Peter Linebaugh interviewed by Johnny Flynn of Independent Left

Johnny Flynn: The first question I had to ask you was about  the subtitle to your Red Round Globe Hot Burning: a tale at the crossroads of commons and closure, of love and terror, of race and class, and of Kate and Ned Despard. I saw you did a video that is up on the P. M. Press blog where you were talking about crossroads and you referenced Robert Johnson and the idea of being at the crossroads. The time of Edward Despard and Catherine Despard was one of commons and closure and race and class: the beginnings of this horrible white supremacy that we’re beset with now (with all these kinds of fascist berserkers that are all over the world gaining strength). The Despard’s attempt to overthrow the industrial capitalist system and restore the commons failed, and we ourselves are at the crossroads now between our plague-ridden current times and what they call the Anthropocene or the warming climate. Could you talk about that a little bit? How the two are related, if that even makes sense as a question?

Peter Linebaugh: It does make sense. The Anthropocene is basically putting carbon dioxide into the stratosphere, so taking what was underneath the earth and putting it on top of the earth has really messed the earth up, to be simple about it. But Despard, of course, was executed or hanged and decapitated in 1803 and this is at a time when – based on ice samples from the Antarctica – some geologists date the beginning of the pollution of the stratosphere with CO2. Carbon dioxide that’s still up there of course, that has led to global warming, planetary warming, species destruction, desertification and so on. So this is a planetary crisis now that we face.

The USA – or Turtle Island as I’ve taken to calling this part of the planet (based on the first names of the first peoples here, they say Turtle Island) – the USA is basically a product of Despard’s time, that is the 1790s. That’s the same as the UK, the United Kingdom. This was also the time of the Anthropocene. You take these two Uniteds – United Kingdom, United States of America – and try to understand how they are related to the factory and then how is the factory related to the plantation.

Taking the republic, the Anthropocene, white supremacy, the modes of production and put them together and it’s a massive attack, it’s a massive counterrevolution, I would even say, on the planet and on social life of not only two-footed critters but horses, livestock, other species. This is really mind blowing in the sense that it contradicts so many standard narratives, you know, of the scientific revolution, of industrial progress, of secular life, of the enlightenment.

I said four things. Let’s see: Anthropocene; the republics; white supremacy; modes of production. I’m sure I’m missing a few other fundamental pillars that had their foundations knit together in the 1790s. Thank you for remembering Robert Johnson and the crossroads because it was that blues tune – or rather the blues man – that was definitely in my mind. This Robert Johnson, the blues man from the Mississippi Delta, who was said to have made a pact with the devil at the crossroads where he was granted genius at the guitar and in music at the price of his soul. And far be it from me to do a sociology of the blues but it is one of the cultural expressions from Turtle Island that arose out of the plantation and against white supremacy.

The dominant religion of white supremacy was this dualistic view of the devil versus Yahweh or a king of the universe, and Robert Johnson defied it in his music. And I see a direct relationship between that and William Blake. William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion is a beautiful meditation against white supremacy, against political domination, against the love of the body, against Eros, against the alienation of labour. It’s a great poem inspired by the Haitian revolt of 1791.

I’m trying to write a tale of the crossroads and I see that in Edward Despard, the last of many children of an Anglo Irish in County Queens or County Laois, and in Catherine Despard, who was really totally forgotten in history and was a descendant of Africans. They met in the Caribbean or somewhere in North America, maybe Central America, and they formed a revolutionary team, a partnership in the age of revolution, in the age of the United Irishmen and the age of the Haitian revolt, against which I think the United Kingdom and the USA were both formed. I see Ireland and Haiti, or the Caribbean islands, the Caribbean plantation, as kind of the one side of the barbells and the other side of the barbells is the UK and the USA, but again, this is perhaps an undialectical image.

The USA and the UK are past their sell-by date

Johnny Flynn: I remember your extraordinarily provocative statement in one of your talks where you were talking about the United Kingdom and United States. You said that they were both formed as a kind of destruction of the commons, especially in the case of the United States and the United Kingdom: let’s say against the 1798 revolution or attempted revolution of the United Irishmen. So the restoration of the commons would be predicated upon the destruction of what we know of as the United Kingdom and the United States. If I remember correctly, in one of your talks you said something like that?

Peter Linebaugh: I think the USA and the UK are definitely hanging on, gasping for life towards the end of their sell-by date. They’re no longer political organizations that can solve the problems that are facing us, beginning with the effects of the Anthropocene or planetary warming. Their answer, at least, has been to intensify class inequalities and to intensify white supremacy and they’re totally at a loss about what to do against very vibrant forces from the assemblies of the Occupy era from 2011, to the attempts at, quote, ‘socialist constitutions’ in Latin America, against the George Floyd uprising of this last summer. They’re not able to meet these challenges. Hey Johnny, by the way, thank you for saying the whole title, Red Round Globe Hot Burning.

Johnny Flynn: It’s a great title, sure it comes from Blake, the Visions of the Daughters of Albion.

Peter Linebaugh: It does.

Johnny Flynn: There is a great selection of literature in that book. Ciarán O’Rourke and I were thinking you could read through your book and just have people read from different texts that are assembled in the book, because it is like a kind of omnia sunt communia of radical culture and art. It’s like this extraordinary coming together of traditions and texts and everything. It’s just a fabulous work of art, historical art. Not many history books are works of art.

Peter Linebaugh: Thank you for sending me two of Ciarán O’Rourke’s poems.

Johnny Flynn: He’s a great poet. He’s a political poet as well, so he’s totally in love with the poetic tradition like Blake and John Clare and he’s a great source for me. It’s good to have a friend who’s a poet, you know?

Peter Linebaugh: Yeah, Edward Thompson kind of had a view of poetry as oracular, you know. As related to the prophets who were able to denounce the powers that be and the world as it is.

Peter Linebaugh on Thomas Spence

Johnny Flynn: Thomas Spence is like that. It’s incredible stuff. As you’re reading it, you feel like starting to shout or whatever because it’s so powerful, the stuff he’s saying and the way he says it. The rights of infants or when he’s talking about, ‘Yes, Molochs!’ And all this amazing stuff.

Peter Linebaugh: Yeah, I think Thomas Spence is in a different league. He’s in the streets rather than the drawing rooms, and I’m not saying Blake was not in the streets. He was. He would read aloud in the garden with his wife and they wouldn’t have their clothes on, which in good weather sounds… You’d want to have short poems! And he was also seen wandering around the streets of Lambeth with a bonnet rouge. But Spence definitely, he’s not only on the streets, he’s lying on the streets to do his chalking on the pavement.

Johnny Flynn: Just compelled to resist and in these imaginative ways, through songs and graffiti and his incredible pamphlets.

Peter Linebaugh: And his songs were to the tunes of popular tunes that remind me of the Wobblies, of the IWW, who would … or of Joe Hill who would take Salvation Army tunes and turn them into working class fighting songs.

Johnny Flynn: Who’s the guy who had, They go wild, simply wild over me? Not Joe Hill but the other great songwriter for the Wobblies. T-Bone Slim? Didn’t he have that one where he’s like, ‘They go wild, simply wild over me’? Where he’s saying the cops keep beating me up, the judge keeps putting me away all because I’m a class warrior.

Peter Linebaugh: T-Bone Slim spoke of civil insanity. I won’t say Spence started that tradition, because I think that goes back to Aesop and it goes back to Commedia dell’arte in Italy, or popular forms of song and popular forms of street actions, but definitely Joe Hill and T-Bone Slim are part of that, and it comes out of Spence. I love it.

Johnny Flynn: Spence, he kind of radicalized Robert Wedderburn, didn’t he? You and Marcus Rediker have a great passage in your Many-Headed Hydra that describes Robert Wedderburn as a linchpin of the revolutionary Atlantic. It’s a great metaphor it’s brilliant. He’s a fascinating character, Robert Wedderburn. He’s a kind of Jubilee enthusiast like Spence as well: a big believer in the Jubilee.

Peter Linebaugh: That’s right, he was.

Johnny Flynn: Get rid of debts, free the slaves, all this kind of great, great vision, you know?

Peter Linebaugh: And leave the earth fallow for a year. That’s also in Jubilee, and that definitely pertains to our point in the crossroads. I was reading Nature Magazine yesterday; it has released this report that 30% of farmland needs to be turned into wild in order to preserve the planet. That notion of fallow, I think, is essential, and it’s in Jubilee as you were saying, along with debt forgiveness.

Capitalist separation and destruction of the commons

Johnny Flynn: You said that the commons is more forgiving or it’s more friendly to women and children and when it comes, the theft of the commons and the rise of industrial capitalism, women and children were prime victims, whether it’s in slave labour like the reproduction of slaves or actually in the factory system where children were literally being fed into machines at the behest of these capitalist. Whereas the commons was a place of love and solidarity but it was also a formidable place with all these different Commoning traditions. And as with your book, Red Round Globe Hot Burning, it’s not explicitly called an international but it is kind of an international of these different Commoning traditions as Despard and Catherine’s journey is navigated through all these different traditions: from Ireland, to the Miskito Indians to the Mayans and the Iroquois, all these different, great Commoning traditions.

Peter Linebaugh: It is, but they never do quite get together. That was the point of his execution: to demonstrate to the world what happens if you try to get them together. But I want to get back to your other point about how the commons is friendlier to women and to children, because that’s a thought that I learned from my colleague, our colleague, Janet Neeson, who wrote the wonderful book called Commoners, which I think is probably the finest book on the commons in England during this period, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She’s the one who taught me that the work of gleaning, the work of pasturage, is something for children as well as for men and women. In fact, just as I was talking, I was thinking of James Joyce. I think as a kid he used to go up into the hills – what do they call it? Booleying? – to look after pasturage of, I suppose, sheep. I’d like to read more about it, but I know he did that. But getting back to the commons and the family life, the family is not just around the kitchen or not just around the hearth, it’s also outside. It’s in the field or in the woods, and here, the family will go. I’m not sure the ramifications of that have been sufficiently explored by historians. I may want to attempt it here with the chapter on the goose, to describe children’s, quote, ‘literature.’

Long before it was literature, it was oral songs and rhymes, not for the nursery but for children, and it took place outside where lessons of cooperation and of sharing would be taught in practice by parents to children. So, then as you say, the factory will put an end and will start to create the divisions between the, quote, ‘public sphere and private sphere’ or the women’s realm and the public reserve for men. We’re still, of course, suffering the ramifications of that, as men can no longer rely on domination as their form of leadership and women are no longer consigned just to compliance and obedience. These are cultural remnants in our psychologies from this era of the capitalist separation and destruction of the commons.

Johnny Flynn: That’s a great way of putting it.

Peter Linebaugh: Well, we need much more work about it, I think, or I’d like to learn more about it, but Janet Neeson, I definitely recommend her.

Johnny Flynn: Would you say it’s a flaw in Marxism, that no one ever talks about how the worker is reproduced? It’s like the worker arrives at the factory to do the work or whatever. You know, do you think Marx overlooked the whole social reproduction? The stuff that was considered women’s work within the kind of capitalist system?

Peter Linebaugh: Johnny, you’re going to make me defensive. So, I think I’ve got to acknowledge that, because I have such admiration for Marx.

Johnny Flynn: Me too.

Peter Linebaugh: And he has so many enemies that to look at his limitations is … Well, it’s necessary and it’s true, he’s got a chapter on reproduction but it’s not social reproduction. In our era there have been such great debates from Maria Mies or Mariarosa Dalla Costa or Sylvia Federici or Margaret Benson, who have pointed and worked with this huge absence from Marx’s political economy, the other half of the human race.

Myself, I think what’s missing in so much of Marxism has depended on his political economy through the disparagement, on the one hand, of the philosophical anthropology of the young Marx, but also the neglect of (and even a failure to publish) the old Marx. Not all the ethnological manuscripts and notebooks have been published or translated. And they are about the commons, whether it’s the Russian obshchina or the peasant ‘mir’ or the Iroquois ‘longhouse’ here in Turtle Island.

Also Marx spent two months at the end of his life in Algeria and there he was investigating also the practices of the Algerian remnants of forms of Commoning. Now, all of this is not to say that just because he’s interested in commons, he’s therefore interested in women’s labour, but the definition of Marxism, I think, has to do with unpaid labour and that phrase that I think has really gotten in the way of many people’s thinking, which is free wage labour. They use freedom in contrast to slavery. I think that’s a hindrance to further thought because when it is labour of reproduction, of raising children, of her care work, whether it’s raising children, looking after the old or getting the breadwinner through the day, that labour is totally unpaid.

Johnny Flynn: What David Graeber, the late David Graeber, calls the bullshit jobs are paid for but the care work is disparaged.

Peter Linebaugh: His death, unexpected, is a great loss to us. He described bullshit jobs definitely. I haven’t read Bullshit Jobs but I did read Debt and I admire it.

Johnny Flynn: We were just speaking about the Jubilee too.

Peter Linebaugh: I think Thomas Spence also confronted this issue of money and wanted to turn money or token into political coin.

Johnny Flynn: Incredible: class war coins. They’re all over your book, Red Round Globe Hot Burning. There are all those different coins in the book.

Peter Linebaugh: I like that [1795] one because the top one is a quote from the Irishman Oliver Goldsmith. ‘One only master grasps the whole domain’ and it shows this village that’s just wrecked and these trees that are dead and the squalid nature of the road. The other side of the coin is called The End of Oppression and it shows two people burning deeds, burning property deeds. So, it’s just like when a Zapatista showed up and led by women, they burnt the property deeds there in San Cristobal.

Peter Linebaugh interview: the Charter of the Forest

Johnny Flynn: You told a story about the Zapatistas where you said that you misunderstood Subcomandante Marcos about the Magna Carta, something like that, and then you ended up doing a whole Magna Carta book. Was that correct? I think I remember reading that and thought it was a pretty funny story.

Peter Linebaugh: You’ve got to use your own ignorance to advantage. I’m lousy at language. I don’t speak Irish or can’t pronounce it, same with Spanish and all other languages, so when I saw Subcomandante Marcos referring to Magna Carta, I thought, ‘Oh boy, this is the 1215 charter of liberty,’ but it wasn’t at all, it was the Mexican Constitution he was referring to. But, despite that mistake, it made me pay attention to the Mexican Constitution which was all against the ejido. And that had been the beginning in 1994 or the year before the ejido was removed from the Mexican Constitution: ‘no more commons’. That caused me to go think about the English Magna Carta, what had been its relationship to the commons? And as a result discovering its sister charter, the Charter of the Forest.

Johnny Flynn: You did very well, actually, because there was some great stuff about the Magna Carta. The Magna Carta Manifesto was brilliant. There’s a video of you on YouTube at Sherwood Forest talking about these great oaks, and you are almost channelling Spence or someone. You get into a real kind of rhetorical power.

Peter Linebaugh: It was like a dream to be in a place where it felt like Robin Hood was going to pop out somewhere and to be surrounded by all these powerful militants from all over the midlands of England, against fracking and for the preservation of the woodlands. There were some wonderful people there and also, Johnny, the most amazing trees I’ve ever seen.

Johnny Flynn: You said to be among these great oaks…

Peter Linebaugh: It was like out of a Hollywood fantasy movie. I expected these oaks to start talking or their limbs moving like arms at any moment.

Peter Linebaugh on thanatocracy

Johnny Flynn: Beginning with The London Hanged you talk about ‘thanatocracy’, which I presume means rule by the spectacle of death, or the threat of death or hanging and executions, as a way of disciplining the common folk who have been kicked off the commons. It’s in Red Round Globe Hot Burning as well, you talk about the thanatocracy. It seems like a key concept for you in the rise of capitalism: red in tooth and claw.

Peter Linebaugh: I’ll talk about it but then I want to know what you think about it, because thanatocracy, I guess it’s Greek, government by death, like you have democracy, government by the people. It comes from John Locke. He defined sovereignty as the ability to pass laws with the punishment of death, and so if that was his notion of sovereignty, that’s the Roman notion of sovereignty too. When Caesar is displaying himself in the city in a procession, he’s preceded by a person carrying a bundle of sticks and these sticks were the fasces and they sit with an axe among them, they indicated sovereignty and the axe was a tool of decapitation.

So capital punishment and the ability to murder or to kill another person was the essence both of the precessions of Caesar but also of John Locke and the foundation of the liberal era. The foundation of law was capital punishment. Of course I wanted to tie it into Marxism. Surplus value, as interest, rent or profit provides bankers, landlords and capitalists and entrepreneurs with their wealth, but it’s always at the expense of those whose value, that is their wages or their receipts of subsistence goods is reduced lower and lower and lower and lower until death arrives.

There is a constant reduction on the value of a human being and the value of work. In fact, work itself is deathly, as Marx showed in Chapter 10 of Capital with the story of Ann Walkley who died from overwork. I learned more about this last night from hearing Mike Stout talk about the struggle at the Homestead Steel Works in Pittsburgh, a factory that produced the steel for the world for a couple generations. He said between 15 and 20 people were killed every year at Homestead at these steelworks in Pittsburgh. And then this summer we saw the police knee on the neck of George Floyd, and this, again, was to demonstrate the power of police. And you look at the policeman’s face and you can see that he’s sort of taking satisfaction in his work, unlike a lot of executioners such as Jack Ketch, a lot of them do not take much satisfaction in that work and it leads to illness. So, there’s a spectrum, I think, from John Locke to George Floyd, and we also see it in the management of the coronavirus, of the pandemic, I think where African American people, poor people, old people are targeted in a kind of triage, an unspoken triage, are left to die, are left to be more susceptible to this disease, and certainly less able to obtain relief.

And then going back to the theories of capitalism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially to Malthus, there is a new form of reasoning, of calculating the deaths numerically across a whole demographic spectrum, a whole society, and I think that method of reasoning had its origins in Ireland with the English conquest of Ireland, with Gregory King and William Petty of the Down Survey. People were beginning to calculate and enumerate populations as a whole. They were beginning to study social reproduction for a whole society. So some of them also anticipated and try to manage deaths. Who is going to starve and who won’t starve? Who is more likely to obtain, get a disease and who isn’t? And this is also, I think, related to thanatocracy. But mainly, of course, thanatocracy refers to capital punishment, which I define not just legally but as the punishment of capital, so it’s trying to broaden the meaning. Now, my question to you, Johnny, is if I had some different essays on this, which I’ve written over the years and I want to put together in a book, do you think I should call it Thanatocracy?

Johnny Flynn: I think it’s an extraordinarily suggestive concept. I think it’s brilliant. For me it gives me a good picture in my mind, everything I think about, the rise of capitalism and through your works I can get a really vivid picture of just the sheer brutality of the enterprise, because often as leftists, you’re always on the back foot. People say, ‘Oh, what about Stalin? What about the brutality of the Soviet experiment or whatever?’ You’re like, ‘Absolutely. I’m not denying it. But let’s also concentrate on this extraordinarily brutal couple of hundred years which is just unparalleled in the terms of the amount of savagery.’ I think thanatocracy is a theme in your works from The London Hanged to tales like The Many-Headed Hydra: such as when Francis Bacon is talking so genocidally about working class people and plebeians.

COVID and the US election from the perspective of Peter Linebaugh

Johnny Flynn: It’s interesting you just brought up the issue of quarantines and COVID. I actually had that as a kind of second question I was going to ask you. Did you think there was any relation to the idea that how people are almost expendable now under this plague system? Does it in any way relate to what you discussed as thanatocracy?

Peter Linebaugh: It’s already part of a mainstream debate in this election year here in the USA. How many lives did Trump sacrifice? Is it 100,000 or is it tens of thousands? There’s sort of a debate, but the assumption in both of them is that those policies led to deaths. But what’s missing from that debate, at least in the mainstream, is those deaths were socially targeted towards a population that’s either dangerous or useless from a standpoint of producing surplus value, from the standpoint of producing wealth or riches for the ruling class. Trump has no use for nursing homes. He has no use for the urban proletariat of cities, and is willing to … I was going to say sacrifice, but it’s more than that. Well, I don’t want to get into his psychology, but politically the morbidity of the coronavirus targets African American, brown people, immigrants and the elderly. That’s common public health knowledge.

What makes a criminal?

Johnny Flynn: I was reading Stop, Thief! where you published, ‘Karl Marx, the Theft of Wood, and Working-Class Composition’, and discuss the essays that alerted or turned Marx towards a more class analysis eventually. You also discuss criminology and especially in The London Hanged and Red Round Globe Hot Burning, it’s like you turn the tables on what is called the criminal and criminality. You basically say the theft of commons was the crime and then this whole architecture of law was built in order to defend that. And then criminalise the customs of the people who were commoners. Let’s say if you worked in the docks you had customary perquisites, you took a certain amount of coffee or tobacco: that was criminalized. You had the police there to ensure that. So now we have this huge architecture of law, this carceral state with the police at the front of it. So I like in your work how you subvert what was traditional in criminology to go, ‘Actually, the real criminals are …’ It’s a bit like the peasant ditty of prison for the man or woman who steals the goose from off the common, but the greater villain is let loose, who steals the common from the goose. I think that’s a great kind of aspect of your work. It’s only one aspect but it’s a very important one because you’re thinking about the whole of capitalism. It really wrong-foots the apologists of capitalism. So if you could talk a little bit about that. That seems to be one of your early kind of entries into this work of yours was that kind of thinking about the whole idea of criminalisation.

Peter Linebaugh: This goes back for me to what I learned from people, other historians like Edward Thompson or Eric Hobsbawn or George Rudé who were writing in the early 1960s. Also, in the early 1960s in the USA there were the municipal uprisings that began in, let’s say, 1962 or ’63 in Harlem and Rochester and then expanded to Detroit, to Watts, and these were rebellions against white supremacy, rebellions against poverty, against slum housing conditions and against a future with no hope, basically no future at all. Those rebellions led to a huge counter-movement of law and order, where it was assumed the only law and order was the law and order of property and of US entrepreneurial individualism. In California it is Ed Meese who becomes the attorney general for Ronald Reagan who then, years later, becomes president under that cultural sign of law and order, which a couple months ago, Trump dragged out and tried to use against the protests of the murder of George Floyd.

That was the context back in the ’60s, this demonization of African American people, and the man who showed that to me and has showed it to the world as being a phony, slanderous labelling was Malcolm X, Malcolm Little, who himself had been a criminal, a burglar, who did time in prison and who learned in prison in the late 1940s, perhaps from Wobbly teachers in the Massachusetts prison. Anyway, over the years, he begins to turn the tables. So, all you have to do is see what he does and then do it yourself. And I wasn’t the only one, like the other historians. I’m trying to say that my knowledge came out of the movement. What I learned was already being put into practice by the African American working class in the USA. And of course it’s worldwide.

You in Ireland would know it, like in South Africa or India, the different forms of humiliation and degradation which the ruling class always uses, whether it has to do with table manners or whether it has to do with racism, whether it has to do with educational opportunities or living conditions. People from colonial settings learn how to be compliant and how to have that double consciousness, of how to get along with the man, how to get along with authority on the one hand and on the other hand it’s ‘save yourself’, to have some kind of dignity, some kind of solidarity with others who suffer. So taking that quatrain that you quoted: the law locks up the man or woman who steals the goose from off the common but lets the greater villain loose who steels the common from the goose. There’s a story in there that Foucault told us about the carceral society but also in there is the story of Malcolm X, the story of how the prison can become the university of liberation. This happened of course with H-Block in Ireland.

The ruling class will always try to criminalize its opponents and when it comes to property or to subsistence life, then it gets very desperate, and then the famine, early death, morbidity arises. But in Red Round Globe Hot Burning, I got two chapters at least about the criminalization of the commons. Usually we think of the commons in rural or agrarian settings or settings of the woodlands or wetlands or pasture but what these two chapters try to help us see is that the so-called criminality in the city is also like a form of opposition to enclosure, forms of opposition that are analogous to the estovers, the pannage, the herbage, the agistments, these old concepts of the agrarian commons. So that’s what I was trying to do.

Johnny Flynn: You were talking about getting radicalized in prison. I love your idea that maybe Thomas Spence met Edward Despard in prison. I was thinking about that for ages afterwards, just imagining the two of them meeting in prison, because Spence was imprisoned at the same time as the Mutineers or the 1797 naval mutiny. And weren’t the United Irish involved in it?

Peter Linebaugh: Yeah, Valentine Joyce.

Edward Despard and Thomas Spence

Johnny Flynn: When they were in prison, Despard was in prison then as well, wasn’t he? Was he locked up?

Peter Linebaugh: He was locked up in those cells in the Clerkenwell or the Stille. They called it the Bastille or the Stille for short. But Despard also had been in Shrewsbury Prison, another new prison, and his life was a time of prison construction. I think Spence had been there in Shrewsbury Prison, or I know he was, but I’ve wrote the Shrewsbury Record Office because I didn’t have the wherewithal to make a personal visit, because you’re always dependent on the generosity of the archivist as a historian, but they couldn’t date an overlap between Spence and Despard in Shrewsbury Prison. But that’s kind of a vain search, you know, Johnny? They wouldn’t know about each other. Like I never met Malcolm X even though he taught me, you know what I mean? Certainly, there would be plenty of songs that Despard would know.

And I think Spence was very expressive and Despard was not. Despard didn’t write much. Spence wrote quite a bit. That was his method of communication. That, then chalking and music. Despard was a military man. He was a leader and could see many different forces at play at once. He saw the city as a target, as an insurrectionist. He’s more like Auguste Blanqui in French revolutionary history. I don’t know Irish politics well enough to know in the Republican tradition who are those who are most apt to go for another Easter Rising, of just attacking, say, the post office as a first step. But Despard certainly had a tradition of this. He was a skilled artilleryman because of his knowledge of geometry, but he was good at: ‘Where do you put a cannon? What do you point it at? How do you get it there?’ This is largely a question of organizing livestock and human beings to move ordinance around. That’s a big job of labour. And so he in a way was a manager, you know what I mean? We have to look at his life, what he was trained at doing. Then, when he’s jailed in prison all through the 1790s in one prison after another, Newgate, Shrewsbury, the Tower, the Coldbath, Stille and several others, he meets a lot of people and they want to shut him up. They want to prevent him from getting food. They want to make sure that there’s no glass in his windows. They want to make sure that the door doesn’t go down to the floor, so that wind and snow and rain can flood his cell. They want to work on his malaria and see him perish.

Peter Linebaugh: That’s where Kate is so helpful in organizing not just her alone but the relatives, the wives, the women of other political prisoners. They formed support groups, and I think as you emphasise in a review you wrote, she was intrepid.

Johnny Flynn: She put the fear of God in them.

Peter Linebaugh: She did. Horatio Nelson, she’d speak back to him. These people lived in fear of this woman’s tongue and of her righteousness, quoting her in parliament and also trying to subvert her by saying a black person could not write good grammar.

Johnny Flynn: That they were too well written or something.

Peter Linebaugh: When they say, ‘Oh, public schooling,’ what they mean is, ‘You’ve got to come and learn the way we spell, the way we think, the way we write.’ Anyway, there she is, helping to write his last speech at the gallows.

Johnny Flynn: That speech at the gallows, that’s a good speech. I like that one. She probably must have written the bulk of that, as he doesn’t seem to be the man of words, was he?

Peter Linebaugh: I think he learned that you want to put things in threes.

Johnny Flynn: I love your rumination at the end of the book, ‘What is the human race?’ You end the book with these real bravura chapters, it’s like the red crested bird and the black duck. Allegorical kinds of interesting mise en scene, like the guy who decided he was sick of urban life and went over to live with a Native American and has come back and is telling this story, and how you connected that story with the Irish and the Native Americans. It’s a fascinating chapter, that one. And then ‘what is the human race?’ is brilliant way to end the book because it brings all the themes together.

Peter Linebaugh: Well, the Irish defeat in 1798 meant a lot. Thomas Jefferson would not have been elected president without the effort of former United Irishmen, who were editors of newspapers in South Carolina, North Carolina. The splendid historian of Ireland taught me that.

Johnny Flynn: Who is that, Kevin Whelan?

Peter Linebaugh: This book could not have been written without the writings of very fine Irish scholars and historians and poets, especially from the Field Day tendency. Kevin Whelan is a big part of it and I was very grateful to him and others who invited me to Ireland at the time of the Good Friday Agreement and we had a grand meeting on the commemoration, the bicentennial of the 1798 rebellion. So I really want to thank them very much. And also Patrick Bresnahan at Maynooth who wrote an appreciation of Red Round Globe Hot Burning in the journal Antipode.

We let a point slide by that I want to return to, which was Catherine Despard was active in preventing the foundation of a panopticon. I just wanted to emphasize that. That was one of Jeremy Bentham’s favourite projects.

Johnny Flynn: I’ve one last question, which is about the Diggers and Winstanley and, ‘the earth is a common treasury for all’. If I understand your book correctly, Winstanley and the Diggers, True Levellers, the Ranters, they come from an earlier tradition as well, like maybe Wat Tyler? And the message from the English Revolution, the radical message, stays alive. So when Edward Despard is accused by the prosecutor, Lord Ellenborough, of being a Leveller, of believing in this equality, this terrible stuff. This is Winstanley’s message back again. It’s come back through Edward Despard and his revolutionary conspiracy essentially. It’s gone around the Atlantic and it’s come back as this conspiracy to restore the commons.

Peter Linebaugh: And Despard is only one of the vectors. There are many others.

Johnny Flynn: It’s fascinating that, like you said in the book, that stories help keep alive the memory of defeats or help us understand defeats, and I think your book kind of does that. If you took your book as a story, it pieces together all these things and all the different things happening at the time and it helps us make sense of defeats, but defeats aren’t the end of the story. In the twenty-first century we could still restore the commons, you know?

Peter Linebaugh: I think the crossroads isn’t something that just happened back then. It’s still here, and the alternatives are for us to revive.

A review of On Seamus Heaney by Roy Foster

Although known for his active support of the South African anti-Apartheid movement and for his open opposition to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Irish poet and Nobel-prize winner Seamus Heaney was not famous for his politics. This has led some sceptics to dismiss the political content in the poems of Seamus Heaney on the grounds of his willing proximity to centres and figureheads of power: from his tenureships in Oxford and Harvard Universities to his warm relations with American Presidents, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (although footage can still be found of a fresh-faced Seamus Heaney expressing his sympathy for the socialistic tendencies of the early civil rights movement in Northern Ireland).

Such critiques are valid in shining a light on the embedded nature of the arts, at least at an institutional level, in the power structures of capitalism, as well as the risks that trail in the wake of creative endeavour as a result, whereby after a period of time (as Adrienne Rich once wrote) the artist “simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage”, becoming a kind of living fig leaf to cover the “radical disparities of wealth and power” in their society. In this case, however, it would be a mistake to oversimplify or overlook the poems of Seamus Heaney in which political ideas are present and important. This is the weakness of an otherwise insightful new book by Roy Foster on the poems of Seamus Heaney.

Imperialism, Roy Foster and Seamus Heaney

In some ways, Foster is an unlikely candidate for elucidating the development and concerns of so complicated a cultural force as Heaney. Deeming Dublin’s 1916 Rising against British imperialism an act of righteous folly, an event he views as derailing the proper course of constitutional nationalism from achieving its promised reward, Foster has long been in the habit of articulating establishment positions on history (and revolution) with a consistency and quasi-literary aplomb that are in themselves impressive, if hardly winning. Such a tendency may partly be seen remarks such as: ‘the advent of apocalypse after 1968 is … an avoidable lurch into violence rather than the inevitable bursting of a boil’; and in the lapidary aside that the conflict in Northern Ireland ‘fed on ancient antipathies as well as recent injustices.’

Foster’s intention is to offer sympathetic clarification of Heaney’s evolving predicaments as a conscientious nationalist averse to armed violence, which these comments partly do, but they also bear hints of a cosmopolitan sanctimony entirely Foster’s own. We might qualify and contextualise Foster’s historicising by reference to another historian, Daniel Finn: ‘Ancestral voices do not call out to people from beyond the grave: they have to be summoned by the living to legitimize a present-day political stance.’ Foster’s reflexive urge to associate Irish anti-imperialism in general, and however subtly, with the “ancient antipathies” of religious prejudice is as much an act of de-legitimizing as any, and should itself be subject to critical scrutiny.

In a similar vein, it’s surely notable that Foster’s criticism, in Modern Ireland: 1600-1972, of United Irishman Wolfe Tone for his supposed ‘inability to recognise the sectarian underpinning of all political activity in Ireland’ in the lead-up to the 1798 rebellion, conflating revolutionary nationalism once again with religious sectarianism, stands in stark contrast to Heaney’s simmering memorial of the same in ‘Requiem for the Croppies’, whose propulsive beginning is:

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley

No kitchens on the run, no striking camp

We moved quick and sudden in our own country.

Although Heaney would later refrain from public readings of this piece, lest it be interpreted as an endorsement of the IRA’s armed campaign (to which he was opposed), its atmosphere of inspired anti-imperialism still retains a quivering power and assurance, while the poem’s seemingly instinctive joy in the mass agency of the rebels (‘We moved quick and sudden in our own country’) immediately calls to mind the stirrings of civil disobedience in Northern Ireland, and elsewhere, in the late 1960s when it was written.

Seamus Heaney’s politics misread

If Heaney vacillated between a disdain for British imperialism as such and a distaste for the tactics and righteous rhetoric of the Provisional IRA, the combative spirit and perception of dignity in struggle that animates ‘Requiem for the Croppies’ persisted in his work, finding a guarded echo in his collection of a decade later, Field Work. In ‘The Toome Road’, Heaney (or at any rate, the expressive conscience that permeates his poems) meets:

…armoured cars

In convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres

This patrol disturbing the natural soundscape as well as the political ecosystem of a locale that, nonetheless, remains an ‘untoppled omphalos’, as the British forces swerve into view,

approaching down my road

As if they owned them.

The poem encapsulates Heaney’s groundedness in the landscape of his origins (it is not, contra Foster’s interpretation of Irish nationalism above, an expression of sectarian pride), as well as striking a clear chord of collective, political defiance against colonial incursion. Importantly, however, in its recourse to classical tradition – in ancient Greek, omphalos means, roughly, a navel and the centre of a social order – Heaney is also making legible and understandable, for an insulated intellectual elite typified by Foster as much as for onlooking political communities in Dublin and London more broadly, the feelings of anti-colonial resentment and communal pride-of-place that define the hinterlands of his first home, in the Derry/Antrim area.

Foster, then, is sometimes inclined to miss or misread the anti-imperialistic charge animating crucial sections of Heaney’s oeuvre.

The experience of empire, Civil Rights and republicanism creates a tension in Heaney’s career and legacy, about which Foster has little to say beyond suggesting that increasing demands on the poet’s time in later years had a debilitating effect on his personal well-being, and citing (fascinatingly, if without further comment) an interview in which the bard indicates his interest in new academic trends that stress, in his own words, ‘the connivance between the promotion of art and the prevailing structures of capitalist society’. No doubt a compelling study could be made of Heaney’s evolving attitude to such issues, and the spectrum of political stances his career incorporated, but they form only a peripheral part of Foster’s focus in this volume.

A richness in Heaney’s poems that escapes narrow politics

By following the line of critique outlined above too rigidly, of course, we risk diluting the richness of Heaney’s work, as well as overlooking the strong current of self-interrogation and self-reproach that courses through it. One of Heaney’s recurring fixations is that of the implication of the poet in the violences (and silences) of history: the sharded nature of his own reflective life. ‘I am the artful voyeur’, he famously writes, in pained remorse,

who would connive

in civilized outrage

at sectarian killing and sacrifice,

yet understand the exact

and tribal, intimate revenge.

For all the rootedness and consistency of its motifs, Heaney’s work refuses any easy faith in its own rituals, or in the integrity of his own position. I…

gather up cold handfuls of the dew

To wash you, cousin

and

plait

Green scapulars to wear over your shroud

… reads ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’, an elegy for his murdered relative, Colum McCartney, whose ghost returns in another poem a decade later to ‘accuse’ the poet: ‘“…for the way you whitewashed ugliness [and] saccharined my death with morning dew.”’ Questions of ethical complicity and redress, of failure and rebuke, haunt and define this most acclaimed of literary laureates, who never presumed to take the accomplishments of his craft for granted.

Where Foster’s study is exemplary is in its praise and foregrounding of the nuanced nature of the work, and its human value. Such qualities have not always given their due.

The development of Seamus Heaney as a poet

‘There is a Proustian exactness in [Seamus Heaney’s] evocation of the texture and detail of his early life’, writes Roy Foster, an ‘unerring memory’ that lends his every reminiscence a living gleam. Here, Foster’s interpretation of Heaney’s work is commendable for its clarity and concision, and noteworthy for its close-focussed appreciation of the skill and achievement of a figure widely regarded as Ireland’s national poet. The compressed format of the Princeton Writers on Writers series, it should be said, is a comfortable fit for Foster’s style, which favours suggestive aphorism over in-depth analysis (which would, in this case, perhaps be cumbersome anyway). As such, the volume serves as a fluent personal response to Heaney on Foster’s part, while also offering an accessible and stimulating reader’s guide to the work: elegant, career-spanning, and lucid, if also somewhat breezily assured of the durability of its own impressions.

Heaney emerges from Foster’s account as ‘a poet’ possessed of ‘a novelist’s perception of circumstance and psychology’, a writer ‘whose complexities stretch far beyond the charm of his early poems’, a ‘charm which itself is never simply what it seems’, an artist whose Catholic upbringing and ground-breaking explorations of his own memory and shaping landscapes Foster finds comparable, intriguingly (although sadly without elaboration), to those of Italian film director, Federico Felini.

Foster is a sensitive reader of the work, from the ‘lush and winsome wordplay’ of juvenilia to ‘the voice [that is] steadying and readying itself for a journey into another dimension’ in Human Chain (2010), Heaney’s final book. Additionally, On Heaney presents an often compelling trajectory of the poet’s development, emphasising his generosity as a public figure (a trait likewise acknowledged by cultural figures as far-flung as the writer, Dermot Healy, and the anti-apartheid campaigner, Kader Asmal), the emotional and intellectual nuance of both the books and the individual poems he produced, and the sharp, sometimes vexed awareness of cultural status and responsibility that increasingly accompanied his literary fame. Foster interweaves these strands of the Heaney story deftly, concluding he was possessed of ‘a strong sense of the shape of his life’ as well as the ‘completely defensible’, if frequently disguised ‘ambition of the major talent’.

Were Seamus Heaney’s poems influenced by Yeats?

Foster’s apparently effortless savvy and decisiveness in such matters is of course in great part due to his playing to his own strengths throughout. The case for Heaney’s ‘Yeatsian’ qualities and ‘Yeats-like’ development as a poet is made repeatedly, although not, to my mind, entirely convincingly. The Heaney canon is full of probing (and dutiful) responses to Yeats, in both prose and poetry: a landmark piece such as ‘Casualty’, for example, adopts the rhythm of the elder songsmith’s ‘The Fisherman’, albeit as much as a means of demarcating its own difference in approach and historical context as for any accompanying literary resonance.

In fact, the resemblance between the two writers is limited at best: only to the extent that Foster has written a biography of one national poet and now is presenting an interpretation of another (both, of course, having been awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature), does Heaney’s work appear to grow from and comes to mirror that of Yeats. In their sensibilities, their sources, their historical backgrounds and perspectives, they are hardly alike. Yeats, oracular and shape-shifting, is forever taking flight, searching for new myths to illuminate and inhabit, before passing on; Heaney, intuitive and cautious, is always hunkering down, his slow roots thirsting in the dark for something sure and known, whose existence he frequently both doubts and yearns for.

In this and in other respects, as Foster’s commentary suggests, Heaney’s work rings true, entering the world with a palpability and force all its own. The observational intensity of his poems is often unforgettable: from the ‘water’ that,

Honeyed

in the slung bucket

of a sunlit farmyard, to the ‘surface of a slate-grey lake’ that’s been,

lit

By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans.

Heaney’s poetry is as much a mode of memory as an act of imagination, giving dramatic life to the sensuousness of longing, both romantic and elegiac: a longing he often acknowledges as being somehow unreachable, ‘Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere’, impossible to bring to a state of fulfilment or permanent healing. Most people experience a version of this feeling, in love or mourning, in aspirations glimpsed or denied. For revolutionaries, it forms a prelude to the complex hope they carry: a realisation that the world to be won encompasses the irreparable losses of past sacrifice and unsuccess as well as the promised gains of mutuality and a common future: we bring them forward with us as we go. Heaney’s poem in dedication to his sons, ‘A Kite for Michael and Christopher’, captures something of this, blending a hard-edged vision with soft, sad faith:

Before the kite plunges down into the wood

and this line goes useless

take in your two hands, boys, and feel

the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.

You were born fit for it.

Stand in here in front of me

and take the strain.

Reading Heaney can be a way of preparing ourselves, and recognising one another; his work clarifies the frequent perilousness and hoped-for (never guaranteed) continuity of our own humanity. We would do well to pay heed.

A review of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Queimada

If you are looking for a recommendation for socialist or revolutionary cinema, then you should start with The Battle of Algiers and Queimada by Gillo Pontecorvo, both of which are contenders for the best revolutionary film of all time.

He’s the most dangerous kind of Marxist, a Marxist poet.

Pauline Kael

Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1965-66) and Burn! (1969) are, in my opinion, the two greatest political films ever made.

Edward Said

When I’m asked if the film was difficult to make. I honestly explain that it wasn’t as difficult as it looks, even though you see a lot of people, because, once you have chosen this theme, you decide you must tell the truth.

Gillo Pontecorvo, talking about The Battle of Algiers

Despite a long career as a director, Gillo Pontecorvo made only five dramatic feature films and a dozen or so documentaries. In a profile of him written by Edward Said, ‘The Quest for Gillo Pontecorvo’, Pontecorvo described how he found it difficult to commit to a project. In the 1960s, however, Pontecorvo collaborated with screenwriter Franco Solinas to make two imperishable classics about the dialectics of imperialism and revolution: The Battle of Algiers and Queimada (or Burn!). The first of these is revered as one of the all-time great political films while the latter has been criminally neglected.

Together, both films still have so much to teach us about the age of anti-colonial revolutions in the 1950s and 60s as well as about the insidious stranglehold of big capital over post-colonial countries.

In the late 1930s, Gillo Pontecorvo was transformed from a handsome, young, tennis-playing bon vivant into a communist militant and resistance leader when confronted by the existential threat of fascism (‘the cancer of humanity’). His elder brother, Bruno Pontecorvo, was both a dedicated communist and a renowned nuclear physicist who defected to the Soviet Union in 1950. Gillo Pontecorvo, like many another, left the Italian Communist Party in 1956, after the Russian invasion of Hungary; Franco Solinas remained in the party until his death in 1982. Pontecorvo remained an independent leftist for the rest of his life. After Queimada, he made only one further feature film, Ogro (1979) about the Basque separatist group ETA.

I was reminded of Pontecorvo’s two films while reading Elaine Mokhtefi’s beautiful memoir, Algiers, Third World Capital. Mokhtefi was an assistant to the press and information adviser to Algeria’s president from 1963 – 5, Ahmed Ben Bella. Algiers was then ‘the capital of revolutions’. As Amilcar Cabral (a major figure in Africa’s anti-colonial movements of the 1960s) famously observed at the pan-African festival in Algiers in 1969, ‘Pick a pen and take note: The Muslims make the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Christians to the Vatican, and the national liberation movements to Algiers.’

Elaine Mohtefi’s memoir and the making of The Battle of Algiers

Mokhtefi writes ‘Every imaginable liberation organisation had an office in Algiers, from the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (the Vietcong) to the ANC, SWAPO, FRELIMO, the MPLA, student hijackers from Ethiopia and Palestinian liberation organisations’. The world she moved in was hectic and exciting, which she describes beautifully: ‘life was exciting and eventful. I was a fly on the window, looking in, beating its wings.’ Her memoir is unique both for its lack of bitterness or self-aggrandizement. She writes with love for Algeria and its people, one of whom, Mokhtar Mokhtefi, she married.

During the filming of The Battle of Algiers, there was a coup by General Henri Boumediene who ousted President Ahmed Ben Bella. This caused some consternation among supporters of the revolution. Fidel Castro was indignant. In France the former Trotskyist turned libertarian communist Daniel Guerin was equally perplexed. He was close to two advisers of Ben Bella who were the theoreticians of the autogestion movement in Algeria. Daniel Guerin was a fabulous character who had great faith in the people of Algeria to self-organise towards something vital,

You should make the land of Algeria a fertile experience of true socialism, that is of libertarian socialism. I have no confidence in your leaders, whoever they are. But I have always confidence in the depth and authenticity of the Algerian revolution.

There is a fascinating book published by AK press called Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria that discusses Guerin’s deep, lifelong engagement with Algeria. The author, David Porter, posits that Guerin’s classic text Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (1965) maybe have been in part influenced by the self-management experiments post revolution.

With the coup of 1965 there was a purging of left wingers in the government, but Boumedienne was eager to underline his Internationalist credentials by his open support for liberation movements worldwide. Algiers became a mecca for anti-colonial revolutionaries.

Elaine Mokhtefi describes as her brief cameo in The Battle of Algiers as her claim to fame: ‘I appear in that film of films for at least thirty seconds (!), clearly visible in the lower right-hand corner of the screen’. She also worked closely with Frantz Fanon whose writings are the theoretical underpinning for both of Pontecorvo’s films. According to Mokhtefi, a dying Fanon told Claude Lanzmann, ‘the lumpenproletariat of the cities and the poor, illiterate peasantry will take up arms and transform the world’. She also shares a lovely anecdote of another side of Fanon, in Ghana, where he was the first Algerian ambassador.

One night Fanon and I went dancing. A Ghanaian photographer focused his camera on us. Frantz caught him on the edge of the dance floor, and warned him to destroy the photo (it appeared nonetheless in an Accra newspaper a few days later). The FLN had placed a boycott on all French cigarettes. When I shared my Gauloises with him, we became partners in guilt, breaking the ban together.

People’s opinions of The Battle of Algiers can be radically divergent. I remember reading an egregious attack on Edward Said by Clive James who smeared him as a terrorist sympathizer. His proof: Said’s favourable opinion of The Battle of Algiers and no doubt his lifelong commitment to the Palestinian struggle. The Pentagon screened the film in 2003 to prepare its troops for the invasion of Iraq. It is often said the Black Panthers treated The Battle of Algiers as a manual of urban insurrection.

For every person who thinks that it offers excuses for terrorism someone else will point out that it takes away any imprimatur for violent revolution. It is tempting to quote the Wilde line: ‘diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.’ As Sohail Daulatzai writes in his book Fifty Years of “The Battle of Algiers”: Past as Prologue,

The Battle of Algiers is an itinerant film, a nomadic text that has migrated around the world, and has, echoing Edward Said’s ‘travelling theory’ been embraced by a diverse group of revolutionaries, rebel groups and leftists, as well as revanchist, right wing dictators, military juntas and imperial war machines. The film has always been a battleground for competing ideas about power and politics at different historical junctures and in varying places around the globe.

The importance of Franz Fanon’s revolutionary liberation theory for The Battle of Algiers

It is the writings of Frantz Fanon that inspire both films. Obviously The Wretched of the Earth is a key text, but also A Dying Colonialism, a work that Daniel Guerin compared with Trotsky’s A History of the Russian Revolution. The portrayal of female revolutionaries in the film is very influenced by Fanon’s essay ‘Algeria Unveiled’, which is the first chapter of the book. This examined the vexed question of the veil in the colonial situation. Fanon says that,

There is thus a historic dynamism of the veil that is very concretely perceptible in the development of colonization in Algeria. In the beginning, the veil was a mechanism of resistance, but its value for the social group remained very strong. The veil was worn because tradition demanded a rigid separation of the sexes, but also because the occupier was bent on unveiling Algeria. In a second phase, the mutation occurred in connection with the Revolution and under special circumstances. The veil was abandoned in the course of revolutionary action. What had been used to block the psychological or political offensives of the occupier became a means, an instrument. The veil helped the Algerian woman to meet the new problems created by the struggle.

We can see this dramatized brilliantly in a stunning sequence where three women make themselves up in European dress in order to carry bombs to three locations. Originally this scene had a lot of dialogue but Pontecorvo made the audacious decision to cut the dialogue and instead to use baba saleem music, a ‘piece that closely resembles a heartbeat’. 

There is so much tension in the scene but also a depiction of solidarity amongst the women. Pontecorvo manages to balance so many different elements: the humanity of colonised and colonisers within the pitiless logic of this struggle. We see assassinations, bombings and torture but nothing is ever crude or simplistic. I don’t think it will shock anyone to discover Pontecorvo’s support for anti-colonial revolution, yet the director of The Battle of Algiers doesn’t hesitate to show the horror of bombing a café or cold-blooded assassinations. In the café, before one of the women leaves her bomb under someone’s chair the camera lingers on the face of a child eating ice-cream. It is one of the many instances where Pontecorvo points to the awful toll of this kind of struggle. We see images of bodies under rubble and mourners keening the dead. The same music is played for the French and Algerian dead.

In 1964, two years after the achievement of independence by Algeria, former revolutionary fighter Salah Baazi arrived in Italy looking for a suitable director to make a film about the revolution. Italy was the biggest film producing nation in Europe at the time. He had three directors in mind: Francesco Rosi, who had recently made the masterpiece Salvatore Giuliano; Luchino Visconti, director of neorealist classic film about a Sicilian fishing community,La Terre Trema; and Gillo Pontecorvo, recently Oscar nominated for his harrowing concentration camp drama, Kapo.

The whole story of how Pontecorvo and screenwriter Franco Solinas came to make the film is fascinating. They had a project called Para, about a former parachutist in Indochina who is working as a journalist in Algiers during the war. The two even made a surreptitious trip to Algeria disguised as Journalists during the last months of the war. What became The Battle of Algiers is based on Saadi Yacef’s memoirs. He was the FLN commander in Algiers and, fascinatingly, plays a version of himself in the film. Thanks to Yacef’s prestige, Pontecorvo gained unprecedented access to the Casbah.

Pontecorvo was a most fastidious filmmaker. He worked on every aspect of the film to ensure it had the look and feel of a ‘found’ document of a struggle.  The Battle of Algiers is often discussed in relation to the Third cinema movement which proposed the decolonization of both the world and the medium of film. In the end, though, Pontecorvo was probably too much of a European auteur to fit into this film movement. Though he advocated a collectivist politics he was somewhat autocratic in his artistic approach. This would cause considerable turbulence on the set of Queimada when his working methods clashed with those of Brando. But every decision he made on The Battle of Algiers seems the correct one. It is a perfect a work of film art, if such a thing is even possible.

The Battle of Algiers is traditionally described as having two stories: one is the story of the defeat of the FLN in ‘battle of Algiers’ (1954-1957) by the Paras and the second is the chorale portrait of the growth of collective consciousness of the Algerian people that eventually culminates in victory over the French, the fourth biggest military power in the world. The closing scenes of the film are justly revered as some of the most astonishing ever captured on film. The pitiless logic of an anti-colonial struggle is represented by Ali La Ponte (a stunning performance by Brahim Hadjadj), unemployed boxer and street hustler turned implacable revolutionary versus Colonel Mathieu, the leader of the Paras. An intriguing aspect of Pontecorvo’s film is the very sympathetic portrayal of the Mathieu character whom film critic J Hoberman describes as ‘a Marxist in reverse’. Ironically, the actor who plays the representative of imperial authority, Jean Martin, was a leftist and a signatory to the petition of the 121 against the Algerian war.

Of course, the logic of Colonel Mathieu’s position is horrific: if you believe that Algeria belongs to France then you must accept to use of torture to defeat the secretive cell structure of the FLN. The film opens on a scene of a man who has been broken by torture to reveal the location of Ali La Pointe. Later, in the film, we see incredibly stark images of torture which recall the grisly scenes at Abu Ghraib.

Queimada an unjustly neglected classic revolutionary film

After the huge critical success of The Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo was offered and turned down countless projects. With the war in Vietnam raging he was still keen to tackle further the topic of imperialism. Screenwriter Franco Solinas developed a story around the transition to a post-colonial situation. Queimada dramatizes the Hegelian master-slave dialectic in the curious Pygmalion-style relationship between Brando’s Sir William Walker, a British agent, and Evaristo Márquez’s Jose Dolores, a water-carrier.

Brando’s character is a variation of William Walker, the US adventurer who invaded Nicaragua in the nineteenth century. In the film, he molds the Dolores character into an anti-colonial revolutionary who overthrows Portuguese rule on the Island of Queimada, which ultimately helps facilitate the exploitation of the Island by the Royal Antilles’ Sugar Company. Jose Dolores and his band of revolutionaries eventually rebel against this new post-colonial administration and Sir William Walker (now under the pay of the Royal Antilles Sugar Company) has to return to the Island to put down the revolt.

Queimada is an amazing big-budget spectacle, a leftist Conradian style epic that has a fascinating central relationship between Brando and Marquez. Franco Solinas’ dialogue is brilliant: there are several bravura speeches by Brando, who plays a seductive, villainous, super-intellectual. There are traces of this character carried over from Solinas and Pontecorvo’s abandoned Algerian screenplay, Para. This was to have starred Paul Newman.

Marlon Brando is superb in the film, ‘the greatest actor in the history of cinema’ according to Pontecorvo. The filming process was notoriously difficult, with locations being switched from Columbia to Morocco late in the shoot. Also, fascist dictator Franco’s ludicrous preciousness about the perception of Spanish imperial history meant that the film became about the Portuguese empire and not the Spanish. Thus, the title changed from Quemada to Queimada.

Queimada dramatises both the transition from slavery to wage labour and from colonialism to post-colonialism. The film uses Brando’s incredible acting skills to great effect in two particularly powerful scenes. In one, Sir William Walker utilizes a very patriarchal metaphor to make the argument in favour of wage labour and freedom from foreign domination. In the other, he outlines the transformations than can occur over ten years and how these can reveal the contradictions of a century. He concludes: ‘and so often we have to realize that our judgements and our interpretation and even our hopes may have been wrong – wrong, that’s all’.

In the intervening ten years, Sir William has become ‘a changed man’, disillusioned, but he still pursues Jose Dolores with the savage counterinsurgency where he burns the island in a similar fashion to the behavior of the Portuguese centuries before. When the representative of Royal Sugar objects to this, Walker responds with a speech to General Shelton about the dangers of ships transmitting messages about successful revolutions around the Antilles,

Do you know why this island is called Queimada? Because it was already burnt once, and do you know why? Because even then, it was the only way to conquer the resistance of the people and after that, the Portuguese exploited the island in peace for nearly three hundred years.

That’s the logic of profit, isn’t it, my dear Shelton? One builds to make money. And to go on making it or to make more, sometimes it’s necessary to destroy.  You know that fire can’t cross the sea because it goes out! But certain news, certain ideas travel by ships’ crews.

The revolutionary politics of the film Queimada

Queimada features some extraordinary Carnival scenes that lead up to the assassination of the Portuguese governor of the Island. It is the world turned upside down. As historian Natalie Zemon Davies writes of the scene, ‘it is infused with African motifs, the slaves are brilliantly costumed, their children covered with white fluid to make them look like ghosts, and their cries and dances transfix the soldiers until it is time for the attack’. There are scenes of both ceremonial keening (after the death of the rebel Santiago) and brilliant celebratory scenes around the dead Portuguese soldiers.

We know from histories of the Haitian revolution that Voodoo songs and spirits played a huge role in consciousness raising. Historian Carolyn E Fick writes, ‘insofar as voodoo was a means of self-expression and of psychological or cathartic release from material oppression’ it was still necessary to ‘translate that consciousness into active rebellion and, finally, into the life-and-death struggle of revolution aimed at the total destruction of their masters and slavery, that emancipation could and did become a reality’.

Queimada dramatizes this brilliantly, when Jose Dolores looks on at the villagers dancing in celebration around the bodies of the vanquished Portuguese soldiers. When we see Dolores and his band of revolutionaries’ marching along the beach it is with a realBlack Jacobin–style majesty of a people transformed. Ennio Morricone‘s beautiful music provides perfect accompaniment.

In some ways the scenes of Jose Dolores’ capture from his mountain redoubt and transferal into custody recall similar scenes in Viva Zapata, which also starred Brando. Though Walker is seemingly the victorious character in this long dialectical tussle, it is Jose Dolores who seems the wiser, he is quoted by a villager as saying,

José Dolores says that if what we have in our country is civilization, civilization of white men, then we are better uncivilized because it is better to know where to go and not know how than it is to know how to go and not know where.

Walker, one the other hand, is essentially a spent, cynical character. Dolores refuses to concede to Walker when offered a chance to escape: Sir William is conscious of the implications of Jose becoming a martyr and then a myth. Speaking to General Shelton, Walker makes the observation,

Walker: The man that fights for an idea is a hero. And a hero who is killed becomes a martyr and a martyr immediately becomes a myth. A myth is more dangerous than a man because you can’t kill a myth. Don’t you agree, Shelton? I mean, think of his ghost running through the Antilles. Think of the legends and the songs.

General Shelton: Better songs than armies.

Walker: Better silence than songs.

Earlier, after the initial vanquishing of the Portuguese, Walker spoke to Jose Dolores,

Walker: Who’ll govern your island, José? Who’ll run your industries? Who’ll handle your commerce? Who’ll cure the sick? Teach in your schools? This man? Or that man? Or the other? Civilization is not a simple matter, José. You cannot learn its secrets overnight. Today civilization belongs to the white man – and you must learn to use it. Without it, you cannot go forward.

Walker’s questions strike at the pernicious reality of the post-colonial situation. European civilization is based on the predation of other countries (‘what civilisation?’ asks Jose Dolores). This recalls Eduardo Galeano’s passage about ‘Europe’s legacy’ in Mirrors: A History of the World, Refracted,

When Belgium left the Congo, a total of three Congolese held positions of responsibility in government.

When Great Britain left Tanzania, the country had but two engineers and twelve doctors.

When Spain left Western Sahara, the country had but one doctor, one lawyer, and one specialist in commerce.

When Portugal left Mozambique, the country had a 99 percent illiteracy rate, not a single high school graduate, and no university.

A systematic underdevelopment of the colonies they exploited was a feature of empire. When the slaves of St Domingue made the greatest slave revolution in history they were ever after punished cruelly by the French and the Americans.

The ending of the film is ambiguous: Walker is stabbed as he walks along the port towards his ship. He hears a voice saying: ‘your bag, senor?’ which is exactly what Jose Dolores says to him on two earlier occasions: once, when he first arrives; the second, when he first leaves the island. This time, it is another, who stabs him, perhaps in revenge for Jose Dolores?

The Battle of Algiers and Queimada are two very different, yet revolutionary, films. Whereas Battle has the incendiary bite of third cinema combined with Italian neorealism, Queimada is an awesome-looking spectacle, more expansive and intellectual. Together they make a fabulous double feature. Hopefully, someone will produce a restored version of Queimada in the future. Until then, you can watch it on Youtube, either the American or European version.

“Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics,” declared anthropologist David Graeber in 2013,

it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.)

Graeber, who died in Venice on 2 September 2020, was writing specifically of what he called “Bullshit Jobs” and in the process demonstrated many of those characteristics for which his life and work were already famous and now are mourned. His dissections of capitalist operations, ideological and material, had a bright-honed clarity and incisiveness: qualities magnified in turn by how intuitively he seemed to offer support, in practice (and in person when possible), to struggles for self-determination, from Seattle in 2001 to the heroic “social revolution” of Rojava in 2014. Graeber’s account of the anti-globalisation campaigns that erupted and expanded at the turn of the twenty-first century are particularly vivid in this regard, blending self-deprecating literary flair with an incendiary (and infectious) perception of the potential of mass power to derail what he categorised as the ruthless imperialism of Euro-American political and financial elites. “The IMF”, Graeber wrote, “was always the arch-villain of the struggle”:

It was their job to ensure that no country (no matter how poor) could ever be allowed to default on loans to Western bankers (no matter how foolish). Even if a banker were to offer a corrupt dictator a billion dollar loan, and that dictator placed it directly in his Swiss bank account and fled the country, the IMF would ensure a billion dollars (plus generous interest) would be extracted from his former victims. If a country did default, for any reason, the IMF could impose a credit boycott whose economic effects were roughly comparable to that of a nuclear bomb… [In] the world of international politics, economic laws are only held to be binding on the poor.

Graeber’s versatile irreverence for the institutions and narratives of neoliberal civilization made him one of the most radical (and humane) of anthropological and economic commentators. His writing dances, in furious delight, with the recognition of capitalism not only as a broken system, but one ready to collapse in ruins at the slightest pressure of “the poor”, whom he counted as his educators and comrades. There is “no possible way we could have an anti-capitalist revolution”, he observed decisively, “while at the same time scrupulously respecting property rights”.

In the days since his death, the internet and other outlets have hummed with personal tributes and reminiscences, a vast chorale of grief and celebration, that place Graeber without fail as a voice of warmth, insight and non-didactic solidarity among the internationalist Left. He had a gift for practicing what he preached, in short, but also for avoiding the instructional pretensions that so often accompany the analyses of Euro-American intellectuals, convinced not only of the complicated rottenness of capitalistic civilisation, but of the exclusive expertise undergirding their own pronouncements. If Graeber’s concerns were prodigiously far-ranging (from his intricately woven history of debt to his interpretation of “fun” as both an evolutionary and revolutionary phenomenon), his interventions were refreshing, always, for the humour, the air of dishevelled enthusiasm, which accompanied their presentation. His wit, his ability to demystify the reigning economic and political superstitions of our time, is often best encountered in full flow, as here:

[Rather] than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations….These are what I propose to call ‘bullshit jobs’…. It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen.

In a single stroke, Graeber dissipates the self-delusional fog that passes for capitalist thought, and does so with utter lightness and lucidity. As a result, and quite understandably, many of the re-prints and obituaries that have emerged since last Wednesday have emphasised the eloquence and egalitarianism that shine across his life and works. No doubt there is some justice in this perspective. Graeber’s writing flares with the freshness and powerful urgency of a true student of humanity in action, and rebellion itself: a person accustomed to thinking of themselves as a participant in a community, a part of a larger whole. “Odd though it may seem,” he wrote,

the ruling classes live in fear of us. They appear to still be haunted by the possibility that, if average [people] really get wind of what they’re up to, they might all end up hanging from trees.

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world,” he elaborated elsewhere (once again evidencing his willingness to think in collective categories),

is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” With such gifts – of expression and vision, faith in the crowd and humility before its might – it’s surely no accident that he is credited as an originator (among others, as he often emphasised) of the rallying cry, “We are the 99%”.

Anarchism at the core of David Graeber’s politics

To give full service to David Graeber’s politics, it is essential to recognise the self-proclaimed anarchism that informed and motivated Graeber’s approach and grapple with its implications. “At their very simplest,” he noted, “anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions”:

The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts.

It is to Graeber’s credit that he applied such principles as readily in his critiques of leftist campaigns and organizations (in America and farther afield) as in his exposés of the violence and distortion inherent in so many of capitalism’s most prized practices and presumptions. In contrast to what he termed “Marxist sectarians”, for instance, with their “top-down popular front groups” and “old-fashioned activist organizing styles” seemingly designed to generate “steering committees and ideological squabbles”, Graeber was clear and characteristically persuasive in his fundamental commitments, declaring himself a glad member of the “horizontalist, direct-action-oriented wing of the planetary movement against neoliberalism”. For this branch (or root, perhaps) of “the planetary movement”, our chances of surviving and even defeating capitalist hegemony, a project necessarily both local and global in its coordinates, are infinitely greater if the campaigns – along with the modes of self-organisation and mutual aid – we adopt now foster and embody values of transparency, equality, democratic participation as a matter of standard practice. Vitally, for Graeber, such political tenets were neither lofty nor aspirational, but could be discerned over and over, and in concrete terms, throughout human history. “When you can actually test them, most of the usual predictions about what would happen without states or capitalism turn out to be entirely untrue”, he wrote, in a passage worth quoting in full:

For thousands of years people lived without governments. In many parts of the world people live outside of the control of governments today. They do not all kill each other. Mostly they just get on about their lives the same as anyone else would. Of course, in a complex, urban, technological society all this would be more complicated: but technology can also make all these problems a lot easier to solve. In fact, we have not even begun to think about what our lives could be like if technology were really marshalled to fit human needs. How many hours would we really need to work in order to maintain a functional society — that is, if we got rid of all the useless or destructive occupations like telemarketers, lawyers, prison guards, financial analysts, public relations experts, bureaucrats and politicians, and turn our best scientific minds away from working on space weaponry or stock market systems to mechanising away dangerous or annoying tasks like coal mining or cleaning the bathroom, and distribute the remaining work among everyone equally? Five hours a day? Four? Three? Two? Nobody knows because no one is even asking this kind of question. Anarchists think these are the very questions we should be asking.

As is arguably true of anti-capitalists in general, Graeber’s radicalism was most manifest, and most valuable, in his urge to frame new questions about the world – including our revolutions within and across it – rather than regurgitating pre-approved answers about the same. His working assumption, moreover, is compelling: that the more vigorously democratic (as opposed to hierarchical) and inclusively action-centered (rather than stage-managed and conciliatory) our radical practice is, the more cohesive, resilient, and effective our struggles will become.  Revolutionaries of all stripes would do well to take heed.

Graeber’s life and work seem to touch and illuminate so many strands of radical thought and endeavour that the notion of offering a final word on either seems flawed, if not plainly ridiculous. Indeed, the unflagging zest and comradeliness, insight and interconnection, of his approach are such that he seems one of the few figures in the present day whose utopian realism can truly be seen as living on, to be borne out and extended, in the actions of mass resistance and mutual support that flourish beyond his own individual, immediate involvement. No doubt this is at best a complex consolation to the friends, comrades, and shipmates on the voyage of his one life, now closed. But if nothing else, it reminds us that the greatest tribute we can pay to Graeber, and those from whom he himself drew inspiration, is to practice and develop the politics and political culture he exemplified when living.