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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He continues:

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

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

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

Related Reviews

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Harman - Marxism and History
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Alan Stern & David Grinspoon - Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto

The arrival of the New Horizon space probe at Pluto in July 2015 was the scientific highlight of the decade. It made headlines across the world, and through social media was followed avidly by millions of people. Despite expectations that Pluto and its moon Charon would be rocky, crater ridden bodies it turned out that they both had a wealth of surface features, with stunning geological formations, huge ice mountains, and shiny plains. The images became some of the most shared pictures on the internet - one of them is the backdrop to the PC that I'm writing this review on now - and continue to inspire and enthuse.

But the New Horizon's mission almost didn't happen. In fact, as this fascinating study shows, it had an extremely long gestation period. The trip to Pluto took just over nine years - but the roots of the mission began much earlier in the 1980s in the aftermath of the Voyager probes to the outer-solar system. The Voyager missions that both visited Jupiter and Saturn with one craft going on to Uranus and Neptune through the 1980s. In their own time they were as inspiring to scientists and the public as New Horizons was to be. But Pluto, at that time still designated as a planet, was not on either of the Voyager's itineraries. For some young aerospace engineers and scientists, this was a challenge and they set about convincing NASA that a visit to Pluto was worth the money, time and resources.

Pluto and one of its moons, Charon. Credit: NASA

With hindsight it is easy to say that New Horizons was well worth the cost. But that was certainly not the case. Alan Stern, one of the authors of this book drove the project forward and it details the ups and downs of the project. Despite proving time and again that a trip to Pluto was worth it in terms of science and value for money, politicians and NASA bureaucracy repeatedly conspired to try and cancel it. Any public sector project suffers from lack of resources and the whims of politicians who can end programmes with a pen stroke, but spaceflight is on a much larger scale.

As the 1980s became the 1990s and then the 2000s, successive US governments and NASA administrators blew hot and cold on the Pluto project and so when the programme finally got the it was a race against time to ensure that the engineering and technology could be in place for a very tight launch schedule. Due to their different orbits Pluto is currently moving away from Earth and any delay made the complex manoeuvres through the solar system harder. In addition Pluto was moving away from the sun and if scientists wanted to study it's atmosphere they'd have to get a probe there earlier rather than later.

I was also struck by the limitations imposed on the selection process through the way that NASA outsources projects to private companies, and secondary institutions, all of whom are in competition for contracts. A good chunk of the story tells how Stern put together a team at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) to make a Pluto proposal against their competitors at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The story of the competitive edge highlights different technological solutions to the problem of getting a package of scientific instruments to Pluto, but in my view also the limitations of this sort of selection process.

Three different manufacturers made the rocket stages and spacecraft propulsion systems and while some 2,500 women and men worked on the New Horizons mission, many were from different companies and institutions:

This workforce stretched far beyond SwRI [Southwest Research Institute] and APL, with more than a hundred participating companies and universities, plus NASA, and other government agencies in the mix. Major subcontracts under APL, SwRI or NASA included Ball Aerospace, which built the "Ralph" camera spectrometer instrument; JPL which provided the Deep Space Network... Lockheed Martin, Boeing... Aerojet... [etc]

Each of these added extra costs, bureaucracy and personal to the project. This is the limitations of doing huge science projects based on a system dominated by private multinationals.

Artists impression of New Horizons at Pluto. Credit: NASA

Given the enormous amount of time (nearly 15 years) that it took to get a Pluto mission into space before the decade long flight, it is no surprise that the crew were enormously emotional at their success. The final sections of this book that deal with the preparations and arrival at Pluto read like an adventure story, particularly when the team have to solve a major critical problem a few days before arrival. The authors give a real sense of the enormous challenges posed by such a project and the marvellous skills of the women and men who made it a success. I was particularly fascinated by the descriptions of how the spacecraft was able to do its observations while travelling at near 30,000 miles and hour through the Pluto system.

Despite the seemingly niche subject matter this is a book that tells an amazing story. It's well written, at places exciting, and always fascinating even when discussing NASA's bureaucracy. As I write this, New Horizons is a couple of weeks away from its next mission target and reading this has given me new insights into what that involves. I'd recommend it to anyone wanting an insight into the work that takes place behind the science missions, but one thing saddened me too. New Horizons demonstrated exactly what humanity can achieve given the resources, but this book showed how all too often achievements like this never get off the drawing board. New Horizons cost approximately $720 million over ten years of flight. The Iraq war cost the US over $1 trillion. One day humanity will decide what its real priorities are.

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Poul Anderson - Mirkheim

Poul Anderson was a prolific US science fiction author whose career spanned the post-war period. He published dozens of books, stories and articles and had an interesting personal background - born of Scandenavian parents and growing up in the USA, he moved to Denmark with his mother after his father died then returned to a farm in the American mid-west at the outbreak of war. Like his contemporary Robert Heinlein, Anderson's politics were right-wing libertarian and they certainly shine forth in Mirkheim.

On one level this is a story with quite a lot of potential. It contains a number of characters that Anderson repeatedly used in some of his novels, but is not part of any extended story arc. It deals with the imperial machinations of various galactic powers as a planet, Mikheim, is discovered. Mirkheim, for reasons that are rather ponderously explained in the introduction, is a source of very rare metals which are not easily obtainable despite the huge size of the galaxy. The planet quickly becomes the centre of a confrontation between various galactic trading blocs that are centred on particular planetary (human and alien) systems.

This confrontation threatens all out war and the central characters of the novel are in a race against time to stop the non-human threats and ensure that free trade is allowed across the galaxy. War is bad for trade, and intergalactic capitalism cannot allow it to happen so the agents of the Polesotechnic League (yes really) are sent out to sort out the problem. Anderson is quite happy to use the novel's conclusion to set out his own views on government and state. Nicholas van Rijn, one of the key characters in the book, who appears to be some sort of trader, freebooter and head of a galaxy spanning financial, trading empire sets out the problem:

The League was once a free association of entrepreneurs what offered goods and services but did not force them on nobody. It is not private outfits what fights wars and operates concentration camps, it is governments, because governments i those organisations what claims the right to kill whoever will not do what they say.

The idea that companies do not force products on others will be news to many, as will the idea that governments aren't acting in the interest of corporations at home. But such are the limitations of libertarianism. Does this matter? Well it shouldn't. Decently written political novels can be enjoyed by those who don't agree with them politically. The problem with Mirkheim is that the whole story appears to be a setup to enable Anderson to get on his soapbox. A problem that is also closely associated with Robert Heinlein. In addition, while van Rijn's accent and awkward sentence construction is a reflection of his Dutch origins - the rest of the book is full of convoluted writing, over-written descriptions and strange language. The introduction is also painfully long and boring. I won't be reading it again, and I'll probably give the rest of Anderson's books a miss on the strength of this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Richardson (ed) - Say it Loud! Marxism and the Fight Against Racism
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Walter Rodney - The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World

Walter Rodney was a leading revolutionary intellectual of anti-colonial and revolutionary movements in Africa and the Caribbean. Born in 1942, by the 1960s he was a leading radical voice in the emerging Black Power movements. His academic work in Jamaica's University of the West Indies was marked by attempts to relate to wider audiences than students and when the authorities banned him from ever returning to the country, riots exploded as thousands demonstrated in his support. Following this Rodney returned to Tanzania where he taught at the University of Dar es Salaam. This book is the first publication of Rodney's writings about the Russian Revolution based on a series of lectures he gave in Tanzania which attempted to understand the 1917 events through the experience of post-colonial Africa.

The first thing that should be said is that the editors and publishers have done a brilliant job in producing this book. It's clear from the introduction that this is the result of years of work in archives and the editors, together with Rodney's family, should be applauded to making this work available. Because the work remained unfinished in the form that Rodney would have liked due to his assassination in 1980 there are of course omissions. But it is clear that the author wanted this book to be available to a wide audience. Thankfully that is now possible.

The book begins with an over-view of the Russian Revolution and most importantly the economic and political context for 1917. Rodney also provides a detailed commentary on the historiography of the Russian Revolution, highlighting for instance, where authors who are critical of events are often linked to political forces (such as the Hoover Institution for War and Peace) hostile to the Soviet Union and radical movements in general. Rodney quotes one hostile account by Harold Fisher, which said that the Soviet "Communist movement...threatens our liberties and those of other free people". Rodney continues:

The reader would need to ask whether he or she is included in Fisher's collective "our," and whether he or she wants to be included, bearing in mind that the "free people" to whom he refers include the oppressed masses of Spain, Portugal, Greece and Latin America, plus (in 1955) all the colonised and exploited people of Africa and Asia and all the oppressed black people within in the United States! 

Rodney here notes that the "views of the Russian Revolution" are often shaped by prevailing political discourse and ignore some of the very factors that made the Revolution possible. But he is also writing about the Revolution in order to strengthen the anti-colonial movements of what today we would call the Global South. These movements took place in the context of historical colonial exploitation or in underdeveloped economies, economies that Rodney argues had been depleted of their wealth, resources and population by Western capitalism. So Rodney is keen to highlight the parallels between Russian in 1917 - with a huge peasantry and relatively small, but powerful working class - and countries like Tanzania where he was working. So this book, far more than most on the Russian Revolution, studies the peasantry. But Rodney does not ignore the central role of the working class. In fact, he follows Trotsky and celebrates the leadership of those workers:

Yet he [Trotsky] attacks the theory of a spontaneous and impersonal revolution as a liberal fiction... Both sides had been preparing for it for years. The fact that one cannot discover the identity of the leaders makes the revolution nameless, but not impersonal. The outbreak must be seen in the context of the generally propagandised condition of the workers, hence the 'conscious and tempered workers educated for the most part by the party of Lenin [Trotsky's words].

Reading this I got a real sense of Rodney trying to understand the Russian Revolution for the purpose of emulating its movements. The chapter, "On the 'Inevitability' of the Russian Revolution" is clearly about teaching a Marxist understanding of social movements - arising out of historical contradictions, but being rooted in a concrete situation . Thus for Rodney the revolution of February 1917 was "made possible" because of the "long-term forces that had been operating within feudalism" but it wasn't inevitable.

All this said there are some aspects to the book I disagreed with. Firstly I noted a few errors - Rodney writes that Trotsky returned to Russia at the outbreak of war, but he actually arrived back in 1917 just before Lenin. Rodney (or perhaps the editors) gets confused about the date of writing and publication of Trotsky's seminal History of the Russian Revolution. In writing that it was written during discussions at Brest-Litovsk the author/editors are confusing this with the earlier and shorter History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk, which Trotsky wrote as a polemic for German soldiers and was published much earlier. This is important as the later multi-volume book was part of Trotsky's arguments about the legacy of the Revolution. These errors should be corrected for any second edition.

More importantly in Rodney's defence of the Revolution he fails to accept that there was a break between events of 1917, the early 1920s and the Soviet Union in the late 1920s onward. He sees continuity when it is essential to see the break. Rodney defends Stalin (though not completely) arguing that his errors were not the result of personal behaviour but that of the whole organisation, and dismisses Trotsky's criticisms of Stalin as being more about "personal character assassination". At times this leads to real problems of analysis. Rodney writes, for instance, that "By 1936, Stalin was the only one left in Russia from that original group [Bolshevik Old Guard]." He omits to mention that Stalin had had most of the Old Bolsheviks executed or imprisoned. For Rodney "Socialism in One Country" was not the invention of Stalin, but the reality of Russia's isolation. But this is to misunderstand what Stalin was doing - his industrialisation programmes were a conscious turn away from the strategy of international revolution that Lenin and the Bolsheviks promoted. This meant that on Stalin's orders the Communist International, which was intended as being a tool to encourage international revolution, became a tool for Russia foreign policy. Thus Rodney is wrong to write:

The failure of revolutions to take place in Western Europe was a function of imperialism, which strengthened their bourgeoisie and disarmed the workers. Stalin and The Russian Communist party and the Comintern had no control over that.

In fact the opposite is true. It Rodney's eagerness to defend the Revolution from its critics, he ends up ignoring many of the problems of the Soviet Union under Stalin and his heirs. This is not to say that Rodney thinks Stalin a saint - far from it. But he does not acknowledge that the Soviet Union of the 1930s was not the revolutionary nation of the early 1920s. He does come close though:

Caught up in contradictions with capitalist powers, the Soviet Union has to strengthen its state apparatus. And in doing so, it is behaving so much like a capitalist state that it is demanding from China land areas once held by the former Tsarist state and it is invading other countries, as in Czechoslovakia.

I think there are two reasons for these errors. First is that Rodney follows Lenin in arguing that there is a labour aristocracy in the West, bought off by the benefits of Imperialism. Ironically however he then ignores that these workers were the ones that triggered the revolutionary movements in Germany and were the core of the Revolution in Russia. Secondly I think Rodney is reacting against the role of US Imperialism in the Global South. It is not surprising in any way that a revolutionary would hate the legacy of colonialism and the new Imperialism that was being deployed in Africa, Asia and Latin America by the United States. But Rodney fails then to see that the role of the Soviet Union has become Imperialist too.

While noting these disagreements, I also have to agree with Walter Rodney's family members who write in their acknowledgements that "This book provides an 'African Perspective' for understanding the Russian Revolution... Readers are reminded that this work needs to be examined in the context of the world as it existed at that time and in the context of who Rodney was at that time, a twenty-eight year old enigmatic historian and scholar-activist, engaging, learning and earning his stripes". Had he not been assassinated there is no doubt that Rodney would have continued to be part of the growing movements in Africa and elsewhere against Imperialism and Colonialism. This book, in its final form, would have been developed and built upon, and while it has its problems it is also a fascinating study of 1917 from a different perspective to that which we normally get in Europe. I do hope it gets a wide readership and sparks further debates on what we can do in the 21st century to liberate humanity from the insanity of capitalism.

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Michael Rosen - Workers' Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables, and Allegories from Great Britain

How do socialists raise awareness among workers about their ideas? It's a question that has bedevilled generations of radicals and activists. Today the Internet has transformed the way that left-organisations try to connect with and influence their target audience, and while there remains, in my opinion, a crucial place for socialist publications - books, pamphlets and newspapers - the nature of these has changed a great deal.

One important difference is that today's socialist publications rarely publish fiction or poetry. But as this fascinating collection of stories from the late 19th and early 20th century shows this was very different in the past. Michael Rosen is a well-known children's author, socialist writer and an academic specialising in education and literature. He has examined hundreds of old publications to show how the use of fiction was a fundamental part of socialist education. These take a number of forms, as Rosen explains:

The main body of these [fictional works] involved a recycling of the traditional literary forms like the fairy tale, the fable, the parable, the allegory and the moral tale. Along with these we find a few examples of the mystery tale. The home for most of this output was in the newspapers, magazines and journals of socialist groups and parties.

It is not difficult to imagine the short stories here published alongside reports of strikes, appeals for solidarity and analysis of the contemporary world. The stories often assume knowledge of particular stories - fairy tales like Jack in the Beanstalk, or Alice in Wonderland. More importantly I think they assume an understanding of the tropes of these story forms - giants for instance are often common characters. One thing I found fascinating is that these stories were not necessarily aimed at children, or even adults with limited education. They were intended to be read, enjoyed and, crucially in my opinion, they probably lent themselves to be retold. It is easy to imagine these tales being read, told and retold at work or in the pub. They also reflect a common belief among the socialist movement that radical change was about education and these stories were a contribution to that.

The use of metaphor and allegory is common, and sometimes read a little crudely. For instance, the left MP Keir Hardie wrote a story Jack Clearhead: A Fairy Tale for Crusaders, and to be Read by them to their Fathers and Mothers, in 1894. It tells the story of the Dullheads who become the slaves of the Sharpheads who own all the resources. The hero of the tale Jack, meets a good fairy who gives him a sword with which to fight for justice. To make the sword's magic work he must chant the rhyme: "Sword, sword fight for me. I belong to the ILP." The reference to the Independent Labour Party must have felt a little forced even in 1894!

But this doesn't always make for a bad tale. I enjoyed the 1907 story Happy Valley which told of a world that was "still beautiful" where "instead of ugly factory chimneys belching forth hideous smoke, fair gardens and orchards made the air sweet and fragrant, and the sun shone golden on the corn". To this idyll comes the giant Monopoly and his two dwarf assistants Capital and Competition. Between then they transform the land into a capitalist nightmare of pollution, hunger and poverty, until the hero, a young man called Fairplay is able to lead a group of followers "after them the women and children" and an army of fairies to kill the giant and drive off Competition. Capital however turns out to be a beautiful princess cursed to be ugly until freed. Fairplay and Capital marry and "worked for the people, and were happy ever after".

It is interesting that many of these stories reference back to an time of a rural idyll, ruined by the coming of industry and capitalism. It reminded me of the way that some radical thinkers use an imagined, or semi-imagined past as a way of encouraging radicalism in the present. Recently I read George Rudé writing about English protest movements in the 18th century:

But the forward-looking elements was still skin-deep even in such riots, and popular protests... still looked to the past; or, in EP Thompson's phrase, the 'plebian cluture'... 'is rebellious, but rebellious in defence of custom'.

Not all the stories are such clear radical versions of fairy tales. Some of them employ metaphor brilliantly. The Peasants' and the Parasites is a lovely story of the literal backbreaking work of the lower classes supporting the ruling classes - the landowners, the church and the lawyers. Others are less obviously telling a moral story or making a political point such as When Death Crossed the Threshold a 1903 story about a family whose mother is dying and the figures of Life and Death intervene.

It also interests me that some of these stories are clearly influenced by new styles of fiction. At least two use forms that were to be come relatively common in Science Fiction. Readers of Arthur C. Clarke's famous short-story Report on Planet Three will find a socialist parallel in the 1909 story A Martian's Visit to Earth which has an alien reporting back on colonial England. Similarly the 1911 imagining of a  future socialist world in The May-Day Festival in the Year 1970 reminded me of Marge Piercy's classic Woman on the Edge of Time, and of course was itself clearly influenced by William Morris' News From Nowhere.

While reading these stories two further things struck me. Firstly there is an air of innocence to them. Capitalism is full of poverty, hunger, unemployment and cruelty - but war is a distant thing. These stories are all written before the First World War and the mass murder of working people in the trenches. Similar stories written in the post-war period would have talked much more about mass bloodshed in the name of capital. Secondly, and perhaps related to this, the question of reform or revolution is not an issue. For many of these writers the transition to socialism involves the removal of a few bad kings or monsters - the question of how that change might take place in the real world is mostly absent.

This is a fascinating and remarkable book that tells us a great deal about the early Socialist movement in Britain. Today these tales might seem dated and often simple. But they represent earnest efforts to communicate the basic ideas of socialism by writers who felt that changing the world was an absolute necessity. Socialists today might be operating in different circumstances but the need for radical change has never been more apparent. This fantastic book is a reminder that we build on the work of thousands of others who often tried innovative and unusual ideas to put their ideas across.

Thomas Mullen - Lightning Men

I didn't realise until I was quite some way into Lightning Men that this is actually a sequel to an earlier novel. Had I understood that I might not have picked it up, and I would have missed out on a really excellent book. Luckily it is a standalone book, but I warn you reading this first will spoil the earlier book.

Lightning Men is set in Atlanta in 1950. America is on the cusp of enormous upheaval. The Civil Rights movement is beginning to bubble under the surface and the post-war boom is starting to wane. Change has already begun. Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith are two police officers in downtown Atlanta. Their beats are restricted and the assistance they get from the rest of the force is somewhat limited - because, alongside a handful of others, they are the city's first black police officers. Patrolling the black areas of Atlanta they see their share of crime, abuse and violence. They also have to be wary of how they are treated by their supposed colleagues, all of whom are racist, to a greater or lesser extent, and not a few of whom ride with the Ku Klux Klan.

The novel obviously takes up questions of racism and segregation. But it also deals with class. A central plot-line is Bogg's upcoming marriage. Bogg's father is a well known and well off preacher, and his parents don't approve of Bogg's fiance, a single-mother from a much lower class. But class is also present in the changes affecting the city itself, as middle class black families begin to spread out into white areas, fed up of the destitution and lack of decent housing in the slums.

Different forces try and deal with these changes - the KKK and other Nazi groups manoeuvre to protect the white areas, but even racists want to make money and the changes in the neighbourhood offer riches to some. Combine this with various criminal gangs who want to sell drugs to the poor, and not a few corrupt police, and you've got a dangerous mix.

Over the course of the novel Boggs and his colleagues have to deal with a series of seemingly unconnected events, and Boggs learns that he actually knows very little about his fiance's background. Thomas Mullen brilliantly describes Boggs' holier-than-thou arrogance, rooted in his wealthier background when compared to his wife. One of the highlights of the development of Boggs' character is that bit when you realise that the policeman is actually quite prejudiced himself. That said his prejudice is nothing compared to the majority of his force, so to make the story work Mullen introduces a couple of less prejudiced officers. I suspect reality was a lot different.

The brings it all neatly together, perhaps a little too neatly as pretty much all the good guys win, and the policemen return to the beat confident that the world is a little less horrible. But the real greatness of the book is the way that Mullen portrays Atlanta - the fear of the KKK, the violence and racism of the white police, and the deep-seated racial prejudice of white people in the face of black families moving to their area. I really enjoyed this and plan to return to Thomas Mullen's work in the future.

C.J. Sansom - Dissolution

When C.J. Sansom's most recent book Tombland was announced I was inundated with recommendations from fans of his Shardlake series as it focuses on the Kett rebellions of 1549. Never having read any of this author I decided to begin at the beginning, and find out what the fuss was about.

Dissolution is the first in the series. It is set during a brief lull (following the Northern Rebellions) in the dissolution of the monasteries that has begun as part of Henry VIII's Reformation. Shardlake is an investigator sent to the monastery at Scarnsea on the South Coast, to look into the murder of one of Thomas Cromwell's agents. The agent has been looking into the monastery, in part it seems, to find evidence that could allow Cromwell to shut it down and confiscate its land and wealth.

Shardlake is caught up in a complex plot, a series of murders and violent attacks that lead him to suspect a number of the monks in turn. Because the monastery is isolated and cut off from the local population, the mystery has the feel of a locked room detective. The mystery itself is enjoyable and keeps the reader guessing right until the end - and cleverly Sansom manages to tie the solution into the wider changes taking place in English society. The threat from Cromwell and Henry hangs heavy over the monastery's inhabitants who worry about their futures and attempt to ingratiate themselves with the regime.

It's this aspect to the story that really made this into a page turner for me. Sansom describes the historical context brilliantly and the detail of life in a monastery and London in the 1530s is superb. It would have been much easier for the author to write a murder story randomly set in the 16th century. Much harder is to tie this into the political and social context and then make these links part of the fabric of the tale, indeed he also tackles subjects like sexuality, disability and gender in subtle and clever ways. To say more would spoil it for future readers, but I look forward to reading the other Shardlake books before reaching Tombland.

Related Reviews

Duffy - The Stripping of the Altars
MacCulloch - Reformation
Wood - The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England
Hoyle - The Pilgrimage of Grace

Costas Lapavitsas - The Left Case Against the EU

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

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

He continues a few pages later,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related Reviews

Clutterbuck - Bittersweet Brexit
Roberts - The Long Depression

George Rudé - Ideology and Popular Protest

Despite its short length this is a detailed and powerful argument that studies how ideas in pre-capitalist protest movements developed. It begins with a closely argued discussion, from a Marxist point of view, of the idea of class consciousness. George Rudé begins with Marx and Engels, showing how they saw ideas arising out of concrete circumstances and then changing through the experience of a changing world and class struggle. Rudé then continues by looking at other Marxist thinkers who have developed these ideas, particularly the Hungarian Marxist György Lukács and the Italian Antonio Gramsci.

But the main argument of the book argues that Marxist theory of the ideology of working-class protest leaves "little room for the struggles of peasants and urban shopkeepers and artisans" in both present day or pre-industrial societies. This is not surprising says Rudé - Marxism developed its ideas in an attempt to understand the "struggle between the two major contending classes in modern industrial society" and this is not strictly applicable to other classes. The remainder of the book is an attempt to develop a "new theory" that works for these groups in capitalism and previous societies.

Rudé argues for a "Popular ideology" which is contrasted to "class consciousness" a "fusion" of two parts,

of which only one is the peculiar property of the 'popular' classes and the other is superimposed by a process of transmission and adoption from outside. Of these, the first is what I [Rudé] call the 'inherent' traditional; element - a sort of 'mother's milk' ideology, based on direct experience, oral tradition or folk-memory and not learning by listening to sermons or speeches or reading books.... the second element is the stock of ideas and beliefs that are 'derived' or borrowed from others, often taking the form of a more structure system of ideas, political or religious...

In my own work on peasant struggles, it is clear that these definitions have a real basis. There are numerous examples of peasant struggles that have been based on perceived "rights" that are rooted in the distant past, popular belief or have semi-legality. These interact with the beliefs received from outside - whether in church or law courts - and often take on new meanings, forming the basis for struggle - collective or individual. Later Rudé argues that whether the "resultant mixture" took on "militant and revolutionary" forms or their opposite, "depended less on the nature of the recipients or of the 'inherent' beliefs from which they started than on the nature of the 'derived' beliefs compounded by the circumstances then prevailing and what E.P. Thompson has called the 'sharp jostle of experience'." In other words, a third element is the ground upon which ideas arrive - the living circumstances of people. Not every group of people who heard a radical preacher like John Ball or read Thomas Paine would necessarily take it and turn towards radical action.

Rudé then examines a number of situations to show how his ideas hold up to reality. These include useful summaries of the English Peasants Revolt of 1381, the German Peasant Wars of 1525 and other rebellions, including the French Revolution and 20th century experiences of agrarian struggles in Latin America. When writing about riot and protest in England in the 18th century, Rudé concludes that the ideology of these "pre-industrial" protests

corresponded broadly to what has been said before: overwhelmingly 'inherent' traditional and apolitical in the case of food riots, strikes and rural p[rotest of every kind; and only touched by the 'derived' ideology of the bourgeoisie - political and forward looking - in the case of the London riots... But the forward-looking elements was still skin-deep even in such riots, and popular protests... still looked to the past; or, in EP Thompson's phrase, the 'plebian cluture'... 'is rebellious, but rebellious in defence of custom'.

This sense of rebellion in defence of tradition or past (invented or otherwise) is extremely useful, and Rudé argues, holds over into more contemporary industrial (he argues until Robert Owen), but is inadequate. In these times, the "ideology of the common people" has had to be "reinforced by an injection of 'derived' ideas, or those of generalised ideas based on the memory of past struggles, to which Marx and Engels... quite simply gave the name of 'theory'." Here Rudé is arguing that the workers' movement has been weakened where it lacks socialist theory. In this regard, I think he is too reliant on a particularly interpretation of Lenin's writings in What is to be Done arguing that socialist theory has to be imposed from outside; an interpretation that has been challenged recently. Despite this criticism, this is a valuable book from which I gained a great deal of insight and I recommend it to those working on peasant questions and struggles today.

Related Reviews

Thompson - Customs in Common
Hobsbawm and Rudé - Captain Swing

James Rebanks - The Shepherd's Life: A Tale of the Lake District

James Rebanks' book is a remarkable study of agricultural life in the Lake District in the North West of England. This is no romantic view of a countryside that is idyllic and constantly summer. Rather this is a warts and all account, that emphasises the hard work, the financial hardships (individual poverty) and the struggle to keep going. I've always through that workers describing their own work are often far more eloquent than they are given credit for, and this is no exception. Its a beautifully written book and the author is not afraid of showing his own limitations, together with his successes. Most of all however, this book challenges those who see the countryside as a place to escape the towns and cities that is unchanged from a distant past. Instead Rebanks shows how the countryside has been transformed, shaped and managed by generation after generation of farming communities.

One of the themes that I've tried to draw out in my own writings on the countryside is precisely this sense of the landscape as resulting out of millenia of human labour, and indeed class struggle. Rebanks himself speculates comments sheep farming in the region would have had many similarities to contemporary Lake District farming.

But another aspect to farming that I've always been struck by is its inherently collective nature. Rebank's book begins with a description of the gathering of sheep from the fells. It requires coordination on many levels - the organisation of the different farmers who come together to bring the animals off the unfenced common land; co-ordination between shepherd and dog and finally co-ordination with nearby communities when sheep become mixed together. This account of sheep gathering on "the greatest concentration of common land in Western Europe" left me near breathless in its description of the joint work of Shepherd and sheepdog. But I was also taken aback by the sense of a community collectively working - an individual shepherd simply couldn't survive here.

This community stretches back into time and Rebanks is very aware of his own position. He writes, rather movingly:

There is a thrill in the timelessness up there... I have always liked the feeling of carrying on something bigger than me, something that stretches back through other hands and other eyes into the depths of time... I am only one of the current grazers on our fell (and one of the smaller and more recently established ones at that), a small link in a very long chain. Perhaps, in a hundred years' time, no one will care that I owned the sheep that grazed part of these mountains. They won't know my name. But that doesn't matter. if they stand on that fell and do the stings we do, they will owe me a tiny unspoken debt for once keeping part of it going, just as I owe all those that came before a debt for getting it this far.

Rebanks highlights the continuity with the past that shapes the hillsides he works and continues to make and remark the artificial landscape, but on a smaller scale he shows through his relationships with his grandfather, father and children a different continuity here. These personal sections are part and parcel of Rebanks' relationship with the land, the community and the farm and they are difficult to read in places, as all honest accounts of family are, but they also tell the tale of how farming communities and farmers have survived and struggled over the centuries. The same communities meet at the same fairs as their ancestors did centuries before. Old men can remember the genetic origins of sheep going back decades, and their knowledge is crucial to 21st century farming.

There is continuity, but there is also change. Rebanks herds sheep with 4x4 vehicles and waterproof clothing that must have transformed the experience of shepherding in the depths of winter. But shepherding still has to be done in the winter, and no technology has yet been invented that can protect a sheep and its lamb in all situations - there will always have to be men and women who go out to find lost herds and rescue newborn animals.

James Rebanks begins his book with his frustrations at those who don't understand the Lake District like he and his family do. Those tourists and poets who simply see beauty or relaxation. By the end of it he understands their point of view too, but wants to make them understand what the Lake District and agricultural communities are - living, developing and growing parts of society that play a crucial role in our economy and have deep historical roots. I am glad that his book has become a surprise bestseller, because it will contribute enormously to an understanding of British farming that can only bear fruit for the future.

Related ReviewsArch - From Ploughtail to Parliament
Clutterbuck - Bittersweet Brexit: The Future of Food, Farming, Land and Labour
Howkins - The Death of Rural England
Hasback - A History of the English Agricultural Labourer
Whitlock - Peasant's Heritage

Leo R. Jary - Kett 1549: Rewriting the Rebellion

One of the best known agrarian rebellions in England is Kett's Rebellion of 1549. Centred around Norwich, it was part of a year of rebellion that shook the ruling class, and culminated in the fall of the duke of Somerset, Lord Protector for the young Edward VI. All too often the rebellion named after its principle leader, Robert Kett, is isolated from the wider rebellions that took place in that year. In 1549 there were two major risings, Kett's in Norfolk, and the so called Prayerbook Rebellion in the West Country. But there were also numerous rebel camps throughout the country, and many of these were put down with force.

Leo R. Jary's new study of Kett's Rebellion is not a re-telling of the event, rather it is a study that seeks to read between the lines of contemporary chronicles and argue that the rebellion was a much bigger, and more serious confrontation than has previously been argued. Rightly Jary argues that "History is written by the victor" and that contemporary accounts of Kett's Rebellion "all refute and belittle the good intentions of Kett, the honourable purpose of the rebel cause, and the solidarity of the rebel army".

As Andy Wood has clearly shown in his book The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Modern England Kett's Rebellion was seized upon by the establishment in the aftermath and used as an illustration of the perils of ordinary people trying to make change. In doing so the ruling class highlighted events in Norfolk at the expense of a wider tale of national revolt.

Jary seeks to correct the historic accounts and transform our view of the rebellion. A central part of this argument is that the final confrontation between Kett's forces and the royalist army under Warwick was a much larger pitched battle than the overwhelming defeat usually suggested.

I've little reason to doubt much of Jary's arguments here. In places he is a little guilty of conjecture. For instance he writes "I believe that Kett's chief gunner Miles understood that [it was dangerous to place his cannon on the rebel flanks] and placed most of his guns well to the rear of his rebels lines." But these are points made by a writer with knowledge and experience of working for the Ministry of Defence so any conjecture is made with serious considerations.

In my mind the most important contribution of the book is to make a strong argument for the real location of "Dussindale" the scene of the final confrontation between the rebels and royalist forces. This, argues Jary, was much closer to the walls of Norwich than is suggested by contemporary accounts, and Jary uses his detailed local knowledge to make a very specific case. It has always slightly bothered me that Kett would have marched away from the strategic position he occupied, and Jary shows why this is unlikely.

It is for this reason that I suspect this short book will be widely read - and because of the author's detailed local knowledge (and the maps and walking guides in the book) the book should particularly sell well to visitors to Norwich.

I was less convinced though by the author's focus on Norwich. 1549 can only be understood as a year of rebellion during times of economic and political turmoil. This explains Somerset's defeat and the late arrival of royalist troops in Norwich. I'm also sceptical of the idea of communications between centres of rebellion in an organised way. More importantly by focusing on Norwich, Jary neglects that Kett had a strategy of expanding across Norfolk to strengthen his position - militarily and politically. The attempts to capture Yarmouth and the other subsidiary rebel camps in the region aren't mentioned, yet they show how Kett's rebels had a much wider strategy and were acting from a position of strength. There is also an over-emphasis on the military aspects of the revolt and readers  would benefit for more on motivations of the rebels.

Despite these reservations I really enjoyed this little book. The publisher and author must be congratulated for producing a beautifully designed book with lovely maps and line drawings. It makes a fine addition to the literature on the Rebellion and deserves to be read by anyone with an interest in the subject.

Related Reviews

Wood - The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England
Wood - Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England
Fletcher and MacCulloch - Tudor Rebellions
Caraman - The Western Rising of 1549
Land - Kett's Rebellion
Cornwall - Revolt of the Peasantry

Paolo Bacigalupi - Ship Breaker

There seem to be no shortage these days of novels set in a future dystopian world ruined by environmental disaster. Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker stands out for me because it captures the lives of those who are at the bottom of the pile in a ruined world. Evoking the men and women who are ship-breakers in India today, dismantling vessels for scrap and materials, this book begins among the impoverished communities of the United States, similarly breaking up old ships (usually oil tankers) so the raw materials can be sold at vast profits by corporations.

Nailer is one of these workers, a young boy about to grow to large for his job of crawling through the dark passages of the wrecks and removing cable. His future is uncertain, and in addition, his father is a violent drug addict who abuses Nailer. Bacigalupi sets up his world well. Nailer stands on the shore gazing at the beautiful, wealthy clippers that move on the horizon, traders and pleasure craft that he cannot imagine. His world is poor, violent and frightening. Exposed to the brutal "city killer" storms that are one legacy of the warmed world.

Everyone Nailer knows is hoping for their lucky break - the chance to escape poverty. But for most that doesn't happen. Nailer's chance comes when a clipper and its wealthy passenger are wrecked nearby and Nailer has to return her to her family.

I didn't realise, when I picked this up from the library, that it was a young adult novel. It is still enjoyable but clearly aimed at a youthful audience, who will appreciate the pace and tension, as well as the brilliantly drawn relationships between the young characters. I also appreciated that many of the main characters are female and black, something that's unusual in novels, but also reflects the reality of those who currently live and will live on the fringes of an economy destroyed by climate change. There are some odd moments - for instance this future world appears to have lost all its radio and telephone communications ability - but this is a clever and thoughtful book that depicts a future far different from the shiny technological utopia climate denying politicians often promise.

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Joseph Arch - From Ploughtail to Parliament: An Autobiography

Autobiographies are strange texts. As an account of the author's own life they are supposed to be an accurate description of what took place, but they are really the account that the author would like to pass on to posterity. Joseph Arch's account of his life as an agricultural labourer, then trade unionist and finally MP is fascinating for its detail. But it is also of interest for what has been left out, or downplayed. As such I highly recommend it is read in conjunction with Pamela Horn's biography and commentary by Alun Howkins. While self-serving in places it is an very interesting insight into the ideas and activities that dominated rural trade unionism in the 1870s by someone who was at the heart of that struggle.

As we approach the centenary of Arch's death it is worth reflecting on the sweep of his life. He was born in 1826 in the village of Barford, and the early chapters of his autobiography are fascinating for their detail of the lives of agricultural labourers. Life for the Arch family, as for almost every labourer, was marked by dire poverty. Arch's family were slightly better off as they owned the freehold to their cottage as a result of his Grandfather saving £30 over many years in an old sock. Most labourers did not have this security and risked losing their homes if they challenged the farmer or landowner. This was to give Arch enormous security in later life as he became a thorn in the local establishment's side and then a leading trade unionist.

Arch's early memories contain a great deal of class difference and struggle. He remembers peering through a crack in the Church door to see his father waiting for Communion in a separate queue to the local gentry and farmers who get seen first. At school his poor clothes are a source of conflict, “sons of the wheelwrights, the master tailor and the tradesmen… peacocky youngsters would cheek the lads in smock-frocks and many a stand-up fight we used to have – regular pitched battles of smock-frock against cloth-coat they were, in which smock-frock held his own right well.”

His mother challenges the parson's wife who wants to impose a particular haircut on Arch's sisters - and they never receive charity again from the vicarage. More seriously Arch's father refuses to sign a pro-Corn Law petition got up by the farmers and is out of work for 18 weeks.

Arch's family was not unusual, and it is no wonder that in the late 1860s and early 1870s trade unionism begins to take off in a serious way in the English countryside. Arch by that point is a skilled worker and preacher for the Primitive Methodists, he is also a strong supporter of the Liberal Party and he is called upon to help set up a local trade union by workers in the nearby village of Wellsbourne in Warwickshire. Once convinced that this is a real attempt, Arch takes to this with enormous enthusiasm and the union rapidly grows in strength.

Reading the autobiography you get the impression that Arch was the only driver of the union. Other biographies and histories show that actually there were numbers of unions being setup at the same time, and many of these merged to form a national union (though significant sections did not). Arch speaks in hundreds of villages building the union and driving it forward, but so do many others. A great weakness of the book is that neglects what is taking place in the world beyond Arch's immediate influence. A second weakness is that Arch is utterly unable to acknowledge mistakes or defeats. The union strike wave that takes place in the 1870s after the union is founded is defeated by a lock-out in the Eastern Counties. The union, and Arch, take a pretty miserable attitude to the final outcome but this is omitted from Arch's account.

In his introduction to my edition, Alun Howkins points out that Arch is also selective about who appears in his book and also doesn't go into the detail of the major rows that took place. Nor does he acknowledge that the union he put so much energy into declines and collapses in the 1880s. The book was published before Arch's parliamentary career was over, but it is selective about his time in Parliament - in fact it was a tremendously difficult time for him. Arch rarely spoke in Parliament and didn't speak at all for the last 6 years! But Arch still portrays himself as a major fighter for the labourers cause.

From other sources one gets the impression that Arch the MP was completely out of his depth. The first agricultural labourer in Parliament was cut off from his base and support and surrounded by wealth and privileged. In fact Arch clearly loved the company of the famous - he was enormously enamoured of Gladstone, and because his constituency covered the Norfolk estates of Sandringham he vowed to be an MP for labourers and the Prince of Wales.

Arch was a contradictory figure in many ways. A brilliant trade unionist but at times he was also remarkably conservative, but then could be very radical - supporting Home Rule and opposing British colonialism in South Africa and Afghanistan. He hated the ideas of socialism, preferring to imagine a countryside free of class conflict where everyone had their place, but the labourers had a decent wage and a small amount of land. But nonetheless for thousands of agricultural labourers and their families Arch helped them have a sense of a better world. The victories won by the union were significant, if not long lasting, but they proved that agricultural workers could organise and could win. And for all his faults Joseph Arch never gave up his belief in the power of organised workers - and nor should we.

Related Reviews

Horn - Joseph Arch
Groves - Sharpen the Sickle!
Marlow - The Tolpuddle Martyrs
Jeffery - The Village in Revolt
Howkins - The Death of Rural England

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related Reviews

Miliband - Parliamentary Socialism
Harman - Revolution in the 21st Century
Choonara & Kimber - Arguments for Revolution
Haider - Mistaken Identity
Marx - Value, Price and Profit
Molyneux - The Point is to Change It