Monday, May 12, 2025

Daniel Mason - North Woods

Ever wonder what happened in the house you live in before you did? Or on the land it stands on? North Woods is an entertaining, if disappointing, exploration of this intriguing concept which follows a small plot of land in Massachusetts from roughly the time of European colonisation onward. The people who live there, from a couple whose illicit love affair means they must flee a tyrannical puritan colony, to twin sisters who succeed their father in the house and grow one of the most beautifully tasting apples in an orchard on the land to modern times when families, isolated individuals and lovers make the place their own. The land, and the house on it, grows and shrinks over time as people make adjustments removing beloved orchards, neglecting (or loving) the land or even digging a swimming pool.

It is an intriguing idea, but the author is trying too hard to be epic. The book feels like a loose collection of interconnected stories tied together by the land and the supernatural elements that mean many of the characters remain in the house and influence those that come after. The problem is the supernatural element doesn't quite work - it is too unclear how and why the ghostly remains influence the world and why - and the ending just doesn't work. Some reviewers have enjoyed what they see as an ecological story in the book - but this is just window dressing. The woods are cleared, they regrow, and some species arriving on American shores from elsewhere, having an impact through the book. But if anyone expects this to produce a metaphor for humanities' impact on nature, or even something deeper, they'll be disappointed.

North Woods is not a particularly bad novel. But I struggled to be that enthusiastic. It's a one trick pony.  

Friday, May 09, 2025

Adrian Tchaikovsky - Service Model

Readers who enjoy Adrian Tchaikovsky's innovating and often surprising science-fiction may find themselves surprised by Service Model. Normally Tchaikovsky's books are set in worlds with exotic alien flora and fauna, with humans grappling with the complexities of world's outside their experience. Service Model however deals with intelligence of a different form, grappling with the complexities of a world outside their experience.

Meet Charles. Charles is a robot valet, an AI with a clever enough brain for it to perform complex tasks such as laying out clothing and managing its human's appointment diary. Deviation from these tasks means following a somewhat limited decision tree, further restricted by Charles' limited experience of a world beyond the household of its master. When something goes badly wrong with the human Charles' is supposed to valet for, a combination of Charles' limited programming and problems with what passes for authorities forces Charles into the outside world.

Here's the interesting thing. We as the reader can appreciate things Charles' cannot. The robot has entered a world in collapse. Human society has broken down. Charles' home may have been one of the last bastions of society. Outside its chaos. Service robots continue to try to maintain the systems - mowing lawns or keeping deliveries going, even when there's no fuel or part, or even things to deliver. We can appreciate the horror. Charles just goes searching for the next stage in it's to-do list.

While we might be used to Tchaikovsky's books showing humans wandering through a dark, dangerous and incomprehensible world, in this case, its a robot in an incomprehensible, but still oddly human world. Will Charles' find someone to serve? Will he find a role? Or will he break free of the constrains of his programming - these are the central questions.

Service Model is a darkly humourous story. I enjoyed it a lot, and I appreciated the unexpected ending. It's a good read, but probably not one I will return too. An interesting take on questions of AI and what it is to be conscious - big questions for the 21st century.

Related Reviews 

Tchaikovsky - Alien Clay
Tchaikovsky - Ironclads
Tchaikovsky - Children of Time
Tchaikovsky - Children of Ruin
Tchaikovsky - Walking to Aldebaran

Wednesday, May 07, 2025

Moudhy Al-Rashid - Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History

Ancient Mesopotamia, the "land between the rivers", sits between the Tigris and Euphrates. An incredibly fertile region, its agricultural food surplus permitted an amazing civilisation to flourish with associated art, military power, royal luxury and monumental buildings. In the 1920s archaeologists excavating a palace building in the pyramid of Ur found a remarkable room filled with items from Mesopotamia's history. The odd thing was that these seemed to be in a place that was built much more recently. In other words these older objects had been moved to a newer room. The headline grabbing speculation was this was an ancient museum.

The pyramid of Ur is old and survived for thousands of years. Its most recent inhabitants, far in our own past, would also have been aware of their own history stretching back thousands of years. In fact, as Moudhy Al-Rashid says:

History, memory and antiquity were important in ancient Mesopotamia and it was not unusual - or even problematic - to blend history and myth. The older a thing or person or event was, the more important it was. Kings regularly sought to root their royal activities and even identities in bygone ages. The Sumerian King List, as a record stretching into a past so distant no sources even survive to corrobaorate it, allowed later kings to associate themselves with such a long list of greatness. The people who wrote the list were attempting the very same thign I am in this book - a history of their ancient past.

The centrality of history, and myth to the Mesopotamian view of themselves is what makes the idea of an ancient musuem so intriguing. So in her exploration of ancient Mesopotamia, Al-Rashid takes the objects found in the "museum" and discusses them in detail to interogate both the ancient history and what history means to us. Its an entertaining exploration of a part of history that I knew little about. 

Part of what makes this point in history so fascinating is that it is so well documented. This is, in no small part, due to the myriad of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform writing. These tablets document everything from orders by shopkeepers to instructions to the king's personnel. There are also letters between sisters, tables of school children who are practising their letters, together with sketches of their teachers. With these, sometimes very dull and sometimes very moving, documents we see both how the people of the region organised their economies and the things they were interested in. Al-Rashid's expertise is these cuneiform tablets and her enthusiasm shines through. Sadly there are no pictures of the tablets she discuses, so its hard to imagine them. But Al-Rashid's descriptions of the tablets, and crucially, the evolution of the writing form is detailed. This is how we begin to see these objects as parts of an evolving history that has shaped our own.

But in describing the objects and tablets Al-Rashid gives us further insights. The history of the past, as the "king lists" suggest is often the history of a wealthy few. But Al-Rashid digs through this to try and draw out more about who made up the majority of society, and how they lived and worked. She writes:

Some of the earliest cuneiform texts from two of the oldest Mesopotamian cities, Uruk and Jemdet Nasr, record lists of workers whose sexes were labelled in the same way as those of cattle using signs that resembled genitalia. They were counted and accounted for like animals.... Other qualifications also appeared alongside people's names, including the combinations of the signs for 'head' and 'rope' to refer to a person led by a noose, and one sign that simply means 'yoke'.

The wealth of places like Ur and its palaces rested on the hard, and often forced, labour of tens of thousands of workers. As Al-Rashid says these people are barely recorded and remembered apart from a few passing cuneiform references. The rich however are memorialised, and "took their stories into death, along with their many privileges, proppsed up by an economic system that concentrated wealth, for the most part, in the hands of palaces and temples for partial redistribution to a wider population of dependents."

Indeed for those at the bottom of Mesopotamian society somethings were horrific. Some cuneiform records record how parents were forced to sell their own children, even babes in arms, into slavery. Al-Rashid is careful to explore the way the ancient texts demonstrate the reality of the past's class societies:

Cuneiform preserves the stories of people whose work in many ways made life in ancient Mesopotamia possible. The agricultural labrouers who harveted grain, factory workers who made textiles, and the runaway slaves (and perhaps even their bounty hunters) live on in the tiny triangles from ancient Mesopotamia and provide a glimpse of what life might have been life for those whose stories were wtitten down by and for others. 

It is unusual to find a book about the ancient past that takes serious questions of class, gender and power. Mesopotamia was a system that produced great wealth, but we rarely hear about those who created it. As Brecht wrote so memorably:

Who built Thebes of the 7 gates?
In the books you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished,
Who raised it up so many times?
In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live?
Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?


Al-Rashid's book does its best to rescue those forgotten lives and place them in the context of their wider world. Its a great book whose only fault in my view is that it lacks a map and any illustrations. A few pictures of the objects described, and a few images of cuneiform tables and their translations would have made all the difference. But don't let this stop you getting a copy and devouring it.

Related Reviews

Scott - Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
Mithen - Thirst: Water & Power in the Ancient World
McAnany & Yoffee - Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire

Sunday, May 04, 2025

Margaret Mead – Coming of Age in Samoa

Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa is one of the most well-known books of anthropology ever written. Mead was in her 20s when she took the audacious trip to Samoa, and then on to the smaller island of Taʻū to live with the Samoan community there. Her account of the lives of the people there, and her focus on the lives of young women was extremely unusual for the time. First published in 1930 the book carries with it some contemporary prejudices, though it must be said that at the same time the book is remarkably progressive for the time – simply taking issues such as female sexuality and gender issues seriously was radical.

The book was written explicitly as a popular work, and is devoid of the complex anthropological classifications and relationship diagrams that bedevil other, similar works. The book is also written as a polemic, aimed at a Western audience (primarily in the United States), about education and development of young people. As Mead writes in her original introduction,

this tale of another way of life is mainly concerned with education, with the process by which the baby, arrived cultureless upon the human scene, becomes a full-fledged adult member of his or her society. The strongest light will fall upon the ways in which Samoan education, in its broadest sense, differs from our own. And from this contrast we may be able to turn, made newly and vividly self-conscious and self-critical, to judge anew and perhaps fashion differently the education we give to our children.

The opening chapter describes daily life in Samoa, a mix of work, play and rest, centred on the production of food (through fishing and agriculture) and the various roles that people play. While Samoa is not a pre-class society, in fact it is heavily hierarchical on a regional and very local scale, it is a society where class differences matter much less than in capitalist society. Chiefs and heads of households have more of a role in terms of managing and organising, at least at the time that Mead visited, village life. The collection of a surplus allows more for the functioning of ceremonial, religious and celebratory life, than the maintenance of a position of power and wealth.

There are strict gender roles as well. However gendered labour is also shaped by differences related to age. Women, and girls, primarily focus on the home, though some girls and women also fish and collect food and some boys work in the home cooking. Age also plays a role in determining hierarchy in a way that is far more than just who is more important than others. For instance, children, including very small children often look after younger children. But all children understand that older people have authority to order them about. This means children are central to Samoan production, but they are also more collectively looked after and developed. They are also freer, at least as they become teenagers, to change households and move about. Meads explorations of the way age, class and gender inter-relate and sympathetic and detailed and make for real insights into a society very different from ours. Indeed this forms the very basis for her points about shining a light on our own education systems.

One important aspect to Samoan culture however was its close nature. Children were much more exposed to the realities of human life – death, birth and sex – than Westerners, especially in Mead’s era. As such children where not sheltered from sex, death and birth. Sex in particular is part of getting older. Children clearly experimented more in Samoan culture, and were prepared and protected. There is also a curious difference between the sexuality of young people before marriage and that after. Young people seemed to have frequently sexual encounters, both hetro and homosexual, and it seems that their first sex was usually with an older person. This latter part feels uncomfortable and it is not clear to me from Mead’s writing exactly how this works unless it is abusive. Some of the sexual realities of Samoan society are, however, much more progressive than our own. The acceptance of homosexuality as a natural part of life for younger people is very different, though again Mead does recount a case of “deviance”, to use her word, where an older male Samoan who might be considered transsexual and/or homosexual is treated with disdain by the community and, indeed the author. Despite Mead’s own possible bisexuality, her comments about homosexuality in Samoan society imply it is merely a childhood distraction, or “deviance”. with hindsight this seems either naïve, a mistake or perhaps Mead recognising that Western society would not accept a truthful account.

Mead also shows that rape, in a particular form, seems to have been relatively common. She writes:

Between the unmarried there are three forms of relationship: the clandestine encounter, “under the pam trees,” the published elopement, Avaga, and the ceremonious courtship in which a boy “sits before the girl”; and on the edge of these, the curious form of surreptitious rape, called moetotolo, sleep crawling, resorted to by youths who find favour in no maiden’s eyes.

These relationships and realities belay the idea that Samoan society in this period was a Utopia. While there were clearly more open and relaxed attitudes to sex, and young people did seem to enjoy and have freedom to explore their sexuality before marriage, it is also true that there were some violent and unpleasant traditions and beliefs. The focus, within the community on "deflowering" of young women and the moetotolo that is related to this, imply a structural problem within Samoan society's approach to women. It demonstrates that for all its positives in its approach to sexuality, Samoan culture had, at the time, an unequal setup between men and women, and consequent unequal power relations. 

Nonetheless Mead's work does remind us that societies can be organised very differently. For instance, Mead reports that her Samoan friends laughed at the story of Romeo and Juliet, believing the idea of lifelong romantic monogamy hilarious. This was not because marriage and love did not happen, or that lifelong love between partners did not occur, but because the idea of a couple only having sex with one another for their whole lives was impossible to understand.

Indeed adultery and consequent punishment did happen. But it punishment was usually about the offended party being paid a fine, such as some well-made mats.

Mead’s discussion of the economic life of Samoan people tells us much about different approaches to life. She tackles questions that remain extremely relevant – how does a differently organised society change approaches to things like Mental Distress, loneliness and love. One interesting point is that the role of the immediately family is much less significant to Samoan people. Mead says: 

It is interesting to note that a larger family community, in which there are several adult men and women, seems to ensure the child against the development of the crippling attitudes which have been labelled Oedipus complexes, Electra complexes and so on.

The Samoan picture shows that it is not necessary to channel so deeply the affection of a child for its parents and suggests that while we would reject that part of the Samoan scheme which holds no rewards for us, the segregation of the sexes before puberty, we may learn from a picture in which the home does not dominate and distort the life of the child.

These are interesting points. The central role of the “bourgeois” family in Western society is remarkably constraining. Leaving aside Mead’s dated psychiatric comments and her framing from her own, much more segregated society, the point that an extended family allows much wider child development still stands.

There are, of course, problems. Mead’s work is often shaped by her own times and as such some of the language and analysis absolutely jars. She also knows that she is seeing Samoan society in a period of rapid change, as US influence is changing things dramatically. She notes, for instance, that the recent compulsory attendance of children at school by the authorities is quickly destroying traditional society which relies heavily on child labour to care for the youngest children and prepare food. This would only be exacerbated in the decades after the period when Mead was writing.

It is also clear that Mead’s approach to certain key questions relies too heavily on a belief that adult behaviour develops just from conditioning in childhood. Yes the differences between Samoan and Western societies are important and the different approach to education is tremendously important. But the organisation of the “economic base” in Western society shapes these factors, rather than simply a desire to educate differently.

These problems aside this is a tremendously influential and significant work. The attacks on Mead’s work by later anthropologists seem, in no small part, to stem from a belief that young women were not, and could not, be the independent, sexual and confident people that Mead described. It is also likely that dismissal of Mead herself, due perhaps to her gender, lay at their root. Mead’s youth, sexuality and liberal politics, no doubt made her a more insightful scientist than many of her peers. The book she wrote reminds us that humans have constantly found new and varied ways to organise their lives. While we should not pretend that Samoan society in the 1920s was a perfect utopia for all, Mead's account should give those of us trying to change the world renewed confidence that things do not need to be like they are. 

Related Reviews

Tuesday, April 29, 2025

Robert Wooster - The Military & United States Indian Policy 1865-1903

This short book is an important, if relatively unknown, study of the way the US military related to, and shaped, government policy toward the Native Americans. It is not an account of troop movements, campaigns and battles, though these do make an appearance. Rather Wooster studies the evolution of ideas that would culminate in a genocidal policy.

Wooster makes some specific points. Firstly, military policy toward the Native Americans was shaped by the battle and campaign experiences most of the US commanders had from the Civil War. This led them to conceive of military engagements being based on columns of armed forces, that would overwhelm the enemy in pitched battles. This led them to be illequiped, logisitically and tactically for the type of combat that they would experience against the various Indian tribes. Secondly, the policy of the US army was often shaped by the ideas of its leading figures. In particular Generals Sheridan and Sherman. This meant that prejudices and racism often undermined the miltary's attempts to subdue the Indians. Wooster makes this point regarding the use of Indians in the army itself:

In addition to scouting, native auxiliaries were by the 1880s performing valuable services as reservation policemen, freeing regulars for other duries and prevening unnecessary army-Indian collisions. Later officials... favoured more direct measures, sponsoring new policies that added Indian companies to most of the army's regiments. This last step never gained full favor among line officers. Some opposed it on racial grounds; others... argued that language problems would demoralise Indians and strip them of their individuality, which had been there greatest asset in servving the army [as scouts]. Although the Indian enlistment program failed to meet expectations, it was a logical culmination of continued efforts to assimilate Indians into society as a whole through the miltiary.

It was also the culmination of a deliberate policy of "divide and rule" that saw the US miltiary turn various tribes against each other, or exacerbate differences, in order to undermine them both. The most obvious example of this were the Crow scouts who accompanied Custer to the Little Big Horn and fought on the wrong side. This in turn flowed from the idea that there were good and bad Indians. 

Throughtout  the period however the Army faced a difficult task. It was undermanned, under-equipped and under resourced. The period immediately after Custer's defeat aside, this was an army that couldn't actually easily do its task and subdue the "enemy". It was also at the whim of politicians whose desire for a military presence in their areas was often more about the jobs and profits that a fort might bring, than any need to subdue the Native Americans locally. As Wooster points out "The military thus influenced the econoimic, social and political structure of the states, territories and communities it protected". 

But it was government genocidal policies that eventually succeeded where military organisation was unable. 

Although the army was plagued by strategic failures, the near extermination of the American bison during the 1870s helped to mask the mlitiary's poor performance. By stripping many Indians of their available resources, the slaughter of the buffalo severely reduced the Indians# capacity to continue an armed struggle against the United States. 

While Sheridan and Sherman "recognised that eliminating the buffalo might be the best way to force Indians to change their nomadic habits", the actual massacre of the animals was mostly done by non-military people. While some officers opposed the killing of the bison, the government actively encouraged it. As the Secretary of the Interior said in 1874, to Congress:

The buffalo are disappearing rapidly, but not faster than I desire. I regard the destruction of such game as Indians subsist upon as facilitating the policy of the Government, of destroying their hunting habits, coercing them on reservations and compelling them to begin to adopt the habits of civilisation.

It is worth remembering that the lessons learnt by the US government and Army in this period were genocidal. Settler Colonialism was always based on mass murder. In conclusion Wooster argues that US Army policy was often confused and contradictory toward the Indians as a whole:

A wide range of political and cultural factors influenced the formulation of that policy. The policy-making process itself was woefully lacking. Neither the federal government nor the army representing it organised institutions to examine Indian affairs in any comprehensive and systmatic manner. The absence of detailed contemporary analysis sowed confusion, mistrust, and disinterest among those involved in making policy.

Where policy was decided it tended to be a response to events - either Indian resistance, or economic - such as the discover of gold in the Black Hills, or the decision that the central US was not "a great desert" but rather an area that could be profitably farmed. These failures led to a brutal and violent experience for the Native Americans, one that the US has yet to redress properly.

Related Reviews

Estes - Our History is the Future
Hämäläinen - Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power

Friday, April 25, 2025

Nigel Harris & John Palmer (eds) World Crisis: Essays in Revolutionary Socialism

That World Crisis exists at all seems remarkable from this standpoint. Published in 1971 by a well known mainstream publisher, it is essentially a theoretical statement of the politics of the then, very small, International Socialists group. The IS was to become the Socialist Worker's Party, having grown significantly during and after the 1968 rebellion. But it was nontheless still a relatively small organisation. More importantly its socialist politics were minority one - even if they were thought through and clear. The rejection of the State Capitalism of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc by the IS put them at odds with almost all the radical left at the time. For this book to come out seems quite extraordinary.

Over fifty years after World Crisis was published how does it stand up? Is it worth reading? I would argue that it is worth reading, and that it has much to offer beyond just historical curisosity for those interested in the history of the British left and the origins of the SWP. While some chapters are necessarily dated, there are others that are fascinating and retain their use today.

In the introduction Jim Higgins and John Palmer restate some orthodox Marxist ideas. The main reason for this is to highlight how much of the left, under the pressure of the existence of the Soviet Union, had abandoned central tenets of Marx's concept of workers' self-emancipation. They write:

And implicit in the struggle of a group of workers against a single employer is the struggle of all labour aginst all capital. The rise of working-class parties based on trade unions, directly or indirectly, is not accidental. Nor is it an accident that in times of fierce economic struggle workers are more receptive to political ideas. It is because of these structural and necessary features of capitalism that Marxists have identified the working class as the revolutionary class par excellence; not because it has some mystical quality of goodness, but because the nature of capitalist production and the relations within it make it so. 

Writing this in 1971 is also a polemic directed at new layers of radicals, aiming to win them to a Marxist view that places working class self-activity at the heart of organisation. This book certainly does this. But the book also asks, what is changing in the world. The opening chapter is "A Day in the Life of the 'Fifties" by Peter Sedgwick and is an amusing, and insightful look at a demonstration "against German rearmament" in Parliament square. The protest is attacked by the police, and Sedgwick uses it as a way to contrast the staid life of the old left: "Almost without exception all the elements which came togehter so hopefully on that late day in January [1955], a decade and a half ago, have been probed, stripped, revealed as nothing by the merciless challenge of the years." Later however Sedgewick notes that at the time of writing workers were less likely to be on the streets, and protests are more often by groups of middle-class radicals in their "brief hour of rebellion". The workers he points out "cannot graduate... but its consciousness is slower to ignite tha that of the Instant Left." Written in a time before student life became something that masses of workers engaged in, this comes across as somewhat sectarian, especially in the aftermath of 1968. But there is a point. The workers did need to link up and develop their struggles. The limitations of this in Britain in 1968 was the weakeness of the whole movement.

Chapter two is somewhat depressingly called "The Decline of the Welfare State". Reading it one is tempted to shout out to the author Jim Kincaid, "you ain't seen nothing yet!". But Kincaid does trace the way that attacks on welfare are rooted in a capitalist approach to the economy. It's must have been a depressing read then. Now it feels like fortune telling. But Marxism as a tool is nothing if insightful, and some of the chapters here give a real sense of debates to come. Here, for instance, is Nigel Harris pointing out that capitalist development does not benefit everyone, and early discussion of topics that would become central to degrowth theory in the 21st century:

But 'growth' may not mean 'development'. The statistics may show a rising national income, even a rising average income per head, at the same time as unemployment is increasing, there is no change int he distribution of the occupied population between agricultural and non-agricultural employment and in the distribution of non-agricultural employment between manufactuing and other sectors. In human terms nothing very much may have happened, and things for the majority may even have got worse.

Paul Foot's chapter on the origins and limitations of the Labour Party is fascinating, beginning as it does with the early betrayals. Written at a time when Labour still had mass membership and considered itself a socialist organisation it is clearly a polemic designed to arm readers for individuals breaking from Labour. But it has some fascinating material that readers today who want to argue against a Parliamentary Road to Socialism will find useful. Similarly Chris Harman's brilliant essay traces the limitations of these countries as "socialist" and puts a clear argument for the importance of State Capitalism as a theory. Its importance, as Harman writes, is in clarifying the left's politics:

A clear analysis of these regimes is a necessary precondition for renewed growth of the Left in the West. Only a theory which centres on the basic problem for the rulers of these countries - that of accumulating capital - and sees this as forcing them into collision with each other and with the working class can comprehend the forms their rule takes and the policies they pursue at each historical point.

Such an analysis proved important for both building a new revolutionary left in the 1970s and developing a critique of the limitations of Stalinist parties in the same period. It also helped ensure that the SWP survived the collapse of State Capitalism in 1989. Characteristically, Tony Cliff's chapter "The Class Struggle in Britain" is an argument about what socialists should do. A couple of things stand out. One is his comment that "a declining interest in the traditional reformist organisations (the Labour Party, Communist Party, etc) does not mean the overcoming of reformist ideology." This is true, though while Cliff probably overestimated the declining interest, he was right that even when this comes, it does not necessarily mean reformism is also dispensed with. However one part of his chapter could very well be written today for socialists in Britain:

The weakness of revolutionaries in Britain at present is quite obvious. Small in number, often isolated because of their social composition - white collar and student - from the main sections of the working class, split into a number of groups, and above all lacking experience in leading mass struggles. But these weaknesses can be overcome. Readiness to learn, readiness to experiment systematically, above all readiness to try and translate the general theories into practical activities - this is what is necessary. In a complex and rapidly changing situation, readiness to move from simple tasks to more difficult ones, above all readiness to overcome one's own mistakes is crucial.

For some socialists reading World Crisis would be an act of navel gazing. Dreaming of past battles. I'm not sure of the value of that. But the clarity of the theory its authors have, their determination to root this theory in struggles, and learn and develop the theory offers much. Some of the chapters are reminders of central revolutionary ideas. Michael Kidron's article on Imperialism and the permanent arms economy is perhaps the most useful in this regard. Foot's chapter on Labour and Harman's on East Europe also offer insights and ideas that remain useful. But standing out all of them display a Marxist method essential to furthering the basis of our theory today. As Cliff reminds us:

The greatest defect of revolutionaries who have been isolated for years from the mass movement is their inclination to make a virtue out of necessity, and concentrate on theories to the exclusion of practice, forgetting that above all the duty of a revolutionary is to raise theory to the level of practice.
Related Reviews

Birchall - Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time
Harman - The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After
Harman - Selected Writings
Harman - Class Struggles in Eastern Europe 1945-83

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

Ismail Kadare - The General of the Dead Army

Twenty years after the end of World War Two, a General is sent from Italy to Albania to find and bring back the bodies of the soldiers killed there. He leaves with a fanfare, carrying with him the hopes and expectations of hundreds of people whose sons, husbands and fathers died, and never came home. In particular the General hopes to find Colonel X, a senior soldier whose body was never found, and whose wealthy and influential family want it returned.

Travelling with the General is a priest and the two form a bond which is more than professional, but not quite friendly. Their world views clash, as the General approaches the task with a mechanical eye - a professional job that needs to be done, and measured out in lists of names, measurements of skeltons and careful identifications. 

But the land itself is full of ghosts. The official international trip is hardly welcomed by the peasants who fought off the fascist invaders, and the long days, the difficult terrain and the tension take their toll on the General who begins to fantasise as his stress develops, that the dead soldiers are an army of his own, manouvering on some old battlefield. The priest questions him - does he think it would have been better if he had led them? Its a poignant question because the General clearly does think so. The reality of war is not something he really knows - though the diaries and stories he hears of the dead soldiers teach him that the war, and the Italian troops, were not the brave heroes of his imagination.

Into this tangle of emotions and stress comes and added problem. A German general is here too. Removing their own bones. Inevitably the two clash. But really want causes the General to finally break down, and indeed brings out his contempt for the host nation and its people, his failure to really understand the nature of his task, and the impact upon the Albanians who were the victims, is the reality of the work. Despite the pomp and circumstance of his initial journey, there's little glory or thanks here.

Its a terrific novel, which says alot about Albania in the post war period, and its attitude to its "fascist" enemies of the past.