Hal Draper - Socialism from Below

The US Marxist Hal Draper is perhaps best remembered for his monumental, multivolume study of the revolutionary thought of Karl Marx. But socialists usually first encounter him in a less grandious way by reading his well known pamphlet The Two Souls of Socialism. That pamphlet, and the work is was originally based on, where an attempt by Draper to grapple with the "crisis" of socialism in the period after World War Two. Then, Stalinism was triumphant, poisoning the very idea of Communism by become stipping it of any sense of revolution from below. As Draper explains:

The crisis of socialism and socialist ideas today, brought about by the aftermath of the Second World War and the rise of Stalinism against the background of the decay of world capitalism, has pinpointed one fact without possibility of dispute: The basic question for socialists is precisely this one of the conception of socialism.

Socialism from Below is a collection of Draper's essays (together with one criticial essay) that explore these crucial concepts. The first essay is the aforementioned Two Souls, which serves as a jumping off point for the discussion, even though most of the other essays have no direct connection in terms of publications. The opening essays explore the arguments of several US thinkers against socialism as a emancipatory mass strategy. These criticisms come in a variety of forms, but the dominant ones for Draper writing in the 1960s were "state control" of the means of production and managerialism. He writes of the US socialist and academic, Maynard C. Krueger that he "equates tendencies toward socialism with any tendency toward increased state controls". Draper's criticisms of these arguments are important because they have their parallels with arguments today, though modern readers will rarely have heard of some of those he is critiquing.

As with Draper's other writing, one of the things that shines through is his deep knowledge of the lives and work of Marx and Engels. In his discussion of Karl Marx and Simon Bolivar, for instance, he explores precisely how Marx and Engels understood Bolivar through a discussion of them writing a encyclopedic entry on the South American radical. He notes that unlike many radicals of the time, and indeed of today, Marx and Engels did not accept Bolivar's strategy, or the vision of some who supported him at the time and later, that the masses had to fight for a dictatorship that could then gradually introduce democracy at some later point, when the masses "were ready". As Draper says, "[Marx] does not accept the rationalisations for dictatorship" and continues:

There seems to be a contradiction: if there is no way for people to become 'ready' for democracy except by fighting for democracy, then it follows they must begin fighting for it before they are certified to be 'ready.' And in historical fact, this is the only way in which democracy has advanced in the world. The continuous solution to the contradiction lies in the process of revolution itself. This is a dialectic which will always be jeered at by those mentalities which know how to celebrate revoluitonary struggles only after they have been straijacketed by a new oppressive establishment.

If Draper here draws on lessons from the 19th century about revolution and the fight for liberation. Modern readers can draw on Draper's lessons from the struggles he was involved in. These include the radical years in the 1960s at Berkeley in California, when Draper was part of student struggles for democracy and against corporate influence on campus. Draper has written elsewhere of these in detail. But what again shines through is his commitment to struggle from below, and a sharp analysis of the limits of movements that do not put their trust in the masses.

A later essay explores the role of trade unions. This was an educational for socialists that Draper spoke at, to encourage a non-sectarian approach to trade union work, inspired by his idea of socialism from below. In it he explores what a trade union is, its limits and its potential and encourages the idea that socialists would be active within such a body. While socialists in Britain today might be frustrated by our union leaders, Draper has to engage with a much more right-wing, corporate trade union burearcacy. Nonetheless he does not right off these unions. I do think that here he gets it slightly wrong however. For Draper the union leaders are figures who can be pulled by mass action from below. He argues, "One function of the union leadership is to provide the organisational leadership of our class." [Draper's emphasis]. This, I think, is mistaken. It is better to understand the TU leaders, as Tony Cliff did, as a class of themselves, positioned between the workers and the bosses, and pulled by their own interests. Cliff's analysis arose out of his understanding of the economic seperation of the TU bureacrats from the shop-floor. 

Draper's position muddies his understanding of the role of revolutionaries within the trade unions. It is, he writes, "their specialfunction to organise that other pressure against the leadership". The idea of "disciplining" the trade union leaders by rank and file feels like a self-limiter on the movement itself. Surely the idea is that revolutionaries should be developing rank and file leaders to provide an alternative source of power to the trade union bureacrats. Consequently in this essay I wasn't convinced of Draper's criticisms of Rosa Luxemburg and the German Spartakist League towards the Revolutionary Shop Stewards during the German Revolution. Draper seems to think that Luxemburg should have abandoned the Spartakists for the RSS which seems to ignore the very constraained position her and Liebknecht found themselves in as counter-revolution raised its head.

Draper can be forgiven these errors in my opinion, because they do stem from having the right original position - the belief that workers action is key to their self emancipation. Indeed, the collection of essays in Socialist from Below, is a detailed reminder of what is lacking on the US left in general. Draper himself is a brilliant writer and polemist. His essays are barbed and full of humour, as his essay Vladimir Ilyich Jefferson and Thomas Lenin brilliantly demonstrates. 

But, as the world faces Trump's second rise, and the US left lacks a serious revolutionary organisation. New generations ought to dig out Hal Draper's work. This collection is expensive and academic, and the editor ought to have put more notes to give context to the articles (such as dates!) and so on. But there's a lot here the left desperately need to relearn. As Draper points out, "Marxism, as the theory and practice of the proletarian revolution, therefore also had to be the theory and practice of the self-emancipation of the proletariat. Its essential orginality flows from this source."

Related Reviews

Draper - Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution Volume 1: State & Bureaucracy
Draper - Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution Volume 2: The Politics of Social Classes
Draper - Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution Volume 3: The 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat'
Draper - Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution Volume 4: Critique of Other Socialisms
Draper & Haberkern - Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution Volume 5: War & Revolution
Draper - The Dictatorship of the Proletariat from Marx to Lenin

Rhian E. Jones - Rebecca's Country

The "Rebecca Riots" were one of the most striking examples of rural rebellion during the 19th century. Today they are mostly remembered, when they are remembered at all, for being against tollbooths and involving men dressed in female attire. But they were much more than this, they were a mass uprising against the way capitalism was destroying communal relations, and transforming traditional Welsh life to  maximise profits for landowners, and diminishing the lives of the lower classes.

Rhian E. Jones' important new account of the Rebecca riots fills a gap in recent studies of the period. Few recent books have covered Rebecca and this work has benefited from contemporary approaches to class and gender. This means that Jones' tells the history of this struggle in a fresh way to a new audience, and takes up issues that have often been ignored about the struggle itself.

The Rebecca movement was initially aimed at tollbooths. But it arose out of the appalling conditions that working people experienced in 1843. Low wages, low crop prices, high rents and unsympathetic landowners contributed to a massive crisis among ordinary people. The toll booths were a symptom of this, as their owners sought to raise cash ostensibly to pay for road repairs, but actually for pure profit.  Hundreds of tolls were imposed, and farmers found themselves paying multiple times on a single journey, essentially being taxed for trying to do their work. Conditions were awful, as Jones says, some houses "built of mud or stone with thatched roofs, had minimal furnishing, often a single room with one or no windows, packed-earth floors and bedding of straw mattresses and homemade blankets".

The rebellion against the tollbooths encapsulated the anger at these conditions. But the tollbooths represented something much more - the literal commodification of the Welsh landscape. It was this that meant the rebellion went much further than an outpouring of anger at the tollbooths, and spilled into a generalised revolutionary movement.

In 1843 the rising was so great that it drove the landowners away from their country estates, saw thousands of troops billeted in the countryside, and pitched battles between protesters, their supporters and the authorities. One contemporary report said, that Wales was experiencing "a formidable insurrection, overawing the law, invading the most sacred rights of property and person, issuing its behests with despotic effrontery, and enforcing them by the detestable agents of terror, incendiarism and bloodshed."

The destruction of tollbooths was a key part of the rebellion. Jones unpicks what took place, which tended to follow a known pattern. At night, a group of dozens of people, led by a figure on horseback would arrive at a tollbooth. Many of the leading figures, and certainly the "leader" on the horse would be dressed up, often in female clothing, and usually addressed as Rebecca. The protesters would expel anyone living in the toll houses, allowing them to escape safely and usually remove their belongings. Then the booth and its gate would be destroyed. The destruction seems to have had an air of ritual to it. Buildings were systematically destroyed, brick by brick. Gates would be sawn into pieces. Fire would consume the rest. Almost as if the protesters were erasing the building from memory, rather than just destroying it. 

The protesters would act quickly and were frequently supported by many onlookers. One thing that struck me was the similarities with the arson and rick-burning that characterised the Captain Swing movement just over a decade before. That too was enormously popular and attacks were often communal events, with local people supporting and watching in great numbers. Rebecca and Swing were both characterised by the mass support, if not complete participation, of the greater part of the labouring rural poor. They were both rebellions that went beyond mere economic demands.

Jones shows how this went further. The mass attack on the Carmarthen Workhouse was in part a rage at the authorities' approach to poverty. But it was also driven by a punishing approach to women who had had children out of marriage, including as a result of rape or abandonment by wealthy men. One of the great successes of Rebecca was a change in the law around the support for women in this situation. But Rebecca also took direct action on this. I was inspired to read how Rebecca protests on occasion confronted men who had abandoned women and their children, demanding financial restitution and support. On another occasion Rebecca rioters installed a poor family in more suitable accommodation, somewhere they were still living many decades later.

One of the things about Jones' book is that it covers womens participation in the movement. Because male rioters dressing in women's clothes was a key part of the rebellion's most public expressions, histories have often focused on male participation. But in fact, as Jones' shows, women were central to the protests, to supporting them, and to the wider discontent. Frances Evans, who was charged as a result of her leading role in the attack on the Carmarthen Workhouse, was accused of "having incited and led the mob... urged on the rabble to proceed upstairs, and otherwise grossly misconducted herself."

Jones' gives a great sense of the political breadth of Rebecca's revolutionary movement:

The targets of Rebecca were evolving to encompass more than tollgates. They now included the enclosure system: near Ammanford, a newly built wall that cut off a section of formerly common land to form a private field... was torn down and the field thrown back open to public use. Meanwhile a vicar at Penbryn received a threatening letter for having forced local Nonconformists to donate to the cost of a Church school.

The Viscount Melbourne wrote to the Queen, fearing a "general rising against property". Ruling class fears of revolution ran through their response to Rebecca. As a result military violence was common place and the stationing of thousands of troops held hold down south-west Wales. There was a general concern anyway that the British working class was on the move. Fear of Chartism had the government on edge already.

But Jones also picks apart the internal debates that helped undermined Rebecca, and how these were reflected in the wider movement. Leading Chartists, themselves riven by debates about violence, were often contemptuous of Rebecca, not least because they saw it as a cross-class movement that involved both workers and their farmer bosses. There was some truth to this. Farmers in fact did pay people to destroy the tollbooths. But ordinary people don't simply take to arson and destruction because they are paid too. There has to be a level of general discontent within society to make it worthwhile, and, as the support and sympathy for the Rebecca makes clear, this certainly existed in southern Wales in 1843.

The movement was broken by a combination of heavy repression and internal division. But, it is important to point out, it was remarkably successful. Jones notes that many of Rebecca's demands were won, toll houses disappeared, roads improved and there were changes made to support those in poverty. Many of those captured and imprisoned by the authorities were let off, either by symapthetic jurors or by the authorities who were fearful of making martyrs. 

Jones concludes that Rebecca's real legacy however, was to inspire others - even today. As she says:

The original Rebecca movement was composed of ordinary men and women who, finding their circumstances intolerable, used what they had to hand - from petticoats to petitions, and fom mass meeetings to sledgehammers - to challenge and change their world. The extent of their success is perhaps less important than the fact they made the attempt.

This new history of Rebecca fills an important gap in the history of rural radicalism. Written by a socialist it addresses key questions about class, gender and social movements that remain important today. It will teach new generations about our history of struggle, and reminds us all that the modern countryside is the consequence of violent class struggle.

Related Reviews

Williams - The Rebecca Riots
Jones - Before Rebecca
Dunbabin - Rural Discontent in Nineteenth Century Britain
Boyce - Imperial Mud: The Fight for the Fens
Griffin & McDonagh - Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500

Verlaine Stoner McDonald - The Red Corner: The Rise & Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana

If you think of the politics of rural America, you probably think of it in terms of conservativism. A mixture of rugged individualistic politics, cynicism about government and conservative political leanings. There's a lot of truth to this. In 2016, 62 percent of the US rural electorate voted for Trump. This reflected the way that Trump's political movement had become the outlet for general discontent at the way small town America had been systematically undermined by successive governments, both Democrat and Republican, and forgotten by an economic system that fails ordinary people in the interest of profits for the rich. In my review of Robert Wuthnow's book The Left Behind, I noted that addressing the concerns of rural working Americans meant developing social movements "whose starting point is that working people, in rural areas and cities, have more in common than their differences."

So on a recent trip to Montana in the US, I was enormously interested to discover, that there is very much a radical tradition in rural America. The radicalism of Montana's urban areas is well known. The insurgent trade union movement of Butte remains a source of pride for working people in that town, and is well documented. But I was particularly excited to learn of Montana's "Red Corner", Sheridan County, which in the early decades of the 20th century, had an extensive radical movement which in the later part of the era, saw Communist candidates being elected to important positions in the County and significant support for left, and communist, politics.

This is a surprising revelation and Verlaine Stoner McDonald's book on the subject The Red Corner, is worth digging out for those who want to know more. McDonald begins with the context. Sheridan County, a remote part of the world even by Montana's standards is buttressed on one edge by Canada and on another by North Dakota. In the late 1800s it was settled by European farmers, many of whom came from Scandinavia, and brought with them left ideas and traditions. McDonald describes the "unforgiving climate", the lawlessness and the difficulties in living on the plains, and argues that this made the population "especially receptive" to the growing "farmers' movement of the 1910s and 1920s":

The movements' message, grounded in the persuasive strategies of other farming and mining organisations in America, would be skilfully manipulated by local political leaders, setting the stage for the astonishing rise of Communism in Sheridan County.

I will return to this comment later. But it is worth dwelling for a moment on the ideas that underpinned the support for such a movement. McDonald explains the,

northeastern Montana farmers' movement, the culture in which it arose, and the types of rhetorical appeals it would use were well grounded in traditional and very widely helf beliefs about the role of farmers in American life. Additionally, the Sheridan County Communists had the advantage of building on a foundation of home-grown populism and labour activism that had been established elsewhere on the Great Plains in the nineteenth century... In the early days of the Republic, American culture was rife with notions about what it meant to farm and to be a farmer, expressed in images that would undergird and enliven the message of the Communist Party in Montana a century and a half later.

These "Agrarian Myth" behind these politics, which celebrated the central role of the farmer to humanity, and specifically the United States, was taken up by a series of farmers' organisations in Montana, and the Plains, "devoted to education, reform, and protest in the rural Midwest and West". There was plenty to protest about and organise around; the cost of living, the price of crops and the realities of farming life on the prairie. The National Grange, one of a number of such organisations, founded in 1867, promoted 

an image of farmers as important and knowledgeable (or at least educable) members of the economic system who were standing up to assert their rights. Grangers also would not hesitate to identify those who would deprive farmers of their rights. In this effort the Grange made occasional use of appeals that would become commonplace in farmer activism, that is, pitting the producers against nonproducers. As banners in an 1873 Grange Independence Day parade asserted: "This organisation is opposed to railroad steals, salary steals, bank steals, and every other form of thieving by which the farmers and laboring classes are robbed of the legitimate fruits of their labour."

It is easy to see how politics like these could evolve into the socialist politics of the 20th century. McDonald notes how the growth of global radical politics in the early years of the new century was mirrored in the United States and Montana. Anti-war, left and socialist politics grew massively in the years before World War One, and mushroomed following the Russian Revolution in 1917. These had their echo in rural Montana where it became focused around the radical farmers' newspaper The Producers News, edited by Charles E. Taylor.

Taylor is a central figure in McDonald's book and this is not the place to retell the whole story. His newspaper became enormously influential, connected as it was to the farmers' movement the Nonpartisan League. The League was accomplished at linking political concerns to mass agitation. Organising meetings, parades and even picnics. It drew in large numbers to its events, and some of its speakers became incredibly well known. Taylor however, developed The Producers News into something more than the mouthpiece of the movement. He filled it with popular columns and editorials, injected plenty of gossip and satire, and was not afraid of mocking and insulting almost everyone else. It was a potent mix and as Taylor's own politics developed, the newspaper carried him with it. As the League morphed into the Farmer-Labour Party, Taylor was twice elected to the Montana senate.

The influence of the left, and the Communists, in Sheridan was extraordinary. As McDonald summarises, at one point 

"Reds" occupied every elected office in the county and had sent a covert Communist to Helena as their state senator for two terms. Local youths could attend camps where they were actively indoctrinated with Communist ideals, and the radicals' newspaper flourished... In [1932], former sheriff Rodney Salisbury was on the ballot in an attempt to become the nation's first Communist governor.

Taylor seems like a fascinating figure, hardworking and exuberant, with a talent for seizing the moment. He was also a socialist, and eventual member of the Communist Party. The US Communist Party had grown, in difficult conditions, out of a complicated merger from a number of different socialist organisations. It was very much a Party that was reliant on its links to the Soviet Union, and while its activists where principled and talented, its limited cadre and the hostile conditions of US politics doomed it. The CPUSA was crude and lacked nuance - it's vision of socialism was far from the emancipatory project that celebrated activism and rebellion from below. This is particularly obvious in its treatment of The Producers News. As the Russian Revolution receded into memory and revolution failed to break through in Western Europe, the leaders of the Soviet Union switched to an isolationist, State Capitalist approach to politics. This was far from the mass radical involvement that characterised Russian socialism in the era of Lenin, and it had its impact in the USA. The Producers News became increasingly a tool to celebrate the Soviet Union and its alleged achievements. Rightwing critics of the News in its rival the Plentywood Herald "acknowledging that farmers in northeastern Montana were enduring difficult times, noted that their suffering was small in comparison with that of Russian workers." 

Increasingly it seems the News was not articulating the anger of its readers, and especially while being edited by official CPUSA members while Taylor was engaged in other projects, becoming a mouthpiece of crude Soviet dogma. It was not a winning combination. The near libelous satire of Taylors' newspaper worked because it could combine local news and gossip, with frustration and anger from below. It connected to the masses, even in the absence of mass movements. The CPs model could not achieve this, and the newspaper went into decline - even when it was converted into the CPs national farmers' newspaper. Along with the decline of the Producers News went the decline of Communist influence in Sheridan County.

This is the extraordinary story that McDonald tells of the rise and fall of Sheridan's Communists. In it, she very much argues that it was the result of a some very specific circumstances. In particular she argues that without leaders like Charles Taylor and the skilled manipulation by left leaders, the movement would never have taken off. I found myself a little unconvinced by these arguments. 

It seemed to me that there was (and is) plenty for farmers in Montana to be angry about, and the left was able to articulate this in a way that was relatively unprecedented in Sheridan County. This shouldn't surprise, after all the question of crop prices, rent, taxes and evictions were screwing many workers and farmers into the ground. Unfortunately what The Red Corner doesn't really give the reader a sense of is the social movements around these issues. McDonald tends to focus on the internecine conflicts between Charles Taylor and his rivals, the arguments between the newspapers that so gripped many Montana readers or the debates within the Communist Party leadership. But there are only hints about the movements against evictions, protests and strikes. It seems to me that there is much more to this story. Radical politics can only take a hold if there is a basis for it, and I was disappointed that there wasn't more given over to the experience of farmers and workers in Sheridan County in the period. 

To give two examples. In 1918, six thousand farmers and their families came to a rally, picnic and festival, in part to hear Jeannette Rankin speak, the first woman to serve in Congress. In 1921 socialist and anti-war activist Kate Richard O'Hare, spoke to "thousands... in a cow pasture under the 'burning hot sun for two hours and ten minutes'." The venue forced on the audience because the assembly all was cancelled. If thousands of people were coming to hear radical parliamentarians and anti-war activists speak, there must have been more of a groundswell radical movement. But we read little of it here.

Verlaine Stoner McDonald's research focuses on "communication" and how activists used communication to connect with voters and the masses. There is no doubt that the role of The Producers News was significant, perhaps exemplary, in this regard. But there is a danger in framing the growth of Communism in Sheridan County, Montana solely through the lens of communication. It means that we focus on the activities of a few individuals, and ignore or downplay the activities of the people at the bottom. It would have been fascinating to learn more about what the angry Sheridan farmers and workers' were actually doing. Nonetheless this is a worthwhile read that gives a real sense of how working people everywhere can become engaged with radical ideas. Trump need not be triumphant again in rural America!

One final point that might only be of interest to fellow Trotskyist readers of this blog. Many of Sheridan's activists did carry on the struggle. A few of them ended up breaking with the Communist Party, and becoming activists in the American Socialist Workers' Party. It seems that the experience of the CPUSA, even in rural Montana, meant that some activists were prepared to carry on the struggle for a genuine socialist politics.

Related Reviews

Tyer - Opportunity, Montana
Punke - Fire and Brimstone
Carlisle - Lentil Underground: Renegade Farmers and the Future of Food in America
Doig - Bucking the Sun
Holleman - Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics & the Injustice of 'Green' Capitalism
LeCain - Mass Destruction: The men and giant mines that wired America & scarred the planet

Margaret Renn - Paul Foot: A Life in Politics

I came to radical politics too late to see Paul Foot's contribution to the fight for socialism and against injustice in person. By the time I joined the SWP in the early 1990s, Paul Foot was an occasional, but immensely anticipated speaker in Birmingham and Manchester where I was active. Having read Margaret Renn's immensely enjoyable biography I realise that I had not appreciated his importance to the SWP, the organisation which he devoted his life, and the wider left movements. 

Paul Foot became one the most best known champions of the underdog. From victims of injustice who were falsely imprisoned accused of crimes they did not do, to those who exposed government crimes and lies, to striking workers. He was also a brilliantly eloquent advocate for socialism, something he did for decade after decade, in newspapers, magazines, pamphlets and, most brilliantly, in meetings. Many comrades, in and out of the SWP, have their favourite Paul Foot talk - from the Peasants' Revolt, to Toussaint L'ouverture. His columns in national newspapers, particularly the Daily Mirror, were avidly read and enjoyed by tens of thousands and, no doubt, helped keep the flame of resistance flying during the dark days of the 1980s.

Foot's life might have been radically different. He came from a wealthy, establishment background. His father, Sir Hugh Foot, was a senior diplomat, including playing a central role in the Britain's governship of Palestine. Foot's family included Michael Foot, and Paul could likely have had a long and important career in Parliament had he been prepared to take that step.

But Foot did not take that path. Renn explores that early, formative period, at university. It is very clear that despite the conservative nature of those around him, Foot was able to find a layer of people whose liberal politics and desire to poke fun at the Establishment began to take him down a path toward radical ideas and politics. It is common, when discussing Foot's politics, to show the importance of these relationships to his development. Several of the people Foot met at Oxford became crucial to his life - including key figures at Private Eye. Encountering socialists and revolutionaries outside of this milleau also began to change his ideas - two of these, Harry McShane and Tony Cliff, were crucial in developing Foot's own Marxism.

But it is also clear that there is another factor. After leaving Oxford University, his early work as a journalist put him in touch with working people, and engagement that would shape his life. Foot began his journalism, and his engagement with revolutionary politics in the early 1960s. It was, however, the struggles of working people that capatured Foot's imagination. Foot, Renn tells, once told an audience about how reading Karl Marx's Civil War in France, "smashed all my exciting parliamentary ambitions". But these ideas only made sense when they came into contact with the struggles of workers, and through his involvement in the International Socialists, Foot saw those ideas become concrete. By the 1970s Foot had been involved in mass struggles - strikes by workers, anti-war protests, anti-nuclear movements and so on. Throughout his life he never forgot the lessons he learnt in this period. In particular, he celebrated the self-organisation and collective power through his work.

Had Foot only been an armchair socialist, reading and writing, he would likely have produced a number of important and interesting works. But it was the way he placed himself at the heart of struggles - both collective and individual, that drove his political life. Indeed, as Renn points out, it was these experiences that made his work so powerful. When writing about racism, Foot was able to,

draw on his experience of a strike at Courtauld's Red Scar plant in Preston, in the mid 1960s. The plant employed thousands of workers, including hundreds of Asian and Caribbean workers... The local union branch of the TGWU negotiated a 50 per cent increase in workload for a meagre 3 per cent increase in wages. All the workers rejected the deal. But on 24 May 1865, amangement of the section where the Asian and Caribbean workers were concenrtared announced the introduction of the speed-up. In response, the workers downed tools. 

But the union leaders in the "white" sections of the factory refused to call out their members in solidarity. One union official described the strike as "racial". When the black workers were defeated, management introduced the speed up to all workers. Racism had divided the workers, and the failure of the white workers to unite, had led to their collective defeat.

Such lessons, and much more successful strikes, inspired Foot throughout his life. Renn shows how he was never happier than when engaged with such action. As a result, workers loved him, were inspired by him, and became activists and socialists themselves. There's no doubt that Foot was central to the growth of the SWP and its development as an organisation that could punch far above the weight implied by its few thousand members.

That said I was surprised that Tony Cliff's life and role wasn't give a larger importance by Renn. Foot finished his introduction to Cliff's autobiography by noting "there are quite a few of us socialists in Britain over the past 40 years or so who thank our lucky stars that we had the chance to stand on his shoulders." While Renn tells us of some of the disagreements between the two, I would have liked more on how they developed political ideas together, how they organised and how they discussed. Likewise, other key socialists in the SWP have only passing mentions - Chris Harman and Duncan Hallas, for instance.

These individuals were important to Foot. But it is clear that Foot's politics arose in a dialectical engagement with working class action. The struggles of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, shaped Foot. Without them he would have been a very different person. But he was not just a passive recipient celebrating workers in some abstract way. He did everything he could to develop the confidence and combativity of the working class movement. Leftists often celebrate Foot's ability to popularise and recover forgotten radical figures such as the revolutoinary poet Shelley. But it is also true that he was central to making sure that anti-racist and pro-immigrant politics were part of the left's furniture - not something that was at all automatic. His fights against injustice, the Carl Bridgewater case, the injustice suffered by Colin Wallace, the case of James Hanratty, the Guildford 4 and Birmingham Six, are well known. They were part of his struggle for a better world. 

Of course Foot was more than a socialist and journalist. Margaret Renn also tells the story of his personal and family life. Some readers will find this aspect to the biography more interesting than others. But what comes across is a the story of a man who enjoyed life, and dedicated himself to trying to make sure that ordinary people got the best of the world. Today, the world cries out for justice and an end to capitalism. The arguments made by Paul Foot, with eloquence and passion in books like Why you Should be a Socialist still resonate and hold true today. So Margaret Renn's book celebrates his amazing life, and deserves to be read by a new generation of activists. Partly this is in the hope that a new generation of investigative journalists, bloggers and podcasters will learn from Foot the sort of persistence and politics that is needed to win. But the main reason is the hope that new generations engage with the type of socialism that Paul Foot spent his life struggling for: ideas that sees the working class as the revolutionary power that can emancipate humanity.

Related Reviews

Foot - The Vote
Foot - Red Shelley
Birchall - Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time

Sai Englert - Settler Colonialism: An Introduction

Almost a year into Israel's genocidal onslaught on the Palestinians and in the myriad of books, articles and pamphlets that have appeared to analyse and explain events, the phrase "settler colonialism" regularly appears. As Sai Englert explains in his engaging new book, this is a phrase that has a long pedigree, arising out of liberation theories and ideas linked to thinkers like Franz Fanon and others. But for the wider left in Britain it is a relatively new concept, and Englert's book is an attempt to explain and contextualise the theory. It is a prescient book. First published in 2022 it is a little out of date given the events since October last year, and the mass movement in solidarity with Palestine, but this should not put off readers as what matters is the theory itself.

Englert begins by outlining the history of colonialism and, closely related to this, the development of racist ideologies that sought to justify colonialism. Here he draws heavily on the analysis of writers like Gerald Horne whose books on settler colonialism in the Americas I have reviewed before. Englert's account of colonialism reminds the reader of the sheer horrors of that colonialism, and the cynicism by which racist ideas were constructed in order to make it acceptable. Indeed Englert notes that the attempts to downplay colonialism's genocidal policies continue today, for instance in the focus that is often placed on "disease" as a killer in the Americas. This, he points out, was important, but "its role is often overstated - or at least extracted from a more general picture of settler violence and murder". It is this violence that is key to understanding what happened in colonialism, and the construction of settler colonial states.

Settler colonialism in general does not separate colonialism from the rise of capitalism. As Englert notes, "the accumulation of wealth in the Americas, based on the murder, enslavement and dispossession of Indigenous and African peoples, kick-started the rise of European empires on the world stage... which laid the ground for an accelerated emergence of capitalist relations of production and the intensification of exploitation at home."

This is important because there is a close link between the impact of colonialism and the development of "settler states" and the progress of capitalism, and its exploitation, in the heart of the colonial powers themselves. The dispossession of hundreds of thousands of peasants from land in Europe, was closely associated with the rise of industrial capitalism, as well as the movement of settlers to places like the Americas and Australasia. 

Settler societies emerged, most strikingly in the colonies that would become the US, which attempted to develop polities free from a reliance on the Indigenous populations. Their economies would be primarily dependent on settler smallholders and European bonded labourers on the one hand, and impotred enslaved African populations on the other. 

This highlights a problem for settler colonial theory, in that the experience of colonialism itself was different around the world. Some colonial projects had a genocidal policy towards indigenous people - eg in New Zealand, others saw indigenous people as making up the enslaved people for the rise of capital.

The centrality of racism to colonialism is important, in part because it helps understand how it was possible for relatively small powers to violently dominant much larger land masses by mobilising the dispossed against the indigenous people. The construction of "whiteness" which gave settlers an identification with their own ruling class, despite being the victims of an exploitative relationship with them, was part of making the settlers buy into the process. While there was solidarity between the oppressed within Settler societies, and indigenous people, it wasn't the norm, though it was not uncommon, as this important piece from Australian socialists makes clear.

Racism, Englert, argues is so central to the colonial project that fighting racism has to be linked to "ending the underlying process of domination that gave birth to it. Only by ending the social reality of settler domination can the ideology that normalises it die". Marxists or revolutionary socialists would  not disagree with this. That racism is part of capitalism, and for racism to end, so must capitalism, is something that has been associated with revolutionary ideas since the days of Marx and Engels. Englert reminds us, however, that we have to ensure that all racist ideas are included within this. He criticises "much of the literature on Whiteness for failing to address Indigenous dispossesion alongside the enslavement of African populations in racism's emergence and reproduction". 

The existence of racism, against Black and indigenous people, underminded the struggle of white workers for their own emancipation. But, Englert takes this further. He argues that settler colonialism means that white workers had, and continue to have, an interest in furthering it. This is undoubtably true of the past. Englert lists a number of occasions when the unity of Black and white workers threatened the structures of colonial power enough for violent measures to be taken to prevent such unity again. He also notes the large number of times when white workers, and their organisations - including trade unions and left parties - organised against black workers.

Englert argues:

Far from challenging the process of settler expansion, settler workers repeatedly played a key role in intensifying racial segregation and Indigenous dispossesssions. Settler class struggle was fought simultaneously against settler bosses and Indigenous workers. Settler labour movements demanded both an increase in their share of value extracted from their own labour power, as well as from the colonial loot extracted through the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. From Australia's labour-led "White-Australia" campaign to the French labour movement's near-unanimous opposition to Algerian indendence, across the colonial world, settler workers fought for the exclusion and dispossession of Indigenous and racialised people, and did so while deploying socialist, communist, or even internationalist rhetoric.

While acknowledging that there have been significant and succesful attempts to challenge racism by activists and the left in all of the settler states, does Englert's argument here remain the case? In a key part of the book, Englert discusses the nature of Settler Colonialism, and writes about "settler quietism" which he explains is "the fact that all settler classes, despite their internal social tensions and conlicts, depend on the Indigenous population's continued dispossesssion, as well as on the settler state to impose their dominance and distribute the colonial loot. Even when the situation escalates to internal military confrontation, peace can be re-established not through structural change but through the intensification of colonial violence, to the settler population's collective benefit."

Here, Englert is arguing that in settler colonial states, all "settler classes" benefit from the structures and activity of Settler Colonialism, which allows the ruling class to buy off workers. But is is that still true today? There is perhaps an argument that this is taking place in Israel, where the displacement of Palestinian people, is allowing material benefits to some Israeli workers in terms of land. This is an argument made by Englert. But is it true of the settler colonial states of Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand today? I am unsure. Englert continues:

Similar to the case of racism... land distribution and economic advantages to settler workers serve as powerful tools for stabilisation of settler rule. They also facilitate the economy's continued functioning as well as the reproduction of both the settler state's and capitalist class's power. In that sense, settler workers participate in securing their continued exploitation, in exchange for land and comparatively better working conditions.

I don't think it is tenable to say this is continuing everywhere and Englert offers no numerical evidence to suggest it is happening. So either Englert's arguments don't fit, or there isn't such a thing as settler colonialism. To argue the theory as no value would be entirely wrong. As Englert's book makes clear, the theory does offer many insights, even while it doesn't necessarily have a single agreed "line". What I think needs to be added to Englert's analysis is a more detailed exploration of settler colonialism as a process that takes place over time - and frequently a long time. What happened to Native Americans until the Massacre at Wounded Knee when the frontier was declared "closed", and what that meant for "settler classes", is different now to how the continued repression and oppression of Native American people impacts on working class Amercians (Black and white). 

But the process itself also matters. It is undoubtably true that people from working class backgrounds went to colonial countries. But those settlers who were "bought off" with land in the early days of (say) Canada or North American colonial history, were no longer workers. Buying them off like this, transformed their class position. They became farmers or smallholders. This is not the same as saying "settler workers" benefited as workers from the continued disspossession of indigenous people and land - and consequently secured their own continued exploitation. It is not correct to say that this process continues in (say) Australia. Israel/Palestine is a different case, which highlights the necessity of understanding specific settler colonialisms in their wider context, particularly that of the global imperialist system.

In general, with the exception of Israel and the case of South Africa under Apartheid, I don't think it is right to argue that workers benefit from settler colonialism. In Australia settler colonialism allowed some of the settler lower orders to avoid becoming wage labourers in that continent. But the workers who did not benefit like this remained workers, and saw no benefit from settler colonialism. Indeed, the racism that went alongside, undermined their position and their ability to fight for better conditions. Englert says that white Australian workers get "land and comparatively better working conditions" out of these relations. But this is simply not accurate. Englert would need to provide more detailed examples to justify this point today. Clarity on this is important, for if "settler workers" do benefit from settler colonialism, than it makes the process of workers' self emancipation either harder or impossible.

Workers everywhere have every interest in defeating racism, and the system that uses it, and they can only do so through completely unity with indigenous people, and principled opposition to all forms of racism. 

These are significant criticisms of Englert's book, but it is made in the spirit of arguing that the book is a contribution to the debates that seek to understand a world where imperialist powers continue to destroy the lives of billions of people, dispossing, oppressing and exploiting them in a unrelating drive to accumulate capital. Much more discussion and clarity is needed.

Related Reviews

Horne - The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism
Horne - The Dawning of the Apocalypse
Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth
Clayton-Dixon - Surviving New England
Tully - Crooked Deals and Broken Treaties

Isaac Rose - The Rentier City

Friedrich Engels' classic book The Condition of the Working Class in England,  details the hardships of working people in Manchester in the first half of the nineteenth century. In it, Engels recounts a  meeting with a "bourgeoisie" in the city:

One day I walked with one of these middle-class gentlemen into Manchester. I spoke to him about the disgraceful unhealthy slums and drew his attention to the disgusting condition of that part of the town in which the factory workers lived. I declared that I had never seen so badly built a town in my life. He listened patiently and at the corner of the street at which we parted company he remarked: “And yet there is a great deal of money made here. Good morning, Sir.”

It's a justifiably famous quote, that tells us as much about Engels who himself was from an affluent background, as it does about the capitalists who were squeezing wealth and life from working people in the city. The tragedy is, as Isaac Rose shows us in his brilliant new book, its a quote that could be attributed to the city today.

Rose tells us the story of Manchester, through its people and their struggles and the lives that they led and continue to lead. He begins with the early history of Manchester, the period when Engels lived there, that saw the city becoming a colossus of capitalist industrial might. The mills and factories went alongside overcrowded, dirty and insanitary slum houses. In the intervening years, struggles over housing and working conditions, and, indeed the very space of Manchester by its working people shaped the city we now know.

In the 20th century, a process of expansion of public housing and slum clearance transformed things for working people. Houses became something that were to be proud of, not profit machines for unscrupulous landlords. For a time in the 1930s and the post-war period, there was an atmosphere of hope. Yet today, living in Manchester is dominated by an enormous housing crisis. Rents are skyrocketing, social housing has all but disappeared and that which remains is decaying and uncared for, and gleaming towers of steel and glass dominate the horizon, but are all but empty of tenants. The impact, Rose points out is worst for the poorest, and its creating a new layer of poor and vulnerable people. As he says, a recent study "has shown that the rent burden is so high in Manchester that it outstrips London for unaffordability, due to the city's lower wages". High rents and lack of social housing mean that "Manchester has the highest number of households assessed as homeless in the country".

How did this come to be? Rose argues it is the consequence of a set of neoliberal politics that are closely associated with Margaret Thatcher's Tory government of 1979 onward. More importantly though, he argues that their impact in Manchester was the result of a series of choices made by the City Council in reponse to Thatcher's assault. In particular, the failure on the part of the Council to be able to fight Tory policies that limited funds. This meant the Council essentially accepting neoliberal ideas, and then becoming the force for driving them forward in the late 1990s and 2000s. Rose says:

Manchester City Council, through the deals struck in the middle years of the last decade, handed over the extraction rights to a broad class of corporate landlords, who extract rent from the tenants and often take this wealth offshore. Manchester has become the pre-eminent example of the real estate state. This is the symbiotic relationship between politicians, the institutions of the local state and the property lobby.

Rose continues:

The local state has gone beyond simply providing the supportive policy context for development or acting as an enabler to being an executor of development. 

Drawing on the work of Marx and Engels, as well as contemporary Marxists such as David Harvey, Rose argues that "there is a profound in-built logic to the dynamics of urban development that are now underway in Manchester."

One thing that Rose highlights throughout the book is that there is a strong tradition of ordinary people in Manchester fighting to improve their conditions, and one of the key battlegrounds has been housing. But in fact in the key battles with the Thatcher government, this force was not mobilised. Where it did come on to the scene was in largely passive ways through public meetings and so on. Unlike, say, the Poll Tax revolt, there was not mass participation in tackling the government. The "dented shield" approach of the Labour councils in the 1990s was very much orientated on the idea that the councils were the only force that could fight the government.

Why is this important? Because if we are to move away from the privatised nightmare that is housing provision in Britain, we're going to have to build the type of social movements that can transform British politics. That will require mobilising the mass of working people to use their economic power, and their politic clout to transform national and local politics. Rose's book was, in his words, written with exactly this in mind, as a contribution towards "the crystallisation of a general force that could again wrest our cities back from the hands of the rentier, landlord and speculator".

The Rentier City is a superb book, powerfully written, accessible and readable, and full of the sort of facts and figures that will get repeated and quoted in pubs, cafes and meetings around the city. Everyone who cares about the great city of Manchester should read it.

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Hollis - Cities are Good for You
Reader - Cities

Louise Bryant - Six Red Months in Russia

Louise Bryant arrived in Petrograd in late September 1917. She went as a journalist to cover the Russian Revolution for radical US newspaper The Masses tasked with reporting from a "woman's point of view". Her articles are gathered together in Six Red Months in Russia and give an inspiring insight into the period between the Kornilov Coup and the first months of Soviet Power after the October Revolution. 

Bryant went to Russia, alongside her partner John Reed, as a convinced socialist. But there is no doubt that her experiences there further transformed her outlook. She writes with sympathy and passion. Her bravery on the front lines, during the insurrection and travelling alone through Russia are examples of the best of journalism. 

While the book is notable for its interviews or portraits of key figures like Kerensky and Kollontai, the most interesting and touching parts are those that deal with events of the Revolution and small moments that illuminate the wider transformation of society. There's a notable account of a Revolutionary Tribunal. This is far from the bloodthirsty events of bourgeois imagination, rather they demonstrate how mass democratic participation allows for justice to take place. For an hour, after a worker is convicted of stealing from a newspaper seller, the audience agrees that he must give his galoshes to the victim. The victim is pleased - she has none to wear while selling papers and the guilty man is pleased as his conscience is cleared!

There are, of course, more world shattering events to describe. Bryant describes the storming of the Winter Palace, notable mostly for the discipline with which revolutionary troops ensured that looting did not take place. She was there for the meetings of the Provisional Council of the Russian Republic and its dissolving by troops, very much without a whimper. Her account of the meetings of the All Russia Soviet are fascinating as she describes the passionate contributions from delegates from across the country, discussing their demands and concerns.

Bryant is primarily concerned with justifying the Revolution to her US audience. Repeatedly she counters anti-Soviet propaganda, denying the lies that declare that barbarity has falled. She frequently has to challenge the idea that the revolutionaries are pro-Germany. In fact this leads to one of the slight contradictions of the book, because she is very concerned that her readers see the Russian revolutionaries as potential allies of America. It almost feels like she's ignoring the great elephant in the room - US imperialism. I suspect her views on this changed quickly when US troops began their military counter-revolutionary campaigns alongside the White Armies. 

The book will perhaps be best enjoyed by those who know already the outlines of the revolutionary year of 1917. Bryant's anecdotes and accounts illuminate the wider dynamics very well. Here she writes about a priest refusing to pay a fare on a street car, claiming exemption as a "man of God":

Immediately the passengers became excited. They were mostly peasants and they began to argue hotly. A man of God, they claimed, was no different from any other man - all were equal since the revolution. But the priest was stubborn and not until the crowd threatened to take him to the Revolutionary Tribunal did he consent to pay, grumbling.

Bryant writes about crime and prisons a fair bit, not least to argue that the Revolution, at least in 1917, was remarkably lenient. Counter-revolutionaries are repeatedly allowed to go free, as the revolutionaries are keen to avoid punishment. During the winter the cells are better heated than the journalists' hotel rooms. A joke by Bryant about this to the Bolshevik guards, who have all experienced imprisonment, gets the dour response that loss of liberty is the worst punishment possible.

Bryant's eye for detail and humour and her ability to capture events in short articles makes this an excellent, if not well known, addition to accounts of 1917. Her frequent focus on women highlights the contributions of many, and reminds the reader of the enormous strides forward made in the early years of the revolution in terms of emancipatory politics. The participation of women in the struggle and the fighting is celebrated, as well as the role of key female figures of the revolution. But Bryant also tells the story from the other side, interviewing the wealthy families still present in Petrograd and discussing the work of spies and counter-revolutionaries. Frankly its a marvellous book that really illuminates how October 1917 was a revolution off and by the most ordinary of people. As Bryant returns home her last article shows how much she has been changed: "I was homesick for my own country, but I thought of the German advance and my heart ached. I wanted to go back and offer my life for the revolution."

Related Reviews

Hallas - The Great Revolutions
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Rappaport - Caught in the Revolution
Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution

Duncan Hallas - The Great Revolutions

Duncan Hallas was a leading activist and Trotskyist in post-war Britain. He was part of the networks that became the International Socialists and then the Socialist Workers' Party. While I only met him a few times as a much younger activist, even today longer standing comrades talk about him as a great agitator. He was, by all accounts, a tremendous speaker and writer, with a depth of knowledge and experience that allowed him to put across complex ideas in accessible ways. There are many on the left today who'd benefit from learning Hallas' ability to talk to workers.

The Great Revolutions is a new book made up of a series of articles that Hallas wrote for Socialist Worker in 1973. Then the British working class was on a high, having just defeated a Tory government the previous year and many activists thought that the high levels of struggle would continue under Labour. Sadly this was not to happen. But these levels of struggle no doubt led to the editors commissioning Hallas to write this series of pieces on "Great Revolutions", stretching from the English Civil War and the American Revolution, through the French Revolution, 1848, the Paris Commune and finally the Russian Revolutions.

These are short, agitational pieces designed to educate readers in the basics of events. But don't let brevity imply simplicity. Hallas' ability to get across complex events in the minimum of words and without academic fluff is definitely on display here. In fact, what is on display, is nothing short of a brilliant grasp of the Marxist method. Hallas shows how different class forces rise and fall in relation to wider social, economic and politic situations. This is particularly obvious in the discussion of the French Revolution, when Hallas clearly explains how different forces are able at different points during the Revolution to impose their ideas, but that it takes struggle from below to push the process forward. Hallas writes about the American Revolution thus:

The developing capitalist class in America, for that was what the revolutionary leaders represented was not oppressed by a semi-feudal monarchy. That had been destroyed in Britain in the seventeenth century revolutions. It was oppressed by the 'colonial system' operated in the interests of British capitalists.

This approach allows Hallas to explore, albeit briefly, why the revolution could be labelled as being about freedom, while oppressing so many others. Why it was led by slave traders yet waved the flag of liberty. The interplay between revolution in American and then the French Revolution is fascinating and Hallas shows how the ideas developed across the Atlantic.

While the book is brilliant and is a wonderful grand sweep of revolutionary history, I did have a couple of gripes. I thought it notable that Hallas, in his discussion of the Americas, did not reference the Native Americans or their struggles. He notes that one of the reasons the poor masses supported the revolution was that they were "prevented from getting land of their own". But he doesn't mention that getting this land would lead to genocide by the American state, nor does he have space to mention how the Native Americans were used as a military pawn by the British against the colonial forces. Simiarly I thought that the omission of the Haitian Revolution was strange. Its impact on the French Revolution, on the battle against slavery and ideologically in terms of notions of freedom was immense, and it warranted inclusion. 

These absences noted, there's still an immense amount to learn here. Credit is certainly due to those who were reading through back issues of revolutionary newspapers, found these articles and decided to get them published. I'm finish by noting Hallas' masterful two part discussion of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 which ought to be read by every young socialist in 2024. Let's hope this book gets into their hands.

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Marcus Rediker - The Fearless Benjamin Lay

Of all the people who resisted slavery and fought for its end, Benjamin Lay is perhaps one of the most fascinating and tenacious. Born in 1682, in Essex, he was shaped by an earlier generation's radical religious ideas - Ideas born from the English Revolution. As a Quaker, a labourer and eventually a sailor, he was also shaped by the the radical Atlantic; the politics that arose from the three cornered slave trade between the Africa, the Americas and Europe. This created enormous suffering, but also radical struggle. Within this, Lay ideas developed. His Quakerism gave Lay a enormous dislike of suffering, and a firm eglitarianism. But a trip to the West Indies opened his ideas to the brutal reality of slavery and from then onward Lay, and his partner in struggle his wife Sarah Smith Lay, become radical abolitionists.

Marcus Rediker's book The Fearless Benjamin Lay is aptly titled. Lay was certainly fearless. Repeatedly he punctured the cosy reality of Quaker meeting houses, exposing the hypocrisy of the rich slaveowners who lived a life of luxury while decrying injustice elsewhere. Today it seems inconceivable that Quakers and others could condone slavery, but in his lifetime Lay was denounced and mocked as being mentally ill for his suggestion that slavery should be abolished. It is important to note that Lay went much further than most of his contemporaries, calling not just for the abolition of all slavery, but demanding that fellow Quakers should refuse to have anything to do with it as part of a struggle to destroy the trade.

As Rediker points out Lay was an early proponent of activists tactics that we would today call boycotts and divestment. He refused to drink tea, use sugar, or sit at the table if a slave was serving. These were bold and radical statements for a man of his era. Later he would become vegetarian and his lifestyle changed to reduce as much as possible the suffering of other creatures. His egalitarian ideas were not abstract, but rooted in a personal and political struggle against injustice. 

When Marcus Rediker's book was first published few had heard of Benjamin Lay. During his lifetime he was, however, well known. In part this was a result of his political activism, not least his public theatre. The book opens with an inspiring, and hilarious, account of how Lay disrupted a Quaker meeting by drawing a sword from under his cloak and puncturing a book within which was hidden a bladder of fruit juice. The red juice sprayed all over his slaveowning audience, covering them in metaphorical blood. 

As a result of this struggle Lay became very well known, despite, after his wife's death, living a life as a hermit. On his deathbed he heard news that his struggle against slavery within the Quakers had borne fruit. During the later part of his life, and immediately after his death he was known and celebrated by a growing number of people who opposed slavery. But his life and struggles quickly faded into obscurity. 

Rediker's book unearths much that had been lost of Lay's life and introduced a new generation to his ideas. Lay had been kicked out of numerous Quaker meetings, and its satisfying to know from the introduction to this, the second edition, that recently various groups of Quakers have apologised for this mistake. Rediker traces these internal struggles in details, sometimes losing the reader in the detail. But they are important, not simply for historical reasons. But also because they were important to Lay, who always framed his wordly view through the religion that meant so much to him. Nonetheless, he wasn't held in a straightjacket by those ideas, but used them to demand and fight for change from the very organisation he was part of. 

Reading the book, and noting how Lay's opponents denounced him as "mad". I was reminded that revolutionaries who dream and fight for a different future, are often described thus. No doubt Lay's disability, personal lifestyle and activity fuelled these slurs. But reading Rediker's account of Lay's struggles I was reminded of the quote by the Irish revolutionary James Connolly, who said "The only true prophets are those who carve out the future they announce." How true that was of Benjamin Lay.

Marcus Rediker's books on the revolutionary Atlantic are crucial reading for everyone who is trying to understand how modern capitalism was born from blood and violence, and what that means to us today. But they also celebrate the struggles against that violence, and the fight for a better world. Benjamin Lay is restored through this work to his rightful place among in the list of brave individuals who refused to back down.

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Howard Zinn - A People's History of the United States: 1492 - Present

Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is a remarkable book in several senses. The first is it's scope, by which I don't just mean the breadth of US history from 1492 to the late 1990s. What's more remarkable is Zinn's ability to cover the breadth of the historical moment, capturing events at the "top" of society and the interaction with the mass of people at the bottom. The second is its radicalism. Zinn's personal radicalism is well attested (and shines through the book), but Zinn's approach to history itself is radical, and nearly unique in terms of books that have become must reads for those grappling with the long view of US history. As Zinn writes of the struggles that are central to his book:

I don't want to invent victories for people's movements. But to think that history-writing must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat. If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should... emphasise new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people shows their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win.

Zinn's history is more than a recounting of events, with a special emphasis on history from below, or forgotten struggles. These are there, of course, and Zinn manages to tell these stories with verve, even within the limitations of brevity imposed by the nature of the book. But Zinn's book does more than this because he discusses what was needed for movements to win. For instance he acknowledges the limitations of the trade union leadership, or movements that repeatedly allow themselves to be sucked into the Democratic party at its cycle of elections.

A review of Zinn's book could focus on many different aspects. The opening chapters look at the genocidal policies of European settlers and subsequent US governments against the indigenous people. These are powerful, and Zinn explores the nature of those societies far more than most histories of this ilk. He discusses their different approaches to nature, resources, land and each other. From here Zinn looks at the early settler colonial society and slavery - and emphasises that the modern United States is built on violence and bloodshed. 

But reading history is always coloured by the present, and while it would be tempting to review this book by simply regurgitating Zinn's history in an even shorter format, I wanted to dwell a little on one particular aspect of history which Zinn was intimately connected to - the Vietnam era. This is, of course, interesting and informative. But it has its contemporary relevance with the current wave of pro-Palestine movements in US (and internationally) colleges. The movement bears striking resemblances to the US movement against the war in Vietnam. It is centred on colleges and educational institutions, but has moved out further. The anti-war feeling of the 1960s was, as Zinn painstakingly shows, more predominant among poor and working class people. There are hints of this today, no doubt for the same reasons as in the 1960s. People are sceptical of the role of governments, and angry at the use of resources for war that might be better spent on health, education and wages.  

But the radicalism of the anti-Vietnam war movement has its parallels with radicalism today - and the processes that Zinn highlighted - growing discontent with the establishment, hopes for alternative politics and a rapid growth in anti-capitalist ideas - have only developed further since he wrote this book. The reason for this, he points out, is the role of social movements as well as the inability of capitalism to deliver for ordinary people. When Zinn finished this book the radicalism and mass movements of the 1960s and 1970s had died away. He finished it with hope though, because he expected new movements to arise due to the contradictions of US capitalism. Those movements did develop in the early 2000s with the anti-war and anti-capitalist movements, though too many US socialists abandoned the struggle in that period.

But Zinn's warnings from history - particularly the ability of the system to protect itself from radicalism by using the Democratic Party remain important today. Writing about the Jimmy Carter era Zinn shows how limited his policies were, yet the Democrats were able to position themselves as the alternative, simply by promising a few changes and bringing the leading figures into the Democratic space. Zinn uses an absolutely superb speech by Malcolm X about the Civil Rights March on Washington to illustrate this. The speech is too long to quote here, but Malcolm X finishes by showing how Kennedy's co-option of the movement meant the radicalism of the march was diluted and everyone left "by sundown". As we face an election between Biden and Trump this year, we'll here the siren voices saying that US activists must hold their noses and campaign for Biden to stop Trump. But Zinn shows why this strategy is a disaster. Activists in the US would do well to read the sections of this book on the post-1960s Democrat/Republican consensus again, if only to remind themselves of the pitfalls we face.

It is, of course, possible to nitpick. Every reader of A People's History of the United States will doubtless find something that is missed, or not done justice - that's the nature of such a sweeping history. I do think though that were Zinn writing today he would have included much more on the Native American history in the 15th to 19th centuries, even while acknowledging that he really does do justice to the history after this era, and especially the struggles by Native Americans in the 1970s. I would also suggest that Zinn might have done more about the single issue radicalism of the 1960s - there's very little here on the LGBT+ movement, though Zinn does mention it. It seems odd to this reader that he does not mention Stonewall. Again though, the fact he does talk about these struggles must have been a major breakthrough for a mainstream US history book - and the sections on women's struggles, feminism and the changing US family are fantastic. The ending chapters of the book focus on what Zinn calls the "coming revolt of the guards". Here he suggests that the crisis of US capitalism would force those whose previous roles involved protecting the system - such as university professors - into conflict with it. While he perhaps over-estimates the importance of this, he would no doubt be pleased to see the number of these people who have engaged in struggles recently. 

All in all this really is an indispensable book, a book for activists today, a book for your US travels and a book that illuminates how we got into this disaster, and how we might get out of them. Read it.

Related Reviews

Horne - The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism
Blackburn - The American Crucible
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Johnson - River of Dark Dreams: Slavery & Empire in the Cotton Kingdom
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Hamza Hamouchene & Katie Sandwell (eds) - Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region

About twenty years ago me, and a large number of other activists, attended an environmental conference in London. One of the workshops at the event included a presentation on DesertTec, a plan to produce vast quantities of energy from solar power by covering large areas of the Sahara desert in soal panels. I think it is fair to say that at the time, myself, and the rest of the activists there, where impressed with this technical solution to the transition away from fossil fuels. Criticism at the time focused on how nation states, and capitalist interests, would prevent this happening.

But since then the work of activists and scholars, including the authors and editors of this important book, have taught activists like myself to think about things differently. What we were essentially told in that seminar was an old lie - that large parts of Africa are essentially empty, ripe for use by the developed world, and in doing this, some wealth might well trickle down into local economies who could use it to improve their situation. It is an old lie, and its shameful that we fell for it then. Today the environmental movement today is much more aware of the need for Climate Justice in the Global South, but there is still much work to do, and this book is an important contribution.

The Arab Region, to use the name from this books title, is simultaneously the origin of the vast majority of the oil that is helping cook the planet, and one of the places where climate change is already causing enormous suffering for ordinary people. But, as this important book explains, the people of the region are not passive victims. They are people who can, and are, fighting for an alternative sustainable future while, at the same time "the Gulf countries are working to ensure they remain at the centre of the global energy regime".

The contributing authors' essays approach this conundrum in various ways by looking at various different countries and experiences. Most essays focus on different aspects of the energy question. These explore a common contradication - that states in the Middle East and North Africa have enormous potential for renewable energy, while frequently relying for their economic existence on fossil fuels. It is a contradication easily exploited by the energy multinationals. This is a point made by Hamza Hamouchene in his discussion on "green" hydrogen in North Africa:

The drive for green hydrogen and the push for a hydrigen economy has already gained support from major European oil and gas companies, which see it as a back door to the continuation of their operations, with hydrogen being extracted from fossil gas (the production of grey and blue hydrogen). It is thus becoming clear that the fosssil fuel industry wants to preserve the existing natural gas and pipeline infrastructure.

He concludes, "it is a deeply erroneous assumption that any move towards renewable energy is to be welcomed and that any shift from fossil fuels, regardless of how it is carried out, is worthwhile." The problem is, as he points out, not fossil fuels but "their unsustainable and destructive use in order to fuel the capitalist machine."

The Arab Region has, of course, been the victim of colonial history and imperialism. The ongoing geo-political reality of this situation means that any transition will, unless capitalism is challenged, "maintain the same practices of dispossession and exploitation that currently prevail, reproducing injustices and deepeing socioeconomig exclusion". Before we agree to such projects, we need to question who, what and why they are being done. With this in mind Hamouchene cautions a younger me about DesertTec!: 

This Desertec vision lends itself to the agenda of consolidating fortress Europe and expanding an inhuman regime of border imperialism, while trying to tap into the cheap energy potential of North Africa, which also relies on undervalued and disciplined labour.

Similarly, writing on energy in Sudan, Razaz H. Basheir and Mohamed Salah Abdelrahman, note that the current plan for energy there "relies on the full and unconditional adoption of neoliberal reforms dictated by international financial institutions". 

A second aspect to this, is that various regimes in the region are able to use the potential for renewable energy to "greenwash" their existence. Look at how Egypt and the UAE hosted COP27 and COP28 for this reason. But in one of the strongest chapters in the book Manal Shqair explores this with a timely look at the case of Israel. "Israel", she writes,

has always depicted itself as a dry coutnry which, despite this, and unlike its Arab neighbours, has developed the tecnology needed to efficiently manage its scarce water resources and mitigate the climate crisis... According to this narrative... Israel alwasys seeks to put its technology at the service of its prached neighbour Jordan.

Israel and Jordan's agreement to swop water for renewable energy seems then like a perfect match. But it has two consequences. Firstly it legitimises the settler colonial state, and secondly, it forces Jordan to rely on imported fossil fuel, because it is locked into an agreement with Israel to send energy over for water desalination. 

Shqair explores how Israel has stolen land, water and other natural resources from the Palestinians, and used these to strengthen its own hand. She concludes: 

The dehumanisation of the colonised, and the complicity of Arab states in this, are greenwashed by the EU and Israel as they collaborate in what is portrayed as a transition to a greener future and a lower-carbon economy.

Many authors however emphasise that the people of the region are not passive in the face of this inequality. There are some remarkable accounts of struggle against governments and multinationals against projects that destroy land and displace people, or for more equitable and just use of resources. In an important chapter on the neglected subject of agriculture in North Africa, Saker El Nour writes on the importance of "pressure from below, infoprmed by the needs and aspirations of small-scale farmers, peasants and farm workers, who remain indispensable in a just transition in the region and beyond". Similarly in an account of mining and renewable energy in Morocco, Karen Rignall writes that the "resource conflicts" often allow communities to "imagine and experiment with a different kind of politics or approach to rural governance. This new imaginary can be considered an emergent politics of the commons." She cautions that those arguing for "just transition" cannot ignore these inputs and ideas, and impose a "predetermined frame of analysis" or crutially tries to substitute existing social movements.

This review can only touch on a few of the articles. But running through all the chapters are two main themes. The first of which is that existing strategies for energy and sustainable transitions are trapped by the logic of a global capitalist system, that sees the region as crucial to the continued accumulation of capital, primarily in the Global North (though China is increasingly imposing its own interests). Thus the interests of the USA and Europe and the fossil fuel corporations that are so closely tied to them, tend to shape what governments across the Middle East and North Africa are planning. This distorts things in a way that rarely offers anything to the mass of the local populations, and in some cases, actively destroys their lives through pollution and displacement. Indeed, the greenwashing associated with energy plans actively empowers the worst states in the region. So Jawad Moustakbal is surely right to conclude about Morocco, in a way that could be applied across the region:

There will be no just transition as long as the energy sector remains under the control of foreign transational companies and a local ruling elite that is free to plunder the state and generate as much profit as it wishes, within a culrutre of authoritarianism and nepotism. The debt system and PPPs are a major obstacle to any model of popular sovereignty, including energy sovereignty.

But there is something else that runs through the book - this is the potential for popular revolt. While few chapters explore the "Arab Spring" in detail, the book carries with it a sense that mass radical change is necessary and possible. As Christian Henderseon concludes the book:

The pressures that led to the Arab revolutions of 2010 and 2011 have not been resolved; deep structural reconfiguration is still needed. It is not too early to foresee how these quandaries will develop but the Guld states are not immune from popular calls for democarcy, equity and redistribution that define the just transition.

I would go further. Without the sort of mass struggles that brought down dictators and rulers across the region, and without those struggles developing into popular movements for democratic control of the economy, we won't see the sort of transition that the region, and the world, desperately needs.

Dismantling Green Colonialism is probably one of the most important books published on climate justice this year. Every activist should try and read it, to learn more about the realities of the Arab Region, the barriers to change and the movements trying to shape a sustainable future.

Recommended read: Interview with Hamza Hamouchene about the book

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El-Mahdi & Philip Marfleet - Egypt: The Moment of Change
Shenker - The Egyptians: A Radical Story