ResoluteReader

Saturday, October 24, 2026

Alexander F. Gazmararian & Helen V. Milner - Climate Fault Lines: The new political economy of a warming world

The annual occasion of the UN climate talks usually provokes a lot of hand wringing from politicians, institutions and the media about the state of the worlds' environment. Platitudes are followed by hollowed promises. Delegates return home from their jaunt usually having been heavily lobbied by fossil fuel representatives and little is actually agreed. As a result the ecological crises intensify, the world sees more floods, droughts, wildfires and these are more powerful.

It is this latter point that is the most important. The actuality of climate change manifests itself in very real ways, on people, companies and businesses and governments (local and national). The impact itself is uneven. Very roughly, countries in the global south, because of historic and contemporary realities - colonialism, imperialism, capitalism's uneven development are disproportionatly hit. The figures are stark: billions face a dangerous and unpredictable future.

How will these realities affect global politics? This is the complex task that authors Alexander F. Gazmararian and Helen V. Milner set out to examine in their new book Climate Fault Lines. Both are academics working in politics and international affairs, but their book differs from those I would normally read on environment and climate politics. It is a complex and important study of how institutions, politicians and individuals respond to climate change. Its conclusions are stark. It offers no easy solutions. But it deserves to be considered seriously.

Firstly let's have a look at what the authors argue. Despite the common belief that "we are all in it together", the authors highlight the "profoundly unequal toll" from climate change, a "variation in vulnerability" they label "climate change's economic geography". They define a "climate fault line", the 35th parallel, "a fuzzy boundary that marks the broad divide between regions projecto to suffer significant damage from rising temperatures and those likely to face more limited harm and, in some cases, potential net benefits". The line roughly divides the Global South from the Global North, but it bisects some countries - such as the United States and China.

Because this is a serious work of theory and science, it is worth quoting from the authors' methods and approach:

Our theory seeks to explain how people, businesses and governments respond to climate change. We focus on their beliefs, preferences, and political activities toward global warming. Our inquiry is positive, not normative. We seek to understand how these actors behave, not prescribe how they should act. The goal is to improve out understanding of why global warming is difficult to address...

...We assume that people, businesses and governments are self-interested when deciding how to respond to global warming. They first consider how global warming affects them rather than acting in the world's best interest. Self-interest doesn't always guide short-term behaviour; but, in the longer run, economic incentives influence political actors' strategies.

I should explain that the authors support their conclusions through analysis of surveys, reports and statistical data. I am no data scientist and more qualified readers than me can disect the methodology, but it seems to me to be rigorous. Troublingly what the authors conclude goes against the grain of perceived thought. Take the case of the study of how individual people change their attitude to climate change when they experience a "climate shock" - a disaster, be it flood, drought etc.

After a climate shock, only people in damage zones become more supportive of mitigation policy [to reduce emissions or otherwise deal with global warming].... There is no effect on climate shocks on policy preferences among people living in less-climate vulnerable areas.

They emphasise, "central to our theory, we find that only people in climate-vulnerable places respond to the shocks". The authors add, a little later, when discussing the impact of climate shocks on "climate skeptics" that:

The finding also suggests that more repeated and stronger exposure to extreme weather and disasters may be necessary to chaneg the minds of people most doubtful about global warming. What's clear, however, is that political attitudes aren't immutable - even among people who initially doubted the existence of global warming.

These conclusions, which demonstrate that those above the fault line do not fundamentally change their attitudes to global warming even after a climate crisis, are matched by similar findings for the other sections of society studied by the authors. For instance

after climate shocks, companies in damage zones spend more on climate lobbying. But for less vulnerable companies, there is no change in lobbying expenditures.... companies below the fault lime appear to learn from climate shocks and then select their political strategies based on how climate change will materially affect them in the future.

Similarly,

only local governments below the fault line respond to extreme heat by disclosing emissions mitigation actions. Importantly, only cities in the most democratic contexts become more likely to disclose mitigation politics after climate shocks. In less democratic contexts, extreme heat makes cities, especially those outside damage zones, less likely to take climate actions.

The authors are good at showing how different cases affect outcome - democratic accountability for instance, or the tensions that will arise within states (eg the US) where some regions are below and others above the fault line. They conclude, "local leaders who fear accountablity and anticipate future damages because of their geographic vulnerability become more likely to disclose emissions reduction actions."

There is a similar, and glaring, conclusion for national governments. Those countries that sit above the climate fault line are less likely to introduce policy to mitigate climate change in the aftermath of disaster. This challenges perceived wisdom. The liberal dominated governments of the developed world, particularly those in Europe and Canada, are considered "climate leaders". It is the countries that are most at threat that are most likely to respond to disaster with positive action on climate change: "national governments [that] perceive greater benefits from mitigation because of their vulnerability... pass more mitigation policies".

Readers who have got this far, or, more likely, finish Gazmararian's and Milner's book are entitled to ask "Why do we get these different responses?" Why in the face of scientific knowledge do governments and individuals, above and below the fault lines, act different? The authors suggest that understanding this requires accounting for "unequal ways that global warming will materially affect places worldwide". They worry that their study's conclusions show that we will "not succeed" in preventing disastorous climate change.

But reducing responses to climate shocks to differing impacts puts the cart before the horse. There are other factors that determine how people, institutions and governments think about climate change. The most important of these is hinted at when the authors acknowledge how more democratic states/governments are more likely to respond positively. This is the question of political campaigning, social movements and protest.

Moving from the theory of Climate Fault Lines to anecdotal evidence will help me illustrate this. Through 2019 there were growing, social movements around climate change. In Britain Extinction Rebellion put tens of thousands of people on the streets, drawing in new layers far beyond existing climate activists. At the same time Greta Thunberg began her school strikes. The response to this was massive, with walkouts in many countries.

In the UK where I am based, the school strikes began to morph into wider action. In September 2019 the movement saw serious, if small, mobilisations of trade unions and workers into solidarity with the students. In schools, colleges and workplaces, as well as the media, discussion global warming mushroomed. Suddenly every institution, government, and workplace wanted to declare a climate emergency and act. It can be argued that this was small beer. But it did lead to enough changes that the right today is desperate to roll back these successes. However we can conclude that social movements do shift companies and individuals, as well as governments - above and below the fault line.

Secondly, understanding how groups respond, must surely also require the study of the global economy itself. How does the penetration of government by fossil fuel companies hold back mitigation. The authors' case study of Norway notes that drought in there failed to lead to climate mitigation, while similar droughts in countries below the fault line did. Norway is a fossil fuel producer. What role did those companies play in holding back action? The industry certainly reduces the impact of COP conferences each year. Indeed the authors' case study of Nigeria seems to prove this point. Devastating floods in 2022 led to bold promises from the Nigerian government to act, yet "implementation has been slow and disappointing for some analysts". The barrier to this may well be the powerful oil companies in Nigeria, as well as the fact that "150,000 to 200,000 people work in the oil and gas industry and could lose their jobs in the transition".

While the Nigerian government is right to point out it needs international aid from countries above the fault line, we also have to probe deeper to understand how resistance from fossil fuel corporations and other stakeholders in the fossil fuel economy holds action back. Thus we are faced not just with the question of geography, but a geography that is superimposed on a global system of accumulation. Which, ultimately, is why social movements become central.

Climate Fault Lines is a challenging book because it points out how difficult dealing with climate change is, and will be. It shows us some painful truths. But I worried that the pessimistic conclusions reached by the authors arose not out of the statistical findings, but because those studies have become abstracted from wider contexts, and it is these contexts that will help us shape the political and social strategies we need to challenge fossil fuel capitalism and its inaction.

Friday, October 23, 2026

Ronald Webber - The Peasants' Revolt

This short book is a little bit of an enigma. I picked it up as it was one of the few books on the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 that I had not read. Paul Greengrass' film The Uprising has recently been released and I wanted to refresh myself as to the known history. Unfortunately while Ronald Webber tells the known story well, the book offers few insights.

Two problems stand out. The first is that Webber has a tendency to depict the rebels in a negative light. The common people, he says, were for the making their voice heard for the first time "and it was a terrifying one". It was, we are told, a "time of fair prosperity", "work was not hard to find" and while Webber notes the "discontent" at the poll tax, there is little here to explain the grinding daily horrors of feudalism. It's hard, on reading this account, to get a clear picture about why the rebels would revolt with such violence and why so many flocked to the rebel banners.

Indeed Webber seems to suggest that many of them were not really rebels, but just greedy for loot. He tells us that

Not all the rebels wanted to be there. Many would have liked to have done more looting and then to leave London and go into the countryside before justice caught up with them.

Perhaps that's true, but its not really evidenced - how do we know what they felt? As Webber points out, we only have the biased chronicles and no voices of 1381's ordinary rebels. Indeed what was striking about the entry into London was how disciplined the rebels were. But "so what?", one is minded to ask. If they looted, they deserved some revenge for poverty and oppression.

A bigger problem is the book itself. Webber is prone to long rambling introductions that are relatively unrelated to the material. While Rochester Castle is important to the story of the revolt in Kent, we do not need it's 300 year history. Nor do we need the detail of the King's ancestors, their deeds at Crecy and so on. This is bloated and distracting.

Webber opens the book by decrying the source materials, pointing out (rightly) that they are biased. Yet his own work with source material is hard to follow. There are no references, and often things are claimed that deserve a source. What evidence is there for "unions" being formed among labourers? When describing John Ball he quotes William Morris' description from The Dream of John Ball, but doesn't inform the reader that this was written five hundred years later, and is a work of Morris' gifted imagination.

Webber finishes by pointing out that the rebellion did not end villeinage. But I think he errs on the side of caution too much by saying that the "economic problems were settled... by the slow working out of economic change over the next three hundred years". The history of the British Isles between 1381 and 1700 was hardly a period of slow working out of things. It was a convulsive period that saw great and sometimes bloody class struggle in the countryside. Feudalism may not have been legislated away, but it did have to be overthrown in a Revolution.

Webber's book does, at least briefly, acknowledge that 1381 spread beyond the areas usually associated with the rebellion - Kent and Essex, and mentions it elsewhere. But there's no real detail.

This is a disappointing and rambling short book. It offers a general history of the events of 1381, but will leave the casual reader wanting more and the more academic reader frustrated.

Sunday, October 18, 2026

Michael Perelman - The Invention of Capitalism

Near the opening of Chapter Twenty Six of Capital, Karl Marx writes about Primitive Accumulation thus:

This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past. In times long gone by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work.

More famously, a few chapters later he writes:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.

With these two quote Marx gives us the essence of his view of how the primitive accumulation of wealth helped usher in, and construct, the basis of capitalism. Bringing that system into existence on the back of violent disposession and murder.

Marx's clarity on this process however was not matched by most of the classic economists upon whom he drew and developed his understanding of capitalism. Michael Perelman's excellent book The Invention of Capitalism is a deep dive into how classic economists, in capitalism's early period understood primitive accumulation. How they wrote about it, and what they thought. Remarkably he finds that the most well known of economic theorists, people like Adam Smith, thought, or wrote little about the process. Betraying their own lack of insight and prejudices.

While Perelman's book is a deep dive into classic economics and primitive accumulation, it never losses sight to two important facts. Firstly the brutality of the process and secondly that the process was long and continuing, rather than a "one time destruction of the peasant economy".

Many of us who have read and written about the development of capitalism, particularly in England, will have tended to focus on a process of peasant dispossession. The enclosure of common lands, the expulsion of peasants who formed the basis for wage labour in town and country (mostly in urban areas) and the destruction of rights of access to land and resources. These are important. But Perelman also explores how these processes extended into wider aspects of the economy. The Game Laws, for instance, and the destruction of household production. This process was resisted through peasant rebellion, uprisings and more passive actions. Perelman writes that the rate of exploitation of the producing classes rises dramaticallty when wage labour, rather than subsistence production, is introduced to households. He says:

When the working class had to exchange a great deal of labour to obtain a relatively small value of commodities in return, it resisted wage labour by producing for itself as much as apossible. In this way, labour would be able to shoten the working day in comparison to what it otherwise would be if workers had to produce luxury goods for members of nonworking classes in addition to their own subsistence.

He concludes that "much of the conflict between classes that occurred during this period, and that much of classical political economy was built around this very struggle". Perelmen quotes a "large" farmer John Arbuthnot in 1773 saying "by converting the little farmers into a body of men who must work for others more labour is produced, it is an advantage which the nation should wish for. We can add that it is one that bought suffering for tens of thousands of "little farmers" and their families.

Classic economics had to wrestle with the contradictions of this. Dispossessing little farmers from land created wage labour that could funnel surplus value into the pockets of rural and urban capitalists. But it meant that such producers no longer could easily produce for their needs. Basic necessities had to be paid out of wages. But how to best organise the economy so that such wages were adequate while also producing enough profits. Such debates were the ones that the economists debated and it was the one that classes fought over. Some econoists, such James Steuart were explicity on the need to disposess the masses, while also "frett[ing] that masses of people detached from the land could pose a serious political threat".

Steuart argued that the process of transition from rural producers to workers required politics (read state action) and unlike people like Adam Smith, he attempted to understand how this could happen. This required the construction fo the social division of labour, the (in Steuart's words) "appropriating a certain number of the inhabitants, for the production of food rquired by all, and by distributing the remainder into proper classes for supply every other want". For Steuart, and economists of his class, the reorganisation of people like this, on the whim of the ruling class resulted from a firm belief in the superiority of the rich, and the subordinate position of the dull workers. Perelmen writes that Steuart's "intention was that more and more people wold have no choice but to accept wage labour".

Steuart's contributions to classic economics are today much forgotten. Indeed at the time he was already obscure. But the eclipse of his ideas by those from writers also arises from how later writes understood the process of change - including an oft misunderstanding of Smith's own ideas. Perelmen tells us:

Today the majority of academic economists believe that market forces suffice to develop and economy. In contrast, until the time of Smith, economists almost universally accepted the necessity of government intervention. Smith vainly attempted to dispute it.

This review is not the place to fully explore how Perelmen shows this. It should be emphasised though that the belief in government intervention did not belay a benevolent view that the masses needed support. On the contrary, this was little considered. The process was brutal. The point was whether the state needed to intervene. Indeed Perelmen feels obliged to argue that Smith was not the benevolent person he is sometimes painted as. He "displayed an unpleasant contempt for the masses of workers and small farmers". But Smith

never squarely faced the issue of the change in the mode of production, as the self-sufficient household gave way to wage labour. He presumably left his analysis of the specific of the transition vague because he assumed that the institution of wage labour somehow came into existence prior to the initiation of the process of development.

While Smith's desire to keep the details of the transition "vague", the actuality of the transition was one of violence and suffering. The economists of the new system, those devoted to understanding capitalism and its dynamics, also believed that their system was benevolent and would lead to a general improvement of conditions. This did not necessarily mean they were democratic. Indeed quite the opposite. The classical economists often fretted about democracy and what this might mean if extended to workers who were discontented with how they had been treated. The reality was different. Suffering continued as exploitation dramatically accelerated. Workers' resisted in a myrid of ways, and often that included resisting the destruction of historic social relations. But the break up of those, the social division of labour that maximised capitalist accumulation at the expense of workers' skills and income, required the destruction of the past.

This was a process that also, and continues, to extend across the globe. Insperable from what took place in England or Europe, was a parallel process that as Marx said, saw destruction and violence extended to colonial countries. Slavery, genocide and the destruction of natural resources globally was part and parcel of that.

Perelman concludes by noting that the classical economists knew this, and "in calling for the acceleration of primtive accumuation, classical political economy displayed a keen sense of the underlying forces of capitalism accumulation. Given the social relations of production, the small-scale producer represented an unmistakable barrier to the advance of capital."

Perelman's book is an excellent summary of how key figures in bourgeois economics understood the dynamics of early capitalism. For the non-economist, in places, it is challenging as individuals and their ideas may be knew. Perelman is adept at explaining concepts and his book, while academic, is shot through with humour and a firm solidarity with the oppressed and exploited. It is however, with Marx, we leave the last word. The final line of Capital emphasises a key point about the processes in the Americas, the "secret discovered in the new world by the Political Economy of the old world... that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the labourer."

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Adam Oyebanji - Braking Day

Five generations after leaving Earth the generation star ship Archimedes is approaching its destination planet. Alongside it are three other ships. As they come close to their destination wear and tear are beginning to undermine the viability of the ships. On board some of the crew are doubting their mission. Perhaps their arrival will destroy and existing biosphere and civilisation. Maybe they should continue onward, and not begin firing their thrusters to slow down on "braking day".

Our story follows a trainee engineer who lives below decks. Ravi Macleod is not officer class. He comes from the infamous Macleod family who are notorious for their semi-legal lives and behaviour. Nonetheless talented Ravi wants to become an engineer and an officer. Together with his friend, and ex-convict, Boz, he studies, explores and anticipates the day the ship will rotate to fire its thrusters and slow them down. It's a time of lots of work, training and stress.

But somethings not quite right. Ravi notices odd things. Boz's illegal tech is also out exploring and they also spot strange goings on with tech and personal. Ravi starts to see things, including people who aren't there (a young woman outside without a spacesuit) and he has strange dreams.

Its a great context for a novel, and I firmly like the inherent locked in mystery of generation space ships. Adam Oyebanji handles the concept well, and gives it enough of a futuristic feel with the characters implants and tech, without making the story seem to overdone.

Nonetheless I found it dragged. The episodic nature of some of the novel was annoying. More frustratingly, despite the unusual context, the story of outsider child learning in a strange environment felt unoriginal. There's even an inter-spaceship games competition to distract our characters.

Frustratingly, the best thing about generation ships - arrival - is absent from this story. Though the reveal of the reason for all the unusual happenings is a decent enough twist. Not as good as I had hoped however.

Sunday, October 11, 2026

Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space

***Spoilers***
I first read Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space shortly first publication in the early 2000s. I recently re-read it, not least because I found a lovely new edition of the book in the SF Masterworks series. More significantly I picked it up again because I remembered the book's grand sweeping space opera. Reading the book again however I had my own revelation. While I had remembered the space opera, I had forgotten how well the book is constructed as a novel and how brilliantly Reynolds ties his narrative threads and characters together.

The book begins in a number of very different places. Reynolds has a background in astrophysics. His novels are constrained by the science he understands with a number of logical extensions. So while the story's are set in our galaxy, and begin many thousands of light years apart, characters and timelines are not always coincident.

As we gradually learn, our galaxy was once host to many thousands of advances civilisations. In the distant past a massive war ended many of those civilisations and a group of aliens known as the Inhibitators evolved who decided to stop any future civilisation becoming galactic. The book opens with an archaeologist, Dan Sylveste, on a planet called Resurgam. Sylveste is excavating the extensive ruins of a huge, but long extinct civilisation that appeared to come to an abrupt and inexplicable end.

Elsewhere, aboard the spaceship Nostalgia for Infinity, its crew are struggling with the capture of their captain by the melding plague, something that features heavily in follow up novels by Reynolds. The crew are trying to get to Sylveste whom they think can heal their captain.

Finally, Ana Khouri, a former mercenary has been hired to assassinated Sylveste by a wealthy, but nameless figure, for unknown reasons.

Over time we learn that all these strands are connected. Khouri is hired to work as a arnaments officer with the Nostalgia for Infinity's alien super weapons and the entire crew heads to Resurgam with their different reasons for contacting Sylveste. In doing so they trigger the inhibitor device that destroyed Resurgam's ancient culture, and is now becoming aware of humanity.

The ending is typical of Reynolds' grand solar system wide set pieces, but it never really looses the human story. All his characters are well drawn individuals, and their way that the book ends neatly ties up the various strands of the stories while leaving the reader wanting much more. The much more appears in the excellent follow ups set in Revelation Space.

I'm not surprised that Revelation Space has joined the SF Masterworks pantheon. It is a remarkable example of a genre, and in hindsight, it's first publication marked a new period for print science fiction. It really ought to be made into a big budget TV series.

Monday, October 05, 2026

Breandán Mac Suibhne - The End of Outrage: Post-famine adjustment in rural Ireland

In April 1856, Patrick McGlynn, a school teacher in Beagh, a very small village in the isolated far west of Donegal, wrote a letter. It was a letter that would precipitate dramatic events for the locals. It was also a letter that meant McGlynn scabbed and betrayed many of lower class people in his region. It arrived with Daniel Cruise, the local magistrate, and in it contained an offer that, in return for protection, McGlynn would betray the local, illegal and underground, activist network known as the Molly Maguires. McGlynn wrote "I have a means of ascertaining their movements and that I will inform either you or the police when I become certain that they shall attack a house or some other depredation". Catching them in the act, he went on to suggest "will not only deter the remainder from such acts in future but restore peace to the country."

In the wake of the Irish Famine, poverty, hunger and unemployment continued at appalling levels in West Donegal. The Molly Maguires were one reaction to this. A clandestine network that used violence and the threat of violence to try and redress injustice. Some of these actions were violent, and resulted in serious injury and death. More often they were threats. Either way, they were part of trying to restore a more "moral economy". An economy in which prices were deemed acceptable and of a level that ordinary people could afford, where land was available and where rents didn't destroy peoples lives.

But the Molly Maguires were a direct threat to the landowner classes and a system that enriched them, while driving the further consolidation and engrossement of land. Using McGlynn's letter, Cruise hoped to capture, imprison, deport and otherwise punish a layer of rebels that were threatening the accumulation of capital. The years since the famine were seeing a transformation of the Irish economy and a consequence transformation of the rural environment, landscape and agriculture itself. In a process with startling similararities to the enclosures that were ongoing in England, rural Ireland was seeing its fields consolidated, its traditional peasantry displaced, land engrossed into larger units farmed on capitalist lines and common land (and the commons in general) privatised.

This is the context for Breandán Mac Suibhne's detailed history of a small part of west Donegal. He uses McGlynn's betrayal as a jumping off point to explore the reality of post-Famine rural Ireland, and the wider transformation of the countryside. He explores the struggles of the population, and the authorities' attempts to keep the people down. As a descendent of the region he also locates this all in the traditional stories passed down. Stories that often highlight the injustices suffered by ordinary people and the cruelty and greed of the landowners and their friends.

While placing this all in the context of wider changes, Suibhne offers a micro-history of Beagh and its environs. Sometimes micro-histories can obscure, focusing on minutiae at the expense of historical context. But Suibhne gets the balance right. Here the detail of individual land plots, their "squaring" or consolidation into larger places, the changes of ownership and so on, serve to illustrate the wider transformation. At the same time he never loses sight of the reality of poverty and suffering.

Framing this history is the story of the Molly Maguires, the local betrayal by McGlynn and Cruise's campaign to get punish them. Interestingly here the authorities stuggled a little. The problem for them was that McGlynn named names, but the conspirators were not caught in any acts. Telling the story of what happened to them here feels like a "spoiler". But it illuminates some of the inconsistencies of the law at the time, and the ability of ordinary people to find ways to try and resist. Nonetheless some of the injustices assigned to the accused led to further depredations on their families and had to be further organised against.

Suibhne finishes the book by looking at how rural society changed to try and adapt to new economic realities - the church in particular was used to help pacify and redirect the emotions and frustrations of the population. Others emigrated, some of them taking the Molly Maguires with them, and organising in the US working class. Some of these paid dearly for continuing to resist capital. Much of the story of this time was passed down by word of mouth. Suibhne does a good job of linking historical records to oral tradition, and its fascinating to see what is passed down.

This is a remarkable book. It documents the grand transformation of the European agricultural economy in a very small part of Ireland. It never forgets the human impact of those changes, and it illuminates our modern world in surprising way. I was, by turns, angered, inspired and fascinated. It seems to me to be a book to take with you to Ireland, to remind the reader and the picture perfect landscapes are ones marred by poverty and resistance.

Thursday, October 01, 2026

Seán Mitchell - Struggle or Starve: Working-Class Unity in Belfast's 1932 Outdoor Relief Riots

By chance I began reading Struggle or Starve on the same weekend that, for the first time in nearly three decades, the Orange Order tried to march along Garvaghy Road in Portadown in the north of Ireland. This sectarian intimidation is supposed to arrive out of the irreconcilable differences between Protestant and Catholic, and only the Irish state can possibility prevent catastrophe. But there is a different, and forgotten, history of working class unity in Ireland that demonstrates sectarian divisions are not inevitable. Seán Mitchell's excellent Struggle or Starve looks at one forgotten episode in this struggle.

The north of Ireland was hit hard by the Great Depression of the 1930s. In Belfast the biggest industry, the shipyards, built and sold almost no ships as global trade collapsed. Poverty was enormous. Tens of thousands relied on megre rations and payment from work in kind to survive. Relief for the poor was overseen by the reactionary, sectarian and deeply conservative Board of Guardians who managed the workhouses. Their bigoted politics and their belief that the poor were only poor because they were lazy added insult to injury.

In this climate few were prepared to resist. But a small group of Communists organised in Revolutionary Workers' Groups (RWGs) decided to get organised and through the summer of 1932 they led a mass, militant protest movement that spilled out into the wider working class. What made the movement particularly dangerous to the authorities and the Board of Guardians was that it drew Protestant and Catholic workers into united action. There are some remarkable accounts. Workers from different sides of the supposedly sectarian divide stood side by side, marching together through each others communities and celebrating what united them. They took militant action together - fighting the police, breaking into meetings of the Guardians and organising a strike of workers of relief projects.

The RWGs conscious efforts to build unity did not necessarily meet with approval at the top, as the following quote shows, but it did lead to unity from below:

There was a strong turnout from Protestant areas on the march. This was not however, reflected in the music played on the day. Catholic bands, including St John's Accordion Band, St. Kelvin's Accordion Band and St Malachy's Pipe Band, accompanied the march. Orange bands were invited too, including the Prince of Wales Band, the Northern Belfast Pipe Band, the North Pipes and Brass Band, the Willowfield Brass and Reed Band and the Ballymacarrett Flute band, though it was announced from the platform that they had failed to turn up. Women too joined the march in large numbers... Over a thousand strong they marched behind one of the textile banners, singing and cheering.

As the protest movement's repression saw it explode into rioting, unity developed further. Mitchell quotes one eyewitness:

On the Shankill Road crowds of growling men lounged around waiting. Suddenly a big red-faced woman with a black shawl thrown over her shoulders, wisps of hair hanging from her eyes appeared from nowhere. She shouted, "They are kicking the shite out of the peelers up the Falls. Are you going to let them down?" That seemed to be a flashpoint for the riot. Thee people started to burn a watchman's hut that had been used in an ODR [Out Door Relief] scheme.

The repression was enormous, but the police lost control of Belfast's working class areas - both Catholic and Protestant. The Guardians had to back down and massive, though not complete, concessions were made. The 1932 ODR riots showed the potential for working class unity, as did a subsequent rail strike which took place across Ireland and saw participation of both Catholic and Protestant strikers in the north.

While the struggle inspiringly demonstrates the potential for unity of workers in struggle, it did not lead to any lasting unity. Sectarianism was consciously reintroduced to break down the unity. The protestant leadership, closely working with the British authorities, introduced all sorts of methods - including protestant only trade unionism, to undermine unity. Mitchell explores why this was able to happen.

This emphasis on the remarkable achievements of the ODR agitation does not mean that the trajectory of events in the aftermath of the ODR riots is unimportant, however. Any serious analysis of the period will have to acknowledge that while the ODR campaign displayed the potential for working-class unity, it also revealed the power and persistence of communal division. Why was this the case?

Part of the problem, as Mitchell explores was that sections of the Nationalist movement bought into the idea that Protestant workers were bought off by the system and their interests lay with the Protestant ruling class. Mitchell shows that this was not true - after all both Catholic and Protestant workers starved in the Depression. He goes on:

The Communist agitation of 1932 was successful because it built a movement capable of convincing large numbers of working-class people that heir lot was better served struggling together across the traditional divide. But this agitation was never combined with a political challenge to sectarian notions - including the vicious anti-Catholicism common within Orangeism... loyalist forces were able to re-articulate class concerns and direct the frustrations of Protestant workers in a sectarian direction.

The left had caught the moment in 1932. But it was too small to seriously develop the struggles after the ODR victory. The RWGs were isolated from the rail strike without roots in those workplaces. But they also had a political flaw. The Communists assumed that a single period was "enough to wipe out sectarianism" they did nothing to "steel the unemployment movement, or even their own cadre, for a political fight with sectarianism".

Mitchell points out that while struggle does undermine division, but "the process of becoming that [struggle] creates will not progress uninterrupted". Sectarianism retreated, but did not disappear. That would require both further struggle and a conscious attempt by the left to challenge it. As Mitchell says, "For anti-sectarian socialist ideas to grow they must become organised, to become a 'material force,' as Marx argued." The RWGs failure to do this, and to try and build its networks to fight on economic and political fronts left it vulnerable. But the RWG was also being shaped by other forces - including the Third Period Stalinism coming out of Moscow. The RWGs eventually played a role in the formation of the Irish Communist Party. Its leading figures playing central roles in ongoing struggles. But the Irish Communist Party itself capitulated to Nationalism, by eventually breaking with the revolutionary demand for a Workers' Republic.

These conclusions are important today. Firstly, and most immediately at the time of writing, there is a need to remind ourselves of the potential for Unity between Catholic and Protestant in the north of Ireland. That may seem distant today, but Mitchell points out that just a couple of months before they built barricades together in August 1932, Catholic and Protestant workers were rioting against each other. Longer term though we must remember that it is not enough to have economic struggle to overcome division, racism and oppression. This is perhaps the most pertinent of lessons. Too many on the left in Britain today, when faced by the rise of the right, argue that what we need is struggle over housing, wages, education and health. That struggle is enough. But we also need to wage a political struggle against racism, oppression and division. The two cannot be separated.

Struggle or Starve is a brilliant and inspiring book. It reminds us of our power and the possibilities opened up by that power. I highly recommend reading it.