Conor Kostick’s new novel, The Retreat, is a thrilling tale set in the Middle Ages during the crusades. It is narrated by Guibert of Rocadamour, a naïve aristocratic youth, who joins a crusade expedition having soaked up the propaganda of the chansons and the chronicles. He is swiftly disabused of his illusions when the expedition is derailed at the outset, with the would-be crusaders sacking the castle of Devinium and stealing its wealth. From there, the novel follows a course of violent actions and reprisals all determined by the cupidity of the characters. So exciting is this tale that it is easy to overlook the political dimensions to the novel and the intriguing ambiguity at its centre. 

This is not a history. I write because I feel a dark geas upon me: almost as though I have been condemned to search my own memories and relive these experiences.

Throughout The Retreat, there are references to Hades, the underworld. The narrator, Guibert of Rocadamour, references the line that Achilles’ shade gave to cunning Odysseus: ‘you told him to choose one day of life as a slave in dusty fields over an eternity of death as the ruler of Hades’. Later, he imagines himself as Orpheus, another voyager to Hades. Geas is a Gaelic word that the dictionary defines as ‘(in Irish folklore) an obligation or prohibition magically imposed on a person.’ This central ambiguity about whether the narrator is dead provides a fascinating lens to interpret the novel. 

Historical accuracy is subtly present in the novel 

Kostick is also an historian of the crusades who has written works like The Social Structure of The First Crusade, which built on his doctoral thesis, ‘The Language of Ordo in The Early Histories of The First Crusade’. So, there is considerable historical erudition subtly introduced in the story. In Chapter 5, Guibert writes:

The news of an expedition travelling to the Holy Land had attracted peasants and burghers of all ages. Entire families of poor people had joined the enterprise: grandparents, parents, and infants. Some of these farmers and city dwellers bore arms, worthless rusty scythes or spears with flimsy points. Most didn’t. Then too, we had monks and nuns of all ages marching with us. 

The narrator is a noble who is forced to confront his class bias. This is fundamental to the story. Why? In part it is because the heterogenous make-up of the expedition’s members eventually upend his world view. Guibert often must rely on the good advice of Gerard, a commoner, for example, ‘I did not resent the fact that Gerard, a footsoldier, gave the orders for our army. Unnatural as it was by the standards I was used to at home, we were a long way from Rocadamour’. The is a double meaning in the word ‘unnatural’, implying both a break from the strict hierarchy but also ‘not existing in nature’. The excellent Song of Count Stephen which appears in chapter 16 captures the notion of a world turned upside down in one of its verses:

A monstrous roar comes from the trees. 

Another army has appeared where none should be. 

It is the cook, the nurse, the old and the sick. 

The smith, the washerwoman, the former serf. 

In their hands are tools not weapons of war. 

The world has turned upside down. 

To the monks, the nuns, adolescents and wives. 

Count Stephen and his knights owe their lives. 

There are some great conversations in the novel that quite subtly fill in the background realities of life in the middle ages. In one instance, there is a tantalizing glimpse of religious heterodoxy when Robert, a knight tells Jacques, a mercenary, about his experiences in the Holy Land. ‘Did you know the Bible doesn’t have all that should be in it?’ Guibert’s tart appraisal is, ‘his voice had in it the enthusiasm of men and women who carried obsessions in their hearts’. ‘Enthusiasm’ conjures up images of religious heresy which was rife in the middles ages.

Later in the novel, Gerard offers an amusing summary of the situation in Ireland, 

There are a hundred kings in Ireland, each with a dozen princes, each with a dozen lords and each of them has at least a dozen followers. But every one of these men reckons a descent from the high-kings and that he would make a great and famous king himself one day. So fortunes rise and fall there faster than anywhere else in the world. 

An historical novel about the crusades that shows how myths begin

We witness in the novel the myth-making process of the middle ages: the creation of chansons and chronicles which celebrate the valorous deeds of lords and knights. Through a single reference to a chronicle entitled The Deeds of Count Stephen the novel hints of the existence of a history of these events and the reader gets to witness the performance of a section of a chanson, The Song of Count Stephen, which exaggerates the bloody battle that we witnessed in the Beserkir chapter. Guibert is apotheosised as follows: ‘I am thunder and lightning. I am / Storm and wrath. I plunge my blade through iron / And bone. Unquenchable heat burns through me, / Like a forest fire.’ Guibert is slightly dismayed at the liberties that the poet takes with the truth. But the poet is unperturbed, ‘the song requires it. If you want history, speak of your deeds to a scribe. If you want fame, then have me leave the verse as it stands’ 

Turning the world upside down is probably one of the most enduring leftist slogans of all time, so it’s not accidental when it appears in the work of a left-wing writer. But here, its impact is compounded by the ambiguity at the heart of the novel. That is, the continual reference to ‘Hades’, the underworld, in lines like: 

And I had not rid myself of the sensation that the shadows of the forest were those of Hades and we were all dead, that perhaps we had all died in the field with the rest of Shalk’s army, it was just that we did not know it.

Or, 

 ‘…then the sky beyond the windows changed to a silvery grey and I knew we were now in Hades.’

Interestingly, this description occurs during the narrator’s nightmare episode in the chapter entitled:  ‘A Dream That Affrightens’. I count ten references to Hades in the novel. Is the narrator in fact dead, hence his susceptibility to the levelling of class distinctions? 

Class and gender are brilliantly interwoven in the relationship between Guibert and Cataline. Our narrator, the young knight, is full of the cliches of courtly romance while the peasant girl Cataline has already lived through a life of hardship and the savage death of her parents. Her post-coital words are profound: ‘Hush. It’s done. It’s all done. We live.’ Her later brusque rebuttal of his oppressive proprietary romanticism is brilliant and deeply problematic. 

I lay with you because you deserved it, for what you did for us. And also because I think we will all be dead soon. Why not enjoy a little sweetness while we can? But I’m not some farmer’s daughter with designs upon a local knight.

Guibert’s relationship with the woman Cataline is a lens through which to view the class differences in medieval society. Noble women did not go on crusades, whereas Cataline and Melinde (a powerful wife of a mercenary leader) are active participants. Guibert is full of romantic clichés, no doubt gleaned from chansons, whereas Cataline is alert the hard reality of life. Her experiences provoke Guibert’s observation that ‘a lady who had never experienced the certainty of her own death, never witnessed a battle, nor carried a knife to slit the throats of wounded enemies, such a lady could never understand and comfort me like this’. 

The Retreat is a tragedy driven by greed

Cupidity is the undoing of the expedition. Greed for loot provokes atrocities that propel the group towards disaster.  The ‘Mutur’ leader, Rainulf, murders the rapacious Bishop Wernher later in the novel and steals his treasure.

One of the most interesting aspects of the novel is the very just criticisms that characters direct towards their class enemies. For instance, when Rainulf disdains the contempt of Count Stephen (and Guibert, too), ‘do I need to witness the contempt of a man whose refined ways are paid for by the toil of a thousand serfs?’ While they are tracking down the forest dwellers that kidnapped Cataline, Guibert offhandedly makes a stunningly revealing statement of his cruel class position: 

‘Sometimes a serf runs. But they hardly ever get far. One time though, Count Theobald sent one of ours all the way back from Troyes. Runaways would never manage to set up a home or village of their own.’  

This is a savage world where the innocent are slaughtered by paid mercenaries, ‘when a man is paid to wield a sword, he loses the right to follow his own wishes’. There is a dark irony in an expedition ostensibly travelling to Jerusalem to ‘lift our sins’ (as Melinde says at one point), which perpetrates atrocities along the way.  

The Retreat is a great novel which merits a second reading to really get to savour the morally complex and brilliantly rendered ambiguity of this failed expedition. I read it the first time as a gripping and violent adventure tale. But then, looking through it again, I began to appreciate the novel’s many subtleties. It is fascinating how the novel successfully condenses so much of the world of the Middle Ages in the text.

The Retreat is currently available as an ebook or as an audiobook.

An online book launch for Conor Kostick’s novel took place on 2 May at 9pm (Dublin) via zoom.

The online launch of The Reatreat by Conor Kostick

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.’

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.

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.

By John Flynn

Peter Linebaugh’s 2019 book Red Round Globe Hot Burning is his greatest masterpiece yet in a lifetime of triumphs. It is a mind-blowing contribution to his lifelong quest for the commons. This is a quest begun through his apprenticeship to the late Edward Thompson (whose copy of The Trial of Edward Despard Linebaugh has carried with him in his luggage all his life), and deepened with his stunning work The London Hanged. Then there is Linebaugh’s utterly miraculous collaboration with ‘fellow shipmate’ Marcus Rediker on The Many-Headed Hydra. Throw in his unforgettable Mayday Essays and his work on The Magna Carta Manifesto, not to mention his Stop Thief, a wonderful, Wobbly-inspired titled collection of essays and you have a writer of such extraordinary power that reading him can move you to tears (and will always lift your spirits). His subjects are the picaresque proletariat of the revolutionary Atlantic: some of the boldest, most irrepressible characters to ever walk the earth.

The title of this recent book is taken from William Blake’s Vision of The Daughters of Albion

They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up,

And they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle,

And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red round globe hot burning

Till all from life I was obliterated and erased.

Linebaugh, like his mentor Thompson, is a Blake enthusiast. He writes perceptively about Blake’s work, seeing the revolutionary thinking in Blake’s complex prophecy in The Book of Urizen which he interprets as an allegory designed to describe the Atlantic transition to child labour and slavery.

It is how Linebaugh glosses the phrase ‘Red Round Globe Hot Burning’ that speaks to everything about our world today, beset as with are with fascist berserkers and a climate out of whack. In his tale ‘at the crossroads of commons and closure, of love and terror, of race and class, and of Kate and Ned Despard’ Linebaugh, ‘the people’s remembrancer’, depicts two revolutionary lovers who broke through the hardening walls of white supremacy and made a valiant attempt to overthrow the still nascent industrial capitalist system and restore the commons. In the words that they wrote together while Despard was in prison, and that he delivered from the scaffold not long after other legendary heroes from the United Irishmen suffered similar fates:

But, Citizens, I hope and trust, notwithstanding my fate, and the fate of those who no doubt will soon follow me, that the principles of freedom, of humanity, and of justice, will finally triumph over falsehood, tyranny and delusion, and every principle inimical to the interests of the human race.

Edward Despard was an Anglo-Irish officer in the British army who once saved the life of Nelson and was greatly respected for his abilities as an engineer. He  married Kate, an African American woman, and turned revolutionary in part because of his experiences among indigenous commoners in Nicaragua and Honduras. It was Despard’s open sympathy with people of colour that provoked the baymen of Honduras ‘to take arms in Defence of our lives and properties against an armed banditti of all colours’. Kate, ‘the fearless abolitionist, the tireless prison reformer, the United Irish woman, is the hero of this story’. She visited Ned in three prisons, was a terror to the authorities, for to quote Nelson, she was ‘violently in love’ with Ned. In one awesome campaign she successfully prevented Jeremy Bentham from building his panopticon on Tothill’s Fields commons.

The themes of Linebaugh’s latest book

The methods that Linebaugh uses to tell this tale are bold and well suited to his themes. He roams like a true commoner through space and time and across many disciplines (History, Literature, Climate Science, Thermodynamics, Engineering, Mycology, Zoology, etc) which makes his book such an incredible read. I have been through it now six times and each reading offers fresh delights. He makes great use of the poetry of John Clare and Blake, two fervent lovers of the commons, and of the poetry of the ‘hidden Ireland’ where insurrectionary thoughts were never far from the surface. He employs both statistical and anecdotal evidence to illustrate the truth behind his favourite peasant ‘koan’:

The Law locks up the man or woman who steals the goose from off the commons,

But leaves the greater villain loose that steals the commons from the goose.

Also, like a true Blake enthusiast, he has an uncanny knack for reading hostile official sources in a ‘Satanic light’ to provide brilliant evidence of the class struggle. What always stands out in Linebaugh’s work is his love of language, particularly the language of poets and proletarians. You really get the sense of Linebaugh relishing the language of each quotation he uses. There is one from an extraordinary passage: part Linebaugh, part William Covel, execrating the enclosers of Enfield commons, which nicely illustrates how much of ‘a true Leveler’ Linebaugh has become through his years of thinking and writing about a tradition inspired by Winstanley and the diggers.

[Covel’s] class consciousness was vivid. He inveighed against the possessors, their fat and scornful eyes, their taunting speech – “What lyings! What cheatings! What blood! What murders! What divisions! What tumults! What pride! What covetousness!” “Oh how the buyers and sellers are guarded, fenced with walls, and defended with Laws!” He said that the wicked of the world rule by three principles: 1) strength united is stronger, 2) “divide and spoil,” and 3) “make poor enough, and you will rule well enough”. In particular, he denounced lawyers, clergymen, corporations, and great tradesmen. Gold and silver were their signs of glory “but to others [they were] a sign of death.” In contrast, mariners, those who follow the plough, and those who practice handicrafts were useful, for on their labors all others depended.

You could with great success and much happiness for yourself practice bibliomancy with Linebaugh’s book. It would be a great spiritual defence in these frightening times to open the text at random and read his glorious prose or the many brilliant quotations he has selected. His discussion of the different kinds of love, for instance, is marvelous,

This is a story both of a couple and of the commons. Doubtless eros was part of their love – Ned and Kate had a son- and so was philia, or that egalitarian love of comrades and friends. The love of the commons was akin to that love the Greeks called agape, the creative and redemptive love of justice, with its sacred connotations.

So, what is the commons that Linebaugh writes of? I would say a permanent revolution in social reproduction inspired by the history of commoning. He advocates for the omnia sunt communia of Thomas Müntzer, the great religious communist leader of the German peasants’ revolt. The great digger, or ‘true leveller’, Gerard Winstanley’s ‘the earth was made a common treasury for all’ inspires his thinking. Linebaugh distinguishes between the radical claims on the commons made by Winstanley to those of Thomas Rainborough.

Winstanley propounds a communist theory of land. Rainborough is all about government and the nation, whereas Winstanley is all about land and subsistence. Rainborough was a Leveler, while Winstanley called himself a “True Leveller”. Rainborough is deferential (“truly, sir”), while Winstanley is declarative (“freedom is the man who will turn the world upside downe”).

We see the same differences between Tom Paine and Thomas Spence which Spence himself brilliantly outlined in his  A CONTRAST Between PAINE’s AGRARIAN JUSTICE, and SPENCE’s END OF OPPRESSION. 

Spence is one the most beautiful, awe-inspiring, irrepressible radical worker intellectuals from the British Isles. He wrote brilliant tracts like the extraordinary work on social reproduction, The Rights of Infants.

Aristocracy (sneering): And is your sex also set up for pleaders of rights?

Woman: Yes, Molochs! Our sex were defenders of rights from the beginning. And though men, like other he-brutes, sink calmly into apathy respecting their offspring, you shall find nature, as it never was, so it never shall be extinguished in us. You shall find that we not only know our rights, but have spirit to assert them, to the downfall of you and all tyrants. And since it is so that the men, like he-asses, suffer themselves to be laden with as many pair of panyers of rents, tithes, &c. as your tender consciences please to lay upon them, we, even we, the females, will vindicate the rights of the species, and throw you and all your panyers in the dirt.

When he wasn’t revisiting his plans for a commoners’ republic, Spencer was singing revolutionary songs, like A Song to Be Sung at the Commencement of the Millenium. 

Hark! how the Trumpet’s sound,

 Proclaims the Land around The Jubilee!

 Tells all the Poor oppress’d,

 No more shall they be cess’d

 Nor Landlords more molest

 Their Property.

And, if not that, he was chalking slogans on walls and roads (“You rogues! No landlords!” “Fat Barns! Full bellies!”). He minted these class war coins with slogans like “Let tyrants tremble at the crow of Liberty”. When he was arrested, as he was many times, he used his trial to restate his plan for an egalitarian society. As Linebaugh writes, ‘Spence was for all creatures – animals, as well as humans – regardless of gender, race, or age’. His thinking which evolved from the commons into ‘a precursor of communism’ was made up of many strands:

Spence combined the practicalities of the commons’ customary rights with the ideals of universal equality. He drew on several ideas and traditions, the Garden of Eden, the golden age, utopian, Christian, Jewish, American Indian, millenarian, dissenting. All of these ideas were experienced in a context of a commons of the sea (his mother was from the Orkney Islands) and of the land (the Newcastle Town Moor), not yet enclosed.

Linebaugh on the great slave revolt of San Domingue (Haiti)

One of the ‘Atlantic Mountains’ that is a towering presence in the book is the Island of San Domingue (Haiti). The greatest slave revolt in human history which was begun on the night of August 22 1791, at the Bois De Caiman (a commons), ‘an all-out war began that culminated twelve years later – at the time of the Despard conspiracy – in the abolition of slavery and the independence of Haiti. It is a great and horrifying story of human freedom that reverberated throughout the Atlantic mountains, shaking every peak and valley’. The successful ‘black Jacobin’ revolutionaries led by Toussaint Louverture taunted their French adversaries (who were sent on a genocidal mission of extermination by Napoleon) by singing songs of the French Revolution, now in Thermidorean decline. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who took over as leader following the capture of Louverture named his army ‘the army of the Incas’ in a fabulous salute to the failed Tupac Amaru revolt in the Andes of 1780 which had first caused the Atlantic Mountains to shake. Linebaugh refers to the work of Susan Buck-Morss, whose book Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, underlines the vital influence that the Haitian revolution had on Hegel’s development of the Master-Slave dialectic. It is incredible to think of the Haitian revolution as a root of the Marxist dialectic when you consider that Marx’s great hero of world history was another slave revolutionary, Spartacus.

Another of the great revolutionary movements of the time was that of the United Irishmen with whom Despard would eventually intersect. He became a member of the United Englishmen and of the London Corresponding Society. After Despard’s hanging, Kate disappears into the fold of the surviving cohort of United Irishmen. The United Irishmen was a glorious moment in Irish history made up of the amazing characters, a movement for ‘the men of no property’, although there were bourgeois figures like Valentine Lyons (whose mansion Kate found refuge in). The military leader was Edward Fitzgerald, ‘scion of the most privilege strata of aristocracy’. But the mass of the people was ‘helots’, a term used by William Drennan, who also coined the phrase ‘the emerald isle’ and composed the oath of the United Irishmen. These were the dispossessed, many of whom seethed with revolutionary discontent. ‘In Ireland’, Linebaugh writes,

We witness popular mobilization for the cooperative production of subsistence, in a powerful political practice known as “hasty diggings”. The Northern Star, the Belfast newspaper of the United Irish, reported that when William Orr of county Antrim was imprisoned, between five and six hundred of his neighbours assembled “and cut down his entire harvest before one o’clock on that day – and what is passing strange, and will no doubt alarm some people, would accept of no compensation”.

Revolutionary influences coursed through the Atlantic. In The Many-Headed Hydra, Linebaugh and Rediker describe the picaresque proletariat as transmitters of revolutionary messages. In an extraordinary passage that beautifully describes how Robert Wedderburn who was radicalised by the ideas of Thomas Spence became a ‘linchpin’ of the revolutionary Atlantic: they write,

Like the linchpin, a small piece of metal that connected the wheels to the axle of the carriage and made possible the movement and firepower of the ship’s cannon, Wedderburn was an essential piece of something larger, mobile and powerful.

Linebaugh has often referred to the ‘boomerang’ of the revolutionary ideas from the Diggers and the Ranters from the English revolution of the seventeenth century as they hurled about the Atlantic and returned to the British Isles in the eighteenth century. Both Despard and the United Irish were part of this movement influenced by the revolutionary currents of the time and attracted to the commoning traditions of indigenous peoples. Edward Fitzgerald was inducted into the society of the Iroquois having been saved from near death by his servant Tony Small, a freed slave. The revolutionaries of Haiti and Ireland were greatly influenced by the writings of Constance Volney, ‘one of those aristocratic Frenchmen whose enlightened outlook contributed to the breakdown of the old regime and whose thinking soared with the revolutionary waves that began to break in 1789’. In 1799, Captain Marcus Rainsford, an officer in the British army, who had served during the American revolution got to experience firsthand revolutionary Haiti: ‘the sons of revolution, American and Haitian, ate from a common dish’. The ‘dish with one spoon’ that the Iroquois leader, Joseph Brant spoke of is an inspiring example of radical egalitarianism in dialectical opposition to the refinements of fine dining. Linebaugh writes:

The meal may be the basis of human solidarity or a mirror of social hierarchy. By the seventeenth century, at least among European nobility, eating from a common dish was finished: everyone had a spoon and a fork and their own plate. Such became the bourgeois savoir vivre by the eighteenth century. These notions of civilite and politesse slowly became a means of differentiating humanite.

Captain Rainsford meets a black labourer who keeps a copy of Volney’s Travels, one of the earliest European texts to posit the African origins of human civilization, much as Martin Bernal did in the late twentieth century. It is one of the many beautiful pieces of anecdotal evidence that Linebaugh presents where humans transcend the pernicious barriers of racial supremacy. Ironically, Volney’s Ruins includes ‘the revolutionary invocation’: 

Hail solitary ruins, holy sepulchers and silent walls!….confounding the dust of the king with that of the meanest slave, [you] had announced to man the sacred dogma of equality.

This text, beloved by the United Irish, was definitively translated by Thomas Jefferson and Joel Barlow, two inveterate racists. Such are the contradictions of history.

Climate Crisis in Red Round Globe Hot Burning

‘Red round globe hot burning’ refers to the effects that our climate is now experiencing from our carbon-based economic system. The rise of Industrial capitalism was intimately tied up with the theorization of the earth as a machine. Linebaugh quotes from James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth, published in 1795:

When we trace the parts of which this terrestrial system is composed, and when we view the general connection of these several parts, the whole presents a machine of a peculiar construction by which it is adapted to a certain end.

Linebaugh writes,

‘A geological epoch commenced with a machine, the steam engine, at the same historical moment that the study of the earth, or the science of geology, conceived of the earth as a machine with heat energy at its source.’

But Linebaugh is rightly wary of an uncritical use of the term ‘Anthropocene’ which puts equal blame on the coal miner forced to labour long hours in hellish conditions with the big mining interests who were at the apex of a brutal class society, whose rise (per Karl Marx) was written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire. Any reading of Marx’s Capital, especially the utterly horrifying sections on ‘The Working Day’ or even more pertinently his section on primitive accumulation would lead one to recoil from a catch-all term like the ‘Anthropocene’ which avoids any mention of class struggle, the very motor of historical materialism. Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital provides a brilliant Marxist analysis of this intense period of class struggle and technological change. 

Linebaugh is also scathing of the ‘stages’ theory of history.

Historical determinism is the law of empire: knowledge of the future is gained by its stadial methods, and its signs are the machines of social production.

Stadialism put the imperial centre and the colonial periphery in different time frames: civilised and primitive. ‘In the new United States, the stadial theory anticipated extirpation.’ It is interesting that the one text of Karl Marx that Linebaugh includes in his bibliography is The Ethnographical Notebooks, described by the late, great Labour historian, Wobbly biographer and Surrealist Franklin Rosemont as one of those ‘works that come down to us with question-marks blazing like sawed-off shotguns, scattering here and there and everywhere sparks that illuminate our own restless search for answers.’  Rosemont’s essay ‘Karl Marx and the Iroquois’ is a fascinating and provocative look at late Marx who was seriously inspired by his reading of anthropological texts. Rosemont writes:

The neglect of the notebooks for nearly a century is even less surprising when one realizes the degree to which they challenge what has passed for Marxism all these years. In the lamentable excuse for a “socialist” press in the English-speaking world, this last great work from Marx’s pen has been largely ignored.

Rosemont bemoans the fact that few Marxists had bothered to take up the challenge laid down by these notebooks which both radically altered the traditional ideas of stages of history on evolutionary progress through class struggle and technological change and looked back to the excitement of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts.

Fragmentary though they are, the Notebooks, together with the drafts of the letter to Vera Zasulich and a few other texts, reveal that Marx’s culminating revolutionary vision is not only coherent and unified, but a ringing challenge to all the manifold Marxisms that still try to dominate the discussion of social change today, and to all truly revolutionary thought, all thought focused on the reconciliation of humankind and the planet we live on. In this challenge lies the greatest importance of these texts. A close, critical look back to the rise and fall of ancient pre-capitalist communities, Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks and his other last writings also look ahead to today’s most promising revolutionary movements in the Third World, and the Fourth, and our own.

I would argue that Linebaugh is a worthy successor to this late Marx. This book, Red Round Globe Hot Burning, is a wonderful testament both to revolutionary and creative writing and to the forgotten heroes of the working-class movement. 

Ned and Kate were colonial subjects who lost their bid to put humankind on a different path, a road not taken. Their love for each other was part of their love for the commons. Eros, philia, and agape met their downfall in the Malthusian love of calculated breeding, or ektrophe, which serves the state and capital.

But in the words of the lovely poem by Thomas Russell, quoted by Linebaugh,

The golden Age will yet revive

Each man will be a brother

In harmony we shall all live

And share the earth together.

You may also like to read the Peter Linebaugh interview with Johnny Flynn.

The Repeal of the 8^th amendment on 25 May 2018 was a seminal moment in Irish history and an amazing moment, one that starkly illuminated the fact that we are no longer a country dominated by the Catholic Church. The dazzling victory felt even stronger than that of the same-sex marriage referendum. It was a hard-fought result, one that couldn’t have been achieved without mass participation in the repeal movement. Everywhere, but especially in urban and working class areas, the issue of abortion was discussed and women shared their experiences.

This was one of the crucial differences compared to previous efforts to liberalise Ireland’s severe abortion laws. The atmosphere of shame and silence that prevented the reality of the need for safe and legal abortions from being expressed was shattered by women having the confidence to speak out in a fashion that was unprecedented for Ireland. With sincerity and conviction, canvassers swayed those who held reservations into voting for repeal. As one of the canvassers in Dublin Bay North put it:

Personal stories and individual experiences that weren’t readily available on television or even on the web were key to the success of the campaign.

Editors Kath Browne and Sydney Calkin invited a range of contributors to write for an anthology that analyses the campaign and also the implications of the result for Irish society and, indeed, the international struggle for reproductive justice.

Different perspectives on the politics of Repeal are offered by Theresa Reidy, Linda Connolly, Fiona de Londras, Máiréad Enright, Sydney Calkin, Elżbieta Drążkiewicz-Grodzicka and Máire Ní Mhórdha. For analysis of the campaign itself, the book draws on Mary McGill’s reflections of events in rural Ireland and the Repeal story within the Irish language community is covered by a chapter from Lisa Nic an Bhreithimh. Lorna O’Hara discusses the power of the iconic ‘Repeal the 8^th’ mural, while Eric Olund’s research is in regard to the press. The aftermath of Repeal and its potential consequences both here and internationally are discussed by Richard Scriven, Kath Browne, Catherine Jean Nash, Noëlle Cotter, Lisa Smyth and Dorota Szelewa.

Dublin Bay North during the Repeal the 8th campaign

There is something of an academic flavour to the book, but the editors are to be commended on their inclusivity and in particular the publication of ‘Campaigning for choice: canvassing as feminist pedagogy in Dublin Bay North’, a chapter by Niamh McDonald, Kate Antosik-Parsons, Karen E. Till, Jack Callan and Gerry Kearns. The framing of the chapter suggests that its value is in providing a case study of successful feminist pedagogy, but really, there is wealth of more general lessons that can be learned from the experience of Dublin Bay North Repeal group, ones that are important for wider campaigns and, indeed, our own socialist project. It helps that Independent Left’s own Niamh McDonald is a contributor to the chapter. Niamh was Chair of the Dublin Bay North Repeal the 8^th Campaign and with her voice, along with others, we hear from working class women who shaped the outcome of the referendum.

One of the challenges facing the group was in how to maximise the energy of the many people new to political activism with the experience of those who had years of experience in trying to bring about reproductive rights for women. They solved this with a number of strategies: there was a ‘buddy’ system, to team up those new and less confident about knocking on the doors of strangers with those who were familiar with such activity; they avoided a potentially patronising and top-down stultifying effect by placing an emphasis on the empowering of the new voices; the internal social media conversations were egalitarian and encouraging (i.e. were not heavily controlled by moderators); decision-making was transparent and democratic; activists with a political background were welcomed but no one party was given a pre-eminent role, finally, respect was reciprocal. Newer activists might say,

My buddy had been knocking on doors for months, and gave me great advice, and boosted my confidence. It also made me feel safe.’

While the more experienced activist could recognise that the enthusiasm of the new activist was encouraging and helped lift her, ‘on bad days.’

All in all, the campaign provides a model, not just for feminist pedagogy but a methodology for creating an inclusive grass-roots campaign. The success of this approach, the fact that Dublin Bay North Repeal retained members and grew to the point that 80 – 100 canvassers were assembling and knocking on doors every day, was decisive in bringing about one of the largest votes for Repeal in Ireland. Overly hierarchical organisations inevitably stifle people who want to express themselves but are not used to doing so. To win the argument around Repeal it was absolutely critical, however, that women of our community, of the working class, got to speak and got to be heard. As one canvasser summarised the situation: ‘our arguments were based on compassion and real life experience’. Real life experience was heard by canvassers, was brought into the campaign and shared, and working class women as canvassers themselves reflected the reality of the necessity of abortion rights.

Dublin Bay North Repeal activists were self-aware enough of the importance of their achievement that they consciously strove to preserve the lessons of the campaign by issuing a survey to members in the aftermath of the vote and with 125 responses, obtained essential feedback from which the lessons of the campaign could be drawn. Very much to the credit of the editors, these lessons have been included in After Repeal.

Some twenty-percent of the Dublin Bay North campaign members were male and among them and one of the founders of the group was Councillor John Lyons. The launch of the book during the election campaign is very timely, firstly because, as John Lyons put it in answer to a question on Twitter to all candidates from the @DBNRepeal account, there is still a lot to achieve:

It took a huge effort to get the referendum and win it, but we aren’t done. We have a legislative review this year, people still travelling, maternity hospital ownership, we need exclusion zones, a countrywide service with no barriers to access. I want to see all goals achieved.

Secondly, it has emerged that the Green candidate, David Healy, is pro-life, voted against Repeal, and endorsed pro-life social media posts. It took some effort for this information to become public and it would be tragic if Dublin Bay North returned a majority of anti-choice TDs after such an inspiring campaign. Yes, climate change is a very urgent issue, but as Not Here Not Anywhere have shown, the left in the Dáil have just as good a record as the Greens on environmental issues and its therefore possible to express support for radical action on climate and the continuation of the struggle for reproductive rights in the general election.

Kate Antosik-Parsons, contributor to the Dublin Bay North chapter in After Repeal expresses why she is voting for Councillor John Lyons in the general election of 2020.

A review of No Time to Spare

From 2010 to her death in 2018, Ursula Le Guin composed blog posts for her website and a selection of these have been collected into a wonderful book, No Time to Spare. Many of the essays are beautiful accounts of moments in her life, with, for example, a most intense appreciation of the art of eating a soft-boiled egg for breakfast that serves as a lesson in mindfulness. Here, though, I want to focus on the political ideas of Le Guin that are explicit and implicit in many of the features.

In one essay where she addresses the question of socialism directly, Le Guin does so in the context of a comment about the alternatives to capitalism:

Some of the alternatives that existed in the past had promise; I think socialism did, and still does, but it was run off the rails by ambitious men using it as a means to power, and by the infection of capitalism — the obsession with growing bigger at all cost in order to defeat rivals and dominate the world.

Ursula Le Guin on socialism, from No Time to Spare

In this one, short paragraph are four hugely important ideas. Firstly, that socialism still has the potential to provide an alternative to capitalism. Second and third, that the reasons previous efforts to create socialism have failed are a) the desire for power and b) the infection of global capitalism. Fourthly, the gender of those who ran socialism off the rails was male.

Of these ideas the first is essential. Almost certainly the majority of people living on the planet right now would agree that the current economic system is deeply flawed. Hardly anyone, however, can agree on what the alternative should be. And this is largely due to the fact that socialism has been discredited. Yet unless the idea of socialism is revived our species is in great trouble, because anything other than a fundamental, radical, reorganisation of the world by workers will succumb to the pressures of trying to co-exist with capitalism.

The second, that it was the seduction of power that wrecked previous socialist projects, is entirely consistent with Le Guin’s core political beliefs, which were those of anarchism. Ursula Le Guin was always wary of defining herself politically, not through fear of alienating people by sounding too radical, but because she felt she lacked the expertise and devotion to activism to be a political authority. Her main passion and her decades of experience were in writing, both in composing beautiful works but also teaching and analysing literature.

The setting for one of Le Guin’s early novels, The Dispossessed, is that of a utopian world. In order to research that world, Le Guin read widely into anarchism: especially Kropotkin and a modern anarchist thinker, Murray Bookchin.

And it was the pacifist, rather than destructive, element within anarchism that appealed to Le Guin the most, as she explained in an interview.

I felt totally at home with (pacifist, not violent) anarchism, just as I always had with Taoism (they are related, at least by affinity.) It is the only mode of political thinking that I do feel at home with. It also links up more and more interestingly, these days, with behavioral biology and animal psychology (as Kropotkin knew it would.)

In Jacobin’s obituary of Le Guin, the novelist is described as being a historical materialist but this is too much of a stretch. An anarchist emphasis on the importance of power in politics is very clear in Le Guin’s thought. Even here, in this discussion about whether Le Guin was a socialist, it’s no accident that she puts the issue of power before the question of structure in signalling what went wrong for socialism in the past.

As an aside, many on the left interested in Science Fiction and Fantasy juxtapose the work of Le Guin, radical, feminist, anarchist and Tolkien, who they see as conservative and anti-working class. China Mieville, whose critique of Tolkien derives from the essay of another anarchist fantasy writer, Michael Moorcock, has been the standard bearer for this approach.

In my view, it is utterly mistaken. Le Guin herself was a huge champion of Tolkien and often spoke up for the literary merits of The Lord of the Rings, a book that despite enormous public enthusiasm, is usually under-appreciated by critics. And in The Lord of the Rings is a metaphor for the corrupting influence of power that is as pure as any in literature. The One Ring is the ultimate test of character and only those wise enough to reject it have any integrity, those who try to use it are doomed to become hollowed-out husks of their former selves.

Having placed an emphasis on the question of the destructive effects of the possession of power, which remains an important issue for the left, Le Guin also sees global capitalism as a key contributor to the failure of previous attempts to create socialism. This is a vital observation for the future too. Any attempt to introduce socialism in one jurisdiction is doomed: either pressure to compete in the world market or direct overthrow will end the effort. Fortunately, today, our world is so integrated globally that a socialist movement that really went down to alter the fundamentals of society would have an immediate and massive international impact, making it much more likely to transform the entire planet.

In unpacking Le Guin’s observation on the previous failure of socialism, one more point remains to be made, which is that she highlighted the fact that it was men who led the movement away from utopia. This is an historical observation as well as a reflection on Le Guin’s ‘steady, resolute, morally committed’ role in the feminist movement. She explicitly defined herself as a part of second wave feminism — the struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s — and her writings throughout her entire life, both fictional and non-fictional, constantly returned to the subject of gender inequality.

It seems to me to be clear that Ursula Le Guin was very sympathetic to all alternatives to capitalism and while more inclined to describe herself as anarchist was definitely open to being persuaded about socialism. The revolutions and socialist movements she saw in her lifetime did not, however, provide a lot of evidence for the potential of socialism to deliver utopia. Personally, I think that potential is evident in all the great working class uprisings of the twentieth century, but you have to really drill down to the detail of the particular variants of socialism active in them to understand why, ultimately, none of them led to the disappearance of capitalism in favour of a sharing society.

Ursula Le Guin on dialectics and Taosim

In No Time to Spare there is another subject that connects Le Guin’s intellectual makeup to socialism and it is the question of dialectics. For socialists, to be able to analyse political systems that are in motion and which can dramatically hit transformative tipping points is essential and the tool for doing this, dialectics, comes to us from a western tradition, originating with the early Greek philosophers and being developed especially by Hegel and Marx. But there is an even older tradition of dialectical thought rooted in ancient eastern societies.

When Le Guin wanted to explain some underlying connections between utopian and dystopian societies in literature, she first needed her readers to understand dialectics and she helped them do so by drawing on her deep engagement with Taoism. An interpreter of Lao Tzu’s sixth century BC Tao Te Ching, Le Guin used the yang-yin symbol to illustrate her point that every utopia contains a dystopia, every dystopia a utopia.

In the yang-yin symbol each half contains within it a portion of the other, signifying their complete interdependence and continual intermutability. The figure is static, but each half contains the seed of transformation. The symbol presents not a stasis but a process.

In the many appreciations of Ursula Le Guin that have been written since her death (22 January 2018) this aspect to her thinking has usually been neglected, yet in my view it is fundamental to her thought.

The presence of a powerful and playful mind is evident throughout No Time to Spare and always Le Guin’s writing is informed by a sense of development and change, even in her own sentences as she formulates them. That’s why they are rich, truthful, convincing. When reading Le Guin, you feel the presence of someone who is not satisfied until she has expressed herself exactly as she intends. Someone who weighs the meaning of every word, every punctuation mark even.

Le Guin’s dialectical way of approaching any subject, even that of the behaviour of cats (she was a great cat lover and if you are the same, you’ll read some of these essays with enormous pleasure) means we never get a dry, linear, didactic essay. Always, they are rich, fecund and humorous.

Was Ursula Le Guin a socialist? She was. And she wasn’t.

In 2014, Ursula Le Guin attended the National Book Awards in the US where she was the recipient of the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. During her speech she made a powerful point to those who feel there is no alternative to capitalism:

The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art and very often in our art, the art of words.

Ursula Le Guin on resistance and change

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