Pip: The 2026 Booker Prize has gone to a dystopian novel about a society collapsing under forces nobody can name or explain — which, depending on your perspective, is either a mirror held up to our moment or a very expensive shrug.
Mara: freerein61 takes that question seriously in a long, careful piece on M. John Harrison's The End of Everything — covering the novel itself, its Booker reception, and what the cultural establishment's enthusiasm actually reveals.
Pip: Let's start with the book, the prize, and the problem at the heart of both.
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Booker 2026: Catastrophe Without a Cause
Mara: The frame here is a tension between what The End of Everything does well and what it refuses to do: Harrison renders social disintegration with real force, but the post asks whether that rendering ultimately illuminates the crisis or mystifies it further.
Pip: The setup matters. Harrison's protagonist is a beachcomber on a ruined English coast, picking through wreckage from the Channel — and the post reads that image straight, as genuinely resonant social realism before anything else lands.
Mara: Right, and the post quotes Mary Beard, who chaired the judges, on exactly this point: "when the catastrophe comes you won't know what's happening."
Pip: Which is either a description of the novel's world or an accidental mission statement for the prize committee — but the post is more precise than that.
Mara: It is. The argument is that not knowing becomes something different from unknowability. The post draws a sharp line: "We don't understand what is going on is a perfectly legitimate starting point for serious art. What is going on cannot be understood is a different proposition and one which can easily become an excuse for helplessness."
Pip: So the issue isn't darkness or ambiguity — it's whether the opacity is a method or a conclusion.
Mara: Exactly. The post traces Harrison's roots in the British New Wave around Michael Moorcock's New Worlds, where scepticism about tidy explanations was genuinely subversive. The argument is that the same aesthetic, in a different historical moment, tips from challenging false certainty into doubting whether certainty is possible at all.
Pip: And the Booker establishment, the post suggests, is perfectly comfortable with that second move.
Mara: Very much so. The post puts it plainly: the cultural establishment can embrace apocalypse so long as it stays ambiguous or intractable. A politically transparent catastrophe — one with identifiable causes and social agents — is what the prize culture cannot absorb.
Mara: What's missing, the post concludes, isn't optimism in any sentimental sense. It's agency — the weight of the social force that could actually push back.
Pip: The beachcomber trawls through wreckage he can't explain. The task, the post argues, is to make the incomprehensible comprehensible — not to enshrine the incomprehension.
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Pip: So the real question the post leaves open isn't whether Harrison is a good writer — the piece is clear he is — but whether serious art can stop at bewilderment.
Mara: And whether the prizes that celebrate that bewilderment are telling us something about the limits of the culture handing them out.
This year’s Booker Prize winner, a dystopian satire by an 81-year-old veteran of the British sci-fi scene, has been described as a breakthrough. The book is a potent rendering of our time’s crisis, but the reader is left with a catastrophe whose cause we can never quite know.
On 9 November, M. John Harrison was awarded the 2026 Booker Prize and its £50k for The End of Everything (his 13th novel). At 81, he is the oldest winner in the prize’s history. The judges (chairing Mary Beard) were unanimous in their decision. The Booker Prize Foundation described the award as historic, with its CEO noting that Harrison was the first winner to come out of the ‘bona fide SF world’.
The response has been absolutely ecstatic. The press have been all over the place, highlighting just how much the novel’s sense of apocalypse and doom mirrors our current anxieties. That’s not in any doubt. The more pertinent question is what the novel and the literary establishment that have anointed it actually do with those anxieties. Does it give us any insight into the forces pushing society toward disaster? Or does it merely present those forces as mysterious and intractable, beyond human understanding? Harrison is a very good and serious writer, and the award is in no way unexpected in literary terms. The way the award has been celebrated in relation to The End of Everything, however, tells us something about the prevailing attitude of the cultural establishment that hands out these awards.
A beachcomber on a ruined coast
The End of Everything is set in near-future England where the social order has been completely upended by some unspecified crisis. The state is effectively non-existent, Europe is out of sight, and the iGhetti (mysterious entities) are now involved in human affairs. At the heart of it all is Phillip Tennent, a beachcomber living on the coast with his elderly artist aunt Marnie. He makes a living picking up the oddities that turn up from the Channel. His discovery of a thing that is changing, that is in fact a living thing, and that starts to speak, is what sets the novel in motion. It’s something that grows and, in the end, completely undermines the characters’ belief that the world around them can be understood rationally.
Harrison’s setting is eastern and southeast England, from Hastings down to the Thames and into Suffolk. More significantly, he said the themes and satire came from ‘current affairs’. The official Booker description captures the essence of his central inquiry: what happens when the very fabric of the established order and the explanations we have for the world are in a state of ‘ongoing disaster’, and yet we have to go on living in it?
The link to contemporary Britain is very obvious. You’ve got a man literally trawling through the wreckage of a world he doesn’t really understand, looking for things to sell. That’s a potent image of life in a society which is in a state of insecurity and decline. That’s where the book’s real subject starts to emerge. Harrison has also pointed to the 2008 financial crisis as the novel’s genesis. That’s significant. The book isn’t simply the product of some eternal fascination with the end of the world. Its creative origins are in one of the most pivotal convulsions of contemporary capitalism.
Catastrophe without causes
The 2008 crisis was the catalyst, but Harrison’s imagined method goes far beyond that. The crisis wasn’t a natural disaster or an alien invasion. It was the outcome of specific economic and social relations: the enormous expansion of financial speculation, the huge build-up of private wealth and private debt and a social order in which the economy is subordinated to the imperative of profit. The austerity then imposed on working people was, of course, also the product of political decisions and class interests.
In The End of Everything, the catastrophe is, in fact, very opaque. The Booker Foundation describes it as an adventure “into the very limits of human understanding” and the nature of the crisis is deliberately obscure. The characters are in no position to really understand what is going on around them. That obscurity is absolutely central to Harrison’s conception of the book. Mary Beard told the press that it’s a story of a society “going through a catastrophe which they don’t really understand”. Even more telling in terms of Harrison’s view of the book, she said the point was that “when the catastrophe comes you won’t know what’s happening”.
Here is the book’s central problem: what starts off as a reaction to the breakdown of historical relations becomes a meditation on the impossibility of ever really understanding that breakdown. Historical relations (with their causes, their beneficiaries and their opponents) become an overwhelming, incomprehensible force which simply crushes the individual. That’s not something particular to Harrison. It’s a commonplace in contemporary literature and film. Ecological collapse, pandemic, technological disruption, war and social disintegration all come back as fate, as an inexplicable eruption, as the inevitable outcome of humanity’s supposed universal tendency to bring about disaster. It’s far rarer for them to be presented as the product of historically developed social relations, which could therefore be understood and changed.
Some people have actually suggested that the iGhetti is AI. Others have suggested it’s a commentary on capitalism, others on Brexit or climate change. Harrison himself is very deliberately non-committal on the matter. If we take the AI interpretation, that highlights the point. AI isn’t some autonomous intelligence that just turns up on an English beach. It’s a technology developed within a particular economic system and overwhelmingly held by big corporations and states. The real questions then aren’t so much what AI might become as who owns and controls it, how it’s used and what social interests it serves.
Turning technology into an enigmatic guest whose ultimate purpose is utterly incomprehensible risks reproducing exactly the ideological veneer it needs to get through. Satire needs more than atmosphere; it needs an object. Harrison’s objects are often rather obscure: the natural human desire for explanation, the persistence of the normal in the face of disaster, commercial opportunism and the sheer absurdity of trying to apply the familiar categories to a situation that has been utterly transformed. Those are all legitimate and potentially very rich objects of satire. The social relations which produce the catastrophe, however, tend to get lost behind them.
From the New Wave to the prize ceremony
Harrison’s career absolutely merits serious attention precisely because The End of Everything didn’t just appear out of the blue. It grew out of the very atmosphere of the New Worlds period, the seminal British SF magazine of the day (the one linked to Michael Moorcock). Harrison was at the heart of the British New Wave, and he was part of the movement that sought to shake up the genre and its inherited assumptions. His subsequent work (the Viriconium books, Light, Nova Swing, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, etc.) developed a particular prose style and a pronounced scepticism about any kind of neat explanation. The Booker material makes it clear he was never going to be comfortably pigeonholed. That scepticism was once genuinely subversive. It rejected the technocratic fantasy of mastery as much as it rejected the comfortable assumptions of much traditional genre fiction. His refusal to construct a fully and neatly rationalised universe assailed complacency.
But of course this aesthetic has its other side. As the political radicalism of the 1960s faded out in the 1970s and 1980s, so did a large section of the intellectual and artistic world move away from the attempt to understand society as a historical totality. The scepticism about false certainty gave way to scepticism about the very possibility of objective historical knowledge. Postmodernism provided the theoretical language for this withdrawal, with its scepticism about ‘grand narratives’ (Marxism and the various socialist narratives of historical development being the most obvious).
Harrison cannot simply be reduced to this tendency. His writing is too individual, and his intellectual formation too complex, for such a crude identification. But The End of Everything shares something of this wider historical path: what begins as hostility towards simplistic explanations ends perilously close to treating explanation itself as impossible. At the post-award press conference, Harrison celebrated the erosion of genre limits. He argued that the epoch of genres understood as “fences and boxes, pigeonholes” was ending, and that a contemporary novel could combine several genres simultaneously. Much is to be welcomed in the destruction of snobbish barriers between “literary” and genre fiction. However, formal hybridity is not in itself an artistic breakthrough. A novel may contain a thriller, mystery, satire, dystopia, road novel and realism simultaneously and still evade the most important questions raised by its subject. The decisive issue in art is not how many forms a work can combine, but how deeply and truthfully it penetrates reality.
Sugar, venture capital and “dynamite”
The Booker Prize has never existed in a vacuum. It’s a product of history and society. Literary prizes don’t just drop down from the sky to pass some kind of value-free judgement. They are institutions in their own right, products of a particular economic and intellectual milieu. That makes Harrison’s reception so fascinating. After all those decades on the periphery of British speculative fiction, he’s finally been welcomed into one of the country’s most august literary institutions. That is, of course, a reflection of his actual achievements, but it’s also a sign of the death of the old divide between ‘serious literature and science fiction.
Yet the Booker set are very much in sympathy with The End of Everything’s vision of apocalypse. It’s a world in which the normal structures have all gone to hell, the future is terrifying, and nobody has the foggiest idea what’s actually happened. Mary Beard put it quite clearly as ‘the politics of now seen through the lens of the future’.
But what about politics? Contemporary official culture is absolutely fluent in the language of catastrophe. Catastrophe is in fact one of its key moods. Climate collapse, authoritarianism, technological dislocation, pandemics, war and the prospect of total societal breakdown are all part of the contemporary cultural landscape. What is largely absent from this is the notion that these disparate crises have identifiable social roots and that working people can consciously shape history.
The cultural establishment can therefore fully embrace the image of apocalypse so long as the apocalypse is in some way ambiguous, existential or intractable. It can be disturbing, it can be grotesque, it can be surreal, it can be ironic and it can be utterly radical in its aesthetic. The only thing it absolutely cannot be is a politically transparent apocalypse. In that respect Harrison’s novel is absolutely the book of its moment.
A “twinge of optimism”?
In announcing the judges’ decision Mary Beard did say that the book, in spite of its very dark subject matter, leaves you with a ‘twinge of optimism’. Harrison has been considerably more cautious on the subject. When asked what he hoped readers would take from the novel he described the world of the book as very grim and very likely to stay that way. The most you could possibly say at the end of the day is that there might be a kind of ‘relief’ rather than any hope or sense of closure.
The point is rather telling, really. What survives the end of everything in The End of Everything is the sheer persistence of human relationships and the sheer fact of people trying to go on when the inherited explanations are no longer going to cut it. That should not be ignored. Human solidarity in the face of social collapse is a valid subject for an artist, and Harrison’s emphasis on the persistence of the ordinary amid all that is going on is clearly one of the book’s major strengths.
But such solidarity remains fundamentally private and defensive. People “muddle through” as Beard puts it. They’re just trying to get on with the business of living in the face of immense forces utterly beyond comprehension. Muddling through is not the same as historical agency and that’s precisely where a materialist criticism has to go further than both Harrison and his Booker contemporaries. The crisis of our time has produced confusion, fear and reaction. It has also produced opposition. Workers, youth and other sections of the population have not simply been the passive victims of history. They have on numerous occasions attempted to resist the worsening of their living conditions, the effects of austerity, inequality, the rise of authoritarianism and war.
What’s missing from so much of the contemporary dystopian art is not necessarily an ounce of optimism (in the sentimental sense) but agency. Harrison’s novel is very attuned to the experience of social disintegration. What it can’t really convey is the sheer weight of the social force which could in fact overcome it. That’s probably why the book has been so warmly received. You can be absolutely convinced that civilisation is in crisis and yet remain profoundly pessimistic about humanity’s capacity to rebuild it on its own. That mixture of deep anxiety and political paralysis is in fact the hallmark of much of the contemporary bourgeois cultural life.
The End of Everything is in fact more interesting than either unqualified triumph or wholesale rejection would suggest. Its strengths point to a contradiction. Harrison is absolutely right to see something real in the picture: the social landscape in a state of exhaustion, the erosion of the old assumptions, the odd persistence of the everyday in the face of disaster, and the experience of the individual who increasingly feels the forces of economic, technological and political change as something which is simply happening to them from outside. The beachcomber trawling through the wreckage is an image which has real social resonance.
But art has to go beyond the surface of things. The fundamental flaw in Harrison’s conception is that the mystification his characters go through might well become the very principle that organises the work. Their sense of being mystified by the forces that shape their lives becomes the very assertion that those forces are in fact unknowable. That’s a very different route from the Marxist conception of art and history. Capitalist society is mysterious precisely because the relations between people take the form of relations between commodities, markets, corporations and all the various autonomous technological forces. The point is not to fetishise that mystery; it’s to get through it.
The difference is absolutely decisive. “We don’t understand what is going on” is a perfectly legitimate starting point for serious art. “What is going on cannot be understood” is a different proposition and one which can easily become an excuse for helplessness. The End of Everything is intelligent, disturbing and clearly takes the bewildered state of life in a society whose institutions and assumptions are clearly on the way out very seriously. Its refusal to offer any easy consolation is a real strength. Harrison’s achievement absolutely merits serious attention rather than being ignored simply because of the acclaim it has received.
But its dominant conception fits perfectly with the view of a cultural establishment that sees catastrophe in every direction and yet sees no social force capable of surmounting it. What we need is not an artificially optimistic literature, still less a literature of political propaganda in the form of novels. Art has its own laws and will reveal truths which are beyond the reach of slogans. The greatest art is art which sees beneath the immediate surface the deeper movement of human relationships and of historical life.
The real challenge facing contemporary literature is therefore bigger than just imagining the end of the world. It’s about making the utterly incomprehensible comprehensible, uncovering the human relations beneath apparently autonomous forces, and restoring the human being to history as more than a frightened spectator of their own destruction. The task of coming to terms with “the end of everything” is inextricably linked to the task of preventing it.
Bibliography
Primary text and works by Harrison
Harrison, M. John. The End of Everything. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2026.
Harrison, M. John. Light. London: Gollancz, 2002.
Harrison, M. John. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again. London: Gollancz, 2020.
Harrison, M. John. Viriconium. London: Gollancz, 2000.
Contemporary sources
The Booker Prizes. “Everything you need to know about The End of Everything by M. John Harrison, winner of the Booker Prize 2026.” 9 November 2026. [thebookerprizes.com]
The Booker Prizes. “The End of Everything: Winner of the Booker Prize 2026.” [thebookerprizes.com]
Loffhagen, Emma. “M John Harrison becomes first science fiction author to win the Booker prize.” The Guardian, 9 November 2026. [theguardian.com]
Jordan, Justine. “M John Harrison’s Booker prize-winner is weird, challenging and strikingly topical.” The Guardian, 9 November 2026. [theguardian.com]
Story, Hannah. “M John Harrison wins 2026 Booker Prize for dystopian novel The End of Everything.” ABC News, 10 November 2026. [abc.net.au]
Criticism and theory
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984.
North, David. The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left. Oak Park, MI: Mehring Books, 2015.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. 1924. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005.
“The Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the class struggle.”Eugene V. Debs, The Socialist Party and the Working Class (1904).
“Should America go communist as a result of the difficulties and problems that your capitalist social order is unable to solve, it will discover that communism, far from being an intolerable bureaucratic tyranny and individual regimentation, will be the means of greater individual liberty and shared abundance.” Leon Trotsky, If America Should Go Communist (1934). [marxists.org]
The economic prerequisites for the socialist revolution are fully matured in the US. The political premises are likewise far more advanced than might appear on the surface.” James P. Cannon, Theses on the American Revolution.
“The Ninth Congress of the Socialist Equality Party convenes at a critical turning point in the political history of the United States and the world—the point of intersection of war, economic crisis, and rapidly growing social radicalization.”
David North, An assessment of the decade of socialist revolution and the tasks of the Socialist Equality Party, 11 August 2026. [wsws.org]
The New Yorker asks whether American socialism can survive its success. The real question is whether the working class can free itself from the Democratic Party, and from those who call themselves socialists to keep it there.
One week after the 2026 midterm elections, The New Yorker published an essay by Harvard historian Jill Lepore titled “Can American Socialism Survive Its Success?” Its subtitle states the thesis plainly: the American movement has often watched its ideas flourish while its organisations withered, and the question now is whether today’s resurgence will go the same way.
The framing is revealing, both for what it assumes and for what it leaves out. For the liberal establishment, the problem of socialism is one of institutional durability: membership rolls, mailing lists, and electoral machinery. Socialism is treated as a set of popular “ideas”, free buses, rent freezes and childcare, that drift into the mainstream, while the organisations that carried them fade away. This is presented as a tragic but natural cycle of American political life.
Marxists reject this framework from the outset. Socialism is not a menu of reforms that a capitalist party may or may not adopt. It is the programme for the working class to seize political power and reorganisation of economic life based on social need, not private profit. By that standard, the “success” The New Yorker invites its readers to contemplate is nothing of the kind.
Whose success?
The Nov. 3 midterms trigger the piece. Six candidates backed by the DSA have taken House seats, bringing the total number of self-described democratic socialists in Congress to eight (per CNBC). Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York; Katie Wilson is the mayor of Seattle. Current Affairs has called it ‘Socialism’s Moment’.
But all of these candidates ran as Democrats on the Democratic line, and all of them will be in a Democratic caucus. CNBC’s own report points out that the sheer size of the Democratic majority will severely limit the leverage any of them can exert. In other words, the ‘socialist’ wave has delivered its votes to a party of Wall Street, the military/intelligence complex and the war machine. This party has never been an independent vehicle for the working class’s political interests.
The same report actually makes a more telling point. DSA leaders claim they are having greater success with donors, including wealthy ones, as the organisation continues building its infrastructure ahead of 2028. That is the real measure of the “success” they are celebrating. It is not the growth of working-class consciousness or independent working-class organisation, but the successful integration of a middle-class political layer into the machinery of bourgeois politics.
The same exit poll found that 70% of voters feel the economic system is rigged in favour of the rich. That’s the actual state of play: a very real and growing antagonism towards capitalism exists among tens of millions of workers. The key question is what political outlook and what organisation will give that antagonism a form of conscious expression? DSA’s answer, ‘just vote Democrat,’ is designed to ensure that it never takes on an independent political form.
What really destroyed the organisations
The idea that socialist organisations in America ‘died out’ while their ideas survived is a complete liberal myth. It’s a myth which conveniently ignores the real political reasons for their demise. The SP of Eugene Debs, which pulled in nearly a million votes in 1912, wasn’t just dissolved by some inescapable law of American exceptionalism. It was crushed by state repression. Debs went to prison for anti-war activities. The Espionage and Sedition Acts were the tools of repression used against the anti-war movement, and the Palmer Raids and mass deportations came in the postwar period. Meanwhile, the SP was being torn apart by the impact of the Russian Revolution and the internal struggle between its revolutionary and reformist elements.
In the 1930s, the great industrial struggles that built the CIO, including Minneapolis, Toledo and Flint, demonstrated the immense social power of the American working class. Socialists, communists and other militants played decisive roles. Yet the Stalinised Communist Party, pursuing the Popular Front strategy dictated by Moscow, worked to subordinate this movement to Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. The Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers Party, whose members had played a leading role in the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strikes, were prosecuted and imprisoned under the Smith Act during the Second World War.
Afterwards, trade unions purged militants and became instruments of Cold War anti-communism and labour-management collaboration. The tendency from which the modern DSA sprang (Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organising Committee, founded in 1973 and absorbed into DSA in 1982) was based on the idea of ‘realigning’ or ‘transforming’ the Democratic Party rather than creating an independent revolutionary party of the working class.
The lesson of this history is not that socialist organisations are inherently weak. It is that the constant subordination of the working class to bourgeois politics has repeatedly killed off the prospect of the working class ever becoming an independent political force. The social reforms that did survive (Social Security, labour rights, Medicare, etc.) were all concessions taken from American capitalism under the pressure of the times. They were not evidence of capitalism evolving into socialism. The fact that both Democrats and Republicans eventually rolled them back is the very definition of the opposite.
City Hall and the limits of “sewer socialism”
New York was the flagship of the new movement. Mamdani was elected on a platform of initiatives including fast and free buses, a rent freeze for rent-stabilised tenants, and universal childcare. In June, after appointing six of its nine members, the Rent Guidelines Board voted 7-1 to freeze one- and two-year stabilised leases from October 2026 to September 2027.
No worker will begrudge tenants a bit of relief from rising rents. It is important to be clear, though, that this is not socialism. A temporary freeze on rents in the regulated part of the market doesn’t change capitalist ownership of land, housing and finance. The property developers, landlords, banks, and other financial interests at the heart of the housing system remain exactly as they are.
Mamdani himself has referred to the municipal socialist tradition in Milwaukee and the so-called ‘sewer socialists’. That tradition was largely about efficient municipal administration and the provision of public services. Any improvements such policies may bring about remain within the realm of municipal reform. They don’t, in any way, eliminate capitalist property or transfer political power to the working class.
New York is still one of the great centres of world capitalism. No municipal administration, however well-intentioned in its reform programme, can transform the class relations institutionalised on Wall Street, since those relations go far beyond the municipal boundary and rest on ownership of the means of production.
This isn’t really a question of individual treachery or individual sincerity. It’s a question of programme. A movement that takes responsibility for administering capitalism has to operate within the economic, political, and legal framework of that administration. Eventually, workers’ interests will run up against the demands that finance, property, and the state make of that administration.
The historical experience of reformist governments internationally, from SYRIZA in Greece to ostensibly left administrations elsewhere, therefore demands serious examination. Winning office and possessing political power are not the same thing.
Ideas without a programme, organisation without independence
The New Yorker’s formula, ideas flourish while organisations wither, should therefore be turned on its head. The central problem is not that American socialists have been organisationally incapable of sustaining attractive reforms. It is that organisations claiming the socialist mantle have repeatedly rejected the working class’s political independence.
DSA is not an independent working-class political party. It operates overwhelmingly through the Democratic Party and organises electoral campaigns for candidates who stand within that party. This contradiction became especially stark during the 2022 railroad dispute, when Congress intervened and imposed a contract on rail workers, preventing a national strike.
An organisation cannot overcome this contradiction merely by increasing its membership, fundraising capacity or representation in elected institutions. Organisational growth and socialist political development are entirely different things. Indeed, under definite conditions the first can proceed at the expense of the second.
The question “Can socialism survive its success?” is therefore posed falsely. What may unquestionably survive is a political apparatus possessing elected representatives, campaign funds, professional staff and positions within existing institutions. But an organisation that grows by integrating itself ever more deeply into the capitalist political structure is not necessarily succeeding as a socialist movement. It may instead be abandoning the historical content of socialism while retaining its name.
What the discussion leaves out
A discussion of American socialism in November 2026 that confines itself to elections and organisational longevity necessarily passes over the decisive questions confronting the working class.
The first is war. American capitalism remains at the centre of an international system characterised by sharpening geopolitical conflicts and enormous military expenditures. Socialism cannot be reduced to domestic redistribution while foreign policy and militarism are treated as separate questions. Opposition to imperialist war belongs at the centre of a genuinely international socialist programme.
The second question is the defence of democratic rights. The growth of authoritarian forms of rule cannot be separated from extreme social inequality and the political crisis it generates. A ruling class confronted by growing social opposition increasingly regards democratic forms as obstacles to securing its interests. The defence of democratic rights therefore depends upon the independent mobilisation of the working class rather than confidence in the institutions or representatives of either capitalist party.
Third is the working class’s international character. Workers in New York and Seattle confront corporations, banks, financial markets and supply chains extending across national boundaries. Their conditions of life are inseparable from those of workers in London, São Paulo, Shenzhen and throughout the world economy. There is consequently no national, still less municipal, road to socialism.
Finally, there is the rank and file. The more significant development is not simply the election of a handful of politicians presenting themselves as democratic socialists but the emergence of struggles by workers against employers and, increasingly, against trade-union bureaucracies seeking to contain those struggles. Socialist politics must seek to develop the working class’s independent initiative and organisation. These are the conditions in which the socialist question is actually posed: not principally as the popularity of individual reforms, but as a question of class power.
The question that should be asked
The real question is not whether American socialism can survive its success. It is whether the American working class will break politically with the Democratic Party and construct its own revolutionary political leadership on an internationalist and socialist programme.
Widespread hostility to inequality, declining living standards, and the domination of political life by immense concentrations of wealth provide an objective basis for such a development. But hostility towards capitalism does not spontaneously become socialist consciousness. Nor will it reach socialism through the electoral structures of the Democratic Party, the fundraising apparatus of DSA or the administration of municipal reforms.
It requires the conscious assimilation of the strategic experiences of the American and international working class throughout the twentieth century, including the Russian Revolution, the degeneration of the Soviet Union, the rise of Stalinism, the Popular Front, fascism, the betrayal of revolutionary opportunities and the prolonged struggle waged by Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International against Stalinism and reformism.
This is precisely what disappears when socialism is reduced to the history of organisations, policies and electoral cycles. The fundamental historical question is not why particular socialist organisations disappeared. It is what programme they fought for, what class interests they represented and, above all, what political relationship they established between the working class and the capitalist state. The New Yorker worries that socialist organisations may wither once again. The working class should draw a very different lesson from this history. It is time to build the organisation that will not.
Bibliography
Articles and reports
Guttenplan, D. D. “The Rapid-Fire Political Education of Zohran Mamdani.” The Nation, 12 May 2026.
Izaguirre, Anthony. “Rent Board Fulfils Mamdani’s Vow to Freeze the Rent on 1 Million NYC Apartments.” Associated Press, 25 June 2026.
Lepore, Jill. “Can American Socialism Survive Its Success?” The New Yorker, 9 November 2026.
“America Doesn’t Like Socialism, but the Candidates Keep Winning.” CNBC, 7 November 2026.
“Socialism’s Moment Is Here.” Current Affairs, 2026.
“NYC Rent Guidelines Board Final Vote.” NY1, 25 June 2026.
Books
Cannon, James P. Socialism on Trial. New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1942.
Dobbs, Farrell. Teamster Rebellion. New York: Monad Press, 1972.
Harrington, Michael. Socialism. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972.
Isserman, Maurice. The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington. New York: PublicAffairs, 2000.
Kipnis, Ira. The American Socialist Movement, 1897–1912. New York: Columbia University Press, 1952.
Salvatore, Nick. Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982.
Trotsky, Leon. The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (The Transitional Program). 1938.
Weinstein, James. The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967.
On 5 November 2026, a jury at Southwark Crown Court convicted Russell Brand of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault. The jury of eight men and four women, required by Mr Justice Bennathan to reach unanimous verdicts, acquitted him on two further counts of rape and one of attempted indecent assault. The convictions relate to offences committed between 2004 and 2009. The rape conviction concerns a 21-year-old woman whom Brand met after a performance in west London in 2009.
Brand, 51, denied every charge and was remanded in custody following the verdict. On 9 November, Mr Justice Bennathan sentenced him to 10 years and six months’ imprisonment. Brand must serve at least two-thirds of the sentence before becoming eligible for release.
In his sentencing remarks, the judge told Brand that as he became famous he had also become a“sexual predator”, and said that the offences demonstrated a disregard for women’s right to refuse sexual contact. The judge also stressed that the sentence concerned only the offences of which the jury had convicted Brand and that he disregarded allegations on which the jury had returned not-guilty verdicts. The Metropolitan Police have said that further allegations concerning Brand remain under investigation. Those allegations are separate from the convictions for which he was sentenced and have not been determined by a court.
The victims are entitled to lifelong anonymity, and this article does not cover their testimony. What concerns us here is the social and political figure: the man who, little more than a decade ago, was hailed in liberal circles as the voice of a disaffected generation, and whose political evolution subsequently carried him into the orbit of Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk and the Trump movement.
Brand’s trajectory is not merely a story of personal collapse. It is a concentrated expression of the bankruptcy of celebrity “anti-politics”, of the media industry that manufactured and protected him, and of the decay of a petty-bourgeois radicalism that rejected the working class as the conscious agent of social change. That Brand could travel in scarcely a decade from calling for “revolution” on BBC Newsnight to sharing platforms with figures associated with the American right is itself a devastating commentary on the politics he represented.
An honest accounting must also be made of the proceedings against him. When the allegations first became public in September 2023, following a joint investigation by The Times, The Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches, the World Socialist Web Site warned against trial by media and insisted upon the presumption of innocence. That principle did not entail declaring Brand innocent. It meant insisting that criminal guilt could be determined only through established judicial procedures in which allegations could be tested, and the accused could mount a defence.
That process has now taken place. Brand was charged, represented by senior counsel, tried before a jury over several weeks, convicted on some counts and acquitted on others. Each charge had to be determined according to the evidence relating to it. Whatever criticisms socialists must make of the capitalist state and judicial system, the proceedings themselves refute the crude contention circulated by Brand’s right-wing defenders that a fair trial was simply impossible in Britain.
The celebrity revolutionary, 2013–2015
Brand’s emergence as a political celebrity was facilitated by the very institutions that he professed to oppose. In October 2013, he guest-edited the New Statesman and, days later, sat opposite Jeremy Paxman on BBC Newsnight. Brand said he had never voted, denounced a political establishment subordinated to corporations, and spoke in favour of a “socialist egalitarian” society.
The interview was watched millions of times. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, years of austerity and the Liberal Democrats’ repudiation of their promises over university tuition fees, Brand’s denunciations struck a chord with many young people who saw nothing in the official political establishment that represented their interests.
Sections of the liberal media responded in an instructive way. Rather than seriously interrogating what Brand meant by revolution, parts of the press transformed him into a political phenomenon. Prospect included him among its “World Thinkers” in 2015. His book Revolution, published in 2014, became a bestseller. His YouTube series The Trews attracted a large audience, while his involvement in the struggle of tenants at the New Era estate in Hoxton against eviction by a US investment fund seemed to connect his rhetoric to genuine social opposition.
Yet the political content of Brand’s “revolution” was always profoundly confused. It combined elements of anarchism, Eastern mysticism, self-help and twelve-step recovery culture with hostility towards organised politics itself. Instead of calling for the construction of an independent political movement of the working class, he counselled abstention from conventional politics and elevated personal transformation and local direct action into substitutes for political programme, organisation and historical perspective.
Capitalism consequently appeared not primarily as a definite system of property and class relations, founded upon private ownership of the means of production and production for profit, but as a kind of spiritual and psychological disorder. Alienation might therefore be overcome through consciousness, authenticity, community action and individual awakening. Class in the Marxist sense, as an objective social relationship and the foundation of political organisation, virtually disappeared.
This perspective’s limitations were dramatically exposed within eighteen months. Days before the May 2015 general election, having previously encouraged his followers not to vote, Brand interviewed Labour leader Ed Miliband and urged support for Labour. The supposedly uncompromising rejection of establishment politics thus ended in an endorsement of the party of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the Iraq War and the deregulated City of London.
The episode revealed something fundamental. Without a programme, historical analysis or class orientation, radical rhetoric could swing abruptly from denunciation of the parliamentary system to accommodation with one of its principal parties. The “revolution” had discovered the ballot box almost overnight.
From the ‘left’ to the far right
The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated Brand’s political evolution. His enormous online audience had originally been built through attacks on inequality, corporate power and the political establishment. Increasingly, however, these themes became entangled with scepticism concerning vaccination and public-health policies, alongside a growing preoccupation with vaguely defined “elites”, censorship and the “Deep State”. In 2022, his programme Stay Free with Russell Brand moved to Rumble, a video platform that became increasingly associated with conservative and right-wing online politics in the United States.
Some of Brand’s interventions still contained elements of genuine opposition to official policy, including criticism of the role of the United States and NATO in Ukraine. But these positions no longer fit within a coherent critique of imperialism or capitalism. Instead, opposition to war and corporate power increasingly coexisted with the themes and personalities of the American culture wars.
After the allegations against him emerged in 2023, Brand’s public political and personal identity shifted again. He converted publicly to Christianity, was baptised in 2024, and increasingly cultivated an audience among conservative Christians and supporters of the American right. He appeared with Tucker Carlson and became associated with political environments involving Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Turning Point USA.
The political distance travelled was considerable. A man once presented by sections of the British liberal establishment as the charismatic representative of anti-capitalist youth was now being welcomed by forces associated with Trump’s political movement. Yet this development should not simply be understood as a betrayal of a previously coherent socialist politics. No such politics existed to betray. Rather, Brand’s evolution exposed the inherent instability of his earlier outlook.
A politics that rejected the independent political mobilisation of the working class, interpreted complex social relations primarily through the actions of shadowy or corrupt elites, and elevated individual authenticity above programme and organisation possessed no reliable political compass. Its language of rebellion could therefore migrate remarkably easily between ostensibly left-wing and right-wing forms of populism. Under conditions of deepening social crisis, opposition to “the establishment” ceased to have any necessarily progressive content. Anti-politics became increasingly compatible with the politics of reaction.
The trial and the myth of the ‘political prisoner’
After the allegations became public, Brand increasingly portrayed himself as the victim of an establishment campaign directed against a dissident voice. Sections of the American right enthusiastically adopted this interpretation. Elon Musk publicly supported Brand after the allegations appeared in 2023. Tucker Carlson subsequently connected Brand’s predicament to his attacks on pharmaceutical companies, establishment institutions and Western policy towards Ukraine. After criminal charges were brought, Carlson presented the proceedings as politically motivated and questioned whether Brand could receive justice in Britain.
This campaign had little to do with a consistent defence of democratic rights. Brand had become a politically useful media figure, and his legal difficulties could therefore be incorporated into an existing narrative in which right-wing personalities and online influencers portrayed themselves as victims of an all-powerful liberal establishment. It was nevertheless necessary to reject the opposite position. Brand’s defenders’ politically reactionary arguments could not justify declaring him guilty before trial. Democratic rights cannot be defended selectively according to whether one approves of the accused.
That is why opposition to trial by media in 2023 was correct. The principle involved is elementary: allegations, however grave, are not criminal convictions. Guilt must be established through evidence tested before a court in proceedings in which the accused has the right to defend himself. The subsequent trial did precisely what Brand’s political defenders claimed could not occur. He was represented by experienced counsel and permitted to contest the allegations against him. His barrister urged the jury to distinguish between behaviour they might find personally objectionable and conduct proved to be criminal. The resulting verdicts show that the jury distinguished between the charges, returning both acquittals and convictions.
The claim that Brand was simply a “political prisoner” therefore cannot be sustained merely by asserting that he had become an opponent of establishment politics. His political opinions neither proved guilt nor provided immunity from criminal prosecution. Brand’s highly visible turn towards Christianity also became part of his new public identity. His appearances carrying a Bible and his repeated references to his faith fit neatly into the wider narrative of spiritual rebirth he had developed for his international audience. Whatever Brand’s personal beliefs, the political significance of this transformation is unmistakable. The former advocate of loosely defined spiritual revolution had reconstructed himself as a Christian dissident confronting what he and his allies described as a corrupt establishment.
The industry that made him
Any serious assessment of Brand must also examine the entertainment industry that created the conditions for his extraordinary celebrity. He committed the offences for which he was convicted while rising rapidly through British television and radio before moving into Hollywood. Brand’s deliberately provocative sexual persona was not incidental to this ascent. It became part of the commodity being sold. Broadcasters constructed programmes around his personality and cultivated the image of the uncontrollable celebrity provocateur. The commercial imperative was obvious: outrage generated attention, attention generated audiences, and audiences generated revenue.
The notorious 2008 BBC Radio 2 scandal involving obscene prank calls to the actor Andrew Sachs finally demonstrated that there were limits to what institutions could tolerate once controversy threatened the institution itself. But by then the mechanisms through which celebrity behaviour was indulged, normalised and monetised were already evident. Subsequent investigations into how concerns about Brand were handled raised broader questions about institutional culture and junior employees’ capacity to challenge powerful performers. The essential issue therefore cannot be reduced to the moral character of one celebrity.
This is where a socialist analysis must distinguish itself from the approach associated with the more affluent sections of the #MeToo milieu. In 2023, parts of the liberal media collapsed the distinction between accusation and conviction, turning the individual celebrity into the exclusive explanation for an entire institutional culture. Such an approach simultaneously threatens fundamental democratic principles and obscures the social relations that make abuses of power possible.
The hierarchical organisation of the entertainment industry places enormous influence in the hands of celebrities, executives and owners. Junior researchers, production workers, runners and other often precariously employed workers can find themselves dependent upon precisely those above them for continued employment and advancement. Celebrity itself is a commodity. Once corporations have invested substantial amounts of money in a profitable personality, enormous commercial incentives arise to preserve that personality’s market value.
The phenomenon is therefore not reducible simply to “bad men”. It involves structures of wealth, employment, power and dependency embedded within the entertainment business itself.
Brand’s later political evolution also cannot be separated from the economics of alternative online media. Digital media has created a lucrative market in permanent outrage. The successful influencer must continually produce novelty, controversy and conflict to maintain engagement. Audiences are encouraged to regard conventional journalism as inherently dishonest, while the influencer’s personality becomes the principal guarantee of truth. Grievance consequently becomes a business model.
Within this economy, every criticism can be framed as censorship, every institutional sanction as persecution, and every controversy as further confirmation that the dissident personality threatens powerful interests. Brand did not merely participate in this media economy. Increasingly, it shaped his public identity.
The lessons
The rise and fall of Brand contains political lessons extending far beyond one individual. The social anger he expressed in 2013 was genuine. Millions of young people had experienced the consequences of the financial crash, austerity, declining living standards, war and extreme concentrations of wealth. They confronted an official political culture seemingly incapable of articulating any alternative. That alienation has certainly not disappeared.
But Brand demonstrated precisely why such anger cannot be entrusted to celebrities, however charismatic, nor channelled through a politics that substitutes personality, lifestyle and authenticity for an understanding of class, history and political organisation. The extraordinary ease with which Brand travelled from the pages of the New Statesman to the political environment surrounding Tucker Carlson demonstrates the instability of celebrity anti-politics. A vague denunciation of corrupt “elites” does not constitute socialism.
Capitalism is not simply the rule of dishonest politicians, greedy bankers, pharmaceutical corporations, media executives or secretive bureaucracies. It is a historically developed social system based upon definite class relations and the private ownership of society’s productive forces. Without understanding this, opposition to capitalism can be redirected endlessly from one supposed enemy to another without ever confronting the social foundations of exploitation.
There is another lesson. It was correct in 2023 to oppose trial by media and insist upon the presumption of innocence. That principle does not disappear because a defendant subsequently proves unpopular, nor does it become retrospectively mistaken when a jury eventually returns guilty verdicts. The principle has now been tested through the judicial process. Brand faced criminal charges, contested those charges and was acquitted on some while being convicted on others. To continue to portray the verdict itself as sufficient proof of a political conspiracy is not a defence of democratic rights. It attempts to transform political sympathy for an individual into immunity from the ordinary requirements of criminal law.
Brand’s political career began with a genuine social phenomenon: mass disgust with inequality, official politics and the consequences of the capitalist crisis. But celebrity radicalism proved incapable of providing any way forward. The working class requires no prophets manufactured by the entertainment industry. It requires a political perspective grounded in the accumulated historical experience of the international workers’ movement and an organisation capable of uniting workers across national, racial and religious divisions against the capitalist system itself.
Brand once offered “revolution” without class, programme or party. What remained after the rhetoric had evaporated was the individual personality itself. That was always the fundamental weakness. And it was ultimately the political trajectory the project contained from the beginning.
Bibliography
Books and primary material
Brand, Russell (2014), Revolution. London: Century.
BBC Newsnight (2013), Jeremy Paxman interview with Russell Brand, broadcast 23 October 2013.
New Statesman (2013), issue guest-edited by Russell Brand, 24 October 2013.
Russell Brand: Comedy, Celebrity, Politics (2016). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Socialist and political commentary
Scripps, Thomas (2023), “Media mob lynches comedian and actor Russell Brand over sexual assault allegations”, World Socialist Web Site, 21 September 2023.
McRedmond, Finn (2023), “We have lost Russell Brand”, New Statesman, 7 March 2023.
McRedmond, Finn (2025), “Russell Brand’s transatlantic trial”, New Statesman, 30 May 2025.
Prospect (2015), “World Thinkers 2015: Russell Brand”, 16 February 2015.
News reports: allegations, charges and right-wing response
Mediaite (2023), “‘I Support Russell Brand’: Elon Musk gives full-throated backing”.
Salon (2023), “Right-wing conspiracists flock to support Russell Brand”, 20 September 2023.
Mediaite (2025), “Tucker Carlson calls on Trump to ‘rescue’ Russell Brand”.
NPR (2025), “Russell Brand pleads not guilty to rape, sexual assault charges in U.K.”, 30 May 2025.
PBS NewsHour/AP (2025), “Russell Brand pleads not guilty to charges of rape and sexual assault”.
Variety (2026), “Russell Brand’s rape trial delayed to October”.
News reports: verdict and sentencing
CNN (2026), “Actor and comedian Russell Brand found guilty of rape and sexual assault”, 5 November 2026.
Al Jazeera (2026), “Russell Brand found guilty of rape and sexual assault by UK court”, 5 November 2026.
The Hollywood Reporter (2026), “Russell Brand found guilty of rape and sexual assault at London trial”, 5 November 2026.
NPR (2026), “From comedian to convicted rapist: What to know about Russell Brand”, 5 November 2026.
CNN (2026), “Hiding in plain sight? Russell Brand’s conviction poses tough questions for UK entertainment industry”, 8 November 2026.
NPR (2026), “Russell Brand to learn sentence after being found guilty of rape and sexual assault”, 8 November 2026.
NBC News (2026), “Russell Brand awaits sentencing as he faces ‘significant’ prison time”, 9 November 2026.
Sunday’s eight-goal draw between Manchester United and Aston Villa was billed as a classic. It was better understood as a symptom. A club that generates more than half a billion pounds a year now sits in the relegation zone, while its supporters protest against the owners who have bled it for more than two decades.
Manchester United, 20-time champions of England, went into the November international break in 18th place after drawing 4–4 with Aston Villa at Old Trafford on Sunday afternoon. The team has won once in ten league games and has gone eight league matches without a victory. It dropped into the bottom three on Saturday for the first time in 40 years, entering Sunday’s match in 19th place. The draw lifted United to 18th, with eight points from ten matches, its lowest position at that stage of a top-flight season since 1986–87, when the club stood 20th.
The match itself was a study in disintegration. Alysson scored for Villa after 59 seconds, and Nicolas Jackson added a second in the fourth minute. Bruno Fernandes converted a penalty in the 16th minute before Youri Tielemans equalised for United shortly before half-time. Within eight minutes of the restart, Villa led 4–2 after a John McGinn penalty and a goal from Leon Goretzka. Only stoppage-time goals from Joshua Zirkzee in the 92nd minute and Patrick Dorgu in the 96th rescued a point.
The sporting press has treated the comeback as a possible reprieve for manager Michael Carrick, who told reporters that he expected to remain in charge. In a testy exchange with a Sky Sports interviewer, he replied: “You’re telling me what you think, aren’t you?” Within weeks, however, he may become the latest in a long line of managers sacrificed to protect the people who actually own and run the club.
The real story was in the stands. Before kick-off, supporters released green-and-gold balloons, the colours associated with Newton Heath, the railway workers’ club from which United developed. They were answering a call from the supporters’ group The 1958 to protest against the Glazer family and minority co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe, and to boycott spending inside the stadium. A separate call had been made for a walkout in the 21st minute, marking 21 years of Glazer ownership, but the walkout did not materialise. The pre-match protest did. Supporters unfurled a banner declaring, “We don’t want a new stadium, we want the owners out,” and chanted against both the Glazers and Ratcliffe.
It was the second such protest in a week. At the Champions League match against Roma on Tuesday, fans threw green-and-gold balloons and tennis balls onto the pitch, briefly halting play, and police arrested three people. The owners can leave the ground. They cannot absent themselves from the crisis they have created.
A club turned into a financial instrument.
The decline of Manchester United cannot be explained by bad signings, a poor coach or a shortage of “winning mentality,” the explanations favoured by television pundits. It stems from the club’s transformation, over the past three decades, into a vehicle for accumulating private wealth.
In 2005, the Florida-based Glazer family bought United in a takeover valuing the club at approximately £790 million. The acquisition was structured as a leveraged buyout, with approximately £525 million of acquisition debt ultimately loaded onto the club. In effect, United was made responsible for financing its own purchase. Money that could otherwise have been invested in the team, stadium, workforce, or community was instead consumed by interest payments, financing costs, and shareholder dividends.
When the Glazers looked for outside investment, they did not sell the club. In February 2024, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the petrochemicals billionaire behind INEOS, completed a deal worth about £1.3 billion for an initial 25 per cent stake and gained control of football operations. Additional investment later increased INEOS’s stake to nearly 29 per cent. The Glazer family nevertheless remained the majority owner. Ratcliffe, a prominent Brexit supporter who moved his tax residence to Monaco in 2020, was portrayed in much of the media as a Mancunian saviour who would restore the club to its proper place.
The opposite has happened. Ratcliffe’s arrival did not end Glazer ownership. It shored it up. The family retains majority control, while the INEOS administration has subjected United to sweeping cost reductions: jobs have been eliminated, staff benefits withdrawn and ticket prices increased. Even sections of the organised support that initially viewed Ratcliffe as a possible alternative to the Glazers are now protesting against both ownership factions.
Workers and supporters pay the bill.
The club’s accounts for the year ending 30 June 2026 tell the story. United reported record revenue of £677.6 million and an operating profit of £22.6 million. Yet it still recorded a net loss of £43 million, compared with a £33 million loss the previous year. This was the club’s seventh consecutive annual loss.
United’s broader debt burden, when historic borrowing, revolving credit and outstanding transfer payments are combined, has been reported at approximately £1.15 billion. This comprises around £578 million in historic debt, £200 million drawn on its revolving credit facility and approximately £375 million owed in outstanding transfer fees. The club borrowed a net additional £90 million after the end of the financial year while financing its summer recruitment programme. The £1.15 billion figure must therefore be understood as a composite debt total, rather than £1.15 billion in conventional bank loans.
The cost of balancing these books has fallen heavily on the club’s employees. Over the two years to 30 June 2026, United’s permanent workforce fell from 1,127 to 805, a reduction of 322 jobs, or 28.6 per cent. Staffing in the club’s media department fell by about 45 per cent, and in its commercial department by about 44 per cent. Administrative and related departments, including ticketing, lost 161 positions, while football operations, including scouting and academy coaching, lost another 60.
Earlier rounds of cuts closed the employee canteen at Old Trafford and ended free hot lunches for ordinary staff, replacing them with fruit at the stadium. At Carrington, non-playing staff were offered reduced soup and bread, while first-team players continued to receive full meals. Executives described such measures as necessary to restore financial stability. For cleaners, administrators, ticket-office staff, media workers, and other affected employees, they meant diminished conditions or lost livelihoods.
Supporters, many of them working people from Manchester and the surrounding towns, have been hit by repeated ticket-price increases. Meanwhile, United spent £191.7 million on summer player acquisitions, including agents’ fees and Premier League levies. The club also incurred compensation costs tied to managerial changes, including the departure of Ruben Amorim, contributing to its ongoing losses.
On top of this comes the plan to replace Old Trafford, home to the club since 1910, with a proposed 100,000-seat stadium nearby. Designed by Foster + Partners, the project has been presented as the centrepiece of a wider regeneration scheme. Its initial estimated construction cost is about £2 billion, although the final cost and financing arrangements remain unsettled. The club has already spent £63.5 million acquiring a 25-acre parcel of land for the development.
The commercial purpose is clear: to increase revenue per match through greater capacity, premium seating, hospitality, sponsorship, naming rights and associated development. Whatever the final financing structure, supporters and employees have every reason to expect that the costs will be recouped through higher prices, increased commercialisation and further demands for “efficiency.”
The protests and their limits
The anger in the stands is genuine and justified. The documented grievances advanced by the 1958 and associated supporter groups include the ownership structure, rising debt, the demolition or abandonment of Old Trafford, ticket policies, declining standards and what they regard as the erosion of traditional match-going culture.
But the perspective that guides these protests cannot resolve the crisis. The demand is that the Glazers sell up and, increasingly, that Ratcliffe go too. Sell to whom? In the world of the Premier League, the only buyers with the billions required are other financial oligarchs, private-equity organisations or sovereign wealth funds such as Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which controls Newcastle United. Each new owner is greeted as a potential liberator. Each has bought the club as an asset serving financial, commercial or geopolitical purposes.
The green and gold of Newton Heath has become a protest symbol, but its significance goes deeper than nostalgia. Workers associated with the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway founded the club in 1878. Like dozens of English clubs, it grew out of the working-class communities created by the industrial towns. Those roots have been progressively severed by the transformation of football, accelerated by the founding of the Premier League in 1992, into a global entertainment industry dependent upon television rights, corporate sponsorship and speculative capital.
Balloon releases and spending boycotts express that anger, but they leave the underlying property relations untouched. The task is not to find a better billionaire. It is to connect the struggle of supporters with that of the workers whose jobs and conditions are being destroyed at United and throughout the economy.
A sport owned by the few
United’s fall is not an aberration. It is the most visible expression of what the profit system does to everything it touches. A game created and sustained by working people has been turned into a commodity, its clubs into tradable assets, and its supporters into revenue streams to be priced, divided, and squeezed.
The same logic that closes the staff canteen at Old Trafford closes hospitals, schools and factories across Britain. The same financial oligarchy that buys football clubs dominates the economy and dictates policy to governments, Labour and Conservative alike.
Sunday’s chaotic draw may buy Michael Carrick a few more weeks. It will not save Manchester United from its owners. Football can be returned to those who play and watch it only as part of a broader struggle to place society’s resources under the democratic control of the working class, organised to meet human need rather than private profit.
Eight years after the Cape Town ball-tampering scandal, former Australian Test opener Usman Khawaja says responsibility extended beyond the three players. His intervention further undermines the official account that reduced a systemic crisis in Australian cricket to the misconduct of three individuals.
The official mythology constructed around Australian cricket’s 2018 ball-tampering scandal is beginning to unravel. Eight years after television cameras caught Cameron Bancroft attempting to alter the condition of the ball with sandpaper at Newlands in Cape Town, former Australian Test opener Usman Khawaja has declared that knowledge and responsibility for what occurred belonged not merely to the three players subsequently punished by Cricket Australia (CA), but to the team collectively. [smh.com.au]
The assertion appears in Khawaja’s autobiography, Sabr, with extracts published ahead of the book’s release. His formulation could hardly be clearer: “It was all of us. Not the batters, not the bowlers, not the staff. All of us.” He insists he believed from the outset that the team should have accepted responsibility collectively, rather than concentrating it on Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft. [theguardian.com]
Even more damaging is Khawaja’s claim that Cape Town was not the beginning of the affair. According to his account, sandpaper had already been discussed and used during the preceding Test at St George’s Park in Port Elizabeth. He recalls open dressing-room discussion about finding a way to roughen the ball, identifying sandpaper as an effective method, and Bancroft volunteering to use it. He also recalls Smith indicating that he did not want to know what was being done.
These are Khawaja’s allegations, not findings established by a new independent investigation. But if substantiated, they would be devastating to the account Cricket Australia has accepted and defended since 2018. CA’s investigation attributed prior knowledge of the Cape Town scheme to Smith, Warner and Bancroft. The first two received 12-month playing bans and Bancroft nine months. Warner also received an indefinite leadership ban, which was overturned in 2024.
Khawaja’s question is therefore broader than who knew what and when during a cricket match. It concerns how sporting institutions respond when conduct generated within their own competitive culture threatens their legitimacy. Sandpapergate increasingly appears not merely as an episode of cheating but as a case study in the political economy of modern professional sport: the creation of relentless performance pressures from above, followed by the individualisation of responsibility when the consequences become publicly embarrassing.
The official story comes under renewed pressure.
Khawaja’s intervention is particularly serious because he says that, despite being a member of the Australian side and sitting beside Bancroft during the Test, CA’s investigator never interviewed him. That claim alone warrants an explanation. An investigation claiming to establish the boundaries of knowledge within a touring cricket team can hardly be considered exhaustive if it did not question team members who may have had relevant information. Yet Cricket Australia has responded by defending the integrity of the original process. After Khawaja’s revelations, the organisation said it remained comfortable with its investigation and its findings.
The issue is made still more significant by what had already entered the public record. In 2021, Bancroft, when asked whether the bowlers knew that the ball was being altered, responded that it was “self-explanatory”. Australia’s Cape Town bowling quartet of Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Nathan Lyon subsequently issued a joint statement categorically denying prior knowledge that a foreign substance had been brought onto the field to alter the ball.
Those conflicting accounts cannot be reconciled by simply repeating the 2018 findings. Khawaja’s statement does not, by itself, prove the precise knowledge or conduct of every individual player, and it should not be used as a pretext for shifting the scapegoating operation from one group of cricketers to another. That would merely reproduce the essential logic of the original affair. The important question is not which additional individuals should now be publicly sacrificed. It is why the institutional and cultural circumstances that produced the scandal were reduced to the misconduct of three men.
Three men made to carry an institutional crisis.
The extraordinarily punitive treatment of Smith, Warner and Bancroft performed a definite function. By identifying three guilty individuals, Cricket Australia could present the scandal as an aberration from an otherwise healthy system rather than as the expression of that system. Khawaja now says that he argued in the dressing room that the team should accept what had happened collectively. His account is explicit: “We did this as a team. We knew what was going on, and we have to take it as a team.” Instead, as he puts it, the three punished players “got crucified”.
On Sunday, 8 November, Khawaja amplified this point, denying allegations that he had thrown former teammates “under the bus”. He described Smith, Warner and Bancroft as those who had taken the blame for everybody else and said that he continued to seek collective acceptance of responsibility. This goes to the heart of the affair. Scapegoating does not mean that the individuals concerned bear no responsibility. It means that their individual responsibility is isolated from the social or institutional circumstances in which their actions developed. The system survives by converting a systemic failure into an individual moral defect.
The mechanism is familiar throughout capitalist society. A bank caught engaging in misconduct discovers a “rogue trader”. A corporation confronted with illegality finds a handful of wayward employees. A government department confronted with a scandal promises disciplinary action against individual officials while preserving the policy and hierarchy that produced the disaster. Professional sport, increasingly organised according to the same commercial imperatives as every other major entertainment industry, operates no differently. The essential purpose is containment.
“Winning without counting the cost”
A striking contradiction sits at the centre of the Sandpapergate narrative. The supposedly aberrant behaviour of three Australian cricketers occurred within an organisation whose own subsequent cultural review identified serious problems concerning its fixation upon winning. The independent review Cricket Australia commissioned and The Ethics Centre conducted examined the organisation’s culture after Cape Town. Its central finding was that Australian cricket had developed what it termed a culture of “winning without counting the costs”. The review concluded that the emphasis placed upon winning had contributed to an erosion of organisational culture and that aspects of player management encouraged negative behaviour.
That wording is significant. CA emphasised that the review did not characterise the organisation as simply pursuing “win at all costs”, but rather as seeking to “win without counting the cost”. The distinction hardly exonerates the organisation. Instead, it identifies the institutional mechanism more precisely. The pursuit of victory had become separated from serious consideration of the methods used to obtain it and the consequences for players, opponents, and the game itself. The review did not confine itself to what occurred on the field. The Ethics Centre specifically framed winning as extending from on-field tactics to the formation of elite players and “the way in which the ‘business’ of cricket is undertaken”.
This was therefore never simply a story about sandpaper. It was about an institutional structure in which performance, commercial success, reputation and victory had become mutually reinforcing imperatives. Yet the public drama of 2018 transformed this broader organisational crisis into the personal disgrace of three players. The contradiction could scarcely be clearer. The cultural investigation acknowledged institutional conditions that encouraged harmful behaviour, while the disciplinary narrative kept responsibility for Sandpapergate tightly individualised.
The commodification of cricket
Cricket’s transformation over recent decades provides the broader context. Elite cricket is no longer organised principally around the game’s rhythms, traditions, or even competitive requirements. It exists within an expanding international entertainment market dominated by broadcast contracts, sponsorship, franchise competitions and the ceaseless production of commercially saleable sporting content.
This does not mean that highly paid international cricketers are equivalent to ordinary wage workers. Plainly they are not. A small layer of elite athletes can earn sums unavailable to the overwhelming majority of the population. But their privileged remuneration does not emancipate professional sport from capitalist social relations. It integrates the athletes far more completely into them. Their performances become commodities. Their personalities become brands. Their competitions become broadcast products. National identity itself becomes commercially exploitable material.
What appears publicly as an almost religious obsession with Australian cricketing supremacy therefore coincides with thoroughly material interests. Victory attracts audiences. Audiences sustain broadcasters. Broadcast exposure attracts sponsors. Success enhances individual commercial value. Failure threatens contracts, careers, reputations and institutional revenues. The romantic mythology of representing the nation consequently coexists with a ruthless commercial structure.
Within such a system, exhortations to win are never abstract. They descend through administrators, selectors, coaches and players as concrete pressures. A sporting culture that measures almost everything according to competitive success inevitably produces individuals searching for marginal advantages. The boundary between permissible innovation, gamesmanship and outright violation becomes increasingly vulnerable when winning assumes overriding importance.
This does not excuse cheating. It explains why moral sermons about three defective personalities explain so little. Indeed, the post-Cape Town cultural review commissioned by CA itself reached beyond individual misconduct. The Ethics Centre interviewed administrators, current and former cricketers and sponsors, scrutinising policies, remuneration structures, ethical frameworks and codes of conduct. The resulting institutional critique sits uneasily beside the insistence that the decisive responsibility for Cape Town could nevertheless be neatly confined to three players.
National morality and the business of sport
Sandpapergate acquired its extraordinary emotional force because Australian cricket had long presented itself as something more than professional entertainment. The national team was invested with claims about Australian character: toughness, honesty, aggression, resilience and playing hard but supposedly within an identifiable moral boundary. The visual spectacle of Bancroft concealing the sandpaper therefore punctured something more commercially valuable than the surface of a cricket ball. It damaged a national brand. Once the affair became a crisis of legitimacy, punishment had to be demonstrative. That process also reveals the peculiar hypocrisy surrounding professional sport. The relentless pursuit of competitive advantage is celebrated until someone crosses a boundary that too clearly exposes the system’s logic. At that point administrators suddenly rediscover morality.
The individual offender becomes useful precisely because he permits the institution to perform moral purification. Expulsion, suspension and public humiliation supposedly demonstrate the health of the organisation rather than raising questions about the environment that produced the offending action. Thus structural responsibility disappears precisely when it is most necessary to examine it.
Khawaja and collective responsibility
Khawaja’s most important contribution is therefore not simply his allegation concerning how many people knew about sandpaper. It is his insistence upon collective responsibility. That principle runs directly counter to the institutional logic through which Sandpapergate was resolved. If Khawaja’s account is accurate, the entire basis for the scandal’s public containment becomes questionable. But even independently of his specific allegations, the cultural findings commissioned by CA after Cape Town had already demonstrated something broader: Australian cricket possessed institutional problems that could not rationally be explained through the moral character of three players.
Khawaja’s eight-year delay in speaking publicly will inevitably be used against him. Critics can point out that the revelations accompany the publication of a commercially sold autobiography. That does not answer what he has alleged. Nor does the observation that memories differ after eight years resolve the conflict between his account and previous statements. The contradictions now require evidence, not insinuation.
If CA is confident in the 2018 investigation, nothing should threaten reopening the factual record through a genuinely independent process capable of establishing who was questioned, what evidence was gathered, how conclusions were reached, and whether significant testimony was excluded. Anything less leaves the obvious question unanswered: why was Khawaja, a member of the team who now says he possessed directly relevant information, not interviewed?
The unresolved meaning of Sandpapergate
Nevertheless, there is a danger in treating another investigation merely as an exercise in finding additional guilty individuals. That would miss the larger lesson. Sandpaper gate’s significance lies in the relationship between individual action and institutional pressure. The objective should not be to replace three scapegoats with six, eight or eleven. It is to understand how a culture was created in which such conduct became conceivable and how, when that culture produced a public disaster, responsibility was concentrated upon the most convenient individuals.
Smith, Warner and Bancroft unquestionably carried responsibility for their own conduct as established in the disciplinary process. But personal responsibility and institutional responsibility are not mutually exclusive. Insisting that one abolishes the other is the ideological sleight of hand that scapegoating depends on. The cultural review Cricket Australia subsequently commissioned seriously undermined that simplistic explanation. It identified a cricketing organisation damaged by its approach to winning and by its failure to reckon adequately with the costs of pursuing success. Khawaja has now reopened the even more explosive question of whether the Sandpapergate investigation’s narrow attribution of knowledge holds up.
Eight years later, Cricket Australia can no longer credibly respond simply by repeating its confidence in the original process. The deepest issue raised by Cape Town was never whether three Australian cricketers suddenly lost their moral compass. It was why a sporting institution saturated with competitive and commercial pressure produced such conduct, and why, when the affair exploded publicly, institutional survival demanded individualising responsibility.
Khawaja’s blunt formulation, “It was all of us”, cuts through the carefully constructed mythology of 2018. Whatever further evidence establishes about the knowledge of particular individuals, it points to a truth that extends far beyond cricket. When institutions create the conditions for misconduct but punish only those caught enacting it, scapegoating does not correct systemic failure. It is one of the main ways the system protects itself.
Bibliography
Cricket Australia. “Reviews Published into Cricket Culture.” cricket.com.au, 29 October 2018. [cricket.com.au]
The Ethics Centre. Australian Cricket: A Matter of Balance. Review commissioned by the Board of Cricket Australia, October 2018. [sportnz.org.nz]
The Ethics Centre. “Cricket Australia: A Matter of Balance.” The review records its central finding that CA had developed a culture of “winning without counting the costs”. [ethics.org.au]
The Ethics Centre. “Renewing the Culture of Cricket in Australia.” 26 November 2019. [ethics.org.au]
Khawaja, Usman. Sabr. Autobiography, forthcoming at the date of this article, with publication scheduled for 10 November 2026. The Sandpapergate claims discussed above derive from material released ahead of publication. [smh.com.au]
Sydney Morning Herald. “It was all of us: Khawaja blows the whistle on more sandpaper use in South Africa in 2018.” 7 November 2026. This is the principal published source for Khawaja’s account of the dressing-room discussions and alleged use of sandpaper at Port Elizabeth. [smh.com.au]
ESPN. “‘It was all of us’ — Khawaja exposes sandpaper details from 2018.” 6 November 2026. [espn.com]
The Guardian. “‘It was all of us’: Khawaja says entire Australia team knew about sandpaper ball tampering plot.” 7 November 2026.
Reuters. “Khawaja denies throwing ‘anyone under the bus’ with comments about ball-tampering scandal.” 8 November 2026. [reuters.com]
The forthcoming Grenfell Britain: Greed, Power and a National Tragedy by Emma Dent Coad promises to be a powerful indictment of the social relations that produced the Grenfell Tower fire and of the political establishment that has denied justice to its victims ever since. Dent Coad stands in a unique relationship to the events. She was elected Labour MP for Kensington only four days before the fire of 14 June 2017, lived close to the tower and had already spent years as a councillor opposing the policies pursued by the Conservative-controlled Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The publisher presents the book as both an act of witness and an examination of what Grenfell reveals about Britain as a whole.
That starting point is entirely justified. Grenfell cannot be understood as an isolated building failure or even as the product merely of individual corruption, bureaucratic incompetence and corporate dishonesty. Seventy-two people died in a disaster whose essential conditions had been created over decades through deregulation, privatisation, attacks on council housing, cuts to fire services and the subordination of elementary human needs to property speculation and corporate profit. The final Grenfell Tower Inquiry report acknowledged that every death was avoidable and documented extensive failures extending through government, construction companies, manufacturers and the institutions supposedly responsible for protecting residents.
The term that best describes these processes was supplied nearly two centuries ago by Friedrich Engels: social murder. In The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Engels used the concept to describe how society knowingly places workers in circumstances that prematurely destroy their lives and then permits those circumstances to continue. The concept matters because it rejects attempts to separate individual catastrophes from the social order that produces them. The World Socialist Web Site applied this analysis to Grenfell immediately, and the Anatomy of the Grenfell Tower fire address delivered at the Socialist Equality Party’s August 2017 public meeting traced the disaster through the interconnected processes of deregulation, austerity, property speculation and the degradation of social housing. [wsws.org]
Evidence since then has vindicated that assessment. The inquiry’s final report found what the World Socialist Web Site described as “systematic dishonesty” among companies connected with the refurbishment, including efforts to manipulate testing, misrepresent data and conceal the dangers associated with products used in the tower. At the same time, government departments had failed over many years to respond adequately to warnings about combustible materials on high-rise buildings. [wsws.org]
What makes Dent Coad’s intervention potentially valuable is that she approaches these processes not as an outside commentator but as somebody who witnessed the extraordinary gulf separating two Kensingtons. On one side stand enormous concentrations of property wealth, luxury housing and some of the richest households in Britain. On the other are council tenants, low-paid workers and families struggling for decent housing in what the publisher itself describes as a broader housing crisis. The publicity for Grenfell Britain explicitly connects the disaster to unsafe housing, empty luxury developments and the continuing domination of housing policy by wealth and privilege.
Grenfell exposed this class divide with almost unbearable clarity. Residents had repeatedly warned of the dangers confronting them. The Grenfell Action Group’s warnings before the fire are now notorious. The failure was therefore not principally one of insufficient knowledge. Those with institutional authority possessed warnings and evidence, while those without power were treated as troublesome obstacles. As the inquiry’s own findings later showed, avoidable danger coexisted with corporate cost-cutting and government failure.
This is precisely why Grenfell cannot be reduced to the language of “lessons learned”. The facts point towards something far more fundamental: a social order in which the accumulation of private wealth takes precedence over the safety and dignity of working people. The facts Dent Coad assembles point towards a conclusion the working class of Grenfell had already reached by bitter experience.
The limits of the parliamentary perspective
The fundamental political problem posed by Dent Coad’s account, however, is the contradiction between the devastating character of the evidence and the parliamentary Labour framework within which its author has historically operated. Grenfell does not simply indict Conservative politicians, corrupt companies or an unusually callous local authority. It raises an unavoidable question about the Labour Party and the entire political system through which capitalist interests have been defended.
Dent Coad’s personal record of opposition to Kensington and Chelsea Council deserves serious treatment. But individual sincerity cannot resolve the historical problem Labour itself represents. Grenfell took place after decades in which Conservative and Labour governments successively deregulated the economy, expanded the power of private capital, facilitated the financialisation of housing and subordinated local government to austerity and market mechanisms. In its assessment of the inquiry report, the World Socialist Web Site noted that the inquiry itself identified governmental failures stretching through both Conservative and Labour administrations, while failing to impose genuine political accountability on the leading figures responsible. [wsws.org]
Jeremy Corbyn’s experience is decisive in this respect. Corbyn’s election as Labour leader generated enormous expectations among workers and young people who saw his leadership as a chance to reverse decades of Blairism, austerity and war. Yet the political orientation remained centred upon transforming the Labour Party and achieving social change through Parliament rather than constructing an independent revolutionary movement of the working class. Grenfell itself exposed the consequences of this orientation.
The World Socialist Web Site repeatedly warned that Labour’s participation in the government-established Grenfell Inquiry risked subordinating popular demands for justice to institutions incapable of providing it. A 2018 report on a Justice4Grenfell meeting noted that Dent Coad participated alongside figures from the trade-union movement in pressuring the official inquiry and existing institutions. Another WSWS assessment in 2019 argued that Labour and its allies were legitimising an inquiry that could not itself establish criminal liability. [wsws.org]
The issue was never whether individual Labour politicians genuinely sympathised with the bereaved or regarded the conduct of the council and corporations with disgust. The more fundamental question was whether justice could be secured through the very state institutions responsible for maintaining the economic and political structures that produced Grenfell. It could not.
The 2019 general election supplied another bitter lesson. Dent Coad lost Kensington after having secured the historically Conservative constituency in 2017. But Labour’s defeat cannot seriously be explained simply through electoral arithmetic. Corbyn’s leadership retreated repeatedly before Labour’s right wing and refused to mobilise the enormous movement that had emerged around his leadership in a political struggle against the party’s Blairite apparatus. The result was not the transformation of Labour into an instrument of socialist politics but the preparation of conditions for restoring the party’s openly pro-business leadership. Grenfell therefore poses the question that parliamentary reformism cannot answer: what happens when the institutions the working class is told to appeal to are themselves structurally integrated into the defence of capitalist property and political power?
After the Inquiry: Where is the justice?
The publication of the final Grenfell Tower Inquiry report in September 2024 demonstrated the dimensions of this contradiction. It identified extensive failings and corporate wrongdoing, yet years after the disaster, criminal accountability had still not followed. The Grenfell Tower fire public inquiry’s final whitewash noted that the inquiry had no power to determine criminal or civil liability and that, when the report appeared, the Metropolitan Police had not arrested or charged anyone in connection with the disaster.
The subsequent After the Grenfell Fire inquiry: Where are the arrests? drew out the political implications. Its central argument was that Grenfell involved identifiable decisions made under conditions in which profit and commercial advantage were treated as more important than working-class safety. The inquiry documented regulatory failures, corporate dishonesty and the ability of private businesses to exploit a weakened regulatory regime, yet justice remained deferred. [wsws.org]
This continued under the Labour government elected in 2024. The final inquiry report appeared under Keir Starmer’s premiership. Starmer apologised on behalf of the British state and said that the disaster should never have happened. Still, the response did not overturn the basic conditions that had allowed political responsibility to be evaded. The WSWS noted at the time that the government promised to consider the inquiry’s recommendations, while accountability through prosecutions remained unresolved.
There could be little more devastating evidence of the inadequacy of the proposition that institutional exposure automatically produces justice. Grenfell has been investigated, reconstructed, analysed, documented and memorialised. Parliamentary statements have been delivered. Political apologies have been issued. Thousands of pages of inquiry evidence have entered the historical record. Yet the fundamental issue raised by the bereaved and survivors from the outset remains. Justice has not followed automatically from truth. Nor has the housing crisis that gave rise to Grenfell disappeared. Indeed, the publicity for Dent Coad’s forthcoming book makes precisely this argument. Grenfell Britain is promoted as asking why, if Grenfell failed to change everything, the conditions surrounding housing inequality and insecurity remain embedded in British society.
This is the question the book must ultimately confront. But the answer cannot finally be found by demanding that the existing political establishment behave differently. The persistence of the conditions exposed at Grenfell is not simply a failure of political will. It expresses social interests.
Grenfell and the logic of capitalism
Housing under capitalism possesses a fundamental contradiction. For the working class it is a basic social necessity. For capital, it is property, an investment, an asset class, and a source of rent, interest, and speculative wealth. In London this contradiction reaches grotesque proportions. Homes exist simultaneously as places where human beings must live and as financial instruments whose profitability may depend on restricting supply, increasing rents, or maximising land values.
Public housing represented, however partially and inadequately, an intrusion of social need into this logic. This is why its destruction became a central component of the neoliberal offensive associated with the Thatcher governments and why subsequent administrations never reversed that offensive. Council estates sitting upon enormously valuable London land occupy territory whose potential exchange value is regarded by developers, banks and investors as being squandered when it provides secure and affordable accommodation to working people. Grenfell stood at the geographical centre of this social antagonism.
The disaster therefore cannot be answered by regulatory rearrangement alone, necessary though rigorous safety regulation unquestionably is. Regulations operating within a society dominated by private profit are under continual pressure from the corporations they regulate. Housing remains shaped by the power of landowners, banks, developers and construction conglomerates. Local authorities operate amid financial constraints imposed from above. Governments of every political colouration insist that the commanding heights of economic life must remain privately owned.
This is why the concept of social murder remains indispensable. It shifts attention from individual wickedness towards the social structure that continuously reproduces conditions in which preventable suffering becomes normal. That does not absolve individuals or corporations of responsibility. On the contrary, those responsible for criminal conduct must be held accountable. But prosecution, however necessary, cannot by itself eliminate the economic system that generates the same conflict between private profit and social need in another form.
What is to be done
The great merit of Emma Dent Coad’s proposed indictment is therefore also the source of the political questions it must raise. If Grenfell demonstrates the consequences of corporate greed, political cowardice and class privilege; if successive governments allowed conditions to emerge in which working-class lives could be subordinated to commercial interests; if official investigations can document devastating evidence without automatically producing justice; and if the housing crisis persists after all the pledges that Grenfell must never happen again, then what conclusion follows?
Britain cannot need merely better politicians administering the same economic system. The necessary conclusion is a break with Labourism and every conception that the machinery of capitalist government can gradually be transformed into an instrument for abolishing the power of capital. The working class requires its own independent political movement, organised internationally and armed with a socialist programme. In Britain, this means building the Socialist Equality Party as the British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International and developing independent organisations of working-class struggle that can challenge the authority of the trade-union and Labour bureaucracies.
Housing must cease to be organised primarily as a vehicle for private accumulation. The major property interests, construction conglomerates and financial institutions upon which the housing system depends must be brought under democratic public ownership and workers’ control. Housing construction, maintenance and fire safety must be planned according to social need and scientifically established standards, not the profitability requirements of investors and contractors. Vast social resources must be directed towards building high-quality council housing and making existing homes genuinely safe. That would not constitute an administrative modification of capitalism. It would mean an attack upon capitalist property relations themselves.
Grenfell’s residents did not lack warnings. They did not lack intelligence. They did not lack determination. They did not lack evidence. Long before the fire they understood the danger facing them, and after the catastrophe survivors, relatives and residents refused to allow the dead to disappear beneath official condolences and public-relations exercises. What they lacked, and what the working class continues to lack, is political power.
Grenfell’s enduring significance lies here. The tower stands not merely as the site of a terrible disaster but as an indictment of an entire social order. No inquiry report can resolve that indictment, because the decisive question lies beyond any inquiry’s jurisdiction: which class controls society, and in whose interests are its immense resources organised? The answer to social murder is not another promise that capitalism will regulate itself more carefully. It is socialism.
Bibliography
Dent Coad, Emma. Grenfell Britain: Greed, Power and a National Tragedy. London: Verso, forthcoming 8 June 2027. The publisher description presents the book as an examination of Grenfell’s legacy and Britain’s continuing housing crisis. [penguinran…mhouse.com]
Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845.
Scripps, Thomas. Anatomy of the Grenfell Tower fire. World Socialist Web Site, 22 August 2017. [wsws.org]
Scripps, Thomas. After the Grenfell Fire inquiry: Where are the arrests?. World Socialist Web Site, 12 September 2024. [wsws.org]
Stevens, Robert. Grenfell Tower fire public inquiry delivers its final whitewash. World Socialist Web Site, 4 September 2024.
Stevens, Robert. Labour and unions seek to corral social anger over Grenfell fire behind official inquiry. World Socialist Web Site, 20 June 2018. [wsws.org]
Stevens, Robert. Grenfell fire anniversary used by pseudo-left to boost Labour and Corbyn. World Socialist Web Site, 17 June 2019. [wsws.org]
Stevens, Robert. Grenfell Tower to be dismantled: Why is there still no justice?. World Socialist Web Site, 11 February 2025. [wsws.org]
Pip: Fraud follows users the way spam follows email — and freerein61's latest piece for A Trumpet of Sedition asks why that keeps happening no matter which platform we flee to.
Mara: The post traces online fraud from Nigeria's Yahoo Boys to Southeast Asia's scam compounds to Bluesky's phishing wave last October — and argues the thread connecting all of it is economic, not technological.
Pip: Let's start with the Bluesky attack itself and what it reveals about who the scammers actually are.
The Bluesky Scammers and the Economy Behind Them
Mara: The starting point is a phishing campaign that hit Bluesky on 17 October — compromised accounts pushing a fake government payment, and a platform scrambling to contain it.
Pip: The scale is concrete. Agent Sky's independent analysis of Bluesky's public moderation stream recorded 3,896 reversed account takedowns between 17 and 19 October alone, coinciding with the incident.
Mara: And that sits inside a platform growing fast — Bluesky went from 25.94 million to 41.41 million users in 2025, nearly 60 per cent growth. More users, more surface area for fraud.
Pip: So the phishing attack is the headline, but the post is really asking a harder question: why does this keep regenerating everywhere?
Mara: The argument is structural. The post draws a direct line to Nigeria's Yahoo Boys — not as a racial explanation, but as an economic one. It quotes the doctoral research of Tolulope Lembola Ojolo, who interviewed 29 Yahoo Boys across Lagos, Ibadan and Ado-Ekiti and identified "poverty, unemployment, corrupt political leadership and law enforcement, the failure of vital social institutions, and the proliferation of internet services as conditions that combined to facilitate cybercrime."
Pip: That list is doing real work. Nigeria's 2022 Multidimensional Poverty Index found 133 million people — 63 per cent of the population — multidimensionally poor. The headline unemployment figure is 7.2 per cent, but informal employment runs at 92.7 per cent. The number hides the precarity underneath.
Mara: The post is careful to say social explanation is not moral absolution. The victims — particularly young people targeted by sextortion, with verified links to more than 40 suicides across North America, Australia and the UK — have an unqualified right to protection.
Pip: And then the post moves to Southeast Asia, where the scam economy has gone fully industrial — compounds combining internet fraud with human trafficking, with the UN estimating 120,000 people potentially held in Myanmar alone, forced to run scams.
Mara: The post also covers how this pattern reached Bluesky specifically. Romance scams, pig-butchering schemes, impersonators targeting artists — NBC News flagged a rapid increase in December 2024. Editor Rob Bignell documented fake beta-reader and editor profiles targeting writers in July 2026. Writers and illustrators working precariously are exactly the population fraud preys on.
Pip: One insecure layer of the workforce turned against another. That's the mechanism the post keeps returning to.
Mara: And moderation alone cannot close that gap. User-submitted reports on Bluesky rose 54 per cent between 2024 and 2025. "Misleading" content accounted for 43.73 per cent of reports in 2025. The platform expanded to roughly 100 moderators during 2024 — a year it received 6.48 million reports.
Pip: The post's conclusion is that policing symptoms has repeatedly failed because the conditions reproducing the problem — mass insecurity, concentrated wealth, precarious employment — remain untouched.
Mara: What it calls for is democratic control over communications infrastructure and economic reorganisation around social need. That's the argument the title is pointing toward all along.
Pip: So the Bluesky phishing wave is a symptom, and the Yahoo Boys are a historical chapter in a much longer story about what poverty does to the internet.
Mara: And what the internet does to poverty. The next episode will tell us whether the platforms or the underlying conditions move first.
The fraud networks preying on Bluesky users are not an aberration confined to one social-media platform. From Nigeria’s Yahoo Boys to the trafficking compounds of Southeast Asia, online fraud has developed alongside an economic order that produces mass insecurity and poverty while transforming the internet into another arena for private enrichment.
On 17 October, Bluesky acknowledged that a phishing campaign had compromised more than 4,500 accounts. The attack spread posts promoting a fake government payment. The company temporarily suspended compromised accounts while attempting to secure them and restore access to their owners. [thehackernews.com],
The scale of the aftermath is evident in an independent analysis of Bluesky’s public moderation stream. Agent Sky recorded 3,896 reversed account takedowns between 17 and 19 October. The researcher cautions that the moderation data do not themselves establish why each account was restored, although the exceptional increase coincided with the phishing incident. The episode was only the most visible manifestation of a problem that has grown alongside the platform.
Fake support accounts, impersonators, romance scams and investment fraud have followed users onto Bluesky. In December 2024, NBC News reported a “rapid increase in scam activity”, including romance and so-called pig-butchering scams. In March 2025, Bluesky Safety warned of scammers impersonating Bluesky and its staff while approaching artists through direct messages and attempting to move them off the platform. The potential target population has grown dramatically. According to the company’s 2025 Transparency Report, Bluesky grew from 25.94 million to 41.41 million users that year, an increase of nearly 60 per cent.
The comparison with the Nigerian “Yahoo Boys” is apt, although not in the manner suggested by racialised representations of Nigerian cybercrime. The fundamental connection is neither nationality nor ethnicity. It is the growth of an international economy of fraud alongside poverty, precarious employment and extraordinary concentrations of wealth.
What produced the Yahoo Boys
The Yahoo Boy phenomenon developed in Nigeria during the formative period of popular internet use in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The name reflected the importance of Yahoo and Yahoo Mail to early internet communications. Fraudsters exploited email for advance-fee scams, fabricated inheritances and other schemes. Over the ensuing decades, the methods expanded into romance scams, business fraud and financial sextortion.
The consequences for victims can be devastating. Statistics maintained by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection show a pronounced predominance of boys and young men among identified victims in the sextortion reports and requests for assistance it receives. An investigation by CBC Marketplace reported in October 2025 that it had verified more than 40 suicides across North America, Australia and the UK during the previous four years that were linked to sextortion, including five in Canada.
The social-media companies themselves have revealed something of the scale. In July 2024, Meta announced that it had removed around 63,000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria that had attempted to engage in financial sextortion. Among them was a coordinated network of approximately 2,500 accounts that the company linked to a group of around 20 individuals. Meta said that the coordinated network principally targeted adult men in the United States, though some accounts also attempted to target minors.
Explaining the social origins of such criminality is not an excuse. Where children and young people are subjected to financial sextortion, there can be no ambiguity about the destructive character of the crime. But moral denunciation by itself explains nothing about why the phenomenon has developed on such a scale.
Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country and has enormous natural resources. Yet its official 2022 Multidimensional Poverty Index found that 133 million people—63 per cent of the population—were multidimensionally poor. Older claims that youth unemployment exceeded 50 per cent should no longer be repeated without substantial qualification, as Nigeria later changed its labour-force methodology. The National Bureau of Statistics reported unemployment of 7.2 per cent among 15-to-24-year-olds in the second quarter of 2023. But this headline figure hardly captures whether people have secure, well-paid work.
The same survey reported informal employment at 92.7 per cent, time-related underemployment at 11.8 per cent, and a youth NEET rate of 13.8 per cent. These statistics point to a social reality far more complex than an unemployment rate alone can reveal: enormous numbers of people classified as employed remain in informal and precarious economic circumstances.
Academic research has likewise placed Nigerian cybercrime within a broader social crisis. A doctoral investigation by Tolulope Lembola Ojolo at the University of KwaZulu-Natal conducted in-depth interviews with 29 Yahoo Boys across Lagos, Ibadan and Ado-Ekiti. The research identified poverty, unemployment, corrupt political leadership and law enforcement, the failure of vital social institutions, and the proliferation of internet services as conditions that combined to facilitate cybercrime. Some interviewees rationalised their activities as redistribution or retaliation for Africa’s historical exploitation through slavery and colonialism.
Such rationalisations do not transform fraud into anti-imperialism. The pensioner whose savings are stolen or the teenager subjected to financial blackmail bears no responsibility for colonial oppression. But the testimony reveals how social desperation can be refracted through a reactionary ideology in which exploiting another ordinary person is represented as revenge against the system. The result is not resistance to exploitation but its reproduction at another level.
The con moves to Bluesky.
As Bluesky attracted users leaving established social networks, fraud followed the migration. NBC News reported in December 2024 that scammers were using established romance and pig-butchering methods familiar from other platforms. Artists and writers have become targets. In July 2026, editor Rob Bignell documented what he described as the proliferation of supposed beta-reader and editor profiles targeting authors on Bluesky. He described profiles using similar approaches and said he had traced a number of the suspected scams to Nigeria, including through accounts on freelancing sites and suspicious LinkedIn identities. His investigation is an individual case study rather than a systematic measurement of fraud across the platform. Still, it illustrates how established forms of online fraud can be adapted to particular online communities.
The targets themselves are revealing. Writers, illustrators, editors and freelancers increasingly work under conditions of insecurity, competing for readers, commissions and contracts in a cultural economy being reorganised by digital platforms and artificial intelligence. Fraud preys upon the hope of a break. Somebody’s search for readers, professional recognition or employment becomes the scammer’s opening. One insecure layer of the international workforce is turned against another. Bluesky’s own statistics demonstrate the pressures created by rapid expansion. User-submitted moderation reports rose from 6.48 million in 2024 to 9.97 million in 2025, a 54 per cent increase. “Misleading” content accounted for 43.73 per cent of reports in 2025.
The October 2026 phishing attack provides another perspective. Agent Sky’s examination of the public moderation stream counted 76,772 account takedowns between 21 September and 20 October but no application of Bluesky’s “scam” label to accounts over the same period. The analysis recorded just nine “impersonation” labels. These figures come from an independent analysis, not statistics published by Bluesky itself, a distinction that should be maintained. But the underlying contradiction goes beyond warning labels. Social networks depend upon enormous populations communicating with minimum friction while simultaneously confronting organised actors seeking to exploit precisely that openness.
Fraud becomes an industry.
The Yahoo Boys represent one historical and predominantly decentralised manifestation of online fraud. In Southeast Asia, however, the fraudulent economy has assumed something approaching an industrial form.
Enormous scam compounds have emerged in which criminal organisations combine internet fraud with human trafficking and forced labour. In 2023, the United Nations Human Rights Office reported that credible sources indicated at least 120,000 people across Myanmar might be held in situations where they were forced to conduct online scams, while estimates for Cambodia were around 100,000. Laos, the Philippines and Thailand were also identified as destination or transit countries.
This phenomenon demonstrates the contradictory character of the international scam economy. Among the people committing fraud are willing participants, but others have themselves been trafficked and coerced into criminal activity. Research published by Asia Times in April 2026 described the experience of a trafficked worker who reported working 15-hour days, seven days a week, simultaneously conducting multiple conversations with prospective victims. The account described an organised division of labour in which different workers established contact, cultivated targets and extracted payments.
A 2026 UN report also documented torture, sexual abuse and forced labour within scam centres. It reported that survivors described severe economic pressures before their recruitment and that some police and border guards were alleged to have been complicit. Here the language of individual criminality becomes insufficient. A person sitting behind a keyboard may be perpetrating fraud against someone thousands of miles away while simultaneously being coerced by the organisation controlling the compound. Recognising that reality does not minimise the harm inflicted upon the person being defrauded. It reveals the extraordinary social relationships through which contemporary cybercrime operates.
The revenues are enormous. Guardio, citing Chainalysis, estimated $17 billion stolen across cryptocurrency scams in 2025, while saying pig-butchering scams grew by nearly 40 per cent year on year. Separately, the Associated Press reported a UN estimate that losses from scams in Asia during 2023 were between $18 billion and $37 billion. Governments have responded with raids, criminal prosecutions and geopolitical pressure. On 13 October 2026, a Chinese court sentenced three members of the Wei family criminal organisation to death for their roles in a criminal network operating in Myanmar’s Kokang region. Another three were given life sentences, and 55 received prison terms of varying lengths.
But suppressing individual organisations does not abolish the economic conditions sustaining the industry. Research published in Asia Times described how infrastructure remained after supposed closures and argued that operations driven out of one location could reopen elsewhere. The same article cited estimates placing annual scam revenue in Cambodia at $12.9 billion in 2023, roughly 40 per cent of the country’s GDP.
The platforms and the limits of moderation
The same contradiction appears at platform level. There is extensive evidence that technology companies are aware of the growth of financial sextortion and organised internet fraud. The Network Contagion Research Institute documented the circulation of instructional materials, scripts and videos facilitating financial sextortion and described Yahoo Boys as playing a major role in the extraordinary expansion of financial sextortion targeting minors.
The scale makes moderation immensely difficult. In June 2026, Snap said it was enforcing against about 220 suspected sextortion instances per day, or roughly 6,600 per month globally, counting both proactively identified cases and alleged violations reported by users. The company published these figures specifically while disputing the decontextualised circulation of an earlier figure claiming 10,000 user reports of sextortion each month.
Bluesky faces the same problem on a smaller scale. Its moderation operation was expanded to roughly 100 moderators during 2024, a year in which its moderation service received 6.48 million reports. The company also increased automation, which reduced processing times but could produce false positives requiring subsequent human involvement and appeals. Bluesky’s decentralised architecture distinguishes it from some older social-media companies, but a different technical architecture cannot abolish the social relationships the technology operates within. A decentralised network connecting millions of people still exists within a world characterised by poverty, private wealth, commercial competition and economic insecurity.
Nor can the struggle against fraud justify unlimited surveillance. The existence of criminal exploitation cannot provide a blank cheque for states and corporations to impose universal identification or monitor legitimate political communications. Protection from fraud and defence of democratic rights must not be presented as mutually exclusive. Technology does not exist outside society. Neither do the criminals who exploit it.
The new Yahoo Boys
To describe the Bluesky scammers as “the new Yahoo Boys” therefore requires precision. It cannot mean that fraudulent accounts appearing on Bluesky are necessarily Nigerian, still less that fraud reflects some characteristic peculiar to Nigerians or Africans. The historical significance of the Yahoo Boys lies elsewhere. They represented an early manifestation of a criminal economy that has subsequently become international, technologically sophisticated and, in the Southeast Asian scam compounds, increasingly industrialised.
The form continually changes. The advance-fee email becomes the romance profile. The romance profile becomes the fraudulent cryptocurrency opportunity. Individual scammers operate alongside large criminal organisations commanding labour forces measured in the thousands.
The platform changes too. Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and now Bluesky become different territories across which fraudulent activity migrates. What persists beneath technological change is an international social crisis that provides both vulnerable targets and a continual supply of people who can be recruited, voluntarily or coercively, into the scam economy.
The individual fraudster remains responsible for deliberate harm. Social explanation cannot become moral absolution. But individual morality alone cannot explain mass social phenomena. When similar criminal industries continually regenerate across different continents, platforms and technologies, the question necessarily becomes social. Police operations can arrest perpetrators. Platforms can remove fraudulent accounts. Stronger security can prevent particular phishing attacks. Human moderation can disrupt individual networks. These measures matter because they can prevent concrete harm.
What they cannot do is abolish the conditions continually reproducing the problem. The experience of the Southeast Asian compounds exposes this most starkly. The worker carrying out the online fraud may have been recruited through fraud. The person sending deceptive messages about fictitious employment, investments or relationships may himself have answered a deceptive advertisement promising legitimate work. Capitalist social relations can therefore transform the deceived into the deceiver and the exploited into an instrument for exploiting somebody else.
Romanticising the scammer is not progressive. The victims, particularly young people subjected to sextortion, have an unquestionable right to protection and justice. But neither is anything gained by transforming the Yahoo Boy into a racialised foreign menace whose existence supposedly expresses an exclusively Nigerian pathology. The phenomenon tells us considerably more about the world economy.
A global problem requires a global answer.
Online fraud reveals one of contemporary society’s sharpest contradictions. Humanity possesses communications technology capable of overcoming geographical isolation on a historically unprecedented scale. Yet this infrastructure has developed within societies characterised by staggering disparities of wealth and opportunity. The internet can connect the unemployed Nigerian graduate, the precarious British illustrator, the American teenager and the trafficked worker in a Cambodian compound instantaneously.
Capitalism determines the social circumstances under which they encounter one another. Too often that encounter becomes another relationship of exploitation. The answer cannot be nostalgia for an imaginary internet before fraud, nor continual migration from one commercial platform to another. Users moved to Bluesky. Fraud followed them.
Working people need both secure digital communications and democratic control over the infrastructure upon which social and economic life increasingly depends. These requirements cannot remain indefinitely subordinate to systems organised around private ownership, commercial competition, and wealth accumulation.
The worker whose savings are stolen and the unemployed young person recruited into cybercrime do not occupy morally equivalent positions. The latter has robbed the former. But both can confront different manifestations of the same international social order. Understanding those relationships does not diminish the crime. It helps explain why policing its symptoms has repeatedly failed to eradicate the underlying phenomenon.
A genuine solution ultimately requires reorganisation of economic life according to social need rather than private profit: secure employment, housing, and education for the world’s youth, together with democratic control over the communications infrastructure on which humanity increasingly depends. Only on such a foundation can the extraordinary productive and communicative power represented by the internet stop functioning as another arena in which desperation is turned against desperation.
Bibliography
Bluesky. Bluesky 2025 Transparency Report. 29 January 2026. [bsky.social]
Canadian Centre for Child Protection. Resources & Research: Statistics: Sextortion. Statistical data covering reports received by Cybertip.ca and related programmes. [protectchildren.ca]
CBC News. “Sextorters are targeting young boys online — and flaunting how rich the scam is making them.” 3 October 2025. [cbc.ca]
Hansen, Randall. “Don’t believe claims Southeast Asia scam schemes were shut down.” Asia Times, 16 April 2026. [asiatimes.com]
Livesey, Keith.“The Bluesky Scammers Are the New Yahoo Boys.” A Trumpet of Sedition, 3 November 2026. [Present article.]
Meta. “Combating Financial Sextortion Scams From Nigeria.” 24 July 2024. [about.fb.com]
Network Contagion Research Institute. A Digital Pandemic: Uncovering the Role of ‘Yahoo Boys’ in the Surge of Social Media-Enabled Financial Sextortion Targeting Minors. January 2024. [networkcontagion.us], [networkcontagion.us]
Nigeria National Bureau of Statistics. Nigeria Labour Force Survey Q2 2023. [nigerianstat.gov.ng]
Ojolo, Tolulope Lembola. A Criminological Investigation into the Lived Experiences of Cybercrime Perpetrators in Southwest Nigeria. Doctoral thesis, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2020. [ukzn-dspac…ukzn.ac.za]
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. “Hundreds of thousands trafficked to work as online scammers in SE Asia, says UN report.” 29 August 2023. [ohchr.org]
Snap. “Fighting back against online sexual extortion.” 12 June 2026. [values.snap.com]
Alberto Manguel’s The Reverse Side of the Tapestry: Notes on the Art of Translation is a cultivated, erudite and often moving defence of literary translation. Published by Carcanet Press on 24 September 2026, the book is described by the publisher as a book-length essay on the translator’s craft and on translation as what Manguel considers the “keenest form of reading”. The volume also contains his own illustrations. Yet the book’s fascination lies not only in what it says about translation, but also in the questions its conception of culture leaves unanswered. Its strengths and limitations belong to a recognisable liberal-humanist tradition in which literature appears primarily as a conversation conducted across centuries between writers, books and exceptionally attentive readers. What recedes from view is the material world that makes this conversation possible: publishers, markets, property, censorship, wages and, above all, labour.
The title itself provides a way to develop a more materialist conception. Carcanet Press explains that the reverse side of the tapestry is the definition of translation Manguel takes from Don Quixote. The metaphor is extraordinarily suggestive. Look at a tapestry from the front, and the picture appears finished and coherent. Turn it around, and another reality is revealed: knots, crossings, loose ends and the physical construction that produced the visible image. Translation similarly refuses the illusion that literature arrives before us in an immaculate, self-sufficient form. Behind the translated sentence stands another sentence, and between them stands a human being making decisions. [carcanet.co.uk]
A materialist criticism begins from much the same reversal. It turns the apparently autonomous cultural object over. It asks what the completed surface conceals: who made it, under what conditions, through which institutions, for which audience and under whose ownership. If Manguel’s metaphor is pursued beyond the boundaries he establishes for it, therefore, the reverse side of the tapestry leads from literary aesthetics into political economy. The difficulty is that Manguel, having turned over the tapestry, remains fascinated principally by its threads. He cares less about the loom.
A lover rather than a specialist
Manguel, born in Buenos Aires in 1948, has held a remarkable position in contemporary literary life as an anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, editor, and former director of the National Library of Argentina. Carcanet Press describes him as Argentine-Canadian and notes that he now lives in Lisbon. His career has always resisted easy professional categorisation. He belongs to the old republic of letters, moving between languages, libraries, literary histories and forms.
Translation is not for him an abstract subject. Carcanet Press notes that Manguel has translated Jorge Luis Borges and Marguerite Yourcenar into English and Katherine Mansfield and Paul Éluard into Spanish. This practical experience matters because his argument rests upon translation as an exceptionally intimate encounter between reader and text. Translating means penetrating beneath the apparent transparency of words into questions of voice, rhythm, ambiguity and intention.
The publisher approvingly reproduces George Steiner’s description of Manguel as an “amateur” in the older, more generous sense of the word: “a lover rather than a specialist”. That characterisation captures both what makes Manguel’s writing attractive and what eventually limits it. His criticism refuses the bureaucratised compartmentalisation of contemporary academic life. For him, literature is a continuous historical conversation. A biblical text can illuminate a modern novel; Cervantes can supply an image through which the modern translator’s predicament becomes intelligible.
There is something genuinely valuable here. Against reducing reading to the acquisition of information, Manguel insists on attention. Translation reveals that words cannot simply be exchanged like identical units of currency. To translate is already to interpret. The translator must decide. No dictionary can abolish those decisions because a sentence’s meaning never resides exclusively in the individual meanings of the words that compose it. Tone, social register, historical association, irony, rhythm and the relationship of one sentence to everything surrounding it continually intervene. A translator consequently produces a reading of the original even where they strive for the greatest possible fidelity.
Here Manguel’s defence of translation rises above the merely antiquarian. Translation exposes something fundamental about literature itself. The apparently transparent act of reading involves interpretation, historical knowledge, comparison, and judgement. The translated text embodies this process. But at precisely this point another question presents itself. If translation is intellectual activity, interpretation and creation, then the translator is not merely the invisible intermediary between two literary personalities. The translator is also a worker.
Translation and the struggle over who may read
The political importance of translation long predates the contemporary publishing industry. The history of translating texts is inseparable from struggles over access to knowledge and over who possesses the authority to interpret it. The history of the vernacular Bible provides one of the clearest examples. William Tyndale’s English translation of scripture belonged to a tremendous transformation produced by printing, religious upheaval and the development of vernacular literacy. The issue was never simply whether one rendering of a Greek or Hebrew word was superior to another. Behind disputes over translation lay the far more dangerous question of whether ordinary people needed an established clerical hierarchy to mediate between themselves and sacred texts.
The subsequent history of revolutionary England reveals what could follow once texts and arguments escaped older institutional monopolies. The enormous expansion of pamphleteering and popular religious controversy accompanying the English Revolution allowed artisans, soldiers, preachers and political radicals to intervene directly in questions previously claimed as the preserve of churchmen, lawyers and rulers. Levellers, Diggers and religious radicals found within vernacular religious and political languages the means to formulate increasingly explosive questions about authority, representation, property and equality.
Translation in this sense belongs to the history of democratisation, but not in the comfortable meaning the term later acquired. Making forbidden, restricted or otherwise inaccessible texts available to wider populations could destabilise established authority. It altered not simply what people read but who could participate in intellectual and political argument. The same process took on an increasingly international character as bourgeois society grew. Philosophical, scientific and political works circulated beyond the linguistic environments in which they had originated. Ideas crossed frontiers that states, churches, and ruling classes repeatedly tried to police. Translation became one mechanism through which intellectual life acquired its genuinely international character.
The development of the socialist workers’ movement gave this process an entirely new historical significance. The writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and later the vast literature generated by socialist movements worldwide, could not have become the theoretical inheritance of an international working class without translation. Translating socialist literature was not an ornamental supplement to political activity. It formed part of the movement’s practical work of education and organisation.
This history points towards something only partially captured by a liberal-humanist celebration of translation as intercultural understanding. Languages do not meet one another in some realm floating above society. Human beings speaking different languages encounter each other through migrations, empires, wars, trade, intellectual exchange and class struggle. Translation is therefore necessarily historical. The reverse of the tapestry is already beginning to look much more complicated.
The translator as worker
Manguel approaches translation above all as a man of letters contemplating a craft. But translation is also an occupation situated within the capitalist publishing industry. This distinction matters because the romantic language surrounding literary production has always served an ideological function. Writing, translating, illustrating and editing can be presented as callings whose supposedly privileged proximity to culture somehow places them outside ordinary questions of remuneration and working conditions. Yet precisely because many people undertake intellectual labour from genuine commitment, their attachment to the activity can itself become a mechanism through which poorly rewarded conditions are normalised.
The organisations representing translators make clear that contracts, payment and rights are not secondary concerns. Britain’s Translators Association, part of the Society of Authors, describes itself as the collective voice of literary translators and advises members on translator-publisher contracts and negotiating payment. It also says explicitly that it campaigns for translators’ rights and fairer working conditions.
The evidence from the United States points in the same direction. The Authors Guild states that literary translation requires creativity, talent, and skill. Still, translators’ work is often overlooked or taken for granted, including through failures to provide proper credit or ongoing royalties. Its model translation contract was created specifically to provide translators with a basis for negotiating better terms.
Such mundane contractual matters expose the social side of Manguel’s elevated conception of translation. If translation is profound reading, then somebody must be paid to undertake that reading. If it requires sustained intellectual attention, somebody must possess the time in which that attention can occur. If the finished translation embodies interpretative and creative judgement, the translator’s right to credit, remuneration and a continuing interest in the exploitation of that work cannot be dismissed as matters external to culture.
The Authors Guild’s model contract gives this struggle particularly concrete expression. Its proposed clauses include a translation fee alongside royalties from print, electronic and audiobook editions and shares from the licensing of subsidiary rights. The Guild notes that payment arrangements vary widely between publishers. The very necessity for such model provisions reveals the contradiction behind romantic conceptions of literary translation. Culture may be discussed in the vocabulary of inspiration, interpretation and artistic fidelity, but the translator ultimately confronts a contract. The capitalist commodity does not cease to be a commodity because the object being bought and sold happens to be a book.
The new pressure of artificial intelligence
The social contradiction becomes sharper with the rapid development of generative artificial intelligence. Here the argument must avoid two equally unsatisfactory positions. One is technological romanticism, which treats human cultural activity as possessing a mystical essence that machinery can never approach. The other is technological determinism, which holds that the ability to automate part of an activity demonstrates the historical inevitability of replacing the humans performing it.
Neither begins with the decisive question: under whose control technology is introduced, for what social purpose, and who reaps the benefits?
Translators’ concerns about generative AI are not hypothetical. The Translators Association states that it is “deeply engaged” in protecting translators’ rights and their craft in the age of AI and says it has called for solidarity with human translators whose livelihoods are threatened by generative AI. Meanwhile, the Authors Guild has incorporated provisions on generative AI into its literary translation model contract.
The Society of Authors additionally advises those negotiating fees to establish a commissioner’s policy concerning AI and says it expects consent to be sought before AI is given access to authors’ materials. These developments demonstrate that AI is already an issue of rights, remuneration and control within literary work, not simply a philosophical argument about whether machines can translate.
This is where Manguel’s conception of translation becomes unexpectedly radical in its implications. If translation genuinely represents an especially intense form of reading, then translating cannot adequately be understood as the mechanical conversion of linguistic units. It embodies interpretation. But a materialist criticism should go further. The central problem is not deciding whether a machine output is “really” translation according to some abstract philosophical definition. The more important question is what happens to human labour when automated systems are introduced into publishing under capitalist ownership.
Machinery under capitalism has repeatedly been presented as liberation from labour, while workers experience it as intensified exploitation, unemployment, deskilling, or loss of control over the labour process. The contradiction arises not fundamentally from machinery itself, but from the social relations governing its use. AI potentially contains enormously progressive possibilities. Technology capable of overcoming linguistic barriers could enormously broaden international access to culture, historical documents, scientific research and everyday human communication. For socialists, there is no interest in defending unnecessary drudgery merely because humans previously performed it.
But under capitalist relations the central criterion governing technological adoption is not the enrichment of human experience. It is profitability. That distinction transforms the AI debate. The question should not be posed simply as “human translator versus machine”. Both are trapped within a social organisation of production that subordinates technological development to private accumulation. The genuine alternative would be to use advances in automation to reduce necessary labour while expanding the time and resources available for higher forms of cultural, intellectual and creative activity. In such circumstances AI might become an instrument available to translators rather than an economic weapon deployed against them.
Translation against nationalism
There is another reason translation should concern Marxists. In practice, the activity contradicts the nationalist mythology that cultures exist as self-contained, internally homogeneous organisms. Every translated book is evidence against such isolation. Languages continually absorb, transform and appropriate elements from one another. Literature develops through these exchanges. National traditions themselves emerge within international processes.
Marx and Engels recognised this tendency extraordinarily early. Capitalism created a world market and drew previously isolated national economies into an increasingly interconnected global system. Cultural production developed internationally alongside this process. Yet capitalism’s contradiction is that economic life grows ever more global while political power remains organised through rival capitalist nation-states. Translation occupies one of the cultural pressure points created by this contradiction. It demonstrates the objective internationalism of culture while remaining embedded in national markets, publishing structures, and economic power inequalities.
Not all linguistic exchanges therefore occur between equals. Some languages dominate the international publishing market while others remain peripheral. Which authors receive translation, which works obtain international distribution and which disappear outside their original languages are not purely literary decisions. Markets and institutions shape them. Consequently, the existence of world literature does not abolish material inequality any more than the world market abolishes national inequality. It reproduces these contradictions on a cultural level.
Yet translation contains another possibility. It makes available humanity’s accumulated imaginative and intellectual experience across geographical and historical boundaries. The same activity that capitalism turns into a specialised market also points beyond cultural nationalism towards the conception of culture as a genuinely common human inheritance.
Literature and the commodity
Here lies the deeper limitation of Manguel’s liberal humanism. Books and readers, libraries and writers, memories and conversations populate his intellectual world. This world is real, and defending it against intellectual impoverishment matters. But the danger is that the library becomes an idealised refuge from society rather than one of society’s products. Books cannot escape the commodity form merely because their content transcends it.
A publishing house must purchase or control rights, commission work, produce an edition, market it and sell copies. Authors and translators must earn their living. Distribution channels determine what reaches readers. The survival of literary works may depend upon libraries and public institutions whose budgets are themselves products of political struggle.
The cultural object consequently possesses the same double character that capitalism imposes elsewhere. It is simultaneously something created because human beings possess the need to express and understand their experience and something produced and circulated within definite economic structures. This does not diminish literature. On the contrary, understanding its material conditions makes a more serious defence possible.
Manguel’s tapestry metaphor permits precisely this kind of investigation. Once the work is turned around, we discover not only interpretative knots but a division of labour: author, translator, editor, designer, printer, distributor, bookseller, librarian and reader. Behind them stand institutions, technologies and property relations. The reverse side of the tapestry becomes society itself.
From humanism to materialism
The attraction of The Reverse Side of the Tapestry is therefore inseparable from its limitation. Manguel protects something genuinely precious: attentive reading, historical memory, linguistic subtlety and the conviction that literature creates relationships across languages and centuries. A Marxist criticism has no reason to reject this inheritance. Marxism did not arise through hostility to the achievements of human culture. It sought the social conditions under which those achievements would no longer remain the effective privilege of minorities. The difference lies elsewhere.
Liberal humanism ultimately appeals to enlightened individuals and institutions to protect culture. Materialism asks what social conditions culture needs to flourish and what forces have an interest in creating them. The translator therefore presents in miniature a much larger problem. How can serious intellectual work survive when the time needed to carry it out is continually measured against profitability? How can literature fulfil its universal possibilities while its production and distribution remain governed by private property? How can technological advances become instruments for enlarging human freedom rather than mechanisms for reducing labour costs?
These are not questions peculiar to translation. Writers, musicians, actors, researchers, journalists, designers and innumerable other cultural workers confront different forms of the same contradiction. The technology capable of distributing cultural works to billions exists alongside commercial and proprietary structures that seek to enclose intellectual production. Never has humanity possessed technological means of cultural communication remotely comparable to those available today, yet never has the pressure to translate attention, creativity and knowledge into measurable commercial value been more pervasive. The defence of culture therefore cannot finally depend upon nostalgia for a supposedly pre-technological literary civilisation. Nor can it depend upon persuading corporations to behave more benevolently towards creative workers. The problem is social.
Alberto Manguel, Alexander Voronsky and the Struggle for Artistic Truth
Translation occupies a peculiar position within literature. The translator creates sentences without being their original author, interprets while resisting the temptation to replace the author, and necessarily changes a work’s linguistic form while trying to preserve what made that form artistically meaningful. This raises the fundamental question confronting every serious translator: what in a work of literature must survive its passage from one language into another? Alberto Manguel and the Marxist literary critic Alexander Voronsky offer complementary answers.
For Manguel, translation begins with reading. In The Translator as Reader, he describes reading as a way to know more about the world and ourselves. He identifies the translator as potentially its most refined and knowledgeable practitioner. In The Reverse Side of the Tapestry: Notes on the Art of Translation, he develops this preoccupation with translation as an exceptionally intense form of reading. The translator cannot remain a passive recipient of meaning. Every sentence demands interpretation: rhythm, ambiguity, historical association and tone must first be recognised before they can be recreated.
Voronsky approaches the problem from another direction. For him, genuine art constitutes a particular form of cognition. In On Art, he argues that art apprehends reality, human thoughts and feelings through concrete images rather than through abstract propositions. Artistic cognition depends upon intuition, although intuition does not eliminate technique or conscious analysis.
Placed beside Manguel’s conception of the translator as reader, this provides the basis for a richer conception of translation. The translator must not merely discover what the words say. The deeper task is to recover the artistic cognition contained within them.
A mechanically accurate translation can therefore remain artistically false. Every word might possess a plausible dictionary equivalent while rhythm is destroyed, irony flattened, ambiguity explained away, and differences between characters’ voices homogenised. Information survives while literature disappears. Conversely, unrestricted adaptation can become equally false by replacing the author’s artistic discovery with the translator’s preferences.
Voronsky’s discussion of the painter Mikhailov in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina illuminates the difficulty. He emphasises the artist’s capacity to penetrate appearances, discovering the significant and characteristic beneath what obscures it. He adopts Tolstoy’s metaphor of“removing the veils” to describe this artistic process. The genuine artist does not merely copy appearances but reveals something about reality that previously remained concealed. [marxists.org]
The translator confronts something analogous. Language itself has become a veil that must be removed and preserved at once. Russian cannot simply become English without transformation. Syntax, sounds, idioms and historical associations differ. Yet the translator must find an equivalent way to let another reader encounter the artistic relationships embodied in the original.
Here Manguel’s translator as reader and Voronsky’s artist as discoverer converge. The translator becomes a reader compelled to demonstrate the depth of a reading through recreation. An ordinary reader can pass over an ambiguity unnoticed. A critic can subsequently revise an interpretation. The translator must repeatedly decide what the ambiguity, rhythm or image is doing and choose words that recreate its function.
This labour also has a profoundly historical dimension. Languages carry the accumulated experiences of societies. Words carry associations shaped by history, social conflict, and cultural development. Translation therefore mediates between historical worlds as well as between vocabularies. Making a nineteenth-century Russian writer sound casually twenty-first-century may erase something essential; manufacturing artificial archaism can falsify the work just as seriously.
This explains translation’s importance to world culture. It challenges the confinement of literature within national boundaries by allowing artistic discoveries produced in one language and historical experience to become available within another. Reading crosses boundaries of time and place; translation materially facilitates that encounter.
A historical irony lies in Voronsky’s own case. His return to English-speaking readers itself depended heavily upon translation. Frederick S. Choate, translator of Art as the Cognition of Life, explained that little of Voronsky’s critical writings had previously appeared in English and that translating them helped recover a major Marxist literary figure suppressed under Stalinism. Here translation became an instrument of historical recovery. [wsws.org]
Manguel helps us understand why the translator must be an extraordinary reader; Voronsky helps identify what that reading seeks: the cognition of life embodied in artistic form. The translator must therefore create to preserve and transform, to remain faithful. At its greatest, translation does not merely carry words between languages. It lets one society’s artistic discovery of life live again within another language.
Who owns the loom?
The Reverse Side of the Tapestry remains an elegant and humane contribution to the literature of translation. According to its publisher, the book explicitly approaches literary translation as the translator’s craft and as an exceptionally intense form of reading. At the same time, Manguel brings his own substantial experience translating major writers between English and Spanish. These qualities make the book worth taking seriously. But its central metaphor ultimately demands to be carried further than liberal humanism permits. Translation is interpretation, certainly. But interpretation requires time, knowledge, training and labour. Labour takes place under social conditions. Those conditions involve contracts, remuneration and property. And property raises the question of class.
The development of artificial intelligence merely makes this chain of relationships more visible. The fundamental issue is not whether technological development should be halted to preserve every existing cultural occupation unchanged. Such a programme would be neither achievable nor desirable. The question is instead whether technological progress will be subordinated to private profit or consciously employed to extend human freedom and culture.
A socialist organisation of cultural production would not erect barriers between technology and creativity. It would seek to free both from their subordination to profit. Automation capable of reducing routine work should increase the time human beings possess for education, thought, creativity and leisure rather than threatening their livelihoods. The increasingly international circulation of culture should become the basis for fuller human communication rather than another field for corporate accumulation.
Translation demonstrates particularly vividly why this question cannot finally be resolved nationally. Translators inhabit the spaces between languages by profession. Their work testifies every day to the inadequacy of national boundaries as containers for human culture. The defence of their labour therefore points logically to workers’ broader international interests.
Manguel begins from the back of the tapestry. It is an inspired metaphor because every apparently seamless work of art conceals the process through which it came into existence. Turn it over, and the order of the finished image dissolves into knots and crossed threads. The observer discovers construction where only beauty had appeared.
But turn it over far enough and something more becomes visible. Someone selected the material. Someone developed the skill required to work it. Someone performed the labour. Someone determined the pattern. And within a class society, someone controls the conditions under which that labour is undertaken and the product distributed. That is where a materialist criticism must begin where Manguel stops.
The Reverse Side of the Tapestry asks us to admire the hidden threads that make literature possible. The task today is to follow those threads from the book into society itself: from translation to labour, from labour to property, and from property to class. The decisive question is no longer merely what we discover when we turn the tapestry over. It is who does the weaving, and who owns the loom?
Bibliography
Authors Guild. “Literary Translation Model Contract.” 14 April 2021. The Guild describes the model contract as intended to promote fair contractual terms and payment for literary translators and includes provisions concerning generative AI.
Authors Guild. “Negotiating Literary Translation Contracts.” 2 June 2022. Discussion of translation fees, royalties, credit and rights. [authorsguild.org]
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Part II, 1615.
Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845.
Lenin, V. I. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. 1916.
Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. London: Flamingo, 1997.
Manguel, Alberto. The Reverse Side of the Tapestry: Notes on the Art of Translation. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2026. Carcanet lists the paperback at £14.99, ISBN 9781800175808, with publication on 24 September 2026. [carcanet.co.uk]
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. 1867.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848.
Society of Authors. “Rates and Fees.” Guidance addressing payment, rights and the use of AI in commissioned work. [societyofauthors.org]
