Rob Wallace - Big Farms Make Big Flu

The media is a fickle beast, so coverage of potential epidemics of diseases veers between the apocalyptic to nonexistence. As an outbreak occurs we hear about the potential terrifying consequences of the disease, combined with graphic details of the symptoms and frequently pictures of large numbers of dead animals.

Rob Wallace's new book is an important polemic that argues that we, as a society, should be a lot more concerned about the potential for disease to decimate the human population. It is very much a question of not if, but when. Wallace's work is important because it argues that the key problem is not inadequate science, nor ineffectual medicine (though at times these may be issues) but an approach to the question which fails to see the systematic way that capitalism has transformed our relationship to the wider eco-system in ways that encourage the spread, mutation and virulence of disease.

Firstly, agribusiness, the huge corporations that dominate global farming today encourage disease. They do this in a number of ways. Farming is vertically integrated - from birth to slaughter animals are brought together in enormous numbers, in single locations. This encourages both the spread of disease and its evolution. Frighteningly, Wallace also notes that research shows that the common response to infection among animals, large scale destruction of the flock or herd, helps to select pathogens to be more virulent, or to target younger animals, both increasingly the likelihood of further outbreaks.

But the real problem is an agricultural system based on profit. Take this example of an out-break in Asia,

The CP Group operates joint-venture poultry facilities across China, producing 600 million of China's 2.2 billion chickens annually sold. When an outbreak of bird flu occurred in a  farm operated by the CP Group in the province of Heilongjiang, Japan banned poultry from China. CP factories in Thailand were able to take up the slack and increase of exports to Japan. In short, the CP Group profited from an outbreak of its own making. It suffered no ill effects from its own mistakes.

As Wallace emphasises though, this is not about humans as such, it's about how agriculture is organised.

The onus must be placed on the decisions we humans made to organize them this way. And when we say "we," let'd be clear, we're talking how agribusinesses have organised pigs and poultry.

It's a theme Wallace returns to frequently

What does it mean to change the use value of the creatures we eat? What happens when changing use value turns out poultry into plague carriers? Does out-of-season goose production, for instance, allow influenza strains to avoid season extirpation, typically a natural interruption in the evolution of virulence? Are the resulting profits defensible at such a rapidly accruing cost?

What Wallace is particularly aiming at is a system that reinvents the world's ecology in a manner that makes disease more likely. Farming is his key concern here, as he puts it "the present agricultural model is farming tomorrow's deadliest pathogens alongside its meat monocultures." But it is also the wider transformation of landscape. In a fascinating discussion of Ebola, Wallace challenges those who simply see it as a question of science, but also those who simply see it as a result of poverty. Instead, Ebola is the consequence of the commodification of rural Africa - the transformation of forests in the interests of agriculture, the changing relationships that people have with the wider natural world. Wallace puts it much better than I can

neo-liberalism's structural shifts are no mere background on which the emergency of Ebola takes place. The shifts are the emergency as much as the virus itself. Changes in land use brought about by policy-driven transitions in ownership and production appear to be fundamental contributions to explaining Ebola's area-specific emergence. Deforestation and intensive agriculture may strip out traditional agroforestry's stochastic friction, which typically keeps the virus from lining up enough transmission.

Wallace is not suggesting that we shouldn't spend money on research, or administer drugs or try and alleviate poverty. What he is trying to do is outline method for scientists and government officials to understand the origins of the root cause of the problem. The reality is though that precisely because agriculture is dominated by huge multinationals, Wallace's warnings are likely to be ignored. This is why its good to see he doesn't ignore the struggles of farmers and agricultural workers to improve things and shows that many farmers are well aware of the limitations of industrial farming. Not least because, as he argues, the aspect of animal agriculture that is least profitable is the bit that the corporations are least interested in - the care and maintenance of the animals themselves. It's also the part that is most risky from a disease point of view. Farmers understand this, and they also know that the system is stacked against them as the corporations and banks collude to maximise profits at the expense of livelihoods.

Wallace's book is a detailed and at times difficult read. It originates mostly as articles he has written for his website Farming Pathogens and hence contains a lot of scientific terms and concepts, some of which were incomprehensible to the interested lay-reader and most of which received little explanation. Because the book originates in essays and talks given elsewhere there is some repetition, but I felt what was missing most was a concluding chapter that summarised the author's arguments and offered a clear strategy aimed at the lay-person. That said, for readers interested in capitalism, ecology and wider environmental questions there is much to be gained from this fascinating, if terrifying book.

Related Reviews

Quammen - Ebola
Davis - The Monster at our Door
Ziegler - The Black Death
Zinsser - Rats, Lice and History

Jason W Moore - Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital

Jason W. Moore's book Capitalism in the Web of Life has become a required read for those trying to understand why it is that capitalism is unable to prevent growing ecological crisis. Moore's work has won awards and has been widely discussed, and critiqued. [Ref 1]

Capitalism in the Web of Life is a critique of what Moore sees as established thinking around ecological questions. His particular targets are what he calls “Green Thought” and the work of Marxists around ecological issues. Moore is at pains to put his own distinct ideas on the table.

My sense of Green Arithmetic is that it appears to work because we assume Society plus Nature add up. But does this assumption hold up under closer examination? Capitalism in the Web of Life opens an alternative path. I argue that “Society” and “Nature” are part of the problem, intellectually and politically; the binary Nature/Society is directly implicated in the colossal violence, inequality, and oppression of the modern world; and that the view of Nature as external is a fundamental condition of capitalism accumulation.[Ref 2] [p2]

On the surface this can sound very radical. We are, after all, fed a constant stream of articles about what “we” are going to “nature” but such a binary is absolutely inadequate to explain what is taking place. Moore continues,

“The economy” and “the environment” are not independent of each other. Capitalism is not an economic system; it is not a social system; it is a way of organizing nature. [p2]

He then explains that “The ‘web of life’ is nature as a whole... This is nature as us, as inside us, as around us. It is nature as a flow of flows. Put simply, humans make environments and environments make humans – and human organisation.” [p3]

It is difficult to argue with this. After all, Marx said something very similar in the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts

The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body – both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature. [Ref 3]

This is perhaps uncontroversial. What becomes controversial is that Moore argues closely that many of those who have argued on these lines, such as John Bellamy Foster, have ended up in a position of replicating the “society” and “nature” dualism. In particular he suggests that the idea of the concept of the “metabolic rift” which Marx (and others) have used to identify the particular break that capitalism has with the natural world because of alienated labour, has actually reinforced the idea of difference. As Moore puts it:

Rather than ford the Cartesian divide, metabolism approaches have reinforced it. Marx’s “interdependent process of social metabolism” [KM] became the “metabolism of nature and society” [JBF] Metabolism as “rift” became a metaphor of separation, premised on material flows between nature and Society. Thus did metabolic rift triumph over metabolic shift as a means of unifying humanity-in-nature within unified metabolisms of power, wealth and nature. [p76]

This seems to me to be a crude criticism of John Bellamy Foster's work. As Foster himself has pointed out in a response [Ref 4] to Moore’s book, this is a misunderstanding of dialectics. The point of dialectics is very much the coming together of opposites. Thus “society and nature” are both the same, society is inseparable from nature, interdependent and so on, but also there is difference and separation too. As Foster points out, “To call that approach “dualist” is comparable to denying that your heart is both an integral part of your body and a distinct organ with unique features and functions”.

But in places Moore recreates this duality himself. Although he talks about the oikeios, as the sum total of social relations that “form and re-form the relations and conditions that create and destroy humanity’s mosaic of cooperation and conflict: what is typically called ‘social’ organisation”. But then, in dozens of places through the book, Moore is forced to use the phrase “human and extra-human natures” emphasising the differences between the two.

I don’t want to dwell further on this part of Moore’s book in part as it's been extensively critiqued elsewhere, though Moore’s oikeios underpins all of the remainder of his work and the weakness of the concept in turn weakens the rest of his argument. For the remainder of this review I want to focus on two other aspects of Moore’s writing. The first of these is the centrality to which Moore gives a reworked concept of the law of value and, secondly, what this means for how we get a non-capitalist, sustainable world. I should note in passing that I did not agree with some other parts of Moore’s book such as his discussion of the Anthropocene [Ref 5] but these are consequences of his approach to the subject and will no doubt be further discussed elsewhere.

Marx argued that the value of a commodity is proportional to the labour required to produce it, a proportion that is related to socially necessary labour-time, averaging the human labour required across society. Moore says that “this cannot be the end of the story” as this fails to account for the central importance of “invisible work” such as the contributions of women to the reproduction of labour, non-human labour and the contribution from natural resources (coal and wood for instance).

These are, in Moore’s view, “A rising stream of low-cost food, labour-power, energy, and raw materials to the factory gates... The law of value in capitalism is a law of Cheap Nature.” [p53]

Here Moore echoes others, like David Harvey, who have emphasised the importance of a new phase of primitive accumulation, what Moore would characterise as the location of new sources of cheap nature at the “frontiers” of capitalism, to fuel the ongoing accumulation of capital.

However, as Sam Ashman and Alex Callinicos have argued there is a limit to this.

In a climate of intense competition and relatively low profitability, capitals eagerly hunt out any niche from which profits can be extracted. Some firms, taking advantage of the shift in public policy towards promoting the interests of private capital, reorganise themselves or are set up to unlock the surplus-value that can be created or redistributed by appropriating state assets. Some of the opportunities on which they seize are to be found in the global South: the role of European transnationals in Latin American privatisations is particularly striking. But the predominant flows of commodities and of capital across the world economy take place among the OECD countries, and – along with the important extension of these circuits to embrace China – they feed the expanded reproduction of a capitalist system that continues to derive its profits mainly from the exploitation of wage-labour. [Ref 6]

This is not to devalue what capitalism does. Moore rightly points out capitalism bends everything to its own interests, the “mapping, quantifying, and rationalizing natures in service to capitalism accumulation”. [p67] We should never forget that this means the systematic destruction of natural resources, human lives and employment and the transformation of everything into systems that can maximise the accumulation of wealth in the interests of a tiny minority.

But Moore argues that this is the central process that has to be understood - evoking a new concept of “world ecological surplus” that falls over time (the phrase deliberately copies the Marxist concept of the falling rate of profit). Without this, Moore argues, “the rate of exploitation of labour-power... tends to exhaust the life-making capacities that enter into the immediate production of value”. [p67] Moore goes further:

If we take the nexus of paid/unpaid work as our premise, capitalism and value relations cannot be reduced to a relation between the owners of capital and the possessors of labour-power. The historical condition of socially necessary labour time is socially necessary unpaid work. [p69]

In other words, we have to decentralise the role of labour, and by extension, workers from the capital-labour relation to properly understand capitalism and its consequences. As Nayeri notes in his own review “Moore privileges “appropriation” instead of “production.”

Moore clearly disagrees with Marx’s approach to capitalism, or perhaps more fairly, he thinks it inadequate as anything but a starting point for his own approach. This is why, I think he emphasises critiques of Marxism by Feminists and Greens because he can use them to bolster his position. But Moore’s argument is limited in part because it mistakenly suggests that Marx and Marxists haven’t seen the importance of this work previously. Take the question of unpaid labour by women. As Judith Orr has noted in her book Marxism and Women’s Liberation:

What is being bought and sold [by the capitalists] is a worker’s ability labour, not the actual work. Because exploitation is a social relationship between worker and boss and between bosses who compete with each other, the crucial question is not even how much value a single worker produces. The concept of ‘socially necessary labour time’ has to be recognised – the average time needed to produce a given commodity in society at any one time.... Just because domestic labour in the home is not directly producing surplus value does not mean that Marxists don’t recognise its contribution to the ability of the ruling class to make profits.

Orr then quotes Rosa Luxemburg “this kind of work is not productive in the sense of the present capitalist economy no matter how enormous an achievement the sacrifices and energy spent, the thousands little efforts add up to... this sounds brutal and insane... corresponds exactly to the brutality and insanity of our present capitalist economy”. [Ref 7]

Of course, this is not to argue that cheap inputs are not important to offset the failing rate of profit. It is one reason, for instance, that capitalists are constantly searching for new, easily accessible sources of oil.

Moore’s argument that Marxism has failed “to see the appropriation of Cheap Nature as central to world accumulation [and] has led to a major mis-recognition of capitalism’s laws of motion”, leads to his conclusion that all capitalism needs is the constant location of new cheap nature, which seems to me less of a great insight, and more of a restating of fact. Marx, for instance, noted the importance of the “cheapening of the elements of constant capital” as a factor in counteracting the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. [Ref 8]

But there is a problem too with Moore’s concept of what these cheap inputs are. For instance, Moore repeatedly argues for the acknowledging the importance of non-human natures’ contribution to the economy. Though I don’t know why Moore thinks that is has not been acknowledged previously. Marx famously polemicised in his Critique of the Gotha Programme that

Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor

But Marx goes further than this; if one reads the full quote,

Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. the above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. [Ref 9]

In contradiction to Marx, who sees human labour as facilitating the use-value of non-human nature, Moore on occasions assigns nature a role analogous to that of workers, speculating for instance that “the problem of surplus capital is one of capital putting nature to work, and then failing because uncapitalised nature balks at working overtime.... A rising ecological surplus in contrast, makes all sort of capital investment attractive, because lots of free nature can work lots of cheap overtime.” [p113]

It is precisely here, in his attempts to understand how capitalism actually operates, that the concept of oikeios is exposed for its limitations. Humans can work over-time, or they can refuse to and “work-to-rule” or strike. Non-human nature cannot make these sort of decisions. It’s a meaningless approach to human ecology. This sort of approach downplays the centrality of humans to historical change, and, most importantly it negates the central role that workers have, through the importance of their labour power to capitalism, to transform society.

For all its critiques of capitalism, and indeed for its excellent analysis of the problems that the “web of life” creates, Jason Moore’s book is perilously short on alternatives and how to get there. It would be entirely fair for Moore to disagree on the Marxist vision of revolutionary change whereby workers transform society and themselves through a mass movement that creates a workers’ state and the organs of popular democracy and a democratic, planned economy. But surly an alternative should be offered. Moore mentions, almost in passing, a few attempts to improve aspects of society, notable some radical attempts to rebuild agriculture outside of the mainstream economy by mass movements of landless workers and peasants in parts of South America. But, given the urgency of the environmental crises we face, this is hardly a vision for all of us.

Moore questions whether “the ‘collapse’ of capitalism.... [is] really to be feared” [p86] pointing out that it is a society that leaves a third of the population in malnutrition. Well the real question is whether there is an alternative. The replacement of capitalism with a socialist, sustainable, world based on equality, democracy and so on, is of course not to be feared. But the collapse of capitalism without such an alternative would be horrific for billions of people – the regression to barbarism that Engels feared would happen without socialism. But despite this fear there is no clear alternative.

I have spent almost all of my review criticising aspects of Moore’s book. It is worth noting that I did find much of passing interest in the work. In particular, I enjoyed Moore’s clear critique of the Green Revolution and modern agriculture. Capitalism in the Web of Life is a book that will be widely read, and has already received many commendations. But there are significant problems with its approach which I hope that I have managed to outline in the interests of a stronger left, and Marxist, ecology.

Related Reviews

Angus - Facing the Anthropocene

Foster - Marx's Ecology

Burkett - Marx and Nature

Burkett - Marxism and Ecological Economics

Smith - Uneven Development

Hughes - Ecology and Historical Materialism

References

[1] I found Kamran Nayeri’s critical review useful http://climateandcapitalism.com/2016/07/19/capitalism-in-the-web-of-life-a-critique/ Though note a slight correction offered by Adam Rose to Nayeri’s article http://swbee.blogspot.com/2016/07/capitalism-in-web-of-life-critique-of.html I also recommend John Bellamy Fosters’ extended piece discussing Moore’s work amongst that of other left ecologists Marxism in the Anthropocene: Dialectical Rifts on the Left in International Critical Thought, Vol. 6, Issue 3, 2016 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21598282.2016.1197787

[2] In this review numbers in square brackets refer to 2015, Verso edition of Capitalism in the Web of Life.

[3] See www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm

[4] John Bellamy Foster responds to a critic, Climate and Capitalism website, Jun 2016, http://climateandcapitalism.com/2016/06/06/in-defense-of-ecological-marxism-john-bellamy-foster-responds-to-a-critic/

[5] Moore discusses the Anthropocene and conflates the start of the Anthropocene as being with the systematic adoption of fossil fuel. [179] I think this misunderstands what the Anthropocene concept is from a scientific point of view, particularly the idea that there has to be a geological marker for its beginning. Moore is wrong also to suggest there are only “weak” arguments for a late Anthropocene. Ian Angus, for instance, puts a strong (and clear) argument for a post-WW2 Anthropocene in his Facing the Anthropocene, Monthly Review, 2016.

[6] Sam Ashman and Alex Callinicos, Capital Accumulation and the State System: Assessing David Harvey’s The New Imperialism, Historical Materialism, volume 14:4, p128-129.

[7] Judith Orr, Marxism and Women’s Liberation, Bookmarks, 2015, p159-160.

[8] Karl Marx, Capital III, Penguin, p342-343.

[9] Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875 www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm

Norah Carlin - The Causes of the English Civil War

The plural "causes" in the title of Norah Carlin's book is important because as she makes clear she is not looking for a single cause. Indeed, as she points out, most historians "see it as their duty to establish a hierarchy of causes and to explain if relevant the relationship of one cause to another".

Instead Carlin paints a picture of a gradually changing society, sections of which are increasingly coming into conflict with the established order. There's the rise in trade, and the growth of capitalist relations in the countryside, but despite the importance of this to the economy, it was "rare" for merchants to rise to the peerage leading to their interests being sidelined in national politics. Simultaneously there was a growth in popular protest, and as Brian Manning has argued "mounting disorder due to the intensification of social conflicts". Carlin notes though, that this is controversial, but it was believed by many observers at the time which was "an important factor in the political choices they made in 1640-2".

Whether or not "disorder" was substantial, Carlin does argue that the period in the run up to the Civil War saw a growth in what we might now call political campaigning amon "layers of the population not normally involved in political activity". One petition from Essex received 30,000 names or marks. These petitions tended to congratulation Parliament, urge the avoidance of war and warn the king that his actions were leading to conflict.

In all this Puritanism played a central role. Carlin stresses that Puritanism played a contradictory role, on the one hand it promoted change on the other it stressed stability. Nonetheless,

English Puritanism can, moreover, be regarded as radical in its promotion of social and political activist, or positive intervention by even humble individuals in the hope of improving things or resisting evil... The radicalism of Puritanism would seem to lie... not in its autonomous 'religious'' characteristics... but in its function as a shared language or culture of activism and reform in the community.

These factors were encouraged by the changing economic and social situation in England. The growth of capitalist relations and the desire by those who made their wealth from trade to have their voices heard and a say in national politics led to a fissure in society that could only result in social conflict.

Changes in English society therefore made not only civil war, but the possibility of an independent political order without the king and even without the nobility, sustainable in a way which would have been unimaginable a hundred years before... The 'middling sort' of seventeenth-century England were prepared to sign political petitions, attend meetings and demonstrations and ultimately to arm for one side or the other (or even against both) in the English civil war because they had become accustomed to regarding themselves as participants in government rather than the dependents of feudal overlords. 

The Civil War that erupted was thus an outgrowth of all the different changes in society coupled with a growing confidence by a section of society to actively engage in political action. Thus when Parliament was unable to militarily defeat the King, it required the bringing together of the desire for political change with those prepared to fight for it. Thus Cromwell's "Russet coated gentleman" who knew what he fought for, became the battering ram to smash the old order.

Norah Carlin's book is an excellent intro both to the causes of the English Civil War and to the wider historical debates that have taken place almost since the war began.

Related Reviews

Manning - Aristocrats, Plebians and Revolution in England 1640-1660
Purkiss - The English Civil War: A People's History
Stone - The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642

Joe Hill - The Fireman

The Fireman tells the reader little about what is taking place in the wide world. There is little about the fall of governments or the failures of technological systems except for the most tantalising of snippets. After all we do all like to imagine what the end of civilisation is like. Rather like another recent piece of apocalyptic fiction, Station 11, Joe Hill's novel focuses on the lives of a few individuals, how they survive and their personal relationships. Some of these come from before the apocalypse, but The Fireman tends to keep the post plague world rather more self contained than Station 11.

The Fireman's world ends with disease, as a plague of Dragonscale effects individuals leading them to spontaneously combust. The shock of the combustion can lead to chain reactions and eventually large areas of the world are aflame.

Reading, and enjoying The Fireman is a little dependent on suspending one's belief in the laws of thermodynamics. There is also a, perhaps unintentional, metaphor for global warming here. One that has a particularly amusing moment as Dragonscale denier and right-wing presenter Glen Beck bursts into flame and dies live on TV. Joe Hill's disaster zone is a frighteningly contemporary one. His heroes compare events to 9/11 and JK Rowling is shot by firing squad for refusing to give in to a particularly nasty right-wing religious regime that comes to power in Britain.

But the centre piece of the novel is how the hero, Harper, comes to an isolated community of fellow Dragonscale suffers who have learnt to control, and indeed, thrive on the flames produced by the Dragonscale. Hunted by vigilantes and authorities (though the difference is often unclear), Harper has to survive the reality of a small group under enormous tension in the face of the collapse of social order. The big question here, of how people who are victims of such a plague survive in the atmosphere of terror that results, has many tragic resonances with today as refugees and migrants are scapegoated around the globe.

The Fireman is a page-turner, in part because of its unique story. But I was disappointed by the ending and at times I thought Joe Hill was trying too hard to highlight the parallels with modern society (let's all hope the references to Trump date very quickly). Comparing it to similar stories, such as Stephen King's The Stand, I wondered whether it will stand the test of time quite as well. Nonetheless its a unusual addition to the genre that will keep the reader glued till the end.

Related Reviews

Mandel - Station 11

E.J. Hobsbawm - Bandits

Who is the bandit? Where do they come from and how do they survive? These are the questions that Eric Hobsbawm's classic work Bandits sets out to explore. Rather then seeing bandits as revolutionaries, Hobsbawm sees bandits as those who are trying to solve problems inherent in the unpredictable life of the peasantry.

En. masse, they are little more than symptoms of crisis and tension in their society - of famine, pestilence, war or anything else that disrupts it. Banditry is therefore not a programme for peasant society but a form of self-help to escape it in particular circumstances... Bandits... have no ideas other than those of the peasantry... of which they form a part.

Rarely do bandits have a political strategy, or a revolutionary programme. Insofar as they do have a vision, it is "the defence or restoration of the traditional order of things 'as it should be'." (Revolutionary traditionalists as Hobsbawm describes them). Because this may well be a mythical past, this can of course inspire others. Thus bandits individually or collectively can be part of organising to both help others (the redistribution of wealth like Robin Hood for instance). But they can also become symptomatic, or play leading roles, in wider social movements. But even when bandits take on more politically active roles, such as the case of the Spanish bandit Sabate, who during the era of Franco held up bars to play anti-Franco songs, or fired leaflets from cannon into football crowds, you get a sense of spectacle for the sake of it, rather than real attempts to lead and organise.

Bandits are part and parcel of the communities they come from. But they are also an "outsider and a rebel, a poor man who refuses to accept the normal role of poverty, and establishes his freedom by means of the only resource within reach of the poor, strength, bravery, cunning and determination". It's this that can turn the bandit into hero, that can ensure that poems, songs and stories live on, long after the usually short lives of the bandits themselves. They inspire the peasant in the face of a world that offers only hard work and poverty, and little way out.

While an interesting read, there are places were this book feels very much the product of its 1969 publishing date. One such passage is when Hobsbawm discusses Sabate, writing that "just as there are some women who are only fully themselves in bed, so there are men who only realize themselves in action". Such sexism will shock the modern reader, and devalues the rest of this informative study.

Antony Hamilton - A Rebel's Guide to Malcolm X

Millions of words and hundreds of books have been written on Malcolm X and the struggle for Civil Rights in the United States. In an era when #blacklivesmatter is an essential rallying cry for hundreds of thousands of people sick of institutional racism and the routine killing of black people by the American police, the lessons of the Civil Rights movement remain crucial.

Of all the introductions to Malcolm X few are as succinct and accessible as Antony Hamilton's new Rebel's Guide. He brilliantly covers the Civil Rights era, showing how Malcolm X's life was intertwined with the changes that were taking place. From Malcolm's early life in a poor black ghetto, where he experienced the violence of the racist state, to the growing Civil Rights movement which exposed the limitations of those who saw change coming from the US state itself, this book expertly captures the political changes that Malcolm went through as he first joined, then broke with the Nation of Islam.

There is no doubt that Malcolm's membership of the Nation of Islam was a key part of his life. But Hamilton shows how Malcolm's revolutionary politics led first to a break with the NOI and then, in the few months he had left before his assassination, a rapid development in his revolutionary ideas.

Central to this were his trips abroad, in particular his experiences of the anti-colonial and pan-African movements that were shaking Western Colonial rule in Africa and elsewhere. Despite the limits of these travels - Hamilton points out that "[Malcolm] was always in the company of national leaders or royalty and separated from ordinary people. His various  speeches and addresses were to academics in universities or governments" - Malcolm was exposed to new united movements that brought together many different people. This helped challenge his black-separatism, at the same time as fuelling his belief in the revolutionary transformation of society.

I hadn't realised the extent to which, in this period, the US left had helped with this. Malcolm frequently spoke on platforms with socialists and trade unionists, though it seems his understanding of socialism was shaped mostly by the idea of strong state ownership.

Swept up in a victorious atmosphere of African nationalism, Malcolm was propelled towards seeing socialism as the key to freeing Black people. He stated that 'you can't have capitalism without racism' and those who opposed racism and capitalism were usually socialists. However, the socialism which was promoted in the newly independent nations was a convenient way to describe their alliances with the Soviet Union in opposition to US imperialism... This guided Malcolm's idea of socialism and gave greater attention to the actions of new governments rather than to the heroic struggles of the working class.

Nevertheless, towards the end of his life, Malcolm was clearly moving in a more direction that was even more threatening to the US state. One of the great strengths of this book is that it shows how individuals like Malcolm X were shaped by the period they were in, and were constantly changing. Hamilton points out,

There is a common tendency to place Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jnr in opposition to each other, one violent an the other peaceful. But this is too simplistic a view. Neither was static. The tactics and determination of both King and Malcolm were necessary components of the movement and both changed depending on the circumstances. 

Had Malcolm X lived he would have continued to play a central role in the struggle against racism, but also one that linked this closely to the fight against capitalism, the system that breeds racism. As such his ideas and his life are very important to the struggles today, and this little book is a wonderful introduction to these.

Related Reviews

Younge - The Speech
Richardson (ed) - Say It Loud! Marxism and the Fight Against Racism
Fryer - Staying Power

Reviews of other Rebel's Guides

Mitchell - A Rebel's Guide to James Connolly
Brown - A Rebel's Guide to Eleanor MarxCampbell - A Rebel's Guide to Rosa Luxemburg
Orr - Sexism and the System; A Rebel's Guide to Women's Liberation
Choonara - A Rebel's Guide to Trotsky
Bambery - A Rebel's Guide to Gramsci
Birchall - A Rebel's Guide to Lenin
Gonzalez - A Rebel's Guide to Marx

Basma Abdel Aziz - The Queue

**Spoilers**

This is one of the most extraordinary novels that I have read in many years. It is being favourably compared to Orwell's 1984 or Kafka's The Trial. Certainly there are many similarities with these works that depict the difficulties faced by individuals confronted by brutal authoritarian rule and faceless bureaucracy. But to simply see this novel as being a Kafkaesque nightmare of bureaucracy gone mad is, in my opinion, too miss its essential context. This is, of course, the Egyptian Revolution.

First published in 2013 and only recently translated here, the book fits the period after Mubarak had been overthrown and anticipates the fall of Morsi and the rise of el-Sisi. As such we get a novel depicting the country in a state of political and economic uncertainty, easily exploited by the new order.

Set in a nameless Middle Eastern country in the aftermath of the "Disgraceful Events" when protests and riots against the country's dictatorship were brutally suppressed. Immediately after these "events", a new, faceless authority "The Gate" appears and from it an endless stream of commands, decrees and laws are made. At first these seem relatively benign, but as the Gate imposes its will it becomes harder and harder to function without the right paperwork.

Then the Gate closes. And the story centres on those who end up queueing outside waiting for the Gate to open. In particular we follow those trying to help their friend, Yehya, who was injured during the Disgraceful Events, and who has a bullet lodged inside him. His friends struggle to get help from the doctors, who are themselves trapped by rules that prevent them assisting. The bureaucracy clamps down harder and harder, statements follow statements. "Bullets were used by the protesters, not the security forces" the Gate declares. "Bullets were not used at all", "Foreigners are to blame", "There was no Disgraceful Event".

Various characters in the Queue represent different forces in the Revolution. There's the religious activist, convinced that only a strict adherence to religion will prevent social decay. There's young women who are fighting sexism and harassment and trying to organise against the state, and there is a man who truly believes his cousin who died in the security forces was actually a hero. There's even a brilliant little discussion about the role of social media as an organising tool.

But behind all this is the imposing monolith of The Gate. As a metaphor for an authoritarian state it's perfect. But the brilliance of this novel isn't this idea alone, nor the depiction of the un-moving queue of increasingly desperate people waiting outside - though the descriptions of the interactions in the queue are wonderful. What is fantastic in the way the author shows how the authoritarian state serves only its interests, and how this destroys some people's illusions, makes some people give up hope and forces others to try and fight back.

Sven Beckert - Empire of Cotton

This is a highly important book that any student of capitalism should read. It locates the cotton industry at the heart of the development of capitalism and the creation of a world proletariat. Sven Beckert charts the different stages of cotton capitalism to demonstration both the development of the economic system and the growth and decline of various national components. It's a readable, at times shocking, introduction to the role of cotton in our history. Beckert answers the question about the uniqueness of cotton early on:

cotton... has two labor-intensive stages-one in the fields, the other in factories. Sugar and tobacco did not create large industrial proletariats in Europe. Cotton did. Tobacco did not result in the rise of vast new manufacturing enterprises. Cotton did. Indigo growing and processing did not create huge new markets for European manufacturers. Cotton did. Rice cultivation... did not least to an explosion of both slavery and wage labor. Cotton did.... cotton provides the key to understanding the modern world, the great inequalities that characterize it... the every-changing political economy of capitalism.

Cotton has a long history, but as the above quote suggests, it's importance exploded as capitalist relations of production grew. Simultaneously the spinners and weavers who produced it became enmeshed in a vast network of merchants and trade, manufacture and sales. In a variety of different places around the globe cotton industry grew and began to transform rural economies. But, as Beckert argues, in the "premodern world" there were barriers to this breaking out into a new social order.

The cotton industry in Europe was dependent on imports of raw cotton, but over two hundred years, European cotton was to come to dominant the globe, reshaping domestic cotton outside of Europe in its own image, helping to subsume whole continents into colonies and driving millions of people into poverty and slavery. These changes

were the first steps towards the Industrial Revolution. Centuries before the "great divergence" of per capita economic output between Europe and East Asia, a small group of Europeans seized control of the heretofore episodic and gradual process of forging global economic connections, with dramatic consequences... The "great divergence" was at first a divergence of state power as well as a peculiar relationship between these states and capital owners. In the process, the many worlds of ctton became a European-centered empire of cotton.

Beckert calls this "War Capitalism" aptly summing up the violence by which European capital trampled over the rest of the globe's people and economies, in its own interest.

While the author doesn't call himself a Marxist, this is work clearly influenced Marx's understanding of the dynamics of capital. Central to the story is that of the constant reinvention of capitalism. Notable for instance, is the discussion of slavery and the tremendous impact on cotton, and hence capitalism, caused by the American Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves. I was disappointed that there wasn't more here about the role of Lancashire cotton workers in their solidarity with the North's war against the South, but nonetheless this is a detailed exploration of how that victory transformed global relations and its impact on, and through, the cotton industry.

Beckert doesn't neglect the resistance to capitalism. He covers the resistance of the slaves, the cotton workers, the machine breakers and so on. He also discusses the way the "capitalist social relations" transformed the countryside and rural relations.  One fascinating point he makes is that it is surprising that cotton growing developed in most parts of the world without slavery. This was solved through the development of new forms of social coercion:

The problem that had vexed cotton capitalists since the 1820s, namely how to make non-enslaved rural cultivators into growers of cotton for world markets, moved toward a resolution that seemed to please the interests of European and North American cotton manufacturers and statesmen... What all these struggles to recast the global countryside had in common was that states now played an important role. New forms of coercion, instituted and carried out by the sate replaced the outright physical violence... so important to slave labor. This does not mean that physical violence was absent, but it was secondary compared to the pressures that came from contracts, the law and taxation.

The book finishes having charted the growth of European and US cotton capitalism, with its decline and the emergence (or re-emergence) of Asia as the dominant force for this essential commodity. This is a rich work of history, nuanced and detailed, as well as politically very important. It deserves a wide readership and I look forward to seeing what the author produces next.

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Richard Morgan - The Dark Defiles

I wanted to love The Dark Defiles. I'd enjoyed the two early volumes in the series and despite some issues with the overly graphic violence and sex, I felt Richard Morgan had created a detailed, believable, working fantasy world. Indeed one of the strengths of the two earlier books was that they never failed to neglect to build an environment of farmers, workers, slaves and "ordinary people" as well as the adventurers, soldiers, rulers and emperors who are the staple of this sort of fiction.

But all this vanishes with the third volume. Defiles seems simply to exist to bring together the strands that hand lose from the earlier books. Thus we effectively have two character arcs which the author almost, but not quite, ties together. Added into this is a growing amount of mumbo-jumbo about the gods and magic that rule the world behind the scenes and a few ancient technological marvels that push forward the stalling plot, and you have a recipe for disappointment.

That said, it's very readable - except when the descriptions of the battle scenes are verging on medical textbook descriptions of the insides of peoples' bodies. But most of the time I had little idea what was going on. I'm still not convinced that one of the central tales of revenge actually has any bearing on the plot at all. Nor do I understand why the heroes had to be catapulted 1000 miles to do it. As with several other of his books I finished this wondering what had actually happened.

Richard Morgan's produced some innovative science fiction and fantasy. Not least in having LGBT characters as the central characters in the story. But this one was a little too "by the numbers" and lacked the passion for world building that the earlier works shared.

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Lawrence Stone - The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642

The question of "why" something happened in history is a vexing one. It's rarely easy to determine simple causal reasons behind events, and for something as complex as the English Revolution of the 17th century, to try and do so would be a pointless task. That said, some have tried and often this has meant confusing specific aspects of those years with the whole event itself. Lawrence Stone himself points out that such "great" historians as C.V. Wedgwood have focused on the reasons for the outbreak of war between Parliament and King, missing the context of the war itself. As Stone points out:

To concentrate upon Clarendon's 'Great Rebellion' or Miss Wedgwood's 'Civil War' is to miss the essential problem. The outbreak of war itself is relatively easy to explain; what is hard is to puzzle out why most of the established institutions of State and Church - Crown, Court, central administration, army and episcopacy - collapsed so ignominiously two years before.

Stone thus sets himself a difficult task. To unpick the complex and intertwined events and changes that ultimately led to Charles' be executed and a Republic being declared. The first chapter of this book then is a sociological study of what a revolution is. Stone manages to make this an abstract discussion that is only of academic interest. It's worth noting that Norah Carlin in her similarly titled The Causes of the English Civil War  points out that

One problem with all such theories... is that they depend on relatively simple generalisations... Few 17th century specialists would now accept [as Stone does]... that the people who led the English revolution could be described, along with eighteenth-century Jacobins and twentieth-century Maoists, as 'fanatics, extremists, zealots... prepared to smash through the normal constraints of habit, custom and convention'.

Stone is on firmer and more interesting ground when he looks at the social changes and economic developments that led to the Revolution. He puts a great deal of emphasis on the numerical growth of the gentry and their consequent increased influence, as well as the decline of the aristocracy. This was crucially of importance in the Houses of Parliament, which grew from 300-500 MPs, as the gentry component increased from 50 to 75 percent over the period.

While emphasising these changing economic circumstances, Stone doesn't ignore other factors, such as the associated growth of education and literacy which meant that taught "the electorate of yeomen, freeholders and shop-keepers" to read. Though, in a reversion to sociology, he suggests that this was important because a "rapid increase in the proportion of the population receiving primary education" is one of the factors likely to lead to revolution. A thoroughly mechanical understanding of revolution in my opinion. That said, Stone is right to link this to the way that the Puritans and more radical movements during the course of the Revolution helped develop and sustain their movements through the production of pamphlets. This is, he argues, a necessary "cause for the peculiar and ultimately radical course the revolution took".

Ultimately what causes the Revolution for Stone is that "new social forces were emerging, new political relationships were forming and new intellectual currents were flowing, but neither the secular government nor the Church was demonstrating an ability to adapt to new circumstances." The words he uses to describe English society in the 1620s is "disequilibrium" and "dysfunction". Wider changes were undermining the basis for the old order and encouraging the development of new forces that could surmount it. There is a sense in Stone's book of society no longer working. Perhaps it's better to see it as a world were things can no longer continue in the old ways, and change has to come, or the old order will reassert itself. As the Civil War developed, those forces who desired change became stronger and more confident and the king's resistance forced their hand. The world was fundamentally changed.

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Yerby - English Revolution and the Roots of Environmental Change

Ian Angus - Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the crisis of the Earth System

It seems that on an almost daily basis we read reports that climate change is getting worse, faster than expected. Only a few months back in the aftermath of the Paris climate talks in December 2015, politicians were hailing the successes of the negotiations. They claimed it was a major step forward. Yet little concrete action has taken place, and many of those who protested and called for serious action from the politicians, will be asking "what has changed?".

Ian Angus' new book is an extremely important contribution to this discussion. The last two decades have seen science take great steps forward in how we understand "the Earth System as a whole. A central result of that work has been realization that a new and dangerous stage in planetary evolution has begun - the Anthropocene."

A recent Guardian article quoted a climate scientist saying that "we are catapulting ourselves out of the Holocene". The Holocene was the geological era when "a stable and predictable climate" made agriculture, and hence human civilisation, possible. The instability of this new epoch threatens all of that.

The concept of the Anthropocene has in recent years become increasingly popular. Its the idea that we have entered a period when human activity itself is transforming the world in fundamental ways. There are important and extensive debates about when the Anthropocene began, and Angus' summarises these, sometimes complex, scientific discussions well. but they are not abstract debates, because they inform the argument about what must be done to deal with the environmental crises that we face.

Humans have always altered their environment. This fact alone has led some to argue for an "early Anthropocene". This is a mistake, says Angus, because it allows some to argue that what we are experiencing today is merely the "acceleration of trends going back hundreds and even thousands of years". But there is a qualitative and quantitative difference between what we are doing to the environment today and what has happened in the past.

What is it about those recent decades that have made things so much worse? The answer, argues Angus, is capitalism. He writes:

Capitalism and fossil fuels have spectacularly expanded human health and wealth for two centuries. Now they are overwhelming the planetary processes that have made Earth hospitable to civilization and our species for 10,000 years. They are thrusting us into a new and dangerous epoch. 

Angus locates this dramatic change in the years following World War Two. In twenty-four graphs of earth system and socioeconomic trends, Angus shows how society's impact on the world makes a qualitative leap around the 1950s. From the emissions of carbon dioxide, marine fish capture and methane emissions to the manufacture of large dams and the use of water, paper and fertilizer there are leaps upward in the 1950s. Angus isn't the first to suggest the end of the war as the turning point, but what he does here is to explain why it happens, arguing that US economic interests were able to shape the world towards an increased dependence on fossil fuels, particularly oil, during and after the war.

At the beginning of 1950, four key drivers of the long boom were in place: a powerful industrial base in the US, .... a large and growing military budget; a disciplined and financially secure labor force... and a seemingly infinite supply of cheap energy.

This drove forward a new era in the relationship between human society and the natural world. In particular, neo-liberalism further undermined environmental legislation, expanded into new parts of the world and destroyed, or reshaped, industry and agriculture in its image accelerating environmental destruction. We are now in a situation of enormous urgency:

We do not know how long we have, but we do know that we simply cannot wait. And we know that just fighting isn't enough: to succeed, we must simultaneously work for immediate changes and advance a vision of the world we want to build.

Its worth highlighting one particular chapter when Angus discusses the crisis of ozone depletion in the 1970s and 1980s. It is one I well remember, and the story is important because it demonstrates how difficult it is for capitalism to do something about climate change. Angus explains how CFC manufacturers responded to criticism of the role of their product in destroying the ozone layer with denial and falsehood. It was only because it turned out that replacing CFCs with other chemicals was actually profitable that major companies ended up supporting a ban. But, as Angus concludes, this will not reoccur with the current crisis of climate change because dealing with fossil fuels means a "decades long transformation of the global economy".

One of the great strengths of this book is that it links an argument about the nature of capitalism with a powerful argument about how movements can fight. In particular Angus argues that the radical left must engage in and build the environmental movement today. If we can't stop fracking or a pipeline, he argues, how can we argue to overthrow capitalism?

In the introduction to his book, Angus says that he is trying to link the advances in Earth Systems science with the insights that a new generation of Marxists have brought to understanding capitalism's relationship with nature. He critiques those on the left who argue that the Anthropocene offers us little insight because it doesn't blame capitalism, or because it suggests that all humans are to blame rather than those at the top of society. What Angus points out is that scientists in debating the Anthropocene understand perfectly well that we are not all responsible for environmental disaster, and "insisting on a different word... can only cause confusion, and direct attention away from far more important issues".

By starting with the science and linking it to a Marxist understanding of capitalism and society's metabolic interaction with nature, Ian Angus has written an important book that will help to strengthen and develop the left's understanding of these issues. It ought to be widely read.

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George Yerby - The English Revolution and the Roots of Environmental Change

This is an interesting and important attempt to grapple with the great transformation that took place in England, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and what that meant for how individuals and society saw the land, and the wider environment. Subtitled, "The Changing Concept of the Land in Early Modern England", Yerby begins by arguing that in medieval times the very word land meant something different:

A 'land' identified the smallest discrete area of cultivation win the great common fields that surrounded each village, and it was the unit by which the equal allocation of strips in the open field was measured. It reflected the shared and direct occupation of the physical land... In every respect, the medieval 'land' represented an unmediated and inseparable physical connection between the village farmer and the earth. [2]

Yerby contrasts this with today. He writes that our approach has become "imperialistic" and

our society of mini-property owners relates less to the real land and more closely to a different, collective usage of the word... This takes the form of a national territory, set apart from other such lands and defined essentially by the exercise of a particular form of law and government. [3]

Exactly how and why this transformation took place is the subject of Yerby's book, and in doing so he tries to get to grips with an important concept, the transformation of society's relationship with nature, or as Yerby puts it "We are no longer part of what we are part".

Commodities

The transition begins with the gradual changing in the way that land is used and organised. In particular this can be seen in the shift away from open fields of medieval times to the enclosed fields. By the second half of the sixteenth century, Yerby points out, that these changes had become " a visible departure from what had gone before and even a reversal of the traditional medieval relationship with the land." [17]

Alongside these changes come changes to the "mindset" of those who work the land and own it. The land is viewed differently, in Marxists terms, the products of labour on the land become coveted for their exchange-value, not their use-value. The land itself, or pieces of land, become commodities. No longer part of the communally owned land of the village they are now to be bought and sold with little consideration of their wider relationships.

This had its ideological repercussions in the Reformation. Here we must be careful. The Reformation was not a product of these changes, though changes in the land helped the Reformation progress in places. But as Yerby argues, the break from Rome "was the basis for a clearer definition of the concept of a 'land'.... In the process, the scope for a discrete national entity occupying its own public space was created". [44] What these changes meant for the poor and the rich is well documented in Yerby's book. His examination of the material paints a picture of a major land-grab that benefited the rich greatly, and impoverished those who had formally worked the open-fields, leading to hunger and depopulation. As Yerby points out, open and enclosed fields had similar yields, but contemporaries (or at least those interested in enclosing land) believed that doing so increased productivity and value.

But one disappointment that I have is that Yerby underplays the resistance that took place to enclosure. For instance, he refers to the ""vigorous reaction of both government and people against enclosure and engrossing in the late 1540s" [75] without noting as historians such as Andy Wood who have pointed out that the late 1540s saw rebellion the length and breadth of England. Today this is mostly remembered because of Kett's rebellion in Norfolk, but simultaneous risings across the country involving tens of thousands of rebels, must surly be classed as something more than "vigorous reaction". Indeed, its arguable, as Steven Bindoff has written in his classic account of Kett's rebellion that the revolts might well have "clipped the wings of rural capitalism".

Yerby spends much of the later part of the book discussing the development of a national vision of the land through the context of the way that this emerges from the struggle between Parliament and King. Economic development in the countryside was furthering the development of trade and industry. Alongside this was evolving a political nation, a coherent political structure capable of perceiving its unified interests. Yerby argues that at root the conflict in the 1640s between Parliament and King is between those who see their interests in furthering this process and those who resist the changes.

Capitalism

For this to take place requires a number of factors such as the enclosing of land and the growth and development of the gentry as a "national class". As the gentry grow in power and influence the role of Parliament changes, no longer an arena to rubber stamp the King's policies, it instead becomes a place to debate the "national interest". Yerby highlights the "radicalism" of the merchant class in this regard (firmly placing himself in opposition to Robert Brenner on this matter). Quoting Christopher Hill who pointed out the "optimism of the merchants and artisans, confident in their new found ability to control their environment, including the social and political environment". For Yerby this highlights the

self-confidence and assertiveness of the merchant... and establishes their relationship to other crucial developments of the time, as in conjunction with the gentry and the yeoman farmers, they broke away from the restraints of the medieval past in the pursuit of liberal freedoms. [167]

With the defeat of the old order and the victory of Parliament a new world is free to take off, one based on a "commercial landscape". But now wealth was not generated solely from land, but from industry too... the depopulation and enclosure of the countryside being an essential part of making industrial, urban capitalism possible. Yerby concludes that the great transition that began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created a world where nature was turned into a commodity, creating a "exploitative relationship with the land and the resources of the earth".

He finishes by speculating that perhaps this transition was, after all, a mistake, and the older ways of organising society were perhaps more viable in the long term. While there was little choice in the transition that took place, I'm not so sure this is a useful question. Pre-capitalist society was hardly free of economic, social and environmental crisis, and had the transition to capitalism not taken place in Western Europe it almost certainly would have elsewhere. A sustainable and socially just future will not be found by looking backwards, but by fighting in the present. Yerby's book is an important contribution to understanding how we got here.

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Emily St. John Mandel - Station Eleven

Station Eleven is one of the best post-apocalyptic novels I have ever read. Perhaps second only to George R. Stewart's ecological classic Earth Abides, in my personal list of favourites. Unusually the novel doesn't just tell the story of what happens to those who survive the end of civilisation, instead Mandel opts to tell the story in part through flashback. Contrasting the lives of those who survive with events from before the tragedy.

Central to the story are actors, plays and the theatre. In the modern world, the story and the characters themselves revolve around Arthur Leander. His wives, friends, and the medics who try to save him form characters in the aftermath of a rapidly spreading flu that decimates the population.

As always in this novel what is fascinating is what happens after the fall of civilisation. One of the central characters in the post-apocalyptic world, Kirsten, a child actor on stage with Arthur Leander at the point when the flu arrives in Toronto, cannot remember the "first year". She's considered lucky. But like many other survivors she remains obsessed with the old world, collecting pictures and stories about Leander from old gossip magazines. With nothing left of the old world, all she can hold on to is the the famous old actor, and the enigmatic graphic novels he gave her - the Station Eleven of the title.

This obsession with the past is true of others too, there's a brief encounter with a scientist trying to find "the internet". Having rigged up a bicycle generator, he peddles furiously and the youngsters are amazed to see a laptop screen light up. Alas, Page Not Found. There are moments too when Mandel's writing gives us real insights into her characters, like the argument about the rudimentary lessons given to children in the new order. At what point should the adults simply stop teaching them about how things were? What's the use of telling them about aeroplanes and mobile phones when they cannot comprehend them?

Beautifully written, with detailed well rounded characters and a plot that never falls into cliche. This is a novel that should become a classic and I highly recommend it.

Josh Sutton - Food Worth Fighting For: From Food Riots to Food Banks

While food is often an incredibly personal choice, the choice of what to eat is rarely made in a vacuum. Today in Britain, over a million people rely on food banks, with an estimated 40,000 volunteers helping to make sure that they don't go hungry. As Josh Sutton points out in Food Worth Fighting For this shocking statistic cannot be separated from wider questions of poverty, unemployment and austerity. In seeking to understand the modern food system Sutton looks back to the beginnings of capitalism.

In order for capitalism in England to develop it needed to transform existing social and economic relations. In the countryside that meant the destruction of any communal aspect to agriculture, the forced depopulation of rural areas and the transformation of peasant labour into wage labour. The battles to defend the common land, to prevent enclosure and the maintain a way of life are, for Sutton, in part a battle over the right to good quality, appropriately priced food. Here Sutton draws heavily from EP Thompson's idea of a "moral economy". Thompson argued that through food riots the "crowd" fought to retain its traditional interests and in particular the right to set the price of food.

A variety of chapters illustrate this. For instance the 1816 Ely and Littleport 'Bread and Beer' riots when crowds of labourers fought for bread and beer. Beer was important, not because of drunken excess as the magistrates at the time argued, but because

until the nineteenth century, domestic brewing was a key part of life for the agricultural labourer, or more often than not, his wife. the poor quality of drinking water at the time was such that brewing beer at home was common practice... However, with the rapid increase in the number of enclosures... together with the economic conditions already described, home brewing fell into decline.

So, as Sutton rightly points out, protesters were merely demanding what traditionally had been theirs - cheap, healthy (at least healthier than water) beer.

There are plenty of other examples, from the Captain Swing "riots" to the Luddite movement, which linked rural work and wages with food. In a fascinating chapter, Sutton examines the Newlyn fish riots. Here again, fishermen fought to defend their right not to work on the Sabbath against other workers who wanted to land fish in order to benefit from the emerging industrial transport system to the capital. Sutton describes the movement well, and how it fits into the "moral economy".

Bringing it back to the modern day Sutton argues that:

The nature of the riot has changed, as have the prevailing economic circumstances in which it takes place. The goal, however, i.e. the desire of communities for a just, equitable and affordable distribution of food, remains firmly in place... In the 21st century, in Britain at least, the food riot is re-invented as a struggle, a 'food fight', and it is a fight that is far from settled.

Here however I found Sutton's ideas on less firm ground. I remain to be convinced of either the similarity in the struggles over food today in Britain with the past, nor their continuity. One of the key points of the battle for the "moral economy" was that it was an attempt to prevent capitalist relations being imposed upon the mass of the population. Tearing down fences from enclosed fields, or fixing the price of bread and meat in the market are conscious attempts to stop the market.

This is not the same as persuading Tesco or Sainsbury to give their excess food to a food bank to feed the hungry. As Elaine Graham-Leigh has pointed out in her Diet of Austerity supermarkets have waste built into their business model. Finding a cheap way of getting rid of that waste is good business sense. More problematic is that, as Sutton does recognise, this sort of action does nothing to undermine, block or role-back the appalling transformation that has been made to our food system, important though it is in ensuring people do not starve. These are struggles at best to reform, or more often deal with the failings, of capitalism.

I have to agree with Tristram Stuart, quoted in the book by Sutton who argues that

it would be contorted and possibly silly to compare the Gleaning Network to literally starving eighteenth century food rioters... Rioting has a special place in civilisation: when people are pushed to a point of urgency that society's rules are set aside. 

To Josh Sutton's credit though he recognises the need to transform our food system and he also acknowledges that we may well see real food riots in the future as increased numbers of people are pushed below the breadline. In fact, its worth noting, that in the 2011 riots in the area of Manchester I lived in then, food and drink were looted and re-distributed. It wasn't just about trainers or hatred of the police.

So I am unconvinced by Josh's thesis of continuity of struggle in one sense. But I do agree with him that people have always tried to organise to stop hunger. This book illustrates that well, and will help every reader understand how we have got into this mess. In this regard the chapters on war-time rationing and the role of supermarkets and big business are excellent. Josh Sutton also offers us inspiration that we can change things for the better today.

Josh Sutton will be talking about his book at Bookmarks the Socialist Bookshop in central London on Tuesday 14 June, 2016. More information here. Expect food riots, music, beer and bread, they say.

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Didier Daeninckx - Murder in Memoriam

History often illuminates the present and surprisingly this crime novel is a wonderful example of that. Set in the 1980s, the novel follows the seemingly random killing of a young man, then looks backward to the horrific and barely remembered events of October 17 1961 when French policemen massacred up to 300 Algerians who were taking part in a peaceful protest against repression in their home country.

In the 1960s Algeria was a colony of France. Its people fiercely repressed where fighting an, ultimately successful, struggle for liberation. The French government was unafraid of using torture, heavy repression and military might to attempt to hold back the resistance movements. In October 1961 that violence reached the streets of Paris when the police were officially given the nod to use whatever means they liked to clear the streets. At the head of the police was Maurice Papon, a veteran of Vichy, heavily implicated in the anti-Jewish crimes of that wartime state. His prejudices no doubt played a key role in events that led to armed policemen throwing dead and wounded Algerians into the Seine.

This is the backdrop to the novel's investigation. The contemporary crime linking back to another that took place at the same time as hundreds of Algerians were being massacred. The central character is Inspector Cadin, a man who seems unafraid of stirring up a hornet's nest as he delves into the murky past of the French police. Like all great literary detectives Cadin is unorthodox in his methods and his sympathies - though the romantic sub-plot doesn't work in my opinion. The final explanation, which I won't ruin here, is shocking within the confines of the story. But in the context of French politics must have been like a bomb going off. Cleverly the author brought together the dirty, dark realities of post-war French society - institutional racism, police brutality, right-wing governments colluding with the far right and violence used against the states' enemies, including its own citizens.

As we try to understand more recent violence and massacres in Paris, this novel helps us understand that these crimes never take place in a vacuum, and they can never be separated off from history, particularly the brutal and murderous crimes of the colonial state.

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Andy Wood - The 1549 Rebellions and the making of Early Modern England

Despite the somewhat academic title, this is an exceptional study of the 1549 rebellions, their causes and consequences. Andy Wood's account puts class at the heart of the discussion of the rebellions, something that is often missing from more popular accounts. This allows him to give a real sense of a period of history going through enormous changes, while different groups in society struggle for their own interests and identity.

Firstly Wood argues that this is a time of growing class confrontation, as economic, political and social changes come together. He points out that traditionally popular rebellions like that of 1549 have been seen as about restoring or protecting the existing social order. It is clear that there is some element too this - the Western Rebellion was explicitly centred on opposition to changes in the established church, while the rebels in Norfolk and elsewhere frequently began by over-turning enclosures of common land. But Wood also argues that the 1549 rebels often demanded a new order in society

The Norfolk rebels of 1549 demanded a polity based upon a combination of monarchic lordship and popular sovereignty in which small communities formed autonomous entities, linked to the sate in a dispersed network... Moreover, the 1549 rebels sought to exclude the clergy from the economic life of the village. [3]

So simultaneously the rebels were looking backward to a more ordered society and fighting for a new society based on a more just setup. This is not surprising, there was growing injustice, as the changing world was demanding more from the commons. Wood points out that the religious changes, the Reformation was interpreted "in terms of the greedy, avaricious and corrupt gentry, back by the Crown." This was a time, Wood argues, when labouring people "frequented articulated" anxieties relating to their futures, or their families future and saw the Reformation in "material terms".

A central part of Wood's book is the role of memory, and in particular the memory of past rebellion. Rebellion was celebrated and the stories passed down, but they also gave a reference point to other rebellions. We are reminded of the parallels of some 15th century rebellions which deliberately chose the same sites to assemble as those of the 1381 uprising.

But as Wood points out, 1549 takes place at a slightly different juncture, the intersection between the older medieval world and the early modern period when capitalist relations was just beginning to change the nature of parts of the English countryside. Central to this was Norfolk, and the town of Norwich which played a central part in Kett's rebellion was key to this. Wood uses Marx's insights into historical change to argue that 1549 was "as dispute between lord and tenant over relations of production and modes of exploitation".

Sections of the ruling class in the mid 16th century certainly understood what was at stake, Sir William Paget's famous letter to the Duke of Somerset, makes this clear

How say for the law where is it used in England at liberty? Almost nowhere. The foot taketh upon him the part of the head, and commyns is become a king; a king appointing conditions and laws to the governors, saying, Grant this and that and we wil go home.

Wood makes it clear that the scale of this rebellion was much larger than traditional accounts have it. The two epicentres of revolt in Norfolk and the South-West are simply the best known of the rebellions of the time. Events in Norfolk in particular, according to Wood, are known to us because the ruling class there specifically recorded and marked them in contemporary accounts. Alexander Neville's account of the rising, upon which all histories of 1549 in Norfolk base themselves, was widely used to offer an alternative narrative to what took place. Bishops read it allowed to congregations, hoping that this would supersede popular memories of events. The popularity of Neville's account obscured events elsewhere and simplified the story. Instead of a countrywide rebellion reflecting mass discontent, the rebellion could be dismissed as a few localised events inspired by individual hot-heads and criminals.

But 1549 was the last of the great rebellions. Wood argues persuasively, that the economic changes taking place, which had in part inspired the rebellion, were undermining the relations in rural communities that gave the uprisings their character.

As the sixteenth century drew to its close, social changes in agrarian regions increasingly divided rich from poor. The consequence of this was to fracture the social alliance upon which the tradition of late medieval popular rebellion had rested. Wealthier villagers had increasingly little in common with the social complaints of their poorer neighbours; indeed, in some communities, they became the target of popular opprobrium. [203]

By the 1580s and the 1590s, Wood argues, it was rich men and farmers who had become the enemies of the poor. I'm less convinced of this particular analysis, which to me seems to suggest that before 1549 there hadn't been any antagonism to the wealthier people in the towns. What is taking place is a transformation of the nature of wealth and power in villages. These were no longer simply wealthier peasants, but a completely different class of people. Wood understands this too:

Driven by a combination of social anxiety and economic opportunity, the 'better sort of people' now stood for a very different est of principles from the 'honest men' who, between 1381 and 1549, had formed the public leadership of popular insurrection. [207]

100 years later this new class would itself dynamite a national rebellion and as such 1549 was the end of a particular era of rebellion, but it wasn't the end of revolt. In some senses, it was just the beginning.

Related Reviews

Fletcher and MacCulloch - Tudor Rebellions
Caraman - The Western Rising of 1549
Land - Kett's Rebellion
Cornwall - Revolt of the Peasantry
Wood - Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England