Author: freerein61

Race, reaction and the fight for democratic rights: The political issues posed by the Cofnas meeting at Oxford

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The announcement that Nathan Cofnas, the self-described “race realist” whose writings have provoked widespread controversy, is to speak at Oriel College, University of Oxford, has become the focus of a political confrontation whose significance extends far beyond another dispute over freedom of speech on a university campus. Cofnas is scheduled to speak on 17 November at a meeting organised by the recently established Oxon Universities’ Reform Society, entitled An Evening with Nathan Cofnas: Is DEI Undermining Higher Education? Stand Up To Racism Oxfordshire has announced a protest outside the college and launched an open letter calling on Oriel College and the University of Oxford to refuse to host the meeting and support the society’s disaffiliation.

The controversy raises fundamental questions about the growth of the nationalist right, efforts to rehabilitate racialist views of society, the crisis of identity politics and, no less importantly, the defence of democratic rights. There must be uncompromising political opposition to attempts to explain social inequality through racial hierarchy or biological determinism. But that opposition must be distinguished from calls for university administrators to suppress meetings and decide which political views students may hear. The campaign to cancel the Cofnas meeting risks replacing administrative prohibition with political struggle.

It invites the authorities of one of Britain’s wealthiest and most prestigious universities to define the limits of legitimate political discourse. This perspective does not strengthen the struggle against reaction; it weakens it by shifting political responsibility away from students and workers and onto institutions whose role is not to emancipate society, but to administer a significant part of the existing social order. The racialist right must be confronted and defeated politically, intellectually and socially—not granted the status of persecuted dissidents through administrative bans.

Cofnas is an American philosopher and postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University who studied at Oxford, Cambridge, and Columbia. He has described himself as a “race realist” and is known for arguing that genetic differences contribute to average racial differences in intelligence. Overheard at Oxford reports that mainstream scientific critics reject his hereditarian position and that the Cambridge branch of the University and College Union has described his work as “race pseudo-science”.

The political significance of these arguments extends beyond the immediate academic controversies. Historically, biological explanations of racial inequality have served a clear ideological purpose: they recast conditions shaped by history and social relations as supposedly natural—and therefore more or less immutable—differences between human populations. As a result, inequalities in wealth, educational achievement, and social position no longer need to be explained by poverty, inherited wealth, unequal access to education, the organisation of employment, or society’s class structure. Instead, they can be attributed, wholly or partly, to supposedly inherited differences between populations. This helps explain why biological determinism and eugenic doctrines have historically been so valuable to defenders of hierarchy.

They made existing inequality appear scientifically inevitable. Contemporary hereditarian arguments arise in a different historical context, and their proponents often distance themselves from earlier racial ideologies. Still, attempts to explain racialised social inequality biologically must face the most rigorous scientific, historical and political scrutiny.

The immediate backdrop to the Oxford meeting is the bitter controversy surrounding the late Cambridge sociologist Arday. Cofnas publicly accused him of plagiarising his doctoral thesis. Arday denied plagiarism but acknowledged mistakes in his doctoral work. Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded his doctorate, concluded that his degree should stand. Cambridge University later announced an investigation, citing what it described as new information about his qualifications and honorary appointments. Arday resigned and died later in August. The controversy cannot simply be dismissed as an invented allegation: Africa News reported that The Times had separately examined Arday’s thesis and identified passages it characterised as “identical or near-identical” to another researcher’s work. Questions were also raised about claims concerning his sporting and charitable activities.

But legitimate questions about academic standards could not justify turning an investigation into an escalating campaign of public denunciation that destroyed an individual. After Arday’s death, his family said a “campaign of misinformation” had become “too much for Jason” and that he had experienced a “campaign of sustained abuse”. The response to his death reflected widespread anger.

A Press Association report said that more than 30,000 people attended a vigil in Trafalgar Square, where Diane Abbott called the campaign against Arday “vicious” and “bitter”. By contrast, Lord Woolley described his death as a “public execution” and a “lynching”. These statements undoubtedly reflected genuine outrage. But the political framework through which much of the controversy has been interpreted—one that treats racial identity as the fundamental explanation for the conflict—obscures the deeper social and class processes at work.

The Arday affair exposes the profound contradictions of the diversity politics that has come to dominate universities, corporations and substantial sections of official political life. Within this framework, social progress is increasingly measured by the racial and gender composition of those occupying positions of prestige. Who becomes a professor, university administrator, corporate director, or senior politician becomes the principal measure of equality. But diversifying an elite does not abolish inequality. A university can celebrate the racial diversity of its senior leadership while students confront debt and academic employees experience insecure employment. Corporations can diversify their boardrooms without altering the relationship between shareholders and workers. Government institutions can promote representatives from different ethnic backgrounds while presiding over policies that increase poverty and social inequality. The composition of privileged layers can change considerably without transforming the social relationships upon which privilege itself rests.

The political right has learned to exploit precisely this contradiction. Reaction accepts the racial framework of liberal identity politics but reverses its direction. Where official diversity programmes attribute significance to the representation of minorities, the right declares that these same minorities have received unfair advantages. Where identity politics speaks of historical oppression, reaction increasingly portrays white people as the victims of institutional discrimination. Where liberalism invokes “lived experience”, its opponents appropriate the same terminology for themselves.

The statement issued by the Oxon Universities’ Reform Society regarding Cofnas demonstrates this process with almost parodic clarity. It claimed that he had been “repeatedly victimised with stigmatising language and structural apartheid by those with institutional power and privilege” and presented allowing space for his “lived experiences” as a means of rebalancing representation at Oxford. The rhetorical inversion is deliberate. The right has discovered that identity categories can be detached from progressive intentions and redeployed as instruments of reaction.

The development of the Oxon Universities’ Reform Society must itself be taken seriously. Registered with the University of Oxford in August, its announced programme has included Andrew Rosindell, Jim Allister, Neema Parvini and Cofnas. Its emergence points to a conscious effort to establish nationalist-right ideas among university students. We cannot counter this with the complacent assumption that reactionary politics will collapse merely because its arguments seem offensive to prevailing academic conventions.

The right seeks to capitalise upon a deepening alienation from institutions whose rhetoric of inclusivity increasingly conflicts with lived experiences of economic insecurity. Young people are continually assured that society is becoming more inclusive and progressive, even as secure employment, affordable housing, and financial independence become increasingly difficult to obtain. Reaction takes this social anger and provides it with a false target. Migrants, minorities, multiculturalism, “wokeness” and DEI become the explanation for contradictions rooted in capitalist society itself.

The international dimensions of the controversy surrounding Cofnas underscore the seriousness of these developments. Ghent University suspended Cofnas in August after his public statements about the Arday affair. The Press Association later reported that US ambassador Bill White pressured the university to reinstate him. More detailed reporting by Overheard at Oxford says the university replaced the original suspension with a three-month measure under which Cofnas works remotely, cannot teach, and must restrict his research to the subjects covered by his appointment, while an investigation continues. These details make clear the need to treat claims of simple “reinstatement” cautiously. Still, the reported involvement of an American ambassador shows that what might initially appear to be an internal university controversy has already intersected with wider political conflicts over academic freedom, DEI, and right-wing politics.

Under these circumstances, Stand Up To Racism Oxfordshire’s demand that university authorities prevent the meeting is politically misguided. There is every justification for demonstrating against racism, exposing its scientific pretensions and challenging the programme of the nationalist right. But protesting a political meeting and asking the authorities to prohibit it are fundamentally different political acts. The first constitutes the exercise of democratic rights by students and workers. The second transfers political power to an administrative apparatus and asks it to determine the boundaries of permissible political discourse. Once the principle is established that university management should decide which political organisations can meet and which political opinions students are permitted to hear, no progressive mechanism guarantees that such powers will always be exercised in a way that respects the right.

The defence of freedom of speech must therefore be separated from political agreement with the ideas being expressed. Cofnas has the right to advance his arguments, and students and workers possess the equally essential right to condemn and oppose them. Those rights are not contradictory. Political freedom depends upon both. A mass political demonstration against racism represents the active exercise of democratic rights. In contrast, administrative cancellation removes the political issue from students and workers and hands it to the university bureaucracy. Suppression also supplies the right with its preferred mythology. Movements that seek to portray themselves as persecuted outsiders challenging an intolerant liberal establishment benefit enormously whenever their opponents attempt to prevent them from speaking. They can then present arguments that ought to be subjected to ruthless criticism as forbidden truths that powerful institutions supposedly fear.

More fundamentally, the growth of racial politics cannot be understood apart from the social conditions that make reaction possible. Britain is characterised by immense private wealth alongside declining public provision and profound economic insecurity. Millions struggle with housing costs, deteriorating services and uncertainty about their future. Under such circumstances, nationalist politics offers an explanation deliberately calculated to conceal society’s structure. Migrants become responsible for housing shortages, refugees for overstretched services, multiculturalism for social fragmentation and diversity policies for declining opportunities. Each such argument directs social anger horizontally toward another section of the population instead of vertically toward concentrations of wealth and economic power.

This is why the struggle against racism cannot ultimately be separated from the struggle against capitalism. Marxism does not deny racial discrimination or minimise its consequences. It explains racial oppression historically and socially rather than treating race as the fundamental organising principle of human society. Workers do not stop sharing common material interests because they have different skin colours, religions, or national origins. On the contrary, ruling classes have repeatedly exploited such differences precisely because workers share interests that transcend national and racial divisions. When workers are persuaded to understand each other principally as members of competing racial communities, their capacity for common political action is undermined.

The answer to racialism is therefore not an alternative system of racial politics with more progressive objectives. Black workers and white workers, British-born workers and migrants, Christian, Muslim, Jewish and non-religious workers cannot emancipate themselves through competition for privileges within the existing social structure. Their common interests lie in transforming that structure. The great historical strength of socialist internationalism is its insistence that humanity can overcome racial and national antagonisms only by attacking their material foundations and uniting working people across the divisions cultivated by the ruling class.

The 17 November meeting should therefore become an occasion for political clarification rather than administrative censorship. Students and academics should expose the history and scientific weaknesses of racial determinism. Workers and young people should oppose attempts to blame migrants and minorities for the social crisis. They should challenge the nationalist programme associated with Reform UK and reject efforts to turn legitimate anger over deteriorating living standards into hostility towards vulnerable sections of society. At the same time, they should oppose attempts to hand university authorities powers to suppress political organisations. A movement genuinely capable of confronting reaction requires confidence in political argument and mass mobilisation, not reliance upon administrative prohibition.

This dispute ultimately concerns something much greater than whether Nathan Cofnas speaks for ninety minutes in an Oxford lecture theatre. The return of racialist ideas is one manifestation of a broader political crisis produced by staggering inequality, declining confidence in established institutions and the absence of a mass socialist alternative through which social opposition can find progressive expression. Reaction grows by exploiting this vacuum. It transforms class antagonism into nationalism, economic insecurity into hostility towards migrants and social inequality into competition between racial groups. Its arguments acquire influence not because racial pseudoscience has suddenly become intellectually convincing, but because conditions of profound social crisis create opportunities for forces that divert anger away from capitalism.

Fighting this danger requires a fundamentally different orientation. Students and workers must oppose racism without surrendering democratic rights, defend migrants and minorities without accepting the fragmentation of society into competing racial constituencies, and confront the nationalist right without placing themselves politically under the authority of the institutions of the existing order. Above all, they must recognise that the fundamental social division is not between white and black, native-born and migrant, or one nationality and another, but between the working class, whose collective labour sustains society, and the capitalist class that controls its productive resources and appropriates its wealth.

Racial pseudoscience will not be defeated by persuading Oriel College to lock the doors of a lecture theatre. Nor will administrative rulings from university authorities halt the growth of the nationalist right. We must defeat these forces in open political struggle by exposing the social interests they serve and removing the conditions on which they feed. That demands building an independent socialist movement that unites workers and young people across every racial and national division in opposition to inequality, nationalism, and the capitalist system itself.

Berlin Shuffle: Boschwitz’s portrait of Weimar’s outcasts on the eve of catastrophe

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Written in exile when its author was barely 21 and published only in Swedish during his lifetime, Berlin Shuffle is a portrait of the human wreckage German capitalism produced in the year the Great Depression began. Its English appearance, nearly nine decades later, is a significant literary event. It also arrives at a moment when the social conditions it depicts mass impoverishment, a political establishment indifferent to low-income people, and the far right’s cultivation of resentment are again visible across Europe and the United States.

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz (1915–1942) is now best known for The Passenger (Der Reisende), written a few weeks after the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom and rediscovered in an archive eight decades later. Philip Boehm’s 2021 English translation became an international bestseller. Berlin Shuffle, the English title for Boschwitz’s debut Menschen neben dem Leben (literally “People Beside Life”), was first published in German in 2019. Boehm’s translation appeared in the US in December 2025 and in Britain in January 2026.

The novel follows a handful of Berlin down-and-outs over a single day in 1929, ending in a drunken eruption of violence in a dance hall on the city’s edge. It contains no Nazis and barely mentions politics. Yet, as several reviewers have noted, it captures with uncanny clarity the social atmosphere from which fascism drew its shock troops. That achievement, and its limits, deserve careful examination.

A life shaped by war, fascism and exile

Boschwitz was born in Berlin on 19 April 1915. His father, Salomon Boschwitz, a Jewish factory owner who had converted to Christianity, served in the Imperial Army and died weeks after his son’s birth. His mother, Martha, came from a patrician family in Lübeck.

In 1935, the year of the Nuremberg race laws, Boschwitz’s uncle, the lawyer Alexander Wolgast, was murdered in the street after criticising the Nazi legislation. That same year, Ulrich received call-up papers for the Wehrmacht and fled to Scandinavia with his mother. In Norway he wrote Menschen neben dem Leben, which appeared in Stockholm in 1937 as Människor utanför, under the pseudonym John Grane. Its modest success allowed him to study at the Sorbonne.

The next years were an odyssey through Luxembourg, France and Belgium before mother and son reached England in 1939. On the outbreak of war, the British government interned them as “enemy aliens,” indifferent to the fact that they were refugees from Hitler. In July 1940, Boschwitz was deported to Australia aboard the HMT Dunera, notorious for the brutal treatment of its passengers. During the voyage, a guard threw overboard the only draft of his third novel.

He spent two years in camps at Hay and Tatura, revising The Passenger and beginning another novel. Released in 1942, he sailed for Britain. On 29 October 1942, his ship, the MV Abosso, was torpedoed by the German submarine U-575. Boschwitz was among the 362 who died. He was 27, and his manuscripts went down with him.

His life thus traced, in compressed form, the fate of a generation: born into the imperialist slaughter of 1914–18, driven out by fascism, and then treated as suspect by the “democratic” powers that claimed to be fighting it.

One day among the “people beside life”

The novel’s German title is more precise than its English one. Boschwitz’s characters live beside life: pushed to the margins of a society that has no use for them. The action unfolds over one day in 1929. Philip Boehm’s introduction rightly draws attention to its “cinematic structure”, cutting between figures who drift across the city before converging at night on a cheap dance hall and bar, the Jolly Huntsman.

At the centre is Fundholz, a beggar who had a respectable life only a decade earlier, and his companion Tönnchen, an obese, childlike man damaged by a tragedy in his youth. Fundholz shepherds him with exasperation and tenderness. The pair begin the novel in a damp cellar room and spend much of the day avoiding the police, who see any poor man as a potential vagrant.

Around them circle others. Grissmann, an unemployed former streetcar conductor sacked years earlier over 20 missing marks, is consumed by humiliation and a craving for power. Max Sonnenberg, blinded in the war, bullies his young wife, Elsi. Minchen Linder, a mistress to older men, and her boyfriend Wilhelm Winter, a petty criminal and pimp, round out the night’s company. A widow, Frau Fliebusch, wanders the streets refusing to believe that her husband died in the war more than ten years before.

Over drink and dancing, Elsi turns to Grissmann. Jealousy and schnapps do the rest: a quarrel between Grissmann and Sonnenberg ends in catastrophe and a collective frenzy. The Guardian’s reviewer called the conclusion fittingly explosive, while describing the whole as funny and light on its feet despite its grim material.

Boschwitz is unsentimental. His men treat women with contempt, and David Herman, reviewing for the Jewish Chronicle, identifies misogyny as perhaps the book’s dominant theme. Nor does he idealise poverty. Hunger makes people cunning and cruel; solidarity, where it exists, is fragile and grudging. Yet the novel is also full of grotesque comedy, and its shabby figures move through a Berlin of trams, the U-Bahn, cinemas and taxis, the bright surface of Weimar modernity that excludes them.

Berlin, 1929: the year everything broke

The choice of 1929 is not incidental. The brief “stabilisation” of the mid-1920s, financed by American loans, was ending. After the Wall Street Crash in October, lenders recalled those loans, and German unemployment climbed from around 1.3 million in mid-1929 to more than 6 million in 1932, nearly a third of the workforce.

The political consequences were swift. The Nazi Party won just 2.6 per cent of the vote in the 1928 Reichstag election. By September 1930 it took 18.3 per cent, and by July 1932, 37.3 per cent, making it the largest party. Its electoral base lay above all in the ruined middle classes. Still, it also recruited heavily among the declassed, the long-term unemployed and embittered war veterans: precisely the milieu Boschwitz describes.

1929 was also the year of the Blutmai. On 1 May, Berlin’s Social Democratic (SPD) police chief, Karl Zörgiebel, enforced a ban on May Day demonstrations. Over three days, police killed 33 people, most of them uninvolved residents of working-class districts, and arrested more than 1,200. The massacre deepened the gulf between the two mass workers’ parties, the SPD and the Communist Party (KPD).

That split proved fatal. The SPD leadership tied the working class to defending a bankrupt bourgeois republic. The Stalinised KPD, following the Comintern’s ultra-left “Third Period” line, denounced Social Democrats as “social fascists” and rejected a united front against the Nazis. From exile, Leon Trotsky repeatedly warned from 1930 that this policy was leading to catastrophe and called for a workers’ united front to smash the fascist gangs before they took power.

Trotsky’s analysis also illuminates Boschwitz’s characters. In his September 1930 article on the German elections, he explained how the crisis drove the petty bourgeoisie and the declassed toward fascism when the workers’ parties offered no revolutionary way out. Writing after Hitler’s victory, he observed that “a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois”. Fundholz, Grissmann and Sonnenberg are not petty bourgeois in the strict sense; several have fallen out of the working class or the lower middle class altogether. But their rage, impotence and contempt for those weaker than themselves are the raw material that fascism organised.

Achievement and limits

Boschwitz’s greatest strength is his eye. He renders the physical texture of poverty- the damp walls, the hunger that never quite lets up, the calculations over a few pfennig- with a concreteness that recalls the drawings of George Grosz and the paintings of Otto Dix. The Jewish Chronicle review compares the atmosphere to Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera and Max Beckmann’s work. Lawrence De Maria, in the Washington Independent Review of Books, writes that the author recreates Berlin’s squalor so completely that the reader can almost taste it.

The novel also shows a psychological acuity remarkable for such a young writer. Grissmann’s self-pity curdling into a desire for revenge, Sonnenberg’s tyranny over the one person weaker than himself, the crowd’s readiness to be swept up in violence: these are drawn without moralising. Kirkus found the book’s main strength in showing, in everyday terms, the atmosphere in which a fascist government could arise.

But the limits are real and should be stated. The novel views society largely from below and from the side, among those already expelled from production. The organised working class, millions strong in Berlin, the city of “Red Wedding,” of strikes, mass parties and mass demonstrations, is almost absent. As Herman notes, there are passing references to Hindenburg and Ludendorff but little sense of the rising far right. Low-income people appear as victims of fate and of one another, not as members of a class capable of changing their conditions.

This is not simply the author’s personal failing. Boschwitz wrote in 1936–37, after the German working class had gone down to defeat without a fight, betrayed by the leaderships of both the SPD and the KPD. The novel’s pervasive pessimism, its sense of people trapped and turning on each other, reflects that historic defeat. It also helps explain why the book is so compelling: it captures what happens when society’s most oppressed layers see no progressive way out.

The reception has been almost uniformly enthusiastic. The Financial Times called it a cautionary tale for our times; The Times found its parallels with the present surprising. Publishers Weekly praised its insight into a country’s descent into madness. Several reviewers, while admiring, have also admitted that they found its characters hard to like and its outlook bleak.

A warning from 1929

Publishers and critics have presented Berlin Shuffle as a “warning” to our own time. The description is apt, but the warning needs to be made concrete. The novel shows how capitalist crisis grinds people down until resentment, rather than solidarity, becomes the dominant social emotion. It does not show, because history had not yet shown its author, that this outcome was not inevitable.

The parallels today are hard to miss. In February 2025, the far-right Alternative for Germany won 20.8 per cent of the vote, doubling its share and becoming the second-largest party in the Bundestag, while the SPD fell to 16.4 per cent, its worst result ever. Across Europe and in the United States, governments impose austerity on the working class while pouring resources into militarism, and scapegoat migrants and refugees for the consequences.

Boschwitz himself was such a refugee, interned and deported by a British government that saw a German Jew as an enemy alien. He died at 27 in the Atlantic, cutting short exceptional promise.

Berlin Shuffle is not a political novel in the narrow sense, and it offers no answers. But as a document of the social decay that preceded fascism, written by a young man who lived through it, it deserves a wide readership. Philip Boehm’s translation has been widely praised [7][8]. The lesson the novel cannot draw, and that readers today most need to draw for themselves, is that only independent, united working-class political mobilisation can block the road to fascism.

Notes

  1. Pushkin Press, Berlin Shuffle, book page (UK hardback, 15 January 2026).
  2. Library Journal, review of Berlin Shuffle, November 2025.
  3. Publishers Weekly, review of Berlin Shuffle, 17 September 2025.
  4. Wikipedia, “Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz”, accessed 24 October 2026.
  5. Glenn Nicholls, “Hell or high waters”, Inside Story, 7 April 2018.
  6. Shiny New Books, review of The Passenger.
  7. Lawrence De Maria, “Berlin Shuffle: A Novel”, Washington Independent Review of Books, 13 January 2026.
  8. David Herman, “Berlin Shuffle review: Pimps, prostitutes and peddlers in Weimar Germany”, Jewish Chronicle, 9 January 2026.
  9. Jewish Book Council, review of Berlin Shuffle, 8 December 2025.
  10. Harvard Book Store, Berlin Shuffle listing, collecting review extracts from the Guardian, Financial Times, The Times and Kirkus Reviews.
  11. Wikipedia, “Blutmai”, drawing on Chris Bowlby, “Blutmai 1929: Police, Parties and Proletarians in a Berlin Confrontation,” Historical Journal 29:1 (1986).
  12. History Today, “Who Voted for the Nazis?”
  13. Leon Trotsky, “The Turn in the Communist International and the Situation in Germany”, 26 September 1930.
  14. Leon Trotsky, “What Is National Socialism?”, 10 June 1933; French text, Qu’est-ce que le national-socialisme ?, Marxists Internet Archive. English quotation from the standard Pathfinder translation in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany.
  15. Leon Trotsky, “Germany, the Key to the International Situation”, 26 November 1931.
  16. The Federal Returning Officer, “2025 Bundestag election: final result”, 14 March 2025; provisional result, 24 February 2025.
  17. Ruth Margalit, review of The Passenger, New York Review of Books, 18 November 2021.
  18. Cognito, “Depression, Unemployment & Crisis, 1929–32” (summary of standard figures).

Bibliography

Works by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

  • Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander. Berlin Shuffle. Translated by Philip Boehm. London: Pushkin Press, 2026. ISBN 9781782279143.
  • Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander. Berlin Shuffle: A Novel. Translated by Philip Boehm. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2025. ISBN 9781250869494.
  • Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander. Menschen neben dem Leben. Edited by Peter Graf. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2019.
  • Grane, John [Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz]. Människor utanför. Stockholm, 1937.
  • Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander. The Passenger. Translated by Philip Boehm. London: Pushkin Press, 2021; New York: Metropolitan Books, 2021.
  • Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander. Der Reisende. Edited by Peter Graf. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2018.
  • Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander, and Jonathan Freedland. King Winter’s Birthday. Illustrated by Emily Sutton. London: Pushkin Press, 2024.

The Passenger: A Jewish businessman’s flight across Nazi Germany in November 1938

“Perhaps their idea is to undress us carefully before killing us, so that our clothes won’t be bloodstained and our banknotes ruined. Murder is carried out economically these days.”

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz wrote The Passenger at extraordinary speed in the immediate aftermath of the November 1938 pogrom known as Kristallnacht. He was 23 years old, himself an exile from Nazi Germany. The novel appeared in English before the war, first in the United States as The Man Who Took Trains and subsequently in Britain as The Fugitive, before largely disappearing from view.

Boschwitz did not live to see Nazi Germany’s destruction. Interned by the British as an “enemy alien” after the outbreak of war, he was deported to Australia in 1940. After gaining permission to return to Britain in 1942, he boarded the MV Abosso. On 29 October, the ship was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine U-575. Boschwitz, aged only 27, was among those killed.

The novel itself survived. Boschwitz revised it while interned in Australia, and editors used instructions he left in correspondence with his mother to edit the rediscovered German typescript. Philip Boehm translates the modern English version.

The book’s recovery is important. Its significance lies not simply in having been written “at the time”, though that immediacy matters enormously. It records with unusual psychological intensity the experience of an assimilated Jewish businessman discovering, almost from one hour to the next, that the social order in which he has invested his identity, property and confidence has turned against him. That experience is also a political lesson.

A man without a place

The novel opens in Berlin in November 1938. Otto Silbermann is a prosperous Jewish businessman, a First World War veteran and, in his own estimation, a thoroughly respectable German citizen. As the violence of Kristallnacht engulfs the country, Nazi stormtroopers arrive at his home, and Silbermann escapes through the back door. He begins boarding trains, desperately seeking some route out of Germany.

What follows is a kind of nightmare picaresque. Silbermann can neither stay safely where he is nor escape. Public spaces have become dangerous and former relationships uncertain. He therefore travels ceaselessly across Germany. The railway carriage, with its anonymity, constant movement, and temporary suspension between departure and arrival, becomes almost the only place where he can exist.

Boschwitz turns this movement without progress into the novel’s organising principle. Silbermann is always going somewhere but never escaping. Each journey offers the possibility of deliverance before returning him to essentially the same situation. The result is a claustrophobia that works all the more effectively because the protagonist spends so much of the novel physically in motion.

The people he encounters form the book’s social heart. Nazis, opportunists, functionaries, fellow victims and apparently respectable citizens pass through the railway compartments. Some embrace the regime; others accommodate themselves to it. Silbermann’s appearance enables him temporarily to conceal the identity that Nazi racial ideology has made decisive. Contemporary descriptions of the novel emphasise precisely this contradiction: a man who considers himself German and can outwardly “pass” as such discovers that neither patriotism nor appearance provides security.

The absurdity of the racial categories does not diminish their power. That is part of Boschwitz’s point. Backed by state institutions, a fiction becomes a material force governing where Silbermann can sleep, travel, work, and ultimately whether he can continue to exist in his own country.

Property and its illusions

Boschwitz is unsparing toward Silbermann, and this is one of the novel’s greatest strengths. Silbermann is not constructed as a conventional heroic figure. He is a prosperous businessman who sees himself as an established member of German society. His wealth, military service, marriage and social standing have encouraged the belief that he somehow occupies a more secure position than Jews who appear more obviously exposed to persecution. The events of November 1938 destroy these assumptions one after another.

Especially important is his relationship with Becker, his non-Jewish business associate and former wartime comrade. The relationship demonstrates how political persecution creates opportunities for private enrichment. Personal loyalty, commercial partnership, and patriotic comradeship therefore prove far weaker than the new realities the regime creates.

Here Boschwitz touches on one of the darkest features of the persecution of German Jews: dispossession occurs not simply through spectacular public violence but through ordinary economic relationships. The destruction of legal and social protection produces beneficiaries. People who yesterday dealt with Jewish neighbours as business partners or customers discover opportunities in their vulnerability.

Silbermann’s attachment to the money he carries therefore takes on greater symbolic importance. It is the portable remnant of his former existence. He has spent his adult life in a society that supposedly confers independence and social status through property. Now he discovers that possession without enforceable rights provides remarkably little protection.

This is what gives the novel’s treatment of bourgeois respectability its particular force. Silbermann has trusted the categories through which established society understood itself: property, citizenship, military service, respectable marriage, commerce and obedience to law. Under fascism these protections collapse because the state itself has become the instrument of persecution.

His journey therefore records more than the destruction of an individual. It dramatises the destruction of an illusion: that accumulated property and social respectability can provide security independently of the political and social order upon which property rights themselves depend.

Big business, fascism and the defeat of the working class

The catastrophe that overtakes Silbermann cannot be understood solely through the history of antisemitism. It unfolded within the crisis of German capitalism and after the destruction of a workers’ movement that had once constituted the most formidable organised social opposition to the German right.

The relationship between Adolf Hitler and German big business before 1933 has been the subject of an extensive historiographical dispute. The crude proposition that German industrialists acted as a single bloc, financed the Nazi movement from its inception and appointed Hitler as their instrument does not withstand scrutiny. Henry Ashby Turner Jr., one of the historians most closely associated with challenging this interpretation, emphasised both the unevenness of business support and the problems with some of the evidence traditionally used to demonstrate extensive industrial financing of the Nazis before they assumed power. [jstor.org]

But rejecting a conspiracy theory of Hitler’s rise is not the same thing as denying the profound convergence that developed between important sections of German capital and the Nazi dictatorship. By February 1933, after Hitler had already become chancellor, leading industrialists met Hitler and Hermann Göring at a gathering intended to raise money for the Nazi election campaign. Under the Third Reich, major German businesses would subsequently participate in and profit from forced labour, the “Aryanisation” of Jewish businesses and the exploitation of occupied Europe.

More immediately, the new regime moved quickly against working-class organisations. Following the Reichstag fire, the government used emergency powers to suspend fundamental civil liberties and incarcerate political opponents. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records that the regime rapidly dismantled democratic freedoms and transformed Germany into a dictatorship. The regime destroyed independent trade unionism almost immediately. On 2 May 1933, SA detachments occupied union offices throughout Germany and forced the unions to dissolve. Union buildings and records were seized, leaders were attacked or imprisoned, and the Nazi-controlled German Labour Front replaced the independent organisations of labour.

This sequence is fundamentally significant. National Socialism did not merely persecute Jews while leaving the existing configuration of class organisations intact. Consolidating power required destroying the institutions through which millions of German workers had previously organised politically and industrially. Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists and other political opponents were among the early targets of Nazi repression.

From a Marxist standpoint, this relationship between capitalist crisis, political reaction, and the smashing of working-class organisation is indispensable to understanding fascism. It also supplies a social background that necessarily lies outside Silbermann’s immediate field of vision. His tragedy takes place after a historic political defeat.

That fact gives meaning to Boschwitz’s focus on businesspeople, officials, and frightened middle-class members. Silbermann searches desperately for individual protection because the collective social and political forces that might have opposed the regime have already been crushed. By November 1938, the possibility of answering Nazi violence through the powerful mass organisations that had characterised working-class life during the Weimar Republic has been eliminated.

The historical irony is devastating. Silbermann has trusted precisely those institutions of bourgeois society that now offer him no defence: property, law, respectable commerce, military service and citizenship. His former business associate can exploit his vulnerability because persecution has altered the balance of power between them. The state no longer stands above their commercial relationship as the impartial guarantor Silbermann once imagined.

His endless railway journey therefore carries a deeper social meaning. Silbermann’s individual security is destroyed in a society where the organised power of the working class has already been broken, and significant sections of economic privilege have accommodated themselves to, collaborated with, or benefited from the new dictatorship. That does not mean that every capitalist supported Hitler or that Nazism can be explained as nothing more than a conspiracy of industrialists. The historical record is considerably more complex. It does mean that the persecution portrayed by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz developed within a dictatorship whose consolidation entailed both the destruction of organised labour and, subsequently, extensive collaboration with German industry.

That broader historical framework makes The Passenger still more devastating. Boschwitz shows the catastrophe through the consciousness of one frightened bourgeois individual. History shows the social defeats that made his isolation possible.

Fascism and the “democracies”

Silbermann is certainly alienated, frightened and increasingly disoriented, but he has not accidentally wandered into a meaningless Kafkaesque universe. He has been placed in an historically specific situation. The Nazi state has deprived Jews of elementary rights and unleashed organised persecution against them.

In his discussion of the novel, André Aciman stresses the terrifying position of someone trapped as Germany becomes impossible to inhabit. At the same time, other countries refuse to admit him. His account describes a Germany where Silbermann discovers that escape has become effectively impossible: “Germany won’t let you out, and other countries don’t want to let you in.”

The international dimension is crucial. Persecution creates the refugee, but borders can transform persecution into entrapment. Silbermann becomes a man who desperately needs to leave one territory without a guaranteed right to enter another.

Boschwitz understood that condition personally. His family left Germany after the Nuremberg Laws in 1935. He subsequently lived outside Germany before reaching Britain in 1939, where the war transformed him from a refugee from Hitler into an “enemy alien” in the eyes of the British authorities. He was ultimately transported to Australia.

This is a bitter historical irony. A young German writer driven into exile by the Nazi regime was interned by the country in which he had sought refuge and transported halfway around the world, only to die aboard the ship carrying him back.

Strengths and limitations

As fiction, The Passenger has the strengths and some weaknesses of a novel written with extraordinary urgency. Boschwitz reportedly produced it in approximately four weeks after Kristallnacht. That urgency survives in the work’s construction. Its movement is rapid and anxious, its recurring trains reproducing Silbermann’s inability to find safety or repose.

The railway compartment is Boschwitz’s most effective artistic device. It brings Silbermann into temporary proximity with strangers whose political attitudes he must continually assess while concealing the fact upon which his survival now depends. Conversation becomes dangerous because the most banal exchange can expose him.

This also explains the recurrence of similar situations. Structurally, the novel can feel repetitive, but the repetition has an artistic function. Silbermann cannot escape the same fundamental problem. Each departure promises a geographical solution to what is ultimately a political catastrophe.

The novel’s perspective nevertheless has limits. Its central social world is that of businesspeople and middle-class members. The reader experiences fascism principally through a bourgeois Jewish protagonist whose assumptions about citizenship, property and assimilation are being violently demolished.

That restriction is historically revealing in itself. Silbermann understands that his former life has ceased to exist long before he can adequately explain why it has disappeared. Boschwitz therefore captures, with remarkable immediacy, the consciousness of a man experiencing a historical catastrophe faster than he can comprehend.

André Aciman’s preface emphasises the novel’s psychological and sociological power, describing it as both an account of Jewish existence immediately before the war and an extraordinarily penetrating portrait of its protagonist. That emphasis is valuable, provided Silbermann’s specific circumstances don’t dissolve into a timeless parable of displacement. Silbermann is not simply modern man lost in an absurd universe. He is a Jewish citizen being destroyed by a definite political regime.

A book to read

The Passenger deserves the wide readership its rediscovery has brought it. Its revived edition achieved substantial international success, including translation into more than 20 languages. Yet its importance ultimately has little to do with the remarkable history of its disappearance and recovery.

Its enduring power comes from the immediacy with which Boschwitz captures the moment when ordinary social existence becomes impossible. Silbermann begins with many of the assumptions of the respectable bourgeois citizen. He possesses property, has served his country, conducts business and regards himself as thoroughly German. He discovers that none of these things protects him once political power decides he no longer belongs.

The horror of The Passenger lies in the incremental character of this discovery. Silbermann has no secure place from which to stand outside events and comprehend them as a whole. Instead, he passes from train to train, conversation to conversation, and humiliation to humiliation, still trying to behave according to the rules of a society whose rules have ceased to protect him.

That gives Boschwitz’s novel a significance beyond its considerable documentary value. Written by a 23-year-old refugee before the full catastrophe of European Jewry had unfolded, it records the atmosphere of persecution with an immediacy unavailable to retrospective historical fiction. Boschwitz did not know what would follow. He did understand that a decisive boundary had already been crossed.

His protagonist’s movement across Germany therefore becomes an image of terrifying simplicity: a man remains physically inside the country he regards as his own while discovering that, politically and socially, there is no longer any place in it where he is permitted to belong. That is what makes The Passenger so disturbing. That is why it remains a book worth reading.

[1] The Passenger, by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, translated by Philip Boehm, with an introduction by André Aciman (Pushkin Press Classics)

Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks in a new translation: the decline of a family, the fate of a class

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A new English version of Thomas Mann’s first great novel arrives as the social order it anatomised once again shows every sign of exhaustion. The book deserves the widest possible readership, not as a period piece about a vanished merchant patriciate, but as a work that grasped, more profoundly than its author fully understood, the historical fate of a class.

Oxford University Press has published a new translation of The Buddenbrooks in its World’s Classics series, by veteran translator Mike Mitchell, with an introduction, chronology, and explanatory notes by Ritchie Robertson, formerly Schwarz-Taylor Professor of German at Oxford. The edition runs to 656 pages. Mitchell taught at the universities of Reading and Stirling before becoming a full-time literary translator. Robertson retired in 2021 as Schwarz-Taylor Professor and is now an Emeritus Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford.

A fresh, carefully annotated edition is welcome because Buddenbrooks holds a distinctive place in European literature. Mann began writing the novel in 1897, when he was 22, and completed it in 1900; it was published the following year. Drawing deeply on his family’s history and the commercial society of Lübeck where he grew up, he transformed autobiographical material into a panoramic account of the dissolution of an entire social world. When he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, the Academy’s citation singled out his “great novel Buddenbrooks”.

What makes the novel enduring is precisely the distance separating the scale of its ostensible subject from that of its real achievement. The title promises a family history, and Mann certainly supplies one in extraordinary detail: marriages and divorces, births and deaths, business transactions and inheritances, illnesses, meals, houses, clothes, religious observances, musical enthusiasms and the minute rituals by which established families reassure themselves of their permanence. Yet behind this accumulation of apparently private incidents another history steadily makes itself felt.

The Buddenbrooks’ tragedy takes place during the transformation of nineteenth-century German society. The novel follows four generations of a wealthy North German merchant family between 1835 and 1877, a period encompassing enormous economic, social and political change. The family fortune, its commercial reputation, and civic standing initially seem almost natural. Business, family and public authority reinforce one another. Yet what one generation experiences as permanence becomes an increasingly burdensome inheritance for another.

This is where Buddenbrooks becomes considerably more than a chronicle of familial decadence. Arthur Schopenhauer profoundly influenced Mann, and the novel’s treatment of exhaustion, death and individual release bears the unmistakable imprint of that encounter. Oxford University Press describes decline in the novel as a “psychological process”, in which growing artistic sensitivity weakens the ruthless commercial instincts tied to the family’s earlier prosperity.

But the novel’s greatness lies partly in its realism, which goes beyond this explanation. What Mann interprets philosophically as exhaustion and degeneration also emerges objectively as historical transformation. The Buddenbrooks have not simply grown too sensitive for business. The world that made their particular form of bourgeois authority possible is itself changing around them. Their inner disintegration reflects an external movement they cannot comprehend or control.

Few novels depict, with comparable force, how a ruling social layer experiences historical decline as personal misfortune. The erosion of social confidence appears first not in political programmes or economic statistics but in marriages, nervous illnesses, failed commercial ventures, aesthetic longings and doubts about the future. This contradiction between Mann’s philosophical conception of decline and the richer conclusions his own realism forces on him gives Buddenbrooks its lasting significance. He set out to describe a family’s decline. In doing so, he produced something far greater: the artistic anatomy of a social world passing away.

Four generations

The novel, whose German subtitle, Verfall einer Familie, means “Decline of a Family”, opens in 1835 with a housewarming dinner in a grand house on Mengstrasse. Old Johann Buddenbrook, a prosperous grain merchant with the rationalism and robust self-confidence of the Enlightenment bourgeoisie, has bought the property from a bankrupt rival. It closes in 1877 in an altogether different world: the house has been sold, the firm liquidated, the male line extinguished, and what remains of the family reduced largely to a circle of grieving women. Across these four generations Mann charts not simply the disappearance of a dynasty, but the gradual erosion of the material security and moral certainty upon which its authority rests.

Each generation inherits its predecessor’s achievements but proves progressively less capable of inhabiting the social role that comes with them. In the patriarch Johann, business appears natural and uncomplicated. Commerce is his element, prosperity the confirmation of rational calculation and worldly competence. His son, the Consul, retains the commercial ethic but overlays it with a distinctly different sensibility. Pietism enters a world previously dominated by Enlightenment common sense. The family chronicle records business calculations, births, marriages, and deaths and commends them to God. The firm is no longer merely an enterprise. It has become a moral obligation, an inheritance whose preservation increasingly assumes the character of a duty.

With the Consul’s children this contradiction becomes sharper.  Antonie internalises the family’s conception of itself perhaps more completely than anyone. Her personal happiness is repeatedly subordinated to the name and the firm’s commercial interests. The firm encourages her to marry Grünlich because it seems advantageous. When he proves to be a fortune-hunter and goes bankrupt, the collapse brutally exposes the economic considerations underlying the supposedly private institution of marriage. Antonie’s second marriage, to the Munich hop merchant Permaneder, likewise fails. Yet she remains devoted to the Buddenbrook name, clinging with almost comic determination to the prestige of a family whose material foundations are steadily weakening.

Christian represents another form of dissolution. Unable to accept the discipline expected of a Buddenbrook, he drifts through business, theatre, clubs, and hypochondria. Christian largely refuses what Thomas experiences as an unbearable duty. The brothers therefore respond in opposite ways to the same inheritance.

Thomas attempts to preserve it through sheer force of personality. He assumes control of the firm, enters public life, and becomes a senator, seemingly embodying the family’s continued success. Yet the more precarious his confidence becomes, the more meticulously he performs the outward signs of bourgeois authority. Dress, manners, public bearing and commercial reputation acquire enormous importance precisely because the inner certainty that once sustained them is disappearing. What came naturally to Johann must consciously be acted by Thomas.

With Thomas’s son Hanno, even the performance becomes impossible. Frail, introspective and artistically gifted, he feels no vocation for commerce and finds his deepest emotional refuge in music. The qualities earlier generations regarded as incidental to existence have moved to its centre. The family has moved from Johann’s uncomplicated identification with commerce to Hanno’s near-total estrangement from it.

Mann gives this historical and psychological trajectory its most economical expression in the family book. Hanno draws a double line beneath his own name. When asked why, he explains that he thought nothing more would come.

The gesture is innocent, but its significance is devastating. A succession that has organised four generations’ lives stops. The child, meant to guarantee the family’s future, instinctively recognises that there is none. The line beneath his name becomes a line beneath the Buddenbrooks themselves.

A family and a class

The years the novel spans, 1835 to 1877, saw German capitalism shift from the fragmented commercial world of the post-Napoleonic states to the unified, rapidly industrialising empire proclaimed in 1871.

The Buddenbrooks belong to the old Hanseatic patriciate: merchants whose economic status is inseparable from civic office, inherited reputation and a code of honour in which the firm appears almost as a sacred trust handed from father to son. Family, property, business and public standing are different aspects of a single social existence.

Their rivals, the Hagenströms, represent something new. Coarser in Mann’s presentation, less burdened by inherited tradition and altogether less embarrassed by speculation, they rise as the Buddenbrooks sink, and it is Hagenström who finally acquires the house on Mengstrasse. Mann treats them with undisguised distaste, but the logic of his own novel shows that their victory is not simply a matter of superior or inferior character. The competition between the two families expresses, within the narrow confines of a provincial mercantile city, the displacement of one historical form of bourgeois life by another.

The book’s handling of 1848 is especially revealing. When a crowd of workers gathers outside the building where the city’s assembly sits during the revolutionary upheavals, the Consul goes out to address them. The worker Carl Smolt, asked what the crowd wants, replies that they want a republic. Told that Lübeck already possesses one, he answers that in that case they want another.

The scene reads largely as comedy, and the crowd eventually disperses, yet beneath the patricians’ condescension Mann registers something more serious: the masses’ momentary intrusion into a political world that had long regarded government as its natural possession. The Consul’s aristocratic father-in-law, Lebrecht Kröger, dies that same evening, almost as though the lower orders’ appearance on the stage of history has proved fatal to him.

Friedrich Engels famously praised Honoré de Balzac because the royalist novelist’s realism compelled him to portray the aristocracy’s historical decline, for which he nevertheless felt considerable sympathy. Something similar can be said of the young Mann. He possessed no sympathy for socialism, and his attachment to the old Lübeck patriciate was profound. Yet his artistic honesty compelled him to portray the decline of his own social world with a truthfulness that repeatedly cuts across his nostalgia.

The Hungarian Marxist critic Georg Lukács, who wrote extensively about Mann, recognised the broader importance of this achievement. Buddenbrooks endures not simply as a record of a dying family’s peculiarities, but because Mann, in the tradition of the greatest bourgeois realism, embodies historical processes in fully realised individual lives. The historical movement is never imposed upon the characters from outside. It emerges through their marriages, inheritances, illnesses, commercial decisions, aspirations and disappointments. The Buddenbrooks’ decline is therefore simultaneously private and social.

For Lukács, realism’s greatness lay precisely in its capacity to penetrate immediate appearances and disclose the forces shaping individual existence. The greatest writers could consequently reveal truths that exceeded, and sometimes contradicted, their own consciously held political or philosophical opinions. Balzac remained Lukács’s classical example: a political conservative whose fidelity to social reality produced an extraordinarily penetrating picture of bourgeois society. Something comparable occurs in Mann. His philosophical categories emphasise degeneration, nervous exhaustion and the conflict between artistic sensitivity and practical life, yet the social world he creates refuses to remain confined within them.

Johann, Tony, Thomas and Hanno are not merely stages in a biological process of family decay. Each expresses a different relationship to a changing bourgeois order. What appears secure and natural to Johann becomes a duty that demands enormous self-discipline from Thomas and, finally, becomes impossible for Hanno. The changing personalities of the Buddenbrooks thus register a historical transformation.

This is why Mann’s realism is more powerful than any simple theory of hereditary degeneration. He does not merely tell the reader that a class is declining. He lets that decline be experienced from within, as inherited certainties cease to match social reality. The family drama thereby acquires historical significance: the fate of the Buddenbrooks becomes inseparable from the fate of the world that produced them.

Decline turned inward

Mann’s own theoretical explanation of the family’s collapse lies elsewhere. Under the powerful influence of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and contemporary ideas of degeneration, he presents decline partly as a biological and psychological process. Schopenhauer’s influence on the young Mann and the novel’s conception of decadence is well established.

With each generation, the Buddenbrooks become more nervous, reflective, and aesthetically sensitive, and apparently less capable of the ruthless commercial activity on which the family fortune was built. In this scheme, sensibility and art become symptoms of a life force running down.

Thomas Buddenbrook is the central figure in this process, and Mann’s portrait of him is one of the novel’s greatest achievements. He holds himself together increasingly by force of will, changing his clothes several times a day and maintaining the elaborate appearance of bourgeois respectability, even as the inner conviction that once sustained his class slowly drains away.

A disastrous speculation on a harvest bought before it is gathered and later destroyed marks the moment Thomas tries to act according to more aggressive commercial principles and fails. Increasingly, the confidence required by the role he performs becomes impossible to sustain.

In one of the novel’s most celebrated episodes, Thomas encounters Schopenhauer and experiences a brief and intoxicating philosophical liberation from his own frightened individuality. Mann later acknowledged how profoundly his personal encounter with Schopenhauer informed the episode. Yet Thomas soon returns to the routines of existence from which philosophy has only momentarily released him. He eventually collapses after leaving the dentist and dies.

Hanno’s world, meanwhile, is music, above all Wagner’s. Mann’s account of the boy’s piano improvisations, and the extraordinary chapter devoted to a single day in his grim, authoritarian school, belong among the novel’s finest passages. The institutional world into which the sensitive child is forced seems increasingly incapable of producing anything but conformity, fear, and submission.

Yet Mann’s limited outlook also becomes evident here. Interpreting the decline of a social class primarily as a fatal opposition between “life” and “spirit”, between commercial vitality and artistic sensitivity, translates an objective social and historical development into the language of psychology and metaphysics.

Significantly, Oxford’s description of the new edition itself identifies the novel’s concern with decline “as a psychological process” in which artistic sensibility weakens the business instincts responsible for the family’s prosperity. It is certainly a psychological process. But it is not only that. The Buddenbrooks are not destroyed because successive generations become excessively sensitive. Their psychological transformation takes place within a changing social world. The conditions that had sustained the authority of a patriciate of merchant-senators are themselves being transformed by the development of capitalism.

The contradiction is essential to the novel’s greatness. Mann’s philosophy tends to mystify what his realism reveals. “Decline” enters his characters’ consciousness as fatigue, illness, aestheticism, and loss of will; in the novel’s objective movement it takes another form: the disappearance of the economic and social conditions on which Buddenbrook authority rested.

Their tragedy therefore cannot be reduced either to biology or to economics. Its artistic power arises precisely because Mann makes the intimate life of the bourgeois family the medium through which historical change becomes emotionally perceptible. Marriage, illness, inheritance, sexuality, childhood, business and art become forms through which an entire social layer experiences, without completely understanding, the erosion of its historical confidence. Thomas Buddenbrook’s inward crisis is therefore the subjective reflection of an objective transformation. Mann’s genius as a realist lets the reader perceive this even when his philosophical assumptions point elsewhere.

The new edition

English-language readers have chiefly encountered Mann’s novel through two earlier translations: H. T. Lowe-Porter’s version, first published in 1924, and John E. Woods’s later translation. Mitchell therefore enters a field in which the novel already possesses a substantial English-language history.

He comes well equipped. Mike Mitchell taught at the universities of Reading and Stirling before becoming a full-time translator and has translated more than 100 works of fiction and non-fiction from German and French. His translation of Herbert Rosendorfer’s Letters Back from Ancient China received the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 1998.

The decision to call the novel The Buddenbrooks, rather than the now-familiar Buddenbrooks, gives the English title a slightly different cadence, natural enough in English, if at the expense of some of the stark, almost ledger-like quality of the German family name standing alone.

One particularly intriguing feature is the inclusion of an “Appendix: Permaneder in Standard English”. Permaneder’s Bavarian speech, incomprehensible and comic to the Lübeck family, serves an important artistic purpose because language throughout the novel marks differences of region, class and generation. The inclusion of a standard-English appendix at least indicates that this translation values preserving that linguistic distance, rather than letting the social distinctions embedded in Mann’s dialogue disappear.

Ritchie Robertson, meanwhile, is exceptionally well placed to provide the supporting scholarly material. He retired in 2021 as Schwarz-Taylor Professor of German at the University of Oxford and is an Emeritus Fellow of Queen’s College. His publications span Kafka, Goethe, the Enlightenment, and German political tragedy.

The edition includes an introduction, a note on the translation, a select bibliography, a chronology, the Permaneder appendix, and explanatory notes. Such annotation is particularly useful for a novel whose texture depends so heavily upon the institutions, religious assumptions, linguistic peculiarities and commercial practices of nineteenth-century North German society.

From Lübeck to exile

The contradictions visible in Buddenbrooks would take increasingly political form in Mann’s later work. During the First World War he wrote Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, defending a conception of German “culture” against Western liberal “civilisation”. During the subsequent crisis of German society, his position changed profoundly. Confronted with the upheavals that followed the First World War and, eventually, the rise of fascism, Mann moved toward defending parliamentary democracy and opposing Nazism.

The old merchant patriciate Mann chronicled belonged to an earlier stage in the development of German capitalism. Its world cannot simply be identified with the vastly more powerful industrial and financial interests of twentieth-century Germany. But the historical development connecting the two forms part of the larger story Mann had inadvertently begun to tell: the transformation of the German bourgeoisie from the locally rooted mercantile order represented by the Buddenbrooks into the industrial capitalist society of the unified Reich and, eventually, into the monopoly capitalism thrown into catastrophic political crisis during the Weimar Republic.

Forced into exile after the Nazi seizure of power, Mann became an increasingly outspoken opponent of Hitler. The political trajectory from cultural conservative to defender of democratic and humanist values was shaped by the convulsions of the bourgeois order whose contradictions his first great novel had already begun to register.

A novel for the present

Read today, Buddenbrooks speaks with renewed force. Mann’s social world has disappeared. Today’s financial oligarchy is separated from the nineteenth-century merchant patriciate by immense transformations in productive forces, corporate organisation, finance and the world market. But the social relations underlying inheritance, private wealth, competition and the accumulation of property have not disappeared.

Perhaps this is why the psychology of Mann’s characters remains so recognisable. Private wealth presents itself as solidity, permanence, merit, and family achievement, even as economic processes continually transform its social foundations, processes its individual beneficiaries neither control nor fully understand. Thomas Buddenbrook believes that he is defending something permanent. In reality, everything around him is changing. The novel’s final pages provide no way forward. Mann could see decline but not the social force capable of overcoming the order to which his characters belonged. The working class consequently appears only fleetingly, most memorably in the episode of 1848.

The contemporary reader need not share that historical limitation. The value of Buddenbrooks lies precisely in Mann’s uncompromising portrayal of a social order that has begun to lose confidence in its own permanence, an exhaustion embodied in the conviction, quoted by Oxford from Mitchell’s translation, that “all this could not last much longer”.

Mann could depict the exhaustion of a class but not the social force capable of transcending the order to which it belonged. More than a century later, that historical limitation does not diminish the novel’s achievement. It helps define it. Buddenbrooks remains extraordinarily alive because Mann’s realism penetrated beyond his own philosophical explanations to reveal how a social order experiences the erosion of its historical confidence in the most intimate realms of human existence: marriage, inheritance, childhood, illness, ambition, art and death.

That contradiction is ultimately responsible for the novel’s enduring power. Mann understood the Buddenbrooks’ decline through Schopenhauer, decadence and the supposedly antagonistic claims of life and art. But the work he actually created goes far beyond those categories. The novelist sees more than the philosopher. Mann’s metaphysics describes the family’s fate as degeneration; Mann’s realism reveals history.

This new edition is therefore a welcome addition. Mike Mitchell’s translation gives another generation of English-language readers a chance to encounter one of the great European novels of the bourgeois age. At the same time, Ritchie Robertson’s accompanying scholarly material situates the work in the intellectual and cultural world from which it emerged. Readers coming to the Buddenbrooks for the first time have an attractive new point of entry. Those who already know the family through earlier translations have ample reason to return.

Select bibliography

Primary texts

Mann, Thomas. The Buddenbrooks. Translated by Mike Mitchell. Edited with an introduction and notes by Ritchie Robertson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2026. 656 pp.

Mann, Thomas. Buddenbrooks. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924.

Mann, Thomas. Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. Translated by Walter D. Morris. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983.

Mann, Thomas. Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Translated by John E. Woods. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. 2 vols. Translated and edited by Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman and Christopher Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Thomas Mann and Buddenbrooks

Bahr, Ehrhard, ed. A Companion to the Works of Thomas Mann. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. It contains a substantial chapter by Herbert Lehnert on Mann’s beginnings and Buddenbrooks. [cambridge.org]

Hayman, Ronald. Thomas Mann: A Biography. London: Bloomsbury, 1995.

Kurzke, Hermann. Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art: A Biography. Translated by Leslie Willson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Ridley, Hugh. The Problematic Bourgeois: Twentieth-Century Criticism on Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994. Particularly useful for the critical history surrounding the novel and the problem of the bourgeoisie in Mann’s work. [archive.org], [thefreelibrary.com]

Robertson, Ritchie. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Realism, bourgeois society and Marxist criticism

Engels, Friedrich. Letter to Margaret Harkness, April 1888. In Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 48. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2001.

Lukács, Georg. Essays on Thomas Mann. Translated by Stanley Mitchell. London: Merlin Press, 1964.

Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. Translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. London: Merlin Press, 1962.

Lukács, Georg. Studies in European Realism. London: Hillway Publishing, 1950.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. London: Penguin/New Left Review, 1976.

German history and the bourgeoisie

Blackbourn, David. The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780–1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Blackbourn, David, and Geoff Eley. The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Evans, Richard J. The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914. London: Allen Lane, 2016.

Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. The German Empire, 1871–1918. Translated by Kim Traynor. Leamington Spa: Berg, 1985.

Editorial rationale

This bibliography keeps the new Mitchell edition at the centre, while Lukács, Marx and Engels provide the theoretical basis for your discussion of realism, class and historical transformation. Ridley and the broader Mann scholarship cover the literary-critical debate, while Blackbourn, Eley and Wehler supply the historical background to the transformation of the German bourgeoisie.

A history of the fight against antisemitism—and the politics it leaves out

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The struggle against antisemitism is a question of burning political importance. Across Europe, parties descended from or modelled on fascism are in government or on the threshold. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland polls as a major party. In Britain, far-right street mobilisations draw crowds unseen since the 1930s, while Reform UK sets the agenda in official politics.

At the same time, the charge of antisemitism has been turned into an instrument of state repression. It is wielded not against the heirs of Hitler and Mosley but against workers, students and Jewish opponents of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza. Any serious history of the fight against antisemitism must therefore answer definite questions. Who fought it? With what methods? On what class basis? And with what results?

This collection of essays, published by the Wiener Holocaust Library, poses the right question in its title. Its answers, however, are shaped by its producers’ institutional and political commitments.[1]

The book and its sponsors

The volume grew out of the Library’s exhibition Fighting Antisemitism from Dreyfus to Today, shown in London from March to September 2022 and later taken to Parliament. Barbara Warnock, the Library’s senior curator, and Toby Simpson, its director, edited it, and it launched in November 2022.

Its essays trace the individuals and organisations that have countered antisemitism since the Dreyfus Affair. They cover the campaign to free Dreyfus, Alfred Wiener’s anti-Nazi work in Germany and the Netherlands, the 43 Group’s post-war anti-fascist direct action, and the Library’s own monitoring work. A final section examines what the publisher calls the differing forms of antisemitism in Britain in recent decades.

The Wiener Library deserves credit. Founded by Wiener in Amsterdam in 1933 and moved to London in 1939, its archive is an irreplaceable record of the Nazi regime and its crimes. The exhibition catalogue drew on photographs from the Community Security Trust (CST) archives and credited the CST’s head of policy, Dave Rich, among others.

That partnership, and the choice of foreword writer, signal where the book will land. Julia Neuberger, senior rabbi of West London Synagogue and a crossbench peer, was among the most prominent establishment voices in the campaign against Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. That is the political lens through which a century of history is ultimately read.

Dreyfus: the decisive role of the socialist movement

The book rightly opens with the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894, a Jewish artillery officer was framed for espionage by the French General Staff and shipped to Devil’s Island. The affair became the axis around which the Third Republic’s political forces polarised: the army, the Catholic Church, and Édouard Drumont’s antisemitic leagues on one side; republicans, intellectuals, and, decisively, the socialist workers’ movement on the other.

Appeals to the authorities’ good faith did not free Dreyfus. Zola’s J’accuse in January 1898 was an act of political war on the military caste. The turning point came when Jean Jaurès overcame the Guesdist wing of French socialism, which had dismissed the case as a quarrel between bourgeois factions, and brought the organised working class into the fight against clerical-militarist reaction.

This is the period’s first lesson, and it is the one a history organised around “methods” of countering antisemitism tends to blur. Antisemitism in France was the banner of a social coalition seeking to overturn the republic and crush the workers’ movement. The working class pushed it back by intervening as an independent force.

Weimar: the limits of rebuttal

Alfred Wiener, the Library’s founder, stands at the centre of the story. A decorated veteran of the First World War, Wiener worked for the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith (Centralverein). He monitored the Nazi press, exposed its forgeries and published counter-propaganda. Around 1930, the Büro Wilhelmstrasse issued Anti-Anti, a handbook of facts for those responding to antisemitic lies.

The courage and diligence of this work are unquestioned. But its strategy rested on the assumption that Nazism could be defeated by information, by the law and by the institutions of the Weimar Republic. Every one of those props gave way. The Nazis were not a misunderstanding to be corrected with better facts. Amid economic collapse, German finance capital and the Junker landowners chose them as the instrument to smash Europe’s most powerful workers’ movement.

United action by Social Democratic and Communist workers offered the only realistic means of stopping Hitler’s advance. But both sides sabotaged such unity: the SPD leadership subordinated the working class to the bourgeois state and its institutions, and the Stalinist line denounced Social Democracy as “social fascism” and rejected a genuine united front. From exile, Leon Trotsky repeatedly warned of the catastrophic consequences of this political paralysis and fought to mobilise the working class in a united front against fascism. Hitler did not conquer power through an irresistible popular mandate in January 1933. Hindenburg installed him as chancellor, backed by powerful sections of Germany’s ruling elite.

A history of anti-antisemitism that does not place this betrayal at the centre cannot explain why the Centralverein’s devoted labours ended in catastrophe. The Library’s archive of rebuttal pamphlets is, in the end, a monument to the limits of enlightenment in the face of a social crisis.

Britain: Cable Street and the 43 Group

The British chapters tell a story whose lessons point in the same direction. On 4 October 1936, tens of thousands of East End workers—Jewish garment workers, Irish dockers, Communist and Independent Labour Party members—blocked Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts at Cable Street. The police, who had been sent to clear a path for the fascists, were driven back.

Anglo-Jewry’s official leadership played no part in this victory. The Board of Deputies and the Jewish Chronicle urged Jews to stay away and leave matters to the authorities. The Communist Party leadership had first planned to send its members to a solidarity rally elsewhere in Spain, and changed course only under pressure from the ranks.

The same pattern recurred after 1945. When Mosley sought to revive his movement, Jewish veterans formed the 43 Group. They broke up fascist meetings, infiltrated fascist organisations and fought them in the streets, again over the objections of the community establishment, which preferred quiet lobbying of the state.

The volume’s attention to the 43 Group is welcome. Their lesson, however, is not about the merits of “direct action” as a technique. It is that fascism was confronted successfully only when working people mobilised independently of—and often against—the police, the courts, and the official leaderships who counselled reliance on them.

Recent decades: Neuberger and the campaign against Corbyn

When the book reaches contemporary Britain, the gap between its historical material and its politics becomes a chasm. The “differing forms of antisemitism” of recent decades are, above all, the terrain of the campaign waged between 2015 and 2020 against Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party.

Neuberger was a leading figure in that campaign. In 2016 she told Newsnight that Labour had a “very particular problem” with antisemitism on the hard left. In June 2018 she urged Jews to resign from the party and said she hoped the issue would stop Labour from being elected. Her 2019 book stopped short of calling Corbyn an antisemite but said he had “behaved like an antisemite”. In the 2019 election, she endorsed the Chief Rabbi’s unprecedented intervention against him.

Her central criterion is that criticism of Israel becomes antisemitic when its tone would not be used of other countries. This tests subjective impression, not objective content. It mirrors the logic of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) “working definition”, whose Israel-related examples Labour was forced to adopt in full in 2018 after a campaign in which the three main Jewish newspapers ran an identical front page against Corbyn.

The campaign was political. The Labour right, the Conservative press and the Israeli state set out to destroy a leader who, whatever his limitations, had attracted hundreds of thousands of young people with left-wing rhetoric. Corbyn’s own response was capitulation: he accepted the IHRA definition, suspended allies and offered apology after apology. The 2022 Forde Report, commissioned by Labour itself, found that the antisemitism issue had been used as a factional weapon. None of this alters the existence of real antisemitism, which socialists oppose without compromise. But a history that presents this episode as a chapter in the fight against racism adopts the state’s vantage point.

After 2022: Gaza and the weaponisation of antisemitism

The book closes in 2022. Events since October 2023 have exposed the consequences of the political framework it endorses. Israel’s assault on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice found in January 2024 raised plausible claims under the Genocide Convention, has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and reduced the territory to rubble.

Throughout, governments in Britain and Europe have used the equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism to criminalise opposition. Mass demonstrations in London, in which Jewish contingents marched prominently, were branded “hate marches” by a Conservative home secretary. The Starmer government proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation in July 2025, and hundreds of people, many of them pensioners, were arrested for holding placards. In Germany, appeals to Israel’s security as a reason of state have been used to ban protests and cancel Jewish and Palestinian speakers.

The effect is doubly reactionary. It shields a state committing mass atrocities by identifying all Jews with its crimes, the very conflation that real antisemites exploit. And it diverts attention from the genuine and growing danger posed by the far right, which combines hostility to Muslims and migrants with the old conspiracy theories about Jews and finds a friendly hearing in official politics.

Conclusion: the lessons the book does not draw

Read against the grain, the material this volume assembles supports conclusions very different from those of its sponsors. Modern antisemitism has never been simply an irrational prejudice to be corrected by education and monitoring. It has been a tool of reaction, mobilised during periods of capitalist crisis to divert social anger from the ruling class onto a scapegoat and to split the working class.

The working class, Jewish and non-Jewish, has beaten it back only when it intervened independently: in the Dreyfusard movement, on the barricades of Cable Street, and in the streets against Mosley after the war. Where reliance fell on the state, the courts, and bourgeois liberalism, as in Weimar Germany, the outcome was catastrophe. Trotsky, writing in 1938, warned that the further advance of world reaction would bring the physical extermination of the Jews. He insisted that only the socialist transformation of society could secure their future.

The Zionist project offered a different answer: a nation-state built on the dispossession of another people. That answer has produced a state now carrying out atrocities in the name of Jews everywhere, which in turn feeds the antisemitism it claims to combat.

The Wiener Library archives will remain an indispensable resource. But the fight against antisemitism today requires a political perspective this book does not provide. That perspective is the international unity of the working class against capitalism, war and every form of racism, including the racism directed against Palestinians.

Sources

Bibliography

Book under review

  • Warnock, Barbara, and Toby Simpson, eds. Anti-Antisemitism: Countering Anti-Jewish Racism in Western Europe, 1890–2022. Foreword by Julia Neuberger. London: The Wiener Holocaust Library, 2022.

Books and documents

  • Equality and Human Rights Commission. Investigation into Antisemitism in the Labour Party. London: EHRC, October 2020.
  • Forde, Martin. The Forde Report. London: The Labour Party, July 2022.
  • International Court of Justice. Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), Order on Provisional Measures, 26 January 2024.
  • International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. “Working Definition of Antisemitism.” Adopted 26 May 2016.
  • Neuberger, Julia. Antisemitism: What It Is. What It Isn’t. Why It Matters. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2019.
  • Sonabend, Daniel. We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post-War Britain. London: Verso, 2019.
  • Trotsky, Leon. “Appeal to American Jews Menaced by Fascism and Anti-Semitism.” December 1938.
  • Trotsky, Leon. The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971.
  • The Wiener Holocaust Library. Fighting Antisemitism from Dreyfus to Today. Exhibition catalogue. London, 2022.
  • Zola, Émile. “J’accuse…!” L’Aurore, 13 January 1898.

Press and online sources

  • “Jewish Peer Attacks Labour for Having a ‘Very Particular Problem’ with Antisemitism.” Jewish Chronicle, 28 April 2016. Link
  • “Senior Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger Urges Jews to Leave Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.” Jewish Chronicle, 22 June 2018. Link
  • “Rabbi Julia Neuberger Rails Against Labour Antisemitism.” Jewish Chronicle, 30 May 2019. Link
  • “Senior Rabbi Julia Neuberger Talks Antisemitism in the UK.” Amanpour and Company, PBS, 27 November 2019. Link
  • The Wiener Holocaust Library. “Book Launch: Anti-Antisemitism.” Event listing, 15 November 2022. Link
  • The Wiener Holocaust Library. Fighting Antisemitism from Dreyfus to Today. Online exhibition. Link

[1] Anti-Antisemitism: Countering Anti-Jewish Racism in Western Europe, 1890–2022, edited by Barbara Warnock and Toby Simpson, with a foreword by Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger. The Wiener Holocaust Library, 2022.

Schama, Zionism and the Politics of Historical Memory

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Simon Schama’s defence of Israel and the campaign to criminalise opposition to genocide

Simon Schama’s recent intervention in defence of Israel is presented as a contribution to historical understanding. In reality, it belongs to a broader political campaign whose purpose is to delegitimise mass opposition to the genocide in Gaza by conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. The significance of such arguments lies not in their historical accuracy, but in their political function. At a moment when millions of people around the world are expressing opposition to war, ethnic cleansing and imperialist violence, intellectuals associated with the political establishment are increasingly being mobilised to provide moral and historical justification for repression.[1]

The campaign’s central mechanism is straightforward. Criticism of the Israeli state is equated with hostility to Jewish people. Opposition to Zionism is portrayed as a modern form of antisemitism. Protest against the destruction of Gaza becomes evidence of sympathy for forces allegedly seeking the destruction of Jews. Through this process, the unique moral authority associated with the Holocaust is transferred to the contemporary Israeli state, allowing criticism of its actions to be denounced as a revival of humanity’s greatest historical crime.

This conflation is not an intellectual mistake or conceptual confusion. It is a deliberate political operation. Its target is not the racist right, which continues to flourish across Europe, the United States and elsewhere. Rather, it is directed against anti-war demonstrators, socialist organisations, students, academics and workers who oppose genocide and imperialist war.

The narrative’s omission of the far right is especially revealing. Many of Israel’s most enthusiastic supporters are found among political forces with long histories of xenophobia, racism and authoritarian nationalism. Across Europe and North America, right-wing nationalist movements have increasingly presented Israel as a model of ethnic exclusivity, militarised borders and state violence against a subject population. These forces are rarely accused of antisemitism when they support Israel because they are politically useful allies. The contradiction exposes the dishonesty of claims that support for Israel constitutes the defining measure of opposition to antisemitism.

At the centre of Schama’s argument lies a familiar liberal-Zionist distinction between Israel’s allegedly noble foundations and the unfortunate excesses of its current government. Schama portrays Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich as departures from a fundamentally democratic and humane project. The implication is that Israel has somehow lost its way.

This narrative cannot withstand historical examination. The catastrophe now unfolding in Gaza did not emerge from a temporary deviation from Israel’s founding principles. It grew out of the state’s historical foundations. The Nakba of 1948, during which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes, was not an accidental by-product of state formation. It was the decisive event that established the state. The subordination and displacement of the indigenous Palestinian population were not peripheral episodes but central components of the Zionist project as it developed in practice.

For decades, Israel has functioned as a strategic ally of the major imperialist powers in the Middle East. Its military, economic and diplomatic position has been inseparable from its role within broader geopolitical calculations pursued by Britain and, increasingly after the Second World War, the United States. To describe the destruction of Gaza merely as the consequence of an extremist government is therefore to obscure the deeper historical and political forces that have shaped the state from the beginning.

Mario Kessler on Antisemitism

The German historian Mario Kessler has made an important contribution to understanding antisemitism by examining it through the history of the socialist movement. His work is particularly valuable because it challenges the widespread assumption that antisemitism and anti-Zionism are fundamentally the same thing. Instead, Kessler demonstrates that some of the strongest and most principled opponents of antisemitism were found within the revolutionary socialist tradition, many of whom were also critics of Zionism.

Kessler approaches antisemitism not simply as a prejudice but as a social and political phenomenon rooted in specific historical conditions. Drawing on Marxist scholarship, he shows how antisemitism often emerged during periods of economic and political crisis, when ruling elites and reactionary movements sought to channel social discontent away from the existing social order and towards a minority group. Jews were portrayed as responsible for social problems that were, in reality, products of capitalism itself.

One of Kessler’s key themes is the distinction between antisemitism and criticism of Zionism. He traces debates within the labour movement from the late nineteenth century onward, showing that many Jewish socialists rejected the Zionist project while remaining uncompromising opponents of antisemitism. For figures such as Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and many members of the Jewish labour movement, the solution to Jewish oppression lay not in creating a separate nation-state but in the international struggle for socialism and democratic equality.

Kessler’s work also highlights the twentieth century’s tragedy. The rise of fascism and the Holocaust devastated the European Jewish population and transformed political attitudes towards Zionism. Yet he argues that understanding this catastrophe requires serious historical analysis rather than political myth-making. The history of antisemitism, in his view, cannot be reduced to support for or opposition to Israel.

Kessler is particularly relevant today because he insists on historical precision. He rejects attempts to use accusations of antisemitism as a weapon against all critics of Israeli policy, while equally opposing genuine antisemitism in all its forms. His work reminds us that the socialist movement developed both a powerful critique of antisemitism and a tradition of internationalism that sought solidarity between peoples rather than separation through competing nationalisms. For readers interested in the relationship between antisemitism, socialism and Zionism, Kessler provides an important historical bridge between nineteenth-century Marxism and contemporary political debates.

The effort to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism also requires the systematic suppression of an alternative political tradition, namely that of revolutionary socialist internationalism. The historical record is clear. The socialist movement, not Zionism, produced the most consistent and principled struggle against antisemitism. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, socialist organisations opposed antisemitism not as an isolated prejudice but as a reactionary ideology rooted in the contradictions of class society.

David North’s The Logic of Zionism and the Fate of Palestine

David North’s The Logic of Zionism and the Fate of Palestine is less a conventional history book than a collection of political and historical essays that examine the origins of Zionism, the Palestinian question, and imperialism’s role in the Middle East. Written from a Trotskyist and international socialist standpoint, the book challenges both the mainstream defence of Zionism and the various nationalist perspectives that dominate discussion of the conflict.

One of the book’s strengths is its placement of Zionism in a broader historical context. North argues that Zionism emerged as a response to the oppression of European Jews, but that it developed as a nationalist movement whose fate became closely bound up with the interests of the major imperialist powers. Rather than treating Israel as simply the fulfilment of Jewish self-determination, he examines how the state was formed, its relationship to the displacement of the Palestinian population and its strategic role in the Middle East.

A recurring theme is the distinction between Judaism and Zionism. North insists that opposition to Zionism is not the same thing as antisemitism and points to the long history of socialist opposition to both antisemitism and Jewish nationalism. The book draws heavily on the writings of Marx, Engels, August Bebel, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and, above all, Leon Trotsky. These figures argued that antisemitism was rooted in the crises and contradictions of capitalist society and could not be overcome through the creation of a separate national state.

Particularly interesting are the sections dealing with Trotsky’s analysis of the Jewish question in the 1930s. Trotsky recognised the terrible danger facing European Jewry under fascism while maintaining that Zionism offered no lasting solution. North argues that subsequent events, including the continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, have confirmed many of Trotsky’s warnings.

The book also connects the Palestinian struggle to broader questions of war, imperialism, and class politics. Rather than advocating either Israeli or Palestinian nationalism, North advances socialist internationalism, arguing that a genuine democratic solution requires workers’ political unity throughout the region.

Whether one agrees with its conclusions or not, The Logic of Zionism and the Fate of Palestine is an important statement of the Trotskyist position on one of the most contested questions of modern history. It combines historical analysis, political polemic and theoretical argument in a way that encourages readers to think beyond the narrow framework through which the conflict is usually presented.

August Bebel and the Socialist Struggle Against Antisemitism

August Bebel (1840-1913), the co-founder and leading figure of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), played a decisive role in establishing the Marxist movement as the most consistent opponent of antisemitism in late nineteenth-century Europe. At a time when antisemitic agitation was gaining influence among sections of the middle classes and even among workers affected by economic crisis, Bebel insisted that hostility to Jews was not a form of social protest but a reactionary diversion from the struggle against capitalism.

Bebel is best known for describing antisemitism as “the socialism of fools.” By this he meant that antisemitic demagogues sought to exploit genuine popular grievances while directing anger away from the capitalist system and towards a vulnerable minority. Rather than identifying exploitation as a consequence of the social relations of capitalism, antisemites attributed poverty, unemployment and financial crises to the alleged conspiracies of Jewish individuals. In doing so, they transformed social discontent into racial hatred and protected the existing economic order.

For Bebel and the Marxist movement, antisemitism was not simply a prejudice or moral failing. It was a political weapon used by ruling elites and reactionary forces to divide the working class. Antisemitic campaigns encouraged workers to blame Jewish neighbours instead of the capitalist class as a whole. This undermined workers’ unity across national, religious, and ethnic lines, which Marxists regarded as essential to socialist struggle.

Bebel’s opposition to antisemitism anticipated later Marxist analyses developed by figures such as Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. His insistence that workers reject all forms of racial and religious chauvinism became a foundational principle of socialist internationalism. At a time when many liberal politicians accommodated antisemitic sentiment, Bebel and the SPD publicly opposed it, making the socialist movement the principal political force combating antisemitism in Germany.

His intervention remains historically significant because it demonstrated that the fight against antisemitism is inseparable from the struggle for working-class unity and social equality. For Bebel, the liberation of Jewish people could not be achieved through exclusion, nationalism, or scapegoating, but only through workers’ common struggle against capitalism itself.

No figure understood this process more profoundly than Leon Trotsky. Writing as fascism rose, Trotsky warned that capitalism’s crisis threatened catastrophe for European Jewry. The destruction of democratic institutions, the growth of fascist movements and the degeneration of bourgeois society pointed toward unprecedented crimes. At the same time, Trotsky rejected Zionism’s claim to provide a solution to the Jewish question through the creation of a national state in Palestine. He argued that the historical problem confronting Jewish people could not be resolved through a nationalist project, but only through the international struggle against capitalism itself.

Subsequent history tragically confirmed both aspects of Trotsky’s analysis. The Holocaust exposed the barbarism to which capitalism in crisis could descend. Yet the establishment of Israel did not eliminate antisemitism. Nor did it resolve the underlying contradictions that had produced it. Instead, new forms of oppression and conflict emerged, above all through the dispossession and subjugation of the Palestinian people.

This history poses an insurmountable challenge to Schama’s argument. The political tendency that most consistently analysed antisemitism, fought it and predicted the catastrophe confronting European Jewry was also the tendency that opposed Zionism. The existence of that tradition refutes the claim that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic.

Indeed, the current attempt to identify opposition to Zionism with hatred of Jews requires the erasure of a century of socialist political experience. Most crucially, the conflation of Judaism with the Israeli state does not protect Jewish people. It places them in greater danger. Antisemitism has historically functioned by attributing the crimes, failures and contradictions of society to Jews as a collective. Zionist ideology, particularly in its contemporary forms, insists that Israel acts in the name of Jews everywhere and that Jewish identity is inextricably bound to the state. This claim reproduces, from a different starting point, precisely the framework upon which antisemitism has traditionally depended.

When the actions of the Israeli state are identified with Jews as a whole, the distinction between a government and a people is consciously blurred. The responsibility for state crimes is transferred to an entire global community. This does not undermine antisemitism. It creates conditions in which antisemitic narratives can flourish.

The defence of Jewish people against antisemitism therefore cannot be entrusted to the Israeli state, nor to the imperialist governments that provide it with diplomatic cover, financial support and military assistance. Genuine opposition to antisemitism requires a fundamentally different political perspective.

That perspective begins with rejecting all forms of nationalism and ethnic exclusivity. It insists on the unity of Jewish, Arab, and international workers based on common class interests. It recognises that war, racism, authoritarianism and genocide arise not from ancient hatreds but from the crisis of the capitalist system itself.

The growing effort to criminalise anti-Zionist sentiment and suppress opposition to genocide is part of a broader assault on democratic rights. Governments that support Israel’s actions in Gaza increasingly resort to censorship, police repression and legal intimidation because they confront widening popular opposition. The attack on Palestine solidarity movements is one aspect of a wider turn toward authoritarian forms of rule in conditions of mounting social inequality, geopolitical conflict and economic instability.

Viewed in this context, Schama’s essay is not primarily a contribution to historical debate. It is a political intervention on behalf of the existing order. Its purpose is to provide intellectual legitimacy for the suppression of opposition to imperialist violence and to shield the Israeli state from scrutiny by presenting criticism as prejudice.

Defending historical truth requires rejecting this falsification. Antisemitism is a real and deadly form of reaction whose history culminated in some of the greatest crimes of the twentieth century. But it cannot be fought through support for a state carrying out mass violence against an oppressed people. Nor can opposition to genocide be silenced by accusations designed to delegitimise political dissent.

The struggle against antisemitism and the struggle against Zionism are not mutually exclusive. Historically, some of the most principled opponents of antisemitism understood this. Their perspective remains indispensable today. The defence of democratic rights, the opposition to genocide and the fight against antisemitism all require the same political foundation: the independent mobilisation of the international working class against capitalism, imperialism and war.

Bibliography

Bebel, August. Mass and Class: Selected Writings. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1980.

Kessler, Mario. Antisemitism, Zionism and Socialism: Studies in the History of Jewish Labour and Political Movements. Berlin: Metropol Verlag, various editions.

Lenin, V. I. “Anti-Jewish Pogroms.” In Collected Works, Vol. 29. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

North, David. The Logic of Zionism and the Fate of Palestine: Historical and Political Essays. Detroit: Mehring Books, 2011.

North, David. “Socialist Internationalism and the Struggle Against Zionism and Imperialism.” International Youth and Students for Social Equality Lecture, 2023.

Trotsky, Leon. “Thermidor and Antisemitism” (1937).

Trotsky, Leon. “On the Jewish Question” (1934-1940), in Writings of Leon Trotsky.

Weiss, Clara. “Mario Kessler on Marxism, Antisemitism and Zionism.” World Socialist Web Site, 3 July 2025.

Pappe, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006.

Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Said, Edward. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

[1] Jew-Hatred: Jewish Quarterly 265 by Simon Schama, 13 Oct. 2026, 96 pages

Victoria and Albert Museum workers strike across all four London sites against “Amazon-style” conditions and poverty pay.

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Workers at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) will strike across all four of the institution’s London sites on October 29 and 30 in an escalating dispute over poverty wages and increasingly intolerable working conditions.

The action, involving union members at South Kensington, V&A East Museum, V&A East Storehouse in Stratford and the Young V&A in Bethnal Green, marks the first time the museum’s entire London network will be hit simultaneously by industrial action. It follows a series of September strikes that exposed a growing rebellion among workers at one of Britain’s premier cultural institutions.

Behind the V&A’s carefully cultivated image as a world-class museum lies a workplace regime that workers have compared to an Amazon fulfilment centre. The dispute first erupted at the newly opened V&A East Storehouse, where staff reported being denied sufficient time for drinking water and toilet breaks during shifts.

That workers had to organise strike action to secure what should be the most basic workplace rights is a damning indictment of the conditions imposed in Britain’s cultural sector. Every Storehouse worker who voted in the ballot supported industrial action, with turnout approaching 88 per cent, reflecting deep-rooted anger over management practices.

Only after the threat of strikes did management partially retreat, agreeing in August to provide two paid breaks per day. Yet this concession addressed only the most visible symptom of a much broader crisis confronting museum workers.

Across the V&A estate, employees have reported staff shortages, excessive workloads and years of declining living standards. PCS members voted 95.39 per cent for strike action with an 87.04 per cent turnout, showing overwhelming support for a fight against management’s offensive. Workers have described severe workplace overheating, dehydration, and even colleagues fainting on journeys home after shifts.

The scale of opposition became clear in September, when about 700 workers, more than half the V&A’s workforce, took part in strike action that forced the closure of several sites.

The workforce’s demands are modest. PCS and Prospect members are seeking a 4 per cent pay increase and an uplift that would bring the lowest-paid workers to £14.80 per hour, making the V&A an accredited Real London Living Wage employer.

Management has portrayed these demands as unaffordable. Yet PCS estimates the difference between its pay claim and management’s existing offer would be roughly £500,000 annually, a negligible sum for a national institution.

Workers have every reason to reject museum management’s claims of poverty. The V&A holds around £72 million in reserves while continuing to invest heavily in major capital projects. As workers have pointed out, funding always seems available for new buildings, refurbishments, and expansion projects, while employees responsible for keeping the institution running are told they must accept further declines in their living standards.

The current dispute unfolds against the backdrop of years of attacks on museum workers. Hundreds of jobs were lost during restructuring carried out throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Real wages have since been eroded by below-inflation pay settlements, with workers absorbing substantial losses in purchasing power during recent years of inflation.

One worker speaking to Museums Journal summed up the widespread mood: “We’ve finally reached breaking point.”

Management has responded by preparing a fresh round of cuts. Last month, the V&A announced a voluntary exit scheme covering all sites, fuelling fears that the institution is preparing further workforce reductions. Such schemes invariably increase workloads for those who remain while undermining public service delivery.

Responsibility for these attacks ultimately lies not only with museum management but with the Labour government. The V&A itself has acknowledged that government funding settlements amount to real-terms reductions once inflation is taken into account. Across the museum and heritage sector, institutions are being compelled to operate under permanent austerity conditions. The result is a familiar pattern: workers are expected to bear the burden through worsening conditions, suppressed wages and job cuts. At the same time, management pursues financial targets dictated by government spending priorities.

Far from representing an isolated dispute, the struggle at the V&A is part of a broader movement among museum and heritage workers. At Royal Museums Greenwich, workers have balloted for industrial action over pay and Living Wage accreditation. The Royal Armouries is pursuing plans to reduce labour costs. Across the sector, management is advancing virtually identical programmes under the banner of “financial sustainability”, while workers face deteriorating conditions and declining real incomes.

The role of V&A Director Tristram Hunt, a former Labour MP, is politically significant. Hunt’s reported refusal to participate in negotiations shows how little management values the workforce. But the issue is not simply one individual’s attitude. Hunt embodies a wider layer of Labour politicians, public-sector executives and cultural administrators tasked with implementing austerity while presenting cuts as responsible management.

The trade union apparatus’s conduct throughout the dispute raises important questions.

PCS General Secretary Fran Heathcote has correctly described it as a scandal that a leading national museum fails to pay all staff a genuine living wage. Yet union leadership has limited workers to a series of isolated, carefully managed stoppages while directing appeals to Labour politicians who are themselves enforcing spending cuts.

No serious effort has been made to unify the developing disputes across museums, galleries, libraries and cultural institutions throughout Britain. Workers face the same employers’ offensive everywhere: understaffing, declining pay, intensified labour, and threats to jobs. Yet struggles remain fragmented, institution by institution.

Workers have already demonstrated their collective strength through strikes, overtime bans, work-to-rule measures and other forms of industrial action. These actions show that museums cannot function without the labour of the workers who maintain collections, assist visitors, provide security, manage archives, and run daily operations.

The decisive question is how to organise and direct that power. V&A workers need new organisations of struggle, rank-and-file committees independent of the union bureaucracy, to transfer decision-making power directly into the hands of workers themselves. Such committees could unite workers across all V&A sites, establish direct links with staff at other museums and cultural institutions, and coordinate a common fight against pay cuts, redundancies and deteriorating working conditions.

They should appeal for support not only among museum workers but also among Amazon warehouse workers, postal workers, civil servants, transport workers, educators, and health workers facing the same attacks amid deepening austerity.

The struggle at the V&A raises fundamental questions about society’s priorities. Vast resources fund prestige projects, corporate subsidies, and military expenditure, while workers responsible for preserving humanity’s artistic and historical heritage are told there is no money for decent wages or humane working conditions.

The treasures housed within the V&A were created through generations of labour. The workers who safeguard and maintain those collections today have every right to insist on secure employment, decent pay, and dignified working conditions. Their struggle deserves the support of workers throughout Britain and internationally.

Chris Wickham (1950–2026): Marxist historian of the medieval world

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Chris Wickham’s death on October 9, 2026, at age 76 removes from intellectual life one of the most significant historians of the early Middle Ages produced in the postwar period. Over a career spanning nearly five decades, Wickham transformed the study of medieval Europe through a rigorous application of historical materialism, demonstrating that the social relations governing production, surplus extraction and class power remained indispensable to understanding the rise and decline of societies.

At a time when large sections of the historical profession abandoned such questions in favour of discourse analysis, identity politics and the increasingly subjective preoccupations of the “linguistic turn,” Wickham remained committed to explaining history through the material foundations of human life. His work restored peasants, landlords, taxation systems, trade networks and class relations to the centre of medieval history.

Born on May 18, 1950, in Rossett, Wales, Wickham studied at Oxford before beginning a long association with the University of Birmingham in 1977. He later held the prestigious Chichele Professorship of Medieval History at Oxford. Throughout his career, he combined meticulous empirical research with broad theoretical ambition, producing scholarship distinguished by an extraordinary command of documentary, archaeological and comparative evidence.

His early work focused on Italy, generating a series of influential studies that examined the social and economic structures of medieval life. Books such as Early Medieval Italy and The Mountains and the City revealed the complex interactions between peasant communities, aristocratic power and emerging forms of political authority. Even at this stage, Wickham displayed the qualities that would define his scholarship: a rejection of elite-centred narratives and a determination to uncover the social forces underlying political change.

Wickham’s most important intellectual intervention came with his 1984 essay, “The Other Transition: From the Ancient World to Feudalism.” For generations, Marxist historians had debated the origins of capitalism and the transition from feudalism to bourgeois society. Wickham instead drew attention to an earlier, equally decisive transformation: the collapse of the Roman world and the emergence of medieval social relations.

He argued that the essential distinction between the Roman Empire and its successors lay in the relationship between state taxation and landed property. Whereas Rome had rested upon a powerful tax-raising state apparatus, the post-Roman West increasingly became a world in which ruling classes derived their wealth directly from rents extracted from peasants. The shift from taxation to rent constituted one of the decisive social transformations in European history.

These arguments reached their fullest expression in his monumental Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800 (2005), a work widely regarded as one of the greatest achievements of modern medieval scholarship. At more than 900 pages and spanning territories from Ireland to Egypt, the book offered an extraordinary synthesis of decades of historical and archaeological research.

Against both nationalist myths and civilisational narratives, Wickham showed that the disappearance of Roman political authority produced sharply different outcomes in different regions. Social development depended not on culture or ethnicity but on concrete relations of class power, the strength of aristocracies, the survival of state structures, and the degree of autonomy retained by peasant producers.

Particularly significant was his analysis of what he termed the “peasant mode of production,” situations in which small cultivators retained substantial control over their own labour and surplus. Such arguments challenged simplistic narratives of uninterrupted aristocratic domination and demonstrated the complexity of post-Roman social development.

The book’s importance was recognised internationally through numerous awards, including both the Wolfson History Prize and the Deutscher Memorial Prize. The latter was especially appropriate. Few historians of his generation did more to demonstrate that Marxist categories remained essential tools for understanding long-term historical development.

Wickham belonged to the tradition of British Marxist historians associated with figures such as Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm. Yet he emerged at a time when both political reaction and intellectual retreat had severely weakened Marxism’s influence in academia.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 accelerated a wave of triumphalist claims regarding the “end of history” and the supposed death of Marxism. Within universities, social history increasingly gave way to cultural studies, postmodernism and various forms of identity-based analysis. Grand narratives of social transformation came under sustained attack.

Against these trends, Wickham continued to insist that modes of production, class relations and material interests remained essential explanatory categories. In doing so, he helped preserve and develop a tradition of historical inquiry that might otherwise have faced marginalisation.

At the same time, Wickham’s intellectual trajectory reflected the limitations of the broader current from which he emerged. As many academic Marxists associated with the postwar British left, he approached Marxism primarily as a method of historical analysis rather than as the theoretical foundation of a revolutionary political movement.

The social and political struggles of the contemporary working class occupied little place in his scholarly work. This separation between Marxist scholarship and socialist politics was not an individual failing. It reflected the broader influence of Stalinism, Labourism and various forms of academic radicalism that shaped much of the intellectual left during the second half of the twentieth century. Historical materialism survived as a sophisticated method of analysis, while its revolutionary implications were increasingly detached from contemporary political practice.

Nevertheless, Wickham’s achievements remain immense. His scholarship powerfully refuted every attempt to explain history through race, national character, religion, or culture alone. He repeatedly demonstrated that political institutions, beliefs, and identities could be understood only through their connection to underlying social and economic realities.

This aspect of his legacy matters especially when far-right movements seek to appropriate the medieval past for reactionary purposes. Across Europe and internationally, medieval history has been repeatedly distorted to legitimise myths of ethnic purity, national destiny and civilisational conflict. Wickham’s work provided a devastating intellectual antidote to such falsifications by revealing the medieval world as a complex and dynamic arena of social conflict, economic change and cultural interaction.

His death comes amid a deepening crisis of higher education. Universities throughout Britain and internationally are increasingly subordinated to market imperatives, corporate management structures and short-term financial calculations. Humanities departments have been closed, jobs eliminated and entire fields of scholarship threatened. The conditions that enabled decades-long projects of serious historical research are being systematically undermined.

Producing works such as Framing the Early Middle Ages required time, institutional support, and a commitment to scholarship that is increasingly incompatible with the demands of contemporary academia. The attack on universities is part of a broader assault on critical thought and historical understanding amid mounting social inequality and political instability.

Chris Wickham leaves behind a body of work that will continue to shape historical scholarship for generations. More than any individual book or argument, however, he leaves an example of what serious historical inquiry can achieve: an unrelenting effort to understand how human beings organised production, how ruling classes secured their power, and how social systems emerged, developed and ultimately passed away.

For historians, students and workers seeking to understand the origins and evolution of class society, his writings remain an invaluable resource. They stand as a lasting contribution to the materialist understanding of history and a reminder that the past can only be grasped through the study of the real social relations that have governed human life.

Selected Bibliography of Chris Wickham

Major Books

  • Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Society 400–1000 (1981)
  • The Mountains and the City: The Tuscan Apennines in the Early Middle Ages (1988)
  • Land and Power: Studies in Italian and European Social History, 400–1200 (1994)
  • Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (2005)
  • Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century (ed., 2007)
  • The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400–1000 (2009)
  • The Medieval World (ed., 2009)
  • Sleepwalking into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century (2015)
  • Medieval Europe (2016)
  • Medieval Rome: Stability and Crisis of a City, 900–1150 (2019)
  • The Donkey and the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950–1180 (2023)

Important Articles and Essays

  • “The Other Transition: From the Ancient World to Feudalism,” Past & Present, no. 103 (1984), pp. 3–36.
  • “Problems of Comparing Rural Societies in Early Medieval Western Europe.”
  • “Marx, Sherlock Holmes and Late Roman Commerce.”
  • “The Uniqueness of the East.”
  • “Historical Materialism and Historical Sociology.”

Recommended Reading on Wickham’s Historical Method

  • Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages (2005), Introduction and Conclusion.
  • Chris Wickham, “The Other Transition” (1984).
  • Chris Wickham (ed.), Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century (2007).
  • Rodney Hilton (ed.), The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (1976).
  • Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974).
  • Guy Bois, The Transformation of the Year One Thousand (1992).

Niall Ferguson tells Europe’s rebellious youth: blame your grandparents, not the banks

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

The ruling class searches for an alibi

Across Europe, young people and workers are entering open political struggle. In France, high school students have blockaded hundreds of schools over crumbling infrastructure. In Belgium, students have joined workers on strike against austerity. In Madrid, tens of thousands have marched against a housing crisis that has become a social catastrophe. These movements terrify the ruling class because they expose the bankruptcy of European capitalism and risk uniting workers across generations in a common fight against austerity, war, and social decay.

Into this crisis steps Sir Niall Ferguson, a Hoover Institution fellow, Harvard-affiliated historian, and managing director of New York advisory firm Greenmantle. Ferguson is no neutral observer: he is a paid strategist for the investors whose interests he defends. His essay, Why Europe Is Burning, is an ideological intervention designed to disarm the emerging movement. Its message to young people is simple: don’t blame capitalism; blame your grandparents. This is not analysis but class propaganda.

Ferguson opens with contempt. He mocks French lycée students demanding investment in education for “filling the streets with burning garbage” and “waving Palestinian flags.” He sneers that their first demonstration resembles a Catholic child’s first Communion, a ritual, not a political act. Madrid’s youth are “incensed (they claim)” about housing. This sneering tone is designed to delegitimise young people’s grievances by portraying them as irrational or unserious. Ferguson omits the documented reality: schools plagued by water leaks, rat infestations and collapsing ceilings; more than half of France’s high schools blockaded or closed; mass repression, including hundreds of arrests in a single day; and a student in Lens who lost his hand to police weaponry. Ferguson omits these facts because they point directly to the capitalist state’s responsibility.

Ferguson’s central argument is that Europe’s fiscal crisis stems from a “war of the generations.” He claims politicians have been “bribing” pensioners, who are numerous and vote, and insists that the young are paying for the old. Yet Ferguson’s own figures undermine his case. He acknowledges that ageing accounts for only two-fifths of the increase in public debt since 2000. The other three-fifths stem from bank bailouts after the 2008 crash, trillions poured into financial markets during the pandemic, tax cuts for the wealthy, discretionary spending, and rising interest costs. He also concedes that pension spending is not exploding: OECD projections show it rising modestly, from 8.8 to 10 per cent of GDP by 2050, because governments have already cut benefits and raised retirement ages.

In other words, the debt explosion is overwhelmingly the result of state transfers to capital, not payments to retirees. Ferguson’s generational framing is therefore not analysis but ideology. It replaces class with age, obscuring the role of the banks, landlords, and investors who pay him.

Reality exposes the fraud. In Madrid, the movement began with the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal; her death then brought 20,000 people into the streets. Young protesters saw her not as a privileged pensioner, but as a victim of the same property speculators who prey on them. In Brussels, young and old marched side by side against austerity. Ferguson’s generational war falls apart on contact with real struggle. His solution is a European Javier Milei: mass layoffs, pension cuts, gutted universities, and the destruction of public services. The investor class demands that workers and young people pay for the crisis, and pay even more.

The protests in Paris, Brussels, and Madrid are early signs of a wider working-class movement against austerity, war, and inequality. Ferguson’s essay is a response from the financial aristocracy to this resistance. Young people seeking a way forward will not find one in generational blame or nationalist demagogy. The answer lies in uniting workers and young people across generations and borders against the system that produces war, debt, and decay, and in expropriating the oligarchy’s fortunes.

Contempt for the youth: the opening move of reaction

Ferguson is not interested in the reality documented for Europe’s youth. In France, the movement began not in elite lycées but in Paris’s deprived suburbs. On the movement’s largest day, more than half of all high schools were blockaded or closed. This was no symbolic gesture; it was a mass refusal to accept conditions considered intolerable in any wealthy society. The state responded with repression, not repairs or investment. More than 600 people were arrested in a single day, and a student in Lens lost his hand to police weaponry. Ferguson’s narrative omits these facts because they point directly to the capitalist state’s responsibility. Acknowledging them would mean confronting the social devastation wrought by decades of austerity.

The same pattern is evident across Europe. In Madrid, the housing crisis has become catastrophic. Rents have climbed nearly 70 per cent in the past decade, driven by speculation, touristification, and investment funds taking over entire neighbourhoods. Tens of thousands marched following the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal, whose death the next day came to symbolise the brutality of Spain’s housing regime. Young people did not view her as a privileged pensioner living at their expense. They saw her as another victim of the same property speculators who prey on them. Ferguson’s generational narrative collapses when confronted with these realities: the conflict is not between young and old, but between the working class and the financial oligarchy.

In Belgium, students joined striking workers in opposing austerity measures that would make workers, pensioners, and low-income households shoulder the burden of deficit reduction. Unions called for higher taxes on top earners instead of cuts to health care and a VAT hike. Young and old marched together, recognising that the crisis is not generational but class-based. This unity is precisely what Ferguson fears. His essay seeks to break it by replacing class with age and turning anger away from the banks, landlords, and investors- the very forces he advises through his firm, Greenmantle.

Ferguson’s contempt for youth is therefore not merely personal disdain; it is ideological. By depicting young people as naïve, emotional, or indoctrinated, he seeks to discredit their demands and obscure the structural causes of their suffering. His sneering tone mirrors the austerity he advocates. If youth are irrational, people can dismiss their calls for investment in schools, housing, and public services. If their protests are mere rituals, state repression can be justified. And if their anger is misdirected, the real culprits the banks bailed out in 2008, the investors enriched during the pandemic, the landlords driving up rents, and the governments slashing social spending can escape scrutiny.

The facts Ferguson leaves out are not incidental; they are essential. They reveal a Europe where public infrastructure is collapsing, social inequality is widening, and the basic conditions of life are worsening for millions. They show a ruling class that responds to every crisis- financial, social, or geopolitical- by demanding sacrifices from workers and young people while protecting elite wealth. They also show a generation entering political struggle not because of “indoctrination,” but because the system offers them no future.

Ferguson’s contempt reflects the ruling class’s contempt for those it has impoverished. His omissions reflect an apologist for capital. His narrative serves as an ideological weapon to divide the working class and disarm its emerging movement. He suppresses a reality we must confront: Europe is burning because capitalism is rotting.

The “war of the generations”: a statistical fraud

Ferguson’s central argument is that Europe’s fiscal crisis is caused by a “war of the generations.” Politicians, he claims, have been “bribing” pensioners, who are numerous and vote. The young, he insists, are paying for the old. This framing is not merely superficial; it is a deliberate ideological construction. It turns a crisis rooted in capitalism’s contradictions into a moral fable about selfish grandparents and naïve youth. It is designed to pit workers against one another rather than against the ruling class that has engineered the crisis.

But Ferguson’s own figures contradict him. He acknowledges that ageing accounts for only two-fifths of the rise in public debt since 2000. The other three-fifths stem from forces unrelated to pensioners and closely tied to the financial aristocracy: bank bailouts after the 2008 crash, when governments transferred trillions to rescue the very institutions whose speculation triggered the crisis; trillions poured into financial markets during the pandemic, not to protect public health or workers’ incomes, but to stabilise asset prices and guarantee investor profits; tax cuts for the wealthy, which have depleted public revenues while enriching society’s top layers; discretionary spending, including corporate subsidies and military outlays; and rising interest costs, driven by central bank policies and bond-market demands.

These admissions undermine Ferguson’s thesis. If ageing accounts for only a minority of the rise in debt, then state transfers to capital account for the majority. The surge in public debt does not result from pensioners voting themselves largesse. Rather, it stems from governments socialising bank losses, inflating financial markets, and cutting taxes for the rich. Pensioners are not beneficiaries of this process; they are among its victims. Ferguson further concedes that pensions are not exploding.

OECD projections show public pension spending rising modestly, from 8.8 per cent to 10 per cent of GDP by 2050. This is not a crisis but a controlled increase following decades of cuts, higher retirement ages, and restricted coverage. In many countries, pensioners have already seen their real incomes fall. Portraying them as a privileged caste draining public finances is a grotesque distortion.

In other words, the debt explosion stems overwhelmingly from state transfers to capital, not payments to retirees. Ferguson’s generational framing is therefore ideology, not analysis. It replaces class with age and obscures the role of the banks, landlords, and investors- the very people who pay him. This substitution serves a clear political purpose: if the crisis is generational, the solution is to make the old pay more, cut their pensions further, and intensify competition between generations. If it is class-based, the solution is to confront the financial oligarchy, expropriate its wealth, and redirect resources to social needs. Ferguson’s argument is designed to prevent the second conclusion and promote the first.

Ferguson’s generational narrative is an ideological weapon designed to divide workers and young people just as they are beginning to unite. It defends the financial aristocracy under the guise of concern for the young. The reality he suppresses is clear: Europe’s fiscal crisis stems from capitalism’s decay, not pensioners’ selfishness. The wealth needed to fund schools, housing, and pensions lies in the oligarchy’s fortunes, which Ferguson serves.

War and markets: the real trigger of Europe’s crisis

Ferguson acknowledges that the immediate shock came from the US–Israeli war against Iran, which began at the end of February. More than seven months later, the war continues to destabilise global energy markets and raise borrowing costs. This admission fatally undermines his argument. If Europe’s fiscal crisis was triggered by an imperialist war waged by Washington and its allies, then recasting it as a generational conflict is exposed as a political diversion. The crisis does not result from pensioners voting for their own benefit; it stems from militarism, financial speculation, and the subordination of every aspect of social life to the interests of the capitalist class.

Ferguson notes that French 10-year yields rose from 3.22 per cent to 4.87 per cent, while public debt reached 119 per cent of GDP. These figures do not reflect demographic change; they directly result from war and the financial markets’ response. When energy prices spike, shipping routes are disrupted, and geopolitical instability spreads across the Middle East, bond markets demand higher returns. Governments then pass these costs on to workers through austerity. This is the mechanism of modern imperialism: war drives up the cost of capital, and capital demands that society pay the bill.

Ferguson’s solution makes the old pay too much, which widens the attack on the working class. It is not a critique of austerity but an extension of it. He accepts the premise that workers and youth must bear the burden of rising debt, and merely insists that pensioners should be included in the sacrifice. This is not opposition to austerity; it is austerity intensified. It is the financial aristocracy demanding that every section of the working class, from students to retirees, be made to pay for a crisis they did not create.

The war against Iran is not an aberration. It is part of a broader imperialist offensive driven by the crisis of world capitalism. Facing economic decline and geopolitical challenges, the United States has increasingly turned to militarism to maintain its global dominance. Europe, tied to Washington through NATO and dependent on global energy markets, is dragged into these conflicts. The result is soaring military budgets, rising borrowing costs, and deepening social cuts. Ferguson’s generational narrative conceals this reality. By focusing on pensioners, he obscures the role of the banks, the bond markets, and the military‑industrial complex.

The rise in French borrowing costs is not natural. Financial markets punish governments for geopolitical instability created by the very imperialist policies Ferguson supports. Public debt reaching 119 per cent of GDP does not result from retirees receiving modest pensions. It results from trillions transferred to banks during crises, trillions more pumped into financial markets during the pandemic, and the enormous costs of war. Ferguson’s argument is therefore not simply false; it is a conscious inversion of reality. He blames the victims of austerity for the consequences of the policies he advocates.

The purpose of this inversion is clear. If the crisis is caused by war and financial speculation, then the solution is to oppose war and expropriate the financial oligarchy. If pensioners cause the crisis, then the solution is to cut pensions and raise retirement ages. Ferguson’s narrative exists to prevent the first conclusion and promote the second. It is an ideological weapon aimed at dividing the working class and redirecting anger away from the ruling class.

The reality he suppresses is that Europe’s fiscal crisis is inseparable from imperialist war. The working class is being told to pay for the bombs dropped on Iran, for the weapons sent to Israel, and for the rising interest demanded by the markets. Ferguson’s proposal to make the old pay too is not a critique of this system but a demand to sacrifice its victims further. The answer lies not in generational blame but in a unified struggle of workers and youth against war, austerity, and the capitalist system that produces them.

Generation as a substitute for class

Ferguson’s ideological sleight of hand replaces class with age. His prize statistic, taken from the Wall Street Journal, shows wealth rising for Americans over 75 and falling for those under 35. But median wealth by age tells you nothing about who owns the wealth. It is a statistical trick that dissolves class relations into demographic categories. It lumps together the retired factory worker in Lille and the billionaire shareholder in Neuilly and calls them both “seniors.” The purpose is obvious. By collapsing class into age, Ferguson erases the capitalist class. His clients the investors, fund managers, and financial institutions he advises through Greenmantle disappear into the statistical fog. The billionaire and the pensioner become indistinguishable, and the real structure of wealth ownership is concealed.

This is not an innocent mistake. It is a deliberate ideological manoeuvre. If wealth is described only in terms of age, then the young can be encouraged to resent the old rather than the capitalist class. In Ferguson’s narrative, the retired worker living on a modest pension becomes part of a privileged cohort hoarding resources at the expense of youth. Meanwhile, the real beneficiaries of the past four decades- the banks bailed out in 2008, the corporations enriched during the pandemic, the landlords driving up rents, and the investors profiting from austerity- remain invisible.

The Madrid movement makes Ferguson’s argument collapse instantly. If the old were the privileged class, why would the eviction of an elderly woman spark mass outrage among the young? Why would her death become a symbol of the brutality of the housing crisis? The answer is simple: because the conflict is not generational. It is class‑based. Young and old alike are victims of the same capitalist forces landlords, banks, and investment funds that Ferguson represents.

The same dynamic was visible in Brussels. There, young people joined striking workers and pensioners in mass demonstrations against austerity measures that would hit every section of the working class. The unions demanded higher taxes on the highest earners rather than cuts to health care and a VAT hike. Young and old marched together, united by the recognition that the crisis is not caused by pensioners receiving modest benefits but by the capitalist class demanding ever greater sacrifices from society.

Ferguson’s generational war collapses at the first contact with actual struggle. It is an ideological construction designed to divide the working class just as it begins to unite. By portraying pensioners as a privileged caste, Ferguson seeks to redirect youth anger away from the banks, landlords, and investors the real architects of Europe’s crisis and toward their own grandparents. It is a classic strategy of reaction: turn the oppressed against one another so they don’t recognise their common enemy. The reality he suppresses is clear. Europe’s crisis is not generational. It is the product of capitalism’s decay, imperialist war, and the domination of society by a financial oligarchy. Young people searching for a way forward will not find it in Ferguson’s statistical distortions. They will find it in workers’ unity across generations and borders against the system that exploits them all.

Equating socialism with fascism: the oldest trick in the book

Ferguson claims the left offers socialism and the right offers “national socialism,” and that both converge on industrial policy, public ownership, rent controls, and “blaming Israel.” This is not an analytical argument but a century‑old reactionary trope: the deliberate conflation of socialism with fascism to delegitimise any anti‑capitalist politics. It is the same device used by Cold War ideologues, by Thatcherite polemicists, and by every defender of the capitalist order who needs to portray socialism as inherently authoritarian. By equating socialism with “national socialism,” Ferguson erases the fundamental distinction between a movement rooted in the international unity of the working class and a movement rooted in chauvinism, racism, and the defence of private property. The purpose is to smear the left, sanitise the right, and present capitalism as the only legitimate political horizon.

This rhetorical manoeuvre also serves another function: it obscures the fact that the far right in Europe is not an external threat encroaching on the political mainstream but a product of the mainstream itself. The same governments that slash social spending, militarise borders, and scapegoat migrants cultivate the conditions in which fascist forces grow. The same media outlets that denounce “extremism” amplify anti‑immigrant narratives. The same political establishment that claims to defend democracy adopts the policies of the far right. Ferguson’s argument conceals this reality by pretending that socialism and fascism are mirror images, equally dangerous, equally irrational, equally detached from the “sensible centre” he inhabits.

He then predicts that youth may turn to burning asylum‑seekers’ hotels and synagogues as if this were meteorological inevitability rather than the product of the very anti‑immigrant hysteria he amplifies. He writes as though racist violence simply descends from the sky, as though young people spontaneously become fascists without any influence from the media, the state, or the political establishment. In reality, such violence is the direct outcome of policies and narratives promoted by figures like Ferguson: the demonisation of migrants, the portrayal of refugees as a burden, the insistence that social decay is caused by outsiders rather than by capitalism.

Ferguson’s warning is therefore deeply cynical. He scapegoats migrants while warning that others might do the same. He fuels the fire and then pretends to fear the flames. His prediction of youth burning synagogues is not a neutral forecast but a political provocation, designed to smear the emerging youth movement by associating it with fascist violence. It is an attempt to delegitimise mass protests by suggesting they could slide into pogroms. This suggestion has no basis in reality but serves the ideological needs of the ruling class.

The truth is that Europe’s youth are not turning to fascism. They are turning to collective struggle against austerity, war, and social inequality. They are marching alongside pensioners, migrant workers, and the unemployed. They are demanding investment in schools, housing, and public services. Ferguson’s attempt to portray them as potential fascists is a reactionary fantasy aimed at discrediting their movement and protecting the capitalist system that has produced the crisis.

His argument is not a warning but a threat: if youth do not accept austerity, they will be blamed for extremism. The real danger comes not from the youth but from the ruling class that is stoking nationalism, militarism, and xenophobia to defend its wealth.

What is really burning

The protests in Paris, Brussels, and Madrid are early signs of a broader working‑class movement against austerity, war, and inequality. They express a social reality no European government can stabilise: the capitalist system cannot meet even society’s most basic needs. Governments are collapsing because no faction of the ruling class can impose the cuts markets demand without provoking mass resistance. Every attempt to shift the burden onto workers, youth, pensioners, or migrants encounters immediate opposition. The political order is cracking under the pressure of its own contradictions.

Ferguson’s essay responds to the investor class’s resistance. It seeks not to understand the crisis but to contain it. His generational narrative divides workers by age, turns youth against pensioners, and obscures the role of banks, landlords, and financial institutions that have enriched themselves through decades of speculation, privatisation, and war. His scapegoating of migrants serves the same purpose: to redirect anger away from capital and toward the most vulnerable sections of society. It is an ideological shield for the ruling class at a moment when its legitimacy is openly challenged.

Young people searching for a way forward will not find it in Ferguson’s generational blame or in the nationalist programs of Le Pen and her equivalents. These forces offer only deeper austerity, intensified repression, and the poisonous politics of division. The real alternative lies in uniting workers and youth across generations and borders in a conscious struggle against the capitalist system that produces war, debt, and decay.

Resources for decent schools, affordable housing, and secure pensions are abundant. They are concentrated in the fortunes of the financial oligarchy Ferguson serves. The task is not to redistribute poverty among generations but to reclaim wealth stolen from society and use it to meet human needs.

Bibliography

Ferguson, Niall. Why Europe Is Burning. The Free Press / Niall Ferguson’s Time Machine, October 2026.

Organisation for Economic Co‑operation and Development (OECD). Pensions at a Glance 2023: OECD and G20 Indicators. OECD Publishing, Paris, 2023.

Wall Street Journal. “Wealth by Age Cohort in the United States.” WSJ Data Feature, 2026.

Taiwan News. “French High School Protests Escalate; Over 600 Arrested.” Taiwan News, September 2026.

Euronews. “Belgium: Workers and Students Strike Against Austerity Measures.” Euronews, October 2026.

Internazionale. “Brussels Mobilises Against Government Cuts.” Internazionale, October 2026.

El País. “La tragedia de Maricarmen Abascal y la crisis de vivienda en Madrid.” El País, 8–9 October 2026.

Gregorio Marañón Hospital, Madrid. Public Statement on the Death of Maricarmen Abascal, 8 October 2026.

OECD. Economic Outlook 2026. OECD Publishing, Paris, 2026.

French Ministry of Education. “État des lycées en France: Rapport sur les infrastructures scolaires.” Government Report, 2025–2026.

French Ministry of the Interior. “Arrests and Public Order Measures During Student Demonstrations.” Press Release, September 2026.

European Central Bank (ECB). Euro Area Bond Market Developments. ECB Statistical Bulletin, 2026.

Ministry of Finance, France. “French Sovereign Debt and Bond Yields: 2025–2026.” Government Statistical Release, October 2026.

World Bank. Global Housing Market Trends 2015–2025. World Bank Publications, Washington, 2025.

International Energy Agency (IEA). Energy Market Impacts of Middle East Conflict. IEA Briefing Paper, 2026.

Hoover Institution. “Profile: Niall Ferguson.” Stanford University, 2026.

Podcast Episode: “Commodity Intimacy: Ella Fleck’s Installation and the Limits of ‘Critical’ Art

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Pip: There is something almost too perfect about an art fair owned by a global entertainment conglomerate handing out awards for work that exposes how corporations sell fake intimacy to lonely men. Almost.

Mara: freerein61 takes that irony seriously, and the essay we are covering today follows it all the way down — through the installation itself, through the jury's response, and into what the art world will and will not say about exploitation.

Pip: Let's start with the installation and what it actually reveals.

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Commodity Intimacy: Art, Labour, and the Limits of Critique at Frieze

Mara: The central question here is what it means for a work of art to expose exploitation when it is shown inside an event built on the same logic — and whether the art world's reception of Ella Fleck's installation tells us as much as the installation itself.

Pip: The post sets up the scene at Frieze London as anything but neutral ground: hedge-fund managers, oligarchs' advisers, and celebrity collectors selecting luxury commodities for private vaults and speculative portfolios.

Mara: Fleck's installation, training material (aria), draws on her undercover experience training as a chatter for an OnlyFans parasite company — a third-party agency that impersonates female creators and runs scripted conversations with subscribers. The post describes it plainly: "The 'girl' a subscriber thinks he is messaging at 2 a.m. is more often than not a poorly paid shift worker following a productivity dashboard."

Pip: So the fantasy of personal connection is, in practice, a productivity metric. The installation makes that physical — visitors stand on a raised server-floor platform, feel male voices from chatter scripts vibrating through their feet, and look at three monitors showing a real manager's dashboard with response times, conversion rates, and subscriber spending.

Mara: That material grounding is where the post says the work is strongest. The raised floor with modular tiles and exposed cabling evokes data centres and call-centre facilities — what the post calls "the literal ground on which contemporary exploitation rests." A pheromone-infused scent fills the booth to underscore that the desire being sold is manufactured.

Pip: And then the jury opens its mouth.

Mara: The Camden Art Centre jury praised the installation for making visible "the hidden architectures and technologies of online desire and commerce," and for addressing "money, control, labour, manipulation and the power of images." The post reads those phrases as ideologically careful — gesturing toward critique without naming the social relations underneath.

Mara: What the jury's statement omits entirely is the workers: chatters documented in the Philippines and elsewhere in the Global South, working night shifts, following scripts, meeting quotas, sometimes paid partly on commission. The post is direct that this is not a cultural curiosity but "a node in the global supply chain of platform capitalism."

Pip: The post also takes apart Frieze's own framing, which describes the work as an investigation of "heterosexual male fantasies" — a move the essay calls a familiar reflex: reducing a social phenomenon to psychology, then to gender.

Mara: The argument is that gender is the costume, not the engine. The post puts it this way: "Capital's logic drives it: the imperative to extract profit from every human vulnerability, every emotional deficit, and every form of isolation produced by a society organised around competition and precarity."

Pip: Which lands the essay at a structural claim about the fair itself. IMG, a global entertainment conglomerate, owns Frieze. The post argues that an event whose business model depends on circulating luxury goods to the wealthy is structurally incapable of naming the class relations underpinning the chatter economy, because those same relations underpin the art market.

Mara: The post is careful to say none of this is a criticism of Fleck for exhibiting there. Artists work within existing institutions. The essay credits her for entering the machinery of exploitation rather than theorising about it from a distance — and for producing work with, as it says, "a genuine subject, grounded in research and lived experience."

Pip: The limit the post identifies is that the installation stops at exposure. It lays bare the cabling without naming who owns it.

Mara: And the essay closes by pointing toward what a follow-up could do: trace the threads from infrastructure to the chatters in the Global South, to the agency owners, to the platform's billionaire class, and to the social conditions — precarious employment, collapsed public services, atomised communities — that produce mass loneliness in the first place.

Pip: That framing — loneliness as a structural outcome, not a personal failing — is where the critique lands hardest, and it points directly to the question of what the digital economy is actually built on.

—

Mara: The through-line here is that exposure and explanation are not the same thing, and the art world has strong incentives to stop at the first.

Pip: The next episode will show whether those incentives hold elsewhere. Worth watching.

“Commodity Intimacy: Ella Fleck’s Installation and the Limits of ‘Critical’ Art at Frieze”

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Frieze London, the annual meeting point of the global art market, is no neutral stage. Hedge-fund managers, oligarchs’ advisers, and celebrity collectors move through Regent’s Park, selecting luxury commodities for private vaults, freeports, and speculative portfolios. Organisers describe the fair as a meeting place for “global culture,” but in reality, it is one of the clearest expressions of art’s financialisation under late capitalism. Here, artistic labour is stripped of its social meaning and turned into an asset class, valued not for its insight or urgency but for the appetites of the ultra-rich. The fact that this year’s fair rewarded a work exposing the industrialised production of online intimacy is an irony so stark it borders on satire. Yet it also reveals what the contemporary art world is willing to acknowledge and what it refuses to confront.

The 2026 Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Award has gone to London-based artist Ella Fleck for her installation training material (aria), presented with LA gallery Ehrlich Steinberg in the fair’s Focus section. Fleck’s project draws on her undercover training as a “chatter” for an OnlyFans “parasite company”, a third-party agency that impersonates female creators and holds scripted conversations with subscribers. Often run transnationally by men, these agencies operate as outsourced intimacy factories. Their workers, frequently based in the Global South, perform scripted flirtation and emotional labour designed to maximise revenue. The “girl” a subscriber thinks he is messaging at 2 a.m. is more often than not a poorly paid shift worker following a productivity dashboard. It is a world of impersonation, alienation and relentless monetisation, where human connection becomes a revenue stream and loneliness a commodity.

Fleck’s research is serious, and her installation is one of the few works at Frieze to engage with the realities of life under contemporary capitalism. Visitors stand on a raised server-floor platform, where modular tiles and exposed cabling evoke the digital economy’s hidden infrastructure. Male voices performing chatter scripts reverberate through the structure, transforming the floor into a resonant chamber. Three monitors show a custom-coded manager’s dashboard, adapted from interfaces Fleck encountered during training, exposing the metrics, quotas and supervisory systems that govern this labour. A pheromone-infused scent fills the booth, reminding visitors that the desire being sold is manufactured. The installation’s strongest gesture is its insistence that visitors stand directly on the machinery of commodified intimacy, feeling the scripted voices vibrate beneath their feet. It effectively exposes a workplace usually concealed behind the fantasy of personal connection.

But the response to the work, and how it is framed, reveals the art establishment’s ideological boundaries. The Camden Art Centre jury praised the installation for making visible “the hidden architectures and technologies of online desire and commerce,” and for addressing “money, control, labour, manipulation and the power of images.” These are safe, abstract formulations. They gesture toward critique while avoiding the specific social relations underlying the industry Fleck has investigated. Absent is any recognition of the workers themselves: who they are, what they are paid, and how their labour fits into the global chains of exploitation underpinning platform capitalism. The chatter economy is not merely a cultural phenomenon or a question of “desire”; it is a brutally efficient mechanism for extracting profit from both the poorly paid worker typing scripted flirtations and the isolated man paying for companionship he cannot find elsewhere. Fleck’s installation points to these realities, but the art world’s reception reveals how far it will go and where it draws the line.

Inside the machinery of commodified intimacy

The most compelling aspect of Fleck’s project is her immersion in what might be called the chatter economy: a hidden, industrialised sector of digital labour beneath the glossy marketing of “creator platforms.” Using a male alias, she trained as “Eliott,” learning the scripts, behavioural prompts and manipulative techniques used to extract money from isolated men seeking connection. The arrangement is brutally simple: men impersonate women, chat with other men and sell the illusion of intimacy. What is marketed as personal desire is actually a production line governed by metrics, quotas and managerial oversight. The chatter is not a romantic interlocutor but a worker performing emotional labour under conditions shaped entirely by profit.

This is the true subject of Fleck’s installation, and where the work is strongest. She does not present the chatter economy as a metaphor or cultural curiosity; she treats it as a workplace. The installation gives this system physical form, making visitors confront the infrastructure that enables such labour. Its raised server-floor platform with modular tiles, exposed cabling and vibration exciters evokes the hidden architecture of the digital economy. This is the kind of flooring found in data centres, call-centre facilities and server rooms: the literal ground on which contemporary exploitation rests. Standing on it, visitors feel male voices from scripted chatter reverberate through their feet. The fantasy of intimacy gives way to the physical sensation of labour.

Three monitors show a custom-coded manager’s dashboard, adapted from interfaces Fleck encountered during her training. It displays the metrics that shape the chatter’s day: response times, conversion rates, subscriber spending, and productivity targets. The dashboard isn’t an artistic invention; it reflects the real tools this industry uses to monitor and discipline workers. A pheromone-infused scent fills the booth, underscoring the manufactured nature of the desire being sold. Everything in the installation points to the same conclusion: intimacy has been industrialised, and the worker’s body reduced to scripts and metrics has been absorbed into a system designed to monetise loneliness.

The platform itself is the installation’s strongest element. It makes the internet’s usually hidden infrastructure tangible, revealing the labour beneath the fantasy. This is a workplace, not a boudoir call centre disguised as a love affair. Visitors stand not in a realm of desire, but amid the machinery of commodification. The voices vibrating through the floor are not whispers of seduction; they are echoes of wage labour. The installation’s power comes from this inversion: it collapses the distance between digital fantasy and the physical conditions that produce it.

Fleck’s decision to foreground the infrastructure is significant. Much contemporary art dealing with digital culture remains at the level of imagery, aesthetics or surface critique. Fleck instead directs attention to the material base: the servers, the scripts, the dashboards, the labour processes. She shows that the chatter economy is not a cultural phenomenon but a node in the global supply chain of platform capitalism. Workers performing these scripts are often based in the Global South, earning low wages, sometimes paid partly on commission. Their labour is outsourced emotional work, sold under the guise of intimacy, and governed by the same managerial logic that structures call centres, content moderation farms and other forms of digital piecework.

In this sense, Fleck’s installation is about more than deception or fantasy. It shows how human connection becomes a commodity and emotional labour is reduced to programmable tasks. It suggests that capitalism colonises even life’s most intimate aspects, turning affection, attention, and companionship into sources of revenue. The installation is most effective when it insists on this material reality and forces visitors to confront the machinery beneath the illusion.

What the jury praised and what it avoided

The Camden Art Centre jury praised Fleck’s installation for exposing “hidden architectures and technologies of online desire and commerce,” and for addressing “money, control, labour, manipulation and the power of images.” Such phrases are typical of contemporary curatorial discourse: safe, abstract and deliberately non-committal. They gesture toward critique without naming the social relations at stake. This allows the institution to appear engaged with labour and exploitation while avoiding confrontation with the actual conditions of the workers whose labour the piece makes visible. In this sense, the jury’s statement is not merely incomplete; it reflects the art world’s ideological limits.

It entirely fails to recognise the workers. The chatter economy is neither an aesthetic phenomenon nor a cultural metaphor; it is a workplace staffed by real people doing real labour under conditions of exploitation. Investigative reporting over the past several years has documented chatters in the Philippines and elsewhere in the global South working for low wages, sometimes with part of their pay tied to commission. Their work is outsourced call-centre labour presented as intimacy. They work night shifts, follow scripts, meet quotas, and are monitored by dashboards like those used in customer-service centres and content-moderation farms. Above them are agency owners, creators, and OnlyFans itself, whose billionaire owner takes a cut of every transaction. The chatter economy is not a cultural curiosity but a node in the global supply chain of platform capitalism.

At the bottom of this hierarchy are two exploited figures. First is the poorly paid chatter, typing scripted flirtations, whose work hides behind the illusion of personal connection. Second is the isolated man paying for companionship he cannot find elsewhere, whose loneliness the same system monetises. Each is exploited differently, but by the same system: the chatter’s labour is cheapened and concealed, while the subscriber’s emotional need is commodified and sold back to him. Both are victims of a social order that has turned human connection into a revenue stream.

The jury’s language dissolves these realities into a cloud of abstractions. “Labour” becomes a conceptual motif rather than a class relation. “Desire” becomes a cultural theme rather than a symptom of social breakdown. “Manipulation” becomes an aesthetic category rather than a description of how corporations profit from human vulnerability. This is no accident. The art world is comfortable with metaphors but allergic to material analysis. It can tolerate works that expose mechanisms, but not those that explain them. Explanation would require naming the class relations that structure the industry, and the art world, dependent on the fortunes of the wealthy, is unwilling to do so.

The chatter economy directly expresses the social crisis created by decades of neoliberal restructuring: insecure work, the collapse of public life, atomisation, and the erosion of community. The men who pay for scripted companionship are not simply indulging in “heterosexual male fantasy,” as the fair’s own description suggests. They are responding to lives shaped by austerity, precarity, and social isolation. Their loneliness is not a psychological quirk but a social fact. The chatter’s labour is not merely a cultural phenomenon; it is exploitation. Yet the art world frames both as matters of “desire,” “images,” and “online commerce,” as though the problem were representation rather than political economy.

This abstraction serves a purpose: it allows institutions like Frieze and Camden Art Centre to acknowledge exploitation without implicating themselves in the system that produces it. IMG, a global entertainment corporation, owns Frieze, and it sells luxury goods to the wealthy. It is structurally incapable of addressing the class relations underpinning the chatter economy, because those same relations underpin the art market itself. Speaking plainly about exploitation in one sector would invite questions about exploitation in another. Better, then, to speak in abstractions to praise works for revealing “hidden architectures” while leaving the owners of those architectures unnamed.

Fleck’s installation points to the realities the jury avoids. It reveals the machinery beneath the fantasy. But the art world’s response shows how far it will go and where it draws the line.

Gender as mask, not engine

Frieze’s own description presents Fleck’s installation as an investigation of “heterosexual male fantasies.” This is a familiar move: reducing a social phenomenon to psychology, then reducing psychology to gender. It is the standard reflex of contemporary cultural institutions faced with exploitation they cannot name. Gender becomes a convenient interpretive screen, safe, fashionable, and politically unthreatening. But gender is not the engine of this industry; it is the costume. The engine is the commodification of human need.

The chatter economy is not meaningfully driven by “fantasy.” Capital’s logic drives it: the imperative to extract profit from every human vulnerability, every emotional deficit, and every form of isolation produced by a society organised around competition and precarity. Fantasy is merely the interface; the machinery beneath it is economic.

Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism feels almost too literal here. In the chatter economy, what appears to be a relationship between a subscriber and a woman who doesn’t exist is really a relationship between a customer and a wage worker, mediated by a corporation and concealed by software. The “girl” is a commodity, the “relationship” a transaction, and the “desire” a revenue stream. The human connection the subscriber believes he is buying is, in fact, a relation between things: a script, a dashboard, and a payment processor. Fleck’s installation brilliantly places the visitor directly on the infrastructure that makes this deception possible. But the work falters when it treats the problem as one of male fantasy rather than capitalist social relations.

The art world refuses to ask the question it must: why so many men, often young and precariously situated, spend money they do not have on scripted companionship. The answer is not some fixed quality of “heterosexual male fantasy.” It lies in the conditions of life under late capitalism: insecure work, the erosion of community life, atomisation, and loneliness on a mass scale. The chatter economy is no cultural aberration; it is a symptom of a society where millions live without stable relationships, public spaces, time, or security. Men who pay for companionship are not indulging a psychological quirk; they are responding to a social crisis.

An industry that profits from loneliness depends on a society that produces it. The chatter economy commercialises a condition shaped by decades of neoliberal restructuring: the destruction of social housing, the erosion of welfare, the casualisation of labour, and the collapse of collective institutions. Loneliness is not an individual failing, but a structural outcome, and the chatter economy monetises it.

Yet Frieze’s framing reduces all of this to “male fantasy,” as if the problem were representation rather than political economy. This reduction serves a clear ideological function: it shifts attention from the class relations structuring the industry to individual behaviour, turns exploitation into psychology, and recasts a social crisis as a cultural trope. It lets the institution appear critical while avoiding any confrontation with the system that produces both the chatter’s labour and the subscriber’s isolation.

This marks the ideological limit of contemporary art discourse. It can acknowledge desire, fantasy, and representation, but not class. It can discuss gender, but not exploitation. It can gesture toward “hidden architectures,” yet it cannot name their owners. Fleck’s installation points to the realities the fair’s framing avoids, revealing the machinery beneath the illusion. But the art world’s response shows how far it will go and where it draws the line.

The art fair as ideological filter

The setting matters. Frieze is not an innocent backdrop but an active ideological filter. IMG, a global entertainment and sports conglomerate, owns the fair, and its business model depends on circulating luxury goods to the wealthy. Its purpose is not cultural enrichment but capital accumulation. In this context, the presentation and celebration of a work exposing the commodification of intimacy becomes a kind of theatre: a momentary glimpse of exploitation staged inside an event devoted to commodifying artistic labour itself. The contradiction is glaring, yet the fair’s framing neutralises it with remarkable efficiency.

The Camden Art Centre jury notes, blandly, that Fleck’s installation is presented in the “particular context” of an international art fair. This phrase is a masterpiece of evasion. It acknowledges the setting only to deflate its significance immediately. The “particular context” is not particular at all; it is the structural condition of the work’s reception. But the jury cannot explore that context. Doing so would require acknowledging that the art world itself is part of the same system of extraction, speculation, and class power that produces the chatter economy Fleck has investigated. The chatter economy monetises loneliness; the art fair monetises culture. Both depend on the same class hierarchy, the same concentration of wealth, the same global circuits of capital.

This is the ideological limit of “critical” art under capitalism. It may expose mechanisms, but it must not explain them. Exposure is safe; explanation is dangerous. Exposure can be absorbed into the fair’s marketing language: “hidden architectures,” “online desire,” “the power of images.” Explanation would require naming the class relations that structure the industry: the billionaire owners, the speculative collectors, the corporate sponsors, the financial institutions that treat art as a hedge against inflation. It would require acknowledging that the fair’s own existence depends on the fortunes of the rich, and that the art world’s economic base is inseparable from the inequalities it occasionally gestures toward.

The chatter economy and the art market are not parallel phenomena; they express the same social order. In both, labour is hidden, value is extracted, and human need is commodified. The chatter’s emotional labour is concealed behind the fantasy of intimacy; the artist’s intellectual labour is concealed behind the glamour of the fair. The subscriber pays for companionship he cannot find elsewhere; the collector pays for cultural capital he cannot produce. Corporations mediate both transactions and profit from individuals’ alienation in a society organised around competition and scarcity.

Yet the fair’s framing insists on treating Fleck’s work as a cultural commentary rather than a political one. It reduces exploitation to aesthetics, class relations to “themes,” and structural inequality to “context.” This is not simply a failure of analysis; it is a structural necessity. The art world cannot name the system that sustains it. It cannot acknowledge that the same forces driving workers in the Philippines to perform scripted intimacy for low wages also drive artists to produce market‑friendly work for speculative buyers. It cannot admit that the same social conditions that make art fairs the preserve of the ultra-rich also produce the loneliness monetised by OnlyFans.

Fleck’s installation, by exposing the machinery beneath the fantasy, points toward these realities. But the institution’s response reveals how far it will go and where it draws the line. The fair can tolerate critique, but only if it remains abstract. It can reward exposure, but only if it stops short of explanation. It can acknowledge exploitation, but only if it does not name the exploiters.

Where Fleck’s work points and where it stops

None of this is meant as a criticism of Fleck for exhibiting at Frieze. Artists have to work within existing institutions, not those they wish existed. The contemporary art world offers few places for serious engagement with the realities of exploitation, and fewer still where such work can be funded, shown, and discussed. Fleck’s willingness to enter a squalid corner of the digital economy, rather than theorising about it from a safe distance, is admirable. Much contemporary art is contentless: formal games, lifestyle branding, or gestures of political “concern” that vanish on contact with reality. Fleck’s work has a genuine subject, grounded in research and lived experience. It is rare to see an artist spend time inside the machinery of exploitation rather than merely depict its surface.

But the installation stops at exposure. It reveals the machinery beneath our feet without showing the system that built it. It lays bare the cabling and pipework, but not the ownership and exploitation that make them profitable. It gestures toward class, then retreats into gender. It identifies alienation without tracing its roots. The chatter economy is not an isolated phenomenon; it is a symptom of a broader social order that has commodified every human need and hollowed out every form of collective life. Exposing the mechanism without analysing the system leaves viewers with discomfort, but not understanding.

This limitation is not personal; it reflects the pressures on artists working within institutions whose economic base depends on the very class whose power they might otherwise critique. The art world can tolerate works that reveal exploitation, but only if they do not name the exploiters. It can reward exposure, but not explanation; acknowledge alienation, but not the social relations that produce it. Fleck’s installation pushes against these boundaries, but does not break them. It points beyond itself, toward questions the art world is structurally unwilling to confront.

The next stepone Fleck is well positioned to take in her upcoming solo exhibition at Camden Art Centreis to follow these threads further: from the infrastructure to the people who inhabit it; to the chatters in the global South, whose labour is hidden behind the fantasy of intimacy; to the agency owners who profit from their work; to the platform’s billionaire class, whose wealth is built on monetising loneliness; and to the social conditions that produce mass loneliness in the first place: precarious employment, collapsing public services, atomised communities, and decades of austerity that have stripped life of stability and connection.

Such an approach would not simply expose a mechanism; it would analyse a system. It would show that the chatter economy is not a cultural curiosity but a direct expression of the crisis of social reproduction under late capitalism. It would reveal that men paying for companionship are not indulging a psychological quirk but responding to life conditions shaped by insecurity and isolation. It would also show that the exploitation of chatters and the alienation of subscribers are two sides of the same social order.

This would be work worth seeing. It would move beyond the art world’s comfort zone of abstraction and metaphor to confront the class relations shaping both the digital economy and the cultural institutions that claim to critique it. Fleck has already shown she can uncover the hidden sites of contemporary exploitation. The challenge now is to follow those threads to their source: the system that produces them, and the possibility of a world where human connection is not a commodity.