Pip: A Trumpet of Sedition opens this week with Spinoza — a seventeenth-century lens-grinder whose ideas were so dangerous they got him excommunicated, banned across Europe, and apparently are still causing trouble in the twenty-first century.
Mara: freerein61 has been busy — the posts this week range from Spinoza's materialist philosophy and its Marxist lineage, to the contradictions inside Hobsbawm's nationalism scholarship and the crimes of the British Empire, to Emily Brontë's social world, and finally to what Hofstadter's paranoid-style thesis actually does to working-class politics.
Pip: A full week. Let's start with the philosophy — Spinoza, materialism, and why Engels said the old man was quite right.
Spinoza, Materialism, And The Marxist Lineage
Mara: The post reviewing Steven Nadler's Spinoza, Atheist frames Spinoza as the foundation of philosophical materialism — the thinker who demolished Cartesian dualism by arguing there is only one substance, God or Nature, and that mind and body are two attributes of the same underlying reality.
Pip: Which means no immortal soul, no divine providence, no miracles — and a seventeenth-century excommunication that described his offenses as "abominable heresies and monstrous deeds" without actually specifying them, which is the institutional equivalent of being too scared to write it down.
Mara: Nadler's specific contribution is on consciousness. The post quotes directly from the Ethics: "In proportion as a body is more capable than others of doing many things at once… so its mind is more capable than others of perceiving many things at once."
Pip: So degrees of consciousness track degrees of bodily complexity — which the post argues anticipates embodied cognition and dissolves the hard problem centuries before Chalmers named it.
Mara: The post then traces the line forward: Plekhanov called present-day materialism "a Spinozism that has become more or less aware of itself," and when Engels was asked whether Spinoza was right that thought and extension are attributes of one substance, he replied simply — "Of course. Old Spinoza was quite right." Marx adds the historical and social dimension Spinoza lacked.
Pip: The contrast with Roger Scruton ties it together — Scruton admired Spinoza's logic but wanted aesthetic consolation, not revolution. The post calls that a difference of class position, not temperament.
Mara: The post concludes that only Marxism can complete what Spinoza began, by grounding consciousness and freedom in the material conditions of social life. On to empire and nationalism — where the same question of class position shapes everything.
Hobsbawm, Empire, And The Limits Of Nationalist History
Mara: The post on Eric Hobsbawm's On Nationalism opens a sustained argument: Hobsbawm's scholarship on invented traditions and national identity is genuinely valuable, but his Stalinist political formation prevents him from drawing the revolutionary conclusion his own evidence demands.
Pip: He can show that Highland tartans and British coronation rituals were largely fabricated between 1870 and 1914 to manufacture deference — and then stay completely silent about Stalin constructing Great Russian nationalist mythology to consolidate the bureaucracy. That silence, the post argues, is not an oversight.
Mara: The post is direct about this: "the most disastrous 'invention of tradition' in the twentieth century was Stalinist nationalism itself — the doctrine of 'socialism in one country.'" Hobsbawm's framework can debunk bourgeois myths but cannot explain why nationalism persists once its constructed character is exposed, because he lacks a class theory of ideology rooted in material social relations.
Pip: David North's essay on Trotsky and Hobsbawm gets named here for targeting what the post calls Hobsbawm's fatalism — the reduction of history to what happened, which retrospectively validates every Stalinist betrayal by insisting there was no alternative.
Mara: The Blood Never Dried, John Newsinger's people's history of the British Empire, runs into a related problem from a different angle. The post credits Newsinger with an unflinching chronicle — the slave trade, the 1857 Rebellion, the Opium Wars, the Mau Mau camps — but argues his SWP background leads him to frame imperial crimes primarily as moral outrages rather than products of capitalism's structural logic.
Pip: The upshot being that moral outrage without class analysis slides naturally into decolonisation rhetoric and identity politics that leave the capitalist system intact.
Mara: The post closes by pointing workers toward Lenin's Imperialism and Trotsky's Permanent Revolution as the analytical tools Newsinger's framework cannot supply. Which connects directly to the next territory — what happens when inner life gets separated from those same social forces.
The Brontës, Class, And The Prison Of Victorian Society
Pip: The post on Deborah Lutz's new biography of Emily Brontë opens a question that runs through the whole piece: how did a clergyman's daughter, largely isolated on the Yorkshire moors, produce Wuthering Heights — and does a biography organised around objects and inner life actually answer that?
Mara: The post quotes Marx directly on Charlotte Brontë and her contemporaries — that they "painted the middle class as full of presumption, affectation, petty tyranny and ignorance" and revealed more political and social truths than all the professional politicians and moralists combined.
Pip: That's the benchmark the post applies to Lutz — and it finds her materialist instincts strongest in her earlier Paperwork essay, which connects Brontë's tiny, concealed handwriting to the cost of paper in the 1840s, rag shortages, and the paper tax not lifted until 1860.
Mara: The post values that work precisely because it grounds artistic practice in economic conditions. But it argues Lutz's thing theory and material culture framework stop short of asking why an exceptionally talented woman had to hide her inner life completely — and the answer the post gives is not personal eccentricity but the societal exclusion of women from public intellectual life in Victorian bourgeois society.
Pip: Emily's privacy was structural, not temperamental. The post extends this to the sisters collectively — the Brontës published as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell because the alternative was dismissal.
Mara: The post also engages Terry Eagleton's Myths of Power as the most comprehensive Marxist reading of the Brontës to date, crediting his argument that Heathcliff's revenge is carried out entirely through property — mortgages, marriage alliances, inheritance schemes — while criticising his Althusserian framework for disconnecting the novels from actual historical class struggle.
Pip: And the SWP's treatment of the Brontës gets a sharp paragraph — reducing three of Victorian England's most complex writers to proto-feminist symbols for identity politics, the post says, diminishes both their legacy and the interests of the working class.
Mara: The post's conclusion is that Wuthering Heights endures because it is, as Paul Bond's review of the Fennell adaptation is quoted as saying, "visceral and astonishing… rooted not just in a brutal landscape, but in a real world of class distinction and savagery that must find reflection in the passions of our daily lives." That framework carries directly into the final segment — what happens when political analysis loses its class grounding entirely.
Hofstadter And The Paranoid Style As Liberal Weapon
Mara: The post on Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics opens by granting the essay a limited concession — it correctly identifies a recurring pattern of conspiratorial politics across American history — and then argues that the framework's real function is to pathologise working-class discontent rather than explain it.
Pip: Labelling millions of people's distrust of institutions a psychiatric disorder is a tidy way to avoid asking why those institutions failed them.
Mara: The post quotes David North directly on Trump's trajectory: "More than any other Republican candidate, Trump has tailored his message to resonate with the intense anger and frustration of tens of millions of Americans who feel quite rightly neglected and scorned by a political system that overlooks their daily issues."
Pip: So the anger is legitimate — the analysis of who is responsible is wrong. That distinction is the whole argument, and Hofstadter's framework collapses it by treating the anger itself as the pathology.
Mara: The post connects this to David North's lecture on the long shadow of history — Hofstadter's shift from The American Political Tradition, written from a genuinely critical standpoint, to the consensus school, which removed class conflict as a meaningful analytical category. The post argues that move served Cold War liberalism's need to delegitimise both McCarthyism and socialist politics simultaneously.
Pip: The revival of Hofstadter in the Trump era gets the sharpest treatment — the post argues it allowed the Democratic Party and liberal establishment to avoid accountability for deindustrialisation, the opioid crisis, and the 2008 collapse by converting a political and economic crisis into a cultural one.
Mara: The post's answer is not a return to the liberal centre but the construction of a revolutionary socialist party — the same conclusion that runs through the Hobsbawm and Newsinger posts, and back to Spinoza's insistence that understanding causes is the only path to freedom.
Pip: What ties the week together is a single question asked four different ways — what does it cost an analysis when it stops at the symptom and refuses the structural cause?
Mara: Spinoza dissolved dualism, Brontë exposed class brutality, and the posts keep returning to the same gap — the political vacuum that fills with paranoia, nationalism, or myth when the working class has no organised alternative.
Pip: More from A Trumpet of Sedition next time.
A Trumpet of Sedition 