David Reynolds - Slow Road to Brownsville

One day, while in Swan River, Manitoba, Canada, David Reynolds learns that road 83, "goes to Mexico". On enquiring further he learns that this is actually true, the road eventually leaves Canada and becomes Route 83, which makes its way south through North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, the Oklahoma panhandle, and Texas, before arriving in Mexico at the US town of Brownsville on the Rio Grande. Reynolds is in Swan River because his grandfather ended up there - an immigrant from the UK looking for work, and he has written an autobiography about the man he never knew.

But Route 83 gives him another idea. How about driving the whole length of it and writing about what he sees and who he meets. He isn't the first. It turns out that lots of people have made the journey, and indeed many Canadians made a habit of travelling south for holidays, and the people they befriended down in Texas used to come north for meet ups. Along the route he finds plenty of people who have travelled some of 83. But he also meets many people who haven't, and sometimes they haven't really left the immediate area they were born in.

North-South roads in the US are not quite the same as the East-West ones. Those, Reynolds points out, are routes to carry lots of travellers long distance. The vertical routes don't have the same need, and thus aren't quite as well supplied in terms of rest stops. Much of 83 is actually two lane road, and it makes for a quiet, if slightly cliched, road trip. For this is small town America, but it is a trip through a small town rural coutnryside filled with history. Reynolds muses on the colonial expansion of the US, racism and the treatment of indigenous people and the nature of rural America itself.

Reynolds is a classic English liberal. He shys away from confrontational politics, but he does meet plenty of people prepared to talk about the things you might expect. Racism, Indians, Guns, Democrats and liberal themselves. Everyone who has been to middle America, or its adjacent states will know that they are friendly and welcoming. Interested and suprised to receive visitors from far away, and proud of their areas. Reynolds however was travelling in what feels like a different time - Obama was just into his second term - and to Reynolds at least, the right feels isolated and on the retreat. Reynolds finds plenty to shock and worry him - not least the open racism he experiences in several places. But his diary of the trip feels a very different place to the United States in the first year of Trump's second presidency.

Like all road trip books, readers will find themselves wishing that the author didnt have to move on quite so fast. There's plenty of stories that we only scratch the surface of, and it feeds this readers on desire to return to this part of the world. But Reynolds is an honest enough writer and observer of people to give his readers a real feeling of the places he travels through. The book is also filled with references and quotes to the books that Reynolds reads about the places - a goldmine for future travellers. One this did irk though. Reynolds is unnevering in his physical descriptions of the people he meets. I'm not sure there is any real need, even when discussing the obesity epidemic, to talk quite so much about how people (and if we're honest it's mostly the women) look.

That said, this is an enjoyable read that has a lot to say about America before Trump.

Related Reads

Estes - Our History is the Future
Zinn - A People's History of the United States: 1492 - Present

Michael Christie - Greenwood

In 2038 the last forest survives on a remote island off British Columbia. The world's woodlands have been destroyed by a cataclysmic disease, that has destroyed huge swathes of humanity and undermined the global economy. The forest, private land, is tended by scientists and forest guides who maintain it for the wealthy tourists to visit to be "regenerated in the humbling loom" of the last trees. Jake Greenwood shares her name with the billionaire owner of the island, a timber tycoon whose wealth was based on the ravaging of North America's woodland. Now Jake is heavily in debt and desperate to cling on to her job.

The Greenwood island is at the epicentre of this multigenerational story. Jake is the latest of a long line of people, who have an association with the land and the forests, and after the opening chapters that detail her place on Earth, the story skips back 150 years to tell how the rich got rich and destroyed the land, woods and people along the way. Its an epic tale, much of which centres on an itinerant veteran of World War One who makes his living tapping maple trees for syrup, and comes across an abandoned baby. Persuded by the powerful and wealthy agents of the millionaire father, Everett carries the baby through a North America wracked by economic depression. This story forms the centre piece for the remaining links to Jake, and the modern world - the story of an abandoned baby and a world gone chaotic around her.

Its an amazing tale, and Michael Christie has done wonders to weave countless threads together. From the 1930s depression era railroad cars to Earth First style direct actions against logging equipment, the book is filled with fully drawn characters, who constantly force the reader to ask themselves why we live in a world with so much beauty at the same time as hunger and destruction surround us. But this is no crude political tract, its a story that links future dystopia to a chain of events - both human and economic. The powers unleashed by a handful of billionaires in search of yet more wealth, draw countless others into the swirling maw. The trees that are stripped and destroyed and burnt along the way, merely fuel for the accumulation of wealth, yet poignant reminders of what we stand to loose. Great novel.

George Edwards - From Crow-Scaring to Westminster

George Edwards was born in rural Norfolk in 1850, the child in a "miserable" cottage of "two bedrooms, in which had to sleep father, mother and six children." At the time his father's wage "had been reduced to 7s. per week". Such poverty, and the appalling working and living conditions that were imposed on agricultural workers at the time, shaped Edwards' life and thought. His father had been a soldier, and an agricultural worker, thgouh his exemplary service bore him no long term benefit. Having protested against unemployment with others in the parish of Marsham, George Edward's father found himself unable to get work.

The punishment for organising against unemployment, low wages and poverty were severe, and as Edwards relates throughout his autobiography the only way to successfully do this was through trade union organising. There were two great periods in Britain of agricultural trade unionism. Edwards was part of the first, which saw the leadership of Joseph Arch and a wave of strikes that shifted the bosses massively. But he was central to the second, and by then was an established trade union leader, and on occasion, paid official. 

As the title of the book demonstrates, Edwards very much saw his most important trajectory as being from the poor beginnings to Parliament. A similar path was trodden by Arch, and both of them - the first and second agricultural workers to become MPs, fell easily into the trap of finding in Parliament the establishment recognition they craved. Arch, is must be said, comes out of it far better than Edwards. Both of them however, end up blaming the workers who cheered them on for their failures. Edwards, however, is far more of a cynic than Arch, the latter of whom retained faith in workers' struggle till the end of his life.

Edwards, by contrast, despises workers' struggle. For him it was the last choice representing failure of negotiations. At one point, in describing the battles of the 1910s, Edwards rights, "I was... determined that I would do everything that was humanly possible to prevent a strike of this magnitude". He continues:

I can't explain it, but I always had, I took a leading part in the trade union movement, the greatest horror of a strike, and would go to almost any length to prevent it, so much so that many of my friends used to say that I went too far in my peace-loving methods.... I have made many mistakes, but that is not one of them.

Edwards' revulsion of strikes stems, in part, from the position he found himself in, as a local trade union leader with an economic interest in avoiding actions that challenged the union. But also from his own weak politics. Edwards' came from a Methodist background. His socialism was not that of Marx and Engels. It was that of the pulpit and Christian socialism. An avid reader, taught to read by his beloved wife, Edwards lists many of obscure books that inspired him. Few of them would be recognisable to socialists today. His politics lacked an understanding of class and power, even though he sided with the lower classes - he is clearly unable to see that struggle is the only way to challenge the entrenched reality of capitalism. Reformism for Edwards flows from his faith and his politics.

That said when battles did happen, Edwards took his side - both on the pickets and in the union. The Norfolk union was built through hundreds of meetings, arguments and discussions. Edwards' training as a Methodist preacher served him sell here. One cannot fail to recognise that it was Edwards' hard labour (and thousands of miles of cycling) that built the trade union, and it was he who was punished by the union itself when the St Faith's strike of 1911 was sold out so that there would be no struggle to distract from the General Election. Edwards' discussion of this period in his book is in part a settling of accounts. The tiresome reproduction of motions aside, it is clear that Edwards' at least held on to a principled defence of the strikers' right to continue and their democratic decisions. Edwards was right. Fifty percent of the strikers did not get taken back, despite the union leadership's compromise.

Nonetheless historian Reg Groves is no doubt right when he wrote of Edwards:

George Edwards tells the stroy from the standpoint of one who was an active worker for the Liberal Party. He saw the growth of the union rather in terms of his own development, of his own slow passage from mesmbership of the Liberal Party to membership of the Labour Party. His opinions change little, if at all: he aw things much at the end of his life as he had done in the early days, and he remained for a long time coparatively indifferent to the changing opinions of the workers themselves, who were hearing and responding to the message of socialism.

Much of the latter half of the book is taken up with somewhat tiresome anecdotes and reprints of speeches and motions that detail the struggles inside the union as the movement went into decline. Then Edwards' election campaigns see reprints and extended quotes from favourable news reports and speeches. As a result there is very little of interest to those interested in rural history or agricultural trade unionism. The book becomes more and more about Edwards, and less and less about the conditions around him. In fact, it is noticeable, that even when describing strikes and protests that he was central too, Edwards is rarely speaks about the struggles, or those struggling. Despite the huge scale of the trade union movement at times, there's little flavour here of the strikes or the movement itself. It makes for a dry read.

One other thing that comes through is how Edwards' loyalty to the British state manifests itself against his better principles. The worst example of this is how he becomes a cheerleader and recruiter for the First World War. The horrors of those battles means he becomes determined to ensure those who returned get treated decently. But he never wavers from the idea that it was right for thousands of agricultural workers' to be sacrificed in the trenches for British capitalism. No doubt this approach is why he had such a fine time in Parliament.

Tiresome and dry though this book is, it confirms on almost every page the essential limitations of socialism without class struggle. Most readers will find in it an interesting insight into the way that Methodism and reformism found in themselves appropriate partners in the British Labour movement. It helps illuminate the way that British Labourism was born tied to the coattails of Imperialism, and how it has failed ever since to break. If you can suffer through the terrible Methodist hymns you might find something of interest. 

Related Reviews

Arch - From Ploughtail to Parliament: An Autobiography
Horn - Joseph Arch
Ashby - Joseph Ashby of Tysoe: 1859-1919
McCombs - The Ascott Martyrs
Groves - Sharpen the Sickle! The History of the Farm Workers' Union

Greg Steinmetz - The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The life and times of Jacob Fugger

In 1526, the Tyrolean radical Michael Gaismair, wrote a remarkable document known as The Landesordnung. In it, he outlined how a radicaly democratic society could function, based on social justice, religious freedom, equality and, through curbing the actions of the rich and powerful. In it, he demanded that the mines, an important part of the Austrian economy, be bought under democratic control and taken off the likes the Fugger bankers. They, and their kin, had

forfeited their right to them for they [bought] them with money acquired by unjust usury in order to shed human blood. Thus also they deceived the common man and worker by paying his wages in defective goods…raised the price of spices and other products by buying up and hoarding stocks. They are to blame for the devaluation of the coinage, and the mints have to pay their inflated price for silver. They have made the poor pay for it, their wages have been lowered in order that the smelters can make some profit after buying the ore. They have raised the prices of all consumer goods after they gained a monopoly, and thus burdened the whole world with their unchristian usury. 

Sadly this quote doesn't appear in Greg Steinmetz' account of the life and times of Jacob Fugger. But having read it, one can certainly sympathise with Gaismair and the rebellious peasants and miners who flocked to his call. Fugger was indeed one of the richest men ever to have lived, and as Steinmetz's account makes clear Fugger was uniquely for his time, adept at seeing business opportunities and using his existing wealth and power to get further wealth and power. He counted among his clients kings, monarchs and popes, and he played politics like a giant game of chess across Europe all in order to further his own ambitions.

Unfortunately Steinmetz's book suffers from superficial analysis and simplistic comment. Writing of the great German radical Thomas Müntzer, Steinmetz says that he "was the most dangerous to Fugger. It was not because he had the most guns but because his populist agenda held enormous appeal". Müntzer did indeed rail against "the profiteering evildoers", but then so did many others. Müntzer was a threat because his brand of radicalism was linking up with a mass movement - not because he was uniquely radical. The revolutionary movement of 1525 was, after all, a massive challenge to all the powerful and weathly. 

Steinmetz charts Fugger's rise to power, and in particular highlighting the way he was able to extract wealth from labourers and use that to strengthen his hand. It is notable, and Marxists might appreciate knowning it, that the world's first capitalists and bankers were as ruthless as others. Despite the lack of serious competitors, Fugger seems personally driven to accumulate wealth for the sake of it. Even Steinmetz who is clearly sympathetic to the banker's lot is forced to acknowledge that Fugger's methods were devious and nasty. In the case of the repression of the peasantry and their allies, Steinmetz notes that Fugger "sponsored" "savagery".

Despite these insights, Steinmetz tends to give Fugger far more credit than he is due. He is portrayed as the figure who personally drives forward key moments in central European history. Steinmetz doesn't appear to be engaging in hyperbole when he improbably claims, that Fugger

roused commerce from its medieval slumber by persuading the pope to life the ban on moneylending. He helped save free enterprise from an early grave by financing the army that won the German Peasants; War, the first great clash between capitalism and communism. He broke the back of the Hanseatic League... He engineered a shady financial scheme that unitnetniotnally provoked Luther to write his Ninety-Five Theses... he most likely funded Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe.

Like Brecht, we might wonder who else built Thebes of the Seven Gates? The problem is that this account fails to acknowledge the very real changes taking place within the economic base of European society in the early 16th century. The changes that were driving all sorts of economic, political and theological changes and opening up a space for others. By placing these changes in the hands of one individual (to be fair Steinmetz does say "helped") the authors is simply engaging in that favourite bourgeois fantasy of the individual discontected from society and the wider world. 

Tragically there are no modern biographies of Jacob Fugger, and Steinmetz has at least written one that covers the key moments of Fugger's life. Sadly its not without fault. It also has some annoying mistakes. Fugger claims that Müntzer was finally defeated in battle at Mühlhausen "a small city Müntzer gad seuzed and sought to run as a communist utopia". But this is wrong. The battle took place at Frankenhausen, and is today marked by a significant museum.

Greg Steinmetz's biography of Fugger will likely have a renewed readership as a result of the anniversary of the Peasants' War. It is perhaps most charitable to say that it is the sort of biography you would expect "a securities analyst for a money management firm in New York" to write, and use it as a jumping off point for more serious studies elsewhere.

Related Reviews

Klaassen - Michael Gaismair: Revolutionary and Reformer
Blickle - The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants' War from a new perspective
Baylor - The German Reformation & the Peasants' War: A Brief History with Documents
Drummond - The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer

Rudolf Hoess - Commandant of Auschwitz

This is, in everyway possible an utterly repugnant book. I must start out by saying two things. Firstly none of the proceeds from this publication go to Hoess' family. The publishers say that royalties go the "help the few survivors from the Auschwitz camps". Secondly, reading this book is an insight into the minds of the figures who made the Holocaust happen. Written as it while under arrest and facing trial for crimes against humanity, it is naturally distorted and with much self-justification. The shocking thing is that Hoess is surprisingly unashamed of his actions.

Hoess starts his book with his childhood, in a strictly Catholic family. He was himself expected to become a priest, and his parents seem strict, but highly moral. He says, without any sense of self-irony, that "I was taught that my highest duty was to help those in need". From his early life he believed in the importance of service, duty and obeyance of orders from those in superior positions. He eventually served in the First World War in Iraq, and like many Nazis, he saw action in the Freikorps. This led to his imprisonment for his role in the murder of a far-right figure who was believed to have betrayed another nationalist to the authorities. Following his imprisonment, Hoess who was already a Nazi member, lived in a far-right rural commune, until the new Nazi regime found him a position in the Concentration Camp system. Hoess' knowledge and contact with leading Nazis in the aftermath of WW1 say him rise quickly - as did his commitment to the cause, and his organisational skills.

This background is important. Partly because it is important to understand the trajectory that Hoess took to get his position runing Auschwitz. Mostly however it ensures that the reader understands that Hoess was a committed Nazi. He wasn't in charge of the world's most appalling death camp because he was good at organisation. He was in charge because he was committed to Nazi ideology and to following the orders of the regime's leaders. 

According to the Auschwitz museum, about 1.1 million people died in the camp. Most of these died while Hoess was in charge. It is impossible then for the reader to be anything but shocked by Hoess' comments. He says, for instance, of his work in Auschwitz:

I though that the construction and completion of the camp itself were more than enough to keep me occupied, but this first progress report served only to set in motion an endless and unbroken chain of fresh tasks and further projects. From the very beginning I was so absorbed, I mist say obsessed, with my task that every fresh difficulty only increased my zeal. I was determined that nothing should get me down. My pride would not allow it. I lived only for my work.

"I lived only for my work" in the death machine that was Auschwitz is such an extraordinary statement that it takes the readers breath away. With paragraph's like the above, it can seem that Hoess is trying to depict himself as a technical functionary, obsessed with the details of the "machine" but unconnected to the wider murder of the camp. Indeed, Hoess's anger at the extreme Nazism of the Der Stürmer newspaper, the newspaper that was avidly read by SS staff in the camp for its extreme antisemitism, is because it undermined the proper functioning of the camp and "far from serving serious anti-Semitism, it did a great deal of harm". This is a theme for Hoess. His frustrations at problems in the camp are because he is frustrated at being unable to properly carry out his order. Hoess himself explains.

When in the summer of 1941 [Himmler] gave me the order to prepare installations at Auschwitz where mass exterminations could take place, and personally to carry out these exterminations, I did not have the slightest idea of their scale or consequences. It was certainly an extraordinary and monstrous order. Nevertheless the reasons behind the extermination programme seemed to me right. I did not reflect on it at the time: i had been given an order, and I had to carry it out. Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked the necessary breadth of view.

While he says that he did not form an opinion at the time. He does not allow himself to argue that it was wrong after the event. Indeed, much of his criticism of the extermination policy comes, not from a moral outrage, but because he thinks it was a waste of labour. Thus the millions of Jews and others who died in the camps are dismissed by Hoess.

Indeed Hoess "watching the killing" himself. The sections of the book where he describes this, and the individual tragedies his witnessed are some of the most difficult pieces of writing I have ever read. Time and again he says things like "the killing of these Russian prisoners-of-war did not cause me much concern at the time". Hoess is more focused on describing the technical solutions, and supply problems that hampered the extermination programme. In fact, at times, the book reads most as a tract written to prove that Hoess was good at his job. Hoess was happy in his work, "In Auschwitz I truly had no reason to complain that I was bored". He continues by explaining that when he was "deeply affected by some incident" he was able to go riding, or see his family, until the "terrible pictures" had been "chased away". Homelife was idylic:

My family... were well provided for inAuschwitz. Every wish that my wife or children expressed was granted them. The children could live a free and untrammelled life. My wife's garden was a paradise of flowers. The prisoners never missed an opportunity for doing some little act of kindness to my wife or children, and thus attracting their attention.

I will spare the reader here by not quoting the passages were Hoess indifferently describes the murder of people, or watching their deaths through the windows of the gas chambers, or his efforts to make the process more efficient. In his introduction Primo Levi says that the book is "filled with evil, and this evil is narrated with a disturbing bureaucratic obtuseness; it has no literary quality, and reading it is agony". He continues that Hoess comes across as "a coarse, stupid, arrogant, long-winded scoundrel, who sometimes blatantly lies".

The "bureaucratic obtuseness" that Levi refers to is accurate. But we have to be careful at simply seeing Hoess' actions as just reflecting the "banality of evil". What Hoess did and describes in this book reflects that he was more than just a functionary. He was committed to Nazism. His strict obeyance of orders flowed not from having a personality that enjoyed organisational work, but because he saw in Himmler and Hitler leaders who he was personally and politically commited to. He was a Nazi through and through, and his last paragraph statement that he was "unknowingly a cog in the wheel of the great extermination machine created by the Third Reich" is exposed as a lie by every preceeding paragraph. Hoess was not a cog in an office far away from the camps. He was looking in through the glass observation panels as trainload after trainload of Jewish people died. He was also happy to kill himself. To those SS men whose moral was sapped he could only offer inspiration by reminding them of the Nazis' plan. 

My interest in Rudolf Hoess came from seeing the recent film Zone of Interest. If anything this book exposes Hoess as a far nastier and brutal person than the film does. I don't think I have previously read a book by a Nazi. It has left me feeling sick and angry. But also committed to making sure that the 21st century fascists never get a chance at power again.

Related Reviews

Evans - Hitler's People: The faces of the Third Reich
Evans - Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial
Roseman - The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution
Mazower - Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe
Browning - The Origins of the Final Solution

James W. Loewen - Lies Across America: What our historic sites get wrong

When Donald Trump became President for the second time, among the batch of plans issued in the first few days, were two that raised eyebrows for their seeming ridiculousness. The first was the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. The other, less commented on, was a plan to rename of Denali mountain in Alsaka, to Mount McKinley. Trump called this a chance to "restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs". 

Ironically, Denali gets the opening chapter in James W. Loewen's classic book Lies Across America: What our historic sites get wrong. In it, Loewen explains that Denali "the great one" is a ridiculous choice in the first place that caused nearly thirty years of debate when it first happened and doesn't actually name the President. That's not to say that Denali wasn't renamed Mount McKinley after William McKinley who became President and was subsequently assassinated. It's just that the renaming took place before McKinley was elected. The mountain was called after him because the namer "favored conservative fical policies, while most people in the West wanted to expand the amount of money in circulation by minting more silver coins". 

It was "little more than a joke" according to one historian. Once the name did get up, it became a battle ground for left and right - for those defending actual history and indigenous culture, and those who prefer to celebrate the history of white European settlers. "It's an insult to the former President" cry those who want to keep the McKinley name, but as Loewen point out, "most Americans don't rank William McKinley very high... They remember him if at all as a creation of political boss Mark Hanna, beholden to big business, and addicted to high tariffs". This is a case of the invention of tradition.

This discussion sets the tone for Loewen's fascinating book which discusses how history is remembered in the United States, and indeed why it is remembered. Sweeping West to East, and down through the American South, Loewen explores countless sites and shows how a particular view of US history is portrayed - one that expresses the dominance of European settler culture, celebrates imperialism, and downplays or ignores events and individuals that challenge this narrative. 

There are some shocking things. There are the monuments to slave owners and the "docile slaves". The celebrations of Confederate defeats that make them look like victories, and the lauding of vile, violent, racist individuals who are portrayed as their opposite. There are monuments and statues that mark the defeat of "savage" indigenous people, lie about massacres (even one marker that commerates a "massacre" that never happened) and portray non-white people as subservient and stupid. There are also booster monuments, designed to attract tourists to the places such as the location were the first car drove, even though it didn't. Lies indeed.

Loewen gives an interesting view into the debate about whether statues should "fall". He argues, convincingly, that statues should not necessarily be destroyed. They could be removed, or replaced with information plaques that celebrate real history, or give a truer account and explain why the original statue was there. However he also notes that some statues were placed as deliberate acts of intimidation and provocation. These should be removed. But how should they be recorded?

One statue, known for many years by the racist term "The Good Darky" shows how this can be the case. It was erected in downtown Natchitoches, Louisiana. It was "from the start, intended to beuseful only to the cause of white supremacy". It markes, as the inscription says, the "grateful recognition of the Arduous and faithful service of the Good Darkies of Louisiana". This "service" was the alleged support of some slaves for the South's war to defend slavery. It ignores the many slaves who escaped to fight with the Union, as well as those who didn't flee from fear of violent punishment - but certainly did not support the South. The statue was also designed to remind black people after the war of their place, and their subservient position during segregation. Jokes about the statue by local whites suggested that it was a place were drunk black people could find their way home. But the statue really showed the position that black people were supposed to have to white people - subservient, bowed, secondary. It was not a depiction of the past, but a demonstration of the present.

Loewen writes of the subservient posture of the person depicted on the statue that, "the servile pose of the statue was no myth but a rational response by African Americans to an untenable situation. The response, like the statue, was nevertheless a white creation."  Loewen continues about what should happen to monuments like this:

American rejoinced when Poles and East Germans toppled their statues of Lenin. Within our shored... we are not so sure. When statues become controversial... civic leaders sometimes suggest that they be carted off to a museum. The statue of 'The Good Darky' shows what can go wrong with that solution. Although run by a university, the Rural Life Museum [where the statue was moved to] has not used 'The Good Darky' to 'provide insight into the largely forgotten lifestyles and cultures of pre-industrial Louisiana,' the museum's avoed purpose. Instead it situated the statue in a place of honor. No plaque gives any information about it history of symbolic meaning.

I read the second edition of this book, is that Loewen explains how the book has changed since its first edition. The updates reflect real change since 1999, as the 2000s saw an enormous blacklash against monuments that depicted problematic things and a growing interested in how history was marked. This, Loewen argues, was the result of two events. The first was the murder of nine blcakc churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, by a "neo-Confederate". Almost overnight many Confederate monuments that had been subject of long campaigns for removal, where taken down. The second was Black Lives Matter, which physically confronted statues as well as forcing a global reappraisel about how the history of slavery and racism were depicted and understood. As such, some of the monuments in the first edition have been moved, changed or destroyed. Others remain. But it is fascinating to see that while Loewen's book's first edition certainly did make a difference and forced some places to reconsider their monuments. It was the mass movements and the revulsion at racist violence, that made the real difference.

This is important for today. Because Trump's renaming of the Gulf of Mexico and Denali mountain is not a random act of stupidity. It is a calculated attempt to reshift how history and geography are used to understand and shape people's knowledge of the world. It is an attempt to reverse the gains of our movements, and it is an attempt to reconsolidate and empower white supremacy and racism. It should be resisted and reversed. Lies Across American remains a powerful tool in that struggle.

Related Reviews

Kuhn & Gill - Topple the Mighty
Blackburn - The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights
Rediker - The Amistrad Rebellion
Nerburn - Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce
Corbin - Gun Thugs, Rednecks & Radicals: A Documentary History of the West Virginia Mine Wars

Jenny Erpenbeck - Go Went Gone

Jenny Erpenbeck's Go Went Gone was first published in German and deals with the important political issue of Europe and refugees. It's central character is a retired, and widowed, professor of literature, Richard, who finding himself at a loose end after retirement, discovers a community of African refugees who have set up a tent city in Oranienplatz, central Berlin. From late 2012, Oranienplatz was the site of such an encampement and Erpenbeck's book clearly draws on this political protest movement and its consequences, as well as individuals who were part of it. 

Richard is drawn to the refugees, his personal isolation, and his feeling that his life lacks direction in retirement, lead him to think about documenting the lives of the refugees. Quickly however he finds himself helping, encouraging and teaching them. 

I was initially skeptical about the book, worried it was going to turn into a "white saviour" trope as Richard solves all the individual issues that the refugees suffer. Instead it is quite the opposite. Richard finds himself unable to push through the legal barriers erected by a racist German state that provent refugees finding sanctuary or work. He is frustrated that the skills of these men are not utilised by a country desperate for young and experienced workers. He is trapped by the logic of a charity based system of refugee support that only treats the men as passive victims. And finally he is poleaxed by the horrors that he has seen.

Erpenbeck depicts all of this with sympathy, nuance and anger. One of the refugees, Rufu, is medically treated for psychiatric issues. Yet it turns out his fundamental problem is not mental health, but a agonising dental issue that no one has diagnosed, because no one has treated him as a human being and tried to communicate properly. Instead they assume he is having some sort of psychotic episode. Osarobo would like to learn the piano so Richard offers him the use of his own instrument. Richard buys Karon land in Ghana, not because he is a white saviour (he is...) but because the barrier has broken down between them. Richard sees the refugees not as numberless refugees who survived the perilous crossing, but as humans like him.

Since its publication racism directed towards immigrants and refugees in Germany has only increased. State support has been reduced, the lives of refugees have become harder, and the growth of fascist and far-right organisations has fuelled animosity and hatred towards the communities who are desperately seeking a new life and assistance. This book is not a political polemic. There's pages denouncing the European Union whose racist policies have led to thousands drowning in the Mediteranean and fuelled the far-right. But implicit in the book is a sense that liberal politics, when scratched, are really not that liberal - but quite racist.

There's a clever plot line in the book when Richard's middle class, intellectual and academic friends gradually realise that one of their own group is actually quite racist. The shock to them is real. The refugees and their situation, as well as their resistance as they protest the government's plan to displace them once again, has forced the liberal intelligensia to see things differently. The refugees here are not a backdrop - they are humans who want to live their lives, but are forced to fight back because the system itself won't let them have lives.

The ending is, well, ambiguous. Just as the refugee problem under capitalism with its borders, barbed wire and nation states will always be. But there is hope, on an individual level, for Richard and his friends. Their is sympathy, mutual learning and the sharing of meals. But if Jenny Erpenbeck's novel tells us anything - its that this is no solution to the fundamental problem. But that does not mean we shouldn't fight to make people, and governments, see refugees as humans who can help us build the future we want.

Kay Dick - They

Kay Dick's They is a forgotten classic of the dystopian fiction that is perhaps more relevant today than when it was first written. Despite Dick's popularity, when They came out in 1977 it sold badly. It was republished in 2022 after being rediscovered in the early 2020s. 

They is an unusual novel, seemingly more a series of interconnected short accounts, which defy easy classification. There is little "story" here, so to speak, rather a series of experiences in a future Britain, mostly set in a buccolic countryside to where dissidents have been banished, or escaped. They roam the country, hunting down culture and cultural producers. Artists, poets, singers and composers are imprisoned and punished, sometimes in the most barbaric ways. The punishment often fits the "crime". A poet has her writing hand held over a flame for eight minutes. Painters loose their eyesight. Others are taken away, and return, their bodies whole but their minds broken. They are mere cyphers, obeying and meekly watching TV.

Resistance is seemingly futile, but, resistance there is. People learn songs, books and poems by heart. Protecting the vanishing culture inside themselves. Books disappear, their absence noticed the next morning, because They come in the night, or when they are unobserved. Their vessels moored off shore, constantly monitoring and watching. In the face of the repression, many opt to collaborate, or hope it blows over, or even to shop those who are fighting to stay human and keep their art. Spies are everywhere, so are those who would, stasi-like, inform on their neighbours for singing or reading. Nonconformity is the only way to be safe.

Those who do not fit the standards deemed fit are also persecuted. Those who live alone, or don't watch TV, or behave unusually are singled out. It's not difficult here to see parallels for the persecution that Dick herself might have experienced as a gay person in mid-century Britain.

To me though the book is mostly about resistance, and how the act of resistance keeps you human. The central characters hold onto their humanity and their culture, not just to survive, but because doing so speaks hopefully of a better future. As Carmen Maria Machado notes in their introduction, the poet whose hand is burnt so badly for daring to write poetry is writing again. Having learnt to use their left hand. It is a powerful declaration of humanity and rebellion. While They might not follow normal patterns of writing it is, nonetheless a book that speaks to a time when having the wrong opinion or failing to conform, can, in many parts of the world have severe consequences.

Christopher S. Mackay - False Prophets and Preachers: Henry Gresbeck's Account of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster

This is a remarkable account of a remarkable series of events. From February 1534 until the early summer of 1535, the German city of Münster came under the rule of the Anabaptists. Then, Anabaptists were at the forefront of the most radical interpretation of the Reformation, and had developed a significantly radical vision of how society should be run. The Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster began as a radical utopian experiment in living, including the redistribution of wealth and resources. But for a number of reasons, particularly the appaling conditions caused by the siege of the city by the region's hostile bishop and lord, the experiment collapsed into a vicious theocratic state. 

The Anabaptists were inspired by a specific reading of sections of the bible, which drove their actions:

Acts 4 seemed to validate direct inspiration of men through the Holy Spirit; verses 32 through 37 were taken to mean that the followers of Christ should share their goods communally, and the radicals’ confiscation of the property of the faithful in Münster was one of the more shocking events to sixteenth-century (and later) sensibilities.

But until Henry Gresbeck's account became available, we've only had second hand sources as to what happened. Gresbeck was the only eyewitness to events within Münster who survived to write down his experiences. His survival was due to his escape from the siege toward its end and his betrayal of the city. This allowed the bishop's forces into the city where they began the most henious repression and pillaging. Hundreds of Anabaptists were killed and their leaders tortured and executed. 

Gresbeck's account is, as Christopher S. Mackay explains, extremely important. It is the only first hand account of Anabaptist Münster, and it provides important evidence to collaborate other sources. Mackay has done an amazing job of bringing together and translating the surviving copies of the original documents and creating a readable whole. But as Mackay warns, "Gresbeck’s retrospective account is not without its own difficulties". Principaly Gresbeck is silent on his own role during the period of the siege, and he is writing for a hostile ruler, intending to justify his own role in the capture of the city, and hoping to get back his own wealth and freedom.

Nonetheless, by reading criticially, and with the Mackay's superb annotations and footnotes we can learn alot about those strange and amazing times. Mackay also provides one of the best introductory accounts of the development of Anabaptist thinking, and the background to the Münster events. As he says:

The events of Münster are incomprehensible without a clear understanding that the main driving force behind the radical leaders was the belief that the events portrayed in the book of Apocalypse were about to come to pass and that they would play a prominent role as the 144,000 who would do battle with the forces of the Antichrist.

Gresbeck himself may, or may not have believed this. But it is notable that he did stay a lengthy time in Münster, not availing himself of opportunities to leave until absolutely necessary. Though, given that the besieging forces usuaully behaved appalling to those who did escape, and that punishment for those who were captured trying to get out was equally vicious, it's possible this was discretion being better than valour on Gresbeck's part. Mackay suggests however that while "abstract theological doctrines were not an issue of great concern to him. One is left with the impression that Gresbeck was an enthusiastic supporter of the idea that a community of socially and economically equal Christians was to be established in Münster."

That said, in his writing for the bishop, Gresbeck certainly hedges his bets. Here are some of his comments written after the defeat of Münster, about the redistribution of wealth:

The preacher Stutenberent continued, “It’s not appropriate for a Christian to have any money. Be it silver or gold, it’s unclean for a Christian. Everything that the Christian brothers and sisters have belongs to one person as much as to the next. You shall lack nothing, be it food or clothing, house and hearth. What you need you shall get, God will not let you lack anything. One thing should be just as common as the next, it belongs to us all. It’s mine as much as yours, and yours as much as mine.” This is how they convinced the people, so that they (some of them) brought their money, silver and gold, and all that they had. But in the city of Münster, the idea that the one person was to have as much as the next turned out unfairly.

Gresbeck's final caution here reads much like those who admonish 21st century revolutionaries that "it will never work". Nonetheless socialists today might be interested in reading about how the redistribution took place:

After the property became common in this way, they appointed three deacons in each parish who were to guard the property consisting of produce, grain, and meat, and any sort of foodstuffs that there were in the city. These deacons entered all the houses and examined what in the way of food, grain, and meat each person had in his house, and they wrote a list of everything that each person had in his house. These deacons went through the city. Each group of deacons went around their parish and were to examine what sort of poor people there were in the city and not let them lack anything. At first, they did this two or three times, but this practice was eventually forgotten because they still had provisions enough in the city. It was with a good appearance that they carried out this procedure in Münster. After they drew up the list for each house, no one had control over his possessions. But if they’d hidden on the side something that wasn’t listed, they were able to retain it. 

This redistribution of wealth was popular, and people did flock to Münster - no surprise given the prevailing poverty in wider society. But I am wary of those who suggest (as writers like Ernest Belfort Bax did) that Anabaptist Münster was some sort of precursor of the revolutionary Paris Commune. One reason for this was there was no democracy. As the siege progressed and deprivation increased power in Münster was concentrated in the hands of the self-declared king, John of Leiden. Gresbeck details how John of Leiden put himself at the top of a hierarchy of power that used violence to ensure his bidding was followed. While Gresbeck gives some account of events for laughs, he does give us an insight into how the "king" created a new, military, state that allowed him to enjoy wealth and food, while the masses inside the besieged town were reduced to eating cats, dogs and rats to survive. Hardly a socialist utopia. Instead this was a theocratic terror state that ruled by fear and murder.

One aspect of the Münster events that has led to much commentary was the institution of polygamy. This makes for some of the most distressing parts of Gresbeck's account. The rulers allowed men in Münster to take multiple wives, against the will of those women. This was justified on the basis of Old Testament scripture, suggesting that the men should have multiple wives and produce multiple offspring to spread Christianity. Whatever the ideological justification, it is clear that this was an incredibly oppressive experience for almost every women, and led to violence and rape, even of children. In fact this situation caused a small uprising against the Anabaptist rule, which John of Leiden stopped with brutal force. Gresbeck does detail other examples of hidden resistance, and people did escape and try to get messages out. But this was not the majority experience. It begs the question, why did Münster hold out so long? In part this is because of the threat of violence - both from the besiegers and from internally. It also was because people seemed to genuinelly believe, or were led to believe, that relief from outside was on its way - and there's so credibility to this. We know that sympathetic Anabaptists did try to rise up and come to the city's aid. But by the time it was desperately needed this was now just fantasy from King John, desperate to offer some hope to hold onto power.

By the time that Gresbeck escaped and led in Münster's enemies, it is clear from his account that the city was on its knees. That does not, however, justify the pillaging and mass murder of civilians by the invading forces. One of the reasons that Gresbeck's is the only account from an eyewitness, is that nearly everyone else was murdered. Münster's enemies wanted to end the rebellion. They also wanted to rub out any other idea that radicals should try and redistribute wealth elsewhere. One might speculate how things could have been different had the bishop not moved to isolate and break the rebellion immediately the Anabaptists were elected to power.

Henry Gresbeck's account of Münster is remarkable, if at times hard to read. It does however repay reading and Christopher S. Mackay has done a superb job of framing and producing Gresbeck's work in a format that is easily accessible to the contempoary reader. For those interested in the Radical Reformation and its consequences, it is a must read. Highly recommended.

Related Reviews

Bax - The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists
Stayer - The German Peasants' War and the Anabaptist Community of Goods
Stayer - Anabaptists and the Sword
Kautsky - Communism in Central Europe in the time of the Reformation

Leon Trotsky - The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany

The recent election results in Germany should have left everyone on the left thinking about the rise of fascism and how it can be averted. While the situation is not the same as the 1930s, emboldened by the second election of Donald Trump there is nonetheless a terrifying rise in confidence for far-right and the fascist movements globally, especially in Europe. 

In the 1930s the Russian revolutionary Marxist Leon Trotsky led a battle within the international Communist movement over the direction of the Communist Parties. This battle was principly over revolutionary strategy and at the heart of his argument was the question of Germany. Germany had a big Commuist Party, and a recent revolutioanry experience. It also had a mass Nazi party, and discussions over tactics to challenge and defeat Hitler were key to the differing visions of Trotsky and the Stalinist left. Trotsky was isolated within the Communist movement, exiled from Russia, he relied on newspapers and letters from small numbers of supporters, who kept him informed. Nonetheless, despite his isolation, he kept up a steady stream of letters, articles, pamphlets and polemics that desperately urged a shift in the course of the German Communist Party (KPD) to enable it to defeat fascism.

The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany is a collection of these writing by Trotsky published by Pathfinder with an introduction from the Belgium Marxist Ernest Mandel. There is a wealth of material here, though readers without some knowledge of the period and the Communist Left, as well as Trotsky's isolation from the revolutionary movement could do well to read some background material. This is in part because Mandel's introduction and some of the introductionary material in this edition is either too brief, or, in the case of Mandel, aimed at a different audience of the 1960s when fascism was not an immediate threat.

The articles represent a number of different approaches of Trotsky to the immediate tasks of the left. The first is understanding the nature of fascism in the 1930s, the second tactics to defeat it, and finally, understanding fascism in the context of Marxist ideas of "bonapartism". There is, out of necessity, repetition. But there are some important conclusions worth noting. Firstly Trotsky's analysis of fascism as a counter-revolutionary force:

Fascism is a product of two conditions: a sharp social crisis on the one hand; the revolutioanry weakness of the German proletariat on the other. The weakness of the proletariat is in turn made up of two leements: the particularly historical role of the Social Democracy, this still powerful capitalist agency in the ranks of the proletariat, and the inability of the centrist leadership of the Communist Party to unite the workers under the banner of the revolution.

Trostky here is clearly writing of fascism in the 1930s, in a period of prolonged economic turmoil and an era when there was an urgent desire of the capitalist class to see the workers' movement blunted and weakened. Its not strictly true today, as fascism has grown in slightly different circumstances. Nonetheless Trotsky's repeated point that "fascism would actually fall to pieces if the CP were able to unite the working class, transforming it into a powerful revolutionary magnet for all the oppressed masses of the people" holds true. What does also remain true today is the way that fascist forces and the far-right in general are growing in the context of general despair at the way mainstream parties have failed to deliver anything for ordinary people. It is also true that in many parts of the world the left, an the trade union leadership have failed to lead the stort of struggles that could win gains for working people and begin to rebuild the movements that can challenge facism. 

Trotsky rages against the analysis of the KPD and the Communist International under Stalin that sees imminient failure for Hitler after each successive election. Trotsky's writings become increasingly desperate and you can feel his frustration at missed opportunities by the KPD fail to undermine the Nazis. The election results, with the Nazis share of the vote declining slightly, that that of the KPD increasing lead to ridculously optimistic positions. In the same piece that was the source of the quotes above, Germany, the Key to the International Situation, Trotsky writes a brilliant piece of analysis that is directly relevent to today. He points out that in the fight to stop fascism "votes are not decisive" the struggle is key:

The main strength of the fascists is their strength in numbers. Yes, they have received many votes. But in the social struggle, votes are not decisive. The main army of fascism still consists of the petty ourgeoisie and the new middle class: the small artisans and shopkeepers of the cities, the petty officials, the employees, the technical personnel, the intelligentsia, the impoverished peasantry. On the scales of election statistics a thousand fascist votes weigh as much as a thousand Commnuist votes. But on the scales of the revolutionary struggle a throusand workers in a one big factory represent a force a hundred times greater than a thousand petty officials, clerks, their wives and their mother-in-law. The great bulk of the fsascists consists of human dust.

How to mobilise this force? The KPD was convinced that it simply needed to declare itself the inheritors of the Russian Revolution and win people to abstract ideas of socialism. Their "third period", in which they labelled the Social Democrats, "social fascists", was designed to tell workers that reformists were the same as Nazis and draw people to the genuine socialists. It had the opposite effect. It prevented the left from uniting over a common programme of stopping the Nazis. The millions of voters for the KPD and the Social Democrats could have been a power to stop Hitler, but were wasted because of the KPD's sectarianism, a sectarianism that as Trotsky repeatedly points out, came directly from Stalin in Moscow.

Some of the most powerful, and tragic parts of this collection are the sections when Trotsky seeks to win people to this vision of a United Front. He draws on his experiences in the Russian Revolution, particularly that during the attempted Kornilov Coup, as well as the early experiences of the Communist International which drew out these ideas for how revolutionaries could relate to workers in a non-revolutionary period. Some of these arguments are surprisingly practical, and provide some of the most interesting and useful parts of the book for today's socialist movement. For instance, in For a Workers' United Front Against Fascism Trotsky writes:

Election agreements, parliamentary compromises concluded between the revolutionary party and the Social Democracy serve, as a rule, to the advanage of the SOcial Democracy. Practical agreements for mass action, for purposes of struggle, are always useful to the revolutionary party... No common platform with the Social Democracy, or with the leaders of the German trade unions, no common publications, banners, placards! March separately, but strike together! Agree only how to strike, whome to strike, and when to strike! Such an agreement can be conluded even with the devil himself, with his grandmother and event with Noske and Grzesinsky. One one condition, not to bind one's hands.

Predicitably, Trotsky's enemies seized on the last polemical idea to unite with the enemies of the workers, to defeat the immideate threat. Their criticisms ignored the body of the argument - a clear strategy to defeat fascism through unity of action by the left and a united workers movement. Trotsky also polemicises against those in the Communist movement who attack Trotskyism, and points out the hypocrisy and the failings. But Trotsky has no mass movement to win the argument and the German working class is defeated. The final chapters in this collection show Trotsky drawing his conclusion that the Communist International has failed and that a new International is needed. 

One surprising thing about this book is that Trotsky doesn't analyse fascism mcuh in terms of its racism and antisemitism. He is mostly concerned with the tactical needs of the movement, and fascism as a force that has "raised itself to power on thew backs of the petty bourgeoisie, which it turned into a battering ram against the organisations of the working class and the institutions of democracy".

He continues, "but fascism in power is least of all the rule of the petty bourgeoisie. On the contrary, it is the most ruthless dictatorship of monopoly capital". But Trotsky is well aware that fascism is a reactionary ideology based on "darkness, ignorance and savagery". Writing as he does from 1930 onward he doesn't need to highlight its antisemitism and racism - it is everywhere evident. He does point out that:

Everything that should have been eliminated from the national oranism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism.

But while it is true that fascism was the rule of monopoly capital. The Nazis did demand their blood payment and that's what led to the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jewish people as well as four million others, plus a global war that killed millions more. Trotsky did not live to see that, though he had a clear understanding that Hitler in power would lead to mass murder. It is, however, a bit unforgiveable that Mandel's introduction doesn't in attempt analyse in any way the Holocaust and events after the Nazis came to power. It is a strange omission on any level.

While much of this book is a polemic by Trotsky at a crisis moment for the European working class, there is much here of interest and importance to the revolutionary left today, trying to build against the growth of the far-right and understanding the role of figures like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. Trotsky's writings cannot be directly applied to 2024. This sort of crude Marxism that takes positions from the past and superimposes them on the present was exactly what he was attacking Stalin for. But that doesn't mean that Trotsky's analysis is dated or irrelevant. Far from it. It'd encourage socialists today to read, or re-read these essays, and think about "how to strike, whome to strike, and when to strike".

Related Reviews

Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution
Trotsky - 1905
Trotsky - On Britain
Trotsky - An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe
Cliff - Trotsky 1: Towards October
Cliff - Trotsky 2: Sword of the Revolution
Cliff - Trotsky 3: Fighting the Rising Stalinist Bureaucracy
Dunn & Hugo Radice (eds) - 100 Years of Permanent Revolution: Results & Prospects

Jo Anne Salisbury Troxel - Waiting for the Revolution: A Montana Memoir

In 1932 an extraordinary funeral took place in Plentywood, in the north-eastern corner of Montana, in the United States. Janis Salisbury, the fourteen year old daughter of Rodney Salisbury, was buried in a "Communist funeral". The room, drapped in red flags, saw a service culminating in the audience singing radical and revolutionary songs. It was a shocking moment for many in Montana, but Plentywood, alongside much of Sheridan County, had many radical and socialist activists and voters. They, angered by poverty, economic turmoil and unemployment repeatedly supported socialist candidates and organisations.

The story of Sheridan County's radicalism has been well told by Verlaine Stoner McDonald in her book The Red Corner: The Rise & Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana. Waiting for the Revolution, is a deeply touching and often inspiring memoir of those times and the aftermath by Janis Salisbury's half-sister by Rodney Salisbury, Jo Anne Salisbury Troxel. She tells the complicated and often stormy account of her parents with the radicalism of the 1920s and 1930s as the backdrop to her life. Jo was born to Rodney and his lover Marie Chapman, who was his partner for thirteen years until Rodney's untimely death in 1938. At the same time though Rodney was married to his wife Emma and, Jo's mother was also married. Despite their clear love for each other Rodney and Emma could not marry, as Emma would not divorce. Rodney was not just a socialist sheriff in his Plentywood days, he had been a Communist candidate for governor, an agricultural workers' union organiser and a revolutionary organiser.

These complicated relationships are emblematic of the wider conservatism of the years. Despite the radicalism of the era, and Rodney and Marie's on socialism, they were trapped by the logic of the system. Jo's memoir tells the story of them and their wider families, placing it in the context of their activism, but in many ways telling a story that is really about the impoverishment and unemployment of the 1930s in the US rural hinterlands. It is not surprise that Marie is an alcoholic, and her and Rodney's children have a different relationship with the adults around them. 

These conditions aside, it is remarkable to read about the radicalism. Rodney and Marie carry their politics through their lives, and it was imbibed by Jo, who maintains a radical set of principles to this day. But her parents, isolated as they must have been in Montana, were principled socialists - siding with Trotsky against Stalin, and working to build the earliest Trotskyist groupings in the US. Readers might like to read the obituary for Rodney that was published in Socialist Appeal on his death in 1938 to a get a sense of the radicalism that existed in 1930s Montana. Sadly it does not mention Marie, though it does talk about Emma a "good wife, companion and teacher, who sympathized with and joined him in his revolutionary outlook".

But most of Jo's account is not about this history - it forms the backdrop to her own story, and that of her family. Shaped by poverty and economicly difficult times, it reminds us that Montana is not just a state of beautiful National Parks, but of class struggle, trade unionism, and the fight for a decent life. Waiting for the Revolution is characteristic of much of American local history, often a little overburdened by complex family trees, these books are nonetheless immeasurably important insights into a history that is fast disappearing. 

Related Reviews

McDonald - The Red Corner: The Rise & Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana
Doig - Bucking the Sun

Louise Erdrich - The Mighty Red

Set in the lonely east of North Dakota, The Mighty Red is an impressive novel that draws out the isolation of small town, rural America and casts it against the swirling realities of capitalist agriculture, ecological degradation and loneliness. Alongside this Louise Erdrich draws out a story of a local tragedy that has left the town's population scarred and desperate for love to heal their collective wounds.

The novel opens with Kismet Poe, named by a whimsical mother, who hopes that hear daughter will escape that confines of small town America. But Kismet is in love with the bookish romantic Hugo, while being heavily courted by the high school sports star, aspirant farmer Gary. Kismet is too kind to refuse Gary's marriage proposal, and the confines of American culture to restrictive for anyone, even the adults, to understand that youngsters don't need to get married to enjoy sex and love for their early years. As Kismet falls into a marriage she knows she doesn't want but cannot say no to, their wedding day is nearly ruined as Kismet's father absconds with the church renovation funds.

Kismet is now trapped, literally, by Gary's family. Stuck on a farm whose topsoil is vanishing before everyone's eyes. The neighbours are trying out new-fangled organic, no drill farming, but they're the weird ones. Preferring to grow food instead of the local sugar beet cash crop. Hugo leaves his bookshop (Erdrich's novels often seem to feature bookshops, presumably like her own in Minnesota) and heads to Williston to make his fortune in ND's gas fields. Fracking is booming.

Kismet has to escape, but doing so means learning what really happened at that town tragedy, whose participants seem to have sworn some sort of pact of silence. The cover-up needs to be uncovered - not for legal reasons, but so that everyone can move on.

Erdrich has constructed a lovely novel of humanity, youngster's trapped by their circumstances and isolation, and the inward looking life of the adults. The drugs, drink, poisoned air and rapacious capitalism that undermine any effort to be different - or indeed normal. Kismet's at the heart of this, her steely character surviving the twin buffeting of her father's betrayal, her new family life and a soulless marriage. Her escape is wonderful, as is her steadfastness. It's a beautiful book. Louise Erdrich has her finger very firmly on the pulse of America. It will be interesting to see what she writes in the coming years.

Related Reviews

Erdrich - The Sentence

Alexander Rabinowitch - The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd

Alexander Rabinowitch is an interesting historian. From a Russian émigré family, he grew up listening to stories about how the revolutionaries had expelled them. Visitors to his family home in the US included figures as important as Kerensky, the former leader of Russia's Povisional Government during the 1917 revolution. Rabinowitch became a historian, and while a young man, as part of his research he travelled to Russia in the 1960s to research Lenin. Expecting to find evidence that Lenin was a dictator in waiting who brokered no argument, Rabinowitch actually found the opposite. What he discovered was that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were riven by debate and discussion, even in the weeks and days before the revolution, and that far from a monolithic organisation, the Bolshevik Party "was both responsive and open to the masses" in that revolutionary year. In his introduction Rabinowitch writes:

For all the lively debate and spirited give-and-take that I find to have existed within the Bolshevik organisation in 1917, the Bolsheviks were doubtless more unifed than any of their major rivals for power. Certainly this was a key factor in their effectiveness. Nonetheless, my research suggests that the relative flexibility of the party, as well as its responsiveness to the prevailing mass mood, had at least as much to do with the ulimate Bolshevik victory as did revolutionary discipline, organisational unity, or obedience to Lenin.

It is a remarkable conclusion for historian who is not also a Leninist, or at least a revolutionary, and it is to Rabinowitch's credit that he did not allow his own prejudices to block his conclusions.

The book is not an account of 1917, though it does begin with a good overview of the background and the first few months of the revolution. The focus is the "coming to power of the Bolsheviks" and this means Rabinowitch begins with the crucial turning point of the revolution, the summer of 1917. July 1917 saw a mass revolutionary impulse, and how to respond to this caused enormous debate within the Bolsheviks. The author details the various disagreements - which essentially focused on whether or not to call for insurrection and support the Petrograd workers as they demanded a Soviet government. Lenin argued it was premature, though it is clear that not all the Bolsheviks agreed. The confusion over this, and the eventual repression saw the right-wing able to turn their guns on the Bolsheviks. Leading figures like Lenin went into hiding, hundreds of Bolshevik cadre were imprisoned and repression was high. In the aftermath things looked bleak. But the threat of a far-right coup against the revolution, and crucially, also against Kerensky, under the figurehead of the fascist general Kornilov, enabled the Bolsheviks to place themselves at the heart of a mass movement to defend the revolution. 

The United Front approach of the Bolsheviks here, allowed them to recover crucial ground and place themselves back in the revolutionary leadership. But as Rabinowitch explains, the success of the revolution from this point onward was not automatic, contrary to the Stalinist myths of the infallibility of Lenin and his party:

The entire history of the party from the February revolution on suggested the potential for programmatic discord and disorganised activity existing within Bolshevik ranks. So that whether the party would somehow find the strength of will, organizational disciple, and sensitivity to the complexities of the fluid and possibly explosive prevailing situation requisite for it to take power, was, at this point, still very much an open question.

But in the aftermath of the attempted coup by Kornilov, what mattered was not simply Lenin winning the rest (or the majority) of the Bolsheviks to his correct position. Lenin himself, as well as the wider Bolsehvik cadre, had to find their way forward. In some of the most fascinating sections Rabinowitch details how Lenin moves towards a position of calling for "All Power to the Soviets". But this "new moderation was not accepted without opposition". 

Lenin and the Bolsheviks were uniquely attuned to the way the masses were thinking and moving. It was flexibility around this that gave them their greatest power. Rabinowitch details, for instance, how the Bolsheviks didn't just adapt to the mood, they tried to shape it. As the hour of insurrection draws closely this interrelated process gets more and more intense. Even until the very last moment of the revolution, Lenin is waging war inside the Party to win the argument of revolution. Given that The Bolsheviks Come to Power is a work of non-fiction, readers may be surprised to find themselves a little carried away by the intensity. Here, for instance, is Rabinowitch's account of how the decision to go for insurrection and the overthrow of the Provisional Government immediately before the meeting of the All Russia Congress of Soviets:

There is very little hard evidence regarding the circumstances of this decision. Latsis later wrote that 'towards morning on the famous night when the question of a government was being decided and the Central Committee wavered, Illich [Lenin] ran to the office of the Petersburg Committee with the question: "Fellows, do you have shovels? Will the workers of Piter [Petrograd] go into the trenches at our call?" Latsis recorded that the response was positive, adding that the decisiveness of Lenin and the Petersburg Committee affected the waverers, allowing Lenin to have his way. 

While Rabinowitch is supremely sensitive to the way that the Bolsheviks' were linked to the masses, he also understands that Lenin was the key revolutionary thinker. The decision to go for insurrection, Rabinowitch writes, is one of "few modern historical episodes [which] better illustrate the sometimes decisive role of an individual in historical events". 

That said, in his close study of these events, it is noticeable how Lenin was not always able to shape events on a hour by hour basis. For instance, I was struck by how, during the Kornilov coup, Lenin was too far away in hiding to have a real impact. Straining at the leash to come to Petrograd from hiding, much of his instructions arrived too late to have a significant impact.

But whatever Lenin's abilities, it was the party he had striven to build that was crucial in October 1917, and revolutionaries today, ought to learn this lesson now. Rabinowitch puts it very well.

That in the space of eight months the Bolsheviks reached a position from which they were able to assume power was due... to the special effort which the party devoted to winning the support of military troops in the rear and at the front; only the Bolsheviks seemed to have perceived the necessary crucial significance of the armed forces in the struggle for power. Perhaps even more fundamentally, the phenomenal Bolshevik success can be attributed in no small meaure to the nature of the party in 1917. Here I have in mind neither Lenin's bold and determined leadership, the immense historical significance of which cannot be denied, not the Bolshevik's proverbial, though vastly exaggerated, organisational unity and discipline. Rather, I would emphasize the party's internally relatively democratic, tolerant and decentralised structure and method of operation, as well as its essentially open and mass character - in striking contrast to the traditional Leninist model.

It was this that enabled Lenin to shift the Party in the crucial moments of 1917, and it was this Party that enabled the revolutionary workers' and their organisations to take power. The alternative would have been fascism and further war. 

Alexander Rabinowitch's remarkable book was first published in the early 1970s. It deserves a reading today. Leninists might find things to quibble about. But in its detail of the events of 1917, and its exploration of the arguments at all levels of the Bolshevik Party, even those who have read much about the Russian Revolution will find much of interest. It is a fascinating insight into how a mass revolutionary organisation operated during the only successful workers' revolution in history and its conclusions are even more powerful given they are written by someone who comes from outside the revolutionary tradition.

Related Reviews

Bryant - Six Red Months in Russia
Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution
Sherry - Russia 1917: Workers' Revolution and the Festival of the Oppressed
Lenin - The State and Revolution
Rodney - The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World
Smith - Red Petrograd

John le Carré - Call for the Dead

Call for the Dead is the first appearance of John le Carré's recurring character, the British intelligence officer George Smiley. Its a very short and puncy novel, dealing with the aftermath of a relatively regular interview that Smiley has with a civil servant Samuel Fennan. Fennan had been in the Communist Party in the 1930s, but that was long ago, and now he's a loyal worker with a decent income and a relatively nice house in the London suburbs. But the following day he is found dead, a suicide note nearby, and Smiley is being blamed for scaring Fennan so much that he felt compelled to kill himself.

But Smiley's recollections of the interview were much more positive. He found Fennan amicable and enjoyed their time together. As he begins to ask questions of Fennan's wife, the local police and probe a bit deeper he finds evidence of a much darker conspiracy. 

Call for the Dead is interesting in a number of ways. Truthfully its more of a detective story, and as Carré's first novel, this and the second, A Murder of Quality, suggest that the author was working out his position in the various genres. The book is also of interest because it gives a lot of background to Smiley himself, that really illuminates some of the later stories. 

But its a great read. The seediness of suburban life and the grimness of post-war Britain really come out well. Smiley himself, and his collaborators in this book, are part of the grey charm. But it's also a reminder that great thrillers do not always need to be 350 pages in length. 

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Carré - A Small Town in Germany
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Carré - A Murder of Quality
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Lev Grossman - The Magicians

Reading The Magicians for a second time, I cannot help but agree with my earlier review from a few years ago. Grossman's book feels, initially like a darker, grittier version of Harry Potter, where violence, sex and death are much more on display than in Rowling's children's fantasy. But re-reading The Magicians in a search for a quick escapist fantasy recently I was struck by how the arc of Quentin Coldwater's story is at odds with more traditional tales. Coldwater goes from naive youth, inexperienced in the world of magic, to a powerful wizard, isolated and cut off from those around him and desirous to learn more even as this leads to him destroying those around him. 

In fact, for almost all of the book Quentin's is a deeply unpleasant character, and his eventual exposing as such by his former partner is perhaps the most satisfying moment. The Magicians stands up well to a second read, its nuances (and its cheerful parody of the genre) becoming more apparent, even as the reader might find themselves repelled by the arrogant behaviour of the central protagonists. And of course, the thirst for wealth and power by a tiny class of unproductive, but extremely dangerous individuals has its parallels with the real world.

Related Reviews

Grossman - The Magicians (The first time) 
Grossman - The Magician's Land
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