would overthrow capitalism, and the centre of revolution would move to Berlin. Unfortunately Krausz downplays this. His focus on Russia implies that the key moment for international revolution was the failed Red Army assault on Poland in 1919. And at times, Krausz suggests that there was limited potential for a Germany revolution and for Bolshevism to spread among western workers.

Lenin also mentions another defining trait - that a majority of the Western workers were not ready to seize power. However, he only sensed that they were subjectively ill-prepared for it, and he neither analyzed the causes nor sought the origins of this phenomenon. He understood that revolutionary Bolshevism could not penetrate the cultural traditions of the Western working masses, but he lacked a well-differentiated sociological analysis of the reasons for the inner stratifications of Western labor.

If Lenin really believed that "Bolshevism could not penetrate the cultural traditions of the Western working masses" then he gave no real sign of it in his writings. Krausz bases much of this on a description of a single visit by British workers to Russia in 1920 (though he fails to mention that in 1919 and prior to the First World War) there had been near revolutionary strike movements in Britain.

While this is a disappointing it should not be used to completely rubbish Krausz's book. The author rescues Lenin as a practical revolutionary, constantly returning to the concrete situation, analysing, listening and learning from those around him. For many decades after the Russian Revolution, we were told there was "actually existing Socialism" in Russia. Lenin would have been appalled. As Krausz points out,

Lenin stated in his last public speech that the realization of socialism was not on history's agenda yet. Now was the time of the transitional period, of creating the historical-cultural preconditions for socialism

Tamás Krausz's books deserves to become a key text for those trying to change the world. As he points out, the discontented keep running into Lenin, which is why his work is endlessly debated. This is not an abstract debate, but one that Lenin would have approved of. Here's Krausz ably summing up why

certain authors have deliberately eliminated from Lenin's legacy the essential philosophical tenets and methodology that made him who he was. For one thing, they neglect his most important practical discovery, namely his precise theoretical interpretation of Marxist dialectics, its reconstruction, and his practical application of those dialectics. Lenin understood, even on the basis of its Hegelian roots, that dialectical materialism (and epistemology) incorporates the self-movement in things, phenomena, processes, as well as the conscious human activist to transform society. Thus it is not a matter of the historical dialectic of ideas, but rather the self-movement and self-creation of history through social classes and individuals. For Lenin, epistemology was not simply a matter of getting to know reality. It did not exist for its own sake. He aimed instead to seek out the truth, the solution to contradictions within things, and the struggles that resulted. He wanted to see a radical transformation of the world so that humanity could rid itself, by its own will, of the dominant powers. Lenin gave Marx's eleventh Feuerbach thesis a new urgency: 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it'. In other words, history was not an abstract whole, an object of study for him, but a tool through which the elements and tendencies to be continued or transformed could be located in the midst of 'collapse'.

Related Reviews

Lenin - Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky
Nation - War on War: Lenin, the Zimmerwald Left and the Origins of Communist Internationalism
Cliff - Revolution Besieged
Cliff - All Power to the Soviets
Krupskaya - Memories of Lenin

Siobhan Brown - A Rebel's Guide to Eleanor Marx

Eleanor Marx's was one of the great socialist activists. She built unions, fought for women's liberation, was active in building solidarity with international struggles from the Paris Commune and Ireland to the anti-imperialist war in Sudan. A translator, a writer, an orator and an outstanding Marxist she ought to be one of the British left's greatest heroes. Yet all too often she is forgotten. Siobhan Brown's book, the latest in the excellent Rebel's Guides series, is a superb introduction to Eleanor Marx's life.

Brown packs an enormous amount in. From Eleanor's early life in the Marx household, to the years of solidarity work with refugees from the Paris Commune to the "busiest decade". The 1880s when Eleanor Marx helped build socialist organisation, wrote a highly important pamphlet on the "woman question", toured the US to argue for socialism and most importantly put herself at the heart of the mass strike waves that ushered in New Unionism.

We get a sense of Eleanor Marx as a thinker, and not just an activist. While touring the US, Eleanor made clear her absolute solidarity with the anarchists being framed for the Haymarket Bombing, but did not hide from comradely criticism. The pamphlet that she wrote with Edward Aveling, The Woman Question from a Socialist Point of View was more than an argument for equality. It was, says Brown, "a critique of capitalism as a system that places an extra burden on women, and working class women in particular, and that distorts relationships and sexuality."

Brown explains that the pamphlet built on Engels pioneering work which made clear the class roots of women's oppression and argued that ending women's oppression meant ending capitalism.

"She [Eleanor Marx] argued that while bourgeois women were competing with bourgeois men, working class women were not held down by working class men. She asserted that their interests lie together. Eleanor quotes Zetkin: 'And that is why the working woman cannot be like the bourgeois woman who has to fight against the man of her own class... With the proletarian women, on the contrary, it is a struggle of the women with the man of her own class against the capitalist class'."

Perhaps the most powerful part of these books are the sections on Eleanor Marx's involvement with the mass unions and strike waves that shook the country at the end of the 1880s. Brown points out that the workers involved in these, from Jewish tailors, to the Match Girls and the Dockers were often considered unorganisable. The tailors were in small workshops, the Match Girls considered easily replaceable, and the Dockers casualised and atomised. Yet all of these led powerful strikes that won significant victories and built powerful unions.

Brown gives us a flavour of Eleanor Marx's centrality to the new unions.

"As well as jumping on tables at meetings, Eleanor committed herself to the more mundane tasks that were required. Ben Tillett, a New Union leader, described how she did 'the drudgery of clerical work as well as more responsible duties', while Tom Mann said she was someone who, 'possessing a complete mastery of economics... was able, alike in conversation and on a public platform, to hold her own with the best."

The decline of the strike wave and union movement undoubtedly hit Eleanor Marx hard, and she committed suicide in 1898. But her legacy was tremendously important. Siobhan Bown ends her book by making the point that what Eleanor Marx demonstrated was that the best way to fight low pay, racism and women's oppression was through mass working class movements that challenged capitalism. But that ultimately capitalism had to be overthrown. This wonderful little book is a great way for activists, new and old, to learn the lessons of the past and be inspired for the struggles of the future.

Reviews of other books in the Rebel's Guide series, all published by Bookmarks

Campbell - A Rebel's Guide to Rosa Luxemburg
Orr - Sexism and the System; A Rebel's Guide to Women's Liberation
Choonara - A Rebel's Guide to Trotsky
Bambery - A Rebel's Guide to Gramsci
Birchall - A Rebel's Guide to Lenin
Gonzalez - A Rebel's Guide to Marx

David Scott & Alexei Leonov - Two Sides of the Moon

I was reading this book while watching the first launch of NASA's Orion spacecraft, a vehicle that many hope will return humans to the moon, mars and elsewhere. I'm skeptical that the political and economic interests exist in the United States for this to happen. In an era were private companies are expected to lead innovation in their pursuit of profit, I suspect that NASA's funding will dwindle. Orion may well prove to be a last hurrah.

Part of my reasoning lies in this interesting book by two astronauts. David Scott who flew with the one of the US's Gemini missions, and walked on the moon with Apollo 15. Alexei Leonov was the first person to walk in space and took part in the Apollo-Soyuz link up. Had things been different Leonov may well have been the first person to walk on the moon.

The book is structured around the authors' lives. Each taking turns to tell parts of their story. Much of the fascination comes from the great differences between the two experiences, particularly their lives within their respective space programs. The Russian's were bedeviled by bureaucracy and lack of funding, which contrasts enormously with NASA's lavish initial support and a much more happy go lucky approach from the astronauts.

Leonov was a close friend of Yuri Gagarin, and their are some emotional parts to his tale, particularly in the aftermath of his friends death. He is also an accomplished painter and its notable that his accounts are often more concerned with his amazement with what he can see, while Scott's could be over-bearing in technical detail and much more matter-of-fact.

Scott was to go to the moon, and this is perhaps the highlight of the book. Forty years later and despite having seen the footage from the various Apollo missions countless times and read dozens of accounts and reports, the sheer fact that humans walked on the moon still has the capacity to stun me. Scott and James Irwin underwent extensive geological and scientific training for the lunar mission and their accounts are punctuated with genuine excitement at particular finds. Their ability to make decisions about exploration shaped by a wider understanding of geology. Something to bear in mind when discussing whether exploration should continue by robot or manned craft.

But these stories are immersed in the wider context of the space race. The confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. Scott is very partisan about the "benefits" of capitalism, over what is labelled communism. As he puts it when describing a discussion with a senator opposed to spending money on NASA, while at a meal with President Nixon,

"The unspoken political undercurrent to our discussion was the importance of the space programme in winning the Cold War. I did not say it directly to the senator grilling us, but underlying my thinking were very fundamental questions: 'Do you want us to win this race? Do you want to live in a free society? Or do you want to live under communism?'"

Scott's enthusiasm for science and exploration vanishes here, in the interests of simply winning an undeclared war with the Soviet Union. By contrast the parts of the book, particularly those by Leonov, which detail the interaction between Russian and US spacemen and the way that their shared experiences broke down barriers are illuminating. Leonov, for instance, bemoans how the ill-discipline of American astronauts missing breakfasts in the USSR meant he had to pay for the wasted food from his own pocket.

Leonov's is a victim of the collapse of the USSR. His encounters with senior politicians and figures in the USSR help expose the reality of that system and he undergoes his own political awakening. He never got to walk on the moon, though his spaceflights were important milestones. His tales, for instance of fighting off wolves while landing in Siberia, are a fascinating insight into the less well known side of the space race, as well as the tragedies. Those fascinated simply by space flight will enjoy the insights from both astronauts into the 1960s and 1970s space race.

But the book is damaged by being over-long and in places seems to drown in its own self-importance. Introductions by Neil Armstrong and Tom Hanks add little, and David Scott has added an extremely long list of acknowledgements which seems to include everyone he ever worked with. In part this is because the book is a defense of his actions in a number of run ins he had with NASA. But ultimately it all detracts from what is otherwise a readable book.

Leslie Thomas - This Time Next Week

The death of Leslie Thomas' parents in the early part of the Second World War meant that he and his brother were wrenched from their lives in Newport and entered into the world of the Barnado's homes. The author himself left his sick brother in the back of an ambulance, being told that he would see him the next morning. 18 months later he ran away from the home to find his brother spending days walking the 60 miles to find him. His brother had only just been informed of his mother's death. Presumably the institutions didn't prioritizes it. The young boy had thought he'd been abandoned when his mother didn't reply to his letters and his brother never got them.

Despite this bureaucratic ineptitude (and occasionally because of it), Thomas' life in the home is by terms achingly funny and beautifully poignant. The cast of characters, many of them in no position to teach a class of self confident boys reads, are remembered in brief little snatches of commentary. Thomas' writings brilliantly portray the men and women, who clearly had made immense sacrifices themselves to look after the orphans. The boys, as boys do, let no chance go to waste. One master, with the innocent surname Allcock, instantly earns the nickname "no balls". A piece of schoolboy genius from which few teachers could recover.

I love this book in part for its wonderful writing, but also because it meant a lot to my father. Reading it brings some wonderful, and some sad memories. So forgive me if this review doesn't go on further.

James Gleick - Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton's copious papers began to appear at auction houses in the early 20th century. By 1936 when interest had waned somewhat, a trunk went up for sale at Sotheby's containing manuscripts with some 3 million of Newton's words. John Maynard Keynes bought much of them, and helped to uncover an Isaac Newton that few had guessed at in the 2 hundred odd years since his death. The documents inside helped expose Newton "the alchemist; the heretical theologian" rather than the rational, mechanical scientist of tradition.

The great strength of James Gleick's short biography is that it helps us understand the whole Newton. Both the man who hide away from the world, jealously guarding his knowledge and discovery, almost fearing to publish, but who made enormous breakthroughs in mathematics and physics and the Newton who spent much of his life trying to work out how to turn base metal into gold; rigorously studied the Bible to convince himself that the question of the theological Trinity was a "fraud" and engaged in long protracted polemics and feuds with other great thinkers.

Indeed, Gleick's description of Newton's approach to theological questions demonstrates Newton's scientific method. Newton "compared the Scriptures in the new English translation [of the Bible] and in the ancient languages; he collected Bibles in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and French. He sought out and mastered the writings of the early fathers of the church." Newton tested his ideas, searched for evidence and examined it until he could come to his own conclusions. In this case, his conclusion was heretical, without a special dispensation from the king he would never have been able to take his mathematics seat at Cambridge because Newton couldn't bring himself to take the holy orders required. When he got the dispensation, he didn't move on, rather he "perfected his heresy through decade of his life and millions of words."

Newton wanted to understand the universe, and god was part of that. As Gleick explains, "if we could decipher the prophecies and the messages, we would know a God of order, not chaos; of laws, not confusion. Newton plumbed both nature and history to find out God's plan. He rarely attended church."

Gleick's book looks at this aspect of Newton's life but doesn't neglect the more well known parts. His invention of calculus, which he hide from the world for decades, until his feud with Liebniz. His work on tides, which apparently he did from first principles, without ever seeing the sea. His discoveries in optics, and most of all, his work on gravitational attraction. Newton wrote millions of words on these topics, from his earliest years he was an obsessive list maker, note taker, writer and doodler. His brain seems to have been on fire constantly. His fame came late. But when it did, Newton seized it, protected it and fought those who challenged him. Newton ended up very rich, heirless and world renowned even if, for much of his life, words or notation did not yet exist for the ideas he was inventing and the thoughts he was having.

Yet for all its strength, this book didn't feel adequate. I enjoyed reading it, in fact this is the second time I've done so. James Gleick peppers the book with literary quotes, poetry and Newton's own words. But it is too short, and I didn't feel like I'd got to understand Newton, merely that I'd been introduced to him and his ideas and I needed a deeper, longer biography. Nevertheless this is an excellent place to start.

Related Reviews

Sobel - Galileo's Daughter
Jardine - Ingenious Pursuits

Gregory N. Flemming - At the Point of a Cutlass

At the heart of this book is the near unbelievable story of the "capture, bold escape and lonely exile of Philip Ashton". It is an amazing story of pirates and castaways, but around it, Gregory N. Flemming has woven the fascinating story of the Golden Age of Piracy, as well as conflicts between Spain and England, the slave trade, the radical preaching tradition and buried treasure. It's a book that is both historically informative and an entertaining read, and one that puts paid to many myths that have developed about piracy.

Philip Ashton was a cod fisherman who was captured by the Pirate Edward Low in June 1722 off Nova Scotia. Low was to gain infamy because of his successful piracy career and because of his violence. This was such that eventually his own crew rebelled against him, but not before Low had captured many vessels, run the Royal Navy a merry chase, and murdered many men. As Marcus Rediker has argued, pirates in the Golden Age were both attempting to escape the violence of the Atlantic shipping industry and enriching themselves. Surprisingly though, they tended to organise in far more democratic ways than existing ships. Rather than the rigid hierarchy of merchant or naval vessels, pirate crews elected and deselected their captains, a fate that was to eventually befall Low.

This view of piracy is the backdrop to Flemming's book. It helps to explain why, when Philip Ashton refused to sign the ships' articles (effectively signing up to a life of piracy) Edward Low was so angry with him. For Ashton signing up, might mean escaping the threat of violence from the pirates, but would mean the end of a rope if their ship was captured.

The pirate, Edward Low

Ashton eventually escapes by marooning himself on an island. With no clothes, tools or weapons he barely survives, until a rather improbable episode with a passing Scotsman gives him the tools to live on. Ashton survives two years on the island, eventually meeting a group of logging workers fleeing the violence of the Spanish - English conflict. Then, in yet another awful coincidence, Ashton is nearly captured by some of the same pirates he escaped from years before. Eventually Ashton makes it home, where an unusual local minister writes down his story. In the puritanical world of north-eastern America, novels are frowned upon, but stories that suggest the positive input of a benevolent god quickly become bestsellers. Because of this, while Ashton himself returns to a quiet life of fishing (though Flemming wonders how he felt every time a large ship appeared on the horizon) his story lives on, inspiring many, even on the other-side of the ocean. Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, appears to have read and drawn inspiration from it.

The story of piracy, sea battles and the castaway alone would make this an enjoyable and recommended read. What really adds to the story is the historical background. At times Gregory Flemming has perhaps included a little too much detail. That said, the book paints an detailed picture of the Americas, whose Atlantic coasts were crisscrossed by networks of trade - slaves, fish, furs and wood. This creates a political and economic battleground for the European powers within which piracy flourishes (and is at times actively encouraged). But we also see the beginnings of the United States as an economic power in its own right.

Such conditions - the danger, violence, poverty and potential riches - meant that piracy would inevitably arise. Sometimes that meant that men like Edward Low with his taste for killing and torture would also exist. But without the lives of men like Philip Ashton, who daily risked their lives for a boat load of cod, Low could not have existed and nor could the wider Atlantic economy. Gregory Flemming's book is an excellent introduction to the subject and the period, which is both entertaining and illuminating.

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Dick Gregory - N*****

Until I picked up this old autobiography, I knew nothing abut Dick Gregory. Today he is relatively well known in the United States for his comedy, his social activism and his long record. Gregory's autobiography, written with the US sports journalist Robert Lipsyte, is an insightful look at the life of someone growing up black in 1950s America, and the early years of the Civil Rights moment.

The book is poignant. At times Gregory's descriptions of his childhood, the family's poverty and his mother's desparate hard work to try and keep the family alive will bring tears to your eyes. But Gregory also describes the sheer normality of vicious racism that went along with this. As a young man, Gregory was an accomplished runner. Such is the reality of racism in the US in that period, that it is actually atheletics that brings him into contact with the Civil Rights movement. He is angered that his running record isn't recorded in the local newspaper, because it was a race for blacks. He joins a protest march, and quickly becomes a key figure.

In the army, Gregory learns that he is an accomplished comedian. Youtube has a few of his early stand-up routines, sand 50 years later they sometimes still work. In his biography he describes how he combined an act that didn't ignore racism, at the same time as learning how to deal with it. Gregory's early efforts in showbiz cost him money and friends, but he does eventually break through. With fame though, comes responsibility, and as a prominant black figure, he eventually gets pulled into the Civil Rights movement as a leading figure. Despite being followed by the media everywhere, the police still brutally beat him (away from the cameras) and Gregory gets pulled further into activism.

For those who've read about the Civil Rights movement, Gregory's slightly oblique look at the struggle will be fascinating. He's not really a leading figure, though a key part of it. But he describes the March on Washington, and the murder of school girls in Alabama with passion - these are not remote incidents, but ones that he sees pulling more people into the struggle. Gregory has his own tragedies. Since this is autobiography, at times he over-emphasises his own importance, but mostly he inspires because he is honest - about his fears, about his guilt and about why he gets motivated. At the end of the book Gregory writes with hope:

You didn't die a slave for nothing, Momma. You brought us up. You and all those Negro mothers who gave their kids the strength to go on, to take that thimble to the well while the whites were taking buckets. Those of us who weren't destroyed got stronger, got calluses on our souls. And now we're ready to change a system, a system where a white man can destroy a black man with a single word. N*****.

Sadly, we still have a long way to go. But people like Gregory were a key part of starting the Civil Rights movement. He remains active today, and his story should continue to inspire a new generation.