There are many excellent and inspiring books about the Haitian Revolution, one of the richest and most insightful of which is The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution by Julius S. Scott.

The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution by Julius S. Scott

In early 1790, Vincent Ogé, a charismatic black revolutionary from Paris, sailed to the French Carribean territory of Saint-Domingue with one aim: to stoke a rebellion that would “overturn the Colony and obtain complete equality between the people of Color and the whites.”

In the months that followed, he and his co-conspirators rapidly became acquainted with the force of circumstance, facing capture by neighbouring authorities shortly after a tactical retreat from a military skirmish. In a show of judicial strength – orchestrated to send a message to other potential insurgents intent on making the “diabolical ideas of freedom and equality” a reality in the region – he was later broken on the wheel in public, and decapitated. Their liberatory venture had failed.

The slaves who made the Haitian Revolution

Apparently undeterred by such a gruesome spectacle, however, and inspired in part by the visions of the vodou priestess, Cécile Fatiman, within six months a self-led army of insurgent slaves did indeed change the course of history. In their tactics and relentless advance, the rebels seemed to recognise as CLR James puts it in one of the most important of books about the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, “the rich” would only “be defeated when running for their lives”: in its early months alone, their uprising levelled “180 sugar plantations and more than 900 other [white-owned] estates” on the island, then the largest producer of sugar and coffee in the world.

By freeing themselves, the militants sent shock-waves through the hearts (and bank vaults) of slave traffickers, commercial magnates, imperial administrators, and white supremacists across the globe. The so-called wretched of the earth were seizing their freedom; the Haitian revolution had begun.

Although the aristoctratic Ogé was ultimately less successful than the slaves themselves, the spirit of his hoped-for coup no doubt inspired many who participated in the later revolt. Likewise, the sadistic cruelty of his execution remains instructive. Among other things, it serves as a reminder that terror was not invented by guillotine-wielding Thermidoreans in revolutionary France, prodigal though they were, nor by the self-emancipators of Saint-Domingue.

Revolution and Liberty on Both Sides of the Atlantic

Calculated butchery, for the purpose of maintaining collective submission, was deployed with coercive zeal by feudal and colonial regimes spanning Europe, the Americas, and the oceans between. The mutilations inflicted on rebels and enslaved workers in the Carribean, the unbridled ruthlessness used to disband the United Irish men and women in the same era, the punitive abuse suffered by sailors trapped (through debt or poverty) in maritime service throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, expand and clarify the vista of programmatic violence that conservative commentators have rightly identified with the 1790s, albeit within too narrow a scope.

Edmund Burke – whose statue today overlooks College Green in Dublin – inaugurated this long tradition of elitist moralism, when he condemned the “gross, stupid, ferocious—and at the same time poor and sordid—barbarians” of France’s new-formed rebel mass: for him, a “swinish multitude” lacking in both “nobility and religion”. Worst of all, Burke declaimed, was that the “Revolution” would render the “murder of a king, or a queen” as “only common homicide”, no longer the “sacrilege” of times past. The established order of things had been turned upside down.

Questions of liberty and equality, of means and ends, were the subject of urgent, heated debate in this period. According to Burke’s “servile reverence for antiquity”, wrote Mary Wollstonecraft in rebuttal, “the slave trade ought never to be abolished”, adding with incisive exasperation: “Security of property! Behold, in a few words, the definition of English liberty.”

The Slave Revolt in Haiti: A Revolt Against Commerce and Racism

He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.

Thomas Paine similarly concluded, observing in the reproving theatrics of his Anglo-Irish antagonist “[n]ot one glance of compassion, not one commiserating reflection, [for] those who lingered out the most wretched of lives, a life without hope, in the most miserable of prisons.” The Bastille of Paris had been overthrown, and at the hands of a people whose misery was presumed as natural (and ritually worsened) by both monarchy and state.

It is a painful irony – and a parable of revolutionary apostasy – that Toussaint L’Ouverture, one of Saint-Domingue’s most famous and effective adaptors of that same radical tradition, should end his days deprived of food and water, a prisoner of the nation that bore “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” as its unofficial motto. In their abolition of slavery, their self-conversion from exploited instruments of capital into agents of social revolution and racial equality, the rebels of Saint-Domingue had set a precedent of successful emancipation from the hierarchies of power that ruled their changing world.

Figures like L’Ouverture were as much of a threat to the economic affairs of post-revolutionary France and America, as to the commercial and imperial ambitions of Europe’s imperial monarchies. Scott, in his book on the Haitian Revolution, highlights the views of one Pedro Bailly in this regard.

A Louisiana militiaman of colour, part of a global community of radicals inspired by the political developments in the Atlantic isle, Bailly understood the world-historical significance of the Haitian example: “We have the title of ‘Citizen’ in Saint-Domingue”, he said, “All of us being human, there should be no differences: color should not differentiate us.”

Glints of Life and Resistance

Thomas Paine himself was regularly burned to death, in effigy, by pro-slavery mobs across the Carribean in these years: reviled by a class whose commercial success depended on those divisions of property and privilege that his writings exposed with such aplomb. “It is time to dismiss all those songs and toasts which are calculated to enslave,” he proclaimed in his defence of the principle of revolutionary self-activity: “On all such subjects men have but to think, and they will neither act wrong nor be misled.”

As we have seen, in an effort to contain the spread of such incendiary opinions, governing forces on both sides of the Atlantic asserted their authority through murder, torture, dispossession, and  engineered necessity, on a scale both pressingly intimate and increasingly far-reaching.

Taken together, untold millions suffered in the name of king, imperium, race, and caste; later, millions more were sacrificed to the poverty and killing labour that accompanied the much-lauded industrial miracles of the nineteenth century. Such degradations, however, do not convey the whole story, which on closer examination is stippled with glints of life and resistance.

A Ground-Breaking Book on the Haitian Revolution

To peer through these kaleidescopic keyholes, as Scott does, is to discover a new history and a new approach. As empires expanded and evolved, as enterprises ravenous for profit and commercial opportunity chased their elusive margins around the world, previously disparate communities responded, often defensively, with re-forged conceptions as to human worth and earthly value, organising themselves into fresh formations of revolutionary consciousness and communication that threatened, at every turn, to up-end the vast ambitions of their supposed masters.

As Scott’s ground-breaking book on the Haitian Revolution shows, the circulation of (radical) ideas was dependent, in the main, on the agency and mobility of often downtrodden people, fashioning their own routes of resistance and freedom. In November, 1791, one English plantation owner, tremulously awaiting news of order lost or restored in Saint Domingue, discovered with horror that “his slaves learned of recent developments on the coast before he did”, through word-of-mouth contact with fellow labourers and fugitives.

Some months later, a similarly watchful naval commander, cautiously navigating the coast of Saint Domingue, encountered a rowboat “armed with fifty or sixty men of all colors” led by an “Irishman of prodigious size”: a “deserter” from the captain’s own vessel, who had “apparently made common cause with the black rebels on land” and now was dedicating himself to raiding “British and American shipping.”

The Struggle for Liberty Inspires History

The masters themselves were governed by fear. Supposedly invisible and disposable populations were embracing the most radical elements of contemporary history as their own. In Jamaica, the white minority noted with trepidation “the Ideas of Liberty” that “have sunk so deep in the Minds of all the Negroes”, anticipating “that wherever the greatest Precautions are not taken, they will rise.”

By the summer of 1792, likewise, “an air of insolence” was said to be circulating among the black population of Kingston, as ruling officials speculated as to their ability to control a potential outbreak of “the same Phrenzy which rages a few Leagues distant” in Saint Domingue.

Farther afield, a decade after Haiti had been declared an independent republic, in 1811 Charles Deslondes, himself a Haitian, marched with “between 200 and 500 rebel slaves” on New Orleans, “setting fire to plantations on the way”, in what was the largest self-organised slave insurrection in North America.

“There’s not a breathing of the common wind / That will forget” the Haitian revolutionaries, William Wordsworth had assured the spirit of Toussaint L’Ouverture in his poem dedicated to the captured general: the “exultations” and “agonies” of their struggle for liberty now bore a catalysing relation to human history at large. In this, as Scott argues in his book on the Haitian Revolution, time and again, he has been proven right.

We Remain Today A Part of the Haitian Revolution

Today, as a result of punishing trade (and aid) agreements, as well as an increasingly entrenched internal culture of upper-class corruption, Haiti has one of the highest rates of child mortality in the world, while a quarter of Haitians live in abject poverty. International conglomerates have consistently sought to capitalise on this economic and social vulnerability, including Digicel, the communications company owned by Irish business tycoon, Denis O’Brien, accused in 2019 of being a “co-conspirator” in a “ruse” to divert funds intended for Haitian education to its own benefit.

Were we to look beyond the fortunes of O’Brien and his ilk, we would see that Ireland, itself simmering in the long aftermath of revolutionary defeat, is in many ways a homeless nation, wracked by inequality and corporate shadow-rule: a tax haven serving the needs of the wealthiest and most exploitative interests on earth.

To counter and transcend this spectacle of crass, murderous venality, we might begin by recognising that Scott’s – and other books about the Haitian Revolution – show us the real traditions of Atlantic radicalism and aspiration that shaped our respective regions once, and may do again. The Haitian emancipators were internationalist in their consciousness, local and concerted in their collective actions; they shaped their insurrection to the demands and rights of their communities, and not to the blinkered vision of the status quo that ruled them; they knew the power of their words and mass; they were unafraid to rebel. We owe Scott our gratitude for bringing their story back to life, with its whispering grassroots voices and tremoring waves of change. From histories like this a common future can be made: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.

If you enjoyed this review, for other books about the Haitian Revolution and that era you might also like to read Johnny Flynn’s review of Red Round Globe Hot Burning and his interview with Peter Linebaugh, the author.

Victoria Biggs, Caged in Chaos

Eoghan Ó Nia interviewed by Conor Kostick

CK: What is dyspraxia?

E Ó N: In very general, broad terms, dyspraxia is a learning difficulty which has to do with your hand-eye coordination. It can be very basic stuff like even reaching out to pick up a cup. Depth perception can be quite difficult. Enough times I’ve reached to grab a cup, I’ve not grabbed onto it properly and dropped it. It’s very basic things like that. Things like walking in a straight line can be quite difficult. Also, fine and gross motor skills. Gross motor skills are things like driving a car, riding a bike, very difficult things to do, and then fine motor skills are using your fingers, like eating food. For example, eating something like chips. I prefer using my hands to eat them rather than using a fork because that’s just very difficult for me. There’s a lot of different things that you can drill into, but in a general broad context, that’s what dyspraxia is.

CK: How common is it?

E Ó N: I don’t know other than in Ireland where the prevalence is six percent among five to twelve-year-olds. When I’ve said it to people, ‘I have dyspraxia’, the majority of those I’ve said it to do seem to know what dyspraxia is or have a basic understanding of what it is. Certainly enough people have it. And I have a good few friends who have it. I would say it’s relatively common enough and people have a good understanding of what it is.

CK: I’m going to get round to how to be inclusive if you’re campaigning or a political party, but having dyspraxia must present learning challenges?

E Ó N: Very much so. Even when you mentioned there about political campaigning. The manifestos and publications that parties put out can be very wordy. You have these big, long articles that someone with dyspraxia or dyslexia definitely would not be able to access. I think in a general sense you need to make the actual material – the manifestos and leaflets – you don’t have to simplify the ideas but you do have to express them simply. Don’t use over-complicated words and make the material something that’s easy to understand and gets to the point.

CK: Do alternative formats like audio and video help?

E Ó N: Definitely. I have dyslexia as well as dyspraxia, so that adds another layer to it because there are people who just have dyspraxia. I’m a kinesthetic learner, which basically means I learn by doing. For example, I learned a lot about politics from just being out in the general election and canvassing. That’s how I learned and picked up things and absorbed the information. Just having a mix of things and having a varied amount of consciousness.

Reviewing Caged in Chaos by Victoria Biggs

CK: You’ve been reading an important book about dyspraxia to review for Independent Left.

E Ó N: Caged in Chaos by Victoria Biggs. When Victoria Biggs wrote the book – originally in 2005 – she was a teenager. She was sixteen-years-old, so still going through secondary school. And she’s struggled with dyspraxia most of her life, since primary school I think. She got the diagnosis of it quite young. The book itself is mostly about her experiences in secondary school, because at the time that’s what she was still going through when she was writing the book, although there are a few mentions going back into the past of primary school.

CK: Did you find it helpful reading it? Did it resonate with your life?

E Ó N: The comparisons were really just astonishing, at times it felt like I was looking in a mirror in a way. Because even in the first chapter it was almost like pretty much looking in a mirror between me and her. Just the struggles, the fact that the basic things that she struggled with really resonated with me. Because the main point about the book that I would make is that it was written by someone with dyspraxia who, when she was writing it, was still going through school and struggling with all the bullying and all that sort of stuff. It’s written by someone who’s actually been through it, so it’s quite raw. It’s quite emotional. It’s very real. It’s just brutally honest about it.

CK: You mentioned bullying there. Do you want to say a bit more about that?

E Ó N: This is a good point which I’ll tie in with my own experiences. There’s a whole chapter in the book about bullying, about the things that people in general with intellectual disabilities are bullied for: the inability to spell, obviously the bullies would jump on that. ‘Ha, ha, you can’t spell a word.’ But Victoria Biggs would respond by saying, ‘Look, I can’t spell a word, but I do at least know what the word means.’

What I found in the bullying chapter was quite amazing because obviously I didn’t have the book when I was in secondary school and I wish I did. I really wish I did, because that would have been so helpful. Victoria Biggs, like me, developed a coping mechanism around making fun of herself, which helped lessen the impact of the bullies laying into her because she was making fun of herself. And that’s exactly what I did. And without even ever reading that book before or knowing about her, I did the exact same thing.

CK: Did you pay a price for that? Did you have to lower your self-image by doing that? Or was it a way of just deflecting?

E Ó N: It was a way of deflecting it. She mentions that although it’s a good coping mechanism, you have to have a high opinion of yourself to be able to do it right. Because when she started doing it, and especially when I started doing it as well, I would have felt like that. Very negative about myself, and it wasn’t helping, but as time went on and I got used to it and I was able to build myself up. It’s just been a part of my humour which means when they would insult me, it would deflect the impact and it was the same for Victoria Biggs. Of course, not many people get the whole thing of the self-inflicted humour. Some will say, ‘Oh, don’t insult yourself,’ and you have to explain you’re not really doing that.

CK: And it’s proven to be a good skill because you’re now pretty sharp at humorous political memes. Maybe developing a strategy of humour has been a bit of training for that.

E Ó N: I think so. Like when an article in the Irish Times covered how people are going to have difficulties with social norms post COBID: like shaking hands. And I put up a meme in Simpsons fans and I just said, ‘Me as someone with dyspraxia who struggles with social norms.’ And it just said, ‘Ha, now you know how it feels.’

An awkward moment for Aodhán Ó RÍordáin during an RTÉ interview:

What does Victoria Biggs’ book about dyspraxia say about school supports?

CK: Did you and Victoria get any support in school?

E Ó N: Victoria Biggs had a good deal of support from her parents and from her family. One of her teachers supported her indirectly without her knowing. Which she said in looking back on it all now, annoyed her. She would have preferred if that teacher had just been honest with her. For example, they’d have to clean up their dormitories. The teacher would make sure that Victoria Biggs was alone when she was doing that because otherwise the other kids would judge her for taking longer to do the cleaning. But she makes the point that she would have preferred if the teacher had have actually been open and honest about it instead of just being helping in a sneaky kind of way.

As for me, I got the usual learning support. That was very good. In fact, actually it was the learning support teacher in my third year of secondary school (I already had dyslexia at that point) who spotted my dyspraxia. I was doing a test in relation to dyslexia and I was struggling with using blocks to make words. I was finding it hard to actually pick up the blocks. And the support teacher rang up my mom and said, ‘I think he has dyspraxia’. I was referred for an assessment and sure enough was diagnosed with it. If it wasn’t for the learning support teacher, I wouldn’t have even been diagnosed with dyspraxia.

CK: Does Victoria Biggs end up advocating for change or policies? What would she like to be different about the world to make it more inclusive for people with dyspraxia?

E Ó N: The main conclusion that she draws with the book is the need to raise awareness for dyspraxia itself and getting people to understand what it is and all the different aspects to it. Obviously, the book was written originally in 2005, so the supports and services in place then were very poor. Dyspraxia was only really a relatively kind of new thing. A lot has changed since then.

I think another point is that when you do the assessment of needs and all the different supports that are there outside of school, they are all designed for children, which isn’t great for teenagers or adults with dyspraxia. Increased support after childhood is also something Victoria Biggs is calling for. We don’t have any supports for anything designed specifically for teenagers or adults.

Advice for inclusive political parties and campaigns

CK: Any tips – this is probably more for you than from reading the book – but any tips for people who are running campaigns to make sure that they’re inclusive and that people with dyspraxia can be fully involved?

E Ó N: First of all, I’d say each intellectual disability presents its own challenges and for someone with just dyslexia and someone with just dyspraxia, there’s going to be two different approaches. But at the end of the day, the experts on this are the people with those particular disabilities. They’ll know what they need and they’ll know where they’re struggling. It’s probably not very enlightening what I have to say, but sometimes – and with the dyspraxia especially – I focus my brain on doing the basics right first, rather than trying to do anything over-complex. And sometimes I feel like people in politics miss that, that they don’t do the basics right. Talk to people with dyslexia, talk to people with dyspraxia and ask them to look at your campaigns and your parties. And ask them: is this something that, regardless of whether you agree with it or not, that you could engage with? That you could involve yourself with? That you can understand what we’re for?

Also, if you have someone in your party or organization that has an intellectual disability, again, talk to them. Let them speak for themselves. I remember after the general election Sinn Fein had a couple of Facebook ‘live’ on intellectual disabilities. Which were good. I liked them. But again, it was mostly just the representatives and the ‘experts’, not really anyone with a disability. Parties have to involve the people with the disabilities in the actual discussions.

CK: It’s a simple tip, but it’s really important. And it’s surprising how often that doesn’t actually happen. Is there anything about the book you particularly wanted to highlight?

E Ó N: I don’t agree with how there’s always a focus on the famous people that have a particular disability. But Victoria Biggs was saying that although not confirmed, they believe that Churchill presented with symptoms of dyspraxia, or development cognition disorder as it’s known now. And so did Eisenhower and Montgomery. So although I’m not a fan of Churchill, I did like the quote in the book that three disabled people kicked Hitler’s arse. That was brilliant, to be fair.

Most of the chapters are obviously about people with dyspraxia themselves, so it’s going through things like how you struggle at home, how you struggle with exams. Growing up and trying to be an independent person. But the thing I would say about the book itself is it’s a good read for non-dyspraxics, because it gives everyone a good idea of what people with disabilities struggle with. And when you read through the book, you appreciate things that you wouldn’t come across otherwise, like tying a shoelace: for someone with dyspraxia, that can be a daunting task.

Like myself, she has that kind of self-inflicted sense of humour. You do get a lot of jokes where she’s poking fun at herself. It’s a very good read. Obviously it’s written by someone with dyspraxia, so it’s not difficult to read through. It’s a very approachable book. As someone who struggles with reading myself, I read one chapter a day, but obviously someone who’s more advanced in reading skills could get through it in a day. It’s especially good for parents of children with intellectual disabilities in general, not just dyspraxia. I know that this book is about people with dyspraxia, but I think it gives you a broader understanding of any kind of intellectual disability. It gives tips for everyone who’s around that person as well. Like, ‘Here’s good tips for parents when it comes to exams’ or ‘Here’s four tips for teachers when it comes to exams’.

She makes an interesting point about growing up in Saudi Arabia. Surprisingly, it wasn’t as bad for her there as when she got to England. The Saudi’s accepted her for who she was, the culture was dyspraxic-friendly; it’s quite a difference in culture that a conservative country like Saudi Arabia, without even trying, was dyspraxic-friendly.

Another important point she makes as well is that you can really do anything. As much as it can be disheartening talking only about all the different struggles that we go through, she says you can achieve a lot. Certain jobs like working in a supermarket might not be feasible but with education, there’s no reason to limit yourself. A lot of people with intellectual disabilities do actually go on to become teachers. Victoria Biggs gives ideas for different careers that you can put yourself into. Now, she doesn’t mention politics, but I’d recommend politics myself. She encourages you to push yourself. Herself, she’s just completed her doctorate in the University of Manchester (on storytelling and memory among Israeli Jewish and Palestinian youth), which is very impressive. Obviously, the main points she makes is you have to think in a different way than most and do things differently, but really, as long as you’re willing to push yourself in what you believe in, you can do almost anything really.

It’s also very good that she gets a quotes from other people with dyspraxia and they address their struggles in relation to the different chapters. I find that’s very good. There is one of these quotes that struck me: ‘If I could attach a printer to my brain, I could prove to people I’m not stupid.’ We have such an issue getting our thoughts and beliefs across, but our brain, it’s all up there, it’s just getting it out. That was my favourite quote from the book.

Dyspraxia resources and further reading for a good book about dyspraxia

Victoria Biggs has a blog here.

Dyspraxia Ireland has a wealth of resources here and a reading list of books about dyspraxia here.

The poet John Clare was born on 13 July 1793, on the same day that Jean-Paul Marat, the zealous Jacobin revolutionary who believed that ‘man has the right to deal with his oppressors by devouring their palpitating hearts’, was assassinated. John Clare died 20 May 1864, a week before the United States Congress formally recognised the Montana territory of settlement (in a region long-inhabited by Crow, Cheyenne and Blackfeet indigenous peoples) and at a time when Union and Confederate forces waged bloody warfare in Virginia and Georgia over the question of American slavery, its legitimacy and continuation.

Throughout his adult life, Clare disapproved of those he called ‘the French Levellers’ for the violence and upheaval of their programme, and he never left England, but his life and poetry nonetheless stand in an opposition to the dispossessions, divisions and labours of the nineteenth century, the age of capital.

In contrast to the majority of his literary contemporaries, John Clare, born in Northamptonshire to a family of tenant farmers, experienced the privatisation of common land that swept across Britain (and British-controlled regions around the globe) in the wake of the 1801 Inclosure (Consolidation) Act, converting communally tended and lived landscapes into real estate, while intensifying the precarity and dependency of an entire population of rural workers. ‘There once were days, the woodman knows it well’, Clare writes in The Village Minstrel, ‘When shades e’en echoed with the singing thrush’:

There once were lanes in nature’s freedom dropt,

There once were paths that every valley wound –

Inclosure came, and every path was stopt;

Each tyrant fix’d his sign where paths were found,

To hint a trespass now who cross’d the ground…

The Inclosure Acts were presented by parliamentary advocates as a form of ‘improvement’ in land law and distribution. John Clare, however, perceived first-hand the violence of the new order, resulting in an entrenched disparity of privileges and resources, forcing newly created ‘parish-slaves’ to ‘live [only] as parish-kings allow.’ ‘Enclosure came, and trampled on the grave / Of labour’s rights’, Clare resoundingly asserts in The Moors, ‘and left the poor a slave.’

John Clare’s landscape poems observe the social as well as the natural

In the work of William Wordsworth, the foremost ‘Romantic’ of the era (and later, Queen Victoria’s poet laureate), the natural world is celebrated and explored primarily as a metaphor for ‘the mind of man’  – with all the gendered connotations of that concept intact – and indeed as a screen on which the artist’s own life and fancies are projected and presumed as universal truths. Even the relatively radical (if also aristocratic) George Gordon Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley follow Wordsworth’s lead in this respect, albeit with the more combative aim of inspiring political and individual regeneration through a renewed apprehension of natural cycles: the revolving weathers of the world coming to symbolise the human capacity for agency and change.

The work of poet John Clare, however, is of a different variety and intensity: an intimate, achingly powerful poetry of natural and social portraiture, grounded in both literary and vernacular traditions, as well as the earth- and sky-scapes of his native locale. His landscape poems have a luminous observational precision, as well as a rambler’s colloquial flow (from Summer Images):

[A] wind-enamoured aspen – mark the leaves

Turn up their silver lining to the sun,

And list! the brustling noise, that oft deceives,

And makes the sheep-boy run:

The sound so mimics fast-approaching showers,

He thinks the rain begun….

John Clare’s biographer, Jonathan Bate, has drawn attention to the poetry’s oral character and technical ease, while also noting Clare’s work (for the fiddle-playing poet, a kind of pleasure) of preserving local melodies as an added dimension and possible source of the famed musicality of his verse. ‘The clock-a-clay is creeping on the open bloom of May, / The merry bee is trampling the pinky threads all day’, reads Summer, ‘And the chaffinch it is brooding on its grey mossy nest / In the whitethorn bush where I will lean upon my lover’s breast’.

As a young man, Clare in fact filled two notebooks with transcriptions of ‘gypsy’ tunes and dances. His instinct, then and throughout his life, was to celebrate and learn from the richness of those folk cultures that fringed the world he grew up in, which (as Tom Paulin reminds us) was ‘no backwater’, but very much alive with its own artistic and intellectual customs.

The poet John Clare’s sympathy for the commoners

‘My life hath been one love – no blot it out’, the poet John Clare urges in Child Harold: ‘My life hath been one chain of contradictions’. And so, if he was cautiously conservative in his formal politics – rejecting what he viewed as the historical extremism of both French and Cromwellian revolutions – his respect and affection for the ‘gypsies’, as well as other groups who suffered disdain and marginalisation from English officialdom, are arguably more indicative of his fundamental social sympathies. ‘Everything that is bad is thrown upon the gypsies’, he writes despairingly of the prevailing attitudes in the Northampton press: ‘their name has grown into an ill omen and when any one of the tribe are guilty of a petty theft the odium is thrown upon the whole tribe.’ Countering this trend, in his poem, The Gipsey’s Song, Clare adopts the voice of the travellers themselves, whose vagrancy and ‘liberty’ (not to mention, their music) he admires.

And come what will brings no dismay;

Our minds are ne’er perplext;

For if today’s a swaly day

We meet with luck the next.

And thus we sing and kiss our mates,

While our chorus still shall be –

Bad luck to tyrant magistrates,

And the gipsies’ camp still free.

As here, Clare’s rhythmic, vibrant verse is also a form of subtly layered social observation. ‘Religion now is little more than cant’, he writes in The Parish, blending satire and poetic rage at the sight of ‘Men’ who:

… love mild sermons with few threats perplexed,

And deem it sinful to forget the text;

Then turn to business ere they leave the church,

And linger oft to comment in the porch

Of fresh rates wanted from the needy poor

And list of taxes nailed upon the door…

In a few lines, Clare exposes the entire edifice of hypocrisy and greed undergirding Britain’s burgeoning bourgeoisie, as represented by the ‘business’-oriented land-holders in the local parish. Tellingly, once again, the poem’s critique is made from the perspective of ‘the needy poor’: a recurring feature of Clare’s work, which repeatedly voices solidarity with those in his society for whom poverty, eviction, exploitation are palpable and perennial realities. Indeed, he writes as one of them such as in Inpromptu on Winter.

O winter, what a deadly foe

Art thou unto the mean and low!

What thousands now half pin’d and bear

Are forced to stand thy piercing air

All day, near numbed to death wi’ cold

Some petty gentry to uphold,

Paltry proudlings hard as thee,

Dead to all humanity. 

Ecological protest in the poetry of John Clare

The acute, eye-level understanding of both social relations and seasonal change is part of what makes Clare so unique a figure in the Romantic literary movement. E.P. Thompson designates him ‘as a poet of ecological protest’ on this basis: an artistic consciousness almost preternaturally attuned to any ‘threatened equilibrium’ in the rural world – shaped by long-standing customs of free movement and shared access to natural space and resources – into which he was born, and which ‘Enclosure’ definitively ended.

Importantly, Clare’s poetic conscience seems always primed to detect and diagnose cruelty as such, whether with regard to the victims of social ‘improvement’ or more broadly. The Badger, for instance, offers an accurate (and brutal) portrayal of baiting day, a village tradition Clare himself thought cruel and disturbing. Indeed, the poem seems propelled by a pained identification with the torment of the titular animal, up-rooted from its den and eventually routed in the street by a crowd ‘of dogs and men’. It finishes:

Though scarcely half as big, demure and small,

He fights with dogs for bones and beats them all.

[…] He tries to reach the woods, an awkward race,

But sticks and cudgels quickly stop the chase.

He turns again and drives the noisy crowd

And beats the many dogs in noises loud.

He drives away and beats them every one,

And then they loose them all and set them on.

He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men,

Then starts and grins and drives the crowd again;

Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies

And leaves his hold and cackles, groans, and dies.

‘Poetry is the image of man and nature’, Wordsworth had declared in the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), ‘a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man.’ Far from idealising humanity and nature (and the relations between them), however, Clare’s ecological sensitivities and ‘customary consciousness’ together helped him to depict life as he found it, and with a realism few other writers were socially equipped or emotionally inclined to engage.

Famously, Clare spent the last twenty-three years of his life at what was then The Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, having previously been hospitalised in a similar institution in Essex (his wife, Patty, and surviving children, remained in the family home in Northborough). As Bate notes, ‘Clare was perceived as an anomaly within his culture’ throughout his career, and after, with the result that there has ‘always [been] a tendency to attach labels to him: mad poet took over where peasant poet had left off.’

Such classifications have obscured the achievements and concerns of the work itself, while also reducing the artist to a cliché (and a potentially harmful one at that). At any rate, Joe Clare continued composing poems throughout this time: cataloguing personal spells of both depression and nostalgia, as well as producing erudite and witty works in the style of Byron (Clare claimed to have been and/or known a number of prominent world figures, including Byron and Napoleon Bonaparte). ‘I am–yet what I am none cares or knows’, he says in this period in I Am!,

I am the self-consumer of my woes,

They rise and vanish in oblivious host,

Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes

And yet I am, and live–like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

Into the living sea of waking dreams,

Where there is neither sense of life or joys,

But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;

Even the dearest that I loved the best

Are strange–nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

The anguish of the poet John Clare

John Clare is a poet of psychic anguish, as well as ecological critique and music. A similarly potent atmosphere of sadness and isolation looms in another late, autobiographical piece, one of his greatest works: The Journey out of Essex. The prose letter was written as a personal account of his spontaneous departure, in the summer of 1841, from the asylum where he had been admitted as a patient, heading for Helpston in search of his first love, Mary Joyce, who was in fact deceased by this time.

It was a four-day journey of ‘hopping with a crippled foot’ in ‘old shoes [that had] nearly lost the sole’, with little food or water, during which he slept out-of-doors more than once, including in a sodden ditch. ‘I was very often half asleep as I went on the third day’, Clare writes (with a characteristic minimum of punctuation), ‘I satisfied my hunger by eating the grass by the road side which seemed to taste something like bread I was hungry & eat heartily till I was satisfied’.  In itself, the combined vividness and loneliness of the text makes for haunting reading.

The Journey also quivers, however delicately, with the pulse of history-at-large. It is difficult not to trace in Clare’s chronic hunger and homelessness, the crippling pain of his ninety-mile trek – expressed with unparalleled literary intensity – the spectres of alienation and displacement that accompanied Britain’s industrialising drive and imperial rule throughout the nineteenth century.

In a chronicle written in the late 1830s, after two tours of the island, French magistrate Gustave de Beaumont noted how ‘every year, nearly at the same season [the] commencement of a famine is announced in Ireland’: a pattern of colonial mismanagement and market-exacerbated scarcity that would reach a new nadir of devastation in the mid-1840s, following the failure of the potato crop. In the same period, hundreds of thousands of peasant and labouring populations from Ireland, and across Britain and Europe, sailed to America in search of a more secure future, often in turn forcing indigenous tribes into conflict or internal migration.

When situated in such a world-historical vista, Clare’s desperate meal of roadside grass, his powerful yearning for home (which is, for him, both a physical place and a memory of a time, now lost, before enclosure), seems almost a parable of universal dispossession, in a decade of civilised disasters.

‘Oh, who can tell the sweets of May-Day’s morn / To waken rapture in a feeling mind’, the poet John Clare asks his readers in the poem The Village Minstrel: celebrating not only the turning seasons, or his own sensations, but the joy and “plenty” promised by the specific community-in-nature he knew in his youth, and which in later years he hoped always (at times despondently) to reclaim. Clare’s poetry is one expression of that elusive but palpable awakening. Our politics might be another, drawn from nature, from rapture, from one another, and (as historians like Peter Linebaugh have contended) from May-Day itself, both a political and a seasonal tradition. If a future commons is possible, it begins now, with Clare: as we shape our lives and relationships through labour, song, compassion and respect. These are the principles by which we make the world.

FURTHER READING

John Clare: A Life by Jonathan Bate

Crusoe’s Secret: The Aesthetics of Dissent by Tom Paulin

Minotaur by Tom Paulin

John Clare: Major Works by John Clare, edited by Eric Robinson and David Powell

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.