A Y Badayev - Bolsheviks In the Tsarist Duma

For revolutionaries who believe that there is a higher form of democracy than that of Bourgeois Parliamentarianism, what to do during elections is the sort of discussion that sparks intense debate. For the Bolsheviks in the years of Tsarist rule it was even more complex because the Russian Parliament, the Duma, existed only as a gesture towards democracy from the Tsar.

In this context the Duma was of limited power - but more importantly, it was seen by some on the left as the first stage in the struggle for the capitalist order, rather than the feudalistic Tsarism that prevailed.

Lenin's Bolsheviks took a principled position. They tried to win seats in the Duma, in the face of extreme hostility from the ruling class, but not for the reasons most other parties tried to do so. The Bolshevik candidates saw the Duma as an arena were they could in a period when their organisation was illegal, spread propaganda and socialist ideas with a level of immunity. Revolutionary socialist ideas were popular - tens of thousands of workers voted for the Bolshevik candidates, thousands of workplace groups sent messages of support - but it was hard to organise. The Tsar's police force ran an efficient network of spies, newspapers and publications were regularly seized. Socialists, Trade Unionists and activists were regular imprisoned and exiled.

But in an era when some were proclaiming that socialism was a future ideal, and the important political task was to win a Bourgeois Parliament like that of the West, the Bolsheviks recognised that they couldn't run the risk of sowing illusions in parliament. The key thing was to use their position to educate, inspire and organise the workers movement. This was made easier by the way that the Duma was stacked against the representatives of the workers movement.

Badayev was one of the Bolshevik deputies. His was a background in engineering and he was a longstanding Bolshevik activist. His account is fascinating for many reasons - in part because of his stories about how they evaded the police and how revolutionaries had to organise in an era when simply being discovered with a socialist newspaper could mean years of exile. But the most important parts of the book are those in which he describes how socialists can use parliament, or other elected bodies to raise the workers movement to new heights. Because it was legal to print speeches of the deputies, it meant that organisatins could distribute speeches by socialists. The deputies could become the focus of networks of workers - collecting money for strikes for instance.

Take the struggle for the 8 hour working day - a key demand of the workers movement in Russia in the early 1900s. The Duma and the Tsar was never going to grant this - it would have to be won by mass struggles and protests. But the Duma became a part of the battleground. The Bolshevik newspaper Pravda explained:

"Of course we do not for a moment expect that the Fourth Duma will pass this bill. The eight-hour days is one of the fundamental demands of the workers in the present period. When this question is raised in the Duma the other parties will be forced to declre their attitude towards it and this will assist in our struggle for the eight-hour day outside the Duma. We appeal to all workers to endorse the bill. Let it be introduced not only in the name of a group of deputies, but in the name of tens of thousands of workers."

As Badayev says, "the very failure of the bill could be made the occasion of further revolutionary agitation".

The deputies, despite their small numbers were very successful. They were able to strengthen and inspire millions of people across Russia, particularly with the work they did to highlight examples of workplace abuse or inter-workplace solidarity. Raising tens of thousands of rubles for strikes in far off Baku, shows just how much their were successful.

The rising revolutionary mood against the Tsar and against capitalism that took place in the pre-war period was curtailed by the outbreak of the patriotism that marked the start of World War One. The Tsar took the opportunity to clamp down on workers organisations, and the Bolshevik deputies were arrested. Even in those difficult times, thousands of workers took action in support of their deputies - a far greater mark of respect than many so called "workers representatives" would get today.

For socialists today, there is much to learn from Badayev's book. It isn't intended as a blueprint for organisation today. Nor is it really a guide for elected representatives. But it does show how socialists who do get elected can use their positions to strengthen the movement. It also shows the need for flexibility and organisation fluidity to adapt to changing circumstances. Over a hundred years later, we've much to learn from Badayev and his comrades.

Alan Sillitoe - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a novel whose rage still rings out fifty years after it's first publication. Post war 50s Britain is a bleak place. Rationing has just ended, there are jobs aplenty, but war seems to be always on the horizon. Arthur Seaton is a young man in his mid-twenties. He doesn't think there is a future and his life revolves around the weekend, when he can escape in a blur of alcohol, sex and the occasional outbreak of violence.

"For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Piled-up passions were exploded on Saturday night, and the effect of a week's monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system in a burst of goodwill."

Arthur's inward monologue, his ruminations on life and society carry you along with them, his dull repetitive work at the lathe becoming a metaphor for the weeks and years that stretch ahead.

You can see why it caused a stir on its publication. Its brilliant style, combined with the honest portrayal of working class life and the social tensions as a new generation of men and women grow up, determined not to live the restrictive lives of their parents, must have terrified some in the establishment. But Albert's musings on revolution and destruction aren't about a dream of a better world - they're about a violent destruction of the one he hates.

As Arthur juggles his affairs, dodging vengeful husbands and finally finding stability, you feel somewhat disappointed. After all, as the novel ends, Albert seems set upon the path of becoming what he despises. Yet this in part is the point. The author is telling us there is no hope. No alternative - only a struggle to survive. As Arthur ruminates at the end;

"And trouble for me it'll be, fighting every day until I die. Why do they make soldiers out of us when we're fighting up to the hilt as it is? Fighting with mothers and wives, landlords and gaffers, coppers, army, government. If it's not one thing it's another, apart from the work we have to do and the way we spend our wages. There's bound to be trouble in store for me every day of my life, because trouble it's always been and always will be. Born drunk and married blind, misbegotten into a strange and crazy world, dragged though the dole and into the war with a gas-mask on your clock, and the sirens rattling into you every night while you rot with scabies in an air-raid shelter. Slung into khaki at eighteen, and when they let you out, you sweat again in a factory, grabbing for an extra pint, doing women at the weekend and getting to know whose husbands are on the night-shift, working with rotten guts and an aching spine, and nothing for it but money to drag you back there every Monday morning."

But something was changing. Ten years after its first publication, the world exploded as men and women across the globe decided that the world should be different. The anger and frustrations at the system so aptly summed up by Arthur Seaton at his lathe, spilled out into protest, demonstration and near-revolution. Arthur might not have joined those rioting against capitalism in the streets near the Sorbonne, in Grosvenor Square or in a hundred other places - he's far to cynical for that. But he'd have understood their anger and raised a pint to them.

Marcus Rediker - Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Marcus Rediker's book is subtitled "Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750". It would seem to be a niche area of interest, but as with his other history writing, Rediker explores far more than the narrowness of his title suggests.

The world of the early 18th century was a very different place to the one we inhabit today. Capitalism, has now spreed to every corner of the globe, but then it had only taken deep root in Western Europe and the Eastern Seaboard of the North Americas. Much of the rest of the world was something to be exploited and plundered by the more power Western powers. In this world, shipping was of great importance. For the trading of everything from foodstuffs to slaves, raw materials to emigrants, you needed ships and their crews.

Without sailors, ships didn't sail. A fact that sailors understood well and frequently used to their advantage. The world of the sailor was a cruel and vicious one. Captain's had virtually limitless rights to punish and even murder the crew. The law courts appeared to offer an impartial restriction on the violence of the captain, but in reality the courts (and the rest of the state apparatus) sided most often with the interests of capital.

In this context, the life of the seaman was an brutal one. It was brutal because of the violence the captain dished out in order to maximise the profits of his voyage. It was brutal because of the constant attempts to undermine the life of the seaman in the interest of further profits - the reduction of rations, the withholding of wages and the fines for the most minor of misdemeanors. It's no surprise that sailors fought back. They cursed their officers, occasionally they struck back and sometimes they mutinied and turned pirate. This review isn't the place to discuss further Rediker's fascinating depiction of pirate life in the early 18th century. Suffice to say Pirates were far from the swashbuckling heroes of our TV screens. They organised a collective lifestyle that is the exact opposite of the hierarchical ship life they had left behind. They had elected officers, accountable to the crew and though feared, the vast numbers of pirates on the seas frequently avoided fighting altogether.

The heart of Rediker's book though, is an attempt to explain the changes going on in the world of work, which the sailors were at the forefront of. Seaman, Rediker argues, were the first workers to loose their individual identity in the way that we understand today. They no longer owned their own tools, but had become a small cog in a collective machine. They had no control over the means of production but sold their labour power for the best deal they could get. They were driven together into a collective environment, lorded over by a master whose job was to squeeze every last penny of profit from their sweat.

"for all of these men, self-protection - from harsh conditions, excessive work, and oppressive authority - was necessary to survival. Too often... 'all the men in the ship except the master' were 'little better than slaves.' Social bonds among sailors arose from the very conditions and relations of their work. These men possessed a concrete and situational outlook forged within the power relations that guided their lives. Theirs was a collectivism of necessity."

And they used their collective power to great effect. "In 1729 the seamen of the Young Prince, when ordered to heave anchor, 'one and all...unanimously agreed to stop & swore Goddamn their Bloods if they would heave the Anchor or go any further with the said Ship but would go on Shore'". Rediker points out that the very world "strike" originates with the sailors who "struck" the sails down and refused to allow a ship to sail.

This collective nature of work, as well as the international character of their work, meant that sailors were at the heart of struggles, protest and demonstration along the whole of the Atlantic seaboard. Rediker argues that it isn't to fanciful to suggest that the very notion of "rights" developed as a result of the political input of sailors with their new collective identity to early land-based struggles.

So the story of the seamen of the 1700s is the story of class struggle. An emerging class struggle that reflected the changing economic and political landscape. It was a struggle that expressed itself through dancing and songs. Valued sailors were ones who could work, but could also sing and tell tales. Rediker's thoughtful and fascinating book is important because it allows us to further understand the blood and violence from whence our modern system was born.

But it also reminds us that people always resisted the arrival of capitalism, and all it's most dehumanising aspects, and fought for a different type of world.

Readers might be interested in this video of a speech on Pirates by Marcus Rediker to the Bristol Radical History Group.

Related Reviews

Rediker - Villains of all Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age
Rediker - The Amistad Rebellion
Rediker - The Slave Ship
Rediker and Linebaugh - The Many Headed Hydra

Sembène Ousmane - God's Bits of Wood

There are many reasons why socialists support strikes. The most obvious of them is that they are the best way that workers can use their power to win changes and improvements to their lives.

But there is a more important reason. Anyone engaging in collective action changes themselves. The old ways no longer seem right. Attitudes and beliefs are shaken, changed and sometimes discarded. The belief in your own class and its ability to organise is strengthened. In the biggest strikes, the very fabric of society is threatened. As Marx put it, in a slightly different context, "All that is solid, melts into air".

It is because he understands this aspect of the struggle that Sembène Ousmane's great novel is so powerful and engaging. Centering on the great strike of the workers on the Dakar-Niger railway in the late 1940s, Ousmane describes the way in which the workers are driven to strike and how they change.

The strike is marked by bloodshed as the authorities resort to brutal force on the very first day. The workers seem to expect it, this is after all, colonial Africa and the European powers' rule has always been marked by violence. Ousmane doesn't dwell on the racism and horrors though - he was writing for an African readership after all. But he concentrates on the way the strikes and their families are.

So the strike is marked by rumour and gossip. As the days become weeks, families have sold everything they have and food and water is in short supply. But suffering is collective. Those who don't strike aren't simply ignored, they are almost incomprehensible to those fighting for their livelihoods.

At the heart of the story is the way that the role of women changes. From being second class citizens they become at first the breadwinners - trying to find ways to feed the family, to powerful fighters on their own. These changes bring their own problems. Turning your world upside down like this doesn't please everyone. Not least the religious leaders who argue that the strike, being the work of communists, must be ended.

But its the women who take centre stage. Whose own action sets the scene for the final confrontation of the story. At the novel's end, the women are changed forever, and they know it. But so are the men, and so is the community. One of the strikes leaders argues that this is a class war. A battle between exploiter and exploited. One where skin colour is only important because the whites are the ruling class. Workers everywhere have shown solidarity, even from France, to the strikers' surprise.

The collective understanding and developing identity is important. Senegal was starting down the road to independence as the events described are happening. This development of an identify forged in struggle is important for Ousmane, writing as he was on the eve of independence. Few books come close to showing what a strike is like for those taking part. Even fewer come close to allowing us to sense the real power of working men and women.

Fred Pearce - PeopleQuake, Mass Migration, Ageing Nations and the Coming Population Crash

Fred Pearce's latest book is a polemic that never quite reads as a polemic. He is tackling two important myths. The first is that the world is over-crowded, the second is that it cannot sustain the existing, or predicted population.

Pearce points out, that in large parts of the globe, in particular the developed nations, population is crashing as fertility rates fall. Countries like Italy and Germany face loosing over 80% of their "native" populations. Russia is loosing half a million from it's population figures every year. Iran has a below replacement fertility rate of 1.7 children per woman. The USA's population is growing, but thanks to migrants. This is of course the irony. Despite the anti-immigrant racism and rhetoric we see so much these days, many countries will be crying out for young workers in the coming decades to help keep the wheels of industry turning.

Secondly, though Pearce takes up the arguments of people like Robert Malthus and his followers. The world can, he argues sustain a much larger population. Partly it's because more people means more hands to work and partly this is because technological innovation can provide more food and improve how we use resources. Most obviously we've seen this with the "Green Revolution" of the 1970s. Pearce quotes one researcher: 

If during the next 50 years or so, the world's farmers reach the average yield of today's US corn    grower, ten billion could be fed with only half of today's cropland, while they eat today's US calories.

But it's also because it's not the areas of high or rapidly expanding populations that are the most destructive to the planet. What really matters is the consumption of a society:

The richest billion people on the planet, their average consumption of resources and production of waste today is 32 times that of the average for the remaining almost six billion. 

Pearce continues, "the richest 7% (about half a billion people) are responsible for 50% of emissions."

The point is not to argue that our developed world needs to become like the undeveloped, but to show that an increase in population in say India or China, will not have the impact of an increase in population in say, the US, Britain or France. Strategies to deal with climate change must include tackling how our societies are organised in the wealthiest nations, rather than putting the blame on the developed world.

There is much else of interest in this book. The way that Overpopulation arguments have always meshed with racist ideas or Eugenics for instance. Something that still continues today. The ideological arguments through the cold-war that led the US to develop better crops, to help stave off revolution in the third world.

Pearce is perhaps overly optimistic, there is still a battle on to save the planet. But the falling population we are likely to see within a generation may help this process. Ultimately though, the question of saving the planet must move on blaming the poorest in the world and start to challenge the priorities of a system which is so inherently destructive.

Related Reviews

Pearce - The Last Generation
Pearce - When the Rivers Run Dry
Patel - Stuffed and Starved

Alastair Reynolds - Zima Blue

This months overindulgence in Alastair Reynolds' science fiction continues with this very recent collection of short stories. Rather like some of the collections of Isaac Asimov's early work, the author mingles in comments on how the stories came to be written and published.

Shockingly, however I have to admit to not being that impressed. Similarly to the most recent novel Terminal World, Reynolds has chosen stories that aren't particular in the realms of his larger space opera. With the exception of three linked tales at the heart of this book, most of the fiction deals with near future or contemporary times. One stories, as the author admits, contains no elements of science fiction at all, simply a meditation on quantum mechanics and the many worlds theory.

This shouldn't matter, but some of these tales come across as very weak. Partly I think this is because they fail to engage with the world we live in. Badly written though they might be, many of Isaac Asimov's stories worked precisely because they could link with our own lives.

Two stories that do work well, do so precisely because they manage to link into our own world. "Signal to Noise" and "Cardiff Afterlife" are set in world's where we can communicate with other alternative universes. The Many World's theory is a theme in this collection. In these universes we can talk to and encounter our ownselves after the universe has branched from our own. Cardiff Afterlife deals with two universes, one where Cardiff has been destroyed by terrorists, the other were it survives. Reynolds imagines future anti-terror agents abusing the link to interogate criminals who perished in one reality and not the other.

The three linked stories I mentioned earlier are a return to wider grand standing sicence fiction. They deal with the quest for a super weapon to save the human race. It was only after finishing the third that I noticed that the character at the centre of the stories, Merlin, is engaged in an almost Arthurian Quest. It's this sort of large scale SF that Reynolds excels at, and these three stories make the collection worth having for his fans.

Related Reviews

Reynolds - Terminal World
Reynolds - Galactic North
Reynolds - Redemption Ark

Alastair Reynolds - Terminal World

With his latest novel, Alastair Reynolds turns away from the galaxy spanning tales of much of his previous works. This time he is Earth-bound, indeed this novel is mainly centered on one city. Spearpoint is an enigmatic place - stretching high into the upper atmosphere, it is clearly deliminated into seperate areas. These areas of varying technological sophistication are kept seperated by an unknown and unexplained force. This means that the different zones don't allow technologies from different regions to function there. You can't bring an internal combustion engine from "Neon Heights" to "Horsetown" without it seizing up. Guns, clocks and every other mechanical device slowly stop working if taken to an area of lower technological development.

Humans travelling between these zones also suffer adversely, but because they aren't mechanical, they can, to a certain extent heal. This process requires medicine, which is in short supply.

The bulk of Reynolds' story deals with the collapse of Spearpoint due to a shift in the boundaries of these zones. The hero escapes and brings together a fleet of dirigibles (not blimps as the pilots insist) with medicine.

On his website, Reynolds describes the novels as "a far future, steampunk-influenced planetary romance about the adventures of an exiled pathologist, and a city in need of medicine..." It's a fairly apt explanation, though existing fans make find it a little light compared to his earlier works. While I enjoyed it, I felt that Reynolds was trying a little too hard to get lots of ideas into the book - in Horsetown people wear wide brimmed hats, like cowboys - the upper zones are populated by "angels" - humans who have the ability to fly.

The end of the book is a slight disappointment, as it seems entirely about setting up a sequel, something that I hate. In particular, I was left feeling that none of the great unknowns about the novel were even close to being tied up. My interest was held by the strangeness of the world that Reynolds was describing. It was a disappointment that there were no answers. Perhaps the author had none.

Barbara W. Tuchman - A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

Barbara Tuchman's book on the 14th Century is surely one of the great works of popular history. It's scope is impressive, less from geographical coverage than from the depth of her research and coverage. Concentrating on life in the areas that we now know as modern France and England, Tuchman explores the lives of people living in the 14th Century and how those lives changed through the developing years.

Out of neccessity, Tuchman has to concentrate mostly on the lives of rich men. This is because, as Tuchman points out any woman whose life was adequately documented would be "atypical" and commoner's lives aren't documented enough, as well as failing to have the scope for her method of showing what the century was like. Tuchman shows the century by concentrating on the life of a noble, Enguerrand de Coucy VII, one of the last of a great dynasty of knights who lived from 1340 - 1397. The reader shouldn't imagine though that this is a biography in a normal sense. While de Coucy, as some sort of real-life Flashman seems to actually have been present at much of the important events of those years, the author uses de Coucy's life as a backdrop to the story of the century.

In contrast to de Coucy's life though, the experience for the majority of the population wasn't as nice. As Tuchman summarises of the six decades that marked de Coucy's on life;

"If the sixty years seemed full of brilliance and adventure to a few at the top, to most they were a succession of wayward dangers; of the three galloping evils, pillage, plague and taxes; of fierce and tragic conflicts, bizarre fates, capricious money, sorcery, betrayals, insurrections, murder, madness and the downfall of princes; of dwindling labor for the fields, of cleared land reverting to waste; and always the recurring black shadow of pestilence carrying its message of guilt and sin and the hostility of God."

For Tuchman, the 14th Century was the end of an ideal, a period of change, she quotes with recognition, one description of the era as a "period of anguish when there is no sense of an assured future". The rise in mercantilism and capitalist relations was shifting the centre of power away from the nobility towards a new class. The hundred years war had left the most prosperous nations poorer, and the peasents on which their wealth was based, sickened and tired. The Black Death that decimated the populations over and over, meant that the old relations of production were no longer set firm. Peasents could and did leave their Lords to find better pay and conditions. There wasn't enough labour to maintain fields. In one haunting passage, Tuchman describes a Paris whose population was so diminished, that wolves patrol the empty streets of the suburbs.

Out of neccesity, Tuchman covers much of this briefly. There are central themes running through the work - the end of the age of chivalry being one, the changes to the church and organised religion being another. I am sure that scholars of the period would find fault, particularly in areas of speciality. I felt that the one bit of the time that I knew fairly well, the English Peasant's Revolt of 1381 was dealt with briefly as an aside - though Tuchman does acknowledge it's importance in representing the end of an era.

These are minor criticisms. Tuchman's book deserves to be read widely, not simply for its fascinating insights into previous times. Nor because it exposes how corrupt and nasty some of the most powerful dynasties in Europe have been in the past (in particular religious ones). It deserves to be read for it's grasp of history as a sweeping story, punctuated by moments that alter it's course, driven by forces that are sometimes, but in no way always, out of human control.

She also understands though, that the forces in 14th century society that would develop and shape the history of the next few centuries were present and developing in the 14th. These new forces could be directed and shaped, but weren't yet ready.

"The times were not static. Loss of confidence in the guarantors of order opened the way to demands for change, and miseria gave force to the impulse. The oppressed were no longer enduring but rebelling, although, like the bourgeois who tried to compel reform, the were inadequte, unreadym and unequipped for the task."

The history of the next few centuries would show these forces developing, first to break through the old order, at the same time as engaging in mutual bloody conflict. That battle continues on new terrain, but a terrain that has been shaped by the past.

Related Reviews

Tuchman - The Guns of August

Meredith Hooper - The Ferocious Summer: Palmer's Penguins and the Warming of Antarctica

Just how does a changing climate impact on flora and fauna? Can we learn anything about global impacts by looking at localised effects of climate change?

Meredith Hooper happened to be at the right place at the right time, to try and answer these questions. She travelled to the Palmer station in Antarctica to research a book, and arrived for the "Ferocious Summer" of 2001 / 2002. Palmer is a research station and one of its key areas of research is the ongoing study of the local penguin populations. The Adélie penguins who nest in huge colonies around the station. Or rather they did. During her time there Cooper was witness to the effective collapse of the local penguin population. A simplistic explanation would be that the warming Antarctic, evidenced by the melting ice, snow and glaciers that the author describes, was destroying the habitat of the Adélies, leading to their deaths.

But Cooper paints a more complex picture. The warming water should in fact lead to an increase in the Adélies' favourite food - Krill. And though this was observed, the populations were falling. Fewer birds were having fewer chicks, and fewer of these were surviving. Some of this was to do with more predators, some because there was more snow (one of the quirks of a warming Antarctic is initially more snow in some areas), and in part because of the loss of their "haul out platform" - the sea ice. As Cooper points out, "A warming peninsula was forcing a mismatch between the resources Adélies need and their ability to access them."

Cooper's point is that there is no simple cause and effect - a changing climate doesn't have a simple effect. Some changes might actually increase the numbers of particular plants or animals, or a change in the places they live in. But climate change does have a major impact and the general trend will be towards decreasing biodiversity.

This is perhaps not news, but by focusing on a particular aspect of the world, Cooper brings home how quickly a changing climate can impact on the world, even in a remarkably localised way.

Sadly Cooper's style leaves a lot to be desired. In places, some of the paragraphs are almost incomprehensible. I also found her reporting of people's speech difficult - rather than it being verbatim, often it is short disjointed sentences, making it hard to follow.

In part this is a diary and Cooper details the life and work of the station. Fascinating stuff, particularly if you are interested in the day-to-day experience of scientists and their support staff. I was struck by how often the scientists bemoaned a lack of equipment, which they were denied for cost reasons. Then the prices would turn out to be a few tens of thousands of dollars. A pittance when compared to the expenditure on, say, the Afghanistan war. But money that could and should be used to increasingly understand one of the greatest threats to our own species.

While this might not be the first place to start if you want to read up on climate change, it is certainly a useful read for those who want to look at the subject in greater detail.

Related Reviews

Lopez - Arctic Dreams
Flannery - An Ecological History of North America and its Peoples
Monthly Review - Ecology, Moment of Truth

Phil Marshall - Revolution and Counter Revolution in Iran

With Iran rapidly becoming the new demon for the West's war on terror, I figured that some background to the country was in order. One of the most important events was the 1979 revolution that kicked out the Shah, who was firmly backed by the US and ended up with the religious leader, Ayatollah Khomeini in power.

This revolution is oft described as a Islamic revolution. But Phil Marshall's short book, first published in 1988, tells a different story. The book is now dated - but the Iranian history contained inside is very relevant and the analysis stands the test of time. Firstly Marshall traces the development of Iran. Originally very much on the periphary of modern capitalism, Iran started to develop rapidly in the early 20th Century. Much of this of course was linked to the huge oil resources there. Britain took control of these, taking the oil and most of the profits, which limited the development of Iran further, but increasingly Iran's own developing capitalist class developed their own interests.

The last Shah took power as a representative of these forces, and his autocratic rule was very muich in the interest of emerging capitalism. His repression of workers and his drive to develop Iran's industry wasn't allowed to continue unhindered. Marshall traces the development of workers organisations, often underground networks, and shows that the Iran working class has been prepared to stand up for its own interests from the earliest days.

The revolution of 1979 itself was a complex affair. Mass demonstrations and strikes took place, uniting the workers with the poor, unemployed and lower middle classes from the Bazaar. The strikes grew in scope and scale, economic demands over pay and conditions mixing with more political demands such as the right to organise, or calling for the Shah to go. Given what some say about how the country is oppressive against Women, it's interesting to note that equal rights and pay for women was a central demand during some of the strikes.

Marshall argues that this interplay between economic and political demands is a classic example of what happens during a mass strike. Yet the next stage - the co-ordination of strike committees and activities failed to occur. The workers' committees that did arise, the Shoras, did not advance beyond the immediate needs of the strike in all but a few areas. It is precisely the development of a more co-ordinated strike, with workers starting to take control of workplaces, communities and towns - that has led to revolutionary moments in the past. This led to a power vacuum, and lacking effective leadership from left wing parties or organisations, the Ayatolla was able to use his influence and the network around the mosques to put himself at the head of the anti-Shah revolution.

Once in power, with the Shah in exile, the working class and liberal movement was isolated and undermined by Khomeini, leading to a new form of tyranny. Khomeini was able to skillfully manouevure different factions and forces. He talked the language of anti-imperialism and helping the poorest, while destroying the gains of the revolution. Yet Marshall argues that much more was possible, and the outcome was by no means inevitable. The lessons of the 1979 have much to offer the workers movement today.

Twenty years after it was written this book still has value, sadly it is out of print. For those who want to read more about Iranian history and the current period, this article is an excellent starting place.

Jean-Patrick Manchette - Three To Kill

This is an unlikely Marxist novel. Now that's not to imply that this is some clunky Stalinist era-story, telling of the great successes of Comrade X as he strives to help the Soviet Nation to acheive greatness. Rather, this is a novel written by someone who has a Marxist understanding of the world, plus, I imagine, some experience of the upheavels that French society went through in the 1960s and 1970s.

This is perhaps best summed up by a section of the opening chapter;

"The reason why Georges is barreling aling the outer ring road, with diminished reflexes, listening to this particular music, must be sought first and foremost in the position occupied by George in the social relations of production. The fact that Georges has killed at least two men in the course of the last year is not germane. What is happening now used to happen from time to time in the past."

The George of the above paragraph is an ordinary travelling salesman, who drinks too much, as a couple of kids and a beautiful wife. In his past, he was a radical militant - from, oblique comments refering to Stalinists - I presume, some sort of Trotskyist organisation. He still retains some of his previous understanding of the world, though it's perhaps now clouded by cynicism.

The author doesn't try and shove marxism down your throat. As my earlier quote points out, the big picture of the novels character is determined by larger social forces. But the detail of the story depends on small individual actions. In George's case, his helping an injured man from a car wreck, sets him up in the sights of soome hired gunmen, who hunt him the length and breadth of France. George goes on the run, hiding out in France's small towns, and eventually escaping his death sentence with a mixture of luck (good and bad) and violence. The ending is neatly done, leaving the story with enough closure to make the reader happy, but it's an uneasy happiness, George is changed by his experiences and not necessarily for the better. What happen's next is in our imagination and who knows were that goes.

Note: I'm indebted to Pechorins Journal for his review of this novel that first brought it to my attention. I'd recommend reading it for a more detailed analysis of the book.

Related Reviews

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Noreen Branson - Poplarism 1919 - 1925; George Lansbury and the Councillors' Revolt

Noreen Branson's excellent work looks at one of the great high points of the British Labour Party's history. In the early 1920s, when the Labour party still remained very much on the fringe of mainstream electoral politics, it started to make gains out of the radicalisation that followed the First World War.

Almost immediately debates took place inside the organisation that would continue in one form or another to this day. Basically, to what extent should socialists within the Labour Party accommodate to mainstream politics in order to win elections, or fight for a more radical set of ideas, using electoral politics as a platform for the struggle for socialism.

Nowhere was this clearer than in the East London borough of Poplar (now part of Tower Hamlets). George Lansbury and a number of other Labour candidates took a majority on the local council in November 1919. Lansbury was a well known socialist and pacifist. He and many of the other newly elected councillors had long roots in the socialist and trade union movements locally. On the back of increasing radicalisation, they were elected to improve the lot of a borough, which was then, as it is now, one of the poorest places in England.

Initially the election of Lansbury et al, had little impact. They made some significant changes to local services, building baths, increasing library use and so on. But then, as the economic crisis of the early 1920s started to take hold, they set upon a path that was to bring them into radical confrontation with the government. This hinged on the allocation of rates. The Poplar councillors recognised that the existing system, whereby all the London councils paid into a pot and money was then distributed back out, was discriminatory to the poorest of boroughs which had the most need to help the poor and unemployed. The Poplar councillors refused to pay a section of this money to the government, instead spending it on employing the unemployed and ensuing poor relief at much higher than normal levels.

This illegal action, though clearly morally fantastic brought down the wrath of the courts, and the Poplar councillors served weeks in jail, until they were released by the pressure on the government from outside.

The story is a complex one. The Poplar councillors refused to bow down to the powers that be. Mobilising thousands of local workers in a huge protest movement that started to radicalise the wider London population. But this was not in the interests of the fledgling Labour Party, many of whom wanted to court legitimacy to ensure they were seen as respectable.

Noreen Branson's history is detailed and passionate. Particularly if you've been involved in radical East End politics at any time since the 1920s - she draws out the problems that face those who would struggle for radical change using bourgeois methods.

The councillors were indeed up against a situation which was new at the time, but which has faced many dedicated socialists since. Convinced of the need for fundamental changes in the system, such people have believed that if elected they will be in a position to make a major impact on the lives of those they represent. But once elected, whether in local or national government, they have found their opportunities are smaller than expected. They are hemmed in by the structure of property relations which in turn is reinforced by administrative ties and legal props. They are bound down by the financial fetters imposed from on high. The existing framework is too strong for them.

Many of the victories of Poplar are considered normal today - that working people should receive unemployment benefit when thrown on the scrap heap of the dole. Family Allowances that don't force extra suffering on larger families. No means testing and so on. But the real lessons from Poplar's struggle is that fighting for change means mobilising large numbers of people, and socialist organisation is crucial to do that.

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Dave Sherry - Occupy! A Short History of Worker's Occupations

Anyone involved in climate or environmental politics will have been inspired last summer when the workers at the Vestas Wind Turbine blade plant on the Isle of Wight occupied their factory against its closure. They followed the Visteon workers who occupied their plants in Enfield and Ireland against closures. Sadly the Vestas workers didn't win, but the Visteon workers earnt a fantastic improvement in their redundancy payments.

It might be to early to predict, but activists around both these disputes felt a new atmosphere in the workers movement. For too long dormant, the desire to fight back against cuts and closures broke through. The occupation tactic was a new one to many in the movement. It's been a long time since such actions had been seen in the UK, but Dave Sherry rescues the tradition and helps us learn the lessons with this new book.

Sherry points out that occupations can be better than strikes. They don't leave you standing on a cold picket line for one thing. But more importantly, they prevent the use of scab labour to break a strike, the closure or dismantling of a plant's machinary or the sacking of those refusing to work. More importantly than this, they raise the prospect of workers control of the means of production and by their very nature, they encourage participation - in the strike and in the support of it.

Sherry looks at a few examples. He misses some - there is only limited mention of the actions in South America recently that showed the immense potential for workers to challenge private profit. But the examples Sherry used are inspirational. The mass occupation of the Italian factories in the early twenties brought the country to the brink of revolution. The experience of the US where sit-down strikes created unions in places no one had thought possible. The stories of France in 1936 and again in 1968, which shook a whole nation, and in the case of 1936, won serious gains that we now take for granted - paid holidays for instance.

This book is a polemic. Aimed at arming a working class under increased threat from economic recession, it also clearly argues that rank and file trade unionism is a must for such tactics to win. A few sad examples of bureacratic occupations that didn't inspire or push outwards, which went on to loose illustrate this. Not missing is Britain, which has a truely brilliant history of such struggles, which I was surprised to learn went on (with some success) well into the Thatcher years, a period which we are told was the end of trade unionism in this country.

Finally argues Sherry, we need socialist organisation that can help spread the solidarity and the message that workers can win. It's a lesson more and more workers are going to start to draw when the next government starts its cutbacks.

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Sarah Wise - The Blackest Streets, The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum

The East End of London has had more than its share of historians. This shouldn't surprising as it was the centre of some of the most important industries to the British Empire – in particular its docks. But the rich diversity of the area, the first stop for a succession of different immigrant cultures that continues today, has made the area a magnet for writers.

Sarah Wise concentrates her book on a tiny geographic area. She has chosen the area known as “The Old Nicol”. A long since vanished slum, filled with the most appalling housing and poverty. In the late 1800s the area was already gaining a reputation and was often the destination for visitors who had something to say about the poverty. Everyone from anarchists and socialists to the rich charity donors and the clergy had something to say about the way in which such poverty could exist at the heart of the richest city in the world.

Wise looks at who this slum came about. How it developed out of need, with landlords (themselves often secretive and very wealthy men) could make fortunes offering housing to the poorest people. She shows how early attempts at reform and improvement were often blocked by the rich local politicians – who often had their own fingers in the pie.

We learn of individuals, some courageous with nothing but alturism on their minds. Others with the vested interests of others – in particular the church – came to the area to try and alleviate the suffering. We also learn of the struggles that shaped the region, how the people themselves tried to escape the poverty, by resisting the system itself, or by stealing and living below the law. One of the interesting themes that runs through the book, is that there is a instinctive collectivism by the people who lived there. A mistrust of authority, that means those escaping the police could always besure of an open door or a helping hand.

Finally Wise discusses the destruction of the slum and it's replacement by what is now the Boundary Estate. These new homes were designed as ideal homes for the poor working people of the Nicol. Yet they proved inadequate for the needs of those whose lives didn't fit the Victorian idea of working life. No trace of the Nicol remains. Wise has brought it to life from contemporary accounts, newspapers and census records. A fascinating expose of the foundations that modern London are based on.

Hans Fallada – Alone in Berlin

It's difficult to believe that this 1947 novel about life in Berlin under Nazi rule, only made it into print in English in 2009. As no less an authority than Primo Levi commented, “the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis”.

Our heroes, Otto and Anna Quangel are quiet, unassuming people. At the start of the book, Anna receives a standard letter informing her that her only son has been killed at the front (we presume in the Battle of France). This inspires both of them to gradually take on a campaign of resistance against the Nazi regime in general, and Hitler in particular.

Resistance means many different things. Under a totalitarian regime, with an unprecedented network of spies and snoops, a complex and extensive security apparatus and a reputation for the utmost brutality, open resistance doesn't last long. Otta and Anna's resistance takes a quiet form, but one that nonetheless angers and terrifies the Nazi power structures. Rather simply, they take write cards with anti-war or anti-Nazi slogans. Despite how the Gestapo imagines them, these aren't the writings of Communists, but the anger fuelled rage of two people whose lives are being destroyed by the Fascist regime.

Simple but for the Thousand Year Reich, no hint of feeling against the regime must be allowed to shine through. So the game of cat and mouse begins. The Quangrels drop a postcard a week at first, gradually gaining confidence. Knowing that the state is trying desperately to identify them.

To tell much more of the plot would ruin one of the world's great novels. But what makes it particularly brilliant are the details of life under the Nazis. The way the system rests on the willingness of some to sell their friends and family. The way in which details of the wider, more horrific horrors are leaking out, gradually. The way that many people don't accept the Fascist government, who are on the Gestapo lists simply because they don't conform, or spoke out once in public.

My own family lived in Berlin at this time. My grandfather, a baker by trade refused to Sieg Heil once after a job interview. Something that almost lost him the job, but could certainly have landed him in far deeper water should someone have complained to the right person. It seems a minor gesture now, meaningless when compared to the atrocities of Treblinka, Dachau or Auschwitz. But the story was told with pride and honour by relatives who knew what it was like to be watched by men who would torture you at a moments notice.

It's this atmosphere that Fallada captures with such brilliance. The end of the novel isn't easy, but in many ways it is full of hope. Even in the darkest of hours, there are those who refuse to bow down.

Tristram Hunt - The Frock-coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels

Fredrick Engels spent much of his life in the shadow of Karl Marx. In itself, this shouldn't be too surprising - Marx's genius eclipsed most of his contemporary thinkers, his prodigious output was enough to drown out other socialists of the time, and his personality was one that made it hard to stand out against him.

In addition, Fredrick Engels, son and heir of one of Germany's growing cotton industrialists was happy to pay second fiddle. He did this to allow Marx the opportunity to develop and write the most important social theories of Marxism, knowing that it was his own labour helping to run the cotton industry that enabled Marx to fund his work.

However Engels was a great thinker, activist and writer as well, and Tristram Hunt's new biography brings out this great life which has been kept too long in the shadows. Hunt starts by examining what would make a young son of the bourgeoisie move to radical politics, placing it very much in the context of a Germany breaking free of the old feudal order and the constraints of church and state, moving towards a new industrial capitalist order. The ideas of Hegel and other radical atheists challenging the old ideas that helped to hold back the development of the new.

From such ideas, it was an easy step, as it was for Marx, to start to challenge the growing belief that emergent capitalism would bring peace and prosperity. Engels was someone who judged ideas on experience and what he saw in the industrial heartlands of Manchester clearly brought him closer to a belief in a socialistic future. His horror at factory conditions was not the false sympathy of the rich charity donor, but a seething anger at a system that wrecked lives in the name of profit.

Hunt follows the growing friendship and collaboration between the two revolutionaries. It wasn't simply money that Engels sent to help Marx. But his proofing skills and his ideas. Engels finished articles and books that Marx had abandoned. Prodded and poked the other into work and became a close family friend.

But what shines through for me is that Engels was a man who loved life. Fine wines and walks in the country, travel and the excitement of revolution. For Engels the world could produce plenty and he clearly believed that the bounty that capitalism had produced should be something to be enjoyed by everyone, not a select few. He wasn't someone to abstain from his own enjoyment. He loved to party. But he also knew that he was in a privileged position, one that could only be extended to others if capitalism was overthrown.

The later chapters of the book deal with Engels' life after the death of Marx. Here Engels comes into his own. Free of the shackles of helping to run the mills, he is able to write and get involved in politics in a way he wasn't able to before. It's now that some of his greatest writings get published - works on sexuality and the family, the origins of humans and his writings on science.

For the developing socialist movement on the continent, Engels was a living link to the past, and to Karl Marx. But if later governments and parties acted in the way that they did because they believed that Engels gave them a blueprint that matched their own beliefs, Hunt shows us just why they were wrong. Until his last days, Engels argued that Marxism was not a dogma, but a guide to action. Engels was always keen to avoid placing himself above Marx, but never shy of his own arguments. The use by Stalin and others to put Engels on a pedestal to justify their actions, deliberately misunderstands that Marxism is a way of looking at the world, not a hard and fast explanation of how society must work.

For any Marxist or revolutionary socialist reading this book, there are inevitably quibbles. I found some of Hunt's descriptions of Marx and Engels actions a little unbelievable. At one point for instance, he implies a cynicism towards the defeat of the Paris Commune, based on the Communards failure to create political organisation along their preferred lines. But such criticisms by the revolutionaries are done in the interests of the movement, and they certainly didn't celebrate the Communes defeat. In fact, as Hunt shows they sheltered and aided those fleeing the counter-revolutionary brutality of the French regime.

This however is perhaps more of a criticism of style or at least a misunderstanding of the importance of the Commune. While Hunt has an excellent understanding of how Marx and Engels' understanding of the problems of capitalism help explain events in the modern era, he isn't writing to arm us for the destruction of capitalism today.

Nevertheless, this is a fantastic introduction to the life of one of the world's greatest revolutionaries, and to the politics upon which the modern socialist movement is based. It should be a springboard to reading further works of both Engels and Marx, but will help many put their ideas into the context of the times.

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Eric Ambler - The Mask of Dimitrios

This is an unusual crime thriller. It follows an unlikely hero, Charles Latimer, as he crosses Europe trying to get discover the full story of the mysterious Dimitrios. Latimer is a crime novelist, and on a trip to Istanbul he is taken by a fan, a senior policeman, to see the results of a real crime. This is the body of Dimitrios, now at the end of a long life of crime, doublecrossing and violence.

As he listens to Dimitrious' somewhat patchy life history a fire is lit in Latimer, who decides he will attempt to find out who this man really was. So starts a trip of discovery that brings Latimer into the dirty underbelly of interwar Europe.

It's a fine novel, not particularly challenging and there are some fairly obvious twists that pop up from time to time. But the descriptions of the cafes, bars and brothels are what makes the novel. Amber has a nice writing style that means he recounts every part of Dimitrios' life differently. Once it is in the form of a letter that Latimer sends containing details of his meeting with someone who knew the man. Another time it's a conversation recounted or a flashback from an old lover.

Clearly this is the forerunner of the more modern "thriller". But it is worth reading not because of this historical interest, but because of the beautifully portrayed, dark and dangerous criminal underworld that we can imagine surrounds our more mundane society.

Related Review

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Steffen Böhm and Siddhartha Dabhi (eds) - Upsetting the Offset, The Political Economy of Carbon Markets

The idea that market mechanisms are the solution to our climate crisis might be considered dangerous in the light of recent economic events. Yet Carbon Trading and other related projects are at the heart of international strategies to deal with the environmental situation we are in. Thus this accessible and detailed examination of the economics behind such schemes and their impact on the world is both timely and important.

Carbon Trading schemes arose out of the Kyoto agreement in the early 1990s. They're based on the idea that you can offset or mitigate emissions of pollutants in one part of the world by balancing them out with projects that reduce or prevent emissions elsewhere. In an excellent essay, Larry Lohman of the Corner House institute points out that such creative accounting has been responsible for everything from coal mines to gas powered power stations being built.

The problem is, that "climate change isn't simply a numbers game". No matter how careful the accounting, offsetting schemes don't allow for other impacts - the eviction of families from land that is intended for tree planting. The problems of time - your offset scheme might allow you to carry on generating electricity by burning coal, but it may take 100s of years for the low energy light bulbs you've paid for to negate the emissions. The schemes are of course open to corruption - with numerous individuals running companies based on them, previously having been involved in pushing the legislation through. The longer term problem though, is that such schemes don't reduce emissions and they end up justifying the status quo.

Where is the incentive to invest in renewable energy if you can simply cancel out the pollution from your coal plant? Why move to more sustainable housing or transportation if you can mitigate the effects of existing practices by spending money elsewhere. Such creative accounting hasn't reduced emissions, but it has led to some very shady companies making large amounts of cash.

If I have one criticism of the book, it's that the alternatives don't match the scale of the problem that is outlined so well. 90% of the book is a critique of market mechanisms, and by extension, the capitalist system that produces them. With this in mind, simply offering small enclaves of sustainable housing or better biking practices isn't enough. As some of the essays point out, we need investment in zero carbon energy and non-fossil fuel based technologies as well as powerful social movements to force governments into action.

But this is a minor criticism. The vast bulk of the essays collected here will be extremely useful to those who want to argue that we have to change the world to save it.

Related Review

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Alastair Reynolds - House of Suns

Alastair Reynolds continues to go from strength to strength, though quite how he churns out such large volumes, quite so regularly is a mystery to me. This latest novel, is as galactic spanning as his others, though this one feels tighter and more compact than some.

In this story, Reynolds grapples with two aspects of his vision of the future universe. The first is the immense time required by civilisations that would seek to create interplanetary societies. Probably because of his scientific background, Reynolds tends to avoid things like faster than light travel. In this case, light speed is a limiting factor, but Reynolds has introduced the ability to slow down - characters can reduce their personal perception of time to travel great distances. This coupled with an ability to live longer gives us humans who can live for immense periods of time.

The second aspect to this book, is the idea that human civilisations, however successful, eventually fail - through internal conflict or external threat. The only exceptions to this are the "Lines". Groups of humans who gather for self serving interests and attempt to remain above such restricting things like civilisations. The "Lines" find that the most precious commodity they can have is information - one the galaxy, on its inhabitants and its history.

We meet the Gentian Line's two most cavalier and bohemian characters. Despite having existed for almost Six million years, the Gentian Line's members have managed to avoid falling in love with each other. Campion and Purslane haven't and this makes them late for the irregular Line meet-up. Arrival and the rendezvous finds most of the comrades dead and a struggle to find out what has happened marks the rest of the book. Needless to say Reynolds can't break from his galaxy spanning background and we are taking on the longest (in terms of time and space) car chase across the universe you can imagine.

If this all sounds a bit bonkers to you, then don't worry. Science Fiction usually does contain insanity, but House of Suns and Alastair Reynolds do bonkers particularly well and this reader was kept guessing right till the end. Well worth the very late night it took to finish!

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Vasily Grossman - A Writer At War, with the Red Army 1941 - 1945

(Edited and Translated by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova).

Since reading Life and Fate, I've been waxing lyrical about it to anyone who will listen. So it was a great pleasure to be given this book which gives a much deeper back ground and understanding to the experiences that led Grossman to write Life and Fate.

The invasion of the Soviet Union by the Germans in 1941 was a great shock to many. Vasily Grossman immediately tried to join the Red Army, but was deemed unfit for service. Given the life expectancy on the Eastern Front, this was lucky for us, as Grossman instead became a special correspondent for one of the leading Soviet newspapers. His experiences with the Red Army were documented in short notes, and these extensive notes form the basis for this book. Time and again I read little notes that reminded me of bits in Life and Fate (and, the editors tell us, often make it into other Grossman novels).

Grossman found himself at some of the crucial moments of military history. He retreated in the face of the seemingly unstoppable German armies as they threatened Moscow. He was in Stalingrad even before many realised how significant the battle was likely to be, and he followed the Russian armies towards Berlin, via the appalling horrors of Treblinka. At the end of the war, after documenting atrocities against the Jews, he found himself in Hitler's bunker, and helped himself to a few pieces of paper from the dictator's desk.

Having read Life and Fate first you see just how much of Grossman's experiences and interviews make it's way into the novel. In fact, for me, it underlined just what an important book the novel actually is. It's more than simply a work of fiction, it is a historical document in it's own right.

Some of what Grossman noted didn't make it into print. In fact lots of it wasn't intended to be in print. Grossman's desire to record accurately what went on, wouldn't have fitted with Soviet propaganda all the time. Records of desertions, collaborations or retreat didn't sit well with the official portrayal of the Red Army. But even these short quotes show why he became loved by many ordinary soldiers - he could describe the realities of war far better than any one else. His notes are full of soldiers honesty and humour.

"A soldier who had been a prisoner of war during the last war looks at a diving plane: 'Must be my lad bombing,' he says.

But the grim reality of war shines through.

"Pilots say: 'Our life is like a child's shirt - it's short and covered with shit all over.'"

For Grossman, the war meant personal tragedy. His mother never escaped from the German's and as a Jew, was massacred. This means that his documentation of Treblinka must have been even more heart rending for him. Though is account of that concentration camp is accurate and detailed enough to have made it important evidence at trials after the war's end.

Grossman comes across as a brilliant writer, but he was naive till the end. Despite his popularity, his writing couldn't become public. His honesty about ordinary people was too dangerous for the soviet machine. He died, never knowing that his greatest work would ever become public. That is a tragedy, but Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova have done his memory a great service by bringing Vasily Grossman's notes to light.

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Charles Stross - Saturn's Children

Sometimes I need to listen to people around me before reading books. I've liked much of Charles Stross' earlier work, as it pushes new boundaries in Science Fiction, deals with different concepts and updates some of the science behind the fiction. It is also often funny and entertaining, even if it doesn't have the most in depth characters and plots.

Saturn's Children is a break from this. It would be wrong to describe this as awful. It's far far worse than that. Take a look at the cover description;

"Freya Nakamachi-47 has some major existential issues. She's the perfect concubine, designed to please her human masters - hardwired to become aroused at the mere sight of a human male".

A friend pointed out to me that this was merely some sort of adolescent masturbation fantasy. "Oh no", I said, "Stross is far better than that. He likes to set up plot lines like this and play with the ideas and stereotypes".

The one original idea at the heart of this novel - that our "perfect concubine" is living in a universe were every human being has died out - is a good one. How would an automated society function with out humans in it? Sadly however it isn't an exciting enough idea to support the deep and meaningful questions that Stross would like. "What does it mean to be free?" is a meaningless question when the reader just doesn't care for the characters and is drowned in a seemingly endless series of inter-planetary trips that seem to simply to show that Stross understands the distances between planets.

Here in lies the real problem. The best ideas in the world are meaningless if the reader struggles to remember who is who amongst all the characters. The fact that they are all robots and most of them are identical models of other robots makes it even harder to follow.

The sad thing to note is, that Robert Heinlein did it all before. Apparently this novel is a "homage" to Heinlein, but where does homage end and pale imitation begin? Heinlein's novel Friday is about a robot super courier who can carry important items in a cavity within her abdomen. Unusually for Heinlein he didn't try and turn that novel into an adolescent masturbation fantasy. Sadly for Stross that's about all Saturn's Children has going for it.

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Deborah Cadbury - The Dinosaur Hunters

At the start of the 19th century, the world was a very young place. God had created the planet a few thousand years previously and placed, according to the book of Genesis, everything on it in a few days. Less than a hundred years later, the natural world and its history had been expanded to include tens of thousands of creatures not mentioned in the Bible, a history spanning at hundreds of thousands of years and the very basis of much that was held as true had been turned upsidedown. It was, in every sense a ideological revolution.

Deborah Cadbury takes us through the amazing individuals that broke down the barriers of a rigid religious based society and strove for a new way of looking at the world. It shouldn't be underestimated what a suffocating atmosphere Victorian atmosphere must have had on this process. At one point in her tale, Cadbury describes a chance meeting between William Buckland, one of the countries greatest scientists with a women in a carriage. Both of them happen to be reading a new book by the French scientist Georges Cuvier, one of the world's most eminent scholars of fossils and geology. There is no one to introduce the two and Buckland has to overcome the social stigma of talking to a female stranger, despite their obvious mutual interests.

The characters at the centre of this fascinating tale of how the past gradually became unravelled make for great reading. But what is really interesting is the way many of them break with their past. Gideon Mantell for instance, the son of a lowly shoemaker, who never went to university, fights to break free of his social position to establish himself as one of the greatest scientists of his time. Despite opposition from his "betters" he is eventually recognised, though much of his hopes are dashed along the way.

We also read of the way that stereotypes are being broken. The stuffy, aristocratic atmosphere of the Royal Society being challenged merely by the existence of women like Mary Anning, fossil collector extraoridinare who despite not coming from the "easier classes", "contributed by her talents and her untiring researches... to our knowledge of the great Enalio-Saurians and other forms of gigantic life."

Scientific was no longer the realm of the rich man who could pursue his researches as part of his life of leisure. It was time for the professional, dedicated scientist who could devote his or her life to the study of the world around them.

The discovery of the great fossils, their identification as extinct animals and the growing understanding of the scale and age of their remains is a story too long for this review. But it is one worth studying as it illuminates just how with the expansion of commerce and industry at the beginning of the 19th century, a new way of viewing the world was needed.

The individuals who fought and argued just how this vision was laid out were not necessarily motivated by trying to expand that viewpoint. Often they were trying to defend the old order. But ultimately they all contributed in part to breaking down the barriers. The rest, as they say is history.

Tony Cliff - Revolution Besieged

Recent reading has made me think about how it was that the hopes of the Russian Revolution of October 1917 became the distorted caricature of socialism that was Stalinist Russia. Revolution Besieged is actually the third and fourth volumes of Tony Cliff's political biography of Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks and hence the effective leader of the Russian Revolution.

This part of the biography is perhaps the most important. Many activists in the International Socialist Tradition will have read part one of the trilogy, Building the Party. That book deals with the importance and necessity of building a revolutionary socialist organisation, viewed through the lens of Lenin's early life and his single-mindedness about turning the Bolshevik party into a mass organisation of the working class.

But this volume is perhaps neglected slightly. It's importance is two-fold. Firstly it examines in great detail the problems inherited by Lenin and the Bolsheviks once they had taken power. Russia with its backward economy and its domination by the peasantry was hardly the ideal place to build socialism in the midst of its powerful capitalist competitors. Cliff then examines what the revolutionaries attempted to do to strengthen their economy and entrench working class power. But it also shows how they tried to spread revolution, supporting revolutionaries elsewhere and trying to help others learn the lessons of the Russian experience. This is the second important strand of the book, because Cliff doesn't avoid criticism of the mistakes made in this period.

In particular, he tries to demonstrate that because the Russian revolutionaries had such a huge amount of respect for having taken power, often their advice was accepted without criticism by local socialist organisations. This led to a number of mistakes, most importantly perhaps, the German Revolution of 1923 was undermined by an over-reliance of the German Communist Party on the advice of the Russians.

Cliff though understands that this isn't necessarily the fault of the Bolsheviks. Lenin had created a revolutionary organisation that had, over a period of decades put itself at the heart of working class struggles. It had made mistakes, but had learnt from them. Bolshevik activists were respected by other workers. Revolutionaries across Europe couldn't simply create such experience out of thin air.

While this isn't a difficult work to follow, it is dense. There is a huge amount of history and politics to cover here. Some important aspects of post-revolutionary Russia are dealt with in short chapters that urge further reading. The debate over the New Economic Policy, the temporary re-introduction of capitalist processes to try and stimulate the economy following the increased isolation of the revolution is clear, but I was left feeling I needed to know more. Cliff isn't hiding anything here, but using a broad brush to paint a picture.



At one point the author asks rhetorically (about a particular point of the German Revolution) what place it has in a biography of Lenin, given that Lenin had no input on the debates. The answer he himself gives is that the "catastrophe in Germany in 1923 was the most important item on the balance sheet of Lenin's Comintern". The Comintern was the international body created following the Russian revolution to spread revolution internationally and cannot be separated from Lenin's life work - the commitment to international socialism.

There are many tragedies in this biography. The greatest are outlined in the final chapters as Lenin lies dying and Stalin manoeuvres to take personal power. One interesting aspect that Cliff highlights is the growing awareness of Lenin of this process, though it must be emphasised that Lenin is by this stage increasingly unable to intervene. However Cliff also highlights the seeds of some of the worst aspects of Stalin's distortion of socialism. We see the leaders of the Comintern labelling the Social Democrats in Germany as fascists and an increasing desire to downplay international revolutionary activity in place of the interests of Russia. Again, this shouldn't be over-emphasised, but Cliff clearly shows that by the time of Lenin's death the stage was set for a greater tragedy.

But Cliff also shows that there were many other seeds in the Russian Revolution. Lenin and the Bolsheviks fought with everything they had to create international socialism. The mistakes they made, as well as their successes provide many lessons for revolutionaries today. Tony Cliff's masterful writing has made these accessible to socialists today, and for that reason alone, though there are many more, this book is worth reading.

David Watkin - The Roman Forum

I started this volume of the excellent Wonders of the World series prepared to dislike it. Perhaps I shouldn't read press releases, but when I read that David Watkin's book "celebrates the Forum as it should be seen - etched in the haunting engravings of Piranesi", my heart sank.

The Roman Forum is, for most people, the heart of Rome. It is the place you can go and feel like you're wandering down the Roman streets like the ancients did. This isn't new of course, Watkins shows us how countless tourists have done just that for centuries.

So I was skeptical about a book that seems to imply that the Forum as it is today was somehow wrong and should be appreciated through a return to romantic etchings from centuries ago. Indeed I thought, how can you discuss objectively such a historical setting, if your starting point is that only a particular artist can portray it correctly.

I have to admit that I was wrong. At least partly. What Watkin has done is very clever. He's exposed the myth that is the Forum and laid the basis for a different way of looking at the remains. Firstly he makes the point that little of what we see is real. Much of the most famous monuments, such as the famous Temple of the Vestal Virgins (pictured) are modern reconstructions, using only small amounts of the original materials. In the case of the Arch of Titus, little remains of the original (with the exception of the famous panels) and it is, according to Watkins "largely a nineteenth-century monument". Piranesi's etchings are important, because they are one of the best visualations of what these ruins looked like before various figures through history destroyed, damaged and rebuilt the area in an attempt to recreate it.


Secondly he shows how even quite recent archaeological practice has destroyed many buildings and remains of great importance in the rush to show the real Forum. This is an interesting and important debate. When you take a historical area like the Roman Forum, at what point should it be preserved? Do we want to see the Roman Forum of 2000 years ago? Or the Forum 500 years ago? The Forum has been lived in for thousands of years. The more modern buildings built in the 13th or 14th Centuries are as much a part of its history as those of Julius Caesar.

This is what the visitor won't see. I think the point that Watkin is making is that visitors are sold an illusion. The idea that the Forum has been frozen in time and they can see it as it was at the height of the Roman Empire. Of course, the Forum changed constantly, particularly in Roman times. Buildings were added, extended and destroyed and Watkin takes us through this history to try and illuminate what we see when we stand there.

So I admit that my first impressions of this book were incorrect. But there are problems with it. Firstly, this is not a history book. It is a book of architectural history that leaves the social and human history of the place out. This is a shame, because the Forum is, above all, a social place. But it can be frustrating for the lay reader. If you don't have a background in architecture and just want to understand more of what you are seeing, what is the non-specialist to make of sentences like this one, describing the Basilica of Maxentius;

"the whole of the north aisle with its central apse and its three arched exedrae with giant coffered barrel vaults which served to buttress the central groin-vaulted nave".

Rare is it that I have to resort quite so often to the dictionary to make it through whole paragraphs. This is a shame, because the rest of the Wonders of the World series that I've read have been tremendously accessible and open to the ordinary reader and this one feels just a little too pompous in places.

What this book does well is make the reader think about the history of places like the Forum differently. How we excavate and display history is important. How we preserve it and interpret it is subject to ongoing debate. So it's an interesting book to take with you to Rome, if only to feel sad has been lost.

Oh, and if you really want to walk down Roman streets visit Ostia Antica. It's a short train journey from Rome. Absolutely deserted and has a fantastic little restaurant in the middle.

Related Reviews in the Wonders of the World series

Fenlon - Piazza San Marco
Tillotson – Taj Mahal
Goldhill - The Temple of Jerusalem
Gere - The Tomb of Agamemnon
Ray - The Rosetta Stone
Hopkins & Beard - The Colosseum