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Friday, June 28, 2024

Gregory F. Michno - Lakota Noon: The Indian Narrative of Custer's Defeat

One of the notable things about visiting the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn today is how it has been changed, under pressure from Native Americans, to incorporate their viewpoints and history into the memorial. While the location is dominated by an overt US militarism, there are multiple, moving testimonies and memorials to the Native American casualties. The story is told from the viewpoint of the victors as well as the victims.

Pursuing this approach to the battle I was pleased to pick up Gregory Michno's book Lakota Noon, whose subtitle indicates that it looks at the Indian narrative, something distinctly lacking from most accounts of the battle. The book is, it must be said, a boon to anyone who wants to do this and it would have been an excellent read prior to the battle. Michno has not just gathered many different indigenous accounts together, he has arranged them in a novel way. Rather than reading different accounts, from different viewpoints at one time, he has collected the parts of peoples' accounts together at the estimated times that they happened. Thus we can read differing points of view from the moment of Reno's attack, or during the chaos of the final moments of Custer's defeat.

The accounts are often shocking. Rarely do we read the actuality of conflict, and this was violent, hand to hand fighting, and the accounts by the Native Americans do not diminish that. But these are not just the reminiscances of arrogant victors, rather they are from soldiers who understood that they were fighting a great and significant battle. For many of them it was to be the most important milestone in their lives, their Lakota Noon. Thus we also also learn about Native American beliefs, their preparations for war, their understanding of US Cavalry tactics, and above all, their praise for the brave men they defeated.

There are some fascinating things among these accounts. One is that of the role of women. One Native American, Antelope, spent significant time on the day close to the action as she searched for a relative. Antelope "had seen other battles and had always liked to watch the men fighting, though she had been teased about it, for not many women followed the warriors to battle". Another example is that of Chief Gall, who recollected his personal experience of losing non-combatant relatives to the US cavalry, "his lodge was vacant. He extended his search around the point of timber a short distance o the south. There he finally found his family. Dead. His two wives and his three children, killed." Another account by Rain in the Face, recollected that a woman Moving Robe, whose brother had been killed was among the fighters. "Behold, there is among us a young woman! Let no young man hide behind her garment" shouted Rain in the Face to inspire the other warriors.

But mostly readers will want to learn the accounts of the battle by Native Americans, like Low Dog:

They came on us like a thunderbolt... The Indians retreated at first but managed to rally and make a charge of their own. Low Dog called to his men, "This is a good day to die: follow me." They massed their warriors. So that no man should fall back, every man whipped another man's horse as they rushed the soldiers. The bluecoats dismounted to fire, but did not shoot well. While firing, they had been holding their horse's reins with one arm. The frrightened horses piulled them all around and many of their shots went high in the air and did the Indians no harm. Nevertheless, the white warriors stood their ground bravely, and none made an attempt to get away.

But there are problems with the book. One of the largest was that the Native American accounts are not direct quotes. Michno acknowledges the problems of the sources - they are biased, sometimes recorded many decades after the battle, often contradictory and frequently have grown in the telling. Memory plays its tricks, but so does the reality of a confusing, scary, noisy and smoke obscurred battle field. Disappointingly though, Michno's narratives are not direct quotes, but are his rewriting of the various testimonies in order to make a readable account. This makes things clearer for the reader, but its not the collection of eyewitness voices I expected.

Michno presents the book as being a final word in understanding what happened. Rightly, he argues, it has been near impossible to know what actually happened to Custer's direct command on the day. By piecing together the Native American accounts, together with a close analysis of the battlefield site, he hopes that he has presented a definitive history of the day. He is dismissive, sometimes to the point of pomposity of some other historians. But by and large his arguments about events on the day are persuassive, as does his unpicking of the conflicting and sometimes extremely unclear accounts of different Native Americans. He points out, probably accurately, that the famous charge by Crazy Horse likely never happened.

Michno is keen to tackle what he sees as the political correctness of recent scholarship of the battle. In fact the book is really an attempt to state a particular viewpoint of the battle using definitive studies and eyewitness accounts, in order to defend a particular historical approach. This is, I think, most notable when considering the Reno-Benteen fight and defense. After Reno is driven off, the battle recentred on Custer's attack. This is not surprising. The Native Americans had to regroup to drive off the bigger threat to their village. But the Reno-Benteen command did make a stand, and faced many hours horrificaly besieged. Michno provides no eyewitness accounts to this. Perhaps there are none. In which case it would have been useful to know. Or perhaps Michno thinks that because Cavalry troops from these events survived, then there's no need to give accounts (though this does not prevent him giving them about earlier parts of the battle). I suspect the real reason is that Michno is focused on other events because the purpose of his book is actually to polemicise about the significance of Custer's final defeat for latter day accounts of the Indian Wars.

This is especially visible in his critiques of those who argue there was "no last stand" in the sense that the battle did not have a definitive ending, rather pettering out into smaller and smaller clusters of killing. These he says are often motivated by a "those more concerned with officious moralising than with finding historical truths". For instance, he bemoans one author whose book contains multiple references (Michno gives them all!) to "genocide, greed and injustice".

The problem with Michno's approach here is that it is difficult to write a genuine history of Native America and its encounter with the US government without acknowleding the "genocide, greed and injustice" that was directed at them from the earliest days of European colonialism in the Americas. Indeed, the books concluding focus on the reality of a "last stand" is less about actual events and more about defeating "revisionist interpreations and political correctness".

The problem of course is that the last stand can mean different things to different people. Those who enjoyed the historically laughable They died with their boots on at the cinema in 1941 and since have a different understanding of the heroism of that day to that of the Native American eyewitnesses here. Indedd they would also probably not agree with Michno himself who is not dismissing the Native Americans as savages.

The point is not the battle, but the context - culturally and historically. Endless debates about about cartridge numbers from battlefield archaeology cannot overcome the wider historical backdrop which is far more important to understanding the aftermath of the Lakota Noon.

Those interested in the battle should read Lakota Noon, if only for the eyewitness accounts and the discussion about events on 25-26 June 1876. For those wanting a subtle study of the context, there are other, better books, polemical in their own way.

Wednesday, June 19, 2024

Alastair Reynolds - Machine Vendetta

Machine Vendetta is the final novel of the Prefect trilogy, a series of hard science-fiction novels by Alastair Reynolds. It is set in the Yellowstone system, among the glitter-band, thousands of orbitals with hundreds of thousands of people. The system is government by a voting system where inhabitants constantly vote, usually automatically, on decisions that manage the system. The Panoply is the police force, a non-lethal police force who are supposed to be under the democratic control of the people of Yellowstone, but in reality act more as a benevolent dictatorship at times.

Machine Vendetta is part three of a trilogy, but the stories are closely linked. As such much of the background to this volume is not explained and instead readers have to return to earlier works. The book begins as a sort of "detectives in space" as Prefect Tom Dreyfus investigates the unusual behavior of his former protege prefect Ingvar Tench which has led to her death.

What starts as a sort of police procedural in space, albeit from a number of different perspectives, rapidly becomes a system spanning thriller, as the Prefects and Dreyfus confront a powerful enemy that threatens the whole of Yellowstone.

All of Reynolds' novels carry the reader along, but unusually this felt a little shallow to me. Some of the big ideas are not really explored very well, and on a couple of occasions I felt characters were simply brought on to advance the plot, rather than being developed into fully fledged personas. Still it's a fun read that Reynolds' fans will love.

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

Thomas Kaufmann - The Saved and the Damned

When Martin Luther penned his 95 Theses against the Church he began a process that was to have far reaching implications. It would have far reaching implications, which went beyond the split between what became the Catholic and Protestant Churches. These implications, religious, social, economic and political would drive struggle, civil war and revolution across Europe and extend into the colonies. Karl Marx famously noted that the Reformation "began in the brain of the monk". It is, on one level a curious statement. After all, Marx's whole life was dedicated to an approach that said that pure ideas did not exist, but are shaped by the economic contexts. Luther however was not abstracted from society, and his criticisms of the Church were closely related to wider economic and political issues. The selling of indulgences, the main target of his Theses was merely represented the tip of much deeper issues.

Thomas Kaufmann's new history of the Reformation, The Saved and the Damned, is an excellent introduction to the period. Particular in "what happened". Much of the work focuses on the German Reformation. In part this has to do with Kaufmann, as the book was originally published in German. But it is also because the Reformation started in Germany and had its most explosive period there. This is not a book of detail, it is a sweeping history which starts from the premise that "the diverging fates of the Reformation in the countries of Europe were fundamnetally connected with the diverse political, ecclesiastical, cultural and social conditions".

But to really understand the Reformation we need something deeper. After all people had made criticisms of the Church beforehand and certainly there were many intellectuals on a par with Luther who were getting an audience. Why did Luther's Theses explode across Europe ("the whole of Christendom in four weeks")? Was it simply their clarity? The Printing Press? Luther's oratory? All of these were important, but mattered was that Europe was in a social crisis, and the Theses landed in the midst of this crisis and encouraged it. For the German Peasants it was a reason to rebel. For people like Thomas Münzter it began them on a path that would lead to revolution. For thousands of others it opened a door to wider criticisms of religion and the role of the Church. Issues of individual freedom, power and wealth. Kaufmann is write to argue that Luther was the "central figure, of the Reformation" without whom it would not have happened. But we cannot ignore the deeper changes.

Here we have to look at what else was changing, and tragically, despite his scholarship on the Reformation, Kauffmann all but ignores the deeper changes in European society, principly the first developments towards merchant capitalism, and the transition from feudalism to capitalist society. Here the Peasant War is informative. Because while many peasants began their critique of society by picking up a pitchfork and a copy of a Luther pamphlet, their criticisms were mostly about economic issues. Principly the right to control their land, their community and their church. While these frequently harked back to an imaginary past, they also reflect how feudal society was moving towards a more capitalist organisation. Increasingly production was for the market, not community use. Wage labour was becoming normal, and the profits of big institutions like the Fugger bank were driving discontent by concentrating wealth in the hands of a few.

Kaufmann reacts to these simply by discussion the Weberian idea that "there is a causal connection ebtween the religious mentality of Reformed Protestanism... and a capitalistic economic disposition". This, Kaufmann thinks is overestimated. In fact he returns several times to this:

The commonly held opinion that 'Calvinism' had an affinity primarily with the nbourgeoisie hardly accounts for the complex social and political mechanisms by which its influence spread in the second half of the century of the Reformation.

Again this misses the point. Protestantism becomes the language of the bourgeoise, not because they need it to be capitalists, but because it fits the logic of how they see the world. In turn they shape protestantism in a particular way (directly opposite to how the rebellious masses understood it). Kaufmann fails to grasp that the bourgeois revolution does not begin with a set of end goals that represent the establishment of capitalism. It is why Oliver Cromwell could say "We declared our intentions to preserve monarchy" in January 1648 and "I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown upon it." by December of that year.

For Kaufmann the Reformation happens, and then has consequence. For instance Kaufmann he notes that the Reformation encouraged capitalist development because of things like the "drastic reduction in holidays". More importantly, as Kaufmann note the Reformation encouraged ideas of individalism. But in his writing these are the key deciding factors, rather than part of a dialectical relationship between society and religion.

So in terms of analysis, Kaufmann offers very little insight, except generalisations:

The Reformation in its multifarious manifestations influenced, encouraged and accelerated the developments leading to what is now called the modern West in many different ways. Nevertheless, the Reformation did not produce modern Western civilisation, neither by itself nor as a major influence, any more than any other factor. The Western modern world is the results of a very complex process of transformation - certainly one which would have taken a different course if the Reformation had not happened.

This is inadequate. What we really needed is to recognise that Europe was changing, and the Reformation was both an expression of that, and a factor shaping the change. The small, gradual processes of economic change in the towns and in rural production were driving much wider economic changes. But they aren't analysed here. It is why another Marxist reviewer commented that "Only the examination of the ways in which people reproduce their lives, enter social relations to that end, and by so doing create their whole society, can ideology in all its conflictual manifestations be understood."

This means that The Saved and the Damned feels rarified. It's history floats above the economic base, detached from wider society. This is not to condemn the book's scholarship. It is, in fact, an exemplary and recommended history of what took place across Europe in those turbulent years, and indeed, what that has meant for the Christian Church since. While it suffers from some annoying proofreading errors and a couple of extra paragraphs that were clearly intended as captions for unused pictures, I've no hesitation recommending it as a read. But I think many readers will come away wanting much more.

Related Reviews

Blickle - Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth Century Germany
Lortz - The Reformation in Germany: Volume 1
Marshall - Heretics & Believers: A History of the English Reformation
Duffy - The Stripping of the Altars
MacCulloch - Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700

Friday, June 14, 2024

Ernest Belfort Bax - The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists

This is the third volume of Belfort Bax's trilogy of books on the "social side of the Reformation in Germany". As I have already mentioned Bax was an unusual and troublesome socialist in the second half of the ninetheenth century and the early years of the twentieth. In particular he was unusual for being on the left and rejecting feminism and women's suffrage. This is worth repeating at the start of this review because it has some relevance to the subject matter.

The third book deals with what I would describe as the final act of the radical Reformation in Germany, the rise of the Anabaptist movement and the siege of Münster. In 1534 a growing and confident anabaptist movement took control of this important town in North-West Germany, and after expelling many opponents they set about constructing, from the top town, a form of communal living. Bax's book tells the story of the Anabaptists, linking their evolution to the most radical thinkers of the Reformation and the most radical aspects of the German Peasant War.

Despite extreme hostility and a military siege, Anabaptist Münster survived for almost 18 months. During these months there were some notable experiments involving communal living, such as collective kitchens and the redistribution of property and wealth. While this was a top down movement, it seems that it was met, at least in the early stages with support from most of those who remained. However as the siege continued, deprivation and violence against the town saw cracks develop and eventually one John of Leiden declared himself king. He lived in opulence, while around him their was hunger and desperation. Eventually refugees let the enemy in, and Anabaptist Münster was destroyed in the most violent of revenge. With hundreds, perhaps thousands killed.

Bax's book is itself a relatively easy read that covers most of the main sources then known and tells the story of the Anabaptists and Münster well. His sympathies are clear, declaring Münster to be a "genuine attempt to carry out logically, principles of the Gospel-teaching and the idea of a return to a supposed primitive Christianity." But there are two aspects that I felt worth exploring further.

The first relates to one of the significant changes implemented by the Anabaptists in Münster later on. This is the question of polygamy. Because many of the men had fled the siege, leaving behind their wives to oversee businesses and wealth, there were something like three women to every man in the town. John of Leiden implemented polygamy (really polygyny) and took sixteen wives. Bax argues that the polygamy introduced was "unique in the history of medieval socio-religious movements" because it was not "a community of wives or free love", but retained the sacred nature of marriage. While Bax is right to charge conventional historians with "hypocrisy" over this, he fails really to explore whether or not this was something that the "women" of Münster wanted. Certainly they could not take multiple husbands. The problem was that "no woman, old or young, should remain outside the marital relation". In other words it was enforced polygyny. It was, in no way, liberating for the women - even if it might have provided some security. I suggest that Bax's anti-feminism is central to his account of the women of Münster. His politics are, using the language of today, distinctly sexist or misogynist.

The second problem is that Bax attempts to draw very close parallels between the siege of Münster and later revolutionary movements. There are, of course, similarities between Münster and the Paris Commune. Bax was writing in the aftermath of that great revolution, but it is wrong to draw too many parallels. What distinguishes the Paris Commune was its mass participatory democracy and workers' power. This was not part of Münster's experience, which was rather more a top down process of reform. Nonetheless the parallels are interesting, as is the counter-revolutionary violence used in both Paris and Münster 350 years earlier. Bax does, of course, know this. But he cannot help himself with his analogies. Despite this, his conclusions are useful:

The dream of the impoverished townsman of a millennial kingdom, based on medieval domestic communism and animated by the ideasl of the small artificer of the time, was in itself as hopeless as the corresponding dream of the peasant ten years before, which also aimed at harking back to an idealised form of a condition of a things that had passed away. The lines of social development were moving in quite another direction.

Bax is right to point out that this was the communism of distribution, not of production, which would not become possible until the working class developed and capitalist production developed.

Does Bax's work have any relevance today? All three books are dated and suffer as a result. Bax's flawed politics and his crude parallels between medieval and modern struggles are frustrating and lead to errors of judgement. Bax's anti-feminism also means that he dismisses and ignores the role of women, and seriously misjudges events in Münster. Writing from the general left, he does have some insights. He notes, for instance,

The conventional historian, in his conventional hatred of the old militant Anabaptism with its communisitc tendencies, and writing as he does in the interest of the possessing classes of his own day, has been found not ashamed to condone, or even to justify, this fiendish and atrocious crime perpetrated by the dominant classes of a bygone age.

I suspect that few people will read Bax today. I'm not sure I would encourage them, as there are other, more useful histories available, though tragically too few by genuine Marxists.

Monday, June 10, 2024

Dee Brown - Showdown at Little Big Horn

I knew of Dee Brown as a historian of Native American peoples. His most famous book is, of course, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Some years ago I also read his excellent account of the Fetterman Massacre. When I recently visited the site of the Little Big Horn battle, fulfilling the ambition of a lifetime, I came away with quite a few souvenirs and several books. Among them was this short work by Brown, which I bought on the basis of the author.

I was surprised to find out that it was not an explicity work of history. Rather it is a fictionalised account of the lead up to the Battle of the Little Big Horn based on testimonials, memoirs and contemporary accounts. After overcoming my surprise, and learning that Dee Brown was also a novelist, I dived in.

The book itself is interesting, but perhaps a little dated. For those not versed in the story of the Little Big Horn it might serve as a good starting point, but the nature of the novel means that it doesn't give any real context. Read a decent history of the Battle and its location within the wider project to destroy the Native Americans in Montana territory first if you want to appreciate the material that Brown uses.

He begins with some relatively minor characters. The journalist Mark Kellogg, who produced a diary and sent regular reports Eastward as Custer's troops travelled. These form the basis of a surprisingly detailed account, as Kellogg wrote almost to the end. Of course Brown has to embellish things with descriptions and context, but it works well. Not all the characters are Europeans. Sitting Bull is one of the more well known historical individuals given a chapter here, but so are less well known ones, such as Bobtail Horse who, with three other Native Americans are said to have held off Custer's troops charge down the Deep Ravine.

Oddly for Dee Brown, the book devolved into sentimentality at the end, with the final viewpoint being that of Comanche, Captain Keogh's horse. The sentimentallity lies mostly of course, with the US Cavalry who lacking any other hero on that field commissioned the horse second in command of the Seventh Cavalry. The irony was not lost on anyone.

Showdown at Little Big Horn is not a particularly great work. Younger readers might find it more interesting, but it lacks Dee Brown's historical knowledge, while retaining his desire to give the Native American people a voice.

Saturday, June 08, 2024

Tommy Orange - Wandering Stars

***Spoilers for both of Tommy Orange's books***

Tommy Orange's second novel Wandering Stars is closely linked to his first, There, There. Unfortunately I had not read the first one before starting Wandering Stars, and I missed out by doing so. Such are the consequences of me not keeping up with new writers. There, There finishes, with a mass shooting, and this forms the centre point of Wandering Stars, but not in terms of events, but as a pivot point for some of the central characters. This is a book about Native America, specifically the lives of working class, poor, Native Americans in urban areas - in this case, Oakland, California.

The book swirls around complex issues about poverty, drugs, guns and Native American identity. It's brilliantly told, not least because it starts in 1864 with the Sand Creek massacre, telling the generational story of a family of Native Americans who descend from one survivor. In doing so it tells how Native American children were wrested from their families and put in dire "boarding schools" to have the Indian civilised out of them, how they were imprisoned and how they fought to keep their identity and their humanity in the face of racism, government indifference and local authority repression. Orange, and his characters, repeatedly make the point that contemporary conditions for Native Americas are rooted in history.

One of the themes of the books is the importance of generational links and ties. The fact these are broken, or not readily known to key characters is crucial. The contemporary characters, who are the focus of the latter half of the book, and whose mother died from a drug related suicide, often feel out of context, lacking roots - despite their close family. Family itself takes on a wider meaning - it is much less about those who are your parents, and more about those who care for you.

After the shooting that leaves Orvil Red Feather with a bullet fragment in his body and an addiction to painkillers, his wider family, including his brothers Loother and Lony, protect and try to survive. They swirl around him, and his daze is not just drug addiction, it is the awareness that this is it. That the American health care system cannot properly care for them all, that there are no real jobs and that school is a meaningless place that trains you to "fly a desk". The schools might no longer force you to cut your hair, stop speaking your language and no longer wear traditional clothes, but they suck the life from you in every other way.

There's a kind of hope at the end of Wandering Stars, one that rests not with magical solutions, but with the solidarity of family and community that keeps people going. Its not the societal fix - nor the restitution that Native American communities desperately need from a capitalist system that still divides and rules, and drives people into poverty. But its a kind of individual hope. Tommy Orange peppers the book with references to Settler Colonialism and injustice. It reminded me that these sores are real, lasting and ongoing. The politics isn't a crude afterthought, but a living thread running through these all too real stories.

If my reading of Wandering Stars was undermined by not having read There, There, I would caution that it's probably not necessary, but likely to add meat to the novel. In a world coming to terms with Settler Colonialism and learning how to fight it, Tommy Orange is a welcome voice.

Related Reviews

Doig - Bucking the Sun

Thursday, May 30, 2024

Ivan Doig - Bucking the Sun

Having read Ivan Doig's beautiful memoir about growing up in rural Montana before I visited that state recently, I was keen to read one of his novels. Unsurprisingly it turned out to be very easy to find Doig's books in Montana's second hand bookshops. He remains, after all, one of the state's most celebrated writers. His books are often set around key moments in Montana's history, and tell stories imbued with historical accuracy.

Bucking the Sun is one of a series of books by Doig set in the north of the state. It is focused on the extended Duff family, homesteaders who have struggled to earn a living from the dry prairie soil, and who are kicked off their land. A New Deal project to build the enormous Fort Peck Dam will flood their farm and the book opens with the government man giving the Duff patriarch the news. The Duffs become New Deal workers on the huge project, which, by coincidence is managed by their son, a leading dam architect. If this conincidence is a little to unbelievable for the reader, it is worth suspending disbelief at this point, as the novel has a lot to offer, despite the contrived set up.

The book opens however with an aging, retired and right-wing sheriff who is thinking back on his career in a old people's home. One unsolved case still bugs him, a case in which two naked bodies were found in a car at the bottom of the Fort Peck resivoir. These entangled lovers were both Duffs, but as the opening chapter concludes, neither was married to the other.

The novel builds up to a climax were the identities of the two Duffs is finally revealed. As the family works on the dam, encouraged and helped along by the senior position of their eldest son, we see their lives, loves and laughs along the way. We also see the hardship of the New Deal work, and the difficulties of life in the West, as the Dam rises, so do the shanty towns around it - a new Wild West.

Doig's put a lot of research into the book - there is a great deal here about what happened that seems historically accurate. But I found the other things telling. The way women get opportunities from the New Deal that give them a level of independence. The lives and work of sex workers at the time. Yet for me, most fascinating, is the radical history that links the struggles of factory workers in the First World War in Scotland, to the strikes and protests of 1930s America. I don't know what Doig's politics were, but the sympathy here with strikers, underdogs, protesters, sabetours and Communists are apparent. His knowledge of politics is enough to include passing reference to Trotskyists, that will please other leftie readers like myself.

Ultimately the story here is in the telling. To a certain extent I was disappointed with the ending - in fact I wasn't really that interested. If Doig hadn't inserted chapters with the Sheriff's flashbacks, I would have forgotten all about the opening mystery. What I was really invested in was the thing that all the other characters were obsessed with - the building of Fort Peck Dam itself. In fact, I might try and see it, should I ever return.

Related Reviews

Doig - This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
Doig - Winter Brothers

Monday, May 27, 2024

Gerald Horne - The Dawning of the Apocalypse

Gerald Horne's earlier book The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism described the horrors that arose from European colonialism in the Americas. The policies of genocide that saw millions die and suffer from war, slavery and disease. But how did this come about, and in particular, how did the political ideology that justified it arise?

The Dawning of the Apocalypse tells this story. In it Horne argues that it was the struggle between the European powers, mediated by the fight against the Ottoman that gave the impetus for settler colonialism to flourish. The importance of this, as Horne says, lies in the fact that "the contemporary United States remains ensconced in the shadow of the original colonisers". The original discovery and opening up of the route to the Americas came from the adventurers and slavers of Portugal and Spain, but "the genocide that was visited pon the indigenous of North America was a rolling process, with the republican knockout blow facilitated mightily by the preceding blows inflicted by Madrid". Spain might not have won out in the Americas, but she opened up the space for Britain to do the next stage of the dirty work.

Much of this book explores why Spain did not build on the earlier arrival of her explorers, slavers and troops in Americas. Much of this is to do with how Spain struggled with her great rivals, the Ottomans, around the Mediteranean and in North Africa. But Horne argues the biggest issue was that Spain had a different ideological approach to colonialism.

Post 1492, Spain was on the march but exposed a glaring weakness when it at times allowed religious sectarianism to trump racist solidarity. England filled the breach when it turned this paradigm on its head and did not allow the conversion of Africans to Protestantism to prevent their being enslaved, and eventually invited the presume Catholid foe to join the brutal colonising of what became Maryland.

In other words England was able to construct a racist ideology, of whiteness, that allowed them to proceed in North American and drive through their own agenda in a more efficient, brutal and successful way that Spain could. Horne also argued that Spain's war on the Muslims, meant that they failed to develop new technological and scientific ideas that, in England's hands, provided extra tools and understanding to exploit the Americas. Spain's war with the Ottomans sucked resources out that prevented her building on their first place in the Americas. But, Horne argues, it was on the question of racism that Spain's ship floundered.

By sticking stubbornly to religiosity in an age of colonialism moving steadily toward the Pan-European "whiteness" that became London's specialty, Spain was determined to fall behind, though even when Madrid emulated London, they flubbed. Even after Alcazar, the local elite in Havana sought to expel the free Negro popluation but was blocked by higher powers. Religious intensity sat alonside solonialism uneasily, a system that tended to advantage racist intensity.

Later Horne writes:

I would say that religious secatrianism and Inquisition mandatges hampered the ability of Madrid to pursue what turned out to be the wining course executed by London, which was Pan-Europeanism and "whiteness" broadnening the base of settler colonialism - increasing the number of 'backwoods settlers' - racialiszing and deeming inferior those not deemd to be 'white' and moving aggressively on two fronts: seizing land and enslaving willy-nilly.

The problem I had with Horne's thesis is that I didn't feel he adequately explained how "whiteness" was constructed. It is certainly true that racial justifications for slavery helped create modern racism. But what of the "whiteness" behind London's strategy over Madrid? This is less clear from Horne's book and I wasn't able to find an explanation. I felt that Horne's earlier points - that Spain fell behind London for a number of reasons such as spending vast resources on fighting the Ottomans and not adequately developing its technological base, hinted at the way that England was developed further because it was able to unleash capital accumulation in a way that Spain could not. In other words, Spain was held back by its semi-feudal social organisation far longer than England. That's why England was able to eventually catch up and supercede Spain. In fact, one cold argue that "whiteness", or at least racism, was more a product of capitalism than anything else. Perhaps Spain would have got there eventually.

Nonetheless, Horne conclusion is right:

By 1700, Spanish armed forces were no more than 63,000' France's about 342,000; and said one source, "Britain was not far behind." The immediate furture was to belong to the United States, which, sharpening the effective tool that was 'whiteness' developed a population base that made these cited figures seem puny by comparison.

The backdrop to this - the indigenous struggles against colonialism, the battles against racism and slavery and the rebellion of the oppressed that Gerald Horne so able places at the heart of this book - were not enough to prevent the establishment of the racist, settler colonial power in Washington. The world has long had to pay the price.

Friday, May 24, 2024

Duncan Hallas - The Great Revolutions

Duncan Hallas was a leading activist and Trotskyist in post-war Britain. He was part of the networks that became the International Socialists and then the Socialist Workers' Party. While I only met him a few times as a much younger activist, even today longer standing comrades talk about him as a great agitator. He was, by all accounts, a tremendous speaker and writer, with a depth of knowledge and experience that allowed him to put across complex ideas in accessible ways. There are many on the left today who'd benefit from learning Hallas' ability to talk to workers.

The Great Revolutions is a new book made up of a series of articles that Hallas wrote for Socialist Worker in 1973. Then the British working class was on a high, having just defeated a Tory government the previous year and many activists thought that the high levels of struggle would continue under Labour. Sadly this was not to happen. But these levels of struggle no doubt led to the editors commissioning Hallas to write this series of pieces on "Great Revolutions", stretching from the English Civil War and the American Revolution, through the French Revolution, 1848, the Paris Commune and finally the Russian Revolutions.

These are short, agitational pieces designed to educate readers in the basics of events. But don't let brevity imply simplicity. Hallas' ability to get across complex events in the minimum of words and without academic fluff is definitely on display here. In fact, what is on display, is nothing short of a brilliant grasp of the Marxist method. Hallas shows how different class forces rise and fall in relation to wider social, economic and politic situations. This is particularly obvious in the discussion of the French Revolution, when Hallas clearly explains how different forces are able at different points during the Revolution to impose their ideas, but that it takes struggle from below to push the process forward. Hallas writes about the American Revolution thus:

The developing capitalist class in America, for that was what the revolutionary leaders represented was not oppressed by a semi-feudal monarchy. That had been destroyed in Britain in the seventeenth century revolutions. It was oppressed by the 'colonial system' operated in the interests of British capitalists.

This approach allows Hallas to explore, albeit briefly, why the revolution could be labelled as being about freedom, while oppressing so many others. Why it was led by slave traders yet waved the flag of liberty. The interplay between revolution in American and then the French Revolution is fascinating and Hallas shows how the ideas developed across the Atlantic.

While the book is brilliant and is a wonderful grand sweep of revolutionary history, I did have a couple of gripes. I thought it notable that Hallas, in his discussion of the Americas, did not reference the Native Americans or their struggles. He notes that one of the reasons the poor masses supported the revolution was that they were "prevented from getting land of their own". But he doesn't mention that getting this land would lead to genocide by the American state, nor does he have space to mention how the Native Americans were used as a military pawn by the British against the colonial forces. Simiarly I thought that the omission of the Haitian Revolution was strange. Its impact on the French Revolution, on the battle against slavery and ideologically in terms of notions of freedom was immense, and it warranted inclusion.

These absences noted, there's still an immense amount to learn here. Credit is certainly due to those who were reading through back issues of revolutionary newspapers, found these articles and decided to get them published. I'm finish by noting Hallas' masterful two part discussion of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 which ought to be read by every young socialist in 2024. Let's hope this book gets into their hands.

Related Reviews

Hallas - Trotsky's Marxism

Thursday, May 23, 2024

Marcus Rediker - The Fearless Benjamin Lay

Of all the people who resisted slavery and fought for its end, Benjamin Lay is perhaps one of the most fascinating and tenacious. Born in 1682, in Essex, he was shaped by an earlier generation's radical religious ideas - Ideas born from the English Revolution. As a Quaker, a labourer and eventually a sailor, he was also shaped by the the radical Atlantic; the politics that arose from the three cornered slave trade between the Africa, the Americas and Europe. This created enormous suffering, but also radical struggle. Within this, Lay ideas developed. His Quakerism gave Lay a enormous dislike of suffering, and a firm eglitarianism. But a trip to the West Indies opened his ideas to the brutal reality of slavery and from then onward Lay, and his partner in struggle his wife Sarah Smith Lay, become radical abolitionists.

Marcus Rediker's book The Fearless Benjamin Lay is aptly titled. Lay was certainly fearless. Repeatedly he punctured the cosy reality of Quaker meeting houses, exposing the hypocrisy of the rich slaveowners who lived a life of luxury while decrying injustice elsewhere. Today it seems inconceivable that Quakers and others could condone slavery, but in his lifetime Lay was denounced and mocked as being mentally ill for his suggestion that slavery should be abolished. It is important to note that Lay went much further than most of his contemporaries, calling not just for the abolition of all slavery, but demanding that fellow Quakers should refuse to have anything to do with it as part of a struggle to destroy the trade.

As Rediker points out Lay was an early proponent of activists tactics that we would today call boycotts and divestment. He refused to drink tea, use sugar, or sit at the table if a slave was serving. These were bold and radical statements for a man of his era. Later he would become vegetarian and his lifestyle changed to reduce as much as possible the suffering of other creatures. His egalitarian ideas were not abstract, but rooted in a personal and political struggle against injustice.

When Marcus Rediker's book was first published few had heard of Benjamin Lay. During his lifetime he was, however, well known. In part this was a result of his political activism, not least his public theatre. The book opens with an inspiring, and hilarious, account of how Lay disrupted a Quaker meeting by drawing a sword from under his cloak and puncturing a book within which was hidden a bladder of fruit juice. The red juice sprayed all over his slaveowning audience, covering them in metaphorical blood.

As a result of this struggle Lay became very well known, despite, after his wife's death, living a life as a hermit. On his deathbed he heard news that his struggle against slavery within the Quakers had borne fruit. During the later part of his life, and immediately after his death he was known and celebrated by a growing number of people who opposed slavery. But his life and struggles quickly faded into obscurity.

Rediker's book unearths much that had been lost of Lay's life and introduced a new generation to his ideas. Lay had been kicked out of numerous Quaker meetings, and its satisfying to know from the introduction to this, the second edition, that recently various groups of Quakers have apologised for this mistake. Rediker traces these internal struggles in details, sometimes losing the reader in the detail. But they are important, not simply for historical reasons. But also because they were important to Lay, who always framed his wordly view through the religion that meant so much to him. Nonetheless, he wasn't held in a straightjacket by those ideas, but used them to demand and fight for change from the very organisation he was part of.

Reading the book, and noting how Lay's opponents denounced him as "mad". I was reminded that revolutionaries who dream and fight for a different future, are often described thus. No doubt Lay's disability, personal lifestyle and activity fuelled these slurs. But reading Rediker's account of Lay's struggles I was reminded of the quote by the Irish revolutionary James Connolly, who said "The only true prophets are those who carve out the future they announce." How true that was of Benjamin Lay.

Marcus Rediker's books on the revolutionary Atlantic are crucial reading for everyone who is trying to understand how modern capitalism was born from blood and violence, and what that means to us today. But they also celebrate the struggles against that violence, and the fight for a better world. Benjamin Lay is restored through this work to his rightful place among in the list of brave individuals who refused to back down.

Related Reviews

Rediker - Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Rediker - Villains of all Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age
Rediker - The Amistad Rebellion
Rediker - The Slave Ship
Rediker and Linebaugh - The Many Headed Hydra

Monday, May 13, 2024

Howard Zinn - A People's History of the United States: 1492 - Present

Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is a remarkable book in several senses. The first is it's scope, by which I don't just mean the breadth of US history from 1492 to the late 1990s. What's more remarkable is Zinn's ability to cover the breadth of the historical moment, capturing events at the "top" of society and the interaction with the mass of people at the bottom. The second is its radicalism. Zinn's personal radicalism is well attested (and shines through the book), but Zinn's approach to history itself is radical, and nearly unique in terms of books that have become must reads for those grappling with the long view of US history. As Zinn writes of the struggles that are central to his book:

I don't want to invent victories for people's movements. But to think that history-writing must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat. If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should... emphasise new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people shows their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win.

Zinn's history is more than a recounting of events, with a special emphasis on history from below, or forgotten struggles. These are there, of course, and Zinn manages to tell these stories with verve, even within the limitations of brevity imposed by the nature of the book. But Zinn's book does more than this because he discusses what was needed for movements to win. For instance he acknowledges the limitations of the trade union leadership, or movements that repeatedly allow themselves to be sucked into the Democratic party at its cycle of elections.

A review of Zinn's book could focus on many different aspects. The opening chapters look at the genocidal policies of European settlers and subsequent US governments against the indigenous people. These are powerful, and Zinn explores the nature of those societies far more than most histories of this ilk. He discusses their different approaches to nature, resources, land and each other. From here Zinn looks at the early settler colonial society and slavery - and emphasises that the modern United States is built on violence and bloodshed.

But reading history is always coloured by the present, and while it would be tempting to review this book by simply regurgitating Zinn's history in an even shorter format, I wanted to dwell a little on one particular aspect of history which Zinn was intimately connected to - the Vietnam era. This is, of course, interesting and informative. But it has its contemporary relevance with the current wave of pro-Palestine movements in US (and internationally) colleges. The movement bears striking resemblances to the US movement against the war in Vietnam. It is centred on colleges and educational institutions, but has moved out further. The anti-war feeling of the 1960s was, as Zinn painstakingly shows, more predominant among poor and working class people. There are hints of this today, no doubt for the same reasons as in the 1960s. People are sceptical of the role of governments, and angry at the use of resources for war that might be better spent on health, education and wages.

But the radicalism of the anti-Vietnam war movement has its parallels with radicalism today - and the processes that Zinn highlighted - growing discontent with the establishment, hopes for alternative politics and a rapid growth in anti-capitalist ideas - have only developed further since he wrote this book. The reason for this, he points out, is the role of social movements as well as the inability of capitalism to deliver for ordinary people. When Zinn finished this book the radicalism and mass movements of the 1960s and 1970s had died away. He finished it with hope though, because he expected new movements to arise due to the contradictions of US capitalism. Those movements did develop in the early 2000s with the anti-war and anti-capitalist movements, though too many US socialists abandoned the struggle in that period.

But Zinn's warnings from history - particularly the ability of the system to protect itself from radicalism by using the Democratic Party remain important today. Writing about the Jimmy Carter era Zinn shows how limited his policies were, yet the Democrats were able to position themselves as the alternative, simply by promising a few changes and bringing the leading figures into the Democratic space. Zinn uses an absolutely superb speech by Malcolm X about the Civil Rights March on Washington to illustrate this. The speech is too long to quote here, but Malcolm X finishes by showing how Kennedy's co-option of the movement meant the radicalism of the march was diluted and everyone left "by sundown". As we face an election between Biden and Trump this year, we'll here the siren voices saying that US activists must hold their noses and campaign for Biden to stop Trump. But Zinn shows why this strategy is a disaster. Activists in the US would do well to read the sections of this book on the post-1960s Democrat/Republican consensus again, if only to remind themselves of the pitfalls we face.

It is, of course, possible to nitpick. Every reader of A People's History of the United States will doubtless find something that is missed, or not done justice - that's the nature of such a sweeping history. I do think though that were Zinn writing today he would have included much more on the Native American history in the 15th to 19th centuries, even while acknowledging that he really does do justice to the history after this era, and especially the struggles by Native Americans in the 1970s. I would also suggest that Zinn might have done more about the single issue radicalism of the 1960s - there's very little here on the LGBT+ movement, though Zinn does mention it. It seems odd to this reader that he does not mention Stonewall. Again though, the fact he does talk about these struggles must have been a major breakthrough for a mainstream US history book - and the sections on women's struggles, feminism and the changing US family are fantastic. The ending chapters of the book focus on what Zinn calls the "coming revolt of the guards". Here he suggests that the crisis of US capitalism would force those whose previous roles involved protecting the system - such as university professors - into conflict with it. While he perhaps over-estimates the importance of this, he would no doubt be pleased to see the number of these people who have engaged in struggles recently.

All in all this really is an indispensable book, a book for activists today, a book for your US travels and a book that illuminates how we got into this disaster, and how we might get out of them. Read it.

Monday, May 06, 2024

Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove

Some years ago when I first planned a trip to Montana I was gifted Larry McMurtry's book Lonesome Dove as one of the classic works of fiction about the state. Having finally got to Montana and cracking the spine of the huge novel, I learn of course, that the book doesn't really deal with Montana much, apart from, appropriately enough, as a destination.

Instead the book focuses on a fictional, but all too real, cattle drive from Texas just as Montana was being opened up to settlers. Two major characters, Augustus McCrae and Captain W.F. Call lead the drive. They are former Texas rangers, veterans of countless forays against Native Americans and summary executions of horse thieves. Writing it like that reminds one of the sort of people who became heroes in the West. Call and McCrae are old comrades, but it is not really clear if they are friends. Their friendship is perhaps closer to that of soldiers who have fought together, and know each other intimately through shared experiences, but don't necessarily like, or love, the other. Only at the very end does this crystallise out, and by then it is too late.

The cattle drive requires a gang of men to control the cattle, and protect and feed the men. McMurtry's skill is to give each of these multiple characters a decent backstory, and make them all individuals. Some, like the two recent Irish immigrants are tragic, the only black man in the troop - Deets - is a skilled trackers and experienced on the trail, but is once removed from the others by his skin colour. These stories, like that of the Indians in the book, hint at wider social issues in the American West at the time, but the context is really the brief period when the Native American's were all but subdued and the frontier had not quite reached beyond Texas and the Dakota territory. Pivotal moments in the story then deal with the encounters with Native American peoples - sometimes these are extremely violent, and others are tragic. But this novel is not a "cowboy and Indian" trope laden piece of pulp fiction. It is much more nuanced than that.

Indeed, it is perhaps better understood as a sequence of vignettes that take place under the umbrella of a story about a cattle drive. McMurtry doesn't neglect the associated tropes at all - there's a storm, a stampede and a desperate quest for water. But these were, after all, real threats. His skill as an author is to weave in wider tales and story lines that bring everything together - from McCrae and Augustus' back stories, to the characters who make up the cowboys on the drive.

But my real surprise was the strength and depth of the female characters. I wasn't expecting these at all - after all the cattle drives were run by men. But the women are not simply peripheral. McCurtry explores aspects of life for women on the frontier - as sex workers for instance. But he also gives them real character arcs, and their own personalities. These are far more than the romantic interludes to the cowboy's story. They are part of shaping that story. One of the subjects dealt with is the traumatic aftermath of one woman's abduction and violent rape. McMurtry treats this with far more insight and sensitivity than I expected - and avoids a simplistic "happy ending". I was repeatedly struck by how his female characters are rounded - with their own ideas, lives, jobs and demands. Even "bit players" are multidimensional. If McMurtry has one fault it is that he often finishes characters off "off screen" so to speak, ending their story lines - the book is perhaps a little too busy. But for the reader, the novel's ending ties up multiple threads and brings this epic full circle - a most satisfying experience.

Nonetheless this is an excellent work, a great Western story that does justice to its subject and acknowledging the horrific, violent reality that is American history. As one character notes, America is built on bones.

Related Reviews

Tyer - Opportunity, Montana

Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Brad Tyer - Opportunity, Montana

Early on in Brad Tyer's book about the town of Opportunity he makes a telling point about the brochures that advertise the tourist mecca of Montana. It is supposed to be an "otherworldly landscape filled with bears and wolves", but both those species and the iconic bison only survive because of direct and regular human intervention. Bison, for instance, are preserved mostly because they are good for eating. The point Tyer is making, is that Montana's nature is not natural, but an artifical construct.

The same is true of many of the rivers. Tyer is a canoeist. He relates to the landscape through the waterways he travels, and Montana's waterways have always been famous. Think of the flyfishing of the film (and story) A River Runs Through It. The film was made far away from the actual location, because that's not natural enough - too many industrial buildings and homes. The story ignores these too. But Montana's rivers have also had an important role in creating the United States. On them steamboats ferried the Seventh Cavalry to their ill-fated meeting with Sitting Bull's forces and, more importantly for the environment, boats moved the copper ore and mining materials in and out of the state. Some of the mineowners might have needed ships to bring in their profits.

The mines have also become repositories for pollution - heavy metals like arsenic and lead, and the muck that falls from the skies. Montana's mines made America, particularly the mines of Anaconda and Butte. But the poisonous waste had to go somewhere, and its ended up in tailings ponds and barely beneath the ground in what has become one of America's largest polluted areas - a superfund site that sucks in millions of dollars to create what is supposed to be a safe environment.

Opportunity is a tiny town, just outside Anaconda. It has become the tragic dumping ground for the legacy of nearly 100 years of copper mining. The people there have various diseases - likely caused by the pollution. There's been a campaign, on and off, by various people to clean it up. But many of the residents, tired of fighting, or worried about their pensions, aren't fighting back. Opportunity, Montana has become the dumping ground in order to preserve the wealthier and more tourist friendly parts of the state.

The Clark Fork River is supposedly being restored to it's "natural sate", but the millions of tons of toxic soil has to go somewhere. And like poor, working class towns from South America to China, Opportunity was chosen. It barely even got mentioned in the presentations about the work.

Part personal memoir, part traveloge, Brad Tyer's book is an unusual look at the consequences of big business being allowed to get away with murder. The big mining companies made billions in profits, yet have been made to give a tiny percentage back to the communities they ravaged. They were happy to suck the life out of their workers' and kill the very earth around the state, yet they're barely accountable for the horror they unleashed.

Tyer's a great writer, and a decent journalist. He's good with people, and his interviews with locals, industry insiders and environmentalists are fascinating. He's a touch to cynical though - perhaps because he's seen it all go to hell before. I'd like to think we can make the bastards pay. Still, this is a great book for opening the curtain on the real Montana, which I finished a few short hours before flying there to see Butte, Anaconda and the rest.

Sunday, April 21, 2024

James Donovan - A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn

James Donovan's A Terrible Glory is widely described as the definitive account of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. It certainly is a readable account that does its best to use first hand accounts to tell the story of the battle as clearly and vividly as possible. Unfortunately it feels as an account of the US Cavalry. The book suffers greatly from a lack of the Native American perspective - not just on the battle itself, but on the context for the battle.

Given the annilation of the men with Custer at the end, there is a natural tendency for the author to focus on the experiences of the survivors. As in many other histories of the Little Big Horn, this means that historians and authors tend to tell the story of the commands of Reno and Benteen. Donovan does this well, giving a real sense of how the troops there, a few miles from Custer's position, had little understanding of what had happened, and their terrifying nights defending their position while being unsure what had happened to Custer's force.

Donovan places pride of place to Benteen here. Benteen, hated by Custer, is built up here as a brave tactician, able to step in when Reno fails and loses control. Benteen's ability to organise the defence and a fighting retreat after Weir's unsuccessful attempt to reach Custer probably saved the companies on the hill. Reno himself is depicted as a coward and a drunk, though Donovan is perhaps less critical that other historians of the man himself. There's no doubt that Reno's initial charge was met by a heavy force, and could not have survived a full scale attack on the Native American village. In the aftermath of that collapse, Benteen could save the men, but there was an utter failure of collective leadership. The real failure of command however, was Custer.

Custer's luck ran out at the Bighorn. It is noticeable that many of those who survived with Reno (thanks to Benteen) assumed that Custer must have survived - he was considered unkillable. But that reputation was built on luck itself. Indeed what's really noticeable in contemporary accounts such as Donovan's is that the massacre of the Seventh Cavalry took place because Custer's command decisions were frequently made on the basis of his personal animosity and factional fighting in the regiment. Ironically, Custer took his friends and family with him, leaving his antagonists with Reno. They're the ones who lived.

Despite starting decades before, James Donovan's book is focused on the battle to the exculsion of much interesting contemporary material and suffers from a lack of Native American material and voices. It is interesting to compare and contrast the account of the Little Bighorn told in Pekka Hämäläinen's Lakota America. Which is entirely from the perspective of the Lakota forces on the day. Donovan's book would have been much stronger had it used this approach alongside the well worn tale from the Cavalry's side.

In the final third of the book Donovan tells the story of the recriminations and blame after the battle. Here the reader is likely to be disappointed. The survivors banded together, for the good of the regiment, and everyone failed to learn any lessons. Many of those who survived however suffered badly - what we would today call PTSD led many to drink, and tragic deaths. The Native Americans celebrated, but were rounded up and destroyed by a beligerent US and so it is right that Donovan finishes with the horror of Wounded Knee - making it clear how the US Army saw this massacre of men, women and children as revenge for the Custer's death.

A Terrible Glory is a readable account of the Little Bighorn fight. But readers will likely find themselves wanting more than James Donovan offers here. Readers looking for a first book about this subject might find Nathanel Philbrick's The Last Stand a better introduction.

Saturday, April 20, 2024

Peter Blickle - Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth Century Germany

What was the Reformation? A simple explanation would be that it was the movement of reform inititated within the Catholic Church by Martin Luther's 1517 criticisms of the Church's sale of indulegences. A movement of Reform that led to a schism and essentially resulted in two distinct branches of Christianity. None of this is inaccurate. But it doesn't really explain what the Reformation was in terms of a movement. How did it manifest itself and propagate, and why did it actually take off in 1517?

Today the historian Peter Blickle is best remembered (when he is remembered at all) for his controversial description of the German Peasants' War as a "Revolution of the Common Man". His book Communal Reformation takes the analysis he laid out earlier and applies it to the Reformation. What results is a much bigger imaginging of these periods of rebellion and reform as an interlinked, and reinforcing process. In particular he makes the strong argument that the Reformation could not have taken place without a longer historical process of class struggle that culminates in the Peasants' War, and indeed the Peasants' War fundamentally transforms the Reformation itself.

For Blickle, it was the struggle of "communal organistation" for self-identity and emancipation that led the lowest orders to drive forward change in town and country. As he writes, "with the help of communal organisation - and only in this way - did peasants and the burghers learn to say no, ro protest, to question the demands of lordship and the claims of the authorities. The protest of the faithful against the church in Rome was rehearsed in the protest of the subjects against their lords."

This insight is important. It makes the Reformation and extension, as well as an expression, of the class struggle against the ruling orders. Obviously it was intensely ideological. The criticisms of the Church unleashed by Luther were taken up and extended into criticisms of the system itself, as well as the established church. But as Blickle says "the common people... developed concepts of the reofrmation that were identical to their basic principles". He continues:

The common people in country and city listened to the reformers when they talked about the people in country and citiy and listened to the reformers when they talked about the realisation of ecclesia, they listened to the southern German reofmrers when they talked about the realisation of the hospel, but they wer enot merely imitators. Their struggle for the Christian Republic was a the qualitative leap from the throry of the intellectuals, who shied away from responsiblity, to the concrete day-to-day practice of the ocmmon peple. And this practice was not nourished by religious faith; tather, its explanation lies in the acutal living conditions, in the village and the city, in the political culture of the late Middle Ages.

These practical demands manifested in all sorts of ways, but particulary in what I would call a democratic impulse to extend control over aspects of village life, particularly the role of priests who were those who propogated the gospel, as well as the ruling classes' ideas. One revealing example of this comes from the Franconian village of Wendelstein, in late 1524, the earliest time of the peasant uprising. The community told their priest his duties and role:

Thus we shall not recognise you as a lord, but simply as a servant of the parish. You do not command us, but we command you. And we order you henceforth faithfully to preach to us the gospel and the Word of God, pure and honest in accordance with the truth (untarnished and unobscured by human doctrine).

The demand for communities to elect their own pastors or priests, was a central part of the Reformation, and one supported by Luther at the start. It was the "essence" says Blickle, of the peasant conception of the reformation. But even in this early period of the Peasant War one gets a sense of a much more powerful impulse coming from the community. It certainly feels like a group of people seeing their priest as an instrument of their community, not an authority figure to be obeyed at any cost. It is, as Blickle points out, precisely why Luther's Reformation buckled and strained under the enormous impact of the Peasant War, and why the Reformation became, after 1525, a Reformation of the princes and not the masses. And also why the slaughter of the peasants by the nobility at the end of the Uprising saw the "end of the Reformation in the countryside". The people who carried the Reformation through were broken and destroyed in revenge for taking it too far. Blickle argues that this was driven through to the fullest extent:

Peasants and burghers voiced the demand - an uncompromising demand - that authority submit itself to the gospel. All incidents of rebelliousness in city and countryside, from the sacking of monasteries by the peasants to the expulsion of recalcitrantly Catholic councillors by the burghers, had no other purpose than to push through this demand. Submission to the gospel became the stamp of legitimacy. Lordship as such meant nothing... The communal reformation posed a fundamental challenge to the legitimacy of political authority.. This was a significant by-product of the communal reformation.... the rebellions in city and countryside were also much more fundamental and deep reaching than ever before... Where the authorities were deaf to the gospel, peasants' and burghers' reformations could merge into a revolutionary movement.

But what does "communal" and "community" mean in this context? Here Blickle is a little unclear. Firstly it is not clear to me that he includes women in this. He explores the meaning of "community" (Germeinde in German) as it is reflected by Luther - the "Christian community". But what I am interested in is how does this manifest itself on the ground. What was the community of Wendelstein who so admonished their new priest in 1524? Note that it included the mayor. Blickle explores how groups of leaders were selected and chosen from within the village/town to represent, decide and collective approach their lords. But this was not democracy in a mass sense. The "community" that Blickle argues drives the Reformation forward "had no real place in the political structure o f estates or their theoretical underpinnings". But the Reformation gave it a "theological justification".

Essentially "community" for Blickle means all the people in a village or town who acted and lived together, and shared common interests - expressed he says "in the analogous uses in 'common Christendom' and 'common weal'." Its nebulosity comes, I think, from Blickle's particular interpretation of "common man" which he uses as "a general term for townsmen and villagers". But did not include "male and female servants, mercenaries, beggars and vagrants". It is a class term, but only by exclusion, "above the common man were the lords, lay and clerical, and below him were the lower social classes and those groups entirely ouside the hierarchy of social estates." It was, Blickle says, by the later half of the sixteenth century, a term interchangeable with "peasant" and "subject". It is noteworthy that never discusses whether or not "Common Men" includes women.

Does this help us understand the Reformation and the Peasant War? I think it does, in as much as we have to recognise the difficulties of understanding rural peasant communities as essentially being an amorphous mass. Marx wrote that the French peasantry was a "simple addition of homonymous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes". Its a helpful, if rude, metaphor, that recognises that the peasantry was a varied collection of wealthier and poorer households.

The differences between these peasants in wealth and consequent class interests would plague latter day revolutionaries from Marx to Lenin. But in the sixteenth century, these interests were close enough not to matter. To discuss a Communal Reformation and Revolution then, is to recognise that the vast majority of the subject classes in Germany at the time, had a collective interest in breaking the hold of the Catholic Church and fighting for control over their own villages and their wider society. It was a powerful movement that terrified the older order and those whose interests were tied up with the status quo. It explains why the enemies of the peasantry who slaughtered them on the fields of Böblingen and Frankenhausen, were from both sides of the Reformation debate.

As I wrote in my review of his book on the Peasants' War, Blickle's ambguity over the "Common Man" means that he has an ambguity over the nature of revolution itself. Nonetheless the insights in Communal Reformation give us a real sense of the Reformation being a social movement driven from below, whose initators struggled to control until they broke from it and forced through a Reformation from above.

Friday, April 19, 2024

Jim Harrison - Legends of the Fall

Best known today from the Anthony Hopkins and Brad Pitt film, Legends of the Fall was Jim Harrison's breakthrough collection of three novellas. The first story, Revenge, is an intricate tale of a man whose affair with the beautiful wife of a Mexican gangster goes badly wrong. Cochran wakes up after being rescued by a Mexican worker who found him in the desert. He's been very badly beaten and would surely have died. Recovering anonymously, he plots revenge against the gangster who has submitted his wife, and Cochran's lover, to the most unspeakable of punishments. The story is well told, tense and unexpected - even if the revenge relies on Cochran having just enough unlikely contacts with wealth and power that seems likely.

Much better is the second story, The Man Who Gave Up His Name which follows Nordstrom from his lacklustre time in college through twenty years of marriage and divorce, while he makes his fortune in business. It is really the story of Nordstrom's growing awareness that there is more to life than money, and that defining himself by wealth is inadequate. But it is also the story of wealthy men and their mid-life crises, and overcoming your inhibitions. Nordstrom, despite, rather than because of his wealth gets a lot of sex. That too is his awakening. I was prepared to dismiss this story as the fantasies of upper middle class mid-life crises, but I really liked the ending and Nordstrom's character arc.

But most people will read this collection for Legends of the Fall. The length of the book and the film are incomparable. The film is much more sweeping and grandoise, even if the story is essentially identical. What is different about the book is the fleshing out of characters. The Montana ranchers are much more buffeted by world history than in the film. Brad Pitt's character is decidedly darker, and their mother is not dead, but living a bohemian life abroad. Global events, like the Russian Revolution are more prominent, as are less well known, but important ones. Pitt's character's capitalist brother is overjoyed when the IWW leader Frank Little is lynched in Butte (though Little isn't named). Russia hangs over the characters in the novella unlike in the film - their mother even has an affair with the socialist journalist John Reed.

The three stories all have some common themes, though they are not at all linked. Montana gets a couple of mentions in the first two stories, and is the setting for the third. But all the stories centre of the lives of strong willed, powerful and usually wealthy men who experience loss of lovers and friends. There's also a common theme of violence - the men all seem to be able to kill and bury bodies in the wilderness with impunity.

Jim Harrison's style needs to be experienced too. It's clipped and free of waffle. Legends of the Fall in particular reads like a film script already. The other two stories would have also made fine films, though perhaps less accessible.

Tuesday, April 16, 2024

Hamza Hamouchene & Katie Sandwell (eds) - Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region

About twenty years ago me, and a large number of other activists, attended an environmental conference in London. One of the workshops at the event included a presentation on DesertTec, a plan to produce vast quantities of energy from solar power by covering large areas of the Sahara desert in soal panels. I think it is fair to say that at the time, myself, and the rest of the activists there, where impressed with this technical solution to the transition away from fossil fuels. Criticism at the time focused on how nation states, and capitalist interests, would prevent this happening.

But since then the work of activists and scholars, including the authors and editors of this important book, have taught activists like myself to think about things differently. What we were essentially told in that seminar was an old lie - that large parts of Africa are essentially empty, ripe for use by the developed world, and in doing this, some wealth might well trickle down into local economies who could use it to improve their situation. It is an old lie, and its shameful that we fell for it then. Today the environmental movement today is much more aware of the need for Climate Justice in the Global South, but there is still much work to do, and this book is an important contribution.

The Arab Region, to use the name from this books title, is simultaneously the origin of the vast majority of the oil that is helping cook the planet, and one of the places where climate change is already causing enormous suffering for ordinary people. But, as this important book explains, the people of the region are not passive victims. They are people who can, and are, fighting for an alternative sustainable future while, at the same time "the Gulf countries are working to ensure they remain at the centre of the global energy regime".

The contributing authors' essays approach this conundrum in various ways by looking at various different countries and experiences. Most essays focus on different aspects of the energy question. These explore a common contradication - that states in the Middle East and North Africa have enormous potential for renewable energy, while frequently relying for their economic existence on fossil fuels. It is a contradication easily exploited by the energy multinationals. This is a point made by Hamza Hamouchene in his discussion on "green" hydrogen in North Africa:

The drive for green hydrogen and the push for a hydrigen economy has already gained support from major European oil and gas companies, which see it as a back door to the continuation of their operations, with hydrogen being extracted from fossil gas (the production of grey and blue hydrogen). It is thus becoming clear that the fosssil fuel industry wants to preserve the existing natural gas and pipeline infrastructure.

He concludes, "it is a deeply erroneous assumption that any move towards renewable energy is to be welcomed and that any shift from fossil fuels, regardless of how it is carried out, is worthwhile." The problem is, as he points out, not fossil fuels but "their unsustainable and destructive use in order to fuel the capitalist machine."

The Arab Region has, of course, been the victim of colonial history and imperialism. The ongoing geo-political reality of this situation means that any transition will, unless capitalism is challenged, "maintain the same practices of dispossession and exploitation that currently prevail, reproducing injustices and deepeing socioeconomig exclusion". Before we agree to such projects, we need to question who, what and why they are being done. With this in mind Hamouchene cautions a younger me about DesertTec!:

This Desertec vision lends itself to the agenda of consolidating fortress Europe and expanding an inhuman regime of border imperialism, while trying to tap into the cheap energy potential of North Africa, which also relies on undervalued and disciplined labour.

Similarly, writing on energy in Sudan, Razaz H. Basheir and Mohamed Salah Abdelrahman, note that the current plan for energy there "relies on the full and unconditional adoption of neoliberal reforms dictated by international financial institutions".

A second aspect to this, is that various regimes in the region are able to use the potential for renewable energy to "greenwash" their existence. Look at how Egypt and the UAE hosted COP27 and COP28 for this reason. But in one of the strongest chapters in the book Manal Shqair explores this with a timely look at the case of Israel. "Israel", she writes,

has always depicted itself as a dry coutnry which, despite this, and unlike its Arab neighbours, has developed the tecnology needed to efficiently manage its scarce water resources and mitigate the climate crisis... According to this narrative... Israel alwasys seeks to put its technology at the service of its prached neighbour Jordan.

Israel and Jordan's agreement to swop water for renewable energy seems then like a perfect match. But it has two consequences. Firstly it legitimises the settler colonial state, and secondly, it forces Jordan to rely on imported fossil fuel, because it is locked into an agreement with Israel to send energy over for water desalination.

Shqair explores how Israel has stolen land, water and other natural resources from the Palestinians, and used these to strengthen its own hand. She concludes:

The dehumanisation of the colonised, and the complicity of Arab states in this, are greenwashed by the EU and Israel as they collaborate in what is portrayed as a transition to a greener future and a lower-carbon economy.

Many authors however emphasise that the people of the region are not passive in the face of this inequality. There are some remarkable accounts of struggle against governments and multinationals against projects that destroy land and displace people, or for more equitable and just use of resources. In an important chapter on the neglected subject of agriculture in North Africa, Saker El Nour writes on the importance of "pressure from below, infoprmed by the needs and aspirations of small-scale farmers, peasants and farm workers, who remain indispensable in a just transition in the region and beyond". Similarly in an account of mining and renewable energy in Morocco, Karen Rignall writes that the "resource conflicts" often allow communities to "imagine and experiment with a different kind of politics or approach to rural governance. This new imaginary can be considered an emergent politics of the commons." She cautions that those arguing for "just transition" cannot ignore these inputs and ideas, and impose a "predetermined frame of analysis" or crutially tries to substitute existing social movements.

This review can only touch on a few of the articles. But running through all the chapters are two main themes. The first of which is that existing strategies for energy and sustainable transitions are trapped by the logic of a global capitalist system, that sees the region as crucial to the continued accumulation of capital, primarily in the Global North (though China is increasingly imposing its own interests). Thus the interests of the USA and Europe and the fossil fuel corporations that are so closely tied to them, tend to shape what governments across the Middle East and North Africa are planning. This distorts things in a way that rarely offers anything to the mass of the local populations, and in some cases, actively destroys their lives through pollution and displacement. Indeed, the greenwashing associated with energy plans actively empowers the worst states in the region. So Jawad Moustakbal is surely right to conclude about Morocco, in a way that could be applied across the region:

There will be no just transition as long as the energy sector remains under the control of foreign transational companies and a local ruling elite that is free to plunder the state and generate as much profit as it wishes, within a culrutre of authoritarianism and nepotism. The debt system and PPPs are a major obstacle to any model of popular sovereignty, including energy sovereignty.

But there is something else that runs through the book - this is the potential for popular revolt. While few chapters explore the "Arab Spring" in detail, the book carries with it a sense that mass radical change is necessary and possible. As Christian Henderseon concludes the book:

The pressures that led to the Arab revolutions of 2010 and 2011 have not been resolved; deep structural reconfiguration is still needed. It is not too early to foresee how these quandaries will develop but the Guld states are not immune from popular calls for democarcy, equity and redistribution that define the just transition.

I would go further. Without the sort of mass struggles that brought down dictators and rulers across the region, and without those struggles developing into popular movements for democratic control of the economy, we won't see the sort of transition that the region, and the world, desperately needs.

Dismantling Green Colonialism is probably one of the most important books published on climate justice this year. Every activist should try and read it, to learn more about the realities of the Arab Region, the barriers to change and the movements trying to shape a sustainable future.