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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related Reviews

Jaurès - A Socialist History of the French Revolution
McGarr & Callinicos - Marxism and the Great French Revolution
Birchall - The Spectre of Babeuf
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Marx – The Civil War In France

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related Reviews

Shrubsole - Who Owns England?
Linklater - Owning the Earth
Klein - The Shock Doctrine
Jones - Chavs
Minton - Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First-Century City
Hanley - Estates: An Intimate History

Thomas Firbank - I Bought a Star

I Bought a Star is the follow up to Thomas Firbank's much better known book I bought a Mountain. In that book Firbank told the story of how he bought a sheep farm in mid-Wales in the early 1930s and turned it into a thriving concern just in time for the start of World War Two. This book begins with Firbank hiding in France after his marriage fell apart and he'd left the farm. There are few mentions as to this sudden turnaround - readers of the first book will be left surprised at the sudden end to what seemed a successful marriage and joint-management of the farm. His former wife, Esme Cummin's remained at the farm and became a significant conservationist figure for Wales.

The German invasion of France leads to Firbank leaving his self imposed exile with a nearly unbelievable drive back to the channel ports, along with the young daughter of an acquaintance who wants her to reach England. Firbanks seems to revel in proving his chilvarous qualities, and safely escorts the woman to England where he travels around London trying to join the army. Eventually he joins the Guards regiment (though knowing an acquaintance and being the author of that book) which ends up with him guarding Buckingham Palace on a night it was bombed. Eventually because of his experiences mountaineering, Firbanks ends up in the 1st Airborne and sees action in Italy, followed by a slightly more sedate service on the fringes of Arnhem. The book ends with Firbank leaving the parachute training school that he ends up running.

Sadly despite all this action, it's a much less interesting book than I Bought a Mountain. Part of the problem is that this is just the story of someone's experience during the War which isn't that exceptional. The action scenes are limited and Firbank's general musings are less interesting than when applied to the landscape and labour of a Welsh hill-farm. More importantly Firbank's somewhat pompous attitude to those he disagrees really begins to grate.

I was annoyed, for instance, at the section when he encounters a group of "socialists" whom he disagrees with greatly. While I'd disagree with the version of socialism these individuals espouse, the dismissal of them (and socialism in general) by Firbank is patronising to the extreme - and mirrors his attitude to those he disagrees with elsewhere.

All in all this is a disappointing book, probably only of interest to those who enjoyed the first part of his autobiography and want some continuity and closure.

Related Review

Firbank - I Bought a Mountain

Robert Poole - Peterloo: The English Uprising

During the massacre of peaceful protesters by cavalry and yeomanry at St. Peter's fields in Manchester on August 16 1819, several cavalrymen answered cries for mercy with the chilling response:

"If we let you go, you will come again some other time."

It's a telling comment that neatly sums up the reasons behind what became known as the Peterloo massacre. Peterloo was, in the words of EP Thompson, "class war", and it was the culmination of an extended period of class conflict that raged across England, but was particularly focused in the north-west. Some people have been sceptical about the title of Robert Poole's new book because "Uprising" implies for them a insurrectionist revolutionary moment. But what Poole shows very clearly is that this was a period of mass working class discontent and the ruling class responded in the most brutal fashion.

Poole puts Peterloo (and the preceding discontent) into a historical context. One of the most important factors is the war with France, and following Linda Colley's book Britons he argues that "arming the people for national defence" against Revolutionary France was a "revolutionary departure, with profound consequences". The government had won the war through mass mobilisation and heavy taxation. The end of the war brought hopes for respite, but it also left a huge number with experience of military mobilisation. But instead of relief came years of austerity. The government "had not fought off revolution abroad in order to concede democracy at home".

Ironically, the hatred of revolutionary abroad exacerbated the response of the government to demands for Reform. Few in London appear to have an sense of a nuanced response to mass petitioning for relief and reform. Today politicians are adept at dangling the hope of future change, but in the post-Napoleonic war period the response was almost always to use force and the law to stop or undermine social movements. Poole argues that this was particularly an issue in Manchester where the Collegiate church ("autocratic, secretive, enterprising and mired in corruption") ran the "greatest village". It was here that "the conflict between property and democracy was played out". There was, suffice to say, little democracy. Manchester's deputy constable, Joseph Nadin "the real ruler of Manchester" according to a contemporary newspaperman, corruptly ran the city with an iron fist. The Manchester oligarchy had "tight control" over local institutions and used them to try and undermine potential discontent where-ever it reared its head. It was this group who made sure the massacre took place, but they did it in the context of national government policy.

Followers of Tom Paine had left a radical tradition across Lancashire, but growing discontent across the region, particularly in the weaving districts, lead to the eruption of new radical groups, publications and, in particular, meetings. Activists like John Cartwright brought the practice of mass petitioning to the manufacturing areas and he and his comrades became adept at finding ways around the limitations imposed by the law. Demands at the time for reform of parliament are often understood as the start of the movement for democracy - this is of course true, and Poole details at length exactly how rotten and corrupt Parliament in the early 19th century was. But he also points out that Reform was also about economic justice. As he points out, the failure of petitioning by Stockport weavers in August 1816 meant that for them reform came to be seen "as the only option for survival". It would also have driven a strong cynicism towards those at the top of society who ignored their impoverishment.

The precise nature of the demands for reform were well thought out. As Poole says, twenty years before the Chartists five of their six demands were being raised at meetings up and down the country. Through the period from 1816 to 1819 there was a groundswell of radical activity, centered on the working class areas of the north-west, demanding change. These meetings were interpreted as revolutionary threats by the government. Poole details the way that the organisers consciously built these up into a mass movement. The August meeting at St Peter's Field in 1819 would be a climatic event that Henry Hunt in particular saw as the point when the government would have to give way.

The problem was that the government had no intention of giving way. Poole shows how the Peterloo massacre became an almost inevitable reaction to a growing mass working class movement.

This was not a challenge for political power. There were revolutionaries who wanted fundamental change and the symbols of the movement, in particularly the red caps of liberty, were understood as representing radical change. As a result pitched battles were fought between government forces and workers at mass meetings over who got the "colours" and Poole quotes many sources from Peterloo about how the yeomanry took revenge for previous failures to get these symbols. But this was not a conscious revolutionary movement.

Hunt's strategy, the "mass platform movement of 1819" had a problem. As Poole explains:

The post-war radical movement made its appeals in the name of 'the people of England' rather than the working class, to the past rather than the future, and to existing constitutional rights rather than new-found revolutionary principles. There was no master plan in 1819. The natural strategy was improvised... Hunt tried to steer a middle way, using sheer force of numbers to persuade the government to back down without getting himself or his followers arrested and with no real idea of how it would all end... Hunt hoped that the threat of insurrection would make military intervention less likely, but from the governments's point of view it made it all the more necessary.

And in August 1819 they did just that. Events at St Peter's Fields were nothing short of premeditated mass murder. The state was teaching the movement a lesson. Hunt's faith "in legal methods" undermined the movement, but that's not to put too much of a blame on him. Hindsight is wonderful, and the government was guilty very much of seeing revolutionary conspiracy where "reformers displayed community".

Two hundred years later, what is the judgement? At the time Peterloo was a massive shock to the movement. But I don't think it was the defeat it is often seen as. The peaceful march to St Peters Fields that was followed by massacre saw an explosion of rioting in the city and there were accounts afterwards of those going home preparing to "return" again but this time with arms. It reminds me of the reaction of the black-working class areas of the United States to the assassination of the pacifist Martin Luther King Jnr. His killing led to an explosion of violence and riot. At the time, the government and its cronies thought they had won. Certainly the media believed it was a famous defeat for reform. But Reform did come and today, with all its limitations, we do have at least limited democracy - thought not yet economic and social justice. In that sense the protesters at Peterloo lost a battle, but the war was won. It is an open question about what might have happened had the movement not had Peterloo. Certainly it would have grown, and might have approached the revolutionary levels that France had experienced. I tend to think that the most likely event would have been a massacre on a different day, in a different place. After all, as Poole shows, Peterloo was in no sense unique.

The 200th anniversary of Peterloo has been much discussed and there have been some wonderful events and exhibitions across Greater Manchester to mark it. Robert Poole's book is, perhaps the best book ever written on the subject. It's well written, exhaustive and covers every aspect of the movement - from the central (though neglected) role of women in the movements, to the forgotten individuals who shouted the slogan "liberty or death" and meant it. It is a masterpiece of historical writing and should be read, not just by those that want to understand Peterloo but by those who want to see how mass struggle was at the heart of the movements that won the rights we have today.

Related Reviews

Riding - Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre
Navickas - Protest & the Politics of Space & Place 1789-1848
Hobson - Dark Days of Georgian Britain
Thompson - The Making of the English Working Class
Hammond & Hammond - The Skilled Labourer

John Williams - Stoner

I often devour novels, rushing to find out the ending as quickly as possible. John Williams' Stoner defies this because it gives you the ending on the very first page. The protagonist, William Stoner, dies and this is the story of his undistinguished life. Little noticed at his death, and un-lamented among his family, his name is quickly forgotten. But what Williams shows is that every life, however undistinguished, is one of high-drama - the sort of drama that every human being has as a result of their social networks - their partners, children, colleagues and friends - which is unimportant to most of the rest of humanity, yet is part and parcel of the network of our lives.

Stoner's parents are struggling farmers and manage to send him to agricultural college in the early 20th century. At college he discovers the wonders of English literature and ends up making a career in the university he enters as a young man. He never leaves the town, instead his exploration of the world is through literature. His marriage to Edith is an almost instant failure, marked only by the briefest weeks of passion when she determines to get pregnant.

To the modern reader there is more than the hint of mental health in Edith's life - a situation that is completely unsolvable given the circumstances of 1930s America. Instead the couple muddle along, Edith isolating her and playing games against Stoner, who tries to carry on his career and bring up the daughter he dotes upon. 1930s mores impinge again when Stoner embarks on a beautiful and passionate affair with a young student. The school authorities make it clear that this is unacceptable and she's driven out of the college.

Most reviewers discuss the book in the context of two aspects - the "campus novel" that frames the whole book - Stoner's career and his battles with bureaucracy and his management and it's celebration of literature, explored through William's discovery of books and poetry and his life immersed in the subject. These are absolutely central to the book, but for me this novel was really about alienation - the way that our lives are atomised and decoupled from wider society. Stoner's life is dramatic, but it's isolated and individualised - notably he doesn't serve in either War. His own greatest achievement - the book he authors, and reaches for on his deathbed - is almost completely forgotten by everyone in academia. Yet Stoner is no failure, his personal struggles are ones that he is happy to have made and he can pass away convinced that his life was worthwhile and satisfactory. In writing Stoner's life, John Williams teaches us the importance of every individual within the context of wider society - though he reminds us that society, certainly as it is organised today, doesn't see this importance at all.

It's a beautiful book, neglected during William's own lifetime, and thankfully having had a massive rediscovery since its republication in the 2000s it deserves continued readership. It's likely one of the most poignant I've ever read and I highly recommend it.

Saul David - Victoria's Wars

The period of Queen Victoria's reign 1837 to 1901 saw the consolidation of the British Empire over it's most important possessions, specifically the Indian sub-continent. Full expansion into Asia, the Middle East and Africa was only just beginning, but it was certainly during Victoria's era that the system began to take shape. The period saw the end of the old rule by companies like the East India and the beginning of devolved state power. It also saw the British Army become a modern military - ending antiquated systems like the buying of commissions for officers, uniforms that were more fit for use in the varied climates of the Empire and the use of more modern weaponry.

So Saud David's book covers a fascinating period of social and military transformation. It is accessible, well-written and entertaining. At times the author is prone to turns of phrase that are somewhat uncouth. Were the mutinying soldiers in 1857 joined by "the rabble from the bazaar" or did ordinary people join them? Is it fair, relevant or even appropriate for David to describe Queen Victoria as "far from unattractive (if you liked your women plump and homely, more milkmaid than courtesan)"?

This is very much a military history. The various campaigns are described in detail, particularly some of the key battles. David dwells on the heroism of British (and occasionally allied) troops, particularly given the relevance of the Victoria Cross to the Queen's personal interest in the military. This isn't a particularly left wing or socialist history of the period, though David highlights how the British government's involvement around the world was driven by their desire to protect commercial interests. This is most clear perhaps, in David's chapter on the Opium Wars, he comments, for instance, that Prince Albert feared that the fall of the Chinese Emperor would "usher in the anti-capitalist Taipings, with all the dire consequences that would have for British commerce".  In the event, following the end of four years of war, vast quantities of opium were brought from the British Empire - a vastly profitable industry which proves, once again, that capitalists are quite happy to make money from appalling trades if they are able.

One of the good things about David's book is that he demonstrates just how useless the British command could be. Not a few of the chapters (Afghanistan and the Crimea are cases in point) deal with the debacles that followed British imperial arrogance. It was these that drove military reform, and Albert had a peripheral role in that.

I was less convinced by David's thesis that Victoria played the central role he attributes to her. He argues that she was "shaping, supporting and sometimes condemning her government's foreign policy - but never ignoring it. And through all this she was helped and guided by her talented and hugely underrated husband, Prince Albert". The evidence that David presents does show the Queen closely following events and putting an argument, but I didn't quite feel that he proved his point. In fact, his epilogue where he describes Victoria's Wars as "the flexing of Britain's imperial muscle" and continues to quote Robert Lowe on Imperialism: "the assertion of absolute force over others... to impose our own conditions at the bayonet's point." In other words Victoria's influence may have shaped particularly responses (her indignation during the Crimean War certainly helped transform Britain's activity in the latter half) but the wars arose out of the needs of British capitalism, and were driven by those interests first and foremost.

Readers who are looking for an accessible account of Britain's military actions in the mid to late 19th century will find this a good start, particularly the accounts of the Crimea and the Opium Wars (I was less taken by his analysis of the 'Indian Mutiny' which David appears to see solely as the consequence of conspiracy, rather than the outcome of British rule). But having read this, I'd highly recommend Mike Davies' Late Victorian Holocausts and John Newsinger's The Blood Never Dried - two books that properly put the wars into the context of the emergence of British capital as an international force.

Related Reviews

Macrory - Signal Catastrophe: The Story of the Disastrous Retreat from Kabul 1842

Dalrymple - Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan
Ward - Our Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres & the Indian Mutiny of 1857
Davies - Late Victorian Holocausts

Newsinger - The Blood Never Dried

George MacDonald Fraser - Flashman

Long standing readers of this blog (I am sure there are some) will know that I have loved the Flashman novels, a collection of outrageous historical fiction that follow the career of the "lovable rogue" Flashman through all the major military events of the 19th century. Some of these I've read and re-read over the years, though I hadn't read the original Flashman book for perhaps 25 years. I picked it up second-hand recently and reading it today I was struck by several things.

The first book which is set immediately after Flashman's fall from grace at university and his enlistment in the army. It follows his accidental and cowardly service in Afghanistan in particular he is at key points in the debacle that leads to the destruction of the entire British Army during the retreat from Kabul. I won't repeat the history here, suffice to say there are several non-fiction books I've reviewed elsewhere on the blog that I recommend listed below and Fraser sticks very close to historical events. I should note, that while reading this I also read Saul David's book Victoria's Wars where he credits the Flashman books as giving him a lifelong fascination with the historical period. I am sure this is true for many readers.

But what struck me on re-reading the first book is how awful Flashman is. In fact he seems far worse than in the later books. His racism is more explicit, his sexism is appalling and in a scene I had forgotten, he rapes a local woman who is betrothed to his arch-enemy. His violence against women isn't limited to Afghans though. In a disturbing scene in England, after he has slept with his father's mistress and been turned down by her another time, he hits her in the face.

I hadn't read the first Flashman novel in almost 20 years and I think Fraser toned things down in later novels - which possibly makes the characterisation far worse in returning to the first book. But I was struck also by Fraser's preface to the new edition. This, the publishers claimed, was found in his study following his death. Fraser gives a potted history of Flashman's origins, and some entertaining stories about those who have analysed the books or believed them to be real. But in responding those who complain that Flashman is a racist Fraser argues "of course he is; why should he be different from the rest of humanity." I was reminded of Fraser's annoying right-wing politics which ruin his memoirs of the Burma conflict.

But most of humanity isn't racist - not in the way that Flashman is or that Fraser seems to think they are.But ost of those who oversaw the British Empire or fought in its wars had appalling views of those they subjugated in this Fraser does manage to capture that about his character, but he plays it for laughs far more than any attempts to expose Flashman's character or the reality of the Empire. In my re-read, Flashman comes out of the book not as the lovable rogue ("coward, scoundrel, toady, lecher and dissembler") that Fraser and many fans imagine, but instead a thoroughly nasty character. In that, at least, he personifies the Empire.

Related Reviews

Fraser - Flashman and the Mountain of Light
Fraser - Flashman and the Tiger
Fraser - Flashman on the March
Fraser - Quartered Safe Out Here
Macrory - Signal Catastrophe; The Story of the Disastrous Retreat from Kabul 1842
Dalrymple - Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan

Ian Gilligan - Climate, Clothing & Agriculture in Prehistory

Precisely why humans made the transition to agriculture from their historic hunter-gatherer and forager modes of production is a discussion that is endlessly varied and fascinating, if frequently unsatisfying. So it is refreshing to read a genuinely new and incisive incursion into the debate by Ian Gilligan an academic at Sydney University whose specialism is the study of clothing in historical contexts. Gilligan's book focuses on clothing, but covers diverse ground - from the extinction of the Neanderthals, to the way pre-historic tools were used to make clothing, as well as the evolution of early agriculture.

Gilligan's argument is that the development of clothing in pre-history was a key, unrecognised, part of shaping the transition to agriculture. He also shows how the world's climate historically proved central to this. It is rather obvious that colder climates would encourage inhabitants to cover themselves to gain warmth. But the point that Gilligan makes is that the need to wear clothing is driven by a changing climate, which then has wider consequences. He shows how, through history, different groups of people have responded to the need for clothing, beginning with an overview of the science of clothing and precisely how they warm us. This might seem esoteric, but it allows us to gain deeper understandings of how people acted in particularly historical circumstances. For instance, the earliest covering (simple clothing) is simply a fur or skin draped over the body - a cloak for instance.  But this only gives a certain level of protection. Complex clothing requires more complex tools, and also, Gilligan suggests, further human development:

We also lack any indication that complex clothing was invented before our own species appeared... In the northern hemisphere, early hominins appear to have contracted south-wards during the ice ages... despite the fact that these environments were often quite well-stocked with food resources... By implication, clothing was restricted to simple clothing... and indeed we find an absence of the requisite technologies: we find plenty of scrapers, but few blades and no needles.

Later hominins were able to develop clothing into much more complex arrangements - encasing limbs and so on, and using multiple layers to protect themselves, and presumably exploit resources of colder climates. History however doesn't progress in a series of steps forward. Intriguingly Gilligan points out that clothing was frequently abandoned when no longer required as people preferred being naked. But

at the end of the last ice age: some people were wearing complex cloths. Whereas simple loose clothing does not present such a problem with humidity and perspiration, the full enclosure created by complex clothing prevents moisture from escaping very easily. For those people who wanted to keep on wearing cloth, one option was to change back to simple garments. But dropping clothes altogether was no longer an option, for a couple of reasons - including modesty.

Gilligan can only provide scanty evidence for this transition "from shivering to shame". But there may be some truth in it and there certainly appears to have been a change in terms of materials at this point in pre-history. Gilligan describes the "textile revolution" as humanity moved towards woven clothing at the end of the ice-age which solved the problem of moisture. From this point onward we begin to see direct evidence of clothing in the fossil record and some of these are fascinating.

Gilligan argues that the demands of these new clothing would have been an important imperative towards the transition to agriculture. It is commonly thought that people starting farming because it produced more food. But the reality is different - agriculture can actually have the opposite effect through reducing food to a small number of crops and leaving communities reliant on farming success. It also requires a lot more hard work and many historic societies (and even relatively contemporary communities of hunter-gatherers) resisted the transition on the basis of the amount of labour.

Gilligan shows how much of what we know about early agriculture and animal/plant domestication provides evidence for at least being driven by the need to provide material as opposed to simply food. In many cases (eg rearing of animals) food might have been a happy by-product, or a secondary reason. I think Gilligan makes a compelling case. Not least because today people frequently forget or ignore the way that agriculture was (and is) integral to producing material as well as food.

I was less convinced by his argument that a further by-product of the adoption of clothing was to drive a psychological sense of "enclosure". As he writes:

In the broadest sense, agriculture is a likely development among people who are enclosed psychologically by clothes and whose worldview reflects their enclosure. In relation to ethnography this means that agriculture will have no great appeal to people who remain naked.

Since Gilligan has spent the majority of the book showing how the transition to agriculture arises in part out of a need to solve an environmental issue this feels more like shoehorning a psychological answer into a debate that is essentially about the economics (in a broad sense) of early prehistory. It also neglects some examples of how foraging communities did develop early forms of agriculture - eg the planting of seeds which they returned to later in the year. Such communities were likely, on Gilligan's evidence, to be naked.

This criticism aside, Gilligan's book is a really interesting read. It's aimed at the general reader and is very accessible. I was disappointed with some of the images which looked fascinating but where hard to interpret as they are reproduced very small. But this shouldn't detract interested parties from reading a book that covers a huge amount of ground in debating a crucial aspect of human history.

Related Reviews

Bellwood - First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies
Flannery & Marcus: The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery and Empire
Anthony - The Horse, The Wheel and Language
Reynolds - Ancient Farming

Pryor - Farmers in Prehistoric Britain

Thomas Firbank - I Bought a Mountain

Thomas Firbank's I Bought a Mountain was a runaway bestseller when it was first published in the midst of World War Two. It must have been the ideal book for those seeking escape from the shortages and danger of wartime life. The book begins with the author purchasing a 2,400 acre Snowdonian sheep farm and follows him, very roughly, through a calendar year (though the story jumps back and forth) as he writes about what takes place on the farm. The accounts of sheep gathering, dipping and selling at market are interpersed with other stories from the farm as Firbanks and his wife Esme Cummins learn how to manage the farm and develop other side projects for more income. Diversification has been a buzz word for years for farmers in the UK, but if I Bought a Mountain tells us anything it's that farmers have been looking for ways to add to their income for as long as there have been farms.

Firbank's writing is entertaining and easy to read. There's plenty of self-deprecating humour thought a little more humour aimed at some of his employees. In fact this highlights one aspect of the book that I found a little troublesome - Firbanks is very much the farmer and owner. Though he certainly works hard and learns the trade, he is also free enough from day to day chores to spend long weekends away with Esme climbing mountains and hill-walking, or driving the length and breadth of the country to buy something for their latest whim. The real workers are those that do all the work, and often get little recompense - likely because they were those who where hired to do whatever the owner needed. I noted, for instance, that when Firbanks and Cummins setup a tea shop and are overwhelmed with the response one of the farm-workers Thomas, dresses up in his best suit to help on a Sunday and was, according to Firbank "quite over-come by emotion when we presented him with a supply of cigarettes to repay his help". No extra pay for someone working on their only day off, despite the big extra earnings. Firbanks cynically comments "one cannot buy loyalty; one can only reward it".

Firbanks purchased the farm for £5000 just at the point the world economy collapsed in 1930. The labour of him, Esme and the other workers make it pay - to the extent their able to install a hydro-electric plant, as well as experiment with poultry and pigs. I understand the book helped encourage a big "back to the land" movement in the post-war period, though few of those wanting to do it would have had that amount of cash.

Those interested in farming will, of course, find much of interest. There is also a lot of fascinating period detail and Firbanks describes how him and others, including Cummins, break the record for climbing all the Welsh 300 feet mountains. Historians of mountaining will also find the discussion of 1927 Great Gully disaster interesting. But readers shouldn't think they're picking up a book about rural Wales through the eyes of ordinary people - in fact, Firbank's somewhat arrogant style becomes a little grating in places. I would also encourage readers to compare it to James Rebanks' contempory book The Shepherd's Life not least because of how much of sheep-farming remains unchanged despite nearly 90 years of time passing.

Not mentioned in the book is the post-war account of what took place. Firbanks and Cummins' sepearated and Firbanks gave the farm Dyffryn Mymbyr to his former wife. Firbanks went on to have a successful business and writing career (building on an illustrious military career described in his follow up book I Bought a Star). Esme Cummins' remarried and rank the farm until her death, but also became a campaigning advocate for Snowdonia fighting for the right of people to enjoy the landscape and places. On her death Dyffryn Mymbyr was gifted to the National Trust who now run it as a luxury self-catering cottage - something that I suspect all the previous owners would find distasteful, but is sadly all-too representative of what has happened to British agriculture.

Related Reviews

Rebanks - The Shepherd's Life
Shrubsole - Who Owns England?
Hasback - A History of the English Agricultural Labourer
Whitlock - Peasant's Heritage
Cameron - The Ballad and the Plough
Bell - Men and the Fields

T.M.Devine - The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed

I had the pleasure of reading Tom Devine's new book The Scottish Clearances on holiday on the Isle of Mull, near where, it turns out, he wrote at least some of the book. It is a sobering experience when you look out on the landscape which he describes in the introduction like this:

The Scottish Highlands, contrary to the image projected in countless tourist brochures, are not one of the last great wildernesses in Europe but in many parts can be more accurately described as a derelict landscape from where most of the families who once lived and worked the soil are long gone.

This history is never far from view in the Highlands. The region is littered with abandoned homes, farmsteads and villages. Devine explains that contrary to much popular belief, it is wrong to see this "derelict" landscape as the product just of the infamous Highland Clearances, but rather of an extended process of change that took place across Scotland. This change has been neglected in both academic and popular history, and Devine's book aims to rectify this. Devine explains the broader context:

The Scottish experience of rural transformation was a national variant of broader developments in Europe. A primary determinant across the Continent and in Britain as a whole was a sustained revolution of increasing population which soon generated immense pressures on traditional modes of food production... different nations and regions took a wide spectrum of roots to agrarian modernisation... In Scotland, and much of mainland Britain, the pattern was different again with landed magnates deploying their power to introduce far-reaching changes from above. Some of their decisions resulted in dispossession of traditional rural communities on a large scale.

This is a detailed work of history, and space precludes a summary of much of the book. Devine's account of the evolution of the clan system in the Highlands is one of the clearest I've read, and sets the context for the behaviour of both the landowners and the mass of the population later in the book. But Devine argues that by the early to mid 1700s, at least for some of the chiefs, "the ethic of clanship was already being subordinated to the pursuit of profit." In the aftermath of the 1745 rebellion it was the "pacification" of "Gaeldom" by the British Crown which effectively led "many of the elite entirely to throw off this historic responsibility in favour of the material advantages of proprietorship, so completing the transformation to landlordism." It is this that sets the context for all the later agrarian developments in Scotland.

Scottish agrarian history can be loosely understood by breaking the country into three parts - the Borders, Lowlands and Highlands. For geographic and climatic reasons the areas differ a great deal, but also have many similarities and Devine argues that the divergence between Highland and Lowland agriculture begins through the 17th century.

The border country however was the first to suffer "improvement", something Devine describes as a "forgotten history". He writes that:

Two generations or more before clearances began north of the Highland line, the dispossession of many tenants and cottars was already under way in the hill country of the Borders...in a social revolution which has long been mainly ignored. The proximate cause was the expansion of large sheep farms, often with flocks averaging between 4,000 and 20,000, and the parallel growth in ther districts of extensive cattle ranches.

Devine's detailed exploration of why this takes place - best summarised as the desire for landlords in a developing capitalist economy to make more money - is brilliantly researched and reported. He never forgets that the development of the economy and the improvement of agriculture is closely associated with the brutal, forced transformation of peoples' lives. Nor does he neglect the resistance to this. One thing that marks the book (and has been noted by other authors of Scottish agrarian history) is the role of song and poetry in recording the impact of the dispossession. Here's one ballad responding to the changes:

The lords and lairds may drive us out from mailings [tenant farms] where we dwell
The poor man says: 'Where shall we go?'
The rich says: 'Go to Hell.'
These words they spoke injests and mocks
That if they have their herds and flocks,
They care not where to go

While discussing the "Leveller's Revolt" in the 1720s, Devine makes an important argument against those 18th century commentators and some historians today. He argues that resistance (such as mass protests against enclosure including the levelling of fences and hedges) was not "simply conservative" and against all innovation. Rather protesters were against "large-scale enclosing of cattle parks and the effect this had on the common grazing ground and arable lands of the small tenants". This is a point that also applies to rural protesters during similar changes in England, where protest was more about protecting existing rights rather than opposition to all change. The agricultural poor where, by and large, ignored when landowners decided to "improve". Though it's worth noting the Devine highlights a number of occasions when landowners did not do this - either through a remnant of a belief in responsibility to their tenants or because they baulked at the dispossession of whole communities. In the end this made little difference as their sons usually had few such compunctions.

By 1830 Scotland had dramatically change, but still retained vestiges of the past. In that year most Scots people still lived and worked in rural areas. But, as Devine notes "stress on continuities" hides the "unprecedented social changes" that had taken place in the previous 70 years. While most still worked the land, how they did so had been transformed.

In the Lowlands most of the rural population had already become a landless proletariat who hired their labour power in the market to employers... In the western Highlands a 'peasant' society remained but differed radically from that of the age of clanship... Indeed, social transformation in Gaeldom was more traumatic and cataclysmic than anywhere else in Scotland. The Highlands moved from tribalism to capitalism over less than two generations... Everywhere, large-scale pastoral farming was in the ascendant.

The ruling class in Scotland, Devine argues was "conservative politically" but "revolutionary in the economic sphere". This drove forward capitalist expansion, and destroyed traditional communities and social-relations on a huge scale. The destruction was sometimes explicit and in other times and places "by stealth". Most of the Lowland areas where, for instance, cleared gradually through depopulation and emigration. Thus the actually height of the population decrease is not, as commonly believed, during the Highland clearances, but afterwards as the final transformation of the countryside takes place. Though I must highlight Devine's argument that it was never emigration that depopulated Scotland, rather it was the "internal mobility within the countryside".  People where moving to find work and this they found in "the interaction of village and town development, agrarian specialisation and the spread of rural manufacturing and mining communities".

In England in 1830s there were mass outbreaks of discontent among rural populations, the most well known of which was the 'Captain Swing' movement. This had not echo north of the border. The quietness of rural Scotland at the time was well noted, including by William Cobbett. Devine argues this has much to do with the differences in employment relations. Agricultural workers in England being much more independent of their employers than in Scotland. Their contemporaries he says had more stability and crucially were "guaranteed food and shelter" but this was only provided for those in employment which gives a little incentive to risk unemployment. Contracts in Scotland were longer which Devine argues was partly due to the way that urban industry was competing for workers. Thus a surplus of unemployed agricultural workers in England led to instability. This explanation seems attractive, but I'm not entirely convinced - I think that Swing in England was driven primarily by a response to economic conditions, but also influenced by revolutionary events in France, the Reform movement and a long tradition of resistance to the employers. In other words the situation is much more complex than simply about unemployment rates.

Minor disagreements of nuance not withstanding this is an amazing piece of historical writing. Devine convincingly shows how the development of capitalism in the three differing areas of Scotland created the landscape we know today, and he shows how this led, over a period of centuries, to the transformation of the enormous rural population into wage workers, or emigrants. Devine writes clearly about quite complex changes, but never loses sight of what these changes meant in terms of ordinary people. If you want to understand Scotland beyond the picture postcard images of hills and glens then read T.M. Devine's book.

Related Reviews

Richards - The Highland Clearances
Hunter - Set Adrift Upon the World: The Sutherland Clearances
Kerr Cameron - The Ballad and the Plough
Hutchinson - The Soap Man: Lewis, Harris & Lord Leverhulme
Hutchinson - Martyrs: Glendale and the Revolution in Skye
Hobsbawm & Rudé - Captain Swing

Extinction Rebellion - This is Not a Drill

The emergence of radical mass movements demanding action on the environment have, given the scale of the crisis, been a much needed sign of hope. The school student strikes which began in late 2018 and the Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement that uses mass civil disobedience as a tool to force action from the UK government have revitalised the environmental movement. Already they have had some impact. The April 2019 actions that lead to 100s being arrested and the shutting down of central London by mass protest forced the British Parliament to declare a “climate emergency”. More action is planned as declaring an emergency does not automatically mean action will follow.

For someone who has been part of the socialist and environmental movement for almost 30 years it has been an exhilarating few months. The Manchester XR group that I’ve been part of since April 2019 has brought together many activists – though the young people far outnumber veterans like me. But what has been most refreshing is that the majority of those activists see the need for radical action because they blame the system itself.

Extinction Rebellion’s book This is Not a Drill tells the story of XR and the environmental crisis. It is designed to inspire people into action and to put across XR’s ideas in an accessible form. Unlike some radical movements of recent years, XR is not an undifferentiated mass of ideas, its leading figures and key activists share a core ideology and are building a movement around them. So This is Not a Drill is an important read. It tells you about XR and offers a way to get involved.

The opening chapters lay out the scale of the crisis. These chapters are not an easy read. Scientists Professor William Ripple and Nicholas Houtman complain that:

We scientists have been frustrated and even in despair over the many years of inaction, but we will continue to speak out, telling the truth about what we all need to do to protect life on planet Earth. 

They call for “evidence-based solutions to the emerging planetary catastrophe”. Other chapters are by indigenous activists, the President of the Maldives and farmers in India who tell how climate change is destroying their communities. Climate change is not something that is far off, but something that is real for millions of people. Action is needed now.

This is Not a Drill is also a guide to action – it lays out XR’s strategy of mass civil disobedience; it also emphasizes key tactics that its leadership focus on, in particularly mass arrests. The final few pages are a detailed guide to how to organise a blockade, emphasising that doing this requires making sure that the protesters do not alienate those caught up in the demonstrations.

One of the great strengths of the book (and XR in general) is that it understands that ordinary people are not the problem. For instance, in his chapter on the Maldives, the country's former President Mohamed Nasheed argues:

Here’s the thing about climate change: we cannot frame it as a war between working people and saving the planet. If we do that, we will stir up the forces that led to the wave of populism that has engulfed the West, and some of the East too. Let us not forget what we owe to decent, working people such as coalminers. The tremendous wealth the world enjoys today, the technological progress, the huge increase in living standards, is due to the work of the people. We should not blame coalminers, or loggers, or oil-rig workers for causing the climate crisis. Instead we should thank them for helping to fuel human civilisation.

Instead, the book aims its fire at the system itself. It is a system “more concerned with profits and the status quo than with the health of people and the planet”. As Farhana Yamin concludes, “we can and must succeed in catalysing a peaceful revolution to end the era of fossil fuels, nature extraction and capitalism. Life on Earth depends on it”.

The book is less clear on what it is about capitalism that makes it so environmentally destructive – other than putting profits before people and planet. This might seem political nit-picking, but I think it means that the authors are less clear on what the alternative might be. One writer, Kate Raworth, argues that “what we need are economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow.” Later she argues “economic rebels” must “create thriving, regenerative and distributive economies that can meet the needs of all…within the life-supporting systems of… this planet”. These are noble aspirations, but we a more than these generalisations.

In his article, the Labour MP Clive Lewis argues that neo-liberalism is the problem. Now it is important to highlight that XR says it is “beyond politics” and includes contributions from Clive Lewis and Green MP Caroline Lucas to demonstrate the way that some politicians are thinking, not because it endorses them. But I feel that Clive Lewis’ argument is what lies behind some of the writers’ vision of a sustainable world. In effect they are pushing for a greener, more sustainable, more regulated capitalism in which fossil fuels have been driven to the margins. That in itself is a worthy aim – but I’m not sure it’s practical as a solution to the crisis we face.

Capitalism is a system where blocks of capital (firms, companies, corporations) are driven to accumulate wealth because they are in a system of competitive production. It’s thus a system where growth is inevitable, and which can only see the natural world as a source of material for production or a dumping ground for waste. Capitalism cannot operate in any other way – it is wasteful, inefficient and damaging precisely because of its nature. Hopes that a Green New Deal will change that are an illusion, even if it might be a good starting point.

Socialists, in contrast, argue that we must fight for green reforms today – such as the One Million Climate Jobs campaign – but that we also need to use that struggle as a bridge to build a movement to end capitalism and create a new way of organising society. But a society that rationally manages its interaction with nature will be one where production is democratically planned, and which will arise out of the mass movements that overthrow the capitalists. This process will also transform those making the revolution – something I think is essential in transforming our conception of our social relationship with nature. It is the working class – whose labour keeps capitalism functioning – who are the only force capable of making that change.

But these ideas are not a million miles away from the thinking of many XR activists. In his chapter, Roger Hallam, one of XR’s key founders, says that:

The key lesson about all structural political change is that disruption works. Without disruption there is no economic cost, and without economic cost the guys running this world really don’t care. That’s why labour strikes are so effective against companies and why closing down a capital city is so effective against governments.

I’d go further and point out that strikes also change workers’ perceptions of their own power and their understanding of capitalism itself. For this reason, I think Hallam (and XR in general) are wrong when they say that fundamental change can happen with a movement of only a few tens of thousands.  Nor do I believe that the focus on mass arrest is a viable strategy. I think you need the vast majority of ordinary people’s involvement to effect fundamental change – particularly in the face of the wealth and power of the capitalist state. History has shown how any fundamental challenge to the status quo will be met with mass violence and repression.

The involvement of workers in the movement is crucial and so from personal experience I’m really pleased that XR is taking outreach to the trade union movement seriously.

This is Not a Drill has some really important arguments. One of the things that is great about the new movements is that they are full of discussion and debate. XR in particular is a place where people can get involved and contribute whatever they feel they are able to. The debates will have to continue – in particular I think we need to discuss through the type of movement that we need. But I do highly recommend the book. It is an inspiring, if frightening, call to arms. Some of the chapters left me depressed, others cheered me. But it is the product of a living, growing radical movement that everyone should get involved in. Reading This is Not a Drill is a good first step.

Support radical book-selling. Purchase This is Not a Drill from Bookmarks, the Socialist Bookshop.

Readers of this book review may also enjoy a new book I edited System Change not Climate Change: A Revolutionary Response to Environmental Crisis.

Related Reviews

Angus - Facing the Anthropocene
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Choonara & Kimber - Arguments for Revolution

CJ Sansom - Revelation

The adventures of CJ Sansom's Tudor hero Matthew Shardlake continue in Revelation. Unlike several previous books Revelation is not set around a particular event during Henry VIII's reign. Instead it's context is the confusion in the latter part of Henry's kingship as different forces vie for control - in particular different factions representing different aspects of religious ideas. Henry is increasingly moving towards a return to more tradition religious practice, at the same time others are holding out for a continuation of the Reformation. The religious changes over the last decades have left many ordinary people confused and a large minority are pulled by more extreme religious doctrine.

Shardlake moves through this confusing situation as he attempts to solve a gruesome series of murders. The killer appears to be using the apocalyptic biblical book Revelations as a basis for the murders - torturing victims in grim parodies of chapters taken from the book. One of the early murders is of a close friend of Shardlake which leads to him being pulled into a secretive effort to find the killer. He is up against time as the killer must be found before he concludes the murders as laid out in his reading of Revelations and before the King learns of the crimes that would likely lead to instability and panic in London, a city already close to religious violence.

Revelation deals little with wider issues - though in the background is Henry's courting of Catherine Parr. This means the book is much more like a modern detective story, albeit set in Tudor London, than the earlier books. Nonetheless it's a gripping read and, despite being fiction, like CJ Sansom's earlier books it gives the reader many insights into the Reformation and Henry's rule.

Related Reviews

Sansom - Sovereign
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Sansom - Dissolution

Brian Aldiss - Greybeard

*** Warning Spoilers ***

Brian Aldiss' 1964 book Greybeard sits alongside John Wyndam's The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes and John Christopher's The Death of Grass in what might be described as classic English novels about the end of the world portrayed through the collapse of the British state. As we face environmental Armageddon I'm finding such  doom-laden science fiction novels both attractive and terrifying, and Aldiss' book is no exception.

Set years after atomic weapon tests have sterilised all of humanity and most mammals, the book looks at how civilisation has fallen and how humanity has survived. The story follows the eponymous Greybeard as he, with his wife and other friends, travel down the River Thames with the aim of reaching the coast. Having left the relative safety of a small village where they'd lived for decades, we follow the group's adventures which allows Aldiss to tell us how the world is coping as the youngest generation reaches their 50s. In flashback we learn what happened in the aftermath of the last baby being born.

This is where it is interesting for contemporary readers. How will civilisation proceed if we see global environmental breakdown? We are unlikely to live through a gradual breakdown of society. Aldiss' describes how, as fewer and fewer children are alive, the world erupts into global conflict as states try and secure young people as future assets. Greybeard takes part in some of these wars, which are brutal - frequently killing the young who they are trying to capture. As economies collapse (people simply stop working as there is no future) states' breakdown and local dictators arise to control and protect local populations in a gross parody of feudalism. Readers familiar with Wyndam's work will recognise similar themes from the end of his Triffid novel. Eventually plague defeats these dictators and humanity survives in tiny villages, fearing outsiders and growing ever older.

Greybeard is a compelling read. I fear it has a lot to tell us about how climate chaos will likely lead to extremes of violence locally and internationally as states try to maintain their existence, though perhaps it under-estimates even that. The novel itself is well-written and compelling, even though I found the ending a little too positive and predictable.

I read Greybeard alongside the new book by Extinction Rebellion which I'll review shortly. The joint experience didn't leave me feeling particularly positive. But at least we have the chance of stopping environmental disaster through radical, mass political action. But the time is short, and in the real world it is the children who will suffer the most.

Related Reviews

Wyndham - The Kraken Wakes
Christopher - The Death of Grass
Morrow - Is this the Way the World Ends?
Robinson - New York 2140

Paul Lund and Harry Ludlam – Trawlers Go to War

At the outset of World War Two Britain lacked ships capable of meeting the needs of its defence. That the navy lacked aircraft carriers and destroyers is one thing, but it also desperately needed smaller craft that could be used to escort convoys, sweep for mines or hunt submarines. In short order the admiralty took control of many existing fishing vessels – trawlers in particular, but also whalers and smaller craft like herring drifters – both old and ones on the production line. These ships were equipped with outdated, inadequate and in some cases antique weapons and sent out to face a formidable foe.

The new Royal Naval Patrol Service, based out of the “Sparrow’s Nest” in Lowestoft, was undermanned, undergunned and extremely brave. Many of the men who crewed the craft were not full time naval ratings, but former fishers and other crew who were commissioned into the force. Rules and regulations were not quite the same as the navy, and the RNPS soon developed a reputation for brashness and bravery. The men, and ships, acquitted themselves well in all areas of the war at sea from 1939 – 1945.

This excellent social history is based on many deeply personal accounts by participants, one of whom, Paul Lund, is co-author. The stories range from the humourous (there’s lots of black humour) to the shocking. They cover the conditions at sea, the inadequate food and the heavy drinking that crews did to cope as well as the long, dangerous and difficult voyages in appalling sea conditions. But all these are the backdrop to the violence of the conflict.

Under-equipped and often years out of date the ships did an amazing job looking for mines or in an escort role. More amazingly they tackled appalling conditions as part of convoys to Iceland or Murmansk in the Soviet Union and they were at Dunkirk, D-Day and Malta.

But because this is oral history the reader never forgets that these ships were crewed by ordinary men in extraordinary times. While reading the accounts of the RNPS during the invasion of Norway it occurred to me how many of the unlikely WW2 films that proliferated in the 1960s were actually remarkably accurate when it came to individual bravery (and some of the accounts in this book rival films like The Guns of Navarone for daring do). The infamous story of the “small ships” at Dunkirk may well have grown in the telling as a propaganda story, but that does not negate the fact that many small-ships brought off hundreds of men from the Dunkirk beaches. One trawler carrying around 1000 troops back to Britain in what must have been shocking circumstances.

For those interested in the experience of ordinary people during World War Two this is a highly recommended, readable account of a forgetting part of the conflict. There are occasional hints that this was not just an experience of the British – at least one trawler is captured from Germany towards the end of the war. But given Britain’s maritime history it is quite unique to the country for which the sea was both saviour and barrier to its participation in the conflict.

Over 400 ships of the RNPS were lost in the conflict – 2,385 men were lost at sea and have their names on the Lowestoft memorial dedicated to them. This little history puts their stories, and those of the survivors, at the heart of the history of the RNPS and reminds us that wars are always fought by ordinary people.

Related Reviews

Lund & Ludlam - PQ17: Convoy to Hell
Monsarrat - Three Corvettes
Monsarrat - The Cruel Sea
Terkel - The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two

Mick Reed & Roger Wells – Class, Conflict & Protest in the English Countryside 1700-1880

The early 1980s saw intense debates among scholars studying rural social history in England. This volume brings together some of the key articles from these debates, which while frequently intense and polemical were always insightful. For non-specialists, the key debates might seem somewhat esoteric – they focus on the nature of social protest and the different contexts in which protest took place. But these debates are of more than specialist interest as they are really about how people protest. I was often reminded, while reading these essays, of Marx and Engels’ dictum that class struggle is sometimes visible and at other times hidden. Protest is not always the highly visible struggle of strikes, riots and insurrection.

The book is framed by two essays that put forward a study of contemporary rural studies. In the opening essay by Mick Reed, he argues that rural history has been limited by mistaken framing of key concepts. He also shows how, in the period covered, the traditional social relations in the rural village were breaking down. A transition from a more collaborative economy (and there are some fascinating examples of cashless economies) to ones were capital (and capitalism) dominated. This is not to say there wasn’t class struggle – far from it, but Reed argues that class itself is complicated, so class struggle is more complex:

Class is not about opposition and antagonism – and of course, power. But there are no simple lines of cleavage that can separate classes into opposing and antagonistic camps.

Here Reed is getting to the heart of the debate that is developed in the essays. I don't agree 100 percent here, because there are simple lines of cleavage between classes – that’s their relationship to the means of production - which is what leads to class struggle. But Reed is correct in that in the period discussed some of these relationships are being crystallised out and so class struggle itself can be much more complex than relations in rural situations than in urban areas or industrial environments in the period considered. As the essays in this volume that deal with the Captain Swing insurrections of 1831 show some farmers (who were a capitalist employing class) sided with the mass of the rural labourers, because they shared some interests (eg the abolition of tithes).

The opening essay by Roger AE Wells (1979) generated much of the debate that followed. Wells argues that “covert” protest, by which ne and other historians meant protest done under cover of anonymity – threatening letters, arson - not hidden protests that might not be recorded (mumbling in pubs, or brief work stoppages) – was the principle form of protest between 1700 and 1850. This was not, he emphasises, “political radicalism” in the sense of Chartism, but rather ongoing struggle against the reality of agriculture work and the changes to farming – such as the changes to traditional employment terms.

Andrew Charlesworth responds (1980) by arguing that Wells “neglected the social component of that process: the changes in the daily lives of the agriculture labourers that emphasised for them their new condition as a proletariat, as a group separate from the employers.” He emphasises the importance of the “open” village, free of landlord control and containing much more diverse groupings of labourers and small artisans separate from the “patriarchal web of control of the farmhouse and the ‘close’ village.” Thus, for Charlesworth, the explosion in collective struggle by labourers as a class was far more important than incidents such as “threatening letters and arson” and represented “overt, direct collective action”.

It is tempting here to follow Charlesworth over Wells, if only because collective action such as strikes clearly left much more of a mark on the rural proletariat even if they didn’t leave quite so much fear in the minds of the landowners and farmers. But Charlesworth ignores the point that Marx and Engels makes – not all class struggle is overt. I tend to agree more with J.E. Archer’s point when he argues that Charlesworth and Wells don’t actually agree with each other on what makes up “covert protest”. He is right to highlight that “Well’s conception of social protest is somewhat broader than Charlesworth’s”. Indeed, he continues by pointing out that much covert and overt struggle (defined loosely as arson and strikes) did tend to co-exist even if one dominated. Archer writes:

Labourers and rural working-class communities appear to have been quite selective in their choice of tactics when furthering a dispute. For example, disputes over charity rights and enclosures usually produced mass meetings and demonstrations in the full light of day and in full view of the police…. Examples… show how overt protest existed alongside covert unrest... In 1844 a year renowned for incendiarism, the village of Snettisham (Norfolk) experienced a serious enclosure dispute. Arson was not employed by the protesters, but instead, they took to felling a large number of trees on the disputed land despite the presence of a large body of heavily armed police.

A further essay by Dennis Mills and Brian Short, undermines Wells’ reliance on the “open-closed” model of the countryside to model locations and types of struggle. These two authors point out that Wells’ own research is highly restrictive to a single parish (Burwash, Sussex). In discussing the nature of protest they uncover some fascinating examples of collective action in agricultural communities – eg the mass leaving of workers at the same time at ends of contracts to punish a bad employer. These lead Mills and Short to argue:

Conflict extends beyond the category of protest success and failure are not to be measured I a schematic way; existence within the social formation of groups other capital and labour allows the possibility of alliances between different groups on specific issues and the mediation of class and power relations by these groups.

In other words, class struggle is much more dynamic and complex than many of the authors suggest – even in, for instance, one closed village “below the surface of the ‘necessarily subservient village there was resistance by an ‘underground’, and almost all men were poachers, whose motivation, amongst other things, was ‘to get even with squires and games laws as well as with ‘Church and State’.  They continue “equally important, conflict occurred within employer’ worker relationships in both open’ and ‘closed’ villages.”

What to conclude from these debates? Firstly, it is clear that simplistic models that assume particular social relationships based on ownership of land (closed versus open villages) do not hold up to scrutiny. Secondly, class struggle and protest is far more diverse than a simple dichotomy of arson or strikes. Thirdly, the particular nature of relations in the English countryside could lead to dynamic alliances between different classes. Finally, the development of class consciousness amongst the rural working class meant that struggle took many forms, but just as with the urban workers, it was near constant. Outbreaks of overt (or covert) struggle might make the headlines, but represented a peak in struggle rather than its appearance out of nowhere.

It is interesting to see all these essays together. Roger Wells’ final, lengthy, essay brings together many different aspects of rural protest, but what I got most from was the interaction between the different authors which might not have been quite so illuminating if only reading them as individual papers in different journals. This book is likely however, to remain a specialist one for students of rural protest, which is a shame as there is much of interest for those trying to understand how, why and when workers fought and the forgotten history of resistance.

Related Reviews

Griffin - The Rural War: Captain Swing and the Politics of Protest
Archer - 'By a Flash and a Scare': Arson, Animal Maiming & Poaching in East Anglia: 1815-1870
Fisher - Custom, Work and Market Capitalism
Rudé - Ideology and Popular Protest