Review of "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" by David Graeber and David Wengrow

A broad-sweep history of early humanity to challenge all of the other broad-sweep narratives about the emergence of what might loosely be called civilisation. So no one-way trip from smaller loosely organised bands into tribes and then into nations, with state formation accompanying. No one-way trip from hunter-gathering into agricultural society, with concomitant evolution of coercive forms of government. No hydraulic imperative driving the rise of absolute rulers and associated bureaucracies. Instead we get a myriad of different forms, huge stone age cities and monuments for different purposes including ritual, sport, and drug-taking, and lots of examples of agriculture and state formation attempted and abandoned.

It's hard to keep on top of all the examples, and a bit hard to keep on top of the argument too - I will for once look for an online talk that might make the structure of that a bit clearer. But it's a brilliant and enjoyable read, and more hopeful and optimistic than the dreary certainties of Sapiens.

I note in passing that David Graeber keeps knocking books out...he's not going to let a little thing like dying affect his output.

Review of "Old Gods, New Enigmas; Marx's Lost Theory" by Mike Davis

Four essays, collected together and published posthumously. The first and longest, from which the title is taken, is great - a long, thoughtful history of socialist and working-class politics. I could take issue with a few assertions, but it's a magnificent piece of work, if not always accessible in style. I've been immersed in this stuff for years but I still learned lots.

The other three essays were not so great - a bit old, a bit rambling, they didn't do much for me. The last one, about climate change and the potential for cities to be agents of good change, had its heart and brain in the right place but didn't seem to say very much, at least not now - it was written 13 years ago.

But worth it just for the first essay.

Review of The Young Karl Marx

Another biopic, as much about Engels as about Marx, during the period 1843-8, and leading up to the foundation of the Communist League and the publication of the Communist Manifesto.

Mainly faithful to the history, and some nice depictions of meetings and characters...a walk-on part for Bakunin, a bit more of Proudhon, and so on.

I particularly liked the portrayal of Mary Burns, Engels's long term partner, and the hint about the oddness of his relationship with her sister Lizzie. The woman playing Jenny von Westphalen is good too.

Considering it's two hours long and mainly consists of besuited men talking in German it didn't drag at all.

Watched in the Common House at Springhill, via informal distribution. A minor problem was that the file was too big to transfer to a USB stick, even one big enough to hold it, so I had to bring my whole PC down to the Common House and connect that to the projector.

Review of The Real Charlie Chaplin

A documentary biopic, with lots of old footage. I've pretty much never found Chaplin funny, but he is a really interesting character, and was a powerful force in Hollywood - he created United Artists, he had his own studio, he was an absolute perfectionist about his films.

This is a bit on the long side, but worth watching. I really didn't know about Chaplin and HUAC, and how his career and presence were destroyed by the anti-Communist witch-hunt...I'd just assumed that he had faded away as his kind of comedy became out of date. That wasn't the case, and he was effectively exiled from the US because the State Department wouldn't let him and his family return from a trip to Europe.

Watched on All4 via Chromecast and mobile.

Review of Denmark

Watched in two tranches, because we gave up at the first attempt - it was so unremittingly miserable. An unemployed recently divorced bloke in Wales lives in a squalid flat below a neighbour who plays loud house and techno all the time, and he's estranged from his son and his mother and pretty much everyone. He has almost no money, though he has a little for drink and weed. But he's robbed, and everything bad happens to him, and then he hears that prisons in Denmark are really nice places to live, so he resolves to go to Denmark and get sent to prison.

Which was where we stopped watching. But the next night I was home alone, and watched the rest, and there is a sort of redemption and a development of characters, and it was worth staying and seeing it through.

Watched via BBC iPlayer, smartphone and Chromecast.

Review of Baby Done

A really terrible New Zealand comedy about a young woman who becomes pregnant but doesn't want to embrace parenthood and give up her life as an aboriculturalist and competitive tree-climber. Her British partner really wants to be a dad, so she doesn't tell him she's pregnant, though he finds out soon enough. I laughed once or twice, but really it was not funny, and sleazy and slightly misogynist - no-one could really be as stupid as this woman. 

Watched on BBC iPlayer via smartphone and Chromecast. Apparently it was only 84 minutes long, but it felt much much longer.

Review of Liquorice Pizza

An odd and rather unsatisfying film...I'm sure when they pitched it the word "quirky" was used, but it's as much shapeless as quirky. At first I liked the fact that is was not only set in the early 1970s but seemed to have been made then too - the colours, the shots, the camera resolution... And some of it is nicely observed, with good close-ups and dynamics between the characters. But the narrative becomes a set of increasingly implausible vignettes and incidents that don't seem to relate to each other.

Quite fed up by the end, it seemed overlong and not so interesting.

Review of The Old Oak

Not one of Ken Loach's best, though it is moving and well acted. It's about a former mining village in the north-east where everything is closed down and the local pub - the eponymous Old Oak - is just about holding on. A group of Syrian refugees are housed in the village, where house prices are in free fall, and where the locals who already feel dumped on feel that these people are just one more thing that's been dumped on them. The pub landlord tries to be kind and welcoming, but his remaining regulars are hostile and racist. 

A good scenario, and lots of sensitive and thoughtful portrayal of the locals...the Syrians are more like ciphers, apart from the female lead played by Ebla Mari, who is a photographer and a rounded-out character. Incidentally, I note in passing the actor is actually a Druze woman from the Golan Heights, so she's never lived in Syria, having been born and grown up under Israeli occupation; oddly this may have kept her alive, because ISIS massacred Druze in the civil war. 

The film is pretty bleak, but then ends with an entirely implausible happy ending in which one of the Syrian families hears that their father, who was missing and then briefly believed to have been found, has died. The entire community, including some of the horrible racists, rallies round to support them in their mourning. The final scene shows the refugees accepted into the traditions of the local labour movement and marching with their own Arabic-inflected banner in the Durham Miners' Gala.

Review of "The Perfect Heresy; the revolutionary life and death of the Medieval Cathars" by Stephen O'Shea

Nicely written popular history about the Cathars with an entirely reasonable focus on southern France and Languedoc. Mainly focuses on the Albigensian crusades and the suppression of the heresy, and not much about how the Cathars grew and became established in the first place. Very little about the intellectual roots of Gnosticism, but hey you can't have everything. I still learned some stuff about Cathar practices, not least the names of the prayers and rituals that they used.

I'd happily read more by this author.

Review of "Single and Single" by John le Carre

Set against the background of the end of the USSR, and in the context of a company that facilitates dodgy deals, money laundering, offshore ownership, and eventually the logistics for heroin distribution. Not le Carre's usual intelligence agencies setting...the "white hats" are customs officials rather than spooks, though they seem to use much the same methods and have similar access to tradecraft and stuff. Some lovely descriptions of places and people...though the main characters do seem to shimmer a little and not feel as consistent as they might. Still, carried me along and an enjoyable read.

Review of "Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action" by Rhiannon Firth

First up - we read this in the Stroud Radical Reading Group, and my friend and comrade Mar Florence wrote a really good summary, which I have pasted just below.

"Here's the longer version of my book summary of Disaster Anarchy by Rhiannon Firth (5-10 min read).

Capitalism and neoliberalism make disasters more likely to happen because they prioritise profit and maintaining power.

Mainstream disaster management is focused on restoring order, maintaining capitalism, and keeping power in the hands of the existing governments.

The human cost in every sense - lives lost, suffering, negative and traumatic experiences - only matter to the extent to which they impact the capitalist system.

She describes non anarchist critiques of mainstream disaster relief, such as ones that point out that existing systems contribute to and unevenly distribute the impacts of disasters.

She says these don't go far enough because they often posit a state led solution, when the state will always prioritise it's own power, and so will fail at prioritising the experience and safety of its citizens.

She then describes an anarchist theoretical approach where rather than asking for help from a state, people help each other through horizontal organising (between peers) and in the form of mutual aid (in which everyone is a helper and everyone is helped).

She describes some ways capitalism stops or reduces the effectiveness of these social movements -

Recuperation - which is when anarchist organising gets absorbed back into the system, eg by becoming part of an ngo or the state or a private company. This imposes hierarchies, reduces the energy of a movement, limits what the movement can do and who can be part of it (she gives the example of excluding immigrants from helping if official papers are required, which would push them into the role of only receiving help, removing the mutual aspect), and prevents more radical action against the status quo like resisting evictions.

Repression - when anarchist action is clamped down on directly by the state. She gives the example of mutual aid after hurricane Katrina.

She describes how some people criticise anarchist ideas as unrealistic because they think people are fundamentally selfish, she calls this Hobbesian.

Terminology.

She uses the words prefiguration, post-Fordist and cybernetic a lot.

I think prefiguration means creating something with an idea that it is part of the future.

Post-Fordist seemed to mean neoliberal capitalism, maybe post industrial?

Cybernetic seems to mean feeding back into the current system in a loop - I always thought it meant something to do with robots.

She then has two chapters of case studies, the first about occupy sandy, a mutual aid movement in new York after superstorm sandy, which was modelled on the occupy wall street movement and involved some of the same people. And covid mutual aid groups in London during the early pandemic.

In the examples she talks about how the different disasters are tackled differently but there are some similarities. In both cases mutual aid groups are faster and more effective at meeting people's needs than the official groups. In both cases the state and ngos try to piggyback on the grassroots efforts, impose rules, and take credit for their successes.

She talks about difficulties such as people joining with different politics who disagree with how things are done or want to impose rules or hierarchies on the groups. She also talked a bit about inclusion and how to solve problems of making sure everyone has the opportunity to help as well as be helped.

Occupy sandy used more in person organising, turned up at people homes to clean out their basements and used community centres and churches to distribute food, blankets and medical supplies. They received a lot of financial donations from the public to do this work and she talks a bit about the difficulties when managing money in this sort of movement. I read in hot money (naomi klein) that they used a shop front as a makeshift medical centre where volunteer doctors and nurses could help people. Occupy sandy used amazon wishlists so people could buy and donate supplies directly. Occupy sandy used bike couriers and bike powered generators so people could charge their phones.

Covid mutual aid groups organised mostly online but had some social centres, and she says where they had some physical space that really helped the organising and distribution of help. Covid mutual aid groups organised people to do shopping for other people and collect their medications, as well as giving individuals money from donations when they applied for financial help. There was a similar discussion about transparency and the difficulties and ethical concerns of managing money.

She talks a lot about the social principle vs the political principle and how they are mutually exclusive. As far as I understand it, the social principle is about helping one another as equals and the political principle always prioritises retaining power in some form between a smaller group."

Such a brilliant summary that there's no need for me to write any more...but I would like to say a bit about my feelings about the book. From the first sentence the language is academic and difficult. Being charitable, I suppose that's inevitable. Leftist thinkers are mainly academics these days - there's not much of an economic base for "organic intellectuals" in the Gramscian sense, so they have to write to the style of their community and their job expectations. And probably much of the market for this kind of book is students who want to learn to write in that sort of language so that they pick up the credentials of academic social science. It's just too bad for activists who are interested in the subject matter but don't have the academic hinterland.

Also, I wasn't all that taken with the actual arguments in the book, once I had decoded them. Yeah, there's a tension between wanting to advance your politics in a mutual aid group which includes others who don't share your outlook, and wanting the group to be effective. And yeah there is something problematic about using tools (especially technology ones with built-in surveillance) developed by exploitative capitalist corporations...though I suspect that the FAI-CNT militias in revolutionary Barcelona didn't worry too much about the provenance of the guns that used to fight fascism. There are great big gaps in the book too...very little about the actual working class history of permanent mutual aid groups, some of which were anarchist-inspired. She seems committed to the idea of spontaneous informal organisation, as if there were no other traditions or ways of organising on the left. Which, I think, is part of the reason why we are in the pitiful, disorganised, ineffective place that we are. We won't get anywhere, we won't involve more people, we won't achieve anything at all, without building permanent organisation that are here today, here tomorrow, and don't burn people out in a couple of years because everything is urgent.

One last thing...the discussion about whether mutual aid provided a sticking plaster for capitalism and actually helped prop it up reminded me of this poem by Brecht, which I will also paste in full.

Bertolt Brecht: A Bed for the Night I hear that in New York At the corner of 26th Street and Broadway A man stands every evening during the winter months And gets beds for the homeless there By appealing to passers-by. It won’t change the world It won’t improve relations among men It will not shorten the age of exploitation But a few men have a bed for the night For a night the wind is kept from them The snow meant for them falls on the roadway. Don’t put down the book on reading this, man. A few people have a bed for the night For a night the wind is kept from them The snow meant for them falls on the roadway But it won’t change the world It won’t improve relations among men It will not shorten the age of exploitation.