Timothy J. LeCain - Mass Destruction: The men and giant mines that wired America & scarred the planet

Just west of the former Montana mining town of Butte, famous as the site of some of the United States' biggest battles between organised workers and bosses, is the smaller town of Anaconda. The town's very name is synonymous with one of the US's most important and influential corporations - the Anaconda mining company. Approaching Anaconda it is difficult to ignore the looming, and now disused, smoke stake - the tallest masonry structure in the world. It is even harder to ignore the evidence of the polluting by products of the copper industry. Slag heaps dominate the approach along the interstate, ruined equipment, piles of dirt and dust surround the local National Park. This marks the giant smokestack, but perhaps uniquely for a US Park, visitors are forbidden. It is too poisonous. 

Similarly, south west of Salt Lake City is the gigantic Bingham Canyon Mine, a different giant corporation boasted of turning a mountain into a molehill there. As a hill of low grade copper ore was turned into a pit measuring several kilometres in depth. Low grade it might have been, but as Timothy J. LeCain's fascinating book explains, mining companies proved adept at turning such minority sources into enormous wealth - with devastating consequences for the local, regional and global environment.

LeCain argues that the development of the modern US economy, and in particular the commodity economy so central to the US view of itself - with mass production of fridges and cars, networked by copper telegraph lines and defended (or extended) by mass military power, was based on "mass destruction". In particular Butte and Anaconda, and Bingham are examples of the enormous destructive power of industrial technology deployed in the hunt for profits.

The polluting by products were devastating. Even in the early days, wind borne arsenic killed cattle and trees for miles downwind of Anaconda. The groundwater in Butte is still polluted to an incredible level. It was only anger from farmers and citizens, and the concerns of national government that forced action to be taken to reduce pollution. 

LeCain's book is an entertaining romp through this history. At points readers will roll their eyes at the shocking detachment of these corporations for people and the local environment. LeCain notes the inventor Frederick Cottrell, who developed some of the earliest equipment to extract pollutants from smoke and gases in chimneys, was "rightly suspicious of the early twentieth-century belief that corporate goals and the public good would always harmonize". It might be suggested that they never really do. But LeCain points out that "smoke abatement motivated primarily by profits failed in other unexpected ways as well". This was because the corporations realised that the extracted pollutants could be recovered and sold elsewhere. If they didn't enter the atmosphere from chimney's like that at Anaconda, they did after being used in agriculture, mining or elsewhere.

Nonetheless there was a remarkable, and persistent, belief by the corporations to pitch themselves as the root of the American dream. LeCain's book reproduces a series of fascinating adverts by Anaconda that encourage visitors to see the "Big Pit" at Butte, the massive hole in the ground produced by the mining. "See America the Bountiful" it puns, encouraging visitors on their way to Yellowstone Park to stop by. Today the same entrance allows visitors to see a pit, several kilometres wide, filled in bright blue acid which has to fire guns every few minutes to stop birds landing and dying. Some of these, perhaps on their way to Yellowstone themselves.

The modernist dream that technology will solve all humanities problem is exemplified by the attempts by corporations at Butte and Bingham to encourage visitors. But, as LeCain demonstrates, it is a feeble hope. The consequences of the production processes drive disaster on an unprecedented scale. It isn't just mining. LeCain draws parallels between these production methods and those of fishing, timber and agricultural industries. The corporations were well aware of the problems. Their solutions rarely solved the problem, simply displaced it in time and space. Or at least got rid of the ability of those affected to complain:

After years of struggling with the Anaconda and the smoke problem with little to show for it, many of the farmers were now willing to sell out. Where the Anaconda did not buy simple title to the land, it was often able to purchase "smoke rights" in which the owner agreed not to sue for any damages the smelter smoke might cause to the land. By the early 1930s the Anaconda either owned or had the legal right to pollute almost all the farm and forest land around the Washoe [smokestack].

LeCain understands that its the drive to profit that causes industry to behave like this, and he is rightfully cynical that attempts to discipline industry can succeed. Perhaps one fault with the book is that it doesn't explore how it is the logic of capitalism's drive to accumulate that causes this to happen. LeCain notes that blaming capitalism begs the question of what to replace it with, but because he believes that the Soviet Union was synonymous with socialism, he cannot see that as a solution. While he rightly points out that Soviet style government were significant industrial polluters and environmental destruction, he doesn't note that this was due to their own, state controlled, efforts to accumulate capital. A different strategy, but a similar outcome. Socialists like myself would suggest that a society based on genuine mass democratic control of industry, but the "associated producers" could do things differently. Indeed, LeCain's book celebrates the achievements of individuals like Frederick Cottrell, whose technologies could have made massive differences, but whose deployments were constrained by the limits they imposed on profits.

LeCain's work draws heavily on theoreticians critical of capitalism, not least the recently deceased James C Scott and the work of William Cronon. It might also have benefited from the insights offered by Karl Marx's idea of the "metabolic rift" between society and nature under capitalism. But this aside, this is a remarkably astute and insightful study of the way that mining corporations have destroyed people and planet in their quest for profits. No environmentalist visiting Montana should fail to read it, before visiting Butte and Anaconda - the "richest hill on Earth".

Related Reviews

Cronon - Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
Tyer - Opportunity, Montana
Punke - Fire and Brimstone

Len Deighton - Winter: A Berlin Family 1899-1945

Len Deighton's novels dominated the 1980s. His trilogies of spy series were massive bestsellers. His books on the Second World War, in particular, Bomber were justly well received and non-fiction books on the war and cooking also bear mention. Deighton's works filled my Dad's shelves, though I only really read the ones about aircraft! The spy novels were a little too intellectually challenging for young me.

I have probably had Winter on my own shelves since my father died but only recently picked it up. It is a classic 1980s family epic, which has loose connectioned with some of Deighton's other spy novels. As the subtitle suggests, this follows the lives of a Berlin family, the Winters, as they live through the most turbulent times of German history. The Winters are wealthy. As the new century dawns, the patriarch Harald Winter, an industralist is beginning to see the investment possibilities of German rearmanent. Throughout the next four decades, he makes millions from the manufacture of arms, despite initially convincing himself that rearming like this will prevent war, rather than lead to one.

The families' general liberal politics is neatly subverted. Harald has a mistress, a Jew, and the family complains bitterly both about the revolutionary movements that overtake Germany ending World War One, and the rise of the fascists. Both of these, they see, as bad for business. But the Nazis are also good as they stop the left, and Harald's sons are pulled closer into the emerging mass movement with the younger becoming a member of the Freikorps - the fascist movement that helped crush the workers from 1919 to 1923, and then the Nazis itself.

The other son ends up in the US, were he becomes a key figure in the Allies attempts to overthrow Hitler from without. He also ends up investigating war crimes and this leads to their final coming together.

The story is faintly ludicrous. One of those slightly contrived tales that places key figures at key moments in history so the author can tell the story of a particular period through their characters. Deighton however, does it well, not least by making most of the central figures of his book unpleasantly rich bourgeois Germans who make a mint from selling arms, and supporting fascism. As a result the story rattles along through the rise of Hitler and the collapse of Germany. There are plenty of smaller sub plots and intrigues that keep the reader engaged.

However there are some problems. There is a lot of exposition by the characters. Deighton clearly felt that some of the events he describes would be too unknown and needed explaining. This is fair enough, but there are times when the characters talk to each other weirdly because they are really talking to the reader. The other problem is that the book tends to ignore wider events. The War and Holocaust are the background, and I felt their impact and horror was somewhat deminished as a result. It means that the role of one of the sons as a senior figure in the Nazi party becomes more about his attempts to protect individual interests. Not as a cog in a wider murder machine.

All in all, its a good read and its encouraged me to revisit some of Deighton's other works and have a look at the ones I ignored all those years ago.

Related Reviews

Carré - The Looking Glass War
Carré - A Legacy of Spies
Carré - A Murder of Quality

Sai Englert - Settler Colonialism: An Introduction

Almost a year into Israel's genocidal onslaught on the Palestinians and in the myriad of books, articles and pamphlets that have appeared to analyse and explain events, the phrase "settler colonialism" regularly appears. As Sai Englert explains in his engaging new book, this is a phrase that has a long pedigree, arising out of liberation theories and ideas linked to thinkers like Franz Fanon and others. But for the wider left in Britain it is a relatively new concept, and Englert's book is an attempt to explain and contextualise the theory. It is a prescient book. First published in 2022 it is a little out of date given the events since October last year, and the mass movement in solidarity with Palestine, but this should not put off readers as what matters is the theory itself.

Englert begins by outlining the history of colonialism and, closely related to this, the development of racist ideologies that sought to justify colonialism. Here he draws heavily on the analysis of writers like Gerald Horne whose books on settler colonialism in the Americas I have reviewed before. Englert's account of colonialism reminds the reader of the sheer horrors of that colonialism, and the cynicism by which racist ideas were constructed in order to make it acceptable. Indeed Englert notes that the attempts to downplay colonialism's genocidal policies continue today, for instance in the focus that is often placed on "disease" as a killer in the Americas. This, he points out, was important, but "its role is often overstated - or at least extracted from a more general picture of settler violence and murder". It is this violence that is key to understanding what happened in colonialism, and the construction of settler colonial states.

Settler colonialism in general does not separate colonialism from the rise of capitalism. As Englert notes, "the accumulation of wealth in the Americas, based on the murder, enslavement and dispossession of Indigenous and African peoples, kick-started the rise of European empires on the world stage... which laid the ground for an accelerated emergence of capitalist relations of production and the intensification of exploitation at home."

This is important because there is a close link between the impact of colonialism and the development of "settler states" and the progress of capitalism, and its exploitation, in the heart of the colonial powers themselves. The dispossession of hundreds of thousands of peasants from land in Europe, was closely associated with the rise of industrial capitalism, as well as the movement of settlers to places like the Americas and Australasia. 

Settler societies emerged, most strikingly in the colonies that would become the US, which attempted to develop polities free from a reliance on the Indigenous populations. Their economies would be primarily dependent on settler smallholders and European bonded labourers on the one hand, and impotred enslaved African populations on the other. 

This highlights a problem for settler colonial theory, in that the experience of colonialism itself was different around the world. Some colonial projects had a genocidal policy towards indigenous people - eg in New Zealand, others saw indigenous people as making up the enslaved people for the rise of capital.

The centrality of racism to colonialism is important, in part because it helps understand how it was possible for relatively small powers to violently dominant much larger land masses by mobilising the dispossed against the indigenous people. The construction of "whiteness" which gave settlers an identification with their own ruling class, despite being the victims of an exploitative relationship with them, was part of making the settlers buy into the process. While there was solidarity between the oppressed within Settler societies, and indigenous people, it wasn't the norm, though it was not uncommon, as this important piece from Australian socialists makes clear.

Racism, Englert, argues is so central to the colonial project that fighting racism has to be linked to "ending the underlying process of domination that gave birth to it. Only by ending the social reality of settler domination can the ideology that normalises it die". Marxists or revolutionary socialists would  not disagree with this. That racism is part of capitalism, and for racism to end, so must capitalism, is something that has been associated with revolutionary ideas since the days of Marx and Engels. Englert reminds us, however, that we have to ensure that all racist ideas are included within this. He criticises "much of the literature on Whiteness for failing to address Indigenous dispossesion alongside the enslavement of African populations in racism's emergence and reproduction". 

The existence of racism, against Black and indigenous people, underminded the struggle of white workers for their own emancipation. But, Englert takes this further. He argues that settler colonialism means that white workers had, and continue to have, an interest in furthering it. This is undoubtably true of the past. Englert lists a number of occasions when the unity of Black and white workers threatened the structures of colonial power enough for violent measures to be taken to prevent such unity again. He also notes the large number of times when white workers, and their organisations - including trade unions and left parties - organised against black workers.

Englert argues:

Far from challenging the process of settler expansion, settler workers repeatedly played a key role in intensifying racial segregation and Indigenous dispossesssions. Settler class struggle was fought simultaneously against settler bosses and Indigenous workers. Settler labour movements demanded both an increase in their share of value extracted from their own labour power, as well as from the colonial loot extracted through the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. From Australia's labour-led "White-Australia" campaign to the French labour movement's near-unanimous opposition to Algerian indendence, across the colonial world, settler workers fought for the exclusion and dispossession of Indigenous and racialised people, and did so while deploying socialist, communist, or even internationalist rhetoric.

While acknowledging that there have been significant and succesful attempts to challenge racism by activists and the left in all of the settler states, does Englert's argument here remain the case? In a key part of the book, Englert discusses the nature of Settler Colonialism, and writes about "settler quietism" which he explains is "the fact that all settler classes, despite their internal social tensions and conlicts, depend on the Indigenous population's continued dispossesssion, as well as on the settler state to impose their dominance and distribute the colonial loot. Even when the situation escalates to internal military confrontation, peace can be re-established not through structural change but through the intensification of colonial violence, to the settler population's collective benefit."

Here, Englert is arguing that in settler colonial states, all "settler classes" benefit from the structures and activity of Settler Colonialism, which allows the ruling class to buy off workers. But is is that still true today? There is perhaps an argument that this is taking place in Israel, where the displacement of Palestinian people, is allowing material benefits to some Israeli workers in terms of land. This is an argument made by Englert. But is it true of the settler colonial states of Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand today? I am unsure. Englert continues:

Similar to the case of racism... land distribution and economic advantages to settler workers serve as powerful tools for stabilisation of settler rule. They also facilitate the economy's continued functioning as well as the reproduction of both the settler state's and capitalist class's power. In that sense, settler workers participate in securing their continued exploitation, in exchange for land and comparatively better working conditions.

I don't think it is tenable to say this is continuing everywhere and Englert offers no numerical evidence to suggest it is happening. So either Englert's arguments don't fit, or there isn't such a thing as settler colonialism. To argue the theory as no value would be entirely wrong. As Englert's book makes clear, the theory does offer many insights, even while it doesn't necessarily have a single agreed "line". What I think needs to be added to Englert's analysis is a more detailed exploration of settler colonialism as a process that takes place over time - and frequently a long time. What happened to Native Americans until the Massacre at Wounded Knee when the frontier was declared "closed", and what that meant for "settler classes", is different now to how the continued repression and oppression of Native American people impacts on working class Amercians (Black and white). 

But the process itself also matters. It is undoubtably true that people from working class backgrounds went to colonial countries. But those settlers who were "bought off" with land in the early days of (say) Canada or North American colonial history, were no longer workers. Buying them off like this, transformed their class position. They became farmers or smallholders. This is not the same as saying "settler workers" benefited as workers from the continued disspossession of indigenous people and land - and consequently secured their own continued exploitation. It is not correct to say that this process continues in (say) Australia. Israel/Palestine is a different case, which highlights the necessity of understanding specific settler colonialisms in their wider context, particularly that of the global imperialist system.

In general, with the exception of Israel and the case of South Africa under Apartheid, I don't think it is right to argue that workers benefit from settler colonialism. In Australia settler colonialism allowed some of the settler lower orders to avoid becoming wage labourers in that continent. But the workers who did not benefit like this remained workers, and saw no benefit from settler colonialism. Indeed, the racism that went alongside, undermined their position and their ability to fight for better conditions. Englert says that white Australian workers get "land and comparatively better working conditions" out of these relations. But this is simply not accurate. Englert would need to provide more detailed examples to justify this point today. Clarity on this is important, for if "settler workers" do benefit from settler colonialism, than it makes the process of workers' self emancipation either harder or impossible.

Workers everywhere have every interest in defeating racism, and the system that uses it, and they can only do so through completely unity with indigenous people, and principled opposition to all forms of racism. 

These are significant criticisms of Englert's book, but it is made in the spirit of arguing that the book is a contribution to the debates that seek to understand a world where imperialist powers continue to destroy the lives of billions of people, dispossing, oppressing and exploiting them in a unrelating drive to accumulate capital. Much more discussion and clarity is needed.

Related Reviews

Horne - The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism
Horne - The Dawning of the Apocalypse
Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth
Clayton-Dixon - Surviving New England
Tully - Crooked Deals and Broken Treaties

Lev Grossman - The Bright Sword

***Warning Spoilers - loads of them***

I'll admit to picking up The Bright Sword with some trepidation. I loved Lev Grossman's Magicians Trilogy, which was a sort of warts and all, grown up response to the Harry Potter monolith. The Bright Sword is a retelling of the Arthur myth. The sword of the title is, of course, Excalibur, so do we really need another account of these stories?

But I am hugely glad I did read it though. The book is a fantastic modern update of the story of Camelot, which is refreshingly 21st century and neatly subverts the genre. Lev Grossman's writing is delightfully engaging, and his construction of the story, will engage even those who know Malory or TH White's books inside out. Grossman introduces us to Collum. A talented sword fighter from the Isle of Mull, who is traveling to Camelot to find King Arthur, drunk on the stories of adventure and chivalry that he has heard. His naivety and ignorance mean that when he arrives in the aftermath of Arthur's defeat and death, he is prey for the swirling factionalism that surrounds the court. Morgan le Fey tries to draw him into her schemes, but Collum's idealism keeps him with the knights of Camelot, as we, the reader, learn through flashbacks the story of Arthur and his court.

But this is not the linear narrative of Malory or White, or even John Boorman. This is Camelot, warts and all. Merlin is a sexual predator who uses and abuses his young proteges. Arthur is a good king, but not a great swordsman. Lancelot... well Lancelot is not the person you think he is. As we go back and forth in the timeline, we learn how Camelot was held together by Arthur's idealism and his pure presence. Its a weak foundation that barely holds things together.

Grossman is to be congratulated for this approach. He could have produced a work that was modern without transforming the story. But the Arthur legend has always been retold. It is, after all, a medieval fantasy that moves 15th century society back into the post-Roman period. Malory has a lot to answer for in this regard.

But Grossman goes several steps further. He too plays loose with history (there was no Baghdad at the time of the collapse of Roman Britain) but is at least honest enough to admit this in the afterword. This allows him to make commentary on the differences between Britain and the rest of the world. His slightly tongue in cheek references to colonialism will no doubt cause some Daily Mail readers to gnash their teeth. But the knight who visits the round table from what is now the Middle East, and bemoans how dirty and backward everything is, certainly has a point.

Grossman does more, of course. There's more magic, more fairies, more of an interaction between the real world and fantasy than either White, Malory or even Boorman and Disney introduced to the genre. It makes for a more unsettling atmosphere, that gives the sense of a world in transition. There's also more honesty about who the Britons were. There are enough black and Muslim characters to further upset the Mail readers, and it must be said, there is a beautiful and touching transgender subplot. To say more would be one too many spoilers for this review.

The Arthur myth was always the story of kingly perfection and the closeness between land and ruler. It is one that always glossed over the realities of feudal society, the oppression and exploitation, and brutal war. In retelling it Grossman reminds us that stories have a power to illuminate a lot more than their subject matter. For this, and for many other reasons, I have no trouble in recommending The Bright Sword as one of the strongest, and dare I say it, most original, works of fantasy in years.

Related Reviews

Grossman - The Magicians
Grossman - The Magician's Land
Grossman - The Magician King

Adrian Budd - China: Rise, Repression and Resistance

A recent Science article discussed an interesting conundrum. Asking "Have China's carbon emissions peaked?" it analysed the impact of China's economy on the environment. China is the single largest national emitter of carbon dioxide, "leads the world in firing up new coal-fueled plants" but is also the biggest installer of renewable energy. The article is unable to answer the question, because that depends on how long the Chinese state continues to support and use coal plants. But hidden in the article is a telling comment. Ending coal use faces a number of barriers, "including pressure from Chinese energy companies to keep coal plants producing revenue as long as possible."

China, after all, is supposed to be a socialist state. It is ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, and surely, one might argue, the revenue interests of Chinese energy companies should not be a barrier to this state meeting its emissions targets. 

Adrian Budd's new book, China: Rise, Repression and Resistance offers us a clear explanation of this seeming contradiction. In fact, it is no real contradiction at all, for as Budd argues throughout the book China is not a socialist state, in fact it is a "State Capitalist" society, whose economic logic is determined by the state's need to continuously engage in capital accumulation due to China's position within a global neoliberal capitalist system. While Budd's book engages in many aspects of China's current political situation, from its environmental impact, to its repression of LGBT+ people, women and national minorities, as well as the resistance to this national project, it is worth looking a little further at what Budd says about China's State Capitalism, as the rest of his analysis flows from this position. 

After positioning the book within a historical framework, Budd argues that contemporary China acts as it does because it has adapted to the changing global economic circumstance. It is both the workshop of the world, and a global imperialist force that is fighting to shape its own global market. Budd writes:

The structures of Chinese state capitalism have changed over the last four decades, and perhaps it even deserves a new label such as 'open state capitalism' or 'state-orchestrated capitalism'. But whatever the label, the Chinese economy is part off, and shares the general hallmarks of, the global capitalist system.

China's economic ascent has been accomplished by its ability to adapt its economy to the rules of global neoliberalism (using FDI [Foreign Direct Investment] and domestic companies to become the world' sindustrial workshop and largest exporter) while simultaneously interpreting and bending those rules to protect and dvelop its own industrial base and wider economy. State influence over borrowers and lenders allows Beijing to delay proelbmes, which would be less possible in more market-driven system, by instructing banks to lend, including to zombie companies. But if reduced dependency on inward FDI and exports proides a degree of insulation from the problems in the wider global economy, China cannot escape the economic laws of motion of capitalism that Marx discovered 150 years ago and its economy is now showing considerable signs of strain.

This last part is important. The laws of capitalist motion determine not just how China relates to other foreign powers, but to how its companies and state act in its interior. This means that China subordinates people and the environment to the logic of capital accumulation, driving both exploitation and natural degradation. This means that China is prone to the the consequences of these actions, including the resistance of workers, oppressed minorities and social movements. Xi Jinping's "mission" in Budd's wods, "is to protect the state-capitalist economy, and the interests of its ruling class, from the mounting problems it faces."

This is why, to respond to the Science article mentioned above, China simultaneously has the largest growth in renewables, yet is also beholden to the interests of its coal companies. The logic of capitalist accumulation drives the onward use of these resources, in the interest of profit. 

Budd's book discusses how the Chinese ruling class justifies this. A mix of repression and regime legitimisation is the strategy of Xi. This means stopping internal dissent, partly through violence and imprisonment and partly through trying to challenge key social issues. One of these, the rampent corruption at every level of society, is a significant barrier to China, both in terms of legitimising the rule of its leaders and in terms of social discontent. A few high profile trials aside, it is notable that Xi's response to corruption is in part to reduce the power base of his own rivals and to severally punish corrupt officials. Both of these are linked to a wider project of increasing authoritarianism within the state. Budd notes that this has close links to the intensification of nationalism as a tool to bind groups to his wider economic and political plans.

There is, however, hope. The book's final chapters look at resistance, both of social movements like those of the LGBT+ community and wider, often localised groups fighting over specific demands such as environmental issues. He has a deep focus on the workers' movement and explores some of the powerful strikes waves that have taken place. Despite the heavy repression of these, and the limitations imposed by Covid lockdowns etc, Budd does note promising signs of "a new generation of workers and acivists" inside workplaces. China has a long history of workers' struggle, and revolutionary struggle based on mass working class movements, that point to potentially transformative struggles far from the parroted "socialist" ideas of China's rulers.

In conclusion Adrian Budd's book is a brilliant dissection of China today. It places this in the context of historical class struggles, imperialist competition, framed by an understanding that human liberation and an end to China's environmental destruction can only come from a struggle against a system based on the logic of capital accumulation. In this sense the struggle of China's workers is identical to that of those in every other capitalist nation. "Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains".

Related Reviews

Smith - China's Engine of Environmental Collapse
Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump
Au Loong Yu - China's Rise: Strength and Fragility
Shapiro - China's Environmental Challenges
Lafitte - Spoiling Tibet
Gittings - Changing Face of China

Robert Ashton - Where are the fellows who cut the hay?

George Ewart Evans' book Ask The Fellows Who Cut The Hay is one of the most remarkable works of rural oral history. Rightly it is considered an indispensible work for anyone trying to comprehend the enormous changes that British agriculture has gone through in the last two centuries. More importantly perhaps it is a book that doesn't patronise its subjects. It takes the lives, beliefs and labour of the Suffolk agricultural workers it records seriously. Any reader will be carried along by its honesty and insight.

So I was excited to learn that Robert Ashton was producing a new book that was to look at "How Traditions from the Past Can Shape Our Future" based on his own connections with George Ewart Evans and the places he lived and worked. I helped sponsor the book through Unbound. The book itself is a lovely production, well made, easy to read and the cover is lovely. But I was disappointed with the content. 

The book works as a two part autobiography. Firstly it is a look at Evans himself, exploring his life and the ideas and forces that shaped him. How did Evans, having grown up in South Wales in a mining community come to live in rural Suffolk, writing and recording the lives and work of the local population? This is fascinating, and I enjoyed Ashton's exploration of the places that Evans had lived, his encounters and the occasional coincidence that allowed him to meet people who knew Evans and loved his work. Ashton himself was taught by Evan's wife. This all allows Ashton to explore further the changes that Evans saw, and those that came after.

The second autobiographical aspect to the book is Ashton's own life and times. His life as a agricultural labourer, tractor driver and finally salesperson for agricultural companies. These events, Ashton tries to use as a tool to extract more details about what has changed and developed in the British countryside, drawing some parallels with the changes that Evans himself saw, and why Evans did the work he did.

The problem is it is quite superficial, and much of the book is Ashton retelling the stories and accounts that Evans recorded. None of this is dull or boring, but it isn't what I expected. Sadly the book doesn't really do what it promises on the cover. There is no real analysis of how the traditions of the past can shape the future. Ashton does make some attempts to do this, noting how there are a return to localised production, and a move away from industrial agriculture. But there's no deep analysis, only a few of Ashton's impressions. Indeed, Ashton's thoughts on the changes that have taken place in society in general are often quite superficial, limited, for instance to noting that clothes are cheap because they are mass produced abroad for workers' on low wages.

The big question, implicit in the title, about what has happened to rural labour could have been further developed. I would have liked to read more about migrants and casual labour in British fields. How these people are organising, and how their wages and conditions differ from previous generations. 

Overall this was a nice enough read, but it lacked the real depth I'd hoped for. The most interesting bits were those about Evans himself, and even then I'd have liked a little more. The passing reference to Evans' Communist Party membership sparked my interest, but that was all there was to it. The building of sustainable, healthy agriculture and socially just societies in the future will, no doubt, require us learning from traditional methods and insights. Unfortunately this book doesn't give enough of this. It will however be enjoyed by those who live, work and travel to and through Suffolk, and would be best read there in conjunction with Robert Ashton's own hero, George Ewart Evans' work.

Related Reviews

Evans - Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay

Landworkers' Alliance - With the Land
Clutterbuck - Bittersweet Brexit: The Future of Food, Farming, Land and Labour
Sutton - Food Worth Fighting For

Isaac Rose - The Rentier City

Friedrich Engels' classic book The Condition of the Working Class in England,  details the hardships of working people in Manchester in the first half of the nineteenth century. In it, Engels recounts a  meeting with a "bourgeoisie" in the city:

One day I walked with one of these middle-class gentlemen into Manchester. I spoke to him about the disgraceful unhealthy slums and drew his attention to the disgusting condition of that part of the town in which the factory workers lived. I declared that I had never seen so badly built a town in my life. He listened patiently and at the corner of the street at which we parted company he remarked: “And yet there is a great deal of money made here. Good morning, Sir.”

It's a justifiably famous quote, that tells us as much about Engels who himself was from an affluent background, as it does about the capitalists who were squeezing wealth and life from working people in the city. The tragedy is, as Isaac Rose shows us in his brilliant new book, its a quote that could be attributed to the city today.

Rose tells us the story of Manchester, through its people and their struggles and the lives that they led and continue to lead. He begins with the early history of Manchester, the period when Engels lived there, that saw the city becoming a colossus of capitalist industrial might. The mills and factories went alongside overcrowded, dirty and insanitary slum houses. In the intervening years, struggles over housing and working conditions, and, indeed the very space of Manchester by its working people shaped the city we now know.

In the 20th century, a process of expansion of public housing and slum clearance transformed things for working people. Houses became something that were to be proud of, not profit machines for unscrupulous landlords. For a time in the 1930s and the post-war period, there was an atmosphere of hope. Yet today, living in Manchester is dominated by an enormous housing crisis. Rents are skyrocketing, social housing has all but disappeared and that which remains is decaying and uncared for, and gleaming towers of steel and glass dominate the horizon, but are all but empty of tenants. The impact, Rose points out is worst for the poorest, and its creating a new layer of poor and vulnerable people. As he says, a recent study "has shown that the rent burden is so high in Manchester that it outstrips London for unaffordability, due to the city's lower wages". High rents and lack of social housing mean that "Manchester has the highest number of households assessed as homeless in the country".

How did this come to be? Rose argues it is the consequence of a set of neoliberal politics that are closely associated with Margaret Thatcher's Tory government of 1979 onward. More importantly though, he argues that their impact in Manchester was the result of a series of choices made by the City Council in reponse to Thatcher's assault. In particular, the failure on the part of the Council to be able to fight Tory policies that limited funds. This meant the Council essentially accepting neoliberal ideas, and then becoming the force for driving them forward in the late 1990s and 2000s. Rose says:

Manchester City Council, through the deals struck in the middle years of the last decade, handed over the extraction rights to a broad class of corporate landlords, who extract rent from the tenants and often take this wealth offshore. Manchester has become the pre-eminent example of the real estate state. This is the symbiotic relationship between politicians, the institutions of the local state and the property lobby.

Rose continues:

The local state has gone beyond simply providing the supportive policy context for development or acting as an enabler to being an executor of development. 

Drawing on the work of Marx and Engels, as well as contemporary Marxists such as David Harvey, Rose argues that "there is a profound in-built logic to the dynamics of urban development that are now underway in Manchester."

One thing that Rose highlights throughout the book is that there is a strong tradition of ordinary people in Manchester fighting to improve their conditions, and one of the key battlegrounds has been housing. But in fact in the key battles with the Thatcher government, this force was not mobilised. Where it did come on to the scene was in largely passive ways through public meetings and so on. Unlike, say, the Poll Tax revolt, there was not mass participation in tackling the government. The "dented shield" approach of the Labour councils in the 1990s was very much orientated on the idea that the councils were the only force that could fight the government.

Why is this important? Because if we are to move away from the privatised nightmare that is housing provision in Britain, we're going to have to build the type of social movements that can transform British politics. That will require mobilising the mass of working people to use their economic power, and their politic clout to transform national and local politics. Rose's book was, in his words, written with exactly this in mind, as a contribution towards "the crystallisation of a general force that could again wrest our cities back from the hands of the rentier, landlord and speculator".

The Rentier City is a superb book, powerfully written, accessible and readable, and full of the sort of facts and figures that will get repeated and quoted in pubs, cafes and meetings around the city. Everyone who cares about the great city of Manchester should read it.

Related Reviews

Christophers - The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain
Robbins - There's No Place: The American Housing Crisis & What it Means for the UK
Hanley - Estates: An Intimate History
Minton - Ground Control
Kynaston - Austerity Britain 1945 - 1951
Jones - Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
Wise - The Blackest Streets, The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum
Hollis - Cities are Good for You
Reader - Cities

Stephen Baxter - The Massacre of Mankind

The Massacre of Mankind proudly displays its badge of honour on its front cover: "Authorised by the H.G. Wells Estate". It might be authorised, but is it a worthy follow up to Wells' classic The War of the Worlds?

For those readers who have been hiding from Martians for seventy years, Wells' book was a classic account of an invasion of Victorian England, which saw the industrial, Imperial might of England defeated by fighting machines, until they are defeated in turn by one of literature's greatest deus ex machina. Baxter's follow up is set a few decades later in an alternate history shaped by the Martian's presence in the solar system, and the likelihood that they will return. The course of history has been diverted from our own timeline. World War One did not happen, Britain is in close alliance with Germany, and is a near dictatorship. Secret government projects exist to plan for the next alien arrival, but most people live in a hard, oppressive and grim world.

But Baxter's follow-up takes Wells' context, but sacrifices the original author's ability to tell a tale sharply and briefly. Baxter's work is overlong, bloated and disjointed. He attempts to tell the story of the Second Martian War as a sort of Victorian steampunk alternate history morality tale. 

The problem is that it all hangs together rather badly. There is a structural problem. Halfway through the book Baxter takes a break to suddenly introduce dozens of new characters to discuss the impact of the invasion on America, Australia, South Africa, China and the Ottoman Empire. Most of these are rapidly discarded (similar to how he discards characters in earlier chapters) and all the stories do is to tell of more destruction. It is likely that Baxter thought these stories might add colour (and it is at least good that places in the Global South get a mention) but unlike say Stephen King, who can add real depth to his wider stories with such bit parts, Baxter just adds to the book's bulk, without adding to the story.

A bigger problem though is that its hard to care about the characters. They are too one dimensional. Baxter simply cannot give his readers people who you identify with. Simply giving people long back stories is not enough. They disappear from the page and are instantly forgotten. He seems more interested in telling his alternative history (and being clever by inserting real historical figures into new situations) but even this feels contrived. The idea that the Russian Empire would leapfrog Western industrial capitalism by avoiding Revolution is incredibly far-fetched. But even that is not as far-fetched as the laughable deux ex machina that Baxter offers to end the Second War. At least HG Well's one was believable.

Overall this is a weak book, that relies too much on its original source material and seemingly clever nods to the reader. Don't bother, especially if you enjoy HG Well's original.

Related Reviews

Baxter - Raft
Baxter - World Engines: Destroyer
Baxter and Reynolds - The Medusa Chronicles
Morgan & Palmer-Patel - Sideways in Time: Critical Essays on Alternate History Fiction
Pratchett & Baxter - The Long Earth

Philip Pullman - The Imagination Chamber: Cosmic Rays from Lyra's Universe

Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials universe has been growing over the years. The initial trilogy, followed by two further books of a second trilogy, have been joined by a number of shorter works, several of these have been reviewed on this blog, and have impressed with the additional materials, and quality of production. The Imagination Chamber is less impressive. It is a collection of whimsical thoughts, that the author suggested are like the "little trails of vapour" that condense around a charged particle in a cloud chamber, though the particles in this metaphor, are charged with story.

Cloud chambers are useful for studying very small things, and these vapour trails are very small indeed, some of them barely a few sentences and stretching the material to fit the description of book is difficult. Fans of the books, particularly the first trilogy, will perhaps enjoy fitting the material into those narratives, but they offer little insight or extra information. They might flesh out things a little, but they are more designed to explore character, rather than plot.

Dedicated fans will probably find something here. But I struggled to. The Imagination Chamber offered little to me, and felt unnecessary. One for the completionists. 

Related Reviews

Pullman - La Belle Sauvage
Pullman - The Subtle Knife
Pullman - The Amber Spyglass
Pullman - Northern Lights
Pullman - The Ruby in the Smoke

James M. Stayer - Anabaptists and the Sword

Anabaptists and the Sword is a detailed look at the evolution of the Anabaptists and their ideas, focusing particularly on the earliest period and the Reformation. James M. Stayer is one of the foremost historians of the radical Reformation, and in his opening remarks he aregues that the Anabaptists were "the most important group of radicals" and that a "major historical problem about them is that they seemed to oscillate between the polar antitheses of pacifism and revolution in their early history."

Many students of the period will notice this most obviously because we associated Anabaptism today with pacifiscm and communities isolated from the wider world. But the sixteenth century saw the forerunners of Anabaptists playing a central role in the Peasants' War in Germany, and most importantly in the capture of Münster when a theocratic radical regime took over the city in the expectation of the end of days.

Anabaptists and the Sword is not for the faint-hearted. Its detailed study of early Anabaptist ideas will appeal to specialists and historians particularly. Perhaps the most important concept is the idea of "the Sword" itself, a contested concept that evolves out of different biblical readings. Where the two powers of "coercive jurisdiction", the civil and ecclesiastical, or just one, wielded solely by the temporal (non-religious) regime. The Anabaptists held to the later, which meant that "the one, temporal, Sword stood for all the authority and force necessary to cement a social order comprised of individuals assumed to be in the vast majority radically wicked, egoistic and, hence, unresponsive to the common good". The concept of the Sword troubled the Anabaptists because it was closely tied up with ethics, and as Stayer argues, led to a multiple of ideas about whether or not it was right to use force to protect oneself, or your beliefs, or use violence to promote those same ideas. 

Writing at the end of the 1960s Stayer finds some interesting parallels between contemporary debates within social movements. But most of his focus is on the evolution of Anabaptist thought through this framework. Much of the book focuses on the evolution of these ideas through looking at key figures of this movement, from Müntzer to Hoffman. There are plenty of useful and interesting titbits and ideas here. I found it particularly interesting that Stayer points out that radical (revolutionary, and hence violent, in the context of sixteenth century Europe) Anabaptism did not end with the defeat of Münster, but lingered on even in almost guerrilla ways. 

Stayer's conclusion however is to avoid any easy generalisations. He argues that early Anabaptism was both radical and apolitical (in the sense of abstention from wider issues) but at the same time there were always important, if minority voices of "crusading radicals" such as Rothmann in Münster. Not all Anabaptists were, or perhaps are, nonviolent (nonresistant). Understanding the dynamics between the groups exposes a wider engagement of the movement with the Reformation and society in general that defies simple answers. 

Related Reviews

Stayer - The German Peasants' War and the Anabaptist Community of Goods
Kautsky - Communism in Central Europe in the time of the Reformation
Bax - The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists

Peter Høeg - Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

The novel opened with an extremely gripping atmosphere of early Nordic noir. Set in Copenhagen it follows events after Smilla discovers the body of a young boy who lives in her complex, that it turns out, she has befriended. Smilla is not particularly outgoing, she's a stranger to Denmark, having grown up in colonial Greenland and she views the world through the eyes of a Greenlander, ignoring many European conventions, thinking differently and having an ear to closer to nature. It is perhaps this that leads her to suspect that her young friend has been murdered, and gradually, with the help of another person from the apartment, she begins to unpack a complex conspiracy.

The first half is gripping stuff. Peter Høeg blends the crime story with wider themes of Danish imperialism, colonial history and indigenous ideas and politics. It's well written and fun, and it was good to see the way that Høeg allows the reader to learn more about Smilla as the story progresses through flashback and the like. But, and it's a big but, the story comes apart quickly in the second half as the crime novel moves deeper into conspiracy and then a sea voyage to Greenland.

One of the delights of a good crime novel is that it came frame events around a seemingly minor event - the death of a person for instance. Then construct a believable world and wider conspiracy around this. Høeg constructs the context brilliantly, but the criminal story is just inadequate to the original crime and Smilla's investigation. The story grows off in random directions, characters come and go, and it all feels to unreal. This is exacerbated by the unsatisfactory ending.

This simply didn't work for me. The ending felt like an attempt to turn a crime story into an existential novel. It was so very disappointing. The book also has the single worst sex scene in the literature.

Dan Saladino - Eating to Extinction

The food we eat has been shaped by many great social, economic and cultural forces. It is the result of thousands of years of agriculture, selective breeding, accidental crossing of genes and unique technological development, which has enabled humans in almost every ecological area to grow, hunt, catch and cook food unique to their lives and cultures. But it is under threat. Dan Saladino's excellent book explains why. 

Saladino's book documents the enormous historical diversity of our food. In the Svalbard seed valut there are an amazing 213,000 samples of different types of wheat, and 21,000 different potato types. There are dozens of further examples, but to quote from his introduction:

At Brogdale in Kent, home of the UK's National Fruit Collection ,there are 2,000 varieties of apple while at the University of California Riverside more than 1,000 different varieties of citrus are being conserved. Across the planet there are 8,000 livestock breeds (of cows, sheep, pigs and so on) being saved, mostly on small farms, many at risk of extinction. Much of our food supply has been narrowed down to a tiny fraction of this diverse array of plants and animals, and in some cases we are dependent on just on variety of a handful of breeds.

This narrowing of food diversity has accelerated in the last century, particularly in the post-war period. It brings with it several threats, not least that of missing tastes. As we loose types of fruit, vegetables or other crops, we lose the potential for different foods and tastes that were enjoyed by our ancestors, but will be lost forever. Perhaps more importantly, we risk loosing breeds of animals and plants that are more suitable for a warming world, a changing climate or are able to withstand disease. In those seed banks are sometimes the seeds that could feed future generations on a hotter planet. But the skills and knowledge needed to find them, or husband them is also threatened.

Why has this extraordinary change taken place? Take one of the world's most important crops - maize. There are literarily thousands of different types of maize. But a handful dominant today, following the introduction of new US strains that have displaced native maize from its centres of origin in South America. These new strains where designed to maximise yields and ensure that US agriculture dominanted the Cold War period. But

The mazine boom producd more calories but helped to make the global food system more uniform, less diverse and increasingly brittle. Evidence for this came in dramatic fashion in the early 1970s. At the time, 85 percent of the crop grown in the Corn Belt shared a single genetic trait susceptible to a fungal disease... The disease spread rapidly through corn fields, resulting hte loss of one billion bushels of maize at a cost of $6 billion to farmers.

In the context of wheat, Saladino explains why this has happened.:

The entire system, the wheat breeding programmes and the approved list, is also designed around one type of of product: white bread made with refined flour for which most of the nutrients in the grain are removed in the milling process. Again, by law, these nutrients are then put back in through the process of 'fortification;. This isn't the fault of the plant breeders; they are paid to create what the current food system demands: cheap grain and a commodity that can turn a profit on global markets. After 12,000 years of farming such a rich variety of wheat, what a strange state of affairs we find ourselves in.

It is, indeed, strange. Capitalism has concentrated food production into a few select types, that maximise profit at the expense of diversity, flavour, resiliance and sustainability. 

Saladino's book tells these, and other unique stories, extremely well. It is part travelogue, party foodie guide and part historical work that shows how food has been shaped by the development of capitalism. For instance the slave trade moved people and commodities between Europe, the Americas and Africa. Enslaved Africans brought with them their seeds and food culture, but were forced to work on plantations that furthered the concentration of food and other crops into a few select types. The industiralisation of fishing and agriculture have ensured that monocrops in animals and plants haved pushed out other types of food, at enormous rish to wider ecosystems. The example of fish, particularly salmon, epitomises this process.

Saladino's book celebrates those who rescue, protect and farm forgotten and minority crops. Because he is a "foodie" he enjoys tasting and eating these rarer foodstuffs, and its a testament to Saladino's ideas that these are never handled as exotic, rather a celebration and understanding of different food cultures. 

But repeatedly we return to the way that the food industry is distorted by profit, through massive multinationals that limit seeds, enforce pesticide and fertilisers and trap farmers in massive debts. Saladino says that "more of the world's seeds - the foundation of the food system - are becomign intellectual property and highly profitable commodities". The sense of food as a way to profit runs through the whole of the book.

This book begins as a cry against the loss of food diversity. But as it proceeds the reader increasingly realises that the problem is the whole economic system. There is, of course, hope. Much of the book celebrates small producers who are rescuing, resurrecting and saving unique foods - from alcoholic drinks to rare wheats. All of these individuals are rightly heroes. But Saladino also recognises that this is really taking place in the context of an overwhelmingly powerful and dangerous system. It needs to be got rid of. As Saladino writes:

Our future food is going to depend on multiple systems of agricutlure. Some will be highly industrialised and mechanised, others smaller in scale and richer in their variety of crops and animals. Diversity can help each of these systems become as successful and resilient as they can possibly be. As we've seen, efforts are already under way to make this happen, from the reappearance of landrace fields of wheat to the work banana breeders are doing, using wild genetics and rethinking the monoculture model. Saving diversity gives us options.

But this will only ever be a breathing space. Unless we scrap capitalism, the profit orientated food system will continue to spread it's ugly tentacles, destroying and driving to extinction, rare and unique foods. This is a threat to us all. Eating to Extinction is a reminder that we must right to change things.

Related Reviews

Landworkers' Alliance - With the Land
Anderson - Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America
Wise - Eating Tomorrow
Kimmerer - Braiding Sweetgrass
Carlisle - Lentil Underground
Holt-Giménez - A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism
Bivar - Organic Resistance
Zabinski - Amber Waves

 

Louise Bryant - Six Red Months in Russia

Louise Bryant arrived in Petrograd in late September 1917. She went as a journalist to cover the Russian Revolution for radical US newspaper The Masses tasked with reporting from a "woman's point of view". Her articles are gathered together in Six Red Months in Russia and give an inspiring insight into the period between the Kornilov Coup and the first months of Soviet Power after the October Revolution. 

Bryant went to Russia, alongside her partner John Reed, as a convinced socialist. But there is no doubt that her experiences there further transformed her outlook. She writes with sympathy and passion. Her bravery on the front lines, during the insurrection and travelling alone through Russia are examples of the best of journalism. 

While the book is notable for its interviews or portraits of key figures like Kerensky and Kollontai, the most interesting and touching parts are those that deal with events of the Revolution and small moments that illuminate the wider transformation of society. There's a notable account of a Revolutionary Tribunal. This is far from the bloodthirsty events of bourgeois imagination, rather they demonstrate how mass democratic participation allows for justice to take place. For an hour, after a worker is convicted of stealing from a newspaper seller, the audience agrees that he must give his galoshes to the victim. The victim is pleased - she has none to wear while selling papers and the guilty man is pleased as his conscience is cleared!

There are, of course, more world shattering events to describe. Bryant describes the storming of the Winter Palace, notable mostly for the discipline with which revolutionary troops ensured that looting did not take place. She was there for the meetings of the Provisional Council of the Russian Republic and its dissolving by troops, very much without a whimper. Her account of the meetings of the All Russia Soviet are fascinating as she describes the passionate contributions from delegates from across the country, discussing their demands and concerns.

Bryant is primarily concerned with justifying the Revolution to her US audience. Repeatedly she counters anti-Soviet propaganda, denying the lies that declare that barbarity has falled. She frequently has to challenge the idea that the revolutionaries are pro-Germany. In fact this leads to one of the slight contradictions of the book, because she is very concerned that her readers see the Russian revolutionaries as potential allies of America. It almost feels like she's ignoring the great elephant in the room - US imperialism. I suspect her views on this changed quickly when US troops began their military counter-revolutionary campaigns alongside the White Armies. 

The book will perhaps be best enjoyed by those who know already the outlines of the revolutionary year of 1917. Bryant's anecdotes and accounts illuminate the wider dynamics very well. Here she writes about a priest refusing to pay a fare on a street car, claiming exemption as a "man of God":

Immediately the passengers became excited. They were mostly peasants and they began to argue hotly. A man of God, they claimed, was no different from any other man - all were equal since the revolution. But the priest was stubborn and not until the crowd threatened to take him to the Revolutionary Tribunal did he consent to pay, grumbling.

Bryant writes about crime and prisons a fair bit, not least to argue that the Revolution, at least in 1917, was remarkably lenient. Counter-revolutionaries are repeatedly allowed to go free, as the revolutionaries are keen to avoid punishment. During the winter the cells are better heated than the journalists' hotel rooms. A joke by Bryant about this to the Bolshevik guards, who have all experienced imprisonment, gets the dour response that loss of liberty is the worst punishment possible.

Bryant's eye for detail and humour and her ability to capture events in short articles makes this an excellent, if not well known, addition to accounts of 1917. Her frequent focus on women highlights the contributions of many, and reminds the reader of the enormous strides forward made in the early years of the revolution in terms of emancipatory politics. The participation of women in the struggle and the fighting is celebrated, as well as the role of key female figures of the revolution. But Bryant also tells the story from the other side, interviewing the wealthy families still present in Petrograd and discussing the work of spies and counter-revolutionaries. Frankly its a marvellous book that really illuminates how October 1917 was a revolution off and by the most ordinary of people. As Bryant returns home her last article shows how much she has been changed: "I was homesick for my own country, but I thought of the German advance and my heart ached. I wanted to go back and offer my life for the revolution."

Related Reviews

Hallas - The Great Revolutions
Sherry - Russia 1917: Workers' Revolution and the Festival of the Oppressed
Murphy - Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory
Rappaport - Caught in the Revolution
Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution

M.T. Anderson - Symphony for the City of the Dead

Dmitri Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony is one of the greatest pieces of music of the twentieth century. It was shaped by two great events. The Russian Revolution and the siege of Leningrad which took place during the Nazi's genocidal war against the Soviet Union. Listening to the piece today evokes many feelings, and it has been read in a number of ways. Its performances during the Second World War, coloured by the fact it was mostly penned by Shostakovich while in Leningrad under siege, made it a masterpiece for many listeners who might not normally have listened to Shostakovich's style.

M.T. Anderson's biographical account of the Seventh and Shostakovich frames the symphony just like this. He explores how Shostakovich's life and attachment to the city of Leningrad, as well as the wider context of Revolution and War meant that he was able to produce this masterpiece. But the problem is not Anderson's framing, but the story he tells.

The problem is that Anderson doesn't really understand the Russian Revolution. He appreciates it's mass nature, and the way it lead to a flourishing of art, culture and music. He writes of Petrograd "swarming" with new art movements, "cubofuturists and neo-primitivists, constructivists and Suprematists, Rayonists and Productivists". This is good because it is normally neglected in histories of the period, though it is a shame that Anderson doesn't explain any of these things. The problem is that the Revolution, for Anderson, is an expression of Bolshevik violence and greed, rather than an attempt at mass human liberation. Lenin, according to Anderson, "believed that the people themselves often did not understand what they truly needed". Anderson lacks any real subtle understanding or analysis of the dynamics of the Russian Revolution and the Civil War that follows. Nor does he display any real clarity on the nature of revolutionary politics. For Anderson there's nothing but continuity from Lenin to Stalin. There's no real sense of Stalin's counter-revolution drowning the hopes and dreams of the revolution itself in a "river of blood".

Anderson is at least on firmer ground when it comes to the music. He explores Shostakovich's works in their context, while defying attempts to simply place them in the straight jacket of that context. The reader and listener are invited to bring their own interpretations while Anderson's supplies a (sometimes flawed) context:

There are few composters whose music and whose own lives reflect so exactly the trials and triumphos of a nation. The music of his yo8uth was electric with the boldness and experimentaion of Leningrad's explosive revouitions. With his music of the 30s, he came to know the grotesque brutality of the Terror. As Stalin closed his fist around Leningrad and the arrests and disappearances began, Shostakovich was in the middle of it. His Fifth Symphony, composed in a time of mute fear, was an answer to the authorities - but, at the same time, it spoke other truths, out of the side of its mouth, to all who had suffered loos and could not speak... He gave a voice to the silenced. 

Is this fair? A more recent Shostakovich biography Simon Behrman has argued convincingly that Shostakovich carried with him an essence of revolution throughout his life:

In one masterpiece after another, he attempted to engage us in the fefining themses of our age: revolution, war, oppression; occasionally giving us hope, more often despair, but consistently reaching out to a mass audience at the highest artistic level. In this aspect of his life and work, he carried the spirit of the October revolution throughout his life, and has bequeathed it to us in his music.

This seems much fairer to Shostakovich and the essence of his mustic

Politics aside, I found myself constantly frustrated with Anderson's book. It patronises the reader, offering superficial banalities while describing the most shocking of events. He writes, for instance, "despite the fact that Hitler and Stalin both called thesmelves socialists, Hitler's Nazi Fascism and Stalin's Societ Communism, were, in many ways natural politicial enemies". There is little attempt here to actually understand what either of these appalling regimes were. Nor perhaps why people who were Communists across Europe fought fascism on the streets and into World War Two. This undermines the author's analysis of Shostakovich's music because he cannot really understand why the people of Russia, and Shostakovich himself, rallied to a regime that was so dispicable. 

So sadly, despite some interesting moments and some excellent illustrations, I must conclude that Symphony for the City of the Dead offers little to the serious reader of Russian and music history.

Related Reviews

Behrman - Shostakovich: Socialism, Stalin & Symphonies

George MacDonald Fraser - Flashman and the Redskins

George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman novels are not particularly fashionable these days. They are very dated in places, not particularly because of Flashman's offensive beliefs, but more so, I suspect because of Fraser's politics. Had Fraser lived longer, there's no doubt he would have written more of the Flashman series, and fans would have gobbled them up. But Fraser's rightwing ideas do not sit well with a new generation coming to terms with colonialism and the legacy of the British Empire.

So why pick up the unpleasantly named Flashman and the Redskins? I re-read this for deeply personal reasons. I first read the book in the late 1980s when I was besotted with Flashman's cowardly run through history. As a teenager the title character's racism and misogyny did not distract me. I was there for the adventure and escapism. This book in particular has a personal importance as it was one of the reads that led me into a lifelong interest in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. At the books climax, Flashman finds himself, through ill-luck, and misogyny, at the Greasy Grass wearing a dinner jacket. A close acquatinance of Custer's he fails to get them to retreat and only luck saves him.

Fraser's telling of the battle closely follows many accounts, and he is unearring accurate in details. As fans of Flashman will know, Fraser seeks out historical accounts where a suitable anonymous person is present at some historical juncture and inserts Flashman there. But it is Fraser's romatic retelling of the Bighorn and his own visit there which inserted the Montana battlefield into my subconcious. Nearly forty years later I too was able to visit the Greasy Grass.

But what of the novel? It is in two parts, one telling Flashman's experiences as a Forty-Niner, travelling with a wagon train to Santa Fe, two waggons full of prostitutes and slaves for a brothel with his (third?) concurant wife. There's plenty of unpleasantness here. Flashman uses racist terms, sells slaves and enjoys bigamy and adultery. He sneers at (and fears) the Native Americans and hates anyone who isn't of European extraction (though it doesn't stop him having sex with them). 

But what shines through is two fold. The first is Fraser's unscruipilous attention to detail, drawing heavily on contemporary eyewitness accounts he is able to paint a very realistic picture of life on the Plains and the North West frontieer. The second thing is Fraser's own remarkable duality when it comes to the oppressed and the victim. He has his main character decry them at every opportunity, yet he also avoids romantacising the Native Americans (though Flashman's wife certainly does this) instead recognising that they have a particular way of life that suited the Plains and was destroyed by the European settlers. But while it's wrong to place the beliefs of a character in the mouth of an author, it is  also hard not to see Fraser as agreeing that the Natives were violent and uncivilised. It makes for an contradictory read.

Part two of the book deals with Flashman's return to America in the 1870s, his presence at the failed attempt by the US government to buy the Black Hills and then at key moments in the preparations for the military encursion into Sioux terrority that led to the defeat at the Bighorn. Again, Fraser's research is exempliary. His footnotes are full of references that I really want to follow up for background on events, and Flashman's presence fits well into the real history.

Here is Western history in its gory, violent, racist detail - Flashman is present at a scalp hunt by White militia as they hunt Apache men, women and children for scalps. Its unpleasant, but the problem is that it is played merely as a way to get Flashman from one sticky situation into another. Fraser doesn't avoid the unpleasantness, but it does not detain him. I have noted elsewhere that Fraser's Flashman liberally uses the N word. Fraser might think this is reflective of the language of the times, but its not something that appears in contemporary accounts such as this one of the Indian Rising of 1857.

Given Fraser's worldview then, it is notable that his comupance in this novel, is closely related to his racist, philandering, sexist and arrogant behaviour. Flashman is suitably hoist by his petard. It makes for a satisfying ending. But should you, dear follower, read the book? I would argue that for all its attention to historical accuracy, its not a book that stands up well. Those of use who read it for nostalgic reasons are one thing. But if you are new to Flashman, the language, framework and ideas are likely to cause offence. While Fraser mentions many genuine heroes through the book, his anti-hero is the centre of the novel and it leaves far to bitter a taste in the mouth. When I was a teenager I wanted Flashman to escape. Now I hate him. A transition that you can follow through the various reviews below.

Related Reviews

Fraser - Flashman
Fraser - Flashman on the March
Fraser - Flashman in the Great Game
Fraser - Flashman and the Tiger
Fraser - Flashman and the Mountain of Light
Fraser - Quartered Safe Out Here

Jeanne O'Neill & Riga Winthrop - Fort Connah: A Page in Montana's History

Fort Connah is likely the oldest standing building in Montana in the United States, but has an importance far beyond its age and architecture. It was one of the original “forts” constructed by the Hudson Bay Company to assist in the extraction of millions of furs from North America through trade with furtrappers and Native Americans. While called a fort, the building had no military value, and was not garrisoned - it was living accomodation and storage for the McDonald family who lived and ran the trading post.

I was determined to visit Fort Connah earlier this year following my reading of James Hunters’ book Glencoe and the Indians. While on a visit, when we had been shown around by very kind and friendly members of the Connah restoration society, I picked up this short book by Jeanne O’Neill and Riga Winthrop. 

The book was published in 2002 when restoration of the Fort was still in the early stages. For those who know the history the book offers little new information. It is really a short introduction to the sigificance of Fort Connah to Montana’s history. As such it deservers a wider readership as I certainly felt that the site was little known, even to locals.

O’Neil and Winthrop locate their history very much in colonial development of the region. The fur industry, they write, “was just the beginning of a history of rape and plunder, of a cycle of boom and bust”. In fact the determining history of Fort Connah was not events on the ground, but wider economic and political contexts, which the authors do due justice too.

Fort Connah in May 2024

The book is short and typical of the peculiarly American local history publication that proliferates in locally in the States. It gives great insights into niche areas, normally only of interest to locals, and in the case of Fort Connah those with the surname McDonald. For, as Hunter’s work has shown, the influence of Scottish migrants on Flathead was significant. Angus McDonald who is buried near the Fort along with his Native American wife Catherine, where the head of a new tribe of locals who have come to play an important role in local history since the end of the 1800s. Angus was, it must be argued, not a genocidal immigrant and clearly, from this account at least, cared deeply for the indigenous  people and their knowledge. O’Neill and Winthrop repeat accounts of him telling Native American history while sharing a drink with visitors. Angus’ life - from Scotland to fur-trapper, Fort manager and then cattle farmer - forms the backbone to this story. But the book does cover more. SOme of this is a little peripheral, but adds to the flavour.

This book is perhaps somewhat specialised, but ought to be read by those heading to Flathead for their holidays. It is an good general introduction to a history of the area that deserves to be better known and would help ensure that Fort Connah and it’s intriguing history is preserved even further.  

Related Reviews

Hunter - Glencoe and the Indians
Spence - Montana: A History