Ciarán O’Rourke – Independent Left

Review: Reading ‘Capitalism in the Web of Life’ by Jason W. Moore after COVID19

Posted on June 2, 2020 by Ciarán O'Rourke

A glass sand timer stands on the left of the image against a stark black background, resting on a white table. Inside the top half of the glass is a miniature tree in sandy soil. Underneath is the skyline of a modern city. The image evokes an impending collapse of the web of life by capitalism. — Entwined and destructive, capitalism undermines the web of life.

A few weeks into the current lockdown, as fatalities and reported cases of COVID19 were continuing to rise, news from the frontlines of Ireland’s food production and agri-sector began to arrive, casting an unsettling light on the many – and now overtly dangerous – levels of exploitation on which this cornerstone of the national economy is based.

First, in April, the public learned that Keelings had flown in (and lodged in shared accommodation) almost 200 casually contracted workers to shift the bulk of the coming season’s fruit for market: a decision that seemed deliberately to ignore the health and safety guidelines specified by the HSE’s emergency Coronavirus taskforce. Such a course of action was justified by Keelings on the basis of keeping domestic and global supply chains open, with little comment made as to the risks posed to the fruit-pickers themselves, their families, and, indeed, anyone in contact with them, as a result of company policy.

This reckless managerial focus – on meeting previously projected revenue margins, at workers’ expense and during a global pandemic – reared its head again in a similar, if even more disturbing, case of industrial recalcitrance in May, when an outbreak of the potentially lethal virus was recorded in a number of Irish meat factories. The sub-heading to The Guardian newspaper’s coverage of the scandal was appropriately ominous: ‘Workers share COVID19 fears over lack of social distancing, crowded accommodation and being forced to buy their own PPE [Personal Protective Equipment]’.

Viewed from high up on a gantry, white-coated workers are working on production lines of slabs of meat. An Irish meat plant: where despite the outbreak of COVID19 clusters, workers and animals were subject to 'business as usual' practices. — Irish meat plant: where despite the outbreak of COVID19 clusters, workers and animals were subject to ‘business as usual’ practices.

The story makes for difficult reading, exposing a culture of normalised exploitation and industrial slaughter, in which low-paid, poorly contracted migrant workers ‘feel intimidated and vulnerable’, unsure of their legal rights, and fearing for their medical safety, with one whistleblower also expressing his combined horror and sadness at the cruelty with which, even in normal circumstances, Irish cattle are butchered and turned into meat. In such a scenario, COVID19 posed an immediate threat to the life and health of factory employees; and yet the overall impression the interviews conveyed was that, from the point of view of both the workers and the animals they were dealing with, business as usual was a systematically ruthless and dehumanising affair.

Although occurring five years after the publication of Jason W. Moore’s book, both incidents could be cited as living (if also quite morbid) proof of the validity of his central argument: that ‘Capitalism is not an economic system; it is not a social system; it is a way of organizing nature.’ Cheap labour, migrant and working-class bodies, brutalised animals, rigorously schematised seasonal cycles, are all – equally and as a whole – fodder for the relentless pillage, the forever-primary drive for profit, that is capitalism’s life-in-the-world.

Capitalism in the Web of Life is a critique and revision of environmental concepts and approaches, rather than a miscellany of insights into present environmental struggles (as in Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate, for example). Such a focus, however, is not necessarily negative: what Moore’s analysis lacks in activist-oriented urgency it arguably makes up for in the expansiveness of its critical scope. Moore’s writing is that of a sincere, discerning and formidable critic of ecological and political arrogance, both capitalistic and leftist; and crucially (against that most insidious of critical bugbears) he is methodical and convincing in suggesting an alternative series of attitudes and understandings.

Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore

As implied by the title, Moore sets out to dismantle the distinction between humanity and nature, industrial civilization and the environment, as binary, separate forces, and instead proposes a long-view and multi-faceted perspective: one that recognises how dependent human activities and power dynamics are on natural seasons, cycles, and ecosystems. We change them, Moore argues, and they change us, continuously: and it is on such a ‘world-ecology’ that the success of future efforts to disband and replace neoliberal civilization with radical and sustainable communities-in-process will depend. ‘A capitalist looks at a forest and sees dollar signs,’ Moore observes,

an environmentalist sees trees and birds and soils; a world-ecologist sees how humans and other species have co-produced the forest, and how that “bundled” forest simultaneously conditions and constrains capital today.

At first glance, the significance of such an argument may seem somewhat remote: an example of the kind of linguistic and theoretical tinkering that only an academic Marxist could afford to spend their time discussing or disputing. But as Moore’s analysis unfolds, its pertinence to contemporary anti-capitalist struggles is clear to see. ‘Yes, diseases make history,’ Moore notes, but only insofar as they (and the conditions that intensify their effects) are understood as ‘bound to commerce and empire’.

So today, as historian Mike Davis and others have also argued, the COVID19 pandemic itself may be viewed as having its origin in – its capacity to wreak so much damage stems from – the networks of relentless intervention and attempted control (over bodies both human and ‘natural’) that sustain the capitalist project globally. Broadly speaking, the same may be said of the climactic and civilisational dangers that accompany continued carbon emissions, or global warming. In Moore’s terminology, capitalism’s ‘way of organising nature’ is inherently destructive of the ‘web of life’ on which its own existence (along with everything else) depends. Or as Karl Marx observed:

All progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility […] Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth: the soil and the labourer.

To his immense credit, Moore treats the latter perception less as an aphorism to be glibly quoted than as a key to a palpable, dialectical conflict in which we are, collectively, enmeshed. Likewise, recalling Marx’s earlier recognition of ‘the merciless vandalism’ with which land usage in both England and Germany had been standardised by way of ‘the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil’, Moore surveys the twenty-first-century vista of global, market-driven, genetically modified industrial agriculture as a field of combined ecological and material violence. He concludes:

We can say with some confidence that food – not just land – has become a central site of the world class struggle in a way that is entirely unprecedented, and unthinkable even three decades ago….. As neoliberalism’s [manufactured] definition of food has rolled out – shifting from the Green Revolution’s caloric metric to the ‘edible food-like substances’ that now line our supermarket shelves – it seems to have made food, and by extension nature, much more fundamental to the Old Left questions of liberté, égalité, fraternité than ever before. The class struggle of the twenty-first century will turn, in no small measure, upon how one answers the questions: What is food? What is nature? What is valuable?

So it is, Moore suggests, that campaigns for food justice, for ethical and non-industrialised farming, for environmental sustainability, for ecological restoration, all drive to the heart of the toxic, earth-spanning, wage-devouring monster that is the modern capitalistic world-order (or disorder). At the same time, these seemingly specialised movements challenge activists to sharpen our understanding of what we mean by – how we envision and situate ourselves, our resources and our relationships within – that horizon of political emancipation that draws us forward.

Moore’s critical perspective is illuminating, his meticulous dissection of capitalist accumulation most incisive when he relates his analysis to the tensions and contradictions of our present moment. Moore is refreshingly and emphatically opposed, for example, to the likes of Sir David Attenborough, for instance, who in an interview with the so-called Duke of Cambridge at the World Economic Forum at Davos last year stated that ‘the Anthropocene, or age of humans’ was effectively to blame for climate change.

William Windsor and David Attenborough seated at the World Economic forum. Attenborough is on the right and is making a point with raised hands in an animated gesture. Windsor looks like he is trying to contain a smirk. There is a backdrop of some large brown animals and a foreground of the tops of the heads of the audience. — David Attenborough and some inexpert but well-suited male at the World Economic Forum 2019.

‘The Anthropocene makes for an easy story’, Moore writes,

Easy, because it does not challenge the naturalized inequalities, alienation, and violence inscribed in modernity’s strategic relations of power and production. It is an easy story to tell because it does not ask us to think about these relations at all. The mosaic of human activity in the web of life is reduced to an abstract Humanity: a homogeneous acting unit. Inequality, commodification, imperialism, patriarchy, racial formations, and much more, have been largely removed from consideration. At best, these relations are acknowledged, but as after-the-fact supplements to the framing of the problem.

Such skepticism of ‘The Anthropocene’ and its eloquently embedded public advocates in the Euro-American climate movement is well-founded, as even a cursory examination reveals: of Attenborough himself, who previously has posited famine as an acceptable natural check to the supposed ‘disaster’ of ‘overpopulation’ in the global South, or a figure like Michael Moore, whose most recent film gives credence to the same Malthusian and racist world-view.

By contrast, Moore’s work correctly pins the blame for impending climate collapse on the the globe’s expropriators-in-chief and the systematised practices that serve them, insisting that the fight for an ecologically sustainable society and future is by nature a struggle against ‘[i]nequality, commodification, imperialism, patriarchy, racial formations, and much more’. Moore’s sober, but clear-eyed discovery is a valuable one: that we are both riven and empowered by our own interconnectedness; that with so much at stake, so much already lost and gone, disfigured and deranged, we still, together, have a world to win.

Review: An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Posted on March 3, 2020March 3, 2020 by Ciarán O'Rourke

The cover of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. A cloudy sky, distant horizon and savanna on which is the faded US flag form the background to the text. — Dunbar-Ortiz’s research speaks to a number of political realities – especially racism – that have evolved in the years since publication in 2014

Speaking in the extended aftermath of the so-called Indian Removal Act of 1830, Andrew Jackson, the slave-owning US president famed for his previous (and merciless) warfare against Creek and Seminole tribes in the American South, laid out the case for indigenous extermination. ‘They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition,’ he claimed, concluding that as the many native communities of the South were now ‘established in the midst of another and a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear.’ By the end of Jackson’s second term of office, ‘the force of circumstances’ – implemented by a combination of wild-firing federal troops and unrestrained settler militias – had resulted in the violent relocation of almost sixty thousand indigenous people from their land and homes to regions west of the Mississippi river, in what historians (shy of the term ethnic cleansing) oftenrefer to as the ‘Trail of Tears’.

‘All the presidents after Jackson march in his footsteps,’ Dunbar-Ortiz by contrast observes in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, a powerful chronicle of native life and struggle over the approximately five centuries of European colonization that witnessed the shaping of the USA as we know it. ‘Consciously or not,’ Dunbar-Ortiz writes, America’s ‘ruling class’ has consistently imitated the task Jackson set for his own administration: how (in her words) ‘to reconcile democracy and genocide and characterize it as freedom for the people.’ Tellingly, Jackson’s portrait today graces the modern $20 US dollar bill, while the nation’s current commander-in-chief has praised him as a political forefather to his own brand of toxic, bigoted, wealth-wielding populism.

In Jackson’s era as now, however, the imperialistic arrogance of the US government was met with (at times brilliantly effective) resistance; and it is one of the many merits of Dunbar-Ortiz’s historical account to foreground the continuous uprisings of indigenous peoples, as well as the persistence and diversity of indigenous cultures, in the face of intensifying colonial aggression. Cataloguing the relentless and self-heroising savagery of US policies (federal and settler alike) towards indigenous populations, her narrative in the process shakes loose many of the foundational assumptions on which American politics and historiography has traditionally been built. Eloquently, meticulously, and with an almost devastating critical focus, she not only dissects the doctrines of manifest destiny (the right to colonize Westwards) and civilizing mission (the right to whitewash such colonization, and expand it globally), but also probes inherited concepts concerning property, the use and ownership of land, industrial development, and the like. ‘The Haudenosaunee peoples,’ she notes of the alliance of tribes spanning the Great Lakes and the St Lawrence River to the Atlantic, and as far south as the Carolinas,

avoided centralized power by means of a clan-village system of democracy based on collective stewardship of the land. Corn, the staple crop, was stored in granaries and distributed equitably in this matrilineal society by the clan mothers, the oldest women from every extended family.

As here, throughout her account Dunbar-Ortiz refuses to fossilise indigenous traditions, writing instead as if the same modes and formations of communal organisation were living possibilities (and perhaps they are). In a similar fashion, we encounter Tecumseh: a Shawnee warrior and one of the key figures of an indigenous confederacy formed in the early nineteenth century to resist the decrees and incursions of the US government and speculators. ‘The way, the only way to stop this evil’, he is recorded as saying,

… is for the red people to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first, and should be now, for it was never divided, but belongs to all. Sell a country?! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?

Such episodes hold up a mirror to the many, violent commodifications of capitalist society – modern and historical – exposing its delusions, as well as its frequent brutality (Tecumseh himself was eventually killed in 1813).

As with issues of land and property, the question of class – of who works, who gains, and how these social relations are developed and enforced over time – is latent in much of the story that Dunbar-Ortiz returns to the record, and sometimes openly bares its fangs. ‘Although a man of war,’ she writes, General Philip Sheridan of the Union Army ‘was an entrepreneur at heart’; she quotes Sheridan in a letter to Ulysses S. Grant in 1867, ‘We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians stop the progress of [the railroads].’ Systematic, sustained colonial violence was the pre-condition for capitalist accumulation in the emerging republic; tracing the profit motive through its history is to discover, again and again, the stench of scorched earth and race hatred that made many of its most esteemed emissaries rich, from the oil and railroad baron, John D. Rockefeller, to industrialist and Wall Street tycoon, J.P. Morgan.

Sheridan himself is an unsettlingly emblematic figure in this narrative. The originator of the genocidal aphorism that the only good Indian is a dead Indian, this ‘entrepreneur at heart’ was born to Irish parents who fled serf-like rural poverty in Cavan for America in the early nineteenth century. As such, Sheridan was never fully accepted as an equal by the political and military elites who nonetheless praised his uncompromising zeal as a commander and, indeed, his later supposed achievements as an environmentalist (he championed the founding of Yellowstone National Park, after having forcibly cleared the same region of its original inhabitants). This dynamic is evident in Abraham Lincoln’s aloof and subtly eugenicist description of the fast-rising officer: as a ‘brown, chunky little chap, with a long body, short legs, not enough neck to hang him, and such long arms that if his ankles itch he can scratch them without stooping.’

Sepia portrait of General Philip Sheridan of the Union army. He is looking past the right shoulder of the viewer, wearing a Union army jacket with two stars conspicuous on the left shoulder, which is nearest the viewer, as he is posed at an angle. He is bearded and has a thick moustache. — General Philip Sheridan of the Union army

Sheridan’s case was in many ways typical. In the second half of the nineteenth century, some of the most ruthless regiments and settler militias of the emerging United States – responsible for the murder, mutilation, and destruction of thousands of indigenous tribes and villages – were lead and stocked by Irish emigrants, themselves (like their relatives in Ireland) very often racialised as un-human or sub-human in popular and press culture. One result, as David Roediger has written, is that ‘politicians of Irish and Scotch-Irish heritage’ in the same period worked diligently to disseminate ‘the idea that a new white American race, decidedly inclusive of the Irish, had superseded the Anglo-Saxon race as the benchmark of fitness for citizenship’ in the new democracy: setting the terms of a discourse with which white nationalists and supremacists, including the likes of Steven Bannon, still engage. Such themes are of course particularly resonant in Ireland today, which in recent months has witnessed a surge in racist mobilising and violence deliberately designed to appeal to a (diffuse, but insidious) tradition that ties Irishness to notions of white supremacist victimhood. Some awareness of the history of these ideological postures is arguably more necessary than ever. As Dunbar-Ortiz summarises, ‘living persons’ may not be ‘responsible for what their ancestors did,’ but ‘they are responsible for the society they live in, which is a product of that past.’

Time and again, in fact, we are reminded that populations dehumanised, displaced, and even exterminated by colonial dogmas and military directives have participated, in one form or another, in the ethnic cleansing and conquest of indigenous communities elsewhere: communities with whom, superficially at least, they would appear to share common cause. On this last point, she is unflinchingly factual, observing that former slaves and freedom fighters of colour in the American Civil War, for example, joined (and were deliberately stationed by federal authorities on) the frontlines of anti-guerilla campaigns against native communities, an apparent contradiction that adds an edge to Bob Marley’s song on the same subject, ‘Buffalo Soldier’. Likewise earlier, during the Spanish campaigns of the sixteenth century, we learn that ‘Cortés and his two hundred European mercenaries could never have overthrown the [Aztec] Mexican state without the Indigenous insurgency he co-opted’. In this case, however, one of the great strengths of Dunbar-Ortiz’s account is her equally clear-eyed perception that ‘resistant peoples’ hoping ‘to overthrow [an] oppressive regime’, should not be blamed for, their cause cannot be used to excuse, the ‘genocidal’ aims of the ‘gold-obsessed Spanish colonizers or the European institutions that backed them.’ By persuasion, force, or guile, every colonial enterprise in history has enlisted sections of the populations it sought to subjugate for the furtherance of its aims (exploiting existing divisions in order to secure whatever form of hegemonic power best favoured its own perceived interests); the racist, resource-hungry killing machine of the Spanish conquest was no exception to this pattern.

Although completed in 2014, Dunbar-Ortiz’s research and approach nevertheless speak to a number of political realities that have evolved in the years since. Reading so unified an account of indigenous life and struggle, indeed, it’s difficult not to interpret the extreme levels and incidence of violence against indigenous women in the US today (‘one in three Native American women has been raped or experienced attempted rape, and the rate of sexual assault on Native American women is more than twice the national average’) as a continuation of a history of state formation for which the murder and brutalisation of native women and children specifically was standard procedure: whether in crimes such as the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 (one of several atrocities that Dunbar-Ortiz rightly posits as precursors to later chapters in America’s imperial story, including the Mai Lai Massacre of 1968) or through federally implemented separation and re-education policies (forcing children into missionary, abuse-laden institutes) of the early twentieth century.

A red banner fills the bottom half of the image with the words: Defend the Sacred. Holding it are members of the Sioux community and behind them a crowd. The issue concerns the Dakota Access pipeline, North Dakota. — Protesters near the the Sioux reservation, Standing Rock, opposed to the Dakota Access pipeline, North Dakota

Dunbar-Ortiz’s prose is also palpably sensitive to the ‘centuries of resistance and storytelling passed through the generations’ of indigenous communities, reminding readers that for native tribes still living under conditions of imposed marginality and social invisibility, ‘[s]urviving genocide’ is itself a form ‘dynamic, not passive’ resistance. From which vantage-point, the Wet’suwet’en nation’s ongoing, militant opposition to the Canadian government’s decision to install a gas infrastructure on their land – like the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance (beginning in 2016) to the Dakota Access Pipeline in the US – may be seen as part of the long, many-seasoned trajectory of indigenous self- and environmental protection that Dunbar-Ortiz outlines: protection in the face of settler-colonialist state projects that have always regarded such actions as illegitimate, such communities as disposable. As the preface has it, everything in this ‘history is about the land: who oversaw and cultivated it, fished its waters, maintained its wildlife; who invaded and stole it; how it became a commodity (‘real estate’) broken into pieces to be bought and sold on the market.’ In that respect, the struggle goes on, drawing on traditions that books like this keep fresh in the memory, vivid as spring.

Derek Mahon, A Poet of The Left

Posted on December 14, 2019March 6, 2020 by Ciarán O'Rourke

A portrait of Derek Mahon, poet, who describes himself as having a penchant for left-wing imagery. He is wearing a blue and purple vertical stripped shirt and is looking directly at the camera with a slight smile. — Derek Mahon: a poet of and *for* the political left

By Ciarán O’Rourke

‘I know the simple life / Would be right for me’, writes Derek Mahon in Ovid in Tomis, ‘If I were a simple man.’ A glad complexity, it seems, is the order of the day; a dynamic interweaving of expression and insight evident throughout Mahon’s work, lending the poems both a clarity and a frequent mystery. ‘It is not sleep itself but dreams we miss’, Mahon posits (with aphoristic aplomb), ‘We yearn for that reality in this.’ Known for his intellectual force and technical fluency, and admired as a translator from multiple verse traditions, the Belfast-born poet is universally recognised in establishment literary circles as a leading figure of his generation and moment. Less mentioned, however, is that – in its breadth, emphasis, and overarching perspective – his work invites celebration and cultural co-optation by socialists, anarchists, and every species of utopian realist in between. For although formally traditional, his poems are critically incisive and, in brief, radically human to the core.

It’s a point that’s seldom heard, and so, perhaps in a small way, worth reiterating. Insofar as the ethical compass and content of Mahon’s poetry are discussed at all, the conversation tends to be couched in a discourse of reflexive academic qualification: so that the specific details of Mahon’s political commentary and commitment, at any one point in his poetic career, are presumed to be offset or made redundant by his aesthetic, philosophical, or even formal concerns at another. We are left with a ‘poet of divided affiliations’, who maintains ‘a cautious distance from schools and groups (whether literary or political)’, his stylistically graceful poems ‘characterised by indirection and obliquity’, even as they depict (occasionally) a ‘humanity… powerless against the inevitable forces [that] shape human life.’ We end up, in other words, with a political poet, but one whose work is said to exceed its own politics: thus transforming the latter into an empty category, rimmed by abstractions such as The Force of History or The Demands of his Time.

Such a trend, of course, arguably relates to culture in general, and not to the work of Mahon alone. It would certainly be a tempting thesis to explore: that in a neoliberal society, art and literature are circulated in order to be owned, to placate, or to make life as it is (exploitative and miserable as it may be for many) more liveable and not to subvert the tenets by which that society is organised. In which scenario, what we think of as literary criticism would in fact amount to nothing else than a series of discursive adjustments and revisions, a sort of academic vanishing trick whereby whatever creative radicalism was identified in an art-work, oeuvre, or historical moment would disappear as soon as it was declared. Sound familiar?

At any rate, for gentle-hearted heretics of all stripes – anti-establishmentarian in their politics, but nevertheless in need of the emotional and critical sustenance that literature provides – there is surely some merit in re-examining the work of poets, great and mighty, and the inherited assumptions that frame our encounters with them. In Mahon’s case, moreover – a writer who calls himself an ‘aesthete’ with a penchant ‘for left-wingery […] to which, perhaps naively, I adhere’ – doing so helps us to reach a fuller and clearer understanding not only of his literary back-catalogue, but of the power systems that rule and rack our present world. This may seem like high praise for one of Ireland’s more canonical of contemporary poets; but it’s also true.

Derek Mahon’s An Autumn Wind

Take Mahon’s book, An Autumn Wind, in which we find the artist’s inward vision turning to survey, with searing perception, a global vista defined in the main by corporate theft and murderous imperialism (headed by the USA). ‘The great Naomi Klein’, he writes,

[…] condemns, in The Shock Doctrine,
the Chicago Boys, the World Bank and the IMF,
the dirty tricks and genocidal mischief
inflicted upon the weak
who now fight back.

Mahon’s praise (indeed, rather pointed name-dropping) of Naomi Klein surely gives credence to his self-proclaimed status as a political Leftist. But it also draws a question mark over the standard critical narrative outlined above. Far from deploring modernity in the abstract, shaped by some equally vague ‘inevitable forces’, Mahon’s verse here associates directly the neoliberal economic doctrines of ‘the Chicago Boys, the World Bank and the IMF’ with crimes against humanity, while also acknowledging both the theory and the praxis of resistance that such doctrines inadvertently generate (typified by Klein and by ‘the weak who now fight back’, respectively). It is difficult to imagine Seamus Heaney or Michael Longley, the two most-fêted of Mahon’s Irish contemporaries, even coming close to advancing such a perspective.

Derek Mahon the poet and the opponent of neoliberalism

It is notable, also, that the much-touted ‘concern for the ecological’ in Mahon’s later work exists, in the poem above, within an explicitly anti-capitalist paradigm. Close-focusing on a ‘hare in the corn / scared by the war machine / and cornered trembling in its exposed acre’, the piece in its closing stanza switches to a wide-angle lens, so to speak, and urges that in the next ‘spring, when a new crop begins to grow, / let it not be genetically modified / but such as the ancients sowed / in the old days : a possible retort to the criminal agri-policies of Monsanto. What’s certain, however, is that this is a poetry that arrays itself against (and takes aim at) neoliberalism per se – or what Mahon terms, in his resonantly titled poem, ‘Trump Time’, ‘the bedlam of acquisitive force / That rules us, and would rule the universe.’

Without wanting to over-extend the argument, there’s also a refreshing contemporaneity and excursive quality to Mahon’s range of reference here. Although he may indeed be a literary practitioner combining ‘classical structure with contemporary concerns’ in his work (read great, white and male) – his ‘precursors’ including ‘Samuel Beckett, Louis MacNeice, the poets of Rome and Greece’ – in this instance Mahon openly, and quite self-consciously, takes his cues from a feminist critic of modern capitalism, herself writing of a number of (highly gendered) grassroots movements, primarily in the Global South. Feminist icon he is not, but Mahon’s work at the very least points towards an intersectional understanding of economic exploitation and political struggle: as companion poems in the same volume (such as ‘Water’) arguably also testify.

Radical poet Derek Mahon reading from a book of his own poems held open in his left hand. His right is raised. He is smiling. A microphone is in front of him and behind him are curtains and the end of a bookcase or cabinet with finely bound books. — Derek Mahon: a politically committed poet of the left

None of which is meant to create a further barrier between the so-called aesthetic merits and political commitments of Mahon’s work. If anything, it’s to argue that these qualities exist in continuity with one another, and to suggest some ways in which the overtly political interventions of Mahon’s verse may be seen to sharpen what one authority has described as the ‘crystalline clarity’ of its intellectual make-up, giving heft and consequence to the ‘sophisticated sound-patterning’ for which his poetry is so often admired. After all, Mahon’s bright-soaring, early imagination of an art drawn ‘From the pneumonia of the ditch, from the ague / Of the blind poet and the bombed-out town’ – one envisaged as bringing ‘The all-clear to the empty holes of spring, / Rinsing the choked mud, keeping the colours new’ – was always grounded not just in the sensations of a literate intellect, but in a sensibility disposed to compassionate identification with the realities of other people’s lives: in a word, to solidarity. For Mahon, equipped as a writer with the same ‘light meter and relaxed itinerary’ so beloved of countless literary fence-sitters, the urge that recurs most persistently is in fact ‘To do something’ – or ‘at least not to close the door again’ on those condemned to live ‘in darkness and in pain.’

On a final note: this short sketch has tried to claim Mahon as a poet of and for the political Left: a loose but very real community, whose existence is rarely questioned except by a few faction-feasting personages who are already in it. In doing so, however, we would do well to remember that the democratisation of power so often promised and struggled for by activists holds exciting possibilities for poetry, too: its creation, its reception, and (again) its circulation. As Mahon’s homage to Shane MacGowan implies, the list of great poets can and should be appreciated ‘together with the names Seeger and MacColl’: dissident troubadours both, generally lacking from Mahon’s academically prescribed influences. Art is what we make of it, in short, and the broader the field of shared endeavour, the better. So let the task be to reap and sow the commons of poetry and song, if for no other reason than to pay tribute to Mahon’s work and in the same spirit that the work itself proclaims.