Crowing Over Crumbs

Long-form sideblog. Far from sophisticated.

[crowinghour]

Top Five Games of 2016

I’ve probably played less games this year than I have since I was in secondary school (probably good), but, for all of the bad in 2016, the games have been good. There are some glaring omissions in my area of interest (Superhot, Oxenfree, We Know The Devil), never mind great things outside it (Doom). This is a list of what I enjoyed the most over the year and, sitting down in the post-Christmas blues, what I, in thinking over 2016, would recommend to anyone interested in them. There’s a few releases here that fell outside calendar year 2016 but, hey, my list, my rules.

Honourable Mention: Twilight Struggle

Twilight Struggle is an adaption of a Cold War board game, a one-against-one match where each player commands a world superpower, bargaining up the world between them. For a game I put relatively little time in compared to some others on this list, the hours I spent playing Twilight Struggle with @megamaam and @hellostarfleet were great fun for me (perhaps less so for them). I don’t have the networks to play board games as regularly as I’d like, but Twilight Struggle would be something I’d happily play more of, online or not.

5. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

The rocky road of MGSV is well-known, starting strongly with a mid-80’s aesthetic and style, but so rugged and unsteady that, by the time I finished it in April this year, I was ready to be done and slightly loathing of its rushed conclusion. The biggest condemnation is the ‘what if’ it poses by its incomplete nature – a three-act game that ends in the middle of the second. It does represent an impressive departure from the norms of its series, combining Metal Gear Solid, particularly Peace Walker, with lessons from ‘Western’ open-world games. As my honourable mention suggests, the Cold War shtick works for me, particularly as both this and Peace Walker gesture towards a more nuanced understanding of the Cold War. MGSV is an impressive game that will continue to be an interesting story as non-disclosure agreements lapse and we get insight into its development process. The thought of an original script or design document alone gets me salivating a little, but the product works between tight controls, the worst character of 2015 (Hueyyyyy), and an overall level of quality that, to an extent, helps one to forgive it for vanishing into vapour after Act 1.

4. Stardew Valley

Overnight farming sensation Stardew Valley is an oddity on my list, as I managed to forget I played it for forty hours. A non-booting hard drive and lack of cloud support has put a return on hold for the foreseeable future, but it was a captivating interest for weeks. I have some history with Harvest Moon (particularly the Game Boy Advance’s Friends of Mineral Town), but Stardew Valley builds on its inspirations and drinks its intellectual predecessors under the table.

Stardew Valley’s most similar item on this list is probably Metal Gear Solid V; both of them do a good job of the imagination through easy-to-understand systems that ingrain themselves in the player. They’re odd companion pieces to one another, but both gave me fresh itches to scratch. I never finished Stardew Valley, but, once I’m not working on a dissertation, I’m excited to dig back into it.

3. Bloodborne

Bloodborne is my favourite From Software title outside of the original Dark Souls (probably my favourite game period). Taking their challenging third-person action-RPG mould and repurposing it into a horror game is not unexpected, given the tenseness the Souls series has always used, but Bloodborne’s execution is fantastic. The turn from Georgian/Victorian werewolf yarn to Lovecraft-inspired cosmic horror story is well-handled, keeps the game feeling fresh, and builds a satisfying narrative around it. It has some of the best individual areas in any Souls games and the DLC is top-notch, particularly everything leading up to Maria of the Astral Clocktower. While some of its more interesting mechanics aren’t followed up on (Insight and the Chalice Dungeons), this game made me excited for From Software’s next few non-Dark Souls games. Bloodborne was good enough to take the spot I’d probably use for Dark Souls III, which is no mean feat.

2. Firewatch

Firewatch was something I made time for late in the year, but comes highly recommended. It’s a rare gem, mixing humour with maturity and a fabulous depiction of a real-feeling relationship between two adults, while still falling firmly into the movie-length game that I’ve come to value. It’s a game that captures both the beauty and tension of being alone in the wilderness with limited human contact. While I feel that Gone Home, the easiest reference point, tells a story that resonated more with me, I feel like Firewatch might be more of a must-play, because the 80s-thriller-esque influence makes for a really gripping game. The relationship between Henry and Delilah is well-written and the performances are strong, and learning that this game has been picked up for a movie deal doesn’t surprise me.

1. Overwatch

 Neither competitive online games nor shooters are genres I choose to play by habit. Initial scepticism was only allayed by assurances that both I and @hellostarfleet would both drop the cash for it so we’d have at least one other person to play with. Overwatch has become a game I would play almost socially and habitually. I don’t feel I can speak to the game’s social impacts in a broader sense, but there’s a lot Overwatch can be commended for. Its work to positively reinforce players welcomed me in, with cooperation and teamwork as keys to success. I feel the game’s community, particularly in the competitive modes, verges on unpleasant and I, even as someone unlikely to be singled out, don’t turn my mic because verbal abuse by strangers hardly excites me. That said, playing with friends, particularly @hellostarfleet, has allowed me to dip into the community in only small doses, making it a game I associate with friendliness and relaxation rather than, well, competitive gaming. Overwatch has been reason to tip the scales of visiting home, just so that I can stay up until fool o’clock to talk with friends and dig into a new update.

As well as the communal aspects of it, I feel that it handles the problem I have with shooters (repetitiveness) effectively. The core loop of the genre (i.e. gun stuff) doesn’t hook me by default. Overwatch goes further than different weapons or loadouts by splitting them out into characters with skillsets diverse enough that one can rotate through them to pick up different battlefield responsibilities. This element reinforces the importance of teamwork and, while never telling you this, encourages a player towards self-improvement as a method of helping the team rather than trying to micro-manage everyone else. I can’t recommend Overwatch to someone else like I would Dark Souls or Firewatch, where I’m confident that anyone could enjoy it, but its easily the most fun I’ve had with a game this year.

[crowinghour]

Private Island, James Meek

Meek, James. 2015. Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else, Verso Books.

Talking to friends from the United States about healthcare has given me an appreciation of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. After hearing accounts of personal difficulty with receiving vital healthcare and casual acknowledgement of high payments needed for check-ups gives me a new appreciation of the fact that I have not had to worry about what Aneurin Bevan (NHS founder) called ‘the money factor’ in healthcare. However, these conversations also give me great apprehension about the future of the NHS, which looks to be walking the route of much of the rest of Britain’s state-run operations.

Following Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 electoral success, her Conservative government embarked on an ambitious programme of privatising the British state. Public utilities such as telecommunications (1984), gas (1986), water (1989), and electricity (1990) were released to the market before Thatcher’s fall, followed by rail (1994) under John Major and postal services (2013) under David Cameron. These privatisations were ideological in nature, intended to challenge union power and cement the right-wing view of government as a regulator at the most. Private Island documents the intellectual origin and practical outcome of British privatisation.

Meek seeks to document this transformation of the British state, arguing that the result of the privatisation of infrastructure has been the privatisation of the public, as private companies begin to collect what was once tax. Meek examines a range of privatised (or soon-to-be-privatised) bodies in England, and this essay will focus on the origins of British privatisation and three items in particular: a lumped discussion of water and electricity utilities, the rail system, and healthcare. Meek’s central thesis, that privatisation is a bad system for public bodies, should not be controversial, yet the dismantling of the public state is the bleak course Britain seems set on. This post will be fairly lengthy, but as I found myself captivated by this book, it seems hard to cut down without removing crucial detail or interesting insight.

Meek traces the etymology of ‘privatisation’ to the German Reprivatisierung, brought into English during the 1930s by journalists and academics studying National Socialist economic policy, in which Nazi elites used the model to solidify control of the state by elites. Privatisation, under the guise of ‘reprivatisation’ or ‘denationalisation’, re-emerged in British Conservative circles in the 1960s, although leading figures were hostile to it (including Thatcher, who Meek quotes as saying ‘one could not have two rival enterprises seeking to sell electricity in competition with one another’ (2015:125) – really!). Re-privatisation is a technically accurate term for the process, as many UK utilities were originally set up as capitalist ventures, brought into state administration during the world wars and Clement Attlee’s post-Second World War government. Privatisation went from ridicule to mainstream acceptance within a few short years, through both small-scale privatisations of items, like government shares in British Petroleum, and the effort of economic ideologues like Stephen Littlechild, who would go on to the first regulator of the privatised electricity system. With ideological history in Britain sketched out as Meek writes it, we will move onto looking at specific privatised industries in Britain, beginning with electricity and water.

Electricity and water are grouped for the sake of space, as while both are interesting, they share similarities. Privatised at similar times, both utilities suffer from the problem that neither electricity nor water are suited for a competitive market in the sense that, say, brands of coffee are, for both spatial reasons and the fact that neither is optional. Businesses must be strongly regulated in order to ensure they do not rip off customers unable to boycott their services or take their custom elsewhere. Free marketeers, such as Littlechild, would argue that competition ensures fair prices, but the mistake they make is in assuming that companies share their passion for competition, but, as Meek says, private companies ‘hate it, and will only compete if forced to do so’ (2015:128). He contends that this was not acknowledged by policy architects or regulators.

In the case of water, Ofwat, the regulatory body, determines ‘fair prices’ for consumers based a few factors, one of which is what it deems a fair ‘return on capital’ for investors, based the assumption that water companies take on a mix of expensive equity financing and cheaper debt financing. In 2008, Oxford economist Dieter Helm published a paper arguing that Ofwat allowed water companies to take on excessive debt in order to charge customers more, allowing for a massive transfer of wealth from customers to company shareholders (running to about £1 billion annually in 2008), while placing company finances in a precarious position. Meek argues that this represents an unstable mixture for the company and a poor service for excessively-charged citizens. 

With electricity, Littlechild’s good faith in private companies was met with companies eager to use unscrupulous tactics to hike up prices, even as fossil fuel and power station overhead costs fell. This was enabled by Littlechild’s power price formula for the UK, which transformed the private power industry into a foreign-owned oligopoly in a mere thirty years. Littlechild, thinking that the American system, which encourages power companies to invest in experimental research and development, was insufficiently free-market, invented a formula which allows companies to only raise prices by ‘RPI minus X’, so the Retail Price Index (which measures inflation) minus a regulator-set ‘X-factor’. This formula encouraged private companies to cut costs and pocket savings, rather than passing them onto consumers or investing them in new technology, as long as they kept in line with the X-factor.

The consequence of this system was higher prices for consumers and vast profits for shareholders, which invited companies from America and continental Europe to cash in and acquire stakes in Britain’s private energy industry. While Britain’s Central Electricity Generating Board had been abolished by Thatcher, it was under Major that Electricite dé France (more commonly known as EDF), its French counterpart, began to move into the British marketplace, along with Areva, another French state company. Despite Thatcher’s Euroscepticism, her privatisation measures ensured that European state companies would be profiting at the expense of British citizens. In electricity, as in water, high prices for customers is a fact of the marketplace, and one unlikely to be solved by free-marketeer governments, whether Labour or Conservative. With these utilities discussed, we will move onto a discussion of rail privatisation.

Meek’s account of the disaster of rail privatisation primarily focuses on the debacle of Railtrack’s rail system, between 1994 and 2002. When the rail system was privatised, Railtrack took over the infrastructure of the British railway system from British Rail, including signalling and tunnels, while assorted private companies could compete to run the trains that would use that infrastructure. Meek argues that the privatisation occurred for ideological reasons, sweetened by underestimating the cost of upgrading and maintaining the British railway system. He quotes Chris Green, former head of Virgin Trains, as saying that ‘what Railtrack did in 1996 was quite exceptional, which was to take a really high-calibre engineering team on the BR system and destroy it’ (2015:69). An example of Railtrack’s disregard for engineering wisdom, most of which was associated with BR, can be seen in the moving block debacle.

Train signalling in the UK uses a system called ‘fixed block’, in which a train line is divided into ‘blocks’, with signals at the beginning and end of each block to regulate entry, in order to prevent train collisions and accidents on the line. Prior to privatisation, there was a concern that the West Coast Main Line, the busiest railway line in Europe, was coming due for upgrades and maintenance, meaning that Railtrack would oversee it. Pro-privatisation officials, backed by future Railtrack executives, argued that they would use a system called ‘moving block’ instead of fixed block, which would require less expensive signalling technology and less maintenance on the line by using computers and a cellular radio network to ‘move’ the blocks around with the trains. Sounds great, right?

If Railtrack had listened to engineers, they would have learned that, at that time (and to this day), no major railway system in the world uses moving block technology, and the busiest line in Europe was not a good testing lab. Given that the technology was not mature, the West Coast Main Line scheme ran over time and over budget, while failing to maintain an aging system. Following rail accidents in the late 1990s, Railtrack was eventually brought into administration and replaced by Network Rail, but the damage had been done – elite engineering teams within British Rail had been ignored, marginalised, and erased to no good end. Meek contends that the privatisation of railways shows the ideology-first implementation of privatisation, with no care for the needs of the infrastructure or the people who use it. With this thesis for the privatisation process explained, one can see how it would apply both to other utilities and the National Health Service.

Before we go deeply into the NHS discussion, Meek makes a point of saying that ‘to respect the NHS isn’t to live it unconditionally’ (2015:180), which is a theme of the publically-managed utilities he discusses. He does not necessarily endorse all their policies, but argues instead that their service under private management is less effective, less accountable, and more expensive than they were while in state hands. I would agree with this argument, noting particularly that to uncritically praise the NHS while a transgender equality inquiry is underway would be ridiculous. Additionally, it is worth noting that the below primarily concerns NHS England, as devolution has produced variations in the Welsh and Scottish branches.

In 1948, Aneurin Bevan argued that ‘there is no reason why the whole of the doctor-patient relationship should not be freed from what most of us feel should be irrelevant to it, the money factor, the collection of fees or thinking how to pay fees’. Today, the NHS has been undergoing a transformation, from a system concerned with making people well into a choice-driven model. Meek asks ‘why are medical implants being marketed like iPhones?’ (2015:185), focusing on rising costs in artificial hip replacements, a multi-billion-pound business pioneered in the austere state-run NHS, driven by the need to offer options. Meek contends that patients are encouraged to view the NHS through the lens of ‘discontent-fostering narratives of advertising: to imagine other patients who are getting better or worse treatment, in prettier or uglier hospitals…’ (2015:171), assisted by governmental reforms (both Labour and Conservative) that incorporate commercial elements into the NHS, such as obliging them to become ‘foundation trusts’ (able to loan money and bankrupt themselves) that are given money through patient-based funding. This funding model means that funding ‘follows the patient’ when they move from hospital to hospital, even if they go into the private sector from the NHS. In this context, quotes from individuals like Mark Britnell, NHS manager turned KPMG health consultant, that ‘the NHS will [soon] be a state insurance provider, not a state deliverer… the NHS will be shown no mercy and the best time to take advantage of this will be in the next couple of years’ (2015:165) seem as accurate as they are cynical.

The most difficult question is how free-marketeer reformers can justify the slow dismantling of a well-working state-run enterprise (outside of ideology), given that the NHS is seen outside the UK as a model to aspire to. Meek’s research indicates that many NHS reformers look to the Californian health corporation Kaiser Permanente’s ‘integrated care’ model, which offers low premiums in exchange for exclusivity, as a model for the NHS to aspire to. However, you cannot have a business like Kaiser without the American healthcare model, (notoriously expensive and awful for most Americans). Furthermore, if one wanted to emulate Kaiser’s ‘integrated care’ model in the UK, Meek argues that reproduction would require health spending in the UK to raise ‘by 87 per cent. That is not going to happen on any Tory or Labour planet in this galaxy’ (2015:166). While it is one thing to adapt ideas from other healthcare models, it is difficult to see the pedestalling of Kaiser as anything but a way to slam the NHS for failing to live up to high standards, paving the way for more reforms that work to pump public money into the private sector. The underfunding of the service prior to privatisation was a factor in British Rail’s closure and understanding this as a trope of pro-privatisation narratives makes policies such as Cameron’s eagerness for a ‘seven-day NHS’ (sans sharp rises in funding) in a new light. Meek doesn’t utilise examples like this, but the narrative works to undermine people’s satisfaction with the health service while stretching resources thinner. If higher standards of care were the goal, meaningful funding would be required, but as the NHS moves into dangerous waters, with an ageing population and difficulty recruiting new doctors, the undertaker is measuring up their coffin.

James Meek’s work is at its best when it acts as a historical autopsy of the privatisation process, looking at the motivating factors and clinical incompetence of the Conservative-led (and Labour-backed) move towards a privatised state. Where Private Island discusses items like the health service, where it would be easy to misstep into speculation, it manages to refrain from sensationalism while speaking of spectacular events. Occasionally, its talk of ‘foreign-owned oligopolies’ seems to stress the former term to an excessive extent, but this is done to contrast it with conservative nationalism, and to highlight the irony of privatisation leading to state companies owning large chunks of Britain’s utilities, but not state companies that UK citizens have control over. Aside from this, Private Island is an exemplary must-read for those who want to understand the processes at work in Britain’s public services today – I haven’t even substantially discussed housing or the postal service!

Citation Collection

‘Transgender equality inquiry launched’, Parliament.uk, 27/07/2015

Haroon Siddique, ‘Jeremy Hunt's seven-day plan for GP surgeries could cost NHS £3bn a year’, The Guardian, 24/07/2015

[crowinghour]

The Extreme Centre, Tariq Ali

Books & Articles Discussed

Ali, Tariq. 2015. The Extreme Centre: A Warning, Verso Books

It doesn’t feel long ago that ‘bipartisanship’ was the political buzzword amongst American columnists, with the United States Congress’ supposed lack of it being the foundation for all of its woes. If it wasn’t ‘bipartisanship’ that was needed, it was ‘grand bargains’ (if you’d rather not read ‘radical centrist’ Thomas Friedman’s fanfiction, try many of his other op-eds), both phrases symbolising neoliberalism, deficit fetishism, and dogmatic allegiance to the political ‘centre’. While these phrases have waned in popularity, the trope of the too-divided U.S. Congress resurfaces from its shallow grave all-too-frequently.

In this light, one may misread Tariq Ali’s opening comments in The Extreme Centre, the indictment of U.S. democracy as ‘a broken system’, in which not voting, ‘a form of passive protest and a recognition that the system is pretty much corrupt’ (2015:1), is common, but his critique directly challenges this analysis. For Ali, what ails democracy is not divergent parties unable to agree, but the suffocating effect of a hegemonic ‘centre’, which transforms politics into a meaningless ‘Tweedledee or Tweedledum choice’ (2015:3). However, his comments on American politics are brief (as mine will be), and the real meat of his focus is on Europe, particularly Great Britain, but the nature of his argument makes acknowledging the U.S. a necessity.

Ali argues that, in the aftermath of the Cold War, social democratic parties across Europe began to wither, as they abandoned their roots in favour of centrist politics, leading to an ‘Americanisation’ of European politics. His focus on Britain makes his account of the transformation of the Labour Party under Tony Blair worth retelling, and this shall be the focus of this post*. The Extreme Centre offers an insight into the frustrating deadlock that electoral politics offers us at present, doing some distance to draw out why, for so many, politics is, at best, nauseating and, at worst, comparable to a cholera-causing open sewer.

Ali charges the British Labour Party of abandoning redistributive policies following their 1997 election, meaning that the Margaret Thatcher-John Major status quo was in safe hands under Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ government. His claim brings to mind the supposed 2002 quote from Thatcher about her greatest achievement (‘Tony Blair and New Labour’), which indicates her success in not just transforming the Conservative Party, but forcing the Labour Party to capitulate to their point of view. He uses a range of evidence to support this charge, from a detailed dossier on Labour officials flying to the private sector after their time in government (including health secretaries burrowing themselves into National Health Service competitors) to a brief history of New Labour. From the latter, I would like to draw attention to three particular points: New Labour’s first three decisions, the failure to renationalise rail, and the ideological refusal to turn left.

Ali contends that the first three decisions taken by Blair were intended to signal to an uneasy financial sector that this was a New Labour government, not an old-style social democratic sheep in wolf’s clothing. These decisions were granting the Bank of England fully independent monetary policy control, cutting £11 from the weekly benefits received by single mothers (an assertion of ‘family values’), and the decision to begin charging students in tertiary education tuition fees, the last of which had been a proposal repeatedly rejected by the Conservative Major government. These three decisions indicate that the hope of grassroots Labour activists in 1997, that Blair talked a good centrist game but was secretly a keen social democrat, was misplaced. This does not mean that the inarguably positive things Blair did (e.g. the institution of a national minimum wage) were not unimportant, but Ali demonstrates that Blair was never a timid social democrat.

Another example that Ali discusses is Labour’s turn from supporting rail renationalisation towards tacitly supporting the failing and unpopular privatised system. Starting in 1994, John Major’s Conservative government set about turning the state-owned British Rail into the private-owned Railtrack, which took control of the infrastructure and was floated on the London stock market. Renationalisation of public utilities polls very well and was a common fixture of pre-Blair Labour rhetoric, yet Blair, despite his reputation and rhetoric of acting as necessary to win elections, has consistently shied away from it, as Ali notes. Following accidents at Southall (1997), Ladbroke Grove (1999), and Hatfield (2000), there was a golden opportunity for Labour to denounce privatisation as a failed project; at Hatfield, a broken rail caused a train to derail, but, unlike with Ladbroke Grove and Southall, ‘the part played by the fragmentation and sale of the railways is very clear’ (Wolmar 2005:158). The decision taken by Labour was to replace Railtrack (which, following Hatfield, exploded) with Network Rail, while continuing to allow private companies to run trains and freight on publically-supported railways. Labour’s consistent refusal to renationalise the railways represents ‘New Labour’s contract with big business: we create the conditions for you to make the money’ (2015:29).

Despite the popularity, cost-effectiveness, and enhanced safety of a truly publically-owned rail system (or other left-of-centre measures), the capitulation of the Labour Party to the interests of big business indicates that electoral politics no longer offers alternatives to British voters in search of change, helping to explain the fall in electoral turnout since 1997. Labour and Conservative, despite their different historical legacies, are ‘all the same’ in modern parlance, with Labour, like the U.S. Democrats, seeking to promote itself on a platform of less-evil-than-thou, to considerably poor success thus far. While one hesitates to make a note about Jeremy Corbyn while shortly before the Labour leadership election completes, his platform seems like it represents part of that radical Labour legacy. If he wins, it will be interesting to see how he fares in a universally hostile environment; if he loses, the centre continues to dominate. One of the more interesting elements of Corbyn’s rise has been Tony Blair’s repeated interventions to save his legacy, including the telling quote: ‘I wouldn’t want to win on an old-fashioned leftist platform. Even if I thought it was the route to victory, I wouldn’t take it.’ While this was given sometime after Ali’s book was published, one would not be surprised to see a second edition with that quote nestled in the first chapter.

Ali writes about much more than just Britain, but his account of the birth of its extreme centre was worth discussing in its own right. While his chapters on other areas are worth reading, the book’s first two (UK-centric) chapters resembled the most cohesive points of discussion to me; it offers a useful analytical tool with which to look at legislative democracy in the modern context. This is not to speak ill of the other three chapters, but they could almost be discussed in another essay, each of which would be far enough out of my expertise for me to do them justice.

Citation Collection

Tony Blair, The Guardian, Speech to Labour pressure group Progress, 22/07/2015

BBC Politics, ‘What is Jeremy Corbyn’s programme for government?’ 14/08/2014

Will Dahlgreen, YouGov, ‘Nationalise energy and rail companies, say public’, 04/11/2013

Jon Schwarz, The Intercept, ‘The Movement to Fight Big Money Politics Now Has a Gold Standard’, 24/07/2015.

Christian Wolmar, 2005, On the Wrong Line: How Ideology and Incompetence Wrecked Britain’s Railways, Aurum Press Limited

* While I hate to speak solely on Britain, given the hopeful tones Ali speaks of regarding Syriza, Podemos, and radical alternatives in Latin America, my knowledge of these is fleeting enough to not wish to do them injustice in speaking of them in generalities.

[crowinghour]

The Oil Road, James Marriott & Mika Minio-Paluello

Books & Articles Discussed

Marriott, James, Minio-Paluello, Mika, 2013, The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London, Verso Books. ISBN 9781844676460

In the prologue to The Oil Road, James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello describe standing at a German petrol station, watching as a lorry rumbles up, ‘the geology of elsewhere’ (2013:7) disappearing out of its exhaust. For most in the West, oil and its derivatives are products, sources simply an inscrutable geographic fact. Marriot and Minio-Paleullo, building off a decade of work with activist organisation Platform, seek to illuminate where the source of the modern oil economy.

I spent some time before writing this post trying to effectively summarise the book. Its authors describe the book as ‘a travelogue in pursuit of oil’, which is a good summary of the distinct blend of investigate journalism, empathetic travel writing, and powerful history that it contains. Starting in the Caspian Sea, Marriot and Minio-Paluello follow Caspian oil, occasionally accompanied by natural gas, through pipelines (first the Baku-Tsibilsi-Ceyhan, then the Transalpine) from extraction to destination. They detail the human cost of oil pipelines and their purpose in shoring up the European geopolitical position, as pipelines transform countries into energy colonies.

The Oil Road is an enjoyable read, but there are two particular points of interest that its authors discuss. The first of these is the concept of the ‘Carbon Web’, the apparatus around the oil industry that entrench their position in oil-producing countries. The second concerns the impact of the Soviet occupation of Azerbaijan for most of the twentieth century, both as a seventy-year ‘usurpation’ of the oil from the private sector and as an ongoing influence. While this does not cover anywhere near the breadth of the history or geographical locations that The Oil Road discusses, they were both salient points in my reflection and deserve recognition.

Marriott and Minio-Paluello develop their idea of the ‘Carbon Web’ throughout the book, detailing the way in which foreign policy, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), local militaries, local governments, and academia are used to entrench fossil fuel companies in oil-producing states. Discussing the ‘contract of the century’ between Azerbaijan, BP, and other oil companies in 1994, the authors quote BP’s magazine, Horizon, as it says: ‘[t]he intent of the “contract of the century” was to develop the country as well as the oil’ (2013:71). This translates to embedding themselves into countries they wish to do business with, whether that means backing autocratic regimes, utilising friendly governments (such as arranging for Margaret Thatcher to visit Azerbaijan in 1992), working with other oil companies, appealing to international law bodies, or sponsoring cultural institutions.

The Carbon Web helps one to understand how oil and gas companies interface with local and global institutions in more than a simplistic ‘follow-the-money’ fashion. While Marriott, Minio-Paluello, and diagrams from Platform in the book focus on BP, this concept is a useful tool in discussing any international oil company, such as Shell. As well as being useful for activists seeking to challenge oil corporate practices, this is useful for anyone interested in looking at the real difficulties of moving away from fossil fuels as the foundation of our economies. These institutions form levers for activists to pull to challenge industry practices, but also potential complicating factors in any significant abandonment of oil or gas technology.

The Carbon Web neatly complements an important note in the book, which is how NGOs are played off against each other when oil companies feel threatened. In response to intense 2003 opposition to the World Bank and European Bank of Reconstruction and Redevelopment granting BP funding by an NGO coalition, The Oil Road reveals PowerPoint slides detailing a corporate strategy to co-opt larger NGOs and marginalise smaller ones. The strategy worked for BP, allowing them to continue to build pipelines, cause massive upheaval, and continue to do business with the backing of public finance. By working with larger NGOs, corporations can normalise their behaviour and grant it legitimacy, and that note of normalisation brings us to our second point.

When one rereads The Oil Road thinking about how oil companies entrench themselves, Marriot & Minio-Paluello’s digression on Villa Petrolea stands out. This is the headquarters of BP in Azerbaijan, named after the home of Ludvig Nobel, the oil baron that the award is named after. Bold claim to historical inheritance is encouraged by fossil fuel corporations, as they exploit the legacy of Baku to legitimise themselves and curry favour with the Aliyev regime in Azerbaijan, under both Heydar and Ilham. To quote the book, ‘[t]here is a strong underlying narrative here: the Western companies have returned to what is rightfully theirs after a seventy-year Soviet usurpation’ (2013:63).

Yet, one of the interesting elements of the book is the many ways in which the historical legacy of the Soviet Union continues. From the dominance of the Aliyevs in Azerbaijan (Heydar having been a high-ranking Communist official in the Soviet Union prior to recasting himself as an Azeri patriot) to the word usage of locals near the pipeline, the imprint of history is plain to see. On the second note, ‘KGB’ and spetsnaz are used repeatedly to describe secret police or military units by people that the authors interview, describing the enforcement regimes that surround the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. The comparisons should give anyone wishing to ignore the harmful local impacts of these pipelines a poignant thought to consider.

To summarise, The Oil Road is a fantastic read, covering many issues not gone into here, such as the difference between the Transalpine and Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipelines or the individual heart-rending details of people suffering as a consequence of fossil fuels. This book, based on the date of this interview with Marriott, has been on my radar for over a year, and it was absolutely worth setting time aside for. The concept of the Carbon Web, particularly, will no doubt haunt my thoughts about fossil fuels for some time to come.

Citation Collection

Democracy Now! Interview with Anna Galkina, James Marriott, and Timothy Mitchell, 08/10/2013

[crowinghour]

Villains of All Nations, Marcus Rediker

Books & Articles Discussed

Rediker, Marcus. 2012. Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, Verso Books: London. ISBN 9781844672813

Our modern popular culture perceptions of pirates are swashbuckling rogues, sly devil-may-care rebels, and unlikely heroes, resented by land-based authority. These draw strongly from the ‘Golden Age’ of Atlantic piracy, during which many famous pirates, such as Bartholomew ‘Black Bart’ Roberts or Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach, operated. Popular shortly after their own deaths, these pirates, like the rest of their seafaring gangs, have been a subject of both official disdain and popular celebration.

Villains of All Nations focuses on a latter point during this golden age (roughly 1650-1730), particularly 1716 to 1726. Marcus Rediker paints these years as a third generation of Golden Age freebooters like Teach and Roberts, distinct from the anti-Spanish Protestant buccaneers of the 1650-1680 period and the Madagascar-based pirates of the 1690s. Rediker’s study dispels some myths, but his portrayal of pirate society as democratic, multi-ethnic, and egalitarian shines an intriguing light on both our perceptions of pirates and our view of Western political institutions.

Two particular points of reflection emerged in my reading of Rediker’s book, these being the diverse nature of pirating crews and the anarchistic communities of pirates. Rediker’s portrayal of pirates discusses them as proletarian heroes – “They challenged, in one way or another, the conventions of class, race, gender, and nation. They were poor and in low circumstances, but they express high ideals” (2012:176). If Rediker dispels some romantic myths, the potential for new compelling stories to be written about this period is clearly dormant.

Within Villains, Rediker devotes a chapter to exploring the diverse nature of pirate crews and, while dominated by male mutineers from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, there were substantial numbers of pirates from elsewhere in Europe, America (both colonial settlers and native), and Africa, as well as several female pirates. As a consequence of official records coming from English courts on both sides of the Atlantic, sailors of British origin receive the most attention (although ‘Great Britain’ was a new invention in this period), but the huge diversity must be underscored, in both geography and gender. Once this is understood, one can examine the ideological lineage that came from the British domination of the makeup of pirating crews without treating that lineage as absolute.

African pirates are obscured from official records, as colonial officials refused to give them a trial, preferring to turn a profit by selling them. Rediker highlights the vast number of pirates of colour, arguing that they were crewmembers on most ships during this period, sometimes making up the majority of pirate crews, such as those around Blackbeard in 1718. Both Africans and African Americans, both free and former slaves, found liberty and freedom amongst pirate crews, mixing cultural contacts and traditions. This diversity draws a striking contrast to the merchant vessels of this time, in which black lives were used as commerce for profiteering Englishmen. Another example of contrasts between merchant and navy vessels and pirate ships can be found in terms of gender, although this contrast is less marked.

Rediker notes that while many elements of pirate culture were egalitarian for their time, pirate crews could be ambivalent towards women. While there were more women sailors and soldiers than history books traditionally show, deep-sea sailing was particularly male-dominated. Rediker notes, as a cause of this, a naval culture of sexual repression (both gay and heterosexual) amongst crews, with sexuality being seen as a source of disruption to the solidarity needed for successful sailing. Despite this, there were a number of female pirates, not all of whom dressed in ‘male’ clothing all of the time, who acted in spaces created by radical female action on pirate vessels. These radical women often came from proletarian backgrounds, which ‘as a matter of course bred physical strength, toughness, independence, fearlessness, and a capability of surviving by one’s wits’ (2012: 114), and for these women, maritime labour was a practical possibility and an economic necessity, which indicates how materially-based contemporary and modern conceptions of femininity are. That these women created a resonant romantic image that remains to this day is both notable and entirely deserved.

Due to the legacy of the British state sponsoring anti-Spanish piracy, there were a substantial number of English, Scottish, and Welsh pirates operating in this period. Rediker demonstrates his Marxist influence by referencing prominent Marxist historian Christopher Hill’s work on the English Revolution (also known as the English Civil War), connecting the legacy of English radicals to pirate society. The account of pirates boarding ships dressed in the tattered red coats of the Parliamentarian New Model Army is resonant with his discussion of how radical communitarian traditions remained, as New Model Army soldiers turned to sailing after the Restoration in 1660. Of course, by Rediker’s period, very few of these sailors remained in service, but their traditions continued, mixing with other cultural influences. This culture is inherently interesting, in its proto-democratic and anarchist hints, and thus deserves full discussion.

In discussing Rediker’s account of pirates as a community, there are three important points: their refusal of the maritime laws of property; the autonomous construction of a collectivist culture; the dialectic of violence between the state and pirates. In this first point, the Atlantic system of trade began to stabilise in this period, with gold and African lives crossing the ocean for the profit of colonial powers, in labour-intensive ships powered by proletarian workers. However, the ocean, temperamental and difficult to control, is a hostile environment for authority, allowing the seizure of the maritime system of production by sailors, either through mutiny or pirate boarding. Once they had seized the property of the state or private citizen, pirates proceeded to collectivise it and run it in the interests of all its inhabitants, not for the profit of its owner. This account offers a radical materialist analysis of pirate rebellion in this period, taking into account the brutal condition of ship labour at this time, which allows one to make better sense of the shape of pirate crews take thereafter.

In Rediker’s description of pirate society, phrases such as ‘proto-democratic’, ‘collectivist’, and ‘anarchistic’ are descriptive and illustrative. At first, pirate crews were composed only of willing volunteers, in the belief that these made for better sailors, more conducive to the necessary social solidarity needed to hold a pirate crew together, but this represented a rebuke to naval impressment practices. In how ship labour was organised in pirate vessels, larger crew sizes allowed for shorter and happier shifts for working sailors, reminding one of labour arguments today in favour of shorter working hours, in contrast to punishingly high workloads in merchant or naval vessels. Whereas other ships insisted on strict hierarchy, Rediker argues that pirates put sailors as the source of legitimate authority, with captains and quarter-masters being selected by consensus, with a captain only able to command obedience in an urgent situation. Rediker writes on the lineage of crews in this period, as pirates tended to stem from a handful of particular ‘initial’ pirate crews, explaining the spread of these practices. The grievance-response parallels between non-pirate and pirate ships are useful for illustrating the labour complaints of sailors in this period, as well as explains the key to why pirates could flourish in this period.

However, the flourishing of pirates at this time was quickly followed by their approximate vanishing, as the Golden Age of piracy drew to a close. For Rediker, this was due to the ‘dialectic of terror’ between pirates and authorities, as the latter acted to preserve merchant profits. Authorities began to seriously challenge pirating through military action and executions, causing overt retaliatory counter-attacks from the seafaring rebels. As this dialectic progressed, fewer sailors became willing to sail under the black flag, starving the pirating way of life of the recruitment of fresh blood that it required. Up until this point, pirates had been hesitant to take unwilling sailors aboard their ships, for fear that they would breach solidarity and be poorer seaman than enthusiastic volunteers, but this changed as 1726 grew nearer, as pirates were forced to impress men into their service. This, of course, only made it harder to find genuinely willing volunteers, and so the dialectic of terror heralded the end of the pirate’s golden age.

Villains of All Nations offers a compelling, interesting, and powerful account of the ‘Golden Age’ of pirates, offering an understanding and sympathetic analysis twinned with personal accounts of individual people who played important roles. While there has been little time for the latter in this piece, the tales of people from William Fly to Mary Read are well worth discovering through a personal reading of Rediker’s work. While the book’s relative brevity does mean that potentially fascinating subjects receive brief treatment, Rediker’s extended works offer interested readers, such as myself, a tantalising taste of an extraordinary world yet to be discovered.

Citation Collection

Bruenig, Matt. ‘Working Longer Hours Does Not Sustainably Increase Growth’, Demos, 10/07/2015