Gabrielle's Reviews > The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic

Short version: go, read this book. I'd let you borrow my copy, but there's a line, and I had already started hyping it up to friends before I finished it.

Longer version: first of all, you might be worried that I'm leading you into a painful/boring/dry reading experience by having you read a history by some autonomist Marxists. And you would be totally, absolutely wrong. This is by far not only one of the most enjoyable to read history books I've ever read, it ranks up there as enjoyable and engaging for books in general. This book is, beyond all the more intellectual goodness, a seriously fun read.

So, that intellectual goodness? Well, I often find myself trying to explain what we mean by technical composition of the class, and process of political recomposition and decomposition. Now, Linebaugh and Rediker don't get into that technical jargon (though they are quite fond of referring to the "motley crew" and of course "the many-headed hydra", referencing terms their primary sources used), but they brilliantly illustrate how struggle, along with a multi-ethnic, multi-racial proletariat, circulated around the Atlantic from the 17th through early 18th centuries, and then spread further. We hear the stories of resistance of indentured servants and slaves, pressganged sailors, pirates, indigenous peoples, antinomians, Quakers, Anabaptists, and the rest of the motley crew, as they formed potent sites of resistance repeatedly, forcing merchant capitalism to respond, trying to break up the motley crew via the construction of white supremacy in stages.

Though the whole thing is an excellent working class history that debunks the whole "white dudes in factories" view of the proletariat (in fact, ships docked in European colonies in West Africa were the first things called "factories"), outside of radicals, probably the two topics that are going to appeal the most to people are the concept of the pirate hydrarchy during the Golden Age of Piracy and the take on the American Revolution. Now, my love of pirates and their multiracial crews where the highest authority was the council of the entire crew, the captain was recallable, and there were lady pirates, is well known so I'm not going to go into this in too much depth.

The take on the American Revolution I got in high school (this is kind of exceptional, but it fits the dominant radical view; we did use Zinn's People's History as our primary textbook, after all) was that it wasn't an actual revolution, because it didn't fundamentally alter social structures to the extent revolutions to, and that's that. Generally, that's how radicals see it: a spat between two factions of the bourgeois, that workers got sucked into. Linebaugh and Rediker's account is far richer: they paint a picture of a revolutionary wave in the 1760s and 70s of the motley crew, that the colonial bourgeois (the "patriots": the plantation master and merchant class) co-opted for their own purposes, their hijacking being complete in the reactionary document that is the US Constitution. So, rather than reducing it to its end result (not a revolutionary remaking of society), they show the struggle between revolution and counterrevolution, with counterrevolution coming out on top. So that's a refreshing take that doesn't erase the agency and autonomy of the motley crew (the working class) from history, as both the conventional account ("Great Men make history") and the standard "radical" account ("Great Men squabble over who gets to spread slavery and commit genocide") do.

After reading this book, one cannot help but notice that not only is the proletariat not now a homogeneous entity, it never has been: what we share is our drive to negate capital and struggle toward a new commons.