NoViolet Bulawayo - Glory

What a remarkable work Glory is. A brilliant satrical novel about post-colonial struggles, the way that the hopes and dreams of liberation struggles can be diverted and destroyed, and how that despair can turn into revolution. But perhaps most remarkable is how NoViolet Bulawayo tells the story.

George Orwell's famous political satire on the Russian Revolution, Animal Farm, tells the story using animals in a human world. Bulawayo tells her account of post-colonial Jidada with a cast of animals. Jidada is a fictional country, but the story is based on the struggles in Zimbabwe, where a movement to overthrow British rule was turned into the dictatorship of Mugabe. Glory focuses on a coup that overthrows the aged Old Horse ruler which, instead of bringing the freedom and hope the animals long for, delivers another brutal dictatorship. It is a parable of the 2017 Zimbabwe coup which saw the Old Horse Mugabe overthrown and Emmerson Mnangagwa installed as the new President.

Bulawayo tells the story through her animals. Their personalities in part dictated by the animals they are. The brave exile Destiny returning to Jidada is a goat, the vicious paramilitary regime enforcers are all nasty dogs. The masses range from chickens and kittens to pigs and sheep. It is two donkeys who raise a banner "Sisters of the Disappeared" at a government rally before the regime disappears them. 

But the novel is much more than the adult fairy tale that this setup suggests. Bulawayo experiments with different methods of telling the story. There are twitter threads, songs and chants. It is a briliant way to capture the atmosphere of both Zimbabwe and the mood on the streets. I was particularly struck by the snippets of conversation from the food queues. They range from sullen acceptance of the situation, to naive hope in the regime to growing radicalism. Like any developing revolution there's a mix of contradicatory moods and ideas. Bulawayo captures this better than any contemporary novel I've read.

It is no surprise that Bulawayo acknowledges all the "Jidadas of the world, clamouring for freedom" and says "A luta continua". While the novel finishes on the glory of the successful revolution, its climax is the revolution itself, as the dogs tear off their uniforms, throw down their weapons and break from the regime. The voices from the police, as they realise they are outnumbered by a combatative and confident mass movement, is perhaps the best depiction of the state's armed bodies of men being broken in the midst of revolution I have ever read. The fact that NoViolet Bulawayo makes this book simultaneously achingly beautiful and painfully sad is a tribute to a fantastic novelist. It is a revolutionary classic.

John Bellamy Foster - The Dialectics of Ecology

What can philosophical preoccupations such as dialectics offer a world in the grip of a existential environmental crisis? For most commentators, indeed for most people concerned about the environment, the crisis is a technological one. Humans, the argument goes, use the wrong technologies, the wrong energy sources or use too much natural resources leading to depletion, exhaustion and pollution. The solution then is to change energy source, or use less. In this view, philosophical approaches have nothing to offer. 

John Bellamy Foster has been a leading figure in ecological Marxism for a quarter of a century. In those years he has helped reevaluate Marx's approach to nature - fostering the idea of enviornmental crisis being the inevitable consequence of a capitalist system based on capital accumulation. In his latest book Foster makes the case that dialectical thinking is a crucial insight that we inheret from thinkers like Marx and Engels, precisely because it explains why a technocratic approach is incorrect. Indeed, why such simple answers have failed to even slow the rate of environmental degradation. As he writes in the preface to this new work:

It is the method of materialist dialectics that is Marx and Engels's chief legacy to us today as we confront the twenty-first-century planetary emergency... the theoretical critique of our alienated world takes on practical significance as transformative praxis only by means of the concrete struggles carried out in relation to ever-changing historical conditions.

Foster explains that this is the point of The Dialectics of Ecology, "aimed at the integration of the ecological and political-economic critiques of capitalism with the conditions of the global struggle conceived in the broadest terms."

This reassertion of the importance of dialectics is crucial for Marxists and non-Marxists. As Foster explains Western Marxism greatest failure was to break from an understanding that placed nature's dialectics as a core part of its thinking. As he says, "Historical materialism was then robbed of any connection to nature as a force in itself, reducing the notion of materialism within Western Marxism simply to denaturalised political-economic relations". It is a poison that continues to plague some thinkers. One of the best things about this book, which develops further the theses that Foster wrote about in his Deutscher Prize winning book The Return of Nature, is the notion that Marxism after Marx and Engels was developed and explored by later thinkers. The chapter here on Engels and the Second Foundation of Marxism is an important restatement of this - exploring as it does how various thinkers fought to establish a genuine Marxism far from the promethean Stalinised version we are used to. But, as Foster points out, this is also important because it highlights how Marx and Engels' work was a collaborative and developing set of ideas - countering those, such as Kohei Saito, who argue for a fundamental break between the two thinkers. A genuine dialectics of ecology must recognise this rather than repeat the mistakes of the past.

Restating Marx's contribution to ecological thinking is worthwhile. To summarise Foster. Marx's materialist view of nature was in three parts, the universal metabolism of nature, the social metabolism of nature though human labour and the metabolic rigt that takes place when the social metabolism of nature is shattered by the dominant means of production. It is these insights, combined with Marx's understanding of the dynamic of the capitalist economy that makes his thoughts so important. 

It is a far clearer, and more useful dynamic, than that inhabited by too many "post Marxist" and "post Humanist" thinkers, who decouple economics from nature, from humanity and much more, "anything by a conception of material-senuous human beings, production, and practice".

Foster's clarity on these theoretical concepts is refreshing. Much of the book is an exploration of the importance of these core ideas to both a theoretical understanding of the society-nature relationship and to practical questions within ecological thinking. One of these, the capitalisation of nature, so called "Natural Capital" is exposed as the trick it is, further subordinating the natural world to the accumulation of wealth. 

Key chapters in the book look at China and its historical development. Foster argues that in China today, "ecological Marxism has contributed to the development not only of a powerful critique of contemporary environmental devastation but also to the promotion of ecological civilisation as an answer". Foster continues, "[t]he concept of ecological civilisation being implemented in China today is seen as representting a new, revolutionary, and transformative model of civilisation". 

The development of such a critique of capitalism and such a vision, should of course be welcomed. But the Chinese state will not be the force that can push through and implement the required change. I think Marxists should see China as being a form of capitalist economic organisation whose accumulation of wealth is driven primarily by the needs of its ruling class to grow, in the context of wider, global, imperialist relations. It is only this that can explain China's repression of internal dissent (including environmental protest) and the state's close work with multinational corporations to faciliate the exploitation of Chinese workers. 

This is not to disagree with Foster's point that Chinese philosophy and history have contributed to a greater awareness of ecological ideas in the context of materialist thinking.

As Foster has repeatedly made clear, the creation of a revolutionary socialist sustainable future will require a break with past social and economic organisation. A society based on the collective interests and activity of the "associated producers" can only be that if it is based on the maximum amount of democracy and workers' control of production from the bottom of society. Creating such as society remains the key task of Marxists today and requires the building, or rebuilding of revolutionary socialist organisation.

Key to developing an adequate transformative thinking for such organisations will be clarity of Marxist ideas. Once again John Bellamy Foster's book is an important contribution to such a task.

Related Reviews

Foster - Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature
Foster & Clark - The Robbery of Nature
Foster & Burkett - Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique
Foster, Clark & York - Critique of Intelligent Design
Foster - The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet
Foster - The Vulnerable Planet
Foster - Ecology Against Capitalism
Foster - The Return of Nature

Sophie Yeo - Nature's Ghosts: The world we lost and how to bring it back

Nature's Ghosts is an excellent study of the way that ecological systems are inseparable from human influence, which means that re-wilding cannot be a return to some imaginary, historic pristine nature. It's a great study and a recommended read. My review of Sophie Yeo's excellent book was published in Socialist Worker here.

Related Reviews

Pearce - The New Wild: Why Invasive Species will be Nature's Salvation
Lymbery - Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were
Kolbert - The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Rawlence - The Treeline: The last forest and the future of life on earth
Malm - Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the 21st Century

Frank Herbert - Dune

Denis Villeneuve's recent two part film of Frank Herbert's Dune novel have reawakened interest in the author's multi-volume work. Dune was a significant milestone in science fiction, a novel that linked aspects of the 1960s counter-culture, with emerging ideas around religion, ecology and resistance. When I first read the novel after seeing David Lynch's less successful film in 1984 it immediately became a favourite, though the sequels never grabbed me and I gave up half way through the third book. I did return to the original Dune, but hadn't read it for two decades when the new films were released. Time for a re-read I thought.

How does it hold up? In short I was impressed. The novel works on a number of levels, but hasn't dated to the extent that some science-fiction of the era has. One reason for this is that the novel is low in technological detail. Unlike the various film dramatization we don't see any space flight. The "ornithopters" are simply fast moving flying machines. Herbert's great technical detail is to make the Spice that is mined on Arrakis a drug essential to plotting space travel. But the lack of details means that the reader (and film maker) can fill in what they need.

But reading the book today it is notable how much it works as a story of religious inspired anti-imperialist resistance. There are two aspects to this. Firstly the influence of Middle Eastern ideas in general and Islam in particular to the religious of the Fremen. These indigenous inhabitants of Arakis, a sand world protecting the Spice, become in the contemporary mind, the Arab masses and oil. Watching the first of Villeneuve's films it was hard not to see this particularly in the treatment of the Fremen by the Harkonnes. The more morally just rule by the Duke Atreides, which still insists on the extraction of Spice simply becomes a liberal dose of imperialism, reflecting a world, or galaxy, that runs on oil/Spice.

Reading the book in the 1980s I probably missed the religious influences and references. I did not, of course, forget the sandworms. But re-reading Dune today what I noticed was the way the sandworms are only the tip of a complex ecological system. In fact the ecological orientation of the novels is one of its best aspects - contributing both to the world-building and the plot itself, particularly the position of Liet Kynes the imperial planetologist, whose role is sadly minimised in the films. Kynes' death is one of the great moments in the novel, reflecting as he does, on the world beneath.

Dune today stands in the shadow of the two most recent films. But it deserves to be read as a brilliant work of highly original science-fiction. It works best, I suspect, if read before heading to the cinema. But because it fleshes out a strange, but simultaneously highly recognizable galaxy, it is worth reading even if you've seen the movies.

Frank Herbert's brilliance in Dune was the create a world that seems endlessly familiar. But that's because it is ultimately a film about how imperialism relates to rare and essential resources. As such its a story for all our times.

Margaret Renn - Paul Foot: A Life in Politics

I came to radical politics too late to see Paul Foot's contribution to the fight for socialism and against injustice in person. By the time I joined the SWP in the early 1990s, Paul Foot was an occasional, but immensely anticipated speaker in Birmingham and Manchester where I was active. Having read Margaret Renn's immensely enjoyable biography I realise that I had not appreciated his importance to the SWP, the organisation which he devoted his life, and the wider left movements. 

Paul Foot became one the most best known champions of the underdog. From victims of injustice who were falsely imprisoned accused of crimes they did not do, to those who exposed government crimes and lies, to striking workers. He was also a brilliantly eloquent advocate for socialism, something he did for decade after decade, in newspapers, magazines, pamphlets and, most brilliantly, in meetings. Many comrades, in and out of the SWP, have their favourite Paul Foot talk - from the Peasants' Revolt, to Toussaint L'ouverture. His columns in national newspapers, particularly the Daily Mirror, were avidly read and enjoyed by tens of thousands and, no doubt, helped keep the flame of resistance flying during the dark days of the 1980s.

Foot's life might have been radically different. He came from a wealthy, establishment background. His father, Sir Hugh Foot, was a senior diplomat, including playing a central role in the Britain's governship of Palestine. Foot's family included Michael Foot, and Paul could likely have had a long and important career in Parliament had he been prepared to take that step.

But Foot did not take that path. Renn explores that early, formative period, at university. It is very clear that despite the conservative nature of those around him, Foot was able to find a layer of people whose liberal politics and desire to poke fun at the Establishment began to take him down a path toward radical ideas and politics. It is common, when discussing Foot's politics, to show the importance of these relationships to his development. Several of the people Foot met at Oxford became crucial to his life - including key figures at Private Eye. Encountering socialists and revolutionaries outside of this milleau also began to change his ideas - two of these, Harry McShane and Tony Cliff, were crucial in developing Foot's own Marxism.

But it is also clear that there is another factor. After leaving Oxford University, his early work as a journalist put him in touch with working people, and engagement that would shape his life. Foot began his journalism, and his engagement with revolutionary politics in the early 1960s. It was, however, the struggles of working people that capatured Foot's imagination. Foot, Renn tells, once told an audience about how reading Karl Marx's Civil War in France, "smashed all my exciting parliamentary ambitions". But these ideas only made sense when they came into contact with the struggles of workers, and through his involvement in the International Socialists, Foot saw those ideas become concrete. By the 1970s Foot had been involved in mass struggles - strikes by workers, anti-war protests, anti-nuclear movements and so on. Throughout his life he never forgot the lessons he learnt in this period. In particular, he celebrated the self-organisation and collective power through his work.

Had Foot only been an armchair socialist, reading and writing, he would likely have produced a number of important and interesting works. But it was the way he placed himself at the heart of struggles - both collective and individual, that drove his political life. Indeed, as Renn points out, it was these experiences that made his work so powerful. When writing about racism, Foot was able to,

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. 

But the union leaders in the "white" sections of the factory refused to call out their members in solidarity. One union official described the strike as "racial". When the black workers were defeated, management introduced the speed up to all workers. Racism had divided the workers, and the failure of the white workers to unite, had led to their collective defeat.

Such lessons, and much more successful strikes, inspired Foot throughout his life. Renn shows how he was never happier than when engaged with such action. As a result, workers loved him, were inspired by him, and became activists and socialists themselves. There's no doubt that Foot was central to the growth of the SWP and its development as an organisation that could punch far above the weight implied by its few thousand members.

That said I was surprised that Tony Cliff's life and role wasn't give a larger importance by Renn. Foot finished his introduction to Cliff's autobiography by noting "there are quite a few of us socialists in Britain over the past 40 years or so who thank our lucky stars that we had the chance to stand on his shoulders." While Renn tells us of some of the disagreements between the two, I would have liked more on how they developed political ideas together, how they organised and how they discussed. Likewise, other key socialists in the SWP have only passing mentions - Chris Harman and Duncan Hallas, for instance.

These individuals were important to Foot. But it is clear that Foot's politics arose in a dialectical engagement with working class action. The struggles of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, shaped Foot. Without them he would have been a very different person. But he was not just a passive recipient celebrating workers in some abstract way. He did everything he could to develop the confidence and combativity of the working class movement. Leftists often celebrate Foot's ability to popularise and recover forgotten radical figures such as the revolutoinary poet Shelley. But it is also true that he was central to making sure that anti-racist and pro-immigrant politics were part of the left's furniture - not something that was at all automatic. His fights against injustice, the Carl Bridgewater case, the injustice suffered by Colin Wallace, the case of James Hanratty, the Guildford 4 and Birmingham Six, are well known. They were part of his struggle for a better world. 

Of course Foot was more than a socialist and journalist. Margaret Renn also tells the story of his personal and family life. Some readers will find this aspect to the biography more interesting than others. But what comes across is a the story of a man who enjoyed life, and dedicated himself to trying to make sure that ordinary people got the best of the world. Today, the world cries out for justice and an end to capitalism. The arguments made by Paul Foot, with eloquence and passion in books like Why you Should be a Socialist still resonate and hold true today. So Margaret Renn's book celebrates his amazing life, and deserves to be read by a new generation of activists. Partly this is in the hope that a new generation of investigative journalists, bloggers and podcasters will learn from Foot the sort of persistence and politics that is needed to win. But the main reason is the hope that new generations engage with the type of socialism that Paul Foot spent his life struggling for: ideas that sees the working class as the revolutionary power that can emancipate humanity.

Related Reviews

Foot - The Vote
Foot - Red Shelley
Birchall - Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time

Timothy J. LeCain - Mass Destruction: The men and giant mines that wired America & scarred the planet

Just west of the former Montana mining town of Butte, famous as the site of some of the United States' biggest battles between organised workers and bosses, is the smaller town of Anaconda. The town's very name is synonymous with one of the US's most important and influential corporations - the Anaconda mining company. Approaching Anaconda it is difficult to ignore the looming, and now disused, smoke stake - the tallest masonry structure in the world. It is even harder to ignore the evidence of the polluting by products of the copper industry. Slag heaps dominate the approach along the interstate, ruined equipment, piles of dirt and dust surround the local National Park. This marks the giant smokestack, but perhaps uniquely for a US Park, visitors are forbidden. It is too poisonous. 

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

Len Deighton - Winter: A Berlin Family 1899-1945

Len Deighton's novels dominated the 1980s. His trilogies of spy series were massive bestsellers. His books on the Second World War, in particular, Bomber were justly well received and non-fiction books on the war and cooking also bear mention. Deighton's works filled my Dad's shelves, though I only really read the ones about aircraft! The spy novels were a little too intellectually challenging for young me.

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