THE SONG OF SIMON de MONTFORT: England’s First Revolutionary SOPHIE THÉRÈSE AMBLER

 THE SONG OF SIMON de MONTFORT: England’s First Revolutionary

SOPHIE THÉRÈSE AMBLER, Picador, 2020, 428 pages

 Review by Phil Shannon

What to do with a pesky British knight of the realm who thinks that all Britons, including those of no wealth, should have a voice in making the laws that govern and tax them, and who has an armed following well up for it?  Why, you drive a lance through his neck in battle, slaughter his followers and, pour encourager les autres big time, you return to the dead knight’s body to sever his hands, feet and head, and as a coup de grace, his testicles, stuffing them into his mouth, the whole grisly package of body parts despatched as a present to your wife.

 This is exactly what the powerful land baron, Roger Mortimer, in alliance with King Henry 111 and his heir to the throne,  Prince Edward, did to Simon de Montfort, the earl of Leicester and revolutionary democrat, at the battle of Evesham in Worcestershire in 1265.  Sophie Ambler, a British historian at Lancaster University, recounts the tragic fate of this early sortie into representative government in the democracy-deficient Mediaeval Ages.

 In the beginning, Simon was a comfortable member of the elite club of land barons, bishops and Royals.  By managing royal administration in the shires (including the collection of taxes and administration of justice) as well as providing the special services cavalry corps for the king’s army, knights were essential cogs in this circle of social connection, political power and material reward.  Simon, by marrying King Henry’s sister and naming their baby Henry, was a skilled player of the suck-up game.

 There were family disputes over the economic spoils of power, however, and Simon was initially propelled onto his politically rebellious path by a large debt owed to Simon by King Henry which remained unpaid because Henry preferred to waste money on vanity military projects.

 Simon also actually took seriously the knightly oath of serving the wellbeing of the king’s subjects, something which Henry had conspicuously failed to do.  Simon’s anti-royalist radicalisation deepened in 1258 when a year-long winter (the result of a massive, climate-altering Indonesian volcano) hit the poor of England with failed crops, soaring corn prices, terrible famine and deadly disease epidemics on top of ruinous royal taxes, fees and fines.

 When, to manage this crisis, the King summoned the religious and secular elite of England to a ‘parliament’ in that year to approve his request for yet another tax, Simon lead a Bolshie delegation of rebel barons and bishops who had come to see a greedy and recklessly autocratic Henry as a threat to the ruling class unity and stable class relations that worked to the benefit of their own interests as the second-tier elite. 

 There was a flamboyant, martial demeanour to Simon’s delegation as well.  Attired in full knightly kit, swords and all, the King’s usually trusty but now aggrieved lieutenants were negotiating from strength and they did not stop with exercising their Magna Carta right of veto over tax proposals (a right won in struggle against the egregiously bad Bad King John in 1215).  More than this specific restraint on the power of the Crown, the rebels wanted an end to costly, pointless royal wars, and, further upping the ante, they demanded a revolution in England’s system of government.

 Government, they insisted, should be by a more widely representative council of ‘leading citizens’ instead of solely by the Crown and its chosen stooges.  In the age of absolute monarchy, this diminution of royal power was revolutionary.  Henry was frightened into political surrender.

 He retained the throne and some residual powers, however, and the resultant system of dual power see-sawed for six years between royalists and democrats as the population’s traditional feudal loyalties to king and lord vied with an emerging, new democratic, political consciousness.  Long before Leon Trotsky was to make ‘permanent revolution’ a trending meme, the more maximalist of the rebels, such as Simon, discovered its necessity in the struggle with the old, still extant, political order.

 Simon consolidated popular support for a showdown with royalty as he extended to the common people of England ground-breaking new rights and avenues of justice against the sheriffs, bailiffs and other agents of the state.  The 50% of the population who were tenant farmers (obliged to serve their lords - they were basically unfree serfs) also exercised new-found rights further down the food chain against their lordly owners.

 This last development alarmed the more moderate of the elite rebels but, for the moment these uncertain class allies held fast against a common enemy, the hard-line royalist reactionaries who eventually wheeled out the usual remedy of putting the upstart yokels to the sword.  The first counter-revolution, by domestic and foreign royalist forces, came a cropper, however, in the  battle of Lewes in 1265, thanks to Simon’s military acumen and political leadership.  Simon took King Henry and Prince Edward prisoner.

 With the wind in their sails, the Montfortians pressed their advantage, expropriating the castles and other assets of the enemies of democratic reform.  They took control of the capital from the royalists, winning over London’s middle class (bakers, and food and wine merchants, who were victims of royal rapacity) and the labouring class of skilled artisans and unskilled workers.  It was not just an elite of barons, knights and bishops who backed Simon but, as a London chronicler wrote, ‘almost all the middling people of the kingdom’ willingly flocked to Simon’s banner, including giving eager service as foot-soldiers in Simon’s citizens’ army.

 

The first parliament of the new regime experimented with a deeper, albeit limited, democracy.  Representatives to England’s ‘first House of Commons’ in 1265 were in part selected, in part elected, including not just knights, bishops and barons but lesser religious and secular notables, and townspeople (well … townsmen, but this was eight centuries ago), too.  In parallel, out in the shires, local people tasted a stronger flavour of democracy by electing their shire sheriffs.  None of this would meet the bar of the bourgeois democracy of our day, of full suffrage and direct election of parliamentary representatives, but, for the times, it was a revolutionary leap forward in democratic rights.

 As parliament deliberated, the symbolism of the humiliated king being led everywhere as a captive under the eye of Simon’s personal military detail of 160 knights, whilst Edward languished in jail, made manifest the fundamental transformation of the political order that had just occurred.

 The old elite knew it and began plotting to get their power back.  Although Simon had won over many knights, much of the Commoner population and a significant number of bishops (the Church tithed ten per cent of its wealth to fund the Montfortian army), none (bar one – who later defected) of the immensely powerful land-owning earls were Simon’s comrades in the struggle against their own class interests.

 These earls had immense wealth for funding a sizeable army, and they had the power to conscript a large body of men, also playing on the tenant-serfs’ cultural conditioning of reverence for royalty and the Pope in order to weaken popular support for Simon.  Well-off moderates in the revolution, fearing for their manors and castles and serfs, betrayed Simon by helping Prince Edward, a ferocious warrior, to escape to lead the military backlash.  The grim logic of war did the rest.

 The anti-democrats doused with blood the Montfortian “flicker in the political dark” but the example of Simon’s revolution survived in popular memory.  Sophie Ambler’s addictively readable historical narrative is grounded in diligent, insightful research and enlivened by warm sympathy for the defeated rebels.  Their revolution had its imperfections – its anti-Semitism, common for the time, is confronting, whilst Simon’s political principle of ‘good lordship’ fell short of a full extension of political power to the lord’s subjects – but the reader is rooting for it all the same.  Simon’s revolution – partial, flawed, defeated but inspirational - remains ours to finish off.

And What Do You Do? NORMAN BAKER

… AND WHAT DO YOU DO?  What the Royal Family Don’t Want You to Know

NORMAN BAKER

Biteback Publishing, 2019, 390 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

When conversing with commoners, members of the British Royal Family are instructed to always ask the question ‘And what do you do?’.  For, after all, this gives the working class something to talk about – their job.  Norman Baker (a former Liberal Democrat Minister in the British parliament) says, however, that it is high time the question was returned in kind by asking of the royals ‘And what do you do?’.

So how do the royals fill their day?  Let us count the ways.

Plaque-unveilings

It seems to be mandatory to have a regal presence to unveil a plaque at the opening of a local council’s latest pride-and-joy.  The royals’ ribbon-cutting function is not just ceremonial, however.  Strictly-observed royal etiquette on such occasions (the lowly people must never speak without being spoken to, arrive after the royal personage, sit in the presence of royalty or be allowed to look down upon a royal from a height) delivers an important lesson about the subordinate place of the great unwashed in Britain’s social hierarchy.

The King was in his counting-house …….

Counting their spondulicks is something the royals are seriously good at.  They used to be given a straight-up bung (under the ‘Civil List’ budget item) from the government but this made just who was paying for the lavish lifestyle of the royals a bit too obvious to the taxpayer.  Public funding of the royals was best dealt with more circumspectly, and more remuneratively, through the ‘Sovereign Grant’, which siphons off 25% (around £100 million a year) of the profits from leasing access to the royals’ land holdings (or ‘Duchies’, a fancy-pants regal term for property asset portfolios).

The Queen has title to the Duchy of Lancaster (45,000 acres of prime agricultural land, most of the Lancashire coast, all the sea-beds around Britain, a golf course in Wales and other valuable properties across England) and Prince Charles has the Duchy of Cornwall (160 miles of British coastline, some rivers, many residential, commercial and farming properties, ‘The Oval’ cricket ground, and gold, silver, tungsten and iridium mines in Cornwall and other counties.  These are all public lands, valued at around £14 billion in total, gifted by the state to the royals.

No one knows exactly how rich the royals are but an apt adjective would be ‘stonking’.   Two decades ago, the Queen was valued at £1.2 billion, whilst the deceased Queen Mother’s estate weighed in at £70 million.  Every one of the fifteen ‘senior royals’ (including Charles’ two sons via Diana - William and Harry) hit the scales at over £20 million each, courtesy of their pocket money from the family’s Duchy profits.

 

Tax accountancy for fun and profit!

The royals are a dab hand at wealth maximisation through tax minimisation.  They are exempt from inheritance tax, capital gains tax and stamp duty on share transactions.  They were exempt from income tax until a series of palace scandals in the early 1990s prompted a PR change of course whereby the royals pledged to pay income tax - on a ‘voluntary’ basis, however, and only then after massive ‘deductibles’ for ‘business expenses’ such as the upkeep for Charles’ polo ponies.  As well as this legal tax avoidance, Monarchy Inc. is adept at underhanded tax evasion - a majority of the Queen’s in-theory taxable income is sheltered from Britain’s tax authorities in offshore tax havens.

How to live well

The Royals are famously profligate with other people’s money, primarily taxpayers’ dosh, but also in-kind freebies from their elite peers in Hollywood and the like who offer up their private jets, cruise yachts, posh ski resort chalets, Kenyan hunting lodges and luxury holiday villas in the Caribbean for free royal use.

They are, however, infamously miserly with what they consider their private money.  The Queen Mother’s frequent, extravagant dining occasions had a liveried footman posted behind each guest’s chair pouring champers from £300 bottles of the stuff but when it came to tipping Royal Marine bandsmen on the royal yacht, Britannia, she protested bitterly to the Exchequer that the token gratuities had to come out of her own pocket (the tips were just 12½ pence per head!).

Job Creation

It would be soup kitchens all over again if it were not for the Royal job creation scheme.  The Queen Mother, for example, had a personal staff of sixty, Charles has 28 whilst the Queen finds room on the payroll for, amongst dozens of others, a Gold Stick-In-Waiting, Master of the Queen’s Music, Gentlemen Ushers, nine surgeons, five apothecaries, an astronomer, a Hereditary Carver, one Sculptor in Ordinary, Warden of the Queen’s Swans and a Royal Bargemaster.  The royals staffing roster is not a “mediaeval mountain of absurdity”, however, as the abolition of the ‘Keeper of the Lions in the Tower’ demonstrates a modernising trend as “the royal family moves seamlessly into the eighteenth century”.

Champions of meritocracy

There is a lot of ribbon-pinning and title-bestowing by the royals to recognise worthy persons who have enriched society, including the royals themselves, including the Royal Family Order, bestowed on all female members of the Royal Family for the achievement of, well, being a female member of the royal family, a prestigious laurel that only a select few deserve.

As connoisseurs of personal worth, it is only right, therefore, that such meritorious beings as the royals be the first to be looked after in the event of, say, nuclear war.  The entire extended royal family, cousins and all, get first dibs on spots in the nuclear bunker when the Big One is about to fall, as specified in the official ‘Order of Precedence’.  For, if we have to start civilisation all over again, this time without any mistakes, the royals naturally come first to mind.

Charity work

The royals are tireless charity workers – nothing as common as doing a shift in the local op-shop but, rather, tapping rich celebrities for donations, a task which might be more impressive if the royal charities didn’t divert large executive salaries and expense accounts from the charities’ funds to the court favourites who head them, or if the royals didn’t charge appearance fees to guest at other charity fund-raising events (the asking price by Princess Margaret, the Queen’s sister, is $30,000 a pop in the US, for example) which comes out of any event proceeds.

Playing catch-me-if-you-can.

The monarch, under the mediaeval ‘principle of perfection’, can do no legal wrong and so can not be prosecuted under common law.  Thus, although Prince Philip’s traffic accident in 2019, which injured two other road users, was the Duke of Edinburgh’s fault, the Crown Prosecution Service offered a deal for the 98-year-old to surrender his driver’s licence in return for no charges being laid.  Just two days after this accident, the failure of both the Queen and the Duke to wear a seatbelt was similarly given a pass (both royals, by the way, are official patrons of road safety charities).

Eco-Warriors

The preferred mode of travel for royalty is expensive, CO₂-intensive helicopter and private jet rather than commercial flight or train.  Prince Harry, for example, chartered a helicopter from London to Birmingham where he lectured an audience to ‘wake up and act’ on climate change.  For added green hypocrisy, Prince Philip, a serial master blaster of wildlife, was a founder member of the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF), whilst Charles became head of the WWF’s UK arm at the same time as he was adding wild boar in Liechtenstein to his big game trophies.

Defending democracy

The royals are all for democracy – when it delivers the right result.  When the Queen’s representative in Australia, Governor-General Sir John Kerr, sacked a twice-democratically-elected Labor Government in Australia in 1975, he was acting on instructions from the palace. 

Agents of political disease

It would be insufficient to conclude that the British royals are just a monumentally expensive waste of space. Far worse is their politically toxic culture of elite entitlement, privileges and prerogatives which subtly propagandises that power and wealth differentials based on birth and wealth are inevitable, a conclusion which is daily garnished by the establishment media’s royalty fetishism with, as Baker says, its “constant diet of sickeningly sycophantic coverage which reports their activities with breathless and uncritical awe”.

Although Baker is too much the political centrist to bring it up, there is an antidote to the political poison of royalty – pink-slip the lot of ‘em.  Starting with the laying-off of the tiara’d and titled toffs, we could then progress onto the business barons and corporate kings.  A small rise in the number of unemployed plaque-unveillers would be a small price to pay for a much greater rise in political democracy and economic equality.

THE MURDERER OF WARREN STREET by MARC MULHOLLAND

THE MURDERER OF WARREN STREET: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Revolutionary

MARC MULHOLLAND

W F Howes Ltd, 2019


Review by Phil Shannon

 

It is the sad, but not entirely undeserved, fate of Emmanuel Barthélemy, to wind up as a star waxworks exhibit (No. 290) in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, stigmatised as an infamous murderer, writes Oxford University historian, Marc Mulholland, about the 19^th century French Republican and communist revolutionary.
 

Karl Marx had the same view.  After initially seeing something to admire in a fellow political exile fresh from his stirring heroics on the barricades in revolutionary Paris, Marx was soon enough crossing furious polemical swords, rather than harmless epées, with his former London fencing salon partner.
 

An artisanal metalworker, Barthélemy was a radical republican inspired by memories of barely a couple of decades ago when the ordinary labouring people of Paris had once ‘stormed heaven’ in the era-defining French Revolution.  Barthélemy’s employer was not at all happy, complaining that his once-model employee had become quite uppity, ‘concerned about political things and … talking freely’.
 

Whilst still a teenager, Barthélemy was leading secret revolutionary societies and commanding barricade battles against French monarchical regimes during the 1830s.  For his troubles, he was severely beaten (losing a finger in the process) by a police sergeant, whom he shot in revenge during a subsequent chance encounter on his way to another armed street insurrection.
 

Jailed for murder, it took a successful republican revolution, in 1839, to free Barthélemy but he soon locked horns with his liberators, a government dominated by republicans of a capitalist or middle-class persuasion.  These conservative anti-monarchists knew which class side their bread was buttered on and predictably delivered hunger, unemployment and repression to their former plebeian allies.
 

The response to this declaration of ruling class war was the spontaneous June rising of 1848.  It was put down with prodigious violence - for those counting along at home, the Republican government troops killed five hundred rebels in just four days of street fighting, whilst three thousand were massacred in the aftermath.  Barthélemy was amongst the eleven thousand sent to prison.

 
A daring jail-break and escape to England by the young, fearless, self-assured and idealistic Barthélemy added to his romantic lustre and he was welcomed into a political alliance with Marx’s Communist League and the left faction of the English working class Chartists.
 

This coalition began to fray, however, when it became clear that, in what Mulholland accurately calls the culmination of a “long and dismal retreat” from the heady days of the 1789 Revolution, the French working class had become politically exhausted, paving the way for the overwhelming electoral victory of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte 111 as President.  Bonaparte then took a leaf out of his real-life Emperor-uncle’s book by exploiting the workers’ demoralisation to seize absolute dictatorial power in 1851.
 

Barthélemy was one of the few working class activists to resist Napoleon’s coup before again escaping arrest and fleeing back to London where, eager for ‘deeds’ and ‘action’, he organised a following of incensed French exiles dedicated to assassinating the new French Emperor.
 

Earlier political differences, once subsumed under a shared expectation of an imminent upswing in the French revolutionary cycle, now became bitterly divisive.  Marx and most of the exiled European left became completely estranged from Barthélemy because of his liking for secret societies, and for his monomania for assassination in an impatient attempt to force the pace of history.

 
Barthélemy adopted his political philosophy from his French mentor, Auguste Blanqui, who believed that a small group of revolutionaries should liberate the working class by seizing power on their behalf.  The workers, Blanqui argued, were not up to the task themselves because ‘ignorance’ made the worker a ‘docile instrument of the Privileged’.  If the working class was not ready to rule, well … the dictatorship of the revolutionary elite would have to rule over them as well.  Although full of Marxist phraseology, a frighteningly authoritarian Blanquist manifesto written by Barthélemy was, as Marx and Engels sourly noted, nothing but ‘pompous nonsense’ and ‘quite stupid’.
 

Barthélemy’s immaturity was not just political but personal as well.  He was temperamentally hot-headed - Charles (son of Victor) Hugo noted Barthélemy’s ‘provocative belligerence’ towards those leftwing comrades who had political disagreements with him.  This could spill over into violence.  In a duel, Barthélemy killed a London-exiled French Republican barricades commander over political differences.  He called Marx a ’traitor’ for urging political analysis, patient explaining and working class organising rather than immediate communist insurrection, adding that ‘all traitors must be killed … Our worst foe is at home, in our own family – we ought to destroy him’, he grimly concluded of many devoted republicans and socialists.
 

Barthélemy’s fanaticism and self-righteousness meant he was quite capable of cold-blooded murder for political ends.  Such was his denouément.  Employed as a machinist in a factory producing ginger beer and soda water, Barthélemy, seeking to finance his assassination plans in France, decided to extort funds from the factory owner by implicating him in a sex scandal.

In the fight that ensued, Barthélemy’s always brittle self-control snapped and he shot his employer and then killed a former policeman who tried to detain him as he fled.  Barthélemy’s anti-democratic politics of elite conspiracy and violence ultimately led to the 32-year-old’s premature end on the gallows.
 

Mulholland solves the true-crime murder mystery quite elegantly but the solving of the political mystery could have done with Lenin’s apt take on the underlying issues.  What Lenin said of Blanqui would equally well apply to Barthélemy (Blanqui’s protégé) - Blanqui was, said Lenin, ‘undoubtedly a revolutionary and an ardent supporter of socialism’ but, crucially, ‘we [the Bolsheviks] are not Blanquists, we do not stand for a seizure of power by a minority’.  Lenin led the world’s first successful socialist revolution; Barthelemy died a common criminal.  Lenin was feared by the capitalist newspapers; Barthélemy became just a tawdry tabloid tale for them.

Stalin's Scribe: Mikhail Sholokhov by BRIAN BOECK

STALIN’S SCRIBE: Literature, Ambition and Survival – The Life of Mikhail Sholokhov

BRIAN J. BOECK

Pegasus Books, 2019, 388 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

Considering the terrors that Mikhail Sholokhov lived through, and nearly perished from, in Stalinist Russia, it is a wonder that the Soviet novelist retained any sense of humour, but he did.  Unrecognised in the exotic shadow of Nikita Khrushchev, the first post-Stalinist leader of the Soviet Union, during a 1959 tour of the US, Sholokhov was only paid any real attention once, at a Hollywood reception, where Charlton Heston announced that he had once read excerpts from one of Sholokhov’s novels - Sholokhov expressed his gratitude and quipped that he promised to watch excerpts of Heston’s next movie.

As Brian Boeck, history teacher at America’s DePaul University, recounts, however, such wry humour was a rarity in the dangerously fraught life of Sholokhov as he navigated the treacherous shoals of Stalinist literary culture.

Sholokhov’s detractors claim that he failed to steer clear of literary shipwreck.  He is routinely dismissed by conservatives, and by many liberals, as just a cultural mouthpiece for Stalinist totalitarianism - Salman Rushdie, for example, reviled Sholokhov as a ‘patsy of the regime’.

Yet, there are compelling exhibits in Sholokhov’s defence.  Despite the attentions of the Censor-in-Chief, Stalin himself, Sholokhov, in his epic Quiet Don, a many-perspectived saga of a tragic anti-Soviet Cossack rebellion, stuck, for the most part, to his guns.

He could have turned his two main characters into conventional Stalinist tropes, making the politically wavering Cossack, Grigorii, a Red Army hero in the end, and his lover, Aksiniia, a decorated Stalinist milkmaid, but he chose literary integrity over political compliance.

Away from his writing desk, Sholokhov at times displayed considerable political boldness.  As a teenaged Soviet tax collector in the Don region during the 1921 famine, he falsified tax records to assist starving Cossack peasants (an act which almost earned Sholokhov a date with a firing squad).

Later, Sholokhov became the nearest thing to a public ombudsman in Stalin’s Russia, receiving hundreds of letters a month seeking assistance from the victims of Stalin’s economic and political policies.  Sholokhov took up the cause of the peasantry who were on the receiving end of ‘rapid collectivisation’ (a program meant to boost grain exports to finance industrial modernisation) and who were subjected to savage grain requisitions (flimsily justified by Stalin as an ‘anti-kulakisation’ drive against rich peasants) when harvests predictably failed to reach unrealistic quotas.  Sholokhov’s pleas to Stalin for emergency food aid saved the fifty thousand people at risk of famine in Sholokhov’s district.

Sholokhov also courageously criticised Stalin’s party purges and the Great Terror of 1936-1938, a program to annihilate all political opposition to the dictator’s rule, starting with the Trotskyists, in which a million were murdered.  Sholokhov, cleverly using as leverage a deliberate go-slow on finishing the novel that Stalin was desperate to see completed, successfully argued the cases of his close friends and party colleagues who were caught up in the paranoia, resulting in their release and rehabilitation. 

Sholokhov was permitted to thus act as private critic and advocate only because Stalin cynically valued Sholokhov, touted by the regime as the Red Tolstoy, for his cultural capital.  So, Stalin would defend Sholokhov to preserve his prize cultural asset, no more so than when the menace of the Terror came for Sholokhov himself, after Sholokhov had named those in the secret police (the NKVD) who were responsible for the Terror in his region.

This made Sholokhov some powerful local enemies.  The NKVD tried to implicate Sholokhov in plots, with Cossacks, to assassinate Stalin and, in league with foreign intelligence agents, to foment armed uprisings.  Sholokhov got word of this NKVD stitch-up and he grimly awaited his doom, spiralling into depression and alcohol abuse, and abandoning any further work on Quiet Don.

An investigator sent by Stalin reported that Sholokhov was on the verge of suicide.  Sholokhov was worth much more to Stalin alive than as a martyr to the Terror, and so Stalin quashed all allegations against his treasured writer.

Stalin also came to Sholokhov’s aid by rescuing his literary reputation.  A literary faction (‘Proletkult’) who thought they were being impeccably Stalinist in accusing Sholokhov of humanism, pacifism, liberalism and of not being sufficiently oriented to the urban proletariat in his novels, was also put firmly back in its box by Stalin. 
 

Stalin also ensured that charges of plagiarism, which jealous rivals had unfairly levied against Sholokhov from the time he reworked a stash of Cossack memoirs and diaries into his creative epic, were denounced as fabrications of ‘rotten Trotskyist attempts to discredit the most significant Soviet writer’.

Only by the top bully in the schoolyard taking Sholokhov under his protection could all Sholokhov’s lesser bullies be kept at bay.  The quid pro quo, however, was that Sholokhov would be expected to return political favours to Stalin.

The compromises demanded, and delivered, were ugly.  Sholokhov added a chapter extolling Stalin’s ‘anti-kulakisation’ program to Quiet Don, and made it the theme of his quickie novel, Virgin Soil Upturned.  Sholokhov also reluctantly accepted over a thousand edits requested by Stalin to Quiet Don to make it better conform to Stalinist political and literary fashion.

Sholokhov, the public intellectual, also signed a letter by leading Stalinist writers demanding the death penalty for eight senior Red Army officers framed in the purges whilst, from his platform as a member of the Supreme Soviet (Stalin’s sham parliament), he dutifully intoned that purging ‘a few thousand vile individuals, people who have prostituted themselves politically, all of that Trotskyite-Zinovievite-Bukharinite scum’, had been warranted.

Sholokhov’s political obedience was also reinforced through material means.  There were tangible benefits to being an officially-approved writer in Stalin's Russia.  Politically-licensed writers made, on average, ten times as much as ordinary workers, with elite writers such as Sholokhov making 25 times as much from their state salary and private royalties.  A gilded cage had its compensations for those writers trapped in it.

Only after Stalin’s death, in 1953, could Sholokhov spread his wings.  Breathing politically freer air, Sholokhov reinstated Trotsky, a minor  character in the early editions of Quiet Don who had been censored out of the novel by Stalin, whilst undoing all of Stalin’s other edits to the novel.

Sholokhov could now also denounce the Great Terror as a program of political extermination based on allegations that were, as he put it, ‘monstrous make-believe and wild nonsense’.

In 1966, Sholokhov also passionately raised the issues of deforestation and industrial pollution of Russia’s rivers, speaking up for, in Boeck’s words, “nature as something more than a resource for immediate economic exploitation”.

Sholokhov’s “deep Stalinist programming”, however, was not so easily undone.  Whilst he lacerated the mediocre and unreadable output from the politically-sanctioned 3,773 members of the Writers’ Union whom Sholokhov called ‘dead souls’ luxuriating in their literary sinecures, he spurned writerly solidarity with jailed dissident writers.  He also spoke positively of ‘the unity of party and literature’, and he was a supportive voice of Moscow’s armed suppression of the 1956 revolt in Hungary.

Whilst Western anti-communists put the boot into Sholokhov over these compromises, some succour was provided by the judging panel for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965.  Less beholden to anti-communist Cold War pieties, the Swedish committee recognised the immense pressures facing Sholokhov, if he wanted to survive as a writer, or at all, to operate under stern political masters and noted his assertion of literary integrity in refusing to fully go along with all the political demands made of him in his art.

Sholokhov’s Nobel award honoured the high literary merit of Sholokhov, his ability to skilfully combine realism, romance, cliff-hanger plot, psychological depth and political ambiguity.  In doing so, they recognised, too, the Sholokhov who was, like his fictional characters, the flawed hero in his own troubled life.

DENIS DIDEROT - Freethinker!

DIDEROT AND THE ART OF THINKING FREELY

ANDREW S. CURRAN

Other Press, 2019, 520 pages.

 

CATHERINE & DIDEROT: The Empress, the Philosopher and the Fate of the Enlightenment

ROBERT ZARETSKY

Harvard University Press, 2019, 258 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

Denis Diderot is now remembered, if at all, only as the name of a Metro railway station in an unfashionable neighbourhood of Paris.  In his day, however, the 18th century Enlightenment philosopher was quite the subversive intellectual who parted the ideological fog of religious, moral and political backwardness for a view of the sunnier uplands of today’s society.

 

The biography of Diderot by Andrew Curran (Wesleyan University Humanities professor) vibrantly displays the radical arc of the life of the effervescent polymath, the son of a skilled cutler who, rather than take to honing knife blades for a livelihood, took to sharpening his mind on the whetstone of Reason instead.

 

As with many revolutionaries of that era, it all started with questioning Christianity as Diderot abandoned a Jesuit priesthood apprenticeship for sceptical writings on religion and society.  A youthful poem in which Diderot looked forward to the day when the last king would be strangled with the intestines of the last priest was emblematic of the trouble Diderot was storing up.

 

Three months in prison duly came his way in 1749, with the threat of worse to come if he continued his freethinking ways –‘the next time you find yourself here, you will never leave’, threatened the Parisian chief of police.  Prudently, Diderot heeded the warning but continued to write ‘for the bottom drawer’, with one big exception – his co-editorship of, and prodigious writing for, the “supreme achievement of the French Enlightenment”, as Curran rightly calls the 28-volume Encyclopédie, which, much more than being just a comprehensive dictionary of all knowledge, was a “triumph of secularism and freedom of thought”.

 

In his article on Political Authority, for example, Diderot advanced the perilous idea that government legitimacy stems from the people, not from God or dynastic succession.  As well as challenging political aristocracy, the Encyclopédie also opened an ideological front against the aristocracy of knowledge by treating the labour and skills of trades and craft workers in the same breath as religious dogma and superstition.

 

Although the Encyclopédie’s incendiary political properties were veiled in an allusive and indirect style to foil the vigilant but dim-witted censors, the project was shut down mid-alphabet by Versailles in 1759.  The Public Prosecutor couldn’t quite pin it down but he denounced the Encyclopédie anyway as a ‘conspiracy to propagate materialism, to destroy religion, to inspire a spirit of independence and to nourish the corruption of morals’.  Religious and royal harassment continued to dog the enterprise and some contributors consequently found a new urgency in tending their gardens instead of their intellects, but the Encyclopédie soldiered on semi-clandestinely.

 

Whilst Diderot was keeping his powder dry, however, he found support from a surprising source - Catherine 11, Empress of All the Russias, the reigning Tsarist autocrat.  As Robert Zaretsky (University of Houston Humanities professor) recounts, Catherine invited the sixty-year-old Enlightenment icon to St. Petersburg for philosophical discussions in 1773.

 

Diderot accepted because he believed Catherine was a different kind of ruler.  As far as despots go, Catherine was, as she immodestly specified for her future tombstone inscription, ‘good-natured, easygoing, tolerant, broad-minded … with a republican spirit and a kind heart’.  She was culturally accomplished (she wrote two dozen plays) and relatively humane (she disapproved of torture and corporal punishment).  Her censorship regime was relatively relaxed and she regarded the slave-like serfdom of Russia’s ten million peasants as morally undesirable.

 

There were, however, red flags aplenty to question Catherine’s progressive bona fides.  She used tens of thousands of serfs as payment to reward her loyal courtiers who supported her murderous coup against her husband, Tsar Peter the Great.  When serfs in the Russian Urals took liberation into their own hands in a peasant uprising under the leadership of the Don Cossack, Emelyan Pugachev, Catherine then took a page out of the despotism manual and ordered her Generals to crush it.  Pugachev was drawn-and-quartered and other leaders hanged or sent into Siberian exile.  The liberal humanist in Catherine was agitated only enough to fret that her violent suppression of the revolt might play badly with enlightened ‘European opinion’.

 

Nevertheless, to the practical question of how the goals of the Enlightenment could be delivered in a pre-democratic era of monarchy, Diderot turned to Catherine as the best bet.  So, the provocatively wigless Diderot, whose plain black coat stood out ominously amongst the assembled Royal bling in the Winter Palace, rolled the dice on Catherine as the agent of change, advancing proposals for progressive social and political reforms that the Empress should undertake.

 

Nothing, however, came of Diderot’s political courtship of Catherine.  The Empress did not adopt any of the ‘great innovations’ Diderot had proposed, including a more representative form of government.  Diderot concluded that the fruitful cohabitation of Reason and Power was a naïve dream and that to pursue it risked turning philosophers into pampered pets in the parlours of the powerful - ‘men of letters are so easily corrupted: lots of warmth and attention, and a bit of money, does the trick’, he warned.  Diderot was personally aware of the co-option trap – he appreciated the $700,000 subsidy (in today’s money) he received over his lifetime from his royal patron but he valued Truth higher.

Diderot finally declared that ‘enlightened despotism’ is an oxymoron because, no matter how well-intentioned or high-minded the individual ruler, the institution of elite rule necessarily violates the liberty, and political agency, of the ruled.  Political sovereignty, he summed up, lies with the people and any right to govern can only be delegated by, or revoked by, the people:  ‘there is no true sovereign except the nation; there can be no true legislator except the people’, he declared, quite radically for the times.

Even more out there for a member of the privileged intelligentsia, Diderot advocated economic as well as political democracy.  A politically powerful elite ‘wallowing in wealth’ only do so at the expense of the labouring classes, he wrote.  Wealth, too, derives from the people and they have every right to ‘revoke’ the material inequality between the ‘two classes of citizens’, he reasoned.    

Diderot’s philosophical, political and economic ideas helped to galvanise the subsequent French and American revolutions, and, unsurprisingly, the democratic socialist Karl Marx, who cited Diderot as his favourite writer.  Marx grasped the revolutionary nub of Diderot’s philosophy, as, in her own, and opposite, way did Catherine, who, after she and Diderot had split, sourly told the French ambassador that if the philosopher’s ideas were to become political practice ‘to suit Diderot’s taste, it would have meant turning the world upside down’.  Quite so, whether that be the antique despotism of Crown or the thoroughly modern version of the despotism of Capital.

THE CLUB: How the Premier League Became the Richest, Most Disruptive Business in Sport

JOSHUA ROBINSON and JONATHAN CLEGG

John Murray Publishing, 2019, 338 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

If football is a simple game (get the ball, pass the ball), then the football business is even simpler (buy the best players, bank the profits).  As the sports journalists, Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg, note in The Club, for Spain’s La Liga, Germany’s Bundesliga and the English Premier League (EPL), there is a near perfect correlation between a football club’s total player wages bill on day one of a season and their club’s ladder position at the end of it.  As the University of Michigan economics professor behind this finding has demonstrated, money buys success.

 

EPL footballing success has been bought by the world’s super-rich who have added historic, working-class English football clubs to their asset portfolio.  A Gulf oil sheik, a Russian oligarch, Asian Tiger titans, a professional poker player, an advertising executive, an ‘adult’ entertainment businessman, real estate developers, commodity traders, hedge-fund managers, an Icelandic banker, the owner of Harrods department store, an Indian poultry tycoon, a number of Chinese businessmen, and a whole phalanx of American corporate tycoons have all gotten in on the act.

 

It doesn’t matter if they aren’t personally passionate about football but they have to be passionate about making money from football.  Spending hundreds of millions of pounds on English football clubs is a rational business investment.  Newly cash-rich clubs can now buy serious footballing talent from across the globe.  This can purchase silverware plus the annual £150 million income from the EPL’s broadcasting rights revenue.

 

Clubs that had yo-yoed up and down the old Football League Divisions can suddenly countenance EPL success under their new mega-wealthy bosses.  Wealthy EPL owners have opened the title door to Chelsea who won their first championship title in sixty years, Blackburn their first ever.  Manchester City lifted their first major trophy in 35 years.  The unfashionable Leicester City’s 2015-16 championship win ended a 152 year title drought courtesy of a Thai duty-free retail baron’s fortune.

 

Short of a title, however, the realistic prize for most clubs’ owners is the highly-coveted EPL golden pass to continued membership of the elite competition through avoiding relegation by just being less worse than three other teams.

 

There are side-benefits, too.  For the image-conscious billionaire (particularly those with political links and dodgy human rights records), an EPL franchise is a must-have PR accessory.  For those owners who actually like football, they can purchase their very own late-life toy - a former Blackburn player said that his club had become a very expensive ‘train set’ for its steel business owner.

 

Established more than a century ago in 1888 by local labourers and factory workers, the football clubs that made up Britain’s old Football League have since been transformed into EPL “trophy investments” as their new owners have figured out how to monetise the people’s game by turning it into a commodity, treating its players as human production units up for trade, and reducing its fans to eyeball-counts for TV networks.

 

Huge satellite television broadcasting deals were the decisive factor in the transformation of English football.  Wary of live television coverage lest it harm match-day attendance and revenue, English clubs had historically not courted broadcasters – in 1964, for example, the sole television coverage was the BBC’s edited highlights show, Match of the Day, for which the Beeb paid just £5,000.

 

The top half dozen clubs at the time were not happy with this monetary return and successfully chivvied the Football League to make more from broadcast rights.  A combination of the big clubs’ business ambitions and Rupert Murdoch’s eye for a quid saw the media mogul pay £304 million for a five-year broadcast contract so he could sit back and watch the advertising dollars and satellite TV subscriptions pour in as a twenty-team (down from forty in the old top flight tier) EPL kicked off in 1992.  The EPL is now “the world’s most popular league in the world’s most popular sport”, a global entertainment product marketed to 185 countries and generating revenue of £5.6 billion pounds a season. 

 

The costs of turning the EPL clubs into London Stock Exchange-listed commercial enterprises, on the other hand, have been borne by you know who.  Pricey season tickets (ranging from almost £1,000 to over £2,000 for premium seats) and corporate luxury boxes have crowded out the great unwashed, and match-day atmosphere has suffered as a result.  As Roy Keane, the former captain of Manchester United, said of the corporate guests chloroforming the once-proletarian terraces – ‘I don’t think some of the people who come to Old Trafford can spell football, never mind understand it’.

 

Football in the EPL era is “a game increasingly divorced from its working class roots”, say the authors.  The discontents of capitalist globalisation as played out in the EPL have seen the organic connections between club, community and nation continuing to fray.

 

Now, driven by profit-maximising global outreach, English football risks “changing its very identity, perhaps irrevocably”.  With two out of every three EPL footballers from overseas, what is so English about the English Premier League? the authors ask.  How much ‘real’ Chelsea was there about Chelsea Football Club when it held the dubious distinction in 1997 of being “the first club to field a team without a single British player in 111 years of English professional football”?  How likely is the English national team’s 1966 World Cup victory to be repeated, now that overseas marquee players galore deprive potential English nationals of weekly selection and valuable experience playing against high-quality opposition?

 

The new EPL football ‘product’ may have scored with the world’s super-rich and TV broadcasters and advertisers but the authors regret the passing of what they call the old “socialist model” of English football (egalitarian revenue distribution, salary caps, restrictions on overseas players).  They mourn the closed chapter of ‘competitive balance’ when all clubs stood some sort of meritocratic chance of success, not just the usual EPL financial elite (Arsenal, Man City, Man United, Chelsea, Liverpool, Tottenham).

 

There is, however, discontent amongst these Big Six that footballing ‘socialism’ has not been fully expunged.  Their sense of entitlement is gargantuan.  Offended by the Leicester insurgents, they ratcheted up already insane levels of player transfer spending and have since reasserted financial, and score-sheet, hegemony.  These apex predator-clubs also want to grab a greater share of the multi-billion pound television rights for themselves, arguing that overseas viewers are only getting up early or going to bed late in order to watch the glamour teams, not “bloody Bournemouth”.

 

Robinson and Clegg disapprove of how Big Money has soiled the working class integrity of English football but, like so many fans, they are resigned to it.  Coupled with a certain admiration for the principal, and very rich, new disruptors starring in a blockbuster “business and entertainment saga”, they rationalise the new money-mad direction of football as necessary to drag “the quaint and tribal world of football into the 21^st Century”.

 

But that’s capitalism for you – if the goal is to put profit and prestige ahead of people and their football passion, then capitalism is in a most unattractive league of its own.

CONSUMING ANZAC: The History of Australia’s Most Powerful Brand by JO HAWKINS

CONSUMING ANZAC: The History of Australia’s Most Powerful Brand

JO HAWKINS

University of Western Australia Publishing, 2018, 173 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

It can be hard sometimes to give a monkey’s if forced to choose between the obligatory, sombre commemoration of war in Australia and the more grubbily commercial profit-making from it, as CONSUMING ANZAC, by Dr Jo Hawkins (University of Western Australia), demonstrates to those who may feel that neither war nor consumer capitalism have all that much going for them.  

Australia’s secular worship of war is centred around Anzac Day, that most endlessly hyped day of patriotic-militarist sentiment, the day the not-long-federated country had its “martial baptism” as a ‘true nation’ when thousands of its soldiers were butchered (or, in the authorised version, ‘engaged in heroic self-sacrifice’) during the failed First World War invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula, Turkey, on April 25^th, 1915. 

Australia’s capitalists were quick to see the tremendous marketing potential of Anzac Day by aligning their civilian consumer brand with the officially revered military brand of Anzac.  As early as 1916, the “commercial appeal” of the word ‘Anzac’ was being used to flog various foodstuffs, beverages, soaps, toys, all sorts of apparel, Rexona healing ointment (tested in the trenches!), watches, matches, jewellery, cafés and restaurants. 

‘Sacrilege’, declared the war-time government as it promptly passed a law against the practice of appropriating the word ‘Anzac’ for commercial purposes.  For many decades, the community guardians of the Anzac tradition, the Returned Servicemen’s League (RSL), would dob in offenders to the government for prosecution or public shaming. 

It wasn’t until an increasingly unpopular Vietnam War had begun to marginalise the conservative RSL and its precious Anzac tradition that the RSL was forced to relax its stern hold over a commerce-free Anzac Day.  The up-side for the RSL was that its shrinking coffers would be replenished by extracting a tithe on approved commercial activity.  An added bonus was that the public legitimacy of war in general could be rekindled. 

A mutually beneficial symbiosis between commerce and commemoration gathered pace from the 1990s with a range of lucrative, RSL-approved, and Government-blessed, Anzac-branded cultural commodities.  Books led the way - in 2003, for example, Australians bought 130 million books on Anzac, most of them “politically anaesthetising” tomes, “celebratory page-turners” which sentimentally acclaimed “the triumph of the human spirit” against extreme adversity.  These were essentially redemptive ‘Misery Lit’ stories which did not deepen the reader’s historical understanding of the war and its structural geo-political-economic drivers. 

Mass market tourist operators and associated merchandise peddlers were also coining it, as tens of thousands of young Australian and New Zealander backpackers annually trek to the sacred site of Gallipoli for a mystical Dawn Service, the search for nationalist epiphany accompanied by the sale of (made-in-China) tourist tat and the opportunity for the ‘war pilgrims’ to cross off yet another destination from the backpacker’s ‘To Do’ list, up there with “bull running in Pamplona or the Munich Oktoberfest”. 

Modern sporting/entertainment corporate behemoths (the Australian Football League [AFL], Rugby League and Rugby Union) are some other prominent heads of the capitalist Hydra to find war profiteering during peacetime to be richly remunerative. 

The AFL’s annual ‘Anzac Day Clash’ (Essendon v Collingwood), for example, includes an official RSL commemorative pre-match extravaganza, whilst the whole fixture is saturated with military symbolism and ritual.  The event has since expanded to involve all clubs in an AFL ‘Anzac Day Round’, further boosting income for the AFL and, for the RSL, the proceeds from the cut of the weekend’s takings. 

This is a far cry from the past, more ‘purist’, era when it was illegal to play or watch sport, or even train, on Anzac Day, and it is even more distant from the First World War itself when the largely middle class (and Protestant) Essendon was one of six clubs to sit out the war whilst working class (and Catholic) Collingwood was one of the four that kept on playing. 

Since corporate sameness has ridden roughshod over grass roots tradition and sociological diversity, however, the more socially homogenised professional football clubs of today lend a more pronounced ‘national unity’ theme to the pro-war “politics of remembrance” as enacted on the football field, playing a significant role in normalising war as a core part of Australian nationalism.

Other corporates to enrol in the RSL-licensed Anzac ranks have included biscuit-makers (Unibic produce the humble ‘Anzac Biscuit’), telecommunications companies (discounted Telstra call rates on Anzac Day), McDonalds, Crown Casino, airlines (Qantas and Virgin Blue discount flights), beer-makers (Carlton & United Breweries’ ‘Raise A Glass Appeal’ is a classic of the ‘cause marketing’ genre, as it is known in ad-land), whilst for just $2.25, you could download a mobile app for the mandatory ‘One Minute’s Silence’ which, in concept and price, is a bigger scam than bottled water. 

Not to be outdone, NewsCorp used the 2002 death of the last surviving Gallipoli veteran, Alec Campbell, to launch a sales promotion through a commemorative medallion available with the purchase of its newspapers.  This scheme was, however, potentially embarrassing because, Campbell, the last original Anzac, on his deathbed, said ‘for God’s sake don’t glorify Gallipoli – it was a terrible fiasco, a total failure and best forgotten’.  This doesn’t fit the official historical Anzac narrative at all. 

Neither does it sentimentally venerate Anzac Day, and, without the emotional propaganda pumped out by the Anzac Day industry, the militarist flame could sputter and dim and this would never do because you never know when and where Australia and its allies may need to invade next in the quest for territory, resources and markets, or to counter (in Noam Chomsky’s words) the ‘threat of a good example’ from countries seeking independence or, worse, socialism. 

For this is what ‘Anzac’ is really all about – the use of war, in all its brutal rottenness, to stake out a piece of the global consumer capitalist action.  Despite the sometimes awkward Anzac Day dance between military commemoration and commerce, the truth is that war and capitalism were made for each other.