Stephen Basdeo - The Life & Legend of a Rebel Leader: Wat Tyler

Stephen Basdeo's book is a fascinating study of the cultural impact of one of England's most famous rebels: Wat Tyler, who was a key figure in the Great Revolt of 1381. I've written myself about the Peasants' Revolt and I won't repeat that here. For those who do not know the history Basdeo opens his book with a good summary of events, though he also encourages people to read Juliet Barker's excellent history. He also concludes his work with fascinating reprints of poems and ballads about Tyler from the periods he covers.

It is one of the ironies of history that the detail that we know most about Wat Tyler is the manner of his death. A whole number of contemporary accounts describe Tyler's murder at the hands of William Walworth, mayor of London, during negotiations with King Richard II as rebels from around London had converged on the capital. It's probably because of this that Tyler has become an iconic figure for generations after - though not always from the progressive side.

My first encounter with Wat Tyler was in the years following the Poll Tax rebellion against Margaret Thatcher. In the early 1990s it was still common to see activists wearing t-shirts celebrating the 1381 rebellion which had begun as with resistance to Richard II's poll tax. As a result of that, and I think because of William Morris' work The Dream of John Ball, the Peasant's Revolt was seen very much as the property of the far-left. Basdeo shows however that there are far deeper roots to Tyler's association with radical politics, but more surprisingly, Tyler was not always someone held up by progressive forces.

In the turmoil of the 1640s, Basdeo explains, the only side to use Wat Tyler's story were the Royalists. Prior to the 17th century, Tyler and John Ball had been held up as examples of people wanting to "overturn the social order". "Perhaps," wonders Basdeo, Tyler was "too radical, even for regicides". Instead, Royalists argued that Tyler shows the folly of trying to challenge the King and hence the real social order. In the words of one writer, Tyler was man who wanted to "change the Monarchy into anarchy". Rather neatly the 17th century writers were slurring those contemporaries who challenged the king (very few of whom before the late 1640s had ever considered deposing the king) as being potential regicides, or at least dangerous revolutionaries.

This approach towards Tyler and the Revolt continued into the next century. One quoted example, from 1769, argues that the events of 1381 showed the

absolute necessity it is for the nation to be provided with such laws, as may prevent even the first steps and approaches towards any riotous and disorderly meetings of the people; for, when once a mob are collected together; and they have done one act of violence, they soon proceed to another, till they perpetrate the most extravagant enormities, and the most horrid cruelties.. that may shake the foundation of a government.

18th century fears of the mob are here given a historical justification. In this, and other works, the struggles of Tyler and his mob, are contrasted by those who stood firm against them, which might have "accomplished the destruction of the Kingdom, had it not been for the gallant behaviour of its citizens". So at the end of the account, it all turns out alright. In one play that Basdeo quotes, performed at the "rowdy Bartholomew Fair", "it turns out the mob never wanted to follow Tyler all along. They had been duped by their wicked captain. Thereafter, due to the good king's grace all of the rebels are pardoned."

I am slightly wary however, about simply reading these accounts as designed to "safely contain" its subversive parts. At the same time as reading Basdeo's book I was reading Christopher Hill's A Nation of Change and Novelty and in his chapter on Literature and the English Revolution Hill demonstrates how, to escape censorship, authors often used happy acceptable endings to ensure their work was published. As Hill writes, "most masques were expected to end with all problems solved by a rex ex machina, and even writers who wished to criticise royal policy had to wrap their message up in so much flattery that there is every likelihood that the king missed the point."

It is entirely possible that authors of plays about Tyler had to end on an appropriate note or risk not being performed, rather than simply being opposed to radical politics. I speculate that playwrights wanted audience approval, they had to at least contain a few passages that would go well among the rowdy attendees at Bartholomew Fair.

As the 18th and then the 19th centuries develop, growing demands for reform from sections of society meant that Tyler's story again gets appropriated, this time to create an "imagined national community" where throughout history there had always been a section of English society who had fought for democracy, freedom and equality. Tyler, in this context, is remoulded as an early freedom fighter, a precursor of Chartists and others. He was no longer the leader of a mob, instead an entirely justified rebel against oppression. In one fascinating appropriation of Tyler, James 'Bronterre' O'Brien, lays the blame for Wat Tyler's defeat, not on the aristocracy, but on the "middle classes who had abandoned their former working-class comrades". O'Brien sees Walworth as a "London shopocrat", a "base and bloody-minded middle-man".

O'Brien's piece, written in 1837, is a reaction to the great defeat of the Reform Act, when the wealthier middle classes won the vote and backed down for further agitation to gain suffrage for the poorer workers. Tyler becomes a weapon in a 19th century struggle for a democracy which he could not even have comprehended.

Basdeo documents how Tyler's story becomes a growing part of the radical tradition, though not without being shaped by each generation's customs. During Victorian times, for instance, the story (and it is a story, without any historical evidence at all) that Tyler began the revolt after a tax collector sexually abused his daughter, became a way of fixing Victorian morals onto the rebellion. Increasingly Tyler also becomes a central figure in historical novels, and Basdeo gives us an excellent summary of these, including a few that I firmly intend to read. I was also amazed to learn that in 1969 the Peasant's Revolt was the subject of a American educational film with no less an actor than Anthony Hopkins staring as Wat Tyler.

Stephen Basdeo's book should be of interest to a far wider readership than those scholars studying 1381. It is a detailed example of how historical events can be used, and abused, by contemporary times to fit the needs of those defending the status quo and those challenging it. Wat Tyler and those who rose with him were struggling against a system that was cruel in its exploitation and oppression of those at the bottom of society. Today we live in a very different world, but there remains much to rebel against and so 1381 will continue to be something from which people draw inspiration. As the author concludes, there will likely be future points when "English people hold a mass protest" and then, "we will once against see Wat Tyler's name reappear".

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John Christopher - The Death of Grass

John Christopher's The Death of Grass is a remarkable ecological disaster novel first published in 1956. It's particularly surprising because it was published six years before Rachel Carson's classic Silent Spring kick started the modern environmental movement and at the heart of the book's disaster is a crisis caused by some of the same problems that Carson highlighted.

The book begins with the emergence of a strain of virus in Asia that decimates rice production there leading to the deaths of millions of people. It all seems very far away for the novel's main characters who, living in Southern England, are perfectly able to imagine that they will never be at risk. After all, Western Countries are producing enough food to send relief shipments to China, and surely the scientists will come up with something, they always do. As two of the protagonists discuss:

"Every government in the world is going to be comforting itself with the same reassuring thought. The scientists have never failed us yet. We shall never really believe they will until they do."
"When a thing has never failed before, it's not a bad presumption that it won't fail now."
"No," said Roger, "I suppose not." He lifted his nearly empty glass. "Look thy last on all things lovely every hour. A world without beer, Unimaginable. Drink up and let's have another."

Of course the virus defies attempts to defeat it, and jumps to wheat, rye and barley. Suddenly life is much more precarious and when the Roger and his friend John learn of the governments plans, they head north toward a secret valley farmed by John's brother David. Getting out of London proves a challenge, and requires John's group to begin their break from "civilisation". If "civilised society" hasn't broken down John comments, they'll all hang after their actions.

The failure of the scientists has been matched by the failure of the state. And civilisation descends rapidly into competing bodies of violent gangs intent on preserving themselves at the expense of everyone else. John's group have an aim - somewhere to get to - but everyone else is simply struggling to survive. This descent into animal like behaviour is actually the least convincing part of the book - I doubt doubt that some people would behave abominably as civilisation collapses and food becomes scarce. But it's also true that in disaster situations people organise collectively to try and help each other - something that just doesn't happen in The Death of Grass. The author underlines this by having the murderers and rapists often cover themselves in gold and jewels, despite their lack of value in the new world.

One great weakness in the book is the portrayal of women. By and large they are depicted as victims, following behind their menfolk who are doing the dirty and dangerous work. They are passive and unable to relate to the new situation. There is a particularly awful scene where one character murders his wife simply because of her infidelity, then takes a new, child bride.

Even within John's group there is discord and danger. The gun seller Pirrie who has come with them and brought guns and ammunition demonstrates the reality of the situation being prepared to kill in order to protect the groups, but exacting a tough price in return. Despite these limitations, the ending is very well done, though the detail need not concern us here.

In the introduction to this new edition, Robert Macfarlene contrasts the book to the "cosy catastrophe" of John Wyndham's work (The Day of the Triffids had been published a few years earlier). I felt that they shared more than he suggested, but The Death of Grass is much more brutal and lacks the comforting endings of Wyndham's books. Christopher also frames the disaster much better, locating it in an agricultural system that David points out, is more about producing goods decreed by the government, for the market; rather than worrying about the future. Faith in science proves, in Christopher's book, the Achilles' heel of modern society, whereas in Wyndham's work it is often society's salvation.

Ecological catastrophe aside, one other stand out of this novel is the extent to which the British state is prepared to go to ensure some people survive. They are stopped in this endeavour by a popular revolution in London, but the victors of this have little to offer except gramophone records on the BBC. Nero fiddles as London burns notes one of our heroes. Despite its bleak portrayal of human nature there is a lot in this book by John Christopher. I'm reminded how much I loved his Tripod trilogy as a youngster. His vision of ecological disaster has tragic parallels for today and I'm not surprised it has had a new renaissance after many years out of print.

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Christopher Hill - A Nation of Change and Novelty

This book is a collection of essays proving how great a historian Christopher Hill was. They demonstrate exactly how detailed Hill's knowledge of the English Revolutionary period was, and his ability to make links between subjects and contemporary politics. They are also incredibly polemical, one, for instance Abolishing the Ranters is a strident defence of the very existence of that religious grouping which had been denied at length in 1986 book by professor Colin Davis. Hill shows his mastery of the contemporary literature, the source material as well as an understanding of his opponents writing.

Ultimately this is a forceful defence of the idea that there was an English Revolution. The book is was written ten years into Thatcher's government and at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall - events that get passing mention in several essays. Hill is defending the idea of Revolution at a time when mass risings were taking place but the political framework of Communism was disappearing. Hill was too good a left-winger to believe that the regimes that were falling apart in Eastern Europe were actually socialist, but he understood that left wing politics were on the defensive. Colin Davies, for instance, "clearly regards [Gerrard Winstanley] as a pre-incarnation of Josef Stalin".

In this context, his essay The Word 'Revolution' is a wonderful piece of writing. It traces the development of the word Revolution through the Early Modern Period. At the beginning of the seventeenth century he argues, the word meant not the overturning of something, but a rotation of something. So when Gerrard Winstanley uses it, says Hill, he means that the "Diggers' object was not just to remove the Norman Yoke but to get back behind the Fall of Man, to a period outside history - the future millennium as well as Adam;s Paradise." There then follows a detailed summary of dozens of different uses of the word Revolution, each demonstrating an evolving use of the word through a period that saw Parliament challenge the King then defeat and behead him, followed by the return of the monarchy. But, in Hill's words:

1688 was a smudged compromise, and helped to prevent England ever having a revolutionary tradition in the sense that the USA, France and the USSR have revolutionary traditions. 1688 was 'glorious', bloodless, because fixed by an agreement between party leaders without involving 'the people' at all. If 1688 was a revolution, had there been a revolution in the 1640s? Voltaire in 1733 took for granted that the 1640s had seen 'une révolution en Angleterre', and this usage continued through the French Revolution to Guizot, to Karl Marx, and to European historical writing generally. But in England, although the shift in the meaning of 'revolution' had taken place well before 1688, the events of that year created new ambiguities. So we cannot think about the evolution of the word without thinking about the evolution of the society.

We also cannot think about it without the context of the times that Hill was writing in, and this is what gives his book a real edge. Hill also demonstrates a nuanced view of what Revolution was and is. In an earlier essay on Political Discourse he writes:

Historians who have failed to find long-term causes of the English Revolution, as well as those who have failed to notice that there was a revolution at all, have perhaps been looking for the wrong things in the wrong places. There were no revolutionaries who willed what happened, no Lenin: there were virtually no republicans in the Long Parliament. But there were tensions in the society, slowly building up in the decades before 1640: and there was an ideology, popularised by Fox and Beard, which in appropriate circumstances could become revolution, as it did in Cromwell.

Collections of essays are always hard to review even when, as in this book, they are discussing a common theme, albeit from many different directions. Some of the chapters here are heavily reliant on a detailed knowledge of a particular subject. I found Hill's article on Archbishop Laud nearly impenetrable mostly because I have very little knowledge of the specifics Hill writes about.

On the other hand, I thought the chapter on Gerrard Winstanley on Freedom was superb and I wish I had come across it earlier. Among many things Hill makes an important point that Winstanley writes about "mankind" rather than "man", meaning that he is including women in his vision of freedom, something that few (if any) of Winstanley's contemporaries considered. I also should highlight the chapter on radicals and Ireland in the period - which explains why they did not oppose the oppression of Ireland by Cromwell and others.

There is much in this collection for anyone studying the English Civil War and Revolutionary Period. Hill brings a freshness to these debates, even today, and his writing is full of humour as well as polemic. Surprisingly he also seems full of hope that thing will get better. He finishes his article on Winstanley with a comment and quote from The Diggers' leader which might well be written about Hill himself:

Winstanley failed; but his writings justify the words he prefixed to one of his Digger pamphlets: 'When these clay bodies are in a grave, and children stand in place, This shows we stood for truth and peace and freedom in our days.

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Iain Ferguson - Politics of the Mind: Marxism and Mental Distress

Iain Ferguson begins his examination of the politics of mental distress with a look at how people in Britain are suffering:

In 2012, more than 50 million prescriptions for anti-depressants were issued in the UK, the highest number ever. In some parts of the country, such as the North West of England, one in six people are now prescribed anti-depressants in an average month.

Later he adds

In June 2017, the Guardian newspaper reported that prescriptions for 64.7 million items of antidepressants were dispensed in England in 2016 - a staggering 108.5 percent increase on the 31 million... dispensed ten years earlier.

These shocking figures tell us two things, argues Ferguson. Firstly people in the contemporary UK are experiencing extraordinary levels of stress, depression and other forms of mental distress. Secondly, the dominant approach that the health service has to this crisis is to offer drugs. Later in the book Ferguson explains that there is good reason to question whether the application of drugs like this is in any way a solution.

But the majority of his book is to try and understand the history of how medical science has approached the question of mental illness and distress and what this tells us about today's practice. In addition he argues that a health policy informed by Marxism can offer a better approach that harks back to earlier forms of treatment.

Despite it's short length there are very useful sections on Freud, Lacan and more recent thinkers such as the psychiatrist R.D. Laing. The attempts by such scientists to understand mental health contrast strongly with the medical approach that simply sees mental distress as rooted in biology. The medical model of mental health, the "increasing medicalisation of everyday life" leads to the private interests of corporations rather than a "humanitarian or altruistic concern" shaping approaches to healthcare. Ferguson quotes Richard Bentall:

When considering the role of the pharmaceutical industry in psychiatric research... Drug companies are no more driven by the desire to do good than the manufacturers of automobiles, canned soup or other household products.... They are willing to use any and every method to promote their products...who have learned (or been taught) to look to the medical profession for solutions to a wide range of physical, social and existential ills.

In contrast Ferguson stresses a number of strategies that involve putting the patient's situation in the context of their wider history, relationships and experiences. He also emphasises the importance of the growing movements of "mental health service users" whose experiences and needs are often sidelined in discussions about treatment. These come together in an excellent chapter "new challenges to psychiatric hegemony". Here Ferguson challenges the dominant medical approaches and celebrates alternatives that have a more social  approach:

A model for mental distress which recognises - and provides empirical evidence for-the casual role played by early life experience, poverty, inequality, racism, sexism and other forms of oppression in the genesis of mental health problems is a huge step forward from a model which locates such problems primarily in faulty genes or biochemical deficiencies. The fact also that the new paradigm does not discount genes, brains and biochemistry but rather emphasises the interaction between our brains and our environments... allows for a much more dialectical understanding of mental distress.

But this takes place in the context of a health service that has been decimated by years of Tory cuts and the scapegoating of mental health service users. So Ferguson cautions against simply dismissing existing treatments - we need to fight to protect existing services, and make them better. Not allow austerity measures to be given progressive cover.

Ferguson goes further. He shows how capitalism distorts our lives and undermines what makes us human. Mental distress may be encouraged by poverty, racism, sexism or oppression. But the very system is irrational. Our lives are taken from us, wasted and our skills underutilised - we are atomised, made to compete with each other when we are used to cooperating and working together and a tiny minority get rich on the backs of everyone else's labour. If you wanted to design a system that created mental distress you couldn't find a better one than capitalism.

But Ferguson also points out that when people collectively challenge their situation and fight back against capitalism they often find their mental health is improved. On a small scale, it's why protests and pickets are often so happy - we are challenging our enemies and working together. He quotes an eyewitness to the Egyptian Revolution describing how everyone had a "new sense of agency". They were, albeit briefly, masters of their future. It's a small glimpse into how the world might be a better place one day. In conclusion I'd like to finish with a quote from a famous study that Ferguson uses in his book. Its a study of depression in women in the 1970s, and the authors conclude:

While we see sadness, unhappiness and grief as inevitable in all societies we do not believe this is true of clinical depression.

Iain Ferguson's book is important because it looks at what we can do in the here and now to improve people's mental distress but how we can also envisage a society where that doesn't happen.

Read an interview with Iain Ferguson about his book here.

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James S.A. Corey - Caliban's War

Volume two of James S.A. Corey's Expanse series continues almost where the first book left off. It maintains the fast pace of its predecessor but has a somewhat darker tone. While there is plenty of action and set piece battles these takes place in the context of the political battles going on between Earth, Mars and the Belter systems.

Because the fragile balance between these three political entities has been fundamentally altered by the arrival of an alien intervention in the Solar System. At the end of the last book an alien molecule which seems to be able to self-replicate (and communicate faster than light) took control of Venus. In the few months that have passed Venus has been completely transformed into an incomprehensible structure.

Elsewhere, different factions of human society compete for their own interests. These imperialist maneuvers in space are reshaping the solar system, but bringing interplanetary war closer. When it does finally erupt, a cascade of events takes place that brings the key characters from Leviathan Wakes into the centre of events again - led by the somewhat wooden James Holden.

Other characters are less wooden, such as the rude and belligerent UN senior politician Avasarala who plays politics like chess. The Martian Marine "Bobby" who watched her entire platoon get massacred by an alien living weapon is wooden, but in the way that soldiers are. The interaction between these two is one of the fun things about the book.

The novel itself races along. The authors have a talent for end of chapter cliff hangers, and because alternate chapters switch between viewpoints it means the reader finds themselves reading late into the night. While the plot isn't original, the story is tight and fun and sets up its fans for book three.

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Gerald Horne - The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism

In the introduction to his latest book historian Gerald Horne makes clear the consequences of European settlement in the Americas:

Though disease spread by these interlopers is often trotted out to explain the spectacular downturn in the fortunes of indigenous Americans, genocide - in virtually every meaning of the term, including volitional acts by invading settlers - is the proximate cause of this towering mountain of cadavers. Thus, even when enslaved Africans chose suicide, which they were often forced to do, it would be follow to suggest that enslavers were guiltless.

It is a deliberately provocative conclusion and the tragedies that resulted from European colonialism is horrifically documented in Horne's book. But his book is more than a simple description of the genocide against indigenous peoples and African slaves. It explains the pattern of colonialism in the Americas through the development of capitalism.

While British colonialism came to dominate in North America, the initial thrusts were made by countries like Spain and Portugal. But the success of the Bourgeois revolution in England enabled that state to more effectively deploy its wealth to strengthen the position of its merchants in the Americas. The defeat of the aristocracy by the merchant class, as exemplified by the execution of Charles I and the consolidation of their power in 1688 meant that they were freed up to maximise their profits. This meant the transport of millions more slaves, their brutal exploitation on the plantations and the selling of the products of their labour back in Europe.

Not only did 1688 allow the merchants more freedom to engage in profit making, it also explicitly encouraged them to do this through the slave trade, which now was directly between Africa and North America, by-passing the Caribbean. Horne writes that

as slave owning became widespread, it became more difficult to limit slave trading to the aegis of the Crown, and one of the revolutionary demands of the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688 in London was the deregulation of this hateful commerce and the entrance into it of 'private' traders.

Later Horne points out that later generations of Marxists and radicals hailed "the resultant growth of the productive forces" but the victory of the Bourgeois Revolution "was a staggering blow to Africans and Native Americans: it was the dawning of the  apocalypse".

If I have a disagreement with Horne's analysis here, it is only to say that not all Marxists "celebrated" the reality of the Bourgeois Revolution, just as there is a crude Marxism that sees history as a series of gradual steps upward there is also a Marxism, in the real tradition of Marx and Engels, that understands history as a series of transformations and capitalism's success as a defeat for millions of people. As Marx famously wrote in Capital:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China, &c.

But Horne does not limit his study to the economic causes of the Apocalypse. He also explains that there had to be a ideological justification for what took place. This means the development of "white supremacy" and racism. One of the running themes through the book is that slaves and indigenous people constantly rebelled. The ideology of white supremacy justified enslavement and repression, and drove a wedge between the slaves and the poorest whites. Horne shows how this can be seen in the historical record:

Pessimism reigned as the colonial elite could not unite the Gordian knot of bringing in more Africans to produce immense wealth while preventing them from rebelling and taking power - which finally occurred in 1791 in what became Haiti. The governor of Antigua remarked during this fraught seventeenth-century moment that his island, like others, was beset by 'great supplies of Negroes and no whites.'. 

To this Horne appends, "Note the term 'white' that was rapidly supplanting Christian to describe Europeans."

Capitalism's drive to accumulate wealth spelt disaster for millions of people, for entire ecosystems and whole societies. The very infrastructure of great European cities is built on the blood and sweat of slaves in the Americas. When trying to understand the nature of the United States today we cannot forget the invention and use of white supremacy to justify mass enslavement. But racism has deep roots in modern capitalist society and so while Horne finishes his book with a demand that there should be reparations to repair this historic crime, he also argues that there has to be a challenge to the system itself. It is not enough to debate with the American Civil Liberties Union "about the 'rights' of fascists" he argues, and instead it would be better to spend time talking with "potential and actual allies in Beijing, Moscow, Havana, Brussels , Pretoria and elsewhere". These are the sort of networks of solidarity that we'll need to end white supremacy and its capitalist parent once and for all.

Horne's book is a brilliant intervention into contemporary debates about racism. It is a powerful weapon that argues the problem is not just a far-right US President or a growing number of fascist protesters, but a system that is built on the back of slavery. I highly recommend it.

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J.L.Carr - A Month in the Country

A few years after the end of World War One, Tom Birkin, a survivor of Passchendaele and a victim of shell shock finds himself in the tiny village of Oxgodby with the job of restoring a medieval painting in the church. Tom arrives in Oxgodby in the pouring rain, yet the weeks he spends there turn into a idyllic summer that he can only contrast with the rain and mud of Flanders. The rainy arrival symbolises his transition into a new era of his life, but the story of what takes place in that summer is told in retrospect - Tom himself only understands it long after he leaves.

As he uncovers the painting he gradually understands that its a masterpiece, a painting of the last judgement, with the damned being condemned to hell and the others rising up to join the heavenly host. The symbolism here isn't difficult to spot, but Carr doesn't force it down the reader's throat, instead he uncovers it slowly, like Tom's restoration.

There are surprisingly few main characters, though Tom's close friendship with Moon, and archaeologist on a similar quest to find a lost grave in the churchyard is touching. They are both veterans of the War, though in very different ways. Moon spots, long before Tom does, that his friendship with the vicar's beautiful wife is becoming more than that and if there is any dramatic heart to the story it is what happens to the two of them.

Tom uncovers a painting; Moon finds a grave and everyone else in the village spends the summer getting the harvest in and going to Church or Chapel. While little happens in terms of a narrative, much takes place. There is a hilarious comic set piece in a music shop where the rivalry between Church and Chapel becomes very real. There's also a moment of pure pain when, without giving away the details, Tom is confronted full on with the consequences of the War. His screams of rage into the empty fields are truly tragic.

This is a beautiful novel - every page celebrates humanity with all its strengths and weaknesses. Despite being written in the late 1970s it feels like an autobiographical sketch by a survivor of the War. That it isn't, is a tribute to the author's ability to make the past a living thing.

Randall Hansen - Fire & Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany 1942-1945

In the excitement of the release of a book called Fire and Fury about Donald Trump's Whitehouse tenure, Randall Hansen's 2009 book of the same title became a surprise bestseller again as confused readers clicked the wrong online ordering button and purchased a book about the firebombing of Germany cities in World War Two. I wasn't confused like this, but having read a newspaper article about the book I hunted it down out of interest for the subject.

It was a worthwhile, if occasionally haunting, exercise. The reality of the Allied bombing campaign against Germany was not pleasant and Hansen uses eyewitness accounts to recount the reality of the mass bombing raids on cities like Hamburg and Dresden. He also tells the story of the smaller towns and cities that were systematically flattened by British Bomber Command, often long after any strategic justification had disappeared.

Hansen contrasts the approaches of Britain's Bomber Command with the US's Eighth Air-force. He argues that the approach of the latter was a strategic success, hampering Germany's ability to wage war and undermining her industry. His authorities for this are many, but include Albert Speer who was clear that repeated attacks on key industries such as ball bearing manufacture and oil, significantly undermined Nazi Germany. Bomber Command on the other hand had a strategy of blanket bombing and destroying whole cities. This arose out of a pre-war doctrinal belief that such bombings would utterly demoralise the population, kill civilian workers and stop Germany's ability to wage war. It also came out of a practical problem - Bomber Command was the only force capable of striking Germany after Dunkirk, and at repeatedly proved itself, in the early years of the war, inept at striking precision targets.

However what becomes clear is that despite mounting evidence that this strategy was having no impact upon Germany's war aims, Bomber Command's Arthur Harris pursued this strategy in the face of mounting criticism from his own military superiors. At times it seems that Harris misled the public and his commanders and liberally interpreted his orders to continue with his strategy of mass murder.

Harris may not have had all the hard facts to hand, but intelligence was available that proved his strategy a failure. Despite this, supporters of Harris continue to argue that his bombing of civilian cities was a success and a necessity. Let's quote Hansen on this.

On by one, the cities of the Ruhr were turned into ash and rubble The effects of these raids on production were minimal. Although two hundred thousand tons of bombs would fall on Germany in 1943... its wartime production increased dramatically... During the Battle of the Ruhr, the country faced nothing approaching a labour shortage. There were 1.4 million workers still employed in household service... By the end of 1943, the Reich still had six million Germans employed in consumer industries. The result was the overproduction of consumer goods. From October 1942 to October 1943, Germany produced 120,000 typewriters, 200,000 domestic radios, 150,000 electric blankets, 3600 refrigerators, ...512,000 pairs of riding boots...According to the official British historians... the Battle of the Ruhr - during which fifty-eight thousand tons of bombs had been poured on Germany - cost the area between one and one and a half months' loss of output. The price for Bomber Command in men and matériel was enormous.

In fact Speer made it clear that when Bomber Command did hit industrially crucial targets, such as oil depots or the famous dams, they failed to follow up on their attacks and cripple the targets. The result was, we should be utterly clear, a militarily failure that could have shortened the war, and the loss of thousands of servicemen and the deaths and injury of tens of thousands of civilians.

By contrast, despite limitations imposed on them by weather, and enemy action, the US strategy of targeting key parts of the German war machines had a considerable impact. What is unbelievable to me, from reading Hansen's book, is that Harris was allowed to get away with minimal criticism. His superior officers failed to challenge him in any meaningful way, particularly when he clearly interpreted orders in such a way as to continue to hit cities at a time when official strategy was to prioritise the final destruction of the oil industry. Hansen concludes, "After flattening dozens of cities and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians Harris should be held to account and not simply be forgive for making a 'bad call'... Churchill could have stopped area bombing and he did not; indeed, near the ed of the war, he urged it on.

Hansen is no bleeding heart liberal. He sees Harris' failure not as a war crime, but as a strategic error that was continued because Harris was unable to break from a strategy that was a "moral and strategic failure" and his high-command did not want to challenge him.  He concludes:

We cannot shy away from this conclusion out of fear of giving succour to the far right or of offending the Royal Air Force or Royal Canadian Air Force aircrew. On the contrary the freedom to write and speak the truth is what the aircrew were fighting for.

While I disagree with this exact conclusion - I think the war was fought for the imperial interests of Britain and the US, one can agree that those who celebrate the defeat of Fascism cannot hide the fact that Britain pursued strategies that failed to limit civilian deaths nor speed the end of the war.

Two further things need to be added. One is that Hansen notes in detail the failure of both the US and the British to use their air-power to limit the Holocaust. There's a heart-rending account from an Auschwitz survivor who saw Allied bombers flying over and prayed for them to bomb the camp to stop the mass murder. Hansen notes how much the Allies knew about the mass murder and concludes that while they may not have stopped the majority of the Holocaust, they could have in the latter years made a real difference. They ignored the targets in favour of area and precision bombing of military targets. That they did not try is a stain on the memory of the Allied forces.

Finally, one missing part is in Hansen's conclusion. If the US strategy of precision bombing was so effective, why did they do the opposite in Japan. The firebombing of Tokyo and the atom bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were precisely what they condemned Bomber Command for in Europe. I suspect that some of the difference in approach reflects a racist view of the Japanese, something that Ian W. Toll has shown was prevalent among US military strategy in the Pacific Arena.

Randall Hansen's book is an important contribution to discussions of military history and World War Two. It is impossible to read it, in my view, and believe that Arthur Harris was not a war criminal, though others may disagree. However everyone who reads this can only conclude that the strategy of mass bombing of cities was an utter failure that probably prolonged the war.

Related Reviews

Taylor - Dresden
Moorhouse - Berlin at War
Gluckstein - Fighting on All Fronts
Heartfield - An Unpatriotic History of the Second World War
Gluckstein - A People's History of the Second World War
Kershaw - The End
Newsinger - The Blood Never Dried

James S. A. Corey - Leviathan Wakes

It's always dangerous diving into a novel that is part of an established series, particularly one like the Expanse universe which has already spawned various short stories, a TV series and is unlikely to see a final book any time soon. However I enjoyed Leviathan Wakes a lot. It is not a brilliant piece of science fiction, but it has some great ideas and good characters. In particular it is good at describing a Solar System carved up into differing and contested spheres of influence between Earth, Mars and the "Belt".

The main story follows two groups - one a rough Belter policeman trying to find a kidnapped woman against the backdrop of a war begun by the second group, a crew of spaceship that have accidentally begun an interplanetary war. Throw into the mix a novel form of alien life, intergalactic politics and a neat disregard for any of the major laws of physics and this is a novel that allows spacecraft to swoop around each other guns blazing, and alien technology that can disregard the laws of thermodynamics and gravity at will. If this sort of thing bothers you then you should probably re-read Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, if it doesn't then you are in for a fast paced novel that draws some of its characters from the work of Raymond Chandler.

At times the plot is head together by some mind stretching coincidences and the aforementioned alien technology that can disregard the laws of science. But the writers whose collective pen name is James Corey are talented enough to get away with it, and the reader that reaches the end is likely to be left wanting to read the eight follow up books.

Related Reviews

Corey - Caliban's War
Corey - Abaddon's Gate

Yuri Prasad - A Rebel's Guide to Martin Luther King

This year radicals will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of 1968, a year of global rebellion. One of the key events of that year took place on 4th April when the civil rights activist Martin Luther King was assassinated by a racist. King's death provoked a wave of furious uprisings, riots and protests.

Yuri Prasad's new book looks at King's political life within the Civil Rights movement. His focus is on how King's ideas changed as the struggle developed. Prasad explains that King never really set out to be the leader he became, and with the benefit of over half a century of hindsight, we can see an element of political naivety in King's early beliefs. As Prasad writes:

King admitted that he had conceived of the fight as being for reform of the system. He thought that, faced with the realities of black rebellion and racist resistance in the South, Washington could be persuaded to act to outlaw segregation, enshrine voting rights and create the conditions in which a true 'brotherhood' could grow. 

The Civil Rights movement did win spectacular gains, and King was at the forefront of some of those key battles. But King was also in a contradictory position - between the demands for radical, immediate change, and his need to keep the liberals and the black middle classes on board with his fight. These latter two groups were terrified of revolution, of too rapid a change and certainly didn't want to have their own interests challenged.

The reality of the racist resistance to the struggle for rights and the pressure from below helped push King towards a more radical position. One of the strengths of this little book is that it reproduces some of King's on words, and included is his letter from a Birmingham jail to those who opposed the protests and insisted he show patience and confine the struggle to the courts. The letter concludes "There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience".

After President Kennedy's assassination King argued that the movement had to give the new president space, and certainly the establishment thought "the battle against segregation was now reaching a conclusion". But now King buckled. Knowing he needed another victory to keep the struggle alive, he compromised and made a deal with Lyndon Johnson's administration to avoid the march on Selma becoming a confrontation with the police. Prasad quotes those involved at the time and their disgust.

The growing radical demands for "Black power" confused King, and when younger activists challenged him he felt hurt. But King was not someone to keep going in one direction simply because he had always done things in a particular way. Prasad shows King engaged with the growing radicalism and began to shift his own politics. Principally this involved his speaking out against the war in Vietnam at a time when few others had done so. This alienated many of his liberal supporters, but King was right to argue "I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government". He also began to tackle wider questions of class and poverty and in a powerful speech in support of striking refuse workers in Memphis he ended by calling for a city-wide general strike if management did not give in.

This new stage to King's politics was cut short by his assassination. Precisely what would have happened had King not died can only be guessed at, but Prasad does demonstrate that King was increasingly looking to challenge racism through a challenge to capitalism. King clearly was coming to understand that you couldn't end the former without breaking the latter. This focus on the evolution of King's ideas is what makes this short book very special. I highly recommend Yuri Prasad's book as a key read for the anniversary of 1968 and for the struggles against the racist system today.

Support radical publishing and buy the book direct from Bookmarks Books here.

Related Reviews
Younge - The Speech
Richardson (ed) - Say It Loud! Marxism and the Fight Against Racism

My reviews of other Rebel's Guides 

Hamilton - A Rebel's Guide to Malcolm X
Mitchell - A Rebel's Guide to James Connolly
Brown - A Rebel's Guide to Eleanor MarxCampbell - A Rebel's Guide to Rosa Luxemburg
Orr - Sexism and the System; A Rebel's Guide to Women's Liberation
Choonara - A Rebel's Guide to Trotsky
Bambery - A Rebel's Guide to Gramsci
Birchall - A Rebel's Guide to Lenin
Gonzalez - A Rebel's Guide to Marx

Lyn Macdonald - Passchendaele: The Story of the Third Battle of Ypres 1917

I picked up Lyn Macdonald's Passchendaele quite by chance. I was looking for a history of the battle to read prior to visiting the World War One battlefields at Ypres. My random selection turned out to be extremely fortuitous - Passchendaele is the perfect book to read to understand the slaughter that was the Third Battle of Ypres. The strength of the book lies in the powerful testaments from those who fought in the battle. These eyewitness accounts are often horrific, tragic and emotional. But they contain a wealth of detail that means that the battle isn't simply an abstract tale of regiments moving here and there, and thousands being killed or maimed, but rather a deeply personal experience.

The battle for Passchendaele takes place in the context of the Ypres Salient, a bulge in the allied lines into German captured terroritry. Straightening the line out, and then pushing onwards cost the lives of thousands and was less about defeating the enemy than making sure that trench warfare continued. By the time of the Third Battle (the earlier two were conflicts that set the scene for the later confrontation) the British High Command had an ambition of moving so far forward they would capture the channel ports from the enemy and cut off their access to submarine bases, thus aiding the cross Atlantic supply convoys. It was a laudable aim, but in the context of trench warfare, the weather and the German defences it was fantasy.

I was struck that British politicians, particularly Lloyd George understood this instinctively. Field Marshall Haig however liberally interpreted his orders and turned preparations into a major offensive. Summer weather turned into a horribly wet autumn. Flanders turned into a sea of mud. Perhaps 40,000 bodies still lie under this mud, and our guide showed us six recent graves of soldiers who'd recently been found. Veterans recalling watching friends and comrades slowly drown in mud, begging to be shot will remain with me forever.

I wrote that the accounts of eyewitnesses (both soldiers and non-combatants such as civilians and nurses) were horrific. At the beginning of the book Lyn Macdonald apologises in advance, but reminds the reader that this is all true. It's an apt point to make. Almost exactly 100 years to the day when I visited Ypres, the Germans began their Spring Offensive of 1918. In a few days of intense fighting, they wiped out the limited gains the Allies had made towards Passchendaele. Tens of thousands of men were slaughtered in an utterly pointless few years of fighting. If you do ever visit Ypres, then I'd recommend Lyn Macdonald's book, but even if you cannot go to France and Belgium then read her book. It deserves a wide readership lest we forget the true horrors of what took place between 1914 and 1918

Related Reviews

Kershaw - To Hell and BackCockfield - With Snow on their Boots

Sherry - Empire and Revolution
Zurbrugg - Not Our War
Romains - Verdun

James C. Scott - Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

This fascinating new book takes a new look at an age old question of ancient history. Precisely when, where and why did early humans move from effectively nomadic existence to a sedentary one? Why did they make this transition that would lead to the first "states"? Traditionally historians argue the key issue is agriculture, and that farming led directly to sedentary life, and then to the rise of states and civilisation.

But this book by James C. Scott argues that while there is some truth to this, reality was often more complex. Of course the "neolithic revolution" was a fundamental transformation for human society. As Scott writes:

The domestication of plants as represented ultimately by fixed-field farming.. enmeshed us in an annual set of routines that organised our work life, our settlement patterns, our social structure... The harvest itself sets in train another sequence of routines: in the case of cereal crops, cutting,m bundling, threshing, gleaning, separation of straw, winnowing chaff, sieving, drying, sorting - most of which has historically been coded as women;'s work... Once Homo sapiens took that fateful step into agriculture, our species entered an austere monastery who taskmaster consists mostly of the demanding genetic clockwork of a few plants.

None of this is particularly new,  but the key question here is "why" did this happen? Scott answers this complex question with a number of points. Firstly he shows that domestication predates sedentary life. Animals and plants were used and managed even when humans were still living nomadic hunter-gatherer lives. He also points out that a transition to agriculture actually requires a lot more work from individuals.

Sometimes Scott is guilty of coming across as though he is the first author to highlight some of these things. But authors like MArshall Sahlins and Richard Lee showed in their studies of contempoary nomadic cultures that communities were well aware that agriculture requires more work per calorie. Its something I myself wrote about in Land and Labour. But Scott does well to show how blurred the distinction between nomadism, agriculture and sedetary life is.

Scott argues points to a number of societies that made the transition back to nomadic culture from sedentary society (the Dakota and Cheyenne nation of North America is a classic example though they did this when horses became available from Spanish colonists). He also argues, and I think rightly, that many early states were vulnerable because of their reliance on agriculture - and that the historical "collapse" of these societies is less the disasters that Jared Diamond has implied and more a transition back to earlier social organisation. In this context its good to see McAnany and Yoffee's book Questioning Collapse getting recognition.

Scott's book really excels when he talks about the nature of early states. I was particularly taken by his idea of "political crops" particularly wheat, barley, rice, millet and maize. These are easy to quantify, ripen at set times and the produce can be easily measured and transported (they're also relatively light for moving in bulk). Students of Karl Marx's Labour Theory of Value might be intrigued by the following example:

Units of grain served as standards of measurement and value for trade and tribute against which the value of other commodities was calculated - including labour. The daily food ration of the lowest class of labourers in Umma, Mesopotamia, was almost exactly two litres of barley measured out in the beveled bowls that are among the most ubiquitous archaeological finds.

I was less convinced of the role that Scott attributes to coercion in the early states. He writes that "when other forms of unfree labour [in addition to slavery] such as debt bondage, forced resettlement, and corvee labour, are taken into account, the importance of coerced labour for the maintenance and expansion of the grain-labour module at the core of the state is hard to deny."

Here I think Scott is slightly guilty of over-emphasising the coercive nature of the state. Writing about Mesopotamia again he says,

The dense concentration of grain and manpower on the only soils capable of sustaining them in such numbers... maximized the possibilities of appropriate, stratification, and inequality. The state form colonizes this nucleus as its productive based, scales it up, intensifies it, and occasionally it adds infrastructure... in the interest of fattening and protecting the goose that lays the golden eggs... one can think of these forms of intensification as elite niche-construction: modifying the landscape and ecology so as to enrich the productivity of its habitat.

Rightly Scott understands that the agricultural surplus is central to the functioning of the state. But to often he sees this as arising only out of coercion by the ruling classes. In other words the mass of the population don't really want to live in a "state" and have to be forced to do so. But precisely because residents would receive benefits from a state - protection from raiding, the organisation of food distribution, maintenance and building of irrigation systems etc - they might not necessarily all have to be coerced all the time. The ruling class doesn't only have a stick at its disposal, they also can dangle carrots.

That's not to say that everyone wanted to live in an unequal society. Agriculture gives human society a surplus which can lead to a class of society and the development of a state. But crucially it doesn't always. Flannery and Marcus' marvellous book The Creation of Inequality shows that early societies, both sedentary and nomadic resisted the development of inequality in numerous innovative ways. The rise of states was not inevitable, but when it did happen it eventually led to the erosion of the majority of other forms of social organisation.

All in all there is much of interest in this book, its easy to read, it made me rethink how and why the transition to agriculture takes place, and its full of fascinating details. Scott beings together a lot of material from many different sources. My slight disagreements about emphasis are not intended to prevent anyone from getting and enjoying this book.

Related Reviews

Bellwood - The First Farmers
Martin - The Death of Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots
Flannery and Marcus - The Creation of Inequality
McAnany and Yoffee - Questioning Collapse
Childe - What Happened in History?
Harper - The Fate of Rome

Alastair Morgan & Peter Jukes - Untold: The Daniel Morgan Murder Exposed

Private investigator Daniel Morgan was brutally murdered in 1987. Thirty years later, the case is "the most investigated murder in British history", yet despite this no one has ever been punished for their involvement in the killing. This remarkable book is the story of Daniel Morgan's family's struggle for justice. It is a book that exposes the rotten heart of the British justice system and forces the reader to confront ugly truths about our police forces.

At the heart of the story is the killing of Daniel Morgan. His brother Alastair and the rest of Daniel's family begin by trying to get justice but almost immediately they found themselves stunned by the inaction of the police and investigative failings. However it rapidly became clear that there was much more to the case, and as the family constantly put pressure on the police more and more dirt is exposed.

It is likely that Daniel was killed because he was about to expose major police corruption and collusion in criminal acts in a newspaper story. Anyone who has been paying any attention to British current affairs for the last thirty years knows that the behaviour of the police has increasingly come under scrutiny. It should come as no surprise that the justice system that failed so many people like the Birmingham Six or the Guildford Four would have institutional failings. One of the formative political campaigns of my life was the struggle for justice for Stephen Lawrence, the teenager killed in a racist attack in South London. That the police were found to be institutionally racist out of that campaign was a real victory. What Daniel Morgan's case shows is that there was also deep seated corruption in sections of the force at the time and it is likely that this is the reason he was killed. This begs the question, as the authors point out, who knew in advance about this?

Yet rather than one issue of police corruption, Daniel might have uncovered many of them. Rather than the crime itself, he might have focused on the conspirators and discovered a network of corrupt police officers. The mention of a 'management committee' organising the murder and cover-up seems plausible. If there was a conspiracy to murder Daniel... then cover it up using police personnel, it would need to be carefully planned.

All the indications... suggest it was meticulously organised .The removal of incriminating evidence from all Daniel's belongings and the abortive media campaigns calling for more information suggest the conspiracy was in operation long after the murder too. Subsequent cover-ups may have escalated to hide the initial conspiracy... With the revelation of a network of corrupt police , dozens of trials could have collapsed and convictions been rendered unsafe. Senior officers may have decided then that burying the true story around Daniel was the lesser of two evils.

So the story's tentacles stretch far beyond the car park where Daniel was killed. There are multiple links to the News of the World phone hacking scandals. After the then PM Gordon Brown spoke in Parliament about the "criminality surrounding the News of the World" Alastair writes:

I was reeling. This was another example of how my brother's unsolved murder and its cover-up had spread so rapidly through so many institutions. I had warned about the dangers of leaving the corruption around Southern Investigations to fester decades before, and now another symptom of the rot was playing out"

I have deliberately avoided trying to retell Untold's story in this review. Partly this is because I would encourage readers to read it themselves, but if you would like a short summary then I recommend this Socialist Worker piece on Daniel Morgan's murder.

As a longstanding political activist I have no love of the police, nor any illusions in the British state. Yet I still found myself repeatedly shocked by Untold. Indeed this is one reason why I would encourage people to read the book, as it exposes the reality of British justice. There is no doubt, that without the dogged persistence of Daniel Morgan's family Daniel's killing would have been forgotten long ago.

If there is to be any justice for the Morgan family then it will only be the result of ongoing campaigning work. One way to help them is to read this book. Another is to visit the campaign website.

Related Reviews

Davies - Flat Earth News
Aspden - The Houding of David Oluwale
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Ben Fine & Alfredo Saad-Filho - Marx's Capital

A decade after the financial crash that marked the start of the Long Depression, capitalism has still failed to recover. Economic crisis, poverty, austerity combine with a staggering concentration of wealth in the hands of a few individuals. It is no wonder then, that the ideas of Karl Marx remain of interest to many people trying to understand the capitalist system, and the two hundredth anniversary of Marx's birth is likely to encourage further interest.

Fine and Saad-Filho' guide to Marx's ideas has been in print, in various forms, since the 1970s. The text I've read is from 2004 and I understand it has been much developed since the early versions. The authors are two leading Marxists and have attempted to condense the key points of Marx's thought into this short book. I suspect it's popularity in no small part lies with its length - many of Marx's works and the guides to them are long, detailed books and this short volume offers an easy start.

The authors look at several key aspects of Marx's work - in particular his Method and the origins of his philosophy; the Labour Theory of Value, commodities; the circulation of capital and its accumulation and the role of the falling rate of profit in creating crisis. These are good introductions, and worth reading. Later chapters, particularly those on finance capital and agricultural rent are harder.

While there is much of interest here, in my opinion the book is too difficult to act as an entry to Marx's ideas. The early chapters are accessible, but by the middle of the book the authors appear to be addressing students with existing knowledge of mainstream economics. Because the book is not a guide to specific volumes of Marx's work in self-contained sections, the authors miss key sections. For instance there is no serious discussion of Marx's concept of money as a universal commodity - a key and very important section of the early chapters of Capital - It's omission makes some of the later explanations harder to understand.

Importantly the authors take up some contemporary criticisms of Marx, though readers who have not read these elsewhere will be left unsure of the arguments as the authors do not spend time in explaining Marx's opponents in detail. They also argue for the continued relevance of Marx, particularly his theory of class and the role of the state.

But there are weaknesses. I thought the section on Marxism and the environment missed some key arguments, not least even a passing reference to metabolic rift theory - despite referencing John Bellamy Foster's work. Of more concern was the author's argument that "capitalism is also capable, not least through the development of new materials and through state regulation, of tempering or even reversing at least partly such environmental degradation". This is an odd conclusion that doesn't really chime with Marx's arguments or those who have written in the field of ecological Marxism.

The section on the environment is from the author's concluding chapter on "Marxism and the Twenty First Century". They argue that the "purpose of this final chapter is to argue for the continuing salience of Marx's political economy for the study of contemporary issues". Here for me was the real problem - what is omitted is a sense of Marxism as a guide to political action, the ideological tools for the ending of capitalism and the building of a socialist society by the working masses. This felt like a retreat into an academic Marxism that explained the approach of the early chapters. So while there is much of use for those trying to get to grips with Marxism here, I'd recommend readers starting elsewhere. Some suggestions follow.

Related Reviews

Choonara - Unravelling Capitalism
Roberts - The Long Depression
Marx - Value, Price and Profit
Allen - Marx and the Alternative to Capitalism
Foster - Marx's Ecology
Engels - Socialism, Utopian and Scientific

Ken Follett - The Pillars of the Earth

Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth is, to the surprise of the experts, one of the most popular novels in the UK. Its sweeping story has been made into a TV series, and even board and computer games and spawned two sequels. The plot covers a largely unknown period of English history, the turbulent 12th century when England was engulfed in Civil War following the death of Henry I's only male heir.

Follett's book is primarily centred on the monastery and settlement at the fictional location of Kingsbridge. There's a  complex web of characters most of whom are hard not to emphasis with, and principally the story looks at those involved in building a cathedral at Kingsbridge and those trying to stop them. What makes the novel work is that the personal antagonisms of various characters, including the vile Earl William and the pious Prior Phillip is in the context of feudal relations and Civil War. William's violence and raids on settlements around his castle are a natural part of feudal society, as are the inter-generational feuds. If the novel overly relies on the ideas of good lords and bad lords, it doesn't neglect that all lords relied utterly on the peasantry to survive.

In fact I suspect that this is one of the reasons for the success of the books. Unusually Pillars of the Earth focuses on the lives and struggles of ordinary people - mostly labourers on the cathedrals, but also their partners and families. While the elite have their role in the book it's often peripheral to the main action, and there are far more detailed descriptions of the lives, labour and food of ordinary people. This is actually quite unusual in novels and works well here, particularly a book that has the hard work of the building of a cathedral at the centre of its epic tale.

There are problems of course. To me the book felt like a soap opera in places - each chapter seeming to end on a cliff hanger that was rapidly resolved by the cleverness of one or other of the "good" characters. There are also a few unlikely coincidences and plot points that don't really make sense (would a grieving husband, having just buried his wife, really jump into bed with a complete stranger a couple of hours later, especially given they were both starving in the midst of winter?) I also found the rape scenes unnecessarily detailed - I get that the author is trying to describe the brutality of a particular character, but it was simply too much. I also skipped a three page sex scene, not out of prudity, but mostly because it was utterly peripheral to the plot.

Nevertheless Follett's book is entertaining. He gives an interesting take on key events in the period and the structure of the book keeps the reader engaged. It's also rare that a novel manages to make the transition from Romanesque to Gothic religious architecture an interesting and integral part of its plot, and it shows well how ordinary people were a central part of that movement.

Mark Lause - The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots & Class Conflicts in the American West

Countless western films, novels and artworks have portrayed the "cowboy" as a lonesome figure, surviving through his wits and ability to quick draw a six shooter. The reality, as this unique book shows, is that the cowboy was a worker. Badly paid, living a life of intense physical hardship, with seasonal and often highly skilled work. They were never loners. Looking after a herd of hundreds of cows was a collective effort and cattle drives required the support of lots of men.

These conditions led to a series of strikes. Cowboys didn't wait to form unions, if they acted at the right time of the season they had enormous power to force the large cattle companies to give them massive pay rises. These strikes were strong, numerous and spread as the cowboys moved along the trail. But they had an inherent weakness - being seasonal work the workers found themselves at the mercy of the employer the next year, and many blacklisted strikers found it near impossible to work again.

This is of course a story that is never told. In an of itself it would be interesting just as the story of an unusual and forgotten episode of working class history. But Mark Lause puts the strikes in the context of the transformation of the American West and, crucially, the development of US captialism and I would argue, the modern US state. One thing that is very apparent about these strikes is how violent they were. Gunfights were common, the assasination of strikers and their leaders was frequent, and many of the classic episodes of gunfights that occur in films are often repeated here in the context of strikers, or former strikers, being hunted down by posse's that were little more than lynch mobs.

Take this example of a "militia" setup by cattle owners in Montana, after a series of strikes. The vigilantes, called "Stuart's Stranglers" after their leader hunted down former strikers who they described as "like many a rebel and anarchist westerner" and perhaps killed up to 75.

The conduct of the Stranglers proved to be notoriously brutal. At one point, they captured a mixed race boy who could fiddle and forced him to entertain them for the evening. The next day they killed him. 'His being a fiddler hadn't nothing to do with his being a horse thief," one said. [Former strikers were often labelled rustlers so they could be executed without trial].... The perpetrators included the founders of the state of Montana. Their '3-7-77' warning - said to notify targets to buy the $3 ticket to the 7am stage to take the 77-mile trip from the area-remains part of the insignia of the state's highway patrol.

Picture via Wikipedia article for 3-7-77

There is a thus a direct link between the anti-working class, racist violence unleashed on the cowboy strikes and the modern police system.

Lause however highlights another aspect to this, which is that this takes place in the context of the larger cattle firms, and their associated industries like the railroads, carving up the American West into huge, enclosed, fenced off lands. The battle between the open-range and the fence builders is the background to many a western. But as Lause points out, in those stories, the small-holders often win. In reality, big capital carved up the west and those who resisted were turfed out, or killed.

There is much more to Lause's book. But I actually found it remarkably difficult to follow in places. In part this is because much of the book dwells on aspects of US history and particularly Labour history which is completely unknown to me. His descriptions of the way that various left organisations tried to develop working class parties was at times difficult to follow. While Lause carefully deconstructs the classic image of the US west, I found the alternative a little difficult to work out, at times Lause seems to focus on events which are difficult to place in the wider narrative.

That said there is a lot in this book for people trying to understand the development of US capitalism, and those who fought against it. I loved this account about Eleanor Marx Aveling's visit to Cincinnati in 1886, "as cowboy strieks swept the West":

The local socialists took her, her husband and another European visitor to see a ground of cowboys on tour there. The comrades lingered behind after the costumed performance and introduced themselves to one of the performers. "To our great astonishment," she recalled, the cowboy "plunged at once into a denunciation of capitalists in general and of the ranch-owners in particular." "Broncho John" Sullivan assured them that many of the cowboys had "awakened to the necessity of having a league of their own" - and that a Cowboy Union or affiliates of the Knights of Labor seemed likely.

Resistance to capitalist domination is a forgotten part of the American west, and many of the famous and infamous figures beloved of books and films played a part in that story. When trying to understand 21st century America, we cannot forget the racist violence that helped entrench the state in the first place - violence against the indigenous peoples, the slaves and the working class. Lause's book is an interesting, if challenging introduction to that.

Related Reviews

Cronon - Changes in the Land
Cronon - Nature's Metropolis
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Louise Raw - Striking a Light: The Bryant & May Matchwomen and their place in History

Louise Raw's book on the famous matchwomen's strike at Bryant and May is a brilliant work of working class history. But it is much more than an account of the dispute. Raw's argument is that up until now the strike itself has been completely misunderstood. Traditionally it has been seen as a strike led by a few outside socialist agitators, principally the Fabian socialist Annie Besant. In addition, the impact of the strike was negligible when compared to the much more important dock strikes that erupted in East London a year or so later. After finishing the book, to test Raw's hypothesis, I picked up a copy of Allen Hutt's "short" history British Trade Unionism, a 1941 book that is effectively an official Communist Party history. He has this to say about the strike:

In July, 1888, a Socialist-led strike of the girls at Bryant and May's match factory in the East End secured wide publicity, alike for the shocking conditions that it exposed and for the revelation of the number of Liberal politicians who were concerned as shareholders. The strike was successful.

To be fair to Hutt he does continue to say that the strike was the "light jostle needed" (quoting Engels) to kick start wider strikes. But his all to brief account makes a number of the mistakes that Raw's book demolishes. Firstly the strike was not led by Annie Besant. While it is true that Besant had published an important expose of conditions in the factory a few days before the strike began, she neither knew of its beginning nor welcomed the event. In fact, Raw's account makes it clear that Besant's middle-class politics preferred the idea of a well publicised boycott of Bryant and May, and perhaps legal action to expose the employers. She did not welcome the self-activity that the Matchwomen displayed, despite the women having some hopes in her.

Hutt himself seems to subordinate the strike to the publicity it generated to embarrass some liberal politicians. This is to downplay the role of almost 1,400 women in bringing out an entire factory and creating a huge political problem for the employers and politicians. The women, despite the vast majority of them being very young, were confident, politically astute and able to articulate their demands. Rather than being the tools of outside agitators as Bryant and May liked to believe these were women who had a history of struggle, organisation and engagement with radical political ideas.

Careful research by Raw shows how deep these traditions went. In 1871 Raw describes how the government (under Gladstone) wanted to introduce a tax on matches. This would have had a significant impact upon the already impoverished workers at Bryant and May. The workers "convened a mass meeting at the Victoria factory, passing a resolution 'unanimously amid great cheering' stating that 'we the matchbox makers and employees of ... match factories, resist to the utmost of our power by all legal means the imposition of this cruel tax upon our labour'." They then marched to Parliament to hand over a petition, and despite their peaceful intentions encountered the full brute force of the police trying to stop them. It is notable that Bryant and May's management simply intended to pass the tax onto their workers rather than challenge the government. 17 years later the workers would again march to Parliament, following the same route as in 1871*.

Popular legend would have the "match-girl" as a tiny, innocent, poor little girl freezing to death on the streets. The reality, as Raw demonstrates over and over, is that she was often a highly political figure willing to organise her comrades, fight the police and protest to try and improve conditions. This wasn't just true of the strike. Raw's research uncovers the latter-day history of some of the strike leaders who became key community figures prepared to fight for their neighbours and friends, as well as being trade unionists.

But conditions definitely needed improving. Despite the enormous profits made by Bryant and May, life in the factories was notoriously hard, and low paid. The work itself inflict tremendous suffering on the workers, with the phosphorous causing a painful bone disease known as Phossy Jaw. Despite the link between phosphorous and the disease the company sacked people who showed symptoms and downplayed the threat. The suffering must have been horrific. Raw quotes one contemporary account of a former Matchwoman who had completely lost her lower jaw.

Gender

The second strand to Raw's book is the question of gender and its role within the strike. Raw argues that you cannot understand the matchwomen's strike without understanding the wider position of women in contemporary society and in the trade union movement of the late 19th century. Despite a few exceptions women workers were not seen as part of the workers movement, in fact, the official trade union movement tended to see women workers as a threat that would reduce male wages or employment. This was closely linked with fixed ideas of gender roles within the family. As Raw writes:

The ideological victory of the concept of 'separate spheres', and all that went with it, had resulted from a long and sometimes hard-fought battle over ideas of sexual morality, the sexual division of labour, and gender itself: what it meant, or should mean, to be a man or a woman in the nineteenth century.

This meant too things. It meant that women who did work, like the matchwomen, were portrayed as immoral, violent and lacking in womanly qualities. But it also impacted on the labour movement and those who wrote its history. The result is, Raw argues, a "history of the figureheads of women's unioniusm rather than of the rank and file, and of these leaders' estimations of the female workforce, often as weak and undisciplined before the imposition of order from outside". Here is the origin of the myth that the strike was "Socialist-led" or organised by Annie Besant.

Raw's book rescues the Matchwomen from a "gender blind" tradition that cannot conceive that ordinary women could self-organise and defeat a powerful and rich employer. But her book is much more than this. While telling the story of the strike Raw also tells us the story of working class life in the East End - the extreme poverty, the appalling conditions at work and home, the arrogance of the middle and ruling classes who only saw violence and promiscuity. Against this Raw shows us a world of solidarity and self-organisation. Of women and men who fought as best they could for their neighbours, workmates, communities and their families.

The finest example of this is Raw's argument that there was no real separate between the action of the Matchwomen and the more famous (and more celebrated) strikes that followed. Against those historians who argue that there was a gap, or no interrelation between the events, Raw painstakingly pieces together the close community and family links between dockers, matchwomen and other workers. More recent historians might have believed that there were no links, but that was not true of trade unionists at the time.

Dockers' leaders Tom Mann and Ben Tillett were both unequivocal, indeed generous to an almost surprising degree, in attributing to the matchwomen's action the very beginnings of New Unionism. Tillett described the matchwomen's victory as quite simply 'the beginning of the social convulsion.

In my own studies of rural class struggle I've often noticed how  ruling class accounts of strikes begin with a belief that there must be some outside agitators starting the commotion. They cannot believe that the peasants and labrouers were able in and of themselves to organise, let alone threaten their wealth and power. This condensation is also true of the matchwomen, though in this case, it has also been copied by some labour historians who should have known better. Louise Raw's book is a brilliant rescue of the role of ordinary working class women in fighting to improve their lives. It is also a masterpiece of historical study - a model for those of us trying to understand and write about the struggles of the past. I urge you to read it.

* I would like to add a personal note to this. Louise Raw points out that the Matchwomen marched in 1871 and in 1888 to Parliament via Bow and Mile End. In 2003, when war in Iraq broke out, a march by thousands of school and college students followed the exact same route to Parliament to protest at Tony Blair's war. It was fairly spontaneous, and it is nice to know of the unconscious celebration of East London history.

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