Revolution: The Rise of Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal by Charles Watts is published by Harper Collins, £20

 

“All great football managers are revolutionaries at first. Take Arsenal’s Arsene Wenger. Appointed in 1996, he was Leon Trotsky: the general brimming with new ideas, ferocious energy and seemingly countless different ways of doing things. By the time Wenger was eased out in 2018, he was north London’s Leonid Brezhnev, the leader of the Soviet A revolution in a particular area of human activity is an important change in that area.”

“ A revolution in a particular area of human activity is an important change. The nineteenth century witnessed a revolution in ship design and propulsion....the Industrial Revolution. Synonyms: transformation, shift, innovation, upheaval. More Synonyms of Revolution.”

Collins Dictionary

The title of Charlie Watts's new book is Revolution. The word means many things to many people. In the context of this book, it is about a football manager who turned around a failing club by initiating a revolution. Harper Collins has called this book a “first of its kind.”

The writer of Revolution is Goal’s Arsenal correspondent Charles Watts. The biggest challenge facing any writer about football is to tell us something we did not know, which is very difficult given the scrutiny every club gets from the media. To his credit, Watts does exactly that. A significant part of the book concentrates on how the new Arsenal manager, Mikel Arteta, managed to change the toxic culture at the club and reconnect with the fans.

One spectacular and emotional way he has done this is using the English singer Louis Dunford’s song The Angel as an anthem played and sung at the beginning of every home game. Dunford was born and raised in north London, released a single called 'The Angel' in February 2022, and Gooners have picked up the chorus, which goes:

North London Forever

Whatever the weather

These streets are our own

And my heart will leave you never

My blood will forever

Run through the stone

The new Arsenal Football Club manager, Mikel Arteta, was a former Arsenal captain from the Basque region of Spain. His first coaching job was under Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola. He has been compared to Arsenal’s former great manager, Arsene Wenger. Like Wenger, Arteta has revolutionised this old club.[1] In a limited sense, Watts is correct in saying that Arteta would prove to be a revolutionary, and the results of this Revolution are showing in his new team now.

Charles Watts is a man of many sides. He is part of the Arsenal press pack and has been a fan since 1989. A year in which all Arsenal fans cherish the memory of. [2]Although close to the Arsenal establishment, his book does not glorify the club or its personnel. Nor is it a biography of Arteta, as it contains little of his life or upbringing. It concentrates on how Arteta has continued the legacy of Wenger. Arteta acknowledges the past by displaying a giant Wenger picture and quoting Wenger at Arsenal’s London Colney training complex. He also invited Wenger to return as a spectator to the Emirates last Boxing Day.

Arteta, like Wenger, lives and breathes football. Both are highly intelligent men. According to Watts, outside of his family and football, Arteta has little other interest except barbecuing. Even in a bitter London winter, he uses these to bond with his staff and players leading former Arsenal player Bacary Sagna to say, "Before I could say hello, he was hammering me about formations. All I was doing was looking for the snacks.”

Perhaps the book's most interesting and insightful parts are when Watts examines the nuts and bolts of Arteta’s Revolution. Watts is more a chronicler than an interpreter of events. Most Arsenal fans would have seen much of Arteta’s Modus Operandi in the extremely interesting 2021-22 Amazon Prime Video’s All Or Nothing series. Arteta operates on very simple principles revolving around “non-negotiables”. These are chiefly mutual respect and taking responsibility on the pitch. He sees Arsenal as a collective rather than a set of disparate individuals.

A brutal example of how Arteta applies his method is the treatment of Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. When his captain and leading scorer missed a COVID test, broke lockdown regulations by having a tattoo, and arrived back late from compassionate absence. Auberyang already had a catalogue of poor timekeeping. Arteta was ruthless. He even compiled a dossier of Aubameyang ‘s misdemeanours for the Arsenal legal team. The £56 million player man left on a free transfer to Barcelona.

As was said earlier, Watts is not completely in Arsenal’s pocket and to his credit, as Dan from the website Just Arsenal writes:

“He puts any connections to one side and gives both sides of an argument. Other journalists would have feared impacting their relationships with the club and/or Arteta, but Watts doesn’t only write what those two want to hear. For example, he strongly implies the belief held by many that Ozil was dropped for non-football reasons, giving strong facts to back up that theory. I won’t give spoilers, but it’s fascinating how, essentially on Zoom, the squad were asked to agree to a wage reduction to save staff jobs during the pandemic. When Arsenal couldn’t get the 75 per cent agreement they needed (Arteta steps in and convinces some to change their mind), Watts asks why Ozil was the only name leaked to the press. He bravely points out that Arsenal lied. 55 staff were still made redundant despite their employer being worth 6.3 billion! He also questions why Matt Smith was on the bench in the Cup Final at the expense of Ozil purely for footballing reasons. (Smith would never kick a ball for our first team).[3]

While Watts is a gifted writer and communicator, he shies away from examining  Arteta and the club in the context of the growing financialisation of football. Football is big business. FIFA, the world governing body, controls a budget of 4bn Euros. Although he briefly mentions that Arsenal was involved in the attempted creation and debacle of a European Super League, his analysis is superficial. As Robert Stevens writes, “The corporate interests in control of the ESL clubs misjudged the popular mood. They were surprised by the backlash against their proposals—reflecting the growing anger against the parasitic billionaire oligarchy and the capitalist system that sustains it. But they remain determined to press ahead. Perez declared on Thursday, after nine of the 12 founding teams had withdrawn, “We're going to continue working… the project is on standby.”Plans for a Super League are not an aberration. It, or something like it, is the logical next step in a sport increasingly dominated by giant corporate and financial interests. The conflict between UEFA and FIFA on the one hand and the ESL founder owners on the other is a competition between two business models, each designed to ensure the lion’s share of revenues for the top clubs.[4]

Watts's book is one of the better footballing books. A must for any Arsenal fan and a very good Christmas present. As Watts writes: “Arsenal’s rise back towards the summit of English football under Mikel Arteta has been a journey that has captivated the fanbase and brought an energy to Emirates Stadium that hasn’t been seen since the move from Highbury in 2006. Arteta has made some difficult decisions and faced some massive challenges during his short time in north London, but in doing so, he has changed the culture of a club that just a few years ago seemed to have totally lost its way.“Whatever happens between now and the end of the season, Arsenal are back on track and in Arteta, they have one of the sharpest minds in European football pushing the club forwards. I’m excited and privileged to tell this story.”

 

 

---

[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenal_F.C.

[2] www.amazon.co.uk/89-How-Arsenal-did-impossible/dp/B075G6J28L

[3] www.justarsenal.com

[4] Billionaires’ European Super League proposal shelved amid mass opposition from football fans

Robert Stevens-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/24/supe-a24.html

Comment sent to the WSWS.ORG

I strongly condemn the imperialist-backed Zionist onslaught against Gaza! The deliberate blockade of basic resources such as water and electricity is a war crime. In a densely populated area of  2.3 million people, the prospect of mass deaths is only a few days away. The deliberate targeting of health workers in Gaza hospitals and the murder of Gazan health personnel.is an unspeakable act of barbarism. I call on all workers, including postal workers in Britain and worldwide, to oppose this slaughter and demand that Israel and its partner in crime, the United States, end this brutal war and keep its greedy hands off the Middle East.

Comment by David Unger

 I very much enjoyed reading your essay, Keith Livesey and you certainly summarized MVL drift to the right. Still, it was surprising to hear MVL characterize Arbenz as a great democratic leader whose agrarian reform included compensation.

 I do want to say that Bernardo Arevalo might not be willing to undertake the economic and social reforms you feel are necessary to even the playing field, but given the depth of corruption in Guatemala his election, if it comes to fruition, bodes well for the future of the country. He is honest, thoughtful, talented and knows how he got to this place.

It's heartening that the indigenous population of Guatemala, 60%, believe he can make a difference. If only.... Thanks for this.

Harsh Times: A Novel, Mario Vargas Llosa; translated by Adrian Nathan West, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pp., $28.00, November 2021

The ability to persuade us of ‘truth,’ ‘authenticity,’ and ‘sincerity’ never comes from the novel’s resemblance to or association with the real world we readers inhabit. It comes exclusively from the novel’s own being, from the words in which it is written and from the writer’s manipulation of space, time, and level of reality.

Mario Vargas Llosa

What is Art? First of all, Art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of fantasy, feelings and moods; Art is not the expression of merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet; Art is not assigned the goal of primarily awakening in the reader 'good feelings.' Like science, Art cognises life. Both Art and science have the same subject: life reality. But science analyses, Art synthesises; science is abstract, Art is concrete; science turns to the mind of man, Art to his sensual nature. Science cognises life with the help of concepts, Art with the aid of images in the form of living, sensual contemplation.

A.Voronsky-Art is the Cognition of Life

“Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.”

― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the coming of the dusk.”

― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right

Whether or not you agree with Noble laureate Mario Vargas Llosa’s political outlook, his novel Harsh Times about the Coup in 1950s Guatemala is a cracking read. According to  Edward Docx, “It speaks to our times”. However, the general reader would do well to delve into the history books of this period, especially Guatemala's history, to fully appreciate the novel's power.

As Docx correctly states, “In many ways, he is the embodiment of what a great novelist should be: unafraid to write panoptic political novels about the fate of nations and the clash of political ideologies; intellectually capable of encompassing such scope; artistically skilful enough to suffuse it with resonance, torque and drama; and all of this without losing the immersive kinesis of individual stories taken from all points on the compass of the human character.”

Vargas Llosa stays very close to some facts, but not all of them. However, he manages to weave a path to the lives of real and fictional characters. Vargas is not a stranger to writing novels that include historical events in Latin America. His tendency to reduce the ideological battles of the Cold War to little more than a minor deviation of “a democratic ideal” is a dangerous simplification of complex historical processes and tends to downplay the role of U.S. imperialism in the tragic events in Guatemala. Perhaps more damaging is Vargas’s insistence that the novelist has no obligation to represent historical facts.

As Ivan Kenneally writes, “ In a lecture he delivered on his own, The Real Life of Alexandro Mayta, Vargas Llosa maintained that the novelist bears no responsibility to represent historical facts at all faithfully. The events as they truly transpired—to the extent that this can be objectively determined—furnish only the “raw materials” for the construction of a novel, the initial “point of departure,” a contention he emphatically espouses discussing another of his works, The War of the End of the World. The singular obligation of the novelist is to be persuasive, to imaginatively materialise a world that does not reproduce but rather negates the one normally inhabited by the reader, a substitution of such force it can induce joy, despair, and revelation. This “sleight of hand replacement of the concrete, objective world of life as it is lived with the subtle and ephemeral world of fiction” is the fulcrum of the novelistic enterprise. Its believability has nothing to do with a humble obeisance to fact. Still, it is a function of the “ponderous and complicated machinery that enables a fiction to create the illusion that it is true, to pretend to be alive”.

Llosa’s playing fast and loose with historical truth is dangerous and has political and historical consequences. His viewpoint is opposed by Kenneally who writes again “If the authoritative power of literature is disconnected from its relation to reality, then why write a historical novel at all? Why should the novelist not manumit himself from the “raw material” supplied by documented history? If the point is to enact the “illusion of autonomy,” the “impression of self-sufficiency, of being freed from real life,” why choose a genre that insistently invokes the irrepressibility of extra-literary existence?[1]

Like many of his generation Llosa began his early career somewhat sympathetic to the revolutionary left’s ideals. The glorification of revolutions such as the Cuban was not confined to a generation of Latin American intellectuals such as Llosa. Several petty-bourgeois radical groups, such as the Socialist Workers Party (U.K.) complemented them. Bert Deck writing in the International Socialist Review said  “The Cuban revolution has shattered the old structure of radical politics in Latin America by providing a new example to follow. New currents and tendencies are emerging. Two roads present themselves to the Latin American revolutionists: “The Guatemalan Way” or “The Cuban Way.” Fidelismo, a more revolutionary alternative to the Communist parties, already exists. The possibility of avoiding the trap of popular front politics has been improved immeasurably. In this new, open situation, the Marxists have an unprecedented opportunity to win support for a consistent revolutionary program. In the complex process of political realignment within the workers movement lies the hope of avoiding future Guatemalas – the hope for a Socialist United States of Latin America.”[2]

The British Trotskyists from the Socialist Labour League opposed this political line saying “Even if Castro and his cadre were “converted” would that make the revolution a proletarian revolution? … If the Bolsheviks could not lead the revolution without a conscious working class support, can Castro do this? Quite apart from this, we have to evaluate political tendencies on a class basis, on the way they develop in struggle in relation to the movement of classes over long periods. A proletarian party, let alone a proletarian revolution, will not be born in any backward country by the conversion of petit-bourgeois nationalists who stumble “naturally” or “accidentally” upon the importance of the workers and peasants. The dominant imperialist policy-makers both in the USA and Britain recognise full well that only by handing over political “independence” to leaders of this kind, or accepting their victory over feudal elements like Farouk and Nuries-Said, can the stakes of international capital and the strategic alliances be preserved in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.[3]

Over time, politically, Llosa began shifting further to the right. During the 1980s, he became a champion of free markets and political liberalism, standing as a centre-right presidential candidate in the Peruvian presidential election in 1990. More recently, his rightward drift has become more open. In 2014, he joined the Mont Pelerin Society, the organisation founded by Friedrich Hayek in 1947 that has become famous for neoliberalism.[4]

Llosa’s sharp shift to the right coloured his analysis of the early Cold War period. He lamented that the C.I.A.-sponsored Coup against Arbenz had caused too many young people in Latin America to turn towards communism and that the United States had crushed “the liberal democratic aspirations” of the people.

His book faithfully reconstructs the events in Guatemala that began with the 1944 October Revolution and ended with the Coup in 1954. The election of Jacob Arbenz. Welcomed by many left-leaning media outlets who hoped that the election of the liberal Arbenz would bring about a new “democratic spring,” Arbenz’s election was met with uncontrollable rage by American Imperialism.

Even the so-called “democratic spring” under J.J. Arévalo and his successor Jacobo Arbenz, who, unlike Bernardo, came to power based upon a program of democratic, agricultural and social reforms, proved most fundamentally that there is no peaceful or reformist road for the masses in Guatemala and other semi-colonial countries to secure their democratic and social rights.

In 1954, the United States carried out a coup d’état to remove Guatemala’s President Jacobo Arbenz from power, cancelling land reforms. The elected government of Arbenz  by introducing a limited agrarian reform that infringed upon the vast holdings of the politically influential United Fruit Company drew the wrath of U.S. Imperialism.

Dwight Eisenhower would later acknowledge, “We had to get rid of a Communist Government which had taken over.” Llosa, the book stops at the 1954 coup. The Coup led to decades of dictatorships, The subsequent Guatemalan elites murdered over 200,000 Guatemalans, most of whom came from the indigenous Mayans.

Eduardo Galeano characterised the decades of dictatorship that followed in his book Open Veins of Latin America: “The World Turned its Back while Guatemala underwent a long Saint Bartholomew’s night. [In 1967,] all the men of the village of Cajón del Rio were exterminated; those of Tituque had their intestines gouged out with knives; in Piedra Parada they were flayed alive; in Agua Blanca de Ipala they were burned alive after being shot in the legs. A rebellious peasant’s head was stuck on a pole in the centre of San Jorge’s plaza. In Cerro Gordo the eyes of Jaime Velázquez were filled with pins… In the cities, the doors of the doomed were marked with black crosses. Occupants were machine-gunned as they emerged, their bodies thrown into ravines.”

As Hegel said, “An idea is always a generalisation, and generalisation is a property of thinking. To generalise means to think”. Whatever its faults and many, Llosa’s new book certainly makes you think, and it does “ speak to our times”. It is perhaps an irony of history when the latest election occurred in Guatemala this year. Bernardo Arévalo, a candidate promoted by the pseudo-left and U.S. imperialism, won the election. Juan José Averalo's son Arevalo was president after the 1944 October Revolution. There is absolutely no basis for describing Arévalo as a left, democratic or progressive alternative to the clientelism of Guatemala’s ruling elite, whose subordination to foreign capital and U.S. imperialism is the main cause of the rampant poverty, inequality, authoritarianism and corruption that characterise Guatemalan social life.

---

[1]Mario Vargas Llosa: Harsh Times and the “Fantastical Repudiation of Reality”

March 10, 2022 Ivan Kenneally-https://openlettersreview.com/posts/mario-vargas-llosa-harsh-times-and-the-fantastical-repudiation-of-reality

[2] Guatemala 1954 – The Lesson Cuba Learned: International Socialist Review, Vol.22 No.2, Spring 1961, pp.53-56.

[3] Letter of the NEC of the Socialist Labour League to the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party, May 8, 1961 – Trotskyism versus Revisionism, Volume 3.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society