‘It’s as if no other poet except Williams had really seen America or heard its language’, wrote Robert Lowell in 1962, near the end of the elder bard’s life: ‘His flowers rustle by the superhighways and pick up all our voices.’ Some decades earlier, Mike Gold, the editor of New Masses magazine, predicted that ‘[w]hen somebody writes the future history [of] proletarian literature in America, William Carlos Williams will be somewhere large in the table of contents.’ For him, William Carlos Williams’s poetry was for and of the working class.

Today, contra both Lowell and Gold, Williams is mainly known, if at all, as the author of a much-loved – and often parodied – post-it poem about someone else’s fruit: ‘I have eaten / the plums / that were in / the ice-box // and which / you were probably / saving / for breakfast…’. His ‘proletarian literature’ and manifold investigations of the American scene remain, for the most part, out of view. This is a shame, because Williams was one of the most socially engaged and formally innovative poets of his generation. A radical democrat in his political leanings, he served as a practicing paediatrician for over four decades: a doctor-on-call whose natural sympathies lay with the working poor of the industrial towns of his native New Jersey. Throughout his life, he saw poetry as a means of recording both the streets-up vitality and the crushing poverty he encountered in these urban centres – places like Rutherford and Paterson – combining an oppositional political outlook with an acute sensitivity to the human drama at the heart of day-to-day experiences.

This last quality is partly evident even in his famous plum poem above, but its political effect is arguably fuller in a piece like Proletarian Portrait, in which a ‘bare-headed woman’ stands on the sidewalk with her shoe in hand, the whole world seeming to pause and tremble in the balance as she ‘pulls out the paper insole / to find the nail // That has been hurting her’. As here, Williams’s most meticulous evocations of ordinary (‘proletarian’) people and scenarios frequently read like exercises in political allegory: parabolic imaginings of things as they really are, or as they might be in the future. This is certainly true of his poem, The Yachts. Ostensibly depicting an afternoon of summer sport and leisure, it finishes as a critique of class society, as the bodies of the masses form ‘a sea of faces’ left ‘[b]roken, // beaten, desolate’, drowned out by the ‘skillful yachts’ as they ‘pass over’.

William Carlos Williams’s poetry was grounded in the vernacular

For Williams, American modernity was marked and maintained through the violence of elite privilege and social exclusion. ‘The wealthy / I defied’, he recalled in one late piece: the wealthy and those ‘who take their cues from them’. Like the social photographers of the 1930s, many of whom he knew and admired, his concern was to restore the experience of supposedly invisible communities – of labourers, immigrants, drifters – to the cultural record. The result was a body of poetic work at once crystalline in its political perceptions and dynamic in its formal movement, both elegant and plainspoken: a poetry grounded in the vernacular rhythms of American life, for ‘what good is it to me’, he asked, ‘if you can’t understand it?’

The same could not be said about the poets among whom Williams is most regularly classed today: high modernists whose literary politics ranged from the lavish insulation of Wallace Stevens, an insurance executive, to the vituperative antisemitism of Ezra Pound, whom William first met as an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.

While Pound increasingly sought to hitch his wagon of economic reform to the scorching lodestar of Mussolini’s racist authoritarianism in the 1930s Williams dedicated time and energy to anti-fascist causes. ‘I myself was chairman [of] a committee for medical aid to Spanish democracy’, he wrote in 1941, with a combination of sorrow and fury, as ‘the Storch Squadron went out with their planes on Easter while the women and children were in the streets [and] blasted them to butchers’ meat in the holy Basque city of Guernica “to see how effective the planes and bombs would be.”’

As Williams’s wife, Florence, recalled in 1964, he and Pound, although lifelong friends, ‘were on such opposite sides. Ezra was definitely pro-Fascist, much as he may deny it, and Bill was just the opposite.’ Likewise, stylistically, Williams  stood apart from his peers, favouring idiomatic literary incisions, with a ‘feeling of reality’, to the allusive, often Euro-centric innovations of Pound and Eliot. The ‘revolution’ will be accomplished, he wrote, when ‘noble has been / changed to no bull’.

Although he published regularly in Marxist journals – a pattern of literary affiliation that earned him the reproval of a McCarthyite literary establishment in the late 1940s – Williams was generally distrustful of what he perceived as the didactic and jargonistic tendencies of America’s formal Left, and never joined, for example, the Communist Party when invited to do so. This didn’t prevent him from reaching his own conclusions, however. In 1936, he could be found arguing, with unapologetic assurance, that a ‘labor revolution by a society seeking to be in fact classless is both great and traditionally American in its appeal’:

            To violently effect, by a brave stroke, the ejection of an inhuman and anti-social domination by those who have an effective control over the means of our common livelihood for their private gain – [this] would appeal to the American character if once put into motion.

If Williams maintained a somewhat chirpy belief in the democratic possibilities of the USA as a political experiment, this credo gained grit and clarity with his accompanying insistence on re-casting ‘America’ as a kind of living monument to rebellion. It’s in this context that he could write so admiringly, in 1937, of H.H. Lewis, the sharecropper-poet and avowed Communist ‘fighting to free himself from a class enslavement which torments his body’. ‘He speaks with fervor,’ Williams observed, ‘a revolutionary singleness and intensity of purpose, a clearly expressed content… he resembles the American [rebel] of our revolutionary tradition.’

A mirror for our own times: the poetry of William Carlos Williams

For Williams, there was nothing more dutifully patriotic than to question, ceaselessly, the presumptions and practices of the status quo: political, literary, and medical. ‘I am boiling mad’, he declared to one correspondent in the late 1940s, at ‘this morning’s mail from the American Medical Association’, which ‘in the name of “democracy” orders me to pay $25 into their treasury to fight “socialized medicine”’. This ‘represents what we are up against in our times,’ he concluded, with a righteous fire drawn from a deep understanding of the human value of public healthcare, as well as the nefarious motives of a professional lobby intent on derailing such an infrastructure. In this respect, Williams’s era (and predicament) holds a foreshadowing mirror to our own.

In a similarly combative mode, in a 1933 editorial to the short-lived magazine, BLAST, which he co-founded ‘in the service of the proletariat’, Williams was keen to correct what he saw as a blind spot in the thinking of some of his contemporaries, taking subtle aim at the racism that remained operative in both radical and literary circles. ‘No Communist should care for the color of the skins of his comrades’, he asserted, perhaps in reference to that phenomenon later described by David Roediger, whereby ‘the great liberal mobilizations of the New Deal and industrial unionism in the 1930s […] became a key site for the making of race’, as the ‘the color line’ was consolidated in workplaces, public housing schemes, and even within the union movement. For Williams, by contrast, the political agitator and the literary ‘artist’ alike should, as he put it, have ‘skin the color of the rainbow – with black added’.

In truth, this gutsy egalitarianism on Williams’s part was more intuitive than programmatic, and not always adequate in practice to his original intentions. He had a tendency to speak from the nerves, writing reactively to what he experienced and perceived in the society around him. The result is a passionate, if sometimes contradictory, record of his times, in which ‘color’ is a charged category and, as Toni Morrison has observed, ‘embedded assumptions of racial (not racist) language’ filter a ‘literary enterprise that hopes and sometimes claims to be “humanistic”.’

In other respects, however, Williams still seems a remarkably thorough and prescient social critic. Paterson, his boundary-breaking long poem published from the mid-1940s onwards, offers not only a  portrait of the titular New Jersey town, but an exposé of the social and environmental degradation faced by its working residents, whose place and circumstances come to stand in for a larger American reality. As Williams’s literary protegé, Allen Ginsberg, memorably noted when growing up there in the 1940s: ‘Paterson itself [seemed to be] degenerating into a twentieth-century mafia-police-bureaucracy-race-war-nightmare-tv-squawk suburb.’ Williams, moreover, ‘had articulated’ this catastrophic situation ‘to its very rock-strata foundations’.

The poem is technically innovative and thematically far-ranging, exploring questions of historical violence, civic and subjective memory, alienation, intimacy, as well as poetic and ecological regeneration. In contrast to Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 film of the same name, the Passaic river as it appears in Paterson is not so much a font of inspiration, bringing the poet’s reverie to life, but a churning symbol of the environmental toxicity, corporate abuse, and social decay that plagues the surrounding region, its waters ‘steaming purple / from the factory vents, spewed out hot’. As Williams once argued, the much-celebrated Alexander Hamilton – who established the USA’s first cotton and textile mills in Paterson in 1792 – ‘led the country [to] financial stability but at the cost of much that had been enivisioned during the early years of the revolution’. The ‘dead bank’ of the Passaic river, ‘shining mud’, is where Williams’s protagonist stands, attempting both to mourn and to fathom this modern America, as he breathes the fumes. Today, even by the environmentally destructive standards of twenty-first-century capitalist civilisation, the Passaic remains notoriously, and perhaps irremediably, polluted. It is impossible to read Paterson, Williams’s unflinching epic of diagnosis and discovery, without feeling an uneasy shiver of recognition.

If literature, for Williams, was a means of gaining access to social realities, right down to the root, it was also an ‘instrument’ for imagining the future: a shared life free of alienation and exploitation. Williams’s ‘delicious’ hunger for ice-box plums and vivid portraits of proletarian endurance both speak to this vision, which Paterson also shares: of an art and a society based on the living needs of human communities. The ‘outstanding character of poetry’, he wrote, resoundingly, is that it ‘cannot exist other than as the revolutionary attribute of a free people’. The message was the medicine: we need it still.

FURTHER READING

William Carlos Williams:

                        A Recognisable Image: WCW on Art and Artists,

                        Collected Poems: Vols I & II,

                        Paterson,

                        Selected Essays,

                        Something to Say: WCW on Younger Poets.

How Monetisation Destroys Good Games

Eoghan Ó Nia interviewed by Conor Kostick

Conor: We’re going to talk about capitalism and gaming. And I suppose we’re framing the discussion by saying that we live in a strange world where whenever there’s anything that human beings do that’s fun, somebody thinks, ‘oh, I could make some money out of this’. And sometimes they can make enormous amounts of money off of it. Very often by doing so they end up destroying the fun. This has happened in so many areas of human culture and I think it’s happening in gaming in a really quite stark way right now. For example, with micro-transactions inside of games. Can you start by talking about these?

Eoghan: There’s a hundred different terms that are used from game to game, but essentially micro-transactions work via in-game currency that you have to pay real money to get. Then you can use that in-game currency to go for additional items, such as a loot box. And through these purchases you have the potential of getting good items that can help you in the game. This gives you an immense advantage over people who don’t pay to use the system. So often the games get called a pay-to-play, because if you want to make any progress in the game, level up, you have to take part in making micro-transactions. If you don’t use them, then your progress is actually slowed down. It’s designed that way, obviously. They manipulate the system to push you towards having to make purchases.

And the most worrying aspect of this is in games like FIFA, which obviously are played by a lot of children. So you’ve got children getting money off their parents to buy this in-game currency for them. With loot boxes there’s a chance that you might get a good item or not. It’s risk-reward. It’s basically a form of gambling, and kids are doing this, which is what is the real concern.

I mean, there’s a whole debate around gambling and the morality of it and all this sort of stuff, but I think anyone can agree that children taking part in any form of gambling is just wrong.

Conor: As a case study, can we look at FIFA in a bit more depth then. What can a player buy in FIFA?

Eoghan: For FIFA, the loot boxes are called packs. There’s a mode in the game called ultimate team where you have to build up a squad of players: your ideal football team. That’s the basic premise of it. You’re building up your dream football team. You buy packs, and the packs have players in them that may want to use or not. Again, it’s risk-reward. You spend FIFA points that you use real money to buy. And it’s a risk-reward activity because the more money you spend, the better the pack, the better the chance of getting a good item.

Conor: And does this mean if you’re playing it online with your friends, or with strangers, it makes a big difference if you’ve spent any real money?

Eoghan: Yes. Because you’ll have better players. It’s as simple as that. You’ll have better players, and then if you don’t get the players you want, you can sell them to make more coins, which is the other in-game currency, which is used to buy players individually. But you’ll basically have more of an advantage over someone who doesn’t use that system, because if you play the game without taking part in the micro-transactions, you earn solely on barely any money to be able to buy anything. You have to play hundreds of games to even get one pack. It’s ridiculous.

Monetization is everywhere in gaming

Conor: We’ve used FIFA here as the case study, but this type of monetization is everywhere now, isn’t it?

Eoghan: Yeah, pretty much. I mean, you can take the example of FIFA, change around a tiny bit and you can pretty much make the same point about any other game that has this system. The names for the items you are purchasing change – in FIFA they’re called packs, or in a game like Fortnite it would be loot boxes – but it’s the exact same thing. One study in 2019 found that over nine years the percentage of loot boxes in the bestselling games on Steam rose from 4% to 71%.

Conor: Most combat games give you better weapons if you’ve paid real money. So if you’re duelling other people, it’s a big advantage if you’re ploughing your cash into them.

Eoghan: Exactly.

Conor: And is this spoiling the pleasure of the game?

Eoghan: Yes, because it basically means that you have to use your real money to give you an advantage. For people who just don’t bother with that, who are just trying to play the game for fun and want to switch off for a few hours, there’s no fun to be had because you’ve got these players who have this massive advantage over them. A lot of games are designed so you need to be on it every day and spending money to actually get anything out of it.

Conor: Back in 2004, this wasn’t around so much, but you could see it coming. Because that year I wrote Epic. The premise of Epic is that everybody on the planet in the book is playing an online game, and it’s corrupt. There’s a small elite who’ve rigged the system. Epic won an award that took me to China. And what I learned on my trip to China was even then – sixteen years ago – there were factories where people were farming all day inside the games: accumulating in-game coins, and then selling the packs of bundles of coins to players in the West. It’s massively accelerated now, but even then people were paying up to $2,000 for a top-of-the-range character who’d been levelled up by these platinum farmers and level grinders. And so they would be doing that nonstop, playing the game, if you can call it play when it’s working for long hours.

Eoghan: And I’m sure they weren’t paid too much.

Conor: I’m sure the pay was terrible. In fact, I remember reading a really good short story of a trade union organizer who goes inside a game as an elven warrior to talk to the people doing it. And they join the union and prepare an in-game strike.

You can imagine the harm that plat farming did to the games, creating shortages for casual players and forcing committed players to spend more money. And the same trends have really grown since. Something that is new, however, is the growth of mobile gaming. Can you say something about that?

Capitalism and Mobile Gaming

Eoghan: With advances in the technology of mobile gaming – the fact that your phone can process more – you’re able to actually have games on your phone. But you can’t have the kind of complex games that you’d be able to have on an Xbox or a top-of-the-range PC. So companies have made very bare bones, simple but addicting games for phones. Social media can be addictive and mobile games are designed around the same features. I think some of the first mobile games were actually Facebook games. They began by being offered for Facebook users and then became more general.

Conor: Can you give us an example?

Eoghan: Candy Crush Saga is a good example. It began on Facebook in 2012 and soon spread everywhere. It showed games companies the power of giving players only a limited amount of turns, with the option of buying more energy to keep going. Some of these ‘freemium’ games are massive, earning over a billion a year. Another example is Simpsons Tapped Out, where you build your own Springfield. Essentially you have to pay in-game currency to speed up the time of the building because the buildings take a real day to complete. Not an in-game day, a real day, twenty-four hours to build one building. So that’s where you are encouraged to buy in-game currency with real money so as to speed up the building time.

Conor: The need for speed-ups is a big feature of these games. These games are addictive, with millions of people playing them. But it must be frustrating to have constant interruptions unless you pay.

Eoghan: Mobile games are even worse than the regular games with regard to these features, because these games are simply about the money. That’s all they are. There’s almost nothing to do when playing them, besides just sit around and wait and pay real money. They are so basic. At least with the games on Xbox and PC they try to hide the fact that it’s capitalism at work.

Add-ons as another monetization flaw in gaming

Conor: Some of the console games are works of art, quite amazing in how they look and their storylines. But they’re distorted works of art that are flawed because of the monetization aspect. Wouldn’t it be brilliant to have people making games just for the joy of it, just for the pleasure of building immersive stories that we can play?

Eoghan: You look at the older games, and you can see that. There are no micro-transactions; there’s no major content that’s brought out as a separate bundle. In the older games, they gave you everything with the game. And there obviously are still some who make games because they love making games. But I think what happened with the rise of the internet and more people playing online, was that business just saw an opportunity as more and more people played video games: this is something we can exploit.

Conor: Well, you mentioned about unlocking extra content. So that’s another big monetizing feature of modern games that didn’t used to be around. So the add-on basically. Can you give us more examples maybe of unfair add-on?

Eoghan: For some games you’ll get extra missions to play through. There’s the very popular Assassin’s Creed for example. So that’s a game where you play as a member of the order of Assassins up against the Templars. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is set in England during the Viking age. In the DLC (downloadable content), they’re going to add Dublin. It’s good that players will be able to go around Viking Dublin, but why wasn’t that part of the release considering Dublin was a very important trading centre? You could talk for hours about why Dublin or Dubhlinn,  was a key centre of the Viking trading network, not just for us as Irish people, but in general, as a major city of the Viking era. It was very important. Why is it only there as an add-on? Because there’s Irish people around the world, Irish people living in England, in America, people with the Irish connection or just with an interest in Ireland: they’ll buy that for the DLC. Ubisoft know that. And so they make it add-on rather than core content because they know they can make money off that.

Pro-Gaming, sponsorship and capitalism in ESports

Conor: Another topic that seems to be relevant to what’s happening in the strange world of gaming is the growth of pro-gaming. What is it, in the last twenty years maybe?

Eoghan: Esports really took off around 2000 with millions of people following Starcraft tournaments. Again it is associated with social media, the growth of the internet, and all the people playing online, obviously.

Conor: What games are popular for ESports and what kind of audiences can they attract?

Eoghan: A good example is Call of Duty. That’s very popular and recently a pro-league was launched for it. The teams of players all have annual salaries and there’s a million dollar pool for the winners to share.

Then there’s the FIFA eWorld Cup. So you have all these different FIFA players come together, over two million in 2016. They have qualifying rounds and then the tournaments. The final games are played out in convention halls. Pre COVID there would be thousands of people present to watch the games. And then of course, they stream it, so everyone is watching online around the world.

Conor: I gained some insights from my nephew, who has the same name as me, who is an occasional Rocket League commentator. As with conventional sports, eSports have paid commentators telling viewers what’s going on in the game. It’s a bit like the YouTubers who just play their games and comment and get millions of followers.

Eoghan: Although with the YouTubers it’s a bit different because the YouTubers, they’re gamers who just happened to record it and obviously commentate on it.

Conor: Some of the popular YouTubers are quite critical of capitalism in gaming.

Eoghan: Some of them have come out. Say, like Critical Nobody, who has around 100,000 followers:

He recently posted a strong argument against Ubisoft and how they monetize games, ruining them as a result.

And then, on the other side, you’ve got the YouTubers like Ali-A who started off quite modestly before growing to 17.5million followers and taking sponsorship money. A lot of them started getting sponsorship deals because basically YouTube dried up advertising revenue via demonetization. Now YouTubers have to get sponsored by someone to make any money, which leads to their broadcasts become dishonest or cynical. You can almost hear the lines from scripts they’ve been given by their sponsors.

Marxism, Adorno and Capitalism in Gaming

Conor: Let me run a Marxist theory by you in this regard, because since we’ve been talking, it’s reminded me a bit of what Adorno wrote about music, because I think some of his ideas cross over into gaming. Adorno said that capitalism is destroying music in two ways. One is by destroying the audience for really cutting-edge, brilliant, profound music. Capitalism makes us too tired to engage with really challenging music because we are overworked and outside of work, our time is used getting ourselves and our families refreshed for the next day’s work. We only have time for something easy to grasp, something catchy. When it comes to music, capitalism creates a mass market of zombies. Similarly, I think in the world of gaming that means neglecting really edgy games where there’s quite difficult moral decisions and strange outcomes. I remember playing a Phillip K. Dick Blade Runner one, which had different endings where you could be the Replicants.

Adorno’s other point about capitalism and music was how it had become very big business. Companies, having invested a lot in a product (in his case musical product), cannot afford for it to fail. So they foist it on the public, even if it’s complete rubbish. And they have a wide array of tools, such as marketing budgets, friendly relationships with critics, purchased air-time, to push that music, no matter if it’s great or not. So you get this tsunami of rubbish basically. And it’s very hard when nearly all the critics (and especially those with the biggest platforms) are saying, ‘oh, this is great’ to orientate yourself and find the good stuff. I think we can say the same about gaming, and it fits with what you were just saying there about sponsorship. If they’ve invested a lot in a product, they are not going to listen to critics, they are going to double down with promotion, sponsorship, and paid reviews, obliging gamers to invest time in something that isn’t any good.

Eoghan: IGN are a company who have built themselves up solely around reviewing video games: they are really multinational, really successful. And what you were saying about reviews is evident there. Of course, they don’t take money directly for a good review but I’d guess that if you did a study of who took out adverts on that site and who got good reviews for their games, you’d find a strong match.

Revolution and the Gaming Industry

Conor: I have a critique of Adorno, which might be worth exploring for what it means for games. For me, Adorno’s theory of music is a bit too bleak because what it doesn’t appreciate enough is the constant bubbling up, especially from within our communities, of new forms of music. Invention, over-stepping boundaries, profundity. And these little bubbles can be amazing. They rarely last, because once big enough to attract the attention of marketers they are accelerated into a monstrous brand that then collapses again. So even punk, which was a fantastic working class, revolutionary musical movement, even that ends up with Johnny Rotten selling butter or something.

It’s not that these movements can ever break capitalism and achieve socialism, but they’re constantly happening. So let’s think about that in terms of gaming. Can we say the same about gaming? Are there small games companies perhaps? Or collaborative forms of gaming?

Eoghan: Absolutely. Obviously you’ve got people involved in small, independent games companies, down to individual game-making on certain platforms. The Stanley Parable is an interesting example. It was essentially the work of one person, Davey Wreden, using a popular gaming engine. The concept is basic: you are an employee in an office and working through your day and you get called to a meeting, but everyone in the office is gone. And as you play the game more and more, you’ve got all these different outcomes you can go to and different endings. The more you explore it, the crazier it gets and there are more outcomes. You’ve got this narrator as well and one of the outcomes arises if you do the opposite of what he suggests. Eventually the narrator just gets really mad and the character goes, ‘right, I’m leaving’. And he leaves. He actually gets up from his desk and he walks out of the game. And then there’s another outcome where he restarts the game because he gets really angry with you. ‘No, you’re not doing the game properly. Restart’. And then he restarts the game so many times he breaks it.’ And so he was like, great. We have to play a different game’. So he puts in something like Minecraft instead. It was the best thing ever.

Crucial to the success of indie games is crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is basically large numbers of people making small donations to the production of a game. It’s a community effort rather than an investment by a large business or financial backer. And the people who want to make a game in this way have to put the idea before gamers and convince them that this is going to be worth giving money towards. It’s just ordinary people giving them a fiver or a tenner who have to be convinced.

With these forms of games you have community involvement, you have a sort of a community ownership, because they actually gave money to that person to make that game. In this model there’s more incentive to reward backers by making the game good and less need to answer to the banks and introduce in-game monetization features. So although capitalism often ruins games, there are always good new ones coming though.

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.