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Friday, November 06, 2026

Roger Moorhouse - Wolfpack: Inside Hitler’s U-Boat War

On the 19th September 1943, Erich Janowitz, my Great Uncle on my mother's side, died in U-341, a German submarine operating south-west of Iceland. It was the boat, and Erich Janowitz's second voyage. He was 21.

Reading Roger Moorhouse's new book was, in part, an attempt by me to find out more about Erich's life in the service of Germany's war machine. There are many books that have looked at the Battle of the Atlantic, but few of them have considered the war from the German perspective and tried to understand how the German submarine crews lived, fought and died. That's not to say that the German U-boat experience has been ignored. The 1981 German film Das Boot famously depicted the horrors of submarine war, based as it was on the 1973 book by Lothar-Günther Buchheim, a German journalist who had travelled with U-96 on one patrol in the Atlantic. Moorhouse explains that Buchheim's photographic account of this voyage was almost completely destroyed in a bombing raid. But the author turned his experiences into a book and film.

Moorhouse's account turns a lot of what I thought I knew about the submarine war on its head. He argues, convincingly, that the submarine war was a lot more one-sided than is usually thought. In the first few years Admiral Dönitz led a vastly inadequate force, but a force that was led by experienced and trained commanders. In this era, before the convoy system was fully implemented and before the Allies developed new technologies properly, the U-boat was highly effective. The victories of a few highly successful commander was a propaganda godsend to the Nazi regime, and led to a plethora of recruits. But the square jawed heroic image of the submarine commander was very different to reality.

Picture the scene. A U-boat returns from patrol at one of the ports in the Bay of Biscay that the German's captured after the fall of France. The hatch opens and the dockworkers move to help. They stop, recoiling from the stink. The so called "U-boat stench" after a long patrol was appalling. Grizzled, pale, sick men get out. Trips on U-boats, contemporary doctors reported, were awful. Men were covered in boils and rashes and infected with STDs. Their accommodation was full of cockroaches and bugs. Food was rotten, unhealthy and covered in mould. If the crews lived till the end of their patrol, then they had done so in conditions that ought to have provoked mutiny.

Making it to the end of the patrol, never mind the end of the war, was for German submariners unlikely. Of the 41,000 who went to war on submarines, only 11,000 survived. A death rate that Moorhouse says "unmatched" in any other theatre of WW2. Not only this, but as the war progressed, anti-submarine warfare developed and Germany went from being on the offensive to being pressed on all sides, losses mounted. Moorhouse says that "more than a third of U-boats lost during the war, were lost on their maiden patrol". Crews from 1943 onward were inexperienced, badly trained and ill-equipped. Losses were colossal. At one point Moorhouse tells the account of the burial at sea of a sailor killed in an air attack. The story is unusual, because such burials were unusual. Most of the dead were part of a "total loss" of their craft. Of 859 U-boats that went into combat 429 had "no survivors and no bodies". 95 percent of those killed had "no grave but the sea".

By May of 1943 Dönitz had to admit defeat in the Battle of the Atlantic. It was a few months before my Great Uncle was killed there. Even the retreat from that front-line did not mean that losses were improved.

What of the successes for the German U-boats. The attacks on convoys to Britain loom large in popular accounts of the war. There is, no doubt, a case to be made that U-boat attacks severely hampered Britain's ability to fight Germany, particularly in the first years of the war. Famously, and much quoted by Moorhouse, Churchill said that the "only thing that ever really frightened him" was the "U-boat peril". Some of the early successes were astounding. But the sinking of ships was concentrated in a very small number of ships - while most crews sank no ships at all. The totals seem large. U-boats sank almost 3,500 ships in the war, over 15 million tonnes. But the merchant fleets of the Western Allies and the British Empire never fell below 14 million tonnes and even in 1939 Britain had access to 18 million tonnes of merchant shipping. Later in the war, when Liberty ships were being built almost by the day, there was no real shortage.

Had Dönitz's pre-war ambitions of a 300 strong U-boat fleet been realised, then he may well have brought Britain to its knees. But the Nazi regime's belief in the U-boat came too late and was badly neglected by Hitler's obsessions with attacking the Soviet Union.

One important discussion that Moorhouse leads is whether the German submarine service was different to the rest of the German military. Despite well-documented atrocities, such as the sinking of civilian and POW ships, there are remarkably few atrocities committed by submariners during WW2. Perhaps, Moorhouse points out, there were many more but the crews that committed them were lost. Or perhaps there is some truth in the argument that the insular nature of submarines, their isolation from the Nazi machinery and bureaucracy also insulated them from the worst of the regime. Moorhouse also suggests that the officers themselves tended to come from a professional class that was hostile, or rather less than enthusiastic about the Nazis. Despite some cases of anti-Hitler politics and actions that Moorhouse tells us (some of which are breathtakingly brave) I am sceptical that there was any sort of systematic anti-Nazi feeling. I think was more likely a general antipathy to murdering fellow sailors.

That said, I came away feeling that Dönitz was far more of a war-criminal than I had previously considered. I felt the book's conclusions was a little softer on him than I'd thought. While some senior Allied naval figures clearly felt he had been done an injustice, Moorhouse's material (even if not his conclusions) suggest much darker conclusions.

Moorhouse's book puts a lot of evidence forward that suggests that the U-boat war waged by Germany was a material negative for the regime. It was a vast drain in terms of material and people, research and development and money. Certainly by the second half of WW2 the Allies ability to read secret German codes gave them an advantage that could not be defeated. The failure of a third of U-boats to survive their first voyage and sink next to no enemy vessels demonstrates this. That said the U-boat threat also diverted a lot of material for the Allies and the propaganda threat must have been high for Germany. Ultimately though it is not hard to think that this was a horrific aspect to a horrific war that could have been avoided.

Moorhouse finishes his book by describing a visit to the U-boat memorial at Heikendorf, near Kiel. Tragically my Great-Grandmother never learnt that her son was memorialised there. Erich Janowitz's name is on a bronze plaque with the names of those who died alongside him in U-341. 30,000 other names cover hundreds of other plaques. A few hundred miles away across the North Sea, the names of tens of thousands of British victims of U-boat attacks on merchant shipping are recorded on a remarkably similar memorial on Tower Hill in London. Many more names are forgotten.

The combat life of those who served in U-boats was uncomfortable, dangerous and frequently short. Roger Moorhouse's account of the German experience never sanitises it, or turns it into heroism. It was just a small, dirty, part of a horrific, genocidal, war.

Tuesday, November 03, 2026

Karl Marx - Capital Volume II

In his preface to the Penguin edition of the second volume of Karl Marx's Capital, the translator David Fernbach notes, with palpable frustration that it is a difficult book to read. Those readers who have finished the first volume will know that one of the great triumphs of that book is that it is a work of political economy, and literature. It is full of references to history, legend and culture and rages, in places, with anger at the conditions in which the proletariat live and work. Capital II, Fernbach says, is not like this, it is "remowned for the arid deserts between its oases". Many a "non-specialist" says Fernbach has been defeated.

I don't disagree with Fernbach at all here. Capital II is undoubtably a work of great intellectual power and weight. There is no doubt that had Marx finished it, it would have been imbibed with purple passages, allusions and the reader would have been eased through the technical parts much more. It also, no doubt, suffers from its origins in the collection of notebooks that Engels edited after Marx death. But for this reader it must be said it was a very challenging read.

The book is clearly intended as a direct follow on from Volume I. Marx references that earlier work frequently, and the reader is assumed to be familiar with the topic. But this is a much more focused work, dealing with the circulation of capital within capitalism in a variety of different contexts and situations. Key to this analysis is how, and when, the value of commodities can be realised. Marx then discusses various scenarios of what the capitalists are able to do with this value, and how they can reinvest in different parts of production in order to continue their search for profit.

While Marx never loses sight of the role of workers ("the first precondition of M-C... P... C'-M' is the continuous availability of the ckass of wage-labourers") this is not the primary, or even secondary focus of the book. Marx is more concerned with drawing out the real nature of production, and he criticises the classical economists for obscuring, or not seeing, the drive for profit and accumulation. Take this section:

The general form of the movement P ... P is the form of reproduction and, unlike M ... M', does not indicate that valorisation is the prupose of the process. For this reason, classical economics found it all the more easy to ignore the specifically capitalist form of the production process, and to present production as such as the purpose of the porcess - to produce as much and as cheaply as possible and to exchange the production for as many other products as possible, partly for th ereptition of production (M-C), partly for consumption (m-c).
The whole process then appearing simple and natural, i.e. possessing the naturalness of superficial rationality... Accumulation, of course, appeared in the same light as production.

Classical economics presents "production" as the purpose, not the making of profits. Here Marx uses the notation M... M' to refer to the circuit of Money-Capital, P... P' for the circuit of Productive-Capital and C...C' for the circut of Commodity-Capital.

In noting the circulation of capital, Marx has to take up some interesting questions. For instance time becomes a factor. How does capitalism work when capital is locked up on productions on ships on the sea, or waiting for beer to brew or crops to grow. Marx emphasises that "the nearer production time and working time approach to eqaulity, the greater the productivity and valorisation of a given productive capital in a given space of time". He continues that the tendency is for the system to "shorten as much as possible the excess of production time over working time".

Examples such as these exist in the book, but as the work progresses it becomes harder and much more abstract. The pages are peppered with equations and calculations, and few readers will be able to follow the detail of Marx's arguement. This is further complicated by Engels' admission that while Marx had a "firm grasp of algebra, he was never at ease in recokoning with figures" and "in his turnover calculations Marx became confused". Thus Engels only includes the "correct calculations". He also points to further problems because he argues Marx gives too much significance to something Engels considers of "little importance", the "setting-free of money capital". This reader is happy to let Engels have the last word here.

Capital II is a difficult read. Readers will, especially if familiar with the first volume, get something from it. I found Marx's writing on natural processes, such as crops and trees growing, to the production system illuminating. But I was much defeated by the later passages. Though even there I found the occasional gem. While there were few oases I did, at least occasionally, drink.

Sunday, November 01, 2026

A.K. Blakemore - Doom Painting

The release of Paul Greengrass' film The Uprising about the events of the 1381 English Peasants' Revolt have spurred me to read, or reread a number of works that I last read when writing "Kill all the Gentlemen". Perhaps the greatest pleasure however has been reading A.K. Blakemore's new novel Doom Painting which tells the story of the rising through the experiences of a number of key figures, particularly Wat Tyler.

Doom Painting begins where almost all accounts of 1381 should begin, with the poll tax collection in Fobbing, Essex. Even in the archival accounts its a violent event, laden with centuries of oppression and exploitation. But the archives don't give you a sense of the culmultative resentment and frustration of ordinary people. Blakemore however gives it us in spades, "A gasp, as an afternoon is confounded: Thomas Baker spits a lug of phlegm at the pointed toes of Sir John de Bampton's cherry-red poulaines."

Baker, she continues "has become familiar" with the "skinned-palm feeling of humiliation" of oppression. He and the others in Fobbing, "are sick of the tax collectors and assessors and serjeants-at-arms, who come at every change of the season, with the teetering and vauely comical officiousness of earthbound magpecks".

Even this cursory quote will give the reader a sense of aspects that are clearly very important to Blakemore's novel. The first is the palpable revulsion at injustice that runs through her book. The second is her frequent references to the smells, tastes, dirt and bodily fluids of feudal England. This is a world of oozing mud, dirty clothing, lice, smells and lack of privacy and disease. It's also a world of sex and violence. Wat Tyler, when he appears (and he surely does appear in this telling), is born of a world of violence, pillage and, tragically, rape. A veteran of what is now known as the Hundred Years War, he's seen his share of collective punishment, war and siege. He knows, for instance, that taking Rochester Castle will be impossible for a peasant army, unless something tips the balance.

And what does tip the balance? Here, and elsewhere? It is the, of course, the masses. In many ways it is Blakemore's ability to give the reader a sense of what the movement on the ground was like that makes this is truely unique work. All too often in novels that deal with mass movements readers are offered a mass of people that are somehow perfigured. Everyone seems to know what they are fighting for, and what they stand for. The leaders are ready cut men (usually men) who are fighitng for an ideal. It's a crude caricature of a movement and Doom Painting doesn't fall into the trap. Instead Tyler is a man whose sense of what is needed develops. Unlike John Ball, the poet and conscience of the rebellion, he has no thought out ideas. Just a grim hatred of injustice and liking of violence. As the rebellion unfolds, Tyler develops a real sense of the potential of the rising, and his own place in it.

In fact there's a remarkable speech that Blakemore puts into Tyler's mouth. It's not one that begins, as polished political rhetoric inevitably does, with lofty ideals and promises of victory. It's one that begins with the reality of war and the cruelty of life, and the promise that everyone will stand by each other and that Tyler will do his best for them. Nothing more, nothing less. The later chants of the crowd, when Tyler's better known and his feats have grown in the telling, are even more earthy, but carry the ring of the working-class movement confident in itself and its leaders, "his name's Wat the Tyler and he shits where he likes".

I presume that Blakemore has her own experience of the joyous nature of protesting crowds. Because the book's depiction of the growing rebellion as it marches on London and executes its enemies, feels true. No one comes into the is rebellion perfect, and certainly no one is made perfect by the movement. After all, the "tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living" and we carry with us the muck of ages. But the people are changed - in confidence and vision, and Blakemore shows us how.

At the other end of the scale is the venel, cowardly, violent and lazy ruling class. "But I am King of England" complains Richard II at one point. They are secure in their class strata and castles, confident that nothing can threaten them, protected by their armed bodies of men. Certainly this reader enjoyed reading of the collapse of their self-belief (and the occasional castle) and the rising panic in their ranks. One thing that I think Blakemore shows us well though, is that what distinguishes the rich and powerful from the ordinary masses is not just wealth. It is also the luxury of leisure. The rich and powerful waste time with gossip and intrigue, games and leisure. The poor, when they aren't sharpening swords and marching on the capital, work dawn to dusk and drink to forget. Which means their lives are ones of misery and desperation.

Doom Painting is a remarkable work. It's a retelling of a well known story that doesn't offer the reader a pretend, Hollywood, happy ending like The Uprising does. Nor does it pretend that its heroes are saints. Running through it is a celebration of the potential of ordinary people to change the world, and an instinctive solidarity with those who try. This is 1381 brought to life.

Thursday, October 29, 2026

Michael Löwy & Olivier Besancenot - Marx in Paris

As all socialist eyes turn to the current rebellion in France it is instructive to look at historic examples of French revolution. The greatest of all of these, from a Marxist point of view, was the Paris Commune. The 1871 workers' revolution that saw the city taken over by it's working population and run, albeit briefly, un a radical democratic way. One of Karl Marx's greatest writings is his Civil War in France. His trenchant defence of the Communards and how he articulated the lessons he had learnt from the Commune.

Marx never saw the Commune in real life. He learnt what he knew from its documents and its refugees, and the active participation of members of the International Workingmens Association. But this short volume imagines that Marx, led by his daughter Jenny, did visit Paris in 1871 in disguise, at the height of its struggles. The novel, written by to great socialist activists, Michael Löwy and Olivier Besancenot, imagines how Karl and Jenny Marx were inspired to travel by the news of workers' revolution, and their impressions. The book is supposed to be a forgotten notebook by Jenny, hidden for fear of alerting the authorities to Marx's visit to Paris and further threatening activists there.

On arrival in France, the authors have Karl and Jenny visit great revolutionaries, all of them working every hour possible to organise the Commune and to implement socialist ideas. Their conversations draw out both the achievements of the revolution both in terms of its transformative policies and the mass participation. In particular they visit Elisabeth Dmitrieff, a member of the IWA who founded the Women's Union to Defend Paris and Care for the Wounded. This organisation was much more than a medical organisation. It was an activist body that fought to demand the participation and equal rights for women in the Commune. They also meet with Louise Michel, a more famous participant, who placed herself on the front-lines militarily and politically.

The are some fascinating moments in this little piece of alternative history, and I did like the moments when Karl showed Jenny the places he knew from his own history and sites of historic organisation. But I found the book marred by its clunky prose. Too many of the conversations between Karl Marx and Communards felt like quotes from Marx's books and articles. The discussions felt stilted and unauthentic, rather like two conversationalists reading out polemics at each other.

Jenny's own thoughts are better constructed and her excitment at the participation of women and her reacquaintance with friends is well depicted.

The authors have done well to draw out the main arguments (Karl repeatedly suggests that the Communards should appropriate the central bank and march on Versailles). But these pieces of politics cannot rescue the novel itself.

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."