ResoluteReader

Thursday, August 31, 2023

Friedrich Engels - Anti-Dühring

There's an old joke on the left that says that no one today would remember the German philosopher Eugen Dühring if Friedrich Engels had not written a 500 page polemic against his ideas! But Anti-Dühring or, to use it's full title, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science is much more than just an attack on a forgotten philosopher. It is a powerful defence of Marxist materialism in the face of criticisms that might have originated with Dühring, but are often repeated. In fact Engels' Anti-Dühring is one of the clearest statements of Marxist ideas and, written as it was much later than the Communist Manifesto, it is in some ways actually a clearer statement of Marx and Engels' revolutionary framework. It should not be surprising that three chapters of Anti-Dühring were

The first thing readers will not about the book is that Engels is really funny. He clearly despises Dühring and the loathing comes out in every page, Engels deploying a dry wit to skewer his opposition. One example will suffice:

What did Herr Dühring promise us? Everything. And what promises has he kept? None. "The elements of a philosophy which is real and accordingly directed to the reality of nature and of life", the "strictly scientific conception of the world", the "system-creating ideas", and all Herr Dühring's other achievements, trumpeted forth to the world by Herr Dühring in high-sounding phrases, turned out, wherever we laid hold of them, to be pure charlatanism.

Engels wrote the book because sections of the German workers' movement and the socialist organisations were attracted to Dühring's work. Partly, I suspect, this was because Dühring offered a simplistic explanation of history and social change that was easy to accept, precisely because it failed to challenge bourgeois philosophy. It's why Engels described his work as an "infinitely vulgarised duplicate of Hegelian logic" and its why he took the time to skewer Dühring. Looking at Dühring's arguments it is easy to spot this. For instance, his emphasis on "Force" as the key driver of economic development, where Dühring generalises from a thought-experiment about two people on a desert island and extrapolates to the whole of human society. Dühring's method, Engels' argues

consists of dissecting each group of objects of knowledge to what is claimed to be their simplest elements, applying to these elements similarly simple and what are claimed to be self-evident axioms and then continuing to operate with the aid of the results so obtained.

A problem in the "sphere of social life" Dühring says "is to be decided axiomatically, in accordance with particular, simple basic forms, just as if we were dealing with the simple... basic forms of mathematics".

Engels points out:

This is only giving a new twist to the old favourite ideological method, also known as the a priori method, which consists in ascertaining the properties of an object, by logical deduction from the concept of the object, instead of from the object itself.

To show how wrong Dühring is, Engels takes us on a detailed trip through human history, showing how human society is the product of wider relations that just those between two humans. Concepts like "morality and law. Equality", to take a chapter heading, arise out of specific historical circumstances:

The idea of Equality, both in its bourgeois and in its proletarian form, is therefore itself a historical product, the creation of which required definite historical conditions that in turn themselves presuppose a long previous history. it is therefore anything but an eternal truth. And if today it is taken for granted by the general public - in one sense or another - if, as Marx says, it 'already possesses the fixity of a popular prejudice", this is not the effect of its axiomatic truth, but the effect of the general diffusion and the continued appropriateness of the ideas of the eighteenth century.

Contrast Dühring, who abstracts from relations that are unreal. As Engels says, Dühring is shaped by his own Bourgeois prejudices...

Dühring is able without more ado to let his famous two men conduct their economic relations on the basis of equality, this is so because it seems quite natural to popular prejudice. And in fact Dühring calls his philosophy natural because it is derived solely from things which see to him quite natural. But why they seem natural to him is a question which of course he does not ask.

In showing the way Marxism provides an alternative to Dühring crude theories, Engels develops a brilliant account of human history and Marxist philosophy. Ranging from the labour theory of value to historical materialism, Engels' polemic is really an exposition of his, and Marx's, own theories. Engels however allows himself some fascinating intellectual detours, from the development of class society to a historical materialist account of the development of modern armies. Anyone, he quips, who tried to use Dühring principles to development and reform military power, would "earn nothing but a beating".

Ultimately though, Engels book is about the project of human emancipation through the fight for socialism, at a time when "every ruling and exploiting class has become superfluous and indeed a hindrance to social development". This is why Engels book continues to be read and Dühring is forgotten.

Monday, August 28, 2023

Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone - This is How You Lose the Time War

Science fiction and romance is a rare combination, so it is wonderful to find a novel that does the sub-genre so well. This is How You Lose the Time War is a short and very tightly written story (the authors apparently wrote alternate chapters) that tells the story of two super soldiers on opposing sides that fight a war up and down history, to shift historical outcomes so they favour their own side.

On one of these battlefields, Red finds a mocking letter from her opponent Blue. To prevent superiors finding traces of the missive, and hence potential for Red coming under suspicion that she's being turned, the letter quickly vanishes. Further exchanges between the two are written in complex codes, the eddies of liquids, the movement of gases, the reflections of lights, and move from mocking, to flirtation to outright declaration of friendship. Which eventually becomes love. Along the way the two share literature recommendations, favourite places and times.

Its a sweet story, that draws out the way that impersonal communications - letters, emails, messages - can become something much more than expected. But its told in the context of a genocidal fight that flips back and forth through time and space. The battles, fights and strategies are mostly hinted at - though the authors give us enough that we can fill in the blanks. Eventually the romance becomes a threat. Should superiors suspect than the agent is for the chop. But is the romance real? Or is it just a complex plot to turn, or entrap the opposition's best soldier?

That, dear reader, is for you to find out. This is How You Lose the Time War is rightly a phenomena, but its well worth digging out for a neat twist on the genre.

Saturday, August 26, 2023

Barbara Kingsolver - Demon Copperhead

Reading Demon Copperhead was not an easy process for me. Barbara Kingsolver has taken, as her inspiration, Charles Dickens' novel David Copperfield and its bildungsroman format. Her central character, Demon Copperhead, like Dickens' titular hero, faces trials and tribulations as he grows old. The book takes from Dickens' many characters and names, scenarios and events. But, as a reader, I was struck mostly by the tribulations. Each time Demon's life seemed to make a turn for the better, tragedy or disaster, awaited around the corner.

Demon Copperhead is set in West Virginia, an area of the eastern United States that Kingsolver knows well and features in several of her works. It is an intimate portrait of an area devastated by the loss of the mining industry and provided historical work, and yet an area that remains shaped by that industry and its legacy. The collapse of the industry has left in its wake unemployment, under-employment, hunger and brutal poverty - and a drug crisis that shapes Demon's life from his birth. His mother is a recovering addict, who loves Demon dearly, but whose life is reversed when she gets together with a new love - a man who brings violence and abuse into Demon's life. Following his mother's death, his neighbours provide love and support, until child services drag Demon away - adding him to a treadmill that puts orphans at the mercy of people who use kids to bolster their workplaces and finances. Their's no love her.

Kingsolver gives her youthful hero a great deal of agency - while he suffers each stage of his life, he constantly tries to break free - though constantly suffering the sort of setback that made this reader grind his teeth in anxiety. His big break, symbolic perhaps of the get out offered to a handful of lucky young men, is a chance on the football team - only to have that snatched away by the inevitable (in this novel anyway) injury - that forces him into opiate addiction.

It's a brutal book, and I found the despair and misery very hard work. But the misery is tempered by hope and solidarity - the community that does look after one another, the social workers that do their best, and the neighbours that support their friends and family. And there is also love.

But other than the individual escape there is little hope. One of Demon's better teachers tells them of the heroic past of the region - the people of the mining towns who fought pitched battles with the mining companies, to get a little more wages for their families. But it is these same multinationals that opened the doors to the drug crisis that blight's Demon's Lee County.

One of the women who support and love Demon makes a point of pointing out to him that the crises he faces are not his fault, they have been "done to him". She encourages Demon, and the reader, to think about who has been doing this. But this is not a Marxist tract - it is a beautiful, if painful, story of hope and personal liberation. Demon's escape - if it is that - is touchingly told. The ending makes the journey worthwhile and with it Kingsolver caps perhaps the great American novel of the 21st century. Let's hope we live to see a time when all the victims of capitalism in places like Lee County, get to see their oceans too.

Related Reviews

Kingsolver - Prodigal Summer

Sunday, August 20, 2023

Mark L Thomas, Jessica Walsh & Charlie Kimber - The Revival of Resistance: The 2022-3 strikes and the battles still to come

In the year to June 2023 Britain saw around 4.1 million strike days. Traditionally these days are described by the media and the government as "lost", but for the trade unionists taking them, and the socialist movement these days represented a revival of the workers movement. This represented the highest level of strike action since the 1980s and a chance for trade unionists to turn back decades of pay freezes, attacks on workers' conditions and austerity. That year saw impressive strikes and pickets lines and huge demonstrations. Like many other socialists engaged in active solidarity I visited more pickets in this year than I had in my previous three decades of activism. The vast majority of those picket lines were exciting, inspiring and big - with a new young generation of workers engaged in strikes, many for the first time.

But the size of the strikes and the celebratory mood on them sometimes hide a problem. In few of the strikes was there a serious strategy to win, and too many disputes have ended with deals that are best described as "poor". With inflation in the UK hitting record levels, many groups of workers settled for deals that were less than inflation and certainly, as this book argues, below what could have been won.

The authors of this book are all leading members of the British Socialist Workers' Party. Their short book is an attempt to analyse the strikes and offer "a sharp challenge to the union bureaucracy and lays out a strategy for the way forward". Thus the book is more than an analysis of the moment, but an attempt to learn lessons and develop workers' struggle. The authors identify a number of problems with the struggle as it stands. The first is the episodic nature of the strikes with unions calling strikes that lasted one or two, sometimes a few days. The second is a failure to coordinate - a reluctance on behalf of the union leadership to strike together with other unions. When this did happen, such as the days that saw the Civil Service union PCS strike with the teachers in the NEU - the joint events, such as the demonstration in Manchester that I was part of, were joyous celebrations of workers' power.

The authors write:

A central less from these experiences is that resisting poor deals is connected to the argument for escalation, which is a break from the limited pressure of episodic strikes. The question of how more can be won, how real victories can be best achieved needs to be raised constantly. This in turn need s to be combined with rebuilding activist networks that understand they cannot rely on the trade union leaderships to fight effectively and consistently.

This critical position on the trade union leadership is often at odds with the initial experience of many strikers. As the authors point out:

For more than 30 years, the near universal experience of working class activists, even the most militant, has been one of relying on and operating within a framework set from above - by the trade union bureaucracy, and acting independently of them has been a rare exception. So it is not surprising that many activists entered the recent strikes with illusions both about the scale of the confrontation needed to achieve decisive victories... but also, and correspondingly the scale of the challenge with their own officials that this would require.

The authors draw on the SWP's analysis, first developed by Tony Cliff, that argues that the trade union apparatus, forms a "separate social layer with its own set of interests distinct from workers on the one hand and the bosses who oversee and enforce their exploitation on the other". The bureaucrats and union leaders have a material interest in maintaining their position and not fighting too hard - not least their high salaries, as a rather shocking and useful salary table in this book shows.

The strikes could, and should, win more - and the barrier is the inherent conservatism of the trade union bureaucracy. The counter to this is the development of rank and file organisation that can lead the struggle from below, in defiance of the leadership if and when needed. The authors demonstrate this with historical accounts and several examples from contemporary struggles in Britain. But most excitingly there is a really inspiring chapter on the movement in France that is on a much bigger scale than in Britain. There the movement "shook" the country and demonstrated the potential to win so much more. There are plenty of useful lessons for British trade unions. The inclusion of this material and linking it to the British struggle is a real strength of the book.

The authors' caution though. The potential for developing these movements is not the immediate victory of socialism, but rather a process by which

workers would start to see alternative sources of power and decision-making that could destroy and replace the capitalist state. Everything that diverts and delays that process is fatal. It creates opening s for the bureaucrats to squeeze life from the struggle.

In conclusion then the authors are hopeful that we can build on the movements of 2022/3 to win real change. But there is a struggle - we need a bigger, stronger rank and file within the trade unions and a bigger revolutionary socialist movement. With these tools the movement can grow and expand its horizons. There has never been a greater need for workers' victory and this short, but inspiring and accessible book should be read by every worker who is sick of the system and wants to fight back.

Tuesday, August 15, 2023

Karl Kautsky - Communism in Central Europe in the time of the Reformation

Today, Karl Kautsky is best known for his political demolition at the hands of Lenin. After Kautsky attacked the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks' role, Lenin wrote a polemic against Kautsky - decrying the former "Pope of Marxism" for his betrayal. For generations since Kautsky has been known as the "Renegade". But Kautsky deserved such a polemic because his betrayal was so great. For years he had been the most authoritative Marxist writer and thinker. His reputation had been built up over long years writing theoretical and historical books. Kautsky had a particular interest in the role of religion in the struggles of ordinary people. Communism in Central Europe in the time of the Reformation is a history of class and religious struggle from below in that period.

It is a wide ranging book where Kautsky's central thesis is that the mass of people had long engaged in class struggle against religious authorities as well as their rulers: "The lower classes, the peasants, the town proletarians and the class immediately above them, together with the burgesses and the lower nobility, groaned under the domination of Rome. Even before the days of Wycliffe and Huss they had shown themselves... to enter upon a struggle against the Papal Church".

Kautsky argues that these class struggles took place using the religious language of the time, and the German Reformation "supplied the catch-words and arguments for the combatants till the middle of the seventeenth century... so that to the superficial observer it might be seen that in all these struggle religion was the only object in question".

This is, of course, the classical Marxist tradition and Kautsky demonstrates this repeatedly over the struggles he covers. He frames these histories in terms of class struggle and the development of class antagonism, particular the emerging capitalist class.

The problem is that Kautsky tends to project contemporary class relations back into history. There is much, anachronistic discussion of proletarians, far beyond the miners and workers' who would come to form the original working class. At time Kautsky hides this by talking of "proletarian elements" but its not particularly clear that he acknowledges the differences. That said Kautsky does help the reader understand how the struggle "from below" is also in the context of the struggles between groups within the ruling class. It is this element that I found particularly helpful.

Much of the book looks at the development of "Communist" ideas. Today the word is tainted by what Stalin did to the Russian Revolution, but in Kautsky's time it would have been much clearer what he meant. Kautsky was exploring how early religious groups in particular developed ideas of Communal living, Community of goods, common ownership and so on. A long section deals with Münzer and the radical wing of the German Peasant War, Münzer famously envisaged a society free of class oppression. It is why Luther attacked Münzer so forcibly:

If he says that God and His Spirit have sent him like the Apostles, then make him prove it with signs and wonders; but forbid his preaching, for when God would change the natural order of things, He signifies it by all manner of miracles.

But it is in the section on Munster and the anabaptists that Kautsky's framework begins to fail him. In 1534, long after the Peasant War had been destroyed, the anabaptist movement take control of Munster and reorganise society in the face of the Catholic Church and their rulers along "Communistic" lines. Kautsky defends the anabaptists from their critics, arguing that the salacious lies and gossip are accusations designed to justify the violent repression. Kautsky's decent account of the rise and fall of anabaptist Munster is not the problem, nor in fact is his demolition of the slander directed against the anabaptists (in particular the accusations of Common ownership of wives etc). He argues instead that this was a practice that arose out of the reality of Munster under siege and was an economic relationship - not a sexual one. Kautsky explores how the anabaptist thinkers, such as Rothmann, drew such ideas from their Biblical readings. But it doesn't really work - Kautsky doesn't explore enough the different roles of women and men within Reformation society and how this affected reality on the ground. A far more believable summary comes from James Stayer's book on The German Peasants' War and Anabaptist Community of Goods, where he argues:

The reality of community of goods in Münster was nothing like the egalitarian transformation of patterns of life and work achieved by the Hutterites. Although Münsterite polygamy reflected the broad interest among Reformation radicals in a regenerate sexuality, according to I Corinthians 7:29, it amounted in practice to nothing more than the regulating of the female majority according to the prescriptions of biblical misogyny. There was a lot of desperate play-acting in Münster from the actor-king downward. These people must have recognized with one side of their minds... that they were destined to violent death... In the meantime the hegemony of notables over commoners and of men over women continued.

Kautsky essential portrays Münster as a early version of the Paris Commune with similar ideals and experiences. Yet the reality is very different. With his vigorous defence of anabaptist Münster against its reactionary critics he fails to critically examine his heroes. The inevitable defeat of the anabaptists then becomes, for Kautsky a crisis on the scale of the defeat of modern day workers' movements:

Anabaptism, the proletarian cause, nay, the collective democracy in the German Empire, lay helpless in the dust; and outside of Germany also the fighting party of the Baptist order had lost all support.

In his attempt to attack contemporary critics of the anabaptists who used Münster as a way to attack modern socialists, Kautsky ends up making the same mistake as them.

A careful reader will pick up traces of Kautsky's later ambivalence over the role of the state in society, but there is no need to explore that here. Lenin, after all, did it far better.

Sadly Kautsky's book doesn't stand the test of time. It is rather dull, though it is certainly possible that is the fault of a bad translation, coming alive only when Kautsky is celebrating the achievements of these movements. But there are more useful, modern studies of similar periods and Kautsky's Marxism offers little insight beyond the superficial.

Monday, August 14, 2023

Christopher Priest - Airside

In 1949, the massive Hollywood star Jeanette Marchand landed at London airport. She got off the plane, the only passenger in first class for that leg of the journey, the crew watched her walk into the arrivals building, but she never left. She was never seen again. Her disappearance was the subject of a few weeks of intense newspaper discussion, and then she was forgotten. Her career a footnote in Hollywood history.

A couple of decades later, Justin Farmer begins to dig into the mystery. As a youngster he saw Marchand in several old films, then as a film student he looked back into her career and later, as a world famous film expert and critic he, though a series of chance encounters, starts to uncover the secret. Farmer is obsessive - he documents every film he has ever seen in minute detail, and he has a strange and uncomfortable relationship with air travel. Airports, partly related to his own childhood in a primary school near Manchester airport, and partly related to his film interests, become a focus for this obsession. They are strange places, intensely time focused, but also timeless. Farmer begins to see airports as places that are the focus for disappearance, and on a global work related trip, jetlagged and tired he has his own strange experiences.

Airside is an unusual book. It reads like a work of non-fiction, with staccato prose, factual and pointed. Marchand is, of course, invented. But her career is depicted in the obsessive detail that a film buff like Farmer would produce. Her life, loves, and films form the focus for an intense account which jumps back and forth as Farmer unravels historic events. The book is compelling. At times its not really clear what is happening, and Priest adds to the mystery and the feeling of non-fiction by inserting invented reviews by Farmer about films - these add to the concepts of the airport and a strange space, give us insights into the tension of Hollywood in the pre-Hays era and also give us a sense of Farmer himself - obsessive, but devoted to film and those he loves.

Sadly the strange premise and compelling, intense novel are let down by a weak and somewhat obvious conclusion - though Priest handles the ending in a rather surprising and enjoyable way. The feeling of unsettling, unreality that is Priest's trademark is heavily on display here. Readers should enjoy this for the journey more than the ending- though if you find airports and air travel anxiety inducing, you might well want to skip this.

Friday, August 11, 2023

Dan Hooper - At the Edge of Time

Somewhere on my shelves I have a copy of Steven Weinberg's book The First Three Minutes, a 1977 classic that looks at the origins of the universe in the Big Bang. Dan Hooper's At the Edge of Time might be considered a modern updating of that book, though it really looks at the "first three seconds" and summarises much of the latest research about how the early universe developed and led to what we can see today in the skies.

The immediate aftermath of the Big Bang was an incredible time. For extremely brief periods the rapidly expanding universe went through a series of different states that saw subatomic particles crashing into each other at massive speeds. Periods known as the Quark-Gluon Plasma era and the Grand Unified era followed in quick succession, followed by longer periods (of minutes) which saw the formation of the first protons and neutrons, followed by the creation of nuclei in the 50,000 years that followed. It is a complex time during which, as Hooper points out, "almost everything... remains a mystery to us". It is a time when the laws of physics we know today probably behaved very very differently, and when the universe expanded faster than the speed of light.

It is this inflationary period to which Hooper devotes much of his discussion - because it is in this period that the large scale structures of the contemporary universe have their origin. It, as he says, ends after a brief moment and "in a sense one can think of the end of inflation as the true beginning of the universe we live in". When Weinberg wrote his book, the idea of the Big Bang had only just been accepted by most cosmologists. Hooper explains that many of them probably expected that 50 years later we would know much of what there is to know, but that isn't true. In fact some of this book is tinged with disappointment as he points out that he, and many of his colleagues, expected the Large Hadron Collider to answer most of their questions about what took place in the very early universe.

The book is easy to understand, though readers without some physics and astronomy background might find some of it hard going. I was challenged by some of it - one realises that ones physics degree from the early 1990s is going out of date quite quickly when reading Hooper or Chanda Prescod-Weinstein). But at times I wasn't sure my incomprehension was simply lack of clarity on physics. For instance, I thought that Hooper confused the many universes theory by simply explaining how the existing universe is broken up into sections that are unobservable due to them being beyond a cosmic horizon where they are receding from the observer faster than light. This is important because, as Hooper points out, we cannot really explain how the temperatures in those distant areas are so similar. But it is not, in my opinion, quite the same as the many universes idea that speculates about multiple universes with (perhaps) different physical laws.

The book is at its best when Hooper is linking these complex ideas to his day to day work. In fact there is rather a nice part when he explains what he actually does! I think this sort of communication is important because it helps to ground science in reality, as well as making it clear that scientists are ordinary workers too.

For those fascinated by astronomy and the early universe, Dan Hooper's book is excellent. Let us hope that his firm belief that many of the unknowns he highlights will be explained soon.

Thursday, August 10, 2023

David De Jong - Nazi Billionaires

This is not a cheerful book, but it is an important one. It deals with the close links between German big business and the Nazi regime, primarily during Nazi rule, but it also touches on the importance of big business and its money, to helping Hitler come to power. This is not a new subject, but De Jong's book takes a slightly different approach with a deep dive into the finances and activities of a small number of very powerful, and very wealthy individuals and the corporations they headed. Tragically we find that most of the guilty, who benefited greatly from Nazi war crimes, state antisemitism and the Holocaust, got of completely, and their firms and families continue to benefit from the money made during the Nazi era.

Five families, or dynasties, are discussed in detail, the Quandts, the Flicks, the von Fincks, the Porsche-Piëch and the Oetkers. Some of the products associated with these companies, and their legacy, will be familier to readers today from the brand names. Others are less well known, but their role in banking, mining, engineering and arms manufacturing ensured they were central to the Nazi war effort. Out of this they made millions.

The Quandts are the focus for much of the book. The complicated family tree, which alongside that of the others is helpfully reproduced in the book's appendices, shows the patriarch, Günther Quandt and a couple of children from two wives. The second of these, Magda Ritschel, became the "first lady" of the Reich, after marrying Joseph Goebbels. The complex story of Magda and Joseph Goebbels battle to adopt one of Günther's and Magda's children is told, but it is only the backdrop to the darker tale of how these close relations led to close financial and then industrial support for Hitler's regime. Magda might have been an ardent Nazi from early on, but her former husband was a classic capitalist. Willing to find wealth through whatever opportunity he could.

And opportunities abounded during the Nazi era. The Quandts, alongside the other families, saw ways to expand their influence and holdings through the takeover of factories and banks in occupied lands, the Aryanization of businesses and the manufacture of arms and ammunition for the war machine. Several of the companies, including corporations that remain house hold names, benefited from slave labour in their workplaces.

It is a sickening story, and De Jong has spent long hours in the archives drawing out the details of what took place, and often correcting official stories or judicial records. For most of the industry heads managed to paint their wartime activity in an entirely different light, rewriting history for the benefit of the future.

De Jong's book is a marvel of research. But it is also a breath taking read, taking the inexpert reader through the maze of financial transactions and legal records. Marxists have long argued that capitalism does not need liberalism or democracy, but is happy to make profits wherever it can. Here is proof that it will use the most diabolical methods to do that. But what De Jong also shows, though perhaps he doesn't draw it out enough, is that big business was keen to support the Nazis (among other right-wing possible future governments) because Hitler promised and end to the troublesome workers' movement. Indeed, the boom time of profits during Hitler's rule was not just about the massive state spending, but also because the trade unions were outlawed and the labour movement crushed.

I was disappointed that the book did not delve much into the links between business and the Holocaust. Some of this material is already known - such as the role of IBM's subsidiaries and IG Farben. More must be out there.

De Jong opens and closes the book by discussing the way that Germany today has not yet fully reckoned with the reality of corporate behaviour during the war. He illustrates this with a number of examples that show how the families and the companies today have, or more usually haven't, attempted to acknowledge their guilt. With the rise of fascist and far right organisations today, this is a legacy that must urgently be explored and highlighted. The companies must be held accountable. The possibility of this has been demonstrated by the Black Lives Matter movement which has forced corporate and public recognition of colonialism and slavery in many, though not enough, areas. De Jong argues that:

This movement toward facing the past is somehow bypassing many of Germany's legendary businessmen. Their dark legacy remains hidden in plain sight. This book, in some small way, tries to right that wrong.

With Nazi Billionaires David De Jong has made an enormous contribution to this process and I encourage everyone to read it.

Related Reviews

Black - IBM and the Holocaust
Paxton - The Anatomy of Fascism
Guerin - Fascism and Big Business
Roseman - The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution

Monday, July 31, 2023

Jan Rüger - Heligoland

In preparation for a recent day trip (of a lifetime!) to Helgoland (Heligoland in English) I picked up Jan Rüger's book in order to get some background to this isolated, but pivotal place. I am very glad I did. It is a readable, informative work that avoids focusing just on the North Sea archipelago's history. Instead it places Helgoland in the context of the colonial and imperial history which swirled around the island and sometimes focused on it.

Helgoland is about 45km from Germany, and its main island is barely one square kilometre. Rationally this would place the island in Germany, but colonialism is rarely that simple. Helgoland came to strategic importance during the Napoleonic Wars when England took it from the Danish to ensure it could not be used by the French. It assumed an importance far beyond its diminutive size when it was used as base to smuggle and spy on the continent.

But it was with the late 19th and early 20th century that the island became most important - not least, as Rüger says, because it was "situated at the fault line between imperial and national histories". The relations between Germany and British were not simply those of antagonists. Helgoland came to prominence in a period when Germany and British rivalry was not automatically that of enemies. For Rüger, "the case of Heligoland is typical of this paradox. It offers history of both the transnational relations that bound nineteenth-century Germany and the British empire together and the reverse process". This is perhaps best summed up by the startling fact that Britain exchanged Helgoland for "colonial concessions in [West] Africa" in 1890.

From then on, Helgoland essentially becomes a site for a war of position between the two empires. During the First World War the islands were fortified as a naval base, after which it was disarmed and put under British control. The island then became a symbol of German nationalism, epitomising the "punishment" of the Treaty of Versailles, and its re-fortification a favourite demand of far-right and fascist politicians. Hitler made sure he was photographed there on his way to becoming Chancellor, and once in power the islands were turned back into a massive military base. After the Second World War the allies disarmed the islands again, and they were returned to British control. The British bombed them over and over as "practice", destroying any historical locations in the process, until a renewed Nationalist campaign returned them to Germany were they once again became a tourist destination as they had been in the 1800s and the 1920s and 1930s.

The detail of this oscillation is brilliantly told by Rüger who has an eye for absurdity, anecdote and a excellent way of telling the broader history of global politics by using this small set of islands as a narrative focus. I was very struck though by Rüger's point that it is impossible to tell the history of Helgoland without the "colonial dimension". This is partly obvious in the way that the two empires traded the island for Zanzibar. Essentially a tiny island was swapped for a major area of Africa without anyone bothering to tell thousands of people who lived in Zanzibar. As Rüger summarises:

While Heligoland turned German in August 1890, the protectorate over Witu [an area in present day Kenya] passed to the Brisih. There was no ceremony or public occasion marking the handover. In fact, there was no handover. Berlin and London agreed that 'Germany withdraws in favour of Great Britain her protectorate'. But they failed to communicate this to Ahmad ibn Fumo Bakari, the sultan whose sovereignty both governments had pledged to respect.

The consequences were horrific, as confusion over rights and colonial claims led to the deaths of nine German colonists followed by violent retribution from the British military and the destruction of Witu.

It is Rüger's insistence that you cannot separate the history of Helgoland from this "colonial dimension" that helps make this book so worthwhile. But I think it undermines his claim that his book's main aim is to allow "us to appreciate the many ways in which Europe and the British empire were bound up with one another." In fact, the book underlines the way that the world was carved up by competing imperial powers - and this included small islands near Europe as well as Africa, Asia and the Americas. Rüger notably points out that the people who were least considered in the various plans of Germany and Britain were those who lived on Helgoland itself, leading to confusion and despair. Like elsewhere, the Helgolanders were able to fight to preserve rights from their changing national powers, but their lives and livelihoods were eventually eradicated by the needs of the state - economic, or military. In this sense Helgoland is a microcosm of the conflicts between nation states, and a specific aspect for the early 20th century.

Despite the occasionally cultural reference today, and a lingering knowledge of the location from the Shipping Forecast, most people in Britain care little for these islands. On my recent trip I was struck by the fact that there were almost no British tourists there at all, despite its charms, idiosyncrasies and fascinating ecology and history. But it would be a real shame if Jan Rüger's book was only read by those heading out to the islands - it is an excellent example of how a detailed study of a very specific subject can illuminate much wider topics. In this case Heligoland tells us a great deal about how Great Power politics shaped our modern world.

Related Reviews

Mazower - Hitler's Empire

Saturday, July 29, 2023

Octavia E. Butler - Kindred

Despite my left wing politics and love of science fiction and fantasy, I have neglected Octavia E. Butler for too long. So I am very glad that I picked up Kindred at the Marxism Festival in London this summer, ready for my holiday. Kindred is perhaps Butler's most famous novel and is regularly set as a text in schools in the United States, as well as being made into a recent, short lived, TV series.

The popularity of Kindred lies in part in its approach to its subject. The book deals with the reality of slavery, and the experiences of those who were enslaved, as well as more complex and related questions such as the position of freed slaves in the American South. These are not easy subjects and Butler spares little in her descriptions of the violence of slavery and the day-to-day brutality, including sexual violence, inflicted on the enslaved.

Butler's approach places the reader at a slight distance, as the story is told by Dana, a working class woman from New York, who is an aspiring writer and married to a white man, Kevin. Dana's ancestors were slaves and she knows a little about them through the inscriptions of a family Bible. She travels back in time to the American South in 1815, pulled back each time Rufus, the heir to a Maryland plantation, life is endangered. Rufus must survive in order for Dana to be born in the future, so she forms a mutual relationship with him, that requires both to protect the other. Rufus' infatuation with Dana also threatens her, and Kevin's trip back in time upsets this dynamic. But Dana continues to return, and spends time with her fellow slaves - encouraging small acts of rebellion, such as teaching reading, while also trying to reestablish contact with Kevin.

This approach is very clever as it allows the reader to be one step removed from the violence, and observe events through Dana's eyes, that is until the slavers decide they need to discipline her. Then the reader, alongside Dana is pulled into the horror.

There is much else in this short novel. The dynamics between the slaves are described, as well as the oppressive and exploitative one between slaver owner and enslaved. These are not always positive. I also enjoyed the way that Butler uses the time travel aspect to illustrate some of the debates about slavery today, as well as demonstrating the way that white people - in the person of Kevin - could simply escape reality.

This is an excellent novel, that deserves its wide readership and accolades and I look forward to reading more by Butler.

Wednesday, July 26, 2023

Chinua Achebe - An Image of Africa

This short book is actually a collection of two essays by China Achebe, the author of the superb novel Things Fall Apart - the classic exploration of the impact of colonialism on Africa. In this theme, the first essay is a brilliant study by Achebe of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Conrad's book is, as Achebe points out, frequently studied and offered as a study of liberalism and imperialism. It is supposed to highlight the reality of colonial rule on Africa, through the mindset of its narrator. As such Conrad is let off the hook, and allowed to be the voice of consciousness for the reader. This, argues, Achebe is nonsense, because Conrad is "a bloody racist" and Heart of Darkness is a book which

parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and places today. I am talking about a story in which the very humanity of black people is called in question.

Achebe continues to preempt those who argue that it is not Conrad's voice, but his characters, by pointing out:

But if Conrad's intention is to draw a cordon sanitaire between himself and the moral and psychological malaise of his narrator, his care seems to me totally wasted because he neglects to hint, clearly and adequately, at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters. It would not have been beyond Conrad's power to make that provision if he had thought it necessary.

Achebe points out that Conrad might have seen the consequences of imperialism, "but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth". This is, of course, because Conrad shared those beliefs and racist attitudes - the Image of Africa that Conrad uses, "did not originate" with him, it is the "dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination" and Conrad simply "brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it". While liberal Europeans might decry this characterisation of Conrad's racism in Heart of Darkness, Achebe notes that "victims of racism" have no such problems identifying the racism at the heart of the novel.

The second essay, The Trouble with Nigeria, seems at first to be a lot less accessible to a reader in the 21st century as it deals with the political and economic issues of post-colonial Nigeria. Achebe illustrates this through discussions of corruption, waste, inefficiency and lack of democracy in Nigeria in the 1970s. He focuses on local questions such as Tribalism, as well as wider issues common to many countries such as inequality. It is brilliantly, and fluidly written - as witnessed by Achebe's specific use of the traffic problem in Nigeria as a metaphor, albeit a concrete one, for the country's problems. How can, Achebe asks, a country like Nigeria - with its wealth of natural resources, people and experience - become a global power? While the book is rooted in its time and place, the questions are eternal - at least under capitalism. And this, is one of the shortcomings of an otherwise interesting essay. Achebe highlights many problems, and notes particularly the immense inequality in Nigeria which has seen a new Black African ruling class become supremely wealthy. The starting point for Achebe seems to be a collective national interest - with the different class interests of its population - farmers, workers and capitalists - placed in second place. The force to change this, is one that has hitherto been silent and includes Achebe himself - Nigeria's intellectuals.

While Achebe skewers the hypocrisy and dishonesty of the country's politicians, he is curiously naive when it comes to the origins of Nigeria's troubles. These he sees as caused by the mindsets left behind by colonialism, which thus requires intellectuals to drive change. He fails to see Nigeria's problems as originating in the nature of capitalism - a system that cannot ever be democratic or just, even when run by a black ruling class. It will take a revolutionary change to fully break free of the chains of international and national capital that continue to hold Africa's development back. Deep down Achebe perhaps knows this, as with his celebration of the black, Muslim socialist radical Aminu Kano, at the end of the book.

I found both these essays highly stimulating politically. But they also demonstrate a powerful polemical talent - these are books that challenge liberal politics and viewpoints, and show that the legacy of European colonialism goes much deeper than many would admit, which is why this short book deserves a read.

Related Reviews

Achebe - Things Fall Apart

Sunday, July 23, 2023

Frederick Taylor - The Berlin Wall

I have a personal connection with the Berlin Wall. My mother took part in protests when the East German government built it, and travelled there to see it fall. We spent many a childhood visit to Berlin looking at the imposing edifice, and I recall my Uncle, in the summer of 1989 telling me and my best friend that the Wall would "always" be there. A few months later it was open, and a year later the place we were standing when we had that conversation was a massive building site as the Potsdamer Platz was rebuilt. I spent New Year's Eve between 1989 and 1990 at the Brandenburg Tour - too lacking in confidence to climb onto the Wall as thousands of other revellers did, I did swig champagne and swap bits of the Wall we'd chipped off with fellow celebrants.

A trip to Germany this year offered the opportunity to read more about the background to my family interactions with the wall through Frederick Taylor's book. Unfortunately, while there is much of interest, the book itself is an indulgent and overlong mess. Taylor begins his account of the Wall with the founding of the city in ancient times and only reaches the end of the Second World War, and the division of the city among the Allied Powers around page fifty. This tendency to over burden the reader with information and detail is a major flaw of the book, which helps push the page count to over 600 and have the effect of numbing the reader.

Another problem is the focus of the story. Taylor frames the history of the Wall mostly through an account of the machinations of East Germany, which means that his point of view is very much that of politicians. This is important when he is explaining the big picture (for instance when he shows the interaction between East Germany and the Soviet Union's interests). It helps the reader to understand why the Wall was built and so on. But it means that much of the human picture is lost. The account is at its best when it draws on interviews and personal accounts - but there is too little of this, and too much about the infighting between Eastern Bloc politicians and others.

I don't know Taylor's particular politics, but there is also a tendency to see the British, French and Americans as generally "good" and the Russians and then the East German's as "bad". This stems from Taylor's critique of the Eastern regimes as being socialist. Unfortunately Taylor makes no real attempt to interrogate what is meant by socialist, so he simply draws a continuous line between (say) Marx and Lenin and Erich Honecker and Gorbachev. Because what was done in the name of socialism by these regimes is abhorrent, he then implies that what was being done in opposition was thus positive. So those protesting against both the East German regime and its wall, as well as US imperialism in Vietnam are dismissed as being naive, or simplistic. Taylor isn't a socialist, so he probably isn't aware of Marxist debates about the nature of the (post Revolution) Soviet Union or the East European regimes. This is a shame - not for point scoring reasons - but actually because understanding the dynamic of those regimes' economies would have helped him explain why the various countries went into crisis in the late 1970s and why the collapse was so rapid.

Sadly the account of the fall of the Berlin Wall (and the rest of the East European regimes) is the weakest part of the book. Here we really are given the impression that the crisis arose out of the machinations of various politicians and the failure of the East German government to manage the economy properly. There's no real sense of the mass protests across East Europe driving a systemic political crisis that forced the politicians' hands. The key point of this, when Hungary opens its borders, is described as something that just happens - rather than being the result of a mass movement. Oddly, given Taylor's discussion of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, there's no mention of the 1988 reburial of Imre Nagy's remains as a focus of this discontent. In fact, the story of the collapse of the East German regime really deserved more about the bravery of the masses than Taylor offers. He's more keen on praising Ronald Reagan, than exploring the ideas and motivations of the people of Leipzig, for instance.

This isn't to say there aren't real gems of interest in this book, but they tend to get lost in the mass of detail. A good editor would have cut back Taylor's digressions (do we need a three page account of the Maginot Line in World War Two to explain the metaphor Taylor uses for the way the Berlin Wall was eventually bypassed?) You do get a good sense of how the US in particular, and the West German's to a lesser extent, did see the Wall's existence as beneficial in the sense of providing stability in the 1950s situation. But readers looking for an overview will probably find this book useful, but it needed a sharper analysis of the regimes and more detail on the protest movements to make it more than a superficial read.

Sunday, July 16, 2023

The Book of Margery Kempe

Reading Janina Ramirez's excellent Femina recently I was reminded that I had a copy of The Book of Margery Kempe on my shelves. Margery Kempe's book is variously described as the first autobiography and the a "spiritual autobiography" that is crucially important for understanding the Middle Ages.

There is no doubt that the book is fascinating and important. It is an account of the life of Margery Kempe dictated to various scribes towards the end of her life. It details her extraordinary pilgrimages and journies to Rome and the Holy Land, as well as eastward from Danzig. It also tells us a little about her own life, though nothing in detail. Readers looking for an account of Middle Age life will not find it her, though you will read much about her own thoughts and ideas, framing the lives of women of the era.

Kempe was an incredible woman. She lived in Lynn in Norfolk (Now King's Lynn) and was the daughter of a wealthy and influential local merchant who was a longstanding Member of Parliament. She was born about 1373 and lived to the late 1430s. For much of her life she suffered from ill health and, what we would likely today term Mental Distress. The latter manifested itself through Kempe's belief that she was in direct personal communication with Jesus and other figures including Jesus's mother Mary and his Grandmother. Kempe engaged in extended dialogue with these figures, particularly Jesus, about her life and sin, and the lives of those around her. She was also prone to loud, distressing and extended periods of crying and wailing - often to the distress of those around her.

Modern commentators often spend time analysing what these symptoms might mean. I am not a medical or Mental Health professional and would not attempt to make those diagnoses. To me, what is most interesting is how Kempe experienced these and interpreted them. To many people around her she was seen as unwell. But not all. Many other people accepted her experiences as religious. Kempe was not seen as a prophet, but she was understood as holy by many people and her behaviour often won her friends and supporters. Frequently during her pilgrimages she was given money by others to help her, and to pray for them. Sometimes these were senior and influential members of the clergy. Often she gave that money away.

There were those who saw her behaviour as being a mark of mental distress or often that she had been possessed by the devil. Unsurprisingly, her symptoms were interpreted through the prism of religion - even by those who were critical of her.

People will read The Book of Margery Kempe, hoping for direct insights into ordinary life in her times. Finding that is not easy - though there are some fascinating bits about the role of women, and Kempe's own struggles with her sexuality and gender. The dialog with her husband about chastity, and the marital rape that takes place beforehand as he wants to continue to have sex with her, as she has decided that she would rather be chaste is often discussed. But less so are her fears of rape and assault while on her travels and the comfort she receives from her discussions with Jesus that he will protect her. These give the reader some insight into the fears of women at the time. I was also struck by the way she finds kindness - especially among "Saracens" while travelling in the Holy Land. She clearly was a woman who was able to communicate and find friendship - even though her behaviour often led some companions to decry and abandon her.

As much of the book is reported discussions between Kempe and Jesus, it is not an easy read without much religious background. Nonetheless we are left with an interesting insight into spiritual belief and behaviour.

Friday, July 14, 2023

Donella H. Meadows & others - The Limits to Growth

Growth, and its counterpart, degrowth, have become hot topics for activists and theoreticians concerned about capitalism's destruction of the world and its people. The idea that we need to move away from an economic system based on accumulation of capital toward one that has a more sustainable relationship with nature is attractive. I have dealt elsewhere with the degrowth concept, and will produce more on that. But in researching the topic I wanted to read the book that is often seen as the grandparent of these current debates. The Limits to Growth was published in 1972 and came out of a group of thinkers known as The Club of Rome. It was enormously popular, influential and has spawned a number of updates and similar books in the fifty years since its publication. It is also a theoretical mess.

The book's authors explain that "The team examined the five basic factors that determine, and therefore, ultimately limit, growth on this planet-population, agricultural production, natural resources, industrial production". They conclude:

If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.

The research is based on the then, relatively new, idea of computer modelling, something the researchers place great faith in. The computers of the era were of course much less powerful than modern technology, and this naturally limited the scope of the models themselves, nonetheless the team were proud of their achievements:

Since ours is a formal, or mathematical, model it also has two important advantages over mental models. First, every assumption we make is written in a precise form so that it is open to inspection and criticism by all. Second, after the assumptions have been scrutinized, discussed, and revised to agree with our best current knowledge, their implications for the future behavior of the world system can be traced without error by a computer, no matter how complicated they become.

With the development of Computer Science also came cautionary arguments, and one of the best known of these was GIGO - "Garbage In, Garbage Out". In other words, your model is only as good as the data and assumptions that it rests upon. In the case of The Limits to Growth, the problem with the book comes down to the assumptions made in the modelling, and in particular the authors' focus on the two biggest drivers of "growth" in their view - capital and population.

As such the models themselves are not particularly at fault, and tend to show what you might expect. Industrial economies rely on the availability of natural resources and labour, and when these are undermined by shortages or other effects (such as pollution affecting health) the system tends to go into crisis. Much of the book's diagrams consists of models that demonstrate things like this:

Thus population and capital, driven by exponential growth, not only reach their limits, but temporarily shoot beyond them before the rest of the system, with its inherent delays, reacts to stop growth. Pollution generated in exponentially increasing amounts can rise past the danger point, because the danger point is first perceived years after the offending pollution was released. A rapidly growing industrial system can build up a capital base dependent on a given resource and then discover that the exponentially shrinking resource reserves cannot support it. Because of delays in the age structure, a population will continue to grow for as long as 70 years, even after average fertility has dropped below the replacement level (an average of two children for each married couple).

Modern readers might be amused at the old-fashioned diagrams. But readers then were very impressed. The computer outputs proved that a system based on growth would go into crisis and this would have a severe impact on the world unless stringent and urgent action was taken to arrest this growth. Even then, the world hung in the balance.

The data did draw some interesting conclusions. They noted, for instance, that growth increased inequality. That technological innovation was not the answer:

it is sufficient to recognize that no new technology is spontaneous or without cost. The factories and raw materials to produce synthetic food, the equipment and energy to purify sea water must all come from the physical world system.

and the very real limits there were to the system which was "being pushed toward its limit-the depletion of the earth's nonrenewable resources."

So what's the problem? The problem is the model is based on two key drivers of growth "population and capital" (as in, for instance, "we are interested only in the broad behavior modes of the population-capital system."). The authors don't really have a concept of growth as fundamental to the capitalist system - unlike the best degrowth thinkers today. Instead they tend to see capital growth as an offshoot of the system, though their real argument is that everything is derived from population growth. In effect, this makes the book essentially a 1970s computer powered modelling of Malthusianism. There is nothing here to link the problem of (say) unsustainable resource use to an economic system based on the accumulation of capital. It is worth noting here that it is written in the 1970s so the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries also suffer from this problem. The authors' tend to see these as some form of socialist society, but they too were governed by accumulation through their competition with the capitalist west. The authors of The Limits to Growth however don't dwell on these details - rather focusing on growth as being separate to the global economic system.

So the book is essentially Malthusian:

Some pollutants are obviously directly related to population growth (or agricultural activity, which is related to population growth). Others are more closely related to the growth of industry and advances in technology. Most pollutants in the complicated world system are influenced in some way by both the population and the industrialization positive feedback loops.

The problem then is that the authors have no way to argue against growth, because they see it as arising out of the nature of people. They recognise that population growth can level off, but that it won't happen fast enough, and thus see solutions as arising out of restricting population levels and challenging the growth of capital - though how this can happen in a system where capitalists are "compelled" [Marx] to accumulate capital is not addressed at all. In fact, the writers explicitly argue that there will be no fundamental change in their models, what they call the "standard run":

Let us begin by assuming that there will be in the future no great changes in human. values nor in the functioning of the global population-capital system as it has operated for the last one hundred years.

In other words, not only is the data input into the model flawed, the model itself assumes that you cannot change the system. But the problem, as millions of people currently understand, is the system - a system that drives growth. While The Limits to Growth is striking because it identifies that serious thought was given in the 1970s to the looming ecological and resource crisis, its flawed approach failed to identify the problem. Thus a generation of people, including millions of readers, were given an incorrect explanation for the coming crisis. Neo-Malthusianism blamed the masses and diverted attention from the real issue - the accumulation of capital. Here is not the place for me to critique Malthus again, I've done that elsewhere. But while The Limits to Growth has some insights - not least in its critique of what we would now call ecomodernism, or those who put their faith in technological development, its Computer driven Malthusian arguments are of no real use. GIGO.

Thursday, July 06, 2023

Janina Ramirez - Femina

I expected Janina Ramirez's book Femina, subtitled "A new history of the Middle Ages, through the women written out of it" just to be a collection of portraits of individual women. While that would have been interesting enough in and of itself, Femina is much more than this. What Ramirez does is to look at the Middle Ages, not simply by telling the story of various women, but also by discussing issues like gender, sexuality and labour within wider contexts. It makes for a fascinating read.

In the preface Ramirez explains that she wants to "show... that there are so many more ways to approach history now". Surprisingly she begins, not in the Middle Ages, but in the 20th century and Emily Wilding Davison, the Suffragette who was killed at the Epsom Derby in 1913. Davison was an accomplished medievalist who took inspiration from individuals from history and Ramirez explains that she seeks to develop this much further: "we need a new relationship with the past, one which we can all feel a part of".

The women discussed in Femina range from some who are already well known, such as Hildegard of Bingen and Margery Kempe, to anonymous individuals such as the women who made the Bayeux Tapestry and the Birka Warrior Woman, a Viking who was found buried with arms and armour. The latter is a fascinating study, not least because it is a massive challenge to many who thought Viking warriors must surely all be male. Ramirez argues that this burial "shows us a Viking world connected across thousands of miles; a city teeming with ideas and influences; a cosmopolitan, complex and fascinating environment that challenges traditional representations of Vikings". She continues:

A ninth-century Scandinavian trading town like Birka would be home to all manner of people from all types of backgrounds. it's likely we'd find women who had faced conflicts and threats, then developed the means to defend themselves in response. There is no single narrative, and the skeleton in grave Bj581 reminds us not to look for a collective 'woman' of the past, but instead to examine individuals, and what they can tell us about the particular time and place they lived in.

It is an important point, because as Ramirez highlights, women in the Middle Ages were not all the same. Their roles, lives and experiences depended on their class, where they lived and the work they did. But we must also be wary of understanding our subjects only through the lens of our own era. Ramirez makes this point well with her discussion of Æthelflæd a powerful figure in late 9th and early 10th century Mercia. Æthelflæd's "story" was told, and retold. A twelfth century poem included the lines, "A man in valour, though a woman in your name / Your warlike hosts by nature you obeyed / Conquered over both, though born by sex a maid." The Normans saw her as a "warrior woman who deserved fame", but her reputation was lost in favour of King Alfred her father, as later generations preferred to remember his male role. As Ramirez says,

She was a victim not of medieval prejudice, but of modern attitudes towards female leadership. Seeing her as her contemporaries did shows us that women could wield influence, and their voices, now written out of the records, can still be heard.

Ramirez asks us to remember her as "Æthelflæd the Great". As the account of Æthelflæd shows, we should be wary of seeing the Middle Ages as contemporary prejudice implies. Women were often, though not always, celebrated, encouraged and supported. Ramirez makes this point about Hildegard of Bingen who "broke gender barriers, but the encouragement from the men around her suggests we should not only be reviewing our understanding of how women thought and felt in the twelfth century; we should also be turning our attention to the way we view the men of this time." It is a theme of this book that modern prejudices obscure a clear understanding of both women and the wider society they inhabited.

High class women, are more likely to make it into records that survive into modern times, or be buried, like the Viking warrior, in graves that highlight their wealth and power. Even so, picking women out in the historical and archaeological record is difficult. It means that the sections of the chapters were Ramirez explores how we know about these women are important. But this book does not neglect the lower orders. In addition, while the focus is very much on what we would now call Europe, Ramirez also explores how modern research offer insights into a Middle Age world that is significantly more connected than usually thought. For instance, we learn that of the London plague victims whose DNA was studied, 29 percent "were classified as Asian, African or dual heritage. Of these, four women and three men had black African ancestry. One woman had black African/Asian ancestry, but the evidence from her teeth and bones revealed she had grown up in Britain". In other words, Ramirez argues, if you were in medieval London "you could expect to encounter a similarly diverse range of people" as you would today.

This section of the book also looks at one example of someone who would likely call themselves transgender today, though as Ramirez points out, "retrospectively applying terms that have only recently been defined" is problematic. This woman, Eleanor Rykener, worked as a sex worker and a seamstress, and is one of the few examples we have of someone who was gender nonconformist in the era and whose trial is the only example of a trial of someone that documents "same-sex intercourse". Ramirez explains though that the records show that it was "dishonesty in trading, breaking of curfew... etc.. that were of greater concern... than their gender nonconformity". While only a short part of the book, the chapter on race and gender is perhaps the most fascinating of the whole work.

Femina takes it name from the books that were written by woman and labelled heretical by the Church. It is a profoundly interesting, insightful and readable account - that doesn't simply tells us the forgotten stories of women in the Middle Ages, but locates them in their times and explores how our own present is a "Distant Mirror" with which we can understand or misunderstand the past. It's an excellent work.

Tuesday, July 04, 2023

John Dickson Carr - The Eight of Swords

The Eight of Swords is the third of the Dr. Fell series of detective stories written by John Dickson Carr beginning in the 1930s. It begins with Fell returning from America and immediately becoming sucked into representing the Metropolitan Police at an investigation into a Country House murder. His investigation is hampered by an overly enthusiastic, and eccentric, bishop who is convinced he is an expert detective. The murder victim is an oddly named, Septimus Depping who turns out to be anything but the wealthy owner of the country house.

Unfortunately the book suffers from far too many supporting characters and an overly complicated investigation. As is his want, and tradition dictates, Fell does not reveal his insights until the end (though on occasion he does try, only to be interrupted). The story has a secret passage, midnight shootings, a tense scene in a village pub and a red herring tarot card. All these things ought to make for a cracking read, but I found myself bored and confused by the meandering story and unsatisfied by the outcomes. Why did the bishop slide down the bannisters? One for the fans.

Related Reviews

Carr - Hag's Nook
Carr - The Mad Hatter Mystery
Carr - The Hollow Man

Wednesday, June 28, 2023

Bob Scribner & Gerhard Benecke - The German Peasant War 1525: New Viewpoints

This collection of essays stands out among the plethora of books to come out of the 450th anniversary of the German Peasant War in 1975. As I have noted in other reviews of books on this topic, there was very much a dividing line between historians of East and West around interpretations of events of 1524/5. This centred on the usefulness or not of the Marxist framework and in particular the interpretation of Friedrich Engels, which gave rise to the thesis that 1525 saw an "early bourgeois revolution".

At the time there was a lack of accessibility to historian's work from East of the Berlin Wall. This collection provided a small sample among work from Western historians. The editors are careful though to argue that the collection should not "be judged by the standard of whether it contributes any definitive judgements on the Peasant War... rather we wish it to stimulate discussion on its relation to wider problems of historiography." Their introduction is also a useful overview of contemporary scholarship on the Peasant War.

What of the collection itself. All of the essays in it contain useful nuggets. Some of them cover rarer aspects of the period. Heide Wunder's article on The Mentality of Rebellious Peasants takes as its case study events in Samland. Then part of Germany and now part of the greater Russia, it was the most separate part of the rebellion in time and space. Sadly the author includes little detail of the struggle in this location, preferring to focus on the interaction between Prussian peasant, German peasant and local nobles. That said it is an interesting engagement.

Several essays stand out for their discussion of specifics of the War. I was much taken by Siegfried Hoyer's account of Arms and Military organisation of the Peasants. One fascinating aspect to this was the way that the rebels organised rotations to ensure that some peasants could return home to work on the land/harvest etc, but it was in turn a weakness. As Hoyer explains:

This system was dictated by the role of each peasant in production, and so probably could not be avoided. There is no doubt that individuals could gain little military experience by this short-term rotation. This defect, grounded in the historical situation, was first overcome during the later bourgeois revolutions, when the mass of the popular armies were composed of the urban classes.

Another excellent study by Siegfried Hoyer looks in detail at a neglected (and anonymous) pamphlet that he describes as one of the "very few" from the "left wing of the movement": To the Assembly of common peasantry who have angrily and defiantly risen up in Upper Germany and many other places. Continuing the tradition of Reformation and Peasant War pamphlets having very long titles, this one is a defence of the right to rebel and an argument for the rebellion. Sadly it is not printed here, but extracts can be found in Tom Scott and Bob Scribner's collection of documents. Hoyer concludes that the pamphlet is not revolutionary as its author "polemicised against a fundamental overthrow of feudal property", but that the demands place the pamphlet close to the most radical thinkers. Peter Blickle discusses his "Common Man" thesis of revolution. Heiko Oberman offers a interesting discussion of how the War has been interpreted, even in its immediate aftermath, though he points out that the description "War" is an "overdramatisation that distorts our historical perspective and tends to isolate the events of 1525". He concludes:

The main thrust of present research is oriented towards economic and social history, hence providing an insight into a large number of elements that go into the making of history. Yet this should not tempt us to permit biblical ideas, Christian apocalyptic ferment and the horizon of religious expectation on the part of the rebels to be relegated to the background, since it is only through these means that the birth and spread of the Peasants War are to be understood.

It's a nuanced view and one that these articles taken together do justice to, even if the various authors tend to come down on one specific emphasis or the other. By including "Marxist" historians from the former Eastern bloc in the collection, those of us who class themselves as Marxists today have an opportunity to engage with how those thinkers approached historical questions. This is epitomised perhaps by Max Steinmetz's Theses on the Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany, which tries (only part successfully) to frame the War in Marxist terms. He quotes from Lenin, Stalin and Engels to bolster his theses, and makes some interesting points:

An increasingly sharpening of class conflict was the necessary outcome of this ever more apparent clash between the development of the material forces of production within society and the traditional relations of production, which had long since become shackles of productive forces, rather than forms of their development.

He also notes that the "second serfdom" in Germany helped enable capitalist development, despite hampering the development of a class of wage labourers as happened in England. While this can come across as dogmatic, Steinmetz does not ignore the ideological context of the Reformation, meaning that while his contribution reads somewhat stilted as a list of "theses" it can encourage further thought about the Bourgeois Revolution in the context of the 16th century. Certainly a collection of essays to be read and inspire further debate.

Blickle - The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants' War from a new perspective

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

Bax - The Peasants War in Germany

Engels - The Peasant War in Germany

Baylor - The German Reformation & the Peasants' War: A Brief History with Documents