Peter Stanford - Martin Luther: Catholic Dissident

Reading Peter Stanford's biography of Martin Luther in Wittenberg itself was a very stimulating experience. Stanford's book is the first one about Luther that I've read from an explicitly Catholic point of view, though it must be said that the author themselves is perhaps a very liberal member of his church. 

Stanford places Luther in the context of a broken and corrupt church, in a "very specific time and in a very specific set of circumstances". Like many other of Luther's biographers Stanford argues that the formative aspects to Luther's character came from his youth - in particular his father and specific experiences. These created someone with an "inflexible, troubled personality". But Stanford is not so reductionist as to simply believe that relations between parent and child led directly to the Reformation. Indeed Stanford argues that Luther was driven by, "his insights into God's justice that challenged the orthodoxy of the day, but also an array of external factors around politics, dynasties and the exercise of power in the Catholic Church."

So it is the political situation that forms the context for Luther's growing discontent with the Church and his (alleged) posting of the 95 theses on the door of the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg. For those fascinated with these things, and those visitors to the church itself, Stanford tends to suggest that the "nailing" of the theses on the door did not actually happen. Though, as he points out, this is hardly the point. The publication of these theses set in train a process that did lead to the Reformation and the break in the Church. Though as the author explains, in part this was due to mistakes by the Church hierarchy itself.

Standford shows how Luther closely linked his critique of the church with the political and economic context. For instance, Luther writes: "Before long, all the churches, palaces, walls and bridges of Rome will be built of our money. First of all we should rear living temples, next local churches and only last of all Saint Peter's." This link between religious reform and economic conditions creates the context for the mass rebellion of the Peasants War in 1525, eight years after Luther's publishes his theses.

Stanford's book opens with his own experiences in the town and this travelogue aspect to the book shapes much of the narrative.  Reading the book in Wittenberg I was struck several times by the way the official marking of key Reformation events in the city, removes the mass context. For instance Stanford describes the mass invasion of the Schlosskirche by angry townspeople who break images and protest. Something that Luther was enormously fearful of, yet which isn't recorded in the official histories on the site. Nor are similar mass participations in the attacks on monasteries. Instead there is a tendency to portray the Reformation as a passive event were ordinary people took part by attending church and reading books. Stanford, instead, describes a mass Reformation, driven by discontent theologically and economically. We see this in the fears of the ruling class when the Church orders the burning of Luther's works:

Albrecht summoned up his courage and ordered a public bonfire of Luther's books in Mainz, only to see it halted by just the sort of popular insurrection he had feared. The official charged with lighting the flames was so worried about the reaction of the crowd that had gathered in protest that he sought their consent before starting the fire. They refused, he reported back to the archbishop, on the grounds that Luther's works had not been lawfully condemned. He did not proceed.

This is most notable with his account of the Peasants' War. Stanford rightly argues that the "Church did not exist in a vacuum from the society around it. There was... no dividing line between religion and what might be broadly be called politics, economics or society". And for one group of Germans, the peasantry, this lead to outright rebellion. James M. Stayer has written that the Peasants' War was the "expression of the Reformation in the countryside", and Stanford's book supports this. Stanford writes

By the language of the street that he used, the ecclesiastical corruption and incompetence that he highlighted, and even his own relatively humble beginnings, Luther had a strong appeal for the lower orders... As he took his stand against the two great powers of the age - the Pope and the emperor - he excited an anticipation of more to come as his reform programme easily... became conflated with the prospect of better circumstances in daily lives, where economic woes would be addressed and that widespread sense of being excluded finally tackled. In the minds of his hearers , the religious and the political were one.

This made it even more shocking to the Peasants when Luther sided with the authorities and called for the rebels to be murdered. In explaining this aspect Stanford tends to argue that Luther's ideas of transformation focused on the ideological and this meant that he could not countenance the idea of radical change. But I don't think this is enough, and I think there is a deeper explanation. The problem I think is that Stanford locates Luther's Reformation in the context of the politics of the era, without trying too look deeper at the economic changes taking place. Beyond the conflicts between powers and the sense of a changing urban economy, I don't think that Stanford adequately shows how these political conflicts arose out of the gradual birth of a new capitalist order. Luther, as I think many left historians have shown, aligned his interests with the new urban merchant petty-bourgeois class. This meant he sided with the authorities against the masses. Herein lies the answer to the conundrum of Luther's behaviour during (and after) the Peasants' War, not just because he needed to "find a way of working with, rather than against, the secular authorities" to construct a new church. Though it would be similarly wrong to ignore completely this aspect.

Does this undermine the book? In my opinion not much. Stanford's sympathies are in the right place - he sees the vacillation of Luther, and understands the anger of the masses at the bottom of 16th century German society. If he doesn't adequately explain the situation, he does describe it brilliantly. 

When I first opened Peter Stanford's book on the way to Wittenberg I was expecting to be frustrated by the framing of the work through the authors' own beliefs. Instead I found myself presently surprised by a nuanced explanation of this turning point in European history. While Lyndal Roper's book is probably a better (and more detailed) biography of Luther, Stanford's is the more accessible read and it is certainly the book to read if you are in Wittenberg for four days!

Related Reviews

Roper - Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet
Pettegree - Brand Luther
MacCulloch - Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700
Stayer - The German Peasants' War and the Anabaptist Community of Goods

Frank Norris - The Octopus

Frank Norris was an American journalist and novelist active in the last few decades of the 19th century. Today he is relatively unknown, though this novel, The Octopus, is an interesting read. I picked it up without knowing anything about the author, and Norris' more unpleasant ideas did not become immediately obvious.

The Octopus is a social realist novel set in rural California in the 19th century. It deals with the battle between wheat farmers and the railroad capitalists, whose interests are interdependent, but also clash. The book is populated by a number of fascinating characters and Norris tells the story by using varying viewpoints. While Norris is relatively progressive in his sympathies (I'll return to his ideas shortly) the book is not really a radical leftist novel. In fact most of the leading characters in the book are unsympathetic in the sense that they are wealthy landowners or capitalists competing for more money. As Norris describes the Californian farmer, "there's your Western farmer,... Get the guts out of your land; work it to death; never give it a rest. Never alternate your crop, and then when your soil is exhausted, sit down and roar about hard times."

The poor and downtrodden exist in this world - they work on the farms and on the railroad and they are frequently treated shoddily. The novel opens in the aftermath of a railroad strike, and one key small farmer is a character who scabbed on that strike, sets up a farm and is then ruined by the dynamics of the market. 

The context of the novel is the battle between agriculture and railroad - the rail capitalists wanted to fully control the land they lease to the farmers - but the main character is the land itself, or rather the wheat. This is grown in a "new order", on

a ranch bounded only by the horizons, where, as far as one could see, to the north, to the east, to the south and to the west, was all one holding a principality ruled with iron and steam, bullied into a yield of three hundred and fifty thousand bushels, where even when the land was resting, unploughed, unharrowed and unsown, the wheat came up.

This is far from the small producing, self sufficient farms of American folklore. In fact these massive agricultural pursuits are tied to an international market, with the big landowners desperate to use international politics to push their produce onto a hungry world. The limit to this are the costs paid to the middle-men, for transport, handling and processing. It is this that sets up the battle between the rail and land.

When I read The Octopus I did not really grasp the violence at the heart of US social relations. Reading Chad Pearson's recent book Capital's Terrorists, which deals with the battles between labour and bosses in a similar period at the same time, I got an appreciation for the centrality of violence. While this is not a conflict between boss and worker, the dispute easily explodes into murderous conflict. The aftermath allows Norris to briefly discuss more radical social change, though the speeches along these lines he places in the mouth of one of his main characters makes little impact. Presley, who plays the main role of observer in the book, a stand in for the reader to key events, fears that the Railroad (i.e. big Capital) will prevail everywhere, and all that can happen is that those opposing it, their struggles, are like a "fleck of grit in the wheels, perhaps a grain of sand in the cogs". 

He refers to alternative "schemes of society", but sees these as being impractical because of the all consuming power of capital to destroy ordinary people, and all obstacles in its way. Norris doesn't like the way the growth of capital smashes and destroys, but he sees it as an unfortunate necessity, in an economic Darwinian struggle for existence. 

The Octopus is thus a radical novel, but not one that is set among oppressed and exploited people. Nonetheless it sees the way that capitalism turns everything into a mirror of itself. In this sense it is probably reflective of a strand of US radicalism that celebrates the small producer, businessman and middle-class, over the proletarian and their struggles. Which brings me to Frank Norris himself. One of the problems with Norris, though not so much with this book, is his racist attitudes. Norris was very much influenced by 19th century Scientific Racism, and was an antisemite. It is notable that many scholars have seen Norris depiction of the main Railroad manager S. Behrman as an stereotypical Jewish figure, greedy for money.

This racism and antisemitism will put off many readers and helps explain how the author is relatively unknown today. Nonetheless the book is interesting, and has clearly influenced many writers such as Jack London, Upton Sinclair or John Steinbeck. 

Karen Maitland - The Plague Charmer

In 1361, just thirteen years after the Black Death decimated the population, another pandemic swept the British Isles. This time the disease seemed to kill men, leaving women and children the main survivors. Coming so soon after the previous plague, the shock to the population must have been enormous.

Karen Maitland's The Plague Charmer is set in a small fishing village in western Somerset, and she skilfully draws a picture of a community in shock and the second appearance of the plague. Characteristically she creates a foreboding atmosphere - the characters in her novels retain a belief in magic, spirits and demons, as well as a adherance to Christian belief. The rescue of a woman from the sea in a great storm however shakes the community's faith in their Christian god, not least after the local priest runs away at the first sign of plague. Nearby, the great and the good are gathering at the manor house, where they seal themselves in at the first sign of disease.

Maitland carefully brings the two stories set in these locations together, characters having links that are gradually revealed through the book. Again, characteristically, many of Maitland's characters are unpleasant - liars and thieves, though they all show their own particular morality. The best part of the story is that which shows the breakdown in community solidarity with the arrival of the plague, and Maitland combines this with the story of what happens to the children of the other hero Sara, who are outside the home when their families are locked in by villagers trying to stop the spread of the disease. One character that links the two locations is Will, a dwarf who has performed for his master at the Manor, but is now banished for some, as yet, unknown crime. Will is a thief and is frequently blamed by the more pious villagers for various happenings. Yet it is his character whose personal redemption carries the village to its own redemption, as he alongside Sara, fights to stop the witch who has cursed them.

Maitland's stories are often very dark and draw on myths and legends that mean there is an interesting, though sometimes discombulating involvement of fantasy. I like to think this realistically shows the medieval mindset, in a world where nature seemed to behave irrationally and unpredictably. Fans of Maitland's work will enjoy this novel and its recommend as a decent introduction to her style.

Related Reviews

Maitland - Company of Liars
Maitland - The Owl Killers

Chad E. Pearson - Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen & Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century

In Summer 1901 some 100 men broke into the homes of thirteen trade unionists in the city of Tampa, Florida in the United States. The union activists were mostly Black and of Cuban and Italian heritage. They were put onto a boat and taken to an island off Honduras were they were marooned. The activists were part of a major cigar workers' strike - a key industry in Tampa - which had successfully closed down production. The kidnapping was designed to undermine the strike, break union organisation and give the initiative back to the bosses. In this it was successful. The 100 anti-union activists were marshalled together by a conglomeration of Tampa's "elite" - business owners and politicians who were "labor's most passionate enemies".

Reading Chad E. Pearson's book Capital's Terrorists it is hard not to be shocked by the stories of repression he records. The Tampa kidnapping of 1901 is unusual because it did not lead to the murder or injury of workers or their union organisers. There are many other tragic examples of lynching, shooting, torture and imprisonment however through the period covered. Pearson highlights the uniqueness of this violence with comparable economies:

Nationally, between 1872 and 1914, anti-labor union forces killed between 500 and 800 workers in direct conflicts. This amount is considerably larger than the number of strike-related deaths in other countries during this period. In Germany... the number of protesters killed during the same period was sixteen. In France... nineteen laborers were killed between 1906 and 1909.

This violence was a consequence of the history of the United States. The kidnapping of Tampa's union activists was inspired by the forced displacement of Florida's Native American population. Systematic and murderous violence against black workers' flowed directly from the politics and organisation of the bosses during the Slavery and Reconstruction eras. The violence that had founded the United States became part of the DNA of class relations. This is not to say that other countries "elites" did not commit murder or kidnapping. The British state's treatment of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the protesters at Peterloo or other rebels gives the lie to that. The point that Pearson makes is that the scale and nature of the violence in the US used against workers' was unprecedented.

W. E. B. Du Bois said that the decade after Reconstruction saw the "counter-revolution of property", a period when Pearson tells us:

Thanks partially to elites' vigilantism, which involved various forms of coercion, intimidation and violence meant to keep African Americans on worksites, and away from polling booths, schools and political formations - the 1880s saw major increase in the production of corn, cotton, rice and sugar. Klansmen and other vigilantes helps to ensure that the South's coercive labor regimes produced enough commodities to meet global demand.

The employers' organisations which drove such counter-labour activities saw their actions as maintaining their power, influence and the status quo - and ensuring huge profits. As such paramilitary groups like the KKK should be understood was more than just racist organisations. They were "multilocational and decentralized association[s] that used terrorism to... promote the interests of society's most privileged members. In short, vigilante groups like the Klan served the class interests of those at the top of society". These groups had the twin goals of "labour control and the reinstatement of 'law and order'."

That is not to say that racism was unimportant. In fact, racism against Black people, immigrants and indigenous people runs through each chapter. The bosses organising against strikers in mines, the cigar industry, streetcars or wherever, used racism as a tactic to divide and rule, as well as being an ideological that they subscribed personally too. Racism was also, clearly a motivating factor for the individuals in groups like the KKK or other organisations discussed by Pearson.

But Pearson argues that class is the crucial tool for understanding these groups and the conflicts they engaged in. The violence used by the elite classes against workers, and the organisations they created to do this, was part of the cementing of comradeship between the bosses and those who identified with them. It helped isolate workers (and their organisations) from other groups in society, such as middle class shop owners and newspaper editors. It also explains the overlap and support given by the regional and national state to the local bosses. Time and again Pearson describes how vigilantes are "let off" or exonerated by the legal system as judges and Presidential appointees identify not with law and order, but with their class interests. Indeed there was an understanding for some trade union activists that "Uncle Sam is against us", in other words - that the US state was their enemy as much as the bosses. The reality of such disputes was, as Pearson points out, that "some relatively moderate union leaders [were transformed] into rather confident quasi-revolutionaries".

Anti trade unionism overlapped very much with anti-socialism. The "elites" themselves developed their own ruling class ideology to justify and encourage their actions. Quite a lot of Pearson's work focuses on J. West Goodwin, an active figure in the setting up of Citizens Alliances where he drew on his own, violent, experiences in stopping strikes. These Alliances, often involving hundreds or thousands of ruling class figures, actively countered workers organisations. Justifying this saw their spokespersons emphasising the importance of the "open shop" - a workplace where workers were not compelled to join unions. In Colorado, the Citizens' Alliance declared "The 'open shop' is the foundation of this organisation". Another Alliance activist in St Louis declared the closed shop "the worst curse that ever befell this country", worse than "wars, pestilence, cyclones, floods, earthquakes, fires" and so on. 

A core ideology of the capitalist system is the illusion that workers' are competing on a level playing field in the labour market. When workers' organise to build a trade union, it challenges the fundamentals of how the system works. So for capitalists like Goodwin, the vocal opposition to the closed shop was linked to their belief in a system that would be free to maximise their profits. The close association in the bosses minds' between a system free from workers' organisation and their personal role was summed up by a motto of the Idaho Springs Citizens' Protective League: "They Who Furnish the Capital Should Conduct the Business. Law and Order First - Politics, Creeds and Unions Afterwards". However the problem for the bosses, as always, was that the capital came from workers' labour and workers' would organise to try and get a bigger share of the fruits of their work.

Why does this matter? In his epilogue, Pearson draws a clear line between Capital's Terrorists in the founding period of US capitalism and the Terrorist attack on the Capitol, in January 2021. At "minimum", "both sets of actors had political agendas that they believed could be achieved by using brute force". But also "it is a safe bet... that most of the terrorists in the Capitol, especially the business owners, opposed labor organisations with the same level of intensity". But as Pearson points out, there are limitations to this analysis. Nonetheless, the key thing is that the history of US capitalism is one that has legitimised vigilante violence against workers, the left and the Black community.

Readers like myself who found themselves surprised by the overt violence used against trade unions as described in Pearson's book, will have a better understanding of the centrality of violence to the US political system itself. In this regard alone, Chad E. Pearson's Capital's Terrorists is a tremendous contribution. But there is one further point. The reader will emerge better equipped to understand the threat that US workers' faced to their organising in the past and today. In an era when we are often told that American workers are part of the problem, reminding ourselves of the brave struggles and appalling sacrifices that they have made in the past is both inspiring and important.

Related Reviews

Lause - The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots & Class Conflicts in the American West
Corbin - Gun Thugs, Rednecks & Radicals: A Documentary History of the West Virginia Mine Wars

Cronon - Changes in the Land

Cronon - Nature's Metropolis

Tully - Crooked Deals and Broken Treaties

Chester Himes - All Shot Up

In A Rage in Harlem we were introduced to two of the most memorable police detectives in fiction, Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones. All Shot Up is their second outing and is run through with many of the same themes that makes Rage such a fantastic novel. There is corruption, racism and grifting as Harlem's black community try to survive the terrible housing, police racism and poverty by looking for their big break.

Snow has hit Harlem, as a speeding, fancy Cadillac knocks over an old lady. She survives, but is them immediately, and gruesomely, killed by another car bring driven by three cops. The cops stop the first car, rob the passengers and steal the Cadillac and go on to get involved in a nasty shootout outside a Gay bar. Johnson and Jones have to pick up the mess, and start by assuming everyone is guilty of something - even if its just not admitting to seeing anything. Their roughing up of the drinkers in the bar has nothing to do with homophobia - the two cops seem to dislike everyone equally - and everything to their violent methods of chasing down the guilty. Knocking over a few witnesses publicly helps them get their lead, and we follow them through the dirty, snowy streets into an extremely complex plot.

One of the interesting things about All Shot Up, is that like A Rage in Harlem, several characters are transgender and there are some quite subtle comments on LGBT issues. Several of the gay men in the book lead double, but relatively public, lives. So while the book says nothing about Civil Rights struggles, there is a tacit bringing together of LGBT and racial subjects. This said, there is little or nothing about women's liberation in this - most of the female characters are sexualised and treated misogynistically by male characters. 

But the novel is driven by Jones and Johnson as they bully their way across the Harlem landscape, freezing in their beat up car, drinking spirits to keep going and absolutely happy to open up with their big handguns as often as they can. Chester Himes' novels revel in the chaos and complexity of a detective novel set in a place were everyone is grifting because no one really has anything. The reader is very much along for the ride.

Related Reviews

Himes - A Rage in Harlem

Penelope Houston - Went the Day Well?

A recent viewing of the Ealing Studios film Went the Day Well? (1942) led me to Penelope Houston's short book. The film itself is a remarkable oddity. Set in the quiet English town of Bramley End during World War Two, it deals with an invasion by German paratroopers who, together with a local Nazi sympathisers, are trying to take over key infrastructure ahead of the main German invasion. The disguised Germans are eventually unmasked by the resourceful villagers who through a combination of skills, luck and sheer violence manage to hold them off until the regular army can relieve them. 

The films uniqueness is partly to do with the unusual subject. British World War Two films rarely dealt with invading Germans on British soil. Modern viewers who know Ealing more for its gentile comedy will be surprised by this, and also by the thing that stood out for me - the surprising and shocking levels of violence.

Penelope Houston's book looks at the film in context, and has plenty of detail about how and why it was made. She argues that it was not designed as a specifically propaganda film encouraged by the government, particularly as by 1942 the threat of invasion had receded dramatically. She also contrasts the film with the Graham Greene story that it is based upon, and comes to some interesting conclusions. There's plenty of material about how and when the film was made that will excite real film buffs and some interesting stuff on Alberto Cavalcanti, the Brazilian director who made it.

The film, Houston argues, is unusual partly because of the things that set it out. But also because it is "imagined history posing as real history, but also aware that the pretence takes in no one". But there are some key messages. One of these is about unity - the great theme of propaganda during times of crisis. We are all in it together. There is the cross-class unity of the village in the face of the enemy. Everyone, the rich, poor, land-girls and a sailor home from service, are herded by the Nazis into the church. Houston notes the one great humorous line uttered by two characters on being herded into the Church, "but we're chapel" - a line that serves to underline the main argument of the film: We're all in it together, but we are never going to stop being British.

The enemy are also utterly brutal. If irrational. As Houston points out, there is absolutely no way that the officer would have been allowed to bring his Vienna branded chocolate (though she fails to note that it is actually incorrectly spelt for German).  Houston focuses on the violence, as many reviewers do. But I was struck by what I saw as her misinterpretation in a couple of places. She notes the "unity" of the village. But she didn't seem to pick up on the emphasis that this unity was actually unequal. There's a scene at the manor when the wealthy villagers entertain the officers before they are unmasked as Nazis. In this the hostess apologises for the lack of choice at dinner (the contemporary viewer would absolutely understand this reference to rationing). But the viewer has also been allowed to see that this lack of choice is subjective - there have been several bottles of wine and courses and the meal was served in great elegance. All in it together, but some are more in it than others.

The other point I thought that Houston missed was the nature of the propaganda. Trying to understand Went the Day Well? in the context of an instruction manual on what to do during invasion, that "careless talk costs lives" or as a lesson in British unity is not enough. The real message is actually about England (and I mean England here) is. In this, she echoes Angus Calder's reading of much propaganda during the early years reflecting a "Deep England". This is designed to appeal to a deep-seated English patriotism that sees the country as a place of small villages of thatched cottages, with limited class conflict, comfort and plenty for all. This is the England under threat, and this is the England that has to be defended. 

Houston points out that the Greene story it is based on is set in a poverty stricken working class village. The difference the film makers put into the film seems to emphasise my point. This is subtle propaganda aimed at more than just giving confidence in the face of the enemy. It's a message about the type of England the rich and powerful wanted. 

This disagreement aside, Penelope Houston's book is certainly worth reading if you want to know more about this incredible film. And there's much here that gives wider context - not least the tragic story of the innkeeper who killed himself after the film crew drank the pub dry and the villagers were somewhat pissed off. Rationing was not the same for all...

Related Reviews

Calder - The People's War: Britain 1939 - 1945
Calder - The Myth of the Blitz
Frankel - High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic
Frankel - The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend
Biskind - Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

Jason Hickel - Less is More: How Degrowth will save the World

Jason Hickel's latest book opens with a devastating summary of the ecological crisis. But despite this, he argues that Less is More is "not a book about doom. It is a book about hope." It is also a book that attempts to go far beyond the mainstream responses to climate crisis which focus on new technologies or neoliberal economics. He concludes that "we" need to cut emissions to "zero much, much faster than anyone is presently planning". The reason that nothing has happened so far goes far beyond the superficial causes of the crisis:

Fossil fuel companies, and the politicians that they have bought, bear significant responsibility for our predicament. But this alone doesn't explain our failure to act. There's something else - something deeper. Our addiction to fossil fuels, and the antics of the fossil fuel industry, is really just a symptom of a prior problem. What's ultimately at stake is the economic system that has come to dominate more or less the entire planet over the past few centuries: capitalism.

More specifically, Hickel argues that it is the growth imperative to capitalism that is the problem, "it's not our technology that's the problem. It's growth".

Hickel's focus in this book on capitalism feels like a breath of fresh air. Early chapters in the book take a look at how capitalism developed and the dynamics of the system itself which create growth. Marxists like myself might find some nuances to argue with here, but that's not the key thing. What is important is that Hickel is discussing capitalism and critiquing its central dynamic. 

Hickel continues, however by arguing that he isn't saying that "growth is bad, in and of itself." Rather, he argues, the problem is "growthism" by which he means the "pursuit of growth for its own sake". Here I do have some important disagreements, because on occasion I think that Hickel comes close to arguing that growth is a choice made by the capitalists. He says for instance that "all sectors of the economy must grow, regardless of whether or not we actually need them to. This is an irrational way to manage an economy". 

But growthism, to use Hickel's word, isn't a managerial choice made by the owners of capital. It is a compulsion. They are compelled to do this because of the competitive nature of the system. It is a system of "competitive compulsion" after all. The capitalists cannot break free of this. 

In a recent piece on another book on Degrowth I wrote that:

Karl Marx said this compulsion flowed from competitive accumulation. Capitalists compete with each other to maximise their profits, and are forced to plough back into production most of the wealth they extract from workers. The compulsion to accumulate arises from the competition faced by capitalists. Unless they constantly innovate and develop production methods, they face losing out to their competitors—resulting in possible bankruptcy.

Now to be fair to Hickel, a great strength of his work is that he draws on the insights of Marx and similar writers to develop his arguments. Indeed he probably wouldn't greatly disagree with what I write above. I make this point not to imply that I am a better reader of Marx or for sectarian reasons, but because I think that the importance of understanding the inherent compulsion for "growth" within the system is key to understanding how we can get to a sustainable society.

Firstly, what do we mean by such a society? Hickel outlines the urgency well: "We have built up a global fossil-fuel infrastructure over the past 250 years, and now we have to completely overhaul it in over thirty". Hickel is not arguing here for austerity politics whereby everyone has to tighten their belts In fact Hickel is in favour of growth in some parts of the economy to ensure that people's needs are met equitably. He is arguing for degrowth in large sectors of the economy in a way that challenges the dominant functioning of our system. One example might be how much we work:

Researchers have found that if the United States were to reduce its working hours to the levels of Western Europe, its energy consumption would decline by a staggering 20%. Shortening the working week is one of the most immediately impactful climate policies available to us.

Here Hickel is certainly not arguing that workers should loose a fifth of their incomes. He is very much in favour of defending wages and improving them. Rather he is highlighting how wasteful our system of production is. Another example is a direct challenge to the colonial system that has impoverished and underdeveloped the Global South. Hickel writes:

It means... investing in robust universal social policy to guarantee healthcare, education, water, housing, social security. It means land reform so that small farmers have access to the resources that they need to thrive. It means using tariffs and subsidies to protect and encourage domestic industries. It means decent wages, labour las and a progressive distribution of national income. And it means building economies that are organised around renewable energy and ecological regeneration rather than around fossil fuels and extractivism.

Hickel argues that the capitalism is marked by "artificial scarcity". His argument is that this drove the development of capitalism, because shortages of land caused by enclosure forced people to take up wage labour to survive. Today he says, scarcity of jobs, resources, public services, time, creates a dynamic that forces people to engage with the system to survive. 

In a growth system, he says, "the objective is not to satisfy human needs, but to avoid satisfying human needs. It is irrational and ecologically violent... Once we grasp how this works, solutions rush into view... liberated from the pressures of artificial scarcity, and with basic needs met, the compulsion for people to compete for ever-increasing productivity would wither away. The economy would produce less as a result, yes - but it would also need less".

Capitalism is a system that produces scarcity at the same time as producing over-abundance. The crises of over-production that see vast amounts of commodities produced for profit, despite not being needed, are a direct result of the compulsion to growth. But scrapping this system will not come from simply wishing it away. It is fine to say, as Hickel does, that "by decommodifying public goods, expanding the commons, shortening the working week and reducing inequality we can enable people to access the goods that they need to live well without requiring additional growth in order to do so". But what is the mechanism.

Hickel argues that democracy is key. He wants to see democracy expanded arguing that democracy is inherently anti-capitalist. But as he also points out, capitalism is inherently anti-democracy. Herein lies the crux of the limitation of Hickel's transformative vision. Unless we come up with a strategy to break capitalism, capitalism will constantly use its own power to smash us.

In my recent book Socialism or Extinction I described various historical revolutions in order to reclaim the idea of revolution as a mass democratic movement from below. I also wrote at length about events in Chile in 1973 when Salvador Allende's mildly reforming government was broken by a vicious military coup led by Pinochet and supported by the United States. The importance of that lesson was not that reforms weren't important. But that without a social movement capable of disarming the capitalist state, such radical reforms are doomed to defeat. And, as Hickel acknowledges, we are not arguing here for minor changes but for a direct challenge to the nature of capitalism itself.

As such I was left disappointed by the end of Hickel's book. His demonstration of the failure of capitalism and his argument for a different way of running society seemed to be less a call for systemic change and instead a call to try and create a different system from within capitalism. In contrast I would argue that we have fight for the greatest possible reforms in the immediacy to minimise ecological destruction and offer social justice, at the same time as recognising that an economic system without the compulsion to growth will be one based on a different economic order. That requires revolutionary politics.

Much of this review has focused on my disagreement with Hickel's conclusion. That perhaps arises out of his framework, which differs from mine. But having said all this, I want to argue that his book, like that of Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter and Aaron Vansintjan is one that Marxists should engage with. There is much we agree on here, and Hickel's eloquence and passion, as well as his anti-capitalism, remain important within our shared environmental movement.

Related Reviews

Foster - Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution
Saito - Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism
Schmelzer, Vetter & Vansintjan - The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World beyond Capitalism

Sylvain Neuvel - A History of What Comes Next

***Spoilers ***

This is a clever alternate science-fiction history that makes the space race of the 1960s the product of the machinations of a group of alien interlopers, rather than the imperial interests of the Soviets and Americans. Or rather, the Kibsu, exploit human international rivalries to encourage humanity towards the moon in order that they might themselves get off planet.

The Kibsu are a group of women who can breed with human males, but whose female children have superhuman abilities to move and fight. They've been with humanity for thousands of years, and through flashbacks Sylvain Neuvel tells us some of their origin story - riding with the Mongol hordes and playing Viking chieftains off against each other. They pass their story down from mother to daughter, and each generation aims to gain wealth and power to influence humanity on to the stars. But they are also pursued. The "Tracker" is hunting them down, trying to kill the Kibsu off and foil their plans. The origin of this conflict is left somewhat unclear at the end of this first volume of a trilogy.

This book focuses on how Mia, a young nineteen year old woman, gets humanity into space. Her mother fled Germany with the rise of the Nazis, and Mia, is sent back into Germany as part of Operation Paperclip to get the best Nazi scientists out to work in the US on rockets. But Mia and her mother realise that American inertia will never get rockets off the ground, so they move to the Soviet Union, understanding that if Stalin gets an ICBM and a person in space then the Americans will be forced to catch up. Once the Americans move their superior economy will do the rest.

Its a clever idea, and Mia is a great character. Her ability to fight back, manoeuvre social forces and organise the mainly male Soviet elite make her a great hero. All this is done in the context of some great asides and background. Neuvel gives us the an interesting moment during the Witch Craze in the Little Ice Age which serves to demonstrate the Kibsu's powers and another of the themes that runs through the book - the growing concern over climate change that makes the alien's quest more urgent. Neuvel also throws in some other interesting events. He places Mia in the clutches of Stalin's henchmen and murderer Beria, and gives her mother a possible role in the death of the dictator himself. 

The book suffers a little from lack of clarity about who the Kibsu are. The reader learns this through the book, though much remains unclear at the end. But the structure doesn't quite work and I was left confused in places. Nonetheless this is a fun counter-history and I look forward to the sequels.

Related Reviews

Neuvel - Until the Last of Me

Peter Frankopan - The Earth Transformed: An Untold History

The breadth of Peter Frankopan's historical analysis, and his dialectical approach to the environmental and societal interaction does not match up to his lacklustre and cynical analysis of the contemporary ecological crisis. Read it for the excellent historical backdrop to modern society, less for his analysis of the modern world.

I reviewed The Earth Transformed for Socialist Worker Long Reads. You can read it here.

Bob Scribner (ed) - Germany: A New Social & Economic History, 1450-1630, Volume 1

Bob Scribner's "new" social and economic history of Germany is part of an academic series of works aiming to give a detailed account of the rise of the modern German state. The books are aimed very much at students, and consist of a highly self-contained chapters that look at particular aspects of the period. This volume, covering the end of the Medieval era from 1450 until 1630, is a period that includes the Reformation and much of the Thirty Years War, so it is a meaty chunk of history. 

However reading the various chapters it is difficult to get a complete sense of the period itself. So while it is useful to read chapters on, for instance, the economic landscape (Tom Scott), Diet (Ulf Dirlmeier and Gerhard Fouquet) or Daily Life (Robert Jutte), it is sometimes difficult to remember how they fit into a bigger historical narrative. This is not to say that there is not much of interest here. Tom Scott opens the book with an excellent summary of the different historical trajectory of various parts of Germany. He notes how some areas differed radically from other parts of the country and other parts of Europe:

There was no widespread enclosure movement in northern Germany in the sixteenth century along the lines of England... In general, pastoralism in northern Germany tended to serve the market for both meat and dairy produce, whereas in the Alps there was a greater concentration upon dairying.. The sharply increased demand for meat from the urban centres of southern and western Germany could no longer be covered by purely regional supplies; instead the cities came to rely upon livestock imports driven on the hoof, often over immense distances. 

Such insights are important, but they felt repeatedly discontented from other chapters which leads on the one hand to some repetition and on the other to the loss of insight. At worst they end up making much of these chapters a series of fascinating insights and facts, rather than a cohesive argument. That said, some of the chapters are really useful summaries, Christian Pfister's chapter on Population traces the complex rise and fall of the German population, from around 9 million in 1500 to 1600 when the population was around 16 million. This great rise came on the back of a 14th century collapse, that decimated and depopulated whole areas. But even the early growth was enough to provoke discontent. Pfister notes that some rebellious peasants in 1525 drew up articles complaining about the shortage of arable land. 

But it is perhaps the growth of trade, and the development of early capitalism in this period, that is of most interest. Several articles examine the implications of this and note attempts to manage and control trade. From the 14th century cities like Cologne were developing extensive links, by the 15th century saw "long-distance trade to England and Danzig with iron, steel, tin and wire". Small towns were "taking on the character of subsidiary centres for the metropolis" with many other industries such as mining, becoming important for economies across the continent. 

The implications for this on communities and the family unit were profound. One of the most interesting chapters is Merry E. Wiesner's on "Gender and the Worlds of Work" which shows how the place of women was reinforced by a conscious approach to education that forced women into subordinate roles. Wiesner notes how studying women's names and identifies helps us understand gender and social roles and position in the period:

It is important to recognise... that 'the wife of a smith' is also an occupational title in the late middle ages and did not simply indicate marital status. That title carried with it a set of responsibilities and duties which the woman herself as well as her neighbours and associates, understood; it was not honorific in the way that calling the wife of a doctor 'die Doktorin' would be in the Eighteenth century. This conflation of occupational and marital title illustrates the fusing of work identify and family identity for women.

These roles were reinforced by a whole number of institutions of "church and state", and the state worried about how they might be upset. Wiesner quotes a clerical author who "commentated that letting the wife take charge would be as bad as the Peasants' Revolt, 'when the subjects wanted to be lords'." The Reformation, they note, furthered this process by defining women's role as "mothers". As Wiesner highlights:

Over the course of the next several centuries, women were excluded from some areas of production, but, more importantly, their productive tasks were increasingly defined as reproductive, as related to 'housekeeping'. Women worked, but what the did was no longer thought of as work.

This is an important insight, and shows how the developing capitalist world transformed what the family unit did and how it functioned. Crucially this was taken to the next level by the Protestant Reformation which "gave it a strong religious sanction by making worker or mother the ideal for all people, not simply the second class Christians who could not remain celibate".  They continue:

We often view the idea of separate spheres for men and women as a product of the nineteenth century, created by the Industrial Revolution, bourgeois notions of domesticity, and Victorian sexuality. I think we can see the roots of this idea much earlier, though the economic and physical structures which would allow actual separation developed more slowly... and would never develop for lower-class people. What did being in the nineteenth century... was the enshrinement of a gendered notion of work in statistical language, defining a man as a 'day labourer' but a woman who took in washing, sewed curtains in other people's homes, sold eggs from her own chickens and taught her children to read as a 'housewife' with none of these jobs contributing to the GNP. The gendered notion of work created in Renaissance Europe is to a great extent still with us.

I've dwelt on Wiesner's capture here partly because it reflects some themes I am focussing on myself, but more importantly because it exemplifies two things about this book very well. First the first rate scholarship in the pieces. Secondly however it shows how self contained the arguments are. Each of these chapters have something to offer the reader, and readers will perhaps focus on specific chapters. Reading the book from cover to cover was, at times, a slog - not least because it is a text book. But students of the period will find much of interest.

Related Reviews

Baylor - The German Reformation & the Peasants' War: A Brief History with Documents
Blickle - The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants' War from a new perspective
Bax - German Society at the Close of the Middle Ages

M.D. Lachlan - Celestial

***Spoilers***

Celestial takes us back to the days of Apollo. The early missions are over. The space race, however, isn't. The Soviets are on the moon and the United States are keeping an eye on them. This monitoring allows NASA to spy on the Russians as their mission finds a hatch in the lunar surface. Opening this, and entering, leads to the Russian lunar explorers vanishing. Markings on the surface, and other intercepted intelligence, leads NASA to recruit a specialist linguist Ziggy Da Luca.  Da Luca is an expert in languages. She speakers Italian, French and Russian and can "fake it in Spanish". Crucially to the mission she is about to embark on, she can speak three Tibetan dialects and read classical Tibetan. This is important because the marking on the hatch on the moon are very similar to those in many ancient Earth locations and in particular to scripts and markings from ancient Tibet that hint at "ancient astronauts".

So Da Luca is whisked to the moon with three other Apollo astronauts, one of whom is a racist Vietnam vet called Griffin who is suffering badly from PTSD. On the moon their return vehicle is apparently destroyed by arriving Soviet craft and inside the Tibetan lunar structure the US and Soviet astronauts proceed to shoot at each other, then make a wary alliance, as they explore the alien world.

Inside the moon the alien structure seems to respond to their emotional state. As our racist astronaut becomes increasingly unable to cope, he hallucinates weapons and aliens, other visions from ancient Russian folktales attack the humans while Griffin tries to shoot them. The humans cross an ocean in Baba Yah's hut, fly around on a spacecraft modelled on Space 1999 and have an encounter with one of the earlier, lost cosmonauts who has changed into a giant squirrel. Eventually some of them get back, but only because Da Luca is able to call upon her own, understanding of Tibetan culture and languages and navigate them home - while Griffin flies.

When I read the first chapter I described the book as "gloriously silly". By the end I just thought it was silly. The plot hangs together based on a sequence of increasingly bizarre events constructed from various subconsciousness, and there is almost no pay off at the end. Perhaps if this had been building to a great reveal, I would have been satisfied. But we never really learn why, or what, is happening inside the moon. There are some small pay offs. The evil Russians are dealt with, and Griffin overcomes some of his racism. But, the negatives outweigh it all. And there are too many unanswered questions - not least is how NASA made an astronaut out of a man who clearly had intense PTSD, and whose racist towards Vietnamese people makes him entirely unsuitable to be in a confined space with someone of Asian heritage.

The author has inserted some references designed to be amusing with our hindsight - "What the fuck is a mandala?" asks a senior NASA figure. "I thought he was a some terrorist in prison in Africa". Its not that funny, or clever - but its the best this shallow book seems to offer.

Avoid.

Related Reviews

Hadfield - The Apollo Murders
Burgess - The Greatest Adventure: A History of Human Space Exploration
First on the Moon - A Voyage with Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Edwin Aldrin
French & Burgess - In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquillity 1965-1969
Scott & Leonov - Two Sides of the Moon

Earl Swift - Across the Airless Wilds

Across the Airless Wilds, a history of the Lunar Rover and its voyages on the final three Apollo missions, might seem like a niche subject - even for those of us fascinated by the history of space exploration. Yet Earl Swift's book is a surprisingly gripping read and deserves a readership beyond the narrow confines of enthusiasts. 

The rover concept had its origins in the near fantasy science fiction stories that shaped the early popular vision of rockets and spaceflight. In those gaudy depictions of Americans on space, popular magazines depicted astronauts exploring the moon and travelling around in a variety of vehicles. For a society seeped in automobile culture it seemed inevitable that visionaries, scientists and science-fiction authors would suggest that moon explorers would soon need a "car". Yet oddly the first people to really push the idea of such vehicles were not Americans, they were German scientists.

Just before reading Across the Airless Wilds I finished a book about the early Atomic scientists and the development of the atomic bomb. Robert Jungk's Brighter Than 1000 Suns showed how former German nuclear scientists were central to the US development of the Atomic bomb. This was also true of the space programme, and indeed the Lunar Rover. Two key figures in its early development Werner von Braun and Hermann Oberth were both  German scientists, with von Braun at least having played a significant role in the Nazi war effort. Swift makes a point that many key figures in the US space programme were "foreign born". 

He continues "America's race to reach the moon, both within NASA and at the aerospace companies that built the hardware, relied on the minds and talents of immigrants - on Americans who happened to start their lives elsewhere." It is hard not to think that Swift is taking a dig at the right-wing politicians in the US (and elsewhere) who attack immigrants, but he makes an important general point about the space programme itself - it was the product of an enormous amount of physical and mental labour by hundreds of thousands of people, and its roots go back into the early twentieth century. That said, Swift does not ignore the murky parts of this history. We cannot forget the fact that one of the key architects of the Apollo programme was a former leading member of the SS and it is important that Swift acknowledges this.

I highlight this to emphasise that Swift's book is no mere celebration of technical achievement, but places that achievement in the context of the time and politics. That said the technical and economic history of the Lunar Rover makes up the bulk of this book, and readers will be fascinated by how the Rover itself came to be. Despite its long intellectual gestation, the Rover itself was only given the go ahead by NASA a few days before Apollo 11 lifted off to put Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon. The engineers had a limited budget and barely 18 months to turn their designs into a functioning vehicle. It seems utterly incredible that it happened, not least as it began around the time that budgets for moon flights were beginning to be cut back. Nevertheless it is testament to the way that the central drive from the state could make things happen far faster than would normally take place if just left to the free market.

The Rover was far more than a car on the moon. It had to be incredibly light and strong, rugged and safe. It had to be able to take its passengers far away from their spacecraft and bring them back. This required incredible inventions in terms of batteries, cooling, and navigation instruments. Even the tires are unique and incredible inventions. The accounts of the six astronauts who drove the Rover on the moon, and how they fared are breath-taking in and of themselves, especially when you see the interaction between crewmembers and technology in terms of solving problems on the lunar surface.

Swift points out that the Rover's importance was not just in terms of exploration. It also helped inspire and reawaken public interest in the programme. As I said earlier this is, in no small part, because of the centrality of the car to US culture. Few people could imagine piloting a lunar lander. But everyone could imagine driving a car. Video of astronauts skidding and racing on the surface touched a nerve in a way that the early astronauts bunny hopping did not. I would have liked Swift to explore this further - not least to draw out more about how the public understood and celebrated the Rover itself. 

There is no doubt that the Rover transformed lunar exploration and massively increased the amount of science that the Apollo machines did. The price tag was around 250 million USD in today's money - a significant investment. Whether that sort of spending was worthwhile is something that continues to be discussed today. Nevertheless the story of the Lunar Rover is the story of how when resources and labour are set to solve a technological task, then the amazing can be achieved. It is a lesson we could do with applying to many other social and economic needs today.

Related Reviews

Rubenstein - Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race
Burgess - The Greatest Adventure: A History of Human Space Exploration
First on the Moon - A Voyage with Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Edwin Aldrin
French & Burgess - In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquillity 1965-1969
Scott & Leonov - Two Sides of the Moon

Neil Davidson - How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions

There is no doubt that Neil Davidson's How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions is a piece of remarkable scholarly work, and demonstrates the enormous breadth of the late author's knowledge. It is perhaps one of the most impressive works by a Marxist within a crowded field of study. The question of Bourgeois Revolutions has been hotly debated on the left, within Marxism and with other approaches to history. Davidson's work is both a study of the subject and a study of the histography of bourgeois revolutions.

The importance to Marxists of the concept of bourgeois revolution is two fold. Firstly, for Marx and Engels, the transition to capitalism, from pre-capitalist societies (most importantly feudalism in Western Europe) offered insights into the revolutionary transtition from capitalism to socialism. More importantly though, the process offered insights into the development of capitalism itself, which helped illuminate its own inner workings and the role of the capitalist class itself. Marx and Engels were keenly interested inthis class, whose machinations in 1848 held back the revolutionary movement in Germany and elsewhere, unlike their predecessors in France and, to a lesser extent, England. Davidson notes that "the Marxist theory of history required a concept of bourgeois revolution; but one did not lie readily at hand". 

The concept of bourgeois revolution also mattered because it destroyed the idea that capitalism was natural and eternal, rather it showed that capitalism had to be fought for by a class with interests in its development. As Marx and Engels said, "when the economists say that present-day relations - the relations of bourgeois production - are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature". The existence of a bourgeois revolution proved the opposite.

Davidson's book then is a defence of the concept, at the same time as a demonstration that the definition of a bourgeois revolution is extremely difficult. Drawing parallels between evenst in England in the 1640s and France in the 1790s is one thing. But trying to include the American Civil War, the Germany Revolution of 1848/9, and the Russian Revolution of February 1917 make such a definition difficult indeed. The granting of a general definition becomes even harder when exploring the arrival of capitalism in countries like Japan for instance.

Davidson argues his point well, but, it is hard to sometimes work out precisely what his point is. In part this is a problem caused by the huge amount of information within the book. Davidson is fond of quoting extensively from other writers and historians, and while usefully illustrating his point (and demonstrating the author's incredibly extensive knowledge of the material) it obscures more than illuminates. A bigger problem comes from Davidson's failure to describe historical events themselves in any detail. He assumes a general awareness of the English and French Revolutions, which is fair enough in a book that is not aimed at people reading their first work about Marx. But he also assumes knowledge about every other transition - from China to Japan. Crucially, and most perplexing to me, he fails to illustrate the examples of revolution with well, accounts of revolution. The storming of the Bastille is surely a crucial revolutionary moment of the French Revolution. Yet it gets no mention. Bizarrely this 800 off page book on bourgeois revolution feels at times like it contains little actual revolution.

Davidson would no doubt defend this by arguing that the revolutionary transition is the actually transformation from one society to another, and this is, of course, correct. But the extent of the bourgeoise's revolutionary nature surely lies, in part, in what they did and didn't do. What they oversaw, encouraged and what they didn't. 

That said there are two parts of the book that are exemplary. The first of these are the chapters on Marx and Engels and what they actually said. Davidson gets too the heart of this and draws out their developing ideas brilliantly. If you only read one part of this massive book, make it this section. The other part of the book that is really good was the chapter on "preconditions for an era of bourgeois revolution" which successfully laid out, using a multitude of examples, the way that capitalist relations begin to develop and lay the basis for revolution. The importance of this lies, as Davidson says, "where and when capitalism shifted from the periphery to the center of economic life was in very large part dependent on the nature of the pre-capitalist state". It is this ambiguity of route and timing of the transition that makes the subject so extensive. Davidson gives a sense of this when he writes:

In most societies where the economy was transitional from precapitalist modes of production to the capitalist mode, states remained under the control of the precapitalist ruling class, although they adapted to the new conditions, most typically in the emergence of absolutism: society became increasingly opposed to the state. As we have seen, these tension were resolved either by a direct external challenge tot he state from the new social classes created by capitalism or, in order to avoid this outcome while enabling the ability to compete in geopolitical terms, by internal pressure from sections of the existing ruling class who themselves undertook the process of transforming the state - or some combination of these two paths, with one predominating.

On the same page he also emphasises that we have to "reject the assumption that all immediately precapitalist states have to map tidily and conveniently onto our categories of tributary, feudal estates  or feudal absolutist monarchy." Rather, Davidson points out, Marxism gives us the tools to be able to understand the transition to capitalism in the various forms that it took place without falling into a one size fits all model.

Davidson's book is epic in scope and detailed in argument. It is not an easy read, and in places I would accuse the author of indulgence. Perhaps this is unfair of me - after all Davidson writes from a Marxist tradition that I would generally agree with - and it is brilliant to see thinkers like Leon Trotsky, Tony Cliff and Chris Harman being acknowledged for their insights instead of the endless stream of Marxist academics usually held up as authorities. But upon finishing the book I was struck by the difficulties in summarising what Davidson was actually arguing, and as such I felt the book failed in answering adequately the answer the author set out to address.

Related Reviews

Perry - Marxism and History
Harman - Marxism and History
Callinicos - Making History

S.J. Klapecki - Station Six

Rarely does science fiction address the lives of ordinary people. Station Six is different. Set in a space station "60 million miles" from Earth, it looks at what happens to a group of workers when their jobs are under threat. Normally readers of novels set on space stations might imagine glistening white corridors, alien spacecraft arriving to make first contact and stories driven by (usually) male heroes. Station Six dispenses with all this fantasy and asks instead, what happens to workers in the future when their livelihoods are threatened by corporate plans to maximise profits? The answer is that they fight back.

The novel opens with Max. Hungry and broke they are heading their job working on Station Six's docking bay. Max is managed by the sort of middle manager whose corporate speak and fake inspiration will be familiar to anyone whose ever had any sort of dead-end job. The job is not exciting, or space age - it is boring and repetitive, and the workers never make enough to pay off their debt to the company. As a result Max, with his buddies, goof off and mess about - finding ways to evade the high-tech monitoring systems. But Max has other ways of coping - a side-line in hacking the body mods of their fellow workers to get around costly software updates and they also hope to get involved in the anarchist resistance and union movements. It is their skills in this arena that mean they are drawn into the heart of the fight back.

When corporate announce that Station Six is going to be converted into a luxury holiday resort, and the workers' will lose their jobs, a strike breaks out and Max finds themselves central to the movement that will hopefully win change. Klapecki does well to show how future technological advances won't automatically benefit working people - here spaceflight, body mods and other marvels haven't liberated anyone - instead they've become yet another way of trapping people into the corporate drive to accumulate wealth for the rich. There's a great scene in the book when Max and some of their fellow radicals break into an area of the space station reserved for the super-rich. It is filled with luxury and evidence of a relaxing lifestyle, an alien environment - but one that is supposed to be available to everyone who works hard for the machine.

But I felt that Klapecki's depiction of the resistance itself did not quite work. Too rapidly it became the story of a few key individuals whose actions would help the rest of the strikers liberate themselves. I was more interested in the depictions of how the strike liberated individuals and allowed ordinary people to being to distribute the fruits of their own labour collectively. The bar where beer was free, and the coffee machines hacked to dispense drinks to anyone who wanted one. That side of the collective struggle was more exciting than the militarised action that focused on Max and his compatriots evasion of the corporate security systems.

That said, Station Six is a fun and unusual novel. The author's use of non-binary language and their inclusion of LGBT+ characters is important, as is their willingness to depict the lives and struggles of working people. I particularly liked the way that Max's own anxieties are integrated into the story of the rebellion. Revolutionaries and strikers are rarely heroes - everyone always worries and second guesses themselves. It was nice to see this drawn out. Sadly it all ended far too quickly - I would have liked to know what happened next to the Station Six Commune.

Related Reviews

Mitchison - Memoirs of a Spacewoman
Aldiss - Billion Year Spree
Kuang - Babel
Miles - Transgender Resistance: Socialism and the fight for trans liberation

Alastair Reynolds - Eversion

*** Spoilers ***

Alastair Reynolds' standalone novels tend to be very different to the high-tech, galaxy spanning books set in his longer series. But Eversion is completely different. It begins with Doctor Silas Coade on a fifth rate sailing vessel exploring the freezing Norwegian fjords for a strange construction that has been reported by earlier explorers. We quickly meet key characters from the crew, all unique - there's a political refugee from Russia who acts as some sort of soldier, the confident captain and the funder of the mission who clearly has something to hide. In addition, Coade's literary nemesis Ada Cossile, who constantly criticizes Coade's writing and speech, and then seemingly mocks him at his death. Because Coade dies in an accident just after the ship has discovered an inexplicable edifice in the ice.

Then Coade is reincarnated. Now he is a Doctor on a steam vessel off Patagonia, but this time crewed by the same characters, none of whom remember the previous voyage, and at the point when they discover the edifice again, Coade is killed again. This time as as result of the betrayals of the voyage's rich funder. Again Cossile is disappointed at his death.

The process repeats, steam ship is replaced by dirigible and then a space vessel. Elements of the narrative are repeated, and each time the trip goes further, but the narrative begins to break down. Others seem to remember earlier trips and Cossile keeps hinting at her deeper knowledge.

The twist is that Coade isn't real. He is Code in a computer and Ada is another subroutine desperately trying to wake Coade/Code so that he can rescue the real crew members who are trapped on a space mission doing first contact on Jupiter's moon Europa. Once we learn this, many elements of the earlier plots click into place and readers might enjoy finding what signposts Reynolds placed in the narrative. The final part of the story is a more conventional science-fiction yarn as Coade and Ada get the humans out of a rather alien danger. 

As I said, this is unusual, but it seems to fit with Reynolds' style - though it felt like a padded short story rather than a novel. That said the characters are drawn very well, particularly Coade, which is ironic as he is not actually real. Reynolds does a nice twist on the traditional AI depiction, by basically giving Coade the personality of a 18th century, small town doctor - and an AI romance to boot.

Reynolds' consistently constructs new and innovative worlds in his books. Eversion will be enjoyed by those who are familiar with his work and those new to it.

Related Reviews

Reynolds – Redemption Ark
Reynolds - House of Suns
Reynolds - Revenger
Reynolds - Inhibitor Phase
Reynolds - Blue Remembered Earth
Reynolds - The Prefect
Reynolds - Zima Blue
Reynolds - Terminal World
Reynolds - Pushing Ice
Reynolds - Slow Bullets

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.

Related Reviews

Bax - The Peasants War in Germany
Blickle - The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants' War from a new perspective
Baylor - The German Reformation & the Peasants' War: A Brief History with Documents
Engels - The Peasant War in Germany