draw on his experience of a strike at Courtauld's Red Scar plant in Preston, in the mid 1960s. The plant employed thousands of workers, including hundreds of Asian and Caribbean workers... The local union branch of the TGWU negotiated a 50 per cent increase in workload for a meagre 3 per cent increase in wages. All the workers rejected the deal. But on 24 May 1865, amangement of the section where the Asian and Caribbean workers were concenrtared announced the introduction of the speed-up. In response, the workers downed tools.
Tuesday, September 10, 2024
Margaret Renn - Paul Foot: A Life in Politics
Sunday, September 08, 2024
Timothy J. LeCain - Mass Destruction: The men and giant mines that wired America & scarred the planet
Similarly, south west of Salt Lake City is the gigantic Bingham Canyon Mine, a different giant corporation boasted of turning a mountain into a molehill there. As a hill of low grade copper ore was turned into a pit measuring several kilometres in depth. Low grade it might have been, but as Timothy J. LeCain's fascinating book explains, mining companies proved adept at turning such minority sources into enormous wealth - with devastating consequences for the local, regional and global environment.
LeCain argues that the development of the modern US economy, and in particular the commodity economy so central to the US view of itself - with mass production of fridges and cars, networked by copper telegraph lines and defended (or extended) by mass military power, was based on "mass destruction". In particular Butte and Anaconda, and Bingham are examples of the enormous destructive power of industrial technology deployed in the hunt for profits.
The polluting by products were devastating. Even in the early days, wind borne arsenic killed cattle and trees for miles downwind of Anaconda. The groundwater in Butte is still polluted to an incredible level. It was only anger from farmers and citizens, and the concerns of national government that forced action to be taken to reduce pollution.
LeCain's book is an entertaining romp through this history. At points readers will roll their eyes at the shocking detachment of these corporations for people and the local environment. LeCain notes the inventor Frederick Cottrell, who developed some of the earliest equipment to extract pollutants from smoke and gases in chimneys, was "rightly suspicious of the early twentieth-century belief that corporate goals and the public good would always harmonize". It might be suggested that they never really do. But LeCain points out that "smoke abatement motivated primarily by profits failed in other unexpected ways as well". This was because the corporations realised that the extracted pollutants could be recovered and sold elsewhere. If they didn't enter the atmosphere from chimney's like that at Anaconda, they did after being used in agriculture, mining or elsewhere.
Nonetheless there was a remarkable, and persistent, belief by the corporations to pitch themselves as the root of the American dream. LeCain's book reproduces a series of fascinating adverts by Anaconda that encourage visitors to see the "Big Pit" at Butte, the massive hole in the ground produced by the mining. "See America the Bountiful" it puns, encouraging visitors on their way to Yellowstone Park to stop by. Today the same entrance allows visitors to see a pit, several kilometres wide, filled in bright blue acid which has to fire guns every few minutes to stop birds landing and dying. Some of these, perhaps on their way to Yellowstone themselves.
The modernist dream that technology will solve all humanities problem is exemplified by the attempts by corporations at Butte and Bingham to encourage visitors. But, as LeCain demonstrates, it is a feeble hope. The consequences of the production processes drive disaster on an unprecedented scale. It isn't just mining. LeCain draws parallels between these production methods and those of fishing, timber and agricultural industries. The corporations were well aware of the problems. Their solutions rarely solved the problem, simply displaced it in time and space. Or at least got rid of the ability of those affected to complain:
After years of struggling with the Anaconda and the smoke problem with little to show for it, many of the farmers were now willing to sell out. Where the Anaconda did not buy simple title to the land, it was often able to purchase "smoke rights" in which the owner agreed not to sue for any damages the smelter smoke might cause to the land. By the early 1930s the Anaconda either owned or had the legal right to pollute almost all the farm and forest land around the Washoe [smokestack].
LeCain understands that its the drive to profit that causes industry to behave like this, and he is rightfully cynical that attempts to discipline industry can succeed. Perhaps one fault with the book is that it doesn't explore how it is the logic of capitalism's drive to accumulate that causes this to happen. LeCain notes that blaming capitalism begs the question of what to replace it with, but because he believes that the Soviet Union was synonymous with socialism, he cannot see that as a solution. While he rightly points out that Soviet style government were significant industrial polluters and environmental destruction, he doesn't note that this was due to their own, state controlled, efforts to accumulate capital. A different strategy, but a similar outcome. Socialists like myself would suggest that a society based on genuine mass democratic control of industry, but the "associated producers" could do things differently. Indeed, LeCain's book celebrates the achievements of individuals like Frederick Cottrell, whose technologies could have made massive differences, but whose deployments were constrained by the limits they imposed on profits.
LeCain's work draws heavily on theoreticians critical of capitalism, not least the recently deceased James C Scott and the work of William Cronon. It might also have benefited from the insights offered by Karl Marx's idea of the "metabolic rift" between society and nature under capitalism. But this aside, this is a remarkably astute and insightful study of the way that mining corporations have destroyed people and planet in their quest for profits. No environmentalist visiting Montana should fail to read it, before visiting Butte and Anaconda - the "richest hill on Earth".
Related Reviews
Cronon - Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
Tyer - Opportunity, Montana
Punke - Fire and Brimstone
Thursday, September 05, 2024
Len Deighton - Winter: A Berlin Family 1899-1945
I have probably had Winter on my own shelves since my father died but only recently picked it up. It is a classic 1980s family epic, which has loose connectioned with some of Deighton's other spy novels. As the subtitle suggests, this follows the lives of a Berlin family, the Winters, as they live through the most turbulent times of German history. The Winters are wealthy. As the new century dawns, the patriarch Harald Winter, an industralist is beginning to see the investment possibilities of German rearmanent. Throughout the next four decades, he makes millions from the manufacture of arms, despite initially convincing himself that rearming like this will prevent war, rather than lead to one.
The families' general liberal politics is neatly subverted. Harald has a mistress, a Jew, and the family complains bitterly both about the revolutionary movements that overtake Germany ending World War One, and the rise of the fascists. Both of these, they see, as bad for business. But the Nazis are also good as they stop the left, and Harald's sons are pulled closer into the emerging mass movement with the younger becoming a member of the Freikorps - the fascist movement that helped crush the workers from 1919 to 1923, and then the Nazis itself.
The other son ends up in the US, were he becomes a key figure in the Allies attempts to overthrow Hitler from without. He also ends up investigating war crimes and this leads to their final coming together.
The story is faintly ludicrous. One of those slightly contrived tales that places key figures at key moments in history so the author can tell the story of a particular period through their characters. Deighton however, does it well, not least by making most of the central figures of his book unpleasantly rich bourgeois Germans who make a mint from selling arms, and supporting fascism. As a result the story rattles along through the rise of Hitler and the collapse of Germany. There are plenty of smaller sub plots and intrigues that keep the reader engaged.
However there are some problems. There is a lot of exposition by the characters. Deighton clearly felt that some of the events he describes would be too unknown and needed explaining. This is fair enough, but there are times when the characters talk to each other weirdly because they are really talking to the reader. The other problem is that the book tends to ignore wider events. The War and Holocaust are the background, and I felt their impact and horror was somewhat deminished as a result. It means that the role of one of the sons as a senior figure in the Nazi party becomes more about his attempts to protect individual interests. Not as a cog in a wider murder machine.
All in all, its a good read and its encouraged me to revisit some of Deighton's other works and have a look at the ones I ignored all those years ago.
Related Reviews
Carré - The Looking Glass War
Carré - A Legacy of Spies
Carré - A Murder of Quality