Eric Hobsbawm was widely recognised within academic and left-liberal circles as an eminent Marxist historian. His notable works on nationalism, especially Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (1990) and The Age of Capital, are regarded as important scholarly contributions to understanding the development of modern nations. Donald Sassoon, a British historian aligned with the social-democratic left and known for titles such as One Hundred Years of Socialism, serves as a fitting intellectual peer to Hobsbawm. Both scholars operate within a ‘Gramscian’ or left-reformist tradition of historical writing, highly intellectual yet ultimately rooted in the political frameworks of Stalinism and social democracy, rather than revolutionary Marxism.

Donald Sassoon’s choice to include Hobsbawm’s views on nationalism mirrors his own political perspective. His book, One Hundred Years of Socialism, promotes social-democratic ideals and provides a detailed history of European leftist parties. Although information-rich, it endorses reformism as the correct socialist method, considering revolutionary ideas extreme. Like Hobsbawm, Sassoon is part of an intellectual faction within a tradition that has focused on managing capitalism rather than overthrowing it for over a century. Quoting Hobsbawm on nationalism indicates a shared political stance: both are products of the post-war European left consensus, which accepted the nation-state, NATO (initially with some reservations), and capitalist democracy. Neither offers an analysis of how nationalism supports ruling classes in the imperialist era, as both lack a perspective rooted in working-class political independence.

To grasp Hobsbawm’s perspective on nationalism, the insights he offers and the limitations he maintains, it’s essential to consider his political background. Hobsbawm was a lifelong member of the British Communist Party, remaining in it even after the 1956 revelations about Stalin’s crimes, when many other intellectuals resigned in horror. As Ann Talbot’s analysis, “Eric Hobsbawm on the Spanish Civil War: an anti-historical tirade,” shows, this loyalty was more than mere organisational allegiance; it revealed a deep-seated hostility to revolutionary politics. In his autobiography, Hobsbawm admits to having the “instincts of a Tory communist,” drawn to authority, order, and subordinating working-class spontaneity to party discipline. He expressed satisfaction at the expulsion of Militant from the Labour Party under Kinnock, and his theoretical journal, Marxism Today, played a key role in shifting Labour to the right, leading to Tony Blair’s New Labour.

Hobsbawm’s view on nationalism is closely linked to the political framework of Stalinism’s Popular Front. When Stalin introduced the Popular Front strategy in 1935, it signified that Communist Parties had stopped pursuing socialist revolution. Instead, it focused on the “national defence” of bourgeois-democratic governments against fascism. This shift replaced the core Marxist principle of internationalism with an alignment to bourgeois nationalism, falsely portrayed as anti-fascism. As Talbot notes, this approach involved defending private property, quelling working-class revolutions, such as in Spain (1936-37), and subordinating workers’ interests to Soviet foreign policy objectives.

Hobsbawm’s political development was profoundly shaped by this tradition, influencing his perspective on nations and nationalism. His scholarly work on nationalism is highly detailed, exploring the “invention of tradition,” the constructed nature of national identity, and the historically dependent emergence of modern nations. However, his framework does not view nationalism as a class phenomenon requiring a class-based explanation. While he documents these elements and provides valuable insights, he does not reach the revolutionary conclusion that, during imperialism, nationalism primarily functions to subordinate the working class to the bourgeoisie of its own nation.

The Marxist perspective on nationalism was first introduced by Marx and Engels, later refined by Lenin in his critique of imperialism, and defended by Trotsky against nationalist distortions. The phrase from the Communist Manifesto stating “workingmen have no fatherland” is more than just a slogan; it signifies a strategic position: the working class is an international group whose interests unite across borders to oppose capitalism. Lenin recognised that, under imperialism, the national question is closely tied to which imperialist power a particular nationalism supports. Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution took this further, arguing that in countries where the bourgeoisie failed to complete their own democratic-national tasks, the working class must seize power and pursue socialist revolution connected to the international struggle. There is no singular “national road” to liberation.

David North’s essay Leon Trotsky and the Fate of Socialism in the Twentieth Century: A Reply to Professor Eric Hobsbawm takes direct aim at the theoretical core of Hobsbawm’s method: his fatalism. Hobsbawm reduces history to “what happened,” dismissing the role of political alternatives, parties, and programs. For him, Stalinism, “socialism in one country,” the very foundation of nationalist distortion within the workers’ movement, was essentially inevitable once the German revolution failed. North shows this is not a materialist analysis but an apology for Stalinism: it retrospectively validates every Stalinist betrayal by arguing there was no alternative.[1]

One of the contradictions at the heart of Hobsbawm’s historiography is that, despite his Stalinist politics, he could produce stunning pieces of history. The Invention of Tradition (1983), edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, is among the most frequently cited works in modern history studies. Its core message is deceptively straightforward yet truly insightful: many traditions that appear ancient and organic, such as Highland Scots tartan and bagpipe customs, elaborate British royal ceremonies, Zulu political rituals, and nationalist mass events, are actually fairly recent constructs, intentionally created for political aims. These traditions aim to foster a timeless sense of national or communal identity, legitimise authority, and generate public support for the ruling elite’s institutions.

Hobsbawm differentiates between “genuine traditions,” which develop gradually and naturally, and “invented traditions,” which are deliberately created, often quickly, to address emerging social needs, especially those caused by industrialisation and the growth of mass democratic politics in the 19th and 20th centuries. He points out that the Scottish Highland tradition celebrated by Romantics like Walter Scott was mainly a late 18th and early 19th-century invention, enforced by the Lowland and English-educated Scottish elite on a Gaelic-speaking population they had largely marginalised. Similarly, the elaborate ceremonies of the British monarchy, such as the state openings of Parliament and coronation rituals, presented as timeless constitutional traditions, were mainly fictionalised between 1870 and 1914, at a time when the British ruling class feared losing deference amid the rise of mass enfranchisement.

This is genuinely valuable scholarship. Hobsbawm correctly identify’s the functional character of nationalist mythology: it serves ruling-class interests by binding the working class to a cross-class “national community” that papers over the real divisions of capitalist society. In this sense, this chapter makes a real contribution by stripping away the ideological veil from some of the most powerful instruments of bourgeois political manipulation.

Ann Talbot’s article, ‘History in the service of ideology,’ clarifies Hobsbawm’s book on the same subject, ‘Nations and Nationalism since 1780,’ which shares the same intellectual background and has become a key reference point in a significant historiographical debate. This debate contrasts ‘modernists who argue that nations and nationalism emerged from modern capitalist conditions, with “primordialists,” who claim that national identity is rooted in long-standing ethnic, religious, or cultural traditions that existed before the medieval era. Hobsbawm was a notable supporter of the modernist view.[2]

This debate goes beyond academia. Adrian Hastings’ primordialist view in The Construction of Nationhood has an ideological purpose: to tie the nation-state to nature and eternity, framing nationalism as an almost innate biological drive. This perspective seeks to subordinate class consciousness to national identity, viewing it as a persistent element of human psychology. As Talbot mentions, Hastings’ lectures were a political strategy, timed to coincide with the rise of Scottish and English nationalisms in the 1990s, aimed at lending intellectual weight to the idea that English national identity is ancient and therefore inherently legitimate. Hobsbawm’s modernist critique rightly identified this as mythmaking.

While Hobsbawm’s descriptive work offers valuable insights, his theoretical framework remains significantly lacking. He can identify that traditions are socially constructed by bourgeois elites, colonial administrators, or nationalist intellectuals, but cannot fully explain why the working class accepts and internalises these invented nationalist traditions. This gap exists because he lacks a solid Marxist theory of ideology and class consciousness, a shortcoming rooted in his Stalinist background. The concept of “invention” functions mainly as a sociology of deception: elites create false memories, and populations accept them. Although this perspective sheds some light, it falls short theoretically for three main reasons.

Marx and Engels argue that ideology isn’t just a set of ideas that can be debunked; rather, it is materially reproduced through institutions like the state, schools, media, churches, and political parties, and interwoven with tangible social relations. The working class doesn’t simply believe in the nation because they’ve been deceived; they perceive nationalism as a genuine force because the capitalist state organises social life around national lines. Workers participate in national labour markets, and social welfare, democratic rights, and legal protections are all mediated through the nation-state. This “invention” endures because real social relations lend it material substance. Although Hobsbawm’s framework powerfully debunks these notions, it cannot fully explain why nationalism persists so strongly once its constructed nature is revealed.

If elites create traditions, it suggests that more educated populations may recognise the invention and disregard it. However, ruling-class ideology does not operate as a simple cognitive mistake driven by false beliefs that can be fixed with better information. Instead, it functions as a form of social consciousness that mirrors the real fragmentation and subjugation of the working class under capitalism. Overcoming this requires organised political effort and the development of a revolutionary party that offers the working class an alternative way of understanding its interests. Hobsbawm fails to provide such a perspective because, throughout his career, he was committed to suppressing revolutionary politics.

The most disastrous “invention of tradition” in the twentieth century was Stalinist nationalism itself. This included the doctrine of “socialism in one country,” the creation of a distinct Russian or Soviet national tradition as the legacy of October 1917, and the alignment of communist parties worldwide with the Soviet bureaucracy’s foreign policy interests. This was a massive, historically destructive fabricated tradition, and Hobsbawm remained a loyal supporter throughout his life. While he wrote insightfully about Highland chiefs crafting tartans to foster Scottish nationalism, he was completely silent about Stalin constructing a Great Russian nationalist mythology to strengthen the bureaucratic caste’s hold on power. This silence is not an oversight but a fundamental limitation of the entire project.

Ann Talbot highlights an important point that goes beyond Hobsbawm’s perspective. The debate between primordialists and modernists, despite its academic focus, conceals a fundamental issue: the nation-state is more than just a cultural or political entity; it also operates as a system of class dominance. As Talbot states, “The nation-state did not fulfil the ideals of the revolutions that created it because the state could not transcend the social relations of its time, those being capitalist relations founded on private property.” The bourgeois revolutions in England, France, and the US, which established the modern nation-state, contained real revolutionary elements—advancing citizen equality, ending feudal privileges, and securing rights. Yet, these revolutions did not eliminate or seek to abolish the class relations underlying bourgeois society.

Hobsbawm can debunk specific invented traditions with great skill. But he cannot draw the socialist conclusion from his own evidence: that the nation-state itself, as a form of class organisation, must ultimately be transcended by a higher form of international social organization — socialism. He cannot draw this conclusion because he spent his political career defending various forms of national-reformist politics, from the Popular Front to Kinnockite Labour.

Hobsbawm’s Invention of Tradition deserves to be read for what it genuinely shows: that the supposedly eternal and organic character of national feeling is a historical, humanly constructed phenomenon, and therefore capable of being superseded. But it must be read critically, with clear awareness of what its author could not say and would not do. The debunking of invented traditions, without a revolutionary socialist perspective, is merely an academic exercise.

“The Jews and Germany”

A Stalinist historian discussing Jews and Germany raises fundamental questions of historical and political significance. Among all topics Eric Hobsbawm could address, the issue of Jews and Germany most clearly exposes the limitations and political crimes of the Stalinist intellectual tradition he embodied. The destruction of Jewish communities in Germany and Europe during the Holocaust was not a mere natural disaster; it resulted from identifiable, analysable historical and political forces. Foremost among these was the failure of the German Communist Party, under Stalinist leadership, to build a united front of the working class against Hitler. Hobsbawm cannot honestly face this reality because doing so would be to condemn the political movement he dedicated his entire life to.

The Class Roots of Modern Antisemitism

A genuine Marxist analysis of Jews and Germany must recognise that class interests drove the emergence of modern political antisemitism in the late 1800s. As David North’s “The Myth of ‘Ordinary Germans’ illustrates, this form of antisemitism was not just a medieval religious legacy but a strategic ideological weapon used by the ruling class. Its target was destabilised sections of the petty bourgeoisie, such as failed shopkeepers, disillusioned artisans, heavily indebted peasants, and worried professionals, whose social positions were being threatened by the rise of industrial capitalism from the 1870s onwards.[3]

The 1873 stock market crash in Germany, along with the high-profile presence of Jewish financiers, bankers, and professionals during a period of rapid capitalist expansion, provided reactionary ideologues with material for demagogic scapegoating. Charles Maurras, a prominent reactionary, plainly explained that antisemitism “enables everything to be arranged, smoothed over, and simplified” suggesting that directing the anger of the dispossessed at Jewish people instead of capitalism was a more effective way to suppress class awareness and reintegrate the proletariat into a “national community” under bourgeois dominance.

The critical point that Hobsbawm, wedded as he is to a culturalist rather than class-based analysis, consistently underweights is this: the most powerful and consistent opposition to antisemitism throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came not from liberal bourgeois opinion but from the revolutionary socialist workers’ movement. As Clara Weiss’s analysis of Mario Kessler’s historical scholarship, The Marxist movement and the fight against antisemitism and Zionism, demonstrates, “the most powerful and consistent critique of both antisemitism and Zionism emanated from the revolutionary internationalist wing in the workers’ movement.”[4]

August Bebel famously called antisemitism “the socialism of fools,” emphasising that it was a misguided form of anti-capitalism. It redirected genuine popular anger away from the capitalist system and onto a Jewish scapegoat. This benefited the ruling class by preventing the working class from gaining a socialist consciousness. Hobsbawm inherited this tradition at least in theory. However, his Stalinist beliefs stopped him from recognising the crucial lesson.

Any thorough analysis of Jews and Germany must address how Hitler rose to power. An honest answer also involves examining Stalinism’s influence. By 1933, the German working class was highly organised, with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Communist Party (KPD) commanding millions of loyal workers and supported by armed paramilitary groups prepared for conflict. Despite this, Hitler ascended to power without confronting significant, organised resistance from the working class. Why did this happen?

Peter Schwarz’s lecture, “The Rise of Fascism in Germany and the Collapse of the Communist International,” offers a clear Marxist perspective. The SPD betrayed the working class twice: first in 1914 by endorsing imperialist war, and again in 1919 by aiding in quelling the German revolution and orchestrating the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The KPD, the supposed revolutionary alternative, committed an even more significant betrayal under Stalinist influence. Following the Comintern’s “Third Period” policy that labelled “social fascism” (meaning the SPD) as the primary enemy, the KPD refused to form a united front with Social Democratic workers against Nazism. It absurdly equated the reformist SPD with Hitler’s movement and sometimes even collaborated with the Nazis against the Social Democrats. Their shocking slogan — Nach Hitler kommen wir (“After Hitler, it’s our turn”) — reflected not revolutionary conviction but a disastrous passivity driven by Stalinist sectarianism.

Trotsky was the only major left leader who clearly understood what was at stake and what actions were needed. He consistently wrote, warned, and urged the KPD and its workers to form a united front against fascism. There was still time—because he recognised that Hitler’s victory would not only topple a government but also lead to the physical destruction of the organised workers’ movement and, as history showed, the genocide of European Jews. Unfortunately, his warnings went unheeded, and his followers were persecuted as “social fascists” and “counter-revolutionaries” by the very Stalinist machinery that Hobsbawm faithfully supported.

Hobsbawm was a young man in Berlin when Hitler rose to power in 1933. He saw these events firsthand and joined the Communist Party that same year. Because of this, he was directly part of the organisation whose ‘social fascism’ line bears significant blame for the political disaster that ensued. Throughout his historical writings, he never addressed this responsibility seriously or honestly. His autobiography, Interesting Times, covers his years in Berlin with typical eloquence and memoir-style charm. Still, it lacks a genuine reflection on what the Stalinist KPD’s failure meant for the millions who perished as a consequence.

After 1935, Stalin shifted his approach by implementing the Popular Front strategy: Communist Parties were directed to form broad coalitions with liberal and social-democratic groups to defend ‘democracy’ against fascism, abandoning any independent revolutionary goals. This was justified as the lesson learned from Germany. However, as Ann Talbot’s analysis of Eric Hobsbawm’s work on the Spanish Civil War reveals, the Popular Front was not a genuine attempt to address the root causes of fascism. Instead, it was a cynical adjustment to Soviet foreign policy, in which workers’ revolutionary interests were sacrificed to the diplomatic priorities of the Kremlin bureaucracy.

Hobsbawm’s entire political career, from his time in Paris in 1936 to his contributions to Marxism Today in the 1980s, was rooted in the Popular Front framework. This context shaped how he approached topics like “the Jews and Germany.” The Popular Front analysis of fascism, introduced by Georgi Dimitrov at the Seventh Comintern Congress in 1935, characterised fascism as a reactionary, chauvinistic, and imperialist force driven by finance capital, rather than, as Trotsky argued, a mass movement of the petty bourgeoisie mobilised by the ruling class against the revolutionary working class. By separating fascism from its class roots—particularly its emergence from the crisis of bourgeois democracy and the failure of reformism—this definition hindered the ability to derive truly revolutionary lessons from Germany.

The authentic Marxist tradition regarding the Jewish question is much more extensive and rooted in political principle than what either Hobsbawm’s Stalinist perspective or the liberal and Zionist alternatives suggest. As Weiss’s analysis demonstrates, Marx’s 1843 essay ‘On the Jewish Question’—often misunderstood and misrepresented—actually advocates for Jewish political emancipation against the idealist Bruno Bauer, who opposed granting Jews equal rights on pseudo-philosophical grounds. Marx argued that Jewish emancipation is inherently linked to the broader issues of social revolution and human liberation. The socialist movement that arose afterwards—highlighted by Bebel’s anti-antisemitism stance, the Second International’s mass protests during the Dreyfus Affair, and the Bolsheviks’ abolition of the Pale of Settlement and tsarist anti-Jewish laws in 1917—embodied the most potent practical effort for Jewish emancipation in modern history.

The Goldhagen Problem and the Alternative

A helpful way to analyse the gaps in a Hobsbawm-style approach to Jews and Germany is to consider his subtle similarity to the culturalist-essentialist analysis found (in a simplified form) in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.” David North’s powerful critique demonstrates that Goldhagen’s portrayal of an undifferentiated “ordinary German” as the bearer of an enduring, eliminationist antisemitism — like the broader liberal Holocaust historiography — frames fascism as a manifestation of a specific German national pathology, rather than as a consequence of identifiable capitalist social forces during a particular historical crisis. Despite expressing horror over the Holocaust, this view ultimately undermines the working class, because if fascism stems from German national character instead of class contradictions within capitalism during a crisis, then the only political lessons are “eternal vigilance” and safeguarding liberal democratic institutions.

Identity Politics and the Left

This 1996 lecture, delivered just before Tony Blair’s landslide election victory, is not primarily a work of historical scholarship. It is a political intervention, a contribution by one of Britain’s most prestigious “Marxist” intellectuals to the British Labour Party’s internal strategic debate on the eve of a general election. As Ann Talbot’s analysis of Hobsbawm established, his interventions were always “timed and targeted with precision.” This one is no exception. Its purpose is to argue that Labour should drop identity politics, embrace a broader “citizen nationalism,” and present itself as the voice of “the nation.” It is, in short, intellectual cover for the New Labour project.

Hobsbawm concludes the essay by lamenting that Labour speaks with a “muffled voice” regarding Britain and the nation. He approvingly cites Thatcher for having had the “strength” to recognise the importance of offering “hope and action to a puzzled and demoralised people” and questions whether New Labour will “make the same effort to restore and transform Britain.” This represents the ultimate goal and the core insight of Hobsbawm’s observations on identity politics, which contain significant substance worth acknowledging before addressing where his framework may fall short.

He rightly states that identity politics arose as a historically specific phenomenon, primarily in the 1960s, rather than being an inherent aspect of human society. He also correctly notes that collective identities are shaped negatively—by opposition to “others”—and are fluid, contextual, and socially constructed, rather than based on fixed, inherent traits. His insight regarding the Orlando Patterson paradox—where people choose their identity groups yet feel as if they had no real choice—is particularly enlightening. These observations are significant, as they foreshadow many issues caused by the rise of identity politics since the 1990s, such as the fragmentation of the left into conflicting “oppressed groups,” the difficulty in addressing the working class as a whole, and the fostering of resentments among different groups of workers.

Hobsbawm’s primary and most critical flaw in his analysis is his explanation for when identity politics arose. He claims it resulted from the “extraordinarily rapid and profound upheavals and transformations of human society in the third quarter of this century,’ describing it as a “cultural revolution’ and a “dissolution of traditional social norms.’ According to him, these changes left people feeling “orphaned and bereft,’ prompting a search for new group identities to replace fractured communities. He endorses sociologist Daniel Bell’s view that the “breakup of traditional authority structures and the previous affective social units—namely, nation and class—made ethnic attachment more prominent.”

This is a sociological account rather than a Marxist analysis. It describes what occurred without explaining why, meaning it cannot suggest solutions other than restoring a “common identity” through (citizen) nationalism. A truly Marxist explanation points to a more precise cause: identity politics arose as a political phenomenon in direct relation to the defeats of the working class — especially the betrayals by the very Stalinist and social-democratic groups that Hobsbawm’s tradition embodies. The working class was fractured not by abstract “cultural revolutions,” but by the Stalinist murders of revolutionary leftists in the 1930s, the alignment of communist parties with Popular Front politics that suppressed revolutionary ideas, the integration of labour bureaucracies into corporate management, and ultimately the rightward shift and capitulation of these parties in the 1970s and 1980s.

When the working class loses its revolutionary political voice—due to betrayals by its parties, trade union bureaucracies becoming tools of class collaboration, or when “socialism” is associated with either Stalinist tyranny or Blairite managerialism—workers, especially petty-bourgeois intellectuals who might otherwise engage in socialist politics, look for alternative ways to express grievances and organise. Identity politics emerges to fill this gap. It is not an inevitable sociological trend; rather, it is a political outcome resulting from the failure of the revolutionary socialist movement. Hobsbawm cannot acknowledge this, as his entire career was spent within organisations responsible for those defeats. Instead, he offers a passive, culturalist explanation: society changed, people became confused, and they gravitated toward identity groups.

I concur with Hobsbawm that the left must adopt a universalist stance. However, true Marxist universalism differs from the nationalistic version; it embodies the internationalism of the working class as a global entity, with interests beyond national borders. The working class is not a mere “identity group” like gender, racial, or sexual orientation groups. It is the only class in capitalism whose social position—producing all wealth while owning none of the means of production—gives it both the interest and the ability to eliminate all class exploitation.

Any arguments Hobsbawm presented in this book should be assessed in this context. The key criterion is not whether his historical research is erudite and well-sourced — which it usually is — but whether it genuinely addresses the crucial political issue: the Stalinist KPD’s “social fascism” stance and its impact on disarming the German working class before Hitler. Ignoring this question in any discussion of Jews and Germany, regardless of other qualities, results in a fundamentally distorted political view. The real solution is not found in detailed academic histories of national development, but in the creation of a revolutionary internationalist party  the very kind of party Hobsbawm dedicated his career to undermining.

[1] Leon Trotsky and the Fate of Socialism in the Twentieth Century: A Reply to Professor Eric Hobsbawm-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/04.html

[2] ‘History in the service of ideology-Review of The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism, by Adrian Hastings

[3] The Myth of ‘Ordinary Germans,'”, A Marxist critique of Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.

[4] The Marxist movement and the fight against antisemitism and Zionism- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/07/03/ajbz-j03.html

“Trump is proceeding now completely illegally. The constitutional framework does not exist for him. He is not restrained by any sort of constitutional norms or legal norms. He is working off of the conceptions which were associated with the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, the so-called ‘state of exception.’ The Führer makes the laws. He has the power. He does with them what he wants.”

David North

“Tocqueville saw that the life of constant action and decision which was entailed by the democratic and businesslike character of American life put a premium upon rough and ready habits of mind, quick decision, and the prompt seizure of opportunities – and that all this activity was not propitious for deliberation, elaboration, or precision in thought.”

Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

“In the eyes of a philistine, a revolutionary point of view is virtually equivalent to an absence of scientific objectivity. We think just the opposite: only a revolutionist… is capable of laying bare the objective dynamics of the revolution.”

Leon Trotsky-In Defence of Marxism

Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay remains one of the most frequently cited analyses of American liberal politics. It’s worth examining carefully because, despite its deeply flawed and class-hostile framework, it contains a valuable insight. Hofstadter accurately notes a recurring pattern in American political history: movements that attribute social grievances to concealed conspiracies—such as Masonic plots, Jesuit infiltration, and Communist subversion. He correctly observes that this tendency has persisted for centuries and spans the entire political spectrum.

However, Hofstadter’s analysis primarily serves as a tool of the liberal establishment to suppress popular discontent. His approach is largely psychological and cultural, viewing ‘the paranoid style’ as a mental disorder, a tendency to perceive enemies and conspiracies. This perspective conveniently avoids addressing a more critical issue: why do millions of people lose trust in official institutions and seek out conspiracy theories?

From a Marxist view, the fundamental causes are social and historical, not psychiatric. Conspiracy beliefs stem from a distorted perception of genuine alienation. Workers feel invisible, unacknowledged, and subjected to uncontrollable forces that influence their lives. Their wages are affected by obscure market forces, and distant financial decisions harm their communities. They perceive their government as serving the rich, their unions as failing, and the mainstream media as spreading misinformation.

When people sense that powerful hidden forces influence their lives but lack the scientific tools of Marxist class analysis, conspiracy theories often fill this gap. The “paranoid style” distorts class analysis that never materialised, serving as a personalised, often racialised alternative to understanding capitalism as a system. Hofstadter, a Columbia University historian, wrote during the Cold War liberalism, in an environment that aimed to discredit both McCarthyism and socialist politics by depicting political “extremism” on both sides as pathological. This reflects the logic of the “vital centre” referenced in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s 1949 manifesto, which claimed that capitalist liberal democracy was the final, rational stage of history and viewed challenges from the left or right as irrational.[1]

This framework aims to discredit working-class radicalism by associating it with right-wing conspiracy theories, which are viewed as demonstrations of “status anxiety” and psychological projection. Unlike Marxists, who recognise the ruling class and advocate its overthrow, Hofstadter considers such thinking paranoid. The critical point Hofstadter overlooks, due to the limitations of his framework, is that conspiratorial politics arise from a political vacuum. When the working class lacks independent political parties, a socialist press, and revolutionary leaders, and when its official organisations, like unions and the Democratic Party, are fully integrated into capitalism, discontent cannot develop rationally; instead, it becomes irrational.

The Long Shadow of History

Richard Hofstadter plays a key role in the intellectual history outlined by David North in his lecture “The Long Shadow of History.” Hofstadter was arguably the most influential academic historian in shaping the ideological landscape after World War II. North highlights the transition of American liberal and left-leaning thinkers from critically examining capitalism to adopting the “consensus” approach associated with Cold War liberalism.

Hofstadter began his academic journey with genuinely radical ideas, authoring The American Political Tradition (1948) from a critical perspective. However, he quickly became the leading figure of the so-called ‘consensus school’ in American historiography, which asserts that American history is defined more by shared liberal-capitalist values than by class conflict. This shift represents the same intellectual move North describes, removing class struggle as a meaningful category in historical analysis. Unlike progressive historians like Charles Beard, who highlighted economic conflict, Hofstadter framed political radicalism as a result of “status anxiety”, a psychological disorder among declining social groups rather than a rational reaction to class exploitation.

Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform (1955) further discounted the Populist movement as a true agrarian revolt, arguing that it was fueled by status resentment, nativism, and conspiracy theories. This perspective enabled him to restore the mainstream narrative of American capitalism as a benign and progressive system, temporarily sidetracked by the irrational passions of marginalised social groups.

Hofstadter’s most famous essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1964), offers important insights. Initially, it seems to criticise right-wing irrationalism. Still, its underlying goal was to frame all anti-establishment politics as psychological issues, turning serious critiques of capitalism into signs of mental illness rather than rational debates. This view aligned with Cold War ideology, allowing liberal intellectuals to appear rational and objective while dismissing both the socialist left and the McCarthyite right as equally paranoid. According to North, this approach was the simplest option for liberals after they felt discredited by Stalinism, shifting from Marxist critiques of Stalinism and capitalism to a smug, depoliticised centrist stance that considered ideology a mental disturbance.

North’s lecture highlights the social foundation of this intellectual development. Hofstadter and other postwar academics were petty-bourgeois thinkers whose material interests were linked to their roles within capitalist institutions. North notes that this social layer often exhibits traits such as egotism, selfishness, and cowardice, which influence individuals’ participation in this process. As postwar prosperity returned and McCarthyism threatened academic careers, many sought comfort in consensus liberalism instead of engaging in the challenging, risky, and academically rigorous pursuit of true Marxism.

The irony lies in his characterisation of political radicalism as “paranoia” or “status anxiety,” which itself reflects the Cold War era’s suppression of socialist ideas. His work remained within ideological boundaries, effectively supporting them by providing an academic justification for the ruling class’s efforts to delegitimise class-based politics. The phrase “paranoid style” aptly describes Hofstadter’s academic setting, a group of well-paid scholars who genuinely struggled to understand why workers might rightly believe capitalism causes their hardships.

Hofstadter’s Revival

Hofstadter’s essay has seen a significant resurgence during the Trump era, often invoked by liberal commentators to frame MAGA as a form of collective mental illness. This interpretation is even more politically naive than the original. It enables the Democratic Party and the broader liberal establishment to avoid responsibility for social issues such as deindustrialisation, the opioid crisis, the 2008 financial collapse, and ongoing wars, which fuel Trump’s anger. Labelling it “paranoia” is a dismissive stereotype that shields the ruling class from accountability. Hofstadter identified the symptom but wrongly diagnosed it as a mental disorder, recommending liberal rationalism as the remedy.

When Trump descended the escalator in 2015 and eventually won the presidency in 2016 and again in 2024, the American liberal intelligentsia swiftly turned to Hofstadter’s work. His essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, was extensively reprinted, cited, and regarded as essential for understanding the Trump phenomenon. The dominant perspective was that Trump embodies a modern expression of America’s irrational, conspiratorial, and “paranoid” tendencies with QAnon, birtherism, and MAGA mythology viewed as contemporary equivalents of McCarthyism and anti-Masonic movements. Prominent outlets like The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, and many liberal commentators articulated this interpretation with apparent satisfaction.

In March 2016, David North examined Trump’s Super Tuesday surge. He questioned not why millions of workers hold skewed or irrational beliefs, but why the genuine, justified anger of the working class has been directed towards a right-wing demagogue instead of a socialist movement. North stated, “More than any other Republican candidate, Trump has tailored his message to resonate with the intense anger and frustration of tens of millions of Americans who feel quite rightly neglected and scorned by a political system that overlooks their daily issues.”

Hofstadter’s framework aims to discourage this kind of statement. Labelling a Trump supporter as “paranoid” shifts the debate from social and political issues—like deindustrialisation, wage stagnation, the opioid crisis, the 2008 financial collapse and bailouts, and ongoing conflicts—toward alleged mental flaws within the working class. This effectively redirects attention away from objective problems, serving as a strategy used by the ruling class.

North asked , “Why haven’t workers turned left despite all this suffering?” The answer isn’t in their minds but in the deliberate dismantling of political tools that could have offered them a left alternative. The Democratic Party had long neglected the working class. Under Obama, who promised “change,” the administration bailed out Wall Street, expanded drone strikes, deported more immigrants than any previous president, and oversaw the largest wealth transfer upward in U.S. history. Corporate interests co-opted Unions. The pseudo-left, including the DSA, the Sanders campaign, and the NGO-industrial complex, diverted political energy back into the Democratic Party and suppressed it. As North observed: “The essential characteristics of this political milieu are complacency, self-absorption, and, above all, contempt for the working class.”

When the working class has no party, no press, no socialist leadership, and every official institution claiming to represent it has betrayed it, a right-wing demagogue who at least names the enemy (even if he names it falsely) will find an audience. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is a distorted, nationalist, scapegoating substitute for a class analysis that was never provided. The Hofstadter framework, by calling this “paranoia,” performs exactly the function it is meant to perform: it insulates the Democratic Party and the liberal establishment from accountability.

The slogan “Make America Great Again” fits within a long tradition of fascist-style national mythology. As North notes, “one of the critical elements of all fascist movements is extreme nationalism and the promotion of miraculous cures to capitalism’s problems on a national scale.” Hitler aimed to restore Germany’s greatness after the Treaty of Versailles; Trump seeks to revive America’s greatness after decades of deindustrialisation and imperial decline. In both instances, the “restoration” is a nationalist myth that masks the true cause of workers’ struggles — the capitalist system itself — and shifts blame onto scapegoats such as immigrants, minorities, foreign powers, and “globalists.”

The ideological function of the “paranoid style” revival in the Trump era can be stated plainly: It pathologises the working class rather than analysing the social conditions that produce political irrationalism. It transforms a political and economic crisis into a cultural or psychological one, thereby making it invisible to social analysis and immune to socialist remedy.

It rehabilitates liberalism as the rational alternative as though the “vital centre” of Clinton, Obama, and Harris hadn’t produced the very conditions that generated Trump. Hofstadter’s framework always points back to the defence of existing institutions, existing parties, and the existing economic order. “Extremism” on both ends is pathological; the centre is healthy. This is ideologically indistinguishable from the Cold War liberalism that Hofstadter himself served.

It disarms the working class by teaching workers that their own anger is a symptom of disease rather than a legitimate response to exploitation. Millions of workers who correctly understand that powerful, hidden forces control their lives — that decisions are made in Wall Street boardrooms that destroy their communities, that politicians lie to them, that wars are launched for interests other than theirs — are told their perception is “paranoid.” The Marxist response is to say: your perception is correct, but your analysis of who is responsible and what must be done is wrong. That is a political task, not a psychiatric one.

As North insisted from the moment Trump emerged, the answer to the far right is not a return to the liberal centre  it is the construction of a revolutionary socialist party capable of giving the working class a scientific understanding of its situation and a program for fighting back. Trump is not an aberration from American capitalism; he is its product. He is the political form capitalism takes when its contradictions reach a breaking point, and the working class has been left without a genuine alternative. Defeating fascism requires abolishing the conditions that produce it  which means abolishing capitalism itself.

Hofstadter’s liberal rationalism has never built a single rank-and-file committee, never organised a single strike, never told a single worker the truth about who actually runs the country and why. As an analytical tool for the left, it is worse than useless  it is a weapon pointed in the wrong direction.

[1] Revisiting The Vital Centre by Kevin Mattson- http://www.csun.edu/~twd61312/mattson.htm

Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) is a significant piece in 20th-century American literature. Viewing it through a Marxist lens reveals insights that traditional literary criticism, whether formalist or rooted in modern identity politics, might miss. To fully understand the novel, it is essential to consider its historical context.

David Walsh notes that Hemingway developed his voice during a time when “the global capitalist system entered a widespread and historic decline, characterised by the intense violence and destruction of World War I.” The war caused over 16 million deaths, led to the fall of four empires, and sparked revolutionary upheavals across Europe that challenged the capitalist elite’s ability to control. These included the assassinations of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, which Hemingway also referenced in his letters.[1]

In 1922, Ernest Hemingway, then a young reporter for the Toronto Star, was dispatched to cover postwar Germany, three years after the murders of January 15, 1919. In his reports and letters from that period, Hemingway openly discussed the political atmosphere in the Weimar Republic, expressly mentioning the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. He described Berlin’s environment, noting how discussions about the killings were common in cafes, and highlighted that those responsible remained unpunished—an indicator of the widespread corruption in the new German government. His personal letters reveal a young man’s moral outrage over the overt counterrevolutionary violence carried out in the name of preserving “order.”

The novel’s émigré characters, Jake Barnes, Lady Brett Ashley, Robert Cohn, Mike Campbell, and Bill Gorton, are more than just lively bohemians drifting through Paris cafes and Pamplona bullfights. They embody the remnants of a social order that led a generation into brutal slaughter in pursuit of rival imperialist ambitions, offering no real justification for the mass casualties. Their excessive drinking, shallow romantic pursuits, and constant travelling stem from an awareness that the civilisation that shaped them is fundamentally morally corrupt. The term “Lost Generation” represents more than their personal stories; it signifies a deep social and historical crisis.

Hemingway’s distinctive minimalist prose was more than just a stylistic choice; it symbolised a rejection of the old order that caused brutal conflicts. Walsh highlights that this style conveyed a disdain for oppressive societal norms responsible for violence. After World War I, the elaborate patriotic rhetoric used to justify sending young men to war became fully discredited. Hemingway’s terse, anti-rhetorical sentences acted as a silent protest against the falsehoods of capitalist civilisation. His famous “iceberg theory” suggests that more lies lie beneath the surface than are visible, reflecting a world where official language often served as a means of widespread deception.

This lends the novel a subtly devastating critical perspective. Nothing in The Sun Also Rises is ever explicitly stated: the war’s horror, Jake’s wound (rendered impotent by combat), and the difficulty of authentic human connection in a society driven by money and social status—all of it exists beneath the surface of concise, “matter-of-fact” dialogue. The understated tone serves as the social critique.

Money, Class, and the Illusion of Freedom

A detailed analysis of the novel reveals that its characters are not truly without class. Their so-called freedom to move between Paris and Pamplona, dine at upscale cafes, or follow the bullfighting scene is actually a constructed sense of liberty. These contradictions create much of the story’s tension. Mike Campbell is depicted as impoverished. Robert Cohn’s social anxiety stems from his fears related to his class status as a wealthy American Jew within European aristocratic circles. The novel’s depiction of him also reflects some period anti-Semitism and shows how class resentment and ethnic bias are connected.

Brett Ashley’s ‘liberation’ as a sexually liberated woman mainly stems from her social status, and it does not lead to her genuine happiness. The bullfight, or corrida, is the only part of the novel that really highlights values like skill and courage traits that go beyond financial influence, which explains why Hemingway’s characters find it so engaging. The novel consciously avoids passing moral judgment on this subject. Walsh points out that Hemingway believed ‘if a writer knows something well, he can omit key details, which enhances the overall impact.’ The crucial element missing here is the economic basis of this ‘freedom.’ Readers instinctively sense the significance of what has been omitted.

The Limits of Individual Rebellion

From a Marxist view, the most authentic and significant aspect of The Sun Also Rises is also its main flaw: it vividly shows the tragedy of bourgeois society. However, it offers no remedy besides stoic acceptance. The well-known ending, with Brett lamenting, “we could have had such a damned good time together,” and Jake’s touching reply, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” is among the most honest conclusions in American literature. It fully rejects false comfort but ultimately signifies a dead end.

Walsh describes this as representative of Hemingway’s overall perspective: “The moral and artistic mission Hemingway began in the early 1920s was founded on the belief that personal courage and strength are essential for success. However, this view conflicted with the complex political problems of the 1930s and 1940s and proved inadequate.” 

The Sun Also Rises highlights this limitation both artistically and meaningfully. The characters are unaware of their social shortcomings and do not see their suffering as tied to larger societal issues. Instead, their reactions to the war’s destruction include seeking sensory pleasures, embracing expatriate bohemia, and adopting stoicism, where bullfighting serves as a symbolic stand-in for political involvement.

This flaw is not exclusive to Hemingway; it reveals a wider issue in petty-bourgeois modernism. Although leading modernists showed remarkable insight into problems in capitalist society, their focus on individualism often closed their eyes to underlying class dynamics, limiting their ability to propose effective solutions. As Walsh notes in his review of the PBS documentary on Hemingway, “If Hemingway ultimately ranks below Theodore Dreiser and F. Scott Fitzgerald in your view, it partly stems from a less critical stance towards American society.”[2]

 Limits of Academic “Political Unconscious” Criticism

It’s essential to briefly examine the dominant academic perspective today, which tends to reduce ‘The Sun Also Rises’ to issues like toxic masculinity, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. This view tends to confuse surface-level symptoms with deeper problems. Although the novel does depict some prejudices relevant to its time and setting, focusing solely on these superficial elements through identity politics restricts a fuller understanding. It neglects the social forces that shape these prejudices and overlooks the novel’s deeper themes. Rather than offering a comprehensive social or historical critique, it simply categorises behaviours as acceptable or unacceptable based on identity.

Marc Baldwin’s “Hemingway’s Political Unconscious” exemplifies Western Marxist academic criticism using Fredric Jameson’s framework to analyse literature. The article makes a valuable contribution by challenging the view of Hemingway as simply an apolitical craftsman of concise, masculine prose. It emphasises that literary form is inherently infused with ideology. The core argument—rooted in Lukács, Eagleton, and Jameson—that “the true bearers of ideology in art are the very forms, rather than the abstractable content”—is a significant insight of Marxist aesthetics. The recognition that Hemingway’s impressionism, his famous “iceberg principle,” and his narrator’s silences are not merely aesthetic choices but are ideologically charged ways of hiding historical contradictions represents a notable progression beyond formalist or purely biographical critiques.[3]

The article points out the shortcomings and distortions in academic Western Marxism, especially within the Jamesonian school, when it fails to adopt a truly materialist perspective on literature. Baldwin accurately observes that Hemingway’s narrator, Jake Barnes, does more than observe; he actively constructs his reality through selective, reifying actions—breaking down people into body parts, transforming social relations into impressionistic sensations, and blending historical time into the “perpetual now.”

This process reflects Lukács’ concept of reification, in which capitalist social relations transform human beings and relationships into commodified objects—abstract, interchangeable units. Baldwin’s interpretation of the Pamplona scene, where Jake reduces the gay men to synecdochic fragments such as “white hands, wavy hair, white faces,” offers a clear illustration of how Jake’s attitude sustains the ideological frameworks of his system.

The connection between the “perpetual now” and ideological mystification is significant. Baldwin rightly notes that a prose style that neglects historical context, presenting the world as a continuous, shimmering surface of sensations, obscures acknowledgement of historical change, class struggle, and social contradictions that impact the characters. His statement that “Ideology needs its subjects to reside in the perpetual now” is a sharp and perceptive observation.

The main theoretical concern in the article is its reliance on Jameson’s structuralist, psychoanalytic Marxism, which treats the text as a self-contained system of ideological mechanisms. It fails to genuinely engage with the historical social forces that influenced Hemingway’s development as a writer. Although Jameson’s approach is sophisticated, it resembles what Trotsky referred to as formalist Marxism, since it primarily analyses ideology through narrative structure. Nonetheless, it overlooks the actual class dynamics and historical circumstances that shaped Hemingway’s development.

David Walsh offers a more realistic view. In his article celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Hemingway’s death, Walsh places Hemingway within a historical context: as a writer influenced by the imperialist slaughter of World War I, aiming to create a new literary honesty suited for a world where the old ruling-class beliefs were exposed as murderous lies. Walsh notes that Hemingway’s succinct style carried “a both moral and political dimension, inherently connected with revulsion against the old order responsible for the brutal conflict and with the revolutionary waves that dismantled empires.” This shows a materialist outlook that Baldwin completely lacks. For Baldwin, silences and omissions are ideological tools used to maintain bourgeois dominance. In contrast, Walsh views them as formal symbols of a real historical struggle—a sincere effort by an artist to confront a broken world and find truthful language amid chaos.

Baldwin’s framework also fails to sufficiently distinguish between how ideology influences an external writer and what an artist intentionally or unintentionally explores. Hemingway was not simply a vessel for middle-class ideology. As Walsh observes, he was genuinely sensitive to “the moral atmosphere of the time,” which often placed him at odds with the ruling elite. The FBI kept him under surveillance for decades. Although his portrayal of the Spanish Civil War was affected by his alignment with Stalinism, it still reflected an earnest engagement with the antifascist movement. “For Whom the Bell Tolls” faced criticism from the Stalinist press because some subtle elements of the GPU’s brutal tactics subtly appeared in the novel, despite Hemingway’s political limitations.

This exposes a deeper flaw in Jamesonian cultural Marxism: it frequently blurs the distinction between authentic artistic achievement and ideological facade. The most significant Marxist aesthetic works—like Trotsky’s *Literature and Revolution*, Plekhanov’s writings on art, and Lukács’s early works—argue that great art can transcend the class biases of its creator, enabling an artist to convey truths beyond their own ideological viewpoint. Hemingway, in his prime—such as in the Nick Adams stories, *A Farewell to Arms*, and much of *The Sun Also Rises*—exemplifies this. The silences Baldwin interprets as merely ideological repression are also, at their best, a formal reflection of something emotionally and historically genuine: the deep shock experienced by individuals whose worlds have been shattered yet are unable to express clearly what has happened to them.

According to a deeper Marxist interpretation, Hemingway’s decline as a writer in the 1930s and later periods is seen as more of a political and historical failure rather than an aesthetic one. His connection to American celebrity culture, his quasi-Stalinist position during the Spanish Civil War, and his misinterpretation of the Trotskyist critique of Popular Front politics restricted his understanding. These issues eventually resulted in a defensive attitude, cynicism, and reticence—traits Baldwin identifies as fundamental to his approach from the start. This approach was well-suited to the post-World War I period. Still, it became increasingly inadequate during the crises of the 1930s and 1940s, which demanded a broader, more historically conscious artistic outlook. Hemingway failed to rise to this challenge, not mainly because of his narrative style, but because he lacked the necessary political insights.

In summary, Baldwin’s article presents a complex Marxist academic critique that sheds light on key aspects of Hemingway’s writings. However, it replaces genuine historical materialism with a focus on structural ideology critique, thereby overlooking Hemingway’s true literary accomplishments and the specific historical factors behind his limitations and decline. The WSWS approach to literary criticism—grounded in the actual history of the 20th century, including Stalinism’s role in betraying workers and confusing the intelligentsia—provides a more profound and accurate framework for understanding a writer like Hemingway.

Conclusion

The Sun Also Rises remains a crucial read, not despite its flaws but because of them. It is among the most honest accounts of how World War I affected a generation and, by extension, the concept of bourgeois civilisation itself. Its deep pessimism is a form of honest truth-telling. However, it cannot offer what only the Marxist movement could provide then and still can: an understanding of the class forces behind the catastrophe and a plan to overcome them through revolutionary unity of the international working class. This is not a critique of Hemingway’s talent — rather, it acknowledges what art alone cannot achieve, emphasising the ongoing need for political struggle.

Notes

Hemingway on PBS: The American writer who sought “the truest sentence that you know” http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/10/hemi-a10.html

[1] Fifty years since the death of Ernest Hemingway- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/07/hemi-j06.html

[2] Hemingway on PBS: The American writer who sought “the truest sentence that you know”- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/10/hemi-a10.html

[3] “To Make It into a Novel… Don’t Talk about It”: Hemingway’s Political Unconscious

Author(s): Marc D. Baldwin  The Journal of Narrative Technique , Fall, 1993, Vol. 23, No. 3

Mike Haynes and Jim Wolfreys’ book, History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism (Pluto Press, 2007), compiles essays that defend the revolutionary tradition against the anti-Marxist historiography that emerged after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. The contributors challenge the revisionist critiques of the French and Russian Revolutions, as well as the Marxist view of historical change. While the book has significant merit in supporting historical materialism against idealist and post-modernist reactions, it also exhibits notable political and intellectual limitations that a Marxist perspective cannot ignore.

Mike Haynes has been a member of the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) for many years. The political framework of *History and Revolution* reflects the SWP’s ideological roots, mainly shaped by Tony Cliff, the party’s founder. Understanding this context is crucial, and within this framework, the ICFI should offer clear and pointed criticisms.

The SWP is not a Trotskyist organisation. Cliff’s concept of “state capitalism”—which suggests that the Soviet Union under Stalin evolved into a form of capitalism—was introduced in 1948 mainly as a political strategy. This move aimed to help the SWP stay neutral during the Korean War, rather than defending the Soviet Union against imperialist forces. It was more an opportunist adaptation than a genuine Marxist analysis. The ICFI, led by James Cannon and later Gerry Healy and David North, identified the Cliff tendency as a revisionist deviation that split from the Fourth International, rather than a true continuation of Trotskyism.

This political heritage influences how the SWP approaches the history of revolutions. Since the SWP cannot defend the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state—because Cliff’s theory rejects that it was ever a workers’ state after Stalin—it lacks a clear explanation of what went wrong with the Russian Revolution. The key contribution of the Trotskyist movement—the idea that Stalinism was a bureaucratic degeneration of a genuine workers’ revolution, not its inevitable outcome—is missing from the SWP’s framework. Consequently, even sincere SWP historians tend to separate the defence of Marxist historical method from their support for the political program of the Fourth International. They can argue that revolutions occur for justified reasons. Still, they fail to explain the betrayal of those revolutions, thus preventing them from drawing the programmatic conclusions necessary for the working class.

Refuting Revisionism champions a left-wing stance advocating for revolutionary history and opposes conservative and liberal revisionist narratives. It challenges figures such as François Furet on the French Revolution, as well as Robert Conquest and Orlando Figes on the October Revolution. While defending the revolutionary historical record against bourgeois misrepresentations is crucial, a Marxist must also scrutinise the underlying perspective to determine whether it truly presents a revolutionary vision for the working class. When examined within the intellectual and political landscape, this stance reveals significant issues.

This collection, featuring Bensaïd advising socialist youth not to focus on studying the Russian Revolution, is edited by the International Socialist Tendency (with Haynes linked to the British SWP and Wolfley associated with the NPA/France Insoumise) and cannot offer that response. The IS tradition has its own core issues with the Russian Revolution, having historically rejected Trotsky’s analysis of the USSR and fluctuated between different forms of accommodation to Stalinism and social democracy.

Revisionism and the English Revolution

The question regarding the English Revolution lies at the crossroads of two major historiographical debates: whether the events of the 1640s truly represent a bourgeois revolution, and what influence the popular radical movements — including the Levellers, the Diggers, and various sects had in it. The “revisionist” school, which gained prominence in British academic history especially from the 1970s onward, challenged the first question by denying that a bourgeois revolution actually occurred. Scholars like Conrad Russell and John Morrill maintained that the conflict was primarily driven by royal mismanagement, court faction struggles, and religious contingencies, rather than by profound structural class conflicts. They also dismissed the idea of a rising bourgeoisie as a form of Marxist teleology.

This revisionist turn was a politically charged academic shift. As Ann Talbot’s excellent analysis of Christopher Hill indicates, the critique of the idea of bourgeois revolution was intertwined with the broader intellectual backlash following the working class’s setbacks in the 1970s and 80s, which gained momentum after the fall of the USSR. The denial of the revolutionary significance of the 1640s was part of a larger ideological effort to eliminate the concept of revolution from historical study.

If we see the English Revolution simply as a misunderstanding between the king and Parliament, the French Revolution as nothing more than a panic among scared nobles, and the Russian Revolution as just a Bolshevik coup, it becomes unlikely to believe that large groups of people can purposefully overthrow an entire social system.

“Radicalism and Revisionism in the English Revolution”

Geoff Kennedy’s research on revisionism and the English Revolution is a significant semi-Marxist critique of the rewriting of 17th-century British history in the late 20th century. His key contribution is his essay, “Radicalism and Revisionism in the English Civil War,” which appeared in the 2007 edited volume History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism published by Verso Books.

Kennedy’s earlier works, like *Diggers, Levellers, and Agrarian Capitalism* (2008), significantly advance the Marxist interpretation of the English Revolution. He seeks to contextualise the radical movements of the 1640s and 1650s—primarily the Levellers and the Diggers—within England’s transition to agrarian capitalism, heavily drawing on Ellen Meiksins Wood and Robert Brenner’s ‘Political Marxism.’ Although this approach is valuable, it also raises critical questions from an orthodox Marxist viewpoint.

Kennedy emphasises the social and economic factors of the English Revolution, challenging revisionist historians who mainly viewed it as religious disputes, constitutional errors, or luck. Unlike revisionists such as Conrad Russell, John Morrill, and others, Kennedy contends that the revolution had a genuine class aspect, with radical movements representing actual social conflicts arising from changes in land and farming relations in England.

His emphasis on the Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, is especially significant. The Diggers are among the most notable early examples of communist ideas in history. Winstanley’s belief that the earth should be a shared resource for everyone, and that land privatisation is the root of oppression. That true freedom involves low-income people working the land collectively went beyond what the bourgeois revolution could accept or achieve. Kennedy rightly sees the Diggers not just as religious eccentrics but as representing the most impoverished groups in the English countryside, those being driven out by enclosure and agricultural commercialisation.

The Levellers, including Lilburne, Overton, and Walwyn, promoted a more advanced political agenda focused on the interests of artisans and small producers: popular sovereignty, a written constitution, religious toleration, legal equality, and manhood suffrage with some restrictions. Their Agreement of the People was a truly revolutionary democratic document. Kennedy’s analysis of the connection between the Levellers and Cromwell’s Grandees, highlighted by the Putney Debates of 1647 and the suppression of the Leveller mutinies at Burford in 1649, accurately identifies this as a pivotal moment in the revolution’s class dynamics.

Kennedy’s theoretical framework

Kennedy’s Political Marxism Framework, based on Wood and Brenner’s “Political Marxism,” highlights the particularities of the English transition to capitalism in agriculture. It focuses on the unique role of the capitalist landlord-tenant-labourer relationship, the early commercialisation of farming, and the dispossession of peasants through enclosure. This approach is a significant improvement over simpler base-superstructure theories and effectively links radical movements to specific social relations.

Nonetheless, the Political Marxism framework has certain inconsistencies. Wood, for example, strongly resisted labelling the English Revolution as a “bourgeois revolution” in the traditional Marxist sense. She believed the bourgeoisie did not lead the revolution and that capitalism in England developed primarily through agrarian, rather than commercial or industrial, capital. This creates a paradoxical stance: recognising the period’s revolutionary nature while distancing it from the classic Marxist classification. This stance is a partial concession to the revisionist view, but it risks obscuring the global importance of the English Revolution as the first major bourgeois revolution. As Engels stated in his introduction to *Socialism: Utopian and Scientific*, it was the event that first raised the banner of the modern bourgeoisie against feudal monarchy.

The Trotskyist view, as exemplified by Ann Talbot’s interpretation of Christopher Hill, emphasises the importance of a revolution’s fundamental social goals. It focuses on the mode of production it supports and the long-term interests at stake, rather than on whether participants explicitly see themselves as bourgeois revolutionaries or whether the bourgeoisie directly ‘created’ the revolution in a narrow sociological sense. For example, Cromwell didn’t need to be a Manchester manufacturer to serve capitalism’s interests. As Trotsky noted, Cromwell was “a revolutionary leader of the bourgeoisie” who used the New Model Army as a political tool, often purging Parliament to advance his class’s aims.

The Levellers and Diggers: Historical Limits and Revolutionary Significance

From a Marxist perspective, Kennedy’s work raises a crucial question: what were the social and historical limitations of these radical movements, and what can we learn from them? The Levellers primarily embodied the interests of the petty bourgeoisie — small producers, artisans, and yeomanry who aimed to engage with the rising capitalist system more equally, rather than overthrow it. Their call for manhood suffrage explicitly excluded servants and those on poor relief, representing the rural proletariat and the most marginalised groups.

During Cromwell’s Grandees’ discussion at Putney, the notable exchange between Commissary-General Ireton and Colonel Rainsborough highlighted the class divide: Ireton defending property as fundamental to constitutional rights. At the same time, Rainsborough claimed that “the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he.” The Levellers ultimately struggled with this internal conflict, torn between their democratic ideals and their status as property-owning classes.

The Diggers aimed for common land ownership, representing a true communist ideal. However, Winstanley’s version was a utopian form of communism by the dispossessed peasantry, not rooted in the scientific socialism driven by capitalist development. In 1649, the conditions for a socialist revolution, such as a modern industrial proletariat, socialised production, and a working class capable of seizing and managing the means of production, were absent. This isn’t a critique of Winstanley but an acknowledgement of historical limitations. Engels highlighted this in “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” noting that many early communist ideas, from Münzer during the German Reformation to the Enragés in the French Revolution and the Diggers in England, voiced the hopes of classes unlikely to have a future in the nascent capitalist system.

Kennedy and Revisionism

Kennedy’s focus on revisionism is a strong point in his work. He rightly recognises that the political motive behind the revisionist school’s denial of a bourgeois revolution is to naturalise capitalism by dismissing the need for violent overthrow. This also aims to undermine Marxist historical analysis during the 1980s-90s, when the ruling class was gaining ground. This same drive contributed to the development of the “end of history” idea and postmodern critiques of historical materialism.

Kennedy’s support for the Marxist framework can be expanded to include an international perspective. As Ann Talbot observed regarding Hill, the limitation of the “people’s history” tradition was its primarily national focus. The English Revolution did not happen in isolation; it was part of a broader European crisis in the seventeenth century. The ideas it promoted—such as natural rights, popular sovereignty, religious toleration, and constitutional government—contributed directly to the Enlightenment and inspired later American and French revolutions. The Levellers’ Agreement of the People was a precursor to the American Declaration of Independence. John Locke formalised the political ideas of the English Revolution into a framework that American and French revolutionaries adopted. Viewing the English Revolution solely through the lens of English agrarian conditions, as the Political Marxism approach often does, overlooks its global significance as the initial stage of the bourgeois revolutionary era.

Overall, Kennedy’s chapter provides a serious and compelling contribution. It defends the Marxist framework against revisionist perspectives, recognises the social significance of radical movements, and clarifies how agrarian capitalism shaped the revolution. Nonetheless, it is somewhat limited by the views of the Political Marxism school, which often dismisses the classical “bourgeois revolution” idea and interprets the revolution too narrowly at a national level. The Trotskyist perspective offers a valuable correction: the English Revolution was a key global event of bourgeois change, whose full significance can only be understood in an international context. Its radical origins—the Diggers and Levellers—also hint, albeit prematurely, at the eventual overthrow of capitalism through deliberate revolutionary action by the working class.

Daniel Bensaïd: The Central Problem

The most notable figure in this collection is Daniel Bensaïd, a leading theorist of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) in France and a key member of the Pabloite United Secretariat. In February 2008, just months before this book was published, he spoke at a forum at Socialist Party headquarters in Paris, alongside Henri Weber, a co-founder of the LCR who had long since become a PS senator and European deputy, openly supporting the capitalist market.

What did Bensaïd say at this forum? He didn’t challenge Weber’s praise of “market freedom.” Instead, he told the audience he saw little chance for revolutionary socialism in the near future, citing the influx of hundreds of millions of Asian workers into the global labour market as a factor that would “permanently lower living standards”—a defeatist, petty-bourgeois viewpoint that dismisses the revolutionary potential of the global working class. Most tellingly, he told the Socialist Party crowd that if young LCR members took a class on the Russian Revolution, “they’re bored silly,” even though he’s a contributor to a book supposedly meant to defend revolutionary history!

This is no accidental contradiction. It reveals the core dishonesty within the pseudo-left’s engagement with Marxist history. Bensaïd and the LCR/NPA tradition evoke revolutionary memory in theory but, in practice, do everything to keep the working class subordinate to bourgeois parties. They present the idea of revolution as a cultural relic, while systematically undermining the revolutionary program as a dynamic political goal. His description of himself at that meeting as a “Leninist rather than a Trotskyist,” along with his attempt to portray Lenin as merely an opportunist, illustrates his aim to distance Lenin from the theoretical lineage of Marxism that Trotsky represented.

Lars T. Lih

Lih is a dedicated scholar whose work on Lenin, especially *Lenin Rediscovered*, offers valuable insights into Bolshevism as an autonomous movement rather than a caricature. His effort to rehabilitate Lenin’s *What Is to Be Done?* from decades of liberal and social-democratic misinterpretation is noteworthy. However, Lih functions as a non-Marxist academic historian; his focus is on illuminating history without linking it to a current political agenda.

His main thesis in *Lenin Rediscovered* is an academically respectable revision: he suggests that the interpretation of *What Is to Be Done?* (1902) as a top-down, elitist plan for a vanguard party—where professional revolutionaries impose socialism on a passive working class—has been mistaken, especially in the West. Lih contends this is incorrect.

He contends that Lenin’s ideas were not revolutionary leaps regarding consciousness but were significantly shaped by German Social Democracy—especially Karl Kautsky—and involved adapting traditional Kautskyism to Russian conditions. The famous excerpt in WITBD where Lenin quotes Kautsky, asserting that socialist consciousness should be imparted to workers “from without” (von aussen), is, as Lih explains, not a groundbreaking innovation but rather reflects the common stance of the Second International.

Lih’s work offers an important correction to right-wing criticisms of Lenin. Yet, limiting the focus to this diminishes our appreciation of Lenin’s wider historical role: as the founder of the Third International, a key figure in the October Revolution, and a successor to a revolutionary legacy continued by Trotsky and the Fourth International, a legacy that still holds significant relevance today.

Enzo Traverso and Geoff Eley

Both are academics operating within the broad field of “critical theory” and left-liberal historiography. Traverso’s work on violence, fascism, and European history is intellectually serious but embedded in a Frankfurt School framework that, as David North has analysed in depth, ultimately leads away from the revolutionary Marxist perspective. Geoff Eley, a distinguished historian of European labour movements, operates within a broadly social-democratic intellectual horizon — his work charts the decline of the left without pointing toward the program needed to reconstitute it on genuine socialist foundations.

Enzo Traverso is perhaps best known for his work on European fascism, revolutionary violence, the Holocaust, and — most tellingly — his concept of left melancholy. His book Left-Wing Melancholia (2016) argues that the contemporary left is defined by mourning for a lost world of socialist possibilities, dwelling in the ruins of defeated revolutions and collapsed utopias. He draws heavily on Walter Benjamin’s famous essay on the “left melancholy” of the Weimar era, as well as on the broader Frankfurt School tradition.

Traverso’s observation highlights that many academic and petty-bourgeois radicals are demoralised and disoriented. However, his political conclusions and the intellectual framework he employs to interpret this are deeply incompatible with Marxism. His notion of “left melancholy” interprets the setbacks of the 20th century as indicative of a fundamental rift between socialism and historical progress, implying that the chance for a socialist revolution is either hidden or no longer attainable.

Traverso’s deep engagement with the Frankfurt School deepens this issue. As David North discusses in his book The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left, the Frankfurt School’s original premise was to abandon the revolutionary working class as a key driver of change.

Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, writing during the era of Stalinism and fascism, claimed that capitalism had subsumed the proletariat, hindering its ability to lead emancipation efforts. This change led to a greater focus on cultural critique, aesthetic theory, and philosophical negativity rather than on the political mobilisation of workers. Traverso follows this entire tradition. While his historical work is knowledgeable and occasionally insightful on fascism and memory, its core principles fundamentally oppose the Marxist agenda.

His interpretation of revolutionary violence and utopia also leans towards a moral-aesthetic assessment that detaches from class analysis. For Traverso, the issue of revolutionary violence mainly becomes an ethical and aesthetic concern focusing on how we remember, mourn, and portray it rather than a political matter: considering the class forces involved, the programs promoted or betrayed, and the responsibility of particular political tendencies for specific defeats.

Geoff Eley and the Retreat from Class

Geoff Eley is a prominent historian specialising in modern Europe, with a focus on Germany and the European left. His notable publications include Reshaping the German Right and Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000. Eley also played a central role in the so-called “cultural turn” in social history, which is linked to the journal Social History. This shift is more controversially associated with a move away from E.P. Thompson’s emphasis on class-based social history toward a focus on discourse, culture, and identity.

Eley’s trajectory offers valuable insights from a Marxist perspective. Initially, his work adhered to Marxist social history, focusing on the German bourgeoisie, the Wilhelmine right, and the structural contradictions of German capitalism. However, influenced by post-structuralism, Foucault, and the “linguistic turn,” Eley gradually shifted away from prioritising class as the main analytical category. His 1994 co-edited volume, ‘Becoming National,’ along with later research on gender, identity, and recognition politics, signified a significant move toward the cultural-theoretical issues that had permeated much of academic social history by the 1990s.

This shift—from emphasising class analysis to focusing on discourse and identity—was not merely a neutral change in approach. It mirrored the broader intellectual retreat of the academic left following Thatcherism, the decline of the labour movement, and ultimately, the collapse of the Soviet Union. The common argument was that “class reductionism” was being replaced by a more “complex” understanding of social dominance. However, what was genuinely being forsaken was the fundamental theoretical framework needed to understand capitalism and identify those with the power to alter it. As the ICFI affirms, the working class remains the only force with both the objective interests and the social influence to overthrow capitalism—a truth no refined cultural critique can negate.

Eley’s “Forging Democracy” offers a comprehensive account of the history of European socialist, labour, and social-democratic movements. Nonetheless, its evaluative lens is mainly social-democratic rather than explicitly Marxist. It portrays Social Democratic parties as the rightful representatives of workers’ hopes, views the Bolshevik revolution and the Communist International as problematic deviations, and remains silent on why social democracy repeatedly let down the working class—from 1914 through the Weimar era, the post-war welfare system, and beyond. The ICFI’s interpretation—focused on the crisis of revolutionary leadership and the working class’s subjugation to reformist and Stalinist bureaucracies—is not apparent within Eley’s perspective.

Critical Theory as an Alternative to Revolution

Traverso and Eley, despite focusing on different aspects, share common ground within a broader intellectual trend that emerged after the decline of academic Marxism in the 20th century. Both are dedicated scholars who critically examine historical issues. They are not mere defenders of capitalism. However, their approaches have shifted towards emphasising cultural critique, ethical considerations, and identity-focused history, replacing the revolutionary Marxist agenda.

David North pinpointed this exact issue in his critique of the Frankfurt School’s political heritage. The complex pessimism inherent in critical theory, emphasising the “administered society,” the colonisation of consciousness, and the seeming impossibility of direct revolutionary action, served as the intellectual framework that led many academic radicals to rationalise their detachment from real class struggles. Consequently, as the WSWS pointed out in its critique of postmodernism and the pseudo-left, there was a “flight from historical truth,” in which objective historical analysis was replaced by discourse theory, memory studies, and melancholic aesthetics.

The true antidote is not a simplistic or mechanical form of Marxism but the genuine tradition: the rigorous historical materialism developed by Marx and Engels, further refined by Lenin’s analysis of imperialism and the state, and Trotsky’s theories of permanent revolution and revolutionary leadership crises. These theoretical tools do not foster “left melancholy” because they offer an authentic explanation for the setbacks of the 20th century—one that looks forward, emphasising the importance of building the Fourth International, rather than dwelling on the past with nostalgia.

A volume that assembles pseudo-left academics to “refute revisionism” in the seminar room, while its most prominent political contributor assures Socialist Party audiences that revolution is off the agenda for the foreseeable future, is not a contribution to that fight. It is, at best, a holding operation for a demoralised intellectual milieu that seeks to preserve the cultural prestige of “revolution” while having abandoned its political content.

Haynes and Wolfreys are responding to a genuine, politically motivated revisionist attack. As David North explains in detail in The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century, the USSR’s collapse was quickly followed by a surge of pseudohistorical literature claiming that the October Revolution and the Soviet Union were the result of a criminal conspiracy imposing an alien, unworkable dogma on an unsuspecting population.

History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism offers a valuable contribution to the fight against post-1991 historical falsification, and readers will find much merit in it. However, it faces distinct limitations stemming from the political and theoretical confusions within the SWP tendency. The ultimate Trotskyist response to anti-communist historical revisionism is not found in the SWP tradition but in the work of the ICFI. This includes David North’s The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century, Vadim Rogovin’s Was There an Alternative to Stalinism? series, and the ongoing publications of the World Socialist Web Site. These works unite the defence of the socialist revolution’s historical truth with support for the political program of the Fourth International—without which such historical defence remains incomplete.