ResoluteReader: 2025

Monday, December 29, 2025

Ivan Doig - Dancing at the Rascal Fair

*** Warning Spoilers ***

The second volume of Ivan Doig's Montana Trilogy, is the first chronologically. It probably doesn't matter whether you read this, or English Creek first, because these are independent tales. But Dancing at the Rascal Fair sets up the origins of most of the people who live in Two Medicine Country, a fictional area of Montana just east of the Rockies towards the Canadian border.

Rob Barclay and Angus McCaskill are leaving Scotland to head to Montana where Rob's uncle Lucas is working as a miner. Lucas sends money home every year - sizeable chunks - and Rob and Angus are attracted to the good pay and better quality of life than late 19th century Scotland can offer. Montana is a land of opportunity, riches, good land and an escape from grinding poverty.

The first chapters have a dreamlike quality as Angus narrates his and Rob's voyage and then their long search in Montana's new towns for Lucas. Eventually they end up in Two Medicine Country, where Lucas is not mining, but running a bar and the two of them join Lucas in sheep business. Right from the start the messy reality of small, close-knit, emigre communities is there. Rob falls for Lucas' partner - and getting him and Angus to homestead in the mountains is part of making sure this doesn't get even more messy.

But it is Angus whom we follow for the next generation, as he farms, clears, and also teaches in the local school. He meets, and falls hard for Anna, another teacher and hopes to marry her. When she choses someone else, in part for economic reasons, Angus is desroyed and marries Rob's sister who has been brought over for that purpose. Their's is a caring and loving marriage, but Angus' love for Anna hangs over it like a shroud. Eventually Rob is unable to cope with Angus' unrequited love and hope and their brotherly, almost lovelike, relationship comes apart.

For while this is a story of love and humanity, it's set against the harsh backdrop of Montana's climate and the economic and political reality of the early 20th century. Boys get sent to fight in the trenches, influenza hits and the farming economy goes through its ups and downs. In addition harsh winters, dry summers and the gradual changing of farming practices transform the area and drive some to poverty.

Doig is wonderfully skilful at placing the human emotions of his characters against the backdrop of economic crisis, winter storms, drought and war. We're rooting for his people, while anxious for their survival. Dancing at the Rascal Fair is no cowboy adventure. Its the story of what happens over time. The book takes place over thirty or forty years, yet some chapters deal at length with a handful of days. It gives the reader a feeling of an epic, while occasionally zooming in on great detail.

What happens to Angus, Rob and the others is, in many ways, shaped by forces beyond their control. There's little here about the US's own politics - other than setting up of the National Forests which plays a big part in English Creek. Instead characters play their parts against a backdrop of events out of their control. That, I think is a deliberate ploy to make the reader think about the people.

It should be noted that one group of people who are not here in detail are the Native Americans. Its probably a criticism of Doig's fiction that he neglects their place in Montana's history (though this isn't true of all his books - see Winter Brothers). Here they are literarily unnamed, but ever present in a Reservation on the other side of the hill. Doig's focus on emigrant and immigrant lives reminds us that the modern US was built in part on the labour of economic migrants. But the other part - the genocide - is absent.

That criticism aside, this is a deeply moving look at the lives that people live, which forms the backdrop to modern Montana.

Friday, December 26, 2025

Francis Pryor - Paths to the Past: Encounters with Britain's hidden landscapes

Francis Pryor's books have been some of the most accessible and popular guides to British landscape history. Works such as Britain BC have helped us understand how monuments like Stonehenge are actually part of a human landscape shaped by thousands of years of labour. Pryor's work with Time Team and his pioneering work as a farmer, archaeologist and historian have offered unique perspectives on history, land and society.

Paths to the Past is a short collection of very brief essays, twenty-four in all, that are Pryor's highly personal engagement with a variety of unusual and sometimes spectacular sites and buildings. These range from very large areas - such as Orkney's neolithic landscape - to the very small: Cromwell's Bridge in Lancashire. In each place Pryor explores the buildings, the human landscape and the natural world. Pryor's aim with the book is to encourage the reader to visit these places, and he certainly did provide a number of places for me to go in the future.

Unfortunately I found that while all of the essays are interesting, they tend to be interesting because of the places that Pryor is describing rather than his particular insights. I was constantly underwhelmed. Each of the essays left me feeling that Pryor was going to give us some great insight, but I was left wanting. Sometimes its no more than saying he felt the presence of the past. After a visit to the Great Orme Bronze Age mines in North Wales Pryor writes that he was "standing in their space, listening to their sounds".

On a number of occasions I also felt that Pryor's approach to history was to separate humanity from the landscape. More problematically there is no sense of struggle in Pryor's work. There's hard labour, such as that of the Bronze Age miners squeezing through dangerous passages, but there's no struggle. Enclosure is simply described as a process of landscape change made by landowners, rather than the centuries long battle over land, space and political rights that resulted in the great defeat of the English peasantry. That's a far more interesting story and one that surely has resonnances to today.

These are interesting places and Pryor writes about them very well (few authors can make a reader want to visit a shopping centre in Peterborough). But it felt removed from the engaging (and pathbreaking) work that Pryor has produced previously and which I have celebrated. See links below.

Wednesday, December 24, 2025

Paul Frölich - Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg was one of the most remarkable revolutionaries to emerge from the European socialist milieu in the late 19th century. There is a tendency on the left to discuss Luxemburg in the context of things that she wrote or did that were wrong. I've been to many meetings which bemoan her failure to "launch a revolutionary party" early, rather than staying part of the German Social Democratic Party, hence dooming the German Revolution. These are, of course, crude criticisms even if they do have some basis. Nonetheless it is important that we say, as Lenin did:

'Eagles may at times fly lower than hens but hens can never rise to the height of eagles'. Rosa Luxemburg was mistaken on the question of the independence of Poland; she was mistaken in 1903 in her appraisal of Menshevism; she was mistaken on the theory of accumulation of capital; she was mistaken in July 1914, when, together with Plekhanov, Vandervelde, Kautsky and others she advocated unity between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; she was mistaken in what she wrote in prison in 1918 (She corrected most of these mistakes at the end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919 when she was released). But inspite of her mistakes she was and remains for us an eagle. And not only will Communists all over the world cherish her memory, but her biography and her complete works will serve as useful manuals for training many generations of communists all over the world.

Paul Frölich's biography of Luxemburg was one of the very first to be written, and was published in unusal circumstances just before World War Two. In fact the English translation became a huge best seller as part of the Left Book Club during the War. It is very much a political biography that places her ideas in the context of her political activty and her organisational context. The Lenin quote above matters not just because of his list of criticisms, or indeed his celebration of Luxemburg's work - but his acknowledgement that her ideas changed in the context of struggle. Indeed part of the celebration of her work that Lenin mentions was impossible because the archive that Frölich built up was trapped by Stalin during WWII and kept from the movement.

What shines through is Luxemburg's understanding of political theory and strategy, based always on working class power. For instance, in the great debate within the German left about how the left should organise and the role of parliamentary activity, Frölich says that Luxemburg

did not insist merely on agitation: the task of a socialist parliamentarian also consisted in taking part in the positive legislative work, whenever possible with practical success-a task which would become increasingly difficult with the strengthening of the party’s representation in parliament. The task could be correctly fulfilled only if Social Democracy retained an awareness of its role as an oppositional party and, at the same time, found the golden mean between sectarian negation and bourgeois parliamentarism-always remembering that its real strength lay outside parliament, in the proletarian masses. Above all, however, it had to give up without reservation the illusion that a working-class party could overpower a capitalist state by a majority vote in parliament, i.e. solely by parliamentary means.

Nonetheless it is clear that the context of Luxemburg's main area of work - the German socialist movement - did have its impact on her throught. Frölich's book is very much a celebration of Luxemburg's work and life - but he isn't uncritical. But in one area he does acknowledge mistakes - her debate with Lenin over the question of political organisation.

This first disagreement between her and Lenin-even if all the various background factors are taken into consideration-nevertheless revealed characteristic differences between these two great leader personalities. Luxemburg underestimated the power of organisation, particularly when the reins of leadership were in the hands of her opponents. She relied all too believingly on the pressure of the revolutionary masses to make any corrections in party policy. Lenin’s total political view prior to 1917 shows traces of unmistakably Blanquist influences and an exaggerated voluntarism, though he quickly overcame it when faced with concrete situations. To overstate the point, it can be said that Rosa concerned herself more with the historical process as a whole and derived her political decisions from it, while Lenin’s eye was more concentrated on the final aim and sought the means to bring it about. For her the decisive element was the mass; for him it was the party, which he wanted to forge into the spearhead of the whole movement.

This is a much better approach than the "she didn't set up a revolutionary party" argument. Not least because it is clear that Luxemburg did always fight for revolutionary organisation, and I was reminded that the Polish group she led played such a role in the crucial war years and during the 1917 revolutionary period.

Perhaps the most interesting discussion of Luxemburg's "mistakes" are in her work on the accumulation of capital. Here again there's a tendency for some reviewers simply to say that she was wrong. Yet in doing so they miss Luxemburg's real attempt to grapple with the limits of Marx's own work on accumulation (born out of his abstraction of the economy from reality in order to clarify his argument) and the fact that she was one of the first to link accumulation to imperialist expansion. She was also, it should be said, someone who was very clear about the role of imperialism in the destruction of indigenous peoples. Her theory here may not be fully developed, but it is a very real attempt to place a Marxist critique of capitalism into a global context.

Luxemburg's work also included two other great pieces of work that developed revolutionary politics to adapt to new eras. Her Reform or Revolution and The Mass Strike both remain indispensible booklets for socialists in the 21st centutry as we grapple with the interactions between social movements, capital and political organisation. The Mass Strike in particular will no doubt be read again and again as workers engage in mass struggles over austerity and politics. The "Gen X" revolts spring to mind.

But it is in the last four years of her life that Rosa Luxemburg comes into her own. Her fight to shape a new revolutionary era out of the ruins of the betrayal of the German socialist movement at the start of World War One and then her attempts to learn from and extend the revolutionary epoch after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Here Frölich engages with her criticisms of the Russian Revolution and the policies of the Bolsheviks, particular towards the National and Agrarian questions. He acknowledges her errors, while placing them in context. Not least the fact that Luxemburg was in prison and had limited access to the movement at times. Nonetheless we see how Luxemburg is constantly striving to develop the movement, and with the outbreak of the German Revolution we she how her politics place her far ahead of almost all her comrades. Her clarity of ideas in December 1918 and January 1919 with the counter-revolution flexing its muscles is poignant given her murder by them in early January.

There is no doubt that the loss of Luxemburg robbed the German working class of one of its most able leaders. Frölich's book is one of the best introductions to her life and politics, but it is also an incredible celebration of working class power and the vision of socialism from below that Luxemburg strived for her whole life. If at times it feels a little hagiographic this is, perhaps, to be expected given that Frölich is writing in the darkest period for humanity as Hitler has won and Stalin's politics is stamping over the revolutionary tradition that Paul Frölich's subject stood for.

Related Reviews

Gietinger - The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg
Luxemburg - Reform or Revolution
Luxemburg - The Mass Strike
Campbell - A Rebel's Guide to Rosa Luxemburg

Monday, December 22, 2025

Chris Harman - Spartacus and the Slave Revolt that Shook the Roman Empire

Redwords have been bringing out a series of books with transcripts of talks by leading Marxists with new introductions. This little book is based on a talk by Chris Harman at Marxism 1998 in London as part of a course on battles that changed the world. In the talk Harman jokes that the reading wasn't to difficult as there are only two sources for the Spartacus rebellion, and these amount to five pages or so. But what we do know tells us a great deal about Ancient Rome and the position of slaves within it. Harman's historical materialist approach places the battles of the Third Servile War in the wider context of the development of Rome and the limits of the Roman Empire.

Give the short nature of the text Harman only touches on some subjects. Indeed, as Christian Høgsbjerg notes in his extremely useful introduction, at one point in the talk Harman realises he is running out of time and has to summarise a lot of material. It is useful then that Høgsbjerg has access to Harman's original notes as he is able to construct and include material that Harman couldn't include on the day of the talk. But two aspects of the talk remain vitaly important. The first is Harman's summary of the class nature of Roman society and how the army was an essential part of this:

Essentially, what happened was the victory of the Roman armies led to two sorts of immense wealth flooding to Rome. One was the immense wealth coming from the territoties which were conquered by Rome.. the second form of wealth ... was the massive enslavement of populations.

Harman continues:

The Roman rich had these vast sums of wealth... [which] enabled them to buy the slaves off the Roman state, and they systematically then established a situation in which they began tilling their estates with slave. And their calculation was quite simply this. 'The Roman army is invincible. Every year, we conquer more people. Every time we conquer more people, we enslave more people, there's an endless supply of slaves'.

This leads us to the second point of Harman's argument. This model was unsustainable and sections of Roman society understood this. The contradiction was that the cost of fighting the wars became prohibitive, and to try to resolve things the Roman ruling class tried to change society, by setting up forms of serfdom. But the centrality of slavery (and war) to the Roman economy made this impossible.

This then places the activity of Spartacus and his rebels into context. Because the taking of Rome by the rebels would have meant them implementing the very regime they were rebelling against (they were, after all, former slaves). Harman's conclusion was that the revolt was heroic, but "history hadn't advanced to such a point in which it's possible for an oppressed class to see overthrowing the empire and estabishing itself as a new ruling class upon a higher, better form of organisation of society". In other words, rather like the peasants of the German Peasants' War, their victory could never be permanent, even if they could never overcome the ruling class's forces.

While it's a short pamphlet and, to be honest, Harman's speaking style doesn't readily translate into an easy reading text, there's a great deal in this talk. Once again Chris Harman's historical materialist approach gives us far more insights that we might expect from just five pages of original source material. Christian Høgsbjerg's excellent editing, introduction and footnotes flesh out the material and make this a fine quick read.

Sunday, December 21, 2025

Bruno Leipold - Citizen Marx: Republicanism & the formation of Karl Marx's social and political thought

How did Marx come to the ideas that are today most associated with this revolutionary politics? This is a question with surprisingly complex answers. Most people who call themselves Marxists today are aware that Marx began his political trajectory as a Young Hegelian, but that he famously "turned Hegel upside down". But, as Bruno Leipold's wonderful new book shows, this is not enough to understand Marx's politics. Leipold argues that to understand Marx's communism, one has to understand its evolution from Marx's roots in Republicanism. He goes on to conclude that Marx's politics have to be seen as developing in both opposition to, and in debt to, the republican tradition.

Marx began his political career as a radical republican who believed that "the arbitary power of despotic regimes" had to be overcome and replaced with a democratic republic where people held democractic power and controlled their elected representatives "through binding mandates". While initially sharing a republican critique of communism, as Marx became a communist himself he "incorporated the republican opposition to arbitary power into his social critique of capitalism" retaining the belief in a democratic republic. Later, in response to the 1871 Paris Commune, Marx further developed his vision of democracy into one that meshed with his earlier radical views "returning to ideas he had defended as a young republican". Of course this was not a reversal, but a development of his radical democracy that "emphasized the need for a much more encompassing emocratic transformation of government."

These three stages are examined in detail in Leipold's book. The first section, which looks at Marx's republican ideas and the republican milieu he was active in is particularly interesting. Leipold begins with the progressive and radical nature of republicanism in the early to mid 19th century, but also its limitations. Marx's "shift from republicanism was driven by a growing disillusionment with the ability of political emancipation, through a democratic republic, to establish truly human emancipation" together with a growing understanding of the unique role of the working class as an agent for change. It is worth noting in passing though Leipold's point that few 19th century republicans "would be satisfied by democracy today". Their radicalism, was a genuine radicalism, but it was born from a utopian belief that everyone could be equal despite class divisions.

That said, and in something I found particularly illuminating, Leipold argues that we must see 19th century republicanism as a "distinct political movement". While liberals might form alliances against the monarchy with republicans at the time, they all "disagreed on the regime that should replace it". Republicanism was a political movement that fought for the "introduction of democracy and popular sovereignty" but with a "distinctive conception of liberty, understood as the absence of arbitrary power or domination". But as Leipold goes on to show this manifests, not as a republican vision for a society free of private property with the means of production held in common, but rather a semi-backward vision of a society of small producers.

Marx became radical within these frameworks but broke with them through a critical engagement both with social movements and with systematic studies of politics and political models. In 1843 Marx

condemned the despotic treatment of subjects and the exclusion of the mass of citizens from political particuipation that resulted from the arbitrary rule of absolute monarchs. In his critique of Hegel, Marx rehected his constitutional model of monarchy, which Marx argued only fractionally extended participation to the king's ministers, bureaucrats and the propertied elite. Marx expressed a preference for a republic over a constitutional monarchy, but also criticized the Maerican model of a republic, where the people were still estranged from the political sphere and consigned to particularism of civil society.

In constrast to these Marx proposed a "true democracy" where "people would hold active sovereign power through the popular administration of general interests... and the tight control over representatives through binding instructions [mandates]." Here I am particularly take with the word "active". It demonstrates that even then Marx's commitment to a popular participatory democracy with constant political engagement. Far more radical than our current democracy with its brief election periods every few years. It is this vision of democracy that re-emerges in 1871 when the Paris Commune explodes.

Around the same time as this, Marx was also going through a change in his attitude to communism. Leipold argues he was "sympathetic" but not convinced in the early 1840s. Marx heads to Paris to challenge communism, but ends up being converted. But, crucially, Leipold writes that "Marx did not so much convert to communism as fashion a new form of it".

This change is rooted in Marx's growing concern with the State as a body that could "not truly free people from obstacles to their freedom, it only relegated those obstacles to civil society". The republican critique of freedom was that people could never be free in a society where a ruler can make them behave in a particular way due to their power over them. Marx concluded that "in order to be free, a person has to live not only in a free state but in a free society". This insight takes Marx into the idea of revolutionary emancipation, whereby proletarian revolution coul lead to the "dissolution of all estates".

If property was the root of power, then a propertyless society could be the basis for a new set of social, political and economic relations that would bring in real freedom. Marx's conversion to communism is remarkably rapid. His time in Paris, described by Leipold as a time of politically sharp debates and engagement with socialist ideas, sees Marx develop a set of ideas that "could no longer be plausibly contained undert the banner of republicanism and democracy and amounted to an encompassing ideological and political conversion to communism."

But it was the revolutionary period of 1848/9 that cemented Marx's understandings of communism and the role of the working class in constructing a society based on freedom. While celebrating the overthrow of monarchies, Marx could also understand that the new bourgeois order was inadequate. As Leipold writes:

For Marx, the bourgeois republic was essentially a change in the political scaffolding that didn't touch the underlying social building... So closely did Marx associate the republic with being simply the poltiical accompaniment of bourgeois society that he often used 'republic' and 'bourgeois republic' interchangeably... Conflating the republic with the bourgeois republic also served Marx's political purpose of highlighting what he took to be the emancipatory limits of republicanism... Achieving the republic would, Marx stressed, not live up to the idealistic hopes of its supporters but instead cement the bourgeois transformation of society.

If the bourgeois republic offered only illusionary freedom to people then what sort of society could offer genuine freedom? Here Leipold usees Marx's Capital to explore how his understanding of capitalism allowed him to develop a vision of socialism and democracy that broke further from republicanism. Marx begins with a critique of the utopian vision of small producers as the basis for egalitarian society. Such a society was one that would be a step backward from the capitalist economy because such a collection of independent producers, isolated from each other, could not utilise the "gains from cooperation, division of labour, the application of scientific and technicalknowledge" and, in a phrase I found particularly insightful, "doomed it in the face of a mode of production that could".

Leipold writes that Marx, "recognised that the political form of bourgeois society, the bourgeois republic, was an inappropriate political form for bringing about communism". But how could a socialist society utilise these capitalist developments? Famously Marx says the "working class cannot simply lay hold of the read-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes". This line comes from Marx's writings on the Paris Commune, It was the Commune that allowed Marx to glimpse for the first time how a radical transformation of workers' relations to the means of production would usher in new forms of democracy and a new epoch of freedom. For some republicans, the opposite was true. The Giuseppe Mazzini said that the Commune's violence "ruined the possibility of national unity". Marx however saw in the Commune the possibilty of a new form of unity that shattered apart bourgeois society and constructed something new. Indeed this was a new shift in Marx's conception of the "social republic" where it was a specific form suited to maintaining and bringing about working-class social and political rule". As Marx writes:

The cry of 'Social Republic', with which the revolution of February [1848] was ushered in by the Paris proletariat did but express a vague aspiration after a Republic that wsa not only to supersede the monarchical form of class rule, but class rule itself. The Commune was the positive form of that Republic.

Crucially it was the active democratic engagement with society of working people coming together with their control of the economy that made the Commune that "positive form". Here Marx could celebrate the Parisian workers who, out of their struggle, implemented the radical vision of democracy that Marx himself had argued for in his younger republican days. The right to recall elected representatives, the payment of such representatives appropriate wages, and the ability to mandate. It was this active and real, albeit short lived, experiment in radical democracy that gave Marx the final insight into how a communist society could function.

Out of these discussions Leipold explores what freedom and equality mean. His final argument brings together earlier themes around politics, arguing that Marx was clear that politics would not vanish after the transition to communism, but take on new forms. Insightfully Leipold also argues that the argument for freedom in the sense Marx (and republicans) used it has an importance today. It means freedom from arbitary control, dictorial power and being tied to the capitalist accumulation machine. We aren't free, not because we don't have the appropriate definition of freedom in a constitution, but because workers cannot be free when they are forced to work for the capitalists - one where we are trapped by the "despotic system of the subordination of labour to capital". Leipold argues, that the "terrain of freedom has too easily been abandoned to conservatives and liberals". We need to win it back as part of a struggle for an emancipatory vision of socialism.

Bruno Leipold's book is a remarkable, and fresh, engagement with Marx's work. For me it opened up whole new areas of thought and refreshed my thinking around key concepts such as freedom, the state, and democracy. But above all I found it an exciting and stimulating reminder of why Marx's ideas remain crucial to the fight for human emancipation. Those whose understanding of Marxism is constrained by that articulated by supporters of Stalin or the regimes in China or Eastern Europe, would do well to engage with this account Marx's deeply human vision of socialism. Citizen Marx has deservedly won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Prize, I hope that the publishers bring out an affordable paperback soon for the thousands of people who would gain so much from reading it. It is my book of the year.

Ivan Doig - English Creek

English Creek is, confusingly, the first of Ivan Doig's Montana Trilogy, but the second book chronologically. The books tell the story of the farming community around the Two Medicine Country on the east of the Rocky Mountains. It's an area similar to that were Doig grew up, and if the places are invented there is a sense of these being real places, real people and real situations.

Jick McCaskill is 14. He's the younger son of hardworking parents. His father is a forester and fire-watcher for the National Parks, keeping an eye on the people using and farming in the Two Medicine National Forest. Jick's mother is a fiercely independent woman who runs the household and small holding and keeps the family organised. Jick's elder brother Alec is the brains of the family. His amazing ability with numbers has led to his parents saving their money to send him to college. They hope he might become more than a farmer or rancher. They want him to escape. But Alec falls in love and announces his desire to get married and stay on the farm. So begins English Creek and the story of Jick's transformative summer.

English Creek is one of those novels were little happens. We see Jick's world view transformed as he is on the cusp of adulthood. Still drinking pop and with time to spare around his chores he is just beginning to see how the grown up world works. His father hands him over for a few days to a transient worker, one of many older men who make their living doing various seasonal jobs. Jick gets drunk for the first time, but also encounters the wisdom of older people who show him the way the world of Two Medicine works.

In the few week's covered by the novel there are a few key events - a rodeo, a Fourth of July picnic and a horrific thunderstorm. The story, such as it is, culminates in a dramatic forest fire. But, to be honest, little else takes place. This is a novel about a time, place and people. Rural Americans whose life has been crushed by the depression, who are desperate for rain or higher prices for their cattle and sheep, and whose lives are closely intertwined, even if not obviously, to world events. The ending, is less of a plot conclusion, and more of a shock to the reader when we realise the context for Jick and Alec's lives.

Ivan Doig's books are not well known outside of the US (and probably Montana). This is a shame. His writing is sparse, but beautifully sharp. And their's plenty of vernacular - which flows both from the local accent and the immigrant communities - something explored further in the prequel. Jick's mother makes an unorthodox, and realtively radical speech at the July Fourth celebrations. In it she talks about her father and his friend Ben. Ben English, she says, "is gone from us. He died in the summer of 1927 of a strained heart. Died, to say it plainly, of the work he put into this country, as so many have."

English Creek is a celebration of that work, that hardiness and the despair that was the lot of so many Americans between the wars. Doig's book is a mighty fine celebration of those lives and struggles.

Thursday, December 18, 2025

Catherine Merridale - Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army 1939-1945

In the Second World War the Soviet Union lost almost 27 million people. The majority of those were civilians, but some 9 million were the men and women of the Red Army and other Soviet armed forces. The Soviet Union's sacrifice broke Nazi Germany's military machine and defeated Hitler, but at enormous cost. Catherine Merridale's book Ivan's War is a history of the troops who fought against fascism. It is based on hundreds of interviews in the 1990s with veterans (though it should be noted that of the interviews that made it to the book they are all Red Army soldiers, no one from the Navy or Air Force is interviewed, and all combat veterans).

At the outset Merridale sets out to counter the traditional story of the Red Army representing a cross section of Russian society willingly fighting against fascism. In fact her account demolishes a number of myths - the all powerful Red machine is shown, especially in the early stages of the war, to be badly organised, ineptly led, fearful and inexperienced. But even after the tide was turning, she shows how the men and women of the Red Army were frequently far from the heroic figures depicted in much Soviet propaganda. In particular she does not shy from describing the mass sexual assaults and rape that took place of German women when the Red Army entered the Reich.

What is striking is that while Merridale has uncovered plenty of evidence in the archives for the less noble tale of the Red Army; records for executions, crime and so on. Few of those she interviews acknowledge this in their accounts. In fact they all very much subscribe to the official view of a united army of principled fighters for socialism against fascism. She writes:

When veterans talk of the good old days, the great communal struggle, they never mention the sleeplessness and long-term malnutrition that afflected almost everyone. They also forget the untreated toothache, the chronic infestations of lice, the diarrhea and boils. The soldiers who survived to tell their stories for this book were a small elite in physical terms. War injuries, poor diet, and strain would shorten millions of lives.

Few of them spoke of arbitary executions of prisoners, rape or sexual assault.

There were of course, millions of acts of bravery and heroism. While much is often made of the Red Army's lack of prepardness or the role of its political officers in forcing men to fight, it must also be remembered that millions of people fought to stop Hitler, and did so bravely. This was a racialised war of genocide. The barbarity of the Nazis was met in kind by the Red Army. The savage nature of the fighting did not lend itself to the small platoons fighting together through the conflict. Merridale notes that there's nothing like the memoires of Vietnam or US troops in the Pacific were men spent years together. Survival rates were far too small. This means that memories of those who survived tend to be highly individual.

That said I was disappointed by the book. Despite the huge number of interviews I felt that we heard the voices of the individual soldiers far to rarely. I thought Merridale took up some fascinating aspects to the Red Army - she explores the role of antisemitism among Soviet troops for instance, and shows how the Soviet Union propaganda distorted Nazi crimes by emphasising them as anti-Russian crimes. But there is almost nothing here about ordinary troop's experiences when they liberated Concentration Camps. Perhaps Merridale wasn't able to find any accounts by those who reached Auschwitz in the interviews, diaries or reports she studied. But that seems unlikely. Thus despite this being a book based on interviews, it was not really a book that gave us their voices very often.

Finally, while I thought Merridale's revisionist account that tried to find the real Red Army was interesting - I felt her book was weakened by a flawed understanding of Soviety history. There was a tendency to lump Stalinism together with the revolutionary socialism of 1917, rather than see the former as a bloody break with the later. Stalin's pact with Hitler would have been something that shocked Lenin's Bolsheviks, and was itself a great crime by a man who murdered many and casualy threw lives away in the name of socialism.

At the end of the book she argues that the outcome of the conflict was to enshrine a "tyranny" in place. Here she ends up victim blaming. While writing that the "human cost was paid by Stalin's people, and whether they were willing soldiers or not, all but a small minority believed that they were on the right side in a true just war". But she concludes that "the Soviety peoplem who had acquiesced, however unwillingly, in the emergence of Stalinism, and who had also fought and suffered to defend it, would now permit the tyrant to remain. The motherland was never conquered, but it had enslaved itself."

This really is a strange conclusion. The Stalinist state was a powerful, brutal and dangerous beast. Merridale's book shows how it was able to use violence to drive the Red Army forward. To blame an exhausted people for the ongoing existence of that State after WW2 and to see them as "acquiescing" in Stalin's victory is unfair and historically inaccurate. It also undermines the bravery of those troops who did fight to stop Hitler. These flaws thus make for a disappointing book.

Tuesday, December 16, 2025

Stephen King (Richard Bachman) - The Running Man

I have not yet seen the new version of The Running Man film released earlier this year. Its release however has been the occasion for me watching the original film, the 1987 one starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and finally reading the book. I am very glad I read the book - Schwarenegger's film much less so - as it is a remarkable novel.

Few readers of this blog are likely to be unfamiliar with the story. Written by Stephen King as Richard Bachman in 1982 it is set in the early 2000s in a dystopian world where poverty and lawlessness are endemic and the US state manages its citizens through a combination of violent repression and distracting TV programmes that offer tantalising prizes to the poor while offering viewers the voyeristic chance to see the players die horribly. What twisted mind could imagine such a future one asks?

This is familiar territory. The 1987 film turned the idea of a man hunted for dollars, risking his life to a massive prize into a gameshow and the trope is now a realtively common one. But, and its a big but, leaving that aside I want to recommend King's book very highly indeed. Because what King does is to turn the story into one about an ordinary, poverty stricken working class man whose daughter desperately needs medication that they cannot afford, into a story about class, power and revenge.

Ben Richards is the titular running man. He's a working class bloke who has been almost broken by the system. Blacklisted for punching a foreman, he has nearly destroyed his health working casual, manual work. His wife is a sex worker whose earnings keep the family afloat. Richards enters the running man because he has to make some money to pay for medicine. But he enters as an embittered and angry man whose frustrations are aimed much higher than those out to hunt him down. When the gameshost is waiting with Richards for a lift to go to the ground floor of the games building, Richards has feted with wealth and power. As he steps into the lift he asks the host of the Running Man, but "who could I kill if I went up?" A good question. Class runs through this book like a red thread. One good piece of advice Richards gets from the games host is "stay with your own". Because what Richards finds is solidarity - from people who look after him, to people who turn their eyes the other way.

As Richards travels he learns more, and in the most powerful bit of the book he finds himself protected by a group of Black radicals who have taught themselves in the libraries about the world they live in. They've uncovered a conspiracy by the state to hide the fact that millions are dying from appalling pollution, but that the rich have all been given nose filters to protect them. The deaths of millions of children like Richard's daughter are the result of a greedy government, not poverty. Richard's attempts to use his position on the show to expose the reality. But his urging of people to "read about pollution", "go to the library" are drowned out by mocking, middle class audience jeers. As Richards flees further he argues with a woman he kidnaps, showing her that her reality is the unreal one. Soon it becomes clear to the network that Richards is actually quite dangerous.

I have always enjoyed Stephen King's books for their insights into the dark underbelly of US history. The Running Man is perhaps the book of his I've read that is most clearly about class, poverty and resistance. There's no collective action here (though a few strikes are mentioned) but Richards is supported by a lot of people. At one point a couple of cops watch his car escape and they mutter to each other - I hope he wins says one. The ending is much more radical and satisfying than the sanitised pseudo super-hero film that Schwarenegger stars in. I've heard that the remake is closer to the original novel. But read the book - its a remarkable novel that speaks a great deal to modern times.

Tuesday, December 09, 2025

Amarpal Singh - The First Anglo-Sikh War

In the early 19th century only one power on the Indian subcontinent stood against British rule. That was the Sikh empire ruled by Ranjit Singh. Singh's kingdom was rich, cultured and big. He ruled with determination and sensitivity. The British East Indian Company looked at the Punjab where Singh ruled with greedy eyes. Singh died in 1839 and in the vacuum that resulted a series of ineffectual rulers struggled for position. In this situation the British readied themselves for war, while carefully manipulating the various Sikh rulers. In 1845 war finally broke out, with the British assuming that their force of arms and numbers would swiftly overcome the Sikh armies. That they did eventually win had little to do with their strength, and everything to do with the betrayal of the Sikh rulers.

Amarpal Singh's account of the First Anglo-Sikh War is an excellent introduction to these events. It is, however, primarily aimed at those who would (either in person or on their armchairs) explore the battlefields. Today these are hardly recognisable, and the British war memorials erected after various battles are in a delapitated state. Nonetheless for enthusasts these are useful guides.

But the strength of the book is that it draws out the day to day experiences of the combatants. Wherever possible the author has used contemporary accounts, diaries and newspaper reports to describe events. He laments that there are few surviving Sikh accounts, though those that do survive are useful.

Much rested on this war. A British victory would open up the Punjab to exploitation. A defeat would have dire consequences for the whole of colonial India. As one of the British commanders Sir Harry Smith said, "all India was at gaze and ready for anything." He continued by criticisng the tactics of his opponent Ranjodh Singh:

He shold have attacked me with the vigour his French tutors would have displayed and destroyed me, for his force compared to me was overwhelming; then turned about upon the troops at Ludhiana and beathen them and sacked and burned th ecity - when the gaze I speak of in India would have been one general blaze of revolt.

And defeat in the Punjab almost happened. Had it done so, India would have risen (as it did only slightly more than a decade later, but this time having already seen the defeat of the British army). It was close. At the battles of Mudki and Ferozeshah the British came close to significant defeat, and had huge casualties. After five hours of hand to hand combat the British at Ferozeshah fell back. Singh describes:

Few soldiers knew where their officers were and who was giving orders. As the British weakened, the Sikh army staged a significant rally and launched a counterattack all along the line. Although Lal Singh had played little part in the proceedings, the Sikh soldiers had lost none of their morale. Less weary than the British, the Sikh line moved forward and began to progressivel recapture the southern area of the Sikh camp.

British arrogance, overconfidence and no doubt racist attitudes to their opponents was once again nearly their undoing. So bad were conditions that officers offered Indian troops months wages for water and licked dew from the cannons. But they were saved by betrayal at the top of the other side. Ferozeshah should have been a supreme victory for the Sikh army, instead it was a defeat that meant that the British would likely win the rest of the war. Other things worth noting. The battles were a precussor to the industrial slaughter of World War One. Take the battle of Sabraon. For two hours both sides shelled each other with artillery, in a "grand contest between the heavy guns". A contemporary account asked the reader to "pause and imagine the thunder of 120 guns on both sides... Never shall I forget the majesty of the whole scene."

But it was the industrial slaughter of the victorious British Army that cost the Sikh army 10,000 men at the end of Sabraon that mean the campaign is shrouded in infamy. Many of those dead were murdered as they swam the river, or failed to escape. It was, says Singh, "[Commander in Chief Hugh] Gough's command to his men not to spare any Sikh soldier [that] turned what had been a battle into a massacre." Not all followed orders. "British soldiers sick of firing at their helpless counterparts offered help to wounded to drowning Sikh soldiers". Many of them refused. It was a tragic, violent end to the campaign. The British victory however only postponed further rebellion and war.

Few people in Britain today know about the first (or indeed the second) Anglo-Sikh War. More know about it in the Indian Sub-Continent, though the events are seldom marked. Amarpal Singh points out that it is the betrayal of the Sikh commanders that is the most commentated event of the war for people in the area now. Indeed without this betrayal the Sikh army would certainly have triumphed in the early battles and it is entirely possible that the history of colonial rule would have been very different.

While this book is very much designed as an introduction to the War and to the sites, it is well written and accessible. I'd recommend it.

Related Reviews

Hibbert - The Great Mutiny: India 1857
Ward - Our Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres & the Indian Mutiny of 1857
Newsinger - The Blood Never Dried
Dalrymple - The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company
Wagner - Amritsar 1919

Hal Lacroix - Here and Beyond

To escape a world ravaged by environmental crisis, biodiversity loss and economic collapse a billionaire builds a generation ship to travel to another planet. 600 people join a voyage that will last almost 400 years, far longer than anyone will hope to survive. Their children's children's children might make it. Here and Beyond is the story of what happens to the generations who live on shipworld.

Science-fiction novels that deal with generation ships are not uncommon, but the best of them allow the author and reader to play with concepts that are elusive in other environments. Communities trapped in deteriorating conditions, or limited space, is one common theme. Others play with the thoughts and frustrations of people trapped in conditions that they would not have asked for. Hal Lacroix's book looks at both of these, and interestingly the bulk of his novel doesn't concern those who arrive at HD-40307G, the exo-planet that is their destination. What concerns Lacroix is the relationships of the generations that are shipbound.

These go through various phases - there are those that remember Earth, including those that were on Earth. Then there are those that that have a connection to Earth through their parents, but as those die out the community begins to develop its own culture, theories and ways of coping. Here one of the fascinating aspects to Lacroix's book is the cultural limits imposed by the billionaire who built it. There are only 100 recordings of music that he liked, and only books from his personal library (which means our intrepid explorers have a strange collection of business books to cope with - though library is eventually recycled). Readers might see in this a metaphor for how the super-rich see themselves and what they consider of value. Its notable that one of the items on the ship is a Olmec head, stolen no doubt and placed there by the billionaire. Another is a painting that has symbolic meaning for the recipient, and is interpreted differently by its subsequent owners.

Readers looking for a scientific account of the 42 light-year trip will be disappointed. Lacroix very much focuses on the people and their relationships, and how they cope, survive and experience the various crises on route. There's some interesting commentary - youngsters go through a phase where they doubt the reality of their mission, believing they are an experiment and have to be shown the outside. Others wonder what clouds are like or what deviled eggs are. Some people rebel against the constraints of the ship. Sometimes they win. The billionaires carefully constructed eco-system quickly breaks down - when doesn't it? Birds die and spices are short.

This is very much a novel to provoke thinking. Lacroix doesn't dwell on some of the experiences - the reader can never understand, like his characters, what happens with one strange encounter. Nor is there a great deal of information on what happens after landing. That's perhaps the beauty of this work. Its not to be read for science, but to provoke you to think what it's liked to be trapped in a failing ecosystem created by the billionaires. Now there's a metaphor.

Related Reviews

Solomon - An Unkindness of Ghosts
Aldiss - Non-Stop
Robinson - Aurora

Friday, December 05, 2025

Stuart Easterling - The Mexican Revolution: A short history 1910-1920

In my favourite film genre, the Spaghetti Western, the Mexican Revolution is usually portrayed as a event led by revolutionary bandits, whose combination of greed and hatred drives the revolution. Meanwhile other social classes are left by the wayside. However, having recently watched the 1966 film A Bullet for the General which subverts some of these and is perhaps the finest of the subgenre of Zapata Westerns I decided to learn more about a revolution that is seldom discussed among European revolutionaries.

I could not have picked a finer introduction to the subject that Stuart Easterling's "Short History", which despite its length is exemplary in its description of events and personalities and its location of the revolution within wider social forces.

The revolution arose out of the contradictions caused by the dictorial politics of Porfirio Diaz, which on the one had was leading to some economic development, but on the other was constraining almost every class of society through corruption and violence. Easterling quotes one future revolutionary who said that "I began to feel the need for change... when I was 19... back in my town.. I saw the police commissioner get druunk, almost every day in the town pool hall, in the company of his secretary, with the local judge who was also the ...tax collector, with the head of the post office; and with some merchant or army officer, persons all of whom constituted the influential class of that small world."

The Diaz regieme was unable to change in the face of such "deep and widespread dissatisfaction", but the discontent was first expressed through the abortive attempt by Francisco Madero to introduce democratic and economic reforms through a Presidential bid. While unleashed social movements from below in a revolutionary wave that brought down the old regime and began to introduce very radical reforms. This story has no doubt been told before, but it is Easterling's analysis that I found so helpful in understanding the revolutionary dynamics. He writes:

A key point to understand concerning the Mexican Revolution is that it did not consist of a single movement. It was not led by a single political party, nor did it mobilise only one social class. Indeed, of the major camps within the Reovlution, only that of Zapara and his allies, based in the campesinos of the 'free' villages, was highly homogeneous in class terms. The Revolution is thus best understood by looking at the various social forces it unleashed - from campesinos to middle-class reformers to industrial workers to disgruntled landlords - and the goals and aspirations they developed. The different revolutionary camps and leaders did not simply float unattached above these various sort of people... it was from this source... that the Revolution's camps formed political programs and leaders formed worldviews.

Thus the Revolution was not a working class revolution rather it was a revolutionary movement whose base reflected the uneven development of Mexican capitalism, and its poor rural base. This is where the revolutionary bandits beloved by this reader found their base. Easterlin recounts how one of the most famous Pancho Villa made the transition from bandit to revolutionary precisely because of his connections to the rural poor. His revolutionary actions thus became those of a Robin Hood type figure:

[Villa's] first act was to attack one of Luis Terrazas' largest estates and summarily execute the administrator. The latter was a man despised by the local peones for numerous abuses, including reserving the privilege of sleeping with bridges on their wedding night.

Other acts of revolutionary violence including forcing a priest to acknowldge a child he had fathered. But Villa's military forces were his real contribution to the struggle, and army that "effectively nationalised wide swaths of territory previously owned by the state's hacendados as well as a number of factories owned by Huerta supporters... In cities and towns under Villista control the Northern Division distributed generous food rations to the urban poor, the unemployed, wiows and orphas. The price of beef was radically reduced".

But it was the tensions between the different revolutionary camps that would prove the revolutions undoing. By Summer 1915 the government had fallen and the radical Carranza was in charge. He was to turn on his previous allies having used his base in urban areas to defeat the government. But Carranza was too tied to the officer class in the army, who were unwilling to tolerate real social reforms. To appease them he turned on his former supporters in the trade union movements. "The destruction of the tyranny of capitalism... [should not be followed] by the tyranny of the workers". The most bizarre anti-capitalist justification for imposing the death penalty for striking and the smashing of the workers' movement. But Carranza himself would not survive these competing interests. He was ousted and then assassinated by the very forces he sought to appease.

The Mexican society that emerged from 1920 was one dominated by military officers, a state which "had acquired an exceptional degree of power relative to the rest of society." The "military caste" was interested in developing capitalism, and this did require a degree of social reform. This meant the state had to make "concessions to the campesino and worker when necessary" to "ensure peace and stability" for the development ocapitalism. Class struggle was to end, and instead a new "perspective was often proclaimed with radical language, and the new leaders often identified this state-supervised capitalism as a form of socialism. This was not seen as the civtory of labour over cpaital, or campesino over landlord, but rather a careful balance between the different sides". That this required the destruction of the most radical and revolutionary forces tells who was really in control.

Easterling's book is by no means a full account of the Mexican Revolution. But it is a brilliant introduction, particularly because its starting point is not just that of description of events, but rather an attempt to understand the often complex and interacting social forces that were emerging in the early 20th century. It really is a brilliant read and it is probably one of the best starting points I could find for a subject that continues to be an inspiration to radicals in South America today. Highly recommended.

Saturday, November 29, 2025

Seishi Yokomizo - The Little Sparrow Murders

In Japan a Temari Song is sung by children as they bounce balls and play together. The titular Little Sparrows Temari song tells the story of three young women, from different backgrounds, who are all "sent away". In other words they are murdered. In the song the women are from different families, whose surname, "locksmith" for instance, tells the listener who they are and what their family does. Such names are common in small rural towns, but this is post-War Japan and a society is going through rapid changes. The song is a link to the past, but it has a shocking echo during the period of the novel as three young women are, indeed, murdered.

The novel is set in Onikobe where the "famous" private detective Kosuke Kindaichi has travelled on holiday. Two decades previously it had been the scene of an intriguing and unsolved murder. But Kindaichi is not drawn there to solve a crime, but to find rest and recuperation. Nonetheless there are connections to the past and early into his holiday the village Chief disappears, leaving traces of blood and poison. An intriguing letter shows that an old lover from the past has reappeared. Has the chieftain been killed for something that happened twenty years before?

As Kindaichi's stay unfolds murder follows murder. The reader will be distracted however by the descriptions of rural Japan, and the fascinating characters. The arrival of a famous singer and actor who grew up in the village further complicates matters, as does the discovery that one of the villagers was an esteemed "silent film narrator" (a role that was peculiar to Japan and makes for a fascinating diversion). The murders are horrific and seem to follow the Temari Song. But I was a little overwhelmed by the number of characters and the convoluted plot. As such I tended to read it more for the atmosphere and aesthetic. Nonetheless I did draw some comparisons with other media - the two rival village families offered some similarities with the setting of the classic Kurosawa film Yojimbo, though perhaps its fairer to say that the context is that of many rural times with families growing rich, or loosing their once esteemed position. In fact there are some intriguing class contexts here but they aren't really fleshed out.

The Little Sparrow Murders was not my favourite Kosuke Kindaichi mystery, but it does have its merits. Readers should start with the earlier books.

Thursday, November 27, 2025

John le Carré - The Russia House

The Russia House feels unusual for a le Carré novel, not because of the plot or the characters, but because it takes place as the Soviet Union is on its last legs. But much else about the novel will feel familiar. It is main characters are ordinary people drawn into complex, dangerous and unusual circumstances - two of them figure - workers in the publishing industry who both visit Moscow to take part in the annual gravy train of publishing conferences and drinking sessions, and try and sell their books (or import Russian ones). On one visit Niki Landau receives a package from a woman called Katya with instructions to get it to "Barley" Blair, a British publisher and heavy drinker.

Landau realises that this is no ordinary manuscript but is a document containing details of Russia's nuclear weapons systems. It's important info, and British intelligence encourage and train Blair to return to Russia to verify the information and make contact with its source - the designer Yakov. Blair and Yakov have history - they'd discussed peace and the post-Soviet world. But British intelligence is skeptical that the source is genuine and worries they are being played. So do the Americans.

While making several trips to Russia Blair grows fond of Katya. The endgame of it all won't be ruined here, but involves Blair making a series of complex decisions that require the reader to follow the text carefully.

But as with most of le Carré's novels the genius is in the interactions between people. In particular the way that the intelligence services treat Blair, and to a lesser extent Landau. How they manipulate, coerce and dig into people's brains is fanatastic, and Blair's interactions with the US intelligence services are particularly entertaining and well written. As with all of le Carré's books this is a book about people caught up in the twists of history. It's excellent, but you might need to read the ending a couple of times.

Sunday, November 23, 2025

M.V.Ramana - Nuclear is Not the Solution: The folly of atomic power in the age of climate change

A few years ago I had the arduous task of reviewing Bill Gates' book on dealing with climate change. I noted that Gates' was obsessed with technological solutions to the climate crisis, in particular nuclear power - an industry which he has got a material interest in. The hunt for technological fixes to environmental crises has a long pedigree. Gates was just one of the billionaires who is most open about it.

The nuclear industry is both wealthy and adept at using the media to put across its case. The argument that nuclear is not a solution is not necessarily straightforward or obvious. So the environmental movement, and indeed the movement against nuclear weapons, should rejoice that M.V. Ramana's new book is available.

Ramana is a trained physicst, who has researched and written extensively on the nuclear industry. He is also greatly concerned about the climate crisis, and understands the intimate connection between the question of energy and reducing emissions. The book demolishes the case for nuclear in two ways. Firstly Ramana challenges the promises of the nuclear industry, both in terms of the potential for nuclear energy and in terms of the technology itself. More importantly though Ramana shows how nuclear power is closely connected with the very systems of imperialism and capitalist accumulation that drive the climate crisis. Let's look at his arguments in turn.

This review is not the place to rehash Ramana's arguments against particular corporations or particular types of nuclear reactors. If you want that I would urge you to read the book itself. But in general Ramana's book explains that

expanding nuclear power production is neither a desirable nor a feasible solution to climate change. Due to the use and production of radioactive materials at reactors, expanding nuclear energy to mitigate climate change will inevitably result in a variety of undesirable risks and environmental impacts. Not is it compatible with environmental and social justice. The consequences and burdens of such an expansion will fall primarily on ecommunities that are distant from the centers of power and economically and politically too marginal to figure in the calculations of decision makers.

Let's take one example - the cost of nuclear power. Ramana discusses research by the "financial firm Lazard" (not a hotbed of radical politics).

Lazard calculated that the average construction costs of a utility-scale solar photovoltaic plant in the United States... was $875 per kilowatt of generation capacity. (For comparison, the cost of a residential rooftop photovoltaic system in the US was about $2,600 per kilowatt.) These estiamates are averages over many different projects and thus smooth over the peculiarities of individual locations, differential labour costs, and geographical variations. Lazard estimated that a nuclear plant costs around $10,300 per kilowatt - or nearly twelve times the corresponding cost for utility-scale solar photovoltaic plants.

Interestingly while the cost of energy generated by renewables such as solar has dropped dramatically, that of nuclear has risen. The costs of "building a new nuclear reactor rose from nearly $6,800 per kilowatt in 2013 to $10,300 per kilowatt in 2021".

Given the problems of potential accidents, nuclear waste storage and the length of time taken to build new nuclear plants, the starting point for opposition to nuclear power should not be the costs. But Ramana's book makes the point that the costs matter precisely because nuclear continues to be touted as the solution by the industry, governments and politicians (of centre-left and right). In other words powerful groups remain committed to nuclear power despite its extremely high cost. Why is this?

One part of the problem is that these groups ignore or downplay the impact and threats of nuclear waste, potential accidents and the impossibility of deploying nuclear power plants on the scale and in the numbers to deal with the existing climate threat. But the real problem is that nuclear power is being promoted by people who have a lot to gain from the investment in nuclear power. Here Ramana's knowledge of the industry proves fascinating. In several examples he shows how nuclear companies have promised to build nuclear plants, then seen costs mushroom and profits leap. Sometimes the costs (and timescales) are astronomical. The now discredited company Westinghouse plannted to build a nuclear reactor in Georgia, which despite their claims it would cost $4 billion and take 36 months, ended up costing "$35 billion for such two reactors and a construction time of over ten years".

It doesn't take a genius to conclude as one commentator told the press, that "every euro invested in new nuclear power plants makes the climate crisis worse because now this money cannot be used to invest in efficient climate protection options". Indeed the "nuclear renaissance" that George W Bush launched in 2005 has cost $40 billion dollars, but "has not yet avoided a single molecule of carbon emissions".

This brings us to the second theme of Ramana's book: the wider context. I was intrigued to understand the cross over between nuclear power and the fossil fuel industry. Ramana shows how many nuclear companies also have investments in coal and oil. He points out that "talking about future nuclear power... is a strategy to shift attention away from their current energy mix". I would add though that it is also a way of maintaining the status quo. Such companies can claim they are reducing emissions elsewhere and continue with their fossil fuel activities.

But the biggest example of how nuclear power is promoted and desired, despite its dangers and costs, is its links with nuclear weapons. Here, I must confess, I learnt a great deal. In fact my own writings against nuclear power have underplayed this angle. The argument is best made by a quote that Ramana has from the physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the man who led the Manhatten Project. Oppenheimer said of a proposal for the international control of nuclear weapons:

We know very well what we would do if we signed such a convention: we would not make atomic weapons, at least not to start with, but we would build enormous plants, and we would design these plants in such a way that they could be converted with the maximum ease and the minimum time delay to the produciton of atomic weapons.

As Ramana shows the nuclear power industry has often been used by countries as a stepping stone to nuclear weaponary. The intimate links between the industry and nuclear bombs, submarines and so on, are carefully documented. Ramana says, "it is remarkable that whenever the nuclear power industry is in trouble, the strongest argument that officials use in order to obtain government support is to emphasize the overlap with military uses." This overlap is in producing raw materials, skills and training. The industry however is wary. The Dalton Nuclear Institute at Manchester University warned that the links must be "carefully managed to avoid the perception that civil and military nuclear programmes are one and the same".

Those in favour of nuclear power argue for it against all logic. They do this because they recognise that nuclear power plays a role within a wider economic and political system. Ramana quotes the billionaire Sam Altman (who runs OpenAI). One of Altman's concerns is of course having enough power to run the computer banks that power AI systems. But his fears for the lack of energy are also about wider critiques of capitalism:

The alternative to not having enough energy is the crazy de-growth stuff people talk about. We really don't want that... I think it's insane and pretty immoral when people start calling for that.

What Altman says here is just what the capitalist class think. As Ramana concludes:

Nuclear energy is being promoted by powerful elites in governments and businesses precisely because it comes with the promise, even if it will be ultimately a false promise, that the economic system can continue more or less along the same path while avoiding large-scale climate change.... Talking about nuclear power from new reactors serves to delay dealing with the climate crisis. Procrastination might be the thief of time, but it is good business strategy for companies that profit from the current system.

Ramana's book is a comprehensive demolition of the lies and technological limitations of nuclear power. But it is particularly powerful because he places these lies within the wider context of capitalist society and the logic that has caused the current environmental crises. While I felt that some of his points could have been expanded - I would have liked more on the carbon costs of the nuclear cycle (from mining to storage of waste) - there is plenty of material here to arm those looking for a rational, and sustainable energy policy. You don't have to be anti-capitalist to oppose nuclear power on the grounds of danger, waste or cost. But understanding the position of the industry in wider capitalist society illuminates a great deal. MV Ramana's book is thus urgent and necessary.

Gates - How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need
Bird & Sherwin - American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Sunday, November 16, 2025

Thomas King - The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

One of the first things that struck me about Thomas King's famous account of "Native People in North America" is that The Invonenient Indian doesn't particularly take much notice of the border between Canada and the United States. After all this imaginery line is really only that. Imaginery. The people who lived in North America (or Turtle Island as some groups describe it) didn't distinguish between the two nation states that were eventually imposed upon them. This ought to be an obvious point.

But so used are we to thinking about the nation state, that we impose it backward. King's book doesn't make that mistake, though in his history of people he does deal with the different paths that have led to different laws, politics and struggles among indigenous people. He writes "while the line that divides the two countries is a political reality, and while the border affects bands and tribes in a variety of ways, I would have found it impossible to talk about the one without talking about the other."

The second thing that struck me was one of King's comments about the hunt for the correct term for the people of North America. First Nations, Indians, Native Americans. What was the correct phrase to use? "Why do we need one?" he counters. After all these were not a single group of people at all.

The point I got from these initial thoughts was how easy it is to slip into very crude and simple approaches to people that stem from the world we live in today. "Being", Marx said, "determines consciousness". And the modern framework of nation states, imperialism and earlier colonialism still shapes these thoughts.

Thus King's book is refreshing in that its narrative is not a simple linear one of conquest, defeat and oppression. Though this material is all there - and sometimes it is shocking and unpleasants. Rather it is a discussion of what it means in terms of how Native Americans (for want of a better term) are seen, indentified, protrayed and understood by non-Native Americans today. King uses two categories to explain this, the Dead Indian and the Live, or Legal, Indian. The former is acceptable in a sense, because it is the Indian that lives in the imagination - in a thousand western films, or in books, or on food containers. It is the Native American of fantasy. It is one that can be dressed up as. The Legal Indian is the existing one, who has rights and land and as King says in a reprinted interview at the end of this book, "the Legal Indian is the Indian that Canada is trying to kill. They don't want no more Legal Indians".

Here King touches on the way that the "Legal" indian, with their land and (some) rights is a barrier to North American capitalism. Their land ownership, their legal rights, their reservations stop the profit machine. Here is the "inconvenience" of the title - the fact that Indians have fought for their rights, to defend and extend them - from the Indian Wars to the Wounded Knee Occupation in 1973. Some of the best parts of the book are those where King describes these more rescent struggles - or at least the battles of the 20th century over fishing rights, land access or wealth.

King makes a final, and important, point. He rejects the idea of a static Native American culture, or indeed one that is particularly mystical. Instead he says that "the fact of Native existence is that we live modern lives informed by traditional values and contemporary realities and that we wish to live those lives on our terms." Reality means that doing that will mean a constant struggle - against racism, oppression and exploitation. King's book shows that there is a long tradition of that and he does this with verve, passion and humour. Highly recommended.

ResoluteReader