"Mebyon Kernow + Cornish Nationalism": Book Review

Unlike Scotland and Wales, Cornwall represents ambiguity as a Celtic nation. Formerly Celtic-speaking, its last native speakers having died before the nineteenth century, for five centuries it remains an English county. This paradox, accepted by many of its residents, introduces this study by Bernard Deacon, Dick Cole, and Garry Tregidga. (Cardiff: Ashley Drake-Welsh Academic Press-Griffin Press, 2003. ISBN: 1-86057-075-5.) Mebyon Kernow & Cornish Nationalism sums up, concisely and dispassionately, the formation of the 'Party for Cornwall' in 1951, its revivalist and antiquarian predecessors, and its inspiration for wider Cornish Solidarity pressure groups and Cornish Assembly campaigns now agitating for de-evolution in the wake of SNP and Plaid Cymru's successes over the past decade.

The language had faded well before industrialization took full hold over Cornwall. Contrasting with Welsh and Scots nationalist efforts in the early 20c, Cornish progressives took the momentum that erosion of agriculture as a basis for most of its residents provided, and celebrated the spread of the machine. Yet, by the end of the last century, the last tin mine having closed after millennia digging and refining the metal that made Cornwall famed, the trust placed in mechanization had crumbled. Instead, the influx of second-home owners from 'up-country' loomed, along with the relegation of Cornwall as a touristed but otherwise neglected backwater by Westminster, as larger threats. Reasserting Cornish Celtic identity has both played into the hands of those vacationing or retiring there, and tricked those predicting that cultural nationalism could never lead to political activism among those once again proud to be Cornish, not English.

The second chapter surveys the early 20c language movement. The Celtic Revival, as elsewhere in the Atlantic archipelago, remained mired too often in antiquarianism. Garbed druids were picturesque, but failed to use their powers to halt emigration of the land's youth. Many who sought to resurrect the language fought against any accompanying radicalism, paralleling the Gaelic League-IRB Hyde-Pearse contentions. Henry Jenner is here quoted in 1926 as claiming 'no wish on anyone's part to translate the Irish political expression "Sinn Féin" into Cornish, [or] to agitate for Home Rule for Cornwall [or to] foment disloyalty to England's King or the British Empire.' (16) Jenner's assurances of an apolitical revival showed how fearful many of the elder generation could be about any revolution, given the scale of Ireland's recent wars.

Only at mid-century, in the postwar British reassessment of conventional pieties, did nationalists form a constitutional party, Sons of Cornwall, MK. Even tiny nudges towards what was perceived as a call for federalism or regional representation aroused mainstream culturalists' fears echoing Jenner's jitters. Under Richard Jenkins and other committed activists, change began, however small. The competition, the content, and the compromises could be tiny: unable to select among three vying canonized candidates to be Cornwall's patron saint, it was agreed to consecrate the Duchy to their care as a trio.

But, by the early 1960s, more substantive rather than symbolic considerations loomed. Although the authors make no mention, the parallel with Sinn Féin in the Wolfe Tone Society ginger group of the mid-60s sharpens the depiction of what confronted a miniscule cadre. Young Cornish patriots, like their Irish and other Celtic counterparts, longed for not nostalgia but real advance into a politically relevant and economically practical terrain upon which the recovery by Celtic nationals of their land, their subsistence, and their citizenship could be contested and won. For MK, the enemy emerged after the Greater London Council was formed. The GLC proposed-hidden from local scrutiny-that their metropolitan overpopulation problem could be alleviated by the relocation of thousands of its urban millions to rural areas such as Cornwall. This 'overspill' would flood whoever and whatever remained of a native, regional, and Celtic culture, the MK argued. Inspired by the SNP and Plaid Cymru, MK fought back through conventional elections. Like the Welsh and Scots (and the Irish parallel again of Official SF-The Workers Party, unmentioned again by the authors), such methods sputtered and few gains were kept in the invader's Parliament. Powers of resistance again slipped away from Celtic control.

Three splits, in 1969, 1975, and 1980, weakened MK. Two of these led to splinter parties. The complaint reminded me again of that leveled against the Provos more than once. The older organization, restless youth and militantly minded veterans complained, was too broad rather than too narrow a place for Celtic action. If everyone from soft-focus language lovers to conservative ruralists to itchy leftists belonged to MK, it could not move forward into grasping and holding onto meaningful gains, politically or practically.

By the 1970s, opposition did coalesce around one main enemy: housing. Holiday homes and the rising prices that tourism spurred combined. They undermined the ability of native Cornish to afford to remain in their homeland.

But the radical action of another group of Mebyon, the Sons in Wales, the Free Welsh Army, and other shadowy contingents was not the acceptable face of Cornish nationalism. As the paper Cornish Nation became radicalized by such Celtic guerrillas in the early 70s, protests were lodged about its 'increasingly sympathetic coverage of Irish Republicanism.' (61) And in a media climate that loved the global warming of fist-pumping wild youth, the Cornish staged their own performance art. Posing as, inevitably, the 'Free Cornish Army,' students from Plymouth Polytechnic, among '40 fully trained units' as they claimed, marched and were duly photographed and publicized before the trick was spoiled. (62) The heated atmosphere of the decade did, however, lead to another substantial storm, albeit contained within the confines of the Cornish nation. The Cornish National Party broke away from a too-timid, so they charged, MK in 1975. Two years later, the CNP leader left, lamenting its 'infiltration by communist elements.' (67)

By the 1980s, then, MK languished. As with the SNP and Plaid Cymru, the authors explain, the Thatcher years hastened MK's retreat into 'internal reflection about its philosophical role.' (75) Restless younger members, often with socialist ideological support, formed into pressure groups for more immediate action. Ties with leftists and Greens were sought. An elusive An Gof entity threatened violence. MK and nationalists consistently rejected physical-force efforts. They preferred backing up anti-nuclear grassroots efforts. They fought 'Devonwall,' in which the Crown would consolidate Cornish with Devon's services after its 1974 reconfigurations of the British counties.

The new European Parliament, later that decade, inspired calls for local representation, but the Cornish constituency was deemed too miniscule.

With the 1990s, the anti-Poll Tax protests sparked a novel legal defense. It was deemed illegal under a treaty, never repealed or superseded it was argued, that was signed by England with Cornwall-in 1508. Allied as Cornish Solidarity, many resistors to the Crown expanded regional resistance. Although only as a fill-in line under a newly placed box marked 'Other,' the Cornish could present themselves to the rest of Britain as a distinct ethnic group for the first time. In 2000, ten percent of the Cornish electorate, or 50,000 voters, signed a call for a local Assembly. At the time this book went to press, this effort met with stalling by Westminster, but the authors cautiously conclude that such a renewed pride in Cornish regionalism signals a sea-change from ingrained attitudes dominant as late as the 1970s that diminished cultural heritage, belittled local tradition, or condemned political activism among the Celtic remnant at the tip of the British island.

Their summaries make instructive reading. Deacon is a lecturer in Cornish Studies at the University of Exeter. Dick Cole currently leads MK. Dr Garry Tregidga serves as the Deputy Director for the Institute for Cornish Studies (at Exeter). They hold that the language activists have been often 'over-defensive'. (114) This may, they suggest, reflect decades-and centuries-of malaise in Cornish society. So long marginalized as the Celtic Fringe colonized within England itself, its natives lack confidence that its leaders can produce change and decide actions on the local level. Yet, the authors add, the cultural agenda derided by many as nostalgic decades ago now proves that results can be measured. The Celtic manifestations may be more displayed as kitsch in souvenir shops than before, but the Cornish flag flies, signs reflect bilingual heritage long suppressed, and resistance to the Anglophonic juggernaut can be seen more immediately than before by locals and tourists alike. (Compare my review of Marcus Tanner's "The Last of the Celts", which has a pessimistic chapter on this heritage industry in Cornwall and considers all six Celtic nations as doomed to extinction as the language erosion in turn eliminates any ground upon which natives can survive with any indigenous culture or self-governing polity.)

Still, the visual recovery of a Cornish nationalism, the authors warn, does not wrest territorial security. The Cornish flag was forcibly removed from flagpoles after the 2002 death of the Queen Mother, they note. This symbolizes how fragile are the symbols.

Flag-waving, they concur, may make Cornish prouder, 'but it has not fostered a clearly and consistently pro-active nationalist political activism.' (115) But, the druid-garbed revivalists of a century ago could never have predicted how fluid Celtic identity could become. Rather than looking back to antiquated slogans, the authors remind us, the newest Cornish symbols may be heard in music-and emblazoned on surfboards. (Amazon US 8-14-12; in slightly edited form to The Blanket 30 Nov. 2005)

P.S. See the New York Times, 17 November 2005. Sarah Lyall's 'Saving Cornish: But Stop. Isn't That Spelled With a K?' About 200 can converse in Cornish. But four competing versions contend, and any e-mailer, Lyall claims, rather than selecting the 'wrong' version and so incite the recipient's hostility, had better write only in English.

Jose Saramago's "Raised from the Ground": Book Review

This chronicle of most of the last century opens long before, when the vast "inland sea" of southern Portugal with its "fish-sheep and predators" was first divided up. Warlords divided the natural from the man-made, as "the future shape of this present land was decided, and by very crooked means indeed, a shape carved out by those who owned the largest and sharpest knives and according to size of knife and quality of blade." 

The Great War begins, beyond these borders of provincial Alentejo, early in the narrative. While it effects the fate of its weary peasants and resigned workers only indirectly, the power of its force, in Jose Saramago's telling, reiterates his judgments, delivered implacably: "War ate a great deal and war grew fat and rich. War is a monster who empties men's pockets, coin by coin, before devouring the men themselves, so that nothing is lost and all is changed, which is the primary law of nature, as one learns later on, and when war has eaten its fill, when it is sated to the point of vomiting, it continues its skillful pickpocketing, always taking from the same people, the same pockets. It's a habit acquired in peacetime."

This passage demonstrates José Saramago's accumulative tendencies. Time subsumes plot. Characters emerge among the Mau-Tempo (their surname denotes "bad-weather") clan, wear themselves out, and die off after generating their hardy offspring. Nature dominates, and man-made imposition of wages and laws and force contends against a perpetual order attuned to the seasons and the crops. To capture this rush of sensation, its lassitude and its propulsion, this author's characteristic prose eschews capitalization and quotation marks and indentation. He inserts whenever a new speaker comes in a capital letter, but otherwise, he prefers a headlong dash of words carrying dense paragraphs along. 

For instance, workers who dare under the Salazar dictatorship to strike (even if they don't know what that concept means, only that they weary of threshing and quit) find this implicit warning: "Mend your ways while there's still time, and swear that you've taken twenty beatings, crucify yourself, hold out your arm to be bled, open your veins and say, This is my blood, drink it, this is my body, eat it, this is my life, take it, Along with the church's blessing, the salute of the flag, the march past, the handing over of the credentials, the awarding of the university diploma, thy will be done as it is in heaven." 

As in this Nobel laureate's daring retellings The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Cain, Raised From the Ground even by its own title evokes enduring myths. The Three Wise Men make a cameo appearance at a baby's birth, suitably adapted for Mr. Saramago's anticlerical sympathies. Here, the protagonists do not battle an angry and jealous God, but their own predicament within the class system. As a libertarian Communist, Mr. Saramago leaves the reader with no illusions as to his stolid humanism. While he nods to the duty of the policeman or priest, he cannot take their side when justice cries out and mercy goes unheard.

"Who gives the orders, who gives us life, well, that's a good question, the boss gives the orders, and as for life, what's that." This counter-narrative voice battles against the commands a peasant is given as he and his comrades are herded to an anti-communist, pro-Salazar rally. Throughout this febrile but readable novel, the Mau-Tempo family seeks to survive in the ancestral terrain of Mr. Saramago's grandparents. Here, the feudal system continues amid cork trees and wheat fields, and the twentieth century unfolds with barely a notice by those bound to the land and the nation taken over by the supposed republic under the Salazar regime. World War Two comes and goes with barely an aside; isolation and ignorance attain the status of virtues by those ruling this far corner of Europe, next to another dictatorship over the rest of the Iberian peninsula. 

When peasants and workers fight back, by striking, by organizing, they are hunted down. From the perspective of an ant, we witness one man beaten to death in a bullring. "Even freedom is a slap in the face, a crust of bread thrown to the ground to see if we'll pick it up." Out of this relentless setting, the Mau-Tempos try to rise up.

The narrator speaks in "we" usually, but sometimes leaps to "I" for a moment, before assuming the voice of omniscience, yet a puzzled one bemused, angry, or resigned to the ages. The teller of this family saga appears not to know all the answers, either. "Our problem is that we think only the big things are important, and so we talk about them, but when we want to know how things really were, who was there and what they said, we're in trouble." 

Mr. Saramago seeks to give a voice back to those from whom his family came. But, he searches within the uncertain vantage point of a narrator also stymied by how to give back to the illiterate and barely literate a fluent tone, a steady consciousness, worthy of them: "if only we could tie up all the loose ends, the world would be a stronger and better place." 

The bulk of the novel settles into resistance against the landowners, followed by repression. An eight-hour day and a minimum wage assume revolutionary potential, as such basic demands meet suppression by a determined oligarchy. Meanwhile, Portugal holds back the outside world, fearing liberalism, imposing censorship.  Margaret Jull Costa's translation of this 1980 novel conveys the contexts of this era with helpful and necessary footnotes filling in what English-speaking audiences will miss about veiled allusions to despots, rebels, puns, and poems from Portugal's recent and distant past.  

The pace slows, as endurance among the Mau-Tempos and their allies dwindles with old age, filtered through the central figures of João and his wife Gracinda in and past the middle of the twentieth century. This novel expects a patient reader, willing to plunge into a detailed, nearly stream-of-consciousness approach played off of Mr. Saramago's unpredictable third-person, yet intimate and off-beat, voice filtered in and out of a variety of heroes and rogues. They yearn for release: "someone caught a glimpse of that much-vaunted freedom, but she is not one to be seen out walking the highways, she won't sit on a stone and wait to be invited in to supper or to share a bed for the rest of our life." However, discontent grows, and rumors of revolt from far off come to hamlets without a radio or a newspaper, with startling results.

Eventually, the "Carnation Revolution" of 1974 succeeds with barely any blood shed. The military regime of Salazar and his cronies ends after more than forty years of control. The novel concludes with a burst of energy: "one thousand living and one hundred thousand dead, or two million sighs rising up from the ground" combine "on this unique and new-risen day" as freedom appears to arrive for the Mau-Tempos and their neighbors at last.  (New York Journal of Books 8-16-12)

Leo Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich": Audiobook Review

Certain stories matter more as we mature, and age. I read this years ago as a student, and found myself remembering its bleak evocations of pain and loneliness. This is a strong story, not for the weak-willed or casual reader. I find it works better, perhaps, for those who've undergone some encounters with those facing death, although it may arouse sad memories.

Now middle-aged, I listened to the Naxos audiobook version with Oliver Ford Davies in returning to the novella. In audio versions, Naxos intersperses classical music from the period deftly. Here, interludes enhance what will prove a harrowing, but necessary, delineation of how one man faces the Biq Question of how death comes, at last, to us no matter what.

Davies captured the officious nature of those around Ivan, colleagues and family, who were faced with the necessary burdens of paying respects and going through the familiar motions we all have, once we've lived awhile, of attending to the impact of death on one we work with or know, but whom we don't feel all that close to. The tedium of funereal arrangements, and the impact of what a colleague or family member's loss will mean for us, will sound all too convincing, for many of us. Tolstoy makes us see, first, Ivan's demise through their perspectives, as ones we recognize with a twinge of guilt.

Then, he shifts to his wife turned widow; we hear her own mixed reactions: she's happy in a way to be free of the torment of a husband she'd grown distanced from, and one whose last hours were but a howl of agony, from the hearing of her, their son, and their household, this being a respectable judge's residence. We understand her weariness with the duties inflicted upon family, and the wish, often unspoken but nearly always felt, by the survivors that the dying one be finally gone.

The doctor is also harried, and we hear from him the routine platitudes and vague assurances that any patient does, no matter how grave the case. It's another day at the office for the medical profession, and what's a case study to solve for them reminds Ivan of his own aloofness as an educated, but detached, judicial functionary, above the reality felt by the troubled man brought before him to be analyzed and sentenced. Again, Tolstoy presents the administrative or familial point of view fairly, and steadily. It's human nature to step away from the messiness of fate and mortality, after all.

Finally, we enter into Ivan's consciousness, indirectly but powerfully. Oliver Ford Davies navigates the gradual move from complacency and self-regard into raw, cold, mental and physical and spiritual brutality. Only forty-five, mostly convinced as most of us that success lies in accomplishments, comforts, a career, and status despite his misgivings, Ivan must confront what we all fear. Davies shows how he moans and contorts, in thoughts and words, as his final moments near. Gerasim, a servant, by his humble commitment to bedside duties helps Ivan find a saving grace of comfort when most needed.

The final moments of this tale moved me to tears as I heard them. I recommend an audiobook version as this takes you away from too quickly skimming over the nuances of emotion and subtlety which Tolstoy brings to this novella. Hearing the prose reminds us of our common fate, and how Tolstoy captures unforgettably the revelation that we can only hope is not an illusion. The delicacy and craft with which he creates the same reactions in us as Ivan undergoes will astonish you. (Amazon US 7-15-12)

Maidin os cionn Nua-Eabhrac

Chonaic mé an péinteáil hiontach seo suas nuair ag cur cuairt Coláiste Vassar faoi deireanach. Phéinteáil Charles Herbert Moore "Maidin os cionn Nua-Eabhrac" i 1859-1860. Bhí maith liom an seo is fearr ina múseam níos scoth sin ann.

Chuaigh Léna, Niall agus mise go Stáit Nua-Eabhrac riamh an stoirm mhór "Sandy" ach mar a bhuail an gaoithe mór, an "nor'easter," go luath ina dhiadh. Bhí muid t-ádh ansin, go fírinne. Chaith muid ag dul mar sin go raibh an agallamh Niall ar an Coláiste na mBhaird.

Shiúil mé an mhaidin dár gcionn ó dheas ar an mBóthar an Réimse in aice leis Baird, ag teorainn ina straidbhaile na Milan. Fhán muid ina teach-óstán beag ag imeall lochán. Shíúil mé ar aghaidh agus ar mar sin gach radharc go raibh álainn: an sciobhál d'aois dearg, coillte tirim tanaí, móinéir leis "cattails," agus lochán eile leis an scardaun bídeach.

Thiomaint muid chugainn triú fhéirmeachtaí d'aois agus bailte an-sean i Connecticut go músaem eile, ó Norman Rockwell ina Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Fhás an aer fuar agus an lá liath. Chuig ar ais ar an Cathair Nua-Eabhrac.

Thug muid cuairt ar an triú agus an ceathrú. D'fhoglaim muid faoi an teaghlach ó Seosamh P. agus Bríd Ó Mordha ina Músaem Tenement agus an oibrithe Giúdach na "sweatshop"; amharc muid an gníomhaígh agus an ghriangraf na saol ar an stráideannái Londáin agus Nua Eabhrac ina Músaem na gCathair fós. Ar ndoígh, d'ith agus ól go maith freisin, shiúil mé na Bowery, bhí amharc agam i oíche toghcháin isteach Sean-Teach Tabhairne na Leann Mhic Somhairle--agus glacadh Niall níos deanaí.

Morning over New York

I saw this wonderful painting above when visiting Vassar College recently. Charles Herbert Moore painted "Morning over New York" in 1859-1860. I liked this best in that wonderful museum.

Layne, Niall, and myself went to New York State after the Superstorm Sandy but as the great wind, the "nor'easter," hit soon afterwards. We were lucky, truly. We had to go because Niall had an interview at Bard College.

I walked the next morning south on Field Road near Bard, on the outskirts of the village of Milan. We stayed in a hotel-house [b+b] on the edge of a pond. I walked on and on and each view was lovely: an old red barn, thin dry woods, meadows of "cat tails" and another pond with a tiny waterfall.

We drove next through old farms and very old towns in Connecticut to another museum, of Norman Rockwell in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The air grew chilly and the day gray. We returned to New York City.

We visited a third and fourth. We learned about the family of Joseph P. and Bridget Moore at the Tenement Museum and about the Jewish sweatshop workers; we viewed many activists and photos of the street life of London and New York in that City Museum too. Of course, we ate and drank well too, I peered into McSorley's Old Ale Tavern, I walked the Bowery election night--and later Niall was accepted. (Painting/Péinteáil: "Morning over New York/ Maidin os cionn Nua-Eabhrac")

Leo Tolstoy's "War + Peace" Kindle Book Review

I chose the public domain version on Project Gutenberg. Earlier reviewers had mentioned a free Kindle version. While as of this writing, it is not available on Amazon, you can find the Maude 1922 translation to download directly as a Kindle file (pg2600.mobi @ 5.2 mb) from the Project Gutenberg site. (This lack of direct access via Amazon happened to me for Joyce's "Portrait" and suddenly for "Ulysses,", as well as Melville's "Redburn," for example.)

One problem is that Amazon lumps all the reviews for different media and versions and translations if it's a public domain title (this happens for "War and Peace," "Huck Finn," "Don Quixote" and "Ulysses," too), to my discouragement. This lack of finesse can confound those of us trying to evaluate one against another. Audiobooks, e-books, Kindle texts and print all jostle for attention. For instance, the version above is what I enter this under, and apparently despite the credit, it's not Constance Garnett's translation as the Kindle version!

I sampled the first chapters of a few e-book versions. Xanzoc's 1-16-11 review set out the first lines of some translations to contrast; I found that entry and Patrick Crabtree's Listmania one after I had done my own sampling to find what Kindle offered. I wondered how the free version stood up against later contenders.

Constance Garnett (1904) is common, alongside the Maude. These two in word choice did differ more than other versions, resembling more each other, and for me, the Maudes get the nod. Garnett apparently left out some nuance in a quick version that nonetheless tried to keep Tolstoy's voice. I thought I'd favor the Pevear-Volokhonsky (2007), promoted vigorously as faithful to Tolstoy's syntax and repetition, but as with their "Brothers Karamazov," somehow its stiffer if more scholarly pace paled. I compared sections in tandem (troika?) with the Maudes' version and frankly, there's often less difference. Sometimes a more contemporary verve enters, but I'd contend the Maudes' century-old take holds its own. (I review P-V on Kindle version under that translation as catalogued separately on Amazon, 8/24/12. Despite the unwieldiness inherent in footnotes, French + German as is to navigate, and the trickiness of using an e-book to go back and forth from notes to text, they do offer in their edition many annotations and maps.) I had read "Brothers" in college in Garnett's version and recalled it being faster paced and more engaging then. Similarly, the pair's take on "War and Peace" appeared to slow a bit, perhaps for those wanting to sense the Russian itself?

Rosemary Edmonds' 1957 translation in an affordable Penguin e-book felt respectable, and this may be a choice for those not enamored with P-V. I confess the different translations seemed more subtly distinguishable than I anticipated. For a bound version, I favor the Penguin 2005 edition by Anthony Briggs (it has maps and notes too, and I like the translation's brisk but slightly theatrical feel a lot). Neither Briggs nor the Maudes keep the French but for a phrase here and there; P-V keep it but translate in the footnotes Tolstoy composed about 2% of his text in French. Without the French blocks of text, both move steadily, if with a British ambiance. Aylmer and Louise Maude worked with Tolstoy on their version, at least for awhile. Americans may not like either version as it puts the lower classes into a register closer to an English/ stage dialect than whatever we'd "hear" from those with broken or lower-class speech.

I wish Briggs' rendering was electronically available. As it is not, I decided for my Kindle given the P-V challenges to stick with the Maude style, which is not as stolid as we nearly a hundred years later may suppose. Of course, a free version lacks the guidance you'll need. I cannot give the public domain version fewer stars for its more venerable idiom, or its lack of editorial additions, as those volunteers labor to give us the best they can out of their own good will.

I read a chapter in Maude. I check in Briggs for endnotes and assistance, as any reader of Tolstoy needs this. But, for a portable e-book, I find myself moving along to my surprise, into a narrative not as difficult as I expected from its monumental reputation. If you read a few chapters past the initial conversations, as with Shakespeare, you will get the hang of the diction and mood. I admired "Anna Karenina" (Garnett) when that too was assigned in college. For both classics, Tolstoy's evocations of dialogue and character merit their acclaim.

(7-24-12 to Amazon US; see my Pevear-Volokhonsky review for more on its comparisons and contrasts via Kindle. Cover image, not "W+P," but Tolstoy's "The Three Bears," Russian still, Yiddish too, CCCP in fact, by "M. Glukhov," which I liked better. #53 of 65 bear images via VintagePrintable)

Jillian Becker's "L: A Novel History": Book Review

What if a purportedly progressive, charismatic leader, enamored with self-sacrifice in the manner inspired by Foucault, Bataille, Sartre, and Georg Lúkas, rose to replace Maggie Thatcher in 80s England? Labour, weakened by Tory rule, cannot resist a violent Left which takes its cue from intellectuals and provocateurs advocating a liberating reign by "action art" and extremism in the name of ecstatic cruelty? A celebrity avant-garde writer from a wealthy family establishes the Red Republic of Britain in the late 80s.

While the introduction gives away the fact that only five seasons and two years span the reign of Louis Zander, the range of opinions and witnesses enriches the situation evoked. This recalls for me the multiple sources used by Jack London in "The Iron Heel" with its 1908 extrapolation of epic dystopia, and its pairing of a future scholar's edition of a contemporary's account. Less directly, see Thomas Flanagan in his historical novels about Ireland, and lately, Joseph O'Connor's Irish-American narratives "Star of the Sea" and "Redemption Falls" (I reviewed the latter in 1/08.) I nod to Gyorgy Kepes' "1985" and Anthony Burgess' "1985"--clever follow-ups to Orwell. Becker via Gill's fragmentation of opinions and the attempt of a later scholar to make sense out of varying testimonies engrosses me, and should thoughtful readers.

It favors a calm, steady, academic tone to filter the dramatic events. It does get more brutal, as such novels tend to, once characters revolt against tyranny. As a reader of the above writers myself (and of two earnest neo-Marxian efforts of Terry Eagleton), it's refreshing to see from a more conservative, cautious perspective their idealistic, somewhat seminar-driven and tenured-radical theories put into deadly force, for "moral murder." As I've been interested but cautious about the more heated, less sensible applications of such grand ideas when everyday people are the victims and when the privileged insist upon their elevated status to perpetrate violence upon the innocent, this is an engrossing parable. Reminds me of Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here" (see my review in Aug. 2012) where FDR was replaced by a faux-good ol' boy who put 1936 America under martial law promptly, and worse.

Jillian Becker's alternative history imagines this from papers assembled by the fictional (despite the Amazon heading) historian Bernard Gill's compilation, in 2023. The trouble with such novels of ideas is that characters can turn mouthpieces for ideologies, and while this is not absent here, it's less of a drawback than usual for the genre. I may lean towards folks she criticizes, but I welcome the chance to hear from other viewpoints. I admit a fondness for this subject. My patience with scholarly voices and my acceptance of a denser style through which predicaments and proclamations may be conveyed may mark me as stodgier than readers now preferring a rapid story with less ideology. But, I accept this style.

I'm reviewing this via a Kindle edition for the US market, 2012. N.B.: the Kindle lacks the list of sources, bibliography, and index of the text version. However, it adds an introduction placing the work in tandem with relevant events since '05.

We face our own decisions about expanding government power. We watch disparate protesters in American cities get shut down by police and corporate interests. Abroad, desperate crowds wanting economic redistribution and an end to corporate and political collusion continue via Twitter and Facebook to attempt revolt against despots. As Becker notes, the re-appearance of this is timely, and the fictionalized if fact-heavy medium a fitting one to spread a warning against how appealingly totalitarianism can arise, not only from the conventional suspects and party lines. (Amazon US 8-10-12--just over 1500 reviews there, and this is my 1500th post on this blog.)

Karl Marlantes' "What It Is Like to Go to War": Book Review

I recommend reading "Matterhorn" first. This non-fictional companion narrates many of Marlantes' real-life incidents around Christmas 1968 on the Laotian border near the DMZ which inspired that masterful Vietnam War novel. Those who immersed themselves in that epic work's detail and mood will see how Waino Melles stands in as a counterpart for Karl Marlantes--even if a few of the most daring moments of his real life (as in hanging on outside an overloaded chopper so he could make his R+R) service gain in the true telling even more than the fictional fashion.

As previous reviewers noted, this follow-up lacks the seamless quality that at its best (which was often) carried one through six-hundred plus pages of "Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War" [see my brief Amazon review in Aug. 2012]. It's much choppier: he integrates recollections of his Oregon coming-of-age among Finnish fishermen, his Yale and Oxford studies, and his difficult re-entry into civilian life. These reminiscences alternate with topical chapters on aspects of warrior culture. These in turn explore in tangents or directions many moments gleaned from his Marine tours of duty, his literary and cultural studies, and his experiences at integration as a man who understands the costs of sending nineteen-year-olds to fight in an era when such duties will be done more and more at a distance, via a drone from a Nevada base and not as hand-to-hand taking a hilltop from the NVA (memorably recounted in both "Matterhorn" and "What It Is Like to Go to War," understandably).

He emphasizes recommendations for rituals that ease the transition from life to death, battle to peace, killing to harmony, which are necessary in an age when compassion for both the fighter and his or her enemy may be more difficult to sustain. Mass killing and not individual duels may add to this societal and cultural switch, and our psyches may not handle the transfer. Marlantes shows how "natural aggression," as with our sexual drive, needs not to be denied or suppressed, but comprehended, cared for, and disciplined. He does not shrink from honesty, and he mingles justice with mercy adroitly.

He draws upon religious analogies intriguingly. He locates the spiritual in combat. He finds "constant awareness of one's own death, total focus on the present moment, the valuing of other people's lives above one's own, and being part of a larger religious community" [loc. 159] in the contrast of the mystic's heavenly ascent and the soldier's hell descent. Both enter a sacred space; respect must be paid. Unless young men and women learn to deal with initiation, the realization of compassion, the balance of justice with mercy in doling out punishment in the field, the shift into this fearsome space and their sudden retreat from it by jet or video, they will not reach healing and wholeness within.

This higher cause appears akin to the "semper fi" commitment he vowed to never leave behind his comrades and to make their needs a priority above his own. Marlantes tells how, in a humble but inescapably dramatic fashion, his first Bronze Star emerged out of such a willingness. He applies Jungian notions of the shadow via Joseph Campbell to explain this imperative.

War ideally is like mercy killing: done out of necessity, but with respect and sadness. Marlantes tackles the "touchdown" cheerleading, the innate reaction we share with apes to kill and take pleasure in it, but he also sees that this alone, the "white heat atrocity" of logically premeditated killing or the "red" of unleashed bloodlust, cannot control those whom we send to fight for us. Evil, as with good, can be summoned out of the energies around us, like we turn on a television.

Transcendence, he boldly argues, can come with frenzy in war. Homer, Cúchulainn, the Bhagavad Gita, video games show this pattern over centuries. We need to channel this energy. Out desire to fight for our side cannot be eliminated. Those who ignore it within our nature do so at a destructive cost. This common drive, as he shows with a vignette from British and Germans pitched against each other in North Africa's desert, can reveal respect that connects the souls of sworn enemies.

I am not sure I agree with his implied stance that if one is not for one's own side in a war decided by national policy and detached politicians, one is aiding and abetting the enemy, but my experiences have not been tested as have been his and his successors, and to be fair, Marlantes aims this book more at them than me. He concludes with ethical suggestions and ways to blend his idealism into practical programs and rituals for those who fight. I teach many veterans (near a VA hospital). I see young men starting college with physical and psychological damage. As I read "Matterhorn" I discussed it with some students, and I will guide more to this companion volume, and their classmates, for this will benefit them all. (Amazon US 9-3-12)

Paul + Karen Avrich's "Sasha + Emma": Book Review

"Red Emma" Goldman turns out a misnomer. She and her companion, and one-time lover, "Sasha" born Alexander Berkman, shared a defiant commitment to anarchism. Deported to newly Soviet Russia after the newly imposed Espionage Act expelled the pair from a WWI America resenting their revolutionary calls for no government and voluntary cooperation, Sasha and Emma within weeks resented their return to their homeland. Exiled, one came back for only three weeks years later and the other never did. They both died in the South of France, four years apart, as again war loomed.

So, if neither Berkman nor Goldman were communists, how did their anarchism infuse their lives? Paul Avrich, a professor of Russian History and Anarchism at Queens College, CUNY, spent his career interviewing those who knew the pair. His daughter, Karen, completes his project and their joint effort in this dual biography pays tribute to the odyssey of this compelling, angry, idealistic pair, fittingly.

The Avriches fluently transcribe the memories of many who shared their recollections with Paul in the 1970s. As I read this, I found myself intrigued by how deeply anarchists a century ago had entered into their own Occupy Movement, from Puget Sound communities where my father-in-law grew up and less surprisingly the Lower East Side neighborhood where I would stay next month, to a few miles away from my house, where the first Los Angeles Times building was blown up during a pro-union dispute in 1910. Such locations lend themselves to over a half-dozen causes célèbres infusing these four-hundred pages of text with places and names still resonating today, for a few radicals.

The Haymarket affair, the Homestead strike, the Frick shooting, the Ludlow massacre, the McNamara brothers, the Mooney-Billings trial, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Spanish Civil War: at the heart of all these, the energy of Sasha and Emma--and their compatriots who denied the legitimacy of any organization, as Autonomist anarchists dismissing leaders themselves--pulsed. Their outrage at what radicals objected to as violence within the capitalist system and coercive legislation by political tyrants and financial tycoons rankled. Autonomists coalesced internationally after innocent anarchists were sentenced to death for the Haymarket incident. In 1886, a bomb went off as police broke up a peaceful Chicago meeting of those opposed to police brutality. Autonomists (unlike most anarchists) rationalized their violent reaction to such repression by Capital and its political representatives as infinitesimal compared to the death count of millions of lives lost under authority and the state. 

That Haymarket incident indirectly set this saga in motion. Immigrating to New York, at the age of sixteen for Emma and eighteen for Sasha, the Russian pair met a year after Sasha's arrival to Manhattan, in 1889 at a leftist café. The Jewish but atheist couple bonded over a common upbringing in Kovno; both had uncles who were anti-tsarist violent radicals, Nihilists. A tempestuous relationship began; never a romantic couple for long, one cannot say they did not practice free love vigorously. Modska Aronston, Sasha's cousin, formed therefore an enduring ménage à trois. 

They connected in their common hatred of capitalism, and their united commitment to Autonomists, fueled by the Haymarket incident. In 1892, they had an opportunity to act on their convictions. When manager Henry Clay Frick refused to give in to striking steel workers in Homestead, Pennsylvania, a siege of the giant mill resulted. Strikers battled the despised Pinkerton security guards, with fatalities on both sides. Locked out for five months, the union members and their families dug in, but had to give in to massive force. The union entirely broken by the corporation run by Andrew Carnegie, to drive home the magnate's refusal never to negotiate, his chairman of the board Frick won the battle. 

But he lost a war with radicals. A plot for revenge slowly formed in Pittsburgh. Emma tried to raise funds from a night streetwalking. A kindly gentleman took pity on her hapless attempt, and paid her upfront to go home. Partially financed by this strategem, Sasha bought a grey suit, calling cards with the name of a respectable employment agency, and a cheap '38 revolver. He gained entry to Frick's office. Two bullets met their mark; three stab wounds in the struggle that followed plunged deep.

Berkman confessed a moment of pity which nearly disarmed him, but his devotion returned. He gloried in the thwarted assassination, not because he had not earned a murder charge, but because he revenged the cause of labor. His fanatical devotion put him at odds even with Emma. She had countered regarding their partnership: "I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand denial of life and joy." She danced, flirted, easily won over wooers, and fired up the crowds with a natural gift for oratory. Short, fat, unprepossessing, but once she spoke, she ignited her audiences.

This talent worked against her: promotion of an unpopular cause found the pair and their comrades reviled; the first American war on domestic terror erupted. The Avriches observe: "A populist at heart, Sasha fought to apply Russian solutions to American problems." His love of the gun and his Nihilist and Autonomist bent left him an outcast in his adopted land. After he tried to represent himself in court in a typically headstrong fashion, he went to the Federal penitentiary for more charges than his admittedly brutal case merited, a sentence of twenty-two years. He was twenty-one.

While Sasha learned from the savagery in his Pennsylvania cell the necessity for prison reform, as his later-published memoirs presented an eloquent and expert testimony for such progress, Emma had to survive. She was hated by many. Odd jobs and a year or so underground as "E.G. Smith" proved her fate after President McKinley's unhinged assassin claimed he "was a disciple of Emma Goldman". 

The media backlash drove Emma and her associates into desperation. While most anarchists, then and now, promote non-violent means to social harmony and economic equality, a few court the spotlight for better or worse to incite and irritate. Public reaction, after the death of McKinley, forced Goldman and company to seek a better method to convince the huddled masses. On his release from prison after eighteen years in the pen, Berkman took up the pen. In 1906, he became editor of Goldman and friends' fresh project Mother Earth, a monthly publication. (See my PopMatters review of its contents anthologized as Anarchy!, edited in its 2012 expanded version by Peter Greenglass.)

Berkman stayed true to his habits. He masterminded a plot, after the Ludlow, Colorado, massacre of striking miners, to kill John D. Rockefeller, Jr. in 1914. He did not involve himself directly. His conspirators in Manhattan failed to get close enough to their target, so they took their bomb back to their Lexington Avenue apartment. There, in proximity with stored dynamite, it exploded; three of the anarchists died, twenty residents in the building were injured. The casualties would have been higher if it were not a holiday finding many occupants on the streets already, for the Fourth of July.

An urn with ashes from the three at their funeral "formed the shape of a pyramid symbolic of the class system, with a clenched fist bursting from the apex." Such details enliven this book. While dense in its accounts of where the globetrotting pair roamed and whose paths they crossed, the narrative moves steadily and downplays even the inevitable ideological feuds and rivalries endemic to any political movement, favoring a careful, objective relating of the pair's actions and writings.

To protest the militarization celebrated at a 1916 Preparedness Parade in San Francisco, Italian anarchists planted another device. Ten spectators died; forty were wounded. The blame fell instead on local labor organizers and agitators. Tom Mooney and Warren Billings were sentenced, as were the McNamara brothers in Los Angeles a few years earlier, in a climate markedly anti-union and pro-business, supported by a vindictive judiciary, corrupt police, grandstanding politicians and sensationalist media. The relevance of such episodes within this study needs no elaboration.

Sasha was not involved, but his determination to defend Mooney led to his indictment. He opposed the draft, so this led the Federal government to apply wartime legislation. This called for his deportation as a disloyal Russian national and his exile, along with Emma and other anarchists, many of whom had emigrated from what was bursting into the Soviet Union there, which fired up the first Red Scare here.

On trial in 1917, Berkman challenged the court: "Are you going to suppress free speech and liberty in this country, and still pretend that you love liberty so much that you will fight for it five thousand miles away?" Goldman followed in her final statement: "Our patriotism is that of the man who loves a woman with open eyes. He is enchanted by her beauty, yet he sees her faults." This time Sasha (and Emma) had a competent lawyer, but the jury took thirty-nine minutes to return a verdict of guilty.

After serving time in America, the pair were sent off along with other foreign-born anarchists and Communists to the USSR at the end of 1919. Emma was fifty and Sasha about a year younger. J. Edgar Hoover claimed personal credit for their expulsion. Her private letters, he confided, made for "spicy reading".

Bolshevik oppression of their own party, not to mention socialists and anarchists, almost immediately disheartened them. Lenin summoned Berkman and Goldman to serve their new state by forming a mutual friendship society with America; the couple had resisted assisting the Soviets directly. The Kronstadt rebellion and its savage suppression showed how thousands rather than a handful might be slaughtered by a power who bested that of capitalists in his cynical bloodshed.

A chance for Emma to attend an anarchist's convention in Berlin offered a chance to escape. 1922 opened with the pair fleeing to Stockholm, then Berlin and Paris. Emma wound up in London while Sasha remained in Germany. By now, both rushed to assist the victims of Communist rule along with getting their accounts into print, if in botched form by the publishers. These books reported for the first time the truth about the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.

But many purported progressives refused to believe. Leftists hurried to dismiss the pair as traitors, while more moderate readers remembered Berkman and Goldman's strident defenses of violence in the name of an anarchist ideal equally suspect by the majority. Neither book sold very well. However, H.L. Mencken praised them, and intellectuals tended in Britain and on the Continent to regard Emma and Sasha with more sympathy and indulgence for what they had endured in the US and the USSR.

Both found love separately, and both wound up in the South of France. A paper marriage allowed Emma to travel on a British passport. A campaign by her friends to Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor under FDR, enabled Emma to return to the America she missed, if for three weeks in 1934. She managed on her visit, in her mid-sixties, to enter a tumultuous affair with a scholar of anarchism at the University of Chicago. A married man and a father, blind since four months old, he was then in his mid-thirties.

In the 1930s, Berkman chose to settle in Nice and Goldman in St. Tropez. Sasha had fallen for a tempestuous girl in her early twenties who proved difficult. Emma enjoyed her modest villa and visited the syndicalists and anarchists fighting for the Spanish government against fascism. Both authors warned, long before that decade had darkened, how Communism led to fascism, two sides of corporate control and authoritarian imposition upon the individual, whose freedom anarchism proclaimed.

Worn out by poverty, extreme pain, and the effects of poor nutrition and incarceration for so long, Berkman suffered from depression. He took his life in 1936, but as with his attempt on Frick, his shots missed the fatal mark, and he died in agony after the fact. Forty-four years after his first use of the pistol, he had fumbled the final action again.

Goldman lasted four more years. After lobbying in Toronto to raise funds for refugees from the Spanish Civil War and the defeat of her allies, she succumbed to a second stroke. Both are buried in Chicago's Waldheim Cemetery, near the graves of Haymarket anarchists who first inspired the pair.

This biography, the first to fully interweave their restless lives over six decades of agitation, education, and organization (if voluntary rather than coerced), results in a solid presentation. Paul Avrich gathered this material efficiently. Karen Avrich arranges the research into an objective, yet accessible and direct, prose style. The authors present the lives of two passionate, outspoken agitators in a calm, considered tone. Endnotes list sources (a full index but no separate works cited) for those eager to follow the journey, ideologically and geographically, of this wide-ranging Russian couple. Although Sasha and Emma worked better as partners rather than lovers, their contributions to the history of political upheaval and social change resonate. A few blocks from the sites of anarchist protests and rallies, Occupy Wall Street rose up a hundred years later, as a similar struggle continues. (Amazon US 10-20-12; with slight alteration 10-25-12 to PopMatters)

Peter Glassgold's "Anarchy!" Book Review

Emma Goldman published 5000 pages of Mother Earth, a monthly journal between 1906 and 1918. If it had not been raided and its contents confiscated by Red-fearing Fed agents, how long might it have lasted? Would Occupy Wall Street burst into life from it and not Adbusters just over a year ago?

Peter Glassgold updates his 2001 anthology, which distilled to four hundred pages the bulk of Red Emma's anarchist appeals. Despite the intentions of Goldman and her one-time lover and lifelong comrade-in-arms, chief editor Alexander Berkman, the magazine devoted far more attention to the benefits of voluntary agreement rather than imposed government, freedom rather than coercion, which defined their anarchism, a marriage of Peter Kropotkin's communal/ communist aspirations with Jefferson, Emerson, and Whitman's libertarian American roots. In fact, its founders wanted to name their effort after Whitman's poem "The Open Road" until a threat of litigation by a rival publication forced the name change. After a buggy ride, Goldman noticed in April spring germinating, and this inspired the title.

This collection, as the magazine itself, focuses on anarchism and political messages--these dominated despite the subtitle of Mother Earth as "Devoted to Social Science and Literature". For Glassgold, the relevance of its contents in the aftermath of Tea Party populism and Occupy reformist agitation remains, although a century ago, radicals sought a stateless society rather than student loan debt forgiveness, single-payer healthcare, open borders, passage of the ERA, or a green economy. For this second edition, he adds an appendix a "summary and partial transcript" of the July 1917 trial of Goldman and Berkman under the newly signed Espionage Act "for conspiring against the institution of a wartime draft". (I plan to review for PopMatters Paul and Carol Avrich's Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman when it is released later this year.)

The contents of Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman's Mother Earth follow Glassgold's five criteria. Variety and verve; brevity; exclusive publication therein; originating in America with this publication; relevance then and now. Certainly the name of Voltairine de Cleyre with "her elegant but grand style" conjures up another era's airs. But, turn to her "They Who Marry Do Ill": "Nothing is so disgustingly vulgar to me than the so-called sacrament of marriage; outraging all delicacy with the trumpering of private matters in the general ear. Anarchists argued against this status as a property arrangement, a state intrusion into what should have been and could be a choice of free adults.

As we debate birth control availability, foreign policy as eternal war, Wall Street wealth and Beltway corruption, these contents show that the subjects explained do not remain dusty or neglected. They merit revisiting, and application to our own global upheavals. Margaret Sanger, The Mexican Revolution, the shooting of the Ludlow miners, Ibsen and Jack London, the case of Mooney and Billings, the Paris Commune, the death of James Connolly and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington in the Irish rebellion reveal the topical concerns of a restless age not unlike our own, as international revolt and violent unrest challenged bankers and business.

Closer to our own concerns, the six chapters Glassgold arranges emphasize an entry into the anarchist origins and its spirited resistance to the loss of liberty. Rather than the currently common distortion of disorder as an anarchist definition, a cooperative arrangement to advance grassroots interests predominates. "Direct action," attempted by the Occupy movements and last year's Arab Spring, back then depended more on unions and syndicalist workers' associations to swerve around politics into boycotts, slowdowns on the job, and general strikes. Spanish and Russian organizing, the Haymarket affair, McKinley's assassination, and predictable infighting within the labor movement exemplify the issues in this opening section.

Feminism focused beyond the campaigns of suffragettes follows, for the right to vote was but a hollow gesture for anarchists opposed to politics as usual. Morality itself met attack. Marriage, modesty, contraception, abortion, free love, prostitution, eugenics broadened the debate beyond convention.

Literature sought with modernism to overthrow the system, too. A piece subsequently attributed to Eugene O'Neill as his disguised debut in print features (not his best). One cannot argue with his conclusion, that the workers' "efforts help their leaders get the Dough" but a weakness of left-leaning lovers of literature persists here. Some soggy verse or militant prose risks being dragooned into the service of right-thinking if dreary, dutiful devotion to the Cause. O'Neill's unsigned ditty appears alongside reviews of London's Martin Eden,  The Jungle, The Brothers Karamazov, and Berkman's Prison Memoirs. Original works enter by talents such as Maxim Gorky, Ben Hecht, and journalist John Reed's companion Louise Bryant.

Bryant returns for part three, along with Berkman and de Cleyre, discussing "Civil Liberties". A fresh contributor, Ben Reitman, Goldman's newer lover, deserves his own biopic. "King of the Hobos," a brash loud doctor, a Chicago slum kid without a high school degree, who gave up his wandering if not his womanizing "which tested Goldman's well-known advocacy of free love to its limits".

"The Social War" tackles upheaval in Paris, Dublin, Mexico, Colorado, Philadelphia among other hotspots; "War and Peace" shifts into how capitalism and its state protections might "wither away," not by a gradual socialist evolution but revolution. Zionism, Italian protests, and the threats to democracy as war fever spread show the range of issues in part six. Kropotkin, Tolstoy, and Errico Malatesta personify the revolutionary caliber of contributors. This moment, however, led to the dissolution not of the capitalist state, but the magazine itself.

The Soviet triumph divided anarchists, who as libertarians tended to side against state-socialism of the prevailing Bolsheviks. Glassgold notes, contrary to the "Red Emma" moniker most associated with Goldman and company, how Mother Earth succumbed. The cause of its termination? Not its support of the Russian Revolution, but its opposition to the Great War and the conscription demanded by the nations who forced its men to fight.

This expanded collection, which originally appeared the year of 9/11, remains crucial for us a decade later. Civil Liberties struggle against surveillance and an endless war on terror. Women's issues return to presidential campaigns and Supreme Court decisions on healthcare reform and insurance coverage. Social wars as street protests in the EU and Middle East flare up regularly. Anarchism itself remains often misunderstood by the mainstream, caricatured by the media, commodified by "punk" marketers, and appropriated by Anonymous and Black Box movements that thrive on secrecy.

With a timely reprint and revision, Peter Glassgold's project to revive the primary sources may find an eager audience. Commentary prefaces some entries, the index and illustrations enrich, and the introduction sets the major players within their unsettled time, not unlike our own decades of uncertainty. For all the bluster and cant along with the genuine encouragement for betterment, part of any socio-political ideology or strategy, those who cultivated the energy within this journal reacted with passion and conviction, facing jail and deportation for their idealism and activity.

Hysteria over subversion and hype over radical threats have not gone away in the century since Mother Earth. Neither have the real opportunities to channel idealism into action to better each others' human condition. As I write this review, my state hosts on its November ballot a proposition against sex trafficking, showing that the horrors of the "White Slave Trade" inveighed against by Goldman survived the fall of communism and the rise of capitalism worldwide. (Amazon US 10-15-12 and PopMatters 10-30-12)

Terry Eagleton's "Why Marx Was Right": Book Review

"I am out to present Marx's ideas as not perfect but plausible": this caution opens ten chapters which refute standard criticisms. Eagleton reminds us how Marx celebrated as well as condemned what capitalism had achieved to unleash its energies on the modern world: "the system breeds freedom as well as barbarism, emancipation along with enslavement. Capitalist society generates enormous wealth, but in a way that cannot help putting it beyond the reach of most citizens. Even so, that wealth can always be brought within reach. It can be disentangled from the acquisitive, individualist forms which bred it, invested in the community as a whole, and used to keep disagreeable work to the minimum. It can thus release men and women from the chains of economic necessity into a life where they are free to realize their creative potential. This is Marx's vision of communism." (59)

As this excerpt demonstrates, it will not convert the skeptics and it will not overturn the empire. It posits a humanist Marx devotedly, and how this vision would be realized may be as much a question for seminars as Christianity is in seminaries. How this lofty aspiration relates to our everyday world needs explanation, and Eagleton for an open-minded reader may provoke more than soothe, as he sets out I suspect to do. My review comes from neutral territory if any still exists for a reader approaching Marx. I am not a political insider, a trained economist, or a tenured radical, so my interest in this comes from a layman's need for an accessible, cogent interpretation. Eagleton's coming to Marx from lit-crit and not poli-sci: this needs emphasis, given some hasty generalizations, logical weaknesses, and underdeveloped sections of what attempts to be a précis. Still, after exposure to Eagleton in grad school (his "Literary Theory" must bring in plenty of royalties as the standard text), I figured I'd give this little book a try, given current events.

I will review its ten chapters briefly. It elaborates what the extreme compression of his 1999 Routledge booklet in the Great Philosophies series, "Marx," could not. Eagleton conveys his material with characteristic wit, odd images and tangents against such surprising targets as Keith Richards, Mel Gibson, and (repeatedly) Prince Andrew. These enliven what can admittedly be slow going, even in a version of Marx for the distracted masses. Eagleton starts this 2011 account with a typical nod: "You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism." (xi)

Here's my summary: I am paraphrasing Eagleton. Eagleton asserts Marx's valid critique against this system attests to its relevance, even when its rival replaced it. We need a democratic, socialist, non-coercive alternative to it, for without a more humane, self-governing and cooperative market or economic model, we face only barbarism. Chapter Two extends the "underlying logic" of Marxist thought. It offers us a counterforce to the material advances capitalism affords us so unevenly, rewarding a few, tempting the rest, and denying many billions their more than fair share of the profits which the proletariat--however broadly defined despite stereotypes; the word comes from the Roman women producing their only contribution to the workforce, raw labor as offspring--contributes to our globalized and relentlessly competitive demand.

The Soviet revolution was a "tragic irony," for "socialism proved least possible where it was most necessary." (20) Instead of cruel party control, Eagleton searches in Marx to articulate a more humane, localized balance to top-down imposition, although he wanders around to try to explain how centralized direction is also necessary for the decentralized, competing markets to function with enough resources. This was the fate of the communist regime in Russia: it lacked the resources that the capitalists held and would not surrender; it forced the USSR into an arms race that crippled its own nation's development and without all the world on an internationalist, leveled playing field, no socialist reform could ever occur as long as resources were not available to new systems fairly. This may sound like special pleading to opponents, but Eagleton tries to argue his case patiently. He loses  track now and then, as he shifts away from markets to directed control as another, if vague, solution.

He's on surer ground back in his version of how Marx used capitalism, as cited in my opening paragraph from Chapter Three. This refutes the deterministic element in Marx, with mixed success. Same with the next chapter, the longest, as it tries to express a philosophical anthropology of an ethics of love grounded in individual freedom as a realizable ideal, not an impossible utopia. Eagleton cites the Manifesto: "The free development of each becomes the condition for the free development of all." (86) He seems to accept this only to claim on the next page it's a goal that never can be fully attained. It's a direction to aim at, not a "tangible" entity any more than the total triumph of a free market. This may dishearten radicals but please those less fanatical: Eagleton settles in this account refreshingly for compromise, rather than force theories down the throats of imperfect humans like us.

Profits shared, egalitarian governance, cooperatives in common: this structure does not demand "a race of Cordelias," only the best way to further the most people's well-being, and as with capitalism, shirkers, thieves, and slackers will remain, as with road accidents and I suppose the common cold. This part of the book felt to me weaker, and the practicality of this proposal receded despite Eagleton's fervor. I suspect that economics challenges him more than the philosophical side of Marx. Eagleton seeks fewer vices, not a perfect vacuum where human emotions and tensions evaporate. Marx for him's a "visionary" and a "sober realist," a rare combination of humanist and theorist.

In the fifth chapter, "praxis" as "production" giving liberated people a chance to connect with their livelihood and share its rewards would bestow more possibility than capitalism, where the "meaning of my work is determined by the institution" (89) despite our delusions that we advance the common good rather than the gains going far more than us to feral stockholders of rapacious multinationals. "The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalism." (115) It shows us how corporate commodification of all we see, do, and dream is far more reductionist than Marxism.

Materialism is the "theory of how historical animals function," rooted in our bodies and not our thoughts. This may sound crude, but Eagleton shows next how what we think and dream emerges from our state as agents, acting on our motivations as beings and not as spirits. I left this curious about how religion and spirituality fit or did not fit, as Eagleton's recent work has addressed the state of Christianity as well as Marxism as to flaws and strengths. For Christianity, to my disappointment, as well as any cultural phenomenon addressing the less tangible, he does not do so sufficiently here.

Chapter Seven follows with a definition of class as a "capacity to deploy one's power over others to one's own advantage," (171). Eagleton shows how few of us possess much status in the knowledge or post-industrial economies as these undergo managerial control and technological efficiency, linked to increasing surveillance over activities on and off the job. Like the industrial models already shifting into service and clerical work a century ago, the new systems extend power of the few over the many.

Chapter Eight notes how few rebel against this. When "scraps and leavings" are tossed by those in control down to the rest, the rest unless very desperate will tend to wait and keep low, rather than revolting. Violence is part of the capitalist system, which has had centuries to inflict what Mao, Stalin, and despots have in decades as to death tolls and live suffering. Without a humane socialist alternative, barbarism may be the only option if capitalism, as we see lately, totters. Eagleton assumes no other choice awaits us. His own critics may differ, arguing for social welfare as many nations did.

"The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they're winning." (197) Certainly events around the time this book appeared in late 2011 prove that correct. Eagleton dispels "dictatorship" as a bad word, tracing it to an "extralegal breach of a political constitution," (204) which may or may not clarify this as used in Marx's time. He needed to explain this better. Eagleton translates the feared term as "popular democracy" with "rule by the majority."

The majority today may be more diverse in terms of inclusions since Marx: the closing chapter examines him in light of his detractors from feminism, post-colonial, and environmental movements. Marx cannot be blamed for all those coming after him have accused him of, Eagleton avers, and he cleverly here manages to deflect many attacks by later theorists and global activists, even if these ripostes may not convince all his critics. He makes a valiant attempt to link materialism to stewardship of nature and not its exploitation as grounded in Marx's writings, no small feat.

The book closes with two eloquent paragraphs continuing this revision of the thoughts and theories of a man who was a "firm apologist" for--and a "ferocious antagonist" of--liberalism and the Enlightenment's campaign to free men and women from their self-imposed and socially constrained shackles. While a more thorough index and greater consistency in linking parts of his doggedly pursued argument would have strengthened this introduction, for readers like me needing a succinct, popular interpretation, this fills enough of my need for now to listen to Marx (if as with Christ one can separate the founder's message from the machinations of his followers) with fresh ears and to confront his work (apart from the distortions of "state socialism" and police states) with open eyes.
(Amazon US 6-17-12. Thanks to Anthony McIntyre and comrades who commented on this at his spirited blog where it was reprinted 11-10-12, The Pensive Quill)

Jonathan Sperber's "Karl Marx": Book Review

During our current economic crisis, a handful of prominent critics if far fewer politicians acclaim Marx's relevance. For example, Terry Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right--expanding his briefer "Marx" monograph--champions a social-democratic visionary rather than a heartless prophet. Hauling donations to Occupy L.A. encampment's lending library, I noticed Marxian pamphlets scattered, underfoot, piled up, neglected.

This leads to the theme of Jonathan Sperber's biography. Rather than promoting a spokesman for our times, he argues that Marx's ideas have run their course. More a product of the French Revolution and Hegel, early English industrialization and political economies of the emerging modern age, than any avant-garde inspiration, Marx "is more usefully understood as a backward-looking figure," who from his own century's first half took the facts "and projected them into the future."

As a professor of history at the University of Missouri, Sperber aims this work at a general audience. I welcomed this approach. I'd been searching after Eagleton's lively if rapid apologia for a popular, if more in-depth, entry to Marx's work within the perspective of "a nineteenth-century life" and his times.

Sperber draws upon the MEGA edition of Marx and Frederick Engels' writings--a project inherited from the Soviets by the newly unified German nation--which includes correspondence of all sorts (notes scribbled on envelopes) and letters addressed to the pair as well as from them. He widens contexts beyond the usual political and economic texts into more idiosyncratic works. He opens up Marx's public and private complexities to show him as an intellectual and an activist, not always in the most flattering light. His ties within the underground of the time blend with interactions with prominent men such as a lord, king, emperor, and chancellor--as well as David Ricardo and Charles Darwin.

This professor follows today's scholars who downplay the singular impact of the Industrial Revolution. They prefer to integrate the French Revolution, religious ideas, nationalism, and family life and gender relations as widening the perspective established by Marx and Engels in their own historical moment. Capitalism has changed: it's not the bourgeoisie but global forces which activate it, so translations need updating. Sperber does not support projecting later formulations back on Marx, nor does he try (as quasi-religious reformers attempt) to purge an ideology of accretions to cleanse a purified founding figure's glow. He emphasizes our distance from Marx's era, not (as in 1989 or 2011) a few "moments of familiarity."

Beginning in Trier, a Rhineland Catholic pilgrimage center, Sperber charts the forward path of Marx's father Heinrich, who worked first under Napoleonic forces, then for their Prussian conquerors. He converted from Judaism to Protestantism to leave behind the subordination of his people, in a "society of orders" under autocracy. He advanced his legal career, and sought to act on his own beliefs in rational Enlightenment values. Within this context, in 1818, one of his nine children (within eleven years to Henriette, of Dutch Jewish stock) inherited his ambitions and drive. Karl added irascibility.

Karl's first rebellion, Sperber shows, came before his heady exposure to Hegelian theology or atheist philosophy as a law student. He became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, four years older: this was sufficient radicalism to outrage Heinrich. Karl's doctorate on Epicurus demonstrated his classical education, while his enthusiasm for the biblical Higher Criticism foreshadowed his confidence in a human transcendence, based not on divine revelations but scholarly analyses and robust exegeses.

Sperber packs a lot into this hefty volume, ensuring that we can follow the rivalries, theories, and upheavals which caused Marx to move back and forth, not always by choice, from Cologne to Paris or Brussels, before spending the last half of his life in London exile. Sperber delivers this story efficiently. He rarely steps aside from the long historical and biographical narrative to offer his own judgment explicitly. He prefers to let a close reading of the documents--combined with primary sources from correspondence, archives, and accounts--tell the tale. It provides a sober and careful study, for the general reader as well as scholar curious about how this combative figure triumphed.

Marx's involvement--more by goading than participating in the insurrections of the later 1840s as radical ideas sparked populist fury against Prussian and French rule--led to the pamphlets and books which gradually evolved his concept of an Hegelian framework. This depended not on appeals to reform by elevated idealism, but a reliance on the working class. Sperber demonstrates how this proletariat emerges more as an invention of Marx to advance the dialectic materialism he concocted than an actual milieu within which he moved at ease.

For, his journalism in Germany and then France and Belgium--as he was hounded as a subversive--tended to be crammed so full of erudition that the laborers it meant to direct found it too heady to figure out. Compare the radical literature strewn on that autumn campsite of Occupy L.A. Funded at one desperate moment by Cologne capitalists when he had to decamp for Paris (one of three escapes there), Marx cultivated carefully his allies who'd support him and his growing family as his journalism failed and he lacked steady work otherwise. But, he thrived on alienating his comrades.

Even as he crafted his vision of a future when communism would bring about amity, the necessary war and class revolution before that attenuated age of peace seemed to reify--in his backbiting and putdowns. He liked to put into the mouths of his often equally radical if insufficiently enlightened foes anti-communist critiques. He held no scruple about deploying anti-semitic jibes against his opponents of the same Jewish background he renounced. He managed self-criticism of his earlier, more compromising positions by attributing them to his enemies--of which he made many, goading him on the move, still unsettled. His letters display a dominance by ideology, via petty score-settling.

One of many intellectual refugees who would be cast adrift from Central Europe in the wake of 1848 and the crackdown after the Manifesto he and Friedrich Engels conspired to issue would emerge, Marx found in London's comparative isolation a safer asylum, if an even more destitute shelter. Then, Engels agreed to manage his family's textile mill in Manchester to pay the bills for Karl, Jenny, and children. Engels also aided Marx when he (Sperber agrees this happened as far as we can surmise) fathered a child by his maid--Engels took the claim of paternity to save Marx's marriage in a situation which despite archival searching remains understandably obscure. Three of his children born in Soho by Jenny died, including a beloved son at the age of eight. When Marx returned from his 9-to-7 stint in the British Library's Reading Room, one acquaintance noted how he'd be met by not Marx's compliments but discussion of economic categories. Marx lived in close quarters with his growing family, but his mind, as far as can be followed on paper, sought comfort in dense calculations gleaned from relentless theorizing.

During the 1850s, as repression returned and reactionaries regrouped, Marx's expectation that the masses would seize control ebbed. Sperber comments: "At least temporarily unable to change the world, as he aspired to do in his theses by Feuerbach, he had to settle for interpreting it." His financial worries and his separation from Continental contacts impelled Marx to return to freelance journalism.  Much of this was for editor Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, nearly 500 pieces--if but a quarter of the total under Marx's name. Engels ghostwrote the rest after Marx ailed. Marx continued to trade in irony and satire as he covered the Crimean War, European politics, and parliamentary debates in his adopted city. His domestic debts eased, enough for him to move to an unfinished suburb, but his isolation from the German community increased. Engels had to step in to bail out the family once more. (They kept not only at least one maid but a governess no matter their income, typical of their genteel status if not cash flow.)

The biographer reminds us that Marx had in the late 1840s called for a unified Germany to fight tsarist Russia. The 1853-56 Crimean War generated his enthusiasm: he anticipated an insurgency across the Continent would better that of the French in 1789. He hated capitalist hypocrites. Britain would not back a total war, so Marx railed, unlike his followers, against the "Peacemongering Bourgeoisie." Marx in his coverage of British India balanced condemnation of imperialism per se with an acknowledgement of the benefits of world markets which colonization introduced. Marx followed Victorian social scientists who judged the East as static and despotic; the West for all its woes forced progress. Of course, in his model, this historical process led to global uprising--under a Eurocentric vanguard.

The coming socialist revolution, he and Engels assumed, would burst out of their own Continent. He cheered, as another destabilizing force, the first world-wide recession, starting in America in 1857. His activism renewed, Marx resumed vigorous agitation and journalistic investigation of tumult in Italy, Austria, America, and Germany, culminating in the Paris Commune and then the Franco-Prussian conflict of 1870-71.

However, continuing troubles over finances, health, and worry distracted Marx and scattered his concentration over the two decades after his flight to London. So, Engels had to assist with the massive Capital as a demonstration of Marx's culminating synthesis. As Sperber sees it, Capital builds upon Hegelian structures applied to economics. It partially integrates positivist and Darwinian theories linked to David Ricardo's readings of Adam Smith's capitalism. These connections, Sperber concludes, keep Capital within a 19th-century framework, looking back to 1800-50 for political and economic grounding. While later labor socialists took up the countercultural aspects of Marx, the marginal utility economists emerged, late in Marx's career, to push ahead past him. Therefore, his great attempt to tie scientific and materialist structures to economy remains historically much more a part of Marx's formative years than he and his followers might have wished.

Marx's last years forced him--wearied by financial worries, family stress, the deaths of Jenny and one of his three surviving children (all daughters), and failing health--to recognize that the revolution would not happen soon. He continued to rely upon Engels for bailouts. He opposed whomever called for gradual reform. He demanded among the fractious and finally failing First International that his comrades adhere to violent overthrow as a prerequisite. While his theories altered over the decades, his opposition to the Prussian and Russian regimes remained perhaps his ultimately only unchanged orientation. This directed his Central and Eastern European followers, under Engels' interpretations (he survived his partner by enough years to matter more, when it came to editing Capital and establishing Marx in a particularly defiant stance) to dominate the  Second International. Finally, as a German, Marx continued his defiance of the occupying and surrounding powers of his homeland. Given his hatred of the tsar as well as kaiser, he advised late in life Russian dissidents struggling to apply Marx's model to what would become the Third International.

In his 1883 obituaries, three identifiers persisted: Marx was a scientist applying positivist principles to a materialist basis for social transformation, class war, and economic upheaval to usher in a proletariat harmony ruling over a changed earth. Sperber diminishes this perspective by reminding us of the ambivalent and only partially favorable ways in which Marx viewed positivism. Next, the "Jewish folk hero" concept tagged Marx and won over many adherents in Russia and Europe, generations as disenchanted with Judaism as were Heinrich and his family. Sperber reckons how, negatively or positively, the identification of the baby Karl baptized a Lutheran with the people his parents rejected continued to tag Marx as Jewish. Marx appears from the letters more culturally Jewish now and then, if not much overall. Given his public aspersions against Judaism, his private reactions, if sometimes slightly nuanced, do not change his overall position that he wished Jews, as with any other religious group, to assimilate.

The most persistent label, of an "intransigent revolutionary," endured. Engels popularized this stance in his partner over the dozen years he survived Marx. This ensured that Bolsheviks and German insurgents would perpetuate it into the twentieth century's appropriations of Marxism's founding icon. This icon, moreover, perpetuated itself as a giant bust, a monolith similar to the graven image that replaced a humbler stone to memorialize him and Jenny at their plot in London's Highgate cemetery. For Sperber, this fossilized Marx and limited his direction: to look back to 1789. What now proves arguably a telling coda is that the British Communist Party that had erected the monument did so in the year of Hungarian repression by Stalin's forces, 1956, and that the Party in Britain now is defunct.
(3-1-13 to PopMatters with slight editing. Amazon US 3-4-13. The Pensive Quill 9-6-13 by kind reprinting. Publisher's website)

Slavoj Žižek's "The Year of Dreaming Dangerously": Book Review

Critic and philosopher Slavoj Žižek gathers his thoughts about last year's resistance to capitalism and globalization. They comprise loosely topical, often rambling and discursive chapters "outlining the contours of its hegemonic ideology, focusing on the reactionary phenomena (populist revolts in particular) that arise in reaction to social antagonisms". These themes segue into "the two great emancipatory movements of 2011--the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street" and then a discussion of The Wire. These sections consider how to fight the system's power without furthering its dominance.

The earlier selections float about ethnic tension, culture clash, and Western distrust of fundamentalist dogma. None of this discussion will be unfamiliar to his audience. Žižek roams around the wreckage of capitalism and the attempts to counter its damage. Marxian critiques dominate, although Žižek realizes that whatever (utopia shimmers behind the flames vaguely) can replace today's monolithic structure flits away, frustratingly for the reader if less so for him--as a veteran Slovene provocateur. Lacan, Jameson, Chesterton, Lenin, Rand, Hegel: the range of sometimes disparate thinkers intrigues, but the level of most of these contents prefers academic terms. The second sentence of the book's second paragraph embeds "a Greimasian semiotic square" with neither context nor apology.

However, clearer phrasing emerges for a patient reader. As in his previous work, he challenges the status quo yet, similar to street activists, sidesteps what must be done for practical reform. Hints of violence, overthrow, and revolution lurk, but peer out nearly rarely, as in the end of his Occupy chapter: "Is there a name for this reinvented democracy beyond the multi-party representational system? There is indeed: the dictatorship of the proletariat."

He stimulates his sympathetic readers while leaping clear of collusion with a discredited Marxist orthodoxy. This clever stance may encourage fellow travelers, but it may irritate those readers wishing for clear guidance. What can be gleaned sparkles here and there amid the dust-ups and pepper spray. He appeals to the radical left to further the threatened gains of liberalism. He pointedly asks what happens, as in the Arab uprisings, if democracy (as of the writing of this book in June 2012) grows, while poverty remains?

"Hysterical actors" jump out of the marches with Molotovs. Occupy's protesters demanded more than recycling, clicking online to donate a few bucks to charity, or a one-percent donation via a Starbucks cappuccino. Such desperation, as we know, fizzled out or was stamped out soon for many of last year's activists.

Today, their rage simmers. "The self-propelling circulation of Capital remains more than the ultimate Real of our lives, a beast that by definition cannot be controlled." Perhaps Marx can help. Freedom beckons not as an end achieved within the political sphere but ultimately in the liberation of the network of "social relations," Žižek reminds us.

Meanwhile, we may vote for a candidate, but never on who owns what, who controls the financiers who control the politicians who control the electorate. Citizens, trapped by representational democracy in cahoots with capitalists, had to bailout the banks. Banks, not uncontrolled government spending, he insists, bear the blame for the breakdown and the taxpayer's forced repair of the rapacious system that rules nearly the entire world.

The chapter on Occupy Wall Street succeeds best in raising necessary questions about where (if far less so how) to confront this predicament. Žižek cites Alain Badiou: "Today, the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It's called Democracy." This articulates, in Žižek's paraphrase, an embrace of a "democratic illusion". This deludes the populace that only democratic procedures can foment possible change.

Citizens lull themselves into a situation where only "legal rights" can be exercised. For instance, nobody can countenance taking over the banks and putting them "under the people's control". The people persist within dream that overshadows "any radical transformation of capitalist relations". The same parties keep getting elected which ruled over the triumphant recovery led by and benefiting the bankers.

Three closing sections enter into pop culture and belief, as they settle into or rise above our political and economic oppression. "The Circle of Life" from The Lion King, Monteverde's Orfeo, and the recent film adaptation of Coriolanus typify the broader cultural connections Žižek enjoys, in another loosely composed but intermittently involving exploration of rebels and sociopaths on screen, following a look at the likes of McNulty, Lester, and Omar from The Wire.

Finally, Pascal's concept of the "deus absconditus," the "hidden God," infuses a "decisionist nihilism" that rejects a safe moderation. Pascal's "existentialist wager" melts into the dramatic skepticism of the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of Mark before transforming into a return to Hegel's rejection of the known for the unknown, in this novel if blurred vision of radical utopia.

All this winds up chaotic, willfully so or due to the author's expectation that his diligent and combative readers do the heavy lifting to enact change, beyond that of intellectual suggestions or ideological explorations.

Admittedly, Žižek without acknowledgement recycles material from his restive, theoretically dense, if also aphoristic, journalism for The Guardian and the London Review of Books, as well as references and passages unattributed from his previous, prolific publications. This collection resembles a rapidly compiled anthology rather than a bold, fresh contribution from a familiar provocateur. Still, Žižek raises, again, this era's telling question: "is playing with the capitalist beast the only game in town?"
(To Amazon US 10-14-12 and slightly altered to PopMatters 10-22-12. Thanks to Anthony McIntyre and the The Pensive Quill for carrying this 11-19-12. See also my Dec. '08 review of Z's book on Violence.)