Emir Sader - The New Mole: Paths of the Latin American Left

Over the last decade and a half or so Latin America has, along with the Arab Revolutions, been one area of hope for those of us who hope to see radical change. A succession of mass movements and left wing governments have offered, and continue (in some cases) to offer hope. Certainly leaders like Evo Morales in Boliva and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela have inspired millions. The mass movements of rural workers, landless peasants as well as the urban working class have brought down governments and shaken the complacency of important people in Washington.

Emir Sader's recent book is an attempt to grapple with the changing movements in South America and offer some direction forwards. Unfortunately the book is somewhat mechanical in its approach to historical change and while it acknowledges the problems of some of those governments (such as that of the Workers' Party in Brazil) which have failed to deliver much of the people's hopes, Sader tends to argue that better a slightly progressive bulwark against neoliberalism than none at all. Even if this means capitulating to the wider problems of the capitalist system.

Sader begins by locating the story of South America in a wider Marxist history. In particular, as the title of his book implies, he concentrates on Marx's "Old Mole" of history, the revolution that emerges, then disappears only to reappear somewhere else. But Sader's vision of what the revolutionary mole is varies through history. Beginning with the post-World War One revolutions in Russia and Europe he then locates a follow up appearance in Cuba.While the Cuban revolution certainly had popular support and defeated a vile regime it was not the same mass movement that had been seen elsewhere.

This becomes even more apparent when Sader describes where the "mole" appears next. With the defeat of guerrilla movements in South America and the death of Che Guevara, Sader tells us that "the mole responded by promoting institutional governments - that of Velasco Alvarado in Peru in 1969, that of Allende in 1970". While these were progressive challenges to the system they were also very much within the system. Certainly not what Karl Marx imaged when he hoped that Old Mole would burrow up into the daylight again.

This is not to say Sader is on the wrong side. He absolutely understands the way that Imperialism and capitalist forces have attempted to smash those governments and movements (from Chile to Nicaragua) that have threatened their interests. But because he also sees the later Soviet Union as progressive (at one point he describes Stalin as one of the "new leaders of the revolution") and the collapse of the Eastern European regimes from 1989 onward as a defeat for the socialist cause, he cannot help but see the problems of the left as being a crisis of legitimacy, rather than a failing of strategy.

As a result of the defeat of the Soviet Union, Sader tells us that the Washington neo-liberal agenda has run rampant. But "neoliberalism's biggest achievements were not in the economic field, where most of its promise had lain, but in the social and ideological fields." By this Sader means the destruction of public services, weakened unions, increased unemployment and an more atomised workforce. "The majority of Latin Americans can no longer organise, have no recourse to justice and no public identity" he claims. Yet this flies in the face of the reality that large sections of the Latin American population have always faced these problems and have resisted and continue to do so.

For Sader, neoliberalism rather than capitalism is the problem. "Latin America was the laboratory of neoliberalism" he tells rightly us;

"Here it was born, here it spread and here it took on its most radical forms. As a result, the continent suffered a neoliberal hangover and became the weakest link in this chain, with a proliferation of governments elected on the back of opposition to neoliberalism, contrary to the tendency elsewhere in the world."

The problem with this analysis is that it increasingly sees the key task for the left as being to encourage those governments that challenge neoliberalism rather than building a wider movement against capitalism. This is not to say that Sader ignores mass movements, on the contrary he champions them, but he does not see them as key.

Why is this? Sader is clearly of the revolutionary left, but in his critiques of what he calls the "ultra left" he seems to have given up on the task of revolutionary change. Part of this comes I think from his weak politics. His obsession with a world-wide defeat for the working class as a result of the end of the "bipolar" world in the early 1990s. More worryingly he seems to misunderstand the role of the state. Classical Marxism as well as the work of subsequent revolutionaries like Lenin, saw the State not as a mediating force between the classes, but as an instrument of class rule. Sader however sees the State as something that can be appropriated by governments as weapon against neoliberalism.

"it could also be a state that has been refounded by governments that seek to break out of neoliberalism, developing new structures of power. The state is, therefore, a space in dispute."

He continues:

"All the more reason, therefore, for the presence of the state in the fight against neoliberalism."

The problem with this analysis is that it leaves the movement and the anti-neoliberal governments Sader looks to weak in the face of the forces of capitalist power. Sader is well aware of what took place in 1973 in Chile when the CIA and Pinochet smashed a left wing government to protect their wider class interests. But he doesn't seem to have learnt his lesson. While rightly critiquing those like John Holloway for not acknowledging the need to "challenge for power" Sader has failed to give any real line of march for the wider left movements in South America that could begin to seriously challenge the system. As a result The New Mole makes some interesting points and is a useful, short summary of the radical history of South America, but it needs to be read critically and challenged.

Related Reviews

Sader & Silverstein - Without Fear of Being Happy: Lula, the Workers Party and Brazil

Rachel Hewitt - Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey

For those readers outside of the UK, the phrase "Ordnance Survey" will probably mean very little. But for millions of Britons over the years, the Survey has represented the maps and charts that we have used to find our way around the country. In particular, hikers, ramblers and climbers will know the garish pink covered maps that, in amazing detail, show the locations of windmills, ancient remains, monuments and public telephones, as well as mountains, roads and waterways.

It is easy to take this for granted, after all it is no surprise that nations have maps of themselves. From this point of view a history of the Ordnance Survey (and wider attempts to map the British Isles) might seem only of interest to a specialist readership. Yet Rachel Hewitt's book contains much of interest to those interested in the development of modern Britain, science and social history.

Hewitt begins with the failed Jacobite rebellion of the mid 1700s. The defeat of Charles Stuart at the Battle of Culloden led to "loyalist" troops hunting down the last of the rebels. They were hampered by a complete lack of maps. In fact, large areas of Scotland were not only very difficult terrain, they were also completely unknown to anyone but the locals.

For a developing nation this was an enormous problem. In addition to the military consequences the nation state also needed to know what it had in terms of resources, people and places. From these early beginnings the modern Ordnance Survey was born.

Hewitt ably traces the story of those early mapping exhibitions. The small groups of men who travelled though inhospitable terrain, measuring, drawing and noting the names of landmarks. Their equipment was rudimentary and their skills were new. Many of the earlier maps are closer to pictorial representations than the symbolic maps we know today. The accounts of the progress of the surveyors are fascinating.

A few individuals struggled to get national recognition, and eventually government realised the importance of the task. Yet it took almost a century before the first, full Ordnance Survey map of the country was finished.

Why did this take so long? It is illuminating that there was a full map of Ireland produced long before the whole of the England, Scotland and Wales. The South Coast was mapped repeatedly long before the mountains of Scotland. The reason for this disparity has everything to do with the needs of the growing British State. The South Coast was important because it was the most likely site of French invasion and understanding the location of strategic sites was crucial for the military. Ireland was Britain's first colony and the government needed to know its resources, people and places in detail. It is noteworthy that the "Great Trigonometrical Survey of India" was begun in 1817 and was well advanced by the mid-1840s, yet the final map in the first series of the British Isles (south west Northumberland) wasn't released until  1870.

One of the weaknesses of Hewitt's book is that she doesn't draw more of this out. In fact it is merely one element in an interesting story for the author, rather than a central theme of the story of British mapping. This is a shame because the story of the Ordnance Survey is one that illuminates the development of British capitalism. Capitalism brought together a particular method of organising production, one that needed incredible amounts of natural resources and people, as well as being incredibly dynamic in terms of scientific and technological development. All these elements are brought out in the story of the technological and social developments of the Ordnance Survey, yet they feel tacked on to Hewitt's history.

This is not to say that Rachel Hewitt's book is not a worthwhile read. She has collected an immense amount of forgotten history and tells a great story. It is one that interweaves William Wordsworth's poetry with the story of the determination of the distance between observatories in London and Paris. It mixes technological genius with stories of men camping for weeks on mountain tops in the hope of a clear day. Sadly this detail sometimes obscures the far greater story beneath.

Carolyn Ives Gilman - Ison of the Isles

Ison of the Isles is the sequel to the marvellously original novel Isles of the Forsaken which I reviewed a few weeks ago. It is such a direct sequel that it really reads as part two of a single volume and the publisher might want to consider re-issuing the two books in this format in the future.

Warning: Spoilers Ahead

Forsaken told the story of the colonial ambitions of the Innings in the Forsaken Islands. Their military interventions and the threat to the lives and culture of the people of these Islands leads to an initial uprising, led by a former naval commander, Harg. This uprising rapidly becomes a revolution against colonial rule, one that in this sequel is being bloodily suppressed by the Inning naval forces. Massacres and violent attacks on towns are leading to enormous numbers of refugees and growing calls for action.

The problem is that the only real option that is apparent to the islanders is military and despite Harg's strategic genius there is no way he can defeat the overwhelming military force being deployed against him. This means that the islanders' only option is to turn to their cultural and religious beliefs to save them. They look for a traditional leader, the Ison, who can lead them. The Ison however has to go through a ritual that will transform him, and the only person who can do that is a Lashnura woman Spaeth, who has the magical abilities but not the experience.

At the heart of this novel, as in its prequel, is the clash between the new rationality represented by the "developed" or "modern" nation of the Innings as contrasted to the "old" beliefs of the Forsaken islanders. As I argued in reviewing the first novel, when in our own history colonial powers have encountered people they want to control, these clashes are not simply cultural - they are rooted in the economic and political nature of the respective societies.

In Ison as in the earlier book the difference is that these forces are very real indeed (at least for the Islanders). Spaeth is able to encourage her gods to use their powers over storm and sea to try and sink the Inning naval ships. Unfortunately, in a brilliant illustration of the central theme of the novels, the captain of the Inning flagship is able to make a lightening conductor to protect his vessel from the vengeful gods. The captain's rationality appears to tame the extremes of nature, but in reality he unknowingly defeats a god.

Carolyn Ives Gilman has clearly built on her understanding of the beliefs of the native peoples of the Americas to create this wonderful fantasy. However she takes this further. There is a darkly humorous part of the book were one of the Islanders is convinced to marry an Inning. The ritual means nothing to her. She cannot comprehend the idea of being a virgin at marriage, or how important monogamy is to the Inning, nor the idea of having a single partner for life.

I also enjoyed the way that different revolutionary strategies are played out. There are those that want to try and defeat the colonials at their own game, but the Islanders' technology and economic system isn't yet strong enough, nor can they win in the courtroom which is rigged against them. The problem for the author is that there is no real solution.

This is a military conflict that the Innings are going to win despite the heroism and the tactics of the Islanders' soldiers. The Forsaken Islands will not be entirely subdued and ultimately, as in the real world, the colonies will rebel and kick out the oppressor. This contradiction means that the end of the novel is somewhat unsatisfying. That said this is an enjoyable read about a fantasy world of magic and warfare that mirrors the clash between oppressed and oppressor in our own history. I look forward to Ms Gilman's future writing.

Related Reviews

Gilman - Isles of the Forsaken

Leon Trotsky - 1905

Lenin described the revolution in Russia in 1905 as the "great dress rehearsal  for the revolution of 1917 which seized power. As a result, the 1905 revolution is often hidden by the shadow of the events twelve years later. Yet for those trying to understand the dynamics of the revolutionary process, there is much to learn from 1905 (as the Bolsheviks themselves understood).

Leon Trotsky was a central figure in this revolution. His book on 1905 is not an attempt at a historical over-view. It doesn't tell the whole story what was a year of revolution - in fact he begins with the massacre of January 9th, when Tsarist troops fired on a crowd who can marched to the palace to raise a number of wide ranging demands for reform. Then he skips to the events of October, barely touching at the surface of what were many months of strikes, protests and intervention from the Tsarist state.

October 1905 was important because it was then that the great body that represented the working people of St. Petersburg - the Soviet of Workers Deputies was formed. Much of 1905 is spent analysising this body, which Trotsky was to chair during a brief period at the end of the year, before the state arrested the leadership. From Trotsky, we get a real sense of the activity of the Soviet, as well as the way that it represented an alternate centre of power to the existing bourgeois state.

"The Soviet's premises were always crowded with petitioners and plaintiffs of all kinds - mostly workers, domestic servants, shop assistants, peasants, soldiers, and sailors. Some had an absolutely phantasmoagorical idea of the Soviet's power and its methods.... Applications and petitions arrived from remote parts of the country. After the Novembers strike the inhabitants of one district of a Polish province sent a telegram of thanks to the Soviet. An old Cossack from Poltava province complained of unjust treatment by the Prices Repnin who had exploited him as a clerk for 28 years and then dismissed him without cause; the old man was asking the Soviet to negotiate with the Princes' on his behalf. The envelope containing this curious petition was addressed simply to The Workers' Government, Petersburg, yet it was promptly delivered by the revolutionary postal service."

The Soviet was also a body of action, it tried to co-ordinate and develop the workers struggles across the city and the country, launching a strike wave to demand an eight hour day, but encouraging workers to implement this in their workplaces in the face of management opposition. This was incredibly successful and in the fifty odd days of its existence, workers made many gains that had been denied to them by the repressive regime. As Trotsky writes:

"By the pressure of strikes the Soviet won the freedom of the press. It organised regular street patrols to ensure the safety of citizens. To a greater or lesser extent, it took the postal and telegraph services and the railways into its hands. it intervened authoritatively in economic disputes between workers and capitalists. It made an attempt to introduce the eight-hour working day by direct revolutionary pressure. Paralysing the activity of the autocratic state by means of the insurrectionary strike, it introduced its own free democratic order into the life of the labouring urban population."

Trotsky's book contains much else of interest - the role of the mass strike wave in revolutionary periods and the way that the masses can attempt to win over the army for instance. However the revolution was defeated, in part because sections of the army remained loyal and in part because of the weaknesses of the under-developed Russian working class. Much of the processes that would shape the 1917 revolution existed in embryo in 1905 - the alliance between workers and peasants for instance.

The defeat of the revolution led to prosecutions. The task for the Russian ruling class though was difficult, because "they had to represent the Soviet as a conspiratorial organisation which, under pressure from a group of energetic revolutionaries, controlled the terrorized masses."

Of course this was very much the wrong way, but the Tsar and his ministers could hardly acknowledge the fact that enormous numbers of workers and peasants had supported a body that had become an alternate to their government.

The edition of 1905 that I read (Wellred publications 2005) contains a lot of useful material. Trotsky uses it to expound his theories of Combined and Uneven Development and Permanent Revolution, arguing long before Lenin that a working class revolution was possible in Tsarist Russia. In later articles and footnotes he points out that his criticisms of the Bolsheviks were no longer valid as they had, in the process of 1917, moved to share his position. Additional material includes Trotsky's account of the trial of the Deputies of the Soviet and his speech in the court room, in which he displays his eloquence, political analysis and rhetoric. It also includes an account of the deputies journey into Siberian exile and an exciting description of his escape on a sleigh pulled by reindeer and a drunken Siberian driver. Sadly this edition is marred by a very bad layout, plenty of typographical errors and spelling mistakes and a couple of duplicated paragraphs. It makes the reading process much harder and would encourage potential readers to search out an alternative edition.

Related Reviews

Cliff - Trotsky: Towards October 1879 - 1917
Cliff - Trotsky: The Sword of the Revolution, 1917 - 1923

Choonara - A Rebels' Guide to Trotsky

Trotsky - An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe

John Romer - A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid

The very idea of Ancient Egypt conjures up some obvious images; the pyramids and Sphinx in Giza, frescoes and carvings showing boats plying the Nile or impressive statues and grave goods. This is not surprising, as these monuments are both impressive and photogenic. Yet they make up only a small part of Egypt's ancient history, a culmination of thousands of years of life near the Nile and the history of the area continued long after the pyramids were built into the era of classical Greece and Rome.

John Romer's earlier books have looked at particularly aspects of ancient Egypt. In particularly I was impressed by his exploration of the daily life of a section of Egypt's more ordinary population, the tomb builders who worked in the Valley of the Kings. That book Ancient Lives included a detailed description of some extended strike action by the workers. But Romer's latest book takes on a far larger task, an account of the whole history of Ancient Egypt. He is well qualified to do this having spent many years excavating and studying the period and this, the first volume of two, is a wonderful book that will set the standards for writing about Egypt for a long time.

Romer begins his tale with the earliest of people who live in the area that we now think of as Egypt. We know a little about the hunter-gatherer nomads who lived in the area, but the real story begins with the farming communities that hunted, grew food and fished on the northern shores of the Faiyum Oasis, a few hundred miles west of modern Cairo. The climate then was different and one of the factors that shaped the eventual growth of the ancient population was a changing environment that helped force the earliest farmers to the banks of the Nile. The arid conditions of the Egyptian desert preserve the legacy of these farmers from perhaps 7000 years ago. When excavated their grain bins were found to not only to contain grain, so well preserved that curators tried to germinate them later, but also the tools and reed baskets had also survived. Thus begins the story of a people who transformed the Nile region using the most rudimentary of tools, yet produced stunning buildings, tombs and artworks. The pyramids after all, were made with bronze age technology.

At the heart of John Romers' story though, is the tale of the growth of the Egyptian State. It took many centuries before what we know as ancient Egypt came to exist. Romer takes pains to explain the neolithic revolution that led to farming becoming the dominant mode of production along the Nile. But he also argues that the particular nature of the Nile, the extreme fertility of the soil meant that those farmers could support a large non-agricultural work force at a very early point in history. Here-in lies the secret of the rapid growth of the Egyptian state, but also its ability to mobilise and sustain large numbers of workers in its monument building phase. During the building of the Great Pyramid, Romer estimates that a tenth of the working population were not working on the fields, but were engaged in building or providing the networks of exchange to support the pyramid builders.

Romer sees the development of this state as central to the development of the wider Egyptian world. While discussing King Narmer, the earliest Pharaoh who united Upper and Lower Egypt, Romer writes that:

"the formation of Narmer's state had provided the foundations of a truly orignal order for [a] society that would last for millennia and which, as Pharaoh's Egypt, became a wonder of the ancient world.... a commonly used term like 'kingdom' appears to be appropriate. Yet the Pharaonic state stands at the beginning of all that. It was created from the ground up, without the benefit of an exemplar and, indeed, without the aid of writing or the presence of a national faith."

In this development of the state, the King or Pharaoh comes to represent the very state itself. Indeed,

"when ancient Egyptian scribes referred to Pharaoh's kingdom in non-literary texts, they used terms like 'residence' - that is the royal residence - to denote the controlling centre of the networks of trade and traffic, tithing and taxing, that operated in the regions of the lower Nile."

Kings like Narmer were often portrayed as warlike and violent. Early Egyptian history certainly was violent, many of the kings of this period, including Narmer, where buried with hundreds of murdered people around them. They are often depicted in the act of vanquishing an enemy, yet much of the migration and spread of the people northwards from the sites where the early Egyptian state developed was marked by peaceful co-existence with those who had come from the Levant. Extensive trade networks developed and cultural ideas, such as design of buildings and farming were taken up and shared by communities from different areas. I liked for instance that in the midst of one enormous Naqqadrian cemetery lies a grave of an individual buried in a traditional way from the Middle East.

All this could only be supported by the agricultural produce from the Nile, and the earliest technological innovations were the irrigation channels and pools built along the banks to trap the annual flood. Such methods are still used in other parts of Africa and one reason we know something about ancient farming patterns is that they lasted until very recent times. The ancient state was never far from the farming and the water that allowed the desert kingdom to flourish. This is why on a giant mace head, archaeologists have found an image of "a man... wearing what would become the White Crown of Upper Egypt, in the act of opening a water channel with the stroke of a farmer's adze... it is improbable that this unique object.... does not reflect something of the age in which it had been made."

In the language of Historical Materialism, the immense surplus that could be obtained from agricultural on the banks of the Nile (sometimes two or three crops a year) meant that the forces of production developed rapidly. Within a few centuries of the early Naqqadrian state and the rule of Narmer, the enormous pyramids were being built. This required a complex and developed state to organise the networks of trade and distribution of food, as well as the movement of stone and metal from quarries and mines. Egypt then as an agricultural state and Romer argues convincingly that the ancient cities were not places as we might imagine them today, but places of residence of the state's workers. Those who oversaw the production process.

Towards the end of the book, Romer laments  that we know very little about these ancient people.

"Our real knowledge of these ancient people hardly extends beyond their pyramids, their tomb chapels and names and titularies. We know nothing, for example, of those who carried [Queen] Hetep-heres in her palanquin, and though we possess her very intestines, we know nothing of the woman or the queen at all."

It is for this reason that much of the this book is dominated by discussions of architecture, pottery or stonework. Yet this is never boring, Romer has tried to draw out a history of people based on what they did to shape the world around them in order to survive. As he aptly points out, the images they have left are less a depiction of what is taking place and more a depiction of the state itself. As the ancient Egyptian state matured, its monuments and buildings also evolved. The very act of building the enormous pyramids also shaped the state and created the conditions of further building works. Our vision of ancient Egypt is thus in turn a reflection of what the ancient state itself did. As Romer concludes, "the greater part of what survives from early Egypt is exactly what those ancient people took pains to store and thus preserve within the dryness of the desert."

John Romers' book is a unique and magnificent read. It is accessible and well written, though if I have one minor criticism it is that the pictures seem old and of low-quality, a few higher resolution images of the objects being described would have been welcome. But this is a minor complaint about what is an essentially materialist account of the rise of the ancient Egyptian state. I recommend it, and look forward to the companion volume with great anticipation.

Related Reviews

John Romer - Ancient Lives; The Story of the Pharaohs' Tombmakers
Shaw - Ancient Egypt - A Very Short Introduction
Verner - The Pyramids: Their Archaeology and History
Kurth - The Temple of Edfu - A guide by an Ancient Egyptian Priest

Robert Lacey & Danny Danziger - The Year 1000

There are an enormous number of differences between the years M and MM in the British Isles. Many of these are of course technological. Ploughs in the year 1000 were predominately wood. Labour in the fields was done by men and women, occasionally they had animals too. Diets were worse, mostly because of the difficulty of storing food and shortages caused by bad harvests, though there were other differences - many foods such as sugar, spinach, tomatoes and potatoes had yet to reach these shores.

In some ways though, these differences are only superficial. They are the result of the exploration, scientific discovery and history of the next thousand years. Vastly more important and more interesting are the more subtle social differences.

Lacey and Danziger's book of popular history is surprisingly interesting in this regard. It takes as its starting point a little known document from around 1020. The Julius Work Calendar (see image here) was probably produced around 1020 CE in Canterbury Cathedral. It is a monthly documentation of the saints days and festivals, principal activities, zodiac signs and information on hours of daylight. Each month is illustrated with a line drawing showing some of the principle activities of that time of year. Most of which concentrate on agricultural work, though one possibly shows the punishment of a thief.

In October huntsmen might try to catch cranes,
driven extinct in the UK a few centuries later.

The year 1000 (though few at the time would have acknowledged this calendaric milestone) was a time of change. While there was already much that would be familiar to the modern viewer in terms of the British landscape - most of the ancient woods had vanished at "almost every modern English village existed and bore its modern name" there was also much that was different. Religion in particular was changing. Out were going the older beliefs to be replaced by Christianity, though many of the rituals were to last many centuries hence. The majority of people still believed in elves or spirits, but they were also coming under the influence of the newer god. Monasteries were important in much of the country, though they to were changing. Newer, more vigorous and restricted practises were becoming the norm - mixed religious institutions, marriage and the like were increasingly frowned upon.

Other changes were more dramatic. The authors of this history argue the role of woman until around 1000 CE was much more equal to those of men. Surviving wills frequently demonstrate that women were property owners and powerful in their own right, and there were legalistic changes to come:

"One Anglo-Saxon law code makes clear that a woman could walk out of her marriage on her own initiative if she cared to, and that if she took the children and cared for them, then she was also entitled to half the property."

But the Christian Church did not like this:

"... a moralistic tone was entering the legal equation. 'If a woman during her husband's life commits adultery with another man...' read Law 53 of Canute, 'her legal husband is to have all her property, and she is to lose her nose and her ears.'"

These laws proved short lived, but increasingly the authors document the way that value would be applied to law. Crimes, whether they were of passion, violence or property where assigned a price and those who could afford to do so, could buy their way out of trouble as never before. Some, those effectively slaves, tied to the land had no such recourse.

Based on interviews with experts of the time, this is an enjoyable, readable account of life for people on the British Isles, 1000 years ago. The general history is informative, and the dirty "Anglo-Saxon" riddles are funny, though the authors do not attempt to pretend this was some rural idyll. After remarking on the way that the village life can seem romantic, they discuss the skeletal remains of a woman from that era who had died in childbirth. The bones of her unborn child stuck in her birth canal, she would, without medicine, pain killers or modern surgical methods have died an agonising death. There is much that we recognise of the past here, but for those of us living in the developed world, and modern Britain, life is far better.

Mike Gonzalez & Houman Barekat - Arms and the People: Popular Movements and the Military from the Paris Commune to the Arab Spring

The classic Marxist account of the State is that it is the collective institutions within society that help ensure the continued position of the ruling class. Some of these are subtle - the laws, religious institutions, prisons and so on that seek to restrict and control peoples lives. Others of these are more physical, what Engels and Lenin describe as "armed bodies of men".

In Britain where I live, most progressive activists have experienced the behaviour of one "armed body" - the police. Less common for us is the role of the military. Though recent experiences during the Egyption Revolution has shown that this is not true everywhere. This new collection of essays is an attempt to draw out the experiences of the role of the military, in particular, the army during periods of social upheaval. In his introduction, Mike Gonzalez draws out the contradictory role of military forces using quotes from the German revolutionary Karl Leibknecht:

"[Modern Militarism] wants neither more nor less than the squaring of the circle; it arms the people against the people itself; it is insolent enough to force the workers ... to become oppressors, enemies and murderers of their own class comrades and friends, of their parents, brothers, sisters and children, murderers of their own past and future. It wants to be at the same time democratic and despotic, enlightened and machine-like, to serve the nation and at the same time to be its enemy."

In order to do this those who make up the army have to be changed;

"First of all, the proletarian in uniform is sharply and ruthlessly cut off from his class comrades and his family. This is done by taking him away from his home, which is systematically done in Germany, and especially by shutting him up in barracks. One might also speak of a repetition of the Jesuit method of education, a counterpart of monastic organisation."

Leibknecht understood however that under the pressure of social events the "proletarians in uniform" could be pulled away from the role assigned to them by the state and won to the interests of the working class. But this could only occur at moments when the working class was able to reach out to the army and fight for their loyalty. In a chapter on the experience of workers and the armed forces during the Portuguese revolution in 1974/5, a soldier describes what happens when he and his comrades are ordered to prevent a demonstration:

"the commander told us that he'd received a telephone call about a demonstration at Lisnave, led by a minority of Leftist agitators and that our job was to prevent it from taking place. We were armed as we had never been before with G3s and 4 magazines... The demo began and a human torrent advanced with shouts of "the soldiers are the sons of the workers", "tomorrow the soldiers will be workers" and "the arms of soldiers must not be turned against the workers". The commander soon saw that we weren't going to follow his orders, so he shut up. Our arms hung down by our side and some comrades were crying... The following day in the barracks things were livelier. Before morning assembly many comrades were up and shouting the slogans of the demo."

Many of the essays in this book explore this process. Some of the essays, like the two on the Russian and German Revolution demonstrate how mass conscript armies are both won towards the Revolution by the impact of the war, economic crisis and the reality of life in the trenches. But the soldiers (and sailors) are also part, at key points of driving the revolution forward. The masses, in the shape of the workers and their organisations, remain essential to winning the revolution, but the loyalty of the armed forces is crucial to ensuring the revolution isn't drowned in blood.

The book also looks at other aspects of the military and progressive change. One chapter - dealing with the Free Officers movements of Egypt and Iraq, explores the way that the military, or sections of the military have been at the front of struggles against colonial rule. In these situations the army tried to move independently but often found itself unleashing wider social forces, which then needed to be controlled.

Two excellent chapters, one looking at the limitations of Guerrilla movements within South America in the 1950s and 1960s, but more particularly Jonathan Neales' chapter on the experience of the US Army in Vietnam, examine the role of the wider population and its impact on the army. In South America with the exception of the unusual circumstances in Cuba, Guerrilla movements made little impact because they remained isolated from the wider population and their struggles for liberation. Conversely in Vietnam the overwhelming US military might was unable to sauced because their opponents were supported by the bulk of the population.

The role of the military is never an independent one. In fact, one of the mistakes of many of those who have tried to change society, is to think that the army stands outside of politics. In a brilliant chapter on Chile in 1973, Mike Gonzalez draws out the limitations of this reformist analysis as he examines the military coup that destroyed Salvador Allende's attempts at reform. As the right wing and the military prepared to drown the Allende government and the rising working class movement in blood, Gonzalez points out the "astonishing... blindness of the Popular Unity leadership to these realities." Indeed in order to try and appease the right, Allende went so far as to introduce three army generals to his cabinet, including Pinochet.

To the last, Chilean activists and foreign commentators spoke of "loyal" officers who would not fight their elected government. But unlike in Russia, Germany or Spain in 1936 (the subject of an excellent chapter by Andy Durgan) there was no pole to pull the mass of the soldiers away from their officers and the state. This, as Gonzalez points out, would have been "an organised, well prepared working class that could fight back across the country". Unfortunately, Allende and most of the left, including the Communist Party had prevented that force developing.

There are many lessons to be learnt from these valuable essays. I would make a couple of criticisms though these are mainly ones of omission rather than disagreement. The first is that there is no chapter on the Red Army. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution Leon Trotsky built from scratch an army that was able to defeat the invading counter-revolutionary forces. That army, like Republican forces in Spain in 1936 had many different attributes to a normal capitalist force and it deserves more than a passing mention here. Secondly there is not enough in here about how revolutionary movements have won, or attempted to relate to soldiers. A recent, non-revolutionary, example might have been the Military Families Against the War campaign in the aftermath of the UK's participation in the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Of course there can be no blue-print for how revolutionary movements should relate to the armed forces. The key answer is that at any point of mass struggle institutions must be created that attempt to win those in the military who want to rebel, or break from their officers to "an embryonic alternative state power". In the Russian and German Revolutions those were the workers councils. In Spain it was the mass revolutionary movement that seized power in the cities. Ultimately it is on the question of power that revolutions are won or lost, and the failure to win the rank and file towards an alternative centre of power has doomed many a revolutionary upsurge. This book helps us learn that lesson today.

Christian Wolmar - Fire & Steam: How the Railways Transformed Britain

Christian Wolmar is an unashamed fan of railways. This is not because he has some sort of obsessional trainspotting tendencies, but rather because he sees the railways, and the infrastructure that they have developed over time, as an essential part of the development of modern industrial society. More than this though, Wolmar understands that the railways have also been shaped by the world around them. The modern British railway system has the shape and routes it does, because of decisions taken back in the 1800s. The paths that Virgin trains use today were laid out by a myriad of different companies over a very short space of time. Some of the technology used, in particular the rails themselves, dates from the earliest days when carts were drawn along out of mines by horses. More recent innovations, such as electrified track or double-decker carriages have been tried, rejected or not installed because of economic and political considerations made decades ago.

The railways have helped shape modern Britain. But they are certainly not perfect. Part of the problem lay with the haphazard and chaotic way that railway companies set out to lay track. There was no overall plan, they simply created routes that they thought would make money. Frequently, branch lines were laid for no other reason than to prevent rivals using the land or routes. Victorian laissez-faire capitalism meant that the state played little role in over-seeing the ventures and it was a long time before the chaos of the early rail system was reduced. In the post privatisation era, we seem to have returned to many of the problems that the railways suffered early on. The decision taken to privatise the railways was done, not out of desire to improve public transport (indeed the exact opposite) but out of sheer financial considerations. Public ownership of British railways was only a minor part of their history, and Wolmar blames this for a "fraught" relationship between government and the industry.

Certainly the decisions taken by the Tory government of the early 1990s were disastrous. Separating off the ownership of the track from the trains that ran on it, has caused chaos and confusion for millions of passengers. It has helped encourage the decline of the railway system and undermine public transport in the eyes of passengers and government. That said, the problems aren't simply to do with privatisation. In the post-World War II era, the system suffered enormously from lack of funding and finance. Today we have the crazy system were the private rail system can only work because the government pours enormous amounts of cash into it. Raising the question about why it isn't a public system in the first place.

Wolmar is a partisan writer. He argues that "the future is rail" and sees the railways as part of the way that we will reduce congestion and greenhouse gas emissions. In his final chapter he offers some tantalising glimpses of the potential for new technologies on the railways.

I've concentrated on the more modern aspects of this book, but the early history is certainly engaging. There is some fascinating stuff here - I was struck by the account of how the Duke of Wellington was to terrified to leave his carriage during the inauguration of the Liverpool to Manchester line, for fear of the protest by working people outside. Wolmar certainly doesn't forget the workers in his history. His accounts of the safety problems and the strikes for wages and better conditions sit well with his stories of wealthy men making even larger fortunes out of the railways. While we might company about delays and high prices today, we can be glad that we don't face the sheer number of accidents and crashes that dogged the earlier railways, though as Wolmar points out, British companies often took a very long time to learn lessons and introduce safety features.

This is an immensely enjoyable read and together with Wolmar's history of the London Underground, a recommended read for travellers.

Related Reviews

Wolmar - The Subterranean Railway

Richard Fortey - The Earth: An Intimate History

Geology as a subject is one that most people know very little about. Few of us understand the processes that formed the world around us. How did the landscapes get shaped? What caused the seas and oceans and why are mountains where they are? Rich Fortey's book is a extremely readable introduction to the history of planet Earth. Rather than tell a long elongated story that starts at the beginning and proceeds ponderously towards contemporary times, Fortey describes places that he knows well. His story is actually the story of the development of geology as a science.

Despite people having studied the Earth for centuries (usually in an effort to find valuable minerals) it is only very recently that the processes that have shaped the planet's surface have become accepted by the majority of scientists. The story of how "plate tectonics" came to be understood is one that involves a large array of different thinkers, each contributing small bits to the whole, and a few whose correct ideas were pretty much dismissed out of hand.

This history is fascinating but it also allows Fortey to dwell on places that demonstrate particular aspects of geological processes. While describing Newfoundland for instance, he doesn't simply explain why the east of the island is so different to the west, he takes us on an long journey through time that eventually ends up on the shore of a forgotten ocean, Iapetus. What begins as a description of the island, introduces the idea of shifting continents back through enormous lengths of time, until the reader can imagine the repetitive clashes of plates and then their fracturing as oceans close and reform over millions of years.

Fortey's writing is also wonderful. For a subject that rarely contains rapid change, he brings the subject alive, peppering his writing with literary quotes and pieces of poetry. He has the knack of making the reader understand the power of the Earth's internal forces and the majesty of their slowness. Take his description of the rock ("brownish, like spiced cake") that makes up many of the buildings, to say nothing of the surrounding landscape, of Sorrento in Italy:

This rock is called the Campanian Ignimbrite. Its origin was a catastrophe that happened 35,000 years ago: a gigantic volcanic explosion threw out at least 100 cubic kilometres of pumice and ash... An explosion of steam and gluey lava blew out a great hole in the earth... not so much a bite out of Italy's profile as a huge punch. A vast cloud of incandesccent material buoyed up with gas flowed like a fiery tidal wave across the limestone terrain. Lumps of volcanic rock were carried along willy-nilly in the mayhem....

Here he describes the mental work of scientists trying to understand the complicated history of particular landscapes, which have had millions of years of changes piled onto each other.

Structural geologists love such things. They read the flexures in the rocks with the certainty of a blind man reading braille. They can easily imagine what it is for a fold system to be caught up in anther subsequent phase of contortion, fold imposed on fold. I admire this capacity to think in three dimensions - four, if you include time - more than I can say.

While Fortey's language is wonderful, at times its near poetry distracts from the subject matter. It is easy to get carried away with the flow of the narrative, and miss the detail of what the author is telling us. In particular since geology is an unknown subject for me, I found it full of strange words and concepts and had to re-read parts to understand it all. I also kept having to remind myself that some of the things being described take place over eons, millions of years. The closing of the Pacific Ocean as the tectonic plates move towards each other is taking place at the speed of the growth of human fingernails. An apt metaphor that helps us understand why it will take around 350 million years. Luckily, given the subject matter, Richard Fortey's book is full of such simple analogies and I'd recommend it to anyone trying to understand what is taking place beneath our feet.

Related Reviews

Fortey - Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution

Peter Alexander, Luke Sinwell & others - Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to Answer

When footage of the massacre of some 34 platinum mineworkers at Marikana in South Africa reached television screens around the world it provoked anger and shock from millions of people. Watching the You Tube videos today, I am struck by two things: the violence of the police opening fire with automatic weapons on protesters at a distance and the justification for that violence. Within a few hours of the massacre the excuses were already being made - portraying the strikers as armed and violent, arguing that the massacre was the result of inter-union rivalry. Few of the journalists covering the deaths discussed the viewpoint of the strikers themselves and certainly didn't talk about the appalling conditions above and below ground, the low pay and the high profits of the mining companies.

This new book by South African researchers is an attempt to both understand what happened near the Marikana mountain and to give it some context. As a piece of social research it is probably unrivalled. Through history there have been any number of massacres of strikers and demonstrators, yet rarely have those involved been allowed to speak in detail about their experiences.

At the core of the book is a series of interviews with mineworkers who took part in the strike. They explain the conditions that forced them to take action, and their experiences of the unions who organise in the mining industry. For the miners, low pay, long hours and lack of health and safety are the norm, as one of those interviewed explains:

the problem that causes accidents in the mine is pressure, we work under a lot of pressure from our bosses because they want production and then there is also intimidation. They want you to do things that are sub-standard and if you don't want to do that and follow the rules.. they say they will fire you or beat you...

Unfortunately the main union the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) has in the eyes of the workers themselves proved incapable of fighting for the members' interests. This is one of the themes of several of the interviews in the book, as one worker explains:

I am not satisfied at all about the way the union is representing us because it does not represent the workers' needs, it does what it is told to do, but in terms of having the workers' best interest at heart it has proven incapable of doing so. They side with the employer more than with the worker.

Another striker explains that this meant the workers' themselves organised a strike over pay, without approaching either the NUM or the other mining union, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU). A rank and file action from below which meant that "this time we would overtake the unions, we ended up wanting this as workers. It was then that it seemed as though the unions were fighting us as the workers...."

On the first day of the strike the workers were turned back by management, who told them to go through the union. The workers decided that they needed to return to the NUM to try and get them to negotiate for them, feeling abashed that they had not done so. Peter Alexander explains what happened next as the strikers moved towards the NUM office. Before they got to the building

there was a line of armed men wearing red T-shirts. The strikers halted their march close to the main taxi rank to the right. The armed men opened fire.

The workers fled to the Marikana mountain where they camped in the open air, sang songs and discussed what to do. It was this initial violence that led some to argue that the problem was the different unions in the mines being at war with each other. The strikers argue that this is not the case:

people say that unions are at war, saying that NUM and AMCU are fighting. Those are lies. Here, workers are the ones who are at war... There are no parties fighting, here only workers, workers are fighting for their rights and they want their money and they are being killed by NUM and [NUM President] Zokwana and the mine and the government that we vote for every day.

Over the next few days some people attempt to argue with the strikers to return to work. They are unsuccessful because the workers themselves recognise that they need to fight to win. But the employers and the state clearly also believe there is much at stake. There is evidence that the violence was premeditated. The workers report the arrival of heavily equipped armoured vehicles that laid wire to box in the strikers. In his conclusion to this book Peter Alexander quotes a spokesperson for the South African Police Service saying, on the morning of the massacre that "Today is unfortunately D-Day".

The massacre itself left over thirty workers dead. The parts of this book, both the reportage and the interviews dealing with the massacre are horrifying. The workers describe frantic phone calls as they try to find out if friends and colleagues are alive. Those arrested are beaten and prevented from contacting their families. One can only imagine the horror that descended over the working class areas around the mine.

But the events did not defeat the strikers. In fact they helped to generalise the workers' political ideas. One worker comments that:

South Africa is a democratic country but we as mineworkers are excluded from this democracy. For one, a white person here in the mines get a better pay than a black person and they are more eligible for promotion and that oppress[es] us black people more... This is a main reason that is preventing me from realising my dreams...

Another worker describes how he would no longer trust the police, even a family member and wouldn't report a crime to them anymore.

As some of the researchers concluded:

The workers developed their own class analysis of the situation at Lonmin and, instead of being silenced and falling back when the steel armed of the state mowed down 34 of their colleagues, they became further determined, and more workers united until all of Lonmin came to a standstill.

In fact the response from the strikers to the "largest state massacre of South African citizens since the 1976 Soweto Uprising" is nothing short of inspiring. The strike did not collapse, despite the death of 34 strikers. They carried on, and were joined by more and more of their colleagues. By 18 September the employer gave in and awarded the strikers major pay rises. The result of this was a whole number of further strikes across South Africa, particularly amongst miners of platinum and gold. As Pete Alexander concludes, "this was one of the most remarkable acts of courage in labour history, anywhere and at any time".

This book too is remarkable, not simply because it tells a powerful story of oppression and struggle, but because it does so through the voices of those that took part. History rarely remembers those at the bottom of society and the authors of this book have collected their voices in a way that both inspires us today, but will also likely form the basis of many future studies.

According to one of the strikers who witnessed the massacre, the first miner who was shot and killed was wearing a Kaiser Chiefs t-shirt. He could have been a worker anywhere in the world, an ordinary person struggling to improve things for himself and his family. This short, but important book has many lessons for all of us, not just workers in South Africa. The role of the trade union bureaucrats, the links between big business and the state (as well as the details of what is currently taking place in South Africa) are all things that workers around the globe need to learn. The struggle for justice for the Marikana mineworkers will continue, but their fight is one that will leave us all stronger and this book is an important part of learning those lessons.

You can purchase Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to Answer from the publisher, Bookmarks here.  

N.A.M. Rodger - The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1642 - 1815

The subtitle of this book is "A Naval History of Britain". The of is important because this and its companion volumes deal with the inter-relationship between the Royal Navy and the wider social and economic history of the British Isles. So rather than simply seeing the naval forces as an extension of the British states interests, either as an extension of colonialism or as a vehicle to protect national interests, the author has a much more dialectical understanding of the relationship.

Given Rodger's interest in the Navy it is no surprise that he considers that it has had an enormous influence on the development and history of the British Isles. He clearly is right in many regards. The Victualing Board, the government body responsible for providing food and drink to the Navy had an big influence on British agriculture. As Rodger points out:

The Board was the largest single purchaser on the London markets for agricultural products, and its policy of managing the markets so as to encourage the growth of large firms, while at the same time promoting competition, was at least influential and possibly critical in the grown of a sophisticated and integrated national and eventually international agricultural market.

Rodger's encyclopedic knowledge of naval history means that he can make such arguments from a strong position. Indeed if one thing characterises this book it is the enormous amount of material in it. The main body of the text of my edition is almost 600 pages long and there are a further 300 pages of additional materials, indexes and appendices - and all for a history covering less than two centuries. This is a real strength, but readers shouldn't think that Rodger's spends lots of time on aspects of his subject. He makes it clear at the start that this is not a detailed history of battles, and sometimes the most memorable events get the briefest of mentions. The Mutiny on the Bounty, for instance is covered in a mere six lines.

Rodger is more interested in describing the changing nature of British Sea Power and the institutions that oversaw it. In part this was shaped by the needs of the British State, particularly during wartime. The early chapters on the period of the British Republic and then the Restoration show a navy that had been left in a bad state. In part this was due to lack of finances, but it was also due to the way that the post-revolutionary dictatorship had viewed the navy itself. The army was the force that had won the revolution, the navy was made up of representatives of the old order.

Over time the Navy became gradually more professional and more organised. Technologies developed and it does seem that the British were far better than other countries, particularly France, at developing and then bringing into use new equipment and designs. Some of this is particularly illuminating. I had no idea, for instance, that 18th and 19th century ships relied so much on copper plating to prevent damage to their hulls.

The book culminates in the defeat of Napoleon and a few pages earlier in the epic sea battle of Trafalgar. Despite his subject matter, Rodger avoids falling into the trap of arguing that Nelson's greatest victory was the key to winning that war. In fact, he makes it clear that in some respects it was peripheral to the wider military victory. Nonetheless Trafalgar was an immense morale boast to the British in their war with Napoleon and helped to set in stone the view that Britain ruled the waves. This was something that the British liked to think had been true since the Elizabethan era, but was not true in practise until the early part of the 19th century.

Rodger is not a radical historian and though this book has chapters on social history, it is in no way a history from below. His account of the lives of seamen is very general and he might well admit to revisionism over certain subjects. Certainly over some points (such as the levels of scurvy suffered on voyages, or the number of mutinies) he may well be right, a more specialist reviewer than myself will have to acknowledge this. Rodger is at pains however to paint the navy in a positive light. He thus argues that violence towards sailors, as punishment or as encouragement was far less common than we have previously thought. I was unconvinced by this. Rodger tends to portray life on navy ships far better than it may well have been. Nonetheless it is true that life in the Royal Navy towards the end of the 18th century was likely far better than it was for most other wage labourers in Britain.

Rodger finishes his history with some generalised comments about why the British ended up triumphant on the high seas. He avoids finding a single reason, rather trying to relate the technological developments with other social factors.

Middle-class participation in public life, professional skills, commerce, industry and private finance directly favoured and were favoured by navies. Sea power was most successful in countries with flexible and open social and political systems.

Here I feel the author is trying to have his cake and eat it. While British naval strength was both an out-growth of, and a contribution towards the development of British Capitalism, ultimately it was a part of the states armed force. In this context, the needs of the British State, tended towards benefiting the Navy. To imply otherwise, by suggesting that somehow Britain's political nature made the Navy inherently better is slightly bizarre and smacks of chauvinism.

I think the truth lies elsewhere. British capitalism developed faster and better than elsewhere precisely because the Revolutionary transformation that took place in the mid-1600s was far wider and deep going than elsewhere. That the Victualling Board could influence British agriculture to the extent it did, was precisely because the British peasantry had been destroyed. These wider social changes set the tone for the strength of British capitalism. It was this social system that needed the Royal Navy and shaped it in its own interests. Rodger's comes close to understanding this when he quotes  approvingly another author, "Warfare on the British model was a triumph for an enterprising and acquisitive society, not an authoritarian one."

These criticisms aside, this is a detailed, well written and exhaustive history of British Naval history. It will give the reader a lot of scope to understand particular events in history as well as understanding the reasons for success and victories in particular wars. The author's own interest in naval history doesn't blind him to wider historical events, and I look forward to reading the forthcoming volume dealing with the Royal Navy's 20th century.

Related Reviews

Rodger - Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain - 660-1649

Carolyn Ives Gilman - Isles of the Forsaken

Carolyn Ives Gilman's book Isles of the Forsaken is a clever and original work of fantasy. At its core are the intertwined stories of four characters, each hailing from distinctive races. The story is set at a time when the population of the Forsaken Islands are beginning to rebel against their imperial masters. The Adaina who live on the Forsaken have been ruled for many years, their islands, to a greater or lesser extent beginning to lose their individuality, but at the same time the more under-developed country is beginning to develop itself. Alongside the technological and economic development is a growth in self-identification that pits itself against the colonial rulers.

In the real world, one of the common themes of the encounters between people from different countries is that those from technologically advanced places tend to misunderstand the beliefs and world-view of those they are meeting. This is done brilliantly in this book as the naive Nathaway Talley arrives in the Forsaken Islands to teach the "natives" about law and order. He believes that the rule of law correctly applied and obeyed can create perfect social relationships. What he doesn't understand is that the Adaina have a society that makes them fairly happy. Nathaway crashes through the lives and social relations on the Islands, misunderstanding ceremonies and beliefs and dismissing ancient traditions of magic as unscientific backwardness. There are some clever moments in this. One section of the Adaina are the magical Lashnura. A small number of individuals, they can heal other Adaina by donating blood. In doing so they can become dhotamar to others, near permanently associated with another individual. Nathaway cannot comprehend this as anything other than an act forced upon the Lashnura. He sees them as slaves, victims of sacrifice and mutilation by the rest of the Adaina population. The reality is the exact opposite, but Nathaway, coming from a strict hierarchical world were everything has a price and violence is used to obtain what is unobtainable cannot easily understand what is taking place.

Such behaviour has many parallels in our own history. The interactions between Europeans and indigenous peoples of North and South America for instance. Gilman is a historian of North American history and clearly has based her fiction on the historical events she studies. But the brilliance of Gilman's novel is that in her universe, the magical beliefs held by the Adaina are real and Colonial rule is disturbing a carefully balanced order between different religious forces. It is almost as if when Europeans had started to take the land from Native Americans, they had been able to fight back with magic and gods, rather than just their weapons.

Apart from the dynamics taking place between oppressed and oppressor. There is a finely told adventure story here as the Adaina begin to revolt against the colonial rulers. Gilman writes well and the action sections of her novel are as exciting as the rest of the book is gripping. I recommend this story of national-liberation with magic, and look forward to the sequels.

Related Reviews

Gilman - Ison of the Isles

Baku: Congress of the Peoples of the East

 My recent reading of The Oil Road reminded me of the fascinating radical history of the city of Baku. Formally part of Russia and now in Azerbaijan the city had at the beginning of the 20th century been a hot bed of working class action. Central to both the 1905 and 1917 revolutions Baku was one of the most important cities for the new Soviet republic.

Central to the programme of the Bolsheviks who led the Russian Revolution was the idea of self-determination. Right from the earliest days after the Revolution different parts of the old Russian Empire were given the right to determine their own future. This contrasted very much with the policies of the previous regimes as well as the later policies of the Stalinism.

However the Bolsheviks fought the revolution with an internationalist mindset. Lenin and the other leaders understood that an isolated Russian Revolution would face starvation and defeat. They hoped for similar revolutions to break out across the world, not least in Germany. But they also understood there was enormous potential for solidarity and revolutionary upheaval in "the East". The Congress of the Peoples of the East then was called in 1920. This was a conscious attempt by the revolutionary leadership to spread the ideas of Communism and Bolshevism through countries like Turkey, Persia, Armenia, China and elsewhere. Hundreds of delegates came from all over the Middle East and further afield. They met, listened to and debated speeches from leading Russian revolutionaries like Karl Radek and Zinoviev. They also heard from representatives of new, or growing revolutionary organisations in Europe. There was a representative from France (Rosmer), Britain and even the Dutch Communist Party.

This stenographic report is not perfect. In parts it is incomplete - I'd dearly love to read the speeches and representations from the Jewish organisations that were present as well as other speeches by the small number of women delegates. The transcripts are also limited to the main speeches, rather than the smaller meetings, caucuses and fringe events. This means much of what we read a fairly long, set piece speeches, rather than shorter discussions. This doesn't mean that they are all rhetoric. There are fascinating references to ongoing struggles in countries like Turkey and debates about the way forward.

One of the key questions for the Congress was the attitude of revolutionary socialists to what would now be called movements of national liberation. Then there were mass movements growing and developing against the colonialism of Britain and France as well as the growing role of American imperialism. For some at the conference the key question was national liberation and the development of an independent national bourgeois before the socialist revolution. This mimics debates within the Russian socialist movement itself, and the Russian delegates argue hard for the idea of "permanent revolution"; revolution that takes the struggle for national liberation immediately over into the struggle socialism. 

There is much in this book, and the translation as well as the supporting notes from the British Trotskyist Brian Pearce are indispensable. Not least because names of places and individuals are often now unknown to us. Those who have read The Oil Road will find here-in the story of the Bolshevik Commissioners who used to be buried in Baku, after their murder by British forces. The Congress itself ceremonially laid their bodies to rest in a square that was only recently destroyed.

Of interest to contemporary debates around the role of women in the Arab Revolutions are the two contributions in this book from women. Comrade Nadzhiya begins her speech with this statement:

"The women's movement beginning in the East must not be looked at from the standpoint of those frivolous feminists who are content to see woman's place in social life as that of a delicate plant or an elegant doll. This movement must be seen as a serious and necessary consequence of the revolutionary movement which is taking place throughout the world. The women of the East are not merely fighting for the right to walk in the street without wearing the chadra, as many people suppose. For the women of the East, with their high moral ideals, the question of the chadra, it can be said, is of the least importance. If the women who form half of every community are opposed to the men and do not have the same rights as they have, then it is obviously impossible for society to progress: the backwardness of Eastern societies is irrefutable proof of this."

Running through the Congress, even amongst those who are not communists and hold out different visions of how to achieve freedom is the enormous respect for the Bolsheviks and the political authority that representatives of the revolution have. This shouldn't be a surprise. The world was experiencing enormous revolts and the Russian Revolution was as yet the only successful revolution. Delegates at the Congress had every reason to believe it wouldn't be the last. They were to be disappointed. Despite the Congress electing a committee to produce publications and organise future events, this was the only meeting of the revolutionary representatives of the People of the East. With the rise of Stalin attitudes towards liberation movements and minorities in the East took an entirely different route, which possibly explains why these reports did not become public until the 1970s when Trotskyists translated and published them.


Today the reports are far more than a historical curiosity. They are a wonderful insight to a political moment, when the world was being turned upside down. They demonstrate the attitude of the Bolshevik movement to different nationalities and movements and there is much to learn. They are also full to the brim of the excitement and enthusiasm of men and women believing their time has come. The transcripts tell us every time the speeches are interrupted for cheering, the singing of the Internationale, or even someone at the back shouting out "speak up". If you want to know the immediate impact of the Russian Revolution on people around the world, you could do far worse than read this.

Related Reviews and Articles

The transcipts can be read on the Marxist Internet Archive here though the book version is published by New Park and can be obtained via socialist Bookshops like Bookmarks.

Useful article on the Bolsheviks and Islam by Dave Crouch here.

Marriot and Minio-Paluello - The Oil Road

Iain M. Banks - The Hydrogen Sonata

One of the great things about Iain M. Banks' Culture novels is the way that they explore what might happen in a society that has essentially left all of it worries behind. When hunger, racism and poverty are things of the past, and war is only waged to defend society from external threat, what might people do? As a result of these thought experiments, many of Banks' characters have been great artists, sexual experimenters or musicians of note. His other characters, the ship Minds with their wonderful self-descriptive names, often seem to spend their time in abstract thought, scientific study or political machinations.

Of the later, the intervention in other civilisations is the most difficult and dangerous. Hydrogen Sonata in fact deals with the collaborative intervention in a society almost as old as the Culture. Unlike the Culture though, the Gzilt have collectively decided to 'Sublime' joining a sort of extra-dimensional group consciousness. However a few days before this happens a piece of evidence turns up that seems to indicate that much of what makes the Gzilt, well the Gzilt is based on a lie.

Culture Ships intervene to try and sort out the mess that occurs as various Gzilt government factions start bumping each other off to protect their interests. Much of the novel then is a Galactic chase as the Culture ship Mistake, Not takes the novel's heroine Vyr Cossont on a tour of planetary systems to try and find the truth out. If we're honest lots of the scenarios are the author playing around with ideas. Banks' highly advanced, post-scarcity societies like the Gzilt and Culture give their peoples the opportunity to experiment with themselves. So many of his characters have extra limbs (though in one case, an important figure has 59 of a special limb that means he needs extra hearts to keep the blood pressure up).

Banks' experiments with ideas and people like this work, precisely because the Culture works. But actually people matter little in this novel. What is really important are the ship Minds (the real force behind the Culture) and the societies themselves. Rather like many historic depictions of Utopia (William Morris' News from Nowhere springs to mind) what matters is less the story than the stage. Our wonder comes from imagining how things "might be".

That said, this is a rollickingly enjoyable adventure. Its action packed, funny and trimmed of any excess fat. A great work of escapism that makes the reader think too. Can't recommend it highly enough.

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Banks - Surface Detail
Banks - Against A Dark Background
Banks - Matter

Francis Pryor - The Birth of Modern Britain

Probably to the annoyance of some of my fellow socialists I've championed the work of Francis Pryor rather alot. His works of popular history have certainly made many contemporary archaeological ideas accessible to the general population and together with the Time Team program, Pryor has been part of a renewed interest in the UK towards the history of Britain.

This book is the fourth in Pryor's archaeological history of Great Britain. Pryor's personal expertise is in the ancient past, and I certainly found Britain BC the volume that deals, effectively with the history of Britain prior to the Roman invasion his most interesting. Unfortunately, the further Pryor moves from his era of expertise, the more I have found that his work disappoints. In particular, this work on "recent archaeology" misses the mark completely.

Because Pryor attempts to look at the wider picture when it comes to archaeology, his work can be particularly useful for those trying to understand the way that historical change has taken place. Rather than concentration on specific sites or archaeological finds, he tries to locate monuments or old buildings within a wider landscape and history. This is most effective when he looks at groupings of monuments in wider contexts. Most obviously, Pryor's explanation of the location of Stonehenge within a wider "ceremonial landscape" that has a history extending from long before the monument was built to centuries afterwards, means that we think about Stonehenge in a wider historical way, rather than as a building from a particular point in time.

This approach should work well when Pryor considers the modern world. After all the growth of cities, the development of modern agriculture, the invention of new techniques and technologies are, as we approach modern times, very much tide up in wider questions. The landscape, the movement of people, the developing forces of production and interests of particular classes within society. The sections in here on the birth of modern agriculture, the development of towns and cities, the archaeology of the first factories and mills to say nothing of transport networks like canals, motorways and railways would seem to fit well with this approach.

Unfortunately, Pryor's approach breaks down. In part his hatred of the word "revolution" is a problem here. Pryor doesn't like revolution. This is not because he isn't a progressive. Far from it. In this book he complains for instance about short-sited immigration controls from various British governments that scapegoat people in the interest of short-term political gain.

Rather Pryor dislikes revolution, because he believes that change is effectively evolutionary. In some senses of course he is right. Human society, history and technology does change through a process of evolution. Pryor argues for instance that the industrial revolution wasn't a revolution because it was based on the gradual development over centuries, of industrial processes, science and technology.

Yet what Pryor misunderstands is that these processes develop within wider society. The enormous social upheavels that took place in the 17th cenutry in England that led to a king having his head cut off, are ones that enabled those individuals in society geared towards developing society based on the accumulation of wealth to become the dominant ruling class. This was at the expenes of the old, feudal order. These changes are in part what makes the agriculatural revoution possible. Pryor's emphasis on evolution means that he misunderstands the enormous changes taking place, emphasising the continuity, rather than the change.

This however is only part of what makes this final volume so weak. The real problem here is the enormous mis-mash of ideas and places. Pryor deliberately avoids a narrative approach, so his history jumps back and forth in time. This isn't necessarily a problem, but the reader is left bewildered by all the different ideas. One moment Pryor is discussing railways, another he is looking at mining then pottery. This means he emphasises very much the particular changes taking place around a specific industry and those who work it, but fails to develop how this is linked to the wider developments in society.

Often the most illuminating parts of Pryor's books are were he draws on personal experience to help the reader understand an archaeological dig or a particular monument. In this book though, the reader is drowned in random, personal anecdotes. He tells us how he gets out of the car to photograph a particular view or enjoys an encounter with an attractive young woman who recognises him from television. But these rarely serve to illuminate the history he is recounting and often seem a bit tacked on. It is almost like Pryor sees himself as the key to understanding British history, rather than the evidence he is presenting us with.

Unfortunately this is a disappointing book that is best avoided, though I would suggest readers should certainly pick up other books by Pryor, particularly Britain BC and his history of the British Landscape.

Related Reviews

Pryor - Britain AD
Pryor - Britain in the Middle Ages
Pryor - Britain BC
Pryor - The Making of the British Landscape
Pryor - Seahenge
Pryor - Farmers in Prehistoric Britain