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.

Related Reviews

Yokomizo - The Honjin Murders
Yokomizo - Death on Gokumon Island
Yokomizo - The Inugami Curse

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.

Related Reviews

Blythe - Akenfield
Taylor - Return to Akenfield
Bell (and Nash) - Men and the Fields

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

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.

Related Reviews

Hastings - Vietnam: An Epic History of a Tragic War
Wilber & Lembcke - Dissenting POWs: From Vietnam's Hoa Lo Prison to America Today
O'Brien - If I Die In A Combat Zone

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

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.

Related Reviews

Chaikin - A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts
Rubenstein - Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race
Shetterly - Hidden Figures
Collins - Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys

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.

Related Reviews

Drummond - The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer
Bradstock - Faith in the Revolution: The political theologies of Müntzer and Winstanley
Ming - Thomas Müntzer: Sermon to the Princes
Stayer - The German Peasants' War and the Anabaptist Community of Goods
Scribner & Benecke - The German Peasant War 1525: New Viewpoints
Bax - The Peasants War in Germany
Engels - The Peasant War in Germany

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