Emmanuel Terray - Marxism and "Primitive" Societies: Two Studies

Emmanuel Terray was a French political activist and Marxist anthropologist whose work was enormously important in the development of anthropological ideas. This short book is a collection of two seminal pieces, translated from French, wherein Terray grapples with the relevance of Marxism to anthropology. He does this by exploring the work of two other influential figures. The first of these is Lewis Henry Morgan whose work formed the foundation of anthropological science and deeply influenced Marx and Engels. Engels in fact used much of Morgan's book Ancient Society to inform his own work Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. 

Terray argues that while Morgan's work was incredibly important, Ancient Society (published in 1877) was much more controversial, because it "committed the mortal sin of evolutionism". After quoting some critics, including Claude Levi-Strauss, Terray sets himself the task of studying "Morgan's language to note not only waht is said in that language, but also what is said in spite of it". In doing so Terray makes a series of important contributions to Marxist anthropology as a science and a method. I should note here that I am not an expert in anthropology, or the works discussed. What matters to me is the process of exploration.

Terray writes that Morgan applied core ideas from Darwinism to human societies. Terray then writes:

It is temptng to close the investigation and conclude that Morgan's "genius" lies in having applied to human evolution the concepts Darwin developed to explain natural evolution. 

But he cautions that Engels had this to say on Ancient Society:

Within the limits set by his subject, Morgan spontaneously discovered Marx's materialist conception of history, and his conclusions with regard to present-day society are absolutely communist postulates. The Roman and Greek gens is for the first time fully explained by those of savages, espeically the America Indians and this gives a solid base to primitive history. 

But as Terray also points out, Marx and Engels were critical of any attempts to apply Darwinist evolutionary theory direct to human society. Marx wrote, in 1870, that "to see history up to the present as a class struggle is enough to demonstrate the superficial nature of an approach that seeks to make this history into an almost undifferentiated 'struggle or life'." Instead Terray argues that Morgan's success (and the support from Marx and Engels for his work) arises out of Morgan's attempt "to construct a theory of that history, that is, a syustem of concepts to make it possible to think it out scientifically". 

In Terray's words, Morgan's theory of history is this: "human experience is produced by the interaction of three elements: man's primary needs, the primary germs of through, and natural logic". Crucial to this, and "the determinant sphere" for Morgan are the "arts of subsistence". Morgan says:

Mankind are the only beings who may be said to have gained an absolute control over the production of food, which at the outset they did not possess above other animals. Without enlarging the basis of susbsistence, mankind could not have propagated themselves into other areas...It is accordingly probable that the great epochs of human progress have been identified... with the enlragement of the sources of subsistence".

Marx and Engels would, of course, have a much more detailed exploration of how humans interact with nature, themselves and produce history. The development of the forces of production and the consequent transformation of social relations are central to their historical materialism. But it is Morgan's attempt to do this, and his recognition that ideas must connect to material reality to produce the necessities for survival, that would make his work so influential.

It's a surprisingly accessible work from Terray. But at times it seems to revel in obscurity. It is possible to work out why he means by "the transition from the punaluan family to the syndyasmian was not adequate to overturn the Turanian system of consanguinity". But it takes some work with a dictionary and a pencil.

Part two of the book is an engagement by Emmanuel Terray with the work of Claude Meillassoux, an anthropologist who trapplied historical materialism to a strudy of a "primative" society, in this case the Guro people of the Ivory Coast, a society in transition under the influence of colonialism. He begins by discussing the Marxist concept of "mode of production" and its relevance here as the Guro have a combination of different economic systems of production. Here I found Terray somewhat mechanical in his approach:

It should be possible to discover the dominant socioeconomic formations through the study of their instruments of labour and hence to construct a preliminary hypothesis as to the nature of the mode or modes of production concerned.  It would then be possible to analyze the concrete social formations found in the field by the ethnologist and to begin to reconstruct the relations of production of which these structres are one "realisation". 

I've always been a little wary of simply generalising from the instruments of labour to existing, contemporary, "social formations" and reading that backward into history. Drawing on Meillassoux's work, Terray argues that the Guro have a combination of "two modes of production". The two identified are a "tribal-village" system with "all the men of the group" acting as authority, and a lineage system whereby the "means of production are owned collectively but a single individual holds them on behalf of the group". These two areas differing in "where these modes of production" operate according to Terray. The former in "hunting with nets" the later in "agriculture, fishing, gathering" etc. The different requirements of the production producing different social relations etc. Terray continues to celebrate how Meillassoux shows the "interplay between kinship and relations and relations of production" vary and change. Here the detail of Terray's anthropology lost me, but he appears to be arguing that the socioeconomic formation of the Guro is shaped by the constant changing of genelogical kinship resting on an economic base:

Concerned to kepp the economic base as the determinant phase of the overall structure, [Meillassoux] gives a brilliant demonstation of the way in which the lineage system in the GUro socioeconomic formation derives from a transformation of genealogical kinship relations, a transformation determined and shaped by the requirements of production. 

Why does this matter? Here we quote Terray again:

It appears that the absence of the exploitation of labor is the second necessary condition for kinship to act as an element in the relaisation of the mode of production. This brings us back by another route to the thesis supported by Morgan and Engels in the first applications of historical materialism to ethnolog: the domination of kinship relations in the social organisation is incompatible with the exploitation of labor and the existence of class relations.

Terray then returns to Marx to explore how the domination of one mode of production over another shapes the nature of society itself.

Terray's second article in this book is an attempt to explore core ideas of Marxism around modes of production and consider how successful the best proponent of the historical materialist approach has  been. Terray concludes that Meillassoux has made important steps forward, which could ensure that "social anthropology becomes a particular section of historical metarialism devoted to socioeconomic formations" without capitalism. It is also clear that Terray's own engagement with this material opened up new vistas for future researchers, helping transform anthropology. 

Marxism and "Primitive" societies is as the title suggests, in some ways very dated. For a none specialist it was, in places hard work. But it was also readable and engaging, and while I was lost in some of the closer arguments about "kinships" and "lineage", I gained a lot from seeing how Terray made his argument. 

Related Reviews

Engels - The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
Patterson - Karl Marx, Anthropologist
Lee - The !Kung San: Men, Women & Work in a Foraging Society

Leon Trotsky - Fascism, Stalinism & the United Front

In the early 1930s, as fascism in Germany grew from strength to strength, the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote a series of pamphlets and articles to explain the nature of fascism and to argue for a working class strategy that could defeat it. These articles, several of the most important of which are collected here, remain some of the best studies of German fascism and Hitler's rise to power. They remain crucial reads today for those trying to understand contemporary fascism - not because the situation is identical, but because Trotsky's method is to place the far-right into the political and economic context.

That said, the essays collected here, contain a great deal of insight, strategy and tactics, that can help us understand how to defeat the far-right and fascism today. Key to this, as Trotsky understood in the 1930s, was mobilising the largest number of workers in militant and mass opposition to the fascists. This required the use of the United Front tactic, a strategy developed in the revolutionary circumstances of 1917 by the Bolsheviks, and adopted by the early Communist International. It required the revolutionary left to build a strategic alliance with forces and workers' organisations to the right of them in order to shape a mass movement. The potential, as Trotsky repeatedly notes, was there but the principle barrier to such unity was the ultra-left position of the German Communist Party (KPD). The KPD argued, following the lead of the now Stalinised Comintern, that the Social Democrats were no better than the fascists. Indeed, at times they made it clear they thought that the Social Democrats and the millions of German workers' who supported and voted for them were worse than the Nazis.

This positioning was tragic. It cut the revolutionary left off from wider workers' forces. This fundamentally weakened the anti-fascist movement and it also undermined the ability of the KPD to build the revolutionary left. Throughout these essays there is a growing sense of urgency from Trotsky as he desperately argues for a different course. 

In 1930 he writes:

If the Communist Party is the party of revolutionary hope, then fascism, as a mass movement, is the party of counter-revolutionary despair. When revolutionary hope embraces the whole proletarian mass, it inevitably pulls behind it on the road of revolution considerable and growing sections of the petty bourgeoisie. 

But the opposite is also true. Trotsky continues:

The election revealed... counter-revolutionary despair embraced the petty bourgeois mass with such a force that it drew behind it many sections of the proletariat. 

Later he points out that:

those workers who remain with Social Democracy, as well as those who voted this time for the National Socialists, did do not out of simple ignorance, not because they awakened only yesterday, not because they have as yet had no chance to know what the Communist Party is, but because they have no faith, on the basis of their own experience in the recent years.

The mistakes of the KPD in the revolutionary era of the early 1920s were one thing, but a bigger problem was the wrong-headed approach to the Social Democrats. One problem of course, was the failure to build unity also undermined the ability of the KPD to build the sort of struggles that could have undermined some of the political and economic base of the Nazi's support.

The belief that the SPD were as bad as the fascists meant that the KPD wasn't able to launch the sort of industrial strategy that could have raised the confidence of the working class and transformed the situation. In his 1932 article, The Only Road, Trotsky points out that it is precisely the chaos of capitalism itself that is leading the capitalists towards seeing fascism as a solution. That requires a clearer revolutionary strategy from the KPD, one that was sorely lacking:

If the economic evils of our epoch, in the last analysis, result from the fact that the productive forces of humanity are incompatible with private ownership of the means of production as well as with national boundaries, German capitalism is goring through the severest convulsions just because it is the most modern, most advanced, and most dynamic capitalism on the continent of Europe.

He continues a few pages later:

The petty bourgeoisie must acquire faith in the ability of the proletariat to lead society onto a new road. The proletariat can inspire this faith only by its strength, by the firmness of its actions, by a skilful offensive against the enemy, by the success of its revolutionary policy.

The barrier to this was, in the first instance, the fact that the Soviet Union's isolation meant that country was no longer led by revolutionaries, but by a "national-opportunistic bureaucracy, which does not believe in world revolution". This is the "misfortune" for the whole proletariat.

Many of these essays are available elsewhere, and some of them have been collected in different collections. One thing that stands out from this edition from Bookmarks in Britain is a very useful framing essay by Steve Wright, and contextual introductions to each year by Chris Harman. This new edition of Fascism, Stalinism and the United Front also benefits from an excellent essay by British socialist and anti-fascist organiser Samira Ali, who brings Trotsky's analysis of fascism up to date. As she says, these articles "endure because of their theoretical clarity and their strategic questions remain profoundly contemporary". 

In Britain we live in the most dangerous times since Trotsky was writing. If the specifics of fascist organisations today are different, as Samira Ali says, we "return to Trotsky['s writings]... not because they offer a ready-made template for understanding fascism today, but because they provide something more important than historical analogy. They provide a method: analyse fascism concretely, identify the forces that can stop it, and argue for forms of working class unity before the decisive moment has passed."

As such this book is one for our dangerous times.

Related Reviews

Trotsky - The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany
Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution
Zetkin - Fighting Fascism: How to struggle and how to win

George Clare - Berlin Days: 1946-1947

In 1938 George Clare, then aged 17 and an Austrian Jew, fled Vienna where he had grown up to escape the Nazi annexation of the country. Clare's parents would eventually die in the Holocaust, but in those pre-war years they initially ended up in Berlin where they expected to get passes to travel to France. Somewhat surprisingly, given the political situation, Clare fell in love with Berlin. Though he eventually made it to England and spent the war there, when he eventually was called up after the war he made it back to Berlin where he began playing a key diplomatic and legal role in the denazification process that the Allies imposed on the population of defeated Germany.

Berlin Days is the second part of Clare's autobiography. The first covers his youth in Austria and the fate of his family. This is a book that covers Clare's time in Berlin, a short period but one that was foundational for European geopolitics and Clare himself. While the book looks at the denazification process and the problems that the Allied authorities faced, it is also Clare's coming to terms with what Nazism meant and how the people of Germany came to follow Hitler. In no small part it is also Clare's reckoning with the deaths of his parents in Nazi concentration camps.

Some of the most interesting, and poignant, parts of the book occur when Clare follows up on people who his family knew from before the war, or does similar on behalf of friends back home. His own family members, being Jews, have simply vanished. Clare's friends fiancee have survived, clearly having suffered through the war, and seek his support to navigate labyrinthine military beauracracy in order to get permission to work. On his arrival there's a certain naivete to Clare as he tends to see the good in people. Later he becomes more cynical as he experiences various former Nazis trying to escape the net or hide their backgrounds.

Alongside other military officers Clare eventually gets to discuss the fates of hundreds of Germans. Those wanting to take on particular jobs, in particular jounralists or actors, have to demonstrate that they hadn't been a member of the Nazi party. This is made more complicated by the different regulations for the Soviet, French, British and American sectors. The division of Berlin adds confusion when, as in the case of the famous condutor Furtwangler, one or other side (in this case the Soviets) want to use them for their own ends. On occasion Clare and his colleagues expose someone who has hidden an appalling past. They, after all, have all the Nazi documents that have escaped destruction.

Unfortunately Clare's rather plodding style doesn't suit the material and the anecdotes are often lost in the material. It's hard to get a wider picture of Berlin in these crucial period, as Clare's focus is so narrow on the immediate bureacracy he experienced. That's not to say there's nothing of interest. For instance Clare meets (in 1946 and again towards the end of her lifetime), Else Bongers the wife oif the Bauhaus architect  and socialist, Richard Paulick. Bongers helps get Paulick out of Germany immediately after the Nazis take power, saving his life. But she remains. But this interesting story is all too brief. The real problem perhaps is that too many actual Nazis were helped out by the various administrations when they had knowledge and skills that were needed.

In his attempts to understand the Nazis and the Germans, Clare is similarly disappointing. He tends to see Hitler as having a unique ability at a time of great Nationalism, to sway millions. There is no doubt truth in this, but Clare fails to grasp why fascism was so effective at destroying political opposition. That said Clare, who was a leftist at the time, does understand that the failure of unity between the Communists and Socialists was crucial to Hitler's breakthrough. He does not, however, not the systematic violence that was used to stop any opposition.

With its over focus on the bureacracy this book will probably interest specialists more than the casual reader.

Related Reviews

Moorhouse - Berlin at War: Life & Death in Hitler's Capital, 1939-1945
Kershaw - The End

M. John Harrison - The End of Everything

Well they always say you shouldn't be afraid to try new things. I was unsure I would like M. John Harrison's latest book The End of Everything after I read the Guardian review here. As quite a literal reader I am uncomfortable with stories that aren't particularly clear on what's happening, or layer meaning upon meaning. Nonetheless I decided to give it ago, not least because I very much like end of the world novels, and we are facing catastrophic change.

The End of Everything is mostly set in the very English seaside world of the Kent coast. A place of small farms, former fishing villages and second homes. The world has undergone some form of catastrophe. Aliens called the iGhetti have appeared connected in some way to financial centres and banking - the City of London being a common location. The military have bombed and shelled their somewhat ghostly forms, but nothing seems to have halted their advance.

Civilisation seems to have collapsed. One character who claims that he has repeatedly visited London to study the iGhetti is met with disbelief. The state doesn't seem to function - there are no police when one of the characters commits murder early in the book - and instead a form of listless mob justice seems to rule. But on the other hand some cafes and inns seem to function in a way that bears no real relationship to an actual economy. Perhaps this is meant to be a comment on our own economy, which seems to bear little relationship to the needs of the people who make up society.

Much of the book centres on people who make their living by collecting artefacts from the sea. Unnamed things wash up on the beach and some are sold or kept. Special artefacts can be transformative for the finder, who consequently leave the coast. Phillip has found one of these artefacts. It seems to be alive - indeed at various points people eat bits of it - and over time it grows and develops. When Phillip dies it takes on his personality or part of it. Marnie, Phillip's elderly relative, goes on a road trip with the artefact and Phillip's ashes. Marnie appears to be on a quest to try and find out what happened. But she doesn't seem to really mind - instead she's drawn to the source of the problem at the City of London. Perhaps its the source of all our problems.

Online commentary suggests that the novel is meant as a comment on Brexit, or capitalism. I thought it had something to say about commodity fetishism - but perhaps thats the Marxist in me reading too much. But there's a real fog about this book. Its not clear what is happening - is anything real. Is anyone even human? Does anyone have a purpose? Are the customers in the cafe ghosts? Or are they real people lost in a landscape that has lost all meaning.

My Guardian reader worried that readers who dislike SF might be put off by this book. I am not sure. Those who are put off are probably those like me who need more certainty in their novels. Those who like ambuguity, metaphor and fog will love it. I could see the brilliant writing. But I couldn't see into the story.

Tomáš Tengely-Evans - Death Rides Out: Imperialism in the 21st Century

As Socialist Worker editor Tomáš Tengely-Evans has had to cover more than their share of imperialist conflict and the threat of such conflict. In the last few years we've seen war in the Middle East, genocide in Palestine, a bloody proxy-war between Nato and Russia over Ukraine and Trump's aggression against countries as varied as Greenland, Canada and Venezula. 

Understanding the tendency for nations to go to war under capitalism, and the particular forms these wars take, has been one of the great tasks of Marxism. Tengely-Evans' new book is a brilliant synthesis of this historical work with insightful studies of current conflicts and their source. The book begins with Tengely-Evans's comment that he wrote the first draft of the book in Sarajevo, close to were Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated - one of the events in the run up to World War One. It's a fitting beginning, because he begins with how Marxists like Lenin, Luxembourg and Bukharin developed and updated Marx and Engels' war to explain the origins of the slaughter. The war did not arise out of the killing of Ferdinand, but what was it about society at the time that meant that within a few weeks of the assassination millions of men were being murdered? 

For Marxists it is the economic division of the globe that leads to conflict. More precisely it is the uneven division of the globe between capitalist interests. As Tengely-Evans writes:

Because capitalism does not develop equally acorss the world, there is a constant fluctuation of the relative power of the different nation-states within the global imperialist system, and this drives a logic of imperialist competition that tends to build towards war.

In hindsight these insights don't feel particularly novel. But Tengely-Evans makes the point that some Marxists thought in the run up to World War One that global capitalism made war impossible. Tragically they were proved wrong, and it was left to a few individuals like Lenin to critique this. One brilliant aspect of this new book though is that it neatly summarises how Lenin, Bukharin and Luxembourg developed a new understanding of the particular capitalist moment. In particular the question of "finance capital" playing a role in pushing and organising production. But Tengely-Evans does point out the limits of this approach, which saw both Lenin and Bukharin generalising too much from the nature of German capitalism - leading Tengely-Evans to point out that "the core of Lenin's theory stands the test of time if creatively applied".

The "core" refers to the way, in Bukharin's words, "the struggle between state capitalist trusts is decided in the first place by the relation between their military forces, for the miliatry power of the country is the last resort of the struggling 'national groups' of capitalists." Tengely-Evans uses this approach in his very stimulating analysis of current conflicts. For instance, writing about East Asia, he says:

East Asia is now the most dnamic region of global capitalism - and consequently, a key battleground of imperialist comptetition ebtween the US, China and regional powers. It makes up around 40 percent of global domestic product and over 50 percent of global economic growth. China, Japan and India are the leading economies in the region making up 65 percent of the continent's GDP.

It is this startling growth that terrifies Washington. Tengely-Evans goes on to show how the US state has been preoccupied particularly by China, but more importantly for understanding the world today, he shows how conflicts in Venezula and the Middle East, are often shaped by the US government acting in response to the threat from China. As he says:

The US may want to focus on the Western Hemisphere. But it does so within a global system of increasing competition and while trying to contain China across muiltiple parts of the world. War with Iran hasn't turned out the way the US planned. But it's a product of that increasing competition, unleashed on the world in large part by China's rise, and that logic of competition drives war between the competing parts of the system.

Does the left really need another book in Imperialism? Especially when those of authors' like Lenin have proved so useful. I would argue that one great strength of Tengely-Evans' book is that it offers an understanding of imperial through a Marxist lens, while demonstrating how Marxism is a tool to understand the world. This constantly needs to be refreshed and new generations of activists taught how the system works, not least because there will be more and more war. Indeed Tengely-Evans quotes Marx: "The working classes have the duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics". Unpicking why Russia is in Ukraine, or how Israel makes it hard for Trump to stop war on Iran needs an wider understanding of the system itself.

In addition Tengely-Evans shows how an Marxist understanding of war and imperialism leads to a revolutionary approach to stopping war. The final section, on how revolutionaries have tried to turn war into revolution is a lesson for everyone today - if we are to avoid imperialist escalation leading us all to our doom.

Related Reviews

Bukharin - Imperialism and World Economy
Lenin - Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
Callinicos - Imperialism and Global Political Economy

Jakub S. Beneš - The Last Peasant War: Violence and Revolution in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe

From the end of World War One through to the 1950s Eastern Europe's peasant societies were engaged in a new continuous "Peasant War". It is a struggle that is rarely acknowledged, except perhaps by those looking to understand the dynamics between workers and peasants during the Russian Revolution. Those who do study these events tend to seem the separately, as struggles around particular events, rather than as part of a longer continuity. The peasant struggles that began as mutinies and rebellions against the War, then morphed into radical nationalist struggles as European nations and empires crumbled at the end of the War, became battles over land and power in the inter-war years.

Jakub S. Beneš' The Last Peasant War is an excellent read that emphasises the continuity and change of these movements, while sympathetically treating the peasant as an object of history. I have been asked to write a fuller review of this book for another publication, and I will link that here when it becomes available.

Iain M. Banks - Feersum Endjinn

Despite my love of Iain M. Banks' science fiction novels I have never read Feersum Endjinn. When I first attempted it soon after it's first publication in the mid 1990s, I was put of by the "difficult" chapters. These are written phonetically, and I found them impenetrable. Today, after nearly three decades of text speak, I was less challenged by them. Perhaps younger audiences will find them normal.

Feersum Endjinn is set on a future Earth facing a gigantic astronomical calamity. Precisely what this is, and what the solution is, is unclear until nearly the end of the book and I won't ruin that here. But living on the Earth, long after huge populations have deserted the planet, are a number of waring factions that inhabit different levels of a colossal structure known as the Fastness. This is the remnant of Earth's spacefaring past, the anchors for its space elevators, and a monument to civilisational collapse. The factions that inhabit the ruins do so in a feudal structure - something that Banks often uses to represent retrograde or backward human societies that have falled from their technology appogee. The war between these factions takes place on a number of vertical levels. It also takes place on a number of cyber levels too. Humans in this future have the ability to enter different dimensions, places were time moves differently, and engage with others physically and mentally.

Banks explores this conflict from multiple points of view. One of them is a senior aristocratic Count, who has been assassinated multiple times, before escaping to a new "level" to solve the riddle of his murder at a different time scale. The other is a scientist who has receved a cryptic message from a seemingly alien presence that alerts her to a potential solution to Earth's dilemma. Finally we have an initially aimless being who appears suddenly at the estate of a minor noble, but whose innocence betrays the fact that she has deeper knowledge of what is happening. Finally there is a oddly minor figure, whose account is told phonetically, whose innocent quest to find his talking pet ant takes him on a strange quest, full of all sorts of beings, that gradually point toward the resolution.

The backdrop to the story is the various factions who are trying to cover up the danger to Earth, and also to protect themselves. the resolution sees the coming together of representatives of the various factions, manipulated by unseen forces and made to overcome their differences.

Writing in 1994 it is possible to see Feersum Endjinn as a metaphor for social intrasigence in the face of oncoming environmental disaster. At the time it was also possible to believe that techology alone would be enough to "save Earth". Today that is unlikely, and perhaps this literal ex machina escape rings less true that it did when the book was first written. Nonetheless for Iain M Banks' fans this is an excellent read, though its structure and language makes the book a difficult one.

Bryan D. Palmer - Capitalism, Colonialism & Crises: The Remaking of Modern Canada 1960-2025

The third volume of Bryan D. Palmer's trilogy on the history of Canada brings the account right up to the present date. Indeed, so recent is some of the material that it covers 2025. It means that there's the slightly uncanny experience, for this reader at least, of reading a history book cover events that are part of your own experience.

Palmer opens his book by making a general point about the period covered. Before the 1960s he says, there was  "scan indication" that oppositional movements could unite together. As both the previous volumes have shown, there is a long and rich tradition of resistance and organisation from below in Canada. This includes movements such as Indigenous struggles, working class movements, including radical socialist and anarchist ideas, movements against war and movements for liberation. At times, particularly in the period covered in the first book, when those movements failed to unite. Had they done so, they was a potential for systemic and radical change. But Palmer says about the first decades covered in this volume:

In the 1960s, voices of anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism gew louder, amplified in many ways. There were also hints that the long-standing divide keeping those challenging the profit system and those opposing colonial thought and practice separate and consequently weakened was breaking down. This 1960s development was paralleled by a strengthening and increasing penchant for militancy among mainstream working-class trade unions and Indigenous organisations, groups and associations.

What these movements saw was a proliferation of radical groups, parties and organisations - a process that mirrored what was happening elsewhere in the world as the post-war boom turned to economic and political crisis, and the movement against US imperialism was fuelled by resistance on the ground. Revolutionary ideas inspired these movements. In Canada, "anti-capitalist and anti-colonial thought... captivated those drawn to the New Left" and "causes traversed one another". Palmer tells the story of an Abortion Caravan that left Vancouver in April 1970, but by the time it reached the capital, some of its participants were also raising demands as "Victory to the NLF" and "Smash Capitalism" was written on the outside.

The peculiarities of Canadian history however added new factors to the radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Quebec, there was an "upsurge of radical nationalism, supported by many Québécios workers" which built upon a movement for independence that had grown up in the 1950s and 1960s. The movement included many who saw colonialism and capitalism as the "enemy". Canada's 1968 moment, in the summer of that remarkable year, saw a massive protest at Dorval Airport near Montreal. Traffic was stopped, buses set afire and molotov cocktails thrown. Gunshots were heard. Palmer says:

New Left aspirations, anti-colonialist indépendantiste demands, and a militant class struggle and anti-capitalist politics thretaened to come together. This was a rare development in Canada... The often young and unusually militant Quebec sovereigntists situatied their struggle within the global anti-colonail mobillisations of the 1960s. They railed against the mainstream politicians and capitalist interests, both French and English-speaking. They held this rich elite responsible for deepening the subordination of oppressed and working-class Québécios.

These revolutionary and radical ideas "appeared to resonate with wider sectors of society" terrifying the ruling class. Here, as in the previous volumes, Palmer places the history of Indigenous people, and their resistance, central to his account. He shows how revolutionary ideas influenced "Red Power" movements, and these in turn, fed back into wider radicalisation. In 1969, the Government struck back, it appeared to offer concessions, but did so by arguing that the Indigneous peoples of Canada, where "burdened... with a historically constued paternalism" this required dismantling and an end to the allocation of "First Nations a plus status as an addition t their citizenship".  While superficially appearing radical, in reality this "would inevitably leave First Nations peoples without any possibility of successfully pursuing land claims or holding on to entitlements that shored up their traditional ways of life". The backlash, including the publication of the tremendously successful book The Unjust Society by Harold Cardinal, saw a retreat by the Canadian government, but it did see the "drift of Indigenous leadership into collaboration with the colonial state" and the decline of the revolutionary Red Power movement.

The radicalism of these movements was the context for a wider awaking of knowledge of Canada's colonial past. In the years after the 1960s Canada saw renewed attempts at control of radical movements and First Nations peoples, what Palmer calls "coercive continuities". If the 1960s had seen Red Power, revolutionary radicalism and "class war from below", including some spectacularly powerful trade union movements, 1975 onward saw "class struggle from above". The political and economic gains of the 1960s  that had been won by working class and First Nations struggles, were eroded as Canada turned toward neoliberalism and austerity to try and resolve the contradictions of its economic crisis. This period saw systematic and brutal deindustrialisation as thousands of workers lost their jobs. In Montreal, for instance, between 1976 and 1996, 27,000 jobs in the garment industry were lost. What strikes there were, were unable to significantly turn this tide. In the case of Montreal, a strike against job losses was sold out, a "scathing indictment of the cozy relationship between the union leadership and garment industry bosses".

The final chapters of this book are perhaps the most depressing. They paint a picture of Canada dominated by economic precarity, low levels of struggle and rampant capitalism - massive levels of homelessness, low wages and economic insecurity are one picture of the period. But Palmer is careful to note that there is resistance, including another rise in the level of organisation by First Nations peoples, often building links with the wider working class movements. This includes the struggles against oil infrastructure and the expose of the horrors of the Residential School system. A horrific chapter on the "murdered and missing Indigenous Women", the thousands of women who have lost their lives and disappeared, makes it clear that much more needs to be done. Indeed the racism at the heart of the Canadian state continues to be exposed by the lack of action on this.

The weakness of the trade union movement, Palmer argues, means that there is a tendency for the trade unions to respond to the current economic situation, including the pressures from the Trump administration, with nationalist answers rather than class struggle. As the labour movement lines up behind national demands, "working people and their interests were hitched to the cart of Canadian capital and the state". 

Palmer's book is, however, written in the spirit of the need to rebuild a new and radical left, that can shift the narrative. If the urgent need is there, so the crisis creates the potential. As Palmer says Canadian capitalism, like that around the world, is "increasingly riddled with contradictions and challenges". Understanding the history of Canada, and the interplay between class struggle, anti-colonial and Indigenous resistance, and updating that for the 21st century is an urgent need.

The final volume of such a series will be distorted by the narrowing of the writer's lens. If the first two books covered sweeping periods of history, this later book covers shorter periods in more detail. This reflects both the author's and the readers' experiences. Inevitably it means that things are missed. For instance I thought it would have been helpful to have more detail on the growth of Canadian fossil capitalism and the politics and economics of (say) the Tar Sands. But this is a minor complaint against a powerful book and a wonderful series. Everyone who is interested in the fight for liberation and the struggle against capitalism today ought to read these three books.

If Bryan D. Palmer's book teaches us anything it is that the history of Canada shows that ordinary people have frequently resisted oppression and exploitation, and they have often done so in the most militant and inspiring ways. The knowledge of that history will be immeasurably helpful in rebuilding the sort of radical left we need to face the challenges of 21st century capitalism. Palmer is owed a huge vote of thanks.

Related Reviews

Palmer - Colonialism & Capitalism: Canada's Origins 1500-1890
Palmer - Capitalism & Colonialism: The Making of Modern Canada 1890-1960

Sinclair Lewis - Elmer Gantry

Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry is a delightfully cynical black comedy. It is also a book very much for our times. The eponymous Elmer Gantry is a happy go lucky young man, brought up in a stifling religious home, but now at college he's a partying, womanising and drinking law student. Realising that becoming a lawyer is hard work, and will likely keep him poor, he decides on a different course of action. Confounding his critics - the hardworking and deeply religious students around him - he heads to a Baptist College where he begins his planned ascent through religious bureacracy to make his fortune, strip the gullible masses from their wealth and sleep with as many attractive parishioners as possible.

When it was first published Elmer Gantry scandalised the good Christian folk of the United States. Small wonder really. Gantry is a lying, swindling, blackard. He is not afraid to dump his friends, betray his flock, and commit adultery. Indeed he happily changes churches, not out of actually religious fervour, but because he sees better chances of enriching himself. Gantry isn't lazy. He's perfectly happy to seep himself in religious works to better understand his place. He just doesn't believe any of it.

Perhaps his worst habit is the way his infatuation with young women leads eventually to boredeom and betrayal - and then abandonment. The only case where this bucks the trend is his encounter with the evangelist Sharon Falconer, to whom he seems genuinely committed - at least to the extent of only creaming off some of the cash, and only having one brief affair. 

Gantry's rise and fall, then rise and further rise, is the story of an obsessive and clever swindler. But it is also the story of hypocritical 1920s America when the church was happy to sell love, truth and future happiness for a decent enough donation in the collecting tray. The only difference Lewis says, is that Gantry is the most extroverted at it. He's also very good, and ambitious. The rest of the Church hate him but his gilded tongue, superb sermonising and his ability to cover his tracks usually gets him through.

HG Wells apparently wrote an article on America based in part on Lewis' descriptions in this book. While Wells probably ought to have done more first hand research, Elmer Gantry feels very much like its based on real people. Indeed Lewis lived with various preachers, went to multiple religious services on a daily basis for months, to research the background to the book. One of those whom he lived with was a preacher determined to show Lewis that his portrayal of priests and preachers in early books was deeply inaccurate. One can only imagine how he felt (and sermonised) about what Lewis did with his hospitality.

It is alleged that Lewis wrote much of the last chapters of the book in a deep alcoholic hole. If that's true than I didn't really find the book any worse for it. Indeed, the ending spoke very much to 21st century America. Lewis is a fine observer of the dirt beneath America's surface.