Nick Estes - Our History is the Future

In 2016 a protest encampment at Standing Rock in the US state of North Dakota became a symbol of resistance to fossil capitalism. The camp, which arose out of indigenous peoples' movements, became a focus, in the dying days of the Obama administration, of bottom-up organisation against the expansion of oil pipelines. Quickly it gathered support and brought together disparate groups of people - from the indigenous communities to environmental activists, NGOs and even former members of the US military. The camp saw down brutal repression to become, at least in the short term, victorious. Perhaps just as importantly the "water protectors" helped inspire other campaigners across the globe. I remember speaking at a protest march against fracking at Barton Moss in Salford in the UK and a great cheer went up when I mentioned Standing Rock - a cheer that celebrated their struggle, not my speech!

Nick Estes' new book is subtitled "Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance" which neatly sums up his central argument: the protests that took place at Standing Rock are part of a long continuity of indigenous resistance towards a settler state that has sought to exploit the US's natural resources and people in the interest of profit and, to do this, has needed to destroy the indigenous peoples. This saw a genocidal war against the Native Americans, culminating in them being forced into smaller and smaller reservations, together with laws that codified their oppression. All this was justified through racism. Estes' book is a history of all this, which is at times difficult to read as well as inspirational.

I won't dwell here on Estes' account of the military repression of the indigenous people. Instead I want to highlight Estes' argument about the way that the US state made the repression and attempted destruction of the Native American way of life a central part of its approach towards those communities. He explains:

The design and development of the carceral reservation world was well under way by the time Cheyennes, Lakotas, and Arapahos made Custer and his Seventh Cavalry famous. In 1876 Indian Commissioner John Q. Smith envisioned US Indian policy as having three central goals: to concentrate remaining Indigenous peoples onto fewer reservations, to allot remaining lands, and to expand US laws and courts' jurisdiction over reservations... the latter two goals were achieved through the disintegration of political and social structure, and the carving up of the remaining communally held lands. The fur trade may have introduced the capitalist market, but it never made the Oceti Sakowin [this is the correct name for the people commonly called the Sioux] truly individualistic, and communal land practices and social customs still prevailed. This was the final frontier.

He continues that "reservations thus became sites where social engineering was used to break communal organisation".

While the use of military force against the indigenous people declined it never disappeared and there were other ways of destroying communities. The creation of dams is a case in point, which Estes shows were frequently built to generate energy, and often located in land or reservations that historically was of importance to indigenous people. Take the Garrison Dam which "inundated the For Berthold Reservation" drowning 152,360 acres of land belonging to the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara nations. But the dam was modified by the Army Corp of Engineers to ensure that the "majority-white border town of Williston, North Dakota" lost no land. The dams location was chosen to avoid damage to other towns whose residents were mainly non-indigenous. No such care was taken for Native American people, and these dams, which were part of the "Pick-Sloan" project of the late 1940s where described by one historian as destroying "more Indian land than any single public workers project in the United States".

The question of land could not be separated from wider social questions - poverty, racism, unemployment and lack of decent housing. Este thus describes as succession of social movements that arose where indigenous people fought back for justice - in the late 1960s these took a more radical turn as a new generation of young people challenged both their elders and put forward more powerful demands from the government. To me, at least, here is a forgotten history of those who, alongside the black, gay and women's movements of the 1960s, created a revolutionary "Red Power" movement, which is remarkably inspiring. But the struggle is by no means over. Estes points out:

Anti-Indianism has also been reinforced under neoliberalism - the restructuring of politics and economy towards privatisation...But the role of the US state in reproducing anti-Indianism has also increased since the mid-twentieth century, including through the expansion of the military and prisons... Native inmates [in South Dakota] make up 30 percent of the total [prison] population while only constituting about 9 percent of the state's population. The rise in incarceration rates directly correlates with increased Native political activity in the 1970s.

Estes is clear that justice for indigenous people will not be solved via the US government in its current form. Clearly there needs to be more funding for schools, hospitals, housing and so on. But at the heart of US society there is a great injustice - the creation of the US state required, and requires, the systematic oppression of the indigenous population. Capitalism will not be able to fix this, as it will require challenging the very nature of the US state. This is also true of many other countries who built their wealth through colonialism and imperialism, and the systematic oppression (and decimation) of people in Africa, Asia, South America and Australasia. Estes details the strong internationalism of the indigenous communities, who have created international movements (eg solidarity between Palestinians and Native Americans) to fight for justice.

Real justice will arise when society can accept that indigenous peoples must have the right to solve problems in their own way. Estes notes that one vision for this was Lenin's argument for the "right of colonised nations to secede and declare independence from their colonial masters" but he cautions, while it is a view that has been taken up  by many in the "Asian, African and South American contexts" it is "entirely absent in North America, except among radical Indigenous, Black, Asian, Caribbean and Chicanx national liberation movements".

The logic of capitalism means the destruction of natural resources and people in the interests of wealth accumulation. One barrier to the continued search for profit has always been, and remains, the resistance of indigenous people. As Standing Rock showed these struggles can ignite further alliances, and such unity raises the potential for a radical challenge to capitalism. I hope that occurs, for otherwise we will not see, what Estes calls "the emancipation of earth from capital".

Nick Estes' book is a powerful read. I learnt a great deal from it - not just about the history of indigenous people in what is called "Turtle Island", but also about what liberation means for them. These struggles, in the face of the most brutal, racialised repression from the US state, are inspirational, but also hold up hope that a better world is possible.

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Kim A. Wagner - Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear & the Making of a Massacre

I am posting this review on the centenary of the Amritsar Massacre which took place on April 13 1919. On that day Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to fire over 1,600 (they counted) bullets at a densely packed, unarmed, crowd killing hundreds and injuring hundreds more.

In Britain the run up to the anniversary has seen debates about what took place and whether or not there should be an apology from the British government. Reading Kim A. Wagner's excellent study of the events before and after the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh I'm struck by how ill-informed much of the discussions have been. For those wanting a clearer understanding of what took place in Amritsar in the Punjab one hundred years ago, there is no better starting place than Wagner's book.

Wagner begins by taking the reader through what is perhaps the most influential account (at least for British audiences) of the massacre - the depiction in Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi. It is a powerful sequence and tells at least a partially accurate account of the day. But Wagner argues that:

Presented without any real context in the movie, the Amritsar Massacre functions simply as a grim vignette to illustrate the power of Gandhi's message of non-violence. The speaker at Jallianwala Bagh is giving voice to the doctrine of Satyafgraha, or soul-force, when he is silenced, quite literally, by British bullets. The massacre is thus depicted as the inevitable result of the clash between Gandhi's righteous struggle and the oppression of colonial rule... Yet the violence unleashed... is entirely embodied by Edward Fox's Dyer: a man seemingly incapable of emotions, who appears as nothing so much as an automaton.

Wagner, in contrast, locates the massacre not as an "inevitable result" of the growth of the independence movement, nor, the consequence of Dyer's mistakes or personality but in the paranoia, fear and racism of the colonial rulers. The story really begins in 1857 when the Great Rebellion, which began as a mass mutiny of colonial troops, nearly destroyed British rule in India. It was a sobering, never to be forgotten, event for the British - India was the key lynch-pin of the British Empire, a vast source of natural resources and the destination was many of the outputs of British Industry. It was also key to a wider network of Imperial relations and losing India could have easily lead to the further unravelling of the Imperial project.

The 1857 rebellion was a bloody event and the British escalated the violence with their collective mass punishment. But the pure fact that it happened left the British terrified. Following World War One the British once again feared rebellion. India had provided vast quantities of troops and resources for the war and many Indian veterans believed that the aftermath would bring reforms and improvements at home. Nothing of the sort took place and growing discontent began to fuel the independence movement of figures like Gandhi. Elsewhere in the world revolution and rebellion where threatening Imperial domination. Most significant was the Russian Revolution which had a major anti-colonial component, but perhaps more important for the people of India were rebellions in Ireland and Egypt which threatened the British.

Its notable that the British in India feared Russian "Bolshevism". Wagner quotes many British people in India who reference the Bolsheviks in 1919 and in the events of April the British certainly imagined shadowy revolutionaries organising violent insurrection. This factor alone put the administration on edge as key figures in Amritsar began to organise the Independence struggle.

But Wagner also emphasises that racism was a central factor in the events that took place. To understand this one has to understand the deeply ingrained racism towards the Indian people by the British. Wagner has many examples, but this particular contemporary account stuck out for me:

Mrs Montgomery told me once she nearly trod upon a krait - one of the most venomous snakes in India. She had been ill at the time, suffering from acute facial neuralgia, 'so that I didn't care if I trod on fifty kraits. I was quite stupid with pain and was going back in the evening to my bungalow, preceded by a servant who was carrying a lamp. Suddenly he stopped and said "Krait, Mem-sahib!" - but I was far to ill to notice what he was saying and went straight on, and the krait was lying right in the middle of the path! Then the servant did a thing absolutely without precedent in India - he touched me! - he put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me back. My shoe came off and I stopped. Of course if he hadn't done that I should undoubtedly have been killed; but I didn't like it all the same, and got rid of him soon after.

What I think existed among the British in India in the post-war period was a racialised paranoia, that meant that people like Dyer (and almost everyone else) saw rebellion everywhere and could only interpret crowds of Indian people as a dangerous, irrational uncontrollable mass. When local leaders were arrested and deported and the local population organised to try and present a traditional petition to the local government on April 10 1919, the British resorted to gunfire to keep the crowds back. This in turn provoked violent rioting which left several British people dead or badly injured and from then on, Dyer's actions were inevitable. He arrives in the city spoiling to teach the masses a lesson and does precisely that. Dyer, it should be noted, was an odious Imperialist, who never wavered in his self-belief after the massacre and was celebrated by the British-Indian establishment, even as he was punished by the British government. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, Dyer acted to collectively punish the city in the most brutal fashion, to try and stop further anti-British anger. This led to the infamous crawling order, and:

The very same day Dyer gave his racialised and righteous colonial sermon in church, a striking example of what 'justice in the hand of authority' actually entailed was made... By erecting the whipping post in the street where [Mrs] Sherwood [a victim of the anti-British riots on April 10] had been attacked, Dyer was explicitly drawing on a long tradition of executing criminals, and afterwards gibbeting their bodies on the site of their crime. Not only was the public punishment intended to serve as a deterrent, it also transformed the physical space into a permanent reminder of the power and vengeance of the state.

The crawling punishment inflicted
by the British after the massacre.

In the aftermath the British struggled "to find the evidence of the rebellious conspiracy that they were convinced had been the cause of the unrest". Wagner show that they were more successful in keeping quiet the extent of the massacre and word barely trickled out. One senior government official claimed he'd only heard about the scale of the events when it was raised in the British House of Commons in December 1919 by the radical Labour MP J.C. Wedgwood who claimed that "This damns us for all time. Whenever we put forward the humanitarian view, we shall have this tale thrown into our teeth". The shadow of Amritsar would certainly hang over the rest of British colonial history. As Wagner points out, when the British fired on a football match at Croke Park, killing thirteen, it was called the 'Irish Amritsar'. Even that arch-Imperialist Winston Churchill described the events as "monstrous", but in doing so, he began a process of depicting Amritsar as an isolated event, that bucked the trend of benevolent British rule. It is this argument that has dominated the airwaves and newspaper papers around the anniversary, but it is one that is singularly defeated by Kim Wagner's meticulous book.

Wagner's conclusion is very different to the mainstream:

Taking succour in Britain's past glory requires that colonial violence and events such as the Amritsar Massacre be glossed over... A British apology for the Amritsar Massacre in 2019 would, as a result, only ever be for one man's actions, as isolated and unprecedented, and not for the colonial rule, or system, that in Gandhi's words, produced Dyer.

The reality of course is that the British Empire saw many massacres. From Ireland to India, from Africa to the Far-East, British rule was based on divide and rule, systemic racism and the regular use of extreme violence. The very unity between Muslim, Hindu and Sikh that was displayed in Armritsar in the period undermined the whole Imperial project. However weak the British state might be today, it stands on that colonial history, and the only real apology will come as a result of a fundamental challenge to a system that continues to oppress and exploit millions.

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Glenn Frankel - High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic

High Noon is, in my opinion at least, one of the greatest Westerns ever. I watched it again while reading Glenn Frankel's fascinating book and I was repeatedly struck by how modern it seemed. The fact there are not just one, but two, strong women leads is unusual for the period and the genre in itself - that one of them was a Mexican actor is even more surprising. The film is incredibly paced - almost every scene has a clock, and as the noon train gets closer the film seems to zoom in, closer and closer, on Gary Cooper, playing Marshal Will Kane. On that train is the killer Frank Miller whose gang will try and take revenge on Kane for his imprisonment. Kane is gradually abandoned by everyone in the town - some who are cowards, some who are scared and some who would simply prefer Miller back.

The backdrop to the making of the film is the second wave of American anti-Communist witch-hunts centred on alleged Communist influence in Hollywood. Carl Foreman, who wrote the screenplay, and was one of the few to stand up to the House of Un-American Activities Committee hearings, was half-way through when HUAC called him in. Frankel's book looks at how Hollywood became associated with the left and what, limited, influence the Communist Party had. Essentially with the end of World War Two, and a strategic alliance with Russia no longer necessary, it became politically useful for the right to run a big red scare. The witch-hunts were appalling, and broke every law of natural justice there is. People lost their jobs, families and livelihoods simply because they had been associated with the left, or were once, however briefly, Communists. A few made retractions, many more named names or swore loyalty oaths and not a few disavowed everything they'd believed in.

But interestingly the Witch-hunts also destroyed the idea that the US was a pluralist society that could accept dissent and criticism. The idea that democracy allowed different views of society was simply cast away. While many individuals suffered, so too did film-making with figures like Carl Foreman leaving the US to making films elsewhere. Films themselves would suffer without that talent or the ideas that inspired them. One "blacklist exile" Michael Wilson, a "thoughtful and unrepentant Marxist" screenwriter who had won an Academy Award for his work on the film A Place in the Sun in 1951 had refused to submit to the HUAC hearing and made the very valid point in a statement that the "consequence of these hearings will be appalling pictures, more pictures glorifying racism, war and brutality, perversion and violence". He was, of course, absolutely right.

There are three strands to Frankel's book - there is the story of High Noon itself, how it came to be, how it was made, and how it was affected by the swirling chaos of the witch-hunts going on around it. The second story is of the blacklists themselves, and the third is the story of Gary Cooper whose late career received and enormous boost from the film (and who got an vast quantity of cash from it too). Cooper was a right-winger, though somewhat naive and surrounded by Hollywood liberals he never quite agreed with it all. Carl Foreman was kicked off the production (though he got a handsome golden handshake) and went on to make some major pictures in Europe. Frankel details the ins and outs of what happened - how Foreman remained unacknowledged following the films blockbuster success and how those involved argued for decades about who was responsible for the final product.

Frankel writes all this well, though I think he is a little too convinced that High Noon is the progressive response to the witch-hunts that he argues it is. In this viewing High Noon is about the hero abandoned by his friends and nearly broken by his experience. There is another, more mainstream view - which explains the film's popularity for some. This is the idea that the individual is more powerful than the collective. That the lone hero can, and will win out, if only he (and its always a he) is brave enough; and finally that such an individual will save society. In this vein it's notable that the film is the one most requested by US Presidents (Bill Clinton screened it twenty times in office!)

When thinking of this interpretation I am reminded of another great liberal film that is often celebrated by the left, but can also be interpreted as a story of the limits of the collective - 12 Angry Men. It is a point also made by Peter Biskind in his book Seeing is Believing. Perhaps the real issue is that liberal politics isn't enough to distinguish yourself from the right in the contested cultural sphere. Whether you like High Noon or not, there's a lot in this book. But fans of the film specifically and the Western genre in general should not miss this.

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Ashley Dawson - Extreme Cities

The extreme city is, for Ashley Dawson, the supreme example of capitalism self-confidence in the face of almost certain disaster. The environmental crises that have arisen out of capital's insatiable desire for accumulation impact cities in unique ways, but capitalist urbanism creates a particular set of social structures and physical designs that exacerbate the impact of environmental disaster and further encourage it. As Dawson puts it:

If today's cities are one of the major drivers of climate chaos, they are also its principal victims. The storms of climate chaos are already breaking on human shores and the devastation is most apparent in the planet's coastal mega-cities, where vulnerable infrastructure, massive  economic resource, and human populations are concentrated in unprecedented quantities. The city is paradoxically the greatest expression, principal culprit and most endangered artifact of our turbulent times.

Dawson begins with New York. His home city and, in the period covered, the site of two major disasters. The first on 9/11 led to an unprecedented rebuilding, one where urban designers and architects encouraged a siege mentality with protective bollards and CCTV. Dawson was a participant of the second, albeit in a neighbourhood that took far less damage than many others, when Hurricane Sandy devastated the city. The anti-terrorist architecture was useless against the rising waters, high winds and consequent blackouts. Emergency response teams were swamped and miraculously activists from Occupy New York created, seemingly from nowhere an infrastructure of self-mobilised aid to help the poor and vulnerable. Often these activists were the first and sometimes only people to reach victims, helping provide food, medical aid and building a community response.

The problem, Dawson is arguing, is that emergency response, planning and rebuilding are done in the interest of those best served by the capitalist city itself. Thus neo-liberalism has gutted the public services that make sure that the majority of the urban population have access to services both in and out of times of disaster; but neo-liberalism also shapes the design and planning of cities themselves before and after crisis. In Extreme Cities the rebuilding of New York's waterside communities in the aftermath of the decline of the city's industry serve as a class case-study of this. While the wealthy are able to buy their way out of trouble, the poorest end up losing everything. As Dawson comments, "as Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy demonstrated all to clearly, it makes little sense to talk about urban resilience in the face of climate change without considering how social inequality renders particular neighbourhoods dramatically more vulnerable than their more well-heeled neighbours."

Globally, some cities, most notably those in the Netherlands have built strong barriers to protect their inhabitants. Dawson contrasts those historical large scale public infrastructure projects with the prevailing economic logic:

To imagine that a Twitter or a Tesla would be capable of such extensive public workers - that capitalist corporations, in other words, would address the threat of flooding on such a massive and systematic scale - is to fundamentally misunderstand the task of building infrastructure... which must be holistic or must fail utterly. The fragmentation and advanced decline of public infrastructure in the US- our collapsing bridges, mass evacuations from unstable dams and highways that are more potholes that roads - is a symptom off the neoliberal doctrines of private affluence and public penury.

Even when some attempt is made to build infrastructure in a more thoughtful and careful way - Dawson gives the example of the Living Breakwater project to protect parts of New York's edge, planners often fail to see wider impacts of their projects or even, in the case of Living Breakwaters, the way that plans to have oyster beds on the breakwaters will be negated by ocean acidification. In the case of this particular plan, Dawson highlights a tendency for protective infrastructure to be associated with a "build it back" vision - a return to a rose-tinted past that is impossible within the context of 21st century environmental chaos. In the case of Living Breakwaters, ambitious plans to build floating barriers covered in oysters as a way of re-stimulating the historic oyster industry seems laudable, but idealist in the context of global catastrophe. At least Living Breakwaters have attempted to engage with local communities and consider the wider ecological impact - something that is not true of other projects that Dawson describes.

The reality is, as Dawson makes clear, that we need a radical approach to building out cities. Some of this will involve "retreat" - some cities, including large parts of New York are not viable in the new environmental context - though it would be political suicide for politicians to admit it. The capitalist solution - large scale, privatised infrastructure projects will, at best, only hold the waters back for a limited period of time. But simply retreating and building again elsewhere on the same model is not the answer either. Dawson argues that the most resilient places are those that put the needs of people and planet first; through community democracy and economic policies not based on profit. That will require an entirely new approach - one that breaks with the prevailing capitalist system. Luckily as Dawson reminds us, the populations of cities are not passive bystanders - they have always been a key part in revolutionary processes:

Cities are the point of greatest vulnerability for the global 1 percent, not just because they possess symbolically resonant rallying sites for the dispossessed... but also because they concentrate the accumulated assets of the world's wealthy in physical form.... As command nodes of the global economy, cities are sites of vulnerability for elites. Revolutionary movements of the past two centuries have almost always had an urban dimension, and sit should be no different in a period of rapid urbanisation.

As Ashley Dawson's excellent book reminds us, the future of the city lies in a new type of political and economic system. Luckily that is not simply wishful dreaming. Whether Paris in 1871, Petrograd in 1917, Cairo in 2011 or in many other examples, urban populations have played a central role in fighting against their exploitation and oppression, as well as creating and recreating their spaces anew. Herein lies the future.

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Victor Wallis - Red-Green Revolution: The Politics & Technology of Ecosocialism

The scale of environmental crisis is absolutely terrifying. So I was very pleased to read Victor Wallis' new book Red-Green Revolution which aims to both explain capitalism and environmental destruction and offer a clear strategy for building a movement to challenge both. Wallis takes up this point early on:

To puncture the resulting sense of helplessness, we need an approach that is at once immediate (short-term) and comprehensive (long-term). A comprehensive approach is a radical one. It embraces every aspect of reality. Without such a panoramic sweep, we cannot even begin to counter the multifold scale on which the threats to life present themselves - whether in the form of war, hunger, pollution, illness, repression, insecurity or insanity.

Wallis uses the term ecosocialism to argue for a "synthesis of ecology with socialism". But, and its an important but, he doesn't argue that socialism (or indeed Marxism) has never had an ecological component. He notes the work of writers like John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett who have drawn out an ecological core to Karl Marx's work and shows how other revolutionary thinkers and activists have also understood the destructive dynamic at the heart of capitalism; and the potential for socialism to resolve the contradiction of a society dependent on the natural world that simultaneously destroys it.

Wallis argues then, that there must be a multi fold strategy. The first stage is exposing the limitations of capitalism. Too many proffered solutions to environmental crisis are based on making capitalism better, or greener. But simultaneously Wallis argues we must put forward alternative models:

Token green measures may bring some relief, but they fail to challenge the power that keeps the toxic practices going. How can people be persuaded to target that power and build a political force capable of supplanting it?.. It entails on the one hand exploring the sometimes indirect arguments whereby the green-capitalist... approach is upheld. On the other hand, it requires attention to positive models, both actual and potential, of societies, movements, institutions, or even individuals that embody a cooperative rather than an aggressive/competitive approach to work and life.

Returning to this theme, Wallis notes that Marx understood that a future, sustainable socialist world, would be one based on democratically organising and controlling the means of production. He notes though that we should not ignore the reality that not all socialist approaches (or societies that described themselves as socialist) have behaved like this. Wallis emphases the limitations of what he calls "first-epoch" socialism, the Soviet Union and Chinese society for instance, and argues that "the notion of workers' control offers, from within socialist thought, the basis for a thoroughgoing ecologically-oriented critique of the legacy of first-epoch socialist regimes."

With this in mind I was enormously pleased to see Wallis defend and promote the concept of "planning" as part of his solution. Wallis makes it clear that he doesn't mean the top-down planning of the Soviet variety, but a bottom up approach that involves mass involvement. If we, as socialists, are to offer concrete solutions and strategies one of the most powerful tools we have is a vision of how a sustainable world can work - and the idea of democratically planning production is one that is unique to the revolutionary tradition. Simultaneously it allows us to show how the great wealth we are capable of producing can be used in a sustainable and equitable way. Too few socialists (eco or otherwise) put this forward and I think it an essential argument for our alternative.

Wallis also discusses technology with this same approach. Technology he argues, is not neutral within society, but is determined by the dominant political and class dynamics. Thus technological solutions to environmental destruction serve the interests of those whose wealth and power implements them - which can in turn exacerbate the wider problem. Socialist technology must be marked by a "commitment to social equality and to ecological health" - it should also be democratically controlled, and the result of democratic decision making in contrast to the way that capitalists simply deploy new technologies to make profits.

I do have two slight linked disagreements with the book. The first is about context, and doesn't really undermine Wallis' wider argument. Among his criticisms of first-period socialism lies an argument that the ecological limitations of those societies arose because they favoured taking and maintaining state power, over the "transforming production relations". I am not sure I entirely agree with this. In the case of Russia in the aftermath of 1917 I think the problem was far more that the devastation of the working class core to the revolution in Civil War and famine destroyed the basis for real workers control. The failure of the German Revolution in turn left Russia isolated and encouraged an inward turn; the development of a bureaucratic class and finally the rise of Stalin's counter-revolutionary interests.

Secondly, I thought that while Wallis was excellent on showing how building a revolutionary ecologically aware socialist movement required strategies for the here and now, as well as a longer term goal, I felt that he missed out having a serious discussion on the nature of the capitalist state and the way it would organise to protect and defend its own interests. Here I think we still have much to learn from Lenin and his understanding of how revolutionary movements can simultaneously smash the capitalist state and create the basis for a new, workers' state.

But these are not points of departure they are places to begin a debate. All in all I found Red-Green Revolution a deeply stimulating read, that tackled important issues without simply regurgitating tired old formulae - the chapter on intersectionality and class was particularly good in this respect. I'd recommend Victor Wallis' book both to environmental activists who want to better understand revolutionary socialist ideas and other, longer standing socialists who want to think through how to engage with the growing ecological movements.

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Hannah Holleman - Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics & the Injustice of 'Green' Capitalism

The "Dust Bowl" of the 1930s was an iconic moment in American history. As a result of what one historian called "the inevitable outcome of a culture that deliberately, self-consciously, set itself [the] task of dominating and exploiting the land for all it was worth" tens of thousands of people fled their homes, usually losing their entire livelihoods in the process. Images of dried out landscapes, dead crops and enormous dust storms that blanket the area in a fine dirt are memorials to the greatest environmental disaster in United States history.

Today scientists are revisiting the 1930s Dust Bowl to try and understand its causes and what events might teach us about 21st century environmental crisis. Hannah Holleman writes that there are "clear parallels between the social and ecological crises of the 1930s and those we confront today".

But, as Hannah Holleman explains in this excellent new book, the traditional view of the Dust Bowl as America's greatest ecological crisis is only part of the story. In this telling, the Dust Bowl came out of nowhere, and was eventually fixed by benevolent government investment. Attractive though this might seem, what is missing is the context - the colonial expansion of white Europeans into the American West and the displacement and massacre of the indigenous peoples and capitalist agriculture that, in its drive for profits, destroyed the very basis of farming - the soil, and its workers. Sadly too many people, scientists and radicals included, believe the myth.

Holleman emphasises that the Dust Bowl did not come from nowhere. For decades before scientists, farmers, governments and politicians understood desertification as a global problem. The "new imperialism" of the 1800s and early 1900s, was "violently transform[ing] societies and the land, entrenching the ecological rift of capitalism on a global scale and the related patterns of unequal ecological exchange that persist to this day."

The British Empire was the best, but far from the only example of this. In 1914, a British government committee on South Africa noted a "general consciousness of the gravity of the problems presented by soil erosion in almost every country where recent settlement or the growth of the population had led to an intensification of agriculture." [my emphasis]. Writing about Ceylon, another official pointed out that the removal of the forest to create space for tea, meant "little or no provision was made at the time to retain in situ the fine soil of the original forest... the loss of soil has been enormous". The capitalist agriculture imposed on the world (and the American West) stripped nutrients from the soil, removed natural barriers against erosion and destroyed farming practises that replenished the earth.

The transformation of global agriculture in the interests of capitalism in Europe (and later in the US) created the first global ecological crisis. Holleman quotes Fred Magdoff who writes, "more and more of the world was drawn upon as primary producers for the industrialised nations." Traditional agriculture, industry and society was destroyed in the pursuit of food and resources for the capitalist world; and the populations were displaced, impoverished and when they resisted, killed. Holleman continues:

International commentators wrote of North America's wasteful exploitation of the land and compared it to similar problematic practises in Europe, Britain, their colonies, and elsewhere. Westward expansion of the erosion problem in North America was made possible by government policy, financing from the imperial urban centres, technological change and military conquest.

Underpinning this was a racist ideology that saw those of white European descent as having a historic civilising mission. Theodore Roosevelt, US President from 1901 to 1909 and a man who would go on to play a significant role in early conservationism, wrote in 1869, "The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drove the savage from the land lays all civilised mankind under a debt."

Picture from Monthly Review article by Hannah Holleman
"No Empires, No Dustbowls"

This "'white man's burden' version of environmentalism" dominated the response to the Dust Bowl. As Holleman points out, it prevented "the possibility of change of the kind and on the scale necessary". In echoes of contemporary neo-liberal politicians, emergency relief was condemned. President Hoover argued that the "federal government should not be required to provide anything or intervene to ease the people's suffering". President Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932 offering assistance to the distressed regions, but the New Deal was based on protecting the status quo - it discriminated against black people, protected the profits of big business and did nothing to challenge agricultural practices that had caused the Dust Bowl in the first place.

In 2013 a UN FAO study on the state of global soils concluded that "the over-whelming conclusion... is that the majority of the world's soils are in only fair, poor, or very poor condition." Today's solutions are much the same as the US government offered in the aftermath of the Dust Bowl - technology, neo-liberal loans and an intensification of agriculture. In this context, Holleman argues, simply arguing for a new New Deal, is not enough. US radicals who do so ignore the wider context to ecological crisis - a racialised capitalism that destroys people and land in the interests of profit. Instead, what we need is a new, radical social environmentalism that breaks from the interests of the one percent. As Holleman writes:

The Dust Bowl did not arise because there was a lack of awareness of the issue or the technical means to address it. Like dust-bowlification today, the ultimate source of the crisis was social, not technological, thus requiring massive social change to address.

Healing the metabolic rift in the 21st century requires a new, revolutionary environmentalism. This must be informed by a clear knowledge of what took place in the past, and Hannah Holleman's wonderful new book is exactly the sort of historical analysis we need. Everyone who cares about the agriculture, the environment and social-injustice should read it.

Related Reviews

Clutterbuck - Bittersweet Brexit
James C. Scott - Against the Grain
Holt-Giménez - A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism
GRAIN - The Great Climate Robbery
Magdoff & Tokar - Agriculture and Food in Crisis
Angus - Facing the Anthropocene
Beckert - Empire of Cotton

Hans Koning - Columbus: His Enterprise - Exploding the Myth

Every American child in second or third grade learns about the brave sailor, son of a Genoese weaver, who convinced the King and Queen of Spain to let him sail west. Fighting the elements and a crew who thought the earth was flat, he persisted, and with his three little ships discovered America.

Thus Hans Koning neatly summarises the Columbus myth in his opening paragraph. It's a summary that fits pretty much with what I, on the other side of the Atlantic, learnt about the explorer in my own school days. Koning then spends the rest of this short book explaining why this summary is deliberately wrong. He draws on Columbus' own writings, other contemporaries and those of various historians to show that Columbus' "Enterprise" was far from a benevolent voyage of discovery - instead it was a violent quest for plunder.

Koning begins, not with Columbus, but with the geo-political context of the competing Europe states of the 15th century. Portugal, a poor nation in the far west, was desperate to find wealth to allow it to compete on an equal footing with its neighbour Castile (modern Spain). Wealth was known to exist in vast quantities in the far-East - India and China in particular. It made its way to Europe via the Italian middle-men from the Middle East. The King of Portugal was beginning to send out exploratory quests down the coast of Africa to find a sea route to India. Columbus' big idea was to head West and when the Portuguese monarch failed to support him, he asked the Spaniards.

Promising them extreme wealth he eventually kitted out the tiny fleet that made it to the Caribbean. There they were universally welcomed by the indigenous people who showered them with gifts and friendship. But Columbus saw them very differently:

All the men looked young... They were well built, with good boides and hansome features. Their hair is coarse, like horse's hair, and short... They have the same color as the Canary Islanders, as they are at the same latitude. They do not bear arms, and do not known them , for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... They would make fine servants... I believe they could easily be made Christians.

But as Koning explains, they were destined to "not even live as slaves; they were to die". In their desire for gold the indigenous people that Columbus were to find were forced to provide vast quantities of gold, despite the land barely containing any. Those who dissented were killed, and those who failed to deliver lost their limbs as a warning to others. Mass rebellion failed and so mass suicide followed. In Hispaniola, Koning writes:

In 1515 there were not more than ten thousand Indians left alive; twenty-five years later, the entire nation had vanished from the earth. Not one Indian on the island had ever been converted to what Columbus called 'our Holy Faith.'

In all of this, Columbus is far from the pious leader he is supposed to have been. He is happy to use violence to achieve his aim; he sees the native population of the lands he finds as little more than slaves who will find him the supposed wealth of the Indies. He does not object to the rape of the women by his sailors - in fact he tries to aid this by taking on board female slaves for his men to use on their voyage. Nor is he particularly nice to his own men - he cheats the first man to spy land out of a massive reward by pulling rank, and he lies to them about their location so they don't turn against the trip. Despite this, he ends up amply rewarded by the Spanish, though few of his predictions have come true. The wealth of the Americas does begin to pour into Spain - in terms of gold, slaves and natural resources - but it comes from other voyagers and admirals.

Today many countries celebrate Columbus Day on the anniversary of his arrival in America. Hans Koning's short, but excellent book, is an excellent explanation of why this day is actually a celebration of genocide, rape and the violent appropriation of natural resources. The myth of Columbus exists to justify the colonial conquest and ongoing imperialism. The legacy of this, the underdevelopment of countries, poverty and lack of resources, is still felt today.

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Mann - 1493: How Europe's Discovery of the Americas Revolutionized Trade, Ecology and Life on Earth
Cronon - Changes in the Land
Galeano - Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History
Galeano - Open Veins of Latin America 

Henry Heller - The Birth of Capitalism: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective

How did capitalism arise? It is a question that has been often discussed, and the debate between Marxists has been fierce. The post-war period saw a intensity of this discussion with figures like Rodney Hilton and others contributing their positions, and in the aftermath of 1968 the development of a new, revolutionary, left that broke with Stalinism, allowed the debate to flourish without the hindrance of a line that stemmed from the political outlook of the official Communist movement. A new generation of scholars, and some longer-standing figures, argued through what became known as the transition debate.

Henry Heller's remarkable book is, perhaps, the best summary of the debate I have read. It is not neutral - Heller is critical of many of those who have written from a Marxist and non-Marxist point of view on the transition from feudalism to capitalism - particularly Robert Brenner and his followers. Heller argues that to understand the transition the historian has to look at a variety of different aspects of society and place them in a unified context. Thus, writing about EP Thompson, he says:

[Thompson] like other British Marxist historians, gave license to an approach privileging the study of workers, plebeians and peasants. This was understandable given the previous neglect of the role of the people in history. But this opened the way to an approach which ignored the study of the political and economic opposition between workers and peasants on the on hand, and landlords and capitalists on the other, in favour of a one-sided preoccupation with the lower orders. The relationship between opposed classes must be the focus of any serious study of the origins and dynamics of capitalism. Moreover, class conflict is always resolved a the level of political struggle and the control of the state... It is the dynamic of class struggle which must be the focal point of a Marxist approach to history.

Heller looks at a much wider context to the development of capitalism than many others - his sections on Japan for instance, are fascinating, though I'd have liked a lot more about China, Asia and elsewhere. More importantly in the context of his engagement with Brenner and others, he firmly argues that it is not enough to discuss the development of capitalism through a study of English history. He uses studies of Italy, Germany and France to illustrate how capitalism began to develop, but failed to break through unlike in Holland and England. This, he writes, is because

The key difference between these countries, where the development of capitalism was arrested or limited, and England and Holland lay in the balance of power between capital, the state and feudal power. Italy failed to consolidate a territorial state because of the too great strength of merchant capital, while in Germany and France feudalism proved too strong. 

The failure of capitalism to break through had a number factors, but when it did break through in England and Holland, precisely because those economies were not separated out globally, it had an impact elsewhere, hampering its development still further. In this context Heller quotes Perry Anderson's criticism of Brenner as a "'capitalism in one country' approach". Heller repeatedly returns to this theme, noting for instance, that:

At the beginning of modern times [the non-unified] Germany and Italy were as much nations as France and England and both witnessed the development of capitalist classes. But the failure to construct national territorial states in the former countries aborted for the time being their capitalist futures. The lack of such a state deprived merchants and entrepreneurs of the protection necessary to gain control of foreign markets and territories, blocked the further development of national markets and arrested the maturation of their bourgeoisie.

Heller notes the special case of France, where the weak bourgeoisie was unable to overthrow the nobility, and the state, despite some "fostering" the development of the bourgeois "to a certain extent", but eventually continued to protect the interests of the old nobility, badly hampered the development of capitalism. He concludes that in France, "capitalism was forced onto the defensive until the eighteenth century". This can be contrasted with those countries where the state began to play the role of a "political bridge between feudalism and capitalism". There the state was able to "provide an arena for the generalisation and integration of capitalist relations of production". Thus the breakdown of the old feudal order was accompanied by the state facilitating commodity production through the creation and protection of markets internally and overseas.

Heller's focus on the world beyond England does not mean he neglects debates about the development of capitalism in England. One particularly important aspect about his argument is his discussion of "agrarian capitalism", much favoured by Brenner and his followers (such as Ellen Meiksins' Wood). Heller favourably quotes Brain Manning's approach which emphasised the interaction between town and country, farming and manufacture, agriculture and industry. In my view this is critical to understand the influence of this interaction if one is to see how capitalism could rapidly take off in England after the Civil War. Brenner, according to Heller, is unwilling to accept this because he rejects the idea of bourgeois revolution. In contrast, Heller highlights historians like Manning who show the way that the Civil War was a victory based on the "mobilisation of the middle sort of people", which "marginalised" the old order of landowners and aristocrats. This in turn creates a new state favourable to the development of capitalism. As Heller summarises:

As a result of revolution, the state was restructured in each case to enhance the further accumulation of capital at home and abroad, and to advance the social and political ambitions of the bourgeoisie. By transforming the state from a feudal to a capitalist institution, the revolutions in Holland, England and France, helped to consolidate capitalism as a system. In taking this view we have challenged the view of Brenner and the Political Marxists, who would deny the significance and even the existence of these bourgeois and capitalist revolutions.

Heller develops this focus on to the state with a study of Lenin's analysis of the development of capitalism in Russia, noting that it can lead to the development of capitalism from above as well as below.

I don't have time here to fully explore the other, linked, themes of Heller's book. One important argument that is worth highlighting here is his close study of the question of euro-centrism in relation to Marxist accounts of the development of capitalism. He absolves Marx of this crime, by noting how Marx emphasised capitalism as a system that grew based on the systematic exploitation of the rest of the world. He also notes the limitations of many "political Marxists" on this question. Heller's treatment of slavery and its importance in the development of capitalism is particularly noteworthy here. The consequences of the breakthrough of capitalism in western Europe were appalling for millions of people, it also hampered the development of capitalism elsewhere.

In his conclusion Heller re-emphasises the importance of his twin track approach - the coming together of social forces that could win revolutionary change, and a state that could encourage and develop capitalism:

Capitalist farmers, a group whose economic ambitions were evident in the late medieval period, together with well-to-do craftspeople followed a revolutionary path by reorganising production in both agriculture and industry from the sixteenth century onward. Led by these same proto-capitalist elements, petty producers and wage workers provided the shock troops of the early modern social and political revolutions.

He continues:

I have underscored the role of the sate in nurturing capitalism at its beginnings, overseeing its development through mercantilism and through combined and uneven development and then being itself transformed by revolution. Throughout I have insisted on tits role in totalising capitalist relations: generalising, maintaining and integrating capitalist relations right through society.

Henry Heller's book is a must read for those Marxists trying to understand how capitalism came to dominate the world and what this means in the 21st century. It is worth mentioning that in his engagement with other Marxists on this question he does highlight the work of Chris Harman who is often neglected as he wasn't an academic. Heller pays Harman the highest of tributes in his book, and it is worth noting that sometimes the best work on this subject comes from authors who were actively engaged in the building of political organisations to try and change the world.

Heller shows how the development of capitalist forces were initially progressive, but have now come to be fetters on the further development of society - and as we face global environmental chaos and economic crisis, his conclusion that we need to transform society again cannot be ignored. His book is important ammunition in understanding both the history of capitalism and the ideas that can be part of the fight for socialism.

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Shirin Hirsch - In the Shadow of Enoch Powell: Race, Locality & Resistance

The 50th anniversary of 1968 has led me to read a number of books marking that year's great struggles. But not everything that took place was progressive. In the UK an infamous speech by a leading Tory MP, Enoch Powell quickly became known by its most famous idiom, "Rivers of Blood" after Powell's prediction that Britain would be engulfed in racial conflict caused by immigration.

Powell's speech has long since become a rallying cry of the far right in Britain. Just a few weeks before I read Shirin Hirsch's new book a fascists poured red dye into a fountain in Bristol and played Powell's words over a speaker system. That they were immediately countered by a strong anti-racist response is, in part, a result of events that began in 1968.

Since his death in 1998 many people have tried to rehabilitate Enoch Powell. They note his military career, his devotion to the British Empire and his supposedly principled positions on many issues. Mainstream obituary writers tended to gloss over his racism, suggesting that it was a one-off, or some eccentric view that rarely got heard. But Powell was a racist, and his racism was rooted in his belief in the supremacy of the British nation and the progressive nature of its Empire. Hirsch shows Powell's rhetoric was not simply the speech of a isolated racist, rather they reflected wider social circumstances.

For Powell the Empire was a source of wealth for the Britain, and its people were merely resources. As Minister of Health he recruited oversees workers to work in the NHS, yet in the early 1960s as the post-war boom turned to decline, Powell turned on those he had championed. He looked at America and was terrified by the Civil Rights movement.

Powell was also ambitious. In 1965 he'd stood for the Tory leadership and been defeated so, as Hirsch explains,

Powell's shift towards a new anti-immigrant politics was made within this context of individual ambition as well as national crisis. In the late 1960s British capitalism was forced to cut real living standards, being to increase unemployment and raise rents and prices. David Widgery recalled how a real fear had begun to spread within ruling class circles that the rule of law was no longer guaranteed.... Powell's speech was born out of this class conflict.

Yet one of the contradictions of this was that Powell, the arch capitalist, found his words had a real resonance with large sections, of the working class. Hirsch says:

For Powell's new racism to resonate with working class lives, his words had also to speak to the fears and disillusionment with established politics which had emerged in 1968, connecting with new material anxieties within sections of the working class who had lost faith in the succession of leaders who betrayed their trust.

The impact of Powell's speech was immediate. He'd released the text early to ensure that there was maximum coverage and quickly it made headlines across the country. Powell was sacked, probably to his great pleasure, and sections of workers took action (most notably a big strike by dockers in the East of London). In Wolverhampton where Powell was MP quotes from local black residents speak of their fear in the aftermath as racists grew in confidence.

Hirsch's book is a close study of Wolverhampton at the time of Powell's speech. He was a master of rhetoric and his speech portrayed a white British culture being destroyed by immigrant outsiders. Hirsch notes that immigrant in this context was code for black, as Powell was not concerned with the Polish or Italian immigrants to the city. Hirsch also points out that in the aftermath of Powell's speech, as racism rose, the black community of Wolverhampton was ignored by the media who descended on the city, and one of the great things about her book is that she gives a voice to some of them.

Most of the response locally was pro-Powell. Despite some critical statements from local figures and trade unionists, there was nothing that could "provide a direction for how to challenge the racism taking hold... however, new forms of resistance were taking place in Wolverhampton, actions and ways of living that challenged Powell's words not yet in a direct form, but instead taking place on an everyday level."

In the context of the wider radicalisation of 1968, left-wingers, anti-racists and campaigners challenged Powell's racism. But Hirsch argues that Wolverhampton's black population was central too the growth of the movement against Powell and racism in general. She shows how the city's history of struggle which had seen black and Asian people engaged in important fights over their own rights, helped shape a response. The wider context mattered too. It was also notable that black people took inspiration from international struggles (particularly the Civil Rights movement in the US) and mobilised themselves. Hirsch writes:

Blackness then became a way of resisting Powell's racial impositions, drawing guidance and inspiration from the politics of Black Power in the United States... The [newly formed] Black People's Alliance went on to organise a [London] demonstration of 4,000 people a few months later... An effigy of Enoch Powell taken from a coffin was set alight with chants of 'Disembowel Enoch Powell'.

Hirsch describes how Wolverhampton's black and Asian communities were placing themselves at the heart of new movements that both challenged racism but also fought for the right to be a conscious part of the working class. These movements took time to make themselves heard. The 1970s were simultaneously a period of growth for the far-right and fascists, but also eventually became a period of a mass anti-racist movement that involved Black and White people fighting together to turn the tide of racism.

Today we desperately need a mass anti-racist movement. I was struck while reading Hirsch's book at the close similarities between Powell and some far-right figures today. Powell was very much a creature of the capitalist class, but he also was skilled at "carefully positioning himself as at odds with government policy, standing up for the little, local man against the pro-migration liberal establishment reigning in London." Readers can make their own parallels with contemporary racists.

The racist forces that were encouraged and called into being by Powell's racist speech were eventually turned back. But the anti-racist movements did not appear automatically, rather they had to be consciously built and Shirin Hirsch's book is a fantastic study of what took place in Wolverhampton which was at the epicentre of the racist storm. As such her book isn't simply of academic interest - it is a tool to help understand how we can turn the tide again today. I highly recommend it.

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Richardson (ed) - Say it Loud! Marxism and the Fight Against Racism
Fryer - Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain
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Aspden - The Hounding of David Oluwale
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Costas Lapavitsas - The Left Case Against the EU

Much of the debate around Brexit in the UK has been dominated by the idea that essentially the right-wing voted against the European Union and the left supported the institution. This is in sharp contrast to the debate when Britain joined the EU when the majority of the left opposed entry to the Common Market. In this important new book Costas Lapavitsas demonstrates the real role of the EU. For left-wingers, he argues, the EU is not to be celebrated. It is a capitalist instrument and is particularly geared towards imposing a neo-liberal agenda on its constituent countries. As he writes:

The EU and the EMU [European Monetary Union] are not a neutral set of governing bodies, institutions, and practices that could potentially serve any socio-political forces, parties, or governments, with any political agenda, depending on their relative strength. Rather, they are structured in the interests of capital and against labour. They have also gradually become geared to serving the economic advantages, and there by the international agenda, of a particular dominant class, above all, German industrial export capitalists.

He continues a few pages later,

EU member states are also capitalist states, and class relations are fundamental to their make-up as well as to their interactions. The resilience of the nation state in Europe is linked to maintaining the balance of class relations in each country, thus requiring command over the structures of judicial, military, administrative and other power. Class relations mark the interactions of each member state with the union but also among member states, determining the interests that are to be defending and promoted. 

In other words, two factors dominate policy of the EU - the class struggle within the nation state and the competition between states. Lapavitsas spends a good deal of this book showing how this works in practice, his emphasis, as the first of the two quotes above suggests, being the role of German capitalism within the EU. Lapavitsas argues it is because German capital has been able to hold down wages of workers at home that enables it to be the dominant economy within the EU. Germany was able to take advantage of the post-1989 East European economies (particularly their low wages) as a source of workers and markets. This, combined with what Lapavitsas calls the "defeat" of German Labour in the 1990s, means that the country had a competitive advantage over the rest of the Euozone.

It also meant that when the Euro was setup Germany was the natural economy to "anchor" the currency to. This had fatal consequences: "The core of the EMU is also riven with profound instability owing to the persistent gap in competitiveness between Germany... and France and Italy." Lapavitsas continues:

By 2017, Germany had imposed its will on the EMU and the EU, pacifying the crisis within the confines of the EU. The dysfunctional regime of the euro was actually hardened, thus solidifying the advantages of German industrial exporting capital, particularly as Germany has refused even to consider changing its domestic politices. German exporting capital continued to earn enormous trading surpluses within the EU and across the world. Austerity and neoliberalism became the credo of the EU, while democratic rights suffered. Capital won at every major turn, while labour paid the price.

Two events demonstrate the real role of the EU. One was the way that the EU, together with other international institutions such as the IMF used the 2008 economic crisis to harden their neo-liberal policies, attack wages, destroy public services and impose harsh austerity on the Eurozone. The second is the refugee crisis that erupted in 2016. The EU "dealt with refugees and migrants as if they were a matter of security, rather than people displaced through wars, some of which were partly caused by EU countries." As Lapavitsas points out the Mediterranean was turned into a "killing field". EU institutions and rules encouraged and facilitated nation states from helping refugees pushing the blame elsewhere and trapping thousands in camps on the fringes of the economy.

The role of the EU in economic crisis is best demonstrated through the experience of Greece. Lapavitsas argues that the Greek crisis had long term causes, many of which are rooted in the economic configuration of Europe, with Greece subordinated to other economies. But during the crisis, "not a single economic or social decision could be made by the Greek state without the agreement of the Troika. Greek sovereignty drained away dramatically." Ultimately the Greek ruling class made its peace with the EU, and agreed to appalling austerity measures that destroyed the lives of millions of working class Greeks.

Lapavitsas focuses on the role of the radical left party Syriza elected with a mandate to fight austerity, and how they capitulated to the Troika within a very short space of time. The problem, he argues, is that the row about the role of the EU was conducted within the party, not on the streets. In other words, the power to challenge the anti-democratic EU was not in clever arguments, but to counter-pose workers' power to the EU's economic power. The EU, with absolute hostility to left-wing ideas refused to bend an inch. So Syriza gave up.

Lapavitsas develops from this point an argument that the Left cannot implement policies "against austerity and in favour of working people" while trying to stay inside the EMU. The EU will not let that happen and indeed its whole structure is created with the aim of preventing such breaks with its direction of travel. A lesson for a potential Labour government is precisely that it is not possible to do this and the EU must be confronted.

Unfortunately, despite his clarity on the impossibility of reforming the EU, in his final section on a radical left alternative, Lapavitsas turns to a sort of left nationalism. While arguing a case for reform (nationalisation of the banks) etc, he suggests that in Britain Labour, post-Brexit, could offer a radical new approach - breaking from the EU and negotiating trade deals that favour the majority.

This is all very well and good, but I think Lapavitsas' treatment neglects the way that even outside the EU the ruling class will mobilise to protect its interests. The capitalist state needs to be challenged through working class power, otherwise it will use force to prevent fundamental change. But he is right to argue that the breaking up of the EU would be a massive blow against the forces of capital, that the working class can take advantage of. This is not to say that there aren't massive problems - the political scene is dominated by the right-wing, and thus the left has to build major anti-racist movements and ensure that the right to freedom of movement is not abandoned. The project for the left cannot be to "recoup popular and national sovereignty" - this is to fight on the terrain of the right - but a struggle for a socialist world.

Nonetheless, this is an important book. It exposes the reality of the EU in an accessible and fresh style. Because it focuses on Greece it was missing further analysis of the EU's role in Ireland, Portugal and Spain. But the left lacks an understanding of what the EU is and who it serves and Costas Lapavitsas's book is an important contribution to finding clarity.

Related Reviews

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Michael D. Yates - Can the Working Class Change the World?

I started reading this book the day that news arrived from Brazil that the extreme right-wing Jair Bolsonaro had been elected President. It made me reflect how the failure of left-projects that fail to challenge the capitalist state can open the door to right-wing and fascist politicians that will decimate the working classes and their institutions.

To start at the end, in his conclusion, Michael D. Yates notes that the "working class must change the world. There really no choice." This short book is thus dedicated to not only explaining why the working class has the power to change the world, but showing that there are no other forces in society that can bring about fundamental change. In a world where the far-right is on the ascendancy and we are threatened by economic crisis and environmental catastrophe the lessons are obvious to all.

Yates returns to the core of Marx's ideas to show the central role of the working class under capitalism. Capitalism requires workers to make profits - they create the surplus value that the bosses need to make their profits and to keep the system growing. But Yates also shows how the bosses need to continually attack workers in order to maximise their profits in a competitive system. This means a continual fight over working conditions, wages and our societies. The system, Yates points out systematically destroys those who labour for it:

[This] takes the form of an assault on the body and mind of the labourer, relentless and unending. Throughout the history of capitalism and in every country, most workers have been and are rendered at least partially incapacitated after a lifetime of toil.

Capitalism doesn't simply destroy the worker, or the peasant, but also ravages the planet in its quest for profits:

Land, water, even air, are made into commodities that can be bought and sold, again creating new arenas for accumulation. The social costs of capital's abuse of nature is typically borne by workers and peasants. They live where air pollution is worst, where the soil has been most degraded. They drink contaminated water... When floods, hurricanes and droughts, caused and exacerbated by capitalist-induced global warming, descend upon humanity the least of us suffer the most.

The question remains then, why does the mass of the population accept this state of affairs? A tiny minority live on the backs of the masses - so why does capitalism survive? Yates shows how capitalism has a number of ways of protecting its interests. Firstly the use of brute force - the police and army - to undermine protest, strikes and revolution. Secondly Yates puts great emphasis on the role of education in creating a pliable workforce that accepts the status quo and is ready to work for capital. Thirdly there are all sorts of in built aspects to capitalism that turn worker against worker, undermining the unity that is required to beat the bosses. Yates writes:

A racial and patriarchal capitalism generated fundamental splits in the working class, and these have been among the most critical impediments to class unity. Objectively , a working class exist, but this does not mean that its members are conscious of their capacity to disrupt production and the system itself.

While I agree with Yates' argument here, I thought it could have been developed further. One Marxist who isn't mentioned is the Italian Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci showed how workers have contradictory consciousness - they can hold both backward and progressive ideas at the same time. Because capitalism brings workers together and forces them into a class struggle, the backward ideas are constantly challenged and progressive ideas can develop further. In a recent strike by 8000 Glasgow care workers, almost all of whom are women, 400 male rubbish collectors refused to cross their picket lines. Many, if not most, of those men would have held sexist ideas, but they did not break the strike because they understood the need for class unity - in doing so they would also have found their own ideas about women challenged.

Yates points out how capitalism stokes racism and misogyny etc to divide workers, but it also creates the conditions when they can be over-come, particularly if workers are organised in trade unions and political parties that challenge these ideas systematically.

In this framework I also slightly disagree with Yates' comments on migration which he seemed to suggest (in the context of the collapse of the Eastern European regimes) weakens the working class. Yates writes:

The exodus [from the former Eastern Bloc] of people seeking employment wherever they might find it provided cheap labour in the Global North. Thus, the working classes everywhere were weakened.

The danger here is to blame migrants for driving down wages, when it is precisely the capitalists, through the mechanisms that Yates' highlights that use division to undermine working class unity. But recent years in the UK have also shown that despite very high levels of racism towards refugees and migrants from the press and politicians, large numbers of people have shown solidarity - either joining protests or, in far greater numbers, giving to refugee charities.

Yates is writing mainly from a US perspectives so readers in Europe and elsewhere will find that some of his discussions are specific to the US situation, though there are many parallels. I cannot but agree with his calls to improve democracy within the trade union movement, or to increase the amount of education the unions have for their members against homophobia, sexism and racism; as well as the history of the movement.

But sometimes I think there are too many generalisations. For instance, Yates says that "unions have proven unable to reverse the impact of neo-liberalism". But I would phrase this differently, and argue that in most countries (I'm especially thinking of here in the UK) the union movement hasn't fought the type of battle that could have ended neo-liberalism or even austerity. I'm thinking of the swift calling off of the 2011 public sector strikes that could easily have put the British government on the back foot over austerity, but were undermined by a section of the union leadership.

And while I agree that social democracy (reformism) has been severely weakened, I don't think Yates is right to say that "Social Democracy has been thoroughly defeated in Great Britain". In fact quite the opposite. Corbyn's election and the massive growth of the Labour Party has seen a huge resurgence in reformist ideas and the rebirth of Labour as a vehicle for social democracy - something that provides big challenges for those of us in the Marxist left outside the Party.

I do think that there is a missing section though which is crucially linked to the question of working class power - which is the need for independent, Marxist, revolution organisation based in the working class. Yates ably shows that workers simply fighting will not lead to the defeat of capitalism - in fact capital can cope with even significant resistance (not the large number of general strikes in Greece for instance). The working class needs clear, principled political leadership - not in a vanguard sense, but in the sense of the best militants being grouped together to try and shape a struggle against the system. I still think that the lessons of the Bolshevik party in Russia in the early 20th century are key to understanding this role.

If this review seems like a list of criticisms, that's because I've focused on sections that I have differences with. There are many other stimulating and positive aspects to this short book. For instance I was struck how it, unlike many others of its type, discusses the crucial role of the peasantry and landless workers, and does not neglect the question of the environment. I didn't always initially agree with what Yates wrote about the former Soviet bloc, China or Cuba, but I found his arguments interesting and informative. I also got a great deal out of the US perspective - particularly Yates comments on struggles against oppression such as Black Lives Matter. At a time when radical left-wing ideas are needed more than ever, a book with the title Can the Working Class Change the World? will undoubtedly get a big readership and I hope that those readers are stimulated as much as I was to think through these important questions.

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Nur Masalha - Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History

The Israeli state's war against the Palestinians is a travesty that continues to anger millions of people around the globe. Every atrocity that hits the news can be guaranteed in Britain to provoke protests that call for justice for the Palestinian people. Jeremy Corbyn's ongoing support for the Palestinians has meant that the question of Zionism - the ideology behind the founding of the Israeli state in 1948 - has become a major issue for the left and the Labour Party, as right-wing enemies of Corbyn seek to undermine him by portraying opposition to Zionism as the same as Antisemitism. I reject that equation and believe that socialists must show full solidarity with the Palestinian people, combined with an absolute rejection of antisemitism and all forms of bigotry and racism.

Nur Masalha's new book is an important contribution to our understanding of the history of the region. As Masalha argues, this history is contested and differing understandings of that history have been deployed by both the British colonial powers and the Israeli state since 1948.

Masalha writes in his introduction that:

Some Arab writers and artists promoting the political and national cause of Palestine or pan-Arabism create meta-narratives to depict Palestinian national identity or Arab nationalism as being more ancient that they actually are. Moreover, until the advent of anachronistic European political Zionism at the turn of the 20th century the people of Palestine...included Arab Muslims, Arab Christians and Arab Jews. Being a rendering of the Israeli Zionist/Palestinian conflict, historically speaking the binary of Arab versus Jew in Palestine is deeply misleading.

Masalha continues a few pages later to argue that "the Zionist liberal coloniser has often sought to combine 'settler-colonisation' with 'democracy' - two contradictory projects - and this tendency has in recent decade contributed to the emergence of the 'New Histories' of Israel." This new history, however, is a continuation of the process of hiding the real history of the region and Palestine itself.

The book begins with a detailed examination of the notion of "Palestine" from the bronze-age onwards. Masalha traces the origins of the term Palestine and shows, at different points, how it has been used by contemporaries to identify a place and a people. This contrasts, he argues, with ideological histories that base themselves in biblical texts, and have been used to undermine or subsume Palestinian history into an "invented tradition". For instance, Masalha explains that there is "no material history or archaeological or empirical evidence" for the 'Kingdom of David'. Nor, for instance, despite the systematic exploration and excavation of Egypt, is there any evidence for the Old Testament story of Moses "leading the 'Israelite tribes' from Egypt to 'Cana'an'." Indeed the name Cana'an is itself a "late literary construct". In contrast,

Palestine was the name used most commonly, consistently and continuously for over 1200 years throughout classical and Late Antiquity, from the highlight of classical Athenian civilisation in 500 BC until the end of the Byzantine period and the occupation of Palestine by the Muslim armies in 637-638 AD.

Despite the book's title, there is not a great deal of day-to-day history here. Instead Masalha studies the concept of Palestine, how it is discussed and understood by contemporaries. He cites many accounts, from different authors of many different backgrounds to show how Palestine has existed historically. All this is an important backdrop to the final third of the book which looks at the way that Palestine in the colonial period has been used and then denigrated. Masalha writes that the

English Industrial Revolution of the 18th century and rise of European capitalism impacted on the economy of Palestine directly and profoundly. These new forces also contributed to the reorientation of Palestine towards Europe and creation of a new political economy and statehood in mid-18th century Palestine.

But with British colonial rule came divide and rule. In contrast to the earlier, "fluid" boundaries in Jerusalem, for instance, "separating the lives of Palestinian Christians, Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Muslims", Masalha quotes one historian Salim Tamari writing about Jerusalem that the "quarter system signalling the division of the Old City into confessional bounded domains was introduced and imposed retroactively on the city by British colonial regulations."

Masalha shows how it was the support by the most powerful colonial power of the time for Zionist plans that made them mainstream. This was done, Masalha argues, out of a combination of colonial and domestic interests on the part of the British.

Few British politicians cared about Jewish people or their history. Many were openly antisemitic and wanted to encourage Jews to leave Europe. Others were religious evangelicals. But all were motivated primarily by a need to strengthen Britain's imperial project. To make it work they had to create a racist myth that denied the Palestinians their history and even their existence. Lord Shaftesbury, Chairman of the Palestine Exploration Fund said, in an oft repeated phrase, that Palestine was "a country without a people" for "a people without a country". Shaftesbury was a key figure in "biblical restorationism" and politicians like him believed that a "'Jewish Palestine' would be convenient for a British protectorate there along the main route to India". The motivation by the British was not out of altruism for Jews facing pogroms and racism, but to protect their imperial interests.

The creation of the Israeli state in 1948 in the aftermath of the Holocaust and World War Two was accompanied by the systematic destruction of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages. New settlements were created on the ruins, and Masalha describes the ways that places were renamed as part of a creation of identity. As the author writes, "this massive appropriation of Palestinian heritage provided support for the European Jewish colonisers' claim to represent an indigenous people returning to its homeland after 200 years of exile." Later Masalha argues that this creation of a historical identity is key to the contemporary ideology of the Israeli state, "the treatment of the cultural heritage of Palestine as a tool for Zionist settler purposes is central to Israeli educational policies, the Israeli biblical academy and the Israeli government's renaming projects."

Masalha clearly demonstrates the way that the history of Palestine, a history where Jews, Arabs, Christians and others lived together peacefully for long periods of time, has been ignored, erased and destroyed in the interests of the modern Israeli state. This is detailed history that restores the forgotten past in the interests of a more just future for everyone, from all backgrounds and religions, in the Middle East.

I do however want to note a couple of minor problems. Firstly the book is difficult to follow in places, primarily because there are no maps which makes it hard to understand where various places are, particularly as names change frequently. I hope the publishers amend this for the paperback. Secondly in many places Masalha has included multiple examples to prove his argument, often leading to several pages of bullet pointed comments that are tiresome to read and unnecessary.

Those criticisms aside, this is an important work of history that has great contemporary relevance. I hope it is widely read and discussed.

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