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Tuesday, February 28, 2023

James M. Stayer - The German Peasants' War and the Anabaptist Community of Goods

The Anabaptist movement was a significant break with established Christianity that began during the Reformation. The early Anabaptists consolidated their faith in the statement known as the Schleitheim Confession made in 1527 in Switzerland. However Anabaptists of various different shades had been around for some years, sharing at root the idea that baptism has to be a conscious declaration of faith and not something imposed by another. The date of 1527 closely links the Anabaptist movement with the German Peasant War of 1524-1525 and various historians have argued for close links or no links at all between the two movements. James M. Stayer's book argues for a more nuanced position, as he explains:

Only a small minority of the participants in the Peasants' War became Anabaptists (and many early Anabaptists did not participate in the Peasants' War)... Early Anabaptism was a fringe phenomenon in a few regions of the Peasants' War. Still... the Peasants' War was a formative experience for many, if not most, of he major leaders of the original, non Melchiorite Anabaptism of the south. Although Anabaptism is not important for understanding the Peasants' War, the Peasants' War is very important for understanding Anabaptism.

Stayer's book expands on these key points. In part it is a study of the links between the Peasants' War and various individual Anabaptists - explaining their involvement and how the War shaped their beliefs. But as the title of the book suggests the key discussion point for Stayer is the question of the Anabaptist "Community of Goods" and how this plays out in the War. The Community of Goods is the belief among some sections of Anabaptists that Christians should live like the participants of the early Church, and share all wealth and belongings among themselves and with those in need. The importance of this to the Peasant War is not that such Communal beliefs were particularly common, though they were significant in later events in Munster, but rather that such radical ideas had a place both in the Reformation and the Peasant War. As Stayer puts it, "the Peasants' War was the expression of the Reformation in the countryside" and if the Reformation in the city was generating radical ideas, then they would have their echoes in rural areas.

But Stayer emphasises a second factor. The Anabaptists were suppressed by their enemies who "regarded the Anabaptists of the 1520-s as a continuance of the commoners' resistance of 1525. Certainly the nonconformist religiosity of the Anabaptists continued to deny deference to the rich, the rulers and the professionally learned".

The book opens with a very useful and interesting summary of the Peasants' War itself told via the histography of the War. Stayer engages most of the key writers on the subject, including several books that I've reviewed earlier on this blog. This is followed by a fascinating study of the "Radicalization of the Social Gospel" during the Reformation. This looks at how activists and writers like Thomas Müntzer interpreted the Bible during the War and what this meant for other religious thinkers. Stayer argues that it was the defeat of the Commoners that allowed religious radicals to further develop their ideas - hence the importance he places on the role of the War in "understanding Anabaptism":

It was only coincident with the final defeat of the commoners that an unreconciled minority trusted to God to break down the hierarchy of estates entirely, and the order of property together with it. In the historical circumstances of 1526 and afterwards they had to abandon military self-defence; but their conception of the social meaning of the law of God was not moderated by military defeat; instead it underwent a further stage of radicalisation.

This radicalisation was true of some existing religious thinkers, and of some who became Anabaptists. Stayer emphasises that "in most regions affected by the 1525 uprising, after an interval of some months or years, former peasant rebels became Anabaptists".

The second half of the book explores how the idea of the "community of goods" played out for Anabaptists and others during the War itself. Here there's a useful discussion of Müntzer's ideas, though Stayer makes a strange analogy between Müntzer's alleged "blankness of his social imagination, once the cataclysmic destruction of the present order was concluded" which he says "reminds one of Marx". It is ironic that both enemies of Marx and some followers of Marx seem equally keen to see Marx, before Marx hidden in the Peasant War.

Such crudities aside, this section has some interesting insights into early radical thought. In particular we learn that Munster's radical experiment with the Community of Goods was not as radical as is often described.

Stayer's book is well written, intriguing and very readable. It's an excellent introduction to the subject and helped me understand the dialectic between the rural rebellion of 1525 and the wider Reformation. For students of the period there is a wealth of material in the footnotes, some great illustrations and a couple of fascinating translations of documents relating to Anabaptism in the appendices. This is a must read for those interested in the Peasant War.

Sunday, February 26, 2023

Robert Jungk - Brighter Than 1000 Suns

Before reviewing this book I feel compelled to note that it represents a personal milestone of sorts. It is likely one of the oldest, unread, books on my to be read pile. Slightly over thirty years ago I purchased it, intending to read it during my physics course at university. I never got around to it, though I wish that I had read it many years ago. The reason for this is that it is a interesting discussion about the motivations of scientists, particularly the moral dilemmas of those engaged in nuclear weapons research. In a time of heightened international tensions between Russia and the United States there's much to concern the public about nuclear weapons, and this book offers insights into the very earliest days of the Cold War.

The book opens with the intoxicating atmosphere of physics research in the first two decades of the 20th century. This would probably have been the most useful part of the book to read during my university period, because it simultaneously captures the excitement of physics and the way in which scientists develop their knowledge. The exchange of information, the excitement of research and the incredible breakthroughs that are covered are fascinating. It is particularly notable that Jungk notes the important roles of female scientists like Lise Meitner and Irène Joliot-Curie, and because this is a political and moral account of their work, we also see their personal bravery in the face of the rise of the Nazis.

The book moves on to the Hitler's victory and World War Two, which provides the first key discussion of the morals of the scientists. Because German scientists had been at the forefront of atomic research there was a real fear that Germany might get the Atom bomb. This fear led to many scientists urging the US to begin their own research into the weapon. Many brave German scientists who did not flee, refused to assist their government's atomic research, or at least slowed it. It is, of course, impossible to say how much this actually took place, and it seems clear that several scientists did assist Hitler's efforts. Historically the book is at its weakest in this section, likely because Jungk was unable to get his sources to speak, or archives were still inaccessible. I am not sure his relatively positive summary of Werner Heisenberg stands scrutiny today. Among atomic scientists the fear of a Nazi atomic bomb appears to have made their belief in the positive force of the United States in the world real. Jungk concludes:

It seems paradoxical that the German nuclear physicists, living under a sabre-rattling dictatorship, obeyed the voice of conscience and attempted to prevent the construction of atom bombs, while their professional colleagues in the democracies who had no coercion to fear, with very few exceptions concentrated their whole energies on production of the new weapon.

Many of those scientists were to find their faith in US democracy undermined by the events of the war and the first use of atomic bombs on Japan. Jungk reports a discussion between the physicist Samuel Goudsmit and a US major, with whom he was liasing between the War Department and the Manhattan Project. Goudsmit remarks, "Isn't it wonderful, that the Germans have no atom bomb? Now we won't have to use ours." The major replied, "Of course you understand, Sam, that if we have such a weapon we are going to use it". This answer shocked Goudsmit, who like many of the scientists seemed to genuinely believe that the US would not use the weapon. This, for me, is the real paradox of these scientists who dedicated their work towards making a bomb, they expected would not be used because they naively believed in the public ideals of the US.

Jungk neatly describes the combination of shock and relief when the first nuclear weapon is used on Hiroshima. The scientists are proud their work has succeeded and relieved the war is over, but utterly shocked that the weapon had been used against a city. Jungk discusses the Franck report, a detailed discussion of the military significance and the need to avoid the use of nuclear weapons by a number of atomic scientists sent to the US President in 1944. Reading it today it seems hopelessly naïve, its authors firmly believing that the world would sit down and sensibly discussion nuclear weapons and work to avoid a proliferation of bombs.

But to be fair to many of the scientists, their immediate response to the use of nuclear weapons was to try to awake the world to their threat and highlight the problems. Jungk credits this movement with forcing both the US and the USSR to acknowledge the scale of the threat to their citizens, and begin a discussion about the use of these weapons. It was, in a very small way, the beginning of the anti-nuclear weapon movement.

These broad outlines tell the main subject of the books, though we learn a great deal more. There's plenty of material on Robert Oppenheimer, though there are better and more recent books. In terms of autobiography only the briefest material is included, but the book offers the reader directions to follow, especially for those interested in specific scientists. The book is at its best discussing the moral quandaries of the scientists of the Manhattan Project during World War Two. In some regards the book is dated, but it does attempt to look at the question of nuclear weapons from an explicitly moral and political individual point of view - a vantage point that is unusual for such studies. Most importantly it is a powerful reminder about why scientists cannot abstract themselves from politics and history, or even social movements. The book is very readable, and I'd recommend you don't wait thirty years to pull it off your shelf.

Related Reviews

Ananthaswamy - Through Two Doors at Once
Prescod-Weinstein - The Disordered Cosmos
Farmelo - It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science

Friday, February 24, 2023

James M. Cain - Serenade

James M. Cain is best known for his two short novels The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. Both of these are brilliant, tightly written novels that delve deep into the underbelly of American society, so I was pleased to get this lesser known work for Christmas.

Serenade is a very different novel. For a start it is longer than his better known works. Secondly it is much looser in terms of dialogue. Postman and Indemnity felt like the written was squeezing meaning out of every word. In Serenade there are extended discussions about music. The main character is a washed up opera singer, and this allows Cain to wax lyrical about composers, musical styles and musicians. It was a favourite subject of Cain's, and he clearly knew his material. It also helps us understand John Sharp, the washed up singer who gets a lucky break back into fame and fortune via a meeting with a Mexican-Indian prostitute.

We know Sharp because he is a man completely convinced of his own greatness, willing to take any opportunity to get back into the limelight, who falls heavily for Juana. Cain sets her up as the fall guy, the reader expects a moral lesson - where Sharp gets together with an unsuitable, non-white woman, and losses everything. That does, in a way happen, but the great surprise is that it is not Sharp's love for Juana that undoes him, but his previous love for a rich musical lover who happens to be male.

Serenade is remarkable for a novel of its era in having gay sex, and romance, as a key plot point. It is true that the homosexual aspect is effectively used in a negative way. Sharp loses everything because he has to flee his past, and his personal narrative, and tragedy, rests on him breaking with his homosexuality and accepting his straight self. In many ways though it is Juana who is the real heroine here - standing up to the blackmailers and bullies and fighting for Sharp - though breaking from him when she has to.

Its a strange book, and readers will find some of it very difficult to stomach. There's a lot of racism and some sexual violence - Sharp, in fact, rapes Juana early in their relationship - though he makes sure to tell himself throughout the book that it wasn't really rape as she wanted it. it makes for an unusual read, that won't be too everyone's taste and perhaps, tells us more about the times than the story itself. Cain does however write some excellent set pieces, particularly the scene when Sharp and Juana are trapped in a Mexican church in a violent thunderstorm - though there's no surprise that this was not made into a movie by Hollywood.

Leigh Bardugo - Hell Bent

Having thoroughly enjoyed Leigh Bardugo's Ninth House, I was looking forward to the sequel a great deal. Inevitably there was going to be some disappointment. Sequels are often difficult. But I was unprepared by the extent to which I felt let down. Ninth House worked because it was able to skewer the wealthy elite who attend universities like Yale. In that book Alex "Galaxy" Stern arrives on a scholarship from a poor background. She has been deemed the next guardian of Yale's magical interests - a sort of magical cop, who is there to make sure that the various Houses don't use go beyond the permitted boundaries of their use of magic. It's ok to use it to grant wealth, power and popularity, but not too go too far.

In the first volume Alex stumbles across a complex plot involving multiple murders. At the culmination her guide, advisor and magical tutor Darlington goes missing. The book finishes with Alex, and her friend, Dawes vowing to enter Hell to get him back. Hell Bent begins almost immediately Ninth House left off. Here lies the first problem. Hell Bent assumes you remember every detail of the first book, and reads like a continuation, not a separate volume. It also means there's no real development of details and plot, and the reader is flung headlong into the action. This might not be a problem - it is a sequel after all - but Bardugo's attempts to explain it all come off badly.

More importantly the plot - rescuing Darlington from Hell - turns the magic of Yale into a personal rescue story. What made the first book work was its expose of the nature of Yale through its magical alternative: Skewering captains of industry, rich kids and pompous academics. This volume feels like a madcap adventure and doesn't work as well. And when Bardugo does attempt to try to explore wider issues she gets it badly wrong. At one point the heroes use a magical map to find another character. The map, actually a model of Yale, turns out to have been something used to find escaped slaves by Yale's elite. The black characters are horrified, and it feels like a Black Lives Moment when a horrible reality is exposed. Yet nothing comes of it. It feels like Bardugo recognised that she had to include more such events, but didn't know how to use them effectively.

Secondly the characters never develop. Alex constantly behaves stupidly and self-sacrificing when it completely isn't required, most of the other characters feel like wooden cut outs, particularly the black Cop, who seems quite happy to break the law on remarkably flimsy evidence. Characters who are exposed to the new magical world accept it far to readily. Finally, once Darlington is rescued, everyone just carries on after a couple of bowls of soup. PTSD just happens to other people in this universe. Hell Bent is a massively disappointing sequel - the first book promised much, but Bardugo could have used her world to discuss race, class and power in a magical setting - just as she used the first book to highlight sexism and rape in universities. Instead she throws it all away and the whole book is just a setup for the inevitable third volume. Read R.F.Kuang Babel instead.

Saturday, February 18, 2023

Kohei Saito - Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism

From the late 1990s onward the ecological core to Karl Marx's work has been drawn out by writers and thinkers such as John Bellamy Foster, Paul Burkett, Andreas Malm and Ian Angus together with many others. Kohei Saito's book Karl Marx's Ecosocialism was a further development of this which closely analysed Marx's unpublished manuscripts to explore in detail how he understood the interaction between human society and the wider world. Marx's ecological work is often summarised by the concept of "metabolic rift" - that capitalism creates a break in ecological systems as a result of how production is organised. It is a theoretical tool that has been used increasingly to understand the extent of the multiple environmental crises that humanity faces. But Marx's work was always a tool for human liberation - a guide to action - that can be used to develop strategies for confronting capitalism as part of a struggle for socialism. It is in this arena that Kohei Saito's latest book contributes its greatest theoretical insights.

In the introduction Saito argues that "Marxism now has a chance of revival if it can contribute to enriching debates and social movements by providing not only a thorough critique of the capitalist mode of production but also a concrete vision of post-capitalist society."

The book is structured into two halves. The first is a explanation and defence of ecological Marxism. Here there is some overlap with Saito's earlier work, and with that of other writers like Foster. But as he did with his earlier book Saito brings a close knowledge of Marx's unpublished writings into his discussion. While defending the Marxist ecology from its critics and exploring Marx's dialectical understanding of the nature-society metabolism, Saito also seeks to understand why Marx's ecological work remained neglected or ignored for so long.

Saito argues that the answer to this conundrum lies in two related issues. The first is the "unfinished character of [Marx's] critique of political economy" and secondly that Engels, who edited and presented Marx's posthumous work (particularly the second and third volume of Capital) lacked clarity on Marx's ideas which meant he in turn downplayed and neglected key insights from his friend and comrade. Saito says that Engels "marginalised" Marx's ecological critique.

Here Saito draws on his deep knowledge of the new Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2) the project that has been publishing all of Marx's manuscripts to illustrate this. He shows how, in the last years of his life, Marx was engaged in a deep study of scientific and anthropological texts which show him grappling with how non-capitalist societies had different relationships to the natural world. In addition Marx was exploring scientific texts that further developed his own ecological understanding. Engels, he argues, neglected and "simplified" this aspect of Marx's work. According to Saito:

Despite Engels's interest in ecological issues under capitalist production, it is undeniably characterised by a philosophical and transhistorical scheme, as a result of which he ended up rejecting Liebig's concept of metabolism and remained satisfied with the 'antithesis of town and country' conceptualised in the 1840s. Furthermore, in Engels's discussion of the real of freedom as well as of pre-capitalist societies, he held a more unilateral vision of historical development based on progressive recognition of natural laws with an aid of modern natural science.

While Saito marshals some interesting arguments I felt the evidence did not completely back up this claim. Importantly I felt that with his focus on the texts, Saito neglects to develop the context of the socialist movement itself. This fundamentally shaped how Marx's ideas were used and developed - something that should not be laid at the feet of Engels. In particular Saito doesn't discuss in detail how Second International socialism, because it was essentially reformist, emphasised the promethean and gradualist aspects to Marx's thought. This is the crux of the debate within the German Social Democratic Party which Rosa Luxembourg engaged in against Bernstein. Yet this key moment in the development of Marxist theory is absent from Saito's study.

In addition, but related to this, the importance of the Soviet Union in developing "Marxism" in the 20th century cannot be under estimated. In particular the fact that the USSR wore the mantel of socialism, while maintaining an economy based on accumulation, meant that they too wanted to downplay aspects of Marx's thinking that would criticise an economic system based on endless expansion.

Degrowth Marxism

The second half of Saito's book develops these arguments to explain Marx as a "degrowth Communist". Here Saito shows how Marx's early ideas developed and changed through his lifetime. As Saito argues this is important in part because it is the response to critics of Marx that say he was eurocentric or argued that history was inevitably progressive. Saito shows, as have other scholars such as Kevin B Anderson, that Marx's ideas on anti-colonialism, national liberation and revolution outside of Western Europe and North America developed greatly. In particular Saito argues that Marx broke from his early understanding of historical development which essentially saw the world following a similar path to capitalist development in Western Europe. As Saito says:

Marx underwent a significant theoretical shift after he brought his attention to bear on the problem of 'productive forces of capital' in his analysis of the 'real subsumption' in the Economic Manuscripts of 1861-1863. This shift made him thoroughly rethink his previous assumption about the progressive character of capitalism. He realised that productive forces do not automatically prepare the material foundation for new post-capitalist society but rather exacerbate the robbery of nature. However, due to the neglect of the concept of 'productive forces of capital';, there remains a common misunderstanding that Marx continued to naively presume a 'progressive view of history' comparable to a natural law.

Crucially, Saito argues, Marx's ideas about the crucial question of "communism" itself changed. It is "not that the paths to communism became plural but that Marx's idea of communism itself significantly changed in the 1880s as a result of his conscious reflection upon earlier theoretical flaws and the one-sidedness of historical materialism". Again Saito draws the readers attention to Marx's close scrutiny of works that explored "natural science and pre-capitalist societies" which "deepen[ed] his theory of metabolism. In this period, Marx increasingly

attempted to comprehend the different ways of organising metabolism between humans and nature in non-Western and pre-capitalist rural communes as the source of their vitality. From the perspective of Marx's theory of metabolism, it is not sufficient to deal with his research in non-Western and pre-capitalist societies in terms of communal property, agriculture and labour... In other words, what is at stage in his research on non-Western societies is not merely the dissolution of communal property though colonial rule. it has ecological implications. In fact, with his growing interest in ecology, Marx came to see the plunder of the natural environment as a manifestation of the central contradiction of capitalism.

What Marx gets from these studies is the possibility of "radically different ways of social organisation of metabolic interaction between humans and nature". This means that rather than the "development of the productive forces of capital as being essential to Communism, the rational management of the societies' metabolism is what matters. This leads to Saito's emphasis of Marx as a degrowth communist, because it is the growth of the productive forces that undermines the very viability of society and any sustainable world has to be based on a completely different vision.

I don't have any particular disagreement with this assessment. Saito explains it well. But again it feels to me that his textual analysis means he misses key insights. Saito writes that it was in the 1880s when Marx's vision of communism fundamentally changed. But this immediately follows one of the key moments in Marx's revolutionary activism - his work supporting the Paris Commune and analysing the event itself.

Saito points to the defeat of the Commune and says it meant the "weakening of revolutionary hope" for Western societies. But the Paris Commune did not just give Marx "hope", it gave him the first clear example of how a democratic socialist state could work. This is why it's disappointing that Marx's brilliant work The Civil War in France is not discussed in detail in Saito's book. It is in this work that Marx explores how a revolutionary Commune arises out of working class struggle, smashing the capitalist state, and creating an entirely new society. In this society, the Commune was to be "the political form of even the smallest country hamlet". Such a vision of insurgent democratic communism from below, based on a completely different organisation of the productive forces, is surely crucial to understanding Marx's vision for a sustainable communism. It is no surprise this work became central to Lenin's own vision of the sort of revolutionary praxis needed for workers' to create their own state based on mass democratic participation.

This criticism aside, I would, argue that Saito's book is a crucial read for socialists trying to understand the process that Marx went through in developing his ecological ideas. Indeed, the final section on "abundance" is an extremely important response to those who argue that Marxism has little to say about a future society. For instance, Saito writes:

Marx envisioned a society in which natural and social differences of abilities and talents among individuals do not appear as social and economic inequality but as individual uniqueness because they can be compensated and supplemented by each other... In this sense, communism does not impose conformity and uniformity upon everyone for the sake of equality, but it is about social organisation and institutionalisation that aims to demolish the capitalist tie between differences in ability and skill and economic inequality.

I was particularly taken by Saito's emphasis, which arises from his focus on the "productive forces", that "abundance" is not about the amount of technology, but is rather a "about sharing and cooperating by distributing both wealth and burdens more equality and justly among members of the society". Saito critiques "left accelerationists" whose vision of a post-capitalist society is "full automation" to provide luxury for all. But they ignore the planetary boundaries that will limit this. Instead, Saito reminds us of the inherently democratic vision of mutual cooperation at the heart of Marx's communism. This, he emphasises, arises directly out of Marx's ecology which is why this is such an important work.

Sunday, February 12, 2023

Mary-Jane Rubenstein - Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race

Mary-Jane Rubenstein opens her book by asking the reader to imagine a "bad dream or a mediocre sci-fi story" where Earth is becoming uninhabitable and "a wealthy fraction of humanity hitches a ride off world to live in a shopping mall under the domination of the corporation that wrecked the planet in the first place." This scenario sums up the vision that certain billionaires have for the future. While millions of people might currently be cynical about Elon Musk's ability to run any sort of complex operation following the debacle of his takeover of twitter, Musk is actually one of the leading "NewSpaceniks" who wants to "save" humanity by pushing us towards space.

Rubenstein's book Astrotopia is a fascinating study of these billionaire visions. It begs some interesting questions. The most obvious of these is why should these billionaires be able to impose their visions of humanity's future? But there are others. By what rules can they divert resources and capital to these plans? What rights do they, or anyone, have to use the mineral resources of the solar system in the interest of furthering the wealth of their class? Finally, what basis is there to their compulsion to go into space itself?

As regular readers of this blog will know, I am a space enthusiast and I have a particular fascination for the early space programme and Apollo missions to the moon. As a socialist and anti-capitalist I was looking forward to Rubenstein's demolition of the ideas of the NewSpaceniks, but was pleased that she develops this into a subtle critique of ongoing space programmes as being motivated by right-wing, colonialist ideologies. As she says, the astropians have a "deeply conservative nature" and "the rocket men seek more land and resources to plunder in space", despite the fact that people, communities and ecologies are under desperate threat in the here and now.

Rubenstein explores how visions of US expansion have been shaped by very similar politics to those that backed up the expansion of European colonialists across the Americas and the genocide against the indigenous people of the Americas. Donald Trump perhaps exemplifies this, and Rubenstein offers several quotes where he refers to America's history as a "frontier nation" and she paraphrases him saying "America is again being called to settle a wild new frontier and embrace its 'manifest destiny in the stars'." The concept of "manifest destiny" having been used for near 200 years to justify European colonial rule. Such language is not restricted to more recent Presidents. Rubenstein quotes Kennedy worrying in the 1960s about the space threat from the Soviets, "This does not mean that the US desires more rights in space than any other nation. But we cannot run second in this vital race. To insure peace and freedom, we must be first". As Rubenstein points out, Kennedy disingenuously argues for US equality in space, at the same time as insisting they'll be top dog.

Such ideas run through the visions that Trump and the billionaires have for space today. Their vision for space is couched in the language of helping humanity, but is really about ensuring a particular vision of society - one where billionaires control everything and the rest of us toil to support them - continues. This is a space were the rocks, minerals and energy available is there to maintain an Earthly status quo, and keep us subordinate. It is, as she says "deeply conservative" not least because we know what such policies have done to indigenous peoples, ecological systems and natural resources in the past.

However I was prepared to disagree with Rubenstein's book. While we share many politics - anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism and a clear hatred of oppression - we come from a very different ideological place. She is a "professor of religion and science", has a religious background and her personal beliefs are clearly important to her. They shape her approach to this work, and I was concerned that her framing of this study as one of "religion" on the part of the billionaires would undermine her critique. But the more I read the more I appreciated the framing given that it is closely tied to the sort of ideological beliefs that have shaped US history so far.

But the use of religion also allows Rubenstein to develop wider understandings of the relations between nature, the universe and humanity - ones that would be completely alien to the billionaire class. In exploring all this, she touches on literature, poetry and religion. I did not always agree with her, but I found it stimulating indeed. Rubenstein is an entertaining writer, and at her best when eviscerating the billionaires and their ludicrous ideas (Musk wants to drop 1000s of nukes on Mars to warm it up...!)

Given my interest in space and astronomy, I was intrigued by how she would answer the question she sets herself at the end: "Should we explore outer space?" She answers in the affirmative, but cautions:

[Only] if we can find a way to study it without doing further damage to its ecology and our own and without escalating human violence. Yes, if we can rein in private interest enough to privilege knowledge over profit and cooperation over competition. Should we try to live there? I'm honestly not sure. But either way, we need to stop pretending that escaping Earth is going to solve our problems... because... we'll bring them all along with us one way or another.

I would argue that this cannot happen without the destruction of capitalism itself. While there remains a need to accumulate for profit's sake, the capitalists will only understand space in terms of capital. We can and must do scientific research, send probes out and use Earth's orbit to help improve peoples' lives. But exploration, permanent bases and new colonies are a distraction from the urgent work to be done - and that includes the fight against a system that would mine the moon for raw materials to make electric cars for Elon Musk's bank balance.

Thursday, February 09, 2023

R.F.Kuang - Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution

Babel is a truly remarkable novel. For the unwary reader it is likely to feel popular because of its initial similarity to the basic premise of Harry Potter - an unlikely child is plucked from their normality and placed in a secret, magical environment. But Babel is a much richer, more complex and far more satisfying novel that Rowling's works. For R.F. Kuang's main characters are not the children of suburban middle class, white, households. Instead they are the children of Empire - Chinese, Indian and Haitian. For in Kuang's alternative world, colonial Empires thrive on the magical powers derived from the subtle differences in translated languages. The slight alternations in meaning between two Mandarin and English words, for instance, can drive power and spells linked to those words when placed in blocks of silver.

The scholars of Babel tower in Oxford University have become rich and fat on their monopoly of this knowledge and the British Empire has become powerful and violent on the back of the power it gives them. But all is not well. The population are revolting - as magic imbued silver powers machines and eases transport. Workers are deskilled, made redundant and driven into poverty by the magic from Oxford, and they are unhappy. But there are further economic troubles on the horizon. Silver is not unlimited and China has much of it and, the power of European languages is fading. Skills are needed from speakers of the languages of Africa, China and India. Which is where our heroes come in.

Robin Swift adopts his name as a boy, because his Chinese name would be unpronounceable to the English. He is taken to Britain, saved by his father from the slums of Canton where plague has devastated almost the whole population. His father, a Babel professor, saves only Swift - he is useful, and potentially profitable. Such is the pattern of Babel and Empire.

Arriving in Oxford after years of forced education, Swift is quickly sucked into the magical realm of knowledge. His lifestyle is luxurious as Babel is fat on the profits of Empire and magic. His friends are also brilliant translators, and they are shaped into a group that will help take the Empire forward. But Swift learns the reality of things quickly - he is pulled into the revolutionary, radical Hermes organisation. A secretive network with the aim of revolution - using Babel's powers to break the British Empire.

Swift moves from naivete to assured rebellion. The powers of Babel resist, though ironically, it is academic hostility to others that proves their final undoing. But Swift, and his friends, have to take on the power of the British Empire - though in their revolution, they do not do so alone. They find allies among the oppressed and downtrodden on Britain itself.

Its a brilliant fantasy, but it is much more than that too. For written into this story is a deeper one - the racism and prejudice of 1830s (and 21st century) Oxford. The limitations of the liberal do-gooders who want to stop war through platitudes, pamphlets and petitions. The frustrations of those self-same white allies who cannot see the reality of racism even inside the privileged, rarefied atmosphere of Babel, where the Asian, Black and Brown scholars are priceless. Kuang has crafted an alternative world, but she has rooted it deep in the history the British Empire - one where the Swing rioters are deported and executed at home, where colonial "subjects" are taunted, dehumanised and mistreated at home and abroad opium is used to destroy an entire country and wars are started to ensure "free trade". Her footnotes, that blend actual history with magical explanations expertly blur the distinction between fact and fiction. It is very much a novel for the Black Lives Matter generation - rooted in part in Kuang's own experiences at the university.

Revolutionary Marxists reading the book will likely pick up on wider themes - not least the question of the state and violence. I was struck, as the book's subtitle suggests, by the clever handling of Swift's journey from activist to terrorist as he seems the impossibility of peaceful reform in the face of the Empire, and Babel's, vested interests. That Kuang places this debate within the context of wider, British, working class activism - albeit in a supporting role, is testament to the nuances of the book. It is, after all, a fantasy, and readers who are concerned about the lack of a "revolutionary party" in the book are missing the point. The rest of you should settle back and stay up all night with this remarkable depiction of the intersection of magic, language and revolution. You'll love it.

Related Reviews

Bardugo - Ninth House
Grossman - The Magicians
Martell - The Kingdom of Liars
Kay - Children of Earth and Sky

Tuesday, February 07, 2023

Donovan Moore - What Stars Are Made Of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

It is difficult, when reviewing biographies, to separate the review of the biography from the subject. It is all too tempting just to rewrite a summary of the person being depicted and ignore the biography itself. This is particularly the case when the subject is such an extraordinary person who is almost unknown outside the field they excelled in. Such a person was Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. As such the main importance of Donovan Moore's biography is that it highlights the life and contribution of this amazing scientist. But first we have to talk about the importance of Moore's subject.

Born in 1900, Payne-Gaposchkin's life straddled the greater part of the twentieth century, and exemplified some of the great changes that were to take place. From a young age she was fascinated by the world around her - botany, astronomy and science in general. But she was also a gifted student of literature and language and later in life, she peppered her science lectures with allusions and references to plays, poetry and literature. Moore's book tells the story of Payne-Gaposchkin's early life and the important influence of her parents who clearly did not hold with Victorian ideas of what a young woman should study. He is particularly strong when highlighting the barriers that Payne-Gaposchkin faced as a result of her gender.

The most important part of the book deals with Payne-Gaposchkin's break into academia. She eventually went to Cambridge were, defying expectations and open hostility from faculty and bureaucrats, she studied botany, physics and astronomy. The first of these she dropped quickly, and focused on her greatest love - astronomy. Her interest in the subject was famously begun when aged eight years old she had seen a meteor while walking with her mother. But it was really after attending a Cambridge lecture by the great astronomer Arthur Eddington about his 1919 expedition to verify Einstein's relativity theories while viewing an eclipse, that she became hooked. She completed her studies but Cambridge would not award a degree to a woman until 1948, so Payne-Gaposchkin emigrated to the United States were she got a job at Harvard in what would become the fledgling astronomy department there.

Payne-Gaposchkin's Cambridge years are of great interest because they show the stifling nature of life at Cambridge. The heavy weight of tradition, sexism and Empire clung to the university. Payne-Gaposchkin's entrance exam to her science course was centred on a translation of a classical text from ancient Greek. Hardly a test of whether or not she understood the basics of her science subjects. But it is the appalling inequality experience by women that is most shocking to the modern reader. The rudeness, casual sexism and dismissive treatment of female students is one thing, but so is the way that they were treated by wider society. Women wanting to play tennis had to have written permission from home in order to go out without petticoats. Male students rioted against the idea that women would be awarded degrees.

Going to Harvard was Payne-Gaposchkin's way out. Getting a low paid job at the university was the result of a brilliant exam, but the university also got its money's worth. Harlow Shapley, the Director of the Harvard Observatory, ensured she was very lowly paid for decades, and Payne-Gaposchkin - for fear of losing the job - never complained publicly. But Harvard was very different to Cambridge, and this probably reflects the different places that the two countries were at. Britain was still clinging onto the remnants of its Empire, stuck in the old ways. The United States, at least, was a country powering forward economically. Its treatment of women was still unequal and misogynistic, but at least women could work at Harvard and no one seemed to care about petticoats too much. Payne-Gaposchkin ended up working on stellar spectra, work that relied on the labour of several female "computers" whose systematic work had provided the observatory with a wealth of raw data. From this Payne-Gaposchkin was able to publish a brilliant PHd thesis that overturned some key ideas of astronomy, including those of Arthur Eddington, her great hero. Payne-Gaposchkin showed how the most abundant elements in the stars, and hence the universe, where not in the same proportions as on Earth. Instead the element Hydrogen was dominant. It was too radical a conclusion and Payne-Gaposchkin had to tone down her argument at the behest of more famous (and male) scientists. But she was eventually proved right - though not accepted until male scientists had verified her conclusions.

At Harvard, Payne-Gaposchkin was a pathbreaking scientist. She also broke down many barriers for women. According to Moore, she was, "The first PHd in astronomy, the first winner of the Cannon Award, the first woman promoted to professor at Harvard... the first woman at Harvard to chair a department."

These firsts were made in the face of opposition and resistance. She was repeatedly ignored for promotion because of her gender, though she also forced the authorities to accept her unusual behaviour. She brought her children to work during World War Two, forcing the Observatory to permit other women to do the same at a time of great shortages of labour for childcare. She lectured while pregnant, something that was considered shocking in the 1930s and 1940s. She was defiant of convention and this defiance led her to take risks and do things, such as drive across the United States with a female friend camping, that must have been shocking to many at the time.

She also exhibited great bravery, travelling to Germany and Russia in the 1930s, helping the astronomer Sergei Gaposchkin escape Nazi Germany and get a job at Harvard. They eventually married and had several children. Cecilia gained the "reputation" of being a "dangerous radical" according to her own autobiography, for the radical discussion groups she and Sergei hosted during World War Two, but it seems that her radicalism never became the organised kind. This is perhaps something she understood herself, saying at a lecture once that she found herself, "cast in the unlikely role of a thin wedge". The words were intended as a joke - Payne-Gaposchkin was almost six feet tall and chain smoked - but they were also very true.

Payne-Gaposchkin was a "thin wedge" but this should not diminish her achievements. It was her fortitude and confidence that drove her forward, and opened up a path for many others to follow. But first and foremost she was a scientist - her love was pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.

Donovan Moore's book is a great introduction to Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin's momentous and unusual life. It is not without its faults - I felt that Moore glossed over the science that Payne-Gaposchkin was working on a little too much. The reader deserved to know more about why her breakthroughs were so important and radical. This requires some more context - the quandary over the make up of the stars (and hence the universe) was because there was no real accepted understanding of how stars worked. This would require clarity over nuclear physics, which was simply not available to the scientists that preceded Payne-Gaposchkin. In this very real sense Payne-Gaposchkin was working on cusp of enormous breakthroughs and her pioneering work helped take this knowledge forward. Sadly Moore doesn't really do this justice. I would also have liked more information on her later years - there is little here about the 1970s and her life then. I would also have valued a slightly more critical engagement with the life and work of Arthur Eddington, whose attitude to critics was problematic and, in the case of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (who also fled Britain to the US) was likely shaped by racism.

Nonetheless this is a fascinating, entertaining and well written account of the neglected life of one of history's greatest scientists.

John Dickson Carr - The Mad Hatter Mystery

I have been reading John Dickson Carr's Doctor Fell novels following my discovery of the later book The Hollow Man last year. That is considered one of the greatest "locked room" mysteries, and Carr's other works tend to work on a similar principle - a ludicrous or impossible situation is worked out by Fell who improbably refuses to divulge any information on his method until he has worked it all out. I suspect any genuine police officers who worked with Fell would have arrested him for "obstructing the course of justice" or some such misdemeanour.

Of course for the reader this is excellent as it allows them to concoct their own theories only for them to inevitably be destroyed by Fell's own explanation. The Mad Hatter Mystery is the second volume of Fell's stories, and follows this pattern closely. In fact, despite the blurb saying that the books can be "enjoyed in any order", this book does follow on relatively soon after the first story. It is better to read it in order in my opinion. Two seemingly separate sets of events are brought together in a murder. One is the repeated, and public, stealing of hats and their placements in public places. The second is the discovery and then loss, of a priceless and unknown short story by Edgar Allan Poe.

The details of what takes place matter little, and their divulgence here might spoil the story for future readers. But I found the story incredibly complicated. There were a plethora of characters, many of whom appear to only exist to complicate the main story. The real joy in the book is the setting and the depiction of the police investigation for the murder takes place in the Tower of London and the police search takes our heroes across 1920s or 30s London. We get quite a few insights into drinkers' culture and the lives and loves of our upper-middle class characters.

But I did not get any satisfaction from the ending. I had little invested in the characters and the central mystery of the Hats was disappointing. A few hours after reading I am not sure I can tell you what and why the murder actually took place. That might be stretching the truth a little, but the book lacked the dark overtones of the other Fell novels.

Monday, January 30, 2023

John Bellamy Foster - Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution

Over the last quarter of a century, John Bellamy Foster's work on ecological Marxism has been hugely influential on the international left. His book Marx's Ecology, published in 2000, was incredibly timely. Coming as the world was increasingly aware of the environmental crises that people faced and offering new insights into how Marx and Marxists have understood nature and the way human society changes the world that we are part of.

As editor of the US socialist magazine Monthly Review Foster continues a prodigious output of articles that grapple with many different topics, but his work on the environment and ecology continues to develop. This new book brings together and updates many of Foster's articles from various different sources, with a particular focus on the way that capitalism transforms nature. Even those who regularly read Foster's articles in Monthly Review will find new material here as it includes articles from a wide variety of popular and academic journals and all of them have been brought up to date.

Foster's argument can be summed up with quote from the introduction where he explains the peculiar relationship that capitalism has to nature. Quoting Karl Marx, Foster writes:

Nature in this system is viewed simply as a 'free gift' to capital, while the vast majority of human beings are treated as an exploitable and expendable mass from which to generate surplus for the wealthy owners. The result is a system that knows no bounds, is oblivious to genuinely human needs, and is inherently unsustainable - now confronting its absolute limits in the Anthropocene.

Many of the chapters explore how exactly this process takes place. Foster looks at the growth imperative within capitalism, that drives accumulation and systematically degrades nature. He engages with contemporary debates about how this system can be challenged, including the degrowth movement. He notes, for instance, while discussing Naomi Klein's work that many critics of the left willingly confuse matters by arguing that degrowth is similar to "the austerity policies associated with neoliberalism" rather than a transformative project that fights for an economy based on "rational use of resources under conditions of absolute necessity and the promotion of equality and community".

As most of these chapters first appeared as articles over a number of years the reader will not a development of Foster's arguments through the book. This is frequently in response to evolving social movements. Foster notes, for instance, that "main thrust" of the environmental movement has changed. shifting "from demand-side initiatives aimed at reducing consumer-market demand for carbon fuels to supply-side strategies aimed at corporations and designed to keep fossil fuels in the ground".

Some chapters however explore more theoretical debates. A number of these are more challenging, and require careful reading. There's an interesting chapter on "the theory of unequal ecological exchange" which explores how Howard Odum's ideas of "emergy" might be synthesised with Marx's own dialectical understanding of society and nature to produce a clearer understanding of how the inequalities of global capitalism had led to an "unequal ecological exchange between center and periphery". There are some useful concepts here, but Foster cautions us that "learning from such a systems ecology approach is one thing; falling prey to the reductionism to which it can potentially lead is another. In any Marxian analysis, ecological materialism must take theoretical precedence over energetics".

Other articles deal with Engels and dialectics and several are defences of Foster works from his critics, particular those on the left who critique the "metabolic rift" theory that Foster develops from Marx's work. I have discussed some of this elsewhere and won't revisit that in this review. Instead I want to finish with a look at Foster's discussion of the struggle for a sustainable world.

What sort of society might this be? Foster argues that a sustainable society is one where there is a rational organisation of the interaction, the metabolism between society and nature. This would be a society organised by the "associated producers" whose aim would be to pass on the world to succeeding generations. This, he notes, contrasts with reformist strategies - even radical ones - where there is no fundamental transformation in economic organisation. For instance,

rather than dealing with the unemployment problem directly - through a radical program that would give people jobs aimed at he creation of genuine use values in ways compatible with a more sustainable society - degrowth theorists prefer to emphasize sorter working hours.

But, he continues, "it is hard to see the viability of shorter work hours and basic income guarantees on the scale suggested other than as elements in a transition to a post-capitalist (indeed socialist) society."

In fact one of the themes that runs though Foster work in this collection is a sense of urgency at the need for fundamental social transformation in the face of ecological collapse. As such, Foster argues that radical demands can only be successful as part of a wider struggle for systemic change. How does Foster envision social transformation? He writes:

Here it is important to recognize that an ecological and social revolution under present historical conditions is likely to pass through two stages that we can call ecodemocratic and ecosocialist. The self-mobilisation of the population will initially take an ecodemocratic form, emphasizing the building of energy alternatives combined with just transition, but in a context generally lacking any systematic critique of production or consumption. Eventually, the pressure of climate change and the struggle for social and ecological justice, spurred on by the mobilisation of diverse communities, can be expected to lead to a more comprehensive ecorevolutionary view, penetrating the veil of the received ideology.

It is not immediately clear to me whether Foster's description here is intended to refer to the period after workers' have won state power and overthrown capitalism, or if it is intended to mean the whole period of revolutionary transition. A few paragraphs later he says, "The path toward ecological and social freedom requires abandoning a mode of production rooted in the exploitation of human labour and the expropriation of nature and peoples." In this case, we must understand Foster's earlier vision as being post-revolution, in the sense of taking place after the defeat of capitalism yet while the earlier social and economic relations continue to exist.

Foster explains that "in general we can expect the Global South to be the site of the most rapid growth of an environmental proletariat, arising from the degradation of material conditions of the population in ways hat are equally ecological and economic".

As I have written previously I am wary of the phrase "environmental proletariat" as it might be interpreted as downplaying the historical role of the working class as producers of surplus value under capitalism. But I am not sure that Foster means it quite in this sense, as he explains the term as referring to a "broad mass" of the population who gain awareness of the environmental threat leading them to revolutionary action. Having said that I do think Marxists need to insist on the centrality of the working class to revolutionary struggle. They are a class defined by their lack of ownership of the means of production and their need to sell their labour power. The working class is the class upon whom capitalist society depends, who have the power to stop the capitalist economy and through their revolutionary organisation build a socialist society.

Of course their position in society will not lead workers directly to an ecological consciousness, but this is why campaigns by environmentalists remain so important - as they can bring ecological issues into the working class movement. On a small scale the presence of environmental activists, often encouraged by socialists, on picket lines in the current mini-strike wave in Britain, is a good example of this process. In this sense Foster's term "environmental proletariat" is a helpful concept.

As with all of his work, John Bellamy Foster's Capitalism in the Anthropocene is enormously stimulating. The book covers many different subjects and readers will find much to grapple with. Foster's theoretical work has been crucial to a new generation of activists, socialists and Marxists trying to get to grips with the multifaceted capitalist crisis we all face. The strength of Foster's work is that it gives a clear theoretical base to the revolutionary struggles that we are engaged in. As such this, and Foster's earlier books, are a crucial tool for the fight for socialism.

Sunday, January 29, 2023

Karl Marx - The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Outside of the radical left The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is not one of Karl Marx's best known works. This is a shame, because it is an engaging, humorous and brilliant work of historical analysis that showcases Marx's writing skills, his polemic and, as Engels notes, his "thorough knowledge of French history". More importantly it is where Marx uses his "great law of motion of history" to show how events are the "clear expression of struggles between social classes", and as Engels said in 1885 "after thirty-three years we must still say that [the work] has stood the test of brilliantly."

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte deals with events in France after the revolutionary proletarian movement of 1848 has been defeated. It is not a straightforward history of events and readers looking for that will need to supplement their knowledge from elsewhere, including Marx's own Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850. Rather Marx shows how specific events in France arise out of the clash between differing class interests, in particular those of different sections of the bourgeoise colliding with each other. But Marx demonstrates how the working class is instrumental in driving forward some of those interests, before itself being isolated and defeated. This passage gives a sense of how Marx writes history - with the back and forth of class struggle shaping wider events:

The bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe can be followed only by a bourgeois republic; that is to say, whereas a limited section of the bourgeoisie ruled in the name of the king, the whole of the bourgeoisie will now rule in the name of the people. The demands of the Paris proletariat are utopian nonsense, to which an end must be put. To this declaration of the Constituent National Assembly the Paris proletariat replied with the June insurrection, the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars. The bourgeois republic triumphed. On its side stood the aristocracy of finance, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpen proletariat organized as the Mobile Guard, the intellectual lights, the clergy, and the rural population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself. More than three thousand insurgents were butchered after the victory, and fifteen thousand were deported without trial. With this defeat the proletariat passes into the background on the revolutionary stage. It attempts to press forward again on every occasion, as soon as the movement appears to make a fresh start, but with ever decreased expenditure of strength and always slighter results. As soon as one of the social strata above it gets into revolutionary ferment, the proletariat enters into an alliance with it and so shares all the defeats that the different parties suffer, one after another. But these subsequent blows become the weaker, the greater the surface of society over which they are distributed.

Marx, of course, reserves his praise for the workers who fought, as against the cowardly, reactionary bourgeoisie.

But at least it succumbs with the honors of the great, world-historic struggle; not only France, but all Europe trembles at the June earthquake, while the ensuing defeats of the upper classes are so cheaply bought that they require barefaced exaggeration by the victorious party to be able to pass for events at all, and become the more ignominious the further the defeated party is removed from the proletarian party.

Marx wrote this to explain the success of Louis Bonaparte, a figure whose seizure of power, and his Janus faced policies, became a byword on the left for reactionary governments and figures. But reading the 18th Brumaire I was repeatedly struck by how Marx places historical materialist analysis front and centre of every event. It produces some of his most memorable and also clear statements on different groups in society, for instance the peasantry, who Marx says forms the class basis for Napoleon's power:

The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France’s poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships... the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes... They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself.

The reference here to the peasants as being a "sack of potatoes" reminds me that this book is full of some of Marx's most quotable passages. It is where, for instance, Marx quips that history repeats itself as tragedy and farce, where he writes that people make history, but not in circumstances of their choosing and where he reminds us of the way the capitalist class subordinates all to their interests:

The bourgeois order, which at the beginning of the century set the state to stand guard over the newly emerged small holdings and fertilized them with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks the blood from their hearts and brains and casts them into the alchemist’s caldron of capital.

Without some knowledge of French history, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is not an easy read, but it is worthwhile as it is perhaps the finest example of Marx's application of his own historical materialism.

Tuesday, January 24, 2023

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein - The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime & Dreams Deferred

It is not uncommon, while looking at reviews of Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's The Disordered Cosmos, to see people describe it as a book of two halves, the first being the difficult science and the second the politics. But to read The Disordered Cosmos like this is to misunderstand a fundamental point about Prescod-Weinstein's powerful polemic. One of her key arguments is that science, and that includes the cosmology and particle physics that she researches, cannot be separated from politics. This is something that the author herself learnt, as she writes in to the introduction, "my new understanding that society would follow me into the world of physics was also something of a phase transition for me."

Prescod-Weinstein's research is complicated. That said, she has a gift for analogy and clear writing that makes the concepts she deals with as accessible as possible. Much of Prescod-Weinstein's work is related to "Dark Matter". This is the mysterious substance that dominates our universe yet is invisible to our detectors. We can infer its existence from experimental measurements and from the complex equations that Prescod-Weinstein loves (though she is careful to only include one of these in the book!). In her explanation of her own work, and the "disordered cosmos" we live in, she begins with the smallest particles and their components, building up and linking these to the enormous structures of galaxies and clusters of galaxies that dominate the galaxy we can see. It is fascinating and Prescod-Weinstein is a brilliant communicator and tackles some amazing science.

But as she explains the science, Prescod-Weinstein also does two other things. She constructs useful metaphors that allow her to explain wider, political issues and tackles the way that capitalism shapes the very framework that scientists use to understand the world. Let's look at a good example of this. Prescod-Weinstein says:

Newton's conception of objects moving in space relied intensely on Euclidean geometry as an organising framework. I a sense, students are still introduced to calculus through this lens... Almost everything in my education about space eventually came back to Euclidean geometry, because it was supposedly intuitive.

But she continues,

The Palikur people of the Amazon see it rather differently. Their geometric system, which more accurately describes the movement of stars across the night sky than the Euclidean one, is what we would call 'curvilinear.' Understanding stars moving across the sky requires a king of intuition for curves - something that's hard to gain when you're always thinking in Euclidean terms. The Palikur system seems to train the mind to think in terms of curves from the very start.

This, is an important insight. The intellectual framework we have for understanding science arises out of a particular time and space - the European enlightenment. This was, as Prescod-Weinstein says, then imposed on the rest of the world through an ongoing process of imperialism and settler-colonialism. So our science is closely tied up with the interests of the capitalist system.

Prescod-Weinstein points out that even a subject as seemingly scientifically "pure" as astronomy is tainted by its role in this process. She highlights the recent debates over a new telescope on Mauna Kea were administrators and scientists dismissed indigenous communities concerns. European astronomy expeditions needed the labour of slaves and indigenous people and their findings helped spread the capitalist system around the globe. Those astronomers and scientists who would dismiss the close links between astronomy and the interests of capital might like to note that the first thing a visitor sees when arriving at the Greenwich Observatory in London is not the brass meridian line, but a set of "Imperial Standards of Length" crucial to the organisation of global commerce. The meridian line itself carves up the world based on a line drawn through the capital of the British Empire. Time itself was transformed by capitalism, as EP Thompson famously wrote about in his article Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.

Our intellectual frameworks then arise out of the dominant economic and political interests of the system we live in - and this has shaped even the science that Prescod-Weinstein studies. The use of colour names as analogies in particles physics is problematic, and Quantum Chromodynamics was originally (and sometimes still is) called "colored physics". A name that would not have been used, as Precod-Weinstein points out, had Black people not been "excluded" from particle physics in the 1960s. The language of physics is "a hot mess".

Which brings me to one of the key points of this book - racism. Physics, Prescod-Weinstein points out, has a racism problem. Part of that is something that she calls "white empiricisms", this is

a practice of ignoring information about the real world that isn't considered to be valuable or specifically important to the physics community at large, which is oriented toward valuing the ideas and data that are produced by white men... I developed this argument by using the specific example of how Black women are treated in the scientific workplace and juxtaposing it against a debate about whether actual observations and experiments are necessary to support theories of quantum gravity. Black women are constantly asked to provide hard evidence for our evaluations of our most common place experiences with discrimination, et white men are taken seriously when they suggest that more affirming data isn't necessary in order to test their theories of quantum gravity.

Physics is a subject that has been built upon racist structures and individual actions of racism and colonialism. As James Poskett has recently pointed out, Isaac Newton had enormous investments in the South Sea Company, which in turn made massive profits from the slave trade. Prescod-Weinstein shows how indigenous people, slaves and servants had their knowledge and labour stolen and used by white-male scientists who claimed it as their own. The scientific establishment has developed on a structural racism that has deep historic roots - both systemically in terms of the history of capitalism and institutionally in terms of the history of the science itself.

The problems with structural racism, and misogyny that Prescod-Weinstein documents, mean that physics is not a welcoming space for people who don't fit the white-male norm. Prescod-Weinstein gives us the unpleasant statistics. But she also tells us her experiences - the racism, the sexism, transphobia and homophobia and the difficulties that students who come from lower income backgrounds (something that is much more common for Black students) experience arriving in an academic environment that is shaped by the interests of better off white people. I suspect this is true of other sciences too, but Prescod-Weinstein argues it is particularly a problem in physics. She also highlights that trans and nonbinary people in physics are "particularly harmed by gender discrimination, including by advisers and colleagues who refuse to use people's correct pronouns". Too often the institutions say that its "too difficult" to learn how to do this. To which Prescod-Weinstein rages:

First-year college physics students are expected in just one semester to not only memorize Newton's laws of physics but also to learn how to apply them. If we can have the lofty expectations that our students will master the basics of gravity - a deeply mysterious force that pervades the entire universe - then surely they are owed mastery by their professors and classmates of a couple of letters that get their pronouns right.

So Prescod-Weinstein is under no illusions that more training in "microaggressions" or "antiracism" is enough to solve this problem. Nor is simply increasing the number of black or LGBT+ students. As she says, "My personal success will not end the structural racism that keeps so many Black people and refugees, especially single mothers, their children, and trans folks in poverty."

Instead what is needed is the destruction of a system that is based on oppression and exploitation. Prescod-Weinstein is very clear that the systemic and structural problems that she outlines are the consequence of centuries of colonial and imperialist rule, and are integral to capitalism. They distort science, and they distort scientists and they make it harder to practice science. As such the system needs to go.

Prescod-Weinstein's book is a powerful, beautifully written study of science and society. It is, at times, a difficult read, because the subject matter includes racism, sexism, transphobia, sexual abuse and rape. Towards the end of the book she writes that as a teenager she believed "that if we solved the fundamental equations of physics, the rest of the proper order of the universe could be derived". This chimed with my own experiences studying mathematics and physics at university. As a white, heterosexual male I certainly do not claim that I can share her experiences of oppression. But I did have a naïve belief in "pure science" that I thought would fix the world. Finding that this was not the case was one of the reasons I became a socialist activist.

In reading The Disordered Cosmos I was reminded however that science, and education, do matter in and of themselves and that we want more people to enjoy them. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's book is filled with her enthusiasm for the universe, as much as it is filled with a rage against a system that denies this to so many people. As she concludes, "We must demand liberation for all, including the right to know and understand the night sky, not as the context of desperate and generous searches for freedom, but as the beautiful place that holds the answers to how we came to exist at all."

Related Reviews

Richardson - Say it Loud! Marxism & the Fight Against Racism
Saini - Superior: The Return of Race Science
Horne - The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism
Winterburn - The Quiet Revolution of Caroline Herschel: The Lost Heroine of Astronomy
Angus - A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism
Miller - Empire of the Stars : Chandra, Eddington and the Quest for Blackholes

Poskett - Horizons: A Global History of Science
Farmelo - It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science
Ananthaswamy - Through Two Doors at Once

Clegg - Gravity: Why What Goes Up, Must Come Down

Greene - The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory

Monday, January 23, 2023

Bethany Clift - Last one at the Party

Regular readers of this blog (there are some, right?) might have spotted my predilection for "end of the world" dystopian fiction. The various threats to the world we live in - pandemic, war and environmental - have stimulated a resurgence in the genre and I have been enjoying their tales of doom. Bethany Clift's take on disaster was begun before Covid-19 impacted humanity, though it features in the opening chapters of her book as the disease she describes 6DM (Six Days Max) erupts out of the United States. "No one wanted to repeat the mistakes of Covid-19" quips her unnamed protagonist, just as governments take rapid, decisive and ultimately pointless action to try and protect their populations.

The United Kingdom as a brief respite from the disease, protected by its island status and a quick decision to blow up the Channel Tunnel, before, inevitably the disease makes its way in and everyone dies. Well everyone that is except for the author of the diary that this book purports to be. This then is the story of the only person left alive, of the minutiae of the end of the world - caring for your dying partner, visiting your dead parents, trying to work out how to find a working car, dealing with the lack of fresh food, and wondering what to do with the rubbish that is no longer taken away. It is a brilliantly believable account, told by a woman who is happy to admit she is completely unprepared for how to deal with this. She "can't change a lightbulb" never mind grow crops. So the story is in someway and account of how she does become equipped to cope with the end of the world, and also a moving account of how our past shapes our attitudes to crises.

Most end of the world novels deal with the fantastical - biker gangs and the like. Last One at the Party considers the mundane - how do we greave for a partner who has died when the relationship was on the rocks? How might our mental health, and the history of our mental health, affect our ability to survive? How would our actions post disaster be shaped by who we were before the disaster? Clift describes how her character navigates both the loss of electricity and her panic attacks. Its a refreshing antidote to those end of the world novels where the central character is a jack of all trades who is also a crack shot. The book is not the dystopian "chick-lit" that some deride it as, its actually really thoughtful and compelling. Clift's prose is easy to read and we are drawn into a world where survival means remembering to fill the petrol tank on the Land Rover, but also not making irrational decisions about where to travel.

There are some intriguing bits too - the rats and seagull infestations evoked George Stewart's ecological end of the world novel Earth Abides. There's also the brilliant depiction of what happens when the last survivor finally meets another survivor. Last One at the Party was an enjoyable read for me, though I felt the ending was a little rushed and slightly unbelievable. But if you like dystopian nightmares, particularly those that develop the "cosy catastrophe" that John Wyndham excelled in, then this is likely for you.