An article written by the sociology professor Vivek Chibber came up in my feed towards the end of last year entitled ‘Colonial Plunder Didn’t Create Capitalism’. What Chibber has in mind when he uses the words ‘plunder’ are the precious metals that the Spanish and the Portuguese siphoned off from the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, so ostensibly the argument is gold and silver do not in and of themselves start capitalism.

This is a bit sweeping. We know how important a plentiful supply of precious metals are to the development of money, to a circulating medium that allows commodities to move around, we know that it is partly because of the consistent drain of gold and silver east across the Mediterranean throughout this period — Europeans liked the spices Asian merchants were selling — is what motivated them to head west in the first place, but there is merit to the argument that the Spanish and the Portuguese didn’t have the domestic capacity, politically or productively, to do much with all the wealth they had acquired. Much of that gold and silver was used to fit out elaborate luxury goods for the aristocracy, jewellery, relics, churches, these are all forms of consumption limited to the upper tiers of society and certainly didn’t represent preponderant forms of economic activity.

The thing is, Chibber is trying to use that quite reasonable argument about the origins of capitalism to discredit a slightly different one which runs: even if the plunder of gold and silver is not the whole story it’s indicative of what Europeans got up to in Asia, Africa and the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which was central in getting capitalism started. The process by which people were abducted and sold along the coast of modern-day Angola, transported to expropriated land in the Caribbean or the United States remains with us in terms of how the world is divided between rich and poor. Unequal exchange, financial arbitrage, punitive debt relations, cash crops, resource extraction, unevenly distributed exposure to the consequences of climate change are all downstream from processes which were initiated three or four hundred years ago; Chibber thinks this is all a bit too woke and doesn’t reckon it as amounting to much in terms of his story of how capitalism got started.

So what does Chibber think capitalism is? Chibber thinks capitalism is something you get in the English countryside. It begins there in the fifteenth century, it’s done and dusted well before the English civil war starts, it just grows when it makes its way into other places. You know its present when the market dictates production and consumption from end to end; when people have to buy their food rather than growing it. You have to find someone to rent land from on the market rather than paying or working on a manor you can’t leave. Under capitalism you have to find an employer to sell your labour to so you can get wages and if you can’t, you can die by the side of the road. If you’re a serf, this schema goes, you’re not in capitalism because your labour isn’t on the market. If you’re a slave you’re not living under capitalism because you don’t sell your labour for wages, your labour is owned.

So even though slavery was highly profitable, became more rather than less intensive as we move closer and then into industrial capitalism, required significant fixed capital investments — warehouses, ports, ships — regimes of labour discipline, rationalisation within the productive process, the sale / consumption of its outputs (tobacco, sugar, cotton, coffee) were not just limited to the aristocracy or the upper middle class, but were part of the growing European consumer market, that this all developed with the assistance of very complex and what might seem to us to be a very modern set of financial mechanisms — clearing houses, joint-stock companies, insurance, and a specialised class of people who could manage it — no free waged labour, no capitalism. I take the contrary view. Robin Blackburn, otherwise a very good historian of slavery, is someone else who wants to maintain this idea that the Caribbean was not capitalist at the height of the slave trade because of the persistence of what he refers to as the natural economy; slaves growing their own food on their own plots. This seems to me to be, in the grand scheme of things, beside the point.

We’ve all read James Connolly, we’re used to thinking of imperialism and capitalism together and perhaps on that basis you’ve had the experience of reading a book on politics or history written by an American where your radar is set off in coming across the position whether expressed or implicit that: England is all you need to know about this subject. My response to that is: if this thing starts in England how is it that the actions of the most powerful people in English society of the time; landlords, crown officials, merchants with investments and capitalised landholdings, in the Caribbean or Ireland are irrelevant? The extent of the physical distance between England and the Atlantic colonies offers an alibi in one respect, but Ireland is right there, and capitalist social relations are expanded and accelerated is introduced in a manner that, like most parts of the world, was very much accompanied by not just by the mute compulsion of the market but also military force. The state consistently presents itself against those attempting to pull off some form of resistance in a manner which aligns quite closely with the colonial logics we see the Brits engaging in Palestine or India and the yanks in Central America.

II.

In the late fifteenth century the crown’s control was limited to an area between Dundalk and Bray, moving inland to in and around Naas, known as the Pale. The central economic unit here was the manor, the estate, which leased land to tenants who in turn leased to cottiers or subtenants who actually did the work. Outside of Dublin, Drogheda and Dundalk there were no urbanised areas really, Ireland’s population centres were only at the level of provincial English ones, though Waterford was a bit more vibrant and commercial as a consequence of its trade links with Bristol. Although sheep were raised for wool and there were some linen exports there was a growing tendency towards the cultivation of crops like corn and oats rather than livestock, historically the traditional farming method in Ireland. These crops were increasingly commercialised, they weren’t just being grown for subsistence purposes, there was a surplus being produced which was sold on the market. Despite the fact that the Pale was where the central administration was located — Dublin Castle had been built by King John after the Norman conquest — we shouldn’t get the idea that this was a world apart from the rest of the island; every peasant, the majority of the population, dressed spoke and lived according to Irish custom.

The Old English were the descendants of these Norman invaders. They were independent lords and though a couple of revolts against Elizabeth Tudor originated in the Old English community, on the basis that she was illegitimate because the pope had excommunicated her, they were overwhelmingly loyal to the crown, regarded themselves as English and were proud to do so. From the Brits’ point of view though they were Gaelicised; they had gone native in terms of their Catholicism and their use of the language.

Under Henry Tudor Irish lords were invited to hold their land under English feudal law. This was called surrender and regrant and within it the Irish would drop their traditional titles, give up their lands and receive them back immediately under English auspices. Nevertheless the crown’s remit didn’t extend into these territories. Nearly all of Ulster was controlled by Irish lords. There was no Old English population there and one crown official described it as being as remote as Virginia. Ulster, along with North Connacht, south-west Munster, Wicklow and the northern part of Wexford had their own legal system. Irish chieftanships were often disputed, through violence, between various members of a ruling family. Unlike lords in England and the Pale who lived on their rents, the Irish lords extracted levies in kind in the form of cattle, butter, bread, oats, beer or labour obligations such as ploughing, reaping, cutting timber and building towers from the smaller landholding families under them. They levied merchants passing through their estates very heavily and households on their demesne were obliged to feed and put up their retainers.

Crown officials and the urban elite in the Pale disapproved of these practices, seeing them as a set of old privileges which were a hindrance to more efficient and more civilised market-based forms of exchange. It was particularly galling to them because Ireland was an outlier in comparison with the rest of Western Europe, where lords had ceded a lot of their power to increasingly centralised monarchies.

One point that’s worth noting here is that there was a propagandistic element to all this. The English had an interest in representing Irish lords as poor stewards or backwards to strengthen the case for more competent Englishmen, such as themselves, to take over and cultivate more virtuous forms of stewardship and improvement. It also fed into the idea that Ireland must contain vast untapped resources such as mineral wealth because the Irish are too backwards to fully exploit their natural resources.

III.

In 1579 James FitzMaurice of the Munster FitzGeralds, resenting the growing pressure from the court to adopt the reformed faith, persuaded Pope Gregory XIII to fund an expedition of Italian and Spanish soldiers to assist in an uprising. They landed on the Dingle peninsula and soon after they were reinforced soldiers under the Lord Deputy Leonard Grey closed in, writing to Elizabeth Tudor subsequently that he oversaw the execution of 600 men. It took another two years for the rebellion to be fully put down, leaving large tracts of land in ruins.

Up until that point in her reign Elizabeth Tudor had vacillated between conciliation and a military solution. The former initially prevailed because adventures in Ireland represented a significant drain on the royal finances. As crown circles came to be populated by more zealous Protestants such as Sidney, Raleigh or Walsingham, a programme of colonisation was mooted in earnest, which would force Ireland to submit to the crown, accept English law and the reformed religion. Ireland would then become a useful destination for England’s rising population — which might otherwise become a source of social instability — and England could begin to catch up with the Spanish and the Portuguese who were ahead of them on overseas conquests. Within this there was the concern that Ireland might become a back-door for these forces of the Counter-Reformation, so sort of a Cuban Missile Crisis kind of situation. The FitzMaurice rebellion bolstered the hawkish argument and as a consequence became a prelude for the Munster plantation.

The responsibility for attracting settlers fell on the plantation’s undertakers, or its tenants-in-chief. There were certain quotas to be met for the introduction of craftsmen, and proprietors were to be levied the cost of installing soldiers and garrisons. Their tenants couldn’t be Irish because the objective was to re-create English society in miniature, though there were servitors, mainly ex-army officers, who received a portion of the land they had assisted in conquering, they were allowed to take Irish tenants on their estates.

In the event the undertakers were not prepared for the extent of the dilapidation and ruin that had been visited on the land during its expropriation. The list of undertakers fell as well as the number of available English tenants, many of whom could find better terms going to an Irish lord whose lands had been depopulated during the war. Other indicators that the higher principles of the venture were being neglected in pursuit of speedier gains are the increasingly militarised and coercive nature of the settlement. Rather than the envisioned formalised system of rent-taking and religious conversion the plantation was characterised by racketeering and extortion; planters began to move beyond their assigned holdings onto lands still in the possession of Irish lords. These were all contributing factors to its overthrow in 1598 by Irish people who wanted their land back. What was particularly demoralising was how quickly the plantation had been swept away and how worse it would have been if some Irish lords in Munster hadn’t remained loyal. Not that they were thanked for it. When the banished settlers returned to England they decried Irish society in toto, its barbaric popery, fuelling exaggerated reports of mass sectarian slaughter when in reality no more than a few hundred settlers were killed.

IV.

I’m not going to go into a huge amount of detail on the military side of this period but it will suffice to say that the Nine Years War was waged on the Irish side by an alliance of Hugh Roe O’Donnell of Tyrconnell and Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone against the Lord Deputy Mountjoy’s incursions into Ulster. Even though O’Neill does do more than was customary at the time to raise an army from his own holdings, conscript his peasantry, provide them with modern weaponry and training and achieving the successes he did through a sort of asymmetric doctrine, this was not an anti-imperialist war as such; O’Neill was seeking to become a legitimate ruler of Ulster in the eyes of the English monarch. But the campaign flounders when O’Neill follows disastrous advice from the Spanish to face Mountjoy’s forces in open battle. This allowed Mountjoy and Chichester, the governor of Carrickfergus, to push O’Neill west and as they did so they devastated the lands. This involved seizing cattle, destroying corn and people’s dwellings to impose a famine on the population in pursuit of an unconditional surrender. The rationale here is to inflict huge amounts of economic damage. If O’Neill’s freeholders are starving and they don’t have shelter they can’t work, they can’t put up his retainers, they can’t stable his horses. There’s enormous pressure on the lords to surrender because the longer the campaign goes on the harder it will be for them to restore their lands to their original condition and the further they’ll fall into debt; this dynamic was an important one in driving dispossession through market discipline. This particular offensive was an instance of the tail wagging the dog because in addition to soldiers’ wages costing so much money that the currency had to be devalued Elizabeth Tudor was dying and the policy to be adopted by her successor James Stuart with regard to the Irish lords in Ulster was unclear. On meeting O’Neill Mountjoy kept the information about Elizabeth Tudor’s death quiet, allowed O’Neill to declare himself a loyal subject pledge never again to seek the help of a foreign power before granting him pardon and allowing him to retain his earldom, this was the Treaty of Mellifont.

Despite the compact the English continued to consolidate their position in the province. A network of forts was constructed in Ireland during and after the war; seventeen out of the forty strongholds were located in Ulster to the extent that every part of the province was within a few hours of a garrison, each of them manned by an English captain with at least forty and sometimes up to a hundred men under him. In the first year of James Stuart’s reign the Dublin government installed twenty new commissioners of martial law; county sheriffs were given extensive powers such as the capacity to disarm, summarily execute and seize a third of the moveable goods of those they did kill. The degree to which scrupulous inventories and valuations of a given victim’s possessions were carried out and the legally mandated third handed over was fairly limited so there was an enormous incentive for these men to kill people or to establish protection rackets and they had significant scope to do so.

In undermining Mellifont to get O’Neill out of the picture, Chichester sought help from the Solicitor General John Davies who was conducting extensive amounts of research in building the legal argument that Irish lords were trespassers on lands which the crown had title to going back to the Norman invasion centuries before. This put the Irish lords in a very invidious position. They had been militarily defeated, they were faced with the loss of their rent, forms of tribute and their most profitable lands — some of these were being transferred into the reformed church — there was a new legal regime they didn’t really understand, martial law was being imposed arbitrarily to the extent that sheriffs and other crown officials were just shaking them down. Convinced the crown was about to move on them to a definitive end, the most powerful figures of the Irish aristocracy fled to the continent in what became known as the Flight of the Earls. This cleared the path for the plantation of Ulster. James Stuart declared the flight treasonous and offered their confiscated territory in perpetuity to any Englishman or Scot so long as they would agree to bring in a specified number of people to work the land, build a certain number of agreed buildings or fortifications, pledge loyalty to the crown, educate any children in the Protestant faith, not sublease any lands to the Irish or adopt any Irish landholding practices but rather introduce English methods of agriculture, which were to be stringently defined. Throughout this period there were a series of surveys carried out by crown agents to monitor levels of compliance, so we have a good understanding of how these enterprises developed over the years.

V.

The idea that the Old English should be excluded from any say in how Ireland was to be governed did not have currency during Elizabeth Tudor’s reign; one ideological resource which was significant in bringing it into broader acceptance were the writings of Edmund Spenser, who had come to Ireland in 1580 to serve as secretary to Grey, receiving an estate in the Munster plantation. His A View of the Present State of Ireland was written in the early stages of the Nine Years’ War and it was a direct appeal to crown policy makers in the form of a dialogue between an Englishman with some experience of Irish affairs, and an interlocutor with a far greater weight of evidence, seeking to bring the official around to a more hawkish line by positioning the English as the Athenians or Romans facing down the Irish Gauls and Scythians, bywords for barbarism and pagan backwardness in the classical sources. Spenser recommended the Old English be excluded from the running of the country as their proximity to the Irish had brought about their degeneration. The social structure in Ireland had to be razed with ten thousand soldiers and a thousand cavalry destroying natives’ sources of food until the Irish ‘shall have no…ability to endure his wretchedness’. For those carrying this task out there was to be ‘no remorse nor drawing back’. The Irish, once subdued, would be taxed to fund a martial government which would establish English colonies on the confiscated property of defeated rebels. They would be resettled in towns close to military garrisons or on the estates of English colonists. Spenser then envisioned the Irish being instructed in superior methods of farming and technical skills, taking English names associated with their new trades, given an English education and then converted to Protestantism, this stage had to come last due to the sheer force of Irish ignorance on religious matters.

Spenser’s works were not influential in his lifetime. He was turned off his estate by the Earl of Tyrone’s allies and died in penury in London, but A View circulated in manuscript among many who were involved in planning the plantation of Ulster such as Chichester, Davies, Bacon and Carew, we also know Oliver Cromwell was a fan. The historian Nicholas Canny argues that Spenser was here elaborating prejudices which were already widespread among powerful Englishmen involved in Irish affairs but that it provided additional justification for policies which previously would not have been admitted on moral grounds, most potently that Ireland would only ever be brought into good order after conquest and plantation. So there’s a dialectic between the growing capacity the British state has to exert itself beyond its frontiers and the literature this felt capacity generates, which justifies further expansion via increasingly brutal methods.

VI.

The undertakers were responsible for planting 10 families or 24 adult males for every 1000 acres. These were to be planted in villages near the strongholds the landlords were obliged to build. Every section of English society was represented among the personnel composing the plantation. There were younger sons of gentlemen, Scottish nobles, men the crown owed money to, London merchants, Protestant clergy, relatives neighbours or dependents of all of these, farmers evicted from the Scottish lowlands, horse thieves, fugitives or captains who had fought the Spanish in Cadiz and the Caribbean. The so-called deserving Irish, who had remained loyal during Ulster’s rebellions, were to be given ~20% of the confiscated territory but these holdings couldn’t be inherited, they were to pass on to an English lord when the holders died. These surviving Irish proprietors lacked the connections the English or Scots had with prospective tenants or merchants in Glasgow and the north of England, which prevented them from exporting any agricultural surplus or finished products their tenants produced. The capacity of Irish landholders to develop were therefore impaired by the exclusion from a growing overseas trade economy. Prospective tenants were in a strong position to negotiate more favourable terms for themselves, depressing the Irish landholders’ intake further. The only proprietors who survived were those who emulated the management practices of the English and since there were many who couldn’t, this became a means of further dispossession; commercialised estates edged out those ones who couldn’t keep pace. So what the planters achieved in Ulster by way of development and prosperity came at the expense of their Irish neighbours; here we’re seeing the extension or embedding of capitalist social relations at first through law, ideology and military conquest — and of course the continued threat of force never goes away — with its more day-to-day functions working through social, religious, ethnic or national means.

James Stuart became concerned about what he regarded as a lack of men of substance within the Ulster plantation. He was particularly focused on Coleraine, where the largest number of swordsmen who had evaded Chichester were holding out, making it the most dangerous area to colonise and defend. So he enlisted the London merchant companies to plant both Coleraine and Derry. In this period Europe’s economic centre of gravity was moving from the Mediterranean towards the Atlantic and London was in a very strong position to begin challenging Amsterdam as a leading centre of finance, with medieval guilds of craftsmen becoming livery companies, headed by men looking for good outlets for their excess capital. These companies were vital to the conquest of Ireland. In addition to serving as a useful means of recruiting men, the crown borrowed from them and merchants received valuable contracts to supply munitions and equip their armies in turn.

In order to overcome merchant concerns that building new towns which could be defended from land and sea — walled settlements had died out in the rest of Europe — would be expensive and fruitless James Stuart came with very favourable terms. The merchants were granted the whole territory within the Foyle, the sea and the Bann, all the fishing up to Lough Neagh, tonnage poundage and customs as well as woodland to be used for shipbuilding and all at a very reasonable level of rent.

Despite disputes with workmen tasked with constructing the fortifications this aspect of the project was significantly easier than getting Protestant tenants; undertakers could only attract English settlers if they offered good terms and it made more sense from a capitalist perspective to rent to the people who were already there, particularly since they were happier than the freshly arrived Tans to pay higher rents or offer labour services. This meant the Irish were not moved on, and that even in densely settled areas there was parity between the number of Irish versus non-Irish tenants. The Fishmongers was one company that refused to eject their Irish tenants despite being threatened directly by the Lord Deputy, saying that if they did they would be operating at a loss. Some even took on Catholic priests because they were more reliable in paying their rent and this is a good example of how, even though the ideological and political project of dispossessing the natives was the means through which capitalism was introduced, its effects were contradictory; landholders were stratified and the plantation paradoxically brought about a decline in arable farming because the Irish correctly felt their leases to be more precarious. It made less sense to plough the land if there was a possibility it would be taken, tending livestock was more rational. Those ideologists of plantation who were strongly influenced by the classical sources had argued that dispersed settlements should be avoided and tenants should dwell instead in villages and corporate towns around manor houses and this was another instance in which the practice was at a remove from the theory; settlers tended to move to better land closer to markets where they faced less danger of being attacked, such as fertile valleys and navigable rivers.

Forms of manufacturing within the Ulster plantation included linen, iron-smelting and leather-tanning but despite these crafts Ulster was not particularly wealthy or diversified. Inland connections were poor and though Ulster had a coastline it lacked an established network of developed ports. We know tillage was not extensive because iron ploughs are not abundant in lists of lost property obtained by English investigators in the aftermath of the 1641 rebellion. Part of this was the cultural background of the settlers – Munster had settlers from the Netherlands and southern England while Ulster had Scots and northern Tans – part of it was ecological; Scots farmed in upland societies where the soil was similarly poor, which tended to favour hardier crops like oats or rye which were important parts of their diet. The bulk of the profit from their labour in the fields also went in rent and service to their landlords. The Ulster plantation was also newer; Belfast required the development of trade connections with the Caribbean to develop, which came later on in the century. Whatever its precise cause the forms of production which developed in Ulster were more personalised; the requirements of the more immediate kin-groups were prioritised over manufacturing for export.

One of the reasons transplanting tradesmen such as weavers, cutlers and people with experience in fishing, timber and iron trades was prioritised in the terms of settlement was the prevailing view that building communities capable of producing and selling materials more cheaply than they were available in England or elsewhere could render the project more durable. Munster formed a stark contrast with Ulster from this point of view, being positioned in an expansive trade network. The East India Company felled timber and engaged in iron-smelting and shipbuilding; Thomas Smith, one of London’s leading merchants, put in for the felling of sixty trees in Clonakilty in association with Lionel Cranfield. Ulster was covered in mature dense forest and large quantities of this timber was used for construction and exported for barrels; colonists were able to make quick profits by smelting iron and exporting lathes and ship timber. John Rowley, first mayor of Derry and chief agent for the umbrella organisation which collectively represented and organised the London companies planting Derry, developed a very lucrative business with the first earl of Cork Richard Boyle, who had significant landed interests in Munster and Connacht, supplying draperies, cutting pipe and barrel staves from the natural forests, fishing and curing sardines for export. The success of these ventures drew the attention of other merchants; pipe staves manufactured in Youghal went to London, Rotterdam, Bordeaux, Lisbon and the Canaries. Dutch traders were very prominent in these businesses as were pirates, who were active along Ireland’s southern coastline. Pack-horses were used to facilitate inland trade, these could carry tobacco, salt, linen, wool, tallow hides and other rural goods. About 40 individuals in the depositions describe themselves as clothiers, effectively merchant manufacturers, selling broadcloths to Dutch merchants, one of whom records an income of £400 p.a. The manufacturing of some of these textiles was facilitated in Tallow by William Page, who employed more than 150 people. Certain forms of labour struggle come through the records too; I’ve already mentioned disputes with workmen hired to build fortifications in Derry. Boyle and his agents complain at the unwillingness of pipestave makers and squarers to be satisfied with mere promises of payment and their resort to mutiny when they weren’t paid. There is also evidence that settlers attempted to convey live cattle and agricultural provisions from Munster to tobacco planters in Virginia; it is worth noting at this point that 35% of the merchants putting capital into Irish plantations between 1586 and 1620 also had investments in overseas companies, most notably the Virginia Company.

There was also significant amounts of moneylending, enormous quantities of debt are cited as losses in the depositions. Henry Turner of Bandonbridge claimed to have lost £774, whether because he had lent money to rebels — many of them were heavily indebted, the extent of the financial pressure the plantations put them under was a significant motivation to rebel in the first instance — or because fellow planters, merchants, tenants they had lent to were killed we don’t know. Some of this credit was probably doled out in the form of consumer goods which would have turned a profit when they were sold on, all of which is indicative of how these merchant manufacturers were conscientious in diversifying their interests. Sir Philip Percival is an example of a landowner and tenant-in-chief to the Earl of Cork, he was clerk and registrar to Court of Wards and Liveries and much of his land had come into his hands through mortgage dealing, indicating how a Dublin-based official could over a short period of time build an extensive estate by investing the profits of his office by extending loans to a series of native proprietors. Even though they principally identify as traders rather than gentlemen they were also investing in land, urban property and money lending. As with any other capitalist this would have been important because of the risks associated with depending on just the one income stream; a ship could be lost that would take out revenue from your whole inventory.

VII.

When the English are beginning their first colonial ventures there would seem to be a tension between the more immediate drive towards plunder versus the construction of sustainable infrastructures of domination which depend to a greater extent on settlement, improvement, agreement and accommodation, however temporary or partial, with the native population rather than short-term military engagements for short-term gains. In an immediate sense adventuring and privateering can have disastrous effects, in Ireland it provoked rebellion, but over a longer time-frame the two approaches converged. In the Caribbean capital was accumulated and expertise was developed which led to the creation of an ocean-going merchant marine force with a knowledge of, capacity to navigate the islands as well as the eastern coasts of North America where some of the individuals involved in the plantations in Ireland also made an attempt at organising settlements, such as Raleigh and Smythe. Though Davis and Chichester did not live long enough, their doctrines and tactics endured and this is without considering the Scottish settler population. Mountjoy’s military doctrine, the destruction of food sources, the felling of woods to build a network of roads and star-shaped garrisons roads which then became planned towns, making territory permeable to markets and armies, was as much a feature of the Anglo-Powhatan wars as it was the pre-history of the Ulster plantation.

These are some of the mutually reinforcing alliances between the embryonic form of the modern British state — the landed gentry, the crown and its agents who require taxes or shipping revenues — and overseas merchants who need state capacity to enforce their monopolies because the costs of trade were exceptionally high. For merchants the overheads were enormous, goods were carried in large and expensive ships, which tied their capital up for long periods of time. Sales of certain commodities could also be interrupted by war, the ship carrying your goods might sink, another merchant’s ship with a very similar set of goods could have gotten to the port before yours did leaving the market glutted; merchants needed governments to mobilise the resources to insulate them from these externalities and this was where funds arising from privateering or plunder could play a very productive role. This alliance would come to its full fruition with the dominance the British Empire exerts over the sea with its navy and consolidated commercial interests. State ships committed to defence of trade take this role over from merchants and navies became increasingly professional. They are supplied and crewed by admirals and captains who are also merchants, ship-builders and naval contractors. Building this navy required new fiscal resources which arose from: levies on merchants. It is estimated that the proportion of national wealth that could be mobilised by the English government more than doubles in the 1640s and doubles again in the 1690s. With the assistance of these new revenues governments can do more; by the 1650s England can mobilise land forces in the tens of thousands. This is a transformative development, ensuring continuity of wages for troops, very important if you want them to stick around.

Despite the revolts that this programme of dispossession would periodically birth, the fact that farming techniques in Ulster had not significantly advanced, the social structure was changing. Lands were managed more intensively than before, output had improved and by 1641 the settler population was around 40 - 45k, with around two-thirds of these being Scots. One-third of the land had passed into settler ownership. The success of undertakers and servitors in acquiring and developing land, stripping their holdings of natural assets while increasing their income was registered first through a remarkable increase in customs revenue, especially from imported goods and later from the subsidies paid by Catholic landowners. Ulster was a source of government taxation and the Tan government met their own costs. The English system of law and reformation was implemented. Undertakers and servitors had pursued pragmatic solutions in getting to this point. as they recognised the impracticality of more extensive and draconian programmes of separation and transportation of the Irish west.

The extent of the attention I’ve just given to the artisan and trading elements as well as the merchants shouldn’t allow us to forget that most settlers in Munster and the other provinces were farmers, but I emphasise it in bringing us back to the Chibber question, who derives much of his theory on what capitalism is and how we get to it from feudalism from the work of the historian Robert Brenner and his study of the English civil war Merchants and Revolution (1993), a book consisting primarily of very granular detail on the activities of London magnates, aristocrats and the New Model Army. In the book’s afterword Brenner lays out his stance on the historiography and how he positions his research relative to two different schools within it. The first, a traditional Marxist one, tends to perceive the English Civil War through the lens of a similarly vulgarised image of the French Revolution, namely the victory of a merchant bourgeois professional class in seizing state power from the absolutist monarchy and their tribute-taking vassals; Brenner correctly repudiates this interpretation of the English civil war and restoration on the basis that England was already substantially capitalist. The second school Brenner disputes takes a revisionist approach to the other extreme, regarding all interests and classes at play in the historical moment as contingent and what played out basically as a random set of events.

I can’t speak to how accurate his account of each school is but a problem I see in M&R is a tendency to introduce quite clean dividing lines between classes and social strata. Brenner uses words like merchants, gentry, aristocracy, stratified variations of each to introduce wholly distinct sets of motives and commitments and I would rather emphasise the diversified character of these interests to underline that, certainly when we’re considering the interests of those Brits who were active in Irish affairs which Brenner doesn’t discuss, though they made indeed have been sectoral, were not decisively distinct. It is not very easy to say what was contingent and what was determined here. The experience of the Old English in Ireland as a significant and capitalised landholding class who were regarded as completely illegitimate on the basis of their cultural or national degeneracy is a total outlier in early modern Europe. There was no sense that they were stakeholders in the decrees issued by English officials implemented by sheriffs, provosts martial and their assistants who could in the final instance depend on soldiers. In this way the military became a normal part of the civil administration and perhaps even a replacement for it. It was also a good source of tenants for settlers because the pay that went to those officers and pensioners then went to improvement of plantation land. The construction of forts leased to officer landowners is effectively state-funding scheme for the creation a new landed military aristocracy which bound officials and the army together. Land ownership was almost universal among those holding civil or military office in Ireland during the first half of the seventeenth century. There was widespread and obvious corruption among senior legal officers dealing with land in the local and provincial courts. There would have been some expectation or pressure on Lord Deputies to reign some of this behaviour in but at the same time these officials were complicit, and in Protestant circles it was seen as their objective interest to reduce Catholic landholding and draw spoils to themselves and the crown. Whatever means were used to achieve that were justifiable. Marriage ties begin to develop between these two cohorts, this is the origin of the Protestant ascendancy, the particular class coalition that plays an enormous role in Ireland’s governance centuries on.

We therefore merchant-debtors, merchant-planters, farmer-adventurers, crown-planters, interests overlapped with whatever Old English or indigenous Irish lords were willing to be useful at a given place or time as well as a corrupt judiciary and lawyers working to advance the frontier of crown lands, in and around the same time their English counterparts were reforming the domestic legal and taxation system to render it less prone to clientelism of this kind. Collective security was provided by men-at-arms who, as have seen, could also be servitors or just accumulate a fortune through theft. So we would have to be careful before we completely dismiss historical studies which play up what was contingent because we’re certain that we have the structures down in advance. The Cromwellian settlement which I am about to describe is at once a long-term process, an outgrowth of continental wars of religion, and a consequence of a sequence of revolutionary events particular to the mid-seventeenth century, it is difficult to envision it taking place without the specific set of circumstances which arise in the three-kingdom war.

VIII.

As I said the Old English in general never regarded themselves as being under threat from the English in the same way the Irish were, but this began to change when some of the lawfare measures began to be directed against their titles and when it became clear that James Stuart was not going to facilitate any kind of religious tolerance; in response to a petition drawn up by the lords of the Pale on toleration, he said that he would fight to his knees in blood rather than grant it. Chichester launched a programme of religious persecution, the petitioners were put under house arrest or imprisoned in Dublin Castle and Catholics were fined a shilling for every Sunday they failed to attend a Protestant service. Letters were delivered to leading Catholic men in Dublin, fining them a hundred pounds each and unpaid fines could be collected in kind, through the seizure of possessions or other goods. Chichester personally forced men into church, here’s a quote:

‘[Chichester] told him, blandly at first, and then savagely, to go in, and seeing he could not prevail on him, struck him a cruel blow on the head with his stick. Then the macebearer attacked him so savagely that he fell to the ground like a dead man, and the viceroy had him dragged into church, where he lay insensible and gasping all the time of the sermon, and no one dared to approach him. Some of his friends afterwards took him home, where he gave his blessed soul to God in two hours’.

In 1634 Lord Deputy Thomas Wentworth called a parliament declaring a new crackdown on recusancy, rolling back encouraging signs Charles Stuart, James Stuart’s successor, had made regarding toleration, and promises to grant secure legal titles to estates. Instead, a Commission for Defective Titles embarked on a set of worrying investigations.

In 1637, Scottish Presbyterians, outraged by Charles Stuart’s attempts to impose Laudian religious rites revolted, seized control of Edinburgh and gathered a large army of covenanters. Wentworth recruited Irish Catholics into the rank-and-file of a new army of 10,000 men, intended to be deployed in support of the crown against the Scottish, but before Wentworth could deploy his force Charles Stuart signed a treaty with the Scots. Wentworth, promoted to Earl of Strafford, left Ireland for the court. Protestants from the Derry plantation successfully lobbied allies at parliament to get Wentworth beheaded, a foreshadowing of Charles Stuart’s isolation and his weakened grip on power.

Irish émigré veterans recruited by Wentworth from overseas to train his royalist army began to consider moving against the crown; their rebellious orientation was helped along by the fact that they were put on half-pay before being disbanded, effectively put out of work. At the same time in the Spanish Netherlands acknowledged leader of the Irish in exile and veteran commander in Philip IV’s armies Eoghan Roe O’Neill, nephew of the Earl of Tyrone (who had died in Rome in 1616) was having similar thoughts. Another important figure here is Phelim O’Neill who otherwise manifested every outward sign of being a member of the loyal deserving Irish. His father Turlough Óg had fought for the English during the Nine Years War and was killed while trying to suppress a subsequent rebellion in 1608. In recognition of his father’s services Phelim O’Neill had received estates in the Ulster plantation. He was raised as a ward of the court in the Protestant faith, attended Lincoln’s Inn in London, and then returned to Ireland in the 1620s. He purchased a knighthood for himself but his reversion to Catholicism on return to Ireland exposed him to religious persecution. Like many of the Irish lords he was unable to manage his lands in the modern commercial style and was caught between an accruing number of levies and customary feudal practices, particularly after the disastrous harvests of 1638 - 9. All these men, the class they represented, and the Old English had seen the success that the Scots had achieved in their extra-parliamentary revolt and had begun to think action along similar lines — possibly the first instance of ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’ — might provide a means of changing the situation. At the same time the success of the covenanters was concerning; they were even more stridently anti-Catholic than the crown Protestants they were accustomed to. Again, it’s plausible to call this an anti-imperialist war in the sense that it was a challenge to colonialism, the fact that the leading conspirators belonged to the landed elite wouldn’t necessarily be out of line with the class composition of later national liberaion movements, but it is important to recall that residual orientation among many of the leaders who saw themselves as loyal to and acting in defense of the colonial administration. Putting together an army in pursuit of that goal was not undertaken with a view to liberation, but as a means of communicating greivances to the king.

The Ulster Irish planned an assault on two fronts. Phelim would target key points in South Ulster to prevent Protestant settlers from linking up with forces from the capital. At the same time Conor Maguire’s men would storm Dublin castle, paralyse the government and get access to a vast quantity of weaponry. Phelim’s plan was successful, he rallied thousands of followers to his banner, especially among landed labourers and small tenant farmers, but in Dublin a companion of Lord Maguire alerted the authorities in advance. The conspirators were rounded up, including Maguire, who was executed in London, but unrest was still provoked in north Leinster and Munster, partly encouraged by a forged commission from Charles Stuart put together by O’Neill to the effect that the King had given the Irish a commission to seize the goods and estates of all English Protestants. The Old English army, initially responding to Dublin’s call to assist in putting down the disloyal Catholics, instead joined the rebellion.

Local Catholic landowners assumed command in their areas but they found it difficult to control the rank-and-file, who increasingly attacked Protestant settlers. These attacks became quite extreme in some cases and provoked hysteria, with unlicensed publications in England reporting 150,000 Protestant deaths which far exceeded the total settler population. As refugees from the rebellion came into Dublin witness depositions were collected, the bulk of them from between 1642 - 3, but a Commission for Despoiled Protestants continued its work until September 1647, producing more than 30 manuscript volumes filled with sworn statements from survivors. Many recognised the propaganda value of these testimonies of savage massacres of Protestant settlers by cruel papists towards building support for massive confiscations of Catholic land. Much of the material is therefore highly exaggerated and incorporates rumours and hearsay. Nevertheless, the findings were presented to Westminster and an MP named Oliver Cromwell was one of those charged with organising relief efforts, he donated £600 of his own money he sat on a number of parliamentary committees dealing with the rebellion.

After significant successes in Ulster, with two-thirds of the province taken, the rebels were on the defensive by early 1642. Phelim failed to capture Drogheda; the irregular rebel forces were poorly armed and lacked military training. The Lords Justices, buoyed by reinforcements from England and the promise of a Scottish intervention, adopted an increasingly aggressive strategy, declaring any commander could execute any rebel or traitor, inviting attacks on civilians. This offensive was stalled by outbreaks of flux, death of the most energetic colonial commanders as well as the beginnings of the War of the Three Kingdoms in August with forces of the British parliament marching against Charles Stuart’s cavaliers and dividing the loyalties of the 37,000 Protestants on the island.

In an attempt to regain the initiative, consolidate their position and secure the support of the Catholic church, the Old English and native Irish convened a Confederation in rebel-controlled Kilkenny where a legislative general assembly assumed responsibility for the functions of government: appointing generals, minting a new coinage, establishing diplomatic relations with courts overseas, re-establishing the rule of law and collecting subsidies. Provincial and county councils extended their authority throughout the localities while standing provincial armies replaced the irregular levies. Both sides made significant efforts to preserve ethnic harmony, with the assembly committing itself to an inclusive vision of national identity, calling on Charles Stuart to treat all Irish subjects equally before the law with place of birth rather than blood being the essential criterion for membership of an Irish nation, with no distinction to be made between old or new English or Irish.

There were two main blocs at Kilkenny. There was a faction of landowners which obviously favoured preservation of their estates, but also wanted access to public office and guarantees of religious toleration. Separately there was a clerical faction demanding full restoration of the Catholic church. This latter cohort was supported by Owen Roe O’Neill, who wanted full Irish independence. Had these factions succeeded in unifying themselves they could have seized control of the island and driven the Brits into the sea but the Old English, still loyal to Charles Stuart and convinced that he was more likely to grant religious freedom than the parliament, engaged in fruitless negotiations which dragged out for years. Tensions increased with the arrival of a papal nuncio, Giovanni Battista Rinuccini who was an absolutist on confessional questions and opposed negotiations with the exiled monarch. These factional disputes distracted O’Neill from military affairs and left the rebels unprepared for Cromwell’s religious crusade.

In the early stages of the war sieges typically failed to achieve their objectives because besiegers lacked either the artillery necessary for taking defended positions or the means to transport big guns into the interior. They therefore resorted to scorched earth tactics towards forcing a surrender. The Cromwellian campaign intensified these trends, with the difference that they were in possession of modern weaponry such as siege guns, which were used to breach Drogheda’s walls in opening up the way to Ulster while the New Model Army marched to Kilkenny. Cromwell could also draw on a continuous stream of reinforcements; he possessed a good understanding of modern organisational tactics and ensured his men were consistently paid.

Cromwell justified the massacre at Drogheda the basis that it was a judgement of God on the barbarous Irish. There are certain historians or commentators who justify it on the basis that slaughter on this scale was not uncommon within the context of the Thirty Years War but Cromwell’s doctrine of no quarter did render it exceptional and shocking to public opinion even at the time. There were no attempts, as was customary, to pursue ransom; this was a pure act of extermination. When calculated in terms of the ratio of casualties to captured prisoners, Cromwell far exceeds the continental norm as well as the worst royalist defeats in England.

Cromwell imposed further punishment with the 1652 Act of Settlement which held out five categories of individuals who would be exempted from pardon for life or estate. Under it, no fewer than 80,000 adult males were liable to be executed. After two years only 200 had been killed through a special high court of justice but for the vast majority the most consequential aspects of this act related to land. Only those who could prove their loyalty to the parliamentarian’s cause could keep their estates which was of course very difficult to do. Protestant landowners who failed this test were to give up a fifth of their estates, though later these sentences were commuted to fines, most of which were never paid. Catholics were to have their estates confiscated entirely and receive alternate ones, two-thirds the size in Connacht, a punishment which fell particularly heavily to Irish of high social position and their immediate dependants. Evidence was drawn from the depositions at court hearings in Loughrea; there was some bribery of court officials to get title to what little land was afforded in Connacht. William Petty’s survey shows Cromwell confiscated eleven million acres, more than half of the island’s landmass. Thousands were transported to the Caribbean or other colonies, others went to the continent to enlist in the armies of France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire.

In lieu of back pay 33k soldiers received pieces of paper entitling them to Irish land. Only 12k of them chose to stay, the remainder sold their debentures at a loss to colonisers who were already in place, who now had the opportunity to augment, consolidate and improve their estates via a fresh influx of Tans and Scots eager to become tenants. In this way Cromwell’s military victories and draconian legislation reinvigorated the colonisation of Ulster. This served to push the Irish onto poor and less accessible land.

Twenty years on the economy had recovered from war and the population began to rise again. For some decades after plantation farming in Ulster reverted to agricultural practices which had been in place when the Irish lords were in control, more intensive agriculture only arrived with a new influx of Scots in the second half of the seventeenth century.

IX.

Why have I been talking about any of this apart from it throwing up issues of historical interest. Well I don’t need to emphasise that the nature of Irish capitalism, that two of the state or supra-state apparatuses on the island today owe a huge amount to processes the British crown initiated over four hundred years ago. The ethnic and religious supremacy at the core of this dispensation kept Irish people out of local government, prevented them from holding weapons, obtaining property or an education; it systematically underdeveloped the capacities of the population. Ireland was prevented from trading directly with Europe, was forced into the production of commodities which were important to England’s pursuit of maritime supremacy; it became a barracks for more troops than imperial India, the extent of England’s capacity to apply military and policing coercion here was the envy of the Prussians.

Industry was concentrated in the north, where the largest Protestant population was and everywhere else life within the state for the majority can be characterised as consisting of a rack-rented cottier class with no capital other than their seed potatoes. Land struggles after An Gorta Mór created a propertied peasantry, while an underdeveloped working class existed in small pockets in the cities, unable to win sufficient space for the assertion of its own interests between a big tent nationalist movement or a party of the upper class. The two greatest labour leaders this country has produced — James Connolly and Jim Larkin — struggled against the sectarian divide which had been inculcated in the Belfast shipyards, but the strength of that division, and continued British interference to frustrate the aspirations of Home Rule, were too strong to be overcome. The particularities of Irish capitalism were such that the environment was not favourable for the development of a classical working class party or radical social democratic movement, with its attendant institutions or organisations such as those which developed in Germany, Sweden, France or England. When the systematically under-employed Catholics in the north had the temerity to seek their civil rights the British state shot them dead in the street.

In certain respects the economic situation on either side of the border has been reversed. By adopting a tax regime taken on by many other British dependencies and plugging itself into Californian tech, the USian administrative state and European subsidies the twenty-six counties has become more wealthy while the so-called peace dividend in the six hasn’t even generated a functioning parliament. The extent of the Saorstát’s dependence on multi-nationals has created a high-consumption economy and brought in a party system in belated conformity with an abstract European model but this has not confronted the legacies of an underdeveloped welfare state. The spirit of the plantations endure in the fact that some of the most immiserated parts of the six counties are the most fertile ground for far-right politics. It is not just a coincidence that this is the population most capable of being bought off with a libidinal investment in the politics of racial supremacy and British nationalism. As the perennial feature of the political landscape in the twenty-six counties, a big tent nationalist party with a contradictory social programme once again vacillates in the fact of the contradictions its attempting t manage, a more contemporary iteration is drawing on the symbolism on the term to eat into parts of Dublin where you once had a mass movement in support of the demands of the hunger strikers.

This is not to argue that the plantations or the origins of capitalism represent a live issue in the present necessarily, but what I hope to have proven is that capitalism is not something that just happens when you get markets. It is a structure of power engineered and distributed across multiple levels: ideological, cultural, national, ecological, religious. It is particular to a given context and change, evolution, movement is fundamental. The way bourgeois economists talk about inflation, central banking and interest rates it is as though they’re forces of nature but we know these are instruments for crushing the power of labour in the seventies because the working class in parts of western Europe had gone as far as they could in achieving equality without beginning the process of expropriating the expropriators. Ethno-nationalism, militarism and state coercion in the present represents the evolution of strategy in response to crisis and it is on these levels, rather than just through trade union politics, mere cost of living questions, that the thing has to be contested, with the recognition and understanding that this is enormously difficult, that where reforms have been extracted they fail to endure. That when it is overthrown it doesn’t seem to stay dead.

The revolutionary horizon to which sections of the left I’ve tended to gravitate around are oriented towards conditions which pertained in Petrograd in 1917. Here, a highly disciplined historical miracle of a mass movement lost its illusions in the conciliationists and liquidationists, until only a disciplined cadre, who did not just maintain or explain their principles but demonstrated them in the workplaces, in the streets, on the field of war, amidst the maelstrom of a decade-long crisis, remained credible. I’m going to conclude by suggesting that the situation now requires us to leave that image, to place it at some point long into the future and think through one more in line with the Confederation of Kilkenny, where, despite much ground held in common, shared values, broad commitment to principles of co-existence and collaboration was facing a catastrophe for which it was totally unprepared. Each faction had a long list of missed opportunities at its back, enormous potential if only the available resources could be adequately directed and a significant part of the coalition had one eye on a separate peace in the hope that old certainties might hold. The revolutionary position which articulated the historical hinge-point was present there, but ungrounded, given that for the large numbers of people outside the legislature, the discussion as conducted seemed irrelevant.

Further Reading

Agnew, Jean. Belfast Merchant Families in the Seventeenth Century. Four Courts Press, 1996.

Banaji, Jairus. A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism. Pluto Press, 2020.

Bardon, Jonathan. The British Colonisation of the North of Ireland in the 17th Century. Gill & McMillan, 2011.

Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653. Verso, 1993.

Canny, Nicholas. The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established 1565-76. Harvester Press, 1976.

—. From Reformation to Restoration: Ireland 1534 - 1660. Helicon, 1987.

—. Making Ireland British, 1580-1650. Oxford University Press, 2003.

— (Ed.), The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century. Oxford University Press, 2001.

Chibber, Vivek. ‘Colonial Plunder Didn’t Create Capitalism’. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2025/12/colonialism-transition-feudalism-capitalism-history-economy

Hilton, Rodney (Ed.). The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism. Verso, 1987.

Hill, Christopher. God’s Englishman. Penguin, 2019.

O’Neill, Timothy. Merchants and Mariners in Medieval Ireland. Irish Academic Press, 1987.

Ó Síocrú, Micheál. God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland.

Radburn, Nicholas. Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Yale University Press, 2023.

Spufford, Peter. Power and Profit: the Merchant in Medieval Europe. Thames & Hudson, 2006.

Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital and European States AD 990-1992. Blackwell Publishers, 1992.

Williams, Eric. Slavery and Capitalism. Penguin, 2021.

I am interested in pulling at the evidence that the protestors, contrary to some online commentary, may have enjoyed significant support from the Irish population and large majorities in the left and soft-left parties. (Depending on a poll in the Independent could be a dodgy proposition here, I hold this up as a hostage to fortune). Rather than calling for a touch-me-not attitude, we could take seriously the idea that Paul Murphy, Roderic O'Gorman and Sinn Féin, are in touch with the anti-government convictions of their constituents. 

The cohort which turned out seems to fit a pattern we have seen in Europe over the past decade; self-employed, beneficiaries of subsidies, in or related to the agricultural logistics sector signalling their hostility to decarbonisation and demanding insulation from higher costs arising from geopolitically-driven supply shocks. In an Irish context though this is distinct; the extent of our imports render us immediately vulnerable to rising fuel costs. There are a number of indicators that this crisis will be uniquely severe, its duration is indeterminate and the twenty-six counties are already a high-cost economy with an infrastructure underdeveloped relative to headline figures regarding wealth and wages, a distortion which has only become more pronounced since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Since 2022 food prices have gone up ~25%. Energy and housing utilities are up 37%, insurance ~22%. (As per the CSO) 30% of households are estimated to be in energy poverty, ~320k (~1 in 7 electricity customers) are in arrears at the end of last year and up to 26% of gas customers. (Stories from the Irish Examiner, Threshold and the Journal). The majority of these arrears are long-term, signalling a deepening crisis of inability to pay, which is of course skewed towards the unemployed and those who are suffering from illnesses keeping them out of work. Wages have risen ~11 - 12% but these increases are concentrated in IT and professional services, pulling the average up. (Again, CSO). Those working in accommodation and retail are also coming from a lower level, meaning their disposable income is hit first, and harder. None of this will be news to those with experience of Ireland's k-shaped economy in which aggregates conceal the divergence. 

Vincent Bevins would tell us that under present circumstances — an effectively leaderless campaign with inchoate objectives organised around social media, a weak left — we should prepare for this to rebound to the benefit of a populist right. The danger is even greater than in those case studies Bevins offers, given the radicalistion which the right has undergone in the past decade and the concentrated character of hybrid warfare waged by American tech oligarchs and their algorithms. This seems to me to be the likely outcome, but I do not think it is inevitable and the crucial question to answer is why PBP's years old cost of living campaign has failed to resonate in the same way. 

It is great to see so many expressing their position on the protests via a commitment to Marx's writings, but his most important concept in an applied analysis is contradiction; the non-identity of social forces and the means they adopt to pursue what they collectively intuit to be their interests. That support for a movement which opposes a carbon tax movement pulls in 50% of the Green Party might tell us there are serious and growing numbers of people squeezed to the extent that they will accept to short to medium term discomfort such is the strength of their anti-FFG sentiment.

This is all of interest to me as someone who thinks about social change and beyond that how new political coalitions might begin to emerge and articulate a concentrated opposition to the very wealthy having such a determining role in terms of how our society is organised. As far as politics goes this is of particular interest to the radical left, who need a social third term to strengthen their position. One of the reasons for a recent split within the Irish left between the largest – but still of course very small – revolutionary left party, People Before Profit, and one of the three organised factions within it, Red Network, was on the question of the constituencies towards which organisational efforts within the party should be directed. Both sides of this disagreement represent themselves as being oriented towards the working class as you'd expect, but RN accuse PBP of gravitating more towards a student layer in practice; historically these have certainly represented the core of their volunteer cadre. RN’s preferred approach is contained in the slogan ‘pivot to the estates’, those parts of the Dublin outside the immediate city centre built up from the 30s onwards such as Cabra Ballymun or Crumlin, as part of Dublin Corporation efforts to clear the tenements and inner city slums.

This is far from a policy paper or an attempt to adjudicate sets of political or personal disagreements with data but since the material is there to be visualised I thought it could be an interesting case to consider.

Methods

I began by pulling the relevant .csv down from the CSO website and taking it into R. I dropped any ‘Other’, ‘Not Stated’ and ‘Total’ columns and, on an iterative basis, any non-illustrative others which were interfering with the results down the line. I dropped any columns with a standard deviation of 0 and any highly-correlating pairs, though I made sure I was always keeping the class coded variables in there.

Occupations

Some of the stuff we’re interested in here are elementary occupations, managers, directors and senior officials, the skilled trades (the upper tier of the working class) the self-employed, farmers and agricultural workers. I aggregated professional and managerial technical workers into a Professional Managerial Class column, and grouped a working-class precariat compound variable by summing the number of unskilled and semi-skilled workers. I also summed long-term unemployment and permanent disability arising from poor health into a single variable.

Education

People with a third-level education and over, those with a primary-only education or school leavers.

Housing

Social housing is very important here obviously, whether being rented from a local authority or a co-operative, as well as private rentals and owned properties (mortgaged or owned-outright). Having no internet internet access or a high room density (which we estimate by a weighted room count) could also be telling us important stuff.

Transport

Transportation by rail as compared to a van could be informative, as well as having no access to a car, which can be a symptom of deprivation in places off railway lines.

One health warning I’d signal about this is that these days points are self-identified; poorer areas skew higher for ‘Other’ and ‘Not Stated’ returns, so I think this is decent grounds for saying collecting data through statutory forms doesn’t work as effectively as you move down the social scale. Rich people love being interpolated.

Analysis

Principal Components Analysis is one of the more straightforward methods we can use to simplify large, complicated datasets for exploratory analysis, think of it as holding the spreadsheet up and looking at it from different angles. Out of simplified and normalised correlations it draws out new variables which are optimised for explaining the patterns of covariance, and this will allow us to differentiate every small area into one of a selection of ideal-types or categories.

Finding the right number of categories – are we just interested about rural versus urban or are there distinctions within the two? – can be a matter of interpretation, so I went with a number which did the most to reduce the sum of the squared difference between each data point and each cluster’s mean. Simply put: what number gave us the most in-group coherence. The number obtained here was 5.

Taking this number we then applied a new clustering method to the data, k-means, but this time we tell the algorithm: there are five ideal types here, bin every Small Area into one of these five bins.

Results

Just before getting into these cohorts I just want to signal: you can’t call these classes as such I don't think. What they do represent are models for understanding parts of the twenty-six counties which are reasonably coherent from a demographic and social point of view. The classed nature of space isn’t my forte, but I’m sure David Harvey or Lefebvre have stuff on it.

Urban Professional Renters (~473k)

The defining feature in these areas is the 56.3% private rental rate, which is the highest in any cluster. Combined with high levels of professional employment (37.7%), degree-level education (38.5%), work-from-home rates (37.3%), no car (34.8%), and high residential density (0.69 people per room), this is the young urban graduate class in the cores of all Irish cities.

The high level of education polarisation tells us there is a significant unskilled workforce in hospitality and delivery; these cohorts might co-exist in unevenly gentrified areas but are economically distinct. There’s also a residual legacy of public housing at 8.2%.

Some examples here would be the Dublin Docklands, inner city apartments, Cork and Galway city centres.

Deprived Working Class / Socially Excluded (~1.09M)

This is the most disadvantaged cluster across nearly every indicator, with the highest levels of social housing (25.9%), long-term unemployment (4.4%), disability affecting work (8.2%), early school leaving (18.9%) poor health (3.1%) smoking (18.9%), no internet access (13%) and lowest numbers for attainment of s third-level education (12.8%). The educational polarisation is low here because there it is homogenously low-educated. Some levels of van commuting and skilled trades (11.9%) suggest some population of manual or construction workers but these are outnumbered by those outside the labour market.

Some of the most populous areas I see coming through here are Poppintree, Darndale, Mullhuddart and Jobstown, so any revolutionary left organisation should probably measure its strength by its presence in these places. More seriously, whatever concrete differences in tactics might be, I think this probably bears out RNs analysis, with the proviso that halting sites represent a confounding variable; long-term labour market exclusion can represent a bit of a blocker for a workerist (non-pejorative) politics.

Settled Rural and Provincial Mainstream (~1.77M)

53.3% own their houses, 30.4% have a mortgage, we’re talking about a level of owner-occupation of 84%. The employment pattern is more balanced than places we’ve seen so far with significant skilled trades (20.6%) and professionals (41.5%). There is a substantial farming presence, 9.3% farmers, 2.8% agricultural workers. Low rail commuting and high van use as we’d expect at 0.4% and 11.2% respective. Only 4.8% don’t have a car.

This is rural Ireland, provincial towns and suburban communities outside the commuter belt like Ennis, Mullingar, Tullamore, rural Cork Galway or Mayo.

Suburban Mortgage Belt / Aspirational Middle Class (~1.03M population)

This is where people have made the transition from private rentals to home ownership and are living in the new expanding commuter-belt estates experiencing rapid, but of course still insufficient, housing development. There is lower deprivation than in Cluster 2, but they’re under more pressure than 3 or 5.

There is high professional employment (41%) and moderately high Level 8+ attainment (28.3%). There is a significant private rental market at (23.6%) and high education polarisation (2.09) reflecting a mixed community of graduates and non-graduates. Moderate levels of working from home (29.8%), low numbers of people with no car (7.6%) or internet (3.7%).

Some examples here would be Naas, Balbrigaan, Cork or Limerick commuter zones.

Cluster 5 — Established Affluent Professional Class (924k)

This is the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy across almost every positive indicator, with > 50% in professional occupations, 1 in 10 working as managers or directors, over 40% with a Level 8 or over, almost 50% own their house outright. The level of poor health and long-term unemployment is at an unbelievable 1% and only 1 in 10 smoke. That 50% level of working from home indicates the importance of the knowledge-economy in this employment base, I think. Worth noting the high level of educational polarisation, clearly there’s a domestic, hospitality and care workforce on hand in these areas. Think of Dublins 4 6 14, Killiney, Foxrock, Blackrock, Salthill, Montenotte, real belly of the beast areas.

Once I can suss out the existence of an equivalent dataset for the six counties I'll run all this again and see if I can skew any categories.

My perspectives on this are complicated. Ending partition would be the righting of an historical injustice, but one of its less important facets. I am ashamed of how badly citizens of the twenty-six counties have performed in making a state for which people have given and taken life. There has been significant economic and social advancement from the state’s foundation, a creditable record of cultural achievement, neutrality and international co-operation, but this is a record which is being undone by extremes of wealth inequality, a NATO or Atlanticist alignment; further evidence if any were needed of a regnant visionlessness given such affiliations are in their autumn years. A depressing index of the direction of travel can be seen in the results of a 2023 ARINS poll, which notes that lower-earners in the twenty-six counties increasingly align with loyalists in their racist views, a constituency which until a few years, I would have thought was confined to the cultures of imperial or ex-imperial nation states.

My personal preference would be for a socialist republic. By ‘socialist’ I mean an economy subject to democratic control, towards the moderation or abolition of class differences and the universal provision of socialised goods such as education, housing and childcare. It would be militarily neutral and advocate for peace and the rights of oppressed peoples in international bodies. By republic I mean something more symbolic. A secular state, a constitutional commitment to anti-sectarianism and asylum for those fleeing persecution or hardship. I regard this as having more pertinence for a growing (but still relatively small) immigrant population rather than just Protestant or unionist - a finding I found amusing in that poll I mentioned above arose from EU or non-EU participants who asked why there shouldn’t be reserved ministerial or veto powers for them - because I see the state having a leadership role to play in undermining rather than encourage the efforts of unionists who would seek to undermine or sabotage the functioning of the state.

Though this is the sole vision for a United Ireland I would be excited by its prospects are remote. The closest thing to this model is something like Cuba during the Cold War, which existed under a highly specific set of circumstances, attested to by the lack of other exemplars. There is also the chance that Castro was history in fatigues and doesn’t come along only once in a century, but I digress; in the advanced industrial capitalist societies of the type that exist on both states on the island, there are no present models for a successful movement for universal rights. No currently existing organisation has a convincing map for doing it in the absence of a landless peasantry, let alone with the combined presence of a petty-bourgeois property owning class and a not entirely separate population of wage earners too internally differentiated to enforce their interests, whether they have any in common or not.

Until recently the momentum seemed to be behind a post-historical demographic drift, which would follow the trajectory of Sinn Féin’s moderation into a responsible party of government and capitalise on the twenty-six county state’s status as a low-regulation / high consumption economy, highly integrated with European and USian markets. We saw this in SF’s unexpectedly high showing in the 2020 General Election, seemingly driven by a generalised frustration with FFG’s failures on resolving the many systemic issues besetting the state, foremost among which is the shortage of available housing. COVID was the first of the number of crises which have set this agenda back by knocking SF into its current pattern of confusion and vacillation, as anti-social elements were catalysed against lockdown and immigrants, encouraged both directly and indirectly by USian tech oligarchs and a partitionist D4-centric media innately hostile to those who seek to transform the nature of the state or state institutions, however modestly. The result is plain to see: climate denialists in office and SF’s disgraceful and self-defeating capitulation to anti-trans and anti-immigrant positions.

I hold two contradictory ideas in my head at the same time here. If SF do decide to get their act together I am confident a broad coalition supportive of a decommodifying and anti-anti-immigration politics is there for them to win - a constituency to which the Catholic nationalist working class in the north would be fundamental. But this is not solely a dynamic of betrayal at the top, but a symptom of contemporary political parties’ relative thinness. Professionalisation and PR-driven politics rooted in participation in state institutions foment an establishment Weltanschauung in the leadership. I agree SF are betraying what I and I imagine a good proportion of their membership would regard as what is valuable in their organisations’ history, but I don’t think they’re capable of the required mobilisation from above, I think there needs to be that projection from below, which tend to only emerge in an extraordinary situation.

My prediction is that inter-capitalist competition and instability arising out of the decline of the US, disorganisation at a European level, the rise of China will shape even the most economistic demands; cost of living crises further stoked by anti-immigrant politics, rising food prices. Decarbonisation opening issues of sourcing from a China which plans to move on Taiwan. This will create opportunities, but as anyone who lives in the six will tell you it can also generate fatalism; debates about Jesus Christ taking the place of concrete actions to fill potholes for example.

That unforeseen circumstances arising out of turbulence and crisis is what shapes geo-political boundaries can be seen firstly in how dated Brexit has become as O’Leary’s most significant macro referent and secondly in the choice of case studies or examples. Germany, Korea, Cyprus, the unity of Syria and Egypt, lack applicability to the present context. However O’Leary can’t be faulted for not seeing the future, or rooting policy discussion in potential ruptures. His work has continued within ARINS and the central lesson he seeks to extract from his account is the importance of preparation, detail and consultation. Well-taken points. But I’m struggling to find the space is for policy and contemporary governance sa lá atá inniu ann. I think we have Facebook brain from below and ‘anything we can do, we can do’ at the top. The problem isn’t state architecture, policy design or messaging but breaking the monopoly a managerial centrism has on this issue.

I remember the strangeness of first encountering people from Dublin’s southside in Irish and French-language summer camps. They had completely different accents, uniformly dyed-blond hair, their skin was orange, they were jacked to an extent that went way beyond the lads who played sport in my year. With the exception of those who were funny or insightful on an individual basis I didn’t have a lot to do with them, choosing to follow around the goths or weed-smokers from Kilkenny or Waterford. I went to a public school, but in the most affluent northside suburb, a parent had to engage in legalism to get them to accept me in a way that underlined her connections with the area, as we had only recently moved into the catchment. This is nothing like the extent of the social engineering these schools go in for, mandating applicants live south of the Liffey, kowtowing to psychotic anxieties parents and teachers have over class / race mixing, or that admission rights hinging on birth might be withdrawn.

None of this is examined much in Irish culture. The historical high-point of political engagement in modern Literary Fiction, which I tend to date to the seventies, was more detained by the self-mythologising travails of the shabby Protestant aristocrat or a fatalistic naturalism in rural Ireland than the very real set of social developments which integration into the post-war world market were driving. As for today, forget about it. What Richard Did, a really good film, is the sole exception I can think of (of course the director comes from this whole milieu) and one thing it absolutely nails is the subtle anti-Irishness, or rather the impulse these people have to regard their position as more of a function of England or United States. From Seamus Deane:

if Ireland could afford pluralism, it would not be for the Ireland we know. What we have instead is a dilapidated version of pluralism, media-led, centred in Dublin 4, a mini-metropolis that regards the rest of Ireland as the hinterland of its benighted past.

Turn on the radio. Read a newspaper. Don’t actually do either of these things, because you will immediately be confronted by that severe loyalty to an unreflective Atlanticism and its attendant lack of interest in reading or knowledge beyond the borders of partisanship. The author negatively evaluates this narrowness relative to French intellectual life, which is up for debate I think — what forms of knowledge were venerated and why? — but whatever it was its twilight is definitely announced by the elevation of e.g. Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Left me wondering about how many theories of the ruling class emphasise their failures to develop certain forces or capacities according to models established elsewhere, their rootedness in superseded philosophical frameworks, a banality that has not in any way interfered with their record of non-stop winning.

The Muslim Brotherhood, an organisation founded a few decades earlier with the aim of preserving the core values of Islam, rejecting what it saw as the decadent modernising ideas coming from the west, was initially supportive, until Nasser suppressed all political parties as divisive agents of colonialism. The Palestinian branches of the Muslim Brotherhood therefore operated primarily in the Jordanian-administered West Bank, under headquarters in Amman. Unlike most political parties the Brotherhood did not seek to implement structural change through direct action or political processes, but rather worked towards individual salvation through recitations of the Quran or discussions of religious texts. They were given a relatively free hand by authorities, as they were seen as a useful means of sapping the energies of the other political currents (communists / Ba’athists / Nasserists) and crucially did not engage in violence against Israeli targets, though they did occasionally co-operate with these nationalist parties in the context of resistance campaigns or mobilisations. Their status was formalised in 1973 with the establishing of the Islamic Complex welfare network in which doctors, dentists, pharmacists and engineers educated abroad provided charitable medical and educational services. At the same time they waged campaigns against other Palestinians, attacking cinemas, cafés, libraries and individuals whose behaviour did not align with their ideological standards. A particularly acrimonious feud with the PFLP was downstream from these ideological disagreements.

1967 marked the beginning of a phase of defeats for the Arab nationalist movements: the Six-Day War, Black September, the PLA’s defeat in Gaza, the crushing of the DFLP in Jordan. It was in this context that the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine (PIJ) was founded, fusing Islamist ideology and Palestinian nationalism with anti-colonial thought. These secular tendencies gave it a more materialist character than the Brotherhood and the Iranian Revolution in 1979 seemed to strengthen their view that Islam rather than mainstream Arab nationalism, or indeed socialism, was a promising vehicle for political transformation.

PIJ’s disagreements with the Muslim Brotherhood arose from their greater degree of liberalism on social issues — PIJ was more focused on violent resistance to the Israelis than unmarried couples holding hands — but there were also organisational and generational questions here; they criticised the Islamic Complex for its passivity and the Brotherhood became anxious about a younger generation of Islamists with a desire for a more confrontational policy. This is the context in which Hamas is founded. Contrary to the meme, it was not a creation of Israeli intelligence.

Hamas’ 1988 charter was unambiguously anti-Semitic and seemed to attribute responsibility for the French and Russian Revolutions to the Jews. This was revised in 2017 to recognise the distinction between Judaism and Zionism, to adopt human rights or international law as a moral and political baseline rather than religion and to signal a willingness to compromise on the legitimacy of the Israeli state in the context of a two-state solution.

The more recent gains these organisations made after years of obscurity derives from the increasing disillusionment with the so-called peace process and the worsening of conditions for the Palestinians following the imposition of the Oslo Accords. Settlers confiscated 51k additional acres between 1993 and 2000, fragmenting the Occupied Territories into enclaves. Everyone entering or leaving Gaza, or even certain neighbourhoods had to go through fortified checkpoints while politicians in the PLO or PA were granted VIP passes.

Hamas and PIJ’s tactics included the organisation of protests, demonstrations, but they also pioneered suicide bombing as a means of demoralising the Israeli population and thwarting the peace process by weakening Arafat as a representative. The Israeli response was one of extreme brutality; fifty Palestinians were killed and more than 1k injured in the first five days of the Second Intifada, which constrained the capacity of the leadership to call for moderation; this was a godsend to Hamas and the PIJ. Both organisations began to collaborate more often either with each other or brigades within the PFLP, subject to factional strength and geography. Suicide bombing as a means of wearing Israeli civilians down was a failure. The international environment post 9/11 was less favourable to terrorism as a political tactic and the bombings seemed to steel Israeli resolve, making targeted assassinations of the leadership more popular. This is a large part of the reason why they have fallen off as a tactic in the years since.

In order to prevent the kind of crackdowns which would have destroyed the leadership Hamas is divided into political, military and social / welfare service wings. Within each of these is the usual contradiction between the indigenous leadership and those in the diaspora. Over time these have fed into a greater disconnect between the moderates abroad — who might be oriented towards a ceasefire in pursuit of greater legitimacy or popularity — and hardliners grappling with a military enemy in a far more immediate sense — who may be, for example, planning an insurgency with an anti-Shiite character. This is a matter of material conditions rather than just personality; Mahmoud al-Zahar was viewed in the 90s as a dove — he received death threats from the Qassam Brigades for discussing a peace agreement with Israel — but in 2003 Israel tried to assassinate him by dropping explosives on his house. His son was killed and his daughter was maimed, which has moved him to a far less conciliatory position.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad boycotted the presidential election of 2005 as they had earlier PA elections in line with their rejection of the Oslo Process and the Palestinian Authority, but in 2006 Hamas contested them, downplaying their conservative message and its advocacy of armed resistance in favour of a reform and change agenda, seeking to take the PA from Fatah to strengthen the resistance. They took 74 seats to Fatah’s 45 in a 132 member assembly, on 44% of the vote. As confrontations between Fatah and Hamas began to escalate, a prisoners' group from many different resistance organisations called for a unified front. However Fatah cracked under pressure exerted by Israel, the US and attempted a coup. Hamas carried out its own counter-coup, taking power in Gaza. Israel imposed a siege, reduced the amount of goods and fuel entering the strip to a minimum, ceased exports and turned the area into an open air prison. The EU and US boycotted the Gazan government.

Hamas struggled to govern according to the requirements or desires of their constituents while satisfying their rank-and-file’s impatience for resistance. The military brigades complained at being reduced to the status of a border control force, arresting militants attempting to carry out attacks as a means of keeping the peace against Israel represents one of their own points of leverage. An increasing perception that negotiations are useless facilitated the increasing popularity of the PIJ. Hamas has also been unlucky in its attempts to negotiate the changing situation in the region after the Arab Spring. Its bet that events in Syria and Egypt would go a different direction than they did let to a cut in funding coming from Iran. The PIJ succeeded in keepin the Republic on board by maintaining a studied neutrality on the potential for democratisation. These diplomatic failures, for which the outside leadership was largely responsible, allowed for the strengthening of the Qassam brigades, who developed additional breathing room through revenue generated from what’s referred to as the tunnel economy. Qassam also preserved ties to Iran and over time increased their presence on Hamas’ political bureau.

Sinwar was initially perceived as a hardliner but made clear his support for peaceful popular resistance and that another war was not in Hamas’ interests. He sought negotiations towards a long-term truce with Israel and reconciliation with Abbas and the PA. A turning point came with the Great March of Return in 2018, an attempt to revive the peaceful march as a tactic of mass resistance. Palestinians of all ages, genders, political and social groups committed to the cause of peace marched to the border. Despite the fact that it was primarily a cultural mobilisation, with field clinics, culture live music dancing, poetry and weddings, in an optimistic atmosphere, Israeli snipers shot and killed civilians and medical staff. At the end of the protests at least 10k people were injured including 2k children. This, along with the ongoing normalisation of relations with Israel across the region, made clear that Hamas had not gained much by taking administrative control of Gaza. October 7 arises out of this bleak scenario.

Skare is sceptical that PIJ and Hamas’ prominence point to a sharp religious turn in the Palestinian resistance movement, describing the extent of Fatah’s religiosity — Arafat’s use of the Quran and oral teachings from the Hadith, separation of boys and girls in the youth organisation, Arafat’s dismissal of the DFLP’s idea of a secular democratic state, Fatah’s founders being Brotherhood members — to make the case that the secular tendencies of the left-wing or Marxist groups can be overstated. The PIJ and Hamas are also working in a different international context, after the decline of communism and developmentalist decolonisation as an international force. In actuality this is not that much of a stark leap from one motor of history to another. If you, like me, are of the totally unbiased point of view that James Connolly is the most interesting figure in the history of Marxist internationalism you will find a lot that is of interest in these arguments, given Connolly was a devout Catholic — more than once being denounced from the pulpit of his own church as one of his daughters recalled — while also being a one-man Zimmerwald left completely isolated from the Second International.

In some reviews of this book coming from an Ordotrotskyist position there is some snobbery about social conservatism within revolutionary movements, which I can comprehend, but at the risk of making excuses — organisations have to answer for their positions — it is not the case that the history of putatively secular or internationalist labour movements have in practice always chosen class over chauvinism, of whatever type. I get the sense that at times these are not being weighed according to the same standards. This is all complicated by how contemporary political parties lay claim to the past, e.g. culture wars over Seán South’s anti-communism or the intentions behind Jimmy Steele’s 1969 speech.

This book is hugely informative and I would recommend it without reservation. If I had one criticism to make I would say there’s a few weeks more editing in this, with a fair amount of repeated information across chapters. Introduction features a critique of something called 'postmodern historians' via Mieksins Wood, Hiroo Onoda vibes.

In its abstract form the distinction Brenner draws here is not a synthetic one between internal and external markets — though when applied to actual historical instances, it can very easily go that way — rather it attempts to clarify the switch, the moment when markets become the required means of surviving and reproducing as a class. This is no longer choice. This is the first time that, in order to continue to exist tenant farmers, faced with higher than average costs from backward production methods, have to specialise and provide for enclosure or farm buildings to prevent falling back on their rent. This is the first time a ruling class has to act according to the maximisation of surplus and the development of productive force. Its agency is no longer a factor, its brain has been switched out with competition.

Historians, economists, Marxists such as Arrighi, Wallerstein, Banaji, Frank — hereafter referred to by the blunt shorthand of World-Systems Theorists (WSTs) — are open to seeing capitalism arising out of the commercial networks beginning in the Italian city states / north-western Europe in early modernity, to incorporate the Mediterranean, the slave trade in sub-Saharan Africa and plantations in the Americas. According to WSTs, any part of this interdependent system of exchange is capitalist, whatever its means of controlling and rewarding labourers; free labour is just one aspect, wage labour is not specifically capitalist, rather the self-expansion of capital is. This is a quantitative rather than a qualitative model. Looking to WST to isolate causes or restricted timeframes is misconceived because the real transition is not feudalism to capitalism as such but how anarchic medieval systems of power, coalesced to into concentrated capitalist power, how these uniquely* fused in Europe, facilitating territorial conquest and the creation of a world-economy. The history of capitalism (The Venetians -> the Dutch -> the English -> the Americans) is the formation of political structures endowed with more extensive and complex organisational capabilities than those previous. Relations of production as a whole moves us beyond Brenner’s short-circuit within the single separable unit, in which labour subject to any form of coercion is de facto feudal, and a world system containing it de facto pre-capitalist.

There is plenty of material in Marx’s works which supports Brenner’s labour-power exceptionalism, but it is fair to say that Marx is trying to make a specific argument about the mechanics of a pure or abstracted capitalism, and how it figures in an industrialised form in early to mid-nineteenth century England; this is the milieu in which the vast majority of his non-literary sources are dealing. Brenner is highly invested in justifying his transition hypothesis relative to Marx, but I think we shouldn’t be too worried about litigating ourselves relative to him all the time; the way capitalism continues to develop will continue to shape our understanding of the historical documents. WST comes out of a moment in which the most advanced anti-capitalist struggles were taking place in Latin America, Africa and South-East Asia. The fact that Marx’s arguments about convergence in the global economy did not stand up to the uneven, contradictory and coercive features of capitalism in these places required answers. Similarly, Brenner’s resurgent Eurocentrism corresponds in time to the relative eclipse of these struggles in the west and the ascent of a form of capitalism characterised by greater mobility or autonomy from state control. I think the rise of China, the genocide in Gaza, climate change, all point to capitalism’s more overtly political character since the GFC and have contributed to how the history of neoliberalism is being written (see: Slobodian). I would predict that over the coming years capitalist historiography will continue to bring greater degrees of attention to the history of market engineering and ruling class agency. This is all to say that, rightly or wrongly, we* are far more used to seeing capitalism in parasitic, destructive and conservative rather than improving terms; I think of sections of Capital which describe how in some branches of industry wages fall below the value of labour-power, dis-incentivising the adoption of machinery.

Anyway, Brenner argues neither specialisation of labour nor accumulation of wealth arising out of trade can account for the rise of a system characterised by a compulsion to revolutionise technical processes of labour and social composition. Profit arising out of exchange only has force when labour has been separated from ownership over the means of production and labourers have been emancipated from slavery or serfdom. In support of this Brenner argues that certain methods of agricultural improvement such as convertible husbandry, or certain forms of rotation, would have elevated output were they introduced when they were first developed in the medieval epoch. However in order to apply these new methods the lord would have had to increase their outlay on manorial supervision or find some means of rewarding the serf to a particular standard. Since labour applied to the lord’s demesne constituted a direct forcible deduction from what was applicable to the peasants’ plot, no such incentive existed and it made more sense to squeeze tenants. Feudalism therefore hindered the development of commercialised agriculture, as squeezing exhausted the soil, fuelling cyclical demographic crises. When new methods of cultivation became widespread in late sixteenth / early seventeenth century England, it was on the basis of a partnership between landlords and richer peasants. In other words, the lords were only increasing their income by relative surplus labour when they were no longer serf lords.

Underdevelopment was one way WST sought to understand why capitalism’s peripheral satellites — what we now to a large extent refer to as the Global South — were forced into becoming export-dependent cash crop economies, the economic surplus expropriated to facilitate the concentration of greater levels of skill and capitalisation in the core. Brenner’s explanation is that it is only in certain countries that labour power can become a commodity and what happened in the Carribean or Latin America ensured there was nothing that could be done to more profitably stimulate investment or productive capacity.

There is a hydraulic character to these arguments.When Brenner challenges Wallerstein’s description of serfdom declining due to changing land-labour ratios putting serfs in a better bargaining position, Brenner says bargaining assumes serfs have already gained their freedom. I think this is indicative of the way Brenner is after formal definitions and would exclude any conception of bargaining-towards-freedom, seeing this as a process rather than something that can only happen when its accomplished. Capitalists could improve because they had to and it is their impulse towards improvement that makes them capitalists. Serfdom is the absence of bargaining; it can’t be serfdom if there is bargaining. Capitalism’s rise cannot be attribute to ‘money’, ‘trade’, ‘the production of commodities’ or ‘merchant capital’ as these all depend on a class structure which precedes them. Under this functionalist model it is impossible to see the emergence of different but equally capitalist systems of labour control, or understand its constructed or agentic character. I hope at this stage it’s clear that Brenner’s model is not one that can accommodate dialectics, we know that as soon as he insists on the closed character of national economies, particularly in an early modern period. Not seeing social processes in motion in general is like talking to someone from the moon for me, whenever I read Althusser I feel like I’m hearing someone talk through a wall, but the idea that concentration of land in England has nothing to do with the expropriation of Ireland in the context of the Plantations is dead wrong, dead dead wrong. Hope to write on this question specifically soon.

All criticism is self-criticism and there are these moments in his profiles of slightly off-piste intellectuals when I think it would be plausible to see him as talking about himself, and given his age this gets harder and harder to do because deep intellectual history, as he plays it, can't really be done his way anymore. Younger generations of critics don’t cognitively map in the same slightly Donnish manner. This is all to say that I think he's lost interest in what a younger generation he would have been aligned with politically in the past (or not, a lot of them are currently being won over by social democrats who will let them down) and is gravitating more towards national conservativism.

This is suggested firstly in a recent LRB piece in which he gave ground to the idea that immigrants were taking the jobs of domestic or indigenous workers in the west and lamented that this latter cohort wasn't consulted in any meaningful way about it. Tariq Ali's recent set of memoirs alerted me to the many ways in which the NLR editorial board is a factionalised entity and the Mandelite wing into which the most recognisable set of contributors would go were - in the late 80s early 90s anyway - in a subordinate position, both to Mieksins Wood and an alliance of what Ali describes as Croation nationalists, though he doesn't name names sadly. I may be wrong therefore in seeing his hand behind some similarly right-wing tendencies manifesting there lately. Either way I am baffled by whatever chain of decisions led to the publication of an interview with a Catholic fundamentalist New York Times columnist conducted by by the social media guy for a lobby group funded by a litany of super-exploitative MNCs with a bloody history of backing the overthrow of leftist governments in Latin America.

I say all this because Anderson introduces this book by a proud American conservative who saw nothing in Vietnam Chile Nicaragua El Salvador Guatemala Cuba Palestine Panama Indonesia and so on which would challenge his view that the United States is not an essentially benign force, or better than any available alternative.

Anderson lauds Schroder all the same for his command over European diplomatic history and his prescience in diagnosing the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a moment of imperial overreach. The essays are in chronological order and track Schroder's growing loss of faith in a party he has always supported, as it becomes more and more obstructionist, spectacle-driven and vacuous. I found myself reading a lot of it and shrugging. The left is coming down with detail-oriented accounts of Bush's imperial ventures and or the progressive derangement of the American electorate, many of which are attentive to the motivations or interests of the agents involved (rather than how elected leaders jam up the nations' institutions in uncouth ways) and also capable of seeing the long thread going from here back to Korea.

I think the bleakness of the present moment has a lot of people who might have known better flirting with stupid shit, like a twice-as-farce of the 30s, not just New York rich kids but also relatively autonomous intellectuals. One of the people blurbed on the cover once approvingly cited an article published in American Conservative to the effect that what the Belgians did in the Congo wasn't as bad as everyone says. That lack of a positive horizon for a lot of people, like the way analytical Marxism is born in a counter-revolutionary atmosphere, either brings you here, one of these 'know your enemy' frauds, or a mush of official communist iconography stretched over a thin realist geo-politics.

But I'm not impressed by conservatives who use the word hegemony. This is a cut above John Gray, but not much else. There's repetition of particular phrases close to each other, and clever syntactical adjustments to make the shunting away of more complicated discussion look elegant. Palestine all too often bracketed off as part of an undifferentiated bloc of the 'Arab states'. The final essay chides Republicans, Republicans (!) for their failures in dealing with inequality and recommends Democrats support the GOP in becoming a sane party of opposition for the good of the American political system (not that this wasn't the position of the gerontocratic leadership). What the fuck is this shit?

When we seek to define ‘fictitious capital’ there are three main varieties we can point to. Credit — the lending of money in the expectation that it will be paid later along with a bonus or dividend according to the rate of interest — is one example. Stocks and securities — titles to a share of future profits — is another and debt issued by nation states — effectively claims on tax receipts — yet another.

Money capitalists making use of these instruments do not strictly speaking contribute to productive investment. Rather than working within circuits which yield value over longer periods, they would rather exploit price differentials between markets by selling claims which inflate or deflate independently of the actual performance of the productive activities in question. They prefer to keep their money in a liquid form and gravitate towards ‘hot’ cashflows. These operators allow far more money to circulate in the economy than can be derived from actual value creation and after the intensive liberalisation projects to which capitalist economies have been subject for the past half century, have become a preponderant source of economic activity, means of capital accumulation — if employers could only invest their real savings, it would be prohibitively expensive to do so at all — but also state capture. With its attenuated regulatory order, the USian state apparatus is largely captured by the power of finance and we are all now having fun finding out how relatively autonomous a state apparatus is when the morbid symptoms of this order is propelled into the cockpit.

This all has enormous consequences for how our societies are currently organised. Ferdinand Braudel’s reading of financialisation as an autumnal phase of capitalist development is legible everywhere in growing indebtedness, inequality and declining in investment / productivity, even as higher profits are levied from the Global South. We know from any number of economists and historians that understood abstractly capitalism tends towards monopoly and that it is highly anarchic. Large companies of systemic importance to the operation of global markets depend on financing that rests on profitability and vice versa at different times and to different extents. If these are not in the same place at the same time, the music stops.

Bretton-Woods, the international monetary system envisioned by John Maynard Keynes in the aftermath of World War II, would rest on a rules-based order that could not be manipulated by larger states. Gold would be retained as the anchor of the system against which the dollar would have its price fixed. Every other nation state would then fix their currency against the dollar and any changes would be determined co-operatively via the supra-national International Monetary Fund (IMF), if it was needed to correct a fundamental disequilibrium in the state’s current account, ensuring economic operators benefited from stability in the prices of the main currencies.

As the twentieth century continued US imperial strategy began to chafe within this dispensation. The Vietnam War brought the US into a structural deficit, further stretched by the US’ dominance in western European markets. The US could have stabilised the dollar by winding down its death-drive - withdrawing from the affairs of other countries or reducing its imports - but the Nixon administration instead destroyed Bretton-Woods by raising interest rates, pressuring Gulf states to raise the price of oil, putting European and Japanese economies into trade deficit and creating a new system of private international lending that would dwarf the IMF and the World Bank. Over time The Brits, the Germans, the French, the Italians were all forced to wind their capital controls down. This strengthened not only the capitalist class, which embarked on an offensive against organised labour in the seventies and eighties, but also the American state itself, now liberated from the same balance of payments restraints to which other nations are subject. If a state is heavily in deficit questions may arise as to whether they will be able to pay off their loans. They may need to sell their foreign exchange reserves, appeal to the IMF or cut back their purchases from abroad, which will have a depressive effect. There is no room for co-operation here in the final instance. According to rules set by the stronger nations, currency stability depends on a state’s creditworthiness, which means integration into American markets.

Writing on subjects like this, which are just that little bit beyond my understanding at present, and therefore compiled to a large extent from notes I’m taking from a few different sources, is spurred by my wish to begin to understand the mechanics of capitalism today. For better and for worse, the people most interested in doing the work in the data mines are Keynesians or post-Keynesians, whose heuristics are short to medium-term in scope and pragmatic in nature: a more federal Europe to facilitate more robust investment strategies, dovishness on inflation / allowing public debt to roll, clarifying or potentially democratising the role of central banks. From what I can gather, and this is a hostage to future reading, this amounts to ‘leaning in’ to historical developments already underway. We know banks are central to the metabolism of the global economy. This requires governments, particularly those whose investments and currencies are relatively preponderant in global markets, to interfere in their operations, even though the regnant ideological position — perhaps until very recently — has been one of laissez-faire, out of a wish to avoid raising expectations among the public that large-scale fiscal intervention may be undertaken for the purposes of downward, as opposed to upward, wealth re-distribution. In short, it suits the capitalist class to present the operation of banking as beyond the reach of politics but as the world becomes less stable this becomes an increasingly difficult fetish to maintain.

The Keynesian solution is to re-distribute systemic risk at a higher level of complexity, rather than abolishing or neutralising the central antagonism of value creation for the public good value versus the baroque universe of finance capitalism I’ve been trying to outline here. I do not like coming back a fundamental antagonism when there’s no social agent at the far end, but I keep looking over my shoulder in the hope it will will show up.

So if you’re interested in receiving a copy reach out and let me know. Warning: it won’t be anything special, it will be a5, on printer paper and bound in those plastic spines they use for theses.

Victor Serge

I am starting up a reading group around the works of the revolutionary and second greatest novelist of the last century Victor Serge. This will be in-person and held on a monthly basis in Dublin, so if you live there you’re very welcome, reach out for details. If you don’t I encourage you to start your own. If you have other responsibilities or work or happen to be passing through the city at any stage over the next year get in touch anyway, since finishing my PhD I find I have less day-to-day conversations about books and history and I think we could all do with more of it.

Cradle Song

When I was carrying you in my womb,
things were not going well for us at all
and I often said: the one I am carrying
is coming into a bad world.
And I said to myself, You must see to it
That he at least makes no mistake,
The boy I’m carrying must see to it,
That the world is a better place.
And I saw mountains of coal with a fence around them.
I said: don’t be miserable! The one I am carrying
will make sure that this coal warms him.
And I saw bread behind windows
and it was denied to the hungry.
The one I am carrying, I said, will make sure
that this bread feeds him.
When I was carrying you in my womb, I often said quietly to myself:
“You, the one I am carrying in my womb,
you must be unstoppable.”

Second Poem

When years ago, studying the goings-on on the Chicago wheat exchange
I suddenly understood how the world’s wheat was administered.
Yet, at the same time, failed to understand – and put down the book,
I saw at once:
You’ve hit upon something bad…

There was no bitterness in me, nor was I terrified
By the injustice – only I thought and I thought –
That’s not the way. No, not the way they’re doing it…

These people, I saw, lived from the harm
They do to others, instead of the good.
A situation that can only continue to exist
Through crime; bad for most human beings.
So every achievement of reason,
Invention and discovery
Must lead to ever greater misery.

Such and the like were my thoughts at that moment,
Far removed from anger or lamentation,
As I put down the book describing
The wheat market and the exchanges of Chicago…
Great pain and discontent were in store for me.

Third Poem

Recently I found my spectator.
On a dusty street
He held a power-drill in his fist.
For a brief moment he looked up. And I quickly
Pitched my theatre between the houses. He
looked up expectantly.
In the bar
I found him again. He stood at the counter
Sweat-stained; he was drinking, in his hand
A sandwich. Quickly I pitched my theatre. He
Looked up amazed.
Today
Luck was with me again.
In front of the railway depot
I saw him jostled by rifle-butts
Amid drum-beats – being hustled into war.
Right there, in the middle of the crowd,
I pitched my theatre. Over his shoulder
He looked back towards me:
And nodded.

German Satire

The chiefs of state
Have gathered in a room.
Man in the street:
Give up all hope.

The governments
Write non-aggression pacts.
Little man:
Write your testament.

Fourth Poem

I am sitting by the roadside,
the driver is changing the wheel.
I do not like it where I have come from.
I do not like it where I am going.
Why do I watch the wheel change
With impatience?

These essays are not strong as arguments. There are a lot of phrases which move us along quickly (‘Most critics would agree’, ‘few address themselves’) or summing up centuries of critical habits (‘since the Renaissance’) by going Plato → Philo → Freud / Marx and the discussions of each are very fundamentally wrong. The Marxist and psychoanalytic critical toolkits are, contra a set of highly reductive examples, open and eclectic, so again Sontag is not looking to settle terms really. This is a polemic that enacts the method it advocates, it is a seduction of the reader into an alliance against philistine moralisers and historicists, terms she uses in a very uninspired and censorious essay on Lukács.

I think we can grasp the appeal of this position in the present moment when there is absolutely a profusion of literalising critiques, e.g. Marty Supreme is bad because the main character is not likeable, Killers of the Flower Moon shouldn’t have been about Leonardo DiCaprio or David Foster Wallace is bad because he supposedly has a demographic (it’s a fact that 70% of Substack is this piece), but Sontag is moving beyond the quite correct point that this is reductive, saying that criticism must reject levels or structure for transparency. It is aesthetic where smaller is beautiful, never totalising, never a world-view or an argument, always a little guy. It must also be sex, this is a point that is made a number of times.

Where is the sinew here? I think: Sontag’s commas and delicate handling of big words. In referring to the ‘Superior kinds of energy, vitality expressiveness incarnated’ in Paradise Lost. Descriptions of ‘excitation, phenomenon of commitment, judgement in a state of thralldom or captivation…an experience of the form or style of knowing something, rather than a knowledge of something (like a fact or a moral judgement) in itself’. The assonance in ‘sensuous surface of art’. The balance between the technical and woozy in the phrase ‘sublime neutrality’. How far this goes with you will depend on your personal preferences. I personally find it gauzy. Citing Homer and Shakespeare as neutral is to take a willfully amnesiac position on their concerns just because they happen to be removed from our own, requiring a working knowledge of the Reformation, war, city-states, absolutism. She’s also introducing sensuousness to the thing-in-itself, an ironic lapse given Sontag’s concern with the dangers totalising criticism poses to the particular clearly shares a family resemblance with Adorno’s critique of identity. What does it mean to be on the surface of Thomas Mann or Come and See?

Style has a definitive concrete existence. It is encountered and compiled in the course of the encounter a reader has with it. It exists simultaneously in abstraction from that encounter, being constituted and reconstituted out of the irreducible set of events which takes place between viewer and text: inspecting the material, identifying affinities across the personal archive one cultivates as an appreciator of such things and rendering them commensurate with others. This image is consolidated out of any number of conscious and unconscious moments inflected by institutional formations inculcating habits of reading and shaping the frameworks at the basis of these socially produced interpretations. I see plenty of freedom here, but it is a relative freedom. I am capable of enjoying fiction at the level of the sentence, but I probably favour ones about thwarted revolutionary hopes (Peter Weiss, Victor Serge, Seán Ó Faoláin). I can appreciate a novel’s architecture, but disproportionately when it addresses the transformation of a social order (Wolf Hall, Gravity’s Rainbow). So the ways human beings make sense of their environments relative to the struggle for universal emancipation is my Absolute, Sontag’s is the ride, and fair play to her.

I’ll look to the Moor in finishing and saying Sontag’s injunction to enjoy enjoy enjoy speaks to the ideology of the ruling class in a given epoch, namely that of American consumerism. It would be too easy to finish off with how many of her examples of great artists discussed at some length are Nazis or Nazi sympathisers - Riefenstahl, Genet, Bergman, Griffiths, if she didn’t have the hubris to dismiss Benjamin’s ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.

I came across Chibber’s article on how colonial plunder did not lead to capitalist development the other day and rather than finding something better to do with my time I decided to write about why it grapples with a strawman.

The headline argument that treasure =/= capitalism, is beside the point. No-one’s arguing this. Nevertheless Chibber dimisses of the work of an array of economic historians or Marxists — Wallerstein, Arrighi, Emmanuel, Braudel, Banaji — who emphasise the importance of extra-national factors to the origins of capitalism such as: trade, slavery, conquest and plunder by disputing this one claim out of a preference for a model which sees capitalism as self-sufficient in England, continuing, in effect, a polemic dispute initiated by his former mentor Robert Brenner regardless of what they said or wrote, which he does not lay out.

Chibber’s story of the transition from feudalism to capitalism is simplistic. The more I read on this stuff the less convinced I am of the idea of modes of production can be separated from the organisational state or ideological regime. I think the policy and cultural mutations of neoliberalism since, say, Hayek published The Road to Serfdom, as well as the character of China’s rise both speak to this. Feudalism -> capitalism is not a thrown switch where capital behaved one way under the former, and another way under the latter. From the article: ‘a change in the social structure of feudalism, so that you move from a feudal class structure to a capitalist class structure’ is a pure tautologism.

Marx wrote a lot of stuff and litigating debates about history via a book and a set of disconnected, often contradictory writings produced by one or two guys almost two centuries ago is for me the real example of the degeneration of debate on the left, but Chibber’s decided he’s the only one who understands Marx, so our counter-argument to some extent has to be that he doesn’t (imo: he’s pretending not to to get attention).

Marx doesn’t draw a hard distinction between capital working qua capital under capitalism versus feudalism. In the Grundrisse Marx says surplus value extraction can be found at any point in history when a particular section of society possesses a monopoly over the means of production, he goes as far back as the Normans. You have capital as such in feudalism with merchants lending, investing or using capitalism’s methods and techniques — rationalisation, subsumption, concentration — in manufacturing. Chibber is absolutely correct to point out there are constraints here: industrialisation doesn’t happen because the countryside is organised along manorial lines rather than being characterised by free labour, he talks about price fixing among the guilds. Another significant blocker is that money has not yet become generalised as a universal equivalent, pace Chibber, silver and other precious metals from the Americas helps here. Whatever constraints there were, they certainly weren’t geographic.

Chibber refers a number of times to a scholarly or academic consensus, but never mentions any names other than his friends who he’s getting all this stuff from: Brenner and Wood. Not incidentally I don’t think the consensus is actually with him on the absolute stagnation and non-capitalist nature of economic life when it was organised around towns, countryside and trade. Domestic markets were small, sure, the bulk of profit rates were derived from a capital-intensive international trade in luxury commodities. If you’re willing, like me, to take a view of capitalism which is not rooted in the highly specific social configuration of England and the Netherlands you could say capitalism emerges first overseas, or it makes no sense to differentiate because they’re related. This is where the slipperiness of dating capitalist construction to 1400 - 1500s comes in. This is two centuries, and it allows a reader to come away with the idea that: ‘oh sure it got bigger but the fundamentals were done and dusted in 1400s, you didn’t need Ireland or the Carribean at all’. Chibber doesn’t expand, he doesn’t offer any detail, no definitions other than class differentiation that arises between property holders and landless labourers, but you have this in Ancient Sumeria.

If we have to insist on a transition, we’ll say when capitalism becomes the dominant activity, just not internationally but domestically and one’s freedoms to invest and to organise are more facilitated than they are restricted by the state, which up until that point operated trade via monopolies, we might ask Chibber where these joint-stock companies were going to and what they were taking back.

Marx dates this moment to the late sixteenth and seventeenth century. He presents England as the hegemonic vehicle, under the tutelage of the Dutch and Chibber might tell me what those two countries had in common. Land seizures, plunder and the deployment of force to get indigenous populations in the West Indies and the Philippines onto plantations producing larger quantities of luxury articles to feed a domestic market and supply domestic industry with raw materials are explicitly mentioned as the means through which large landowners begin accumulating and turn people working their land into waged labourers, i.e. how the manor is eclipsed as a unit of social and political organisation. These enterprises engage in speculative activities — backed by the Dutch state’s innovations in banking and other financial technologies — which facilitates accumulation by dispossession. Chibber doesn’t mention slavery but Marx talks about how ‘the civilised horrors of over-work are grafted onto the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom etc’ and its status as a source of surplus value rises in proportion to cotton’s export. Luxemburg writes on capitalism’s rise amidst enduring forms of slavery and serfdom, if she was alive today would Chibber would say her and Marx are the trendy left?

Finally Chibber’s points on Spain’s stagnation don’t stack up. Growth Spanish agriculture and cities was significant and in some cases exceeded England’s; its domestic market for agricultural produce stimulated a process of expansion identical to the processes Chibber derives from Brenner. Over time though, Spain’s silver began to die off; Spain is not a feudal counterfactual, but England if there was no colony.

Chibber’s definition is the ‘historically unprecedented rates of growth that we see emerging in the 1500s and the 1600s in Northwestern Europe’ but it cannot be emphasised enough how this growth is absolutely dwarfed by what’s achieved in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. This is capitalism’s quantum leap in terms of yield ratios, population density, urbanisation, technological and communicational development, productivity, warfare, state capacity, you name it, this is what Brenner’s is trying to explain in the first instance, but at the same time I wouldn’t put it past Chibber to say this had nothing to do with imperialism either.

Taking the most generous interpretation of Chibber’s argument: he is correct that 300 years before England became a regnant industrial power for a century, their countryside can be characterised by a proletarianised peasantry. If we decide this is the characteristic of capitalism, that economic, social and political structures obediently fall along contemporary national boundaries, because they didn’t apply then, sure, this is where it starts. But if we’re honest about these being the disclaimers, there is nothing here of substance.

TLDR: Vivek Chibber walks into a bar. Bartender asks him what brings him to Cootehill. ‘I walked’ he replies. ‘All the way from NYU?’ says the bartender. ‘Would you not fly?’ ‘I did faith’, Chibber answers, ‘but the decisive force is in the relations internal to my legs and feet’.

Conclusions

Where do the politics of this lead us? This is centuries ago we’re talking about, England is in decline, isn’t this just a debate to allow academics like Chibber to pose as radicals with all the answers against other cohorts of radical academics with all the answers?

In the second part of the interview Chibber provides a history [sic] of anti-imperialist liberation movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but without naming names, figures, dates or countries. This contestation is framed as boiling down to two statements rather than a set of material relationships, the white man’s burden line coming from the metropole: ‘this is for your own good / economic development’ and the response: ‘no, your presence and activities here are not altruistic but self-interested’. However the Congolese, the Irish, the Haitians take all this a bit too far and say: ‘all your wealth was taken from us’. Seriously, read the piece it’s that simplistic. This is not the argument made by any anti-imperialist or dependency theorist of which I am aware and this is probably why Chibber doesn’t cite any. What the exploited masses of the Global South have failed to take account of is the Brenner hypothesis, the efficiency and improving impulses of western wage labourers and frankly they should apologise.

Chibber tells us Marxists from the Global South (no names) disproved this idea decades ago but it has come back in two manifestations, firstly with the idea that the Global North as a collective exploits the Global South. That this can, as Chibber claims, be empirically and theoretically disproven remains to be seen, no figures no sources to follow up on, but again, the question as to whether or not the Global South is collectively exploited by the North America and Western Europe does not hinge on whether or not feudal lords would switch to capitalism because they have treasure.

Secondly the race reductionism and the idea of a ‘global white supremacy’, meaning that too many leftists now read capitalism as racial. Again, no examples or sources of where these bad arguments are so I can’t engage, but I see far more kicking of a hugely overstated spectre of black nationalist and white genocide arguments on the left than I do actual instances. On the other hand Chibber’s interviewer Melissa Naschek makes the point that Chinese people aren’t white, which is not only funny but insightful too, it’s both funny and insightful.

What Chibber is trying to do is get away from the idea that workers in the west constitute a labour aristocracy, a phrase used by trendy academic idpol leftists Engels and Lenin to describe how certain workers have more in common with their bosses than other workers. What is on people like Chibber who take this point of view to explain is, if their interests are indeed aligned, why is it that the western working class have not made common cause with workers in low-wage countries making their clothes, electronics, toys and the rest of the cheap consumer catchpennies constituting the crude parody of a collective social life that we all live in.

Books written by Emmanuel and Cope (who died last year RIP) are on my to-read shelf, but from Smith and Amin I have to say I think the case that: oppression of workers in poorer countries is of direct economic benefit for those of us fortunate enough to be born in the west is pretty clear. The tech workers and stockholders of companies like Palantir creating a strata of genocide rentiers. Cheap tourism which allows us to offset the costs of our consumption to parts of the world even less equipped to deal with what’s coming than we are. Dangerous migration routes draining former colonies of their younger generations so they can bring us takeaways and clean us in our old age. Is it worth noting that Hamas have done the most to array the entirety of the western political class against an external threat more than any organisation proceeding solely on the basis of class has in my lifetime? It’s something to think about. Merry Christmas all.

The final volume in Peter Weiss’ trilogy about anti-fascism and the relationship between art and freedom appeared in English this year, so I am now in a position to verify that it is definitively the greatest novel of all time. I cannot recommend the experience of reading it slowly while patching up one’s knowledge gaps in the period as you go enough. Wrote it up here.

I was put onto Henry Williamson’s novel Tarka the Otter (1927) by Barra Ó Seaghdha’s wonderful essay on same in the Dublin Review of Books. The first thing I’ll emphasise the language. The descriptions are perfect and of that vowel-dense, affording of proper names type that will remind most people coming to this today of Heaney, albeit in an even more modal register. At about one and a half points the author, in really subtle and affecting ways, suggests that everything is everything, which is not to say that there’s any protection against violent death. This could chime with the fact that the author was a fan of Hitler and a friend of Oswald Mosley. Relatedly it reminded me of the contradictions latent within the work of so many English writers poets and musicians who have their heads turned by some idea of The Land and its historic makeup (Sinclair, Moore, Ackroyd, neo-folk, folk horror, Kingsnorth, Hughes etc. etc.). No figures here, human or animal (if it is within the spirit of the work to draw the distinction) are granted any inner life and this documentary approach means that no-one possesses any ability to understand the nature of their experience. their suffering is inexplicable, impersonal and generalised, like so much suffering is.

In The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938) CLR James provides an account of the Haitian Revolution and the brutal slave plantation system / processes of racialisation which motivated it. It owes a lot to Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (1930), both in its style, as well as its rendering of distinct social layers with their contradictory interests and impulses, how these are realised in leaders of different capabilities or strengths whose fortunes rise and decline within an over-determined situation. Don’t know if an historical moment has ever been rendered on the page as well, if you only take one recommendation on here it’s this one.

When I first read Capital my understanding was shaped to a large extent by David Harvey; his lectures were to hand and the book is difficult, I needed the help. Since going a bit deeper into Marxology I’ve come to grasp how his reading derives from his interest in spatio-temporal relations, the city and a very immediate perspective on neoliberalism. As he once said in a talk launching one of the ten books he produces every year ‘we’re in a volume two story now’, he’s here referring to financialisation, tourism and services, the realisation-driven imperative to attenuate the duration between purchase and consumption by the division of labour as well as the development of transport and communications technology.

John Smith is one of Harvey’s critics and he goes after him because Volume II is the only place he allows for imperialism to enter the picture. Smith sez Harvey misses that the defining feature of capitalism today is not the shrinking of the state, or something called the knowledge economy, but the uneven functioning of the law of value; monopoly rents allow capitalists to exploit labour in the third-world at a rate far more advantageous to themselves than they can (on average) get away with in Europe or the United States. Imperialism is not a remnant, happening in the guise of a retrograde or rent-seeking coercion, but is on its cutting-edge the wage relation. The point here is to assert the existence of a labour aristocracy against Eurocentric Marxists who say the regime the western working class lives under is either the same as the one oppressing textile workers in Bangladesh, or is in fact worse, because European and North American workers are more productive, ergo, more exploited.

Smith’s work has only become more relevant as the ruling class’ successes in activating portions of the petty-bourgeoisie and working class as the vanguard of genocidal warfare amidst climate breakdown continue to accumulate, but two developments I would hope Smith would work out if Monthly Review were to put out a new edition (rather than more paranoid nonsense about the Frankfurt School) would firstly be to move China up out of the victim of imperialism category and secondly introduce those workers existing in a less straightforward relation to the nation state, a category that Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right (2025) and Harsha Walia’s Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (2021) helped me think through.

Even though I’d always been sceptical of certain left formations tactically limiting the struggle for working-class gains within the terrain of (let’s call it what it is or would amount to) a white Volk in a position of relative advantage, I did fall for it when certain Irish Republican organisations - whose cadres do tend to be more working class than those of larger and more open radical left groups - were going to protests in e.g. East Wall, because i) I assumed they were there to try and break people off from the fascist agitators, ii) because I still do agree with Lukács that we shouldn’t expect virtue or good instincts from the exploited iii) I was in the grip of some idea that getting rights and entitlements for refugees was a necessary step rather than the objective in itself. I came away from Walia knowing that I haven’t left the twentieth century in my thinking at all and I need to read a lot more before I have. Melinda Cooper’s Family Values (2017) is one that was recommended by one of the heads in a similar vein and I hope to get to it next year.

Victor Serge was born into a Narodnik family in exile from Tsarist repression. He moved around radical political circles in Europe (check out the first half of Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1951) for more on this), was imprisoned for his membership of an anarchist organisation (Men in Prison (1930)) and moved back to Russia after 1917 to assist in building the Soviet order. Reading Serge takes me back to having those first transporting experiences with poetry and prose which, for me anyway, were derived from works which by my own standards now were far too rich in sentiment and yearning and glorifications of nature. Tempering this mode with the language of officialdom and deprivation - material, cultural, psychological, whatever - is the winning artistic formula for me:

But of what matter now the rhythm of that bygone language. The precision and ardour of that thought, bound to events in order to force them, ceaselessly invoking history in order to make it? The old text lives because it expresses a fidelity, a necessity. It is necessary that someone not betray. Many may weaken, retract, fail themselves, betray. Nothing is lost if one man remains erect. Everything is saved if he is the greatest. This man has never yielded, will never yield, either to intrigue or fear, to admiration or to slander, even to fatigue. Nothing will separate him from the revolution - victorious or defeated, covering crowds with songs and red flags, heaping its dead in common graves to the sound of funeral hymns, or preserved in the hearts of a handful of men in snow-covered prisons. And if after that he is wrong, if he is intractable and imperious, it hardly matters. The essential thing is to remain true.

Conquered City (1932) is just one of the 3 perfect novels he wrote which move between, around, through a cast of ~30+ connected characters in Russia mourning the loss of October’s utopian aspirations.

I was chatting to a group of lads from Derry at a wedding once and they were telling a story about getting into trouble with the PSNI on a night out. Not only were unbelievably good storytellers - only digressing when it served a purpose, providing exactly the right amount of background detail to serve the payoff - they were also exceptional collaborators, each one would regularly come in to round off or flesh out some point of detail. Mike Leigh’s Four Days in July (1984), which represents two new families one on each side of the sectarian divide during marching season, has several scenes which represent exactly what it was like watching that long anecdote unfold. Most realistic appraisal of everyday conversation I’ve ever seen on film.

I think Sergei Loznitsa is the greatest living director and A Gentle Creature (2017) is as good as Donbass (2018) in providing an absurdist, bleak, bleak, bleak reflection on Russian interference in Ukraine. I lack a lot of the background knowledge that would make the subtleties clear to me, but perhaps that’s the wrong word to use where we see a Western-backed NGO put a portrait of Stalin up next to a pride flag.

A World Not Ours (2012) is a documentary set in Ein El Hilweh, one of the largest Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. The portrait of the camp’s three generations of inhabitants gives us resilience, the sense of community, some hope but also the despair and the psychological damage inflicted by the dispossession inflicted by the Zionist state. I’d recommend all of Mahdi Fleifel’s films, especially his shorts which are on docalliance.

I’ve cooled a bit on Shifty (2025) since I wrote it up here, partly off quite correct critiques Hatherley and Gilbert have put forward, but mostly off Curtis’ interview with failing Ari Aster, who he effusively praises for giving a sympathetic appraisal of paranoid anti-mask, anti-BLM, politics. Like fuck off actually. His endless refrain that nothing's changed, that everything that seems different is just a nostalgic rerun of the last century, is just him admitting he doesn’t know what’s happening now and doesn’t care to find out. There are moments in A Grin Without a Cat (1977) which make his exceptional editorial skills look clumsy and remind us that our problems are in many respects perennial and that lions used to walk the earth.

Tunes

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Mid Stuff

‘The Shoah After Gaza’ is a really brilliant piece of writing but the book annoyed me for its more extensive subsumption of the genocide to European intellectual history; I get frustrated that this ends up facilitating the wheelhouse of already-existing intellectuals rather than encouraging them to go off for a more adequate lens. I found Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book a bit prone to carry on like he was the first person to see the situation for what it was, although at the same time perhaps in his liberal American magazine circles that’s true.

Bad Stuff

I quite like Band of Brothers (2001) but it looks even more like Amerikkkan exceptionalist Spielberg schmaltz guff next to The Pacific (2010) which is just fucking great televisions and one of the most convincing pictures of war and PTSD that I’m aware of. I therefore presume Spielberg and Hanks were more involved in the unwatchable Masters of the Air (2024) in which 3 - 5 baby-faced young men of the moment endlessly mug, jabber and slap each other on the back. It has that cold de-saturated shiny glaze that I first started to see in cheap BBC docudramas ten years ago and has become completely ubiquitous. In Chaos: The Manson Murders (2025) one-trick pony Erroll Morris sits down with Tom O’Neil who might know more about the subject than anyone else to focus on the most mundane and established aspects - who stabbed who where, Manson’s kooky mannerisms - equates his meticulously researched work with one that it completely discredits and sums it all up as an instance of the usual midwit take on matters of public record such as JFK, COINTELPRO et al., namely ‘oh well have you considered that reality is actually complicated?’ Finally X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) is worst thing I’ve ever seen.

Fuair mé an eolas is mó thíos ansin ó Traidisiún Liteartha na nGael á foilsíodh i dtosach sna 70í ach anois curtha ar ais i bprionta ag Cló Íar Connacht (eagrán álainn astu mar is gnách) agus ar fáil uatha anseo, molfainn duit é.

Aontaím leis an scéal a chloisimid go rialta gur athraigh scríbhneoirí na tíre seo stair na litríochta go hiomlán timpeall casadh an chéid. Aontaím freisin leis na mínithe a leagann béim ar na streachailtí réabhlóideacha ag an am. Cibé acu atáimid ag caint faoi Chogadh na Saoirse, Réabhlóid na Rúise, nó forbairt na teileachumarsáide, tá nasc láidir idir cultúr agus bealaí maireachtála. Tabhair faoi deara go bhfuilim ag caint anseo faoi litríocht scríofa i mBéarla agus gur tháinig daoine cosúil le Joyce agus Beckett ón bpríomhchathair; is feiniméan uirbeach í an litríocht nua-aimseartha. Mar sin - seachas cúpla duine aonair - tá constaicí móra ag obair i gcoinne gluaiseacht liteartha sa Ghaeltacht, atá suite sna háiteanna is tearcfhorbartha na tíre (ní maith liom téarmaí chomh cinntitheach sin a úsáid go rialta ach, bhuel, sin an coincheap cuí anseo).

Sna blianta ina dhiaidh sin, rinne scríbhnéoirí ar nós Frank O’Connor agus Maeve Brennan ainm dóibh féin i litríocht an domhain mar gheall ar an mBéarla agus an rogha a rinne siad chun gearrscéalta a scríobh; bhí margadh ann i bhfoilseacháin Meiriceánacha agus freisin ba mháistrí iad ar an stua a thugann Donald Barthelme ‘neamhchiontacht sháraithe’ air, plotaí ina gcláraítear mothúcháin ach nach ngníomhaítear orthu; tá an dinimic seo fós linn inniu ar go leor bealaí.

Sna tréimhsí i gceist anseo, bhí Impireacht na Breataine ag dul i léig. Bhí gluaiseachtaí náisiúnta ag neartú, bhí an lucht oibre ag eagrú, bhí an tír neamhspleách ó thaobh an dlí de, ach ceard faoi na blianta roimhe, nuair a bhí struchtúr polaitiúil coilíneachta á bhunú ag na Sasanaigh le linn an fheachtas Cromwell nó na Plandálacha? Nuair a smaoiním ar litríocht sa ré seo smaoiním ar na téamaí a phléitear san saothair Shakespeare, Milton, Wyatt, Spenser fiú; freagracht an mhonarc, pastiche ar na foinsí clasaiceacha, agus féinmhúnlú (ar fáil níos éasca dóibh siúd laistigh den chúirt nó gar di ar ndóigh). Oscalíonn bearna nua, mar a deirtear, idir an duine poiblí agus an duine príobháideach agus tagann suibiachtúlacht agus íoróin isteach.

Ach in Éirinn ba aicme ardcháilithe agus oidhreachtúil iad na filí. Bhí baint acu, ní hamháin leis na ríthe ach le maorlathas an stát freisin (nó on prótastát b’fheidir). Bhí bonneagar ann chun an aicme sin a athchruthú - coláistí agus structúir phatrúnacha - agus mar gheall ar na hinstitúidí seo, chum siad faoi smacht an tráidisiúin. Mhol a gcuid filíochta an structúr soisialta ordlathach; níor cuireadh mórán luach ar indibhidiúlacht san seanrá seo. De bharr sin tá na samplaí atá againn níos gaire don dlí canónta nó deabhóidí. Na rudaí is suimúila sa leabhar domsa ná na hipitéisí síceolaíocha faoi na neamhréiteigh idir na haicmí éagsúla ag an am, na fílí, na draoithe is na húdaráis sách nua san eaglais. Cé go raibh conspóid eatarthu bhí tionchar freisin. Mar shampla níor úsáideadh téama an dúlta roimh an Críostaíocht; glacaim leis gurb iad foinsí clasaiceacha freagrach anseo.

Scrios na Péindlíthe an bonneagar seo. De réir na n-achtanna seo níor ceadaíodh d’aon Chaitliceach airm a iompar, scoil a bhunú nó a chlann a chur thar sáile chun oideachas a fháil. D’imigh an stadas agus an leanúnachas a bhí ríthábhachtach dóibh, chuaigh go leor filí thar lear agus ba iad an díshealbhú agus an deoraíocht príomhábhair an traidisiúin tar éis. In áiteanna iargúlta go háirithe i gCiarraí, i gContae an Chláir agus i gConamara, d’éirigh cuid acu a dtraidisiúin a choinneáil beo agus sin an fáth go bhfuil an oidhreacht fós linn i bhfoirm éigin, i saibhreas an bhéaloidis mar shampla. Sin ráite, bhí iarmhairtí níos dearfaí ann. Rinne an dream staidéar ar fhealsúnacht agus ar dhiagacht i gcoláistí Caitliceacha na hEorpa, níor cheart dearmad a dhéanamh ar a gcuid oibre ag tiomsú foclóirí agus saothair ghramadaí a thrascríobh agus a phriontáil. Feicimid an díshealbhú seo agus an damáiste a rinneadh don teanga is soiléire i gcuid de na dánta thíos:

Transport, transport, mo mheabhair ar Bhéarla,

Shoot him, kill him, strip him, tear him.

A Tory, hack him, hang him, rebel,

A rogue, a thief, a priest, a papist.

D’éis transplant ‘s gach feall dar cheapadar,

D’éis transpórt na seól tar farrige,

’S go hiath Jeméco a mheid do scaipeadar

Don Fhrainge, don Spáinn, ‘s gach áit dá ndeachadar.

is cuid dá ndíol is na criochaibh daora

ag déanamh sochair do bhodaigh an Bhéarla.

Scum na Sagsan is na bailtibh fé thréine

ag mille na coda dár foscadh ar eigin…

Bheinn ag dul rófhada dá ndéarfainn gur inspioráid iad na dánta seo don chineál litríochta is fearr liom: breathnú díreach ar chúrsaí polaitiúla ó thaobh baill d’intleachtúlacht atá scriosta go hiomlán ag an bhfrith-réabhlóid/impiriúlachas, an guth idir dearcadh rómánsúil agus díomách…. ach is smaoineamh é.

In addition to an antipathy to foreign commentators, an important line of attack is Heaney's reticence, the fact that none of his poems advance a consistent world-view and are therefore intellectually weak. Foremost for Fennell is the colonial question and the legitimacy, comprehensibility, and continuity of the Provisional IRA's campaign against British occupation of the six counties, as opposed to the imperialist self-representation as an honest broker attempting to keep the peace between two warring tribes, whose differences are endogenous / confessional. For Fennell there is a right and a wrong here, one side of this revels in the supremacist power the state exerts on their behalf, the other is oppressed. This straightforwardly anti-imperialist position is not one Heaney abides by; insofar as they were explicit during his lifetime it was with the constitutional nationalism of the SDLP. In the book length interview Stepping Stones Heaney differentiates between his formative experiences growing up in a rural townland peacefully coexisting with Protestant neighbours versus Seamus Deane's early life in Derry town: 'where the RUC were bigoted bastards and that was it'. Even if Heaney's experiences militates against the drawing up of battle lines, events in the long war appear only obliquely. Cf. Thomas Kinsella's Butcher's Dozen, which put him definitively beyond the pale for the London-based poetic establishment or Tom Paulin's statements on Israeli settlers (seriously, look these up).

The national question though is secondary to Fennell's populist line, that Heaney writes poems in which the aesthetic effects are calculated and hermetic, where the unusual language and archaisms culminate in expressionism or abstraction. Fennell never disputes that Heaney is a very competent poet, that he has the ability to concretise and materialise objects in language itself, rather this seems to be part of the problem. Within this competence is a repudiation of musicality in favour of the modal rhythms of the natural world. Viewed as such, Heaney is a practitioner of poetic field recording, an idea I find, perhaps in spite of Fennell's intentions, interesting and will definitely be bringing to my next read-through when I pick up the Collected. In any case this is why Fennell argues that Heaney is not generally quoted, he is a writerly, not a readerly poet.

Fennell does seem to grant that at an earlier stage of his career there was a clarity and an appeal to the everyday but Heaney's canonisation has led him to prioritise those readers who will bring their substantial amounts of learning to writing commentaries. This is a self-reinforcing cycle, as no-one reads poetry anymore poets no longer concern themselves with 'common types of feeling'; as Fennell points out 25 of the 34 included in The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry are employed in an academic institution. This is a normative model which prioritises an idea of the value of direct communication that isn't really parsed out. I don't want to be an apologist for academicisation of poetry, or indeed the bloated masculinist tradition which I would say is of far greater importance to Heaney's shortcomings such as they are, but I don't know what an aesthetics of access or presence outside the academy would look like. Perhaps I'm too close to that world but I can't say that I've really had my head turned by any self-publishing populist poets I've taken the time to check out.

Helen Vendler, the New Yorker’s poetry critic and prominent champion of Heaney's work in the US, is the villain here, and by quoting those instances - freighted in the faux-technical terminology of contemporary literary criticism - in which Vendler is effectively saying ‘this poem is good and I like it’, Fennell conveys that Vendler celebrates poetry which offers an insight into a poet's personal sensibility over the presentation of ideas or history. This is a criterion of value we will be familiar with from New Criticism, the hegemonic means of engaging literary art in the American academy. It emerges from and provides the ecology of reception for the literature of the early twentieth century. T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, what these authors have in common is the notion that appearances do not represent the whole story, there is a deep anthropological or mythological structure which literature should be attentive to. History isn't absent, but it's just one system of meaning within this aristocratic world-view. John Crowe Ransom is an important figure here and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he is in possession of an explicit nostalgia for the pre-war antebellum South, nor that Gertrude Stein, Eliot, Pound and Yeats were, to varying extents, collaborators. This is a digression: I obviously don't think Heaney's a fascist, rather it is indicative of where you can end up with you celebrate mind for itself, Yeats' tower, Pound's gold standard, Heaney's bog. This is why modernism is the paradigmatic literary instance, it is the best teaching aid in that they speak to the formative social convulsions of our time, there's a neat narrative story - things were realistic and then they weren't - and in both senses they address the trajectories of critical and social theory. This was the case when I was at college anyway, when I was tutoring YA or pop-cultural iterations of the canon had made pretty substantial inroads.

Fennell's big sociological theory beyond all this therefore begins with New England and the history of puritanism, arguing that after the failure of the sixties, the rejection of a secular reality went into 'movements for healthy food, real ale, organic farming, unchlorinated water, clean air, smokeless lungs and slim figures - with slimming, jogging, aerobics, squash and marathons supplying the requisite pain. Its antipathy to sex and sectional lodgements in radical feminism and homosexuality, Political Correctness, guaranteed purity of mind to intellectuals'. This is all aul lad nonsense (reminded me that Angela Nagle was championing Fennell there at one stage actually) and I don't find it completely clear what relationship it bears to Fennell's dismissal of the self-referential poem which is architecturally sophisticated but self-referential. Rather I think his strongest moment comes through in a bit of close reading, picking apart a quote from Heaney's 1984 Pete Laver memorial lecture:

''Pure' poetry is perfectly justifiable in the earshot of the carbomb, but it still implies a politics, depending on the nature of the poetry. A poetry of hermetic wit, of riddles and slips and self-mocking ironies, while it may appear culpably miniaturist or fastidious to the activist with his microphone at the street corner, may be exercising in its inaudible way a fierce disdain of the amplified message, or a distressed sympathy with it'.

Fennell: 'This seems to mean that a poetry which says nothing about contemporary social events may be doing something relevant to them silently'.

The first strain that stood out to me most in reading the material collected in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991), as well as the critical essays which open each section, it is the relative failure of a modern intellectual or creative culture to propagate and to secure, a civic Republican identity capable of transcending the cultural and social inheritance of imperialism. Of the two faces of Irish nationalism, Enlightenment-based citizenship on the one hand, ancestrally governed and essentialist modes of identification on the other, it was instead the latter that won out. We could obviously litigate this last statement for days but for the moment I’m to be let off just saying that.

Seamus Deane expresses this in a by-the-by reference to John Mitchel’s white supremacy but it is Seán Ó’Faoláin who weaves it into a macro-explanation, citing the racialised classification of ‘the Gael’ as the germ of the Free State’s intellectual and cultural pathologies which, from Ó’Faoláin’s perspective, fatally inhibit Lemass’ modernisation projects. In a way that I don’t think any ingenuous reading of Labour In Irish History (1910) or Socialism and Nationalism (1897) can sustain, Ó’Faoláin blames James Connolly for all this, and compares his wedding of Celtic feudalism and communism to Nazism. It can’t be disputed that Connolly’s account of the ancient Irish past does not correspond to the historical evidence but I think one commentator gets it right when they say that Connolly is not demonstrating any strategic conclusions flowing from socialism’s supposed Irishness, rather he’s contesting the hegemonic position of the constitutional nationalist party, the pantheon they lay claim to, and one of the more common lines of attack the Roman Catholic hierarchy levelled at those who advocated for working class insurgency, namely the doctrine’s supposed foreignness. In any case it is a snag on progress:

‘whether it be the Shannon scheme or improved rural housing, or the growing of wheat, or migratory schemes to lessen unemployment or the efficiency of the army, or the development of air transport or tourism…all that the more perfervid Gaelic addicts have ever contributed to any of these is a nark. Why should the Army play rugby! Tourism will ruin the west! Keep the Gaelic migrants inside a kind of Red Indian reservation — as was proposed last month by the Gaelic League as its Annual Conference’.

I was surprised to see O’Faoláin take this line. From his fiction, which is hugely under-rated and out of print, I had the impression that he was a left-Republican, but there’s some evidence of an armchair revolutionary’s sour grapes here. Incidentally History Ireland had an issue a few months back about how his military record was insufficient to merit a pension.

From the material across the other volumes, I see the origin of ‘The Gael’ in the relationship that once existed between the filí and the tribal king. Through the access they gave to genealogies, origin myth, topographical lore, court poets were one of the primary sources of transcendent social power. What we see when we read fifteenth, sixteenth-century Irish poetry is a document of the passing of a social formation and its cultural inheritance. Material dispossession forces the Irish into retrospect, to excavate prior achievements in pursuit of consolation, finding there particularity and spiritual life in an ethnic identity.

O’Faoláin appears as the first contributor to the section on Irish historical revisionism, but I seem to remember critical notes James Hogan (Professor of History in University College Cork 1920-1963) was making of a growing number of historical works which fit the revisionist bill avant la lettre, being as they were pro-imperial and without references to any Irish-language sources, so I wouldn’t be surprised if O’Faoláin is picking this up from stuff he’s reading around the place. Whatever its original source phrases like myth and blood sacrifice became appealing touchstones for the revisionist critique in the decades following, an effective means of representing Catholicism, violence and anti-imperialism as the one assemblage and consistently in opposition to a set of values we could associate with liberalism and modernity. This was imperative in the sixties and seventies. There was serious work done by intellectuals in politics and the media to contest the legitimacy of the Provisional IRA’s war against the British state in the name of the same founding myth from which the twenty-six county state derived its own legitimacy; Lyons states very clearly in one of his lectures that historians have a case to answer here.

I am all for contestation. One of the things that this anthology, and a bit of reading I’m doing about Seamus Heaney’s work and its reception, is how much of a golden age the seventies and eighties now seem from the point of view of those who mourn for a literary or intellectual culture engaged in debates of some consequence - rather than fitting out ouroboroi of over-written blurbs - but what I find so irritating about the revisionist approach is its shameless deployment of strawmen, here’s Moody representing Republican and anti-imperialist interpretations as a conspiracy theory treating colonial authorities as mere schemers:

‘The great famine (1845 — 50) and the land war (1879 — 82) together produced a crop of strong and bitter myths. As seen by nationalists at the time and subsequently the famine was ‘a fearful murder committed on the mass of the people’ by a heartless British government and its no less heartless adherents in Ireland, the landlords. Historical research has drawn a very different picture. The famine was too monstrous and impersonal to be the mere product of individual ill-will, or ‘the fiendish outcome of a well-planned conspiracy’

Foster:

‘To blame every unwelcome development in Irish history on British malevolence, disallowing economic, social and political forces within Ireland, is an attractively easy option; it also implies an Irish moral superiority which leads too easily to self-righteous whinging’.

In the same essay Foster settles accounts with a scholar who takes exception to his intellectual mission statement, describing them as ‘referring intriguingly to ‘the obscene socio-economic status of nationalists in the six counties’ [I like the way Foster expects the adjective ‘obscene’ to stand as a patently over-stated description of the sectarian discrimination the six-county state meted out] before challenging Foster and his ilk as follows:

‘When you’ve finished re-writing Irish history you can start on the rest of the world. You then may use your limited literary skills to convince us that Dachau, Hiroshima, My Lai, Sharpeville, Shattila and Selma, Alabama, were not so bad either’.

Owned.

Desmond Fennell’s reflections on the subject are interesting, particularly because he promotes a conformist Hegelian position, arguing that positive images of the historical past are necessary to bind a community or nation of people together. His definition of the project — ‘that in our relations with Britain on the Irish question we Irish have been very much at fault’ — has a lot of merit too it, but he is even more accurate in pinpointing one of the most malign effects of the approach:

‘‘Forget’, they told the Irish and the world of Africa, Asia and beyond, ‘that you saw in the Irish revolution one of the great liberating landmarks of this century, and treasured the names of MacSwiney and De Valera. It was a mistake, a huge blunder, something we should not have done, or at least not that way’’.

Revisionism brings you the most pernicious kind of provincialism, in that it thinks its identification with the values of the then-EEC is the ne plus ultra of human cultural or intellectual achievement.

The second through-line is the quiet recognition of the steep fall-off from the Joyce / Beckett generation. In a remark that does not seem unrelated Deane notes that it would be possible to read a lot of twentieth century Irish literature and not be aware of fascism or communism, that this generation was far more detained by issues of personal identity and personal morality; how one’s impulses are smothered by respectability and convention. We see this in the characteristic Irish short story when buried emotions are recognised but not acted upon, as if the morbid symptoms of a provincial literature consistently failing to situate itself were being neurotically staged and re-staged. John Wilson Foster paraphrases a contemporary literary critic Augustine Martin, one of many figures I’ve added to a list of people to follow up on, who critiqued the postwar generation for ignoring industrialisation, foreign investment and continuing to cast Irish social life as a preserve of outcasts and troglodytes: ‘The repetitive subjectivity of Irish fiction needed in the 1960s to be qualified or balanced by a larger social canvas, a more normative viewpoint, a greater objectivity’.

The issue here is expressed most cogently, not for the first or last time, by Deane when he says the only hope for the language movement would have been allied to revolutionary politics, to lend it some futurity rather than a uniquely Catholic or rural possession. This is the Faustian bargain of progress, you find some way to integrate, to sell yourself for the tourist board, or get out of the way. This is why we have to have ‘Fáilte roimh Bearlóirí!’ on the poster when we’re advertising the Ciorcal Comhrá.

close to your poor soft and downy

shoulders,

pebble-weight, but still bracing in place

your chest,

heaving with expelling breaths.

Your ward was full of noise,

bright jaws on the snap-tos,

your father’s polemics,

and the others born before their hour,

squeaking like mice in jam jars.

I used imagine life in a plastic cage,

room-wide and under the earth,

watching the earthworms, raw, pink,

indifferent, metabolising behind the homely enclosed pyrex glass.

Reading Heaney, I wonder if the people you've been born to aren't pink lumps,

swaddled in single-use cotton, blasted to crust off-site,

skirting strands where bitter squalls take great bites out of sand cliffs and further down hassle the yellow and grey pools of rock.

Here, there are enough clothes for five infancies. Among them,

a pair of brown curdory trouserlegs bearing on them a pattern of pale blue dogs I once rolled up,

to wade ankle-deep and feel again grit, the deep uneven sense of the waves' application.

You will always be welcome to it.

I want to read a book about how Stalin was good. This book would necessarily be in certain respects a polemic, but it would also be a work of history, one that is as conversant with ideas and intellectual developments, the social balance of forces — from below as well as from above — as it is with the archives. It would not be a work of political science or international relations. It would not be a book that spends time weighing the casualties of the Gulag against the atrocities committed by the British Empire, noting the differences between the USSR under Stalin and Germany under Hitler and it would not be a book about the ways Cold War liberals seek to differentiate their good internationalist and metropolitan murder from bad totalitarian murder. This book would take the massive conflagration of social, political and cultural resources of the 20s and 30s — perhaps also Comintern policy in Germany and China — and say why it was all very good.

In clarifying what I mean by the good I can only bring my own perspective. What I want is the abolition of capitalism, here understood as a social structure in which money equates to social power, allowing those who hold it in large quantities, as well as their hangers-on, to exploit and to live fuller lives than the exploited. I call what I want communism because capitalism operates internationally. This thing does not respect borders. It draws and re-draws them, often because breaking them while maintaining them makes more money. It sets factory workers in the United States against those in China as producers while allowing the former to benefit as consumers of products cheapened by suppressed labour costs. It seems possible to partially de-commodify certain sectors of social life such as housing, healthcare or education under the rule of capital, but from any honest itinerary of the last century I think it’s reasonably clear that this only happens in very specific places and times and if then only on a conditional basis. I want it because the privatisation and instrumentalisation of information makes people irrational and selfish, because financial technology can make them, knowingly or unknowingly, shareholders in genocide or destruction of the biosphere. Finally I’m interested in what works. Everything you look at in your immediate environment is a consequence of collective effort and the onus, for me, is on others to demonstrate why people who don’t participate in this work should be making money from it.

In Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend Losurdo has not written a book about why the Purges and collectivisation were of benefit to the long-term project of abolishing class. I think history has rendered its judgement as to whatever it is we call what was happening in Russia and its environs from 1917 - 1990 was sustainable — neither word in the phrase ‘Soviet Communism’ quite applies — and if I have any insight into how things are likely to go over the long-term, I’ll guess that it will be most likely be seen as an aberrant forerunner to China, with Western Marxism as a gnostic offshoot. Losurdo has instead written a defense of Stalin according to the Burkean critique of the French Revolution, which is: once a clique of revolutionaries embark on a programme they measure according to universals they will destroy whatever it is in society that renders it coherent and functional, namely tradition and all that flows from it, such as order, law, and the family. Hegel’s praise for Oliver Cromwell is also produced here on the basis that:

he knew what it meant to govern…he took with a strong hand the reins of government, dissolved away that parliament that was poured out in prayers and held with greater splendour the throne, as Protector.

Losurdo’s gloss:

Knowing how to govern here means being able to give concrete concentrate to the ideals of universality that provided over the revolution…distancing oneself, as far as the English Revolution was concerned, from the followers of the ‘fifth monarchy’, the empty utopia of a society deprived and not in need of legal norms.

The analogy here is clear, you need a strongman to keep the levellers out of power and negate ‘the dialectic of Saturn’, whereby revolutions always eat their children. It annoys me to see the word dialectic abused like this. Dialectics means understanding the plurality of ways in which society changes according to the never-ending process through which concrete social phenomena inter-relate. It is not a moral fable or some mechanistic algorithm of action-response.

You might be surprised to learn that this is the case being made for the leader of a nation state founded in the course of a socialist revolution. The leadership of the Bolshevik party were cosmopolitan intellectuals, shaped by a system of thought produced by a German philosopher who emphasised change as the fundamental dynamic of social life and human history. It is an optimistic and humanistic doctrine, that aims at clarifying the predicates for a condition of universal human freedom. The Bolsheviks saw the value of a Soviet state in Russia consisting primarily in the example it would set for an international proletarian revolution along these lines. We know now that things didn’t go that way and they were left carrying the can as best they could, and that in a lot of ways they didn’t do very well. It is true that Stalin, who did not hang around Vienna attending Congresses of the Second International or authoring elaborate philosophical texts, was at a remove from this set; he was one of the very few Bolsheviks not from a bourgeois or petty-bourgeois background. His legacy as a thinker is that of a rightist, more socially patriotic than internationalist (once telling Tito that communism could be achieved in England under the monarchy), more defencist than defeatist, which sits uneasily with his collectivisation programme, which went further left than anyone in the senior levels of the party were proposing. Losurdo praises Stalin for his revision of Bolshevik doctrine on the basis that linguistic cultural and national identities were likely to divide human beings long into the future. I’ll editorialise a bit here and say I think drawing political strategic decisions from the idea that national identity is unitary, static and immutable = poison.

So if Stalin is the strongman of order how do we explain all the death. From Losurdo’s perspective there is a path dependency coming out of the hostile international environment; only a state of exception, with which legality was incompatible, was possible. The use of the word ‘agency’ has become a punchline on Twitter for those satirising how liberal interventionists dismiss the ways in which social forces shape the actions of individuals, but when it comes to the idea of imperial encirclement, we don’t have to look for very long at the USSR’s real material accomplishments to see that we’re not talking about Gaza here. Enormous landmass, huge population, significant intellectual and cultural resources (concentrated in an urban-based leadership, it’s true) a network of affiliations to organisations representing a growing, sympathetic, partially enfranchised industrial working class in other countries and colonies to the point that supporting or facilitating anti-state activity in multiple jurisdictions was possible. There was serious capacity here, it was possible to do other things, particularly given how centralised this entity was. The onus is on Losurdo, or anyone else who wants to write a book about how the Purges were not only necessary but positive contributors to building communism, to say how exactly Britain, France, the US prevented the USSR from doing particular things and how those particular blockers made specific things unavoidable. Because I would say that in response to investment boycotts one of the lower priorities would be to imprison and shoot the most experienced personnel in the state apparatus.

Something I’ve been looking out for lately in history writing is when mechanisms of causality aren’t actually material causes but metaphors the author has derived from the material or some theorist or other. The state of exception is one I’ve already mentioned. The ‘matrix’ of Tsarist-era stochastic political violence that Losurdo mentions is another, an attempt to insinuate via pseudo-mathematical terminology that this is something endemic to the Russian context which under-writes the state of exception. It is important to say that was no serious prospect of the Communist Party in general or Stalin in particular being overthrown, especially once Trotsky had been dispatched quite quickly after Lenin’s death. Menshevik, SR, democratic, anarchist, peasant, Trotskyist opposition groups were fragmented, disorganised, well-monitored and easily dispatched, especially after the Purges. Stalin’s control over the appointments apparatus was absolute, veterans of October who might have been in an opposition faction against Stalin at one point such as Zinoviev, Kamenev or Bukharin had no ability to rouse the populace. What is Losurdo’s evidence that they were a threat? An article in which Malaparte describes the presence of significant amount of Trotskyist agents in the state apparatus. I quote Losurdo on this:

Is this fantasy or the echo of regime propaganda? The book quoted here circulated widely in Europe at the time, and the theses put forward in it did not seem to raise ironic smiles or cries of scandal?

Weak stuff. As is his argument that Tukachevsky considered taking power in a coup on the basis of speculative memos between Hitler and Goebbels.

Relatedly there is no original research here. We derive Stalin’s political thought from speeches delivered at congresses. I find this annoying because those speeches have to be understood in their context of what was happening at that particular time. Stalin was immensely skilled at wielding these events to his ends, in order to crush or polarise his opposition, to introduce some distance between himself and policies he had instituted or laying hints for future pivots to come. In almost no other source should we be more aware of the non-identity of words and deeds. But Losurdo unpacks them in a very pol-sci way where, for example, it is never considered that promises of political liberalisation such as free elections by secret ballot or freedom of the press might be all talk or that they were in actual fact, bracketed by two phases of widespread arrests the motives for which are actually quite obscure. Flushing out opposition and keeping people off their feet would be my own guess. Secondly we hear a lot from anti-communist establishment histories such as those written by Applebaum, Conquest, Figes and even The Black Book of Communism. These are used firstly for moments in which they might suggest that the gulag system or Soviet society was not murder and mayhem at all times (‘if this very fervently anti-Communist historian says it wasn’t all bad it must be true!’) or prurient images of extreme violence clearly printed in the original to discredit the Soviet project in toto, so Losurdo can underline the ever-present danger of the collapse of the social order against which Stalin’s firm hand was needed. Applebaum is quoted to represent a picture of the gulag system that I can only describe as idyllic, with competitions, libraries, concerts, sport or leisure facilities, furnished cells, state honours and opportunities for social advancement. No atrocity is too vicious for inclusion in condemnations of Nazi or British concentration camps, and rightly so, but the gulag comes across as an adventure holiday here and not just by comparison. This glances off one of Losurdo’s less objectionable devices, arguments that Western nations are morally compromised by their own records of mass incarceration, terror and authoritarianism. This is all quite true, but I’m wondering if Stalin was the necessary strongman with the state of exception at his back why you’re bringing up Churchill in a way that’s clearly intended to function by way of mitigation.

Any left critique of the USSR Losurdo considers comes from The Revolution Betrayed read so tendentiously Trotsky is rendered as pro-Hitler. Where are the particularities of the left critique of the USSR? That collectivisation was profoundly wasteful, that local party organisations were weak and top-down and therefore unable or unwilling to feed upwards how much pointless destruction of life, livestock and property would arise from blanket coercive measures. The word Losurdo uses most often in regard to the left — almost everyone who wasn’t Stalin or those of his lieutenants he didn’t purge — are ‘messianic’, for their having in view the communal expropriation of private surplus. Typical is Losurdo’s quoting Bloch saying something characteristically maximalist without elaborating as to how widespread these views actually were allowing him to equate all criticism to religious primitivism and idealisation of the poor.

The part of this book which is most indicative of Losurdo’s outlook is his critique of Kollontai, an early theorist of what we’d refer to as family abolition and getting beyond the slogan, the establishment of social structures which recognise the fact that domestic labour too is collective and that there are better social and psychological outcomes associated with the support of broader networks of care. Losurdo describes his as an abdication of parental responsibility (!) and relates this to Stalin’s internationalist critics:

Just as it does not constitute a real overcoming of domestic egoism to ignore and evade the particular responsibilities one has towards one’s children and closest kin so it is by no means synonymous with internationalism to lose sight of the fact that the concrete possibilities and tasks or revolutionary transformation are to be found in the first place on a definite national terrain. The detachment or indifference towards the country in which one lives may take on a significance that is anything but progressive.

Losurdo goes on to quote Herzen, an author who Losurdo tells us Lenin liked (note the sleight of hand), to the effect that the Russian aristocracy were very cosmopolitan and that they denied the commonality between themselves and the peasantry. Note the second sleight of hand; an instance of ruling class ideology, plainly rooted in class, has been reconfigured as anti-national sentiment. The aristocracy are anti-national and bad, therefore: ‘without affirming the idea of nationhood and national responsibility, one is not a revolutionary’.

In some respects Losurdo has done his critics a service in outlining just how far his intellectual defense of Stalin departs from the objectives of the October Revolution’s protagonists. Rather than revolution, we have geo-politics. Rather than collectivisation, national-development. No socialism, just the order, family and nation. Power to you if that’s your programme, sounds like a load of shit to me.