Erica Chenoweth & Maria J. Stephan - Why Civil Resistance Works

The question of non-violent social change has once again become a major focus of discussion within social movements, in particular because Extinction Rebellion in Britain have argued that non-violent civil disobedience is the only viable strategy to force governments to enact the changes that will enable society to reach zero-carbon by 2025.

In their theory Extinction Rebellion have placed central importance on the work of Erica Chenoweth, an academic and researcher at, among other places, the Peace Research Institute of Oslo. Why Civil Resistance Works is her most significant publication, jointly written and researched with Maria J. Stephan a "strategic planner with the US Department of State". In the book the authors attempt to show how and why non-violent civil resistance works and argue that no other form of action is as successful.

As a revolutionary socialist I must admit to beginning the book expecting to significantly disagree. This is not because socialists favour violence above all else, but because the crude summaries of Chenoweth's work that I had heard and read, mostly in the new British environmental movements, had led me to be sceptical. While I finished the book unconvinced of the authors' arguments I found them much more nuanced that expected, and there is material here that is both important and interesting.

The authors' central argument is quite straightforward: "The most striking finding is that between 1900 and 2006, nonviolent resistance campaigns were nearly twice as likely to achieve full or partial success as their violent counterparts." Their detailed statistical arguments show that:

Among the 323 campaigns, in the case of anti-regime resistance campaigns, the use of a nonviolent strategy has greatly enhanced the likelihood of success. Among campaigns with a territorial objectives, like anti-occupation or self-determination, nonviolent campaigns also have a slight advantage. Among the few cases of major resistance that do not fall into either category (anti-apartheid campaigns, for instance), non-violent resistance as had the monopoly on success. The only exception is that nonviolent resistance leads to successful secession less often than violent insurgency.

It is important to note that the authors do not claim that non-violent resistance always wins, or that violent campaigns don't/can't win. They argue that non-violent strategies are most often successful.

The main explanation they have for this is that "non-violent campaigns have a participation advantage". In other words, it is harder to get people involved in campaigns (eg terrorism) that are likely to lead to their death or injury. Also non-violent strategies tend to create moral situations which encourage participation, or help to portray the opponent as amoral, particularly if the respond with violence. Finally, it can be harder (though by no means impossible) for an enemy to unleash violence on a non-violent campaign. The consequences of this, the authors write, is that mass non-violent campaigns can create the sort of situations that are likely to win - encouraging foreign support, encouraging regime supporters to break away, or helping to turn soldiers or the police onto the side of the protesters.

The authors then continue by arguing that not only are non-violent campaigns more likely to succeed, but that the "transitions that occur in the wake of successful non-violent resistance movements create much more durable and internally peaceful democracies than transitions provoked by violent insurgencies".

None of this is particularly surprising or disagreeable. I also, for fear of seeing crude critiques of Chenoweth and Stephan follow from this review, want to note that they do highlight situations where there are differences to their general case. For instance, they write, "It is worth noting that there are some important deviations from our assumption that violence campaigns attract only limited numbers of participation" and continue by listing the Russian, Chinese, Algerian, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions.

So what did I think? Well I think there are a few issues that arise from the book. Firstly the question of violence itself. Often campaigns and movements adopt non-violent strategies for moral reasons. But the violence that Chenoweth and Stephan talk about is usually terrorist or guerrilla warfare. They aren't really considering situations where a few windows get broken as part of a much bigger demonstration, or where during a mass, non-violent protest strike or stay-away, a group of protesters might injure or kill a policeman. In fact, in many cases, the authors note that these sort of incidents did occur but class the movements as non-violent.

The problem is that most contemporary movements that argue for these strategies are not arguing against terrorism as a strategy, but arguing that no sort of violence is permitted - which can lead to problems when, for instance, understanding the role of the police, or considering whether to resist arrest. This isn't a criticism of this book, but of some of those who claim to follow its teachings.

Aims

Secondly we have the question of aims. The book has four major case studies that it examines to understand the authors' thesis practically - the First Intifada (1987), the Iranian Revolution (1979), the Burmese Uprising (1988) and the Philippine People Power Movement (1983-186). The case studies are themselves quite interesting. But they are limited. For instance, despite the close arguments of the authors I struggle to see the First Intifada as a non-violent movement, though I appreciate it was much more than stone-throwing. Secondly the discussion of the Iranian Revolution focuses on the movement that ousted the Shah, but neglects the role of mass workers movements in almost reaching a point when the question of workers' state power was on the cards.

In fact, when it comes to aims, the authors really judge success through the lens of bourgeois democracy. So the First Intifada is considered a partial success because it led to the recognition of the Palestinian Authority, despite the fact that the Israeli occupation still continues today and that Palestinians are still violently oppressed. The Iranian Revolution was a success because it brought down the Shah, but what came afterwards was hardly a victory for the oppressed masses. Other classic non-violent movements such as the American Civil Rights movement and the anti-Apartheid movement are considered successful, despite the ongoing existence of state racism in the United States and the extremely unequal reality of contemporary South Africa (indeed their active violence against workers).

The case study of the Iranian Revolution is also of interest because the authors make clear that it was the very possibility of the use of violence against the old order that helped the new regime to victory. As they themselves note the Ayatollah almost issued a declaration of Holy War, but stopped short.

Thirdly I think the approach of the authors that "the way a transition occurs predicts the way that the new regime will rule". Here the obvious example is the Russian Revolution, which they decry as a violent movement whose violence originated with the revolutionaries. They note the civil war that followed, but this was, of course, caused by the intervention of the old bourgeois order and the imperial armies of the capitalist nations who wanted to crush socialism as quickly as possible.

The problem is that the authors are not considering the sort of movement that can end capitalism. In order for that to take place, the capitalist state must be defeated. While it is certainly true that powerful mass movements and strikes can lead a movement to the point when the question of state power is in the balance, these are not enough to actually seize state power. That will require the use of force (though we should note that this is not the same as violence). The insurrection of October 1917 was relatively bloodless in Petrograd because of the scale and discipline of the movement. This was not as true in Moscow where the Bolsheviks were not as embedded in the working class. But the violence of the revolutionary year of 1917 arose, by and large, out of attempts to limit or stop revolution - though it should be said that centuries of oppression and exploitation did mean that when the workers and peasants rose, unsurprisingly they did enact revenge.

It is entirely possible to bring down governments, end unjust laws, or enact change through movements that are non-violent. But the key thing here is not actually non-violence, but a mass movement, particularly one where the economic power of workers is deployed through strikes and stay-aways to undermine the existing authorities (I was very pleased that the authors repeatedly note the importance of strikes). An attitude of non-violence on the part of the movements can help to encourage participation, but fetishising it can undermine the movement when violence is deployed against it. If the question of state power is to be considered, then non-violence will not be enough.

In conclusion then, I found this book stimulating in its discussion of social movements, but limited because its authors saw change solely through the prism of bourgeois democracy. Though I am never convinced that applying mathematical models to such movements is viable. They also rarely discussed the type of single-issue movements that their main exponents today are part of. In fact, when considering the battle to stop environmental destruction today, the question of state power is very pertinent. Everywhere fossil capitalism survives with the support of the capitalist state. Getting to zero-carbon by 2025 means challenging the state. But as Leon Trotsky wrote in his writings on Britain, the question of state power is one that inevitably brings with it the question of force:

In preparing to take state power it is thus necessary to prepare for all the consequences that flow from the inevitable resistance of the possessing classes. It must be firmly understood: if a truly workers' government came to power in Britain even in an ultra-democratic way, civil war would become unavoidable. The workers' government would be forced to suppress the resistance of the privileged classes... A truly Labour government, that is to say, a government dedicated to the end to the interests of the proletariat would find itself in this way compelled to smash the old state apparatus as the instrument of the possessing classes and oppose it with workers' councils. That means that the democratic origin of the Labour government... would lead to the necessity of counterposing revolutionary class force to the reactionary opposition.

Addendum

Extinction Rebellion and other activists make much of a figure from Erica Chenoweth that says that movements that involve 3.5 percent of a population in a sustained non-violent campaign fail. This conclusion is not in this book, but is based on further study of the data that the book is based on. You can read more on that here.

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Doug Enaa Greene - Communist Insurgent: Blanqui's Politics of Revolution

The struggle against capitalism has thrown up many radicals and revolutionaries. Some of them have been a adventurers who've been prepared to risk everything for fame and glory. Among these is often included the name of Louis-Auguste Blanqui an alleged reckless insurgent who would risk anything and everyone in the name of revolution. So it is excellent that Doug Greene has written this recent biography of Blanqui rescuing his name from such crude distortions.

Blanqui was born in the aftermath of the Great French Revolution. But the legacy of that Revolution had been squandered and a new generation of radicals were looking to transform the world anew. New socialist ideas were developing, but these new formed theories had yet to crystallise into a ideology that could help the working class transform the world. Blanqui own ideas developed in the context of growing discontent with society, but he was not one to simply accept the idealism of early socialist thinkers. He railed against Utopian socialists:

No one has access to the secret of the future. Scarcely possible for even the most clairvoyant are certain presentiments, rapid glimpses, a vague and fugitive coup d'oeil. The Revolution alone will reveal the horizon, will gradually remove the veils and up the roads, or rather the multiple paths that lead to the new order. Those who pretend to have in their pocket a complete map of this unknown land - they truly are the madmen.

The early years of the 19th century in France saw the development of new social forces. The old artisans were gradually being replaced by workers in factories. This process would take many decades to complete, but these workers increasingly organised major struggles that showed their power. Two major uprisings in Lyon in 1831 and 1834 demonstrated this, and Greene argues that Blanqui would take the old revolutionary Jacobin tradition and "renew and radicalise republicanism by orienting it to the working class".

From this point Blanqui increasingly develops a more revolutionary socialism that argues"there is a war to the death between the classes that compose the nation". The July 1830 Revolution had, Blanqui thought, had seen the people drive forward against the old order, but only to see a new oppression, as Blanqui wrote:

The people were the victors. And then another terror seized them [the bourgeois[, more profound and oppressive. Farewell dreams of Charter, of legality, of constitutional royalty, of the exclusive domination of the bourgeoisie... You can see that during these days, when the people were do grand, the bourgeois were tied up between two fears, that of Charles X in the first place and then that of the workers.

The new emerging capitalist class wanted to break free of the last chains of the old feudal order but were held back by their fear of the workers power. The compromise would last till 1848 but for Blanqui it solidified a harder revolutionary understanding. Blanqui became involved (or setup) a series of radical underground organisations. Some of these were shaped by old ideas that came from the earlier period of radicalism. The Society of Families, for instance, was dominated by what Greene describes as reflecting "the Jacobin concept of the people with more than half being artisans, property owners, shopkeepers and intellectuals." Blanqui did not see this as a problem:

The bourgeoisie contains an elite minority, an indestructible phalanx - enthusiastic, zealous, ardent: this is the essence, the life, the soul and the spirit of the Revolution. It is from this incandescent core that ideas of reform or renewal incessantly arise, like little bursts of flame that ignite the population... Who leads the people into combat against the bourgeoisie? Members of the bourgeoisie.

So while Blanqui saw workers as essential to successful revolution, it would be led by a minority of the bourgeoisie who had come over the side of revolution. Sadly the strategy repeatedly failed. Greene documents some of these failed attempts at uprisings. On May 12 1839 for instance, Blanqui's forces tried to lead a revolutionary uprising in Paris. No one rallied to the flag. Greene writes:

Blanqui had expected that a single heroic strike would awaken the revolutionary elan of the workers, and this would spread the revolt across Paris. Instead the Parisian population watched in confusion... and they took no part in it. This was the fatal flaw in Blanqui's conception of revolution: the masses played no role in liberating themselves.

Blanqui was certainly no coward and he paid for his revolutionary beliefs with many years in prison - years of hardship that almost killed him. He never lost his revolutionary politics though and continued to develop his ideas of revolutionary organisation. Certainly one thing that socialists can all agree with is Blanqui's assertion that "Organisation is victory; dispersion is death". The problem is, of course, what that organisation does and why.

What Blanqui was not able to understand was that revolution is an event in which the working class is absolutely central. Workers are not a stage army, marched on at an appropriate time to display their power. Rather they are a force that will, through their own organisation, smash the old order and create a new one. This will, as Marx pointed out, lead to the transformation of both society and the workers, who throw off the "muck of ages". This was not to dismiss the importance of revolutionary organisation, but to give that organisation a specific role shaping and develop the movement, not substituting for it.

Certainly Blanqui was unable to break his faith in old forms of organising. By the mid part of the 18th century underground secret conspiracy was no longer necessary nor desirable. In fact, Blanqui's insistence on such forms of organising arguably left him unable to sense the mood of the masses or in a position to shape their struggles. It is tragically notable that Blanqui was captured and imprisoned on the eve of the outbreak of the Revolution of the Paris Commune in 1871. Interestingly the ruling class understood exactly this and refused to release Blanqui in exchange for even the most important prisoners of the Commune. While Blanqui himself failed to understand the Commune as illustrative of a new stage of struggle (he tended to compare it back to the Paris Commune of 1792), his enemies understood that where he at its head he would have brought a clarity to its revolutionary leadership that the Commune sorely lacked. Such a testimony is perhaps the greatest compliment that Blanqui could ever receive.

How should we understand Blanqui nearly 140 years after his death? It is easy, as many have done, to simply critique his vision of revolution being down to a few inspired leaders. But Blanqui was a revolutionary of his time, and if he failed to develop his organisational ideas with a changing and evolving situation, he was hardly the first or the last. The Paris Commune of 1871 led to Karl Marx transforming his own vision of revolution. Since then revolutionaries have been able to build on a nearly 150 years of experience of mass workers organisations and struggles. Blanqui did not have that luxury, but he, at least, never gave up on the dream. Doug Greene concludes by pointing out that

Marxists such as Lenin, Luxembourg and Trotsky agreed with Marx's criticism of Blanqui, but they recognised that when their opponents condemned them a 'Blanquists' it was not because they actually were... it was not because they shared Blanqui's vices, but because they upheld his virtues - his willingness to struggle against the odds, treating insurrection as an art, and his uncompromising revolutionary communism.

This short biography has much of value, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in French history. More importantly it is extremely valuable for socialists today who are trying, often in difficult circumstances, to build, or rebuild mass revolutionary organisation. In the 21st century capitalism offers poverty, environmental disaster, economic crisis and the prospect of war. Understanding how we can stop that means learning the lessons of our revolutionary history. While Blanqui's ideas are dated and misconceived, we can still learn from his failures and mistakes in order to be victorious in the future.

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Brett Christophers - The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain

One of the things that has made Jeremy Corbyn a popular Labour politician over the last few years has been his commitment to renationalise those industries that were privatised by previous Tory and Labour governments.

But what was the biggest of these privatisations? Brett Christophers shows that it is the one that no-one has ever heard of - the privatisation of public land. He goes on to argue that this has had far reaching consequences that have big implications for society. Let's note the scale of this privatisation.

Since Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street in 1979, and continuing all the way to the present day, the state has been selling public land to the private sector. It has sold vast quantities - some 2 million hectares, or about 10 per cent of the entire British land mass.... my best estimate... is that, at today's prices, the land that has been sold is likely to be worth something in the order of £400 billion, or the equivalent of more than twelve RBSs [the bank privatised following it's government bailout in 2008].

This staggering sell-off has gone almost unnoticed, even by those academics and activists who write and campaign about privatisation. This is surprising not simply because of the scale of the privatisation, but because, as Christophers points out, "one cannot grasp actually existing patterns of socioeconomic inequality without factoring in landownership." Owning land, grants a number of things onto the owner - income, usually in the form of rent is the most obvious, but Christophers argues, more importantly land ownership,

also confers a set of powers of much more far-reaching scope: namely, to play a meaningful part in shaping the economic, social and ecological development of communities, regions and even nations. This is not just a question of power, but also of privilege.

It is not surprising then that even before the neo-liberal era began with Thatcher's election, the question of public land was already being discussed. Nor is it surprising that Thatcher and those who followed in her footsteps were keen to facilitate the selling off of land in order to grant that power and privilege to their wealthy friends in big-business.

The first section of Christophers book is a study of various attempts to understand land ownership in the context of capitalism. He draws heavily on the ideas of Karl Marx, Adam Smith and more recent authors like Karl Polanyi and David Harvey to explore this. One of his interesting conclusions is that public land is good for capitalism. He quotes Allen Scott who says, [public ownership of urban land is]... a collectively rational and necessary response within capitalism to the prevailing patter of fragmented, dispersed and privatised landownership... to ensure the achievement of he overriding capitalistic goal of unhindered expansion of the bases of commodity production". But neo-liberalism is anything but rational when looked at in wider context of society.

At the start of the Thatcher era, public landownership was at an all time high. The public sector, with organisations such as the Ministry of Defence or the Forestry Commission, owned "as much as a fifth of all British land." Sections of the civil service and the Tory Party had been sowing the ground for this moment. The concept of "surplus land" had been created, the idea that the public sector, particularly local government, had lots of land that was unused, and being hoarded. The very existence of this "surplus land" was holding society back and it should be freed up. The concept continues up until today. In 2014, the Tory MP Mark Prisk moaned that "the public sector is continuing to hoard surplus land and buildings".

But the consequence of the massive sell off of land is actually that the private sector has ended up being the real hoarders. To sweeten the sell-off of land (often done as part of wider privatisations such as railway or NHS sell offs) various governments have promised that the land will be used for house-building. The reality is that little has actually been used for this and much land remains held by private companies who are speculating in land, or getting improvements (like planning permission) so they can make a profitable sale even though nothing has been built.

The story of land privatisation is closely tied up with the story of the sell-off of council homes. Space precludes a detailed discussion of this here. But the sell-off of these homes to private business has ended up reducing the availability of housing for the poorest in society. One quoted report from December 2015 shows that "Britain's biggest house-builders owned enough land to build more than 600,000 new homes." Few of these are actually likely to be built as these companies build slowly to maximise profits by keeping demand, and hence prices, up.

Post 2008 austerity politics has made the situation worse. Governments have encouraged local authorities to sell off land to help pay for front-line services starved of cash (though they've only been able to do this explicitly since 2016). At the same time it is extremely difficult for LAs to buy land and use it for social needs because they are not on a level playing field with private sector, which as Christophers points out, is why golf courses cover ten times more land than local authorities. 

Christophers concludes that the consequence of the self off of public land has been to help transform British society into a rentier economy, as well as increase "social dislocation" and business "land hoarding". A small number of multinationals and individuals have made vast amounts of money from this process. This is no surprise. If you turn public land into a commodity than the capitalists will treat it like one, and that never benefits the majority of society.

I didn't expect to be cheered by Brett Christophers book. It is yet another insight into how successive governments have destroyed wider society through prioritising the economic interests of big business. But I did find it a really insightful book that demonstrated exactly how thought through the strategy of privatisation was and how the selling off of assets like land has helped to create the disenfranchised, economically depressed and atomised societies of today. The solutions are less obvious, but surely will begin with a future government quickly reversing privatisations and clawing back the land and other resources that were sold off. That will not be an easy process as those corporations will want to hold on to the wealth they've taken from us. Brett Christophers book tells us exactly why reversing the "new enclosure" is an urgent and necessary task.

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Barry Commoner - The Closing Circle

Imagine a book that is written by a left wing scientist who is actively engaged in work with non-scientists to challenge environmental degradation. Imagine it is written in an engaging style, that explains complex ecological arguments clearly. The book highlights the impact of our economic system on the environment and how that then impacts negatively back on us. It challenges other popular explanations for environmental destruction - over-population and consumerism for instance, because it emphasises the way that the profit motive and the blind accumulation of wealth under capitalism destroys our ecosystems. This book offers a radical, but straightforward solution to contemporary environmental problems, but warns that without rapid and urgent action to transform the economy, humanity will find itself in a dangerous place. Its a book written to inspire collective action and social change through informed, politically engaged, social movements of citizens.

Its a book that could have been written today, but here I'm referring to a book first published in 1971 by Barry Commoner. In the 1970s The Closing Circle was a radical antidote to much of what passed for comment on what we now see as the first wave of environmental concern. But in finishing it I was filled with an, albeit brief, feeling of despair. For almost fifty years we've understood how capitalism is destroying our ecological systems and many people (Commoner's book was a best-seller at the time) understood exactly what was needed; but the environment is still being destroyed in the name of short-term profit.

Commoner begins with an overview of the science of ecology. He argues that one of the problems in trying to understand environmental destruction is that most scientists approach the issue in a reductionist way. Reductionism he explains, is "the view that effective understanding of a complex system can be achieved by investigating the properties of its isolated parts", but this is "not an effective means of analysing the vast natural systems that are threatened by degradation".

In contrast, and in possibly his most famous contribution, Commoner offers the reader four laws of Ecology. His first law, everything is connected to everything else, immediately shows why a reductionist approach is wrong. The second, everything must go somewhere is almost a restatement of the first law of thermodynamics, but applied to substances, rather than energy it points out how everything put into a system has an effect. His third law, nature knows best, is in my opinion his weakest argument. Commoner says himself it's the one that will get the most "resistance" because it "contradict[s] a deeply held idea about he unique competence of human beings". For me this isn't the problem - the real issue is that nature doesn't "know" anything. It operates and acts, but not in any conscious way. To be fair to Commoner he is making a wider point that biological entities and systems are the result of millennia of evolution, and that outside changes effect them negatively. Finally there is no such thing as a free lunch is both a return to thermodynamics and the obvious point that additions to systems are required for changes. Commoner puts it better than me:

Because the global ecosystem is a connected whole, in which nothing can be gained or lost and which is not subject to over-all improvement, anything extracted from it by human effort must be replaced. Payment of the price cannot be avoided; it can only delayed.

Using this framework, Commoner examines how post-war society destroyed the environment. He makes the same point that any serious observer of the capitalist economy highlights: "all modern economic systems are designed to grow by means of such self-generated expansion". While not a Marxist he was clearly aware of Marx's writings and in several places like this has either borrowed or independently come to similar conclusions. Writing about agriculture he argues that "once removed from this [ecological] cycle, for example to a city... bodily wastes are not returned to the soil but to surface water, the human population is separated from the ecosystem of which it was original a part". Marx, famously, used exactly this to develop his idea of a metabolic rift between society and nature in his own work.

Several contemporary environmental issues take up some space here - the question of smog, air and water-pollution and potential consequences of sonic booms from supersonic aircraft. In each case he demonstrates how these arise (and exponentially grow) out of the particular changes to the US Economy in the post-war period. I was, here, reminded on several occasions of discussions around the Anthropocene and locating its start in the same period. But what was special about this period according to Commoner. Firstly he makes his position clear:

I believe that the [environmental] crisis is not the outcome of a natural catastrophe or of the misdirected force of human biological activists. The earth is polluted neither because man is some kind of especially dirty animal nor because there are too many of us. The fault lies with human society - with the ways in which society has elected to win, distribute and use the wealth that has been extracted by human labour from the planet's resources.

The quest for profit, in Commoner's view, leads to the adoption of technologies that maximise profit and usually do so, he argues, at the expense of the environment: "There is evidence that a high rate of profit is associated with practices hat are particularly stressful toward the environment and that when these practices are restricted, profits decline."

While Commoner associates socialism with countries like the USSR, and notes their own environmental problems, he does also argue that a planned economy would allow societies to deal with the consequences of environmental destruction far better than an anarchic capitalist one. More importantly Commoner notes that Marx's theory (the ideology behind socialism as he says) certainly does envisage a society in balance with the natural world. Commoner's own solutions are based around fiddling with the economy to make environmental consequences part of the costs of production. But Commoner is very clear that it is the specific nature of capitalism as it stands that is the problem. Solving the issue, he says, does not mean

the people of industrialised nations will need to give up their 'affluence' as judged by conventional measures... is itself an illusion. To a considerable extent it reflects ecologically faulty, socially wasteful types of production rather than the actual welfare of individual human beings. Therefore, the needed productive reforms can be carried out without seriously reducing the present level of useful goods available to the individual.

He continues:

There are, however certain luxuries which the environmental crisis... will I believe force us to give up. These are the political luxuries which have so long been enjoyed by those who can benefit from them: the luxury of allowing the wealth of the natural to serve preferentially the interests of so few of its citizens... etc.

It is thus a specifically revolutionary alternative Commoner is offering, as it is one that challenges the very dynamics of the capitalist system. Commoner is clear on the need for an informed mass environmental movement. In fact some of the most interesting historical bits of The Closing Circle are those that show how scientists like Commoner and citizen movements have won real environmental changes.

Reading Barry Commoner's book I wished I had read it years ago. For many of those reading it in the 1970s it must have been inspiring. By rooting his understanding of the contemporary environmental crisis in both ecological science and a radical critique of capitalist society his work is inspiring. He also makes it clear that solving the problem required an urgent struggle for change. Sadly that did not happen, and fifty years later the environmental crisis has reached an acute point. One that Barry Commoner warned us would raise the very survival of humanity. It isn't too late to act, though time is now very short, and works like The Closing Circle remain an important contribution to our understanding of the struggle we need.

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Danny Dorling - Population 10 Billion

Far too many books on population are filled with fearful predictions about what will happen if the world's population continues to grow. So it is refreshing to read Danny Dorling's much more sober study that argues for a more nuanced discussion of the subject. It is also entertaining, something that can rarely be said about demographic studies. Dorling sets his case out early on. In the opening introductory chapter titled "Stop Worrying" he argues that he problem is not over-population, or population growth, but a world that prevents people having what they need. Talking of 2011/2012 when population was predicted to reach 9.1 billion by 2100 he writes:

The main reason for the scare stories of 2011 and 2012 was that some demographers had been influenced by those with other agendas, people who were becoming interested in demography because they believed there were too many people already. Projections that indicate a 'soft landing' of human population growth do not help the agenda of those who want to cry wolf. As the world economy faltered in 2008, there were groups that wanted to put the blame for the fact there would be too little to go round in future on there being too many people, rather than not enough sharing.

As I've noted in other recent reviews on books about demography, there is a close association between the growth of global capitalism and population expansion. Dorling shows 1851 as the start of the "population explosion" but he argues that 1971 (ironically the year when Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb was first published in the UK) as being the point when population when "global population acceleration... ended". In keeping with the "Stop Worrying" theme, Dorling argues:

The latest UN projections suggest that in the 14 years following 2011, we will increase in number from seven to eight billion humans. What king of world can we expect to live in by 2025?... Look at the graphs in this book of where population growth is forecast to occur - almost all the extra people are to be born where pollution by humans is least. And notice the deceleration. It is going to take longer, another 14 years, to add this extra billion as compared to the billion that came before. This is the first time we have ever seen an increase in the number of years it has taken to hit the next billion.

Dorling puts an firm case against those who argue that population growth is the problem and that we need to take drastic action to lower population. Instead, Dorling argues, the problem is inequality in wealth distribution: "There is suddenly a very obvious solution to a rich world plagued with greed and obesity and a poor world suffering oppression and starvation, a solution that is only possible because we are not going to have additional billions to be fed decade after decade.

He also argues that population growth will decline quicker if we "tackle gross economic inequalities". He also skewers those on the right who rail against immigration and migration. Rather than this being a problem, it is enormously  important for ageing populations in the developed world, and, he notes, encourages global population to decline because immigrants to rich countries have smaller families.

This facts are important because they contradict those on the right who argue population is inevitably growing to the detriment of the plant. It also gives anti-racists further arguments to defend migrants, immigrants and asylum seekers. But I'm not sure it's the best way to approach the debate because it gives some ground to the idea that population is an issue. Here, in my criticism I should reiterate how much I agree with 99 percent of Dorling's book. He says, for instance, "Children are not a cost to the planet". This is a fundamental point, those who argue that population is a problem forget that each life matters to our world, their friends and family etc. They are part of a solution, not a problem.

But I think what Dorling fails to do is really show how the problem is the capitalist economy which is driving environmental destruction and producing hunger, poverty and unemployment. For instance, Dorling concludes:

The "problem" with global population - if there is one - is too many rich people consuming too much, not too many poor people. There are not that many rich people on the world, but there are a few rich people who consume a huge amount of our collective resources.

I disagree. I think the problem is we have a system which gives a tiny minority vast wealth because it is based on the blind accumulation of wealth for profit. It's that economic organisation that destroys the planet. Its those multinationals that burn the oil and fossil fuels and encourage more consumption and production. It's not the consumption of the rich, (nor the consumption of the masses) but the system that puts profit before anything else. And, as a by-product, it is capitalism that also produces the inequality that Dorling rightly rages against.

But this criticism aside, Danny Dorling's book is a well written powerful destruction of the "over-population" argument. It stands out for its focus on inequality and his discussion of class in this context. Written in an accessible, entertaining style but not one that omits the crucial facts and figures. I highly recommend this to anyone wanting to understand population debates particularly those from the environmental movement.

Related Reviews

Bacci - Our Shrinking Planet
Morland - The Human Tide
Pearce - PeopleQuake, Mass Migration, Ageing Nations and the Coming Population Crash
Meek (ed) - Marx and Engels on the Population Bomb

Malthus - An Essay on the Principle of Population

Paul R. Ehrlich - The Population Bomb

Do any sort of campaigning around environmental issues these days and it isn't long before someone tells you that the problem is simple - there are too many people. This argument doesn't just come from the right, but is quite prevalent (though I don't think dominant) within the environmental movement itself.

Paul Ehrlich's book wasn't the first to put this argument when it was first published in 1971, but it was certainly enormously influential, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and propelling Ehrlich to fame. Ehrlich argues that overpopulation was the root cause of a whole host of social issues, though he did focus on two, questions that remain central to this sort of polemic today - hunger and environmental destruction.

There tends to be a very simple approach behind the "too many people" hypothesis. This is set out clearly in The Population Bomb:

Think of what it means for the population of a country to double... the food available for the people must be doubled. Every structure and road must be duplicated. The amount of power used be doubled. the capacity of the transport system must be doubled. The number of trained doctors, nurses, teachers and administrators must be doubled. 

In other words, there is a direct relationship between number of people and services required, as well as food eaten, and, he continues to point out, impact upon the environment. It should be noted here that Ehrlich's background in biology meant that this book reflects well the growing awareness and knowledge of environmental problems in the 1960s. While global warming is mentioned only in passing, Ehrlich highlights issues such as water and air pollution that remain problems today. We are less worried however by declines in atmospheric oxygen levels or supersonic booms from aircraft. Problematic however is that Ehrlich rarely gets beyond explaining these environmental issues as anything other than arising from population growth.

He paints a frightening picture of the future. Take one example from early in the book:

This problem [population growth in the developed world] is not as severe as it is in the UDCs [Undeveloped Countries] (if current trends should continue, which they cannot, Calcutta could have sixty-six million inhabitants in the year 2000). As you are well aware however, urban concentrations are creating serious problems even in America, In the US, one of meh more rapidly growing DCs, we hear constantly of the headaches caused by growing population; not just pollution of the environment, but overcrowded highways, burgeoning slums, deteriorating school systems, rising crime tares, riots and other related problems.

Almost all of Ehrlich's predictions failed to materialise. In 2014 Calcutta had a population of 4.6 million, far short of the potential 66 million Ehrlich feared. I am not going to spend more time here on his mistaken predictions, but wanted to draw out what I see as Ehrlich's cynical view of people.

In The Population Bomb Ehrlich saw population growth as fundamental to humankind. He compares it to compound interest early on, and repeatedly suggests that populations double automatically.  He also has a tendency to compare masses of people (usually when talking about the developing world) in terms that are highly problematic. His infamous description of his awakening to the issue while travelling through Delhi is a classic example:

The stress seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping, people visiting, arguing and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi windows, begging. People defecating and urinating.... People, people, people, people...mob...dust... cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect... All three of us were, frankly, frightened.

Ehrlich didn't write this about the crowds in the New York or London underground and its tempting to see it as a racialised critique of the people of India. I also think it shares with Robert Malthus, someone not mentioned by Ehrlich, a fear of the poor masses. Malthus famously wrote his pieces on population as a riposte to radicals who saw, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, a possibility for a world without poverty and inequality. Malthus also shared with Ehrlich a belief in exponential growth of humanity without backing this up. This is clear in The Population Bomb where Ehrlich demonstrates a fear of revolution, communism and radical left wing politics. In one of his "scenarios" (which are better described as fantasies) he imagines "the last non-Communist government in Latin America" being replaced by a "Chinese supported military junta" following years of protest when "food riots have become anti-American riots".

Ehrlich's "cheerful" scenario, by contrast, imagines a US on population control where the government refuses to sell food to countries like India that it considers "beyond hope" population wise. Ehrlich's solutions, to be fair, don't begin with population control abroad, but start in the US where he suggests the introduction of a government department that has the power to use "whatever stepes necessary" to reduce population. This might, he suggest, in the future involve mass sterilisation, but in the short term he imagines rewards and tax-breaks for couples who don't have children, and increases on prices for toys and so on. Perhaps his solutions are deliberately provocative, but I found some quite sinister:

In short, the plush life would be difficult to attain for those with large families - which is as it should be, since they are getting their pleasure form their children, who are being supported in part by more responsible members of society.

The problem with all this, is that Ehrlich separates population from society. On occasion he notes how companies pollute to increase profits, but fails to see this as being an inherent issue with capitalism. He makes, for instance, when talking about air-pollution as simple equation: Smog comes from too many cars, which arises from too many people. But he fails to discuss the possibility of public transport using clean energy. Just as when he writes about the doubling of population requiring a doubling of nurses, or roads, he fails to show why this is true even under a system like capitalism.

The problem with The Population Bomb, leaving aside its scaremongering and its fear of the masses, is that at its heart it fails to prove its central hypothesis, and its examples don't justify how Ehrlich uses them. The famines that he foresaw happening in the 1980s did occur, but they were not because of food shortages - they were caused by the inability of the countries concerned to be able to buy grain. Thus what Ehrlich imagines is a problem of humanity is actually a problem of society - specifically capitalism. Thus The Population Bomb is a text book for people who want to blame individuals, not the system - a truly ruling class ideology.

Related Reviews

Bacci - Our Shrinking Planet
Morland - The Human Tide
Pearce - PeopleQuake, Mass Migration, Ageing Nations and the Coming Population Crash

Meek (ed) - Marx and Engels on the Population Bomb
Malthus - An Essay on the Principle of Population

Guy Shrubsole - Who Owns England?

"Who owns England?" is a very good question, and a surprisingly difficult one to answer. That's not to say that various people haven't tried. One of the fascinating things about Guy Shrubsole's book is the discussion of the various historical attempts to understand precisely the question of ownership - from the post-Norman Conquest Domesday book to more recent studies. The roots of contemporary land ownership frequently do stretch all the way back to William the Conqueror. In fact Shrubsole gives a telling quote from one of the numerous Duke of Westminsters who, when asked how "young entrepreneurs" could be successful today answered, presumably not entirely tongue in cheek, "Make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror".

Today the aristocracy's persistence is traced out in part by land ownership. In 1873 just 4217 peers owned 18 million acres of England, about 50 percent of the country. Never mind the 1 percent, these people were the 0.01 percent. Trying to understand how much of England is owned by the aristocracy today is difficult. Shrubsole concludes that a third of land is owned by the wealthy descendants of William's friends (or those that bought into their class later). Despite some attempts to blunt their wealth, and a few donations of land (often for tax reasons), aristocratic landowners continue to get huge incomes from their ownership, often from land subsidies. It becomes even more obscene when you learn of the vast acreage of land used for grouse, undermining vital biodiversity for a bloodsport enjoyed by a tiny minority. It cannot continue. Shrubsole argues that the aristocracy must become "active stewards, nursing our land back to health... a reformed system of farm subsidies would provide a spur to this, but it will also require the aristocracy's active participation. Will they rise to such a challenge?" I'm doubtful that they can, and tend to think we need a much more radical challenge to their ownership.

However it isn't enough to reduce landownership to the remnants of feudal rule. Who owns land today is the result of enormous changes that have taken place over the centuries linked closely to wider political and social transformations. The land owned by the Church of England or the Crown has been dramatically altered over the years by events like the Reformation and the Civil War. But it's perhaps the development of capitalism which has had the most impact. As I've written elsewhere, this was not simply about ownership but also how land was used and understood. In this, the people who almost always lost out were those who worked the land. As E P Thompson wrote in The Making of the English Working Class about the development of capitalism and its transformation of the rural economy:

In village after village, enclosure destroyed the scratch-as-scratch-can subsistence economy of the poor. The cottager without legal proof of rights was rarely compensated. The cottager who was able to establish his claim was left with a parcel of land inadequate for subsistence and a disproportionate share of the very high enclosure cost. Enclosure, (when all the sophistication are allowed for) was a plain enough case of class robbery, played according to fair rules of property and law laid down by a parliament of property-owners and lawyers.

Shrubsole notes that in 1600 about 30 percent of land was in common. While there was widespread resistance, much of this was lost and never recovered. Today it, and the rest of the country, is owned by the Church, big landowners, massive corporations and various other institutions such as the military. Some of the figures that Shrubsole gives us are extraordinary and give a real insight into wider social issues in the UK.

Private companies own, for instance, about a fifth of the country's land. In doing so, major landowners like supermarkets have transformed our towns and cities in their own image. Often this is for short-term profit, and very rarely is it about providing services. As Shrubsole notes, "Consultants Molior have estimated that between 25 percent and 45 percent of sites with planning permission in London are owned by companies that have never built a house." In other words, ownership has become a method of making money through speculation. It is a situation that cannot continue and Shrubsole is absolutely right to argue:

Remembering that today we are landless because the commons were taken from us doesn't mean we should be looking to return to some sort of rural Arcadia, where we all live by toiling in the fields. A modern movement for English land reform is about solving the housing crisis, rewilding our landscapes and reconnecting ourselves to the food we eat. It's about both rural and urban land and about sharing the wealth that comes from owning land.

By coincidence the day that I write this review is the same day that UK Labour published its proposals for land reform. Guy Shrubsole and others have been part of drafting that, and this book sets out many of those ideas behind those policies. Few who care about the environment and ending social inequality will disagree with proposals to end privatisation of publicly owned land, abolishing "the last vestiges of feudalism in our system of land ownership" and, in particular, ending the madness of subsidies based on land ownership. I am also firmly in agreement that a proper "right to roam" must come as part of giving access back to the wider population. But I am more cynical about whether this legislation can happen with out a major fight.

As I read Who Owns England? I found myself identifying even more than usual with those revolutionaries who advocated the revolutionary seizure of land - its nationalisation - for use by all. The aristocracy has proved adept at fighting to maintain its possessions, and modern corporations are no different in that regard, and I wonder to what extent we'll really be able to reform away the inequalities that Shrubsole so ably describes.

This is a really important book. Many on the left, from Karl Marx onward have sought to understand how capitalism developed and what this meant for the land and its people. But who came to own the land as a result of that process has profound consequences for people today. Guy Shrubsole's book is written with humour and anger and offers a viable alternative. It is an essential read and I highly recommend it.

Related Reviews

Clutterbuck - Bittersweet Brexit: The Future of Food, Farming, Land and Labour
Howkins - The Death of Rural England
Holt-Giménez - A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism
Magdoff & Tokar - Agriculture and Food in Crisis
Mazoyer & Roudart - A History of World Agriculture
Linklater - Owning the Earth

Massimo Livi Bacci - Our Shrinking Planet

Massimo Livi Bacci is a distinguished professor of demography and this short book is his attempt to explain what population changes mean for humanity. His main argument is that we live on a world where space is shrinking for its inhabitants. The rapid and significant population growth of the last two hundred years has dramatically reduced the amount of resources and space available for each person. However there isn't a simple population story that fits every country, the tendency Bacci argues, is for population growth to follow a rough pattern - accelerating as nations go through economic development and then plateauing at a certain point. Exactly when an where this point is depends on a number of factors - healthcare, wealth, access to contraception and education levels.

Bacci shows how this leads to a contradictory situation whereby some parts of the world are facing a crisis caused by an aging population where 100 year lifespans are a distinct possibility in the near future. Bacci comments:

If ... established norms remain the same, then citizens of the 100-year society will have to dedicate around fifty years to work, pushing back the retirement age - which today (effectively_ stands at a little above 60 - to 75 years of age.

The telling phrase here is "established norms". Because this can only be a problem in a society were  the labour of the vast number of unemployed, or under-employed, is ignored. There's no reason why anyone should have to work longer given that huge numbers of people are desperate for work.

Discussing the international development goals, Bacci notes how despite decrease in rates of poverty in some areas, over-all numbers of people living in poverty has grown. For instance he writes:

In sub-Saharan Africa extreme poverty struck 48 per cent of the population in 2010, as against 56 per cent in 1990. However during those two decades the absolute number of poor people rose by 46 per cent to 125 million, as a result of unrestrained demographic growth. [My emphasis]

A few pages later he asks, "How come a tenfold increase in GDP has not succeeded in containing or reducing the numbers of the needy?" The answer is that problem lies with the nature of the economic system, and how that system sees development. A growth in GDP can be encouraged by allow companies like Monsanto or Cargill to take over a privatised agriculture in a country in sub-Saharan Africa, but that neo-liberal agenda is completed at the cost of driving peasants further into poverty and hunger. Population growth is not the problem - but a system based on the drive for profits.

Similar problems occur when Bacci talks about sustainability - where he simply equates population growth with increased environmental destruction. He isn't so naive as to ignore the point that individuals in developing countries have a smaller environmental footprint than those in the developed world - but he argues that rapid population growth in the developing world, combined with sheer numbers and economic improvement will effectively cancel out the difference. But Bacci fails to note the way capitalism leads directly to environmental destruction. Even the liberal Guardian can point out that 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions. Those companies behave like that not because of population growth in sub-Saharan Africa, but because the logic of the market drives them forward.

The "Malthusian Trap" that Bacci constantly refers to is one that removes people from their economic and social circumstances. While there are planetary boundaries, they are being breached not because population is growing, but because our economic system cannot exist in a sustainable way.

While Bacci's framework is faulty, there is much of use in this book - his facts and figures are presented in a clear and useful way. He takes seriously subjects that some authors ignore - such as the importance of migration and immigration, particularly in the context of an aging population in the developed world. Ultimately he hopes that the demographic situation will lead to a "fourth globalisation" with "positive effects for global relations". But this can only come about in a world of social equity and freedom - and that's not going to happen under capitalism.

Related Reviews

Morland - The Human Tide
Pearce - PeopleQuake, Mass Migration, Ageing Nations and the Coming Population Crash
Meek (ed) - Marx and Engels on the Population Bomb

Deborah E. Lipstadt - The Eichmann Trail

While campaigning in recent elections against the far-right and fascists I've been drawn, once again, to historical events to try and understand the motivations of contemporary Nazis. It was this that meant I picked up Deborah Lipstadt's short study of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Discussion of this event has long been overshadowed by Hannah Arendt's account of events, and Lipstadt discusses the trial, as well as Arendt's own account.

Lipstadt says that she was motivated to write about this as part of her own experience in the courtroom as part of the David Irving libel trial. In fact the importance for her was in part the parallel processes. The prosecuting lawyer at Eichmann's trail deliberately used the testimony of multiple Holocaust survivors to create a historical context for the legal action. This was a controversial strategy, but in Lipstadt's conclusion is the "most enduring legacy of what occurred in Jerusalem in 1961".

Readers after a blow by blow account of the court case will need to go elsewhere. Lipstadt focuses instead on the debates around the trail, though that is not to say there is nothing here that demonstrates how Eichmann was very much an unrepentant Nazi. As both the prosecuting evidence and his behaviour during examination and pretrial interrogation shows, he had a very clear understanding of his role in the Holocaust. Eichmann however attempted, but failed, to use the classic Nazi defence of "following orders" and not knowing the consequences of his actions.

Hausner [the prosecutor] had presented an overwhelming body of incriminating evidence to prove that Eichmann's excuses were shams. He demonstrated that Eichmann had a very good memory: he remembered his salary when he trained at Dachau; he recalled the special brandy a colleague had served him; even his own lawyer marvelled that he remembered what he had eaten at a 1943 SS dinner - but not the number of Jews he'd forced into deportation trains.

Given the subject matter the book is at times difficult to read. But some of the most awful material, after the accounts from survivors, is actually the parts where Eichmann's own testimony gives us an insight into the mindset of those who made the Holocaust happen. As here with Eichmann's words at the end of the war in a speech given to his men, summarised by one of the trial judges, "for five years millions of enemies had assailed Germany, and millions of enemies have been killed. And I estimate that war has cost five million Jews."

Eichmann, Lipstadt points out that Eichmann had said he would jump into his grave fulfilled at having been part of this effort.

The Eichmann trial was controversial at the time. The abduction of the Nazi by Israeli special forces and the trial in Israel itself, a country that didn't exist at the time of the Holocaust, did not meet with approval by everyone. Lipstadt, and others at the time, point out that the laws that Nazis were tried under after the war did not exist at the time of the Holocaust so this is a mute point.

Discussing contemporary debates about the trial between the Israeli PM Ben-Gurion and critics who questioned Israel's right to try Eichmann she writes:

Ben-Gurion responded by drawing a direct line between the Holocaust and the state  of Israel. Acknowledging that while Israel could not speak in the name of all Jews, he argued that it must speak for the victims of the Holocaust because they believed 'with every fibre of their being that they belonged to a Jewish people.'

Lipstadt cautions that "many of the victims believed no such thing" and continues "For  Ben-Gurion, however, this was utterly immaterial." Thus the history of the Holocaust was closely linked to contemporary politics and the existence of Israel itself. As I noted at the start, the growth of 21st century far-right forces that use anti-Semitism, racism, bigotry and new forms of fascism make understanding this history even more important. The insights into fascism we get from the Eichmann trial are part of the knowledge which helps us fight it today in order to avoid future barbarity and destruction.

Related Reviews

Lipstadt - Denying the Holocaust
Evans - Telling Lies about Hitler
Wendling - Alt-Right
Sereny - Albert Speer: His Battle with the Truth
Paxton - The Anatomy of Fascism
Sereny - Into that Darkness

Paul Morland - The Human Tide

Contemporary books on population are often, at best, frustrating. At worst they are apologies for anti-human policies that see people as the origin of all our problems - whether poverty, food or environmental. So I was pleasantly surprised that early on in this new book by Paul Morland he puts a case that population growth is not a bad thing:

But for all the caveats, proper acknowledgement should be made of the great achievement that is the vast multiplying of human numbers and the provision of billions of people with a standard of living and health care and education which the wealthiest of earlier ages would have envied.

By this, Morland distinguishes himself from a myriad of other authors who contend that population growth is in itself bad. This is not to say that he dismisses population growth or ignores some of its consequences. Much of the book is a study of how population change has taken place across the world at different times. I won't repeat Morland's arguments here, but his conclusion is roughly that societies go through a fairly predictable pattern of slow, gradual growth interrupted occasionally by events like the Black Death, followed by a rapid acceleration that is associated with the transition to an industrial economy, followed by a slow decline in fertility and mortality. The latter, he says take place on time-scales "which once took generations [but] now take place in decades."

This is very interesting, and for those who are arguing against the tide, that population growth is not the origin of poverty, hunger or environmental disaster, the book contains many, very useful, facts and figures about the likely demographic future. However Morland comes unstuck with his argument that demographic change is at the heart of the vast majority of historical change. His book is, as he explains, "about the role of population in history". He says that "demography is a factor which itself is driven by other factors, numerous and complex, some material, some ideological and some accidental." But despite saying this, often he falls back on an argument that population change is the most important factor. For instance Morland writes:

As soon as a country of many hundreds of millions starts to get going [economically], even moving from abject to moderate poverty for its average citizen, the weight of numbers starts to count. The United States... is not the largest economy in the world because its people are very much richer than people in the individual European countries or Japan, but because there are so many more of them.

Later he says:

Germany's burgeoning population at home allowed it eventually to field great armies on the battlefields of the Eastern and Western Fronts in both world wars. Britain's mass emigration meant it could raise a smaller army from its home population but could call on the assistance of a worldwide network in wartime, for food, equipment and men.

Both of these examples do not stand up to real historical analysis. The population of the US matters, of course, but US power in the 20th and 21st century arose from a host of historical factors that are far more important that sheer numbers of people. The decline of European colonialism, the rise of a more modern industry over that of Europe, the exhaustion of Britain (in particular). Britain could call on resources from around the world not because of emigration, but because of colonialism and Imperialism. One million Indian troops fought for Britain in World War One - not because of emigration, but because of colonial history, a factor that helped fuel the Independence movement.

Morland is repeatedly guilty of putting a mechanical argument about population ahead of a deeper understanding of economic development, political change and ignoring colonialism and imperialism (an issue which leads to a particularly crude analysis of the origins of the Israel/Palestinian conflict0. At times this is surprisingly crude. To argue, for instance, that war in Yemen (indeed war or violence in general) is due to young populations is to be guilty of crude causation. Or to write that "The fact [Woodrow] Wilson was in a position to impose his ideas [at Versailles] reflected the triumphant growth of America's population". Demographics was not the reason - economic power was, and that is not the same as having lots of workers.

It is important to stress that Morland is no conservative. His argument is that population growth is not the threat that so many think it is. This is, he argues, because larger populations can be supported by planetary resources and will provide more people to do work to improve the planet and the economy. Unfortunately there's not enough here to back that up and I suspect many readers will be unconvinced. He also points out that we are not living through a population explosion, but a trajectory which will see the levelling off of population growth in the not to distant future. As countries become more wealthy, more urban and, crucially, make sure women are provided with real choices about their own fertility, population will plateau and likely decline. In this, fertility choices are closely linked with economic and political realities.

Fertility rates...are especially low in countries where women are encouraged to get an education and a career but where birth outside marriage is frowned upon. They are much better in countries where attitudes to women in the workplace are more positive and provision is made to allow both female and make workers to combine careers with parenting.

Later, he concludes that "the human tide is best managed by ordinary human beings themselves". Having looked at failed examples of state fertility management in places as varied as the former USSR, China and the US, it's hard not to agree.

Unfortunately I find it hard to recommend Paul Morland's book. The useful nuggets of information are drowned out by crude arguments which don't stand up to scrutiny. A more useful book on population in my opinion is Ian Angus and Simon Butler's Too Many People? which locates demographic change squarely in the context of the economic and political system.

Related Reviews

Malthus - An Essay on the Principle of Population
Pearce - PeopleQuake, Mass Migration, Ageing Nations and the Coming Population Crash
Thornett - Facing the Apocalypse: Arguments for Ecosocialism
Meek (ed) - Marx and Engels on the Population Bomb

Penny McCall Howard - Environment, Labour & Capitalism at Sea: 'Working the Ground' in Scotland

Working at sea in the fishing industry is 115 time more dangerous than the UK average. It' i a startling statistic, that is usually explained by the idea that the sea is "dangerous". But Penny McCall Howard's important book is a detailed examination of why this is an incorrect explanation. More than that, it is a brilliant anthropological study of the lives of those on the west coast of Scotland who making a living from the sea. Howard shows how human labour is part of shaping an ecology which is far wider than just the "prawn monoculture" they fish.

Many of the classic works of anthropology are written by observers who maximise their distance from their subject. In his classic studies of the Nuer people of Southern Sudan, E.E.Evans-Pritchard wrote detailed accounts of his subject's lives, but always remained an observer. Howard too is an outsider, but she doesn't remain aloof from the fisher communities that she is writing about. An accomplished sailor she works with the men (they are all men), joining their small fishing boats or working on trawlers. As such, this is an intimate account of labour at sea, and how it is shaped by wider environment and economy. Howard explains her framework:

I focus on people's labour as what ties environments, people and tools together as they work to make dishing grounds productive. I take a phenomenological approach that focuses on people's experience of their own labour, including the results of that labour, and the aspirations and hopes that they pour into it. As a result, this book challenges the popular conception of the sea as a hostile wilderness...I explore the more complicated reasons why human-environmental relations at sea are fraught with ruptures, tensions and contradictions, tragedy, unfulfilled hope and even desperation.

Howard says that in the communities she studied, fishers feel in "a state of siege".  One fisher told her that "if you are trawler-man you think everyone is out to get you". This should be of no surprise - one of the consequence of heightened environmental awareness in the general population is an understanding that we are facing a biodiversity crisis and this is commonly understood to be particularly an issue for sea-life. Indeed the week I write this review the Guardian carries an article by George Monbiot which has the unfortunate headline "Stop eating fish. It’s the only way to save the life in our seas". It's hard to see any of those who Howard writes about here as seeing this as anything else as an assault on their livelihoods.

Howard begins with the nature of labour at sea, tracing it's impact on the environment, the process of shaping the "grounds" themselves and how wider, social relations, transform that experience. In one anecdote, she notes how an experienced fisher complains about having to go to the toilet at sea in a bucket, while the owner has spent tens of thousands on new navigation equipment to improve his chance at a profit.

All workers become intimate with their environments - whether it is a computer network, a phone call centre, the fields an agricultural workers frequents or fishers who "work the ground". The word "ground" is important. Howard says that she has noted more than 80 uses of the word - which means far more than, say, the sea-bed. Instead "what linked these places was the productive labour that took place in them. The ground was a place that afforded fishermen better catches and where they found their work to be productive. The affordances of grounds were not static and they were historically inextricably connected to the labour expended there."

Crucially, she continues, "fishermen re-shaped the affordances of grounds through their work and developed new tools in order to further develop the affordances of grounds." It brought to mind Marx's statement that "Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature".

Howard shows how fishers have a complex relationship with the grounds they work. To understand their labour as simply bringing fish on-board a ship in a net is to misunderstand the intimate relationship with the sea. This is not a romanticised view of life on-board ships, rather its the way that years of experience allow the fishers to develop very clear understanding of the sea, its tides, its depth and the seabed. Using this information (often obtained through careful watching of equipment screens, but also through feeling the vibrations of the boat and its equipment) workers are able to make decisions about how, where and when to fish. Some areas might bring a bigger catch, but be risky for expensive equipment, other places might bring smaller fish in bigger quantities which require more labour to prepare. All of these decisions take place in the context of the wider, capitalist, market which might mean a fish that was extremely valuable one week is almost worthless the next. Grounds then, "are places where affordances are intentionally developed in particular social and economic context, and through often improvised actions with particular conditions of satisfaction."

Howard draws on the work of environmental geographer Neil Smith who argued that humans "create nature". Howard shows how fisher's labour transforms the environment. For instance, she quotes one fisher saying "if you come across a piece of ground with a lot of skate, first you have to fish them off, and that's when you will find you start to get a good fishing of prawns." Howard continues: "Trawler skippers saw themselves as intervening in ecosystems to make them more productive of the prawns or crabs they fished for."

Thus those critics who might simply see the fishing industry as exploiting a pristine environment are incorrect. Fishers are part and parcel of shaping the ecology that they labour in. In fact, fishers almost always see their labour as making a positive contribution. That is not to suggest that the consequences might not be destructive, but to show how the actual catching of prawns is the result of wider social interactions. This was drawn out for me by Howard's discussion of the working practice of the skippers of the boats she worked on. They would often keep up a constant radio and 'phone chatter with other skippers, sharing information with others. So the work was intensely co-operative - a "community of practice" as Howard puts it. But skippers could also conceal and hide information. They might be fearful that someone else would undermine their catch at the market, or get fish that they might want. So wider capitalist social relations shape the relations between the working boats and their crew. Something also seen in Howard's brilliant discussion of technology - as alluded to earlier, technology at sea is usually about maximising profits, not improving the lives of those who work there. I don't have space to draw this out further, but Howard's conclusion is important. Technology, she explains, arises out of and then shapes, the industry:

The effects of technologies must be examine din the context of the transformation of sea creatures into valuable commodities with a variable price in faraway markets, and the alienation of fishing crew from any ownership relation with a boat and from the sea as a source of reliable livelihood.

This is also true of the relations between workers. Technology allows the better exploitation of the environment. But it also means that the job becomes more deskilled, and boat owners can employ cheaper labour. The final chapters of the book look at what this has meant for communities and crew, particularly through the hiring of immigrant workers on very low wages. Class differences have, as Howard is careful to emphasise, always existed in the fishing industry. So the system of shares that determines pay rates on many boats doesn't arise out of some historical communal system, but out of a system of multiple ownership of boats. Today that means that crew will often receive low pay for long hard work, and sometimes get nothing if the trip itself is not profitable. It is a system open to exploitation, but one where it is difficult for workers to organise collectively.

This returns me to my starting point. The horrifically high level of deaths and injury in the fishing industry is not the result of accidents. It is a consequence of the job "as currently organised" where boat owners cut corners on maintenance and safety to maximise profits, or crew must risk going to sea in a extreme conditions in order to make enough money to pay rent or loans. Returning to the work of Neil Smith, Howard shows how the "ideology of nature" means that the natural world is seen as outside the lived reality of people - something to be used and exploited. But capitalism makes the sea more dangerous for workers. As Howard points out the idea of a "hostile and dangerous sea naturalises the deaths of those working on it, no matter what the real cause." Deaths are seen as a result of the sea itself, not the system that exploits those who work it in the quest for profits.

Howard's book is a remarkable piece of work. It's a first rate piece of Marxist anthropology that puts human labour at the centre of a discussion about ecology. It shows how the biodiversity crisis in the oceans is related to wider social relations, and emphasises again how the fight to prevent environmental destruction requires challenging the priorities of the system - not just changes to our diet. For radical environmentalists and Marxist ecologists this should be a required read, and I'm pleased to see that a cheap paperback is to be published soon.

Related Reviews

Smith - Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space
Carson - Under the Sea Wind
Clare - Down to the Sea in Ships
Rediker - Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Lymbery - Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were

Talat Ahmed - Mohandas Gandhi: Experiments in Civil Disobedience

One of the most exciting things about radical politics in the UK in 2019 has been the emergence of mass protest movements against environmental destruction that take their inspiration from historic non-violence, direct action and civil disobedience struggles. Figures like Martin Luther King Jnr and Mohandas Gandhi loom large in discussions about the most effective way to campaign. So I was very pleased to pick up Talat Ahmed's new book that looks at probably the most famous proponent of non-violence, Mohandas Gandhi.

Talat Ahmed traces the development of Gandhi's politics from his experiences as a youth in India, the experiences that shaped him in England while he trained to be a lawyer and then the sharper experiences in South Africa were he encountered systematic racism for the first time. Ahmed shows how Gandhi's politics evolved relatively early into a highly structured religiously inspired vision that placed a highly developed moral code at the heart of everything that Gandhi did and argued for. In particular Gandhi's activism transcended the traditional barriers within Indian society. For instance. he fought hard for the rights of the dalit community, the caste popularly known as untouchables. Gandhi also argued for unity between religious communities, even at time of great unrest and ethnic conflict.

But Ahmed also argues that Gandhi's approach was limited by his approach to wider social conflict.  She writes:

Gandhi abhorred violence, particularly if resorted to by ordinary people, and certainly if it was part of a class struggle against exploitation and oppression - foreign or domestic. This was true in South Africa, Chauri Chaura, Mappiula [Rebellion], the Quit India movement and the naval mutinies. On each occasion, Gandhi lectured ordinary people, the subalterns, for not having understood the principles of his satyagraga strategy, And on each occasion, those who wielded power and had a monopoly on violence to mete out the full power of the state with no regard for passive resistance were absolved somehow of responsibility. 

She concludes that "By treating violence and non-violence as abstract moral precepts, Gandhi effectively left the mass of people defenceless in the face of colonial state brutality and violence."

It is clear from Ahmed's book that Gandhi had a horror of struggle escalating out of control, particularly if it began to challenge the basis of bourgeois society. In fact, Gandhi's vision of India after the British had left was very much one of bourgeois capitalist democracy. Gandhi was "a leader precisely because he also possessed the ability to unite the myriad of class forces... in Indian nationalism". Thus those struggles which brought together different religions as part of a mass struggle were often rejected by Gandhi if they went too far. Gandhi himself, under pressure from the growth of the left, had some ambiguity towards capitalism. Ahmed quotes a response from Gandhi to the Indian Communist M.N. Roy's arguments in favour of the Bolsheviks:

I am an uncompromising opponent of violent methods even to serve the noblest of causes... I desire to end capitalism almost if not quite as much as the most advanced socialist or event communist. But our methods differ, our languages differ.

But the problem was not just about method and language. It was also about vision, and ultimately this meant that Gandhi undermined struggles that could have advanced Independence and the struggle against an enormously unjust Indian society. Some examples that Ahmed gives are quite stark - for instance Gandhi calling off struggles when they develop into strikes, or when his supporters riot against policemen who have killed protesters.

Despite Gandhi being forever associated with Indian Independence, Ahmed explains that the British authorities credited other forces for being the final catalyst for change. Clement Attlee, for instance, said that the "principle reason" for the British deciding to leave India was the "erosion of loyalty to the British crown among the Indian army and navy" resulting from the more radical movements. Attlee went on to describe Gandhi's role as "minimal". This is not to say that Gandhi had no significance - indeed he helped create a mass movement against the British, but that Gandhi's strategy, at crucial points, was not enough to drive things through because he had elevated non-violence to the level of a unbreakable religious belief, rather than a tactic.

Talat Ahmed's book is a highly readable, critical, introduction to Gandhi's life and politics. Its importance is underlined by her hope that it will "help activists today grapple with the real life and complex and contested legacy of this enigmatic and contradictory 'non-violent revolutionary'" and to encourage today's activists "to go beyond what Gandhi ever thought possible and engage not only in 'experiments in civil disobedience'" but to build the sort of movements that can fundamentally transform society. Since the bloody legacy of Britain's Partition of India is two countries armed with nuclear weapons, this is a vision that has never been more important.

Related Reviews

Ward - Our Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres & the Indian Mutiny of 1857
Davies - Late Victorian Holocausts
Newsinger - The Blood Never Dried
Wagner - Amritsar 1919