Reviewed by W. Loud
May 15, 2025
Mutiny: How Our World is Tilting by Peter Mertens. Foreword by Vijay Prashad. (LeftWord Books, 2024, 244 pages)
Mutiny: How Our World is Tilting is a compelling book by Peter Mertens, a top leader of the Workers Party of Belgium and an elected member of the Belgian National Chamber of Representatives. The book blends discussions of geopolitical rivalries with 20th and 21st century history. It seeks to show how left-wing activists can utilize today’s multiple crises to actually gain traction with workers. It proposes a joint mutiny of people in the global North and global South.
The book is a series of essays that Peter Mertens crafts around the thesis that, while the world is changing, the thumping heart of capital accumulation is losing its mask.
Mertens argues that the COVID-19 pandemic, expanding environmental crisis, and global political violence have more clearly exposed that the old global order is in a precarious position. Working class people everywhere — most of humanity — are learning that they cannot live like this forever. And they do not have to live like this forever. Living costs keep rising while the crises that impact our food and health continue to worsen. The precarious position of the working class is becoming obvious even to the politically uninterested and uninformed. The world is set up and rigged so that only a few reap the rewards of the labor of others. This dramatic disparity is dominating politics today, and even those political forces creating the crisis must acknowledge it. The cycle of exploitation is hitting bumps, and people are seeing that they can fight back.
The book is divided into six chapters. Chapter One roots the analysis of this book by focusing on personal stories and short interviews with some workers at the forefront of the collapsing world order. Chapter Two shows how the challenges of many economies today can be traced back to rampant privatization and cutbacks in public investment during the Milton Friedman-inspired austerity of the Reagan and Thatcher eras. This is a particularly poignant section given the projected recession about to add to the hardship that workers are suffering in the US and other western nations.
Chapter Three is all about global trade and how it impacts national economies and worker power; it is particularly timely with the Trump trade wars now raging worldwide. This chapter is the convergence point for the entire book. Merten’s international trade section helps the reader comprehend the path charted for the world economy, spearheaded by US imperialism. Trade blocs are being re-shaped, with the United States racing to the bottom of a zero-sum game. China is the target; China increasingly takes on new importance as the primary foe.
This strategy has major negative consequences globally and is notably bad for Europe. When it comes to energy production, industrialization, infrastructure, and technologies for the future, the rapidly changing international trade battlefield is sucking the working class dry. Desperation is the normal state of things for workers and peasants across the globe, while big financial institutions, governments, and monopoly industry – the three-headed hydra of the capitalist machine – all forge new trade blocs to generate new superprofits. Mertens details the continuous decline in living standards. I recommend this section most strongly. All workers need to read it.
Chapter Four details how the austerity measures of the 20th century were camouflaged with bogus “human rights” issues, the global “war on terrorism.” Chapter Five showcases how a global reordering could have different and productive outcomes, instead of a destructive one, as the Ukraine war and debacle attest. Chapter 6 explores how workers today are not nearly as isolated as in the past, no matter where they are. Mertens shows how in the present world, activists, workers, and a broad coalition of global actors can utilize their collective power to change our present collision course.
As for the book’s title Mutiny: rebellions aboard the vessels of international commerce in centuries past are where Mertens finds inspiration. Much that is critical in history is thought to have taken place on land; but class struggles and rebellions permeated the seafaring realm. Ships and ports today play a huge role in the modern economy. Ships and transport in centuries past were where people of all different backgrounds came to be a part of the same thing: the working class under the heel of the bosses. Chattel slavery, wage slavery, and uprisings against those institutions were exported and transported worldwide by the seafarers of each generation.
Even among people that seemed so different, working people persistently resisted. People rebelled when they strategically figured out to utilize the vulnerabilities of ships, and use what information was passed on to them at ports by workers. These rebellions became more common as trade expanded. Shipboard rebellions, called “mutinies,” were not only among people of the same town or family, or social circle; the mutinies united people of different family, town, tribe, ideas, and nation around the oppression of their shared class position. When you add in the factors of racism and how imperial violence is practiced, the vulnerability of all labor becomes even more clear. Workers labored below deck; the people above were empowered by a system to use and abuse them as they saw fit. And ships and the commerce they carry may not move when those below deck have decided that enough was enough.
Mutiny helps us see that while the economies of the industrialized nations of the global North enjoy more creature comforts, they are simply on nicer “vessels” where the abuse is better hidden. Rebellions by Indian farmers and by workers in the United Kingdom, for example, may not seem to be connected, but linking these struggles is not only possible, it is necessary for the left. This unifying of the message of international struggle does not have to be complicated. People in the global North understand that problems exist. But what Mertens’ highlights is that while people want change, and they want those that abuse them to be removed, the left does a generally poor job of connecting different groups angry with a common enemy.
What is special about Mutiny is that Mertens underscores that a good strategy for organizing is by highlighting the features of the global order that abuse people everywhere, then uniting them to coordinate their actions by means of strikes, work stoppages, united political action and the other ways through which working people have won solutions to their problems.
Coordination of action around mutual and tangible needs across the globe is how the left grows. People want to be on the winning team, and people are fed up as they continue to realize that their team, their class, is going to continue getting the short end of the stick. It is all by the bosses’ design. The left grows when the left wins. It is easier to win when something is made tangible. I found Peter Mertens Mutiny: How the World is Tilting to be an interesting read. I recommend it to all, particularly young workers like myself.
-W. Loud is a writer and researcher focused on finding new ways to solve the old problem of building worker power.
Thank you for reviewing this very important book. Mutinies are essential in historical struggles. The Bolsheviks’ called on soldiers to “Turn the guns around” and American soldier and sailor mutinies often led by men and women of color were vital in ending the U.S. imperialist war in Vietnam.