Raymond Chandler - Trouble is my Business

This collection of stories by Raymond Chandler will be familiar to anyone who has read any of his other works. They all begin from a similar theme - the lonesome, hard drinking, cynical detective confronts a conspiracy or mystery that usually involves a beautiful woman. First published as a book in 1946 the stories were themselves published in magazines between 1933 and 1939 and carry a flavour of their times. Prohibition is over, but gangsters, millionaires and confidence tricksters rule the roost in an underground that frequently erupts into violent crime. Mostly ordinary working people are bystanders - like the hotel staff that the hero of Guns at Cyrano's slips cash too because they wages don't stop their hunger (though perhaps he's the gullible victim here?).

Cyrano's is a slightly unusual story for Chandler, as it initially focuses on a boxing match were one fighter has been asked to take a dive. The mob feature heavily, but it soon becomes clear that the real criminals are one step removed and no-one is actually telling the truth.

The title story Trouble is my Business is the most Marlowe of  the novels though the detective doesn't share the name (which doesn't stop publishers marketing the book as being a collection of Marlowe stories). Here is a convoluted plot that involves a wealthy heiress, a no good lover with gambling debts and a really annoying butler that carries the reader along rather than tells a story. Chandler once said about his style:

The denouement would justify everything. The technical basis of the Black Mask type of story on the other hand was that the scene outranked the plot, in the sense that a good plot was one which made good scenes. The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing. We who tried to write it had the same point of view as the film makers.

This is very true of these stories here. Like those science fiction stories that are read just for the twist ending, the resolution of the story is key here. Though the resolution is not always the ending, that is usually the bit where Marlowe (or whoever) bemoans the fact that the beautiful heroine has left/been murdered/or rejected him.

Chandler was very aware that he followed a formula when writing. One of the problems reading several of his stories or novels in succession is that you notice they all have very similar scenes. There's almost always a point when a couple of policeman play good cop/bad cop with the detective and threaten him because it looks like he killed someone. There's also always a bit when Marlowe (insert other name here) discovers a body then leaves after cleaning all traces of him. Then his apparent pre-knowledge of a killing allows him one over others in the story.

These sound like negative points, but Chandler was writing to sell stories, and his style worked. Nonetheless he isn't just a hack writer, he has a knack of painting pictures with a couple of sentences, and creating scenes with barely a paragraph. None of us has ever seen Benny Cyrano, but when Chandler tells us that he was "shaped like two eggs, a little one that was his head on top of a big one that was his body" we can all picture him instantly. The opening paragraph to Red Wind is classic Chandler:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

Its a paragraph that drags you in to the whole story. The ending to Goldfish was for me, marked not by the actual location of the missing pearls, but the realisation that the wife of the main criminal almost pulls the wool over the eyes of the detective who is trying to recover them for the insurance agency. That he is doing so for reward money to split with a policeman who has been kicked out of the force for marrying a known criminal who is now in prison makes it all the more brilliant.

If you've not read Chandler this is a good place to start, though its also true that Chandler's short stories never quite get it as much as the full length novels. Nonetheless they're fun and classics of a genre that stand out from among tens of thousands of similar tales.

Related Reviews

Chandler - The Long Good-Bye
Chandler - Playback
Chandler - The Little Sister
Chandler - Farewell My Lovely
Chandler - The Big Sleep
Hammett - Red Harvest
Hammett - The Maltese Falcon

Jeffrey St. Clair & Joshua Frank - The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink

This excellent collection of essays by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank brings together beautiful travelogues infused with ecological science, polemical critiques of the big businesses and politicians destroying the planet and a celebration of those that fight to protect the environment. Almost all of the essays focus on the United States, though several of them have a wider remit. A chapter on the human and environmental devastation caused by the US' repeated wars in the Middle East and the impact of industrial fishing are testament to the way that imperialism drives destruction far from national borders.

I initially chose the book because I had hoped to visit Montana in the United States which is the subject of several chapters. Sadly, that voyage is unlikely to happen now, but the opening chapters made me realise that this would have been the perfect read for visiting that part of the world. These combine wonderful portraits of the flora and fauna, particularly the wolves and buffalo of Yellowstone, with devastating critiques of the impact of global warming and government policy. Here we see writ large the limitations of a strategy to protect biodiversity that is reliant on creating islands (even very large ones) of nature within a wider landscape.

Only a capitalist system could imagine the way to save animals like bison that stray out of their designated area (who knew bison couldn’t read signs) from hunting would be to sell the herd to the biggest cattle market in the region. As one campaigner said, "how did the promise of wild buffalo in Yellowstone National Park for the enjoyment of future generations become ranched buffalo fenced behind PRIVATE, NO TRESPASSING signs?". The problems are made worse because of those politicians for whom permission to allow the hunting of wild animals is based on the number of local swing voters.

One theme that runs through the essays is the close link between multinationals and politicians. Whether its oil companies in the Mexican Gulf or nuclear power corporations, having several friendly politicians can help smooth the wheels of environmental destruction. Readers who are more used to seeing Obama praised to the high heavens might find themselves surprised at the extent of anger directed at his Presidency by these authors. In a chapter that has a great deal of resonance during the current Coronavirus epidemic "How Obama Defanged the Environmental Protection Agency", the authors complain about his reaction to the Deepwater Horizon disaster:

Even though it was the largest oil spill the US had experienced in decades Obama prevented the agency in charge of overseeing the country's environmental regulations from being involved in any meaningful way. Could it have been that Obama surrendered to BP because he had two years earlier accepted more campaign cash from the company- a mix of cash from employees and political action committees - than any politician over the last two years? Not many in the environmental community were asking."

The final sentence hints at another theme. The mainstream environmental movement, particularly the NGOs, is culpable in the destruction itself. This is not that the authors argue the NGOs and charities wilfully destroy the environment. Rather that their lobbying and well-funded, media savvy campaigns are part of a movement that operates by aiming for concessions within the system. They're happy to take a few green offerings even if they have to agree to let much else go by.

The last section of the book celebrates those struggling to protect the environments. That's not to say that they're ignored elsewhere, many of the essays, whether it’s those about bison in Yellowstone, or mid-west towns facing cancer clusters or water pollution, emphasis the role of local activists organising - sometimes in difficult circumstances. The shadow of Karen Silkwood hangs heavy over the chapters that look at the sordid history of nuclear power in the United States.

So the last few chapters focus on several activists in groups like Earth First! that have fought the multinationals, the US government and institutions like the FBI. Here's another dirty tale - the framing and violence used against those who dare to protect ancient forest from logging or protest nuclear power. The authors contrast these activists with the limited successes of the big NGO environmental movement and I'm glad they do - there is at least some hope here. But because these are the only options offered to saving the planet it felt like the book was concluding that only such action could save the environment. Commenting on the protests that exploded when Trump was elected the authors are understandably a bit cynical when they complain that those marches didn't achieve anything concrete. But they continue:

Where were those people during eight years of Barack Obama, an oil and gas man of some distinction? Where were they during eight years of Bill Clinton, one of the greatest environmental con men of our time?... Action, however, is not marching in a parade a couple of times a year, featuring puppets, vagina hats and signs printed up by the Sierra Club.

We certainly do need to go beyond NGO stamped marches. But I think this approach is unhelpful. If we're to build a movement to defeat the powerful multinationals, corrupt politicians and inappropriate capitalist solutions to ecological disaster, we'll need the type of movement that can challenge capital through mass movements. I don't think we will build that movement by dismissing those demonstrating, possibly for the first time, as not doing enough. We'll need to show how we need far more than just marches. We'll need the sort of movements that can shut down big oil, big timber, big nuclear power - through mass protests and strikes as well as direct action. But we shouldn't counter-pose the strategies. A living, breathing mass movement will involve all sorts of actions interacting and giving each other energy. Mass marches in particular can inspire further, radical action. That movement won't start were we'd like it to - our job is to develop and shape it. And that is partly what this book will do.

Because despite my strategic disagreements with its epilogue, I have no hesitation in recommending this collection of insightful and inspiring essays. I hope it will inspire activists to block roads, protest and strikes - and ultimately overthrow the system that sees nature as a commodity to be bought and sold for profit.

Related Reviews

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Angus - Facing the Anthropocene

John Bellamy Foster - The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology

John Bellamy Foster's classic work Marx's Ecology was published in 2000. Since then it has rightly become a classic study of the ecological core to Karl Marx's thought. The Return of Nature is his latest work which, he says, has taken nearly twenty years of research.

This detailed study of those scientists, thinkers, activists and socialists who, in the years following the death of Marx developed and expanded the dialectical thinking that Marx and Engels first developed, is ground-breaking. It will join Marx's Ecology as a classic work of radical ecology.

My review of John Bellamy Foster's book was published in the International Socialism Journal 167, July 2020. You can read it here.

Related Reviews

Foster - Marx's Ecology
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Peter Berresford Ellis & Seumas Mac A'Ghobhainn - The Radical Rising of 1820

April 2020 was the two hundredth anniversary of the forgotten "Scottish Insurrection" of 1820. First published in 1970 for 150th anniversary, this book seems to be the only popular account of the Insurrection and for that reason alone it should be celebrated. One reason the Scottish rising of 1820 is ignored is that it took place in the shadow of the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester the previous August. Yet the conditions that led to that mass protest and state killing were not confined to Manchester. Rather they reflected the great anger and frustrations of huge sections of the British working class at their conditions of life and the lack of popular democracy.

In Scotland however there was an additional factor - the Union with England. The book begins by looking at the history of the union and shows how popular discontent in Scotland often manifested itself in the radical traditions of Republicanism and Independence. The end of the 18th century saw a growth in radical ideas driven by the French Revolution. In Scotland radicals were inspired by Irish radicals. For instance Wolf Tones' well known United Irishmen had their counterpart in the United Scotsmen. Growing Scottish discontent in the early part of the 19th century led increasingly to the growth of radical movements that sought to break from English rule. By 1820 these movements had searched the point of support where leading figures considered a revolutionary break with Britain as distinct possibility.

If radicals believed it, the English authorities certainly did. Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth had an extensive network of spies embedded in the movements, and it seems likely, effectively controlled the main leadership of the movement in and around Glasgow. These spies, like they did across Britain in the same period, encouraged rebellion. It is well attested that such spies tended to do more than simply report activity. If they could provide evidence of potential rebellion they were more likely to get paid, and by encouraging rebellion among disaffected workers, they could make their prophecies true.

They also gave the authorities license to crack down. In April 1820 it came to a head. A week of discontent, protests and, crucially, mass strikes exploded. The radical movement had, despite the spies and agent provocateurs, had built a large network of activists and sympathetic workers. ON Saturday 1 April 1820 a Radical Committee placarded the streets of Glasgow and a strike exploded across much of Scotland's industrial areas the following Monday. A group of badly armed workers marched towards iron works near Falkirk, south of Scotland with the aim of seizing more weapons. They had expectations of meeting much larger revolutionary forces marching from elsewhere. At Bonnymuir they encountered British Cavalry, who overwhelmed the workers, killing capturing them. The expectations of mass numbers of revolutionaries had been concocted by spies, and the small numbers surprised the authorities and the rebels alike. Nevertheless the state had to have its blood and several rebels were selected as examples - two leading figures John Baird and Andrew Hardie made defiant speeches from the dock, but they, together with another leading radical James Wilson, were executed.

There is no doubt there was mass popular discontent. The scale of the strikes and the huge protests that were put down by bloody violence show that. There was clearly less of a mood for insurrection, and the small numbers that did rally to a more revolutionary flag did so because they were persuaded by spies who hard to work very hard to encourage them. The authors of this book make it clear that the executions of some of the leaders and the transportation of many others was the result of a gross distortion of justice. Indeed the actual trial itself was illegal as the authorities ignored the niceties of Scottish Law to push English convictions on the men. The fact that everyone was pardoned a few years later demonstrates the gross injustice.

Nonetheless, I was struck by the defiance of those convicted and the solidarity from the Scottish working class. I also noted that the jurors themselves stood up to an intimidating judge in their refusal to convict some prisoners. Nonetheless I was disappointed that the mass crowds at the executions didn't storm the scaffold and free their heroes.

There is little history about the events in Scotland in 1820. This is, as the authors explain, mostly to do with the importance given to events like Peterloo in 1819. The stressing of English history in the British Isles means even those of use who think we know a lot of our radical history ignorant of events like this. Welsh radicals will no doubt remind us that few today remember the Merthyr Rising of 1831, the repression of of which was as bloody as Peterloo or Scotland in 1820. As such, this is an excellent piece of history which should be read in this, the bicentenary of those cruel events.

Related Reviews

Hutchinson - Martyrs: Glendale and the Revolution in Skye
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Lev Grossman - The Magician King

Following my enjoyment of Lev Grossman's The Magicians I've pitched in quite quickly to reading the sequels. This, volume two, continues on from where the first book finished with the main protagonist, the insufferable Quentin Coldwater, firmly established as one of the kings of the magical land of Fillory. Quentin is one of the most annoying "heroes" of any fantasy book and his dismissive attitude to anything but his own well-being means that he's excellent monarch material. Ruling alongside him are a couple of other graduates from Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy, a school that is hidden from normal people in North America.

Ruling alongside these three is Julia, by far the most interesting character in the book. Julia failed her entrance to Brakebills, but the magic designed to wipe her memory also failed and she manages to teach herself the rudiments of casting spells. From here she finds her way into a secret underground network of magic, hidden from normal society and from the magical authorities. Her skills develop faster and further than any other contemporaries making her a powerful rival. Angry at the world, at the way that Quentin failed to help her with magic and the likes of Brakebills Julia's rise to power means she uses most people around her. Ultimately she finds her way into a grouping of magicians that begin to do very deep, dark and primordial magic.

The story of Julia's past fits around Quentin's contemporary quest, which is to save Fillory from the end of magic. His arrogance and failure to grasp a more nuanced understanding of the world leads to him making a series of errors which dump him out of Fillory and he has to begin a new quest to find himself back in the magical land.

The well rounded characters, the complex back stories and the surreal landscape of Fillory makes this an excellent read. I particularly enjoyed the secret underworld of "alternate" magic, with its traditions and it's naive spell users. I also liked the dragon living in Venice's canals. I look forward to the final volume.

Related Reviews

Grossman - The Magicians
Grossman - The Magician's Land

Cynan Jones - The Long Dry

One morning a Welsh farmer Gareth wakes up during a long, hot, drought-ridden summer. He kisses his wife Kate and tells her he is off to find a pregnant cow that has gone missing. That is, essentially, all that happens. But as Gareth walks around the land we learn about the history, his family, his deep yearning for his wife and her fears about her attractiveness as she ages, their mutual delight in their daughter and her games. The care that farmers have for their animals - both those destined to be meat at someone's dinner table and those, like the dog, that live around the farm.

We also learn a great deal about farming life. This is a book written by someone who understands farming - not just the growing of crops or the husbandry of animals, but also the historical struggles, the poverty, the mental illnesses and, the constant worries about money. Gareth and Kate's eldest son exemplifies the contradictions - he's pulled by the excitement of the town, the nightclubs and prospects of a better life, but he also likes and, Gareth hopes, might come to love the farm itself. The loss of animals, financial worries and concerns for the land are one thing, but worse is to come. Its a delightful book - with a dark and savage twist. In barely 100 pages Cynan Jones covers a lot of ground - including discussions on the threat of ducks, and what goes through the mind of a cow that's lost as well as a moving moment when two small boys encounter a rabbit dying of myxomatosis - something lost on Gareth when he finds the tiny body. Nature is everywhere, part and parcel of the farm and life, changing, growing and threatening. This is one to look out for.

Terry Hunt & Carl Lipo - The Statues that Walked: Unravelling the Mystery of Easter Island

In the last couple of decades the story of Easter Island/Rapa Nui has been retold many times because of its supposed relevance to accounts of ecological collapse. One of the key reasons for this is Jared Diamond's 2005 book Collapse in which he tells the story of the "last tree" being chopped down by islanders who, while knowing it was the last tree, couldn't help themselves. The deforestation that they'd caused ultimately destroyed themselves. The story of Easter Island has become a universal story for humanity - a metaphor for our self-destructive impulses wherever and whenever people have lived.

The problem is that Diamond's story is incorrect. There have been a few works that have challenged his narrative, not least the excellent Questioning Collapse (2009). But sadly few of those have broken through into popular understanding. The Statues that Walked is an impressive book about Easter Island that challenges misconceptions. It relies on detailed archaeological field work as well as comparative studies with other Pacific islands to draw out a much more nuanced explanation of the enigmatic people who lived on Easter Island and built the incredible stone monuments.

The authors begin with misconceptions, some of which arise from Colonial attitudes to indigenous peoples that mark encounters between European travellers and settlers in many parts of the world. The key one of these is that indigenous peoples are lazy and don't utilise land properly. Despite their ability to erect massive monuments, people don't use the land properly. As one account from 1722 says, "this place [Rapa Nui] as far as its rich soil and good climate are concerned, is such that it might be made into an earthly Paradise, if it were properly worked and cultivated; which is now only done in so far as the Inhabitants are obliged to for the maintenance of life".

To a certain extent, similar attitudes led scholars to miss interpret the real nature of Rapa Nui's archaeological remains. In 1996 a graduate student Joan Wozniak noticed that while there was "no obvious evidence of cultivation" there were countless places were broken rocks, stones and obsidian splinters. The "surface remains appeared to be just a carpet of cobbles and boulders, the subsurface demonstrated plenty of prehistoric activity". It turned out that the soil had been deliberately "enriched" with broken rocks to improve soil fertility and improve growing conditions. Rapa Nui is an "engineered landscape". Rapa Nui's seemingly barren landscape was actually carefully managed. Similar investigations by the authors show that there was an extensive road network which facilitated the moving of the massive stone heads that are the principle known monuments from the island. Incidentally, the book has a detailed explanation of attempts to understand how these heads were moved and how they were most likely moved. The explanation is relatively straight forward and is similar to the way we might move a tall and heavy fridge. The nuance is that clever sculpting of the heads themselves which ensures they have a low centre of gravity. Belief that these statues couldn't be moved by people with stone age technologies is reflective of the same racist colonial attitudes that suggested they didn't farm their landscape because they were too primitive.

The authors explain that the people of Rapa Nui cannot be understood without seeing them as a society that operated carefully to maintain a delicate balance between them and their environment. Rapa Nui is not resource rich. It is likely that it was colonised only once by Pacific islanders which explains the small number of plants and animals that were used. Deforestation did occur, caused by the rats that probably arrived with the original settlers. But deforestation was not total - many early accounts did refer to trees and woodland (as well as agriculture). These were forgotten in the construction of European colonial myths about the islands.

What did destroy the Rapa Nui's pre-contact society was contact itself. A series of violent encounters which brought disease (as well as colonial murder) decimated the original populations. The "collapse" of Rapa Hui's society is, according to Diamond the result of islanders "pent up anger at their leaders" similar to the throwing down of statues by East European's in their "paroxysm of anger and disillusionment... at the end of communism". However, less emotionally (and politically charged) Hunt and Lipo conclude that while some toppling "may have been purposeful... many more likely came down as a result of inattention and lack of maintenance". They conclude that "what is clear... is that with the arrival of Europeans the rationale for participating in moai construction and movement had been undermined; the activity had lost its value."

Whatever the reasons for erecting the statues (and we can only speculate) the point is there was a reason that was inseparable from the nature of pre-contact Rapa Nui society. The arrival of Europeans broke the social relations up on the island (with some evidence of a 'cargo-cult' type worship of European goods developing). Other things arrived with the Europeans apart from disease, guns and goods - one of these was ideological. Diamond refers to "cannibalism" appearing on the island after European contact which along with chicken farming "underwent explosive growth" after 1650. Hunt and Lipo argue that this was a myth: "references to cannibalism became a common theme only after the missionary presence, and these references become increasingly embellished, especially in the European accounts painting a treacherous picture of these 'savages' and their wild past."

Hunt and Lipo's analysis of the history of Rapa Nui is underpinned by archaeology and comparative studies of other, similar, inhabited island environments. But they also use game-theory to model how it such societies might live and conclude that it is much more likely that the pre-contact islanders lived in communal societies, rather than savage warlike ones. One intriguing argument is that the a by-product of statue building was that while it "wasted" resources from a purely economic point of view, it was also reducing reproduction to ensure that population levels in an environment were total resources were short. The authors explain:

We have to be careful to emphasise that we are not saying the islanders consciously decided to spend more time making and moving statues in efforts to take time and resources away from reproduction. The role of the statues as costly signals probably explains why so much time was devoted to them. But the benefits of bet-hedging offer a strong explanation for why spending so much time and energy on the statues didn't threaten Rapanui survival, and indeed probably helped to sustain it. In considering what leads to evolutionary success, those reaping the benefits of any given practice need not understand why it contributes to their survival.

What emerges from this account is not one of humanity self-destructive behaviour. But rather one that shows that humans actually worked hard to protect and utilise the resources they had and, even in environments were resources might have been limited, they were able to create impressive and complex cultural societies. The arrival of European imperialists, with their myopic view of land utilisation and commodity fetishism broke the delicate balance between social and economic life, and that's what led to collapse. The story doesn't make for as great newspaper headlines as Diamond's version does. But it is more useful in terms of understanding how human societies have worked in the past and how they might organise to be sustainable in the future.

Related Reviews

McAnany & Yoffee - Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire

Rob Boffard - Adrift

This novel puts an science fiction twist on the age old story of the sailors trapped on a lifeboat after their ship is sunk. Set in a universe where two factions of humanity are on the edge of war, we begin the book as Sigma Station, a luxury space hotel on the edge of the Horsehead nebula, is blown up by an unknown ship. The ship also destroys the wormhole back and the only survivors from Sigma are a handful of people in a decrepit old tourist shuttle. The shuttle has no food and limited water, the bare minimum of essential medical supplies and systems that date back decades. Hannah Elliot is the guide, this is her first day on the job, she's got know experience, knows no-one and little in her education has prepared her for this. The pilot is a grouchy war veteran who drinks vodka and the passengers range from a couple of annoying adolescents and their pampered parents to a retired former space miner and a alcoholic travel journalist.

The novel works quite well. There are some decent backstories that get exposed, and various secrets are outed. The adolescents are relatively know-it-all, like most teenagers, but that proves useful and Bob Boffard manages to neatly shift the focus of the story away from Hannah and on to others, so we get quite a claustrophobic sense as we bounce from character to character.

Unfortunately it doesn't all work very well. In places the characters get themselves out of fixes in ways that are a unbelievable, or rely on chance too much. The finale is entertaining and ties up all the lose ends rather well, but just doesn't work from a in-universe point of view. The book works because of the characters and scenario, not the plot.

James D. Hornfischer - The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944-1945

For those of us living in Europe, the history of World War Two tends to be dominated by events in Europe. Even this is distorted - the British remain convinced they won the war against Nazi Germany single-handed, with the story of Russia's huge contribution tending to be relegated to a side-show. In this context the story of the war against Japan in the Pacific is often neglected and even though Britain was involved in Burma, Singapore and elsewhere, British World War Two history tends to neglect events in the greatest ocean on Earth. For many Americans though this was the war and Hornfischer's book is only one of many books that deal with events.

Despite professing to be a history of events from 1944-1945 Hornfischer's book focuses on the Battle of Saipan. The capture of Saipan was a key strategic event for the US military as it would bring the Japanese mainland into bombing range. It was very much total war, with a massive naval contribution supporting the landing of US marines and army units on the island. Hornfischer tells the story well, deftly moving from the strategic overview afforded by commanders such as Vice Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, who headed the US Fifth Fleet to the experiences of individual soldiers on the battle field to Japanese civilians and troops on the other side. Spruance is one of a handful of characters that Hornfischer uses to tell the wider story.

The focus on Saipan gives a real sense of a turning point in the war in the Pacific, one that allowed total war to be taken to the Japanese mainland. It marked the end of Japanese air power with the massacre of hundreds of her carrier borne aircraft which shifted the balance of forces heavily towards the US. Important though it is, the emphasis on Saipan means the neglect of other events such as the invasion of Iwo Jima, the capture of Guam and the Battle of Leyte Gulf. These events get a few pages at most (Leyte Gulf was the biggest battle in Naval history, yet is described almost in passing) which tended to distort the history somewhat.

Nonetheless what Hornfischer does well is to give the reader a sense of the vast shift that takes place in US military might in the Pacific in the years after Pearl Harbour. There's a figure depicting annual US naval production by ship-type early in the book, which shows a massive growth in the manufacture of craft. In 1943 the US war economy produced 15 aircraft carriers, with 8 in 1944. Production of landing craft peaked at 38,000 in 1994. It was this enormous production that was to lead to victory in the Pacific.

The final part of the book discusses the most controversial part of the war - the use of atomic weapons. Hornfischer doesn't avoid controversy. For instance, he is honest about the reality of the conflict on the Pacific island which lead to US soldiers repeatedly killing Japanese POWs. Conversely he also makes it clear that the Japanese military were able to encourage Civilians to commit mass suicide through their propaganda and violence. Total war in the Pacific, just as it did on the Eastern Front in Europe led to atrocities on both sides. In this context the use of the atom bomb for Hornfischer was a choice made by commanders who wanted to end the war with minimal casualties on their side. It was also rational by political leaders with an eye on the future world where their emerging economic power would confront the USSR in a potential new conflict. From the point of view of US imperialism the use of the bomb was rational and this book makes it very clear why the US ended World War Two as the most powerful global superpower. While Hornfischer devotes little time discussing whether the targeting of civilians was morally acceptable he doesn't ignore the suffering caused.

My belief that the use of atom bombs was a war crime remained unchanged by the discussion here, though I did find the discussion on the inability of the Japanese high-command to see that they were defeated, and thus agree to surrender, enlightening. I also felt that the discussion of US-Japanese relations after World War Two was a little to rose-tinted. The behaviour of US troops on Okinawa long after the end of the war remains a sour point decades later.

To be fair to the author though I didn't pick up the book with the intention of getting a political and moral discussion of the end of the war, I was after a history of the Pacific War itself. Unfortunately the detailed focus on the Battle of Saipan, interesting and well written though it was, meant that the wider ebb and flow of the conflict was harder to see. That said, this well illustrated book will be of interest to those trying to understand World War Two in all its arenas.

Related Reviews

Toll - Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific 1941-1942
Toll - The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands 1942-1944

Lev Grossman - The Magicians

The story of a young man discovering he has magical powers and finding out there's a secret magic school that he can attend to develop his skills and enter the hidden world of magic naturally draws parallels with JK Rowling's books. However Lev Grossman's The Magicians is a much more rewarding novel which draws on much older traditions of fantasy. The majority of the book deals with Quentin Coldwater's entry into Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. Here he learns about magic and the wider magical world. Quentin is also a huge fan of a series of intriguing novels set in the world of Fillory. These are enormously popular and are heavily modelled on CS Lewis' Narnia books. Eventually Quentin and his friends make their way into Fillory, the story of which forms the latter half of the book.

What makes the book most interesting is that it deals with issues that are far more complex than many fantasy books are willing to take up. Death, sex, violence are some of the themes. But perhaps more importantly is the way the book looks at how the world of magic turns out to be at odds with the fantasy's of the naive young outsiders who first discover it. Quentin's still thinking in terms of the fantastical magical lands of Fillory even as the reality of those lands leads to death and destruction among him. The wizards who graduate Brakebills don't worry about poverty or work - they're too busy using their powers to live lives of luxury and relaxation.

It's an intriguing story which Lev Grossman writes very well and I look forward to the sequels.

Related Reviews

Grossman - The Magician's Land
Grossman - The Magician King

Hubert Mingarelli - Four Soldiers

Hubert Mingarelli's beautifully written short story set during the Russian Civil War delivers an emotionally powerful account of comradeship and friendship among a small group of soldiers. Set during a lull in the fighting it tells of a summer that would have been idyllic if it weren't for the war just over the horizon. The four soldiers in the title form a close knit, secretive group within the larger camp and become emotionally and physically dependent on each other.

Their friendship has the intensity that can only be matched by those formed under the threat of intense stress. Mingarelli doesn't overburden the story with wider details. There is nothing here about the Civil War itself, though we learn a few background facts about some of the characters that tell of grinding poverty. The army also requisitions food from surrounding villages, but the soldiers have little to say about this. The ending isn't cheerful, but it is enormously powerful. But perhaps not the most positive of stories to read during the anxiety of global lockdown.

David Reisman - Thomas Robert Malthus

Thomas Robert Malthus is usually remembered today for his thoughts on over-population. Since the publication of the first edition of his infamous An Essay on the Principle of Population he has been attacked, usually from the political left, for his views.

However Malthus' thoughts weren't just about population. Indeed his economic theories were important contributions to bourgeois thought about how economic systems work, and what can be done to bring the best benefits to the population. While Karl Marx rightly attacked Malthus' thoughts on population he also often used his ideas on economics as a foil to put across his own views in works like the Grundrisse or Capital. So for those trying to better understand Malthus its welcome that this new biographical work has appeared, though unfortunately its ridiculously high price will put it out of reach of those who do not have library access or are lucky enough to find it in an online sale.

Reisman begins, of course, with Malthus' work on population. Few people today read his Essay (in all its variations). So it's good that the author has taken time to do this. The Essay has often been the target of vicious polemic (not always, however uninformed). William Taylor Coleridge (who had read it) argued that Malthus took "350 pages to prove an axiom" and "a pop-gun would batter down the impregnable Fortress". Marx, wrote that it was "schoolboyish, superficial plagiary".

Reisman is, perhaps by contrast, keen to show that Malthus had a consistent method. He quotes Malthus, writing to his friend the economist Ricardo, "The science of political economy is essentially practical". A few pages later he explains how Malthus introduces statistics to the "British Association" and quotes Malthus as "establishing systems upon facts". This may indeed be what Malthus wanted to be remembered as doing, but I'm skeptical. For instance, the key theoretical argument about population at the heart of the Essays is the idea that population rises geometrically whereas food rises aritchmetcally. This will inevitably lead to starvation. But there is no empircal evidence today, or when Malthus was writing, that this is actually true. A later quoted comment from Malthus to Ricardo is more telling, "My object was to elucidate principles... To do this I magined strong cases that I might shew the operation of those principles."

That said, Malthus was a child of his time and class. He can be criticised for having views that today might be seen as right-wing and based on inaccuracies. But Malthus was trying, in his own way, to explain the world and understand it in the interests of the general betterment of society. Like most other bourgeois economists Malthus thought that improvements for the wealthy would lead to improvements for the poorest. A general rising of boats. Though he was also contemptuous of the poor for the laziness. As Reisman summarises:

Political economy makes the civics clear. The deprived should seek out well-paid employment, limit the number of their dependents and practise self-denial through frugality. They should learn that they alone are the captains of their fate: 'nothing perhaps would tend so strongly to excit e a spirit of industry and economy among the poor, as a through knowledge that their happiness must always depend principally upon themselves'.

Reisman continues, "Charity begins at home. It is the lesson of 'nature and reason' that ordinary people, not the capitalists, the landowners or the politicians are 'themselves the cause of their poverty".

Those with a deep interest in 18th and 19th century economics will find Reisman's study of Malthus' economics useful. But unfortunately I was very disappointed by the book. I found the style, as perhaps the quotes above show, inaccessible. Reisman frequently summarises Malthus' views supplemented by quotes from many different sources in a way that obscures whose voice is being told. At times it reads like Reisman is trying to be Malthus personified in articulating his points of view. But I found it frequently obscured understanding Malthus' arguments. Take the following sentences introducing chapter 10, "Society and State":

Economics is about passion. Every undergraduate knows that. There is the passion for spending: 'An adequate passion for consumption that may fully keep up the proper proportion between supply and demand, whatever may be the powers of production'. There s the passion for not spending: 'A passion for accumulation must inevitably lead to a supply of commodities beyond what the structure and habits of such a society will permit to be consumed'. The passion for the immediate plus the passion for the deferred add up to the national income. Every statistician knows that.

The quotes are from Malthus. The rest is Reisman, but it's not clear whether the author believes this, or that he is paraphrasing Malthus. Either way, "every undergraduate" and "every statistician" may well not agree with the propositions.

As such I was deeply disappointed by this book which I think will be of most interest to academics studying Malthus.

Related Reviews

Kallis - Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care
Malthus - An Essay on the Principle of Population
Meek (ed) - Marx and Engels on the Population Bomb
Ehrlich - The Population Bomb

Dorling - Population 10 Billion

Dashiell Hammett - Red Harvest

I was drawn to Dashiell Hammett's classic hard-boiled detective novel on learning that it had served as the inspiration for Akira Kurosawa's film Yojimbo which in turn provided the inspiration for Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars. First published in 1929 it is a classic of its genre, with the central anonymous detective playing fast and lose with his gun in the midst of a deeply divided, corrupt town called Personville. Personville is so awful it's known to those who live there as Poisonville and upon arrival our hero quickly finds out that there are no innocent characters here. In fact the town is riven in two, with rival forces fighting for control of the liquor trade and other underground activities. The police aren't separate from this - they make up one of the violent and corrupt sides.

Red Harvest is incredibly violent. In contrast to Raymond Chandler's works and others by Hammett such as The Maltese Falcon there is a lot of killing. But what distinguishes Harvest is that the hero partakes in the slaughter. This isn't just self-defence either, there are several points when he sets up characters to be killed. The ambiguous moral position of the "Continential Op" is a key part of Red Harvest. He lies, break laws and murders his way around Personville trying to fix the larger problem - is a crime committed to prevent far worse things actually a crime?

Most of those the Continent Op encounters turn out not to think so - but then they are criminals themselves. Oddly for such a detective book there is only one major female character who is a pivot for much of the action - she is a sort of female version of the Op, playing off sides against each other, though in her case she's doing it for her own interests.

Interestingly Personville also optimises something else about 1920s America - the greed, violence and pollution of industry. Several representatives of law enforcement have been party to the murderous suppression of trade unionists from the Industrial Workers of the World. Hammett is supposed to have based this on his time in the Pinkerton agency, the model for the Continental Detective Agency that our hero represents.

This is the set up. Does it work as a novel? Its certainly not what I was expecting havnig read The Maltese Falcon. This is more action packed and more violent and less about the actual process of working out a mystery. In fact the reader, like the Continental Op's fellow detectives, spends most of the time in the dark following the hero around different scenes. The book probably betrays its origin in magazine serials far more  than other stories. Reading it as a book works as an adventure story, though I was left unsatisfied by the conclusion.

John Bellamy Foster & Brett Clark - The Robbery of Nature

Over the last few decades John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark have been at the forefront of showing how classical Marxism is the foremost tool in explaining capitalism's rift with the ecological systems that support our society. They have shown how Karl Marx's idea of the "metabolic rift" explains how capitalism is a break with other historical modes of production, a break that has transformed our relationship to the natural world and then broken the ongoing metabolism between humans and the planet. Reading this book while trapped at home during the Covid-19 pandemic it is very easy to see the practical application of Marx's metabolic rift theory. Other authors will no doubt build upon this, just as other scholars have followed Foster in particular and applied metabolic rift analysis to human systems like agriculture and the oceans.

This book brings together a series of essays by Clark and Foster, as well as a few other authors like Paul Burkett, that summarise this work. Many readers might have engaged with these articles in earlier forms when they have appeared in journals like Monthly Review. But to see them simply as a collection of previous articles is to miss their wider coherence.

Karl Marx developed metabolic rift theory based on his close reading of vast quantity of scientific material, in particular that of the German soil scientist Justus von Liebig. Liebig himself developed a number of ideas, in particular the idea of capitalist agriculture being a "robbery system". For Liebig, England in particular had developed a "high-input, high-output, capital-intensive form of large-scale industrial agriculture". This had yet to develop elsewhere in the world, but at the time of Marx and Liebig it had become entrenched so deeply in the English economy that it was having lasting effects upon England's soil fertility (decreasing at a rate that would today warrant the label of environmental crisis). As the English capitalists sought to solve the problem they were already spreading the problem globally as they robbed far-flung countries in search of raw materials to heal the "rift" caused by industrialised agriculture.

Marx developed this theory further into a general one of ecological degradation. More recently, John Bellamy Foster in particular has shown how it is a way of viewing capitalism's destructive action upon the world's ecology. This process is inseparable from the system itself. As the author's, quoting Marx, write:

The capitalist valorization process could thus never free itself from the conditions of "metabolic interaction between man and nature." All attempt to do so, as in industrial agriculture or the exploitation of labour power, generated a metabolic rift, a crisis of social metabolic reproduction. 

They continue, again quoting Marx:

At the heart of the contradiction was the reality that the social metabolism with nature under capitalism was mediated by value. Thus 'the cultivation of particular crops depends on fluctuations in market prices and the constant changes in cultivation with these price fluctuations.' This reflects the fact that 'the entire spirit of capitalist production, which is oriented towards the most immediate monetary profit - stands in contradiction to agriculture, which as to concern itself with the whole gamut of permanent conditions of life required by the chain of human generations.'

Much of the book explores different aspects of what this means for capitalism today as we face global environmental crisis. There are other important arguments though. One of which is the way that capitalist economics sees certain aspects (such as natural resources) as "free gifts" to production. In an important chapter Foster and Clark extend these discussions to the realm of social reproduction - in particular the way that the bourgeois family is used to create the next generation of labour. For instance, they write:

By the late nineteenth century... capital had at least formally created separate, alienated spheres of housewife and breadwinner... This transformed the family itself under monopoly capitalism, resulting in the relative rather than absolute expropriation of time within the household... Likewise, capital dealt with it first ecological crises (the degradation of the soil and rapacious deforestation) by means of new alienated mediations (synthetic fertilisers), which in the long run were to reappear as crucial aspects of a global metabolic rift that degrades nature even further.

While looking inward to how capitalism transformed social relations within its key economies, the authors also show how colonialism and imperialism allowed the British metabolic rift to be "transferred abroad". As Marx says, the "view of nature which has grown up under the regime of private property and of money is an actual contempt for and practical degradation of nature". A new chapter on colonial rule in Ireland demonstrates this in particular, but this is a theme that runs through the book. I also want to highlight the excellent chapter Marx as Food Theorist which defend Marx from accusations he didn't think through what capitalism did for the food systems we rely on. But the book expands that analysis to cover the contemporary agriculture/food/industry complex in ways that are particular pertinent to discussions around Covid-19 and farming today.

Two other chapters are worth highlighting for the author's defence of classical Marxism. The first is a chapter about work under capitalism and socialism. Here the authors tackle an older debate about the nature of work. Under capitalism workers are alienated from their labour. This means there is a tendency to see the future sustainable socialism as meaning that work forms a minority of peoples lives - and authors have tended to highlight the way that socialism would allow vast quantities of leisure time. This must, in part, have been a way of appealing to workers who were exhausted by their labour. But Foster and Clark highlight how this is also a misunderstanding of the nature of labour within human society. Capitalism alienates our labour, takes it from us. But it is also what makes us human. Thus

the real potential for any future sustainable society rests not so much on its expansion of lisure time, but rather on its capacity to generate a new world of creative and collective work, controlled by the associated producers.

In particular Foster and Clarke draw on the work of William Morris including his seminal novel News from Nowhere to support their arguments. I think this is an important argument, though its worth pointing out that Morris did not neglect the aforementioned leisure time either - News from Nowhere has as a subtitle "An Epoch of Rest". But this is very much in the context of his understanding that labour should not have to mean exhaustion.

The second of these key arguments is from an article that first appeared in International Socialism and is a defence of the Labour Theory of Value from critics in what might loosely be described as "left ecology". Here the authors of that article (Burkett and Foster) also tackle important debates that defend both Marx's ideas (such as metabolic rift) and his method.

These debates are important, and left ecologists and socialists must understand them. But this is not an academic argument. The importance of the politics in The Robbery of Nature lies in informing readers for the most important struggle of our times - the defeat of capitalism before it destroys the ecological basis to human life. Foster and Clarke explain that we face "ruin or revolution". Winning that revolution will require clarity of ideas and of political method. This book is part of arming us with both.

Related Reviews

Foster - Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature
Foster - The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet
Foster - The Vulnerable Planet
Foster - Ecology Against Capitalism
Foster, Clark & York - Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism, From Antiquity to the Present
Foster & Burkett - Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique
Burkett - Marxism and Ecological Economics: Toward a Red and Green Political Economy
Burkett - Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective

Richard Borshay Lee - The !Kung San: Men, Women & Work in a Foraging Society

Why should we plant, when there are so many mongongos in the world? - /Xashe, a !Kung man from Mahopa

Richard B Lee's classic book on the hunter-gatherer people known as the !Kung San, who call themselves the Juǀʼhoansi, was the product of several expeditions and years of field work by Lee and his associates. But it is also the product of a uniquely radical period for anthropology. Lee first visited the !Kung in the mid-1960s and left to become part of the anti-Vietnam movement. His later return and further studies mixed with his experiences of US Imperialism and knowledge of the Vietnamese resistance movements, as well as his radical Marxist politics, to produce one of the most insightful and important books ever written about foraging societies.

Lee is careful not to speculate too much about what his studies of the !Kung tell us about other, prehistoric communities. Though he does acknowledge that we can have some insights into how those societies behaved. However Lee visited the !Kung in a period of transition. For tens of thousands of years people had lived in the Kalahari desert, likely in societies similar to the !Kung's contemporary life. But from the 19th century onward the !Kung had encountered new groups of people, in particular those from European colonial communities. More recently the !Kung's foraging life-style was being transformed by their relations with the capitalist market - through wage labour in particular.

In contrast to the tradition view of hunter-gatherers as living a life that was "nasty, brutish and short", Lee shows how the !Kung actually had a life that was marked by low levels of work (compared to Western capitalist society), with a usually (outside of droughts) varied and excellent diet and, perhaps most importantly, a "fiercely egalitarian" self organisation. Lee describes differences with other societies, noting for instance that young people and children did not have to labour to provide food (unlike peasant societies). Describing one group of !Kung he explains:

Their camps... do not consist of a core of males related through the male line [as previous anthropologists had argued]. But neither is the camp a random assortment of unrelated individuals whom adverse circumstances have thrown together. In essence, !Kung camp consists of kinspeople and affines who have found that they can live and work well together. under this flexible principle of organisation, brothers may be united or divided and fathers and sins may live together or apart. Furthermore, through the visiting network an individual may, during the course of his life, live for varying times at many water holes, as establishing residence and one camp does not require one to relinquish a claim to any other.

Lee's book works on a number of levels. Firstly it is a detailed account of the life and labour of the !Kung. Lee demonstrates how the !Kung's mode of production works - their tools, social organisation and relations. But it is also a wonderful example of the use of Marxism to understand how people (and communities) relate to the natural world. But Lee's work is far from the crude understanding of hunter-gatherers that we sometimes hear:

[An] inaccuracy is the view of hunters as having no private property. Land and its resources are collectively owned and utilised, but tools and other belongings are the property of the owner. Nonperishable goods are dealt with differently from foods. Meat many be distributed throughout the camp, but the bow and arrow that killed the animal belongs to the hunter. Material goods are important items of trade, and dyadic trade networks are a key means of cementing social relations; but the 'worker' owns the means of production.

Finally the book is a deeply personal account. Lee describes the dialectical relationship between observer and observed. He knows that his presence changes things, and uses this (to sometimes comic effect) to better understand the people that he is with. A case in point is when Lee provides a cow for a feast when he is leaving, failing to understand why the !Kung mock his gift as being small and inadequate despite it providing a hearty feast for all. Only later does he realise that this is part of how !Kung organise - their mocking of his largesse is an example of how they tackle arrogance, self-importance and any tendency to inequality or hierarchy.

The egalitarian, sharing, non-hierarchical society tells us a great deal about how human societies change. But perhaps of most interest in this book, and high relevance to contemporary discussions, is the emphasis that Lee puts on understanding the role of men and women in !Kung society. Food is always shared beyond the immediate family group. But the food that is shared is provided mostly by the women. There is a division of labour - women tend to forage and gather, and men hunt. Though it is clear that this is not strict. Men do often forage and collect food alongside the women, and women "very occasionally hunt". Lee writes that "the actual productive process may be individual or cooperative. Men may hunt singly or in groups; women may gather alone or with others".

Hunting is tremendously important to the group. Boys are taught from a young age to track and identify animals. Women's input on hunting is sought and is important because "they cover much ground on their gathering trips and because they are as keen observers of the environment as are the men, their observations are sought and taken seriously".  Men actually have a higher work effort than women (even when taking into account the rearing of children), but it is the women who provide most calories for the group. Work is key to Lee's study. He writes:

The beauty of the study of work is that work can be precisely quantified and can be tied into a whole gamut of social and economic variables. underlying the network of social relations anthropologists are so fond of studying is a network of energy relations to which we pay little or no attention. Yet the basic units of social behaviour and interaction have never been satisfactorily defined and isolated, although the basic units of energy relations are relatively easy to define and measure. The advantage of the study of work for anthropology is that it anchors the ephemera of social life on the foundations of the natural sciences.

This is not to say that Lee neglects the "ephemera" of !Kung life. In fact he spends a great deal on their tools, their camp life, their marital relations and how women and men work, play and rest (and they have a lot of rest - far more than those of us who work a 9-5 job have).

Time an again we are reminded of the inter-relations between men and women. Both men and women make tools, that might be used by the other sex. How does the labour break down?

Men clearly have the heavier share of work in subsistence and tool making and repair. Women do more housework than men, but overall the men appear to have a longer work week. The shorter subsistence workday of the women does not result in a lower return in foodstuffs... women provide more food per day of gathering than men provide per day of hunting. Women return to the camp earlier in the day than men. They use the time to ensure that the ostrich eggshell canteens are filled and that some food is prepared.

He continues:

A major category of work... is child care, and to the child's own mother falls 60 to 80 percent of the work with young children, a proportion that more than redresses the apparent disparity between men's and women;'s work... Neither do these figures support the notion that women are the exploited members of !Kung society. Their weekly work effort, including housework, is less than that of the men, and even adding the work of child rearing does not raise the women's total work load significantly above the range of the men's.

As the last quote indicates Lee's arguments are backed up with tremendous amounts of observational data. But this doesn't make the book dry. On the contrary it is readable and engaging. In fact there is so much here that I cannot hope to cover it all in the review. Whether it is the detailed description of how a !Kung hunter makes his most important tool - the arrow quiver, or how they poison their arrows or the spacing that !Kung women have of children and how this relates to hunter-gatherer life the book covers it all. There is also a detailed but extremely important discussion of violence within !Kung communities.

The final part of the book shows how the interaction between the hunter-gatherer communities and capitalist market networks had, at the time of study, begun to break down social relations. Lee shows how other groups' agriculture had encouraged sedentary life for some !Kung. Social relations are transformed with contact with a market economy - the production of commodities to be sold to tourist markets, or !Kung working in the mines. As Lee concludes:

The informal leadership, vague boundaries, and reciprocal access to resources worked well for the !Kung when the land was vast and the people were few. But with the transition to village life the old mechanisms have proved quite inadequate. The process of moving to a new mode of production involved the !Kung not only in changes in the economic base, but also has necessitated the emergence of new kinds of political relations, new forms of leadership and new methods of resolving disputes.

Lee's book is one of the best works of anthropology I have ever read. But that's not simply because his style is accessible, it is because his approach to the !Kung is one that begins from an attempt to study their life as part of a wider understanding of human society in all its forms. Lee's Marxist approach aids this but doesn't obscure it in jargon. His own humanity is written on every page, but the most important story is that of the !Kung whose story is captured at a particularly moment in their history. Richard B Lee's book tells their story but also part of own our history too.

Related Reviews

Leacock - Myths of Male Dominance
Scott - Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
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
Engels - Origin of Private Property, the Family and the State
Evans-Pritchard - The Nuer
Evans-Pritchard - Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer
Gilligan - Climate, Clothing & Agriculture in Prehistory

Iain Banks - Whit

Outside of Iain Bank's science fiction Whit is his novel that I've repeatedly enjoyed over the years (which explains why it's the first book to be reviewed twice on this blog). It displays Bank's abilities at his best - occasional slapstick humour mixed with the bizarre and unusual, while happily pointing to the hypocrisy of "normal" society. The latter is important in Whit because the story centres of Isis, the elect of God, who leaves the seclusion of her religious community and enters the normal world of 1990s England for find her "lost" sister.

Much of the entertainment comes from Isis' bizarre beliefs contrasted with the outside world. Eschewing comfort she must always sit on a wooden board on transport or sleep in a hammock, she shouldn't use a telephone or other electronic equipment and there are a myriad of other rules and beliefs that make her trip to London (initially) a bemusing experience for Isis and hilarious for the reader. There are some other poignant moments - Isis' encounter with some BNP paper sellers exposes their hypocrisy and her response is deeply satisfying for the reader.

But re-reading this in 2020 I was more intrigued by the nature of the religious group she is part of. Bank's weaves the story of its development into Isis' contemporary trip. But reading it now, rather than in the 2000s I was more aware of the cult-like behaviour of the founder, and Isis' horrible experience with him late in the book takes on new relevance and meaning in the #metoo era, as does the nature of the "festival" the group celebrates every leap year.

Whit is one of Bank's more satisfying endings even though it is ambiguous. I'd forgotten the extent to which Isis' journey opens up her understanding of the world and her own community. The last page leaves the reader open to the suggestion that Isis has realised that what is important is the community, not the religious belief - truth is what matters. But will she tell her followers the whole truth?

Related Reviews

Banks - Raw Spirit
Banks - Matter
Banks - Look to Windward
Banks - Dead Air
Banks - Whit (first review from 2005)
Banks - The Hydrogen Sonata
Banks - Surface Detail
Banks - Against A Dark Background
Banks - The Steep Approach to Garbadale
Banks - Look To Windward
Banks - The Algebraist

Laura Miles - Transgender Resistance: Socialism and the fight for trans liberation

In Britain today trans people have a greater visibility than perhaps at any other time in the country's history. As a result trans people and trans politics has become a subject for fierce debate on the right and the left. Tragically, especially in Britain, many on the left have ended up taking positions that are transphobic or transcritical. This is despite the horrible oppression and discrimination faced by transpeople in Britain and around the world.

So it is excellent that socialist and trade union activist Laura Miles has written this new book. Miles begins with the strides forward that trans people have made, "through the hard work and efforts of countless activists there are now many support organisation for trans and non-binary people, something that could only have been dreamed of forty or fifty years ago". There are now many (though not nearly enough) positive articles, books, role-models and representations in the media of or about trans people. Yet there is also tragedy. Miles explains that the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDoR) has been marked on 20 November every year since 1999.

The 2018 TDoR report revealed a total of 369 reported killings of trans and gender-diverse people between 1 October 2017 and 30 September 2018, an increase on the 2017 figure of 325... Most of the murders occurred in Brazil (167), Mexico (71), the United States (28) and Colombia (21).

It is important to highlight this oppression and violence against trans people. One of the arguments that trans-critical people often use is that transgender people are a threat to non-trans women in particular. Yet they rarely acknowledge the routine violence and discrimination that trans and non-binary people experience. I was glad that Miles doesn't just focus on the trans experience in Britain, or the developed world. One chapter looks at what it is like for trans people in countries and regions as diverse as Africa, South Korea, Russia, Latin America and the Indian sub-continent. These are difficult chapters to read as the violence is horrible and often routine. Miles concludes:

These snapshots of life for transgender people around world demonstrate that transphobia is endemic in modern capitalism although it varies in form and intensity from society to society and over time. A range of factors contribute to this - cultural and religious issues, economic factors such as crises and levels of wealth and poverty. A very common factor is how prejudice, discrimination and violence against trans people and others is whipped up as part of a general repression of opposition to growing inequality and disparities of wealth.

Despite this repression, trans and non-binary people have a long history. Miles looks at the way different historical societies have understood gender. Studies of Native American societies have shown Miles says, how "rather than being ostracised or forced into obscurity, gender-variant people were embraced by some 150 tribes, serving as artists, medicine people, religious experts and tribal leaders". She continues that "many societies considered that there were not two buy three, four, or more genders". I won't dwell here on the historic material, even though it is fascinating and demonstrates that humans have frequently taken very different views about sex and gender to that which is usually considered normal in modern capitalism. I will note though that I was pleased to see that Miles records the way that historic rebellion, such as that of the Rebecca Riots in Wales, often involved cross-dressing by rebels. There is a long tradition of this stretching particularly through British rural rebellion that I have noticed in my own studies of the subject.

The tour of the historical experience demonstrates the way that ideas of gender and sex become fixed with the development of the capitalism family. Here Miles draws on the classical Marxist analysis of the role of the family within capitalist production shaping wider social relations. It is this, she argues, which shapes the way that trans people are seen and related to within capitalism. While Miles shows exactly why science doesn't confirm the simple "two genders" model, it is the political analysis that is most important. It's worth quoting Miles at length on this:

The source of sexism, misogyny, women's oppression and trans oppression lies in the exploitative class relations that derive from capitalism's drive to appropriate and control labour power in order to accumulate surplus value, and in the dominant ideology of the nuclear family and its role in the socialisation, reproduction and provision of care for workers.

Everyone's gender identity is part of the deeply held sense of self which develops neither as an exclusive derivative of our biological sex nor merely as a response to the social norms and gender expectation that we encounter by virtue of being social beings. If it were simply one or the other, arguable there would not be transgender or non-binary people, either because our chromosomes would be all-powerful in forming our gender identity or because society's strong and pervasive gender binary oppression would lock us all irrevocably into one of the two hegemonic gender binary categories.

These conclusions don't seem particularly radical. So it is alarming that many on the left have adopted positions that would seem closer to those of the right in seeking to deny trans people rights and protections. Often these arguments take the form of arguing that such rights undermine women's rights won through decades of struggle. But Miles demonstrates how this is not the case. In particular fear-mongering over the right to self-identify risks setting back trans-rights many years. As Miles concludes, "such measures... would sweep away trans women's rights in particular and would in effect erase them as well as intersex people and those identifying as non-binary".

Miles concludes the book by looking beyond simply winning the rights that we might get under capitalism. She shows how a socialist society, by breaking free of the capitalist model of the family, and ending poverty and inequality can, through the process of revolutionary change be one in which people would have "many different gender expressions". She finishes with an inspiring quote from Leslie Feinberg who wrote in hir book Transgender Warriors:

None of us will be free until we have forged an economic system that meets the needs of every working person. As trans people, we  will not be free until we fight for and win a society in which no class stands to benefit from fomenting hatred and prejudice, where laws restricting sex and gender and human love will be unthinkable.

The important statement here, is that "none of us will be free" which includes those who don't identify as trans, as well as those who are non-binary or transgender. We will not be free, until everyone is free. Laura Miles' is book is a timely and important contribution to that struggle that ought to be read by every political activist fighting oppression and exploitation.

Related Reviews

Orr - Marxism and Women's Liberation
Leacock - Myths of Male Dominance
Engels - Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State

Victor Serge - Unforgiving Years

To understand Victor Serge's Unforgiving Years means understanding Serge's own life. As a young anarchist he was imprisoned for his rebellious activity. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution he arrives in Petrograd inspired by the Bolshevik revolution and determined to be part and parcel of spreading it internationally. His writings, speeches and activity become geared to that end. Sadly Serge wasn't in Petrograd for the Revolutionary height of the movement. But he was there to document it, and to write on the Civil War and its aftermath - the rise of Stalin's bureacratic state that stifled and destroyed both the Russian Revolution and the international movement that had developed from it. Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary, detail much of this experience and are essential for socialists today. His account of the Russian Revolution and Civil War in Year One of the Russian Revolution is similarly indispensable.

These experiences imbibe Serge's novel Unforgiving Years. This was his final novel. It's filled with the darkness at the heart of the twentieth century - the Second World War and the defeat of the Russian Revolution (though not, specifically the Holocaust). In four closely connected episodes Serge sums up the Revolution as an event that drew colossal inspiration and dedication from millions of people, who were then spat out by the regime that took over. It's a complex and difficult work. Serge has a small group of inter-connected characters, two of whom Daria and D might be easily confused. D is a Russian secret agent who wants out, and Daria is a close comrade he has known since she was a young fighter in the Russian Civil War. D escapes, Daria stays and, while disgraced, is recalled to duty in the Siege of Leningrad where she experiences the horrors of that most brutal of conflicts. Characters, lovers, friends, comrades come and go - some die, some vanish, written out of history, and others move on.

Daria ends up underground in Germany as the war ends. She meets up with the Resistance and brutally dispatches the Russian enemies. This is the section that reads most like a novel, as she and others struggle to survive the collapse of Hitler's Reich. It's the final part though, when reunited in Mexico, the two D's face the end.

The novel is dark and full of despair. The hope, the love, the inspiration is fleeting but rather than simply being due to war and destruction it is also because of the tragedy that has befallen people's hopes of a better world: crushed by fascism and Stalinism. In this sense the novel follows Serge's own tragedy. He once told Trotsky's widow that only the two of them really remembered how it was. It was an exaggeration, but not by much. Serge wasn't murdered, but his life's work was broken. Perhaps he saw a future when the movement would grow again, but that's not here in this novel - this is the defeat of a class, individualised down to the experiences of a handful of characters.

The book isn't an easy read. It benefits the contextualisation that translator Richard Greeman gives in his introduction. But it's subject matter, it's disjointed story-line and its wide range of characters make it difficult to follow in places. Nonetheless it's an amazing work.

Related Reviews

Serge - Conquered City
Serge - Revolution in Danger
Serge - Year One of the Russian Revolution
Serge - Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901 - 1941