The Sugar Barons by Matthew Parker – review

The cane fields of the West Indies hid a corrupt society

Ian Thomson
The Guardian, Saturday 2 April 2011

In Jamaica recently, I was invited to lunch at a Restoration-era plantation house. The sound of crushed ice clinking against glass greeted me, as bow-tied waiters served guests at a long table draped in linen. The top brass of the island’s sugar industry was there. For three centuries the plantation’s slave-grown sugar had satisfied the British craving for cakes, confections and the popular version of coffee and tea (that “blood-sweetened beverage”, the abolitionist poet Southey called it).

Modern Britain, according to Matthew Parker, was built on sugar. There is hardly a manufacturing town on these shores that was not in some way connected to the “Africa trade”. The glittering prosperity of slave ports such as Bristol and Liverpool was derived in large part from commerce with Africa. In the heyday of the British slave trade, from 1700 to 1808, West Indians (as white sugar barons were then known) became conspicuous by their new wealth. A popular melodrama of 1771, Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian, satirised them as boorish creatures who had settled in the Caribbean to acquire a fortune and a social status they would have been denied at home.

In The Sugar Barons, Parker provides a glittery history of the British impresarios, heiresses and remittance men involved in Caribbean slavery. Typically they cast Jamaica or Barbados aside like a sucked orange in order to fritter their profits back home in England. Outside of Georgian London, the greatest concentration of retired West Indians was in the Bristol suburb of Clifton. There, in their cocked hats and fashionably buckled shoes, the new men of capital were disliked for their ostentation. George III, the story goes, was peeved to encounter a West Indian in the seaside resort of Weymouth whose coach was more resplendent than his own. “Sugar, sugar, hey? – all that sugar!” the king complained loudly.

In this racy, well-researched history, Parker concentrates on such egregiously cruel sugar barons as Thomas Thistlewood, who ran a slave plantation in west Jamaica between 1750 and 1786. By his own precise account, Thistlewood had sexual intercourse on 3,852 occasions throughout his 40-year-long Caribbean rampage. His strenuous licentiousness, chronicled in schoolboy Latin in a diary he kept (“About 2am, cum Negro girls”), makes it clear that sex was important to Britain’s imperial project: the empire gave planters like Thistlewood the licence to abuse their captive women and indulge a predatory nature.

Needless to say, sugar barons had no scruple about the brutality of the “Negro trade”. At Drax Hall estate in north Jamaica, slaves were flogged virtually into the grave in order to speed up cane-cutting and crushing. (The Drax family gave its name to the fiendish Sir Hugo Drax in Ian Fleming’s 007 extravaganza Moonraker.)

Since the West Indies were riddled with disease, insects and reptiles, British planters became absentee landlords if they could, or else they liquidated their tropical holdings outright. Still others never set foot in the West Indies at all. The Gothic novelist William Beckford’s sole attempt, in 1787, to visit his father’s property Drax Hall took him no further than Lisbon: sea-sickness, combined with a fear of shipboard cockroaches, detained him.

The few planters who did stay behind aimed to send their children “home” to England for their education. Tobias Smollett (pictured), the 18th-century Scottish novelist, having married a “home-comer” from Jamaica, appointed a London agent to oversee the sale and purchase of his wife’s slaves. Typically, funds were slow to arrive as British slaving agents were inefficient and, often as not, drunk. “That cursed Ship from Jamaica”, Smollett complained in a letter of 1756, “is at last arrived without Letter or Remittance.” Smollett and his wife could hope to earn £80 for each “Negro man” sold on their behalf – a considerable sum in those days.

To judge by Parker’s account, sugar was the only reason for the British Caribbean’s existence. Barbados society was notably created from slavery; Barbadian customs and culture were fashioned by slavery. The effects of slavery are moreover plain to see in the island’s class and racial divides today. Though African complicity in the British slave trade can hardly be ignored, Parker makes nothing of it. The African side of transatlantic slavery was exemplified by the slave castles the British operated along the Gold Coast until the slave trade’s abolition in 1807, and which served as holding centres for Africans captured by and sold into servitude by fellow Africans. Conceivably, the forebears of British Jamaicans today passed through these warehouse-dungeons. The Sugar Barons provides eloquent testimony to the mercantile greed of a few and the manifest misery endured by millions in the pursuit of sweetness.

Ian Thomson’s The Dead Yard: A Story of Modern Jamaica (Faber) won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje award 2010.

Indomitable
Terry Eagleton

How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011 by Eric Hobsbawm
Little, Brown, 470 pp, £25.00, January 2011, ISBN 978 1 4087 0287 1

In 1976, a good many people in the West thought that Marxism had a reasonable case to argue. By 1986, most of them no longer felt that way. What had happened in the meanwhile? Were these people now buried under a pile of toddlers? Had Marxism been unmasked as bogus by some world-shaking new research? Had someone stumbled on a lost manuscript by Marx confessing that it was all a joke?

We are speaking, note, about 1986, a few years before the Soviet bloc crumbled. As Eric Hobsbawm points out in this collection of essays, that wasn’t what caused so many erstwhile believers to bin their Guevara posters. Marxism was already in dire straits some years before the Berlin Wall came down. One reason given was that the traditional agent of Marxist revolution, the working class, had been wiped out by changes to the capitalist system – or at least was no longer in a majority. It is true that the industrial proletariat had dwindled, but Marx himself did not think that the working class was confined to this group. In Capital, he ranks commercial workers on the same level as industrial ones. He was also well aware that by far the largest group of wage labourers in his own day was not the industrial working class but domestic servants, most of whom were women. Marx and his disciples didn’t imagine that the working class could go it alone, without forging alliances with other oppressed groups. And though the industrial proletariat would have a leading role, Marx does not seem to have thought that it had to constitute the social majority in order to play it.

Even so, something did indeed happen between 1976 and 1986. Racked by a crisis of profits, old style mass production gave way to a smaller scale, versatile, decentralised ‘post-industrial’ culture of consumerism, information technology and the service industries. Outsourcing and globalisation were now the order of the day. But this did not mean that the system had essentially changed, thus encouraging the generation of 1968 to swap Gramsci and Marcuse for Said and Spivak. On the contrary, it was more powerful than ever, with wealth concentrated in even fewer hands and class inequalities growing apace. It was this, ironically, which sparked the leftist rush for the exits. Radical ideas withered as radical change seemed increasingly implausible. The only public figure to denounce capitalism in the past 25 years, Hobsbawm claims, was Pope John Paul II. All the same, another couple of decades later, the fainthearted witnessed a system so exultant and impregnable that it only just managed to keep the cash machines open on the high streets.

Eric Hobsbawm, who was born in the year of the Bolshevik revolution, remains broadly committed to the Marxist camp – a fact worth mentioning as it would be easy to read this book without realising it. This is because of its judiciousness, not its shiftiness. Its author has lived through so much of the political turbulence he portrays that it is easy to fantasise that History itself is speaking here, in its wry, all-seeing, dispassionate wisdom. It is hard to think of a critic of Marxism who can address his or her own beliefs with such honesty and equipoise.

Hobsbawm, to be sure, is not quite as omniscient as the Hegelian World-Spirit, for all his cosmopolitan range and encyclopedic knowledge. Like many historians he is not at his sharpest in the realm of ideas, and he is wrong to suggest that the disciples of Louis Althusser treated Marx’s Capital as though it were primarily a work of epistemology. Nor would Hegel’s Geist treat feminism, not least Marxist feminism, with such cold-eyed indifference, or consign one of the most fertile currents of modern Marxism – Trotskyism – to a few casual asides. Hobsbawm also thinks that Gramsci is the most original thinker produced by the West since 1917. Perhaps he means the most original Marxist thinker, but even that is dubious. Walter Benjamin is surely a better qualified candidate for that title.

Even the most erudite students of Marxism, however, will find themselves learning from these essays. It is, for example, part of the stock-in-trade of historical materialism that Marx broke decisively with the various utopian socialists who surrounded him. (One of them believed that in an ideal world the sea would turn into lemonade. Marx would probably have preferred Riesling.) Hobsbawm, by contrast, insists on Marx’s substantial debt to these thinkers, who ranged from ‘the penetratingly visionary to the psychically unhinged’. He is clear about the fragmentary nature of Marx’s political writings, and rightly insists that the word ‘dictatorship’ in the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, used by Marx to describe the Paris Commune, means nothing like what it means today. Revolution was to be seen not simply as a sudden transfer of power but as the prelude to a lengthy, complex, unpredictable period of transition. From the late 1850s onwards, Marx did not consider any such seizure of power either imminent or probable. Much as he cheered on the Paris Commune, he expected little from it. Nor was revolution to be simplemindedly opposed to reform, of which Marx was a persistent champion. As Hobsbawm might have added, there have been some relatively bloodless revolutions and some spectacularly bloody processes of social reform.
Harvard University Press – Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice

An absorbing chapter on Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England claims it as the first study anywhere to deal with the working class as a whole, not merely with particular sectors or industries. In Hobsbawm’s view, its analysis of the social impact of capitalism is still in many respects unsurpassed. The book does not paint its subject in too lurid a colour: the charge that it depicts all workers as starving or destitute, or living purely at subsistence level, is groundless. Nor is the bourgeoisie presented as a bunch of black-hearted villains. As so often, it takes one to know one: Engels himself was the son of a wealthy German manufacturer who ran a textile mill in Salford, and used his ill-gotten gains to help keep the down-at-heel Marx family afloat. He also enjoyed a spot of fox-hunting, and as a champion of both the proletariat and the colonial Irish maintained a unity of theory and practice by taking a working-class Irish woman as his mistress.

Did Marx see the victory of socialism as inevitable? He says so in The Communist Manifesto, though Hobsbawm denies that it is a deterministic document. Yet this is partly because he does not inquire into what kind of inevitability is at stake. Marx sometimes writes as if historical tendencies had the force of natural laws; but it is doubtful even so that this is why he saw socialism as the logical outcome of capitalism. If socialism is historically predestined, why bother with political struggle? It is rather that he expected capitalism to become more exploitative, while the working class grew in strength, numbers and experience; and these men and women, being moderately rational, would then have every reason to rise up against their oppressors. Rather as for Christianity the free actions of human beings are part of God’s preordained plan, so for Marx the tightening contradictions of capitalism will force men and women freely to overthrow it. Conscious human activity will bring revolution about, but the paradox is that this activity is itself in a sense scripted.

You cannot, however, speak of what free men and women are bound to do in certain circumstances, since if they are bound to do it they are not free. Capitalism may be teetering on the verge of ruin, but it may not be socialism that replaces it. It may be fascism, or barbarism. Hobsbawm reminds us of a small but significant phrase in The Communist Manifesto which has been well-nigh universally overlooked: capitalism, Marx writes ominously, might end ‘in the common ruin of the contending classes’. It is not out of the question that the only socialism we shall witness is one that we shall be forced into by material circumstance after a nuclear or ecological catastrophe. Like other 19th-century believers in progress, Marx did not foresee the possibility of the human race growing so technologically ingenious that it ends up wiping itself out. This is one of several ways in which socialism is not historically inevitable, and neither is anything else. Nor did Marx live to see how social democracy might buy off revolutionary passion.

Few works have sung the praises of the middle classes with such embarrassing zest as The Communist Manifesto. In Marx’s view, they have been by far the most revolutionary force in human history, and without harnessing for its own ends the material and spiritual wealth they have accumulated, socialism will prove bankrupt. This, needless to say, was one of his shrewder prognostications. Socialism in the 20th century turned out to be most necessary where it was least possible: in socially devastated, politically benighted, economically backward regions of the globe where no Marxist thinker before Stalin had ever dreamed that it could take root. Or at least, take root without massive assistance from more well-heeled nations. In such dismal conditions, the socialist project is almost bound to turn into a monstrous parody of itself. All the same, the idea that Marxism leads inevitably to such monstrosities, as Hobsbawm observes, ‘has about as much justification as the thesis that all Christianity must logically and necessarily always lead to papal absolutism, or all Darwinism to the glorification of free capitalist competition’. (He does not consider the possibility of Darwinism leading to a kind of papal absolutism, which some might see as a reasonable description of Richard Dawkins.)

Hobsbawm, however, points out that Marx was actually too generous to the bourgeoisie, a fault of which he is not commonly accused. At the time of The Communist Manifesto, their economic achievements were a good deal more modest than he imagined. In a curious garbling of tenses, the Manifesto described not the world capitalism had created in 1848, but the world as it was destined to be transformed by capitalism. What Marx had to say was not exactly true, but it would become true by, say, the year 2000, and it was capitalism that would make it so. Even his comments on the abolition of the family have proved prophetic: about half of the children in advanced Western countries today are born to or brought up by single mothers, and half of all households in large cities consist of single persons.

Hobsbawm’s essay on the Manifesto speaks of its ‘dark, laconic eloquence’, and notes that as political rhetoric it has ‘an almost biblical force’. ‘The new reader,’ he writes, ‘can hardly fail to be swept away by the passionate conviction, the concentrated brevity, the intellectual and stylistic force of this astonishing pamphlet.’ The Manifesto initiated a whole genre of such declarations, most of them from avant-garde artists such as the Futurists and the Surrealists, whose outrageous wordplay and scandalous hyperbole turn these broadsides into avant-garde artworks in themselves. The manifesto genre represents a mixture of theory and rhetoric, fact and fiction, the programmatic and the performative, which has never been taken seriously enough as an object of study.

Marx, too, was an artist of sorts. It is often forgotten how staggeringly well read he was, and what painstaking labour he invested in the literary style of his works. He was eager, he remarked, to get shot of the ‘economic crap’ of Capital and get down to his big book on Balzac. Marxism is about leisure, not labour. It is a project that should be eagerly supported by all those who dislike having to work. It holds that the most precious activities are those done simply for the hell of it, and that art is in this sense the paradigm of authentic human activity. It also holds that the material resources that would make such a society possible already exist in principle, but are generated in a way that compels the great majority to work as hard as our Neolithic ancestors did. We have thus made astounding progress, and no progress at all.
LRB Book Bags

In the 1840s, Hobsbawm argues, it was by no means improbable to conclude that society was on the verge of revolution. What was improbable was the idea that within a handful of decades the politics of capitalist Europe would be transformed by the rise of organised working-class parties and movements. Yet this is what came to pass. It was at this point that commentary on Marx, at least in Britain, began to shift from the cautiously admiring to the near hysterical. In 1885, no less devout a non-revolutionary than Balfour commended Marx’s writings for their intellectual force, and for their economic reasoning in particular. A whole raft of liberal or conservative commentators took his economic ideas with intense seriousness. Once those ideas took the form of a political force, however, a number of ferociously anti-Marxist works began to appear. Their apotheosis was Hugh Trevor-Roper’s stunning revelation that Marx had made no original contribution to the history of ideas. Most of these critics, I take it, would have rejected the Marxist view that human thought is sometimes bent out of shape by the pressure of political interests, a phenomenon commonly known as ideology. Only recently has Marxism been back on the agenda, placed there, ironically enough, by an ailing capitalism. ‘Capitalism in Convulsion’, a Financial Times headline read in 2008. When capitalists begin to speak of capitalism, you know the system is in dire trouble. They have still not dared to do so in the United States.

There is much else to admire in How to Change the World. In a suggestive passage on William Morris, the book shows how logical it was for a critique of capitalism based on the arts and crafts to spring up in England, where advanced industrial capitalism posed a deadly threat to artisanal production. A chapter on the 1930s contains a fascinating account of the relations between Marxism and science – it was the only period, Hobsbawm points out, when natural scientists were attracted to Marxism in significant numbers. As the threat of an irrationalist Fascism loomed, it was the ‘Enlightenment’ features of the Marxist creed – its faith in reason, science, progress and social planning – which attracted men like Joseph Needham and J.D. Bernal. During Marxism’s next historical upsurge, in the 1960s and 1970s, this version of historical materialism would be ousted by the more cultural and philosophical tenets of so-called Western Marxism. In fact, science, reason, progress and planning were now more enemies than allies, at war with the new libertarian cults of desire and spontaneity. Hobsbawm shows only qualified sympathy for the 1968ers, which is unsurprising in a long-term member of the Communist Party. Their idealisation of the Cultural Revolution in China, he suggests with some justice, had about as much to do with China as the 18th-century cult of the noble savage had with Tahiti.

‘If one thinker left a major indelible mark on the 20th century,’ Hobsbawm remarks, ‘it was he.’ Seventy years after Marx’s death, for better or for worse, one third of humanity lived under political regimes inspired by his thought. Well over 20 per cent still do. Socialism has been described as the greatest reform movement in human history. Few intellectuals have changed the world in such practical ways. That is usually the preserve of statesmen, scientists and generals, not of philosophers and political theorists. Freud may have changed lives, but hardly governments. ‘The only individually identifiable thinkers who have achieved comparable status,’ Hobsbawm writes, ‘are the founders of the great religions in the past, and with the possible exception of Muhammad none has triumphed on a comparable scale with such rapidity.’ Yet very few, as Hobsbawm points out, would have predicted such celebrity for this poverty-stricken, carbuncle-ridden Jewish exile, a man who once observed that nobody had ever written so much about money and had so little.

Most of the pieces collected in this book have been published before, though about two-thirds of them have not appeared in English. Those without Italian can therefore now read a number of important essays by Hobsbawm which first appeared in that language, not least three substantial surveys of the history of Marxism from 1880 to 1983. These alone would make the volume uniquely valuable; but they are flanked by other chapters, on such topics as pre-Marxian socialism, Marx on pre-capitalist formations, Gramsci, Marx and labour, which broaden its scope significantly. How to Change the World is the work of a man who has reached an age at which most of us would be happy to be able to raise ourselves from our armchairs without the aid of three nurses and a hoist, let alone carry out historical research. It will surely not be the last volume we shall be granted by this indomitable spirit.

December 30, 2010
The Fiery Trial
By ERIC FONER
Reviewed by Scott McLemee

Just after publishing The Black Jacobins (1938), his great history of
the Haitian slave revolt, the Trinidadian man of letters C. L. R James
settled in the United States, where, in due course, he began to think of
writing about Abraham Lincoln. The project that took shape in his mind
was unusual. For one thing, James thought historians should look at
history from below, with an eye to how the slaves had fought back
against their oppression. He wanted to treat Lincoln as part of their
story, not vice versa. But James also wanted the book he had in mind to
discuss both Shakespeare’s play King Lear and the Russian revolutionary
V. I. Lenin.

Peculiar as this may sound, it made a kind of sense. For James, Lear is
the definitive picture of an old social order in the process of
disintegration, while Lenin was the visionary architect of a new way of
life (though James, as a fierce anti-Stalinist, had nothing good to say
about what had been done with the blueprints meanwhile). In effect,
Lincoln would appear in the middle panel of a triptych: the most
Shakespearean of presidents, and one whose enemies saw him as a dictator.

Only fragments of the project were left behind when James died in
1989—and I doubt very much that Eric Foner had any of it in mind while
writing The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, which is
as painstaking and straightforward a book as James’s would have been
imaginative and idiosyncratic. But there is an affinity between them,
even so. The Fiery Trial is not, strictly speaking, a biography of
Lincoln; the attention is always focused on his relationship to slavery,
with other aspects of his life and personality refracted through that
question. And because slavery was the fault line running through the
very depths of American society, each nuance or shift in Lincoln’s
attitude is charged with enormous implication. Foner shares James’s feel
for how a leader’s outlook is shaped by (and then responds to) tensions
unfolding on the world’s political stage.

Foner is one of the great contemporary U.S. historians, and one doesn’t
want to go too far with comparing this book—in some ways a prequel to
his 1988 book Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution,
1863-1877—to a work of drama. But his method throughout The Fiery Trial
takes advantage of the fact that we, the audience, know something the
main character cannot: that the attitudes towards slavery expressed in
his early life (when he hated it while also keeping his distance from
abolitionism) are so many steps along the way to the enormous cataclysm
of the Civil War. Foner takes care to emphasize Lincoln’s own words as
they were recorded at the time—not the later recollections of them by
people who knew, as we do, what was coming.

He registers each little shift of attitude and widening of perspective
along the way, while continuously situating Lincoln’s opinions (and his
occasionally maddening silences) in the context of the debates of the
time. While there is no reason to doubt the statement, near the end of
his life, that he had always hated slavery, that revulsion reflected a
sense that it was morally damaging to white people—much like alcoholism.
Like other reformers of the day, he saw “genuine freedom as arising from
self-discipline rather than self-indulgence,” writes Foner, “something
violated by both drinkers and slaveholders, who allegedly lived
according to their passions.” This Calvinist streak was accompanied by a
policy wonk’s sense of how the problem could best be solved—through
compensating slaveholders for emancipation while relocating freed slaves
to Africa.

So much for trying to patch over a crack in the foundation. In time,
Lincoln shared the conviction that the country faced “an irrepressible
conflict between opposed and enduring forces” that would make it “either
entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation,” to
quote a famous speech from 1858 by William H. Seward, his future
Secretary of State. But Lincoln remained persistent in trying to pursue
gradualist efforts to eradicate slavery, well into the Civil War—with no
regard, most of the time, for any notion that black people might have a
say in the matter.

Foner is too serious a historian to editorialize about how Lincoln was a
racist. Sure he was; the point is cheaply made. But as ex-slaves throw
themselves into combat against the Confederacy—and the need to destroy
the old system, root and branch, becomes inescapable—Lincoln begins to
develop a conception of African-American citizenship with implications
that can only be called radical. This is a powerful book, confirming the
point that C. L. R. James often made: a leader, however farsighted, may
unleash forces that then push him further than he ever imagined going.

In fact, if this debacle has a name, Scheer suggests, it is the “Clinton Bubble,” that era when the administration let its friends on Wall Street write legislation that razed decades of robust financial regulation. It was Wall Street and Democratic Party darling Robert Rubin along with his clique of economist super-friends—Alan Greenspan, Lawrence Summers, and a few others—who inflated a giant real estate bubble by purposely not regulating the derivatives market, resulting in the pain and hardship millions are experiencing now.

The Great American Stickup is both a brilliant telling of the story of the Clinton financial clique and the havoc it wrought—informed by whistleblowers such as Brooksley Born, who goes on the record for Scheer—and an unsparing anatomy of the American business and political class. It is also a cautionary tale: those who form the nucleus of the Clinton clique are now advising the Obama administration.

* * *

In /The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth/, environmental
sociologists John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York offer a
radical assessment of both the problem and the solution. They argue that
the source of our ecological crisis lies in the paradox of wealth in
capitalist society, which expands individual riches at the expense of
public wealth, including the wealth of nature. In the process, a huge
ecological rift is driven between human beings and nature, undermining
the conditions of sustainable existence: a rift in the metabolic
relation between humanity and nature that is irreparable within
capitalist society, since integral to its very laws of motion.

*John Bellamy Foster* is editor of the US-based Marxist journal,
/Monthly Review/. He is professor of sociology at the University of
Oregon and author of /The Ecological Revolution/, /The Great Financial
Crisis/ (with Fred Magdoff), /Critique of Intelligent Design/ (with
Brett Clark and Richard York), /Ecology Against Capitalism/, /Marx’s
Ecology/, and /The Vulnerable Planet/.

*Brett Clark* is assistant professor of sociology at North Carolina
State University. He is coauthor (with John Bellamy Foster and Richard
York) of /Critique of Intelligent Design/.

*Richard York* is associate professor of sociology at the University of
Oregon. He is co-editor of the journal /Organization & Environment/ and
coauthor (with John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark) of /Critique of
Intelligent Design/.

**********************

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Tuesday, Jul 20, 2010 09:15 ET
“Fur, Fortune, and Empire”: How the fur trade shaped America
Animal pelts helped create our nation — and spawn a global power
struggle. A fascinating new book explains how

By Chuck Leddy, Barnes & Noble Review

Fur, Fortune, and Empire by Eric Jay Dolin

Historian Eric Jay Dolin brilliantly argues that the trade in
animal skins turned colonial America into a tumultuous frontier
where global powers battled for control. From the 17th century
right on up to the Gilded Age, the developed world’s appetite for
fur and its unique qualities made the new continent, with its
wealth of fur-bearing wildlife, a seemingly inexhaustible
resource. The result, as laid out in Dolin’s new book “Fur,
Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in
America,” was a major boost in the evolution of the colonies into
a powerful new player on the world stage.

Modern-day Manhattan, for example, owes its existence to the Dutch
eagerness to establish dominance in the fur trade: New Amsterdam
was first settled in the early 17th century as a trading post
where they could exchange European metal goods for beaver pelts
brought in by Native Americans. The Dutch wielded military power
to oust rival Sweden from the colonial fur trade, yet the
popularity of their wares proved their undoing. The intense
competition from the English colonies and from French fur traders
came with armed backing, and the English Navy ultimately ousted
the Dutch from New Amsterdam in 1664.

Dolin sheds insight on the ways the fur trade created
international tensions — in New England, the Great Lakes and the
expanding West. As traders clamored for access to land controlled
by Native Americans, tribes were pushed off their land, then given
guns and liquor, wreaking havoc on their traditional way of life.
The fur trade also triggered exploration more generally; fur
traders were often the first white men to map major rivers,
forests and mountains. The trade and the broader economy that
followed in its wake pulled people west, including Lewis and Clark
and Kit Carson, culminating in the monopoly of the 19th-century
fur trader and celebrated philanthropist John Jacob Astor, whose
American Fur Co. opened up trading posts across America (and whose
fortune would endow the library that became a national icon). For
all of fur’s contentious position in American culture today, Dolin
has skillfully illuminated its centrality in our nation’s
ever-surprising history.

Is Anti-Capitalism Enough? The New Crisis & the Left
— Howard Brick

The New Spirit of Capitalism
by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello
translated by Gregory Elliott
Verso Books 2006, paperback edition 2007, 656 pages, $39.95.

WHETHER OR NOT the current economic crisis and a historic
presidential election open up hidden potentials for renewed
popular protest and collective action, it is obvious that the
radical Left has lost a great deal of its size, visibility, élan
and influence since the 1970s.

When French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello commenced
their work together in the mid-1990s, resulting in this monumental
and inventive book, they saw not only that the Right had surged
and the Left declined since heady days of revolt in the late 1960s.

They also believed that “social critique has not seemed so
helpless for a century.” That is, the practical and theoretical
opposition to the status quo was weaker than at any time since the
beginnings of the modern mass labor and socialist movement.(1)

Why was the opposition so deep in the hole? After all, the signs
of growing inequality were evident, and activism persisted through
the 1980s and ’90s in addressing acute problems and grievances,
concerning AIDS, homelessness, the plight of the undocumented, or
the lack of modern medical care in the poor world at large. But
almost no one talked much any longer of the systemic framework —
of capitalism — that demanded a correspondingly systemic
challenge, thought Boltanski and Chiapello (hereafter B&C).

In this respect, things may have been different in the United
States than in France. Here, plenty of people were talking about
capitalism — in an overwhelming din of celebration.

While the remarkable energy signaled by the burst of the
“anti-globalization,” or global justice movement, promised to
“revive critique,” as B&C put it, those campaigns suffered a sharp
setback in the wake of a renewed Right turn following 9-11. Even
the momentous antiwar protests of 2003 lost energy steadily as the
Iraq war continued.

Now, nearly ten years after B&C first ventured their judgment that
“capitalism has benefited from the enfeeblement of critique,” it
remains unclear if much is different.(2) Capitalism has suddenly
revealed its fragility for all to see, but it is quite another
matter whether the Left now has the standing or the poise to offer
the radical, democratic and transitional demands that would, one
would think, have a growing audience amidst the present crisis and
current calls for “change.”

It is the great ambition of The New Spirit of Capitalism to
diagnose the peculiar shape that capitalism has assumed since the
1970s, to explain how and why its new forms have eluded a
forceful, concentrated challenge, and to venture proposals for
reinvigorating, indeed reinventing an effective anticapitalist
critique.

It’s not as if everything is new: Capitalism, in B&C’s eyes,
remains a system for pursuing profits and limitless accumulation,
amidst the generalization of wage-labor; and anticapitalism —
critiques of the domination, alienation, inequality, and
antisocial egoism spawned by the system—has kept it company since
its very beginning. Yet there has been plenty of room for
shape-shifting along the way.

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The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy
By Adrienne Mayor
Princeton Univ. 448 pp. $29.95
“The Poison King” is, as its subtitle makes clear, the story of the life of Mithradates, leader of the ancient Black Sea kingdom of Pontus, who, in the 1st century B.C., did everything he could to overthrow the Roman Empire. I read this biography as a layperson, not a scholar, but I can say without reservation that it’s a wonderful reading experience, as bracing as a tonic, the perfect holiday gift for adventure-loving men and women. A finalist for this week’s National Book Award, it’s drenched in imaginative violence and disaster, but it also wears the blameless vestments of culture and antiquity. You can have all the fun of reading about a greedy villain being put to death by being made to “drink” molten gold, but still hide safe behind the excuse that you’re just brushing up on your classics.

Mithradates, as the royal heir of Pontus, was trained in all the manly sports and modeled his life on heroes of yore like Alexander the Great and Hannibal. Perhaps because of his suspicious, murderous mother, he took a lively interest from his earliest years in poisons and their antidotes. Quite a few of his relatives had been or would be poisoned, so this was a sensible precaution.

The reader could be excused if they thought from the title of Le Fanu’s book that he has new scientific information which throws light on our existence: why we are here and if our story has a plot. But, alas, no. Le Fanu’s point is that science has set out to explain human life and its origins but has in fact failed in that quest and has succeeded only in emphasizing that life is indeed a mystery and we a mystery to ourselves. This, in turn, leaves us free to wonder at the astounding marvels of creation and, above all, at what a piece of work we humans are.

From the end of the Second World War to the start of the new millennium, with one discovery after another, it looked like science, as a discipline would sweep all before it. With the human genome project, it seemed we had reached the final frontier and we would unlock the crucial chromosomes that make us truly human and show why we differ from our primate cousins. On top of this scientists had also developed the technology to peer inside the human brain and record its activity. The mystery of the human mind, too, would be laid bare.

“Both the Human Genome Project and the Decade of the Brain (1991-2001) have transformed beyond measure , our understanding of ourselves — but in a way quite contrary to that anticipated”, says Le Fanu. (p14)

What the Human Genome Project discovered, among other things, was “the human genome is virtually interchangeable with that of our fellow vertebrates such as the mouse and the chimpanzee — to the tune of 98% or more. There is nothing to account for those very special attributes that so readily distinguish us from our primate cousins — our upright stance, our powers of reason and imagination, and the faculty of language”. (p15) Le Fanu says these findings were not just unexpected: they undermine the central premise of biology that the near-infinite diversity of form and attribute that so definitively distinguish living things one from the other must ‘lie in the genes’. (p16)

And, with the Decade of the Brain, we are no nearer finding out how the electric firing of the brain’s billions of nerves translate into our perception of the sights and sounds of the world around us, our thoughts and emotions and the rich inner landscape of personal memories. All that it has succeeded in doing, according to Le Fanu, is demonstrate how infinitely complex the human brain actually is.

Le Fanu initially chose to concentrate on the The Double Helix and the human brain because they represent the two forces that impose order on the world. The Double Helix imposes “the order of form on living things and the human brain and its mind imposing the order of understanding. (p71) Moreover, like Newton’s theory of gravity, these two explanations are non-materialist and fail the test of scientific knowability which holds that everything must be explicable in terms of material properties alone. According to Le Fanu it is biological science in general that has misled us into believing it can explain human life and its mysteries and Darwin in particular who offered an apparently all-encompassing and exclusive materialist explanation for the phenomena of life.

These are the two central planks Le Fanu wishes to establish upfront, because he thinks that they are crucial and have been overlooked in the general euphoria surrounding both projects. Having done this to his satisfaction, he goes on to make further objections to scientific materialism in the form of Darwinism which are more familiar, as they are still the matter of some contention.

For instance, he cannot see how evolution is a gradual process as Darwin and many of his latter day followers maintain, when the slow development of our enlarged brain and upright stance would put humans at a serious disadvantage in the survival stakes.

The ‘puzzle of perfection’ — where something, for example, the eye has to have all it parts fit for purpose all at once or not at all — and the failure of the fossil record to record the continuity of life — again cast doubt on this part of Darwin’s theory.

His aim is to demonstrate that what passes for established fact in Darwinism is still at the stage of hypothesis.

He is especially critical of the New Synthesis of Darwinism and Mendelism, with genetic mutation as a vehicle for natural selection and gradual change. He characterizes The Descent of Man as The Fall of Man, saying with the New Synthesis he is “no more than the plaything of his genes” and goes on to say that “the source of all this mischief lies in the necessity to portray man not as he is but as he has to be in order to incorporate him into an evolutionary theory that requires him to be different ‘only in degree not in kind’ from his primate cousins. We need, in short, a fuller, more rounded view that acknowledges the core reality of the human experience which sets us apart — the sense of the autonomous, independent ‘self’ …”. (p175)

Although, it is, at times, hard to follow the thread of his argument, his final goal is to promote a Cartesian separation of reality into material and non-material realms, with the contention that humans uniquely inhabit both. And this he says can be established from the findings of the latest brain research. He shows how scientists between 1861 and 1950 mapped out all the significant areas of the brain and from then to 1980, conceived of the brain as an information processing machine at the time when computers where dominating the conceptual landscape. But from 1980 onwards the development of the PET scanner changed all that.

The PET scanner found with regard to the act of seeing, for instance, that “at every stage the information received and interpreted by the retina and transmitted down the highways of the optic nerves to the visual cortex is less than sufficient to capture the world ‘out there’. ” (p205) This must mean that the brain somehow actively constructs a visual image.

But we have no idea how the brain first deconstructs and then reconstructs the electrical patterns of activity generated by the miniscule forces of energy impacting on our senses: no idea how they are integrated together into a clear, coherent, instantaneous sense of being in the world and no idea of the physical basis in the brain of every simple fleeting moment of our life.

He says that the imaging studies illuminated the most significant attribute of the human mind namely ‘the freedom to choose’, otherwise known as ‘the problem of mental causation’. The simple act of paying attention shows different area of the brain lighting up on the PET scanner according to what is being attended to — sights, sounds, smells — and the electrical activity of adjacent areas are turned down. But just thinking about one’s thoughts can alter the neuronal circuits of the brain as happens in cognitive therapy where negative beliefs can be replaced by positive ones, with a resulting change in behavior. So our non-material thoughts can have physical effects. Therefore, argues Le Fanu, we are free to choose and with choice comes personal, moral responsibility.

Le Fanu goes on to outline the five cardinal mysteries of the mind which he says “the (unanticipated) legacy of the Decade of the Brain has brought to our attention…that taken together offer the profoundest insights into our understanding of ourselves.” (p225) The mysteries are subjective awareness, free will, memory, reason and imagination, and self, which he says are the properties contained by the traditional notion of the soul. “And that soul, freed of its theological connotations, is no mere construction of the human imagination, but rather a resilient entity that changes over time yet remains the same…” (p227)

Whilst Le Fanu’s arguments are well-constructed, they are colored by the particular school of thought in the ascendancy for the last fifty years that has come to redefine Darwinism in an exclusively reductionist way. He calls for a new paradigm but unfortunately because of its subjective and individualistic approach his paradigm would be just as lopsided.

But Darwin’s theory is not a single entity but a heterogeneous collection of ideas. In fact, as it is today, Darwinism has turned into a broad scientific movement embracing a variety of interpretations, because from its peculiar blend of fact and hypothesis, it can absorb new findings, and still maintain its general thrust.

A candidate for such integration is the idea of symbiosis, touched on by Le Fanu, but not pursued, and now being considered seriously by biologists. With its emphasis on mutual advantage and cooperation, it could explain the sudden emergence of new species in the fossil record. It might also account for our socially contrived progress as a species and that greatest of all collaborative endeavors, the social construction of the human mind.

But as we debate these issues in our little corner of the cosmos, the larger Darwinian question remains unaddressed: Is homo sapiens wise enough to survive as a species?