On Friday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered an extraordinary address to the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention in Washington. Thirty-five years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and after decades in which the ideologues of capitalism proclaimed the death of socialism, Rubio informed the assembled representatives of the conservative legal establishment that their system had failed to exorcise its greatest ideological enemy. “Even as we defeated the institution of Soviet communism, we did not triumph over the spirit of Marx,” Rubio declared. “That spirit of Marx, it lives.”

The words deserve to be taken seriously. Rubio was not addressing an obscure gathering of anti-communist eccentrics. He was speaking as the US Secretary of State to the Federalist Society. This organisation has played a central role in building the right-wing legal apparatus in the United States. Rubio himself devoted the opening portion of his speech to celebrating its rise from a handful of conservative law students in the early 1980s into a powerful institution capable of shaping American jurisprudence.

The irony is unmistakable. More than three decades after capitalism supposedly demonstrated its historical superiority over socialism, one of the most powerful representatives of American imperialism finds itself compelled to announce that the ghost has not departed publicly. Marx and Engels opened the Communist Manifesto in 1848 with one of the most famous sentences in political literature: “A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism.” They added that “all the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre.” Rubio has effectively volunteered for membership in the twenty-first-century version of that alliance.

“Stop quoting laws to men with swords”

What supposedly constitutes this renewed “spirit of Marx”? According to Rubio, it is no longer simply communism or the organised socialist movement. It appears in international law, international institutions, universities, journalism, NGOs, the courts and every other institution that might impose even limited restraints upon the exercise of American power. Rubio devoted much of his address to attacking the International Criminal Court and the wider system of international law. He denounced what he termed the “glittering generalities of international law” and accused international institutions of attempting to subordinate American sovereignty to an unaccountable global bureaucracy.

His most revealing statement came during his denunciation of the ICC. Should the court attempt to enforce its decisions against Americans, Rubio declared, Washington might answer in the words traditionally attributed to the Roman general Pompey: “Stop quoting laws to men with swords.”The remark drew laughter and applause.

Rubio’s theatrical delivery should not obscure its significance. The chief diplomat of the United States was telling an audience of lawyers that when legal restrictions collide with the interests of American imperialism, military power has the final word. The invocation of Pompey is particularly revealing. Rubio sought to present it as evidence of hard-headed realism against the pretensions of international lawyers. But the image he selected was that of armed power brushing aside civil authority. The sword stands above the law because the state possessing overwhelming military force considers itself entitled to decide when law applies.

The post-1945 institutions that Rubio now excoriates as vehicles for forces supposedly animated by the “spirit of Marx” were never socialist. The United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions and the wider infrastructure of the post-war international system developed under conditions of overwhelming American economic and military predominance. Whatever disagreements existed among the major powers, Washington played the decisive role in constructing the international framework through which it exercised global leadership.

International law never abolished imperialism. Nor did the United Nations overcome the nation-state system. Korea, Vietnam, the coups and dictatorships backed by Washington during the Cold War, and later the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya made sufficiently clear how readily the language of international order could coexist with military violence. Rubio’s speech therefore matters elsewhere. An American ruling class increasingly unwilling to tolerate even legal restraints fashioned during its own period of global ascendancy is dispensing with the language through which it once presented its domination as the universal interest of mankind.

When American capitalism stood at the summit of the world economy after the Second World War, its representatives could more easily identify American power with economic reconstruction, international cooperation and universal progress. The immense industrial strength of the United States provided the foundation for this ideological confidence. That world has disappeared. American capitalism remains extraordinarily powerful, particularly militarily and financially, but it confronts intensifying economic competition, immense social inequality at home and growing challenges to the international position established after 1945. Under these conditions, the language of universal principles increasingly gives way to the blunt assertion of national power. Hence Pompey and the sword.

An ideology of expansion

Rubio’s speech went far beyond criticism of the ICC. At one point he offered a remarkable description of American history. The American national character, he argued, had always been driven by a desire “to expand, to grow, to explore, to conquer, to stake a claim to new frontiers.” Speaking of the nineteenth century, he celebrated the transformation of the original 13 states into a continental power stretching to the Pacific. America, he declared, had been a nation “advancing across the continent, settling land, building cities, laying roads and railways, subduing the wilderness.”

What disappears from this narrative is precisely what must disappear for the mythology of American expansion to survive: indigenous peoples, slavery, the conquest of Mexican territory, the brutal development of capitalist property relations and the class struggles produced by industrialisation. The history of American capitalism is transformed into the heroic unfolding of a timeless national personality. This mythology then becomes a programme for the present. Rubio explicitly rejected the proposition that the United States must accept its position as merely “one nation among the many.” Americans, he insisted, must reject arguments that they cannot “impose ourselves upon the world.” The phrase is remarkable in its candour.

Imperialist domination is presented not as the consequence of particular economic and class interests but as an expression of American civilisation itself. Expansion ceases to be a historical process rooted in capitalism and becomes a national virtue. Rubio therefore arrives at an openly imperial conception of American sovereignty: the United States possesses the right to determine its interests independently, while international institutions have no corresponding right to restrain the exercise of American power. The “men with swords” supply the ultimate constitutional principle.

“Every society has a ruling class”

But perhaps the most revealing section of Rubio’s address came before his attack upon international law. “Every society,” Rubio said, “has an elite, has a ruling class. “It is an extraordinary phrase coming from an American Secretary of State. For decades, the official mythology of American political life has denied this reality precisely. The United States supposedly consists of individuals competing freely within democratic institutions. Classes may exist as income categories, but the concept of a ruling class possessing definite material interests has traditionally been dismissed as Marxist dogma.

Yet Rubio stood before the Federalist Society and discussed the problem of political power in explicitly class terms. He identified the ruling class as residing not simply in government but in “academia, in powerful nonprofits, and in nongovernment organisations,” as well as “corporate boardrooms and C-suites and think tanks and journals, in foundations and in mass media. “There is an important sleight of hand here.

Rubio correctly acknowledges that political domination extends beyond elections and formal government. But he then dissolves the ruling class’s capitalist character into an amorphous cultural elite. Corporate executives somehow occupy the same analytical category as university professors, journalists and NGO officials. Ownership of the means of production disappears as the decisive social relation. Marxism begins precisely where Rubio stops. A ruling class is not defined principally by its opinions, university degrees, or cultural preferences. Capitalists constitute a ruling class because they own and control society’s productive resources and appropriate the surplus produced by wage labour. Political and cultural institutions ultimately operate under social conditions established by these relations of ownership.

Rubio therefore borrows the language of class while stripping it of its material content. The result is a familiar form of right-wing populism in which sections of the capitalist oligarchy portray themselves as insurgents against an alleged establishment consisting of professors, civil servants, liberal journalists and bureaucrats. The billionaire no longer belongs to the elite. The university lecturer becomes the embodiment of ruling-class power.

Rubio’s discussion of the Federalist Society exposes the fraud of this presentation. The organisation, he explained approvingly, understood it could not control political institutions merely by winning elections. Long-term victory required networks, recruitment, intellectual organisation and what Rubio himself described as pipelines to power. He praised the organisation for changing the intellectual environment within which American judges operated and for cultivating generations of conservative lawyers capable of carrying its ideas from lecture rooms into the highest courts.

This is worth emphasising because Rubio simultaneously attacked the left for allegedly pursuing domination through institutions. He delivered his own speech celebrating one of the American right’s most successful institutional political projects. From Rubio’s standpoint, there is no contradiction. Institutional power exercised on behalf of capitalist nationalism is legitimate. Institutional influence impeding that programme becomes Marxism.

This conception also illuminates the political purpose of his extraordinary expansion of the definition of Marxism. Liberal judges are Marxists. Human rights organisations become Marxist. International lawyers become Marxist. Academics become Marxist. Criticism of American history becomes Marxist. International institutions become manifestations of Marxism. Eventually any political or legal restraint upon the executive power of the capitalist state can be interpreted as an expression of the “spirit of Marx. “This has little to do with Marx’s actual ideas. It has everything to do with identifying an internal enemy.

The ideological heart of Rubio’s speech was concentrated in one passage: “Marxism sought to abolish the distinctions between men. The radicals of our time seek to abolish the distinctions between nations themselves.” Rubio almost accidentally approaches the real issue. Marxism does indeed seek to abolish certain distinctions between human beings, but not individuality, personality, culture or difference. It seeks to abolish the class divisions arising from private ownership of the means of production: capitalist and worker, exploiter and exploited. For Rubio, these social distinctions disappear into the abstract category of inequality between “men.” But capitalism does not simply produce differences between individuals. It concentrates productive property and wealth within a comparatively tiny social layer, while the overwhelming majority depend on selling their labour power to live. Rubio’s formulation converts historically developed class relations into natural human distinctions. The defence of “distinctions” therefore becomes, consciously or otherwise, a defence of hierarchy itself. Behind the denunciation of Marxism stands the defence of private property in the means of production.

Nations and the world economy

Rubio’s second proposition is equally revealing. The supposedly new Marxists, he argues, seek to eliminate distinctions between nations. But international lawyers, academics, or NGOs have not brought about the historical erosion of national economic self-sufficiency. Capitalism has itself created an integrated world economy. Modern production operates through vast international networks of manufacture, transport, finance, communication and labour. Raw materials extracted on one continent are processed on another and incorporated into commodities assembled elsewhere, then sold worldwide.

Capital has globalised production while preserving the political framework of competing nation-states. This is one of the central contradictions of the contemporary world. Production is international, but capitalist property and political power remain organised through rival nation-states whose ruling classes struggle over markets, resources, investment opportunities, and strategic influence. The more integrated the world economy becomes, the more explosive its collision with the nation-state system becomes.

Trade war and military conflict are not aberrations imposed upon an otherwise harmonious system. They grow out of capitalism itself. Rubio proposes to solve this contradiction by asserting the unrestricted primacy of the American nation. Marxism advances the opposite programme: the international unification of the working class. “The working men have no country,” Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto. That declaration does not mean workers have no languages, cultures, or historical identities. It means that their fundamental social interests cannot be reconciled with the competing national programmes of capitalist ruling classes. An American worker has more fundamental interests in common with workers in China, Mexico, Britain, Germany or Russia than with the billionaire owners of American corporations. That is precisely why nationalism becomes increasingly indispensable to the ruling class.

What collapsed in 1991?

Rubio’s assertion that the United States “defeated the institution of Soviet communism” reproduces one of the central historical falsifications of bourgeois ideology. What collapsed in 1991 was not Marxism. The October Revolution of 1917 had established the first workers’ state based on international socialist revolution. It degenerated under specific historical conditions: economic backwardness, the devastation of civil war and imperialist intervention, and, above all, the isolation produced by the defeats of revolutionary movements internationally. From these conditions arose a privileged Soviet bureaucracy personified politically by Stalin.

Against the internationalist programme of the Bolsheviks, Stalin advanced the nationalist theory of “socialism in one country.” The bureaucracy increasingly monopolised political power. The revolutionary generation was ultimately subjected to systematic repression and murder. Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition waged an irreconcilable struggle against this degeneration. In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky warned that the Soviet bureaucracy did not represent a new socialist ruling class and that its continued domination threatened the October Revolution’s achievements. Unless the working class carried through a political revolution and restored Soviet democracy, capitalist restoration would ultimately result.

That warning was vindicated. The liquidation of the Soviet Union in 1991 was carried through by forces emerging from within the Stalinist bureaucracy itself. State property was dismantled and appropriated, producing oligarchic capitalism and immense social catastrophe. The USSR did not collapse because capitalism overcame the contradictions Marx analysed. On the contrary, those contradictions subsequently emerged in increasingly acute forms on a world scale.

The return of Marx

This explains Rubio’s dilemma. If 1991 truly represented the historic victory of capitalism over Marxism, why must the Secretary of State of the United States warn his audience in 2026 that the “spirit of Marx” remains alive? Marxism survives because the social relations Marx analysed survive. Capital still confronts wage labour. Production remains subordinated to profit. Wealth accumulates at one pole of society while insecurity accumulates at the other.

Technological development capable of reducing human labour and dramatically raising living standards instead threatens workers with displacement whenever greater profitability demands it. Enormous productive capacities coexist with poverty and social deprivation. A globally integrated productive system remains imprisoned within competing capitalist nation-states. The fundamental contradiction Marx identified between the social character of production and private appropriation has not disappeared. It has assumed an unprecedented international scale. One of the most significant moments in Rubio’s remarks came during the question-and-answer session when he acknowledged that young Americans were falling behind previous generations and that millions judged economic conditions not by the stock market but by whether they could afford what they needed. This admission speaks far more directly to the renewed interest in socialism than all his denunciations of international bureaucrats. Young people are not turning towards socialist ideas because international lawyers have secretly indoctrinated them. They are responding to social conditions.

Rubio nevertheless attempts to identify Marxism with the institutions of the liberal establishment: universities, NGOs, judges, journalists and Democratic Party politicians. This identification is politically indispensable to the American right because it conceals the actual character of Marxism. The Democratic Party is not a socialist organisation. It is one of the two principal parties of American capitalism. Whatever bitter tactical and institutional conflicts separate Democrats and Republicans, both defend capitalist property relations and the geopolitical interests of American imperialism.

Liberal appeals to international law are likewise highly selective. The differences within the ruling class concern how American capitalism should defend its global interests and manage mounting domestic opposition, not whether capitalism should be replaced with socialism. Nor should the identity politics entrenched throughout substantial sections of academia and the professional upper-middle class be confused with Marxism. Marxism locates the fundamental division in capitalist society in class relations arising from production. Contemporary identity politics fragments society along racial, gender and other identities while generally leaving capitalist property relations untouched.

Rubio benefits enormously from conflating the two. By describing liberal identity politics as Marxism, the right can simultaneously attack genuine socialism and discredit opposition to social inequality without confronting the actual Marxist critique of capitalism. The result is an ideological hall of mirrors in which representatives of a capitalist government define other defenders of capitalism as communists.

From the “end of history” to men with swords

The historical contrast could hardly be sharper. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, bourgeois ideologues proclaimed that the great ideological struggles of history had essentially concluded. Capitalist liberal democracy supposedly represented humanity’s final political horizon. The coming decades produced something very different. The United States launched successive wars while social inequality soared. The 2008 financial crash exposed the global financial system’s instability. Governments poured enormous resources into stabilising banks and financial markets. Political institutions increasingly lost popular legitimacy. Trade conflicts intensified alongside geopolitical confrontation.

The confident language of capitalist universalism steadily gave way to economic nationalism. Rubio’s speech belongs to this historical transition. The representative of American imperialism no longer promises a universally applicable order in which all nations will eventually converge upon liberal capitalism. Instead, he asserts America’s particular right to pursue its interests and condemns institutions that claim universal jurisdiction when they obstruct those interests. The ideological progression from the “end of history” to “stop quoting laws to men with swords” expresses a profound transformation in the position and psychology of the American ruling class. The first formula reflected triumphalism. The second reflects crisis.

The spectre behind the speech

Rubio delivered his remarks immediately after serious Republican reverses in the midterm elections. He responded by instructing the Federalist Society not to regard electoral defeat as decisive. He argued that genuine political power must be developed across institutions over decades. That argument confirms how seriously powerful sections of the American ruling class are approaching the coming period. Rubio’s rhetoric cannot be reduced to eccentric anti-communism.

His invocation of national destiny, his celebration of conquest, his hostility towards legal restraints upon American power, his identification of adversaries throughout universities and courts, and his appeal for organised institutional mobilisation form a coherent political outlook. It is an ideology suited to a ruling class confronting intensifying crisis. Unable to resolve deteriorating social conditions through reform, the capitalist oligarchy turns increasingly towards nationalism and the strengthening of executive authority. Unable to maintain unquestioned international dominance through economic supremacy alone, it resorts more openly to military power. Unable to explain capitalism’s contradictions, it searches for scapegoats and internal enemies. And unable finally to dispose of Marx, it announces that Marx is everywhere.

Rubio is nevertheless correct about one thing. The spirit of Marx lives. But it does not live where Rubio claims to find it. It does not reside in the International Criminal Court. It does not reside in United Nations bureaucracies. It does not reside in Democratic Party headquarters. It does not reside in corporate diversity programmes or fashionable departments of elite universities. Marxism lives because capitalism has reproduced on an enormously expanded scale the social contradictions that gave rise to Marxism in the first place. Its objective foundation is the international working class.

The global integration of capitalist production has created a working class that is larger and more internationally interconnected than at any previous period in history. Workers separated by enormous geographical distances participate in common chains of production and confront corporations whose activities transcend national boundaries.

Capitalism has thereby created the very social force that can replace it. But objective contradictions do not automatically produce socialist consciousness. Workers confronting declining living standards, austerity, unemployment, authoritarianism and war can be diverted behind nationalism, racial antagonisms, religious divisions and the competing factions of bourgeois politics. The decisive question is political leadership. The struggle against capitalism therefore requires building a consciously international socialist movement in the working class, assimilating the strategic lessons of the twentieth century and, above all, the struggle of Trotskyism against Stalinism and nationalism.

The alternative the capitalist crisis increasingly presents is not reform versus revolution, but socialism versus barbarism. Rubio’s address exposes something normally concealed beneath the ritual language of American politics. Beneath the denunciations of international bureaucrats stands the assertion of naked state power. Beneath the celebration of national sovereignty stands the defence of capitalist property. Beneath the invocation of national unity stands a society divided by irreconcilable class interests.

And beneath the attack on the “spirit of Marx” stands a ruling class deeply conscious that the social order it represents has failed to overcome the contradictions Marx identified more than a century and a half ago. Marx and Engels wrote in 1848 that Europe’s ruling powers had entered into a holy alliance against the spectre of communism. Every government denounced its opponents as communist while the defenders of the existing order united against the emerging political movement of the working class.

The names have changed. The institutions have changed. The world economy has developed on a scale Marx and Engels could scarcely have imagined. But the fundamental antagonism remains. Rubio’s speech therefore deserves to be remembered not simply for its crude anti-communism but for its extraordinary involuntary confession. Thirty-five years after the supposed death of socialism, the most powerful capitalist state on earth is still haunted by Marx. The spectre has not disappeared. The task is to give it conscious political form.

Bibliography and further reading

Primary sources

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

Rubio, Marco. “Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Federalist Society’s 2026 National Lawyers Convention.” US Department of State, Washington, DC, 13 November 2026.

Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? 1936.

Trotsky, Leon. The Transitional Program: The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International. 1938.

Marx, capitalism and the world economy

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I. 1867.

Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 1852.

Lenin, V. I. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. 1916.

Lenin, V. I. The State and Revolution. 1917.

Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution. 1930.

Stalinism and the Soviet Union

Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed. 1936.

Trotsky, Leon. In Defence of Marxism. 1942.

North, David. The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International. Labour Publications, 1988.

American capitalism, imperialism and political reaction

Beard, Charles A. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. Macmillan, 1913.

Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. Harper & Row, 1980.

Williams, William Appleman. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. 1959.

Contemporary source material

US Department of State. Transcript of Marco Rubio’s address to the Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention, 13 November 2026.

Reuters. “Rubio assails international court in speech to conservative legal group.” 14 November 2026.

Federalist Society. Materials relating to the 2026 National Lawyers Convention, Washington, DC.

A walking guide recovers two centuries of struggle in the capital, yet it fails to provide readers with the political lessons that these struggles were intended to convey.

Ninety years on from the Battle of Cable Street, the debate about London’s radical past is far from academic. In a city currently marked by such extreme social inequality, by the crisis of housing affordability, by the decline of public services and by the re-emergence of a kind of nationalism and anti-migrant politics, the history of those who had fought against poverty, exploitation, political repression and fascism is very much with us.

This is what makes the third edition of David Rosenberg’s Rebel Footprints a particularly valuable contribution. It is neither a conventional history of London nor merely a guidebook. Rather, it offers a political geography of the city, built from the author’s own walks, connecting streets and buildings to the movements that occurred there. Pluto Press describes the revised edition as guiding the reader from well-known to lesser-known sites associated with struggles from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. The third edition substantially revises the book, now comprising eleven main chapters. The Russian Revolution and the East End, Hackney, and radical Soho all receive new or reorganised treatment. The volume concludes with an epilogue on the Brick Lane struggles of the 1970s, and Michael Rosen provides the foreword.

The enterprise is immense. Rosenberg brings workers, immigrants, women, political exiles, anti-fascists, and socialist organisers back into the picture in a way they have largely been absent. The significance of the history he recovers makes the shortcomings of his political approach all the more glaring. Rebel Footprints is absolutely full of the notion that history is made through struggle. It simply doesn’t come to terms with the question of why movements of such immense courage and such broad popular support ended up with such limited political outcomes, why they were defeated or why they were absorbed into institutions which were themselves committed to the defence of the social order against which those movements had been directed. The central issue is therefore a question of political perspective. It is a history of rebellion, but not a history of the working class’s struggle for revolutionary leadership.

A rebellious city

The underlying concept of Rebel Footprints is absolutely effective. The streets we normally see as routes between railway stations, offices, shops, and houses are reconfigured as physical evidence of political struggle. London stops being the endless accumulation of palaces, monuments and institutions of the state as presented to us by the tourist industry. It becomes a landscape of contestation.

The 2026 edition begins with “Trailblazers for Democracy in Fleet Street and Clerkenwell”, followed by “Sparks of Rebellion in Bow and Whitechapel”. It then explores “The Russian Revolution and London’s East End”, “No Gods, No Masters: Radical Bloomsbury”, “Hackney’s Buried Histories” and the struggle for housing in Bethnal Green and Shoreditch. Subsequent chapters move south and west through Battersea and Soho, then head east again to Poplar, Bermondsey, and, finally, Cable Street and Long Lane. The historical itinerary continues beyond the main chapters with the epilogue, “Battleground Brick Lane 1970s”.

In my view, this is one of Rosenberg’s real masterpieces. The geographical structure prevents radical history from being boiled down to the life stories of a few famous people. Political movements get a locality. They had meeting houses, workshops, factories, tenements and streets. Rosenberg has been running London social and political history walks since 2008. When talking about the genesis of the project, he has been very clear about the influence of Bill Fishman, the historian who believed you could understand history in a very real way, not just through the lecture hall but by walking through the very places where it happened. That is a very democratic approach. It’s a way of confronting the monumental history of the city that the ruling class has always presented as its own.

History against official London

This is where Rebel Footprints is at its very best. London’s history is increasingly being presented through the lens of heritage, tourism and property. The working people who actually built the city are only there in passing. Rosenberg flips the script completely. The centre of historical interest moves from Westminster, the monarchy and the City to the political activity of the very people who are normally invisible. The book is designed to get you to look at the apparently mundane and ask a very different set of questions: who lived here, who worked here, who organised here and what struggles took place here?

That approach has real power in a city which is constantly being reshaped by property speculation. Working-class areas get redeveloped and repackaged, and their social history is often turned into marketable ‘heritage’. Rosenberg’s approach is the other way around. The city itself becomes the archive. The history is also inherently international. London was not just the British capital. All over the world, industrialisation, empire and political repression have brought workers, refugees and political exiles into the city. Radical London was never a purely English phenomenon.

History is of course particularly pertinent when migrants are once again being presented as the cause of social problems they didn’t create. The history of workers breaking down national, ethnic, and religious barriers points overwhelmingly to a class explanation of inequality. The very notion of internationalism in the labour movement is, however, problematic, and Rebel Footprints doesn’t address it adequately. London was both the epicentre of working-class resistance and the capital of the world’s largest empire. The relationship between those two realities is fundamental to understanding British labour history.

The Russian Revolution comes to the East End

One of the most significant additions in the 2026 edition is a whole chapter on ‘The Russian Revolution and London’s East End’. That massively broadens the political canvas. The Russian Revolution can’t just be tacked on as part of the general tradition of London radicalism. October 1917 was a moment of total rupture. For the first time, the working class, under Marxist leadership, took state power and began reconstructing society on a socialist basis. That in itself was a moment of international political significance, and Britain was no different.

The importance of the Russian Revolution to the British working class cannot be confined to inspiration, solidarity, and radical culture. It sparked a major debate about revolutionary organisation, reformism, and the working class’s political independence. That debate had a very real and tangible effect on the British labour movement. This is where the distinction between radical history and Marxist history becomes so important. Radicalism is such a broad term that it can cover everything from democrats to anarchists, pacifists, syndicalists, feminists, trade unionists, Labour reformists, communists, and revolutionary Marxists. What these different tendencies had in common was that they all provided diametrically opposed answers to the fundamental questions of state, capitalism, imperialism and political leadership. To absorb them into a single category of ‘radicalism’ and celebrate them as such risks erasing the very disagreements that ultimately shaped history.

The Labour Party as the destination of struggle

This is clearest where the histories of local revolt intersect with the growth of Labourism. You can see it in many of the people you met in Rosenberg’s London who went from militant working-class politics to parliamentary Labourism. It wasn’t just a series of individual biographies. It was a fundamental process in shaping the British labour movement.

The key historical question, of course, is why. The reformist interpretation is that the Labour Party, the recognition of trade unions, municipal reform, and ultimately the post-war welfare state were simply the institutionalisation of the popular struggles of the 19th century. In that view, the rebels of the 19th century are the forerunners of 20th century social democracy.

A Marxist account has to put the issue in a different light. Reform and revolution were alternative approaches to the problem, stemming from different conceptions of the capitalist state. The point is that reform in itself doesn’t alter the capitalist relations of property or the nature of state power. The 20th century has shown time and again that reforms won under pressure from the working class can be taken away when the balance of class forces has shifted. British working-class radicalism therefore cannot be thought of as having reached its logical conclusion in the Labour Party. Labourism itself has to be a subject of historical analysis.

Poplar and the limits of municipal socialism

The Poplar struggle is the textbook example. The willingness of the councillors to go to jail rather than impose such onerous burdens on the poor working people was absolutely a landmark moment in London labour history. It was a demonstration of what could happen when a body of elected representatives was under the pressure of a mobilised working class. Poplar also, of course, highlights the limits of municipal politics. Municipal socialism can redistribute resources within the boundaries of the national state. It cannot abolish the capitalist social relations that are the very source of inequality.

This is particularly pertinent to George Lansbury. You can’t understand his political evolution in terms of sheer personal courage or moral commitment alone. You have to see it as part of the evolution of Labourism. Trotsky’s Where Is Britain Going? (1925) is still absolutely essential precisely because it looked at the contradictions of British reformism at a time of intensifying class struggle. Trotsky argued that the apparent gradualism and peacefulness of British politics masked deep-seated class antagonisms. That argument is not confined to Lansbury. Workers could be extremely militant within organisations which were formally and in practice nationally reformist. That contradiction is the thread which runs through much of the history Rosenberg reconstructs.

Battersea and the politics of accommodation

The Battersea section is another example of the book’s strength in that it doesn’t present a one-dimensional political picture. It’s very much a geographical chapter in which south London is not some marginal area to the more ‘familiar’ revolutionary history of the East End. Of course, you have the same thing with individuals who start out in working-class and socialist movements and then go on to become quite accommodative of the existing order. Those shifts too can’t be explained by biography alone. They resulted from very specific historical and material conditions. The strength of British capitalism, the huge amount of capital accumulated through empire, the power of the parliamentary system and the development of a privileged trade union bureaucracy all exerted a pressure on the labour movement.

That’s why London’s history is inextricably bound up with Britain’s position as an imperial power. The same city which was home to such profound levels of poverty was the administrative and financial heart of the empire. The fact that such extreme poverty coexisted with the metropolis’s immense wealth was a direct consequence of the international structure of British capitalism. You simply can’t make sense of the particular vigour of British reformism without placing imperialism at the very centre of the analysis rather than at the margins.

Cable Street: heroism and political mythology

The chapter on Cable Street remains inevitably one of the most powerful parts of this historical landscape. The Battle of Cable Street on 4 October 1936 belongs to the collective memory of London’s working class because Jewish, Irish and other workers mobilised against Oswald Mosley’s fascist movement and attempts to march through the East End.

There is every reason to defend this memory. But Cable Street must also be rescued from mythology. The question is not whether Communist Party members and supporters fought courageously. Many unquestionably did. The historical problem is the politics of Stalinism and the Popular Front. By 1936 the Communist International had abandoned the revolutionary internationalism associated with the October Revolution. The Popular Front subordinated the independent political movement of workers to alliances with supposedly democratic sections of the bourgeoisie.

This was not an abstract dispute occurring somewhere outside the history Rosenberg describes. At precisely the time British workers confronted fascists in London, the Spanish Revolution posed questions of state power, revolution, and counter-revolution with immense urgency. Any account that commemorates anti-fascist militancy while treating the Popular Front primarily as a strategy of broad democratic unity misses the fundamental political issue. Courage cannot substitute for programme. Indeed, that is one of the central lessons running through twentieth-century history: workers repeatedly demonstrated immense courage while being led by organisations whose political strategy subordinated them to forces protecting capitalist property and state power.

What is missing: Trotskyism

The absence of sustained engagement with the Trotskyist movement consequently becomes more conspicuous as the historical narrative approaches the 1930s. Trotskyism was not simply another radical current competing beside anarchism, Labourism, feminism or Stalinism. The Left Opposition, and later the Fourth International, arose from the struggle against the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union and Stalinism’s abandonment of socialist internationalism. This had direct implications for every major political question in the latter part of Rosenberg’s book: fascism, the German catastrophe of 1933, the Popular Front, the Spanish Revolution, imperialism, and the approach of another world war.

One need not convert a London walking guide into a history of the Fourth International. But once a book seeks not simply to identify places but to explain radical political traditions, suppressing or marginalising conflicts over revolutionary programme becomes consequential. Without those conflicts, Stalinism risks appearing as merely another component of the broader radical tradition. It was far more historically significant than that.

Brick Lane and the extension beyond 1939

The addition of“Battleground Brick Lane 1970s” is therefore particularly interesting. It breaks the earlier tendency for Rosenberg’s narrative to terminate around the Second World War and carries the geography of struggle into London’s later history. That is a valuable development because migration changed but did not end the political character of the East End. The location that had earlier witnessed the organisation of Jewish immigrant workers became associated with later struggles involving newer migrant communities.

Placing those experiences within the same geographical landscape carries considerable historical power. The danger, however, remains that the concept of radical continuity replaces political differentiation. Successive populations certainly confronted discrimination and racist mobilisation. But the organisations, programmes and international political conditions within which they fought changed profoundly. Continuity of struggle should not be confused with continuity of politics.

Rosenberg and Corbynism

The project’s political standpoint becomes particularly apparent in Rosenberg’s own retrospective account of the book’s history. Writing about the third edition in November 2026, Rosenberg recalled that Jeremy Corbyn was one of the speakers at the launch of the original edition in 2015. He describes Corbyn’s subsequent entry into the Labour leadership contest as heralding “one of the most exciting and hopeful periods in Labour’s post-war history” and notes that enthusiasm for earlier radicals increased when Corbyn became Labour leader, with what Rosenberg calls a “solid mandate for radical change”.

This is politically revealing. Corbynism represented an attempt to channel the widespread opposition created by years of austerity back through the Labour Party. Its essential proposition was that Labour could be reclaimed and transformed through mass membership and pressure from below. The fate of this project cannot be treated as external to the political lessons of Rebel Footprints. If history is invoked to demonstrate what mobilisation can accomplish, it is equally necessary to examine what happens when mobilisation remains politically imprisoned within organisations defending the existing state. The critical historical issue is therefore not simply that movements need courage, organisation or pressure from below. British labour history has all three. The issue is political independence.

History from below and the problem of leadership

The book shares many strengths with the tradition usually described as history from below. It turns attention away from monarchs, prime ministers and generals and towards people whose experiences were routinely excluded from official history. That intellectual achievement should not be diminished. But there is a danger in transforming history from below into history only from below.

The working class does not make history under circumstances of its own choosing. Spontaneous struggle does not automatically provide the political programme needed to overcome capitalism. Workers encounter existing parties, trade unions, bureaucracies and ideologies. Different tendencies struggle consciously for leadership. Consequently, leadership is itself a historical question. Why did revolutionary opportunities end in defeat? Why did reformist organisations acquire authority? Why did Communist parties that originated under the impact of October become defenders of Stalinism? Why did organisations created by workers come to police workers’ struggles? These questions cannot be answered simply by reconstructing mobilisation, however sympathetically or vividly. The working class requires historical memory, but memory without political analysis can become commemoration.

The continuing value of Rebel Footprints

None of this diminishes the usefulness of Rosenberg’s achievement. The fact that the third edition exists at all indicates the continuing appetite for histories different from those supplied by official heritage culture. A contemporary favourable assessment describes the walks as a form of public “history from below” that makes the histories of ordinary people accessible through the city itself. Readers should use the book exactly in that spirit.

Walk Fleet Street and Clerkenwell. Walk Bow and Whitechapel. Walk Bloomsbury, Hackney, Battersea, Soho, Poplar, Bermondsey, Cable Street and Brick Lane. Look behind the expensive apartments, redeveloped warehouses and commercial façades. Recover the city inhabited by generations who refused to accept the conditions imposed upon them. But then ask the questions that the landscape itself cannot answer. Why were their victories limited? Why were reforms reversed? Why did organisations built through working-class sacrifice accommodate themselves to capitalism? Why did socialist internationalism come into conflict with Labourism and Stalinism? And why, after two centuries of struggle, does extraordinary private wealth continue to exist beside deprivation in one of the richest cities on earth? Those questions lead beyond the politics of radical remembrance.

Which footprints should be followed?

This is ultimately the contradiction at the heart of the third edition of Rebel Footprints. Rosenberg has produced something genuinely valuable: a counter-map of London. It is a city populated not simply by kings, financiers, property owners and politicians, but by workers, immigrants, women, socialists, democrats and anti-fascists. It reminds the reader that rights presented retrospectively as natural stages in Britain’s peaceful democratic development were secured through bitter struggles.

Yet history provides more than inspiration. It provides warnings. The working class’s greatest defeats did not occur because workers failed to struggle. Frequently they struggled heroically. Defeat resulted when courage and militancy were subordinated to political programmes incapable of challenging capitalist power. That is why revolutionary history cannot finally be reduced to a collection of inspiring rebellions.

London’s radical past contains competing political traditions, not a single progressive inheritance. Chartism, anarchism, parliamentary Labourism, Stalinism and revolutionary Marxism cannot simply be placed together beneath the heading of rebellion. Their differences concerned the most fundamental question of all: which class should hold political power?

In 2026 that question is far from historical. The physical London Rosenberg guides us through has changed drastically. But the social antagonism that produced earlier struggles has not disappeared. Enormous private fortunes coexist with workers struggling with housing and living costs. Migrants are again made scapegoats for crises they did not create. Nationalism is used to divide workers whose interests cross borders.

Rebel Footprints helps recover the memory of those who resisted previous manifestations of these forces. Its limitation is that memory is continually allowed to stand where political explanation is required. Readers should nevertheless take the book onto the streets. Walk the routes. Find the halls, estates, factories, meeting places and battlegrounds. Remember the matchwomen, Chartists, immigrant workers, suffragettes, tenants, socialists and anti-fascists. But their greatest legacy is not the proposition that protest eventually persuades society to become more progressive.

It is that every serious advance of the working class was secured through struggle against entrenched interests, while the decisive question remained the political programme under which that struggle was conducted. The footprints therefore point somewhere Rosenberg does not finally go. They point from protest towards the problem of political power, from radicalism towards socialism, and from the recovery of working-class history towards the necessity of revolutionary and internationalist leadership.

Bibliography

Book under review

Rosenberg, David. Rebel Footprints: A Guide to Uncovering London’s Radical History. 3rd ed. Foreword by Michael Rosen. London: Pluto Press, 2026. 416 pp. ISBN 9780745351810. [plutobooks.com], [amazon.co.uk]

Earlier editions and related work

Rosenberg, David. Rebel Footprints: A Guide to Uncovering London’s Radical History. London: Pluto Press, 2015.

Rosenberg, David. Rebel Footprints: A Guide to Uncovering London’s Radical History. 2nd ed. Foreword by Ash Sarkar. London: Pluto Press, 2019.

Rosenberg, David. Battle for the East End: Jewish Responses to Fascism in the 1930s. Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2011.

Further reading

Branson, Noreen. Poplarism, 1919–1925: George Lansbury and the Councillors’ Revolt. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979.

Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845.

Fishman, William J. East End Jewish Radicals, 1875–1914. London: Duckworth, 1975.

Lenin, V. I. “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder. 1920.

Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. The Suffragette Movement. London: Longmans, 1931.

Piratin, Phil. Our Flag Stays Red. London: Thames Publications, 1948.

Rocker, Rudolf. The London Years. London: Robert Anscombe, 1956.

Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz, 1963.

Trotsky, Leon. Where Is Britain Going? 1925.

Trotsky, Leon. The Spanish Revolution (1931–39). New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973.