Jonathan C. Slaght - Owls of the Eastern Ice

Reading a blow by blow account of someone studying for a PHd might not be the most exciting of book choices, but Jonathan Slaght's account of his studies of Blakiston's Fish Owl is absolutely riveting. These particular owl's are extremely rare. They live in Japan and Primorye, an extremely remote part of Russia, north-east of Vladivostok and near the mutual border with China and North Korea. This is a genuine wilderness area, of tiny frontier towns, few roads, vast expanses of forest and some unusual ecological systems. Slaght know's the area relatively well and he is well acquainted with Russian and Russia. But he is very much an outsider. Many of the people he meet with are gobsmacked to meet someone from America and he's bombarded with questions about the life they expect him to lead based on their knowledge from television.

Slaght's plan is spend several seasons locating pairs of owls, then tag and trace their movements over the next few years. Plans, of course, seem very straightforward when they are written in the comfort of offices. But the reality of the cold, desolate and wet wilderness makes things very difficult indeed. Slaght could not have succeeded without a supporting cast of conservationists and colleagues. These men (and they are all men) have more experience than he does, and are more knowledgeable of the surroundings. They know locations, people and, crucially, the owls. They are also wonderfully eccentric. Slaght quickly learns to drink vodka - visitors who come to their hut to see the America inevitably bring a bottle of vodka with them. Slaght learns that Russian vodka often only has a foil cap. Once opened the bottle is always drained - why would you need a screw on lid? At one celebration when he has finally managed to tag an owl, Slaght gets very drunk and wakes with a terrible hangover. It turns out the guests that night had brought cleaning fluid not vodka.

Fish owl's are fascinating creatures. They live off fish and seek a space with open water, nesting in the trunk of a dead tree nearby. They have a unique mournful cry that a pair will duet together, and look (from both the pictures in this book and Slaght's description) like a bedraggled grumpy bird that Slaght describes at one point as looking like "feathered golems". They are also huge - as big as eagles.

Primorye is wilderness, but it is being opened up by loggers. The logging companies threaten the bird's landscape but ironically often provide the support infrastructure that the conservationists need. Slaght recognises that he has to work with the companies to protect the owls and, together with his colleagues, seems to have some success. There is a similar convoluted relationship with the hunters of the region whose actions threaten not just the owls, but also the rarer tigers. 

Oddly enough, for a book focused on fish owls, I felt that I wanted to know more about the birds themselves. They are elusive and I suspect few people who read this book will have heard of them before. But because Slaght focuses on the story of his studies, we tend to learn about the owls as he does. It means that the totality isn't really brought together. 

But the book is more than just an account of these studies. It is a fascinating account of the human ecology of Primorye. The people here are poor and buffeted by wider social, environmental and economic forces that appear, as if by magic, to transform their lives and landscapes. Their confusion at the idea of western people studying the owls is made plain by several people Slaght talks too. But so are their wider hopes. There's a poignant moment when when Slaght is in his van, two older women stop them and ask how to get treatment. Confused by this, Slaght learns that rumours where that a team of doctors were driving an X-ray van around the region helping people. Slaght has to dispel the myth though the story underlines the remoteness and lack of infrastructure in the area.

It's possible to read Owls of the Eastern Ice on many levels. It is firstly a fascinating insight into the hard work, science and boredom that goes into much crucial conservation work. It is also an entertaining travelogue of the type that opens up an entirely different community to outsiders eyes, though Slaght is not so crude a writer that this feels patronising or obtrusive. Finally it is a study of a rare and endangered animal that helps us understand how wider capitalist economics can threaten and transform an entire landscape. I highly recommend this fascinating read - even if you've never heard of Blakiston's Fish Owl before.

Related Reviews

Tudge - The Secret Life of Birds
Carson - Silent Spring
Lymbery - Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were
Weiner - The Beak of the Finch: Evolution in Real Time

William Dalrymple - The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

The story of the East India Company is perhaps without parallel in colonial history. The rise of a minor trading company, founded in 1599, to become one of the most powerful and wealthiest forces in the world is fascinating. It is also deeply tragic. As William Dalrymple points out in the introduction to his new history of the EIC, the first Indian word to enter the British lexicon was the Hindustani slang for plunder "loot". The anecdote tells us a great deal about what the EIC did in India. By 1773 the company had become "too big to fail" and was saved by an enormous bailout from the British government. Before that it had made a handful of English individuals enormously wealthy and many politicians, businessmen and royals had a finger in the EIC pie.

The vast scale of wealth was impressive. In 1765 the East India Company's Robert Clive was granted rights to trade in Bengal, as well as raise taxes (which generated between £2 and £3 million annually - £210 to £315 million today). This wealth did not simply line the pockets of the company's shareholders and directors it funded the growth of the EIC's power:

Seizing the many riches of Bengal with its fertile paddy fields and rice surplus, its industrious weavers and rich mineral resources, opened up huge opportunities for the Company and would generate the finance to continue building up the most powerful army in Asia. The vast revenues of Bengal, which had for so long powered the Mughal exchequer, could, Clive knew, make the Company as unassailable as the Mughals had once been - and provide the finance for perhaps, one day, conquering the rest of the country.

Dalrymple documents the clever dealings of the EIC and Clive in particular in building up bases of power among the Indian rulers who could support the Company's interests. As Emperor Shah Alam signed over rights to the EIC, it meant that: 

Two hundred and fifty EIC clerks backed by the military force of 20,000 Indian sepoys would now run the finances of India's three richest provinces, effectively ending independent government in Bengal for 200 years. For a stock market-listed company with profit as its main raison d'etre, this was a transformative, revolutionary moment.

Of course people like Clive returned home fabulously wealthy. Powis Castle on the Welsh borders was (and is) crammed to the rafters with glorious objects from India. The castle itself was bought by Robert Clive's eldest son with the millions that his dad made from his positions in India. One contemporary Indian observer Ghulam Hussain Khan contrasted the rule of the Mughals with that of the EIC.

They [The Mughals] bent the whole strength of their genius in securing the happiness of their new subject; nor did they ever abate from their effort, until they had intermarried with the natives and got children and families from them and become naturalised.

But the English

have a custom of coming for a number of years and then of going away to pay a visit to their native country, without any of them shewing an inclination to fix themselves in this land. And as they join to that custom another one of theirs, which every one holds as a divine obligation: that of scarping together as much money as they can in this country and carrying these immense sums to the Kingdom of England; so it should not be surprising that these two customs, blended together, should be ever undermining and ruining this country, and should become an eternal bar to it ever flourishing again.

The author might be forgiven for having a rose-tinted memory of Mughal rule - their immense wealth arose from systematic exploitation of the mass of the peasantry and military conquest after all. But the basic difference of the dynamic of rule is true, and there can scarcely be a better description of the way colonialism has destroyed landscapes and economies in the interests of capitalism.

Nor did the capitalists of the EIC care for the people under their rule. During the infamous famine of 1770 Dalrymple describes the disgraceful behaviour of the Company which utterly failed the millions of people starving. Despite massive amounts of cash they failed to supply seed grain or assist the starving. They did, in what Dalrymple calls the "one of the greatest failures of corporate responsbility" enforce taxes collection and even increased taxes by ten percent. At the height of the 1770 Bengal famine, about £100 million (in today's money) was sent back to England by the EIC.

As with Colonial rulers everywhere the Company became adept at playing off different sections of Indian society against each other. They built up rulers (especially ones they'd defeated) and played them off each other. As one statesman, Nana Phadnavis commented, "They know best how to destroy Indian cohesion. They are adept at the art of creating insidious differences and destroying the harmony of any state".

Eventually Company rule became to embarrassing for even the British government who found successive ways of taking over control. But British rule in India in the 19th century was built on the behaviour of the EIC. The Indian Rising of 1857 was the final nail in the coffin. In fact the origins of that mass rising lay in the behaviour of the British in India since the beginnings of the EIC. The callous, ignorant and racist attitude to the Indian people and the systematic stripping of their country of wealth.

Sadly, Dalrymple's book focuses on the rise of the East India Company. As such its decline and fall is described in an all too short epilogue. But in many ways its this period of Indian history that is often neglected by people trying to understand the impact of the British Empire. Dalrymple also gives a detailed account of Mughal history - something rarely acknowledged in British history books.

Understanding precisely how a stock holding company could come to exert such massive state power in India is crucial to understanding what happens in the 19th and 20th century. As the Black Lives Matter movement has shone a light on forgotten Imperial history this is a book that helps explain how the British came to be in India and what they did to the people after they arrived. William Dalrymple's book is based on original Indian and English sources and with every sympathy for those whose lives the EIC destroyed. Brilliantly written, powerful and moving I highly recommend it.

Related Reviews

Dalrymple - Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan
Gopal - Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent
Ward - Our Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres & the Indian Mutiny of 1857
Davies - Late Victorian Holocausts
Newsinger - The Blood Never Dried
Wagner - Amritsar 1919
Crowley - Conquerors

Mike Davis - The Monster Enters

Those of us who read Mike Davis' The Monster at Our Door in 2005 were perhaps more mentally prepared for the Covid-19 pandemic than many others. Some of us however spent the intervening years in a state of anxiety, jumping every time a news report (usually buried in the back pages of the newspapers) mentioned a "new strain" or "disease outbreak" somewhere in the world. Sadly Davis' has been proved right. While Covid-19 is not a strain of avian flu, the parallels are terrifyingly apparent to even the casual observer.

This new, updated, expanded and renamed edition of his book begins with Covid-19. Davis shows how in the aftermath of SARS, Ebola and Avian Flu many scientists and a few politicians drew important conclusions about the need for public health responses that both tried to avert disease and plan for pandemics. Unfortunately Davis also, meticulously, shows how the US government in particular undermined and destroyed the limited preparations that had been made. Rightly Davis eviscerates the Trump regime for its disastrous public health policies, but he shows how this response was rooted in earlier politics that saw public health spending as an unnecessary luxury.

In response to the threatened 2005 avian flu pandemic [Californian] Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Democratic leaders of the legislature spent hundreds of millions of dollars to stockpile 2,400 portable ventilators, 50 million respirators and materials to assemble 21,000 additional hospital beds. They also invested in three state-of-the-art 200-bed mobile hospitals that could be up and running within 72 hours... But Schwarzenegger was succeeded by a notorious penny pincher named Jerry Brown, who in 2011 crossed out the annual allocation of $5.8 million to maintain the stockpile... the strategic supplies... were either given away or sold off.

As I write this California has over 600,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19. No doubt those supplies, even with the differences between avian flu and Covid-19, would have been useful. 

But Davis doesn't simply note the horrific mistakes made by governments like Trump's in responding to Covid-19 and failing to heed lessons of the past. He shows how a much more thorough-going solution was needed if further pandemics were to be prevented. Indeed, the central theme of the book was how the neo-liberal driven industrial agricultural model (particularly in SE Asia, but also in Africa, Europe and the Americas) was the driver of disease and pandemics.

What was needed was fundamental change:

Permanent bio-protection against new plagues... would require more than vaccines. It would need the suppression of these 'structures of disease emergence' through revolutionary reforms in agriculture and urban living that not large capitalist or state-capitalist country would ever willingly undertake... As [Rob] Wallace emphasised a few years ago, "the agroeconomic impacts of global neoliberalism are foundational, felt across biocultural organisation, down so far as the virion and molecule.

One of the reasons I've spent the intervening years between first publication of Davis' book and the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in a state of anxiety is the knowledge that there has been no attempt to challenge the 'structures of disease emergence' inherent to industrial agriculture. Indeed, exactly the opposite has happened.

The problem, as Davis ably details, is that challenging these "structures" means challenging powerful corporate interests and the states that rule in their name. Behind the threat of avian flu pandemics lie the massive corporations that produce enormous quantities of chickens through the concentration of millions of birds in factory farming. The media and Trump inspired anti-Chinese feelings imply these are an Asian problem (when they bother to look at the role of industrial farming at all) but the problem of this model of farming is global, and is related to a model that puts profits before people, animals and planet. In fact Davis' analysis of the avian flu crisis shows how corporate power actually made government and medical responses worse as they shifted the blame onto small producers rather than change the massively profitable behaviour of the big factory farms. 

Writing about the enormous Bangkok based agricultural corporation Charoen Poklphand which "figures centrally in the story of H5N1's terrifying return in the winter of 2003-4" Davis writes:

CP senior executive Sarasin Viraphol assured reporters that, although the company would not allow the press to inspect its plants, avian flu was completely absent in Thailand. In fact, as the Bangkok press later reported, the government had been colluding with CP and the other giant poultry producers to conceal the epidemic by paying contract farmers with infected flocks to keep quiet; official deceit gave the big exporters several months to process and sell diseased inventory, as well as to disinfect their plants and institute isolation procedures... Small producers... were left alone to bear the brunt of the epidemic's human and economic costs.

While the situation with Covid-19 is different, its clear that similar priorities today have made the situation worse, and once again the poorest are suffering the most. In particular Davis shows how the contemporary model for drug research, through competing, profit orientated drug multinationals, makes finding a cure or vaccine harder and less likely.

While much of the book focuses on the 2000s and the threat from avian flu (Davis points out that this threat hasn't disappeared at all, only got worse) this book is still important reading. In fact those who read it, and were scared back in 2005 ought to re-read it, if only for the brilliant new opening chapter.

As in all his work, Mike Davis writes eloquently and clearly with a sympathy for ordinary people. His implicit call for us to challenge the status quo in order to prevent further pandemics is the biggest lesson we can take from this book. His clear analysis is a tool to help us understand and change a system that has already condemned millions of people to sickness and death in the interests of profit. One monster has entered the door, but further ones lie waiting outside.

Related Reviews

Davis - The Monster at Our Door (2005)
Davis - Late Victorian Holocausts
Davis - Planet of Slums
Quammen - Ebola: The Natural and Human History
Wallace - Big Farms Make Big Flu
Zinsser – Rats, Lice and History

Iain Banks - Stonemouth

*** Spoiler Alert ***

Stewart Gilmour returns to Stonemouth, a small town in Aberdeenshire. Its almost seven years since he's been there. The last time he saw the place he was hiding in the back of a freight train fleeing the town's main gangsters. Now he has returned for the funeral of Joe Murston, an old man who he befriended there, the patriach of the Murston gangster dynasty. Gilmour isn't a gangster himself, his first mistake was to fall in love with Ellie Murston, the beautiful eldest daughter of the dynasty. His second mistake was getting caught having sex with someone who was not Ellie a few week's before Gilmour was to be wedded to Ellie and, by default, the rest of the Murston clan.

Gilmour's first act on arrival back in Stonemouth is to make a very deferential visit to the man who would have been his father in law, and one of the most violent people in the town. But visiting Stonemouth takes Gilmour back into his memories. The story flits between the present and his own recollections of growing up in a place where hard-drinking, unemployment, drugs and violence were common. Eventually Gilmour expects to meet Ellie, and perhaps give her and apology. But there are Murston's who will do everything to stop that and protect their honour, even if that's not what Ellie herself wants.

Taking place over a long weekend the book packs a lot into a short space. It's remarkably tense. Not knowing what it was that led to Gilmour heading south as fast as the railway could take it, meant that there is an air of doom over the whole first half of the book. It wasn't easy reading, not helped by the hint of violence that also hangs over the book. An enjoyable read, the problem was that Gilmour behaves utterly stupidly throughout the whole thing. To me it seems utterly ridiculous that he would go to the town, parade himself around (even with the Murston seal of approval on the whole event) and get out of his head of drugs and drink. He invites retaliation and seems surprised when it appears. 

The ending too seemed a little fantastical - a little bit too much wish fulfilment as Gilmour gets his true love back. Ellie is the most one-dimensional of the characters, though she is the one who I sympathised most with. She's the one most trapped by the gangsters that she was born among. As a entertaining story it was certainly readable. As an exploration of how we look back on our youthful mistakes and wish things different it felt too unreal, contrived and its main character particularly stupid.

This was, sadly, Iain Bank's last novel. It's stronger than many of his others, but not his best. But his talent shines through in his writing, if the plot is a little bit messy.

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Ashley Dawson - People's Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons

In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution Lenin said in a November 1920 speech that Communism would be "Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country". Lenin outlined how industrial development wasn't possible without electrification, but the primary emphasis on Soviet power arose from his view of Communism as being a society were Soviets, workers' councils based on mass participatory democracy, would control and run the means of production.

I was reminded of Lenin's quote on several occasions while reading Ashley Dawson's latest book People's Power. Dawson argues that, given the great environmental crises we face, in particular climate change, the "great task" of our time is to end the fossil fuel infrastructure at the heart of capitalist society. But, he shows, it is not enough to do this simply through a transition to renewable energy. This will be insufficient "to avert climate chaos":

Unless we dismantle and replace a capitalist system based on extreme extraction, inexorable growth, mounting inequalities, militarism and colonialism, our headlong rush toward extinction will continue. We need not just decarbonization, but global system change.

A little later he continues:

The struggle for energy transition is thus a fight for public and collective control of energy resources, and for democratic control of the state power that shapes the development of such resources. It is, in sum, a struggle for energy democracy.

No wonder I found myself reaching for that Lenin quote.

Based in the US, Dawson takes a highly critical look at the existing US energy system. It is a chaotic mix of power companies and suppliers, a highly unsuitable electrical grid and a system trapped by the logic of capitalist accumulation around fossil fuels. It is also a energy system that has been at the heart of both transformation vision and class struggle. Dawson shows how different visions of energy supply were present at the birth of the US electrical era. One were the system was organised for public good, the other for corporate greed. Dawson explains how in 1926 Gifford Pinchot argued for the transformation of the Pennsylvanian electrical grid. Pinchot said about the transition to electricity from stream power:

It behooves us not to let it break upon us unawares, not to permit generations of needless bitter conflict to follow it, but to think out the problems it will create, and to take measures in advance to avoid the long train of struggle and disturbance which followed the last great change in industrial power.

It would be easy to chastise someone like Pinchot for naivety in the face of capitalist industrial power, but his vision remains important to us, not least as around 1.1 billion people do not have access to electricity today. With the need to offer everyone in the world equitable access to energy, at the same time as making sure that we aren't tipped into runaway climate change, this remains the central question for Dawson. How can we supply energy safely, cheaply and sustainably for all? Dawson asks,

How might the coming energy transition contribute to new relations of production and exchange that are based on solidarity rather than exploitation? If past energy transition have tended to intensify the power of elites, can the current energy transition help spark a broader shift toward more egalitarian and democratic social relations?

Much of the book points out the barriers. The power and immense wealth of the energy corporations. The centrality of fossil fuel to capitalism. The way that politicians and capitalist states have used their close links to coal, oil and gas companies to prevent the introduction of renewables or energy reduction measures. Many of the these examples are from the United States, but their are parallels for all of us living in the Global North. Even "liberal" politicians like Obama have used their positions to encourage the development of new sources of fossil fuels like shale gas.

In contrast Dawson highlights the mass, collective struggles that have fought to provide energy to those that lacked it, and to move towards renewable energy over fossil fuels. I was, I'll admit, initially disappointed by Dawson's focus on German movements that have (successfully) collectively fought to setup local renewable cooperatives and the like, by-passing big national corporations. I was worried that Dawson was heading down a path of arguing that we could build sustainable spaces within the existing capitalist system. But actually Dawson's approach is more nuanced. He shows how these sort of community campaigns can make real change, transforming the national political agenda, and putting the corporations on the back foot, even though the capitalists do fight back and seek to regain their position by supply Green energy. At root, what is needed, Dawson explains is real democracy, control and management from below.

Do legal paradigms already exist to help community-based organisations... escape from the clutches of fossil capital and adopt solar power on a mass basis? What are the limits... and what juridical innovations might address these limits? These questions all relate to much broader struggles to establish new, revolutionary forms of popular sovereignty to defend and extend the commons, but they have a particular import for the fight for energy democracy. The struggle for a rapid and just energy transition is at the core of broader struggles... The question of the energy commons is therefore fundamental to the fight for a collective future.

Of course such arguments fly completely in the face of capitalist logic. Ultimately this means that winning such gains on the scale required means a challenge to the capitalist system, and in particular the state. Unfortunately I think that Dawson's argument around this is undermined by his reliance on the analysis of the state provided by the Greek-French Marxist Search Results Nicos Poulantzas. Poulantzas concluded that the analysis of the state developed by Lenin meant a "permanent scepticism about the state [which] precluded the possibility of mass intervention in existing politics". In contrast Dawson quotes James Angel arguing that the state "was not to be discounted as a 'mere instrument of capital'." Personally I think this is inadequate. After watching the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871, Marx concluded that workers cannot simply take over the machinery of the state but find new ways of organising. Engels wrote that the state was "armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds". I think this analysis fits more closely with how governments behave in supporting fossil fuel corporations. But more importantly I think this approach to the state helps answer that important question that Dawson raises. How will we make the urgent change we need? 

The answer lies in workers power - the new organs of working class democracy that revolutionary movements throw up. That's not to say we should shun any attempts to build alternatives to the fossil fuel corporations today- though as Dawson highlights we need to be honest about the limitations of these within capitalism. In fact Dawson's final chapter is a brilliant challenge to those who think we can build space within capitalism that can save the planet on its own. 

Unlike leaves... solar panels do not grow on trees: they must be manufactured, using chemicals that are often highly toxic and in conditions that do not escape the conditions of labour exploitation and degradation that characterise the era of fossil capitalism... Eventually, the question of controlling the means of production returns... and energy transition that maintains existing forms of capitalist production and infrastructure will be nothing short of devastating for the planet and vulnerable frontline communities.

Ashley Dawson's book is a devastating critique of fossil fuel capitalism. Its a call to arms for a transformative approach to energy that places collective ownership, democracy and the rights and needs of everyone at the heart of the struggle for a sustainable planet. My minor criticisms aside, this is a really excellent read.

Related Reviews

Dawson - Extreme Cities
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Yohannes - The Biofuels Deception

Priyamvada Gopal - Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

One of the consequences of the reemergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 was a renewed discussion about the nature and legacy of the British Empire. The toppling and then symbolic drowning of a statue of the slave trader Edward Coulson in Bristol became emblematic of this when anti-racist protesters quite literately pushed a critique of empire into public discourse.

Priyamvada Gopal's book is a wonderful contribution to this process and ought to be widely read among those seeking to understand the British Empire and what it meant for the modern world. Among right-wing commentators (and many of those who were upset by the destruction of Coulson's statue, there is a a belief that empire was essentially a benevolent institution that developed the infrastructure and institutions of the colonised countries, lifting them to up nearer to that of the "civilised", "democratic" European west.

Gopal's book shows how many people who saw empire through a similar lens to this latter position had their views transformed by the active resistance of people in colonised nations to the empire. So this is not a book that gives a people's history of empire. Rather its one that takes specific moments of revolt in Imperial history and shows how they transformed the political terrain in Britain. Often this led to far-reaching transformations in how people conceived of the world they lived in. The Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica in October 1865 for instance, arose not simply out of colonial brutality, but the reality of colonial rule itself, where the plantation owners, believed "the main problem affecting Jamaica was the lack of steady black plantation labour". But this

refused to acknowledge the widespread desire among freed slaves and their descendants to control their own economic destiny through farming smallholdings rather than be shackled to low-wage labour on terms laid out by the planters. What emerged, therefore, was a stark ideological clash about what freedom meant. One view, touted by the planters and endorsed by the colonial government, insisted that freedom consisted of the 'option' of selling labour to a capitalist entity for prices determined by the latter. The other refused anything resembling the contractual and compulsory extraction of labour in favour of controlling the output of a smallholding. 

Resistance and rebellion raised wider issues than simply oppressive social and political relations. They opened up debates about the very nature of society and for some of those watching from Britain, they raised questions about the type of society they wanted too. Some of these figures are fascinating in themselves. The British diplomat, writer and poet Wilfrid Blunt was in Cairo in the run up to the British suppression of the Urabi Rebellion. Blunt was close to Urabi himself and became a go-between, albeit one whose sympathies lay increasingly with the Egyptian people. Blunt's engagement with Arabic people, their culture and religion opened him up to a very different world-view, which meant that when "the occupation of Egypt inaugurated the modern phase of British high imperialism - the infamous 'scramble for Africa'" he became a key figure in a "chorus of dissent from within Britain". Blunt, alongside other British liberals "found their assumptions and ideals challenged, complicated and reshaped by witnessing anti colonial rebellion and engaging with Egyptians involved in it".

All of these examples used by Gopal bear out this process. From Morant Bay and Egypt to the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and so on, we see how the voices and actions of rebellion led to the transformation of ideas for activists in Britain. In turn this helped fuel anti-colonial movements in the heart of the empire itself.

It would be wrong (and dangerous) however to interpret this as examples of white radicals becoming aware of social reality and then becoming the sole agents of change. Indeed Gopal shows that there was often a dialectical process between the social movements in the colonies and British thinkers and activists. But she also emphasises the role of black activists, thinkers and academics in being the agents of new ways of thinking about empire and colonial rule. For example, the London Manifesto that came out of the second Pan-African Congress in 1921, led by W.E.B du Bois, raised complex questions that still resonate today. Gopal explains:

The London Manifesto made visible a fault-line that would haunt metropolitan anti-colonialism and debates on the left over the next decades. In the execution of capitalist crime, where the project of empire was inextricable from the project of capital, could it be that white labour is 'particeps criminis with white capital'? The authors and endorsers of the manifesto were not claiming that white labour was not exploited... They also refuse to claim 'perfectness of our own', assigning black people responsibility for what the text calls 'failure to advance'. Instead, it places a more challenging question on the table: how could and show white labour assess its role in the project of imperialism given the extent to which, both consciously and unconsciously... it had been 'cajoled and flattered into imperialistic schemes.

The Manifesto, Gopal says, "put forward a difficult proposition. The problem of labour versus capital would not be solved in England... as long as a parallel dynamic 'marked the relations of the whiter and darker peoples'."

Black radical thinkers and wider events such as the Russian Revolution would shape new ideas in anti-colonial thought and practice. The London based International African Service Bureau, founded by figures including George Padmore, CLR James in 1937 would take existing anti-imperialist ideas and radically develop them. Gopal explains:

Rather than just 'translating' communist categories into 'the idiom of Pan-Africanism', the task at hand was one of creating a new language that did not repudiate other vocabularies of critique, but sought to bring them in more strenuous engagement with each other. Out of this would emerge a revitalised collaborative anticolonialism. The collective work of the IASB pointed towards Africa as n the West Indies as 'co-producers' of modernity, black intellectuals not just being influenced by European thought, but producing knowledge of the world.

Reading this in 2020 as Black Lives Matter has exploded onto the streets and forced politicians and institutions globally to address questions of historical legacy, racism and Imperialism today, I was struck by how relevant these debates felt. Gopal's book is much more than a catalogue of imperial crimes, it is an insight into the way that anti-colonial rebellion has thrown up individuals and ideas that challenge existing worldviews and forces new ways of looking at society on even distant observers. Today that process continues with debates around the politics, language and practice of the anti-racist movement. But, as Gopal concludes, studying this history, "enables Britons to lay claim to a different, more challenging history, and yet one that is more suited to a heterogeneous society which can draw on multiple historical and cultural resources."

Priyamvada Gopal's Insurgent Empire is a key text for those activists trying to understand the nature of the racist capitalist society we live in, and develop strategies and ideas to transform it. I highly recommend it.

Related Reviews

Anderson - Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity & Non-Western Societies
Høgsbjerg - Chris Braithwaite: Mariner, Renegade & Castaway
Gott - Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt
Newsinger - The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire
Wagner - Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear & the Making of a Massacre
Ward - Our Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres & the Indian Mutiny of 1857

Charlie Jane Anders - All the Birds in the Sky

One of my best reads over the Covid period was Charlie Jane Anders' The City in the Middle of the Night so I was really pleased that the first book I was able to buy in an actual bookshop was her earlier book All the Birds in the Sky. I am pleased to say that this was as good a read as City and matched it for innovative thinking, entertainment and radical politics.

The novel begins with a girl and boy in a typical American school. Both are outsiders and, as a result are ostracised and bullied. Patricia is a witch, she discovers that she can speak to birds and Laurence, who becomes her friend is a technology geek, scientist and inventor of the two second time machine. The two second time machine is useless, unless you want to escape bullies, but it is enough to show the outside world that he's got extremely important skills.

As you'll already tell, this means that the book is set in a world that is not quite ours. Magic is real, though controlled by a secret network of witches. Science technology is different to our universe, but only slightly. But, similar to our own time, Patricia and Laurence's world is on the brink of disaster. As adults both Patricia and Laurence take different approaches. Patricia's magical network tries to heal unhappiness. Laurence ends up with a network innovators, headed by the billionaire Milton (modelled on Elon Musk?) who are looking for a technical way to escape Earth.

Telling you more about the story would ruin things. What's important to note though is how Anders handles the relationship between Patricia and Laurence. From their estrangement at school, based on misunderstandings and outside interference to their reunion years later, Anders explores what its is like to be an outsider, to be confused about friends and lovers and trying to understand who you are. Unfortunately Patricia and Laurence are doing all this in the context of the Unravelling of system.

In essence this is a story about friendship, but its also a warning about the dangers of trying to solve the world's crises with simple solutions - both technological and natural. But the world building is wonderful, the characters are brilliantly drawn and the growing environmental and capitalist crisis feels frighteningly real. There's a lot here: engaging entertaining reading, plenty of in-jokes and a clever plot. Great fun.

Related Reviews

Anders - The City in the Middle of the Night

Nick Martell - The Kingdom of Liars

I was looking forward to reading Nick Martell's debut novel because it seemed to offer an intriguing basis for the magic of this fantasy land - those who specialise in various magical powers - lose memories as they use them. Its in interesting idea, implying that the magic requires something from those who seek to master it. Unfortunately this is about the only innovative idea behind the novel and I found the rest of the story overlong, meandering and, in places, confusing.

It is set in the city state of Hollow, where former noble Micheal Kingman, struggles to find his place in society. As a boy his father, a devoted follower of the king whose hereditary social position was intended to act as a balance to the ruler, is found guilty of killing the king. Branded a traitor, and exiled from the Court, Micheal remains convinced of his father's innocence.

Hollow is beset by outside threats and its rulers respond with repression and violence. But the state teeters on the brink of collapse. Michael finds himself in the midst of confusion and shifting intrigues by various court figures and mercenaries as he tries to work out what really happened on the day is father allegedly became a traitor and find a safe niche for him and his family.

It all sounds very interesting. But the story is cumbersome and overly complicated. In older fantasy there was usually an attempt to build the world early in the book so the reader can understand the actions of the characters in their context. Nick Martell has chosen however to reveal important aspects of the world and its magic through the book, so there are lots of confusing references that only make sense when something is explained later, often much later. These include key information that explains how Hollow is ruled. At other times I was left bemused - Martell emphasises the strangeness and magical nature of Hollow, but ensures that our characters breakfast heartily on bacon and tea. The combination of fantasy and normal made little sense to me.

While Martell manages to create a real atmosphere of disintegrating social chaos around the rulers of Hollow, he fails to follow this up with fleshed out characters. Michael Kingman's behaviour seemed unreal to me. He constantly makes decisions that seem utterly, well, stupid. I ended up finding him really annoying rather than identifying with his flawed heroism as the author clearly wanted me to. This, combined with confusing world-building, left me unsatisfied and unlikely to read the sequels.

The Vinland Sagas - The Norse Discovery of America

Conventional wisdom has it that in 1492 Christopher Columbus "discovered" America. Of course he didn't discover it - that was the privilege of those people who crossed the Bering Straits some tens of thousands of years before and created complex societies from North to South of the Americas. But Columbus' discovery however is a useful narrative that seeks to place Europeans as the most important people in the Americas. It also conveniently wipes from history the experience of other explorers, raiders and colonisers who got there 500 years before 1492 from Greenland. The Vikings.

The two Viking sagas that make up this book, with a supporting introduction from Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson, tell the story of these expeditions. The Grælendinga and Eirik's sagas detail the way that Vikings from Greenland discovered, by chance, the lands and tried to initially colonise them.

The actual sagas are short - in fact the introduction is longer than either tale, the authors of which caution against reading the sagas as either historical accounts or stories. They are, in fact, cultural artefacts which combine history with important genealogical information as well as exciting tales. Much ink has been spilt trying to match up landscape details with real life geology in the Americas, and this has been only partially successful. Its worth noting that the introduction here is written only shortly after the Norse site at L'Anse aux Meadow was discovered, so archaeological evidence is limited.

Readers attempting to see these sagas as simply historic accounts and those transposing information directly will quickly come unstuck. What to make of the Viking account of a Uniped that kills one of the colonisers? Perhaps that bit was invented during one of the retelling of the sagas, or a story that returned with the first visitors to North America. Either way, like other accounts of the ancient past, there is a tendency to seamlessly blend fantasy into the narrative.

But there is some interesting, if very limited, information here about the region the Vikings arrived in. Similar accounts in both the sagas show the Vikings traded red cloth for local goods, especially food. The region had both vines (hence the name) and grains, as well as much wildlife. In an interesting account the Vikings send two slaves off to explore who return with reports of excellent land suitable for cultivation.

Backing up the main narrative is information on Viking voyages from European mainland to Iceland and on to Greenland. The Greenland Viking colony (given that name to make it more attractive to settlers as both sagas attest) is often imagined to have been unsuccessful and shortlived - conditions were even harder than Iceland. But it is clear that multiple voyages to North America provided resources, particularly wood, for the colony. Nonetheless the Viking community survived in Greenland for 500 years, making it more successful than some more modern states.

Both sagas, and the introduction, are readable and entertaining, as well as provoking many other questions for the reader. They give a sense of a much more dynamic society 1000 years ago than we usually believe. And, they also remind us, that had Native Americans driven Columbus back into the sea in 1492, as their ancestors eventually drove the Vikings off, then history might have been a little different.

Related Reviews

Parker - The Northmen's Fury
Gaiman - Norse Mythology
Lindsay - The Normans and their World

Mark Roseman - The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution

When I was young we had several trips to Berlin to visit family. There we would always look forward to visiting the Wannsee resort, playing on the artificial beach and exploring the woods. Many years later I was horrified to learn that Wannsee was synonymous with the Holocaust.

On the 20 of January 1942 senior figures in the Nazi bureaucracy assembled at a villa in Wannsee. The subject of the conference was the "Final Solution" of the "Jewish Question". The conference itself was relatively small, with 15 delegates representing different sections of the government. Convened by Reinhard Heydrich who reported to Himmler, the conference had the stamp of authority from the highest levels in the Nazi government though, ironically, author Mark Roseman argues we don't clearly know why it was called.

Wannsee would have remained forgotten had it not been that a single copy of the thirty minutes printed after the event would turn up in the post-war investigations into Nazi crimes. These minutes (known as Protocols in German) summarised the event and its conclusions. Some investigators hoped this would be the smoking gun that showed the Nazi machine deciding to embark up on programme of mass murder. But as Roseman explains, that programme had already begun. Instead, the event appears to have been an occasion to discuss the problems that arose from the planned destruction of the Jews in terms of resources, but also - chillingly - to thrash out who in the bureaucracy had ultimate responsibility. It also, as Roseman concludes, was a place where the high-command was informing lower levels of existing decisions:

The Wannsee conference is thus a king of keyhole, through which we can glimpse the emerging Final Solution. It took place at a time when the idea of a reservation had been abandoned, labour scarcities were pressing and when the Nazis may or may not have decided exactly how to eliminate all the Jews. But it is evident that Wannsee is not the place at which the murder decisions themselves es were taken. For the most part, Heydrich was disseminating conclusions drawn elsewhere. On some issues the participants had something to say; for the most part their role was to listen and to nod.

The Wannsee Protocols are published in the book's appendix, though they are easy to find online. It is a awful document to read - their structure is similar to the minutes produced from normal conferences and meetings, but their subject is mass murder. Roseman points out that the language is made up of euphemisms that disguise the real subjects - talk of Jewish "reservations" and "emigration" when the Nazis had already ruled out these strategies. Roseman writes:

The euphemisms were its normal mode of communicating about murder, and will have served here to remind recipients of the language codes they should use. At the same time it was so vital to establish the participants' shared knowledge in the killing programme that this overrode the need for caution. This is why Lammers, Stuckart and others were at such pains after the war to deny having seen the Protocol, to escape from the trap that Heydrich had set them.

But reading the Wannsee Protocol myself I was stunned by how open the language is. It is impossible to read these sentences without seeing a group of men around a conference table discussing mass murder.

Jews fit to work will work their way eastwards constructing roads. Doubtless the large majority will be eliminated by natural causes. Any final remnant that survives will doubtless consist of the most resistant elements. They will have to be dealt with appropriately.

The men having these discussions, and enjoying a brandy afterwards, were just bureaucrats. These were "educated" men, most of whom had doctorates. But almost all of whom had long years in Nazi organisations. These were dedicated fascists, who had spent years advocating the destruction of Jewish people and other undesirables. In addition, Roseman points out that "what is striking is how many people round the table had given direct killing orders or themselves had experience of killing". As a result, "no one arrived at Wannsee with even the faintest intention of speaking up for the Jews".

As mentioned Wannsee was not the moment the Holocaust was agreed. The Holocaust was a process that evolved over time, having its origins in the Nazi genocidal ideology, with its specifics arising from the realities of total war on the Eastern Front, the horrors of Nazi treatment of Jews and the violence of the fascist state. But the Wannsee conference, in Roseman's words, "cleared the way for genocide" by pulling in the fascist bureaucracy behind the plans. Mark Roseman's short book is an important insight into how, once Nazis take power, the machinery exists to turn genocidal fantasy into reality.

Related Reviews

Browning - The Origins of the Final Solution
Kershaw - Hitler, 1936-1945: Hubris
Kershaw - Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis
Lipstadt - Denying the Holocaust
Lipstadt - The Eichmann Trail
Evans - Telling Lies About Hitler
Black - IBM and the Holocaust

Richard Benson - The Farm

Picking up The Farm I will admit that I thought it would be a rather annoying romanticised description of life in the countryside. But Richard Benson's book turned out to be an insightful and entertaining  history of recent changes in rural England. Benson is not a farmer, though he comes from a family of farmers. While working in London at a job on a fashion magazine he gets a phone call from his parents back on the Yorkshire farm he grew up on. They're selling up. The initial shock to the system leads to the first of many returns home that culminate with the family farm being sold to a property developer. While telling this story Benson simultaneously tells the story of growing up on the farm and the changes to the English countryside.

Benson has no head for farming. He can't drive a tractor in a straight line, never has the right tool ready for his dad and constantly struggles with the animals. But he is intimately tied to land that generations of his family had worked. But the industry and the farm is changing. While a boy his parents had already sold off the land used for growing crops to focus on pigs. Then they found, alongside most of their neighbours, that they couldn't compete with cheap meat from the continent. Today the middle classes love some locally reared, organic pork. In the 1990s it was all about the cheapest possible cuts - or rather the massive profits that supermarkets and big agriculture could make.

The economic downturn as British agriculture is neglected by successive governments, means unemployment, drinking and drugs become a feature of life in rural communities. So are suicides. Benson deals sensitively on the question of mental health, including that of his father. A childhood friend commits suicide and you get a sense of the anger and frustration in the community at the inability to fight the destruction of a way of life. Interestingly, and contrary to much perceived wisdom, these farmers aren't right wing Thatcherites - there's a charming bit when Benson's mother defends the striking miners.

Benson survives by running away to study literature and become a writer. His brother remains to look after the pigs and work on other peoples land; land that was once owned by the family. When the farm goes his brother can continue with labouring, but you do wonder what the long term future holds. Its a question that many more British farmers must be asking in 2020 as economic uncertainty rises.

Benson's writing is fluid and entertaining. Among the tragedy there is real humour and warmth such as can only come out of a close knit community. There's no way that the middle-class urbanites who buy up the former farm buildings which have been converted into luxury homes will ever know that feeling.

Related Reviews

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Mary Shelley - Frankenstein

One of the things that becomes quickly very clear when reading Frankenstein for the first time, is that you aren't reading the book you thought you were going to be. Frankenstein has become such a cliche that you expect the monster to be a lumbering giant that is animated by a fancy electric apparatus, powered by lightening with a switch thrown by a maniac scientist. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein however is a much more subtle work that deals with big philosophical questions as well as shocking its reader with cruelty and violence.

Famously Shelley wrote the book after a late night discussion with her partner Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and his companion Polidori who came up with the idea of them all writing a ghost story. Although only Mary Shelley's story reached a book length publication, the Penguin edition I have also includes the few pages that Byron wrote and the longer (and quite effective) vampire story that Polidori produced. This latter in itself is fascinating for its insights into Byron, but need not detain us here.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a remarkable work that poses a very big question. What is it to be human? Dr. Frankenstein who animates the "monster" (which is very distinctly not called Frankenstein - take that Hollywood) is a troubled genius. Arriving at university Frankenstein is inspired to break from his abstract philosophical thought and pursue a career in the natural sciences. Shelley starkly poses the rational sciences as being separate from the more abstract romantic ideas that her anti-hero has been dabbling with. Its not clear how Frankenstein makes his creation, but once life is breathed into the creature, its inventor runs away, terrified by what he has done. Devoid of friendship and lost in a strange world the creature gradually learns to speak and locate his creator. Shunned because of his looks, the creature begins a terrible revenge - not to simply destroy Frankenstein, but to break him by destroying everything that is dear to him.

The other thing that strikes me reading Frankenstein is how horrible Victor Frankenstein is. This scientist is not "mad" as the film suggests, rather obsessed with triumphing over natures laws to create life. To literally become God. When this backfires his remorse and fear overcome his own rationality and he retreats - his emotions taking over from logic. But on every occasion when he might have fixed things he backs down, interested in only himself. Its a theme that the creature also takes up. His eavesdropping leads him to an understanding of the real horror of society. Overhearing the conversations of a poor family the creature learns:

Every conversation of the cottagers now opened new wonders to me. While I listened to the instructions which Felix bestowed upon the Arabian, the strange system of human society was explained to me.  I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty, of rank, descent, and noble blood.

Poverty is a great theme of Frankenstein. If the creation of Frankenstein's monster is an easy metaphor for the industrial revolution, it is a revolution that eats its own children through poverty and destruction. The creature, shunned by humanity and his creator, wants to run away to his own idyll, with a second female creature created by Frankenstein. When Frankenstein refuses the scene is set for mutual destruction. Mary Shelley's background in radical politics and the left-wing, radical, milleui that she wrote the book in is apparent on every page. If this is a ghost story, the real horror is the real world.

Told through letters, recollections and flashback this is not an easy read. The story is filled out, in the manor of Victorian novels, with vast amounts of scene-setting information. But this is a fascinating and very enjoyable read - just not necessarily the one you were expecting.

Jonathan Crary - 24/7

Karl Marx pointed out that there are two ways that the capitalists can extract extra surplus value from workers and hence make more profits. By increasing either absolute surplus value or relative surplus value. The latter means making workers more productive, but the former requires making the worker labour more. The problem for the capitalists has always been the natural limits of the worker and the world they labour in. You can only make workers labour for a certain number of hours before they need food, relaxation and sleep. In this context Jonathan Crary's 24/7 book ought to be an important discussion of how capitalism has tried and is trying to extend the working day into 24 hours. Factories work shift systems, public transport systems operate round the clock and so on. But can capitalism fundamentally overcome naturally imposed limitations on the working day? These are important arguments for both the exploiters and the exploited. As Crary points out:

The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated needs, subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism. Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism.

The importance of sleep, which Crary argues "stand[s] for the durability of the social", is inseparable from the way that time itself has transformed itself through history. Indeed a study creation of capitalist time illuminates the way that society has commodified every aspect of our lives in the pursuit of profit.

So it is disappointing that Crary's book fails to engage with this material, and instead focuses on an esoteric engagement with various philosophers that seems to cover everything from technology to social media, but rarely gets to grip with the real material aspects of sleep and capitalism. While there is a lot of material of interest, the brevity of the work prevents the author drawing out these insights and constructing a coherent argument around them. I was left feeling that the author was more angry about the way that social media has intruded upon our lives than (say) workers working 12 hour shifts in sweat shops:

An attention economy dissolves the separation between the personal and professional, between entertainment and information, all overridden by a compulsory functionality of communication that is inherently and inescapably 24/7. 

This is, of course, true. But I felt that Crary overly focused on this rather than the detail of why capitalism operates like it does and what that means for workers. Social media, likes, friends and shares are an example of what the system does, but they are a consequence of 21st century capitalist production not its central aspect.

I was surprised that there wasn't at least passing reference to E.P. Thompson's classic essay Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism which I think backs up some of the historic material that Crary covers. But my biggest criticism is, perhaps, the opaque academic language which would put off many potential readers, even those who had enjoyed a good nights rest. There are far too many sentances that read like this, "This particular constellation of recent events provides a prismatic vantage point onto some of the plural consequences of neoliberal globalisation and of longer processes of Western modernisation". Writing like this can only restrict engagement with books like this, which is a shame, because the topic is of great importance to every working person today.

Related Reviews

Thompson - Customs in Common
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Kevin B. Anderson - Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity & Non-Western Societies

Karl Marx is popularly seen as an economist. His writings are often reduced down to an economic analysis and critic of capitalism. However, as this important book shows, Marx was a revolutionary thinker who, through his life, developed a sharp critique of the way that capitalism remade the world in its own image. In doing so Marx took up issues relating to racism, colonialism and non-Western communal social forms, that he considered essential for the socialist movement to understand as part of the struggle for a Communist society. Anderson writes:

In the 1840s, he [Marx] held to an implicitly uni-linear perspective, sometimes tinged with ethnocentrism, according to which non-Western societies would necessarily be absorbed into capitalism and then modernised via colonialism and the world market. But over time, his perspective evolved toward one that was more multi-linear, leaving the future development of these societies as an open question. By 1881-82 he was envisioning the possibility that Russia could modernise in a progressive non-capitalist manner, if its peasant-based revolutionary movement could link up with the working-class movements of Western Europe.

Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto begins with a celebration of capitalism over previously existing societies - the way that it had unleashed productive forces hitherto inconceivable. Marx writes of these forces "battering down" Chinese walls, drawing "even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation". Capitalism, they continue, "compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image."

While the Communist Manifesto does then continue to highlight the barbarity of "Civilisation" it is not particularly detailed on what "creating a world after its own image means" in terms of the impact of colonial countries, indigenous peoples and so on. But one of the central points of Marx at the Margins is that Marx's thinking on these issues evolves through his lifetime. As Anderson explains,

By 1853, Marx has begun to overcome the one-sidedness of the treatment of non-Western societies in the Manifesto... people from within non-Western societies are now credited with the potential of 'throwing off the English yoke-altogether' and self-starting the 'regeneration' of their societies and cultures. This regeneration would not, however, any more than the struggle of the Western working classes, be aimed at a return to the precapitalist past. It would retain the achievements of capitalist modernity.

A great deal of Anderson's book explores how Marx (and Engels) acted upon this understanding. Firstly he draws out neglected and ignored parts of their writing to show the extent to which an anti-colonial politics was at the core of their work for much of their active careers. Some of this is based on works like Capital and the Grundrisse, but some of its is also based on Anderson's knowledge of the much less well known works of Marx, including the detailed Ethnographic Notebooks. One reason that these works are less well known is that Marx archivists didn't consider them as important as his economic work. Marx's work on historic societies, indigenous people, non-Western societies and colonialism get relegated to secondary importance or worse. One editor of Marx's works, in 1925, for the MEGA project complained "why did he [Marx] was so much time on this... inexcusable pedantry".

But as Anderson shows, Marx's pedantry was not because of distraction, but because he was increasingly aware of the importance of these wider issues to his understanding of capitalism and the strategic ambition of the socialist movement.

Secondly Anderson shows how Marx's awareness of issues of colonialism and racism, were a key part of his activism. The question of Irish independence was never far from Marx's heart and Anderson draws out the key role of Marx and Engels in placing opposition to British colonial rule in Ireland within the politics of the First International. As Anderson shows, it was directly as a result of Marx's work that the International supported a position on Ireland that broke with "decades of prejudice and hostility of the British towards the Irish".

Equally important was opposition to slavery and, reading this as I was during the Black Lives Matter movement's re-emergence in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, I was struck by the importance of Marx's work on slavery to understanding the current situation in the United States. Anderson shows how despite their rulers' support for the South, British workers sided with the North during the American Civil War, "This was not only because they were antislavery, but also because European workers saw the US as the most democratic society of the time, virtually the only country were even white male workers enjoyed full suffrage". He quotes Marx:

As long as the English cotton manufactures depended on slave-grown cotton, it could be truthfully asserted that they rested on a twofold slavery, the indirect slavery of the white man in England and the direct slavery of the black man on the other side of the Atlantic. 

Time and again Marx celebrates the workers opposing the slave states in the US Civil War, and he and Engels engage in detailed discussions of the pursuit of the war and Lincoln's failure to encourage a revolutionary strategy.

Marx drew important revolutionary conclusions from his understanding of the close link between colonial oppression, resistance to colonialism and the contemporary socialist movement. A country that oppressed another, couldn't itself be free. So the importance of the British working class movement (and the left) in supporting the struggles of oppressed peoples' was key to the success of the struggle in the imperial nations. "[Marx] was placing Ireland at the centre of British revolutionary and labour politics. In both Cromwell's time and the 1790s he now held, the collapse of revolutionary possibilities in Britain was receded by British suppression of the Irish people."

But this itself was a position that developed. As Marx wrote to Kuglemann,

I have become more and more convinced - and the thing now is to drum this conviction into the English working class - that they will never do anything decisive here in England before they separate their attitude towards Ireland quite definitely from that of the ruling classes, and not only make common cause with the Irish, but even take the initiative in dissolving the Union established in 1801... Every movement in England itself is crippled by the dissension with the Irish, who form a very important section of the working class in England itself.

Marx was also shaped by the resistance movements themselves. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 for instance, meant that Marx "attacked British colonialism far more sharply" than he did in his 1853 writings.

Two final points from Kevin B. Anderson's work must be highlighted. Firstly the question of the development of capitalism. Marx's writings on primitive accumulation hold that the West followed a distinct process that saw capitalism arise out of feudal relations. This was often read "as a global and unilinear process of capitalist development, with England exhibiting the 'classic form'." But Anderson shows how Marx was constantly developing this position, and by the time of the later French edition of Capital he'd reached a more nuanced position, where (in Anderson's words) Marx's "narrative of primitive accumulation was meant as a description of Western European development, nothing more, and hardly a global grand narrative". Its this that forms the basis of Marx's writings about the peasant communes in Russia and their potential to move direct to socialism, without capitalism. Such ideas no doubt influenced Russian revolutionaries like Leon Trotsky in his work on combined and uneven development.

The other point I wanted to conclude on is Marx's "racism". In place, Anderson repeatedly notes, Marx did use language that we would see as highly ethnocentric and, on occasion, racist. For instance, Marx uses in several places the "N word". Interestingly Anderson points out that in modern editions of his work this has often been replaced with the word "blacks". Does this mean Marx was racist? Anderson argues that Marx was "using racist language in an anti-racist way", in other words his language was on occasion racist but his use of the terms was always in the context of confronting racism and colonialism as part of a wider project of the emancipation of all.

As I hope I have shown in this review Kevin B. Anderson's book is a highly important work for many reasons. The first of these is to rescue Marx as a wide-ranging anti-capitalist author, not simply a revolutionary economist. The second is to show Marx as a committed anti-racist activist who put opposition to Empire and colonialism at the heart of his theoretical and activist work. Thirdly to show that Marxism has a great deal to contribute to contemporary debates about the legacy of colonialism, slavery, imperialism and Empire today - particularly an understanding of the origins of racism. Finally Anderson indicates that many of Marx's lesser known works can contribute to important discussions around issues as diverse as indigenous struggles and historic communal societies. The book is well written, engaging and detailed and it is a must read for radical activists today.

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Marx - Capital Volume I
Marx - Grundrisse

Nina Lakhani - Who killed Berta Cáceres?

Between 2002 and 2017 some 1,500 activists were killed for their roles in protecting water, land, natural resources and the communities that rely on them. The death rate among environmental activists during the period was higher than for UK soldiers deployed to combat zones. One of those murdered campaigners was Berta Cáceres, a Honduran campaigner who had won the Goldman Environmental prize in 2015. A year later she was shot to death in her own home.

Journalist Nina Lakhani's work has focused on Honduras and activists like Berta Cáceres. This detailed book is the story of the murder and the struggle to for justice. At the end of it, several individuals are found guilty and are imprisoned. But what makes Lakhani's book so important is that the murder (and the role of those convicted) is put into the wider context of Honduran history and current political situation.

In Honduras there is a long tradition of violent repression of those challenging the status quo. As Lakhani explains:

anti-communist fervour was not a Cold War invention. In the first half of the twentieth century, Central America's elite landowning families - who enjoyed absolute economic and political power in their regional fiefdoms - were more that comfortable branding popular uprisings as communist threats. Any sniff of a political, social or labour movement demanding even modest reforms to tackle the stark inequalities was crushed, often brutally, to protect the interests of these elites.

By the 20th century Honduras was very much in the part of US interests, with successive US governments concerned with protecting their sphere of influence from left-wing threats (perceived or imagined). Infamous US ambassador John Negroponte, who served in Honduras from 1981-1985, oversaw military aid "rocketing" from $4m to $77m a year, in what Lakhani calls a "straightforward cash-for-turf deal" whereby the US gained "free rein" over Honduran territory. What is crucial for the story of Cáceres is that this created "a loyal force hooked on American money, equipment, training and ideology: cheaply bought loyalty which the US could count on again and again".

The late 20th century saw the arrival of neo-liberal policies that required the Honduran government, like most other central American nations, to implement all sorts of "reforms" which did nothing for the majority of the population but opened up the landscape to the multinationals. Under the Washington Consensus, Rafael Callejas, Honduran president from 1990-1994,

promoted programmes top break up collective land rights of indigenous and campesino communities in favour of multinational conglomerates. This is what ignited the modern-day land conflicts in Honduras, by putting rural communities opposed to environmentally destructive projects...against the country's elites and international financiers invested in so-called green energy projects.

Berta Cáceres

It was in these struggles that Berta Cáceres became a thorn in the side of the powerful. She came from an activist family and cut her teeth in the armed rebellion of the 1980s. In the early 1990s she helped found the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organisations of Honduras (COPINH). By the 2000s this was a key force organising rural and indigenous communities to oppose dams such as the Agua Zarca in the Lenca territory. In 2009 a coup overthrew President Manuel Zelaya whose minor reforms had irritated sections of the Honduran ruling class. While there is no space to go into this in detail here, it is worth noting that Lakhani shows the failure of the Obama administration to seriously challenge the coup, and specifically Hilary Clinton's pathetic role. The coup"unleashed a tsunami of environmentally destructive 'development' projects as the new regime set about seizing control of resource rich territories."

It is in this context that communities began to resist plans by a Honduran company (with links to international capital) Desarrollos Energéticos, S.A. (DESA) to construct several dams on the Gualcarque River. The river was important as a historic site, a place of work and a source of food and water which irrigated local farms. The dams would destroy communities and agreement had been driven through with no consultation in breach of international law. Cáceres threw herself into organising the movement which threatened to derail the project. She knew, as a result, that her life was in danger. DESA had spies in the movement and community and Honduras had a climate of impunity where murderers were seldom brought to justice. As we have seen activists of any stripe faced violence and murder regularly.

Berta Cáceres was a remarkable woman. In these pages were see a principled fighter for social justice who understood that the struggle to defend the environment was inseparable from the fight against injustice and capitalism. She was not afraid, in a macho environment, to champion the rights of women and the LGBT+ community. As one activist told Lakhani, Cáceres was killed "because they could not allow a woman to get away with endangering their business and threatening their investments... Berta's murder was fundamentally a machista murder". Another of Cáceres friends said "they killed a woman who dared speak out against a patriarchal system, that's why I call it a political femicide".

This book is thus a celebration of Berta Cáceres' life and struggles, as well as a devastating attack on the corruption and violence at the heart of Honudran society. The book, however, makes it clear that this is not simply about Honduras, but is a result of Western Imperialism and the way it commodifies the whole world in the interest of capital. The murder of Cáceres, and thousands of other activists, is one way the interests of imperialism and capital are furthered.

I wanted to finish my review by also highlighting the importance of author Nina Lakhani's work. Her journalism before and after Berta Cáceres' murder made sure that the world knew what had happened. It is in no small part due to Lakhani's reporting that those directly responsible for the killing are in jail. This book goes a long way to exposing the wider forces that made that possible. As a result Lakhani herself has faced very real threats of violence. Consequently her book is also a tribute to the sort of investigative journalism that has always told truth to power. But the last words should belong to Berta Cáceres:

If they kill me, the struggle for justice will go on. The world is more powerful than these criminals.

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