Charlie Kimber & Judy Cox - Revisiting the General Strike of 1926: When workers were ready to dare

On day in May 1926 when my grandfather was on his way home from school in Plymouth, he was astounded to see a tram tipped over by a crowd of people. It was such a vivid moment in his youth that in his nineties he could still recall it. It was his only recollection of the British General Strike, but it stuck with him even though it was the closest he ever got to the trade union movement. 

This new book, written for the hundredth anniversary of the General Strike, has many such events in it. But I mention it as an opening to this review because it demonstrates one of the themes of Charlie Kimber and Judy Cox's important new book. May 1926 was a period of brutal class war, and the strikers were prepared to escalate and fight for victory. Responsibility for their defeat lay in the hands of the trade union leadership, not in their lack of courage.

This important corrective is needed because the General Strike has traditionally been remembered, outside of the radical left, as a time less of class struggle and more of classes rubbing shoulders. I remember being taught at school about strikers playing football with policemen. How surprised I would have been to hear that strikers derailed The Flying Scotsman the emblematic train of the time. My grandfather would have been less surprised. The authors give us a more examples:

On Wednesday 5 May, there were violent clashes between strikers and scabs in Poplar and Canning Town and around the Blackwall Tunnel [all in London] and cars were shashed and set alight. Newspapers reported that strikers 'tried to impede the progress of cars and motor buses', scabs driving buses had to run to escape violence and 'organised gangs' of strikers were baton-charged by the police. In Hammersmith seven buses were wrecked and fascists attacked strikers... A magistrate in Hammersmith declared, 'Women will be treated the same as men. They often inflame men's passions'.

Such reports demonstrate that this was no mere strike marked by peaceful picketing and protest. Rather, as the authors say:

In 1926, working class people made a huge leap of politics and of imagination by hurling themselves into the struggle. They did not know if they would win or not - but they were determined to try and assert the power of their class.

The General Strike was not an isolated event. It grew out of a long period of radicalism, which saw the British working class, like its comrades elsewhere, flexing its muscles and trying out its power. The run up to World War One and the immediate aftermath had seen strikes and revolutions across Europe. Britain had not been immune from that. 1919 had been a year of near revolution. 1926 saw the big battalions of the British working class taking action to defend their collective interests. The problem was that most workers had illusions in their trade union leaders. As the authors explain:

Trade union leaders and the full-time employees of the unions constitute a separate social stratum with their own set of interests distinct from workers on the one hand and the bosses who oversee and enforce their exploitation on the other. They become negotiators between workers and bosses instead of class fighters looking to end exploitation altogether... This makes them pull back from leading strikes in the militant direction which could lead to victory.

In 1926 the trade union leaders in Britain did everything they could to limit radicalism and undermine the strike. They were terrified of it getting out of hand. The worst of the leaders (including those in the Labour Party) made sure that the British ruling class knew that they were not under threat. Despite these flawed leaders, British workers demonstrated their desire to fight for real change. The authors write

Overall, strikers and other trade unionists set up some 300 Councils of Action during the strike. Some began to take over the local administration of society, the basis of elementary and temporary "dual power". It is in this sense that they gave a glimpse (no more than that) of workers' councils and soviets.

Workers "contested the way the TUC leaders had tried to constrain and narrow them politically". 

Even the best books on the General Strike can downplay the role of women in the struggle. Revisiting the General Strike on the other hand explores the centrality of women to the struggle usually as active supporters (as the Hammersmith magistrate mentioned earlier demonstrated). The authors quote one local strike newspaper, "We would like to pay special tribute to the brave, enthusiastic and effective co-operation that has been given by the wives and other women relatives of the strikers."

But this support wasn't just passive, it was active in the sense that women took part in protests, meetings and pickets. By the time the strike ended and the miners' were locked out, women had to play a new crucial role in sustaining their communities. Soup kitchens and communal kitchens were set up, and women played a central role in making these work, which "added greatly to the solidarity of the whole community". The strike, and the lock out, also transformed things in the mining areas one commentator noted "there were concerts in every street, and the sense of fellowship in the community was more marked than at any other time."

Women were also central to "mass community mobilisations against scabbing in the South Wales coalfields", and many were arrested and fined. 

The authors rightly describe the end of the strike as its "murder". The sell-out came as an enormous shock to strikers, most of whom were experiencing near total solidarity and an escalating number of workers' taking action. The trade union leaders turned off the dispute with vague promises from the government of no victimisation. The anger from below however was contained because there wasn't any political force capable of urging the workers on and taking control out of the hands of the leadership. The potential for that however is described by one of the most fascinating aspects to this book. These are the collection of dozens of telegrams from across the country and the trade union movement protesting the end of the strike. The authors have done an amazing job to get these into print for popular readers as they definitely demonstrate a different story to the one that will be made in May 2026 when various trade union leaders celebrate the anniversary. Let's quote a few:

Custom House: 14 May, Demand resumption of General Strike to safeguard positions of men who responded to the strike call.

Stafford: 13 May, Report extreme dissatisfaction with strike ending here

Hampstead: 14 May, There is a growing feeling locally that your leadership together with our standard of life is at stake

The telegrams once again demonstrate the key argument of Kimber and Cox - the strike showed of workers' growing confidence, their desire to fight for real change and a growing frustration with the established leadership. These were "Days of Hope". But they also were days when the British working class could have moved to a new level of struggle. Tragically the only significant socialist organisation at the time, the British Communist Party, had an incorrect understanding of the trade union leadership and despite its militants being the most frequently victimsed it had disarmed the movement by putting faith in the left trade union bureaucracy.

The book ends with two important final parts. The first is a study of the cultural impact of the Strike, particularly its influence on literature. Having never read Lady Chatterley's Lover I was intrigued to find that DH Lawrence had been inspired by the strike to include it in all three drafts, with growing levels of radicalism. But I was disappointed that the authors didn't mention my favourite example of the Strike in literature - its part in Goodbye Mr Chips (and it's imitator To Serve Them All My Days). The private schoolboys scab on the strike, but Chips surprises them with his sympathy for the workers. As the authors say the strike "shaped the work of the writers who lived through it. For some, it was a terrible reminder of the power of the working class struggle to uproot society. For others, it was a movement of inspiration and possibility).

Finally the book is aimed at a new, and emerging socialist movement. The book is not just a retelling of the history but an attempt to educate workers in the meaning of struggle and the lessons of the period. The inclusion of a glossary of keywords that are much forgotten today - pickets, rank and file organisation, solidarity - shows that the book is a tool to sharpen the struggle today. Read and use this excellent book and the anniversary of the General Strike to renew our fight against capitalism.

Related Reviews

Hinton & Richard Hyman - Trade Unions and Revolution: The Industrial Politics of the early British Communist Party
Cliff & Gluckstein - Marxism and Trade Union Struggle: The General Strike of 1926
Newsinger - Them and Us: Fighting the Class War 1910-1939
Darlington - Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-1914

Len Deighton - Horse Under Water

*** Spoilers *** 

Len Deighton's follow up to The Ipcress File begins in the same seedy post-war Europe that the first novel did. The anonymous hero of Horse Under Water may, or may not, be the same "hero" of the first book. Deighton's 2009 afterword makes it clear he doesn't know himself. It does not really matter, because the point Deighton seems to be making is that spycraft in the 1950s and 1960s was in the context of a cold Cold War and the economic decline of Western Europe. 

Horse Under Water though has a difference, it's set in Portugal and Spain, by then they were holiday destinations - for a minority of people. Our spy hero meets his milkman on the flight Lisbon - but we aren't yet in an era of mass tourism. There's still an elements of exotic to the destinations, plane travel and general being abroad drinking coffee and eating local food. Deighton plays this well - not the fancy food of Ian Fleming, but the ordinary tasty working class fare that would appeal to his readers and to him as a cook.

The plot, as always, is convoluted. There's an old Nazi U-boat off the coast and the British want to get into it to grab forged cash that the Nazis had made to finance the resistance against Franco and for democracy. Other people also want the U-boat, but then it turns out that there might not be any cash, only drugs, and then it seems like the drugs are the tip of a rather nasty Nazi iceberg. In fact, it turns out that the Nazis who fled Germany on said U-boat, had in their possession a list of Nazi sympathisers from the Second World War who are now, leading figures in the British Tory Party. Who could have imagined it?

Either way our brave spy, naively hunts this list down in order to fight for democracy and against fascism, only to find out that his masters know already and don't really care. It's a bit grim. But realistic. British spies haven't exactly been known to be on the side of the angels.

Its a thrilling ride that leaves world-weary London with its fan heaters and damp behind, and gives the reader a glimpse of the sun and the exotic world of Southern Europe. There's a touch of the naive about it too. There's so exposition (bizarrely requiring a trip to the Welsh valleys) where the reader gets various types of drugs explained to them. Our hero still has to put in his expense claims at the end though, and there's little to show for it. A great little thriller and, it has to be said, it's a nifty pun title that you might only work out half way through.

Related Reviews

Deighton - The Ipcress File
Deighton - Winter: A Berlin Family 1899-1945
Ambler - Journey into Fear

Ivan Doig - Ride With Me, Mariah Montana

Ride With Me, Mariah Montana is the final volume in Ivan Doig's English Creek trilogy. It's a sweeping history of Monata set in Doig's remote, and fictional, Two Medicine Country, nestled up near the top end of the Rocky Mountains. After the Native American's were displaced and destroyed it was a part of the world built on sheep, cattle and tourism. The book is set in 1989 as Montana is about to celebrate its centenary, which it should be noted, reminds us just how young much of America is. 

One of Doig's strengths as a novelist is his books are not constrained by a format. He can write sweeping epics, and tight little stories focused on a handful of people. English Creek, the first but middle book of the trilogy is focused on Jick McCaskill, a teenager whose family is about to be torn apart as his elder brother falls in love and abandons the plans his family have made for him. The first volume, Dancing at the Rascal Fair also dealt with romance, but set against a breathtaking story of homesteading and the founding of a farming community. In Ride With Me, however Doig abandons both these styles and opts for a road trip featuring the now elderly Jick.

Jick, the bright teenager of English Creek, is now older and more cynical. He has just lost his wife and is bereft. As Montana's centenary approaches his daughter, Mariah approaches him. A photo-journalist, she has been commissioned to do a series of pieces about the centenary, and about Montana, with the star journalist Riley Wright from the local paper. Riley, unfortunately happens to be Mariah's former husband, whose spectacular falling out during the divorce appears to have been the talk of small town Montana. He also rejected Jick's offer to take over the ranch, threatening that the small farm would be subsumed into the big agricultural conglomerates that have been a disliked feature throughout the history of the state and the trilogy.

All this is a convoluted setup to explain why Jick is driving a Winnebago around the backroads of Montana with his daughter and ex-Son in Law in the back. It means that Doig is able to write about the places and people of Montana with his customary love and sensibility. There's plenty of history of course - including some sentimental stuff for Jick, and plenty of other stuff about the decline and fall of various Montana staples - the mining industry of Butte. I was also glad that Doig's characters acknowledged the Native American history, visiting Chief Joseph's final battle site (though oddly there's only a passing mention of the Little Big Horn). 

While all this is fun, and its particularly cute for anyone who has done a Montana road trip as you'll recognise places, roads and so on. It makes for a less engrossing story that the early books. It feels like a crude attempt to tie up loose ends from the earlier books. One scene has Jick going to a local library and finding letters from his grandparents back and forth to Scandinavia. These are all characters from Dancing at the Rascal Fair and it all felt contrived.

All in all this was a disappointed finale and not up to the standard of Doig's other works.

Related Reviews

Doig - This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
Doig - Bucking the Sun
Doig - Winter Brothers: A season at the edge of America
Doig - English Creek
Doig - Dancing at the Rascal Fair

Sheldon Krasowski - No Surrender: The land remains Indigenous

Between 1871 and 1921 a series of so called "numbered treaties" were signed between the First Nations of Canada and the (settler) Canadian government and the monarch. They covered issues such as access to land, resource extraction, farming, education and regular payments. The first seven of these are the subject of Seldon Krasowski's book. Krasowski's book is an intervention into a longstanding discussion about the treaties, which begins from the historical record, First Nation's oral traditions and history and other, often ignored or unpublished sources. The debates are not sterile. They have important implications for contemporary Canadian politics and social movements, and at their heart is a crucial question - whose land is it? As Krasowski says in their introduction:

Indigenous oral histories state that there was no surrender of lands through the treaty process. First Nations agreed to share their lands in exchange for the benefits offered by the Canadian government.

Many accounts, even those sympathetic to the First Naitons, have suggested that the problem was that the indigenous people did not understand, or comprehend the treaties themselves, that "cultural differences impeded a mutual understanding of the treaty terms". It is fair to say that Krasowski's research makes it clear that this is wrong. The First Nations were extremely clear on what they were arguing and hoping to get from the treaties. But it was the Canadian governments negotiators who changed the terms of verbal agreement. One previous historian who rejected the "cultural misunderstanding" argument says of treaty nine, that the Anishinaabe and Cree "did not know what the parchment said when they touched the pen". Here, touching the pen, refers to the practice of the Indigenous signatories to the treaties touching the pen with their fingers before someone else wrote their names. It is not merely about whether or not the First Nations people could write, but Krasowski argues, it was also a way of separating the negotiations from the actual physical treaty. 

Context also matters in two ways. Firstly the pressures on First Nations peoples was forcing them into reliance with the Canadian government. As Krasowski says of the context to the first and second treatries, "by 1870 the declinging resource base, competition from free traders and a lack of support from the Hudson's Bay Company led to chjallenging economic times for the Anishinaabe.

But second there was also the context of the indigenous peoples' society, how they made decisions and how they understood their relationship with land. A quotation from Cree Elder Jimmy Myo makes this clear: "You cannot begin to understand the treaties unless you understand our cultural and spiritual traditions and our Indian laws".

The importance of the oral tradition is key here. As Chief Mawedo-peness said to Commissioner Morris, one of the government negotiators for treaty three, "you must remember that our hearts and our brains are like paper; we never forget". Thus the oral records of treaty three contain different understandings of the treaty text to the printed edition. Dawson recorded this speech from CHief Mawedo-peness:

And I trust, what we are about to do today is for the benefit of our Nation as well as for our white brothers - that nothing but friendship may reign between the Nation and our white brothers. And now I take off my glove to give you my hand to sign the Treaty. And now before you all, Indians and whites, let it never be said that this has been done in secret. It is done openly and in the light of day.

In the newspaper accounts of the speech though, the crucial line reads "I take off my glove and in giving you my hand, I deliver over my birthright and lands". Krasowski argues that this shows how the newspaper, as a public record, "might have been influenced by pressures to achieve a surrender of Indigenous Lands". Dawson was writing for himself and his account "does not conflice with Anishinaabe oral histories and in fact reinforces them". Krasowski concludes:

The addition of the clause "I deliver over my birthright and lands" in the official record of Treaty Three is significant because it suggests that Canada's representatives introduced the notion of a land surredner where none existed. This arose from a strategy of the Canadian negotiators to ignore land questions in favour of benefits. Such duplicity meant that quite quickly the First Nations were complaining about the Treaty and their benefits. It is clear here, and elsewhere in the various treaties, that the government's representatives were acting to downplay the impact of the treaties, to introduce arguments that had not been discussed and to lie. These were not misunderstandings, it was purposeful duplicity.

It is important not to neglect the role of the First Nations representatives who fought to ensure they got the best deals possible. Indeed one response to Treaty Three after the Nations felt they government had reneged on its promised was to highlight that their warriors were ready for battle. As Krasowski writes of Treaty Six, it is 

unique ecause a number of eyewitness accounts of the negotiations were record... These accounts contadict the offical accounts published by Treaty Commissioner Morris and emphasise the agency of the Chiefs who managed to expand the treaty terms beyound what had been authorised by the Canadian government, including protection from disease and famine, the medicine chest clause and assistance in the transition to agricutlure... Oral histories shared by Treaty Six Elders have emphasised that Indigenous Peoples did not surrender their Traditional Territories and eyewitness accounts noted that the surrender claused was not discussed by the commissioners... Chiefs focused their understanding of the treaty on the oral discussions and were less concerned with the reading of the treaty text.

The duplicity and lies of government negotiators has left a lasting political and legal legacy. As Krasowsku say.

The texts of the numbered treaties clearly state that the First Nations surrendered their 'rights, titles and privileges to the land.' However there is no evidence thatAlesander Morris or his fellow treat commissioners discussed the surrender clause during any of the treaty negotiations... The treaty commissioners' accounts claim that the interpreters read the terms of the treaties after the negotiations, but I argue that the interpreters were chosen because they supported the commissioners.

This "casts doubt on the validity of the complete surrender of Indigenous Lands". The question of land sovereignty remains central to the question of freedom and liberation of First Nations people in Canada today. It also casts doubt on the role of the Canadian government in the past and today. A recent victory by the Quw’utsun Nation, while not directly related to the numbered treaties, demonstrates the ongoing importance of questions of land ownership and social justice, as well as the potential for victory by social movements. Seldon Krasowski's book is an important and detailed argument for First Nations rights and a weapon those fighting racism and oppression in Canada today.

Related Reviews

McMillan & Yellowhorn - First Peoples in Canada
Estes - Our History is the Future
Tully - Crooked Deals and Broken Treaties
Nikiforuk - Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent
Englert - Settler Colonialism: An Introduction

Ken Liu - All That We See or Seem

One night Elli, a famous artist and extremely popular weaver of dreams, gets out of bed, closes the bedroom door on her still sleeping husband Piers, and walks out of the house. She vanishes. There's seemingly no reason for it. The police are baffled and Piers has no idea. Then he gets a phone call. Someone called The Prince has Elli, and is demanding that Piers return what she stole. The Prince tells Piers that he will kill her if he doesn't find the missing thing. The problem is that Piers doesn't seem to know what is missing and the Price is light on clues.

Piers finds Julia Z, a young woman who lives in the fringes of society. Its a world of data, surveillance and control. Everything from information about what you do, where you go and how you live is stored, bought and sold. Data is everything. Julia, in rejecting that, has learnt to live in the cracks and use her skills to earn cash through semi-legal schemes and also to resist the system itself. Julia, Piers hopes, can rescue Elli by identifying what is missing. 

So begins a romp through a future world that feels not very different to our own. This is Ken Liu's first techno thriller and he embraces the concept fully. Few pages pass without some new technological idea, equipment or concept being thrown at the reader. There's a lot of action, thrills and spills and some nasty bad guys - not least the Prince himself whose corporation manipulates data and knowledge to shift governments, opinion and, well anything. 

The problem is that its all a bit one-dimensional. Julia, the centre of the story, has a good back story that shows how she rejected society and entered the underworld. But she's just unbelievable as a person. Her skills are almost superhuman. At various points in the story she's able to reach into her rucksack and pull out a self-built gadget that can hack, store, video, fly or analyse. AI here is a tool to be used and key to modern life. Yet it's also a deus ex machina that fills every plot hole and drives the story foreward. There's no real innovation - the bad guys are comically bad, and the contrived plot let's Julia jump from escapade to escapade leaving the reader bored and unconvinced.

There's a good story here, trying to get out. But Ken Liu's world building, character development and overreliance on increasingly unbelievable technology as a problem solver didn't do it for me. As a commentary on our world of data and surveillance it failed.

Related Reviews

Stephenson - Snow Crash

Vine Deloria Jr - Custer Died for your Sins: An Indian Manifesto

When Custer Died for your Sins was first published in 1969 it came out in the midst of the growing and radicalising Civil Rights movement. It is an angry read, a rage against the American system that condemns Native Americans to poverty, disease and racism and offers a powerful manifesto to alter the imbalance of power and wealth. As such it is also a very contempory book. If many of the demands of the manifesto are now dated or too specific, the framing of the book and the context of which it sets itself remains highly relevant. The source of the book's infamous title is a bumper sticker produced by the organisation that Vine Deloria organised through - one that parodies and rejects the politics and actions of the Christian Churches that are tasked with "helping" the Indians. The title also reflects the humour and rage that makes this such a powerful read nearly sixty years after first publication.

Running through the book is the influence of the US Civil Rights movement. Deloria writes

Indian Affairs today suffers from an intellectual stagnation that is astounding. Creative thought is sparse. Where the younger black students were the trigger to the Civil Rights movements with sit-ings in the South, young Indians have become unwitting missionaries spreading ancient anthropological doctrines which hardly relate to either anthropology or to Indians. The young blacks invented Black Power and pushed the whole society to consider the implications of discrimination which in turn created racial nationalism. Young Indians  have barely been able to parody some black slogans and have created none of their own.

If this seems, in hindsight, a little unfair, it is a reflection of the author's frustration. Timing was everything. As Deloria was writing the book the American Indian Movement which famously took control of Wounded Knee in 1973 was just being formed. Movements take time to grow and generate politics and ideas of their own. The Civil Rights movement was clearly an impetous that would grow over time. Nonetheless there are some important insights that Deloria offers, centred on one of his great hates - anthropologists. He writes positively of the Apaches, who "don't worry about what type of Indianism is 'real'" and counters this other young Native Americans who

attend workshops over and over again. Folk theories pronounced by authoritative anthropologists become opportunities to escape responsbility. If, by definition, the Indian is hopelessly caught between two cultures, why struggle? Why not blame all one's lack of success on this tremendous gulf between two opposing cultures? Workshops have beomce therefore, summer retreats for non-thought rather than strategy sessions of leadership enhancement.

But, this was not unique to the Native American movement. It was also true of those whose response to US imperialism, inequality and racism was to "tune in and drop out" and form hippy communes. But Deloria is making a point about the need for a movement that struggles for demands and poltiics. Indeed he argues that it is not enough to "talk of Civil Rights", because this "lessens our chances of understanding the forces involved in the rights of human beings... we should begin talking about actual econoic problems; and in realistic terms we are talking about land".

Deloria argues that 1968 represented a crisis for the Native Americans and the Civil Rights movement. The murder of Martin Luther King and the explosion of riots, Deloria says, meant simply taking a colour TV. "America, rioters seemed to be saying, is a colour TV and this is what we want from here". This is a crude analysis that mirrors what the mainstream were saying, but it arises, Deloria argues out of a contradiction about what was wanted from "Civil Rights":

When the black seeks to change his role by adjusting the laws of the nation, he merely raises the hope that progress is being made. But for the majority of blacks progress is not being made. Simply because a middle-class black can eat at the Holiday Inn is not a gain. People who can afford the best generally get it. A socio-economic rather than legal adjustment must consequently be the goal.

Indeed, Deloria is frustrated that while King made a turn in 1968 toward economic issues he lumped "all minority communities [together] on the basis of their economic status." But the "real issue for Indians - tribal existence within the homeland reservation - appeared to have been completely ignored". Native American poverty was awful, but alieviating it required a more radical approach.

Deloria ends the book hopeful. While his manifesto contains much in the way of detailed suggestions about politics, land control and the US government, he has as an amibition a wider aim - the protection of Indian space within US society. Here he celebrates the story of the Tiguas, a tribe in Texas that won recognition as an Indian tribe after having seen a steep social and economic decline. The fact that they had protected their culture meant that a campaign was able to win a protected reservation and recognition for them and "a chance to build a sound economic base for the future". Deloria says:

Ever since Indians began to be shunted to reservations it has been assumed by both Indians and whites that the eventual destiny of the Indian people was to silently merge into the mainstream of American society and disappear. The thought of a tribe being able to maintain traditions, socio-political structure, and basic identity within an expanding modern American city would have been so preposterous an idea had it been advanced prior to the discover of the Tiguas, that the person expounding the thesis would have been laughed out of the room. 

Deloria hoped this would lead to a great revival of Native American culture and life. Ultimately however, he wants the "recolonisation" of "the unsettled areas of the nation by groups of Indian colonists".  With this Deloria hoped/expected that "traditional Indian customs will come to predominate" within the communities. Indeed there is a hope that this would go further and lead to the rejection of capitalism:

Where ordinary white corporations serve to produce income from capital invested, corporations will not do so in the new Indian scheme. Rather they will serve to coordinate community life. Earnings will be used to provide services ordinarily received from various governmental agencies. As economic independence becomes greater, independence in other areas of life will follow. Indians can thereby achieve a prosperity not seen since the landing of the white man.

Sixty years later this has not happened. Indeed Native American reservations remain some of the poorest parts of the United States. Racism, imperialism and the politics of settler colonialism continue to divde and rule and keep the Native Americans in poverty. Part, perhaps of the problem, was that the Native American movement was too separated from wider Civil Rights struggles. Deloria himself repeatedly seems to reject radical and revolutionary (he says "violent") struggles. But it was Wounded Knee in 1973 when Native Americans literarily took up arms and fought of the US state which helped shift the narrative (and the occupation of Alcatraz). Nonetheless his agenda is assuredly against the system. Nick Estes has written recently that "Deloria's calls for peoplehood... were a step toward national self-determination: Black and Indigenous peoples taking charge of their own lives and destinies. To do so first required the restoration of Indigenous governmnce and territories, a project long in the making, as well as the abolition of the colonial system". It is an inherently revolutionary project.

Is the prospect of Native American reemergence within wider "white" society possible still? I would suggest it is, but it will require the dismantling of US capitalism. In winning this Native Americans will surely fight alongside all the poor and oppressed people of America. 

Custer Died for your Sins was enormously influential (not least among shamefaced anthropologists). It forms the base for much later theoretical and revolutionary work and those interested in Settler Colonialism, as well as Native American struggles, will get much from reading it. I found it hard to get hold of a copy in the UK, but I recommend that you try.

Related Reviews

Estes - Our History is the Future
King - The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America
Miller - Custer's Fall: The Native American Side of the Story
Marshall III - The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History
Wooster - The Military & United States Indian Policy 1865-1903
Nerburn - Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce
Englert - Settler Colonialism: An Introduction
Hämäläinen - Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power

qntm - There is no Antimemetics Division

The online SCP Foundation, via the SCP Wiki, has been a source of excellent fictional writing focused on the idea that various secret organisations exist that study and fight paranormal, alien and (sometimes comic) supernatural creatures and species. Qntm, the pen-name of Sam Hughes, has produced an excellent novel based on their writing on the SCP Wiki and various short stories. There is No Antimemetics Division is based around Marie Quinn, the leader of the Antimemetics Division which fights various alien and supernatural creatures, most I think of which appear on the SCP Wiki.

The story begins with some of the more mundane events, where it becomes clear that there are many existing threats to the Division and to humanity in general. But what also slowly emerges is that there are layers on experiences and knowledge that are hidden from the characters themselves. Fighting monsters that can live in ideas, or thoughts, or their awareness of you, means sometimes having to forget key pieces of information. Then there is the problem that some of the monstrous threats alter or destroy memories. So the joke of the book's inner flap "Welcome to the Antimemetics Division, this is not your first day" is a very real one for employees of the Division.

What quickly becomes clear is that there is a very big conspiracy that is threatening reality itself. Quinn is central to fighting this, but she's not entirely aware of her role, and some of the best bits of the novel are those where characters like Quinn find hidden information or even special firewalled offices that allow them to discuss infomation they have forgotten.

One of the great things about the SCP Foundation has always been the way it gives the reader tantalising glimpses of wider stories. If this was all qntm's novel did it would probably work - especially because frequently these glimpses come through the character's own discovery of knowledge of their forgotten memories. But the novel really works because there is a good story here too. Quinn discovers that the Division is shrinking. They are losing their war. This is deeply personal for her and this loss is at multiple levels. In fact the reader is not just an observer - we know things that Quinn forgets. This allows a level of horror to develop beyond that of just that caused by death and destruction.

Related Reviews

Lacroix - Here and Beyond
Elliott - Awakened
Moore - The Great When
Bester - The Demolished Man

Ben Ware - On Extinction: Beginning again at the end

It seems fitting that my last book review of 2025 is "on extinction". After all, this year once again broke records for temperature, extreme weather, floods and so on, and also saw a failed climate COP. The human cost of these tragedies is growing, and the outlook is bleak. But Ben Ware's On Extinction is not a catalogue of disaster, nor an interrogation of the science, or indeed a historical study like Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction. 

Ware's book is an attempt to grapple with how we understand extinction philosophically and the limitations of what he calls "progressive liberalism". In other words the book is a critique of how we think about the end of the world and what we imagine can be constructed instead. I will admit that I approached the book with some trepidation - I am not someone for whom philosophy comes naturally. That said Ware's book was accessible, stimulating and I was carried along by his easy prose.

At the heart of the book are two related discussions. The first is the aforementioned inability of liberal political thought to construct an alternative to capitalism that can avoid catastrophe even in the imaginations of the liberals. The second is the concept of revolution. Revolution is an essential alternative to capitalism's logic of accumulation ("moses and the prophets", says Marx). It is capitalism that is dragging us under, but it is also the only framework most people have - witness a host of books written by well meaning academics and writers anxious about the future, but ideologically unable to imagine anything different.

Ware says that in 1921, the Marxist Walter Benjamin described "capitalism as a demonic cult, 'perhaps the most extreme that ever existed'." Capitalism is, for Benjamin,  a celebratory cult where there is no break, no holiday, every day "demands the utter fealty of its worshippers". Ware contines:

In the first instance, the demonic figures as a kind of bad infinite: it is surplus-producing activity without cessation - activity that threatens the complete destruction of human existence... a crucial second sense... [capitalism] establishes guilt/debt as the organizing principle of social relations."

The second demonic sense Benjamin explains is that this guilt/debt causes the "expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world." What does guilt/debt/despair mean in this context? 

Our guilt/debt is part of the compulsion to behave in a particular way. To spend, to work, to obey. And in doing so we acccept we will live in a system of exploitation and oppression, war and homelessness, poverty amid plenty. But for the capitalist it might refer to the compulsion they experience to endlessly accumulate due to the competition inherent in the system. We have seemingly no choice but to sell our labour, and buy their commodities. They have to behave in a particular way too. Ware analyses this through a brief study of the popular series Squid Game (which I haven't seen). The winner of that (imaginery) game carries with them, the "guilt-burden" of everyone else's failure. Or, "their new-found wealth remaining permanently indebted to a system of suffering, exploitation, and sadistic enjoyment". That at least is not fiction.

Ware concludes however by saying that "we might say that the only thing one is certain of under capitalism is one's guilt... but this then creates an issue that Benjamin does not exxplore... how to deal with accumulated guilt."

Ware points out that for Marx the vampire of capitalism sucks the life blood from the worker, it is a "mechanical monster" whose "demonic power", "drains the life-energy from the body of every man, woman and child". But crucially for Marx the worker is also the "active agent of political change, the potential motor of world history". For Marx this potential for revolutionary transformation is the hope. But for many revolution is not about fundamental change, it is about internal change. 

Ware looks at this through a discussion of Kant. Ware says:

For Kant, one becomes morally a 'good' person only through a 'revolution' in one's 'disposition';, through a kind of 'rebirth' or 'new creation'... political enlightenment, but contrast, can only be achieved 'slowly', by a gradualist movement from worse to better... In relation to the French experiment, what matters is not the revolution itself but instead the way in which it allows enthusiastic spectators to extract moral and aesthetic capital form it. What Kant thus appears to want is revolution without Revolution.

Here I think Ware nails things exactly in relation to contemporary politics:

What we encounter here then... is a version of torday's 'progressive' left liberalism: a politics that is bringin with enthusiasm when it comes to 'looking at' the burning issues of the day - ecological devastation, accelerating inequality, the threat of nuclear war - but which... has not the slightest intention of activiely participationg in anything that would change the political and economimc conditions from which these problems emerge.

Think of all those failed COP meetings, the heart-searching articles and books by the likes of Bill Gates, or countless academics, whose hope is to reinvent capitalism or defang it to make it all nicer. The alternative has to be revolutionary. Here Ware returns to despair, but this time reconstructed as a potential force to encourage change:

By opening outselves uip to the force of despair, we arrive (potentially at least) at a properly political truth: the problems we confront cannot be resolved within the existing framework, and so it is the framework itself that must be transformed.

It is a powerful conclusion and reminds us of the power of philosophy. Ware's book is a polemic, but it is not one that I expected - it left me enthused and stimulated, and enlightened (in the best sense). But it is also encouraging that at least in Ware's response to extinction the working class, as a class, is at the heart of his answer. On Extinction covers a lot of ground in its 150 pages. Ware touches on a host of philosophers and thinkers, and many cultural milestones (some of which are quite obscure). Nonetheless this is a stimulating book that will provoke plenty of debate, argument and inspiration too. 

Related Reviews

Dawson - Extinction: A Radical History
Kolbert - The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Riley Black - The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs

Riley Black's The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs is a remarkable book that places dinosaurs in their historical and ecological context. But it also shows how our own understanding of dinosaurs is constantly changing. As such the book is also a history of paleontology. As Black jokes in her afterword, "in the past two hundred years our favorite prehistoric creatures have stompled through our imaginations as immense lizards, leaping oddities, tail-dragging dullards and rainbow-coloured fluffballs". By placing dinosaurs in their wider ecological, social and historical context a new understand emerges. This ecological approach is important. Dinosaurs are changing, growing and developing creatures. They are, in consequence, very real.

This was brought home to me when I was lucky enough to visit the Museum of the Rockies in Montana. There a fantastic display Triceratops skulls shows how the animal heads changed through their lives. Later, adult, skulls had huge fans and horns. But also holes (fenestra as they are known) in their fans which only developed later in life. Dinosaurs, like Triceratops, grew up. Their bodies changed constantly, and as Black repeatedly points out, so likely did their behaviour.

For instance the horns or clubs of dinosaurs have usually been understood as weapons - reflecting a tendency for nature to be understood as "red in tooth and claw". While it is undoubtably true that dinosaurs hunted each other and bit each other, it is far from the only use for such features. Black shows how horns and claws are more likely to have been used for multiple purposes (as many animals do today) having roles in development, mating or fighting. It is very unlikely that given the variety of dinosaur horn arrangements, they "all evolved their horns to principally ward off predators" otherwise "there would likely be an ideal configuration for telling tyrannosaurs to back off". Instead the variety of horn arrangements suggests that "interactions between individuals of the species were a central factor in how these dinosaurs evolved".

Black shows how palentologists have had to break with older ideas to allow us to understand dinosaurs in a new way. It is hard not to conclude that some of the newer approaches to ecology that have developed in recent decades are part of this changing view of the dinosaurs. The environmental crises have changed our understanding of how human society interacts with nature, and this has led to new approaches to how we should understand the interaction between living things and their environment. Black's book feels refreshing in this regard. It moves us on from simply seeing dinosaurs as carnivorous individuals fighting over a herbivore carcass as they are often portrayed in books or on screen. Indeed, Black repeatedly encourages us to see dinosaurs within their wider context - including non-dinosaur animals. Here again the reader is encouraged to think differently:

The supposed antagonism between dinosaurs and mammals has been overplayed, and in some ways misunderstood because of a focus on competition for ecological prominence.... The emerging pictures is that competition between different forms of early mammals restricted the evolution of our ancestors, not the dinosaurs.

The competition between species may have been less important than the interactions between individuals of the same species. Here I really enjoyed (and learned a lot from) Black's discussion of the rearing of young dinosaurs, and how adults treated their eggs. Sometimes they cared for them, and sometimes they left the eggs alone and the young to fend for themselves. But whichever strategy was adopted by different dinosaur species, it had consequences for the behaviour of the young and for the wider ecology. Take young T-Rexs. Their very existence likely changed the local ecology, but also the fossil record. As Black says of the T-Rex young they took up the "distinct ecological role of the medium-size predators that we would expect to find, preventing other dinosaur species from taking it up. it's one reason that the Hell Creek Formation... sometimes seems to have lower dinosaur diversity than other habitats". 

Of course dinosaurs, like all living creatures, transformed their own environment. Black gives several examples of how they changed the landscape - creating pools through their size and weight, or ensuring that a forest would have had plenty of open space as well as woodland. The disappearance of the dinosaurs then opened up an evolutionary space where mammals could become dominant, but so could many other forms of flora and fauna. Dinosaurs were not isolated lizards. They were social creatures that changed their environment and evolved, developed and disappeared over a huge period of time. Black reminds us that the later dinosaurs could possibly have walked past fossils of their older ancestors. It is a startling reminder of how old the Earth is, and how long the time of the dinosaurs was.

Since reading one of Riley Black's earlier books The Last Days of the Dinosaurs I have enthused about it to everyone who mentions dinosaurs to me. The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs is a fine volume that broadens the story and places dinosaurs in a much wider context. Anyone who wants an introduction to the dinosaurs that shows how we have changed our understanding of these fabulous beasts will enjoy this book. Its an excellent, entertaining and insightful read.

Related Reviews

Black - The Last Days of the Dinosaurs
Cadbury - The Dinosaur Hunters
Fortey - Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution
Gould - Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
Mayor - The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths and Myth in Greek and Roman Times
Kolbert - The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Ward - The Call of Distant Mammoths: Why the Ice Age Mammals Disappeared
Fortey - Survivors: The Animals and Plants that Time has Left Behind

Ivan Doig - Dancing at the Rascal Fair

*** Warning Spoilers ***

The second volume of Ivan Doig's Montana Trilogy, is the first chronologically. It probably doesn't matter whether you read this, or English Creek first, because these are independent tales. But Dancing at the Rascal Fair sets up the origins of most of the people who live in Two Medicine Country, a fictional area of Montana just east of the Rockies towards the Canadian border. 

Rob Barclay and Angus McCaskill are leaving Scotland to head to Montana where Rob's uncle Lucas is working as a miner. Lucas sends money home every year - sizeable chunks - and Rob and Angus are attracted to the good pay and better quality of life than late 19th century Scotland can offer. Montana is a land of opportunity, riches, good land and an escape from grinding poverty.

The first chapters have a dreamlike quality as Angus narrates his and Rob's voyage and then their long search in Montana's new towns for Lucas. Eventually they end up in Two Medicine Country, where Lucas is not mining, but running a bar and the two of them join Lucas in sheep business. Right from the start the messy reality of small, close-knit, emigre communities is there. Rob falls for Lucas' partner - and getting him and Angus to homestead in the mountains is part of making sure this doesn't get even more messy.

But it is Angus whom we follow for the next generation, as he farms, clears, and also teaches in the local school. He meets, and falls hard for Anna, another teacher and hopes to marry her. When she choses someone else, in part for economic reasons, Angus is desroyed and marries Rob's sister who has been brought over for that purpose. Their's is a caring and loving marriage, but Angus' love for Anna hangs over it like a shroud. Eventually Rob is unable to cope with Angus' unrequited love and hope and their brotherly, almost lovelike, relationship comes apart.

For while this is a story of love and humanity, it's set against the harsh backdrop of Montana's climate and the economic and political reality of the early 20th century. Boys get sent to fight in the trenches, influenza hits and the farming economy goes through its ups and downs. In addition harsh winters, dry summers and the gradual changing of farming practices transform the area and drive some to poverty.

Doig is wonderfully skilful at placing the human emotions of his characters against the backdrop of economic crisis, winter storms, drought and war. We're rooting for his people, while anxious for their survival. Dancing at the Rascal Fair is no cowboy adventure. Its the story of what happens over time. The book takes place over thirty or forty years, yet some chapters deal at length with a handful of days. It gives the reader a feeling of an epic, while occasionally zooming in on great detail.

What happens to Angus, Rob and the others is, in many ways, shaped by forces beyond their control. There's little here about the US's own politics - other than setting up of the National Forests which plays a big part in English Creek. Instead characters play their parts against a backdrop of events out of their control. That, I think is a deliberate ploy to make the reader think about the people. 

It should be noted that one group of people who are not here in detail are the Native Americans. Its probably a criticism of Doig's fiction that he neglects their place in Montana's history (though this isn't true of all his books - see Winter Brothers). Here they are literarily unnamed, but ever present in a Reservation on the other side of the hill. Doig's focus on emigrant and immigrant lives reminds us that the modern US was built in part on the labour of economic migrants. But the other part - the genocide - is absent.

That criticism aside, this is a deeply moving look at the lives that people live, which forms the backdrop to modern Montana.

Related Reviews

Doig - English Creek
Doig - This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
Doig - Bucking the Sun
Doig - Winter Brothers: A season at the edge of America

Francis Pryor - Paths to the Past: Encounters with Britain's hidden landscapes

Francis Pryor's books have been some of the most accessible and popular guides to British landscape history. Works such as Britain BC have helped us understand how monuments like Stonehenge are actually part of a human landscape shaped by thousands of years of labour. Pryor's work with Time Team and his pioneering work as a farmer, archaeologist and historian have offered unique perspectives on history, land and society. 

Paths to the Past is a short collection of very brief essays, twenty-four in all, that are Pryor's highly personal engagement with a variety of unusual and sometimes spectacular  sites and buildings. These range from very large areas - such as Orkney's neolithic landscape - to the very small: Cromwell's Bridge in Lancashire. In each place Pryor explores the buildings, the human landscape and the natural world. Pryor's aim with the book is to encourage the reader to visit these places, and he certainly did provide a number of places for me to go in the future.

Unfortunately I found that while all of the essays are interesting, they tend to be interesting because of the places that Pryor is describing rather than his particular insights. I was constantly underwhelmed. Each of the essays left me feeling that Pryor was going to give us some great insight, but I was left wanting. Sometimes its no more than saying he felt the presence of the past. After a visit to the Great Orme Bronze Age mines in North Wales Pryor writes that he was "standing in their space, listening to their sounds".

On a number of occasions I also felt that Pryor's approach to history was to separate humanity from the landscape. More problematically there is no sense of struggle in Pryor's work. There's hard labour, such as that of the Bronze Age miners squeezing through dangerous passages, but there's no struggle. Enclosure is simply described as a process of landscape change made by landowners, rather than the centuries long battle over land, space and political rights that resulted in the great defeat of the English peasantry. That's a far more interesting story and one that surely has resonnances to today.

These are interesting places and Pryor writes about them very well (few authors can make a reader want to visit a shopping centre in Peterborough). But it felt removed from the engaging (and pathbreaking) work that Pryor has produced previously and which I have celebrated. See links below.

Related Reviews

Pryor - Britain BC
Pryor - Britain in the Middle Ages, An Archaeological History
Pryor - Farmers in Prehistoric Britain
Pryor - Seahenge: A Quest for Life and Death in Bronze Age Britain
Pryor - Britain AD: A Quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons
Pryor - Flag Fen: Life and Death of a Prehistoric Landscape
Pryor - The Birth of Modern Britain
Pryor - The Making of the British Landscape

Paul Frölich - Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg was one of the most remarkable revolutionaries to emerge from the European socialist milieu in the late 19th century. There is a tendency on the left to discuss Luxemburg in the context of things that she wrote or did that were wrong. I've been to many meetings which bemoan her failure to "launch a revolutionary party" early, rather than staying part of the German Social Democratic Party, hence dooming the German Revolution. These are, of course, crude criticisms even if they do have some basis. Nonetheless it is important that we say, as Lenin did:

'Eagles may at times fly lower than hens but hens can never rise to the height of eagles'. Rosa Luxemburg was mistaken on the question of the independence of Poland; she was mistaken in 1903 in her appraisal of Menshevism; she was mistaken on the theory of accumulation of capital; she was mistaken in July 1914, when, together with Plekhanov, Vandervelde, Kautsky and others she advocated unity between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; she was mistaken in what she wrote in prison in 1918 (She corrected most of these mistakes at the end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919 when she was released). But inspite of her mistakes she was and remains for us an eagle. And not only will Communists all over the world cherish her memory, but her biography and her complete works will serve as useful manuals for training many generations of communists all over the world.

Paul Frölich's biography of Luxemburg was one of the very first to be written, and was published in unusal circumstances just before World War Two. In fact the English translation became a huge best seller as part of the Left Book Club during the War. It is very much a political biography that places her ideas in the context of her political activty and her organisational context. The Lenin quote above matters not just because of his list of criticisms, or indeed his celebration of Luxemburg's work - but his acknowledgement that her ideas changed in the context of struggle. Indeed part of the celebration of her work that Lenin mentions was impossible because the archive that Frölich built up was trapped by Stalin during WWII and kept from the movement.

What shines through is Luxemburg's understanding of political theory and strategy, based always on working class power. For instance, in the great debate within the German left about how the left should organise and the role of parliamentary activity, Frölich says that Luxemburg 

did not insist merely on agitation: the task of a socialist parliamentarian also consisted in taking part in the positive legislative work, whenever possible with practical success-a task which would become increasingly difficult with the strengthening of the party’s representation in parliament. The task could be correctly fulfilled only if Social Democracy retained an awareness of its role as an oppositional party and, at the same time, found the golden mean between sectarian negation and bourgeois parliamentarism-always remembering that its real strength lay outside parliament, in the proletarian masses. Above all, however, it had to give up without reservation the illusion that a working-class party could overpower a capitalist state by a majority vote in parliament, i.e. solely by parliamentary means.

Nonetheless it is clear that the context of Luxemburg's main area of work - the German socialist movement - did have its impact on her throught. Frölich's book is very much a celebration of Luxemburg's work and life - but he isn't uncritical. But in one area he does acknowledge mistakes - her debate with Lenin over the question of political organisation.

This first disagreement between her and Lenin-even if all the various background factors are taken into consideration-nevertheless revealed characteristic differences between these two great leader personalities. Luxemburg underestimated the power of organisation, particularly when the reins of leadership were in the hands of her opponents. She relied all too believingly on the pressure of the revolutionary masses to make any corrections in party policy. Lenin’s total political view prior to 1917 shows traces of unmistakably Blanquist influences and an exaggerated voluntarism, though he quickly overcame it when faced with concrete situations. To overstate the point, it can be said that Rosa concerned herself more with the historical process as a whole and derived her political decisions from it, while Lenin’s eye was more concentrated on the final aim and sought the means to bring it about. For her the decisive element was the mass; for him it was the party, which he wanted to forge into the spearhead of the whole movement.

This is a much better approach than the "she didn't set up a revolutionary party" argument. Not least because it is clear that Luxemburg did always fight for revolutionary organisation, and I was reminded that the Polish group she led played such a role in the crucial war years and during the 1917 revolutionary period.

Perhaps the most interesting discussion of Luxemburg's "mistakes" are in her work on the accumulation of capital. Here again there's a tendency for some reviewers simply to say that she was wrong. Yet in doing so they miss Luxemburg's real attempt to grapple with the limits of Marx's own work on accumulation (born out of his abstraction of the economy from reality in order to clarify his argument) and the fact that she was one of the first to link accumulation to imperialist expansion. She was also, it should be said, someone who was very clear about the role of imperialism in the destruction of indigenous peoples. Her theory here may not be fully developed, but it is a very real attempt to place a Marxist critique of capitalism into a global context. 

Luxemburg's work also included two other great pieces of work that developed revolutionary politics to adapt to new eras. Her Reform or Revolution and The Mass Strike both remain indispensible booklets for socialists in the 21st centutry as we grapple with the interactions between social movements, capital and political organisation. The Mass Strike in particular will no doubt be read again and again as workers engage in mass struggles over austerity and politics. The "Gen X" revolts spring to mind.

But it is in the last four years of her life that Rosa Luxemburg comes into her own. Her fight to shape a new revolutionary era out of the ruins of the betrayal of the German socialist movement at the start of World War One and then her attempts to learn from and extend the revolutionary epoch after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Here Frölich engages with her criticisms of the Russian Revolution and the policies of the Bolsheviks, particular towards the National and Agrarian questions. He acknowledges her errors, while placing them in context. Not least the fact that Luxemburg was in prison and had limited access to the movement at times. Nonetheless we see how Luxemburg is constantly striving to develop the movement, and with the outbreak of the German Revolution we she how her politics place her far ahead of almost all her comrades. Her clarity of ideas in December 1918 and January 1919 with the counter-revolution flexing its muscles is poignant given her murder by them in early January.

There is no doubt that the loss of Luxemburg robbed the German working class of one of its most able leaders. Frölich's book is one of the best introductions to her life and politics, but it is also an incredible celebration of working class power and the vision of socialism from below that Luxemburg strived for her whole life. If at times it feels a little hagiographic this is, perhaps, to be expected given that Frölich is writing in the darkest period for humanity as Hitler has won and Stalin's politics is stamping over the revolutionary tradition that Paul Frölich's subject stood for. 

Related Reviews

Gietinger - The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg
Luxemburg - Reform or Revolution
Luxemburg - The Mass Strike
Campbell - A Rebel's Guide to Rosa Luxemburg

Chris Harman - Spartacus and the Slave Revolt that Shook the Roman Empire

Redwords have been bringing out a series of books with transcripts of talks by leading Marxists with new introductions. This little book is based on a talk by Chris Harman at Marxism 1998 in London as part of a course on battles that changed the world. In the talk Harman jokes that the reading wasn't to difficult as there are only two sources for the Spartacus rebellion, and these amount to five pages or so. But what we do know tells us a great deal about Ancient Rome and the position of slaves within it. Harman's historical materialist approach places the battles of the Third Servile War in the wider context of the development of Rome and the limits of the Roman Empire.

Give the short nature of the text Harman only touches on some subjects. Indeed, as Christian Høgsbjerg notes in his extremely useful introduction, at one point in the talk Harman realises he is running out of time and has to summarise a lot of material. It is useful then that Høgsbjerg has access to Harman's original notes as he is able to construct and include material that Harman couldn't include on the day of the talk. But two aspects of the talk remain vitaly important. The first is Harman's summary of the class nature of Roman society and how the army was an essential part of this:

Essentially, what happened was the victory of the Roman armies led to two sorts of immense wealth flooding to Rome. One was the immense wealth coming from the territoties which were conquered by Rome.. the second form of wealth ... was the massive enslavement of populations.

Harman continues:

The Roman rich had these vast sums of wealth... [which] enabled them to buy the slaves off the Roman state, and they systematically then established a situation in which they began tilling their estates with slave. And their calculation was quite simply this. 'The Roman army is invincible. Every year, we conquer more people. Every time we conquer more people, we enslave more people, there's an endless supply of slaves'.

This leads us to the second point of Harman's argument. This model was unsustainable and sections of Roman society understood this. The contradiction was that the cost of fighting the wars became prohibitive, and to try to resolve things the Roman ruling class tried to change society, by setting up forms of serfdom. But the centrality of slavery (and war) to the Roman economy made this impossible. 

This then places the activity of Spartacus and his rebels into context. Because the taking of Rome by the rebels would have meant them implementing the very regime they were rebelling against (they were, after all, former slaves). Harman's conclusion was that the revolt was heroic, but "history hadn't advanced to such a point in which it's possible for an oppressed class to see overthrowing the empire and estabishing itself as a new ruling class upon a higher, better form of organisation of society". In other words, rather like the peasants of the German Peasants' War, their victory could never be permanent, even if they could never overcome the ruling class's forces.

While it's a short pamphlet and, to be honest, Harman's speaking style doesn't readily translate into an easy reading text, there's a great deal in this talk. Once again Chris Harman's historical materialist approach gives us far more insights that we might expect from just five pages of original source material. Christian Høgsbjerg's excellent editing, introduction and footnotes flesh out the material and make this a fine quick read.

Related Reviews

Harman - Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis & The Relevance of Marx
Harman - Selected Writings
Harman - The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After
Harman - Revolution in the 21st Century
Beard - Emperor of Rome
Parenti - The Assassination of Julius Caesar
Rees - The Far Edges of the Known World: A new history of the ancient past
Tacitus - The Agricola and the Germania

Bruno Leipold - Citizen Marx: Republicanism & the formation of Karl Marx's social and political thought

How did Marx come to the ideas that are today most associated with this revolutionary politics? This is a question with surprisingly complex answers. Most people who call themselves Marxists today are aware that Marx began his political trajectory as a Young Hegelian, but that he famously "turned Hegel upside down". But, as Bruno Leipold's wonderful new book shows, this is not enough to understand Marx's politics. Leipold argues that to understand Marx's communism, one has to understand its evolution from Marx's roots in Republicanism. He goes on to conclude that Marx's politics have to be seen as developing in both opposition to, and in debt to, the republican tradition.

Marx began his political career as a radical republican who believed that "the arbitary power of despotic regimes" had to be overcome and replaced with a democratic republic where people held democractic power and controlled their elected representatives "through binding mandates". While initially sharing a republican critique of communism, as Marx became a communist himself he "incorporated the republican opposition to arbitary power into his social critique of capitalism" retaining the belief in a democratic republic. Later, in response to the 1871 Paris Commune, Marx further developed his vision of democracy into one that meshed with his earlier radical views "returning to ideas he had defended as a young republican". Of course this was not a reversal, but a development of his radical democracy that "emphasized the need for a much more encompassing emocratic transformation of government."

These three stages are examined in detail in Leipold's book. The first section, which looks at Marx's republican ideas and the republican milieu he was active in is particularly interesting. Leipold begins with the progressive and radical nature of republicanism in the early to mid 19th century, but also its limitations. Marx's "shift from republicanism was driven by a growing disillusionment with the ability of political emancipation, through a democratic republic, to establish truly human emancipation" together with a growing understanding of the unique role of the working class as an agent for change. It is worth noting in passing though Leipold's point that few 19th century republicans "would be satisfied by democracy today". Their radicalism, was a genuine radicalism, but it was born from a utopian belief that everyone could be equal despite class divisions. 

That said, and in something I found particularly illuminating, Leipold argues that we must see 19th century republicanism as a "distinct political movement". While liberals might form alliances against the monarchy with republicans at the time, they all "disagreed on the regime that should replace it". Republicanism was a political movement that fought for the "introduction of democracy and popular sovereignty" but with a "distinctive conception of liberty, understood as the absence of arbitrary power or domination". But as Leipold goes on to show this manifests, not as a republican vision for a society free of private property with the means of production held in common, but rather a semi-backward vision of a society of small producers.

Marx became radical within these frameworks but broke with them through a critical engagement both with social movements and with systematic studies of politics and political models. In 1843 Marx

condemned the despotic treatment of subjects and the exclusion of the mass of citizens from political particuipation that resulted from the arbitrary rule of absolute monarchs. In his critique of Hegel, Marx rehected his constitutional model of monarchy, which Marx argued only fractionally extended participation to the king's ministers, bureaucrats and the propertied elite. Marx expressed a preference for a republic over a constitutional monarchy, but also criticized the Maerican model of a republic, where the people were still estranged from the political sphere and consigned to particularism of civil society.

In constrast to these Marx proposed a "true democracy" where "people would hold active sovereign power through the popular administration of general interests... and the tight control over representatives through binding instructions [mandates]." Here I am particularly take with the word "active". It demonstrates that even then Marx's commitment to a popular participatory democracy with constant political engagement. Far more radical than our current democracy with its brief election periods every few years. It is this vision of democracy that re-emerges in 1871 when the Paris Commune explodes.

Around the same time as this, Marx was also going through a change in his attitude to communism. Leipold argues he was "sympathetic" but not convinced in the early 1840s. Marx heads to Paris to challenge communism, but ends up being converted. But, crucially, Leipold writes that "Marx did not so much convert to communism as fashion a new form of it". 

This change is rooted in Marx's growing concern with the State as a body that could "not truly free people from obstacles to their freedom, it only relegated those obstacles to civil society". The republican critique of freedom was that people could never be free in a society where a ruler can make them behave in a particular way due to their power over them. Marx concluded that "in order to be free, a person has to live not only in a free state but in a free society". This insight takes Marx into the idea of revolutionary emancipation, whereby proletarian revolution coul lead to the "dissolution of all estates".

If property was the root of power, then a propertyless society could be the basis for a new set of social, political and economic relations that would bring in real freedom. Marx's conversion to communism is remarkably rapid. His time in Paris, described by Leipold as a time of politically sharp debates and engagement with socialist ideas, sees Marx develop a set of ideas that "could no longer be plausibly contained undert the banner of republicanism and democracy and amounted to an encompassing ideological and political conversion to communism."

But it was the revolutionary period of 1848/9 that cemented Marx's understandings of communism and the role of the working class in constructing a society based on freedom. While celebrating the overthrow of monarchies, Marx could also understand that the new bourgeois order was inadequate.  As Leipold writes:

For Marx, the bourgeois republic was essentially a change in the political scaffolding that didn't touch the underlying social building... So closely did Marx associate the republic with being simply the poltiical accompaniment of bourgeois society that he often used 'republic' and 'bourgeois republic' interchangeably... Conflating the republic with the bourgeois republic also served Marx's political purpose of highlighting what he took to be the emancipatory limits of republicanism... Achieving the republic would, Marx stressed, not live up to the idealistic hopes of its supporters but instead cement the bourgeois transformation of society.

If the bourgeois republic offered only illusionary freedom to people then what sort of society could offer genuine freedom? Here Leipold usees Marx's Capital to explore how his understanding of capitalism allowed him to develop a vision of socialism and democracy that broke further from republicanism. Marx begins with a critique of the utopian vision of small producers as the basis for egalitarian society. Such a society was one that would be a step backward from the capitalist economy because such a collection of independent producers, isolated from each other, could not utilise the "gains from cooperation, division of labour, the application of scientific and technicalknowledge" and,  in a phrase I found particularly insightful, "doomed it in the face of a mode of production that could".

Leipold writes that Marx, "recognised that the political form of bourgeois society, the bourgeois republic, was an inappropriate political form for bringing about communism". But how could a socialist society utilise these capitalist developments? Famously Marx says the "working class cannot simply lay hold of the read-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes". This line comes from Marx's writings on the Paris Commune, It was the Commune that allowed Marx to glimpse for the first time how a radical transformation of workers' relations to the means of production would usher in new forms of democracy and a new epoch of freedom. For some republicans, the opposite was true. The Giuseppe Mazzini said that the Commune's violence "ruined the possibility of national unity". Marx however saw in the Commune the possibilty of a new form of unity that shattered apart bourgeois society and constructed something new. Indeed this was a new shift in Marx's conception of the "social republic" where it was a specific form suited to maintaining and bringing about working-class social and political rule". As Marx writes:

The cry of 'Social Republic', with which the revolution of February [1848] was ushered in by the Paris proletariat did but express a vague aspiration after a Republic that wsa not only to supersede the monarchical form of class rule, but class rule itself. The Commune was the positive form of that Republic.

Crucially it was the active democratic engagement with society of working people coming together with their control of the economy that made the Commune that "positive form". Here Marx could celebrate the Parisian workers who, out of their struggle, implemented the radical vision of democracy that Marx himself had argued for in his younger republican days. The right to recall elected representatives, the payment of such representatives appropriate wages, and the ability to mandate. It was this active and real, albeit short lived, experiment in radical democracy that gave Marx the final insight into how a communist society could function.

Out of these discussions Leipold explores what freedom and equality mean. His final argument brings together earlier themes around politics, arguing that Marx was clear that politics would not vanish after the transition to communism, but take on new forms. Insightfully Leipold also argues that the argument for freedom in the sense Marx (and republicans) used it has an importance today. It means freedom from arbitary control, dictorial power and being tied to the capitalist accumulation machine. We aren't free, not because we don't have the appropriate definition of freedom in a constitution, but because workers cannot be free when they are forced to work for the capitalists - one where we are trapped by the "despotic system of the subordination of labour to capital". Leipold argues, that the "terrain of freedom has too easily been abandoned to conservatives and liberals". We need to win it back as part of a struggle for an emancipatory vision of socialism.

Bruno Leipold's book is a remarkable, and fresh, engagement with Marx's work. For me it opened up whole new areas of thought and refreshed my thinking around key concepts such as freedom, the state, and democracy. But above all I found it an exciting and stimulating reminder of why Marx's ideas remain crucial to the fight for human emancipation. Those whose understanding of Marxism is constrained by that articulated by supporters of Stalin or the regimes in China or Eastern Europe, would do well to engage with this account Marx's deeply human vision of socialism. Citizen Marx has deservedly won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Prize, I hope that the publishers bring out an affordable paperback soon for the thousands of people who would gain so much from reading it. It is my book of the year.

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