“Who was Thomas Muntzer? Simple: he was a Devil, he was Satan, he was a Ravening Wolf and a False Prophet who stirred up murder, rebellion and bloodshed. Or so, at least, said Martin Luther, the theologian [who] opened the gates to the Reformation movement.”
Andrew Drummond’s marvellous new book, The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Muntzer: The life and times of an early German Revolutionary, published by Verso, is “the definitive” biography of the sixteenth century revolutionary, in the words of one Marxist historian.
Drummond explains how Muntzer developed from a radical theologian in the Catholic Church to a revolutionary, and how he used his position as a priest to try to convince the poor to fight for a free society.
Muntzer played a key role in a mass revolutionary peasant movement across Germany in 1524-1525. Drummond argues that they were years “of tremendous excitement and activity in Germany, the like of which were not seen ... until perhaps the chaos and creativity of the revolutionary years immediately after 1918”. 
In his book The German Peasant War, Friedrich Engels argued that Muntzer was “a representative of a budding proletariat” and the heart and soul of a revolutionary movement that threatened feudalism. Drummond’s new research confirms it.
From the late fifteenth century discontent was everywhere, from the peasants to town dwellers and even the lower ranks of the aristocracy.
“[Christianity] was the common language of all.” And dissident ideas (heresies) in the powerful Catholic Church were rife. Drummond argues that “heresy was almost the only way in which unrest could manifest itself”.
Luther opposed the Church’s increasing turn to secular money-making by swindling its followers. But he argued that only reforms acceptable to the secular authorities were endorsed by God.
Muntzer went further, arguing that the church—and indeed all the social, economic and political institutions of feudalism—had to be destroyed if the poor were to be free.
Democratic reforms he introduced to church services were popular with the poor. He turned the alter around so the priest addressed the congregation rather than preaching with his back to them. During mass, everyone was given both a wafer representing the body of Christ and a sip of wine, representing his blood—previously only the priest got to drink the wine.
Like other reformers, Muntzer translated hymns and psalms sung in the mass into German from the traditional Latin. But his were very “liberal” translations; “guides to action” says Drummond. They sang in the church about overthrowing their oppressors!
His sermons in Allstedt in 1523 attracted up to 2,000, many of whom walked long distances, including miners from 20 kilometres away.
Drummond documents the massive rebellion over large areas of Germany. The peasantry mobilised in bands, created democratic councils, and marched across the country burning down castles and churches. They regarded the riches they plundered as the product of their toil and used it to provision their armies.
In response, Luther argued that violently suppressing the peasants was Godly work. It is said that anything between 100,000 and 300,000 out of a population of 4 to 5 million were slaughtered by reactionary armies.
Drummond writes of the rival theologians: “In May 1525, Muntzer stood with the lowest members of society, Luther with the highest”. This explains why Luther is much better known than Muntzer.
Drummond’s portrait of Muntzer provides a role model for socialists today.
He passionately believed that the peasants and the poor could, and must, win a free society themselves.
His visceral hatred of the rich and powerful comes across even when he writes to a Count he is trying to placate: “you miserable, wretched sack of maggots—who made you a prince over the people?”
In the face of counter-revolutionary savagery, Drummond finds that he “did not shirk his revolutionary duty”. He was tortured then beheaded along with his close collaborator, Johanne Pfeiffer, in May 1525.
Drummond concludes:
“Perhaps he did not achieve much, but he saw beyond the present and aimed for the future. Read his words ... their relevance has not aged ... ‘Look: the origin of usury, theft and robbery lies with our lords and princes, who treat all creatures as their own: the fish in the water, the birds in the air, the plants in the earth—everything must be theirs. And they then proclaim [that] God has commanded that you shall not steal. But of course that does not apply to themselves.’”
The words of a sixteenth century revolutionary resonate across the centuries, uniting all the exploited and oppressed in a common struggle for human emancipation. What better reason to learn about him and the movement he led?
Sandra Bloodworth will introduce a session “Black Forest Rebellion: The German Peasant War of the 16th century” at the <a href="https://www.marxismconference.org/">Marxism Conference</a> over the Easter long weekend.

Sandra Bloodworth

16th century revolutionary’s words resonate today: review of new book on Thomas Muntzer

Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade 
By Jeff Schuhrke. Verso, 2024; 352 pages.
Reviewed by Joe Allen.
--------------------
Soon after Israel launched its genocidal war in Gaza with the full support of the US government, opposition emerged to the Biden administration in a place that many professional political commentators found confounding: within <a href="https://laborforpalestine.net/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">US trade unions</a>. President Joe Biden regularly <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=355239130231216" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">boasts</a>, “I am the most pro-union president in American history”. So it was something of a surprise to outright shock that many unions—including major industrial unions such as the United Auto Workers <a href="https://uaw.org/uaw-statement-israel-palestine/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">(UAW)</a> and an array of smaller local unions and leadership bodies—called for a ceasefire in Gaza. The most notable <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/29/the-teamster-connection-apartheid-israel-and-the-ibt/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">exception</a> to this trend has been the Teamsters, led by Sean O’Brien.
Yet, at the same time, trade union opposition to Biden’s support for Israel has been frustratingly limited, never really threatening to disrupt what the late historian Mike Davis called the <a href="https://indypendent.org/2022/11/mike-davis-forgotten-book/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“barren marriage”</a> of the US labour movement and the Democratic Party. Resolutions and public statements by union leaders haven’t led to strike action in vital industries to stop the manufacture and distribution of weapons destined for Israel, despite it being one of the <a href="https://twitter.com/WorkersinPales1/status/1713908923848130880/photo/3" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">demands</a> of the Palestinian trade union movement. Shawn Fain, the President of the UAW, a union representing many defence contractors, for example, <a href="https://jewishcurrents.org/what-the-uaw-ceded-in-endorsing-biden" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">undermined</a> the union’s call for a ceasefire by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvXnFAR52yI" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">endorsing</a> Biden for reelection, then Kamala Harris after Biden dropped out.
However, the echo emanating for a ceasefire from US unions has spread far and wide, surprising many. This is a dramatic change from the past when US unions were reliable, if not enthusiastic, supporters of US foreign policy, especially when it came to Israel. Historian Jeff Schuhrke has played an important role in chronicling the burgeoning labour opposition to the US support for Israel in <a href="https://jacobin.com/author/jeff-schuhrke" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Jacobin</a>
and other <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/authors/jeff-schuhrke" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">publications</a>. Jeff teaches <a href="https://sunyempire.edu/news/releases/2023/harry-van-arsdale-school-of-labor-studies-professor-featured-on-matter-of-fact-with-soledad-obrien.php" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">labour studies</a> at Empire State College. His new book Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade examines on a much grander scale the American labour movement’s support for US imperialism.
Jeff sets out his goal early on in Blue Collar Empire:
“The same twentieth-century American labor movement that brought a measure of economic security and personal dignity to millions of working people also participated in some of the most shameful and destructive episodes in the history of U.S. imperialism. For decades, trade unionists in the United States have struggled to make sense of this, reluctant to discuss or even think about it. But, with the U.S. labor movement now undergoing a youth-led renaissance, and with renewed superpower rivalries threatening billions of lives amid a host of other planetary powers, it is long past time for a thorough reckoning.”
Indeed.
The publisher, Verso, calls Jeff’s book “the untold story”, yet he is the first to admit that parts of this seedy story have been told before: “Union activists, journalists, and scholars first began documenting US labor’s Cold War intrigues in the late 1960”. In the decades that followed, many books on the subject have been published: Ronald Radosh’s <a href="https://archive.org/details/americanlaboruni0000rado" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">American Labor and United States Foreign Policy</a>; Paul Buhle’s <a href="https://archive.org/details/takingcareofbusi0000buhl/mode/2up" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor</a>; Kim Scipes’ <a href="https://archive.org/details/kim-scipes-on-the-afl-cios-secret-war-against-developing-country-workers-solidarity-or-sabotage" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The AFL CIO’s Secret War Against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity Or Sabotage?</a> 
I would even include in this list Hugh Wilford’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Mighty-Wurlitzer-How-Played-America/dp/067403256X" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America</a>, as well as <a href="https://www.amazon.com/El-Golpe-Labor-Mexico-Wildcat/dp/074534562X" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">El Golpe: US Labor, the CIA, and the Coup at Ford in Mexico</a> by Rob McKenzie and Patrick Dunne, published in 2022.
Jeff argues that there was a narrowness to many of the earlier studies:
“Early studies and exposé characterized the AFL-CIO as being little more than a puppet of the US government. The spotlight was especially shone on labor’s shadowy ties to the CIA. Many assumed the spy agency was corrupting hapless union leaders, while many others mockingly called the labor federation the ‘AFL-CIA’. More recent studies have demonstrated how the CIA was only the most notorious government entity that organized labor partnered with. In reality, the AFL-CIO became closely allied with almost the entire US foreign policy apparatus—not simply the CIA, but also the State Department, Agency for International Development, and the National Endowment for democracy.”
American labour leaders were partners in this international criminal operation, not dupes or paid off lackeys. They were true believers in the anti-Communist crusade. What makes Jeff’s book unique is that he provides us with a century-long history—with an emphasis on the post-WWII era—that chronicles the hand-in-glove workings of the AFL-CIO and various US government agencies, most importantly the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the covert and later overt ways that the US unions operated abroad. It’s illuminating and shocking. Reckoning with this history and changing it is the challenge, given that American trade unions continue to have a significant presence in countries around the globe.
I don’t want to recount the whole sordid story here. You should read the book. But I think it worth saying that this alliance between the US government and American trade unions would not have been possible without the crucial role played by ex-Communists, most notoriously by Jay Lovestone, the former leader of the US Communist Party, ex-socialists like Walter or Roy Reuther of the UAW (who later became critics of the CIA connection), or the octogenarian leader of the Socialist Party, Norman Thomas, in the 1950s and 1960s. They provided the US government with inside knowledge on the union movement, the left, international connections, and political cover for US government operatives abroad.
There are two areas in Jeff’s book that I’m critical of. I think he looks back to the founding of the World Federation of Trade Unions in 1945 as a lost moment in international solidarity: “With the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), communist and noncommunist labor organizations attempted to build the kind of international that might have served as a powerful rebuke to the Cold War, but the AFL and the CIO sabotaged this vision”. While Jeff is correct that the AFL and CIO sabotaged the WFTU, the member unions from the former USSR and other “socialist” countries were <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Workers-Against-Monolith-Communist-Parties/dp/0902818414" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">state-controlled</a> trade unions, pursuing their own countries’ foreign policy interests, especially the USSR’s.
This leads to a second problem, which is a bigger issue for the left internationally. Jeff writes:
“If they are to be serious vehicles for strengthening and protecting the working class both at home and abroad in this era of overlapping crisis, today’s AFL-CIO and its affiliates must adopt the kind of principles labor internationalism that would inevitably bring them into conflict with U.S. foreign policy instead of reflexively serving it. But a labor movement that places class struggle and anti-imperialism ahead of deference to Washington’s international designs will not come into being unless workers, both within and outside the AFL-CIO, built it themselves.”
I wholeheartedly agree with Jeff, but how do we do this without mass-based revolutionary working-class parties—the kind of parties spawned by the Russian Revolution of 1917, which had a short-lived existence during the early years of the Communist International? We have lived with the deadening legacy of Stalinism and social democracy for many decades, only to be followed by the collapse of both, along with the unravelling of the older industrial union movement across Europe and North America. These have been some of the most difficult decades for the class struggle and anti-imperialism in modern history. Rebuilding a socialist, anti-imperialist, working-class movement is an international task.
The roots of the current opposition can be traced back in a herky-jerky manner to opposition to President George W. Bush’s invasion of <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/unions-against-the-war" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Iraq</a>, and even further back to Ronald Reagan’s wars in Central America in the 1980s and the closing years of the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/U-S-Labor-Vietnam-Philip-Foner/dp/0717806723" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Vietnam War</a>. War weariness is <a href="https://time.com/6590408/us-biden-middle-east-war/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">widespread</a> in the United States today, a product of two decades of the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Forever-War-Dexter-Filkins/dp/0307279448" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“forever wars”</a> in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with an expanding and visible social crisis at home—issues I have <a href="https://jacobin.com/2020/01/iran-antiwar-movement-united-states-iraq-afghanistan" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">written</a> about and <a href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/12/a-tale-of-two-resolutions-why-is-tdu-so-hostile-to-anti-war-activism/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">participated</a> in. Much work needs to be done. The world is a much more dangerous place now than just a few years ago. Jeff’s book is an important contribution to understanding how we got here and how we can move forward.
First published at <a href="http://www.joeallen-60224.medium.com">Joe Allen on Medium</a>. Joe Allen is a socialist based in the United States and the author of Vietnam: The (Last) War the US Lost.

Joe Allen

How US union leaders worked with the CIA to undermine democracy

Review of A Nasty Little War: The West’s Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution by Anna Reid, John Murray Press, 2023.
Within hours of taking power in October 1917, the new revolutionary government in Russia had declared its withdrawal from World War One. “The government considers it the greatest of crimes against humanity to continue this war”, its ‘<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/25-26/26b.htm">Decree on Peace</a>’
stated, calling on “all the belligerent peoples and their governments to start immediate negotiations for a just, democratic peace”.
The declaration scandalised and frightened the rulers of the Allied countries Russia had been fighting alongside. What they did in response is recounted in A Nasty Little War, Anna Reid’s very useful new book. In this narrative history, she documents the attempts made, first to corral the Soviet government back into the fighting and, later, when that had failed, to overthrow it. 
To say the Bolshevik-led Soviet regime flouted international conventions is an understatement. The previous tsarist government had incurred many debts. The Bolsheviks refused to pay them. Secret treaties were found and published, including the infamous <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Sykes-Picot-Agreement">Sykes-Picot Agreement</a>,
which, unbeknownst to its inhabitants, carved up the Middle East between Britain, France and Russia. When a Soviet delegation was dispatched to negotiate with Germany for peace, it included a revolutionary by the name of Anastasia Bitsenko, who had assassinated a former Russian minister of war. On arrival, the delegation didn’t bother with the usual diplomatic niceties, but instead took the opportunity to distribute revolutionary literature among German soldiers. 
“You might as well legalise sodomy”, British member of parliament Winston Churchill declared, “as recognise the Bolsheviks”. The fact that war-weary populations around the world were becoming increasingly mutinous only intensified the ruling-class panic and hatred of the Soviet regime. They feared events in Russia would spur on rebellion elsewhere. This fear was well grounded; fully four empires would collapse as the revolutionary wave that began in Russia swept the world in the following years. 
Initially, the likes of Churchill hoped the Soviet regime would die a natural death. In their eyes, the Bolshevik-led government in Russia was so unstable as to represent more of a power vacuum that would inevitably be filled, sooner or later, by a more “responsible”, capitalist government. In the meantime, though, the Allied powers were desperate to keep the Russians in the war. The role of the mass of Russian workers and peasants in the army was, as they saw it, to tie up large sections of the German army in the east, easing the pressure on their own forces to its west. In other words, to be cannon fodder.
They took matters into their own hands. They sent soldiers and diplomats to Russia to take over port towns, control supply lines and scheme against the new regime. 
Gathering soldiers for the intervention wasn’t simple. There wasn’t much public appetite for a new war. But intervention forces, including Australians, were gathered nonetheless. Reid writes of a group of Québécois soldiers who resisted mobilisation—their ship was forced to set sail with thirteen of them handcuffed in the ship’s hold. 
The extent to which the question of Russia’s continued involvement in the war dominated over other considerations in the early stages of the intervention is demonstrated by Britain’s first military engagement on Russian soil—which took place in Murmansk in March 1918. There the British forces fought, not against, but alongside the Soviet Red Army—repelling an attack by a group of Finnish reactionaries who had crossed the border and captured a Russian town. A revolution had broken out in Finland, and the counter-revolutionaries were supported by Germany. If victorious, they would align Finland with Germany in the war, something the British were very keen to avoid.
Despite this peculiar alignment of forces, however, the Finnish revolution went down to defeat. The reactionaries cemented their victory with a reign of terror, slaughtering thousands of the rebels. 
This experience provided a lesson for the Russian revolutionaries, showing the kind of treatment they could expect were they to lose power themselves. At the time, the so-called White armies were grouping together across Russia, preparing to unleash counter-revolutionary massacres of their own. Meanwhile, the lesson drawn from events in Finland by those leading the Western powers’ intervention in Russia was definitely not that the forces under their control should continue their momentary alignment with the Reds. Quite the contrary—the stronger the White armies became, the more support they gave them. 
The attitude of the foreign delegations to the locals was, in the main, appalling. One story recounted by Reid involved an American military engineer running a trench through a cemetery. In the process, many bones were left scattered on the ground, and a group of American soldiers amused themselves by kicking an exposed skull some blocks down the road. Russian women were described as “handy for doing our washing”.
Other examples are more sinister. British Major General Lionel Dunsterville wrote in his diary that on 5 August 1918 he returned to a town where earlier in the year he had negotiated with the local revolutionary committee “all very pleasant and ‘comrade-y’”. This time, though, things were very different. The committee, Reid writes, were “arrested and sent to Baghdad”—an early example of what, in the context of this century’s “war on terror”, became known as <a href="https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/torture/extraordinary-rendition">extraordinary rendition</a>. 
The intervention forces built prison camps with despicable conditions, while they preferred to sleep in luxury hotels. They introduced the Spanish flu to towns with no local resistance, and, according to Reid, deployed the “world’s first air-dropped chemical weapons”.
Given all this, it’s not surprising that the Bolshevik government began increasingly to circumscribe their freedoms. The measures were initially not very harsh. Reid describes the aftermath of an attempt to overthrow the soviet in the town of Archangel. When Bolshevik reinforcements arrived and restored (revolutionary) order, you might expect drastic reprisals to have been inflicted on the coup plotters. Yet, as Reid has it, they were left alone—hanging around the American consulate, playing football and cooking up new schemes. But the Bolshevik situation was becoming untenable as the White armies made gains, and the measures the former enacted became harsher and harsher. 
In November 1918 an armistice was signed, and World War One officially ended. This removed continuing Russia’s participation in the war effort from the objectives of the foreign intervention and left only the overthrowing of the Bolshevik regime. Through 1919, the fighting intensified. Tens of thousands of people were killed in battles between the Red and White armies across Russia. 
For the White armies with which the intervention forces aligned themselves, toppling the Bolshevik regime was only part of the mission. They intended to brutalise the population to such an extent that even the thought of resistance would become inconceivable. 
One of its largest forces was known as the <a href="https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/volunteer_army">Volunteer Army</a>. It was profoundly antisemitic. “As soon as the Volunteer Army entered a city”, Reid quotes historian Elias Heifetz as saying, “one could find everywhere on the walls ... proclamations against the Jews”. Antisemitism provided a convenient explanation for everything the Whites despised in Russian society, which they combined into the figure of the contemptible and traitorous, but somehow also all-powerful, “Bolshevik Jew”.
The pogrom was one of the Whites’ preferred methods of struggle. Scores of them would take place in areas under White control in these years, with something in the region of 150,000 killed. “The first major pogroms of the period took place in December 1918”, Reid writes, “in and around Lviv, near Ukraine’s present-day border with Poland ... The recorded death toll, probably an undercount, was 132, and doctors reported that sixty twelve-year-old girls were recovering in hospital from soldiers’ ‘hooliganism’”. 
Some historians have seen these pogroms as rehearsals for the Holocaust. Certainly some of the members of the German Freikorps who volunteered after World War One to fight against the Bolsheviks later joined the Nazi militias. The future Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss was, in Reid’s account, one of them. 
How did the leaders of the interventionist forces respond to the pogroms and other unconscionable acts of the Whites? “The British military representative”, Reid writes, “dismissed pogrom ‘rumours’ as ‘grossly exaggerated’”. Many Western newspapers in fact politically supported them, providing story after scandalising story about the supposed crimes of the “Jewish Bolsheviks”. In a sign of ruling-class attitudes in this period, the major British horse race, the Coronation Stakes (not the Cup, as Reid has it in the book), was won in 1922 by a horse called “Pogrom” owned by former member of parliament Lord Astor. 
The Russian revolutionary and leader of the Red Army Leon Trotsky later commented that, if the Whites had won in Russia, “fascism” would be a Russian word. Fortunately however, after years of desperate fighting the revolutionary side came out on top.
In some—for a reader with revolutionary socialist politics—particularly enjoyable pages, Reid describes the end of the interventionists’ time in Russia. By early 1920, their forces were in a terrible state. Soldiers had relied primarily on White army-issued currency for money and were now penniless. “They sold spare clothing and blankets at a street market, and found odd jobs”, Reid writes. “Several gave English lessons.” 
One British soldier found himself with a compatriot begging for help from a Bolshevik who, as Reid describes it, “delivered an impassioned lecture on how revolution was about to sweep England too”. “Captain Horrocks and I”, the soldier recounts, “looked at each other with amazement, for we realised that we were dealing with a state of things of which we had no previous conception”. 
In short order they fled. “As the Red Army advanced and the White ones collapsed”, Reid writes, “Allied troops destroyed equipment, filed back onto their ships and sailed away. Typically, the last they saw of Russia was smoke rising from burning warehouses”.
The forces of international reaction had thrown 180,000 foreign soldiers at the revolution. They were armed to their teeth with all that capitalist governments could provide, and financed with limitless cash. But the revolution showed its strength, and fended off the challenge. 
It’s sometimes said that “socialism was tried and failed in Russia”, as though it were a laboratory experiment carried out in pristine conditions and not a society subject to massive internal and external pressures from capitalist forces bent on its destruction. Reid’s book demonstrates the falsity of that claim and exposes the true sordid history of the Western ruling classes that—not content with the rivers of blood that flowed in the slaughter of World War One—attempted with the most barbaric means to quash the rising that finally put an end to it.

Jess Lenehan

The West’s war on workers’ power in Russia

Review of Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters by Oliver Franklin-Wallis, Simon &amp; Schuster UK, 2023.
Journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis’ Wasteland provides a horrifying insight into the realities of our global waste system. Through the book, Franklin-Wallis recounts his journey across the world and interactions with the people, processes and facilities responsible for the final stages of the capitalist production cycle. From recycling plants in the UK to toxic e-waste in Ghana, each chapter explores a fresh revulsion with the way global capitalism handles waste disposal.
Franklin-Wallis’ aim is to open readers’ eyes to what is too often left unseen. He starts with the Ghazipur landfill, a mountain of 14 million tonnes of garbage that “looms over” India’s capital New Delhi “as if someone has lifted a chunk of the Himalayas”. The scale is often incomprehensible, but Franklin-Wallis’ descriptions of the sights, sounds and unbearable smells help to convey the spectacle far better than any picture could. 
Franklin-Wallis emphasises the negative impacts of capitalism’s “wastelands” on both human beings and the environment. He doesn’t describe the Ghazipur landfill as if it were a purely aesthetic phenomenon. The reader is given a sociological background to the lower caste workers picking through the mountain of trash, and a harrowing description of a cloud of scavenger birds that have found their place amid the landfill’s ecosystem of rotting foodstuffs. Franklin-Wallis conveys, too, the joy some young children find with a half-empty bottle of bubble-making solution they salvaged. 
While reeling from the immense scale of a garbage pit in the UK so deep that his guide has never seen the bottom, Franklin-Wallis poses the question: “Do we hide our waste because we are disgusted, or ashamed?” The rest of the book makes clear, though, that it’s neither. The mass of people are disconnected from the “wastelands” of the production cycle the better to facilitate the profit-making of companies whose trash ends up there.
The primary consequence of waste is environmental degradation. The various dump sites discussed in Wasteland each produce “plumes of carbon dioxide”, and a single landfill in Pakistan was found to be emitting 126 tonnes of methane per hour. Plastics are particularly odious due to their inability to be fully broken down, with the upper ocean estimated to contain 24.4 trillion microplastic particles. 
The harmful environmental effects of waste are often not well understood, as there are an incredible number of different pollutants. One class of pollutants is known as persistent organic pollutants (POPs). POPs are not very soluble in water but very soluble in fats. This has resulted in them accumulating in whale blubber to the point that certain whale carcasses “are so contaminated they are classified as toxic waste”.
Keeping food waste hidden from view is also important to maintain the myth of global capitalism being an efficient economic system. <a href="https://www.wwf.eu/?4049841/fifteen-per-cent-of-food-is-lost-before-leaving-the-farm-WWF-report">According to the World Wildlife Fund</a>, 15.3 percent of all food produced is wasted before it even makes it to stores. Overall, according to the United Nations World Food Programme, a third of all food produced is wasted—weighing 931 million tonnes and worth US$1 trillion a year. This waste is both an indictment of the system’s inefficiency, as there are still hundreds of millions of people who are malnourished, and devastating for the environment. Food waste produces up to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. 
Recycling is a regularly proposed solution to the world’s waste problem that Franklin-Wallis explores. He is optimistic about this (perhaps overly), while acknowledging there are serious limitations. Globally, <a href="https://www.developmentaid.org/news-stream/post/158158/world-waste-statistics-by-country">less than 20 percent</a> of the more than 2 billion tonnes of household waste produced annually is recycled. And recycling is a drain on other resources too. For example, producing one kilogram of recycled paper requires 170 litres of water. Additionally, a proportion of waste can’t be recycled at all or only for a limited number of times. Many plastics in particular degrade over successive recycles and become toxic. 
Franklin-Wallis talks to the commercial director for a plastics company who, commenting on the recent corporate strategy of encouraging customers to return used plastic bags, says it’s “absolute bollocks isn’t it? It’s greenwashing ... most of it has gone to landfill or waste-to-energy”. The boss of a T-shirt recycling company tells him that if a truly “circular economy” where all products used were recycled was possible, it would involve someone buying clothes, wearing them once, and returning them to the producer without ever washing them. It would be, he says, “less of a closed system of ethical consumption than capitalism as hamster wheel, spinning ever faster”.
Franklin-Wallis discusses how profit-making is an essential component of recycling, waste management and sanitation systems under capitalism. Throughout the world, things happen only when some company can turn a profit. Much of the clothing that is sent for recycling in the West, for example, actually ends up being shipped to countries in the developing world, where a large portion of it is simply dumped, because it’s more profitable to do that than to recycle them. Rivers are polluted and people’s sources of water contaminated because companies won’t accept the cut to their profits that would result from disposing of waste safely elsewhere.
Franklin-Wallis describes how tanneries in India illegally dump chromium waste on roads, polluting the groundwater to 4,000 times the safe drinking limit designated by the World Health Organization. These kinds of breaches are unavoidable in a system in which the logics of profit-seeking and competition dominate. Often, too, the environmental regulations under which companies operate have been designed by governments in consultation with the biggest polluters to be both loose enough not to be a barrier to profit-making and intentionally confusing for consumers.
Inequalities and class differences in how people relate to waste and production are also intrinsic to capitalism. In Wasteland Franklin-Wallis often recounts tours of waste facilities led by, and discussions of waste and recycling with, the bosses and managers of companies. Where he relates to the workers, it is typically as an observer rather than as a direct interlocutor. While this somewhat one-sided class perspective does colour the book, Franklin-Wallis is never uncritical of what the bosses tell him and is incredibly sympathetic to the way workers and the poor are affected by the “wastelands” he discusses. 
When it comes to sanitation, in particular, Franklin-Wallis centres the impacts on the working class. In a way reminiscent of Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England, he shows how the advance of industry in the early days of capitalism resulted in an incredible depreciation of the standard of living for working-class people. He describes how the Thames river in London “was unimaginably polluted”, but that “despite the putrid state of the river, many of the city’s poorest inhabitants were still sourcing their drinking water from communal street pumps”. It was only, Franklin-Wallis says, after the smell started to affect the wealthy and the health of their labour supply that the ruling class began seriously to consider improvements to sanitation.
The working class and poor suffering from waste and sanitation-related illnesses is not a mere historical fact, but a persistent truth of modern capitalism. Franklin-Wallis points out that 1.7 billion people still do not have access to adequate sanitation. One in ten people globally consume unsafe drinking water, which is largely responsible for <a href="https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-health/diarrhoeal-disease/">1,200 children under five dying every day</a> from diarrhoea. 
As well as examining its health and environmental impacts, Franklin-Wallis emphasises how waste is dehumanising. He relates feeling sick just briefly walking around a waste dump full of animal carcasses. But, as his book makes clear, many people around the world are forced to live permanently in such conditions. On this point, Franklin-Wallis’s analysis could have benefited from reference to the Marxist concept of alienation, or the idea that capitalist and class societies generally remove people from what makes them human, and often force them to live in truly inhuman conditions.
Crucially, alienation explains how working-class people have no agency in, or real connection to, the production process. Whereas historically people laboured to meet definite needs and contribute to society, under capitalism the individual existence and personal goals of workers have no bearing on productive life at all, and the labour people perform is compelled and directed towards making profit. Franklin-Wallis’ question about why we hide from our waste is fundamentally misdirected. We, as workers, don’t hide from anything. Our fundamentally alienated existence means that what is, and isn’t, hidden from us is something that others—namely, the capitalist ruling class—decide for us. 
The disconnection of the mass of workers from production, and the waste that it generates, is something that the capitalist class facilitates and supports. The “throwaway” culture of contemporary capitalism, in which we’re encouraged to “buy, buy, buy” and think little or nothing of the waste we’re helping generate in the process, provides immense benefits to capitalists whose profits depend on selling things in ever greater quantities. Waste is hidden from us because it’s good for business.
Some of the proposals Franklin-Wallis offers at the conclusion of the book, such as rationalising packaging, are useful. However, a problem as great as waste—itself a product of the internal logic of capitalism—cannot be solved by anything short of a total restructuring of production and class relations with it. This is why Franklin-Wallis’ ultimate conclusion—that we should simply “buy less stuff”—falls so flat after much of the rest of the book lands so forcefully. 
Franklin-Wallis ends Wasteland by pondering a water bottle: “Who made this thing? How many lives has it touched, whose hands, whose lips?” Waste is a product of people, with their labour embodied in its creation. However, it won’t be until we have abolished capitalism that production, and waste, can be rationally organised in accordance with human needs.

Liam Kruger

Why do we hide from our waste?

Review of 12 Rules for Strife by Jeff Sparrow and Sam Wallman, Scribe publications, 2024 
From the first pages to the last, the hero of 12 Rules for Strife is: ourselves. 
Cartoonist Sam Wallman’s work is a regular feature of picket lines, protests, and union and radical publications in this country. In 12 Rules for Strife Sam teamed up with well known left-wing author Jeff Sparrow to create 128 pages of illustrations and argument, exploring how ordinary people collectively create and share thought, work, movement, controversy, and transformation—in other words, how we go about creating the “strife” needed to win a better world. 
Sam’s work, as always, is wonderful—both in the sense of “really great” and also “full of wonder”. The collective of strife-makers he portrays in this book is no mere accumulation of automatons. Human frailty, contradiction and uncertainty, as well as strength, well up out of every page. 
Sam somehow manages to capture the risk that each “ordinary” person bears in taking a single step on the path to extraordinary, history-making actions. His drawings capture that combination of nervousness and keeping our nerve when we take our first step to contradict a manager; the challenge in finding the courage (and the right approach) to start a conversation about workplace issues with a workmate; and how these individual acts flow out of and feed back into a bigger whole.
Changing the world is no walk in the park. A monstrous three-headed dog, recognisable to fans of Harry Potter and Greek mythology alike, makes an inconspicuous cameo in chapter three being walked by a (literal) cartoon capitalist. This horror then reappears in later chapters—off the leash, roaming at will, and on occasion being fed by some of our fellow workers.
This gets to one of the central political arguments of 12 Rules for Strife, which will be familiar to readers of Jeff Sparrow’s 2018 book Trigger Warnings: Political Correctness and the Rise of the Right. In Trigger Warnings, Jeff argued that the decline in the level of struggle since the 1970s is intertwined with a political degeneration within the left. 
It used to be common sense on the left to view workers as having a vital interest in combating the oppression and division that capitalism creates. Workers could challenge that oppression, and overcome those divisions, through a combination of struggle and political argument. By contrast, much of the left today effectively treats the mass of workers as irrelevant or even an obstacle to social change, due to their contradictory and sometimes reactionary views. 
In 12 Rules for Strife Sam and Jeff, in word and in illustration, take aim at this elitist conception. The chapter headed “Reject smug politics” is a direct and very welcome attack on the idea that struggle and politics should be reserved for those who have already passed some test of political clarity or purity. 
The “direct politics” that Sam and Jeff advocate puts the actions of ordinary people, and especially workers, at the centre of any project for social change. They contrast this with “delegated politics”, where we’re relegated to the status of passive observers. 
This is a useful distinction. It’s also one that leaves plenty of room for argument, given that “direct politics” could encompass the contending approaches of socialism from below, syndicalism, and the muscular do-it-yourself reformism of many progressive trade union militants. The role of “strife” in the sense of polemic between these various approaches isn’t explored in this brief book. 
Perhaps a more consequential omission is the role of political organisation: after all, throughout history it has been organised political forces that have played a crucial role in determining how far waves of struggle and radicalisation can go. No doubt the argument can (and no doubt it should) continue about which rule or rules we might like to add, or to tweak: 12 Rules for Strife
is an intervention into an argument, not the final word.
12 Rules for Strife is a wonderful political manifesto, released at an extraordinary political moment. The book came out on 1 May, just as student encampments in solidarity with the people of Palestine were spreading from Columbia University in New York to campuses across the US and around the world. 
In the week or so since I read Sam and Jeff’s book, I’ve been able to visit several of the student encampments around Melbourne. In a time of horror, it’s been a wonderful experience—again, in both senses of that word. 
At each of the camps, whatever was going on, there was an electricity in the air that came from the awareness that many thousands of people around the world were doing precisely what we were doing at that moment: putting up a tent, defending an encampment either physically or politically, leafleting and chalking, or engaging with students to draw more people in and to discuss the politics and history of the Palestinian struggle and the importance of solidarity. 
More than once, I’ve felt what Sam portrays as a recurring motif in this book: the tendrils of thought and human connection, energy, and purpose that bind us to each other, and to a bigger whole. Many thousands of us, perhaps many millions, are joining each other in strife.

Jerome Small

Choose strife

The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, Resistance Fighters and Firebrands By Donny Gluckstein and Janey Stone Interventions, 2024. 385 pages 



As Israel lays waste to Gaza, an ideological battle rages over who can lay legitimate claim to Jewish identity and historical experience. So this excellent new work by Donny Gluckstein and Janey Stone—unapologetic Marxists, Jews and anti-Zionists—could hardly be timelier.
Zionism extols what Gluckstein and Stone refer to as the “lachrymose” (tearful) interpretation of Jewish history, according to which Jews meekly submitted to centuries of repression, only to find redemption through the establishment of Israel as a Jewish ethno-state. In contrast, Gluckstein and Stone uncover the radical Jewish tradition, which combated anti-Semitism with socialist politics and international working-class solidarity, encompassing Jews and non-Jews alike.
The spread of capitalism across Europe revolutionised social structures and political agencies. Confronted by an increasingly self-conscious working class, the capitalist class and its hangers-on came to rely on nationalism and racism to forge alternative political identities that did not threaten their rule.
This included using anti-Semitism to turn sections of the working class against each other, especially in eastern and central Europe. Gluckstein and Stone demonstrate how anti-Semitism was not innate among non-Jewish workers but was consciously promulgated by the ruling classes in a strategy of divide and rule. The result was pogroms, systematic discrimination and ultimately the Holocaust.
Anti-Semitism drew three main responses from the European Jewish community. First, liberal assimilationism emphasised political respectability and adaptation to locally dominant national cultures. Second, Zionism—Jewish nationalism—argued that anti-Semitism could not be defeated within Europe, and that Jews needed their own nation-state to protect their interests. These responses were popular among the minority of middle- and upper-class Jews.
But the majority of European Jews were workers. They confronted both the economic exploitation common to their class and the racism specifically directed at Jews. Only the socialist movement promised to eradicate the single underlying cause of this dual oppression: capitalism. Consequently, Jews played a disproportionately important role in the development of the socialist movement, both as leaders and among the rank and file.
Jewish socialists frequently clashed with conservative religious leaders, middle-class Jews who craved respectability, and Jewish factory owners who were happy to exploit their co-religionists—or occasionally refused to employ Jewish workers because they were too rebellious! These conflicts shattered the illusion of a unitary Jewish community. 
Defying their impoverishment and political repression, working-class Jews again and again showed their fighting spirit. Stone and Gluckstein trace these stories of resistance from the ghettos of eastern Europe to the slums and sweatshops of New York and London’s East End. The class struggle encompassed consumer boycotts, rent strikes and above all unionisation and strikes. Jewish workers were in particular pioneers of the class struggle in the Russian empire, where they frequently made up a high proportion of the urban working class.
Socialists also organised resistance against anti-Semitism. Armed militias defended communities against pogroms in eastern Europe, while mass mobilisations drove back the British Union of Fascists in 1930s London. Even when unsuccessful, such actions developed political consciousness and self-respect among participants. A particularly moving chapter describes the heroic defiance of armed ghetto uprisings against the Nazis.
Gluckstein and Stone do not shy away from the political debates thrown up in the course of struggle. Some currents combined aspects of socialism with Jewish nationalism, resulting in so-called labour Zionism. This contradictory approach inevitably resulted in Zionist chauvinism winning out over socialist internationalism. Labour Zionists eventually played a key role in the establishment of Israel and the dispossession of Palestinian workers and peasants.
There were also socialists who argued that Jews needed to form separate political parties and unions, exclusive of non-Jews, to counter their specific racial oppression. This foreshadowed what we would today call “identity politics” and “autonomous organising”. But the most successful approach was that of the Bolshevik party, in which many Jews played a leading role. They insisted that all workers should unite in revolutionary organisations, so they could more effectively struggle together against both racism and capitalism. Under Bolshevik leadership, the Russian Revolution was a highpoint in the fight against anti-Semitism, with legal equality secured and pogroms at last suppressed in the land of the tsars.
Ultimately, the Jewish radical tradition shared the fate of the wider European revolutionary socialist movement, suffering crushing defeats under Nazism and Stalinism. Zionism emerged as the dominant political force among Jews following World War Two.
But, as Gluckstein and Stone argue, those earlier generations of rebels have bequeathed a vital political legacy to socialists today:
“This is not a sectional history; it belongs not just to Jews or Jewish socialists but to all people who fight back against the horrors of capitalism, who engage in the struggle to transform the world. It is ... a guide to uniting to resist the threat of annihilation that has returned today.”

16th century revolutionary’s words resonate today: review of new book on Thomas Muntzer

How US union leaders worked with the CIA to undermine democracy

The West’s war on workers’ power in Russia

Why do we hide from our waste?

Choose strife

Documenting Jewish radicalism

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us