Richard Borshay Lee - The !Kung San: Men, Women & Work in a Foraging Society

Why should we plant, when there are so many mongongos in the world? - /Xashe, a !Kung man from Mahopa

Richard B Lee's classic book on the hunter-gatherer people known as the !Kung San, who call themselves the Juǀʼhoansi, was the product of several expeditions and years of field work by Lee and his associates. But it is also the product of a uniquely radical period for anthropology. Lee first visited the !Kung in the mid-1960s and left to become part of the anti-Vietnam movement. His later return and further studies mixed with his experiences of US Imperialism and knowledge of the Vietnamese resistance movements, as well as his radical Marxist politics, to produce one of the most insightful and important books ever written about foraging societies.

Lee is careful not to speculate too much about what his studies of the !Kung tell us about other, prehistoric communities. Though he does acknowledge that we can have some insights into how those societies behaved. However Lee visited the !Kung in a period of transition. For tens of thousands of years people had lived in the Kalahari desert, likely in societies similar to the !Kung's contemporary life. But from the 19th century onward the !Kung had encountered new groups of people, in particular those from European colonial communities. More recently the !Kung's foraging life-style was being transformed by their relations with the capitalist market - through wage labour in particular.

In contrast to the tradition view of hunter-gatherers as living a life that was "nasty, brutish and short", Lee shows how the !Kung actually had a life that was marked by low levels of work (compared to Western capitalist society), with a usually (outside of droughts) varied and excellent diet and, perhaps most importantly, a "fiercely egalitarian" self organisation. Lee describes differences with other societies, noting for instance that young people and children did not have to labour to provide food (unlike peasant societies). Describing one group of !Kung he explains:

Their camps... do not consist of a core of males related through the male line [as previous anthropologists had argued]. But neither is the camp a random assortment of unrelated individuals whom adverse circumstances have thrown together. In essence, !Kung camp consists of kinspeople and affines who have found that they can live and work well together. under this flexible principle of organisation, brothers may be united or divided and fathers and sins may live together or apart. Furthermore, through the visiting network an individual may, during the course of his life, live for varying times at many water holes, as establishing residence and one camp does not require one to relinquish a claim to any other.

Lee's book works on a number of levels. Firstly it is a detailed account of the life and labour of the !Kung. Lee demonstrates how the !Kung's mode of production works - their tools, social organisation and relations. But it is also a wonderful example of the use of Marxism to understand how people (and communities) relate to the natural world. But Lee's work is far from the crude understanding of hunter-gatherers that we sometimes hear:

[An] inaccuracy is the view of hunters as having no private property. Land and its resources are collectively owned and utilised, but tools and other belongings are the property of the owner. Nonperishable goods are dealt with differently from foods. Meat many be distributed throughout the camp, but the bow and arrow that killed the animal belongs to the hunter. Material goods are important items of trade, and dyadic trade networks are a key means of cementing social relations; but the 'worker' owns the means of production.

Finally the book is a deeply personal account. Lee describes the dialectical relationship between observer and observed. He knows that his presence changes things, and uses this (to sometimes comic effect) to better understand the people that he is with. A case in point is when Lee provides a cow for a feast when he is leaving, failing to understand why the !Kung mock his gift as being small and inadequate despite it providing a hearty feast for all. Only later does he realise that this is part of how !Kung organise - their mocking of his largesse is an example of how they tackle arrogance, self-importance and any tendency to inequality or hierarchy.

The egalitarian, sharing, non-hierarchical society tells us a great deal about how human societies change. But perhaps of most interest in this book, and high relevance to contemporary discussions, is the emphasis that Lee puts on understanding the role of men and women in !Kung society. Food is always shared beyond the immediate family group. But the food that is shared is provided mostly by the women. There is a division of labour - women tend to forage and gather, and men hunt. Though it is clear that this is not strict. Men do often forage and collect food alongside the women, and women "very occasionally hunt". Lee writes that "the actual productive process may be individual or cooperative. Men may hunt singly or in groups; women may gather alone or with others".

Hunting is tremendously important to the group. Boys are taught from a young age to track and identify animals. Women's input on hunting is sought and is important because "they cover much ground on their gathering trips and because they are as keen observers of the environment as are the men, their observations are sought and taken seriously".  Men actually have a higher work effort than women (even when taking into account the rearing of children), but it is the women who provide most calories for the group. Work is key to Lee's study. He writes:

The beauty of the study of work is that work can be precisely quantified and can be tied into a whole gamut of social and economic variables. underlying the network of social relations anthropologists are so fond of studying is a network of energy relations to which we pay little or no attention. Yet the basic units of social behaviour and interaction have never been satisfactorily defined and isolated, although the basic units of energy relations are relatively easy to define and measure. The advantage of the study of work for anthropology is that it anchors the ephemera of social life on the foundations of the natural sciences.

This is not to say that Lee neglects the "ephemera" of !Kung life. In fact he spends a great deal on their tools, their camp life, their marital relations and how women and men work, play and rest (and they have a lot of rest - far more than those of us who work a 9-5 job have).

Time an again we are reminded of the inter-relations between men and women. Both men and women make tools, that might be used by the other sex. How does the labour break down?

Men clearly have the heavier share of work in subsistence and tool making and repair. Women do more housework than men, but overall the men appear to have a longer work week. The shorter subsistence workday of the women does not result in a lower return in foodstuffs... women provide more food per day of gathering than men provide per day of hunting. Women return to the camp earlier in the day than men. They use the time to ensure that the ostrich eggshell canteens are filled and that some food is prepared.

He continues:

A major category of work... is child care, and to the child's own mother falls 60 to 80 percent of the work with young children, a proportion that more than redresses the apparent disparity between men's and women;'s work... Neither do these figures support the notion that women are the exploited members of !Kung society. Their weekly work effort, including housework, is less than that of the men, and even adding the work of child rearing does not raise the women's total work load significantly above the range of the men's.

As the last quote indicates Lee's arguments are backed up with tremendous amounts of observational data. But this doesn't make the book dry. On the contrary it is readable and engaging. In fact there is so much here that I cannot hope to cover it all in the review. Whether it is the detailed description of how a !Kung hunter makes his most important tool - the arrow quiver, or how they poison their arrows or the spacing that !Kung women have of children and how this relates to hunter-gatherer life the book covers it all. There is also a detailed but extremely important discussion of violence within !Kung communities.

The final part of the book shows how the interaction between the hunter-gatherer communities and capitalist market networks had, at the time of study, begun to break down social relations. Lee shows how other groups' agriculture had encouraged sedentary life for some !Kung. Social relations are transformed with contact with a market economy - the production of commodities to be sold to tourist markets, or !Kung working in the mines. As Lee concludes:

The informal leadership, vague boundaries, and reciprocal access to resources worked well for the !Kung when the land was vast and the people were few. But with the transition to village life the old mechanisms have proved quite inadequate. The process of moving to a new mode of production involved the !Kung not only in changes in the economic base, but also has necessitated the emergence of new kinds of political relations, new forms of leadership and new methods of resolving disputes.

Lee's book is one of the best works of anthropology I have ever read. But that's not simply because his style is accessible, it is because his approach to the !Kung is one that begins from an attempt to study their life as part of a wider understanding of human society in all its forms. Lee's Marxist approach aids this but doesn't obscure it in jargon. His own humanity is written on every page, but the most important story is that of the !Kung whose story is captured at a particularly moment in their history. Richard B Lee's book tells their story but also part of own our history too.

Related Reviews

Leacock - Myths of Male Dominance
Scott - Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
Bellwood - The First Farmers
Martin - The Death of Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots
Flannery and Marcus - The Creation of Inequality
McAnany and Yoffee - Questioning Collapse
Engels - Origin of Private Property, the Family and the State
Evans-Pritchard - The Nuer
Evans-Pritchard - Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer
Gilligan - Climate, Clothing & Agriculture in Prehistory

Laura Miles - Transgender Resistance: Socialism and the fight for trans liberation

In Britain today trans people have a greater visibility than perhaps at any other time in the country's history. As a result trans people and trans politics has become a subject for fierce debate on the right and the left. Tragically, especially in Britain, many on the left have ended up taking positions that are transphobic or transcritical. This is despite the horrible oppression and discrimination faced by transpeople in Britain and around the world.

So it is excellent that socialist and trade union activist Laura Miles has written this new book. Miles begins with the strides forward that trans people have made, "through the hard work and efforts of countless activists there are now many support organisation for trans and non-binary people, something that could only have been dreamed of forty or fifty years ago". There are now many (though not nearly enough) positive articles, books, role-models and representations in the media of or about trans people. Yet there is also tragedy. Miles explains that the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDoR) has been marked on 20 November every year since 1999.

The 2018 TDoR report revealed a total of 369 reported killings of trans and gender-diverse people between 1 October 2017 and 30 September 2018, an increase on the 2017 figure of 325... Most of the murders occurred in Brazil (167), Mexico (71), the United States (28) and Colombia (21).

It is important to highlight this oppression and violence against trans people. One of the arguments that trans-critical people often use is that transgender people are a threat to non-trans women in particular. Yet they rarely acknowledge the routine violence and discrimination that trans and non-binary people experience. I was glad that Miles doesn't just focus on the trans experience in Britain, or the developed world. One chapter looks at what it is like for trans people in countries and regions as diverse as Africa, South Korea, Russia, Latin America and the Indian sub-continent. These are difficult chapters to read as the violence is horrible and often routine. Miles concludes:

These snapshots of life for transgender people around world demonstrate that transphobia is endemic in modern capitalism although it varies in form and intensity from society to society and over time. A range of factors contribute to this - cultural and religious issues, economic factors such as crises and levels of wealth and poverty. A very common factor is how prejudice, discrimination and violence against trans people and others is whipped up as part of a general repression of opposition to growing inequality and disparities of wealth.

Despite this repression, trans and non-binary people have a long history. Miles looks at the way different historical societies have understood gender. Studies of Native American societies have shown Miles says, how "rather than being ostracised or forced into obscurity, gender-variant people were embraced by some 150 tribes, serving as artists, medicine people, religious experts and tribal leaders". She continues that "many societies considered that there were not two buy three, four, or more genders". I won't dwell here on the historic material, even though it is fascinating and demonstrates that humans have frequently taken very different views about sex and gender to that which is usually considered normal in modern capitalism. I will note though that I was pleased to see that Miles records the way that historic rebellion, such as that of the Rebecca Riots in Wales, often involved cross-dressing by rebels. There is a long tradition of this stretching particularly through British rural rebellion that I have noticed in my own studies of the subject.

The tour of the historical experience demonstrates the way that ideas of gender and sex become fixed with the development of the capitalism family. Here Miles draws on the classical Marxist analysis of the role of the family within capitalist production shaping wider social relations. It is this, she argues, which shapes the way that trans people are seen and related to within capitalism. While Miles shows exactly why science doesn't confirm the simple "two genders" model, it is the political analysis that is most important. It's worth quoting Miles at length on this:

The source of sexism, misogyny, women's oppression and trans oppression lies in the exploitative class relations that derive from capitalism's drive to appropriate and control labour power in order to accumulate surplus value, and in the dominant ideology of the nuclear family and its role in the socialisation, reproduction and provision of care for workers.

Everyone's gender identity is part of the deeply held sense of self which develops neither as an exclusive derivative of our biological sex nor merely as a response to the social norms and gender expectation that we encounter by virtue of being social beings. If it were simply one or the other, arguable there would not be transgender or non-binary people, either because our chromosomes would be all-powerful in forming our gender identity or because society's strong and pervasive gender binary oppression would lock us all irrevocably into one of the two hegemonic gender binary categories.

These conclusions don't seem particularly radical. So it is alarming that many on the left have adopted positions that would seem closer to those of the right in seeking to deny trans people rights and protections. Often these arguments take the form of arguing that such rights undermine women's rights won through decades of struggle. But Miles demonstrates how this is not the case. In particular fear-mongering over the right to self-identify risks setting back trans-rights many years. As Miles concludes, "such measures... would sweep away trans women's rights in particular and would in effect erase them as well as intersex people and those identifying as non-binary".

Miles concludes the book by looking beyond simply winning the rights that we might get under capitalism. She shows how a socialist society, by breaking free of the capitalist model of the family, and ending poverty and inequality can, through the process of revolutionary change be one in which people would have "many different gender expressions". She finishes with an inspiring quote from Leslie Feinberg who wrote in hir book Transgender Warriors:

None of us will be free until we have forged an economic system that meets the needs of every working person. As trans people, we  will not be free until we fight for and win a society in which no class stands to benefit from fomenting hatred and prejudice, where laws restricting sex and gender and human love will be unthinkable.

The important statement here, is that "none of us will be free" which includes those who don't identify as trans, as well as those who are non-binary or transgender. We will not be free, until everyone is free. Laura Miles' is book is a timely and important contribution to that struggle that ought to be read by every political activist fighting oppression and exploitation.

Related Reviews

Orr - Marxism and Women's Liberation
Leacock - Myths of Male Dominance
Engels - Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State

Tom Lawson - The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania

The story of the British arrival in Tasmania (known then as Van Diemen's Land) and the subsequent genocide of the aboriginal people who lived there is rarely discussed. It has parallels with events in other colonial nations, particularly in mainland Australia. But, as Tom Lawson's convincing but  tragic book shows, this was a genocide that was made in London and needs to be understood in the wider context of British colonial policy.

Lawson is a Holocaust scholar and he explains that he came to write about this subject after looking at the depiction and understanding of the Holocaust and genocide in society. As such this book is not a detailed history of what took place in Tasmania, though there is enough to make those who do not know the general history understand that this was a period of horrific events against the aboriginal population. An early massacre of aboriginal people at the first settlement at Risdon Cove was horrific enough, but the British turned this into an explanation for the aboriginal resistance that they experienced, which required a response in turn. In other words, the British argued that the victims were the cause of their genocide - which combined with racist prejudices formed the backdrop to subsequent events. As Lawson explains:

The idea that the island's [Tasmania] people had been prompted to an indiscriminate vengeance by the massacre, a passion which sustained them and their descendants over the next 30 years, tells us much about the assumption that the British brought with them to Van Diemen's Land. Tasmanians were not, they supposed, capable of rational thought or action. Indeed the belief that indigenous peoples across the Empire were essentially childlike, incapable of meaningful communal or political action, underpinned the very basis of the British occupation of the land. It was widely believed that an imagined failure of such peoples to exploit the resources of the land provided the moral and legal basis of colonisation.

The British considered that a "state of war" existed, which basically legitimised their actions. But their prejudices about the indigenous peoples also affected what they wanted done. "No longer would the communities be able to pursue their nomadic, migratory culture. Instead they would be reliant for sustenance on a colonial authority that wished to enclose them permanently."

The contradictory interests of the British and the aboriginal people "could only be resolved by force", and the power was in the hands of the colonists. Lawson explains about the colonial authority in Tasmania that it was

trapped within a mindset that they could not recognise made little sense even on its own terms. They were committed to a path that continually sanctioned a greater and greater degree of force, while arguing that force should be avoided. With every approval they opened up new possibilities for violence even while they continued to condemn violence itself. The British government preached protection [of the aboriginal people], while contrarily approving of measure after measure that would escalate violence. It was, at the very least, a form of self-deception.

This last point is important. Some historians have argued that the destruction of Tasmanian culture was the consequence of the British on the ground. Lawson, in contrast, argues that it was British policy that encouraged genocide. Since violence was considered a legitimate response to resistance from the aboriginal people, then massacres became acceptable. In passing its worth noting that much of this violence was committed by convicts sent to Tasmania. As Lawson points out "their violence was directed at the only people in their world less powerful than themselves." The role of convicts, undesirables, in the eyes of the British government would become an excuse for many for what took place in Tasmania.

Lawson points out that the British government select committee that was setup to examine the aboriginal people's condition reflected a "class-based discourse" that saw the violence as arising out of sending "Britain's own savages" abroad. But we should not lose sight of the fact that genocide came from colonial policies that saw indigenous peoples as occupying land that they could not and would not use, and that colonialism could both use those resources and transform the aborigines into model British citizen Christian farmers. In the eyes of the British, when they refused to conform, the aboriginal people were doomed to an inevitable decline.

Liberal and progressives in Britain also saw this inevitable decline arising out of a similar process. If Britain was the height of technical and intellectual achievement than "lesser" peoples were doomed in the face of British arrival. Perhaps most fascinatingly and distressingly, Lawson shows how this approach pervades attitudes to indigenous remains and relics that were in British museums until recently. Efforts to get human remains and important cultural objects back to Tasmania were, on several occasions, met with responses from authorities which assumed that either the Tasmanian people must be extinct or that they could not look after the objects themselves.

This is a remarkable book that deserves a wider readership than it appears to have had. Lawson argues clearly that the destruction of Tasmanian culture was the consequence of  of the British Colonial Office's "commitment to the relentless pursuit of colonial development". But he goes further and argues that the horrific, forgotten events of this time, mean that "when we think about the British Empire we should remember the violence on which it was based, and when we think about genocide we should remember that it is part of our world too".

Tom Lawson's book is an important contribution to post-colonial studies of British Empire and a must read for anyone trying to understand Australian politics as well as contemporary debates around genocide.

Related Reviews

Gammage - The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia
Pascoe - Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture
Moorehead - The Fatal Impact

Bill Gammage - The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia

In The German Ideology Marx and Engels write "nature, the nature that preceded human history...is nature which today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral-islands of recent origin)". They were arguing that the natural world is transformed by humans, constantly recreated and rebuilt. It is an insight that kept returning to me as I read Bill Gammage's excellent book The Biggest Estate on Earth. Gammage's contention is that the Australian landscape as seen by European colonial explorers, settlers and convicts post-1788 (the date of first arrival of the British first fleet) was not natural, pristine or untouched and certainly not terra nullius. Rather as the author says, "there was no wilderness". The Australian landscape was shaped by thousands of years of careful, planned human labour.

But this is not what those arriving from Europe saw. Instead they tended to interpret the landscape as a natural collection of park-like spaces. As Gammage explains "Almost all thought no land in Australia private, and parks natural. To think otherwise required them to see Aborigines as gentry, not shiftless wanderers. That seemed preposterous."

The reference here to gentry relates to the fact that hundreds of European accounts (Gammage quotes dozens and dozens of examples) describe the landscape as often being "park like". Park, at this time, referred to the type of landscapes created by wealthy British landowners. They were rich enough to leave landscapes laid out for pleasure - not to produce food, or generate wealth. It is, as Gammage suggests, peculiarly myopic to see these perceived landscapes and equate them with parkland in Europe, and conclude that they cannot have been artificial. It is also a view imbued with racism and class.

Much of the book looks at exactly how and why the aboriginal people shaped the land. There is a brilliantly illustrated section (in full colour) that uses paintings and old photographs as well as contemporary images to show how the landscape changed after 1788 when the land wasn't burnt back. Burning was the key way that land was cleared and the clearance allowed food to be grown or helped with the hunting of animals like kangaroo. The changes also meant that the destruction of aboriginal communities was also written into the landscape. Take this picture Mills' Plains by John Glover (circa 1832-1834).

Gammage writes:

Glover shows Tasmanians. They were not there in 1832, for in 1828-30 they were shot or rounded up by bounty hunters like Glover's neighbour John Batman. Glover knew this. He captioned his [painting] Batman's Lookout, Ben Lomond (1835) 'on account of Mr Batman frequenting this spot to entrap the Natives'. Yet he depicts not only their presence, but their absence. His Mills' Plains foreground shows young gums, wattles and casuarinas which all regenerate quickly after fire. They are young because Tasmanians burnt the old; they are there because Tasmanian burning was stopped. They are the first generation for decades not to get burnt, so their height measures the end of Tasmanian dominion.

Ironically the lack of burning also meant that some flora and fauna went extinct. The burning encouraged particular growth, or created ecological niches that were needed by certain animals. The end of burning led, for instance, "to the extinction or decline of over a third of small desert animals species."

The recent extreme bushfires in Australia have reawakened debate about how a return to regular backburning could help prevent future catastrophic fires. Gammage certainly provides ample evidence that this is true. But he also makes it clear that it wouldn't be easy. The Aboriginal people had thousands of years of experience and even sympathetic attempts to recreate this have failed: "They knew which fire regime worked" he writes. That said, the effects could be dramatic. As Gammage explains, Aboriginal people rarely had to deal with enormous fires because they rarely happened - because "people had to prevent it, or die". Gammage recounts a story from the 1870s:

When a fire menaced the station while its men were away, an [Aboriginal] elder studied the flames, then organised women and children to light spot fires in five staggered rows across the advancing front. This broke up the fire and it was put out."

But these skills with fire arose from long experience and a particular understanding of the natural ecology. I don't have space to cover Gammage's explanation of Aboriginal understanding of their relationship to history and space. But the "Law" he describes is an obligation on everyone to manage and protect the land as it was and is.

All must care for the and and its creatures, all must be regenerated by care and ceremony, no soul must be extinguished, no totem put at risk, no habitat too much reduced. That mandate, not the theology, made land care purposeful, universal and predictable. This is true of very part, even what might seem untouched wilderness, and even where ecologists today can't see why. The parks and puzzles Europeans saw in 1788 were no accident.

Thus the shaping of landscape was not technological, it was something that arose out of the very understanding that Aboriginal people had of the land and their place in it. There's a tragic story that demonstrates this, told by Gammage, of a small band of Tasmanian people, decimated by the colonial powers, who continued to fire the landscape, doing the work of ten times their number, to try and maintain the land - even though the smoke would betray their existence.

This approach can be contrasted with the settlers who saw the land with very different eyes. It is summed by a quote from 1864 by a surveyor WCB Wilson who wrote:

heavy showers fell which had a wonderful effect upon the hitherto parched up ground innumerable bulbous roots shooting up their long green stems in every direction and clothing the earth with a profusion of flowers.... It is very delightful to contemplate Nature in her holiday garbs, but unfortunately both the flowers and the coarse green grass are intrinsically worthless.

Gammage comments that Wilson "didn't value anything much". But here, summarised, is the new capitalist approach to land as a source of value. The landscapes that the Aboriginal people created where particularly prized by settlers, not simply for the clear areas, but also for the management of water courses, or the holding back of particular plants. But once they had control the Settlers couldn't maintain these landscapes and massive bush-fires are just one ecological consequence. Before 1788 Australia was very different, but so were the societies that lived there. Gammage concludes:

'Man' made such country home for at least 20,000 years. People civilised all the land, without fences, making farm and wilderness one. In the Great Sandy Desert women replanted yam tops and scattered millet on soft sand, then watched the seasons: millet crops a year after its first rain. This is farming, but not being a farmer. Doing more would have driven them out of the desert. Mobility let them stay. It imposed a strict and rigid society, but it was an immense gain. It gave people abundant food and leisure, and it made Australia a single estate. Instead of dividing Aborigines into gentry and peasantry, it made them a free people.

Marx and Engels pointed out that examining the economic basis to a society enabled you to understand its structures and social relations. Aboriginal society was based on a different relationship to the land and that enabled a much more equitable and sustainable world. Capitalism is the negation of that. Replacing capitalism with a sustainable world will not mean a return to the aboriginal communities from before 1788. But it will mean learning from their relationship with the land to ensure that future generations can enjoy it.

Bill Gammage's excellent and book is a powerful exploration of how we can understand non-capitalist social relations. He shows how modern Australia arose out of the destruction of a way of life, and consequently a landscape. He challenges racist myths about Australia's indigenous people and reminds us that things do not have to be like they are.

Related Reviews

Pascoe - Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture

Angela Saini - Superior: The Return of Race Science

The election, and re-election, of right-wing governments around the world has encouraged the growth and confidence of racists and fascists. Racism is not a rational world-view, but racists, and those who want to encourage them often need to justify and explain their ideologies. Pseudo-scientific racist ideas have been around for some time - arising in particular out of attempts to justify the African slave trade. But, as Angela Saini's important new book explains, there has been a revitalisation of scientific racism and this is helping give confidence to right-wing ideologists today.

That these ideas should return is itself a shock. For most people the scientific justification of racism was closely linked to the Holocaust, and in the aftermath of the defeat of the Nazis, these ideas were banished. In fact, as Saini says, it seems impossible that rational minds could conceive of such ideas. Writing about the Max Planck institute, a prestigious scientific organisation in Germany which, in 2001, had to "accept responsibility for historic crimes committed by its scientists" under the Nazis:

The truth - that it is perfectly possible for prominent scientists to be racist, to murder, to abuse both people and knowledge - doesn't sit easily with the way we like to think about scientific research. We imagine that it's above politics, that it's a noble, rational and objective endeavour, untainted by feelings or prejudice.

She continues, "the answer is simple: science is always shaped by the time and the place in which it is carried out. It ultimately sits at the mercy of the personal political beliefs of those carrying it out." But there is a problem says Saini. The unique horrors of World War Two have made race science abhorrent. But, "were scientists in the rest of the world so blameless?" In fact, as my reference to the slave trade above indicates, "the well of scientific ideas from which Hitler and others... drew their plans for 'racial hygiene', leading ultimately to genocide, didn't originate in Germany alone. They had been steadily supplied for more than a century by race scientists from all over the world, supported by well-respected intellectuals, aristocrats, political leaders and women and men of wealth".

So the book is in two parts. The first deals with the history of race science. The second part looks at how those ideas are used today. But really there isn't a separation between these two halves. As one researcher from the 1970s who studied the far-right commented many years later, "I didn't really understand that there were these structures and networks and associations of people that were attempting to keep alive a body of ideas that I had associated with at the very least the pre-civil rights movement... going back to the eugenics movement... These ideas were still being developed and promulgated and promoted." Saini unpicks these networks, the shadowy sources of funds and the journals that allow those with similar beliefs to publish. Publication in particular gives a sheen of academic veneer to right-wing ideologists who want to push race science.

Today race science isn't solely pushed by those who want to see genocide. It can, as Saini points out, be used for all sorts of ideological arguments, for instance that equal opportunity programmes are "doomed to fail". In fact, one of the problems with contemporary race science, is that it often builds on the work of anti-racist scientists who thought their research (into eg genetics) was undermining the very basis for racism. Writing about the Human Genome Diversity Project, a 1990s programme that tried to understand human evolution and migration through genetics, Saini comments that the well intentioned scientists "failed to connect what they were doing with people's rel-life experience of race, with the history and politics of this deadly idea. They thought they were above it all, when in fact they were always central to it." Discussing one of the scientists who was central to the project, the esteemed scientist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza who at the end of his long life maintained "there are simply no races in humankind", Saini points out that "it is also difficult to read his work and come away convinced that his generation of scientists had fully abandoned race science after the Second World War. Although they had ditched race in name, it wasn't clear that they had necessarily shed it in practice". So some scientists argue that there is so much variation in human genetics that the idea that there are only a few races is incorrect, instead there could be thousands of "social groups" having some biological uniqueness. But, as Saini says:

Canadian philosopher Lisa Gannett has similarly warned about the ethical limits of thinking about race in this new way. To some, it may not seem racist to think about average 'populations' rather than distinct 'types' of people. Certainly, early population geneticists such as Dobzhansky believed that racism was rooted in the assumption that within ethnic groups, people are all the same, whereas those like him believed that, within these groups, people are actually very different. But in the racist mind... it doesn't necessarily matter how differences are distributed, so long as they are there in some form or another. This conceptual loophole in population genetics - the fact that we're all different as individuals but that there is also some apparent order to his diversity - is what has since been seized upon by people with racist agendas. Gannett calls it 'statistical racism.

Modern science doesn't back up race science. But, as Saini points out, that doesn't matter, "racists will find validation wherever they can". The problem is exacerbated she argues, because we are increasingly locked into generalisations and categories that have little basis in reality.

We can't help it. We keep looking back to race because of its familiarity. For so long, it has been the backdrop to our lives, the running narrative. We automatically translate the information our eyes and ears receive into the language of race, forgetting where that language came from.

Even well meaning scientists fall into this trap, as do some anti-racists. In her chapter on "Black Pills" Saini shows how pharmaceutical companies are targeting "black" people for specific medical conditions, even though the causes of those diseases and illnesses are entirely social. Such an approach "lets society off the hook. It places the blame for inequality at the foot of biology. If poor health today is intrinsic to black bodies and nothing to do with racism, it's no one's fault."

In other words, it's not society at fault, for treating people differently, but genetics - and that cannot be helped. But as this book demonstrates, the truth is the opposite. Society both causes poverty and inequality, and the racism that is used to justify it. At best race science provides a cover for this, at worst it opens up the door to those who would like to encourage genocide.

Angela Saini's book is an urgent and important read for every anti-racist. But it should also be read by scientists, and not just those in biology departments. It makes it clear that tackling racism and bigotry needs more than just facts, but also requires an approach that understands the origins of these divisive ideas and can challenge them.

Perhaps we need a revival of left wing science - both in practice and organisation. There's a long tradition, particularly in the 1930s, of scientists collectively challenging dominant right-wing narratives. In an era when we see the revival of far-right politics and fascism and growing concern about climate change such networks of radical scientists could come together with anti-racist and environmental movements to push back the right-wing agenda. That would be a powerful weapon in fighting bigotry and the system that causes it. Angela Saini's book is crucial ammunition for that struggle

Related Reviews

Richardson (ed) - Say It Loud! Marxism and the Fight Against Racism
Paxton - The Anatomy of Fascism
Hirsch - In the Shadow of Enoch Powell
Reich - Who We Are and How We Got HereSnowden, Jr - Before Color Prejudice

Max Hastings - Vietnam: An Epic History of a Tragic War

Max Hastings is not a natural ally of the left. He is, after all, a former editor of the pro-Tory newspapers the Daily Telegraph and the London Evening Standard. Yet, despite his politics, his book on the Vietnam War turns out to be both insightful and readable. Unlike some accounts of Vietnam, which overly focus on the American experience in Vietnam, Hasting understands the need for the long sweep of history to understand both the US involvement in the country and their ultimate defeat.

Hastings begins with the French. Their colonial rule of the country generated enormous discontent. Their ousting, but a popular military uprising was an incredible feat of arms for an under-armed national liberation movement. Hastings' vivid account of that most symbolic of defeats for the French, the shambles at Dien Bien Phu, leaves the reader with no other conclusion than colonial racist arrogance led the French to believe that they invincible.

Unfortunately the United States failed to learn the lesson. As American involvement in Vietnam gradually developed from simply advising and funding the enormously corrupt South Vietnamese regime to active military engagement, its representatives behaved exactly like the former colonial rulers. Hastings' writes:

In 1961, and indeed thereafter, there was an insensitivity among policy-makers about the impact that a Western military presence makes. Many harsh things may be justly be said about what communist fighters did to Vietnam, but their footprint on the ground was light as a feather by comparison with that made by the boots of the US military. The very presence of affluent Westerners, armed or unarmed, uniformed or otherwise, could not fail to exercise a polluting influence on a predominantly rural and impoverished Asian society. Like other senior Americans posted to Saigon, the CIA's Bill Colby adopted a domestic style befitting an imperial proconsul, occupying a villa with a domestic staff of six. Army enlisted men took it for granted that a Vietnamese cleaned their boots and policed their huts.

Readers will detect that Hastings' is not a fan of the Communist movement that led the struggle to oust the Americans. It's probably fair to say that, on balance, he thinks that Communist victory was a "bad thing", a failure for Western foreign policy. But that does not mean he is gung-ho for the US. In fact his sympathies lie very much with the ordinary Vietnamese who suffered appalling during French and US involvement. In this regard while celebrating (to a certain extent) the expulsion of the French, Hastings sees a fundamental break with the movement that defeated the United States. He concludes that:

The fatal error of the US was to make an almost unlimited commitment to South Vietnam, where its real strategic interest was minuscule, when the North - the enemy - was content to stake all, and faced no requirement to secure or renew popular consent. Moreover, the 1964-65 American takeover of the South, which is what took place, legitimised Vietnamese communism.

Hastings is at his best in the book when he zooms from the strategic overview of politicians like President Johnson, or Kissinger or Hồ Chí Minh and Lê Duẩn down to the level of the ordinary solider (on both sides). The anecdotes he tells of the battle fields are often horrific, and he is balanced in making sure he covers the experiences from both sides. Aspects of the conflict that are often ignored - the experience of long-range high-altitude bomber pilots, or Russian and Chinese "advisors" in North Vietnam are covered. He is also scrupulous in trying to give the reader a sense of strategic interests of both sides.

He also is not afraid to expose inconvenient truths. Discussing the enormous corruption of the South Vietnamese government, including the vast sums of money given to them by the US and their involvement in illegal buying and selling of military materiel and the laundering of money. But he notes this could not have happened without "active or passive complicity of thousands of Americans, some of the relatively exalted".

It is no surprise then that Hastings can write:

It is among the themes of this book that the foremost challenge for the allies was not to win firefights, but instead to associate itself with a credible Vietnamese political and social order. Dr Norman Wyndham a... Australian surgeon who led a volunteer medical team in a Vung Tau hospital, was a devout Christian who made himself a fluent Vietnamese-speaker. He wrote in 1967 of the local people: 'Most want a united Vietnam, but not one controlled by the communists... the feeling is growing... that anything would be better than life as it is today.'

One of my major criticisms of Hastings is that his anti-Communism colours his ability to understand the dynamic of those opposing US involvement in Vietnam at home and in the country itself. For instance, he tends to imply that the left at the time (and by extension, the anti-war movement) tended to look positively on Hồ Chí Minh and celebrate a North Vietnamese victory. Hastings does acknowledge that hindsight makes this seem more credible. But I'm also not sure that it was true at the time. Many anti-imperialists understood very clearly that the Communist government of the North was an oppressive one, even in the 1960s. But Hastings doesn't have a framework to understand Imperialism - despite knowing it is real - and so he cannot understand the celebration of anti-Imperialist movements, even if they don't make a perfect social movement. As Lenin said of the Easter Uprising in Ireland, "whoever expects a 'pure' social revolution will never live to see it."

But for Hastings the biggest reason for US defeat was its methods in fighting the war.

The Vietcong exploited their own excellent local intelligence networks to eliminate enemies, often with conspicuous sadism. Yet none of the villagers assembled to witness beheadings and live burials doubted why appointed victims were killed: for opposing the revolution. By contrast, when Americans or ARVN killed civilians, while some where communist activists or sympathisers... others were not. The indiscriminate nature of American-led terror, caused by ignorance about the identities, never mind loyalties, of many of those whom its warriors killed, inflicted as much damage upon US strategic objectives as upon the moral legitimacy of its war effort.

To this we might add the high levels of racism towards the Vietnamese (even their allies) and the indiscriminate nature of warfare that involved blanket bombing and chemical weapons. As an aside Hastings downplays the scale of the impact of Agent Orange. He seems incorrect here as my understanding is that it was much worse than Hastings suggests. I hope to find further reading to clarify this.

Despite the length of the book, I thought some aspects weren't dealt with in enough detail. One key aspect to this was the anti-war movement in the west. Hastings mentions it, but doesn't go into detail and he certainly doesn't really get deep into the links between this and the growing discontent in the US military. There is nothing here about the anti-war newspapers produced by military personal, and while he covers events like the fragging of unpopular officers, he tends to imply it was more individual discontent rather than systemic, organised rebellion. Despite this he displays a subtle and sympathetic understanding of the reality of class and racial differences within the US army itself.

These points, which probably reflect Hasting's own prejudices and politics, I was very surprised by the book. It demonstrates that honest bourgeois historians can produce remarkably insightful accounts. Hastings shows how little the political leaders in the US cared for the Vietnamese, and the cynicism with which they condemned thousands to their deaths. For a book of nearly 700 pages of main text I was unusually gripped to the very end. Hastings has an ability, helped in no small part by being actually present in the briefing room and on the battle field as a junior reporter, to link the big political decisions, with the reality for the US marine, or the North Vietnamese soldier. It makes for a very useful account of what was an appalling war.

Related Reviews

Marlantes - Matterhorn
O'Brien - If I Die In A Combat Zone

Camilla Royle - A Rebel's Guide to Engels

2020 is the bicentenary of the birth of the great revolutionary Friedrich Engels. The anniversary is likely to see numerous articles, pamphlets and books about Marx's friend and collaborator. But few of them will get across Engels' ideas and life as succinctly as Camilla Royle's latest contribution to the Rebel's Guide series.

Engels came from a wealthy bourgeois background. While the money he earned allowed him to lead the life of a relatively well off member of British society, it also enabled the Marx family to survive, Karl Marx to write and Engels' the space and time to develop his own work. As a result Royle points out that Engels was "a disappointment to his parents and a traitor to his class". It is a description Engels himself would have been proud of.

Royle's book begins with Engels' early years locating him in the milieu of those progressive German thinkers who were breaking with Hegelian philosophy as they attempted to understand the changing world around them. Engels himself fought on several barricades during various Continental revolutions and, like Marx, had to flee the authorities on several occasions. These movements shaped Engels profoundly, as did his experiences of the working classes. Royle writes:

Marx and Engels had more less independently reached the same conclusions about the importance of the working class; Engels by observing workers in England and Marx through his reporting of the revolts of the Silesian weavers, where thousands of workers took strike action and smashed machinery in protest at declining wages and living standards.

With their re-acquaintance in 1843 Marx and Engels embarked on a lifetime of collaboration. But Engels also produced some significant works independently. Most famously his The Condition of the Working Class in England. Royle also emphasises the importance of some of their joint works, showing how both thinkers contributed significantly to what would become known as Marxism. In her discussion of The German Ideology, a book which she explains Engels wrote most of the text for based on long detailed discussions with Marx. In the book the authors show how Marxism roots its understanding of human history in the relationship between humans and the natural world. It is a key point that shows how an ecological understanding of human society is central to Marxism, with important implications for Marxism as a tool to understand capitalism's environmental degradation.

I'm pleased that Royle devotes two chapters to two of Engels' lesser known works - Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature. The first is a polemical critic of the near forgotten German Utopian socialist Eugen Dühring. Royle shows how Engels attacks Dühring's ideas explaining the centrality of dialectics to Marx and Engels' work. In her comments on Engels' Dialectics of Nature Royle shows that he was trying to apply these ideas to the natural world. Sadly, given the importance of "nature" to the current class struggle, Engels' book was left unfinished. Royle criticises the way that some of Engels' book has been interpreted, particularly the infamous question of the three laws of dialectics. She argues that these laws "can be useful in demonstrating the type of philosophy dialectics is. But if they are taken too literally, they can end in an attempt to look for rules in nature, which is more complex than trivial examples about boiling water". That said, she does celebrate parts of Dialectics especially the wonderful The Part Played by Labour in the Transition of Ape to Man. This is a section that stands the test of time and I'm glad Royle highlights its importance to a new generation of readers, given the parts of it where Engels writes on the human-nature relationship.

The final part of the book looks at Engels life in the aftermath of Marx's death. Engels helped make sure that Marx's unfinished work was published - a surprisingly difficult job; and he carried on the work that had been a near constant theme of his, and Marx's life, the building of socialist organisation. Here Royle defends Engels from crude attacks that argue he abandoned revolution at the end of his life, and show him remaining committed to the revolutionary workers movement till the end. Royle concludes by pointing out that the Marxism that both Engels and Marx developed was not an "unchanging dogma, but a method, a set of tools that we can use to help make sense of the world". Understanding the world helps us change it and Camilla Royle's book is an important contribution to making sure that 200 years after his birth the ideas and activity of Friedrich Engels helps our revolutionary struggle today.

Related Reviews

Prasad - A Rebel's Guide to Martin Luther King
Hamilton - A Rebel's Guide to Malcolm X
Mitchell - A Rebel's Guide to James Connolly
Brown - A Rebel's Guide to Eleanor Marx
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

Engels - Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Engels - The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
Engels - The Condition of the Working Class in England
Hunt - The Frock-coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels

Carl J. Griffin & Briony McDonagh - Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500: Memory, Materiality & the Landscape

2019 was a very interesting year to be a socialist in Manchester. The bicentenary of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819 was marked by a plethora of events: a controversial new memorial was (finally) unveiled, walking tours, exhibitions, meetings and a major day of marches to a central rally all took place. I suspect that there were many more, smaller scale, events in schools, colleges and trade union meetings. At those events I attended I was struck by the contemporary parallels with Peterloo. Many speakers also noted this - not because they expected an imminent cavalry attack - but because there was a sense of deep discontent, poverty and inequality about Britain in 2019.

Manchester has, to a certain extent, always marked Peterloo. In a recent book Katrina Navickas has shown how the protest was a touchstone for numerous protest marches in the years and decades after 1819. Radicals and social movements sought legitimacy for their contemporary causes by associating themselves with Peterloo - by marching to St. Peters Fields or invoking the name of the massacre.

But as Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500 shows this is nothing new. Those of us who have been involved in radical and trade union politics for a while will know our movement is often more fond of celebrating past victories and defeats than it is of fighting to win new struggles. But this was very much true of the past. As Nicola Whyte says in the introduction to her chapter in the the book:

Memory has not atrophied, but rather the relationship between society and its past always takes on new forms, being wrought in the dialogical space between official and unofficial perspectives. Meanings do not merely shift with the passage of time, they are renewed through the evocation of various, multiple and unpredictable pasts.... people interpret and employ the past for diverse ends, both as a social resource and means to articulate their own life-histories.

Whyte explores these concepts by looking at Mousehold Heath, the site outside Norwich where in 1549 Robert Kett and thousands of rebels camped as part of what became known as the "Camping Time". While 1549 rebellion was part of a much larger period of rebellion Andy Wood has shown elsewhere how it was highlighted to posterity by the local establishment who wanted to use it's lessons to undermine potential future rebellions.

But Mousehold Heath was a site of protest going back to 1381 and for long after 1549. A 1589 map reproduced in the book is as much as record of past events as it is of contemporary locations and pathways. It is a "way of seeing" as Whyte explains, a "lord's view of the world...that chronicles past events and actions attaching them to physical places, and embedding a hierarchical understanding of social relations in the landscape". Even in the 21st century there were protest events on the Heath that had links back to the distant past. It is not enough to think about the impact of an event like 1549 through "oral tradition" or the records people have:

Memories do not simply reside in the mind to be evidenced in the speech patterns of local people; rather, memories are made through routine practices and experiences of being in and making landscapes. Memories of Mousehold Heath operated at the level of the everyday, remembering past generations and... the material work of day-to-day resistance. A landscape approach provides a useful methodological and conceptual framework for our understanding of the dynamic and contingent relationship between people and the material worlds in which they lived.

Such an approach is further developed in Briony McDonagh and Joshua Rodda's discussion on the Midlands Rising of 1607. This "all but forgotten" event saw a major, though relatively localised protest against enclosure in Northamptonshire. However 1607 was not an isolated event in the grander historical narrative. The authors put the rebellion in a "longer-term historical context and wider landscape setting". For them, the key question is the way that "national and local politics of land" shaped events prior to, during and after 1607. Primarily this relates to the way that the enclosure of previously open lands impacted upon those who lived and worked in the localities - thus 1607 was not a unique event, rather a peak of struggle. As the authors write:

We can read the Midlands Rising not simply as a response to an unprecedented upsurge in the scale and frequency of enclosure in the English Midlands in the decade prior to 1607, but rather the most striking movement in an ongoing surge of discontent with enclosure which had been building at least through much of the previous reign.

Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto that class struggle "was [an] uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight". History is full of peaks of rebellions and revolutions, but these are really the more visible parts of a continuum. McDonagh and Rodda bring this out extremely well as part of their discussion on 1607, an event that continued to inspire and worry both the authorities and the lower orders for years afterwards. The authors highlight several examples of those who raised the spectre of 1607 as part of their struggles (and legal cases) in the aftermath.

A similar continuum of protest is discussed in Simon Sandall's account of the protests in the Forest of Dean when protesters and rebels retained memories of previous social organisation (the Mine Law Court) to justify and bolster contemporary struggles against injustices caused by the development of capitalist relations in the region. This was more than simple tradition, but an active use of tradition as a weapon in their struggle - to inspire participants and give vindication to a cause.

Ruth Mather's chapter takes a different approach looking at the hitherto mostly ignored subject of the way that protest was remembered within the homes of working class people. Visitors to the Peoples' History Museum in Manchester and the Working Class Movement Library in Salford will know that the events like Peterloo were often commemorated by the issuing and sale of "memorabilia". But this was more than simply the purchase of pictures or plates that serve as a talking point, it was part of creating a radical tradition of memory and connection to the past.

This was not just about physical objects. Mather notes Peterloo was memorialised through "radical child-rearing". This included the naming of babies after radicals (136 children received the unfortunate first name 'Henry Hunt' after Peterloo), but also the production of materials to instruct children in the history of struggle. A map produced as a teaching aid, is Mather says, "physically materialising reminders of the events of the day" to "carry forward the aims of the radicals...to sustain the movement into the next generation."

Mather's chapter, draws on the memoir of Peterloo leader Samuel Bamford. She notes that the description of his home notes with pride the items that decorate a typical working class home. I raised a smile at this because in a recent visit to Rochdale museum's exhibition on Peterloo I noted that among the exhibits were Bamford reading glasses. The use of object to venerate, remember and memorialise history continues.

Samuel Bamford glasses, among other historical objects
associated with Peterloo in Rochdale Museum (my photo).

Space precludes a detailed discussion of all the chapters in this excellent book. They all, in different ways, contribute to a wider understanding of how radical movements create spaces for memorialising that draw on the past. Rose Wallis says in her discussion of the Captain Swing movement that "the memory of popular protest was... central in shaping both the resort to protest in the present and the responses of the authorities".

The past cannot be separated from the present. Historical struggles shape the terrain that contemporary women and men fight on, and within which they try to shape the future. Radicals planning incendiary attacks in 1830, riots in the Forest of Dean or organising marches to St Peters Fields in 1819 drew on their experiences, knowledge and understanding of what had gone before to try and be victorious. Similarly the forces of the establishment and authority learn their own lessons, for their own class. But what this book also shows, is that those memories are not simply remembered from generation to generation, but are often written into the very landscape that people act upon. As Carl Griffin comments,

we might usefully understand plebeian communities, individual bodies and the landscapes in which they lived as bearing the characteristics inherited of past tragedies, something akin to a cultural form of Lamarckism,... It is all there, but it is just that in the shift from the personal to the community narrative, the archive is used selectively, past events become written in the matter of place and in the body of the community...Through remembering to remember and remembering to forget, the past was constantly folded, remade, reanimated, becoming something always new.

Understanding how the past has been interpreted and memorialised thus helps us understand the actions and motivations of later generations. Learning from protest history is more than simply empowering our contemporary struggles - it helps explain the world we are in and the movements we have. Carl Griffin and Briony McDonagh's book is a wonderful insight into these processes. The individual chapters contribute to the central theme and are also very illuminating on their specific subjects. I highly recommend this collection to those interested in the history of protest and the writing of that protest.

Note: I do feel bound to comment on the disappointingly high price of Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500. Aimed at an academic audience it was only because the publisher had a massive online sale that reduced the price by about £60 that I was able to afford to get hold of it. Sadly this will price the book out of reach of the hands of almost any ordinary activists and readers who do not have access to an academic library. It is a real shame because its contents would appeal greatly to a current generation of radicals who might want to learn from the past.

Related Reviews

Navickas - Protest & the Politics of Space & Place 1789-1848
Griffin - The Rural War
Wood - The 1549 Rebellions and the making of Early Modern England
Wood - Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England
Poole - Peterloo: The English Uprising
Riding - Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre

Jeff Sparrow - Fascists Among Us: Online hate and the Christchurch Massacre

This new book by Australian socialist Jeff Sparrow is an important contribution to understanding fascist movements in the 21st century. It is a short book that focuses on the Christchurch killer, a fascist activist who murdered 51 people and injured 49 more at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. Person X, as he is anonymously labelled in Sparrow's book, left a detailed manifesto which was much more than the ramblings of a madman. Instead it was a carefully crafted piece of writing, that was designed to appeal to a particular set of far-right online activists and encourage further killing.

I initially picked up the book because I wanted to know more about "eco-fascism". This is the tendency for far-right activists to use concern over environmental crisis to push their own agenda. As Sparrow shows, close links between fascist ideas and nature are not new. While concern about the environment is usually seen as a left-wing cause, there has historically been a far-right strand of environmentalism. This, as Person X demonstrated, is usually tied up with ideas of over-population.

The concern of Person X and other "eco-fascists" is contradictory, and so , says Sparrow, needs to understood in what Person X "describes as his 'tactics for victory' - in particular, something he calls 'accelerationism'." Sparrow spells out what this means:

Person X's embrace of accelerationism means, above all, an advocacy of social and political breakdown as both necessary and desirable. Stability and comfort constitute, he says, major obstacles to the fascist revolution, which can only arise from the 'the great crucible of crisis'. As a result, fascists 'must destabilise and discomfort society where ever possible'. Even someone pushing for minimal changes with which fascists might agree should be considered 'useless or even damaging' far better, Person X says, to have 'radical, violent change regardless of its origins'.

So fascists can even celebrate climate change as a solution - one that will kill off many of those who they hate, and where, as one commentator points out "only the strong should survive". 

But Sparrow's book is far more than an explanation of eco-fascism or even a detailed study of Person X's motivations. He also shows how, perhaps paradoxically to the outside observer, Person X's appalling crime was actually a response to the success of the anti-fascist movements. Sparrow shows how, in the wake of Trump's victory, the fascist movement in the US was able to grow. Far-right politicians like Trump in the US, as in a host of countries post 9-11 created an atmosphere of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim feeling, within which fascists were able to grow. The movement tried to move from "online influence" to "real-world popularity". To do this, the fascists "needed to bring their supporters out from their computers and into the streets".

At the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, USA in 2017, where fascists openly marched and chanted antisemitic and anti-Muslim slogans, a young anti-fascist activist, Heather Heyer, was killed. The violence that is never far below the surface among fascists surfaced. But in the context of 2017 caused massive revulsion. After this, fascist protests were massively outnumbered and proved unattractive for the Nazis.

A similar process took place in Australia where Person X originated. Finding it impossible to march and create the atmosphere of togetherness that the Nazis wanted, some, like Person X, looked for other strategies. Sparrow explains:

American fascism hadn't disappeared. But its key figures learned... that they couldn't convert their online support into a conventional political movement as easily as they had hoped. Such was the context in which Person X developed his own strategy for bridging the gulf between fascism's online strength and its real-world weakness. That strategy was terrorist murder.

Compared to other mass killings, Person X "injected political content into an apolitical form":

In his reshaping of rage murder - injecting a conscious political element into the already-existing massacre script - Person X hoped to set in motion a cascading sequence of atrocities, in which young men (on the fringes of the fascist movement or at least already vaguely sympathetic to far-right ideas), would individually decide to, as he put it 'stop shit-posting and make a real-life effort' with each murder inspiring murders to come.

Tragically Person X has already inspired copy-cats. Massacres like this will not provoke a fascist revolution - but that was never really Person X's plan. He hoped that such events would help spread the fascist message in a way that couldn't easily be stopped by counter-protests.

Historically we know that fascism grows during periods of political and economic crisis; it is then that the violent fantasies of the fascists can be taken up by mass movements. The task, as Sparrow explains, is to build social movements that can fracture the nascent fascist movements which people like Person X want to build. To do this means of course confronting the far-right and fascists wherever they appear - out-numbering them, exposing them and preventing them marching. But it also means providing an alternative to economic and environmental crisis. It means creating a positive message that can offer an alternative. As Sparrow concludes, "the more we offer an alternative to environmental destruction - and to the society that unleashes such destruction - the more squalid and miserable fascism seems."

Jeff Sparrow's book is an excellent, and much needed, introduction to contemporary fascism; online and in "real life". It contextualises this with a detailed explanation of historical fascist and Nazi movements, showing how fascism has evolved, while retaining links to its past. But Sparrow emphasises that fascism's ambition is to rebuild mass movements - to break out of the on-line ghetto - and that what the left does on the streets and online matters in terms of stopping it. I encourage everyone to read this, and then get involved in fighting the far-right, wherever you live.

Related Reviews

Wendling - Alt Right: From 4chan to the White House
Paxton - The Anatomy of Fascism
Guerin - Fascism and Big Business
Piratin - Our Flag Stays Red
Browning - The Origins of the Final Solution
Lipstadt - Denying the Holocaust

Bruce Pascoe - Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture

Dark Emu is a remarkable book that deserves to be widely read and discussed. Firstly it is a fascinating discussion of the history and culture of Australia's Aboriginal people before European colonial arrival. But it is also a brilliant, and very readable, account of how that history was distorted, covered-up and forgotten in order for the colonial powers to develop their own political and economic structures that benefited a new capitalist order.

I suspect that most people who pick up Dark Emu might believe, at best naively, that Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers before the arrival of Europeans. Using primary and secondary sources Bruce Pascoe shows that this is completely erroneous and, Pascoe argues, prevents us developing a clearer understanding of both historical Aboriginal society and how that relates to contemporary political, environmental and social politics:

Arguing over whether the Aboriginal economy was a hunter-gather system or one of burgeoning agriculture is not the central issue. The crucial point is that we have never discussed it as a nation. The belief that Aboriginal people were 'mere' hunter-gatherers has been used as a political tool to justify dispossession. Every Land Rights application hinges on the idea that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people did nothing more than collect available resources and therefore had no managed interaction with the land... If we look at the evidence... and explain to our children that Aboriginal people did build houses, did build dams, did sow, irrigate and till the land, did alter the course of rivers, did sew their closes and did construct a system of pan-continental government that generated peace and prosperity it is likely we will admire and love our land all the more.

Contrary to perceived wisdom, Aboriginal, pre-contact society was not just one of nomadic hunter-gatherers, though, as Pascoe points out that does not mean there were no communities like this.

It may be that not all Aboriginal peoples were involved in these practices, but if the testament of explorers and first witnesses is to be believed, mos Aboriginal Australians were, at the very least, in the early states of an agricultural society, and, it could be argued, ahead of many other parts of the world.

But the crucial thing is that Aboriginal societies were dynamic - they changed and evolved. And in most areas, by the time of European arrival, Aboriginal communities had developed complex systems of agriculture, aquaculture and villages.  For instance, Pascoe describes the work of archaeologist Heather Builth who shows how a complex system of fish traps at Brewarrina, in NW New South Wales, supported a community of about 10,000 people in a "more or less sedentary life in this town". With such a large population, people would have needed to store food and Builth shows how food was smoked and stored and "formed the basis of trade with regions in New South Wlaes, South Australia and other parts of Victoria".

The evidence for complex human society (particularly agriculture) from archaeological sources as well as records of early European colonists and explorers is incredible. What is even more shocking is the way that this evidence is dismissed, ignored and hidden. Part of the reason for this is the racism of the European eyewitnesses. There is an incredible example of this from the accounts of James Kirby who , in 1843, explored an area which not not yet seen European colonisation. He describes (using racist language) an ingenious fishing device whereby people fished with an rod in tension that when triggered by a fish, "threw the fish over the head of the black [the Aboriginal fisher], who would then in a most lazy manner reach back his hand, undo the fish, and set the loop again". Kirby interprets this in the most racist way. Rather than be amazed at the semi-automated fishing system, he says he has "often heard of the indolence of the blacks and soon came to the conclusion after watching a blackfellow fish in such a lazy way, that what I had heard was perfectly true".

All human societies transform the landscape they inhabit. This is not usually recognised about the Aboriginal people because of the inherent racist assumption that they were savages who existed simply through an negative relationship with their environment. Again, the opposite is true. In one of the most fascinating sections of the book, a section that has particular resonance given the recent horrific wildfires in Australia, Pascoe shows how Aboriginal agriculture frequently relied on regular firing of the bush to encourage conditions for improved farming. Europeans, on arrival, feared fire and so they didn't use it to clear land. Ironically this encourages the conditions for more power fires, and undermined the fertility of the land itself: "Changing the timing and intensity of fires radically changed the nature of the country, so that what had been productive agricultural land became scrub within a decade." Fire was "part of a planned program of cropping or". This has implications for how we understand the Australian landscape. Pascoe quotes archaeologist Rhys Jones:

What do we want to conserve, the environment as it was in 1788 or do we yearn for an environment without mas, as it might have been 30,000 or more years ago? If the former then we must do what the Aborigines did and burn at regular intervals under controlled conditions. 

But this also has implications for continued agricultural practices that, driven by the desire to maximise profits, encourage environmental degradation and make fires more likely.

Pascoe doesn't pretend that Aboriginal societies were without conflict. Though he does point out that judging Aboriginal society by standards of European "civilisation" means that you miss the democratic, sustainable, non-hierarchical society that was able to provide for the needs of thousands of people for centuries. Nonetheless I think Pascoe is guilty of some naivety when it comes to understanding why, for instance, European societies were brutal and exploitative, and Aboriginal societies were not. It is clear, for instance, that class society had not developed in Aboriginal communities - historical development elsewhere in the world demonstrates that the invention of agricultural allows the creation of a surplus which can (I emphasise can) lead to the development of class society. When European colonialists arrived and smashed up Aboriginal society any further development was ended. What Pascoe makes clear is that had this development not been prevented, the peoples of Australia may well have begun the long historical road to further evolution of society - the had clearly already begun to develop complex agricultural based societies. But it is not inevitable that any future development would have retained social mores that made Aboriginal society so different to that which supplanted it.

Pascoe's use of source material shows what had long been hidden. Aboriginal societies, prior to the arrival of Europeans, were complex and extensive. But I am not sure how unique this is. Pascoe makes some reference to other pre-capitalist, indigenous societies. This could have been developed more and I think would have illuminated the way that capitalism has only succeeded through the destruction of other modes of production. Unfortunately for the limited analysis of this aspect of his argument Pascoe relies on the work of Gavin Menzies, whose work has been discredited.

However this does not discredit the arguments that Pascoe is making. In fact, I'd suggest that Dark Emu is one of the most important contributions to understanding the Aboriginal history that has been hidden and forgotten. It is also a powerful critique of contemporary Australian society - a society where the very land burns because profit is more important than people.

Related Reviews

Estes - Our History is the Future
Tully - Crooked Deals and Broken Treaties
Cronon - Changes in the Land
McMillan & Yellowhorn - First Peoples in Canada
Leacock - Myths of Male Dominance

Seth Donnelly - The Lie of Global Prosperity: How Neoliberals Distort Data to Mask Poverty & Exploitation

The end of 2019 has seen a growing "global revolt" in countries as varied as Hong Kong, Chile, Iraq, Ecuador, Catalonia and Lebanon. Driving those protests are a myriad of concerns, but one issue that dominates is the question of growing inequality, driven by neoliberal policies. Seth Donnelly's new book is not about these revolts, but is an explanation of the dynamics that have driven the impoverishment of the Global South and how the ruling class seeks to justify things.

The first part of the book looks at the "Lie of Global Prosperity". Donnelly begins with the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of 2000 - policies that set the ambition of drastically reducing inequality is spheres like hunger, poverty, education, child mortality and so on. The UN claims that this strategy has been universally successful, though as Donnelly points out:

It is ironic that the OECD member countries should take it upon themselves to design a campaign against global poverty, since it is their own neoliberal policies and financial asphyxiation of the Third World that has led to so much poverty, hunger and disease in the first place... most solutions proposed for meeting the MDGs are actually geared toward extending and maintaining the same unfair global order.

The reality is that the rich nations would have to pay a "small portion" of their wealth to eradicate inequality. Certainly the money spent by the United States on weapons alone would transform the lives of billions of people if used on health, education and sustainable agriculture. So claims to success in meeting the MDGs are, as Donnelly says, based "entirely on who is telling the story". Ideologically the United Nations are committed to free-market, neoliberal capitalism - and their argument for solving inequality rests very much on the idea that a "rising tide raises all boats". The problem for the capitalists is that this doesn't work, and so they've had to fiddle the figures. Donnelly explains:

The World Bank uses PPP [Purchasing Power Parity] to set the international poverty line... the original dollar-a-day line, set in 1995 using PPPs from 1985 was updated to $1.08 in 1993 with PPS from that year, and then was kicked up to $1.,25 with the publication of new PPPs in 2005. To date, the Bank;'s latest revision is $1.90 per day and is based on the 2011 PPP rates. Contrary to appearances, this new, nominally, larger figure does not mean that the Bank raised the poverty threshold; in fact, setting it at $1.90 per day actually lowered the threshold, conveniently erasing 100 million poor people overnight.

There is an accounting trick that means the World Bank and other institutions have effectively redefined poverty levels and a rate that reduces numbers of people classed as being in poverty. There are other tricks too that Donnelly details - essentially economists base their rates on commodity prices that may or may not be comparable between different countries in the Global South and the much richer North. Other mathematical tricks write out of history vast numbers of poor people. One example is from India. In 2007, the World Bank used a $1.25 PPP to place the "extreme poverty" rate at just above 30 percent. An Indian state run Commission calculated that 77 percent (836 miillion people) lived in poverty. Their level for the poverty line was 50 cents (20 rupees).

Of course, even this is a distortion because 20 rupees itself is relatively arbitrary. Is someone on 21 rupees actually much better off? Such sleight of hands mask the true horror of 21st century capitalism - that "71 percent of the world's population is in the low income category, with most living in severe poverty".

It's not just poverty of course. Donnelly shows how the UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation changed the definition of hunger to be based on "fewer calories" and "created an illusion of progress" while millions of hunger and undernourished people disappear from official graphs and powerpoints.

The second half of the book is Donnelly's examination of the nature of capitalism and imperialism. It's a good account of how neoliberal policies have deregulated and dismantled institutional protections that fed, clothed and housed millions of people. He shows how the rich countries (primarily the US) have used their economic and military power to make sure that the global capitalist system channels wealth in their direction, while outsourcing production to lower cost areas. Imperialism is often used as short-hand for military intervention by powerful economies against weaker ones, but it is, as Donnelly shows, much more complex - economic leverage helps shape the world as much as the US army, navy and airforce. Donnelly writes that:

In essence the old imperialist system - in which the core countries extracted raw materialism, minerals and primary commodities from the periphery and then manufactured them into final products within the core country itself - has given way to a new, more complex system.

I'm slightly sceptical that this is a completely new Imperialist system. I think the world economy has always been complex, and we must not forget that global Imperialism isn't simply about rich nations versus poorer ones - there is competition between, say, member states of the EU and the US over differing interests even while US interests shapes the wider picture. This means that changes (such as emerging economies, or revolts in the global south) can change the bigger picture. As Alex Callinicos has written:

The combined impact of continuing slow growth in the core of the system and of a shifting global distribution of economic power is likely to create significant centrifugal pressures on the major blocs of capital that, it should never be forgotten, are in competition with each other. Maintaining both the political cohesion of the advanced capitalist world and US hegemony over it is not an automatic effect of a self-equilibrating system It requires a continue creative political effort on the part of the US, and in particular the successful pursuit of divide and rule strategies at the western and eastern ends of the Eurasian landmass where the two zones of advanced capitalism outside North America are to be found.

Such pressures are clearly behind some of the current political ruptures between the US and its traditional allies.

But Donnelly emphasises that "neoliberalism is a variant of global capitalism... a symptom of a bigger problem." This "problem" is global capitalism and to "struggle against neoliberalism without confronting global capitalism, or to struggle against capitalism without confronting twenty-first century imperialism is to tilt at windmills".

This is an extremely important point and hopefully the growing global revolt with move beyond fighting aspects of capitalism into confronting the system as a whole. Capitalism in the 21st century doesn't simply mean poverty and hunger, but the threat of complete ecological breakdown. Seth Donnelly's important book helps explain why, as well as the lies the capitalists tell to pretend things are okay.

Related Reviews

Harman - Zombie Capitalism
Callinicos - Imperialism and Global Political Economy