Geoff Brown - A People's History of the Anti Nazi League (1977-1981)

In 1968 Enoch Powell made an odious speech in which he predicted "rivers of blood" if immigration to Britain was not halted. In the aftermath of the speech racist attacks grew dramatically. One of the chief beneficiaries of this was a small Nazi organisation called the National Front. After Powell they grew quickly. One NF organiser remembered:

Powell's speeches gave our membership and morale a tremendous boost. Before Powell spoke we were getting only cranks and perverts. After his speechs we started to attract, in a secret sort of way, the right-wing members of the Tory organisations.

The NF quickly began to establish itself. Its methods of operating were to target minorities, particularly black and Asian people and communities. But also to hold provocative and headline grabbing violent events. They stormed left events, protested at politicians and held intimidating marches through black and Asian areas. By the early and mid-1970s racist violence and attacks, including murders, were common. The NF could mobilise hundreds and often thousands to its ranks.

In opposition to this, as Geoff Brown's excellent history shows, a myriad of anti-racist groups began to organise. Some of these were liberal and soft, refusing to challenge the fascists and hoping to demonstrate that love might overcome hate. Others were more confrontational and still others saw oppressed communities fighting back to defend themselves. By 1976 the anti-racist movement was ready to go on the offensive. Increasingly militant anti-racists, often led by socialists and communists, were able to confront the fascists. Often this meant taking on the far-right and their friends in the police. In May 1976

two students Dinesh Choudhri from India and Ribhi Alhadidi from Jordan, were fattally stabbed by white youths while making their way to an East London restaurant. A fortnight later, a young engineering student Gurdip Singh Chaggar was murdered by two white teenagers in Southall, West London. Sick of racist and police violence and of their elders' passivity towards it, Southall's young Asians came out en masse. Some demanded 'Blood for blood', attacking white passers-by and stoning cars. When police made arrests among those leaving a meeting... hundreds marchesd without hesitation to the police station and sat down. Surrounded by a sea of protesters, the police got community leaders to pressure those arrested to come out of the police station with promise they wouldn't be charged.

It was on the back of such resistance that the Anti Nazi League was born, but perhaps the key event was the Battle of Lewisham which saw thousands of protesters smash a NF march off the streets. The event was a turning point. One anti-racist socialist activist remembered a NF member at his workplace in Salford taunting him before the protest. After Lewisham the NF member took down his posters and eventually left the fascist group.

Lewisham was a turning point, but it was definitely not the end. The launch of the Anti Nazi League saw the Socialist Workers' Party, together with left-Labour MPs, leading trade union figures and cultural icons come together in a loose leadership that was able to give a national shape to an anti-fascist response.

Brown's account of this process is fascinating. It demonstrates two things. Firstly that principled anti-fascism was key to the ANL - exposing the Nazis as Nazis, helped to discredit their violence. Secondly uniting people around these policies, while allowing participants to retain their individual politics created the space that would enable local groups to flourish. In fact what is remarkable about the ANL through this period is precisely how much it was organised from below. Thousands upon thousands joined, and local initiative was key. Brown repeatedly makes the point that it was local organisation, often, but not always, led by SWP members that created the space for anti-fascism to break free. There are many different examples of this. Take an example from the railways:

These [Anti Nazi League] bdages proliferated around King's Cross. It was really good because it connected you to people you didn't know. In the depot of 500 drivers, I knew them all but there were probabl another 500, maybe 600 guards and another 500 station staff so you couldn't know everybody. But once you saw someone wearing one of those badges, suddenly you hit it off and black workers in particular realised there were more anti-racists than racists around.

The ANL created a space where the NF could be marginalised. But it took more than just badges. The local groups were able to build networks that could, in turn, mobilise hundreds and thousands. Countless meetings, protests, pickets and counter-demonstrations helped to physically stop the Nazis. This often required self defence, but it was sheer numbers that undermined the Nazis and made it difficult for them to carry on.

Brown's book is remarkable for being a genuine "people's history". It is filled with memories, recollections, interviews and press cuttings. Readers get a real sense of how the movement built and how participants were shaped by it. A generation of radicals learnt their organising skills in the ANL and often generalised into wider arenas. Brown highlights, for instance, how the LGBT+ movement in the 1970s gained renewed energy from the anti-Nazi fight as did movements against sexism. Some of this deeply moving. Gurinder Chadha, the renowned film director who made Bend it like Beckham was at first Rock Against Racism carnival. She recalled being unconfident to go on the march, so waited near the park and hearing the approaching demonstration stood on a box to see:

When I looked down the street, what I saw changed my life forever. From that moment I became the political filmmaker I am today, hundreds and hundreds of people marching side-by-side in the display of exuberance, defiance and most importantl, victory. I couldn't believe my eyes, these were white, English people - many with long hair like the rockers I could never relate to - marching, chanting to help me and my family find our place in our adopted homeland.

Rock Against Racism was a key part of the anti-fascist struggle. It help shutdown the cultural spaces the Nazis were trying to take as their own. But it also made it easier for thousands of young people to become active politically. There were other off-shoots. One of the most fascinating chapters of Brown's book is on SKAN - School Kids Against the Nazis. A remarkable organisation that, with very little adult input, was able to shape politics in schools and among young people in fascinating ways. Starting with the fight against racism, it quickly took up issues like corporal punishment.

Brown's book is a brilliant read. One of its great strength is that it is not London focused, but tells us the stories of how the ANL organised across the country, not least in Greater Manchester where Brown was organising. But it is more than just a nice bit of history. It is a political manual for building a mass movement against racism. Brown, a long standing SWP member, is clearly proud of the role of the organisation and that of people like himself. Quite rightly. But he is also proud of the political clarity that made the ANL both possible and successful. The book doesn't hector in its politics - there are sections that look at historical struggles and take up theoretical discussions. But these are part of a wider story, and the real political lessons are in the reports of the hundreds of people that are interviewed and quoted in the book. Using the method of the United Front, the SWP was able to relate to wider forces and change British politics. The NF were smashed.

Today the far-right in Britain and around the world seems to be unstoppable. Yet if Geoff Brown's book teaches us anything, they are very much stoppable. Doing that requires mobilising the anti-racist majority in society, and particularly turning out the workers' and their organisations who bring numbers and collective power. Everyone who wants to see the end of the far-right in the 21st century should read this superb book. It is very much one for our time, and Geoff Brown has done our movement and our history a remarkable service.

Related Reviews

Hirsch - In the Shadow of Enoch Powell: Race, Locality & Resistance
Richardson (ed) - Say it Loud! Marxism and the Fight Against Racism
Aspden - The Hounding of David Oluwale
Dresser - Black and White on the Buses: The 1963 Colour Bar Dispute in Bristol

Sally Rooney - Normal People

I must admit that I picked up Sally Rooney's book Normal People because of the reaction from some quarters about her comments on supporting Palestine and the criminialisation of dissent. Rooney is very explicitly pro-Palestine and against Genocide. Some of her detractors, perhaps never having read her work, or even understanding where she was from, attempted to say they would bring the full force of British Law on her head. Hailing, as she does, from Ireland she was remarkably unbothered.

Normal People is very much a novel of its time and place. It is set in Ireland in the 2010s as the country is going through massive austerity and political convulsions. The story of two youngsters growing up has as its backdrop a sense of crisis. The system doesn't work. There's no future. Class differences between the two are important. Marriane is clever, solitary and from a rich background. Connell is popular, attractive and very clever. His mum cleans Marianne's family home. The book is about their love affair and how they come close, grow apart but never leave each other. But it can also be read as the story of two people trapped by a system that leaves them little room for manouvre. Perhaps the best example of this is how Connell abandons Marianne - their love affair is kept secret and in his anxiety for not being thought badly for dating Marianne he takes someone else to the prom. It is of course appalling. It is also exactly the sort of thing that student teenagers do to each other, and it destroys Marianne for sometime. It is also, as we find out, completely unnecessary and Connell carries that guilt for some time.

Sometime later they meet at university and have an on off relationship. Their friends are mostly superficial, though they clearly feel extremely important. Their love is by turns chaotic, painful and beautiful. They never quite get the balance though and neither knows what they want. They discuss politics - there's an early college kid discussion of the Communist Manifesto - and they're both on the left, but not the activist left. There's a certain middle class disdain from both of them towards protest and political action. The one demo they do join - ironically about Palestine - is described in lacklustre and performative turns. Despite the opportunities they have they are trapped - because going to Trinity College takes Connell out of his Working Class life and Marianne from her upper-middle class life and turns them into a classless student. Academia beckons. Or perhaps work in some NGO. Despite Marianne's deep interest in politics - she seems remarkably unengaged with the world. The book makes one focus on the relationship above all else. Perhaps this is Rooney's comment on that Irish decade? Perhaps it is also arguing that the personnal shapes all else. Perhaps its just because its a book about two young people fumbling through life, love and sex. It left me unsatisfied. But it mostly reminded me why university was such an obnoxious experience.

David Olusoga & Casper W. Erichsen - The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide

In the late nineteenth century Germany was straining at the boundaries of its borders. Most of the Global South had been carved up by European powers. Britain, France, Italy all had their Empires. German capitalists needed more markets and more natural resources. They too wanted an empire that they could subjegate and pillage, like the other industrial powers. Five thousand miles from Germany, Namibia was to become the African country were German empire building began, and it became an experiment in racist control, genocidal war and colonial rule. The consequences for the people of Namibia, tribes like the Herero, Tibooi Nama and Bethanie Nama was appalling. 

David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen's remarkable history is a study of this history. But they are making a wider argument. What happened in Nambia was a trial for the Holocaust and the Nazis. As the authors say:

What Germany's armies and civilian administrators did in Namibia is today a lost history, but the Nazis knew it well. When the Schutztruppe attempted to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples of Namibia a century ago, Hitler was a schoolboy of fifteen. In 1904, he lived in a continent that was electrified by the stories of German geroism and African barbarism emanating from what was then German South-West Africa.

Indeed Hitler was "closely associated" with one of the leading figures in the genocide. When Hitler joined the ranks for the far-right in 1922, it was "under the command of the charismatic Gerneral Franz von Epp, a violent, racist, military leader who firmly believed in "lebensraum". One of the startling things about this book is how words that readers will associated with the Nazi Holocaust during the Second World War were first used in Nambia in the 1900s. Lebensraum was a term coined to justify the need of Germany to expand and build colonies. Konzentrationslager, the German translation of the English term Concentration Camp - first used in the Boer War - was used to describe the slave-labour camps in Namibia.

When "war" broke out between the German military and the Namibian people, it took place on racial lines:

From the start, the outburst of intense fury againt the Herero was channelled and manipulated by an array of nationalist and pro-colonial societies. Along with the right-wing press, they set out to portray the Herero as savages, their uprising motivated by innate brutality. Ignoring the facts, they repeatedly claimed that the Herero had launched an indiscriminate racial war and that, as savages, they fought without restraint. Many newspapers also carried reports of atrocities - most exaggerated, some entirely fabricated - claiming that a number of German children had been killed, that white women had been raped and that some of the male settlers who had been killed had had their noses and testicles cut off.

The racial war against the Nambian people was carried out in the brutal fashion. Those in command were imbued with hardened nationalist and racist views. On his way to Africa, von Epp wrote, "The world is being divided... With time we will inevitably need more space; only by the sword will we be able to get it. It will be up to our generation to achieve this. It is a matter of existence." 

But least that we conclude this was only a German problem, note that another volunteer for action in Namibia, "regarded the recent history of the United States as a model of how Germany might transform her own colonial frontiers". Economic "development" in the colony went alongside the "extermination of the Herero and Nama peoples". The camps were sources of slave labour for the colony, including for industrial corporations as well as individual families. But, it is crucial to emphasise, they were not work camps. Writing about one of the colony's heads, von Lindequist, the authors contrast the British in South Africa with Germany in Namibia:

Von Lindequist's promise to the Herero - that their suffering in the concentration camps might come to an end if their 'compatriots, who are still in the bush' surredered - bears the hallmarks of Kichener's earlier strategy. Yet there was one crucial difference. In the Boer War the concentration camps had been part of a strategy aimed at ending an ongoing insurgency. In German South-West Africa, the Herero were defeated when von Linsequist took command. As he admitted in mid-1906, they had no ability and no desire to fight. The concentration camps were not part of a military strategy.

The "defeat" however of the Namibian tribes came at a cost for Germany. Indeed the most inspiring chapters of The Kaiser's Holocaust are the remarkable story of the extended, guerilla war that fought the German army to a standstill. A war that was not marked by atrocity on the part of the Nama and Herero people, but rather the opposite. The Namibian fighters in fact treated women and children with kindness and did not arbitarily kill or rape them. Their warfare was directed against the male settlers and the army sent against them. Its a remarkable story of rebellion and war, against a foe unable to imagine that poorly armed black people were able to fight them to a standstill.

But eventually, by subterfuge and starvation, the Namibians were defeated. Led into concentration camps while being promised peace and relocation, they were taken to brutal torture and death. The lessons from German South-West Africa taught a new generation of far-right nationalists. Events in African were a blueprint for the Nazis own behaviour:

Soldiers and scientists whose careers began on the pastoral deserts of South-West Africa or in the killing fields of East Africa, Togo and Cameroon were to play leading roles in the Nazi tragedy. 

and

When designing the lasws needed to create the 'racial state'... the Nazis found a number of definiations and legal precedents, along with a whole lexicon of racial terminology, in legislation passed in Germany's former colonies.

The authors also show how the pattern that led to the "Kaiser's Holocaust" was also repeated in Eastern Europe as the needs of their racist programmes clased with the military needs of the Nazi economy:

The desire to exterminate or expel their racial enemies ran counter to a growing and desperate need for labour and concerns for the well-being of the fighting men. Tese contradictions were never fully solved, but as in South-West Africa, one solution was the creation of forced labour camps in which labour becames a means of liquidation.

David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen's book is a remarkable piece of history. It rescues a forgotten period of colonialism from deliberate obscurity. It reminds us again of the bloody reality of colonial rule, and it shows how Nazi ideology has a long and terrible antecedent. But it tells us something else. Reading this book at the same time as the Israeli state continued its murderous assault on the people of Gaza, the book reminds us that settler colonialism always rests on racist ideas and can have genocidal conclusions. If there is one other thing to remember, with this in mind, it is that the resistance of the people of South-West Africa was brave and principled, and that in Germany at least a minority on the left did seek to highlight and stop the war. Tragically that was not enough to stop the Kaiser's Holocaust. This book is an essential read for anyone trying to understand twentieth, and twenty-first, century history.

Related Reviews

Achebe - An Image of Africa
Hamouchene & Sandwell (eds) - Dismantling Green Colonialism
Lindqvist - 'Exterminate All The Brutes'
Pakenham - The Scramble for Africa
Rüger - Heligoland
Davis - Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
Rodney - The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World

Samantha Shannon - A Day of Fallen Night

In my experience it is rare for a fantasy prequel novel to succeed quite as well as the original book. With A Day of Fallen Night Samantha Shannon has proved that this is not always the case. Her 2019 book The Priory of the Orange Tree was a massive seller. It's label of "feminist Game of Thrones" was I argued in my review a slight misnomer as it undermined some of the radical edge to the work. The prequel A Day of Fallen Night is set 500 years ago, and is a complex piece of world building that sets up the dynasties and factions which are still vying for power years later.

These competing nations are set on a world geographically much like ours. However there are sleeping dragons and dangerous beasts resting beneath volcanos waiting for the opportunity to wake and destroy humanity's world (though the reason for their anger is never explains - presumeably beasts under volcanos are just evil). From the start the novel focuses on several different groups of people. Queen Sabran is one of a long line of queen's who all look identical. Their daughters are the magical barrier that prevent the great "nameless" evil from waking and destroying the world. At the start of the novel Sabran has made a marriage of convenience with the King of Hróth (a society that is a thinly veiled viking north). Their daughter Gloria's destiny is simply to keep the line going and while doing so learn from her mother how to build alliances and strengthen the realm.

Elsewhere in the Priory, the focus of the earlier book, Tunuva Melim is a guard of the Orange Tree, but while she and her sisters are trained to fight monsters - none have appeared. There's tensions here as the youngsters chafe at the restrictions and society. Is it even real? 

Finally there's the dragon rider Dumai, or would be dragon rider (there are no dragons) whose realm is organised around the Gods - the dragons - and their awakening. 

The novels shifting viewpoints are gradually, as in all great epics,  brought together. The evil awakes (as do the dragons) and an appalling assault on humanity begins. The various different heroines each have a role or quest, as they bring together different strengths and powers to fight the evil monsters. One of Samantha Shannon's writing strengths is that she describes a bloody good battle - and there are some corkers here. Particularly ones where humans get beaten. The monsters win, rather a lot, and humanity is pushed back into tiny hideouts, barely surviving.

The book builds to a good climax setting the stage for the sequel. But what of the radicalism. Here I found that some of the edge of Orange Tree was blunted. Part of the strength of that novel was the (then) Queen Sabran grappling with her role as a mother just for the next generation of Queens. There was a tension between personal desire and the needs of the regal role. That's absent here because the story needs to set up volume two. As in her other work Shannon is good at writing LGBT+ and female characters and so there are some interesting points about gender and sexuality. For instance in Tunuva's realm all the fighters are women and men take on supporting roles. But these are the backdrop to the novel, they are not the core point - refreshingly.

Subversion, such as there is, lies in the challenge to the Tolkienesque fantasy tropes - the medievalist, white, hetrosexual males - rather than the "viewpoint of the proletariat".

As such I found A Day of Fallen Night was not quite as sharp as its follow up. In addition the multi-view points and many many characters often got confusing. That said, its a fun read - particularly if you like reading about humanity getting killed off - and brilliant world building for the stronger Orange Tree. 

Related Reviews

Shannon - The Priory of the Orange Tree 

 

Sarah Vogel - The Farmer's Lawyer: The North Dakota 9 & the fight to save the family farm

In the early 1980s rural America was devastated by economic crisis. Tens of thousands of small farmers were seeing loans called in, land values collapse and debts mount. Thousands of family farms were foreclosed, farmer suicides rose and rural communities were destroyed. It was the worst crisis for rural America since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But unlike the 1930s there was no support for the family farmer. Ronald Reagen, the new neoliberal US President was elected on the back of promising to cut the deficit and government funding. One way the government could save money was through calling in loans from farmers who had taken out multiple loans they could not afford. The line from Washington, and from the bureacrats at the Farmers' Home Association, was that these farmers were greedy, frivolous and lazy. The FmHA, the government body that was supposed to protect and support farmers, had become the vehicle for their destruction.

Of course the farmers were not lazy, stupid or greedy. Quite the opposite. They were hardworking families that had offered loans on the promise that the economy would not decline. Rather than greed driving their loans they were the only way to continue. Many had multiple jobs, worked all hours, had never had a holiday and lacked cash to buy food. Driven by policy from above, the heartless  FmHA bureaucrats were systematically driving farmers to the wall, selling their farms off to pay off debt and destroying communities.

Into this situation steps Sarah Vogel. She was a lawyer with pedigree. Her father and grandfather were also lawyers. The family's involvement in North Dakota agriculture had seen them support the Non-Partisan League, the 1920s left social movement of farmers which had fought hard for legal protection and the rights of farming communities. The NPL hadn't just lobbied. It organised thousands of farmers across the US, putting them on the streets to protest and, crucially, opposing auctions. The early chapters of Vogel's book celebrate a movement that refused to let farmers lose their farms at auction, collectively bidding pennies to keep the bankers away from their homes. Crucially though the NPL had won a series of legal victories that ensured government protection for farmers in hard times. When drought, storm, or economic crisis occured the government was supposed to step in. Now the opposite was happening.

The farmers who approached Vogel knew her as someone who would stand up for them. Vogel quickly realised that the processes that the FmHA was using to foreclose were morally repugnant, but crucially they also broke the regulations and the law. She was able to fight and win a class action that enshrined these rights and processes in law, blocked foreclosures and prevented the FmHA from continuing, returning it to a body that protected farmers.

The story of this case is told in detail in this wonderful book. Vogel is a remarkable woman. She fought the case with almost no money and no experience. A single parent she lost her home, her phone was cut off and she relied utterly on the kindness and support of others, including her father. She details how she constructed a case that would become a national action to protect thousands of farmers, while juggling being a parent and coping with the stress of little money. But what drives her is the sheer gall of the government, the lies and hatred of the FmHA bureaucrats and their lawyers and the injustice of what is happening to communities. She is also remarkably progressive. In the class action she makes sure that there are Native American plaintiffs, detailing the particular issues facing farmers of colour and those from indigenous communities.

I have no legal insights, so some of the processes Vogel describes are a little opaque. But this doesn't matter. The book reads like a John Grisham legal thriller - down to her luck in court, her opponents who are almost caricature's of evil lawyers and the support of the community. Her victory was a real boost for millions of people facing destitution from a cruel Republican government. The book is also full of amusing insights into North Dakota, the second smallest US state by population, and dominated by religious conservatism and small agricultural communities.

Vogel is able to win through perserverance and luck. Extraordinarily it was actually her first case - and the win changed US law. But she really wins because in this specific case the law was on the side of the ordinary person. As Vogel emphasises the laws were won threw the struggles of farmers and agricultural workers in previous generations. Without the fights of the NPL in the early 20th century, Vogel would not have had a case. It is an important point because our side cannot trust the law. We cannot rely on the state. But having knowledgeable and symapathetic lawyers can ensure that we can fight within the system as well as against it. This is, of course, a point that Vogel also seems to understand even if she is not quite so explicit: after their victory she sends a framed print of an old NPL poster to her fellow lawyers, linking their struggle back to the past.

But the story is more than a history lesson. Today in the US Donald Trump's tariffs and his economic policy threaten millions. In 1979 most farmers in North Dakota voted Reagen, who then turned on them. The same happened at the last US election when US farmers voted overwhelmingly for Trump. But the forces that were threatening the family farm in the 1920s and 1980s are returning. As Vogel explains, using an analogy of the whiffletree, the board on a ox team that is supposed to keep a plough on the right direction:

Today's whiffletree of agriculture policy is pulling too far toward the side of industrial-scale and corporate farm agriculture and too much in favour of massive seed, feed and chemical agribusiness. Further, the reings to the plow are being held by politicians who are okay with a crooked whiffletree because of the donations they get from those who benefit from it. As the Nonpartisan League farmers understood almost a century ago, the financial incentives of corporations providing "inputs" (patented seeds, ferilizers, pesticides, insecticides, credit and so on) do not necessarily align with farmers' well-being.

In the 1980s Vogel has to deal with the right-wing and neo-Nazis in rural America. Then they were a fringe, but a growing one. There's a satisfying moment when she disrupts a Nazi meeting for farmers. Now those forces are ever stronger and it will need more than legal arguments to deal with them. As Vogel says, "we can straighten the whiffletree by looking to the past... the shift to bigger and bigger farms and 'corporatised' farming is not inevitable."

It is a powerful argument, but one that will have to be relearnt in rural America (and there is a powerful if forgotten tradition of this). I expect that Sarah Vogel's book will be read widely among North Dakota farmers who owe her such a lot. Hopefully it can teach a layer of American farmers and agricultural workers that struggle can win. But that's not to downplay the incredible courage, dogged perseverance and self sacrifice of Sarah Vogel herself, who showed that if you fight, you can win - no matter how powerful your opponent.

Related Reviews

Carlisle - Lentil Underground: Renegade Farmers and the Future of Food in America
McDonald - The Red Corner: The Rise & Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana
Holleman - Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics & the Injustice of 'Green' Capitalism
Punke - Fire and Brimstone

Jairus Banaji - Theory as History: Essays on modes of production & exploitation

Jairus Banaji's Theory as History is a 2010 collection of essays that together are designed to encourage and stimulate a return to serious Marxist approaches to history - both in a theoretical sense and in a the sense of studying specific periods of history. Banaji is an important and long standing scholar whose determination to use Marxism as a historical tool is only matched by his refusal to let dogma go unchallenged. Unafraid of challenging existing Marxists his writing can, at times, be blunt. But nonetheless it is full of insight:

To take modes of production first, these, for Marx, comprised the 'relations of production in their totality' (as he says in Wage Labour and Capital), a nuance completely missd by Marxists who simple reduce them to historically dominant forms of exploitation or forms of labour, for example, positing a slave mode of production wherever slave-labour is used or ruling out cappitalism if 'free' labour is absent. The underlying assumpotion here is that Marx means by relations of production the relations of the immediate process of production, or what, in a perfectly nebulous expression, some Marxists call the 'method of surplus-appropriation'.

Some of the most useful parts of this collection are when Banaji challenges specific academic interpretations of historical eras in order to draw out the real relations of production by deep diving into historical times. This often displays an amazing understanding of source documents - as displayed for instance on the essays about land relations and ownership in colonial India.

While some of the essays display this "deep dive" into particular eras and geographical locations. Others are more theoretical, while being rooted in evidence. One of particular importance and insight is Banaji's writings on the Tributary modes of production, something that many Marxists have grappled with over the years. Take also his conclusins around modern slave society in North America:

The slave-plantations were capitalist enterprises of a patriarchal and feudal character producing absolute surplus-value on the basis of slave-labour and a monopoly in land. This heterogeneous and, as it appears, disarticulated nature of the slave-plantation generated a series of contradictory images when the early Marxist tradition, not equipped with the same abundance of material available today, attempted its first characteristations.

Here Banaji demonstrates two characteristics of his writing - his desire to neither deny that Marx made mistakes or didn't have full insights on occasion, and his commit to updating this. This is particularly noticeable in his writing on wage labour, which is, he says "not a product of capitalism specifically, unless there is a sense in which class itself is peculiar to capitalism, so that workers before capitalism fail to constitute a class in the same sense as workers under capitalism". He then continues:

Wage-labour strikes as a peculiarly modern institution, because the ancient world, indeed all periods of history before capitalism, are seen as intrinsically impervious to any of the institutions that characterise capitalism.

Then:

Labour-power can appear on the market as a commodity, indeed did, even when free labourers are scarce or non-existent. Appian [95-165] CE tells us that a major reason why the rich who had monopolised the public land and carved huge estates out of it preferred the employment of lsaves was that the peasantry was subject to conscription and the supply of labour unstable.

He concludes:

The point of these remarks is not to deny the centrality of 'free labour' to the accumulation of capital in the modern economy... but to undermine the particular way Marx attempts to constue the link between wage-labour and captial. 

Over the half dozen or so pages that cover this argument, Banaji explores multiple theoreticians 'approaches to wage-labour, capital and ancient/modern society, while clearing out a distinctive position of his own. It shows a remarkable command of the material, both sources and contemporary and a deep knowledge of Marx's own work.

However Banaji doesn't simply dismiss others claiming only he has the right line. His discussion of Chris Wickham's work is a case in point. He is both incredibly generous in praise of Wickham's historical writing and, on occasion, quite critical. But it is done with nuance and clarity. There's not a few Marxists who could learn from this.

All in all Theory as History is a remarkable work. But it is hard work. Some chapters were opaque because I had no wider knowledge of the period they covered. Other sections required repeated re-reading. But this is a serious work, that rewarded close reading and I'll undoubtably return.

Related Reviews

Perry - Marxism and History
Carr - What is History?
Callinicos - Making History
Marx & Engels - The German Ideology: A new abridgement by Tom Whyman
Harman - Marxism and History
Heller - The Birth of Capitalism: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective

Vanda Felbab-Brown - The Extinction Market: Wildlife trafficking and how to counter it

In the midst of the environmental led biodiversity crisis, there is another tragedy taking place for global flora and fauna: poaching and wildlife trafficking. While many of us will only be dimly aware of the problem, it takes place on a staggering scale. Vanda Felbab-Brown gives us a sense of the scale in the introduction to this book: 

Between 2010 and 2012, almost 100,000 elephants were killed for their tusks in Africa... African elephants have thus experienced a drastic net population declaine of some 111,000 since 2006, leaving a likely current poplation of 415,000... Between 2009 and 2015, Tanzania lost between 50 and 60 percent of its elephant population... in South Africa alone, 1,215 rhinos were killed for their horns in 2014.

The list goes on and on. A 171 of a global population of under 4,000 tigers were poached in India between 2010 and 2015. More than a million pangolins were poached in the decade prior to the book's publication. Millions of reptiles are poached every year. It is a grim story, and a difficult question to approach. As Felbab-Brown argues the drivers of poaching are complex - and are often rooted in economic instability and poverty. The solutions are not straightforward either, and in this nuanced book Felbab-Brown uses her knowledge of the global drugs trade to discuss various strategies to challenge poaching. 

While the story is grim, the discussion is nuanced. Felbab-Brown points out, for instance, that total bans don't always work, and can often have adverse effects. Indeed, the centrality of hunting to some communities means that bans should be carefully considered. This is not, of course, to follow the lead of the US National Rifle Association who oppose bans on ivory trading in order that their members can go on hunting safaris. But, she points out:

Under some circumstances, legal sales from hunting or farming crucially underpin and enable wildlife conservation in a way that bans, prohibition, and law enforcement will not [be] able to accomplish because they fail to give key actiors and economic stake in conservation. 

Having said this, Felbab-Brown does acknowledge that this is neither easy not automatic. While "the legal trade of farmed crocodilians also resulted in the recocver in the wild of several crocdilian species", there can also be a consequent increase in demand, or allow illegal hunting to insert animals into the legal supply chains. In addition to these nuances, Felbab-Brown is also aware of the way in which questions of poaching and conservation interact with wider political and historical issues. For instance she notes that the setting up of US National Parks such as Yellowstone saw the forced displacement of Native Americans. She also notes that because of how hunting was linked to colonial rule in parts of Africa:

Environmental policies thus came to be strongly associated and directly overlapped with colonial oppression in the minds of many African and Asian population. Not surprisingly they felt morally justified and economically empowered by illeagally hunting and exploiting protected areas. Poaching became not only a means of susbistance but also a form of rebellion against colonial rule.

Indeed the best examples that Felbab-Brown can offer in terms of "parks" and protection of animals from hunters are ones were the local populations are empowered to see the protection of the habitats and the animals as being in their interests. This might mean ensuring that wildlife guards are properly paid to ensure they don't become poachers at night to raise extra cash. But it might also mean ensuring that local communities have land to farm and adequate access to the natural resources they need.

What are the solutions? These must start from a clear understanding of the problem. Felbab-Brown summarises:

Althought global poaching and trafficking have become more organised, many poor individuals and communities willingly participate in them and do not embrace conservation. For them, hunting, sale and consumption of animals and the conversion of natural habitats to agriculture or resource exploitation are means of economic survival and social advancement. Ignoring this uncomfortable truth, as has become a fad in some parts of the consevation communityu, including many environmental NGOs, will produce unsustainable and ineffective policies.

Going further she points out that the "dominant narrative" over emphasises organised crime as a driver of poaching and downplays "corruption of government institutions and the wildlife industry" in affected countries.

The question really becomes one of economic wealth. What are the best ways to ensure that people and communities don't need to hunt animals to extinction? Some of this should be straightforward - making people feel a stake in the protection of plants and animals. Some requires removing demand. This is harder - some markets for animals parts are closely linked to countries' traditional beliefs, foods or practices. Though it is interesting to note that Felbab-Brown points out how much of these are recent inventions, and how "Chinese Traditional Medicine" is constantly reinventing itself as sources change. 

The strength of the book is its nuanced approach. That there is no "one size fits all" for every country, market or animal is a repeated mantra of Felbab-Brown's book. But despite this I was a little unconvinced by the general thrust of the author's argument. Part of the problem is that the generalised approach by capitalism towards nature is the commodification of nature. The "natural capital" approach which seeks to place a value on nature and embedded it in economic flows is one adopted by most governments, lots of NGOs and almost all global agreements on biodiversity. But once you do this you guarantee that there's a profit to be made. This is why Felbab-Brown argues that "Although it is vital to clean up the corruption that has permeated trohpy hunting in much of Africa, to suspend it indefinitely will hurt, not advance conservation". 

This surely is short-sighted - it assumes firstly that people will always want to hunt for trophies and secondly that conservation can only be helped by a uncorrupted hunting industry. I think it's entirely possible to imagine a world where animal hunting for trophies is inconceivable - but that requires a massive challenge to existing ideologies and power structures. A properly funded environmental approach that doesn't rest on "natural capital" would also release the cash needed for the sort of bottom up conservation that Felbab-Brown shows clearly works. But that again requires a challenge to existing global economic priorities.

So while Felbab-Brown has many helpful insights into how not to try and restrict poaching, because her outlook remains essentially bourgeois, I'm not convinced it offers a long term solution. It is why conservation cannot be separated from wider political and economic questions, particularly ones that are about lack of resources and wealth inequality. That's a big criticism, but in making it I want to emphasise that Vanda Felbab-Brown's book has a great deal to stimulate discussion about conservation and the protection of biodiversity loss. It also makes it clear that those who hold the key to protecting biodiversity are often those who are usually dismissed. The book challenges many assumptions and has a multitude of facts and figures that deserve to be widely known. 

Related Reviews

Bourgon - Tree Thieves: Crime & Survival in the Woods
Archer - 'By a Flash and a Scare': Arson, Animal Maiming & Poaching in East Anglia: 1815-1870

Iain M. Banks - Inversions

Inversions is one of Iain M. Banks' novels that I read multiple times after it came out, but haven't read in... well as long as this blog has been going. I found it again recently and re-reading it I was struck by how great a book it is.

The book is set on an unnamed planet, but one where a former powerful Empire has fragmented into rival states following what sounds like a major disaster with multiple asteroid impacts. The remaining rival kingdoms are analogous to Earth's European feudal states - though Banks is very careful not to make them identical. Knights may wear armour and ride to battle - but whether they are on horses is never clear. Banks avoids using words that tie things too closely to Earth.

There are two parallel stroies. Alternate chapters are titled The Doctor and The Bodyguard. Both characters are in kingdoms separated by a great distance. The Doctors' chapters are told by her assistant Oelph, though they are really his lengthy reports to an unnamed Master who is spying on the Doctor. The Doctor has arrived from a third, distant land, and risen quickly to become the personal physician to the King. This causes jealously, suspicion and doubt, particularly when the King begins enacting reforms that benefit the cities and the lower, producing, classes.

The Bodyguard is Oelph's publishing of a separate story that he finds long after the events he is involved in. Consisting of the account of the personal guard to another king, there are natural parallels with The Doctor chapters. But this consists of The Bodyguard's attempts to protect the King and his family while facing down external threats. In doing so he befriends one of the King's harem women and the King's son.

The Bodyguard tells his friends stories, and these can be read, particularly by those who've read other works by Banks, as examples of the way that The Culture view other civilisations that have not yet reached their level of technological and cultural sophistication. A further clue that this is set in the Culture universe and that the Bodyguard and Doctor are possibly not from the planet at all, lies in they way their ideas do not quite fit those of their chosen kingdoms. But are they there as agents of the Culture? Or are they running away from something? Or perhaps each other. 

Ultimately it becomes clear that the Doctor at least is from another place - she has access to knowledge and equipment that are far beyond the planet's technological development. However if the novel is reduced to this guessing game it does it a disservice. The best thing about the novel is the interaction between the characters from different societies. It reminded me of a classic Soviet SF novel Hard to be a God by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky which postulates a future socialist society's agents observing and living within a feudal society trying (or not) to influence its development (while also critiquing the Soviet Union itself). 

The book has little of Banks' trademark hard SF. Its focus is on relationships - and there are several that are beautifully described - in particular that between the Doctor and Oelph and the Bodyguard and Perrund, the King's concubine. But there are others - the Doctor falls for the King and in one moment of exuberance announces her love. It devastates Oelph, but more importantly it shifts the story dramatically as the Doctor realises she cannot be both of the world and from elsewhere. 

Despite barely being The Culture, this is one of the great Culture novels - demonstrating Banks' amazing abilities as a writer, and his ability to hand multiple different ideas and characters. Well worth a read, or re-read.

Related Reviews

Banks - The Hydrogen Sonata
Banks - Surface Detail
Banks - Against A Dark Background
Banks - Look To Windward
Banks - The Algebraist

Iain Banks - Canal Dreams

Somewhere in my head I had an idea that Iain Banks' novel Canal Dreams was written for a bet. Someone suggested an utterly implausible plot, and Banks proved he could get it published. For the life of me I cannot find evidence of this on the internet, though I do understand that Banks was never particularly happy with the work.

Perhaps Banks was too much of a perfectionist, because while the plot is implausible, it is certainly an exciting read. It centres on Hisako Onoda, a Japanese virtuoso cellist whose fear of flying means that she embarks on a world tour by boat. Travelling through the Panama Canal as the region slides into war, her and several other cargo boats and their passengers and crew are trapped on the Canal near Panama. As the wait drags on, those trapped entertain themselves with dinner parties, arguments and romantic liasions. Eventually, however, the ships become the target of terrorists who want to use them as a base to attack US interests.

The first part of the book sets up the concept through a series of flashbacks as Hisako remembers her life, and how she came to play the cello. It follows her through music school and a centre point is her first failure to fly. Meant to accompany her orchestra on a plane to tour the US, she's unable to go, and the turning point becomes an emblematic moment for her - both in her transition to adulthood and her image of herself as a loner. 

Trapped on the ship, she falls in love with a flamboant and cocky French officer, who teachers her scuba diving, in exchange for intimate lessons on the cello. In the midst of war and uncertainty this becomes Hisako's first real taste of stablity and love.

But then the terrroists hit, and the book becomes a classic adventure story as Hisako fights for her survival and tries to prevent a wider atrocity. Here I am being vague, because there is a major twist that deserves to be unknown in advance of reading. But it is the destruction of her cello that symbolises most Hisako's transition from to vengeful violence.

The last part of the book is essentially an action film on paper. It is an entertaining read, but perhaps is too much of a stylistic break from the first half to make for that satisfactory a novel. But whether written as a bet, or not, there's an entertaining and clever adventure here that will while away a couple of hours. 

Related Reviews

Banks - Raw Spirit
Banks - Whit
Banks - Stonemouth
Banks - Dead Air
Banks - The Steep Approach to Garbadale

Susan Crawford - Charleston: Race, water & the coming storm

One of the immediate, and most expected, impacts of climate change is a rising sea level. Nasa says that "since the satellite record of ocean height began in 1993, the rate of annual sea level rise has more than doubled. In total, global sea level has gone up by 4 inches (10 centimeters) since 1993." But this is nothing to what is coming unless there is a rapid, and drastic, cut in carbon emissions. According to Susan Crawford, "some scientists say we should be planning on three feet of rise by 2050, six feet by 2070 and ten feet by 2100". For the majority of the world that uses metric units this is 0.91m, 1.82m and 3.05m. Billions of people who live in low lying and coastal areas will find themselves, their communities and their economies under threat from this future.

How will this threat impact? Susan Crawford's book is a study of one example - the lowlying, heavily populated southern US city of Charleston in South Carolina. Charleston is a fascinating place. It's a city that has been at the epicentre of US history, mostly because its geographical position meant the slave trade was centred there: about 40 percent of enslaved humans brought to the US from Africa came through Charleston's port. After the international trade in slavery was abolished, it became the centre of interal trade in enslaved people. The legacy of slavery, the centrality of the city to the Confederacy during the Civil War, and the legacy of racism and colonialism have meant that Charleston is a stunningly unequal city. 

Climate change, and particularly flooding, will explode through and along the lines created by capitalism in this city - ones of race and class. As Crawford explains, Charleston's strategy for dealing with flooding exposes this directly:

The reason some breachfront homeowners, but not all, get that sand dumped on their beaches, and the reason that some portions of cities, but not all, get federal funds for building walls, is that the one rule of thumb for all these expenditurers is that they be made subject to a cost-benefit analysis. But that means the only thing that is valued is the price of the property being protected. Lower-income people, or renters, do not get protected or rescued. 

"Surely," asks Crawford rhetorically, " we are interested in everyone thriving, not just those who have the highest land values." The answer is of course that no, US society does not care for all equally, nor does it have a plan for the majority of people who do not have valuable enough assets to warrant projection. In the case of Charleston almost all (but not everyone) of these people are black.

One way that we know the future will be like this is because the past and the present are already like this. The accident of history that placed the initially European settlers at this location, has also meant that the city that developed and grew up, was built on marshy, lowlying, wetlands. As the city expanded much of this was done on the waste and rubbish of the existing town. The poorest areas, again with almost an entirely black population, are built on the worst and most dangerous terrain. Unbelievably this means that some of the material supporting the roads, housing, hosptials and infrastructure is human waste, offal and rubbish. When the tides and storms come, the inevitable floods bring cholera and e-coli into the streets. Crawford uses Noaa data to explain how bad it will get:

Current (2020) numbers of flood days will double or triple by 2030 - double the eight-nine floods in 2019, the sixty-eight floods in 2020, the forty-six floods in 2021, each one of which made some roads in Charleston impassable and undermined strtures. By 2050 [Noaa] says, the number of days of more serious flooding could be five to fifteen times as great as it was in 2020.

Through a combination of reportage, statistics and interviews with citizens, Crawford shows how the black community is hit worst and first by these regular floods. The second thing she demonstrates is that the authorities have done nothing to aid the people at risk, instead channelling funds and investment into reinventing Charleston as a tourist hotspot for wealthy (white) tourists who come to experience Southern "charm". This mostly seems to involve a disney style experience of seeing homes built on the profits of slavery and eating expensive seafood on areas completely isolated from the real Charleston. Black, and poor, Charlestonians are excluded from the rich areas, as racism and poverty keeps them out of the bars, clubs, restaurants and other destinations. Over the years more and more areas have been converted by buying up land from black people (or forciably relocating them) in order to further expand this tourist paradise. Little of the new builds are flood proof, protected or insurable long term. "More than 100,000 structures in Charleston are sited in FEMA's notoriously inaccurate floodplains" says Crawford. FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Agency whose funding and activities are already seriously under attack from Trump.

This is, of course, the great tragedy. Charleston is doomed. The first people to go will be those forced out of the unprotected areas. But unless there is radical action, great parts of Charleston will simply become unsalvabable. That's why Crawford discusses the reality of "retreat" in the face of sea level rise - something that's already being discussed in low lying areas like the Netherlands, but rarely is talked about in the US.

One of the things that I really enjoyed about Crawford's book is her focus on individuals from the affected communities - people who have lived, worked and frequently campaigned for change in Charleston's black areas. They are people whose families and communities are most at risk, and ultimately they are the people who are the only force that will bring change - both in terms of a socially just solution for everyone in the city and in terms of winning a wider, more equal United States. Stacked against them however are some greedy, corrupt and powerful forces. Time and again Crawford shows how politicians and business leaders, their eyes firmly focused on wealth and tax income, take decisions that mean ignoring the threat from sea-level rise. Its hard to even speak about climate change in the US political arena today. In Charleston's its near impossible to discuss the links between race, poverty and flooding. Local politicians seem to think that a magical solution is there in the future. Actually they really think that what will happen is a major disaster that will lead to significant funding from the Federal government.

The problem is that this seems less and less likely, and Charleston has its specifics, but it is not unique. Millions of Americans live in areas threatened by floods, and in this unequal, racist and violent society many of them (most?) will be left to fund for themselves. This is why I think Crawford's book would have benefited from a closer study of other countries impacted by floods - who returned home? Who got compensation? What sort of activism was needed to win compensation? In addition I think the book could have done with a long look at the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans. There are plenty of lessons to be learnt for Charleston's future there in terms of race and class.

I explicitly mention class in ths context because the fractures in Charleston's society don't just run through racial lines, but also class lines. It is the poorest who will be affected first by climate change - wherever they are. These same inequalities also exist through the US, even if there are differing ethnic makeups. But class also helps us understand why there's no money for certain communities. Its not just racism (though that's very important) but also a disdain for those at the bottom - the very people who have a vested interest in building a different sort of America, and have the power to change it. And, let's be honest, no one else is coming to save them. Crawford writes:

Few are talking about how America is going to get through the rapid rise in sea level that is coming. Like most other countries, we have no national plan.

Susan Crawford's detailed study of the specifics of Charleston are important for understanding what will happen to the majority of citizens in that city, and other areas globally. For many readers, particularly those outside the US, the reality of racism in the southern states even today will be extremely shocking. At certain points I was dumbfounded by the realities of what the author described. I was also inspired that despite the difficulties and the violence of the police, people protested, campaigned, formed organisations, marched and stood up. That must be the hope for the future. Otherwise, as Susan Crawford says, things are bleak:

Charleston's story reveals a general blind spot that will become more visible as at least thirteen million people are expected to have to retreat from swamped [North] American coastlines. Americans will learn, if they did not know already, that some lives count and some do not.

It's a book for everyone thinking about the climate future in an unequal and unjust society that puts profits before people.

Related Reviews

Vaillant - Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World
Dawson - Extreme Cities
Molavi - Environmental Warfare in Gaza
Glynn & Clarke - Climate Change is a Class Issue
Smith - The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood and Transformation in an American Boomtown
Nikiforuk - Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent
Sparrow - Crimes Against Nature: Capitalism and Global Heating

James Ellroy - Perfida

James Ellroy is perhaps best known for his two works Black Dahlia and LA Confidential. I recently read, and enjoyed, his American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand, set among conspirators, CIA agents, murders and racists around the time of the Kennedy assassination. When I reviewed American Tabloid I described it as being set in "the dark underbelly of the American dream".

Perfida is a very different book to the sprawling conspiracies of American Tabloid and its sequels. However it is also a very dark encounter with US history. Set in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbour, the book looks at a horrible episode in US history - the internment of thousands of Japanese Americans for alleged threats to national security. This infamous event was the culmination of racism, imperialism and an opportunity for people to steal the assets and land off those arrested and interned. 

Ellroy explores this episode through the investigation by Los Angeles Police of the murder of a Japanese family. Two rival detectives, both of whom feature in other Ellroy novels set later, are here as is Hideo Ashida, an intriguing character - a Japanese forensic specialist cop. As they police investigate they unravel a conspiracy that brings together Fifth Columnists, asset strippers and many other lowly types, that threatens to spill over the bring down corrupt politicians, policeman and other nasty types.

Its a fat book. Ellroy's clipped style is taken to many an extreme here. "He snagged his car and laid tracks. He took the 1st Street bridge to Broadway. He took Broadway to the parkway. He popped two bennies and hit Avenue 45". It is not hard to believe that 790 pages could have been 350. Sadly Ellroy's probably too big an author to have that level of editing these days. 

But lack of brevity is not the problem. Nor, indeed, is the violence. For me the convoluted plot took too long to bring to a conclusion and I had mostly lost interest by the time it was wrapped up. But if that was one issue the other was the characters who are too one-dimensional. There's  Kay Lake a young woman with radical ideas desperate for adventure whose endless stream of lovers just happens to include almost every other major character. Her radicalism is quickly brought off by a policeman lover who happens to want her to destroy a group of leftists. The leftists in this book, including the awfully cliched radical filmmaker Claire De Haven (who has apparently read Marx and various religious tracts and concluded Marx got it wrong on religion and there is a god) are bad parodies but, I suspect, they reflect what Ellroy thinks about leftists of all stripes.

If the left in Perfida are corrupt, the right are appalling. But it is the right, the fascists and the racists, who get all the airtime to spot off their views and engage in their nefarious plots. There's plenty of random deaths, beatings and racist attacks here. But no one (even the leftists) seems to care. As I thought when I read LA Confidential, one of the problems is that there are no good, or kind, or even normal people in Ellroy's world. This is the underbelly of the US, but there's no nice side. No solidarity, friendship or kindness. 

After finishing Perfida I realised that I had the option to read the rest of the trilogy. But I also realised I didn't care enough - about the characters, about what James Ellroy was trying to say, or about his distorted view of the world.

Related Reviews

Ellroy - L.A.Confidential
Ellroy - American Tabloid
Ellroy - The Cold Six Thousand

David Grann - The Wager: A tale of shipwreck, mutiny and murder

In May 1741 The Wager, a 28 gun Royal Navy ship on a voyage to harass Spanish treasure ships off the western coast of South America, ran aground on a then, nearly unknown, island. This barren mountainous place was home to some 150 castaways for months. David Grann's account of the voyage, the deprivations of the crew, the bullying of their officers and the appalling conditions on the island is based on a closed reading of all the contemporary accounts. On the island, the survivors gradually split into two groups - one, around Captain Cheap and the other the mutinous majority crew. 

Despite the shipwreck, sickness, intense hunger and a severe shortage of any supplies Cheap harboured fantastical dreams of continuing the mission and bringing home glory to "King and country". The rest of the crew recognised that this was not just a fantasy, it would get them all killed, and so they wanted to go home. They did so by seizing control of a boat, supplies and heading back into the Straits of Magellan and home via Spanish controlled ports on the east coast. Some of them took longer. Many died. It was a brave and remarkable journey.

Cheap too eventually made it back, though with far fewer survivors, including the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron. For both groups of sailors the voyages to escape their shipwreck were as bad, if not worse, as the initial voyage itself.

Grann's account underlines the horror of life at sea in the 18th century. This was a violent "wooden world", one where officers had power over life and death, and where hunger, sickness and the horrors of life in a tiny wooden ship in high seas were ever present. In places the Grann's descriptions are almost unbelievable - how anyone could imagine a trip around Cape Horn could leave a small flotilla in a condition to wage war is mind boggling. Nonetheless the Admiralty seemed to think it was possible. But if your crew is sick of typhus, underpaid and terrified then you gets what you pay for (the cook was in their 80s!)

But what really makes Grann's book is his insights into the wider seafaring world. The horror of the castaway life on what became known as Wager Island, is linked to the wider horror of the transatlantic slave trade, colonisation and imperialist ambition. This raid took place during the jingoistic "War of Jenkin's ear". A conflict that should never have happened. It was a war all about British sea power, and those who died on, and off, the Wager were sacrificed to this ambition. Grann notes wider implications - the racist attitudes to indigenous people that drove their saviours away, and the horror that a black British seaman was kidnapped into slavery while on his way home. He even finishes with a second mutiny of enslaved people who were on the ship to Europe carrying some of Wager's survivors.

All in all this is a great read which has surprising depths and is strikingly anti-imperialist. I thought David Grann's earlier book Killers of the Flower Moon about the treatment of Native Americans was fantastic. This is not quite on the same par as that, but is a very good read.

Related Reviews

Grann - Killers of the Flower Moon
Rodger - The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1642 - 1815
Bullocke - Sailors' Rebellion

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