Kai Bird & Martin J Sherwin - American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Like many others I bought American Prometheus after watching the 2023 film Oppenheimer. By any judgement, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the subject of the biography and film was a remarkable figure. A brilliant scientist who in his early career made a series of important breakthroughs in the febrile atmosphere of early 20th century physics, he was a public intellectual with connections and sympathies with many radical movements of pre-war United States. A multifaceted figure who found himself a central figure in one of the most controversial projects of World War Two - the development of the atom bomb. 

Few of Oppenheimer's enemies would have disagreed with many of these judgements. They acknowledged his genius, his political connections and his central role in the creation of viable weapons of mass destruction. But for these enemies Oppenheimer was a threat to the security of the United States because he was prepared to openly discuss the moral consequences of the atom bomb's invention and its possible future. Fearing that he would use his position to undermine the US's post-war lead in nuclear technology, challenge its military doctrines, and possibly even strengthen its enemies, they decried him as a Communist - spread lies, undermined (and possibly killed) his friends, and dredged up past mistakes to blacken his name. In the growing anti-Communist witch-hunting atmosphere of the late 1940s and 1950s, Oppenheimer was one of thousands whose lives were destroyed. The difference was that Oppenheimer was famous and wealthy. Many others, from trade unionists and civil rights activists to leftists and even a handful of actual communists had their lives ruined.

American Prometheus is the story of how Oppenheimer found himself trapped in the logic of this witch-hunt. It begins with his childhood in a nurturing, wealthy, family who offered him opportunities to develop his knowledge and genius. He was also introduced to the finer things in a wealthy family's life - travel, cars, books and fine foods. Family Oppenheimer was the perfect space for Robert to develop - even if his own personal development was stunted at times. Travelling to Europe in the 1920s, Oppenheimer finished his Phd at an incredible scientific moment, studying and contributing to the insights of the emerging fields of Quantum Mechanics and nuclear sciences.

Back in the United States he found himself at an intoxicating moment. As a scientist, physics was expanding and breaking barriers on multiple fronts. There were countless opportunities for a physicist of Oppenheimer's brilliance to make a name for themselves. But for a liberal thinker, who was well read and engaging with wider political debates, there were many other opportunities. Oppenheimer found himself in the midst of growing political radicalism, the struggle for Civil Rights, and most particularly, the early 1930s, a wave of strikes in San Francisco.

It is here that the authors of American Prometheus really get to grips with Oppenheimer as an individual. Biographers (and indeed his enemies) have of course noted his left ideas, after all Oppenheimer himself did not exactly hide these. But he was teaching at Berkeley at a singular moment - a wave of strikes hit the port of San Francisco. Oppenheimer, some of his friends, and several of his students were supportive and engaged with the struggles:

Berkeley itself was split between critics and supporters of the strike. When the longshoremen initially walked out on May 9, 1934, a conservative member of the physics faculty, Leonard Loeb, recruited "Cal" football players to act as strikebreakers. Significantly, Oppenheimer later invited some of his students... to come along with him to a longshoremen's rally in a large San Francisco auditorium. " We were sitting up high in a balcony," recalled [Bob] Serber, "and by the end we were caught up in the enthusiasm of the strikers, shouting with them, 'Strike! Strike! Strike!' " Afterwards, Oppie went to the apartment of a friend, Estelle Caen, where he was introduced to Harry Bridges, the charismatic longshoreman union leader.

What is interesting here is that Oppenheimer wasn't just a casual onlooker, though he was not a political activist. He was engaged with struggles, and supportive of them. And indeed, in the case of unionisation, he encouraged it on several occasions through his working life. The point is that Oppenheimer had been immersed in radical politics that went beyond mere abstract ideas - though he certainly also engaged in those. He took these seriously, even if he did not always agree. One acquaintance thought he had read more Marx and Lenin than mnay active Communist Party members. While he certainly was radical, and was very close to some Communist Party activists - both his lover Jean Tatlock and his wife Katherine "Kitty" Puening, were CP members and activists - he was not a member (though even CP members often thought he was). The point of this is not that Oppenheimer was close to the CP. Its more that he had a set of ideas - political and scientific - shaped by a period of struggle in US history which influenced his thinking, while not being powerful enough to enable him to understand the threat to him posed by those who hated any ideas to the left of Harry Truman.

When World War Two came, the US scrambled to reassert itself. Money was poured into projects that could strengthen its military position. One of these was the Manhattan Project - the development of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer was an obvious choice, though his politics made him already suspect. But crucially two factors, often ignored by his detractors decades later, were central. First was that the great threat from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan meant that people were included into military arenas that they would not normally have been allowed into. People with suspect ideas, were not considered as much of a threat as they would under McCarthyism because the danger was very real. Even liberals like Oppenheimer, who hated the idea of unrestricted military murder, felt that the atom bomb was needed because Nazi Germany would otherwise get it. Note that at this point Nazi Germany was considered the real danger by the likes of Oppenheimer. The second issue was that the Soviet Union was a friend and ally.

Oppenheimer played a central role in making the bomb real - the book details his work, his influence and his importance and we need not be distracted by that here. But Oppenheimer also played an important role in making the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima happen. He drew up the instructions for the proper and best use of the first weapon. He did, as he later agonised, have "blood on his hands". Nonetheless the reality of the atrocities against Japan slowly changed his mind:

Once again [Oppenheimer] had failed to persuade the president and members of his Administration to turn their back on... "the whole rotten business." The Administration now supported a program to build a bomb 1,000 times as lethal as the Hiroshima weapon. Still, Oppenheimer would not "upset the applecart." He would remain an insider - albeit one who was increasingly outspoken and increasingly suspect.

Bird and Sherwin map the trajectory of Oppenheimer's transition from concerned scientist to outspoken critique of the nuclear strategy of the US and its allies. Though I should add here that I think they neglect the work of other scientists who tried hard to build a peace and anti-nuclear movement. This is well documented in Robert Jungk's excellent book Brighter Than One Thousand Suns. Jungk also highlights the significant role of other scientists in the development of nuclear physics, and more detail on events at Los Alamos. Bird and Sherwin's hyper-focus on Oppenheimer means that this material is often neglected undermining the larger story.

However what matters is not Oppenheimer's trajectory but the limitations of his politics. By the 1950s and 1960s, Oppenheimer retained his liberal criticisms of society. But he was very much a US patriot. The crude equation of Soviet Russia with existing Communism meant that Oppenheimer and many others, simply dismissed socialism completely and saw the US as the only option - albeit an option that had to be reformed. 

Intriguingly it is no less a figure than Albert Einstein who understood Oppenheimer's greatest weakness. As the witch-hunting grew louder and those who wanted to dethrone Oppenheimer as a Communist who was at the heart of the US nuclear machine and consequently needed to be destroyed, circled, Einstein commented "the trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn't love him - the United States government." Despite the brilliance of his mind, Oppenheimer could comprehend that the US was not a democratic system based on rational debate. It was a imperialist power prepared to murder its enemies, destroy civilians and smash opposition that threatened it - however mild it might be.

Even after he was defeated and lost his security clearance, Oppenheimer remained, according to the science sociologist Charles Thorpe. "in spirit a supporter of the fundamental direction of its [the US's] politics". Bird and Sherwin point out that despite what the US state had done to him, "Robert was determined to prove that he was a reliable patriot". Indeed, his failure to challenge the dominant politics directly led to his downfall. As one person commented, "The trouble was [Oppenheimer] accepted his accusers' terms from the beginning... He should have told them at the outset that he was the builder of the atom bomb - that he was a scientist, not an informer".

Whether that would have been enough to save Oppenheimer from his enemies is a moot point. Socialists ought to, in my opinion, acknowledge the horrors unleashed by the US's nuclear strategy, and the problems inherent in the nuclear bomb. This is not to downplay or ignore the grave injustice of the witch-hunt against Oppenheimer and the others caught up in the US's anti-communist attacks. That said, Oppenheimer did at least get some vindication - subsequent US Presidents recognised the errors and injustices, as did many thousands of scientists and others. 

The same was not true for countless radicals, trade unionists, and socialists who lost their livelihoods and sometimes their lives, as a result. Nonetheless the attacks on Oppenheimer, despite the lack of any real basis, the failure of any sense of natural justice, the collusion, smears and lies that brought him down had lasting impacts. Oppenheimer's brother Frank lost his job in his beloved physics environment. Toni, the gifted linguist daughter of Robert and Kitty, failed to get a job as a UN translator due to the FBI's grudge against the family. The rejection surely contributed to her mental health issues and eventual suicide. I think that accusations that the US government killed Jean Tatlock because of her politics and closeness to Oppenheimer have some merit.

Oppenheimer was not a Communist spy at the heart of the US nuclear programme. He was a gifted scientist and thinker who was brave enough to speak out. He was not a political activist, and once he had lost his position, he retreated from explicit criticisms of the threat of nuclear war. He seems to have made little, or no, comment on US politics - either imperialist or civil rights - in the later years of his life. As a public intellectual he had significant limits. 

American Prometheus is certainly the best biography of this complicated man. The authors have done an admirable job in drawing out the factors that shaped Oppenheimer. They are less clear on those factors that shaped the politics of the system that would destroy him, and continues to deploy nuclear weapons today. Nonetheless through this brilliant account we learn a great deal about the politics that have shaped the world that we live in today, and the individuals who built it - as well as created forces that could destroy it all. A great biography should always leave the reader feeling like they've lived the triumph and/or tragedy of its subject. American Prometheus certainly does that.

Related Reviews

Robert Jungk - Brighter Than 1000 Suns
Miller - Empire of the Stars
Cathcart – The Fly in the Cathedral
Moore - What Stars Are Made Of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Karin Wieland - Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin & a century in two lives

Marlene Dietrich was one of the great artists, actors and performers of the early twentieth century. Her life was shaped by the twists and turns of the German Weimar period, when poverty, capitalist crisis and radical politics shaped a generation. Whatever the particular nature of her beliefs, Dietrich was one who was unafraid to call out things she disagreed with. While she could be a problem to work with, and her casual dismissal of lovers and relationships left many shocked and confused, she was, no doubt on the right side of history.

Leni Riefensthal an admirer of Hitler, a calculating careerist who saw in the Nazi regime a chance to become close to power, to advance herself and to share in the wealth and adoration that went with it. At times this meant she literally used Gypsy prisoners from concentration camps as film extras, before returning them to their inevitable deaths. That she herself was playing a romanticised gypsy in the film being made only heightens the horror. 

Karin Wieland's double biography tries to tie these two individuals together. It is a difficult task. There is little or no physical overlap between the two, though a photo of them together is included. Instead what Wieland is trying to do is to tell the story of the 20th century through the lives of her two subjects. As such the book ends up falling between biography and history and getting neither particularly well. 

What the reader gets from this book will depend on their particular interests. I approached it hoping to learn more about Dietrich, who for me is the enigmatic singer and actor, who threw her lot in with Hollywood and left German as the Nazis rose. Her principled refusal to return to Germany and act in Nazi films, despite her perennial lack of money, was a genuine blow to the propaganda efforts of Hitler's regime. As a result of this, and her choice to become the entertainer of choice for the US military, sparing no effort or personal discomfort to sing, perform and cheer up the troops on the front lines, felt more like a powerful effort at anti-fascism. But Wieland also makes it clear that Dietrich also found a renewed love of applause and adoration. Here she was at her best - not the leading lady from Hollywood, but the Weimar era cabaret superstar who had a instinctive ability to speak to the crowds. 

On the other hand I had little interest in Riefenshtahl who, in my opinion had little talent, and whose close links to Nazism and Nazi leaders was carefully hidden through post-war manipulation. While she clearly had some talents as a director, it is also abundantly clear that these talents came through because of a close identification with the Nazi aesthetic cultivated by Hitler and Goebbels. 

I was, however, intrigued to see that Wieland pulls no punches in retelling Riefenshtahl's career. While there's less material that for Dietrich, she draws out the essential emptiness of Riefenshtahl's life. At the same time Wieland makes it very clear just how close to fascism and the Nazis the filmmaker was. Her post-war career is shaped by the same controlling, manipulative behaviour and a singular failure to atone for her sins. 

Unfortunately there is not enough of a parallel between the two figures to tell the story of the century. Indeed Dietrich isn't enough of a principled political thinker and Riefenshtahl's too limited an actor and performer to make the lives parallel. They just happened to live the same lives - with little or no overlap. At the end of her life Dietrich comes across as a sad, lonely and impoverished former great - someone who made some amazing films, with personal determination and principle. But she was at least a great performer and actor in her time. And after the war Dietrich was at least obsessed with trying to understand and atone for her native country's sins. Riefenshtahl comes across as a pig who got away with a host of crimes, and was accepted back by the establishment as soon as it could.

Readers wanting to learn more about either figure will find lots of material in this book of interest. But it failed too offer any insights into the period, or real connection between the two.

Related Reviews

Evans - Hitler's People: The faces of the Third Reich
Boyd - Travellers in the Third Reich

Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man

Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man is considered one of the great works of post-war Science Fiction. First published in 1953 it is easy to see why it was considered a great work. But reading it today the book seems out of date and not as sharp as it must have read in the 1950s.

While very much sitting in the futuristic science fiction genre, surprisingly the book is actually a police procedural detective novel. There are two twists to this. The first is minor, the book is what Wikipedia charmingly describes as an "inverted detective story". We know, from the opening chapters who the killer is, and how they did the crime. Though it is not clear why. The more dramatic twist is that the crime takes place in a future where some people are "peepers", mind-readers who have varying abilities to read thoughts. This means that the most acomplished peepers can tell what someone is thinking, why they are thinking it, and everything else in their subconcious. It means that there hasn't been a pre-meditated murder in many years - though crime is very much still real.

The main character, and it is not a spoiler to say this, the killer is Ben Reich. Extremely rich, powerful and unpleasant, Reich is challenged by an equally massive company run by Craye D'Courtney. Reich is troubled by dreams of "the man with no face" and is increasingly paranoid. He resolves to murder D'Courtney and comes up with a series of clever plans to evade the peepers and hide his crime.

While much of the novel follows the telepathic police office Lincoln Powell's attempts to prove Reich's guilt and motive, the story's twist is that in the eyes of the law Reich has no motive. Quite the opposite. In fact Reich had everything to gain from keeping D'Courtney alive because a proposed merger of their companies which would have solved Reich's finanical troubles, was on the cards. The murder meant Reich's bankruptchy.

The problem is that telepathicly obtained evidence is not admissible in court, so Powell cannot simply bring in Reich for questioning, but has to find a way to prove what is going on in the killer's mind. 

All this set up makes for an intriguing premise. There's a lot of interesting stuff about the pros and cons of a society where some people can read minds, but where those peepers are not all as able as each other. Bester sets up some other intriguing ideas - the "cartel" of telepaths who monopolise and try to control individuals with those powers, leaving some peepers operating underground or without training and constraints. There are also some surprising class politics - the idle rich whose orgies are carefully hidden away and provide a perfect space for Reich's crimes.

But there are problems. Not least in the uneasy relationship that is depicted between Powell and D'Courtney's daughter. The murder of her father means his daughter regresses to childhood and Powell cares for her as she recovers through an accelerated childhood. From being a father figure, Powell becomes her lover. It feels really inappropriate - quite literal grooming - with the added problem of telepathic intervention.

This actually points to the real problem - the ending. Here Bester resorts to what feels now like a dated and cliched freudian explanation of why Reich commited the murder. It fits, of course, with the general narrative of thought and subconciousness. But it makes for an unbelievable and unsatisfying ending that feels very old fashioned. Bester's book is best read for its world building. But it just doesn't work for me.

Related Reviews

Bester - The Stars My Destination

Eamon Duffy - A People's Tragedy: Studies in Reformation

As one of the preeminent scholars of the English Reformation I have always found Eamon Duffy's work to be insightful and interesting. Despite his framework differing entirely from Marxism, his frequent focus on the lives of ordinary people, the impact of religious changes and the role of religion in day-to-day life, means that there is much to be gained from a study of his work. Two of his books remain unparalleled. The Stripping of the Altars is a fantastic account of the impact of the Reformation with a nationwide view, and The Voices of Morebath is a deeply touching close study of one community's encounter with the sweeping changes of the Reformation through a half century recorded by its vicar, Christopher Trychay.

What to make of A People's Tragedy, collection of Reformation themed essays by Duffy, which mostly explores how the Reformation has been understood by people in the centuries since? While several of the essays are interesting, they are most likely to be fully enjoyed by various experts. However there are some stand out chapters. Two of these demonstrate Duffy's excellence at exploring the ordinary experience of religion. The first, on the nature and experience, of pilgrimage before the Reformation gives, like Voices of Morebath, a real flavour of ordinary lives. Here are the ordinary pilgrims, "goggling" at the splendour around them, distracting them from the shrine. The second, which looks at the doomed, pro-Catholic, rebellion of 1569, again demonstrates what I argue is the essence of the Reformation for "history from below". In England it was experienced by most people as an assault on their culture and community, from above - and thus rebellions against it must be seen as resistance to attacks on ordinary people - rather than just a defence of Catholic practice.

Other essays look in detail at how different historians, religious figures and so on have discussed and understood the Reformation. Some of these are obscure to non-specialists. Others less so. There is a fascinating chapter that dissects Hilary Mantel's trilogy on Thomas Cromwell. Exploring how the author reverses the character and behaviours of two key figures - Cromwell and Thomas More, to the detriment, Duffy argues of popular understanding of the English Reformation. While the main thrust of the argument is understandable, Duffy's desire to protect the legacy of Thomas More seems more sectarian than historical. Another fascinating chapter looks at the development of the English Bible, and its impact today.

To be fair to Duffy, he is concerned not just with pushing a more pro-Catholic viewpoint on the Reformation than most readers will be used to, but in actually exploring the legacy of the schism itself. This, he argues, was quite negative. Regarding the end of the tradition of pilgrimage, Duffy concludes that with its end, "English imagination was the poorer for it". While it is certainly true that the infrastructure and fabric of churches suffered from the consequences, was collective "imagination" really that damaged? Me thinks the writer protests too much.

Part of the problem is that Duffy is concerned about religion per se. This is particularly notable in his chapter on the rise, fall and rise again of pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin Mary at Walsingham. Here, in his account of contemporary politics of the event, he is keen to stress the unity of the wings of the Church, over and above the nature of the pilgrimage itself. What does pilgrimage mean in the 21st century is not really a question that Duffy tries to answer. This, I think is important, because Duffy has disconnected his religion(s) from wider economic, political and dare I say it, historical processes. Sometimes this is obvious on a specific level - for instance in the account of 1569 (a revolt entirely neglected by contemporary left historians) Duffy writes:

Till relatively recently, historians have been inclined to explain the rebellion in essentially secular terms, as the last gasp of northern feudalism, an attempt by northern grandees, resentful of their own exclusion from the corridors of power and the domination of the Elizabethan court.

Duffy, instead, reminds us that people did (at all sorts of levels in society) enthusiastically embrace the opportunity to reassert their own religion and practice in the old way: Digging up altar stones, teaching choirboys to sing the old songs and so on. But what Duffy misses is that the revolt can be understood as both aspects. Indeed it is both the desire for northern power and the desire to worship in the old ways that provided the impetuous for revolt by elite rebels and the space for some of the masses to support them.

It is Duffy's ability to disconnect religion from context (while recognising its centrality to the lives of ordinary people) that makes the book a frustrating read. Duffy might be keen to build bridges between the different Christian Churches and to argue against viewpoints that sometimes place Protestantism and being automatically more progressive than Catholicism. But this is abstract religion - there's nothing really here about the role of religion in the modern world, or indeed how a unity of purpose for different Christians might impact on wider politics. Given the uses and abuses to which religion is being purposed in the modern world, particularly by the right and far-right, its a shame that Duffy's excellent historical analysis of the Reformation as a religious process cannot be deployed in ways that might illuminate contemporary politics.

Related Reviews

Duffy - The Voices of Morebath: Reformation & Rebellion in an English Village
Duffy - The Stripping of the Altars

Newsinger - Chosen by God: Donald Trump, the Christian Right & American Capitalism

John Rose - Revolutions Thwarted: Poland, South Africa, Iran, Brazil and the legacies of Communism

John Rose, who died recently, was a veteran socialist of the 1968 generation. I reviewed his excellent book The Myths of Zionism many years ago on this 'blog and like many socialists I learnt much from his pamphlet Israel: The Hijack State. In the 2010s Rose began working on a project to critically examine the revolutionary socialist ideas that had been so central to his activist life. In the introduction to this book he writes that he was motivated to examine a fundamental question, "why was the Marxist left in such a precarious state, especially when the proverbial crisis of capitalism... was so serious?" He decided to put his "1968 assumptions" to an "independent test" by studying three failed revolutionary upheavals (a fourth was later added). 

These studies, on Poland in the early 1980s, Iran in 1979, Brazil in the 1980s and 1990s and South Africa at the end of Apartheid, were all examples of mass workers action that had the potential to spill over into working class revolution. With the possible exception of Iran, which saw workers' councils in a small number of highly organised areas of workers' strength, none of them did. Comparing these events, with the high points of revolutionary activity in the early 20th century, form the main purpose of the book. Despite the book originating in a Phd study Rose writes not out of pure academic interest, but with the ambition of revolutionary emancipation. It is a remarkable work.

The book opens, however, not with 20th century revolution, but with 1848 and The Communist Manifesto, "one of modernity's greatest historical documents". The Manifesto, writes Rose, "provides strategic and tactical guidelines for accomplishing the ultimate goal of a classless society". Rose traces the development after 1848, not just of revolutionary ideas, but also of organisation. Crucially, he notes that while Marx and Engels did not fully develop their thoughts on revolutionary organisation, others did. Gramsci, for instance, noted how his revolutionary newspaper in 1918-1920 "worked to develop certain forms of new intellectualism"... individuals whose strength was not simply "eloquence" but "in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organiser". Such individuals were, Gramsci writes, "elites of intellectuals of a new type who arise directly from the masses through remaining in contact with them".

While Rose fully explores other aspects of revolutionary thought, particularly Marx and Engels' key concept that the emancipation of the working class will "be the act of the working class" themselves. The importance of revolutionary worker "intellectuals" remains central to his argument. It was individuals like these, Rose concludes, who made the Russian Revolution: "Lenin's purposive workers: worker leaders, 'genuine heroes... with a passionate drive toward knowledge and toward socialism' [Lars Lih]" Why is this important? That, in essence, is the argument of the second part of the book.

In examining the four "thwarted" revolutions of Iran, Poland, South Africa and Brazil, Rose explores two things. Firstly the ongoing relevance of the Marxist approach to social change. The moments when mass action by workers begins to spill over into the demand for "self management" a slogan that Rose describes as one of 1968's greatest slogans. This self-management is evident in a number of examples. Rose quotes from his interview with one of the Solidarity activists from Poland who describes a key moment in the strike wave:

There was a nuclear bomb shelter in the basement. I used this shelter because I was formally leader of a trade union... I organised a strike committee for this March mobilisation for all offices, all workshops around the old market. I even prepared food for three months. So I had everything prepared for these strikes... It was a classical dual power situation. There was still a state with military apparatus and police... But the real power, day by day, went to workers' factory councils.... we organised a plebiscite in the biggest factories in Wroclaw about who has the power to choose the director, manger, the Party or workers' councils? And in every factory we won this plebiscite.

If that was the situation in Poland, in some parts of the Iranian Revolution power went even further. One account, quoted by Rose says:

The oil industry is virtually controlled by dozens of independent workers' komitehs, committees, which, though loyal to the central government, are nevertheless participating in all the decisions related to production and marketing... the komitehs have unquestionably demonstrated that they can run the oilfields and the refineries without the top rank Iranian managers and without the expertise of some 800 foreign technicians.

But as Rose shows at crucial points in all four of these risings the left failed the test. This was, it must be stressed, not just about whether or not the left supported workers' action or retreated at the wrong point (a particular issue in Poland), but also whether or not key questions such as oppression were taken seriously. In Iran, for instance, the left failed to support women's fight for their rights, seeing it as a distraction. Comparing the German Revolution of 1919 with Iran in 1979 Rose writes:

The German communists in 1919 had one tremendous advantage over their Iranian counterparts... Both shared the experience of taking part in revolutionary upheavals, toppling tyrannies, as a result of decisive collective workers' action. Both shared the experience of witnessing and participating in very advanced experimental forms, though at different stages of development, of organised workers attempting to establish democratic forms of workers' control of production... But the German left had at least secured elementary democratic and constitutional rights, which allowed the German Communist and the independent workers' movement time to recover from the defeat.

He continues, that the 

tragedy of the Iranian left is that not only was this decisive advantage denied to them; the Iranian left itself has to share some of the responsibility for this failure. The struggle for popular democracy, including the defence of women's rights and the independent press in 1979 was just as important as defending the workers' shoras and the new regime's anti-imperialist stance. 

But the left was unable to engage in the sort of tactical twists and turns that Lenin's Bolsheviks used throughout 1917 to consolidate their position in the minds of the masses. The problem was politics, or the lack of political clarity. In Iran, Rose argues that "the Stalinist mind-set not only ruled out such essential tactical and strategic flexibility, it altogether downplayed the importance of the struggle for popular democracy". Those leading the movements, in all four case studies, too often shared a political allegiance or set of ideas that saw mass struggle as secondary. It was always their downfall.

But it wasn't simply the lack of a clear political line, or a distortion of strategy. It was also the failure of the sort of revolutionary organisation with large numbers of Gramsci's intellectual activists within the working class. Activists who could think about strategy and fight for mass action, at the same time as building an independent movement. That's not to say that individuals like this did not exist. Rose interviews several of them, and he notes that the best of these "the regimes most feared because of their widespread influence" and they tried to silence them. But he concludes, for Iran:

The problem of how to revitalise that vision [of socialism] in the shadow of Soviet Communism and its Iranian apologists was never resolved. The same applied in Poland, South Africa and Brazil. It also meant that the nascent worker intellectuals were unable fully to develop their political abilities.

It is a problem that contemporary socialist organisation must grapple with. Indeed Joseph Choonara has recently written a piece on how revolutionary parties can develop cadre. While the International Socialist Tradition, of whom John Rose was part, have rightly always understood the problem of the Stalinist politics of the State Capitalist regimes and the Communist Parties who acted in their name, Revolutions Thwarted demonstrates how lasting and extensive that influence was. Rose concludes:

This... underestimates the impact of the collapse of Soviet Communism and the growing doubts about its viability that preceded it. Criticisms of the Soviet Union... easily flowed over into a demoralising sense that the original socialist revolution in Russia 1917 was itself flawed... the independent workers' movements in the four countries... were... dogged by the experience of Soviet Communism and lacked confidence to develop sustainable ideological responses which would revitalise a communist project centred on their own self-activity.

The conclusion can only be to build the sort of intellectually dynamics, revolutionary socialist organisation that was lacking in these movements in Polish, Brazilian, Iranian and South African history. The sort of organisation that John Rose dedicated his life to building. Revolutions Thwarted is, in many ways, one of the most important books to come out of the International Socialist tradition in the last ten years. Its a book that reasserts the core politics of classical Marxism, puts workers' self emancipation at its heart, and is not afraid to be self-critical and honest. Its one that a generation of socialists ought to read to arm us for the struggles to come.

Related Reviews

Rose - The Myths of Zionism
Molyneux - Marxism and the Party
Cliff - State Capitalism in Russia

Mary Beard - Emperor of Rome

Emperor of Rome is Mary Beard's latest book aimed at a popular audience about Ancient Rome. As with her others this is accessible, entertaining and readable. This book looks at the Emperors, though as she makes clear this is no easy task. The Imperial period covered a long period of time, and there were numerous Emperors, some of whom lasted a very brief time and several of whom we know little or nothing about. Beard avoids a chronological approach, which is good because it means she avoids having to tell the same story over and again. Instead what she tries to do is to give the reader a general impression of the role, perception and activities of the man who was the pinnacial of the highly rigid, violent society that was Rome.

One of the advantages of this approach is that the Emperor is understood in context. We avoid the "1066 and all that narrative" of good and bad men, and begin to see the men as mor than "benevolent elder statesmen or juvenile tyrants". These are there, and Beard cannot but avoid give us some of the salacious gossip and slander. But she also can conclude that these stories are ones that arise in context - as attempts to discredit, or boost, an Emperor during or after their lifetimes. The Emperors were the top of the ruling class, but they were also important figures in terms of continuinty. As Beard points out, "the magnifying lens of these stories helps us to see clearly the anxieties that surrounded imperial rule at Rome".

It also means that Beard doesn't try to separate the Emperors from those below them. The Emperor cannot exist without military guards and networks of patronage. But he also, being at the top of a slave society, cannot exist without the labour of thousands of slaves. It is the casual commodification of the slaves that highlight the first example of this interaction, as Beard recounts how the Emperor Domitian once held a dinner were everything, including the food dishes, was coloured black. The slaves were painted back, and guest's dinner places were marked with pretend tombstones. The sombre atmoshpere would have terrified the diners: were they about to be executed? At the end, upon returning home, the guests were met by tone of the slaves, carrying a fake tombstone and the washed slave dressed up as a gift. 

There's much in this example - the Emperor's casual references to death as a symbol of power. The even more casual giving of the slave as a gift which, Beard points out, is what will stand out to modern readers. And the use of dinners as places where the Emperor would network and distribute gifts. But we also have to ask "Did it happen"? Was the story, recounted centruies later by the Roman writer Dio, even true. Its a good example of how what we think about Emperors as individuals as well as the role, might be distorted - even if the story reveals much about wealth, power and the nature of Roman slave society.

There's a lot here, and I enjoyed the book as an exploration of the nature of class rule in Rome. Surprisingly for a book focused on individuals it also shed a lot of light on some of the ruins in Italy, particular those in Rome and made me eager to visit again. For other visitors this would be a good book to pack in your holiday suitcase.

Related Reviews

Beard - SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
Beard - The Roman Triumph
Beard - Pompeii: The Life of A Roman Town
Beard & Crawford - Rome in the Late Republic
Hopkins & Beard - The Colosseum

Mike Davis - Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the imagination of disaster

I started to read Ecology of Fear in the aftermath of the recent LA uprising. In part that was because one of the first great such urban risings I remember was when, around the time I became an active socialist, LA rose up in 1992. What is it about the city that makes it such a place of resistance, and a place hated by the US right? Mike Davis' classic book has the answers. 

For Davis, Los Angeles is a city whose location in time and space places it at the epicentre of disaster, and that disaster is made worse by the history of the city, and the history of America. It is a city of gross inequality, racism and cheap labour, and a city smack squarely at the epicentre of disaster. This is why it is, as he systematically documents, a city that has been destroyed in film, literature and comic book hundreds of times, and why that destruction is often covered with a veneer of white supremacy and genocide. It it is so called "natural" disaster that takes up the first chapters, the threat from earthquake, tornado and firestorm, then Davis systematically shows how those disasters are amplified by the reality of capitalist LA:

Megacities like Los Angeles will never simply collapse and disappear. Rather they will stagger on, with higher body counts and gretaer distress, through a chain of more frequent and destructive encounters with disasters of all sorts; while vital parts of the region's high-tech and tourist economies eventually emigrate to safer ground, together with hundreds of thousands of its more affluent residents. Aficionados of complexity theory will marvel at the "nonlinear resonances" of unnatural disaster and social breakdown as Southern California's golden age is superseded forever by a chaotic new world of strange attractors.

While we have long known that "natural" disasters hit poor and marginalised communities first and hardest, Davis' eloquent writing reminds us of how it is the fissures and fractures in capitalist society that creates this reality. 

In the provocatively titled chapter, The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, Davis discusses the war that wildfires and their particular threat to the City, arise from a juxtaposition of location and capitalist planning. Putting profits before people meant making decisions that simultaneously worsened the risk of disaster, and turned the city into an unhealthy and concentrated urban area:

The 1930 fire should have provoked a historic debate on the wisdom of opening Malibu to further development. Only a few months before... Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr - the nation's foremost landscape architect and designer of the California state park system - had come out in favour of public ownership of at least 10,000 acres of the most scenic beach and mountain areas... Despite a further series of fires in 1935, 1936 and 1938 which destroyed almost four hundred homes... public officials stubbornly disregarded the wisdom of Olmsted's proposal.

Almost a century later the homes of this land, now the preserve of the rich and famous, burn over and over again.

The interaction between nature, society and capitalist interests is the great theme of this book, and it's Davis' genius that ensures that the reader never forgets the human cost. But also places the very real story of exploitation and oppression within that wider narrative. Here are the stories of immigrant workers, paid starvation wages, victims of the poorest housing in the most dangerous areas, fighting and organising to improve things, and the callous politicians, city officals and greedy landlords opposing them. But it is also a city bedeviled by official racism and a far-right confident to organise within the space:

According to the Los Angeles Count Commission on Human Relations, attacks on blacks increased 50 percent from 1995 to 1966. Los Angeles became the nation's capital of racisl (539 crimes) and sexual orienation (338 crimes) violence... The commission's annual report also noted that racially motivated crimes had been clearly clustered in older suburban areas... as well as in the economically troubled Antelope Valley. Although the human relations commissioners cautioned that the report "does not say it has become open season on African Americans," the dramatic surge in attacks on blacks suggested otherwise.

While LA has a special place in Mike Davis' heart, the interaction of racism, class, nature and capitalism described in Ecology of Fear could stand in for any number of urban US environments. The history helps us understand the roots of the LA rebellions of 1992 and 2025, and the further resistance. As well as the hatred that the US elite have for the city and its population. It is the book that explains the real background to today's ICE raids and racism, and Trump's military occupation of the city.

Long before many others had even stopped to think about the interaction of these forces in the urban environment, Mike Davis was writing about how global warming would exacerbate the tensions of capitalism. But it is his love of the city, its people and his superb dialectical politics that make this book one to come back to time and again. Its renewed my desire to read his other works on California and US radical history - that's probably the best endorsement the book could have.

Related Reviews

Davis - The Monster Enters
Davis - Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
Davis - Planet of Slums
Davis - The Monster at Our Door

John Molyneux - What is the real Marxist Tradition?

What is the real Marxist Tradition? is a remarkable short work that was written to fight for a clear understanding of Marxism in one of the hardest, recent, periods for Marxists. First published as an article in 1983 and then republished by the SWP in 1985 as a book, it sought to rescue Marxism as a theory of international proletarian revolution, at a time when Marxism was categorically identified with the State Capitalist regimes of Eastern Europe, and the working class was in retreat.

Reading it, particularly the 1985 edition which has a cover depicting Lenin, Trotsky,  Luxembourg, Marx and others from the classical Marxist tradition as well as Castro, Kautsky, Stalin and Mao, I expected it initially to be a critique of each of these individual's politics. Instead this is a much more nuanced study of Marxism, which begins with Marxism as a totality of ideas, that arise out of the working class, which in turn allows Molyneux to discuss the limits of Stalinism, Maoism etc through a discussion of the class basis of their own ideologies.

As I have been asked to write more on this elsewhere, I'll finish this review here and encourage activists to read Molyneux's work online. Watch this space for more.

Related Reviews

Binns, Cliff & Harman - Russia: From Workers' State to State Capitalism
Molyneux - The Point is to Change it: An Introduction to Marxist Philosophy
Molyneux - Will the Revolution be Televised? A Marxist Analysis of the Media
Molyneux - Marxism and the Party
Molyneux - Anarchism: A Marxist Criticism

Laura Elliott - Awakened

Highly recommended by reviewers, I was attracted to Awakened despite my usual rejection of the horror genre. It's pretext sounded intriguing. In a future Britain, a small group of scientists hide out in the Tower of London, protecting themselves from what is essentially a zombie horde outside. The difference here is that the zombies are the result of experiments by the scientists themselves to make people more efficient and profitable by eliminating the need for sleep.

As I said, it's intriguing. The story focuses on the arrival of a stranger, one of the sleepless, who seems to not be quite the same as the others. With him arrives a pregnant woman, proving perhaps that things outside of the Tower are very different. The impact of this arrival on the community, and in particular the narrator, Thea Chares is the subject of the rest of the novel. Thea has her own secrets and reason for her presence in the Tower. She's a scientist, one of those brought in by the eccentric billionaire who developed the chip that ended sleep. Thea's transformation through her developing relationship with Vladimir, the name adopted by the monster from outside, is the core of the story. Unfortunately I found it difficult to follow, events being confusingly described at times, and perhaps deliberately, Laura Elliott ends of drowning out the individual storylines with brooding menance. I had to read the ending several times to really work out what was being said, and found myself not that impressed. Ironically I didn't think the book was that much of a work of horror. It is, perhaps, more of book of implied violence. But I did also think that Laura Elliott had hit upon a good point to start from - if the billionaires could find a way of making us work through our sleeping hours they would. And they'd market it as a good thing for us, while they raked in the coins. This, perhaps, is the actual horror.

Herman Lehmann - Nine Years Among the Indians 1870-1879

In May 1870, Herman Lehmann and his brother Willie, aged 11 and 8 respectively, were kidnapped by Apache Indians and taken from their family farm in Texas. A few days later, in a brief battle with troops, Willie escaped and remarkably got home. Herman was to spend the next nine years away from his family living with the Apache and eventually the Comanche. 

Nine Years Among the Indians is Lehmann's famous memoir of his captivity and then life among the two tribes. Initially the Indians feared he would escape, and he was brutally assaulted and imprisoned. Soon however he became ingratiated into the tribe and began to learn how to live, hunt and fight among the Apache. His captors told Lehmann that his family had been killed, and this probably led Lehmann entering the tribe more easily. He seems to have become an accomplished fighter and horserider, and eventually as much a part of the tribe as anyone else - leading raids and fighting against the "whites". 

Lehmann's account demonstrates a remarkable memory, given it was written towards the end of his life. While most people today will probably read it for its eyewitness account of traditional camp life, the reader must also be wary. Writing for a "white" audience Lehmann seems to dwell on the brutality and violence of the Apache and the Commanche, and while expressing sympathy for the Indians he tends to celebrate the "civilising" affect of colonial society. This is, it should be said, particuarly noticeable in the introduction by one J. Marvin Hunter, whom produced the book from Lehmann's dictation. Hunter's introduction is full of racism and makes for uncomfortable reading.

Nonetheless there's a lot of interesting material, especially about life among the tribes, and the type of relationships between the Indians inside the tribe and with others. The internal disputes which led to Lehmann leaving the Apache and after many months alone, joining the Commanche are worth reading. But so are the account of the battle with the Texas Rangers (and the account of the same encounter from the other side). This, no doubt, inspired many a tale including similar events in Larry McMurtry's Comanche Moon.

Despite its short length, there is plenty to engage in here, and the difficulties that Lehmann found when he did eventually return to his family are touching. There's an amusing account of how he disrupted a Methodist revival with his Indian dancing, leading to him being banned from religious services until he was brought back to "civilised" behaviour. Lehmann's conclusion no doubt plays to his audience, but at least retains an understanding of who he was, and the life he was never quite able to leave behind. He dedicates the work to his mother, "and to those noble brothers and sisters I owe all for my restoration, for if it had not been for them I would today be an Indian still." If you can get past the appallingly dated language there's a lot here.

Related Reviews

Miller - Custer's Fall: The Native American Side of the Story
Hämäläinen - Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power
Michno - Lakota Noon: The Indian Narrative of Custer's Defeat

Douglas Newton - The Darkest Days: The truth behind Britain's rush to war, 1914

Why did Britain go to war in 1914? There are some old lies that explain this: "poor little Belgium", German troops "murdering babies" and that old canard, "for the defence of democracy". There are some more complex lies - that Britain was pulled into the war because of treaties and obligations to France and Russia, which place the war as an outgrowth of the complex game of thrones that Europe was in the early 20th century. However, Douglas Newton's brilliant book argues something very different. Britain went to war in 1914 because a small group of right-wing politicians, egged on and encouraged by a fanatically anti-German right-wing media pushed the boundaries at every stage making war more and more likely with every hour that passed.

Newton's book argues that Britain's involvement in the war was not inevitable. Indeed Europe wide, and eventual global war, was not inevitable either. But once Britain entered the conflict World War became a reality. Not least because the very first thing the British military did was to move to seize German colonial assets. 

The book covers a relatively short space of time. Remembering that old quip by Lenin, that there are "weeks when decades happen", the few days before in early August 1914 saw a mass of meetings, telegrams, arguments and diplomacy. It also saw a lot of anti-war organising, protest, resignations from the cabinet and a British government on the brink of collapse. The latter is usually neglected by historians.

War, according to Newton, was not inevitable primarily because there were significant sections of the British population - from the working classes to the liberal cabinet - that did not want war. Newton's focus is very much the machinations of the cabinet and leading politicians. In the cabinet, four ministers  John Burns, John Morley, John Simon and Lord Beaumont offerd their resignations at varous stages as the crisis progressed. These were principled men, whose opposition to the war was based on politics as well as morals and religion. However they were men who were wedded to the parliamentary system and national interests. Despite their resignations PM Herbert Asquith kept this crucial news from the British people and from parliament. Unwilling to allow a chink to appear in the armour of the British government on the verge of war, the four rebels kept their mouths shut. Asquith worked hard to pressure them to keep quiet, and this allowed the government to portray themselves as united. 

The drive to war was however also engineered by those who wanted it. Winston Churchill in particular as First Lord of the Admiralty, played an inglorious (and undemocratic) role, escalated tensions by mobilising and concentrating the British navy, encouraging a feeling of crisis and putting further pressure on the German leadership. 

Perhaps the most shocking thing to those who have faith in parliamentary process is that the declaration of war was never put to the test of parliamentary debate. Asquith's cleverness in hiding the fractures in the cabinet meant that when he spoke to Parliament and implied an ultimatum was being presented to Germany, 

the Radicals did not challenge Asquith. Why? Perhaps they still believd in the promised major debate before any declaration of war. But most likely, the Radicals chose to tread cuatiously and wait for confirmation of the facts from Belgium. It is possible, too, that the suddend adjournment of the House, under a recent and controversial Speaker's ruling 'that was little understood', caught the Radicals off guard.

The Radicals, says Newton, "simply lost their courage and chose silence on Tuesday 4 August". But it was not even the whole cabinet that made the decision for war. Newton points out that decision was made by "a small clique bunkered down in the Cabinet room. A mere coffee table's worth of the Cabinet". Later Newton adds, the King and three members of the Pricy Council declared war: "Faithfully reflecting the pre-democratic order, four men had launched Britain's war. There was not one elected man among them."

It was a sordid process of duplicity and cowardice. But it was not inevitable. Not least because as the crisis rapidly spiriled all sorts of activists, including trade unions, mobilised to try and stop the war. If I was worried that Newton's book would solely focus on the machinations of the political class, I was disabused of this fear by the chapters looking at the protest meetings, anti-war rallies and the newspapers of those who opposed the war. Despite the shortness of time, impressive numbers mobilised, and had those in the cabinet made their resignations public, its possible that this movement would have grown phenomenally and Britain would have been unable to join the conflict. Millions of lives might have been saved. It is in this spirit that Douglas Newton concludes his wonderful book:

How should Britain's Great War be remembered after a century? In a 'national spirit'? Perhaps the idea that for Britain there was no alternative to war, no error in her handling of the crisis, and no deed left undone in pursuit of peace is an essential consolation. But it is fairy dust. There is really only one story worth telling about the Great War: it was a common European tragedy - a filthy, disgusting and hideous episode of industrialised killing. Not the first, and not the last. It was unredeemed by victory. The uplifting element of the story lies in the struggle to avert it.

This is a remarkable book that will be denounced for its revisionism. But as we live in a world where nations commit genocide and go unpunished; Presidents bomb enemies without debate among their elected representatives and arms spending spirals upwards, its a story worth learning.

Related Reviews

Nation - War on War
Sherry - Empire and Revolution: A socialist history of the First World War
Zurbrugg - Not Our War: Writings Against the First World War

Olivier de Schutter - The Poverty of Growth

There are a now a plethora of books and articles about degrowth from a left and liberal point of view that show how capitalism's insatiable drive for growth delivers inequality, poverty and environmental injustice. Some of these books are very good, extending the critique of growth into a critique of capitalism itself and arguing for an alternative society. Others pretend that capitalism can exist without growth, or somehow imagine a gradual shift to a non-growth society without any clear vision of how this could happen. 

Surprisingly this short book had its origins in a meeting between the author and Pope Francis in 2022 where Olivier De Schutter was challenged to "identify certain levels that could be used to eradicate" global poverty. His solutions, that make up this book, place the book firmly in the second type of book about growth - its an attempt to square the circle.

This becomes clear from the preface. de Schutter writes:

Poverty and inequalities should not be seen as an inevitable consequence of the progress of capitalism that we should tolerate before trying to remedy their impacts: they should be seen, instead, as a symptom of an economy that has become ill-suited to the aim of a shared and sustainable prosperity. We must now move from an extractive and predatory economy to a non-violent economy, from an economy that responds to the demand expressed by the superior purchasting power of the rich to one that caters to the basic needds of the poor... etc

The idea that there was a period when capitalism was not ill-suited to providing a shared and sustainable society is laughable. Exploitation and oppression are inbuilt into a system where growth, based on the accumulation of capital, is not an adjunct to modern neoliberal economics, but a central part of how the system functions. 

Central to de Schutter's analysis and critique here is not a systematic exploration of the capitalism's exploitation, nor the centrality of accumulation, rather its a vision of capitalism as a system of supply and demand. It makes for a weak analysis both of systemic problems and solutions. Take this annoying sentence: "We all know of people around us who travel by air to exotic holiday destrinations because they drive a hybrid car during the year."

We no, we don't ALL know such people, and even if we did, this tells us nothing about how the system functions. Its a surface level reflection of the way production is geared under capitalism. 

The best parts of this book are those that expose the inequality and exploitation, and sheer destructiveness of the modern economy. It is also interesting that de Schutter begins by saying that it is the "world of work" where we need to start shifting this. He paints a charming liberal picture of a world with less work, equal pay, more rest time and workplace democracy. But there's no real attempt to discuss how we, as workers, could win that world. How do we challenge the right and the far-right? How do we take on the capitalist state which exists to perpetuate the status quo and the interests of the system? Is it enough to vote for more progressive parties? And what do you do when those parties go back on their plans and expand the fossil fuel economy in the interest of capitalism. De Schutter has not strategy and no agency of change. Which is why it is so sad that writers like him ignore the work of Karl Marx - not for pedantic ideological reasons, but because Marx's analysis of accumulation led him to identify the working class as the gravediggers of the system.

Tragically this makes this particular work of growth and poverty indisinguishable from a dozen other similar books, and fails to build on the more radical work of the best degrowthers such as Jason Hickel. I'd look elsewhere. My own article here offers some thoughts.

Related Reviews

Kallis, Paulson, D'Alisa & Demaria - The Case for Degrowth
Hickel - Less is More: How Degrowth will save the World
Saito - Slow Down: How degrowth Communism can save the Earth
Pilling - The Growth Delusion

Andrew Bradstock - Faith in the Revolution: The political theologies of Müntzer and Winstanley

This is a fascinating little book. Its author is a Christian radical whose purpose in exploring the ideas of the German radical Thomas Müntzer and the English revolutionary Digger Gerrard Winstanley is to try and understand the role of Christianity in the struggle for revolution. Whether you have an opinion on that or not, Andrew Bradstock's summary of both these fascinating figures is very useful and interesting for radicals today. 

Bradstock begins with Müntzer. On this blog I've reviewed many books about Müntzer and the German Peasants' War that provided the context for his revolutionary ideas. Müntzer's starting point was, in the words of Bradstock, a "commitment to a transformation of the world", but he cautions that Müntzer 

takes up the cause of the poor and oppressed as much from a concern about the spiritual consequneces of such oppression as anything else. Indeed, his main worry is that, because the people have to work day in and day out to survive, they have no time to attend to the health of their souls, and are forced to reply for spiritual guidance upon the learned scholars and priests; and thus they never get to hear about the possibliilty of receiving a revelation from God.

This is an important point about Müntzer (and also, I think about Winstanley). He was a religious thinker before he was a social activist, but in becoming a social revolutionary Müntzer was not breaking from his revolutionary politics, but extending his religious activity and thinking. Müntzer "never envisaged fighting the last battle alone" - he did not see himself as a the person who was the vessel for God's actions. He say an enlightened minority the "elect" as being the people who would change the world and humanity. The non-elect were "destined for eternal damnation" and the elect would be saved. Who was who? 

The key to such knowledge... is to be found in the concept of urteyl, judgement, a gift of God to the elect by which they are enabled to know themselves to be among the chosen, and to recognised those who are the ungodly. This concept is essential for Müntzer and vital for an understanding of his leagues [his organisations], his apocalyptic, and his participation in the peasants' struggle.

Bradstock points out that Müntzer's thinking on the elect developed. But towards the end of his life he was seeing the elect as being the same as "the poor and materially oppressed common folk".  He made "the peasants' cause his own". It is tempting to draw an analogy here between Müntzer's concept of the enlightened few changing the world and Anarchist ideas of a minority changing the world for the masses. It's also possible that Müntzer was better than the average Anarchist in this sense because he understood that the elect were a mass social force. Though he doesn't seem to have abandoned his "two-tier conception of humanity".

How does this compare with Winstanley's thought? Winstanley was also shaped by the struggle around him, though England in the 17th century was much more economically developed than Germany in Müntzer's time. Winstanley was writing during and following a revolutionary movement that had beheaded a King, so his revolutionary policies in some ways are closer to modern revolutionary ideas than Münzter's. But Bradstock writes that:

Had Winstanley's millenarianism not been geuine - had he, in other words, truly been a secular thinker - it is at least arguable that he could have produced a more revolutionary programme than he did, since by interpreting the political struggle in which he was egaged religiously he failed to see it in a true historical perspective. Hi millenarianism, in other words, made it 'unnecessary' for him to demonstrate how it was possible for his programme to be realised.

I've written elsewhere on the brilliance of Winstanley's "vision of utopia". Here I think Bradstock is right. Müntzer understood that the, and the rest of the elect, had to fight. Winstanley didn't grasp that there were barriers to the implementation of his vision, so he tried to simply go out an enact it - digging on St George's Hill. Both leaders were however defeated because they underestimated their opponents and the historical context of what they were trying to win.

How does Bradstock's analysis fit with other revolutionary thinkers? He is at pains to criticise Engels' "analysis of Müntzer". This he says is basically an argument that religion is irrelevant to their struggles. He does this on a reading of Engels on the Peasants' War where Engels says that "the class struggles of that day were clothed in religious shibboleths... [but] this changed nothing and is easily explained by the conditions of the time." Bradstock here concludes that Engels (and thus all Marxists) are saying that "the presence of religious language in the revolutionary programme of a Müntzer or a Winstanley is politically insignificant". 

But this is a strange conclusion to come too, as neither Marx nor Engels thought this. They understood that religion arose in an material circumstance, and their writings on the Reformation, Luther and Müntzer reflect this analysis. So it's a strange to critique Engels for making an argument that is at the root of their materialist theory of history. Nonetheless, nowhere does Engels or Marx argue that the religious language of Münzter doesn't matter. Indeed quite the opposite. Both would have understood the centrality of Reformation thinking to the programme of Müntzer, while understanding that these ideas emerged from the economic and social context. 

Indeed despite Bradstock's clarity on some of the ideas of both the revolutionary figures he is discussing, he underplays the differences in economic, social and political development of the two contexts, which weakens his analysis somewhat.

The final section of the book is Bradstock's attempt to grapple with the issue that is central for him. What can Christianity offer revolution? Here he rightly emphasises the way that religion can be a force that encourages, inspires and offers guidance. He notes the importance of Christian thinking to radical forces in Nicaragua in the 1979 revolution as well as libertion theologists in South America. Too often though he falls back on radicalism being something brought from outside - just as Winstanley and Müntzer tried to do:

The relationship between scientific analysis and utopian visions is broadly dialectical: the former, by exposing the reality of the situation and the real possibilities for change, opens up new horizons for revolutionary activity, while utopian thinking, with its overarching vision of new people in new relationships, serves to stimulate science to explore new fields of possibility.

I think this is wrong. No mass revolutionary movement has been built because it started from utopian visions. Rather, in the case of the most successful of those movements, the visions have emerged out of the concrete reality of mass struggle. The Soviets and Workers Councils of the 1905, 1917 and 1919 revolutions in Russian and Germany were not pre-planned. They emerged because they were organs of struggle that did, or might have, become the basis for a new way of organising society. 

Unsurprisingly, as a Christian, Bradstock concludes that his religion makes revolutionaries better because they have "the certainty that neither they nor their effort will ultimately be meaningless or lost". It is, in my opinion, a little patronising to assume that non-religious, or non-Christian, revolutionaries might not feel the same. In either event, the belief in an afterlife shouldn't be some sort of get out clause for revolutionaries. What really matters is people's concrete engagement in the struggle, and the politics and theory that emerges from the testing of their ideas in practice. While Faith in Revolution is a book that I enjoyed reading this was more so for the author's penetrating insights into the ideas of two key radical figures, and less for his musings on Christianity and revolution.

Related Reads

Klaassen - Michael Gaismair: Revolutionary and Reformer
Stayer - The German Peasants' War and the Anabaptist Community of Goods
Drummond - The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer

Larry McMurtry - Comanche Moon

In chronological order Commanche Moon is the second book in the series that Larry McMurtry wrote about the Texas Rangers Woodrow Call and Agustus McCrae. In the order of writing though, it was the fourth. This is in itself interesting, because it means that the book is both a prequel to the pulitzer winning Lonesome Dove, and also a full stop at the end of the stories of the two characters.

But it is as a prequel to Lonesome Dove that the book will be mostly judged. Here I found the work slightly wanting. This isn't because it is badly written, but rather that the plot is hung less around the story and more around the need to manouevre the characters (both major and minor) into the positions they occupy at the beginning of Lonesome Dove. So obvious is this, that the Texas Rangers have a brief hiatus at the eponymous settlement to show it at a slightly earlier stage in its limited development.

Because of this the book sometimes crams in some story arcs. Characters die off rather rapidly, and not always because of murder. Some of the stories seem unfinished. It's unclear what Ahumado's disappearance is all about - there's certainly no closure in these pages - which means that main arc of the first third of the book is left hanging. There's no purpose to this part of the story other than to introduce characters later. If, when reviewing Lonesome Dove, I could say I was impressed by the strength and centrality of the female characters, here they are mostly there as foils for the men. The exception is the portrayal of how surviving female victims of Native American attacks are shunned by white society afterward.

Unlike earlier works there is more focus on Native Americans, though unfortunately like earlier works, most Indians are depicted as bloodthirsty savages. At least Buffalo Hump a Commanche chief in this book has his violence given context, and the depiction of the actual raid he led is rather well done - even if there is a little too much lingering on violence against the Whites.

McMurtry is, to be fair, more sympathetic to the Native Americans here than I was used too. Though the main characters are either violent sadists (also true of Ahumado) or eccentric wanderers. Not great really.

Looking at the book as the end of the story, despite its position chronologically, makes the book somewhat more satisfying. Its easy to read this and find Lonesome Dove just around the corner, which makes the reader feel the ending is merely a pause. The love/hate relationship of the two characters, scarred by battle, love and loss, positions them well for their roles in Dove. But the novel was undermined for me by its transitional nature. Read in chronological order would be my advice - but understand that Dove is by far the better, and more rounded novel.

Related Reviews

McMurtry - Lonesome Dove
McMurtry - Dead Man's Walk

Philip Marfleet - Palestine, Imperialism and the Struggle for Freedom

As the genocide in Gaza continues, millions of people around the world are trying to understand the reason for Israel's continued assault on the Palestinians. If my personal experience is anything to go by, there can be few workplaces, coffee shops or trade union meetings were there have not been discussions about the causes of the occupation and the possibilities of peace. So the publication of Philip Marfleet's new book Palestine, Imperialism and the Struggle for Freedom should be welcomed because it seeks to explain the current conflict in the context of a century of "colonial occupation, displacements and dispossession". Crucially, and unusually for even left-wing books on the subject, Marfleet's book puts Palestinian action and resistance at the heart of the history.

Marfleet begins with the Zionist "vision" of a "public project for colonisation by Zionist settlers". He writes:

As the Ottoman Empire went into rapid decline Britain became the focus of Zionists' attention. Now the movement's leading figure was Chaim Weizmann, who was convinced that it must win support from within the British ruling class on the baiss that a Jewish state could serve the best interests of Britain's emprie. Weizmann was able to deal directly with members of the British government. During the First World War, as Britain advanced on German-Ottoman forces in Palesinte, he lobbied decision-makes in London, allying with the most aggressive imperial stategists - ministers who sought to extend British control across the Middle East.

These close historic links between Zionism, colonialism and imperialist interests are crucial to explain the modern actions of the Israeli state and the close relationship it has with Western powers. Marfleet shows how the Zionist state that was created in 1948 did not invent repression of the Palestinian people, instead it "learnt from the British". He writes:

Britain's ideologues of empire and those who administered it colonial territories were not only racial supremacists but also designed and implemented policies that involved savage represion. As Zionist settlement in Palestine accelerated, Britain was crushing resistance in neighbouring Egypt and Iraq. 

In Egypt in 1919, a rebellion involved "members of all the country's ethno-religious communities: significantly, Jews joined Muslims and Christians in the uprising". But the British "colonial regime used all means against the movement". Thousands were killed.

The point here is that there is no automatic divide between the religious peoples of the region. In fact, as Marfleet shows, Jews, Muslims and Christians lived side-by-side for centuries. One of the lessons the British taught the emerging Israeli state was how to divide and rule.

But it is the resistance of the Palestinians that is central to Marfleet's account. This began long before the creation of the Israeli state in 1948. In 1936 there was a massive revolutionary movement in Palestine. This history is seldom told, and much of it was new to me. It is one of the most fascinating parts of Marfleet's book. This revolution was incredible. Zionist militias were violently assaulting Palestinian villages, British colonial rulers were oppression and restricting Palestinian freedoms and resistance exploded. Marfleet places the revolution in the context of a developing industrial capitalist economy:

Change accelerated during the 1920s as Britain established the Mandate regime and Jewish settlement intensified. More and more peasants were forced from the land but - as Britain favoured industrial and infrastructural defvelopment for the Jewish sector and Jewish organisations impements the policy of Hebrew labour - many were rapidly impoverished.... by 1936 the majority of workers in Jaffa, a key industrial centre, were living below subsistence level. Industrial workers, semi-proletarians of the countryside, the peasants and the urban poor not only faced a European power and an emerging colonial-settler regime but also the reality of immiseration. It was in these circumstance that the uprising 'spread like wildfire, gripping the cities and country alike and giving rise to an unprecedeted armed insurrection'.

Space precludes any further summary of Marfleet's account of this extraordinary rebellion. But here we see one of the first examples of a theme which Marfleet returns to time and again - the way that Palestinian resistance sparks rebellion elsewhere. The 1936 "Palestinian intifada also stimulated solidarity across the Arab region. In Egypt there were demonstrations of support and the Muslim Broptherhood declared backing for the uprising".

Marfleet tells how the establishment of the Israeli state required the systematic displacement and violent oppression of the Palestinian people, as well as confrontations with the Arab states. In doing this Israel became a crucial ally of Western Imperialism, particularly of the US, post World War II. 

Importantly Marfleet shows how the failure of the leaders of the Arab world to build real solidarity with the Palestinians, and the limitations of the Palestinian leadership which became focused on the creation of a Palestinian state, undermined the wider struggle for freedom. But while Marfleet is rightly critical of some of the Palestinian leadership, he also notes how the cause of Palestinian oppression remains the Israeli state. He quotes Martin Shaw, a "pioneer figure in Genocide Studies" who said in 2010:

We should view Israel's destruction of large parts of Arab society in Palestine in 1948 not simply through the perspective of settler-colonial genocide, but as an extension of the exclusivist nationalism which had recently brought about extensive genocidal violence in the European war. 

This is, tragically, an ongoing process. Marfleet quotes from the genocide historian Mark Levene's work in 2024:

The target of Israel's offensive could not realistically be Hamas, said Levene, for the organisation 'will redeploy from underneath the rubble at will'. Referencing the pioneering work of Rafael Lemkin, [Levene] saw Israel's war as 'a conscious, wilful effort to destroy the integrity of a society'. Levene concluded: 'The charge of genocide is legitimate.'

But as Marfleet shows this genocide arises out of global imperialist interests and the nature of the settler-colonial state. It means that the solution, in terms of peace in the region, cannot be one with two states side by side, but rather a single state were people of all faiths, Jews, Muslims, Christians and none, live together. This has been the case in the past and could be in the future. The importance of Palestinian resistance is thus in part their ability to inspire and shape to mobilise and encourage resistance elsewhere in the world. In particular that of the massive working classes of the region. These, Marfleet argues are the force that can fundamentally transform the region. 

Palestine, Imperialism and the Struggle for Freedom is thus a book that stands out from among many other books about the history of the region, because it has an emancipatory vision of the struggle to liberate Palestine. It locates Israeli's oppression of Palestine in a historical process and argues that struggle from below is the force that stop it.

Marfleet is a long standing socialist and has written and studied the Middle East for many years. An earlier book of his on the 1987 Intifada became a crucial text for a generation of socialists. This new book ought to play the same role for new generations of radicals.

Related Reviews

El-Mahdi & Marfleet - Egypt: The Moment of Change
Sand - The Invention of the Jewish People
Masalha - Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History
Molavi - Environmental Warfare in Gaza
Pappe - Ten Myths About Israel
Gluckstein & Stone - The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, resistance fighters & firebrands
Hamouchene & Sandwell (eds) - Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region