ResoluteReader: 2025

Monday, October 13, 2025

Leon Trotsky - The First Five Years of the Communist International (Vol. I)

The setting up of the Communist Third International in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution was a conscious attempt to use the authority and experience of the Bolsheviks in Russia to spread and develop revolution and revolutionary organisation around the world. The leaders of the Russian Revolution, principly Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin had always made it clear that unless revolution spread, Russia's would be left isolated and die. The founding of the International in 1919 took place in a situation when revolution beyond Russia was real. Workers' soviets and revolutionary councils were a reality in countries like Germany, Hungary and many other places.

As one of the most authoritative figures of the revolution, Leon Trotsky's writings from this period, and specifically the writings, speeches and polemics that are part of this collection, are particularly important. They cover an intoxicating moment, when the Russian Revolution was a few years old and in the midst of Imperialist intervention, and when serious debates about revolutionary strategy are taking place. As part of the debates at successive conferences of the Commintern, Trotsky intervenes sharply in the internal discussions of three countries in particular - France, Italy and Germany. In the former there is a real debate about the need to break with the Reformist, opportunist, leaders of social democracy.

In France's case Trotsky writes two letters to leading figures using his personal connections to urge them to come over to the Communist cause. But, the main thrust of his polemic is to challenge the best elements of the working class movement - the anarcho syndicalists - on the need to break with their non-political practices. It is a sharp discussion that challenges the genuine revolutionaries to break with their past, and join the emerging Communist movement in France. It is also urgent, and the speeches drip with the pressure of events. Similar discussions, in slightly different contexts, take place with German and Italian comrades. Both of whom are grappling with the experience of Reformists in their ranks - the sell outs of 1914 and those in their ranks who are more concerned with revolutionary purity over and above the messy business of engaging in struggle.

In Italy in 1920 the revolutionary movement was inspired by the radical pronouncements of the Socialist Party, but these opportunists immediately backtracked when faced with a powerful working class movement leading strikes and occupying workplaces. In Germany similar groups of socialists had diverted the revolution of 1919 into Parliamentary channels, after murdering its best leaders. Some of the discussions at the meetings of the Communist International grapple with the nature of Reformism - a force that had little representation in Russia in 1917, but was a significant force in central and Western Europe based on the history of the Second International. Trostky says:

This epoch of proletarian reformation gave birth to a special apparatus of a labor bureaucracy with special mental habits of its own, with its own routine, pinch-penny ideas, chameleon-like capacity for adaptation, and predisposition to myopia. Comrade Gorter identifies this bureaucratic apparatus with the proletarian masses upon whose backs this apparatus has climbed. Hence flow his idealistic illusions. His thinking is not materialistic, non-historical. He understands the reciprocal relations neither between the class and the temporary historical apparatuses, nor between the past epoch and the present. Comrade Gorter proclaims that the trade unions are bankrupt; that the Social Democracy is bankrupt; that Communism is bankrupt and the working class is bourgeoisified. According to him we must begin anew and start off with – the head, i.e., with select groups, who separate and apart from the old forms of organization will carry unadulterated truth to the proletariat, scrub it clean of all bourgeois prejudices and, finally, spruce it up for the proletarian revolution.

Such debates are hampered by some wrong-headed thinking. In particular there are several early refences to the question of the labour aristocracy. Here Trotsky and others argue that a layer of workers are bought off by super profits from imperialism, and act as a break on the revolutionary movement. Though these workers were some of the most revolutionary in Petrograd in 1917, Germany in 1918-1919 and Britain in 1919. There is some truth though, but the Communist International, at least in this period, doesn't seem to get to grips with the real problem which is the trade union bureacracy who are a conservative brake on struggle due to being removed from the work force.

Perhaps the most interesting speech in this book however is the one that marks the transition from a period of immediate revolution to one where some economic revival in the capitalist nations has seen growing confidence on behalf of the capitalists. This Report on the World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Communist International is a remarkable text. Trotsky grapples with both the (hopefully temporary) retreat of the revolution and the changing economic circumstances. In particular he analyses the growth of American capitalism and what that means for the dynamics of global struggle. It's a striking discussion of the impact of World War One, the changing global picture and things like anticolonial movements. In particular Trotsky is discussing whether capitalism "is it either restoring or close to restoring capitalist equilibrium upon new post-war foundations?" His answer was very much that any stability that capitalism was experiencing in 1921 was temporary, and that there were deep seated problems for the system. A prediction that would prove terribly prescient by the end of the decade, and which anticipated the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, even in 1921 he could note the threat of a destabilised middle class hit hard by economic crisis. In the 1930s this class would form the basis of the European fascist movements:

The reformists pinned great hopes upon the so-called middle estate. Engineers, technicians, doctors, lawyers, bookkeepers, accountants, functionaries, civilians and government employes alike, and so on – all these constitute a semi-conservative stratum which stands between capital and labor and which must, in the opinion of reformists, reconcile both sides, while directing and at the same time supporting democratic regimes. This class has suffered even more than the working class during the war and after, that is, its living standards have deteriorated to an even greater degree than the living standards of the working class. The main reason for this is the decline in the purchasing power of money, the depreciation of paper currency. In all European countries this has given rise to sharp discontent among the lowest and even middle ranks of functionaries and the technological intelligentsia.

Trotsky argued that:

America’s productive capacity has grown extraordinarily but her market has vanished because Europe is impoverished and can no longer buy American goods. It is as if Europe had first done everything in her power to help America climb to the topmost rung and then pulled the ladder out.

What would be the consequence? Instability and war. Take this prediction from later in the same 1921 conference:

The last great war was – in its origin, its immediate causes and in its principal participants – a European war. The axis of the struggle was the antagonism between England and Germany. The intervention of the United States extended the framework of the struggle, but it did not divert it from its fundamental course. The European conflict was settled by the resources of the whole world. The war, which in its own way settled the contest between England and Germany and to that extent also the conflict between the United States and Germany, not only failed to solve the question of interrelations between the United States and England but has, for the first time, posed it in its full scope as the basic question of world politics, just as it posed the question of interrelations between the United States and Japan as one of the second order. Thus, the last war was a European prelude to a genuine world war which is to solve the question of who will exercise the rule of imperialist autocracy.

It is a remarkable prediction of war, and war on a far greater scale. What was the answer? That was the question posed by all the early conferences of the Communist International: the building of revolutionary organisation. How to do this, and how that changed as the situation evolved provides some of the clearest and most useful parts of this volume. In The Main Lesson of the Third Congress Trotsky reiterates how the Social Democrats had stopped the revolution in the critical aftermath of the Russian Revolution:

In the most critical year for the bourgeois the year 1919, the proletariat of Europe could have undoubtedly conquered state ower with minimum sacrifices, had there been at its head a genuine revolutionary organizatiom, setting forth clear aims and capably pursuing them, i.e., a strong Communist Party. But there was none. On the contrary, in seeking after the war to conquer new living conditions for itself and in assuming an offensive against bourgeois society, the working class had to drag on its back the parties and trade unions of the Second International, all of whose efforts, both conscious and instinctive, were essentially directed toward the preservation of capitalist society.

Had their been genuine revolutionary organisations that could have been avoided. The failure to do this was not the end of the revolutionary opportunity. The next volume deals with the critical period and the grappling of the Communist International with further threats to revolutionary Russia, and tactics for Communist Parties with significant memberships in periods of low levels of struggle.

There is much in this first volume though, and the clarity of Trotsky's analysis, the honesty of the debate among attendees of the meetings, and the serious attempts to learn how to develop the struggle are fascinating. While these collections are only Trotsky's contributions, and other volumes contain more, we can learn a great deal from them all. I look forward to the second volume.

[346] on the missing revolutionary party

Saturday, October 11, 2025

Seichō Matsumoto - Tokyo Express

Traditionally Tokyo Express is described as a novel that opens with the discovery of two bodies on a grim, rocky beach in Japan. They are apparently a couple, who've died by suicide. But actually the novel really opens with the women who work in a small restaurant where one of the dead couple is a waitress.

It's worth noting this slight difference, because central to this classic detective novel are small details of ordinary life. The women who work at the restaurant, whose clients are often wealthy (and corrupt) business men, play an important role in the novel as observers. They are led to see things by the characters, and its how and what they saw which makes the detectives who think there's something odd about the suicide, reevaluate.

Tokyo Express was first published in 1958. It is very much a novel about post-war Japanese society. A society in transition from the stifled, imperial, past to one of open capitalism. While tradition remains important, businessmen are corrupt and easily led. Government officials are lining their own pockets and covering up shady dealings and ministers are under investigation. It's a society in transition, but also on edge. Almost everyone, with the exception of the disheveled detectives, is out to grab what they can.

One other difference is worth noting. The new Penguin edition is a new English translation. The original English title wsa Points and Lines. That, in my opinion, is a far better title. It captures the essence of the novel which hinges on the detectives working out exact timings, connections and travel on timetables. One of the characters (and I avoid too many spoilers here) is unable to leave their sick bed. In doing so, they've become obsessed with the Japanese railway timetable. A similar detailed study by a detective helps break things through. This is a novel that hinges on times and travel, because its all about who could be where and how. And, if they were somewhere specific, then Japanese formality meant that they would leave their name to be trapped by bureacratic paperwork.

This then is a novel that could not have worked in the same way in England. Timetables here might have constructed the context, but the bureaucratic record would have not matched the detective's thoroughness. Tokyo Express then is a tightly written crime novel relying on superb levels of detail. But it's depth depends on close attention to culture and society.

Friday, October 10, 2025

Ronald Blythe - The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-1958

Like many of my generation I probably know Ronald Blythe through his most famous work Akenfield, his semi-fictional account of a rural farming community through the long change of the twentieth century. Finding The Time by the Sea in a second hand bookshop I was expecting something similar, but got something very different. Though Akenfield runs through the book - mentioned as it is in passing and for the film being made. This is the intimate account of Blythe's arrival in Aldeburgh and the community of artists, composers and writers that swirled around him. It is not an account of the "ordinary people" of a Suffolk costal town - though they do occasionally appear. Rather it is a collection of essays about experiences and relationships.

There are probably many of an earlier generation of cultural critics, literary experts and well read folk who will find in these pages a sequence of famous names. Blythe will drop the occasional nugget of information that is likely to be the source of (or sourced from) gossip. Some will find this entertaining. Others will find interesting the way that individual composers or writers found inspiration, motive or confrontation from others in their circles. Many modern readers likely myself will regularly resort to Wikipedia to find out who some, not so famous name, was.

But if all this sounds like Blythe's self indulgent account of a time and people long since past, I would disagree. Blythe's gentle meandering essays have much to calm an anxious mind, as you walk along the Suffolk beaches or wood paths with him. His style of shortened sentences had me in mind of something else - until I finally realised it reminded me of 1066 and All That, as the author presents a series of slightly connected statements before finally concluding.

There are many in these pages that represent English culture of the 1950s in all its staid and restrictive sense. Benjamin Brittain, Blythe's friend and the founder of the Aldeburgh festival, looms over the book (and the town). His circle includes Imogen Holst, Eric Crozier and the like. Composers, directors and figures intimately connected to the previous century through family and networks.

But there's something else, particularly important for Blythe's friend John Nash. Nash, a painter and illustrator, had like most of his generation, been transformed by the slaughter of the First World War. Blythe encounters him as a figure strill trying desperately to come to terms with the impact of that war. But by 1955 there had been another war, and another generation of scarred people. This time epitomised by the two Jewish families, Leon Laden and his wife the artist Juliet Perkins and Kurt and Gretl Hutton. Blythe talks about "their silence on the Holocaust", not as denial but as shock and horror. This is a poignant chapter as it shows them carrying "the terror of their time" which never "quite vanished". Its important because of what it tells us, but also because of what it shows was lacking among this literary set. Blythe can write eloquently about people, place, landscape and, indeed, change. But he and his fellows lack any real explanation for what has happened and why. It is, perhaps also the weakness of Akenfield. A brilliantly observant and honest account of what happened to people as British capitalism rose. But without any real sense of why or how. Socialism here is the realm of the a few mystics and oddballs - principly HG Wells - everyone else drifts about buffeted by forces beyond their understanding.

Read this for the time and the place, for the mention of people famous and forgotten, and for Blythe's poetry, comment and lyricalism. I enjoyed it, but was left empty. I needed more.

Friday, October 03, 2025

Nicola Chester - Ghosts of the Farm: Two women's journeys through time, land & community

In late 1940 Julia White arrived in a small village in Wiltshire. She was as old as the century and she had dreamed for most of her life of being a farmer. She was to live, in a caravan, on the land of the wonderfully named Miss Marguerite de Beaumont and her "romantic and business partner" Miss Dorothy Mason. There she learnt the basics of agriculture and eventually she, alongside Dorothy, ran her own farm, taken on as the country descended further into war and Britain's agriculture became as closely managed as its military. White was to learn more than agriculture though. Her 15 years spent running Manor Farm saw it turned into one of the best in the country. Simultaneously she become a central, and much loved, figure in her community. She looked after evacuees, and scouts, introduced machinary, built roads, provided water and electricity to her tenants, and dragged Manor Farm into the latter half of the twentieth century.

If Nicola Chester had written a straightforward biography of Julia White, it would have been a good book by any measure. White's life was remarkable. Her entry into the male world of farming, her farming life at a pivotal moment in British history during a time when British agriculture was being transformed is fascinating in and of itself.

But Chester has gone much further than that. By comparing her own life in rural Britain she has used a "distant mirror" to explore the world we live in today. From climate change to gender, from LGBT+ issues to horses versus industrial farming Chester covers some big questions. In studying the past, Chester does not romanticise. True there is fun; laughter, jokes, food and drink and happiness. But rural Britain in the 1940s and 1950s, as in the 21st century, also had poverty, tied cottages, low pay and greedy landlords. There was also the risk that the roof would fall in because the previous owner hadn't done any repairs for years.

This then, is a book about change and continuity. In his wonderful history of the Second World War, A People's War, historian Angus Calder noted that the 56,000 tractors on British farms in 1939 mushroomed to 230,000 by January 1946. Milking machines increased by 60 percent between 19424 and 1946. Calder wrote:

Agriculture was dragged... into the 20th century, the ploughman servicing hist rtractor and the farmer calculating his needs for fertilisers drew closer in spirit and attitudes to the engineers and manger who made, among other things, the new farm machinery.

Chester's account of White's period running Manor Farm shows the human reality of that change. We have the beloved older farm worker who has built, and decorated, his last haystack, the horses that are not no longer needed and the flocks of birds and clouds of insects that will disappear out as industrial agriculture sweeps across the land. As Chester says, with pain born of personal insight:

The horses vanish so quickly from the countryside, in justa few short years ,it is astonishing. And with them, so much else - wildflower meadows, clouds of butterflies, blooms of insectrs, works from the soil, birds from the sky, and people and their voices from the land. Singing. Mechanisation saves people, it feeds them; it allows ease to those punishing hard jobs and lives and covers the yawning gaps in labour.

Chester imagines herself travelling in time to talk to Misses White, Beaumont and Mason. She thinks about how they would react to books like Silent Spring. Would they be horrified? She's sure they would. White clearly loved the natural world. But would they do something different? Here Chester is less sure. Modern farming, and White's role in Manor Farm, was to maximise food production and profit. That meant getting the tractors and the combines and, sometimes, seeing the workers go into retirement.

The question of gender is, perhaps, the most central of the issues raised by Chester's book. White stood out as a female farmer. But she was part of a small number of women who entered that "realm of men". But she also wasn't that unusual. The war, writes Chester,

broke further the leather harness and traces of those social restriants already broken, kicked over or weakened by the First World War, a still-fresh and reignited memory; the fields and farms and relationships depleted of men.

Chester gives us a rural echo of that fascinating process which saw women brought into the workforce in enormous numbers, rapidly transforming them and society and one which was impossible to reverse when peace came in 1945. With work, and money, came independence. Or at least more independence than women had ever had. It shook the system. It opened new vistas and began a slow process that would explode again in the 1960s. That said I can't help but wonder about class here. It is possible (Chester is careful not to say for definite) that White was gay. Marguerite and Doris certainly were. Chester wonders at how that was seen by the other villagers. Was their sexuality tolerated more because they were women? Or because they were from a higher class with all the protection that money can bring? Or did no one care?

Chester points out that "we can be blind to what kind of acceptance or awareness of sexuality and gender relationships existed then on a day-to-day, getting-on-with-it attitude in a rural community." But we can't also forget that things are always shaped by the prisms of class and wealth. I like to think that there was acceptance of these women, and not just because they were the masters, but because I like to think that people are generally nice.

But no doubt everyone went through a process that saw their ideas change. Just as the locals became more accepting of women farmers in the male "realm" of farming when the saw them doing the traditionally male jobs. Perhaps this was also easier in rural communities too. After all women very much worked on farms. There's an amusing moment when a group of women collecting fruit from hedges stop to peer at White working. "Have you never seen a woman work before" shouts out one of White's (male) workers to the onlookers?

So why was it that by the 1980s Chester herself could not live her own dream? Despite her experience and knowledge, she was not able to become a farmer. While they couldn't put women back entirely in the home, there had been a rolling back of the gains of the 1960s. Margaret Thatcher might have been a female PM, but she, and her government, made things much harder for women. Chester's first book On Gallows Down covered some of those battles and defeats. But it remains clear that what had been missing in rural Britain was the sort of struggle that could have defended and extended the rights of women and the LGBT+ community. Indeed after 1945 the British countryside saw few working class struggles, and still less the trade unionism that could have led that fight - another consequence of the atomisation of industrial farming.

The past, we are told, is another country. But we can, occasionally, visit it - even if we never get the full picture. Ghosts of the Farm tells us a very real story of people striving to live the lives they want to. It also tells us much about how we have got here, and in particular, how we have arrived in a situation where the food we eat comes at the expense of the environment we rely on to produce it. Nicola Chester has not written political polemic. Instead she's produced a beautiful engagement with the people and places of the past to enable us to look around us with fresh eyes. You'll love it. I did.

Related Reviews

Chester - On Gallows Down: Enclosure, Defiance & the Cuckoo's Return
Calder - A People's War

Sunday, September 28, 2025

Joe Allen - Vietnam: The (last) war the US lost

The American war in Vietnam was, says author Joe Allen, the "greatest military defeat ever suffered by the United States". In the decades since, various US governments have tried, and failed, to shake off the "Vietnam Syndrome". This is the fear that any US military intervention abroad would result in troops becoming bogged down in an unwinnable war, while domestic discontent, anti-war movements and rebellion rose. Understanding what happened in Vietnam and the nature (and scale) of US domestic rebellion is crucial in order to know what is needed today to stop the US imperial machine. Joe Allen's book Vietnam: The (last) war the US lost sets out to do exactly that.

Allen begins by framing the US's Vietnam with the history of colonial occupation. The defeat of France's forces in Vietnam was a harbinger of what was to come. When the French were kicked out of Vietnam, the US stepped into "a devastated country". They "used the remnants of the French colonial state to begin building a new one", but the new state the US created in South Vietnam in the 1950s was "a brutal corrupt dictatorship". The puppet governments and leaders that the US supported in South Vietnam could not contain the discontent of ordinary people, nor solve the political and social crises that dominated. Crucially however, the post-France colonial settlement left intact the forces that could step into the gap.

Despite their attempts to avoid deploying troops to Vietnam, the US became deeper and deeper embroiled in war. Growing discontent at war melded with disontent at a host of domestic economic and political issues - particularly the question of civil rights. By 1968, as rebellion back home exploded, the anti-war movement surged. It was the year of the Tet Offensive, the assassination of Martin Luther King, urban riots and the growth of revolutionary and radical movements such as the Black Panthers. If most of us know anything about the anti-Vietnam war movement it is from this year.

But 1968 was the result of a much longer process. The gradual development of the Civil Rights movement, coming together with the peace movement was a key part of this. There had been a small, if signifiant, movement against nuclear arms in the US. While this was fervently anti-left, it provided the context for a layer of activists to begin widening the scope of their pacifism into opposition to imperialism. Simultaneously the Civil Rights movement was creating the conditions for a generalisation of politics among its activists:

Throughout the spring of 1960, thecountry witnessed a new, more militant stage of the civil rights movement. Beginning in Greensboro, North Carolina, more than fifty thousand young Black and white people participated in sit-ins against segregation at lunch counters, theaters, parks and swimming pools throughout the country but mostly concentrated in the South and border states. These sit-ins captured the imagination of northern students, drawing many of them into the South, and led directly to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Allen continues:

In May 1960... white students in San Francisco proved that the nonviolent tactics of the southern movement could be used effectively against other kinds of unjust authority.

The occasion for this was a large protest against the hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the body associated with McCarthyism and the US governments repression of left wing and progressive movements. In May 1960 the protesting students "battled the police" shocking the country. It was a moment that saw the "collapse in the ability of official red-baiters such as HUAC to inspire fear among Americans with liberal views".

This rapidly developing process of radicalisation came together with the defeat and demoralisation inflicted by the Vietnamese on US forces in Vietnam to create a potent mix of radical rebellion at home and within the military. But it was perhaps in "Black America" where this mix was to be so potent. Not least because the US military was dominated by Black troops - but also because of the reality of life in the US for ordinary Black Americans. Allen quotes an insightful comment by George L. Jackson, a US naval commander, "the Negro civil rights action has introduced definite constraints on the military capability of the US". It continues:

The most important of these constratings is that produced by the coalition of civil rights organisations and the anti-war organisations. This coalition has spearheaded the shift in public opiion away from support for the Vietnam conflict.

The intersection of the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war movement is quite well understood. But Joe Allen adds another crucial factor with one of his most important chapters, which discusses the US working class (and its organisations) and their relationship to the war. This chapter is important because discussion of US workers and the War often starts and ends with the protests in favour of the war and against the "hippies". What Allen shows though is that even from the early days of US intervention there was significant opposition to the War from working people. By October 1969, "a full page ad against the war" appeared signed by trade unionist Cesar Chavez and Paul Shrade, Western director of the UAW. Others were signed by leading figures in the Teamsters and the Chemical Workers. "Forty unions endorsed the Moratorium march in New York, labour leaders poke at many of the protests... thousands of union members attended the various protests that day." Allen concludes:

From the first Vietnam moratorium events in November 1969 to the explosion of rage following the Cambodian invasion, to the spring events of 1971, millions of Americans were drawn into political action against the war. The actions were becoming more militant, more working class, more multiracial and more left wing.

It was the beginning of the end.

Vietnam: The (last) war the US lost was published in 2008. At the time it was an intervention into the US anti-war movement by a socialist author determined to learn the lessons of the anti-war movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the questions it tackles - such as the importance of mass demonstrations - are clearly engaging with debates that were crucial in the 2000s as the US government invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Allen draws on the past to show how a radicalising and growing anti-war movement needed mass mobilisations to give confidence and develop the movement further. But he also shows how the movement needed to draw in wider forces, and wider social movements, to generalise the discontent and give a home to wider forces. Crucially he argues that US movements have to understand that the US imperialism is not all powerful, but that "the US must be put under tremendous pressure to turn away from its vital interests". At the same time it was the coming together of US resistance with Vietnamese resistance that swung the balance in the 1960s. When Allen was writing in 2008 that resistance, and that of the US "GI movement" in the 2000s was "still in its infancy".

While the book is a contemporary polemic it is, however, well worth reading today. When I reviewed Max Hasting's monumental history of the Vietnam War, I noted that it did not do justice to the anti-war movement in the US. This book does. But it also shows how that movement arose out of the intersection of other social movements, and the resistance in Vietnam against the US. Allen's book is a useful antedote to those who ignore the US movement, or see it as just a bunch of peaceniks and hippies. Crucially though, for progressives facing the rise of the right and the clampdowns of the US government today, it reminds us that millions of Americans have resisted, protested and rebelled again. That's was the force that helped pull US troops out of Vietnam and its the force that can defeat Trump today.

Alan Moore - The Great When

The idea of a secret world adjacent to our own is a compelling one in fantasy. In Alan Moore's new book, The Great When, the first of a promised quintet, the veteran fantasy writer and author takes it to a whole knew literary level. The Great When is the alternate London, only visible to those who have the imagination to join it, and then, perhaps only as the result of extreme tension, stress or danger. Young Dennis Knuckleyard, a second hand bookseller in a shabby post-war London first glimpshed the alternate London at the height of a bombing raid during the Blitz. He did not comprehend it then, and it is only with the discovery of a book that shouldn't exist, that he is able to stumble into the alternate space.

Moore places fast and loose with the alternate world. Its a place of danger and fantasy. Its a place where organic machines with multiple knives can escape into our world and murder. It's a space where death is all around, and where monsters and monstrous people pull strings to control normal London. Its somewhere were giant creatures epitomise riot, poetry and crime and those attuned during the Battle of Cable Street, or other events can glimpse them, striding about.

Dennis Knuckleyard has to return the book that shouldn't exist. But in doing so he is pursued by the criminals of the London underworld, determined to access the When themselves so they can profit from it. Young Dennis is swiftly exposed to a violent world, while navigating poverty, unemployment, sex and love.

Like all great fantasy novels The Great When is about more than just the fantasy world. Dennis' somewhat gormless entry into alternate London is matched by his gormless struggles to understand the much more sophisticated world of Grace Shilling, a young prostitute he falls for. But that world too exposes him to violence and horror.

There are some great moments, and some clever running gags. I enjoyed the LOSED and PEN references to the shop door. But the book is special because of its literary twists. Moore loves playing with language, throwing in references, double-meanings and references. London itself is a character in The Great When, and those who have lived there will get more than just clever puns on names on its street names. The more gothic prose, when the text changes to italics as Dennis enters other London, need a little more attention that some readers might enjoy. But it's worth perservering, as Dennis' comes to terms with the new world out there and learns who and where his friends are. Superb. I cannot wait for the rest of the series.

Related Reviews

Aaronovitch - Rivers of London

Tuesday, September 23, 2025

Adam Higginbotham - Challenger: A true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space

The first time I went to the United States in the very early 1990s, when I told anyone I was a space and astronomy enthusiast, everyone wanted to tell me their recollections of January 28, 1986. It was a seminal moment for that period, and perhaps the most important collective event for American citizens until September 11 2001. The Challenger disaster was particularly poignant and memorable because it was the flight which promised to make the possibility of the ordinary person in space more than just a dream. Christa McAuliffe was an ordinary teacher on board the mission, and she, alongside six other astronauts died several minutes after a leak on one of the shuttle's booster rockets exploded the fuel in the main tank.

In the aftermath of the disaster NASA came under extreme scrutiny. The Roger's Commission set up by the US President to investigate what happened declared it "an accident rooted in history". They singled out how a succession of choices made by senior managers at the company that manufactured the booster rockets and NASA bureaucrats combined to give the go ahead for launch on a day when temperatures made failure of the crucial O-Ring component very likely. This was despite the energetic and powerful opposition for key rocket engineers.

But Adam Higginbotham makes it very clear that the "history" of the shuttle, and the potential for disaster began many years before 1986. His account of the development of the shuttle as a break from the Apollo programme was rooted in the US government's desire to make regular space usage cheap and profitable - as well as a key component of the US's military strategy. Despite the enormous technical difficulties of a reusable spacecraft, Nasa was driven to make a vehicle that could be reused, with senious figures and politicians daydreaming of weekly flights. But cost cutting, out-sourcing, design flaws and extraordinary political pressure to get the Shuttle aloft meant a series of technical shortcomings and potential floors were made. In addition, as Higginbotham repeatedly points out, decisions about flights were often made under pressure - not the immediate pressure of a politician on the phone, but an internal pressure caused by NASA culture.

Higginbotham's book is very much the biography of a number of key individuals. The lives and training of the astronauts is told in detail which means the disaster, which you know is coming, is very personal. But it also serves to highlight the horror that results from budget cuts and bureaucratic pressure. But also here are the accounts of the engineers, some of whom never recovered from their failure to stop the flight and several of whom made enormous sacrifices to expose the shortcomings and failures that led to Challenger's explosion.

For a teenager obsessed with space, the Shuttle programme was shiny and inspiring. Challenger makes it clear that in many ways it was a sordid, overly expensive, project that could never deliver on early promises. That's not to detract from its potential, but to recognise that a system that puts profits before people and places national prestige above safety and rational planning, will only ever deliver space programmes that eventually cost lives. Tragically the deaths of the seven Challenger astronauts where followed in 2003 of a futher seven astronauts as Columbia exploded on re-entry. The investigation after that disaster found that few lessons had been learnt in the long term, and failures of communication and leadership overruled the safety decisions that could have saved lives. While Higgenbotham's excellent book is about Challenger, it is also very much about how organisational corner cutting can be deadly. The details may often be technical, but the story is very human.

Sunday, September 21, 2025

Loren Goldman & Massimiliano Tomba - Thomas Müntzer and the German Peasants' War at 500 Years

I don't often review academic journals on this reading blog, but this special issue of History of the Present caught my eye. Despite the intense discussion around the 500th anniversary of the German Peasants' War in Germany there are few publications in English so I was pleased to get hold of this.

At first glance this is an eclectic mix. Alongside some engaging and penetrating articles on Thomas Müntzer and his legacy, there are some new translations by Andrew Drummond of key related texts and extracts from Eric Vuillard's excellent novel The War of the Poor. Drummond's contributions also include a fresh working of the Twelve Articles of the rebellious peasants. Though the most useful translation here is of Martin Luther's Letter to the Princes of Saxony, Concerning the Rebellious Spirit. It is helpful to have this accessible as it is not in every Luther collection. In it we see, once again, Luther's use of the Bible as an authority to justify princely destruction of the rebels:

For Your Princely Graces know well that your power and worldly sovereignty are given to you by God with the command that they should be used to keep the peace and punish the unruly, as St. Paul taught in Romans 13. So Your Princely Graces should neither slumber nor miss this opportunity. God will demand an answer of you if you neglect to use the sword that has solemnly been entrusted to you. And the people and the world would not forgive it if Your Princely Graces were to tolerate and suffer such rebelliouos and outrageous violence.

Later, says Luther, "it is either us or them". But note. This is an article from June 1524 before the main rebellion has started. The "sword" here is not yet the physical sword, though the ambiguity must have been useful. It is the metaphorical sword. Luther warns "we are quite prepared to allow and tolerate it if you fight back with words, so that the true teaching is protected. But we declare that you should not use force or mobilise any troops. For we, who chamption God's word, should never fight back with the fist". Within a year Luther would abandon that position and urge the princes to "stab, smite, slay".

Understanding why Luther could come to such a violent position, and in particular the role of Müntzer in advocating for a rebellious struggle against the status quo is part of the purpose of the new material in the book. An excellent introductory article by the editors places Müntzer and the "War" in the context of 500 years of history. They conclude that "to remember Müntzer and the Peasants' War today means exploring the not-happened and the not-yet-explored". This highlights the importance of the period and the struggle (as well as Müntzer's own ideologies) in creating spaces to think about the future and try and shape it. Müntzer was expert at drawing and building on radical traditions to advocate for a common future, at the same time as "protecting it in a tehological shell". His thinking is both universally radical, while at the same time being constrained by the time and place in which he was developing his thought.

This "insurgent theology" is the subject of Massimiliano Tomba's main piece. He makes an important point that while Luther created new ideologies to "justify the princes' authority" as above. But others expanded on this. Hegel "celebrates the Reformation" and sees in it the transition to a new order freer of theological constraints, constructing a "specific conception of freedom and rationality to a universal principle for the foundation of law and the modern state". Tomba points out, that this was to stabalise society in the wake of a struggle that had almost torn apart the old world. It would be Engels and Marx who would take this further and see within the post Peasants' War society a stagnation of development and theory that would hamper German development until the 20th century. As Tomba says:

The trajectory that emerged victorious from this clash used armed violence to suppress the insurgents and used theoretical violence to weaponize concepts and categories in order to neutralise the concrete possibilities contained in diffrent political and legal trajectories.

The Reformation, at least in this stage, was shaped by the class struggle of the GPW, and the ideologies (principly Müntzer's) that emerged out of the struggle. Had Michael Graismar not been isolated in time and space on the other side of the Alps, he might also be listed here for his more developed economic thinking. What came out of this Reformation's victory, was a top down process that imposed change from above. It was, as Tomba says, the "culmination of a war machine against different visions and practicies of life in common". Though here I would suggest culmination is an inadequate and passive definition. A better word would perhaps be victory. It was, if nothing else, a class war that was won by the ruling class.

These themes are explored further in Loren Goldman's article on Müntzer in the "Marxist imagination". Goldman points out the way Marxists, in three key periods, have used the GPW to explore their own contexts. Engels, famously, in 1850. Kautsky in the 1920s seeing Müntzer as "harbinger and herald of the urban industrial proletariat class" and and Bloch who sees Lenin in Müntzer. It is a reminder, Goldman says, that any historical character, "reflects the insurgent particularlity of those who summon it". Here it is difficult to agree, but we could also add that the State Capitalist regime of East Germany put their own spin on Müntzer. A revolutionary precurrsor to their own society, that helped a veneer of socialism to be painted over the anti-democratic nature of their hierarchy.

Two other essays are worth mentioning. Alejandro Zorzin's study of the impact of Müntzer in Latin America, particularly on revolutionary liberation theology, opened up new areas for me. It is remarkable to see how radicals, working with limited translations, were able to use Müntzer for new activist and theoretical reasons. Anne Norton's study on Müntzer also brings fresh material. Here she explores the way Müntzer could use scatalogical and vulgar language to pierce the powers of hierarchy and wealth. She says, quoting Müntzer "They stink, all of them, the powerful and their military minions, for these 'enemies of the cross have crapped their courage into their pants'."

Parallels with 2025 are obvious. But Norton cautions us not to draw too many parallels, not least between the "sovereignty" of the rebels of 1525 and contemporary revolutionary democratic theory:

This conception of sovereignty differes radically from the conception of 'the people' as a unifed and uniform whole... It acts in a dispersed, disseminate form, seeding the democratic. It is embedded in people as they work to rule themselves. Sovereignty is in them, in their bodies. If is in their earthly, material presence, that the right to rule is present in the world.

Perhaps the common theme that emerges from most of these essays is that Müntzer's radical vision in 1525, which emerged from the class struggle that was the Radical Reformation, is not a blueprint, but an inspiration. It is a tool to shape contemporary revolutionary thought - to inspire of course - but also to open the radical imagination. Müntzer will continue to be read to remind us that we can think beyond the political spaces we already have.

Friday, September 12, 2025

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

Thursday, September 11, 2025

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.

Saturday, September 06, 2025

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.

Tuesday, September 02, 2025

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 previously, 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 are tensions here as the youngsters chafe at the restrictions and society. Is the threat 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

Tuesday, August 26, 2025

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 (where 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.

Sunday, August 24, 2025

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.

ResoluteReader