Hooked: Addiction and the Long Road to Recovery- by Paul Merson- Headline Book Publishing – September 16 2021

Hooked is Paul Merson's brutally honest and eminently readable memoir about his thirty-year addiction to drugs, gambling and drinking. This is not your run-of-the-mill footballer's memoir, as it was nominated for the Whitbread book prize and serialised in The Times newspaper.

Merson was a professional footballer winning two First Division titles with Arsenal and was arguably one of the finest players of his generation. But for all his football career and beyond, he was addicted to alcohol, drugs, and gambling. His addictions, coupled with deep depression, led him to thoughts of suicide 'I've come to realise that I'm powerless over alcohol ... I'm an alcoholic. My drinking and gambling have left a lot of wreckage.'I wanted to kill myself. I couldn't go on anymore. I couldn't see a way out.'

Fortunately, he managed to face his demons, saying, 'One day, I was walking home from the pub late on a Sunday evening, and I thought I've had enough of feeling like this, every day of my life. I rang up Alcoholics Anonymous the next day, and since then, I haven't had a drink.'

Merson estimates he lost over £7 million on gambling since becoming addicted, playing cards as a teenager. He even took the deposit he and his wife had saved for a new home and spent it on gambling. Although not mentioned in the book, when Merson was asked by Cambridge and Imperial College London researchers to have his brain hot-wired to one of their machines, it went haywire when he felt tempted to have a bet. His brain was docile when shown images of family life and beautiful natural scenery, and when shown dice throwing or a roulette wheel, it went mad.

Merson's story is by no means unique, as one person a day dies from a gambling-related suicide. It is estimated by the Gambling Commission that there are over two million people in the UK who have a gambling addiction. Most of these people run up large debts and are prone to depression; some end up killing themselves.

While Merson is heavily critical of the gambling industry, his book does not delve into the capitalist nature of the gambling industry. The industry is one of the most predatory enterprises, predicated on the mantra that the 'house' always wins. Merson's despair is felt by millions of people like him, and the betting companies like Bet365 prey on this despair and make millions out of it. It is no accident that Britain's highest-paid CEO has built her fortune on online gambling. Recently Denise Coates made an obscene £265 million.

As Jean Shaoul writes, "Gambling revenues are overwhelmingly based upon the exploitation of the poor as well as those on the threshold of poverty, for whom the dream of winning provides a means of escaping a world of constant nagging worry over how to make ends meet, horrendous journeys to work and then being exploited in low-wage jobs by highly paid bosses. General statistics for gambling, including online betting, show that just under half the UK's population (48 per cent) participate. After this, breakdowns focus on gender and age rather than income and social class. However, betting shops are most likely to be found in Britain's poorest communities, with the east London borough of Newham hosting 86 shops, including 18 on one high street, each with their permitted maximum of four fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) that can take £100 bets every 20 seconds. This contrasts with 56 in the southwest London borough, which has a similar population but is considerably wealthier.[1]

Merson does not sugarcoat this terrible period of his life, and his book is an unflinchingly honest memoir of his battle with addiction. He is now recovering, having not touched a drop of alcohol or gambled. But his biggest problem is whether he could continue sober. In his own words, he says, "This is it. This is the last chance saloon." I hope he makes it, not because I am an Arsenal fan and Merson was one of a group of outstanding, talented footballers, but because he is trying to survive.

Perhaps more importantly, Hooked has opened up a national debate about addiction, depression and the damage they cause. As Shaoul states, gambling is an unhealthy industry emphasises social inequality, acting as a cash nexus, transforming everyone and everything into a commodity. Its growth is another example of social decay, a parasitic enterprise that appeals to the worst instincts: greed, individualism and indifference. Such diseased enterprises are the norm today, with governments embracing gambling at the same time as profits of the banks and other financial institutions have become ever more reliant on forms of speculation, divorced from the creation of social wealth, such as trading in currency futures."[2]

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[1] Britain’s highest paid CEO built fortune on online gambling- Jean Shaoul- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/12/05/casi-d05.html

[2] Britain’s highest paid CEO built fortune on online gambling- Jean Shaoul- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/12/05/casi-d05.html 

Lucy Hutchinson and the English Revolution-Gender, Genre, and History Writing-by Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille-Hardback-Published:10 October 2022-368 Pages

Yet after all this he is gone hence, and I remain, an airy phantasm walking about his sepulchre and waiting for the harbinger of day to summon me out of these midnight shades to my desired rest — Lucy Hutchinson, Final Meditation'

"I write not for the presse to boast my own weakness to the world" — Lucy Hutchinson.

Lucy Hutchinson and the English Revolution by Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille is an extremely important and long overdue evaluation of Lucy Hutchinson's historical writings and her Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. The memoirs, although written between 1664 and 1667, were not published until 1806, and the Memoirs were largely forgotten in the twentieth century. It could be said that Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille rescues Lucy Hutchinson from the condescension of history.

Gheeraert-Graffeuille has had a little help in this rescue mission. The early 1980s saw more historians and literary scholars interested in Hutchinson and other female writers. Hutchinson's book challenges the assumption that early modern women could not write the history of the English Revolution. Gheeraert-Graffeuille shows that Lucy Hutchinson was a reader of ancient history and a gifted historian of the English Revolution. She should be ranked alongside Richard Baxter, Edmund Ludlow, and Edward Hyde.

The 17th-century philosopher and historian Lucy Hutchinson was the wife of Colonel Hutchinson, a regicide who sent Charles I to his execution in 1649. Without his wife's memoirs, this significant figure of the English Revolution would have been lost to history.

Lucy Hutchinson was born in 1620 to a class of landowning merchants. She had a comfortable childhood, and her father was a lieutenant of the Tower of London. Hutchinson was part of a  growing gentry, later among the most dominant class forces during the English Revolution. From a political standpoint, she dominated the marriage. She was able to pursue a significant political involvement that was not available to most women. However, she could not publish under her name using her husbands or remaining anonymous.

At the beginning of the English Revolution, the Hutchinson family rejected the Royalist cause and became firm Republicans. Her book Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson is an extremely important documentation of the English Revolution. While an intimate account of her husband's actions during the revolution, it is a highly lucid political and sociological analysis of British history's only successful social revolution.

Gheeraert-Graffeuille seeks to restore Hutchinson to the pantheon of writers of the 17^th-century English Revolution. Figures like Thomas Hobbes, one of the most important early materialist thinkers, tend to dominate mainstream accounts of the English Revolution.

Hobbes wrote at a time of war And revolution in Europe. Particularly endemic was the Thirty Years War. This war shaped Hobbes's world view leading him to write his world-famous view of the state of nature expressed in chapter 13 of Leviathan, in which he describes the life of man in a state of nature as "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short." The state of nature was how human society fell when civil society broke down. Ann Talbot said, "For Hobbes, the state of nature was not an abstract, theoretical construct. It was something that existed in large parts of Europe. Hobbes's response to these very real causes of fear was to attempt to construct a scientific and materialist theory of politics that was revolutionary in its implications and was to reverberate through the Enlightenment.

Hutchinson was a different type of thinker than Hobbes. As Chris Dite writes, "Hutchinson diverges from Hobbes. "Disorder" is not some wild state of nature but the corrupt existence of man-made hierarchies. "Order" is their destruction and replacement with something natural, good and just. Think of her order-and-disorder schema as a kind of "socialism or barbarism" for the first revolutionary movement of early capitalism."[1]

Hutchinson, according to Dite, sought to steer a middle course. He writes, "Two disastrous poles emerge in Hutchinson's account. The first is Oliver Cromwell and his Grandees, who successfully vie for a republican oligarchy. Hutchinson is too proudly independent to support their brutal centralisation, and she condemns them as corrupt slaves to their ambition. The second is the Diggers — proto-communists who "endeavoured the levelling of all estates and qualities." This is no less disturbing to Hutchinson, who viewed private estates — overseen by good-hearted landlords committed to justice for the poor and the mighty — as the model community. So this victorious Hutchinson — so attuned to the power dynamics of revolutionary change — finds herself too "virtuous" to further usher in any new world. As Cromwell's dictatorship fell apart upon his death, the monarchy returned to power in 1660. John was arrested on suspicion of plotting against King Charles II and died in prison."

Despite the woeful lack of media coverage, this is an important book. It rightfully restores Lucy Hutchinson's place amongst the great figures of the 17^th century, such as Hobbes, Harrington, Baxter, Edmund Ludlow, and Edward Hyde.

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[1] https://jacobin.com/2022/11/lucy-hutchinson-regicide-king-charles-i-memoirs-english-civil-war

Review: Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay, A Graphic Novel by David Lester, with Marcus Rediker and Paul Buhle- £8.99-Verso Publications.

 

"The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth".

William Howitt: "Colonisation and Christianity: A Popular History of the Treatment of the Natives by the Europeans in all their Colonies." London, 1838,

"If money, according to Augier, "comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek," capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt".

Karl Marx

It should be as given that this graphic novel about the early Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay will resonate with today's struggles against oppression and modern-day wage slavery.

The story of Benjamin Lay's life is long and complex. Still, it is to illustrator Daniel Lester and historians Markus Rediker and Paul Buhle credit that this graphic novel does justice to Lay's life and brings his remarkable story to a wider and younger audience.

Benjamin Lay was born to a Quaker family in Copford, Essex, in the late part of the 17th Century. He was born a dwarf and ran away to sea from an early age. It would not be an overstatement to say that Lay led a diverse life. He worked as a shepherd, glove maker, sailor, and bookseller. His worldview was a complex mixture of  Quakerism, vegetarianism, animal rights, opposition to the death penalty, and abolitionism. Lay, while being anti-slavery, was not anti-capitalist. He did shun the trappings of wealth that his business acumen brought him. While in America, he lived in a cave with a library of two hundred books. His 12 years at sea were a seminal period for him as he experienced the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade in the West Indies.

Lay saw slavery as an abomination and would dedicate his life to its abolition. His campaign was unorthodox, and his radical movement included what can only be called "guerrilla theatre" against the Quaker capitalist ruling elite who owned slaves. In a  Burlington Friends Meeting House in New Jersey, he enacted one of his guerilla actions at a prayer meeting denouncing the slave owners in the room. One of his more famous actions was soaking slave owner Quakers in fake blood. Lay said, "All slave-keepers that keep the innocent in bondage, pretending to lay claim to the pure and holy Christian religion, commit a notorious sin. Thus shall God shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow creatures." Such was the class hatred of the ruling Quaker elite. Lay was only "reinstated to the fold" in 2017. The Abington Quakers of Pennsylvania recognised him as "a Friend of the Truth". London Quakers followed suit by declaring "unity" with Lay's spirit.

As Sabrina Jones points out, "Arriving in Philadelphia, the Lays were dismayed to find the "City of Brotherly Love" was also rife with the buying and selling of "fellow creatures" by members of their faith community. For his dogged denunciation of Quaker slaveholders, Lay was thrown out of four Quaker meetings, including Abington Friends, near Philadelphia, where he eventually settled in a cave with Sarah and his library of hundreds of books. Though largely self-taught, Lay wrote a fierce polemic of a book. All Slave-Keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates was printed by Benjamin Franklin, who discretely left his name off it to avoid offending his Quaker clients. It was published without the approval of the Quaker leaders, who bought ads in the newspaper to disavow the book and its author."[1]

As Markus Rediker states in his book Lay despite heavily influencing 19th-century U.S. abolitionists, was lost to history. You might say Rediker rescued Lay from the condescension of history. For most of his life, Lay led almost a single-handed campaign against the Quaker elite, who made handsome profits from slavery. His initial campaign took place in America. In Prophet Against Slavery, Rediker explains the importance of Lay. "David Lester, Paul Buhle and I created this graphic novel to recover his inspiring life for our tumultuous times," He was a revolutionary, attacking rich men who "poison the earth for gain". He believed that human beings and animals were "fellow creatures" within the natural world.

Honestly, I have never been a great fan of graphic novels, but artist David Lester's book, while not an easy read, turns out to be a stunning visual experience. He keeps his storyline simple and lets his drawings give the reader a deeper insight. This graphic novel is adapted from the superb biography The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist by Marcus Rediker. Rediker did an essay for this book.

As Rediker highlights in his book Lay's significance was that he was one of the first radicals to call an end to all slavery in whatever form it took. He refused to consume anything produced by slave labour. Lay was opposed by a significant section of Quakers, who had grown fat on slavery. As Rediker points out, these Quakers played a massive part in the bloody rise of American capitalism. The New England Puritans and Quakers became some of America's most significant industrial leaders.

As Karl Marx wrote, "The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.[2]

Although only touched upon in Lester's book is Lay's acknowledgement of the importance of the English Revolution to his struggle against slavery. Lay had a  deep connection to the radicals of the English Revolution. Rediker said, "I've identified five major influences, and the first and the most important of these was a specifically radical variant of Quakerism. Now Quakerism goes back, actually, to the English Revolution. It began as one of many radical Protestant groups.

The others were the Levellers, the Diggers, the Seekers, and the Ranters. The Quakers are all part of this. Those groups arose during the English Revolution when royal censorship broke down as the king, King Charles I, and Royalists did battle with Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentary side. These radical groups burst into print in that situation, offering from below their solutions to the day's problems. Quakers were part of this, and there was a man named James Naylor, who was an especially radical Quaker. I basically argued in my book that Benjamin Lay channelled this early generation of Quakers. They were very activist. They performed at street theatre. They were very confrontational. He managed a couple of generations later to reach back to them in order to revive that spirit of Quakerism."

It would appear that Benjamin Lay is many things to many people. Lester writes, "I think of this book as being an activist book. It's meant to propel activism, and Benjamin Lay's story is pointing activists to the importance of having a long-term view of social revolution. For Lay to do what he did for 27 years dedicatedly is inspiring. He had the integrity, fortitude and stamina needed to work in a situation where you might not live to see the results of your activism. In some cases, revolutions occur overnight. But we know that revolutions can backslide and can be full of problematic areas. So, you must be in for the long haul and know it's a long, messy road to social progress."

I can understand why Lay is attractive to elements within the Psuedo Left. Despite his seemingly revolutionary activism, Lay was no anti-capitalist, let alone an early Marxist. However, Lay's life and struggle contain lessons for today's workers in struggle and is an important introduction to students in schools and colleges and the wider public.

 

Notes

The return of Benjamin Lay-by Naomi Wallace and Marcus Rediker-Tuesday, 13 June – Saturday, 8 July 2023-Finborough Theatre-https://finboroughtheatre.co.uk/production/the-return-of-benjamin-lay/

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[1] https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/from-slaveowners-to-abolitionists/

[2] Karl Marx. Capital Volume One-Chapter Thirty-One: Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist-https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm

The Revolutionary Politics of Angela Davis-Naima Omar.Bookmarks Publication-£3.00-2020

This pamphlet is based on a series of articles written by Naima Omar. It includes a speech by Angela Davis after her release from prison in 1972 and an interview from June 2020 on the Black Lives Matter uprising. From a political standpoint, the Socialist Workers Party member Omar largely whitewashes the reactionary Stalinist politics of Angela Davis.

Davis was a political activist and writer from an early age, joining the Communist Party USA when she was fifteen. Her writings ranged from the struggle against racism and for prison abolition, for women's liberation to campaigning against imperialist war, and in support of Palestinian rights.

According to an article by Helen Halyard “ Davis has joined with other academics, such as Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, to promote the theory that blacks in America remain the victims of a caste system epitomized by the disproportionate number of African Americans in the US prison system. Davis and a section of the pseudo-left have latched on to the massive growth of America's prisons as a rationale for promoting racial politics to divert attention away from the more fundamental class issues. While referring to the capitalist economic system, Davis described the prisons largely in racial terms, at one point saying, "it was a way to manage black bodies in the aftermath of slavery."[1]

Her most famous work was: Women, Race, and Class, published in 1981. While useful from the standpoint of a historical study of female oppression, its heavy concentration on race over class stemmed from her philosophical outlook. Davis's central premise is that race, not class, is the fundamental division in American society.

From an early age, she was influenced by philosophers such as Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault. Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was a leading representative of the Frankfurt School. After fleeing the Nazis, Marcuse came to the United States, where he became a university professor and wrote several books, including One Dimensional Man, that influenced the 1960s student movement. Marcuse, as is well known, worked for the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, during World War II.

Marcuse's anti-working-class politics led him to believe a "proto-fascist syndrome in the working class" existed. He thought the "revolution" would not be made by the working class but by the young intelligentsia, small fringe groups or guerrilla movements. Its driving force was not the class contradictions of capitalist society but critical thinking and the actions of an enlightened elite. Davis's promotion of racial politics has absolutely nothing to do with Marxism. Her racial politics are the product of a strain of anti-Marxist thought going back decades, including postmodernism and neo-anarchism.

Suffice it to say the SWP mentions nothing of her reactionary political evolution. The pamphlet presents her as a radical activist still on the side of the oppressed. While mistakenly still seen as a figure of the left, she smoothly transitioned from left icon to "left" academia, securing a position at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has recently retired.

 

 

 

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[1] At University of Michigan symposium Angela Davis offers political cover for Obama- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/01/31/adav-j31.html