Rhian E. Jones - Rebecca's Country

The "Rebecca Riots" were one of the most striking examples of rural rebellion during the 19th century. Today they are mostly remembered, when they are remembered at all, for being against tollbooths and involving men dressed in female attire. But they were much more than this, they were a mass uprising against the way capitalism was destroying communal relations, and transforming traditional Welsh life to  maximise profits for landowners, and diminishing the lives of the lower classes.

Rhian E. Jones' important new account of the Rebecca riots fills a gap in recent studies of the period. Few recent books have covered Rebecca and this work has benefited from contemporary approaches to class and gender. This means that Jones' tells the history of this struggle in a fresh way to a new audience, and takes up issues that have often been ignored about the struggle itself.

The Rebecca movement was initially aimed at tollbooths. But it arose out of the appalling conditions that working people experienced in 1843. Low wages, low crop prices, high rents and unsympathetic landowners contributed to a massive crisis among ordinary people. The toll booths were a symptom of this, as their owners sought to raise cash ostensibly to pay for road repairs, but actually for pure profit.  Hundreds of tolls were imposed, and farmers found themselves paying multiple times on a single journey, essentially being taxed for trying to do their work. Conditions were awful, as Jones says, some houses "built of mud or stone with thatched roofs, had minimal furnishing, often a single room with one or no windows, packed-earth floors and bedding of straw mattresses and homemade blankets".

The rebellion against the tollbooths encapsulated the anger at these conditions. But the tollbooths represented something much more - the literal commodification of the Welsh landscape. It was this that meant the rebellion went much further than an outpouring of anger at the tollbooths, and spilled into a generalised revolutionary movement.

In 1843 the rising was so great that it drove the landowners away from their country estates, saw thousands of troops billeted in the countryside, and pitched battles between protesters, their supporters and the authorities. One contemporary report said, that Wales was experiencing "a formidable insurrection, overawing the law, invading the most sacred rights of property and person, issuing its behests with despotic effrontery, and enforcing them by the detestable agents of terror, incendiarism and bloodshed."

The destruction of tollbooths was a key part of the rebellion. Jones unpicks what took place, which tended to follow a known pattern. At night, a group of dozens of people, led by a figure on horseback would arrive at a tollbooth. Many of the leading figures, and certainly the "leader" on the horse would be dressed up, often in female clothing, and usually addressed as Rebecca. The protesters would expel anyone living in the toll houses, allowing them to escape safely and usually remove their belongings. Then the booth and its gate would be destroyed. The destruction seems to have had an air of ritual to it. Buildings were systematically destroyed, brick by brick. Gates would be sawn into pieces. Fire would consume the rest. Almost as if the protesters were erasing the building from memory, rather than just destroying it. 

The protesters would act quickly and were frequently supported by many onlookers. One thing that struck me was the similarities with the arson and rick-burning that characterised the Captain Swing movement just over a decade before. That too was enormously popular and attacks were often communal events, with local people supporting and watching in great numbers. Rebecca and Swing were both characterised by the mass support, if not complete participation, of the greater part of the labouring rural poor. They were both rebellions that went beyond mere economic demands.

Jones shows how this went further. The mass attack on the Carmarthen Workhouse was in part a rage at the authorities' approach to poverty. But it was also driven by a punishing approach to women who had had children out of marriage, including as a result of rape or abandonment by wealthy men. One of the great successes of Rebecca was a change in the law around the support for women in this situation. But Rebecca also took direct action on this. I was inspired to read how Rebecca protests on occasion confronted men who had abandoned women and their children, demanding financial restitution and support. On another occasion Rebecca rioters installed a poor family in more suitable accommodation, somewhere they were still living many decades later.

One of the things about Jones' book is that it covers womens participation in the movement. Because male rioters dressing in women's clothes was a key part of the rebellion's most public expressions, histories have often focused on male participation. But in fact, as Jones' shows, women were central to the protests, to supporting them, and to the wider discontent. Frances Evans, who was charged as a result of her leading role in the attack on the Carmarthen Workhouse, was accused of "having incited and led the mob... urged on the rabble to proceed upstairs, and otherwise grossly misconducted herself."

Jones' gives a great sense of the political breadth of Rebecca's revolutionary movement:

The targets of Rebecca were evolving to encompass more than tollgates. They now included the enclosure system: near Ammanford, a newly built wall that cut off a section of formerly common land to form a private field... was torn down and the field thrown back open to public use. Meanwhile a vicar at Penbryn received a threatening letter for having forced local Nonconformists to donate to the cost of a Church school.

The Viscount Melbourne wrote to the Queen, fearing a "general rising against property". Ruling class fears of revolution ran through their response to Rebecca. As a result military violence was common place and the stationing of thousands of troops held hold down south-west Wales. There was a general concern anyway that the British working class was on the move. Fear of Chartism had the government on edge already.

But Jones also picks apart the internal debates that helped undermined Rebecca, and how these were reflected in the wider movement. Leading Chartists, themselves riven by debates about violence, were often contemptuous of Rebecca, not least because they saw it as a cross-class movement that involved both workers and their farmer bosses. There was some truth to this. Farmers in fact did pay people to destroy the tollbooths. But ordinary people don't simply take to arson and destruction because they are paid too. There has to be a level of general discontent within society to make it worthwhile, and, as the support and sympathy for the Rebecca makes clear, this certainly existed in southern Wales in 1843.

The movement was broken by a combination of heavy repression and internal division. But, it is important to point out, it was remarkably successful. Jones notes that many of Rebecca's demands were won, toll houses disappeared, roads improved and there were changes made to support those in poverty. Many of those captured and imprisoned by the authorities were let off, either by symapthetic jurors or by the authorities who were fearful of making martyrs. 

Jones concludes that Rebecca's real legacy however, was to inspire others - even today. As she says:

The original Rebecca movement was composed of ordinary men and women who, finding their circumstances intolerable, used what they had to hand - from petticoats to petitions, and fom mass meeetings to sledgehammers - to challenge and change their world. The extent of their success is perhaps less important than the fact they made the attempt.

This new history of Rebecca fills an important gap in the history of rural radicalism. Written by a socialist it addresses key questions about class, gender and social movements that remain important today. It will teach new generations about our history of struggle, and reminds us all that the modern countryside is the consequence of violent class struggle.

Related Reviews

Williams - The Rebecca Riots
Jones - Before Rebecca
Dunbabin - Rural Discontent in Nineteenth Century Britain
Boyce - Imperial Mud: The Fight for the Fens
Griffin & McDonagh - Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500

James M. Cain - Mildred Pierce

This 1941 novel by James M. Cain is not one of his best known, though it was made into a film starring Joan Crawford as the eponymous Mildred Pierce. That film, apparently, gave the story an upbeat ending. This is remarkable, because the novel is certainly not upbeat, and instead describes a life of bittersweet travails. The Hayes Code had a lot wrong with it.

Mildred Pierce is a middle class housewife, one of thousands brought low by the Great Depression. Her husband brings her lower, leaving her in the early pages of the book for his mistress. Pierce is left alone with two daughters, and finds her only hope of employment in menial jobs that she thinks are beneath her. 

Its a powerful start. Cain takes as his subject a woman undone by economic circumstance and her husband's misogyny. His subject is not the usual one in novels about the era - working class victims are better heroes of novels than the aspiring middle class. Above all else this is a novel about class. Mildred Pierce uses her contacts, her business acumen and her good looks to drive a project forward. She wants to rebuild her position in order to ensure her eldest daughter Vera loves her, and respects her.

Vera is the villain of the book. Her greed, her snobbery, her love of money and fame, and her ability to use others goes unnoticed by Mildred. Her mother can only see good, not the double crossing. As Mildred's success grows, she is once again brought low. But this time it's not capitalism, but her need to buy Vera's love. It means, really, that there cannot be a happy ending. The two main women characters' are so flawed as to be unable to find a mutual way out. But it is Mildred who is left to pick up the pieces.

This is a powerful novel. But it's grim. One reads it hoping it will get better. But every success brings the seeds of failure for Mildred. It is, perhaps, a metaphor for the futility of real happiness under capitalism. Cain may not have had the politics of anti-capitalism. But he could see it around him. In Mildred Pierce he put it on the page.

Related Reviews

Cain - Serenade
Cain - The Postman Always Rings Twice
Cain - Double Indemnity

Michael Balter - The Goddess & the Bull: Çatalhöyük An Archaeological Journey to the Dawn of Civilisation

Çatalhöyük is perhaps one of the most remarkable neolithic archaeological sites in the world. Situated in  Anatolia, Turkey, it is one of the earliest "cities" known. First discovered by James Mellaart in the 1950s, it was partially excavated several times by him. and numerous artificats, human remains and art works were found. It has been further explored in the 1990s and through the 2000s. It is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most important places for understanding early human history. 

Michael Balter's book is one of the few modern, and accessible, accounts of Çatalhöyük. It is simultaneously a book about the history of the site, as well as being an account of the history of the exploration of Çatalhöyük and also a social history of the modern dig. Balter was present for multiple digging seasons - initially because he was writing about Çatalhöyük as a journalist, and then to study the people and the dig itself. It makes for a remarkable account. As one of the archaeologists notes, if you want to understand what has been found, you also need to understand the person doing the dig.

The story starts in the 1950s with Mellaart's discovery of the site, and then his initial excavations. Mellaart looms large over Çatalhöyük, firstly as the finder and excavator, and then as a more controversial figure. Mellaart's own studies were rooted in the prevailing ideas of the time, and several were dated. His own excavations were less rigorous than contemporary digs, but they still yielded important information and insights. Mellaart became a world authority, skilful at public outreach that made him, and the site, famous. But Mellaart was also controversial. Permission for his archaeological exploration was abruptly withdrawn by the Turkish authorities and he was banned from the country after the scandal known as the Dorak affair. In this Mellaart was accused of smuggling treasurers out of the country. The book was published during Mellaart's lifetime, and finishes with him visiting the contemporary dig. But after his death a few years later, it became clear that he had engaged in forgery, blemishing his authority about the site.

Mellaart's legacy and work hung over the dig at the time of its reexcavation in the 1990s. This was led by a British archeologist Ian Hodder, a pioneer of what became known as post-processual archaeology. Balter's book explores the development of archaeological theory, showing how the 1960s led to the emergence of a "New Archaeology" that argued archaeology was primarily concerned with human cultural change. In constrast, Hodder and others argued in the 1980s onward, that what was needed was an approach that "would combine the New Archaeology's emphasis on studying the processes of social change with the concerns of an earlier generation of archaeologists such as V. Gordon Childe and Glyn Daniel, who had viewed archaeology primiarly 'as a historical discipline' and artifacts as 'expressions of culturally framed ideas.'"

This meant that for his excavation of Çatalhöyük, Hodder developed a radically different approach to excavation. He assembled a broad and large team of experts who could look at multiple different aspects of the site - from the remains of plants to the location of bodies - and offer insights. Digging the site must have been a heady experience at times, as the team of archaeologists bounced ideas off each other and explored different approaches. The new approachs to archaeology that emerged in the second half of the 20th century, were heavily influenced by radical movements - from Marxism to Feminism. It is interesting to see the importance of these approaches explored by Balter's book, and indeed how they actively shaped the work and interpretations of the archeaological workers. 

What Balter does in this book then, is quite remarkable. His exploration of the history of Catalhöyük takes place on multiple levels. First their is his account of early human history - the ideas, activity and lives that made up the neolithic culture there. But through his discussion of these he also explores the nature of modern archaeology and its own shaping through contemporary culture. Finally, and inseparable from the previous two, he looks at the workers on the site. Exploring how their own lives, ideas and cultures shape their understanding of the neolithic. 

Lacking an academic grounding in archaeology but an enthusiasm for the distant past, I was expecting to mostly enjoy the bits about ancient Catalhöyük society. I actually found myself fascinating by Michael Blater's exploration of archaeology itself, and the people who make and shape it. A recommended read.

Related Reviews

Irving - The Fatal Lure of Politics: The life and thought of Vere Gordon Childe
Reader - Cities
Childe - Man Makes Himself
Lewis-Williams - The Mind in the Cave
Mithen - After the Ice – A Global Human History 20,000 – 5,000 BC

Kevin Barry - The Heart in Winter

The town of Butte, Montana, USA, was built on mining. Its miners came from everywhere around the world, and their labour lined the pockets of the mine-owners to the extent of millions of dollars. Not for nothing was the town known as "the richest hill on Earth". The miners, of course, worked hard, long hours in dangerous conditions. Today the most sombre place for visitors to Butte is the memorial to the lives lost in the Speculator mine disaster of 1917. Another place to visit is one of the town's former brothels.

Both these aspects of Butte are part of the plot of Kevin Barry's novel The Heart in Winter. Set in the 1890s, one of its two central characters is Tom Rourke, an Irish immigrant who failed at being a miner, but now makes a living by selling dope, and casual work in the local photographer's shop. His nights are spent in Butte's bars and brothels. 

Polly Gillespie, on the other hand, is a mail order bride. She arrives at the station and within minutes is married to the zealous religious man Long Harrington, a manager at the Anaconda mining company. Her background is less clear, though its obvious she is not the shy virgin that Harrington thinks. Her marriage is immediately dark, as her new husband flagellates himself, presumeable for the sin he commits with Polly. On meeting Tom at the photographers, Polly is immediately taken. Soon they are fleeing through Montana's forested mountains, on the back of a stolen horse whose money bags are filled with the rent collected by Tom's former landlady. Rent that Tom rarely paid. Leaving the lodgings burning, and with little in the way of survival gear, Tom and Polly, escape into the woods and meet a succession of random, eccentric characters - precisely the types you might expect to be living in the woods in 1890s Montana. Religious, eccentric and brutalised. They are persued by three violent sexually obsessed thugs, hired by Harrington to return Polly and murder Tom. 

Their love affair is powerful and intense. It is brilliantly written, though the reader instinctively knows that it will not end well. Few lives seem to in Barry's portrayal of a Montana run through with profit hungry multinationals and with Native American genocide only a few years in the past.

Barry's writing is tight and clipped. This is not a long novel, though he packs a lot into each sentence. It is sparse, to the point of frustration at times. I found myself wanting a few longer descriptions of events. Reading this too fast means missing how events completely. But the pace fits the story of two lovers on the run, and its a fantastic portrayal of life on the edge of Western civilisation, in a place where as Sergio Leone put it in Few Dollars More, "Where life had no value, death, sometimes, had its price". 

Related Reviews

Doig - This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
Doig - Bucking the Sun

Anthony Seldon with Jonathan Meakin - Truss at 10: How not to be a Prime Minister

This sort of political biography rarely interests me. But I must admit to a certain fascination with the short 49 day premiership of Liz Truss. Part of this arises from attempting to understand how her chaotic period as PM could have had such a profound effect on the British economy. Her disastrous mini-budget which, according to Anthony Seldon's new book, was even dismissed by US President Biden while he bought an ice-cream, had disastorous effects for people already suffering a massive cost of living crisis. For many there has not yet been a recovery. But this book also offered the attraction of reading about the infighting among Tory politicians, each seemingly more greedy for power than the other, and each of them willing to sell their own grandmother for a chance at success.

Anthony Seldon is very much an establishment figure - this is not the work of a raging socialist who would happily see the whole Tory Party condemned to prison. But he is a faithful and honest recorder of events. Despite the short length of Truss' time in Number 10, Seldon's book is based on some 120 interviews with insiders, MPs, advisors and "people in the room". It is also a rumination on what "success" and "failure" are for British PMs.

Liz Truss came to Prime Ministerial office more by accident than design. Her success was a result of machinations that were trying to keep out the right's favourite Penny Mordaunt in favour of Rishi Sunak. Truss arrived, blinking in the daylight, with few plans and concrete ideas other than a profoundly right wing neoliberal outlook on the economy and a happy go lucky attitude to finance. Partly as a result of the painful leadership election Truss was limited in who she could ask to be in her cabinet. More problematic was her focus on the hard-right of the Party which meant that fringe figures like Jacob Rees-Mogg were pushed to the fore instead of more level-headed and experienced people. Truss herself, it must be said, was relatively experienced. Seldon makes the point that in different circumstances, she could have been a relatively benign PM, after all she had served in multiple cabinets for previous PMs.

But she was elected by a Tory membership that favours the right-wing politicians, and she cobbled together a cabinet that reflected this. Seldon repeatedly makes the point that Truss' biggest failing was to mistake the enthusiastic support of the Tory membership for the electorate as a whole. 

In office she made a series of blunders and errors. It is wrong, and deeply unfair, to attribute these simply to Truss's incompetence. Though there was plenty of that. Truss was singularly unwilling to listen to advice and criticism. Worse than this she made a series of personal choices that removed those best placed to offer concrete suggestions, even had she been willing to listen. In addition some of the ideas she was getting from those close to her were wild. Rees-Mogg's belief that the public could be won to nuclear power if a naval submarine was moored in the Liverpool docks and its reactor connected to the national grid being just one. 

More problematic however were Truss' own right wing ideas. In fact, in Seldon's account, there is more than a little of Trumpism to her approach. Her obsession with the "blob", an alleged amorphous mass of civil servants and liberals blocking free market initiatives was one example. This meant she sacked or ignored those whom she disagreed with, cutting herself off from people who could have helped her find a way through the mess. In the middle of the economic storm it was a fatal mistake and a real weakness of her personal leadership.

However it was her commitment to a right-wing "mini budget" designed to kick start the economy that was her undoing. Improperly costed, with no intention to balance the books, the already fragile British economy was sent into freefall as the markets sold the kitchen sink as the pound collapsed. A vicious circle developed and neither Truss nor her closest allies could offer confidence or stability. It was only a matter of time before she went.

What is important here is the way that British capitalism reacted to Truss. There is no doubt that her measures would have been attractive to many in big business. Cutting taxes, ending the cap on bankers bonuses and so on. But they were mistimed, and in a period of instability, British capital needed stability in order to maximise profits. It was this that Truss and her Chancellor could not offer, and it was this that Jeremy Hunt, who replaced Kwasi Kwarteng as Chancellor and dramatically reversed all Truss' ideas did offer. Stability is always better for the bosses, and Truss had to go. It wasn't the blob that did for her, but the free market operating as its proponents think it should.

There is a certain delight in reading about what was happening behind the scenes. Truss' confusion, shock, horror and incompetence are good for a laugh. At the time, of course, we, the public, knew little of this. Seldon's interviews give us a real insight into what was going on. It is like watching a political car crash in slow motion and in HD. But if readers remember, at the time, we weren't laughing. We were all glued to the news because it was our mortgages and gas bills going through the roof. At one point there was a serious possiblity that all our pensions would vanish. 

The problem with Seldon's account is that this aspect to the crisis is entirely absent. Indeed the whole book takes place within the rarefied atmosphere of establishment parliamentary politics. There is one, brief, allusion to the strikes that had rocked Britain in 2022 and continued to into 2023. One of the reasons for Truss' weakness is that these strikes had demonstrated a popular militant alternative to Tory government by and for the rich. Truss, and indeed the PMs who preceded and followed her, were incredibly vulnerable to that power. Sadly the TUC and the union leaders didn't push that through and ensure that the next PM was chosen on the back of a powerful working class mobilisation. We all would be in a better position today.

Anthony Seldon's account of Truss's pathetic stint in Number 10 can be read on many levels. One aspect to this is to see just what odious people some of these politicians are. Seldon's quotes an anonymous insider who notes that when Truss thanked them for their work after she decided to resign, it was the first time any of them had heard her say "thank you". So this is an insider's account of political disaster, chutzpah and consequent decline and fall. But it also reminds us that the "gang of waring brothers" who govern, are motivated by self interest. At the same time they are divided in only one way - how to best to maximise profit. Reading Truss at 10 is a bit of an insight into the establishment that should make us all more committed to fighting for a more rational political system - one not guided by greed.

Related Reviews

Jones - Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
Miliband - Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour
Groves - The Strange Case of Victor Grayson
Arch - From Ploughtail to Parliament: An Autobiography

Abram Leon - The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation

Abram Leon was a brilliant intellectual and socialist activist whose life was cut short when he was murdered in Auschwitz. Born in Warsaw in October 1918 his parents emigrated to Palestine when he was a schoolboy, but then moved to Belgium shortly afterward. From his parents Leon learnt Zionist politics. He quickly becoming an activist in the Zionist socialist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair. He read avidly, as even a cursory glance at the extensive bibliography in this book shows. But he studied Marxism seriously and began to break with Zionism. Leon wrote for a Belgian Troskysist newspaper, and quickly became involved in the group behind it. During World War II Leon wrote a "Theses on the Jewish Question" which became the basis for this book. Through the war years Leon became a leading underground revolutionary, connecting activists in France and Belgium and his group was one of the few socialist organisations maintaining principled positions against imperialism. Tragically when the end of the war was in sight Leon was captured by the Nazis, tortured and eventually deported to Auschwitz where he was murdered.

The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation was his only book. It is a masterpiece of hisorical materialism, limited only by the conditions in which it was written. The editors and translators of the Pathfinder edition I read have done wonders to attempt to find all the source material that Leon used. Naturally he was unable to check all his sources, though this does not undermine the work at all. In the book Leon attempts to understand the position of Jewish people under capitalism and how they have become the victims of fascist and right-wing politics. To do this he explores the history of the Jews from ancient times through to the 20th century. He does because in his words:

We must not start with religion in order to explain Jewish history; on the contrary, the preservation of the Jewish religion or nationality can be explained only by the 'real Jew,' that is to say, by the Jew in his economic and social role.

Thus Leon argues that "the cause of ancient antisemitism is the same as for medieval antisemitism: the antagonism toward the merchant in every society based principally on the production of use values". The Jewish religion means that Jews in ancient and feudal society were forced to occupy particular roles within society, that of the merchant, trader and eventually money lender. These positions meant Jewish people become the victims of antisemitism because they are hated both by the ruling class and lower orders for their economic roles. Leon spends some time exploring the different roles of Jewish people in medieval times - particularly the way that the ruling class dominated their repression - stealing their money, initiating pogroms and expelling them from their lands. Its a fascinating account which sees monarchs and lords dependent on the Jewish people, and empowered to exile and imprison them. But as the economies developed, this was undermined as other people could take on the positions previously restricted to Jews:

The evolution in exchange of medieval economy proved fatal to the position of the Jews in trade. The Jewish merchant importing spices into Europe and exporting slaves, is displaced by respectable Christian traders to whom urban industry supplies the principal products for their trading.

This developement drives a further change which sees Jews become associated with "usury" in particular - though Leon is careful to avoid seeing "lending" as being seperate to "commerical capital". Instead he argues is that "the eviction of the Jews from commerce had as a consequence their entrenchment in one of the professions which they had already practiced previously." Again Leon explores in some fascinating detail historical examples of how Jewish people lived and worked in the period, and their social positions. Crucially Leon argues against common antisemitic lies:

The ideology and capacities of each class formed gradually as a function of its economic position. The same is true of the Jews. It is not their 'innate' predisposition for commerce which explains their economic position but it is their economic position which explains their predisposition to commerce. 

Leon continues by arguing that just as it is "infantile to see the economic position of Judaism as the result of the 'predispositions of the Jews'... it is puerile to consider it as the fruit of persectuions and of legan bans against exercising other profiession than commerce or usury." He documents the various roles, jobs and positions that Jewish people did hold in medieval society outside of trading and usury. It demonstrates that even in highly religious societies like medieval Europe, antisemitism was not a constant. But the association of usury with Jews drove new explosions of antisemitism among the rich as well as the peasants and artisans in cities. As Leon explains:

In the measure that usury became the principal occupation of the Jews, they enetered increasingly into relations with the popular masses and these relations worsened all the time... It was... direst distress which forced the peasant or the artisan to borrow from the Jewish usurer... It is easy to understand the hatred that the man of te people must hav efelt for the Hew in whom he saw the direct cause of his ruin, without perceiving the emperor, the prince, or the rich bourgeois, who had become richer thanks to the Jewish usurer. it is in Germany above all where Jewish usury took on its most "popular" form, pricipally in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries... a hatred which ended in anti-Jewish massacres and in the "burning" of Jews (Judenbrand).

This lays the basis for ongoing antisemitic tropes and racist beliefs about Jewish people, even into the capitalist era when Jews no longer played the social and economic role they had done under feudalism. As Leon writes:

On the one hand, capitalism favoured the economic assimilation of Judaism and consequently its cultural assimilation; on the other hand, by uprooting the Jewish masses, concentrating them in cities, provoking the rise of antisemitism, it stimulated the development of Jewish nationalism. 

The development of Zionism as a reflection of this nationalism however is unable to resolve the contradictions that arise from class society. As Leon says, "an evil cannot be suppressed without destroying its causes. But Zionism wishes to resolve the Jewish question without destroying capitalism, which is the principal source of the suffering of the Jews."

Unsurprisingly it is the horror of the Nazis that shapes the conclusions of Leon's book. Though he remains hopeful. It is worth quoting in full these words, written as they were by a socialist revolutionary in the midst of the Nazi Germany's conquest of most of mainland Europe:

The very paroxysm, however, that the Jewish problem has reached today, also provides the key to its solution. The plight of the Jews has never been so tragic; but never has it been so close to ceasing to be that. In past centuries, hatred of the Jews had a real basis in the social antagonism which set them against other classes of the population. Today, the interest of the Jewish classes are closely bound up with the interests of the popular masses of the entire world. By persecuting the Jews as “capitalist,” capitalism makes them complete pariahs. The ferocious persecutions against Judaism render stark naked the stupid bestiality of anti-Semitism and destroy the remnants of prejudices that the working classes nurse against the Jews. The ghettos and the yellow badges do not prevent the workers from feeling a growing solidarity with those who suffer most from the afflictions all humanity is suffering.

Leon argues that the destruction of capitalism and the building of a socialist society would enable the Jewish people to live in peace and freedom precisely because it would allow "the possibility of assimilation as well as the possibility of having a special national life". Perceptively, several years before the establishment of the State of Israel he notes the potential for a socialist future to unite people, "when national barriers and prejudices begin to disappear in Palestine, who can doubt that a fruitful reconciliation will take place between the Arab and Jewish workers, the result of which will be their partial and total fusion". 

Socialism, by removing national barriers, class antagonism and the need to "divide and rule" will, through the joint struggle of people from different backgrounds, cultures and religions, create a society free of antisemitism forever. It is only socialism, Leon argues, that can offer hope and a safe future to Jewish people everywhere.

The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation is a remarkable book, both for the conditions of its writing and for the clarity of its argument. Inevitably there are some things that are dated, and it would have been interesting if Leon had been able to develop further his analysis of fascism and antisemitism. But in its clarity of historical analysis, Abram Leon's use of Marxism to understand how Jewish people's lives and social roles changed historically, and his utter commitment to the complete liberation of humanity, it remains an inspiring and educational work.

Related Reviews

Gluckstein & Stone - The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, resistance fighters & firebrands
Austin - The Jews and the Reformation
Pappe - Ten Myths About Israel
Sand - The Invention of the Jewish People

Walter Mosley - What Next: A memoir toward world peace

Walter Mosley is best known for his crime novels, many of which feature Easy Rawlins, an American black detective working in Los Angeles. But Mosley is less well known for his political work. What Next: A memoir toward world peace is an essay he wrote in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11 2001 in New York City. In it Mosley explores the reasons for the attacks and the dangers of a US led response. In doing so he interogates the racism, poverty, violence and class nature of the United States.

Reading What Next I was reminded about the radical politics of the era. September 11 happened in the midst of the merging and growing anti-capitalist movement, which then morphed into the anti-war protests. A strong sense of radical politics emerged within these movements that is very much reflected in Mosley's writing. He rights beautifully about how the Civil Liberties movement shaped contemporary America. But he is also painfully aware of the reality of US imperialism and how what is done to the rest of the world in the name of US power, impacts back on those who live in the US state, but are also victims. 

The "memoir" aspect of the title comes in part from Mosley's own memories of his father. He was a US soldier in World War Two, and Mosley remembers how when he asked his Dad if he was scared his father's answer shocked him. Mosley senior wasn't scared at first, because he thought the Germans only hated Americans, and as a black man, he had never been considered American. The Nazis however, didn't appreciate the sutbletiles of 20th century US racism and tried to shoot him. It was a defining moment for Mosley's father and thus for Walter.

As Mosley watched the burning Twin Towers, he say "in the column of smoke", the legacy of that system:

Every child wasting away under his mother's powerless gaze. Every Muslim burned by a Hindu. Every innocenet citizen blown up by a suicide bomber or crhsed by an onrushing, revenge-drunk tank. I know we are responsible because US dollars have found their way into, and out of, every battlefield, every hospital bed, and every pocket of every terrorist in the world. We - Black men and women in every stratum of American society - live in and are part of an eco-system of terror. We, descendents of human suffering, are living in a fine mansion at the edge of a precipice. And the ground is caving in under the weight of our wealth and privilege.

Much of this could be written about today not least in US imperialism's support for genocide in Gaza. But there is ambiguity in Mosley's assertion that everyone in the US is in someway responsible for it. He does understand that not all Americans, and certainly not all "people of color in this nation" are wealthy, successful or privileged. There are many who suffered in the US's rise to power: "Native Americans and Chinese Americas and millions of poor white Americans who suffered and died for the railroads and steel manufacturers in wars for land and economic control."

But it is, and was, unfair to right that "black men and women in every stratum" are living in a "fine mansion" in "wealth and privilege". Quite the opposite in fact. Mosley's polemic is contradictory. He understands that the poor, the oppressed and the exploited are victims, yet because they are part of "America" he portrays them as part of the machine. However, this sits at odds with his belief  that the enemy is the system itself, and that "we must redefine our notion of the The Enemy, taking into account the role and actions of our own political and economic systems".

The problem is of course, the word "we". US politicians are adept at claiming that they speak for all. In fact all imperialists are. They justify actions by claiming to speak in our name. It is why so many placarsd on anti-war protests read "Not in Our Name". Mosley echoes this: "Even if we condone military actions, we might at least claim some culpability". And Mosley turns this into a critique of the general mainstream political narrative: "If we commit these murders, then we are also The Enemy of Civilisation" he concludes. Here he deploys "we" to force the reader to question who they are within the logic of imperialism.

It is safe to say that Mosley was not writing for me. His polemic was written specifically "as an address to African America", as a discussion on how black American history relates to the War on Terror. That's not to say there isn't plenty here for everyone though, even two decades after that failed war began. Running through the book is the question of class. I was enthralled by the clarity of his prose when it came to understanding the differences between the poor and the rich: Those who labour, and those who don't. Mosley uses this theme repeatedly, linking the war abroad with the war on working class Americans.

In vilifying the capitalist shell of our foreign policies, the victims also vilify the American people. This makes sense. Don't we always malign our enemies?... But... we Americans don't necessarily believe in the pracitvies of our corporate structures. Many of us feel the plundering effects of big business in our own work lives, bank accounts, energy bills and certainly at the hospital. Today many Americans have lost vast quantities of cash betting on the hollow promise of the stock market. College funds nad retirement accounts have been depleted and lost while the captains of capital remain well-heeled and unaffected.

In fact it is very notable that Mosley's definition of class is a Marxist one, linking it to the individual's relation to the means of production, rather than sociological nonsense like ones accent. 

So Mosley's conclusions are revolutionary. His calls to action are very much shaped by the preoccupation of the 2000s anti-capitalist movement: concern about the media, questions about organisation, fears about state security bodies and perhaps some naive illusions in state democrarcy. The movement still obsesses about some of these these questions today, which is why the book feels so contemporary. 

But it also feels contemporary, because the problems that Mosley refers to in the aftermath of 9/11 have only got worse. The US has been involved in endless wars. Imperialist crisis is spreading. Economic slump and crashes have reoccured and the environment has only got worse. The movements against racism that form the core of much of his essay have, however, exploded: Black Lives Matter saw the biggest days of protest in World History. These built on the movement against war and capitalism that inspired Mosley. They continue today - not least in the Palestinian solidarity movement. In this sense Walter Mosley's book speaks to a new generation.

Related Reviews

Chenoweth & Maria J. Stephan - Why Civil Resistance Works
Malm - How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Solnit - A Paradise Built in Hell
Vaillant - Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World