Raphael Samuel (1934–1996) was a leading figure in post-war British historical culture. He was a Marxist/Stalinist-trained intellectual, a founder member of the History Workshop movement and the journal History Workshop, and a powerful advocate for what became known as “history from below”, the study of the social and cultural lives of ordinary people rather than ruling elites.

Samuel was not an orthodox historian by any stretch of the imagination. Anyone studying Samuel’s archive at the Bishopsgate Institute would see that his note-taking and working methods were chaotic at best. According to Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite ‘ Each thought or reference to a source was written or pasted onto a single side of a loose sheet of paper. It might be the source itself – an advertisement, a jam-jar label or an extract from a Xerox – it mattered only that it was attributed and sub-headed under a theme. Then the notes were filed in groups. Scholarly prestidigitation allowed the pages to be constantly reshuffled so that new combinations of ideas appeared, presuppositions might be overturned, and surprising connections thereby be generated. All that was needed was reams of rough paper, scissors and a pot of glue, phalanxes of lever-arch files, and a hole-puncher.’[1]

His method and traits were learnt from Beatrice and Sidney Webb, progenitors of Fabian socialism, who developed it in the late 19th century. Samuel would have absorbed not only their note-taking style but a large chunk of their politics. But his work revitalised popular and local history, encouraged collective research methods, and brought working-class memory, oral testimony, and archival recovery into historians’ practice. These are enduring gains. The recovery of workers’ lived experience helps counter the abstractions and elitism of bourgeois historiography.

Before founding the Universities Left Review, Samuel was a member of the British Communist Party. He left two years after Kruschev’s secret speech. He was a very young member of the Communist Party Historians Group. The CPHG arose inside and around the British Communist Party and the wider milieu of Communist and labour politics between the 1930s and 1950s. Its best‑known members—E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill and others—produced influential work that challenged bourgeois and Whig traditions of national history and insisted on the agency of popular classes. The group’s scholarship should be read against the background of the political orientation of the Stalinist bureaucracy—its Popular Front politics, its nationalism and its accommodation to bourgeois forces—which indelibly affected the intellectual formation and institutional constraints faced by historians working within or alongside the Party.

The CPHG did, however, make enduring contributions to socialist historiography. It overturned Whig teleology, insisted that ordinary people make history, and enriched archival and methodological practice. These were advances that Marxists should defend and extend. However, the group’s political roots in a Stalinist‑influenced party had concrete consequences. The Communist Party’s “People’s History” orientation and Popular Front politics tended to domesticate class conflict, subordinating proletarian independence to alliances with liberal or petty‑bourgeois currents. The result was, at times, an apologetic stance toward state bureaucracy and a reluctance to carry the political implications of Marxist analysis into the present.

Raphael Samuel and the Universities Left Review

Samuel was a leading British Marxist historian and a central figure in the post‑war “history from below” movement. He helped found the History Workshop and was associated with the small‑circulation left journals and intellectual networks that emerged in Britain in the 1950s and 60s, among them the Universities and Left Review (ULR). ULR (1957–60) brought together student radicals, young intellectuals and some socialist critics of the university and the Labour Party. It aimed to radicalise university life and cultural debate, critiquing orthodox academic history and promoting popular and labour history.

Samuel’s main collaborator on ULR was Stuart Hall. Hall’s political and intellectual trajectory—from the Universities and Left Review (ULR) and the New Left to Cultural Studies and his later role in Marxism Today was the product of definite class formations, political realignments and the changing social position of layers of the intelligentsia after World War II. Hall’s work cannot be treated as an abstract contribution to theory divorced from the social interests it expresses.

As Paul Bond writes,‘ Hall’s central theme was the repudiation of the class struggle as the axis of social development, as this assumes that the working class is the decisive agent of political change. Instead, he argued for a turn to the cultural sphere. This was not a Marxist appraisal or critique of culture, but the elevation of “culture” as an arena contested by different “agencies”. Longtime Pabloite Tariq Ali wrote that Hall said, “half-joking to friends that his cultural studies project was politics by other means”. That indeed it was: a project that replaced class as the central political factor by race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality and other “sub-cultures” and “identities”, making it impossible, in the end, to address capitalist exploitation. Instead, the struggle had to be conducted in every supposedly “relatively autonomous” sphere. The logic led to garden-variety single-issue, bourgeois-reformist politics, as an article Hall co-authored last year made clear: “Mobilising resistance thus requires alliances of a sort which only a multi-focused political strategy can hope to construct”.[2]

From a historical‑materialist standpoint, the importance of Samuel, Hall and their ULR project lies less in any single programmatic contribution than in the social position they occupied: a layer of petty‑bourgeois intellectuals reacting to the crises of post‑war capitalism and the limitations of established reformist politics. Their cultural interventions—renewed attention to working‑class experience, local history and culture—were progressive in exposing bourgeois narratives and recuperating popular memory. Yet, understood in class terms, this milieu tended to substitute cultural critique for a political orientation to the working class as a revolutionary subject.

Samuel was in the Communist Party at the same time as the founder of People’s History, A.L. Morton. As Ann Talbot brings out in her essay on Christopher Hill, “The Communist Party sponsored a form of ‘People’s History’, which is typified by A.L. Morton’s People’s History of England, in which the class character of earlier rebels, revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical approach reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries.

People’s history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy, which provided a democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr.’ [3]

The ULR and similar currents reflected objective social forces: a post‑war expansion of higher education, the growth of a politically conscious intelligentsia, and the fragmentation of the labour movement. These social origins explain both the strengths and limits of the project. Samuel’s cultivation of popular history responded to an objective weakness: official historiography ignored the working class. But the limitations were also objective: petty‑bourgeois layers, detached from a sustained orientation to working‑class organisation, are prone to turning working‑class culture into a form of moral critique rather than mobilising it as the basis for revolutionary political independence.

The lessons of Samuel and the ULR are twofold and complementary. First, recovering working‑class history and culture is necessary: it combats bourgeois erasure, builds pride, and strengthens class identity. Second—and decisive—cultural work must be subordinated to political orientation: it must be used to connect workers to a programmatic, internationalist Marxist perspective and to build rank‑and‑file organisation and a revolutionary party. Without that link, cultural renewal risks becoming an appendage of liberal reformism or of petty‑bourgeois radicalism.

Workshop of the World

Raphael Samuel’s essays, collected in this book, came under the rubric of a “people’s history”. They include material often associated with the idea of Britain as the “workshop of the world”. They do offer rich documentary and cultural evidence about working‑class life, memory and resistance. Samuel’s micro‑histories become instruments for understanding how material conditions, class formation and consciousness interact.

He helped institutionalise a new historical practice—through the History Workshop movement and collections of oral histories and local studies—that shifted attention away from great men and state archives toward popular culture, labour traditions and everyday life. This intervention broke important ground: it democratised history, widened the sources, and made working-class experience visible in ways that conventional academic histories often ignored. Yet, from a classical Marxist and Fourth International standpoint, Samuel’s legacy is both positive and limited.

Samuel’s History Workshop arose in the 1960s and 1970s amid rising labour militancy and intellectual currents that critiqued elitist historiography. He collected oral testimony, household economies, popular ritual, and the souvenirs of everyday life. This expanded the archive, exposed working‑class creative resistance and revealed how consciousness is formed through struggle, culture and community. These contributions are invaluable for socialists building working‑class memory and confidence.

But Samuel’s practice frequently stopped at descriptive recovery. While he emphasised the autonomy and creativity of popular traditions, he often treated culture as an end in itself—celebrating particularisms and local solidarities without always linking them systematically to the political organisation required to overthrow capital. In moments where the transformation of society is the question, empirical cultural history must be integrated with an analysis of capitalist accumulation, state power and the strategy of revolutionary organisation.

Samuel emerged in the same milieu that produced the 1960s New Left and the cultural turn in history. That milieu included significant intellectual currents hostile to classical materialism — strands of the Frankfurt School, post-Marxist and post-structuralist thought.

The domination of this school of thought meant the working class paid a heavy price for this fragmentation of the working-class perspective. Samuel’s work, while recuperative of working-class sources, often stopped short of linking that history to a program for working-class political independence. Samuel’s practical insistence that historians listen to workers, use oral history, and develop local archives advanced the working class’s capacity to know itself. This recuperation of proletarian experience strengthens historical consciousness when it is anchored in a materialist understanding of class relations.

At the same time, Samuel’s culturalism and the New Left milieu into which he was embedded often moved away from a rigorous classical Marxist method. The petty-bourgeois currents of the New Left tended to relativise class as the central subject of history and to prioritise cultural, identity, or therapeutic frameworks over an analysis anchored in production and property relations.

Robert Tressell and the Early Socialists

There are two chapters in the book that I want to pay particular attention to. Robert Tressell (Robert Noonan), author of The Ragged‑Trousered Philanthropists, occupies an important place in the cultural and political formation of British working‑class socialism. His novel gives an unsparing depiction of artisan and factory life, petty‑bourgeois illusions, and the corrosive ethics of capitalist wage relations.

But to situate Tressell historically and theoretically, it is important to locate him within the longer trajectory from the early socialists and utopian currents to the emergence of scientific Marxism and the revolutionary program defended by the Marxists. Socialists like Fourier, Owen, Saint‑Simon, and later various British and French reformers raised vital moral and institutional objections to capitalist misery. They exposed capitalism’s inhumanity and proposed cooperative or communal remedies. Tressell’s literary moralism continues that tradition. His vivid exposé of exploitation aimed to awaken sympathy and spur reform among his readers.

Tressell’s milieu in Edwardian Britain was artisans, small contractors, and a growing industrial proletariat showing both the objective development of capitalist productive forces and the subjective unevenness of working‑class consciousness. Tressell’s novel contributes to shaping consciousness but cannot substitute for organised, political working‑class activity.

                           Origins of People’s History

Samuel’s essay on People’s History is probably one of his finest. Under the guise of the People’s History genre, it reopened questions long suppressed by institutional historiography: ritual, popular politics, communal solidarities, and the cultural forms that sustain working-class life.

People’s history—often called “history from below” was not merely a literary genre but a social product rooted in class relations. From the standpoint of the materialist conception of history, historical consciousness arises out of concrete social practice: collective labour, struggle, deprivation and organisation produce memories, traditions and forms of political culture. As Plekhanov stressed in tracing the emergence of the theory of class struggle, ideas about history flow from changes in property relations and social development; historians who ignore class obscure the motor forces of social change.

In Britain, after World War II and especially from the late 1960s, Raphael Samuel and the History Workshop movement institutionalised the turn to popular and cultural history. They emphasised archives of everyday life, oral history and collective memory, seeking to make the working class visible within historical narrative. This cultural recovery reflected real social processes: the postwar restructuring of capitalism, renewed political radicalism among students and workers, and a crisis in the authority of traditional elites.

There is a progressive side to the genre in that, correctly applied, it undermines the bourgeois monopoly on the past, restores agency to workers and oppressed groups, and supplies documentary armour for organising—stories of strikes, self‑organisation and mutual aid that can inspire present struggles. Recovering these experiences helps politicise layers of working people by showing that social change was made by ordinary people, not by abstract “great men.”

However, when detached from a dialectical, class‑struggle method, people’s history can become an end in itself: localist nostalgia, culturalism, or therapeutic memorialising that fails to connect the past to present class relations and the necessity of a revolutionary program.

Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory, 1994

Samuel did not write many books but concentrated on essay writing. He only wrote one sole-authored book in his lifetime, Theatres of Memory (1994). A second volume of Theatres of Memory, titled Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, was published in 1998, after his death.

As Samuel McIlhagga points out, ‘It is perhaps a unique feature of British intellectual culture that its greatest Marxists have more often been essayists than authors of lengthy theoretical treatises. The self-contained responses to a specific political or historical problem, or the witty corrective to dominant orthodoxies, are well suited to a nation whose intellectual elite are as closed and coherent as Britain’s. When E. P. Thompson wrote “The Peculiarities of the English,” his breathless polemic seeking to correct a dismissive attitude to the radicalism of his country’s history found in the work of the Marxist writers Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, he was pitting himself against two thinkers whom he knew personally and who edited a journal to which he, too, had contributed.[4]

Samuel’s was a new orientation which drew on Marxist themes of class, labour, and social conflict. Still, he combined them with a broad culturalist sensibility and an emphasis on the historian as activist-organiser. From the standpoint of classical Marxism, this combination has both strengths and weaknesses. It should be pointed out that Samuel was not a classical Marxist.

Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory (1994, ed. with Paul Thompson) was a foundational intervention in the study of popular memory, oral history and the politics of historical representation. Samuel recasts history as a living, contested cultural terrain: memory is staged, rehearsed and institutionalised in festivals, museums, songs, local traditions and archives. There are similarities and major differences between Samuel’s work and E.P. Thompson’s. Thompson (The Making of the English Working Class) developed a class-formation method that treated class as a historical process: classes are made through concrete struggles, economic relations and political experience, not by sociological labels or algebraic categories. Thompson insisted on grounding consciousness in workers’ material conditions and lived struggles.

Samuel, on the other hand, followed a culturalist tradition, i.e., history-from-below, collective memory, institutions, everyday life, shifting attention to the cultural forms, practices, and repositories through which people experience, narrate, and reproduce social life — oral tradition, rituals, popular politics, festivals, literary tastes, and memory.

These two contending historiographical approaches clashed in 1979. According to Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, “The 1979 History Workshop staged a rehashing of what was already one of the most vituperative disputes on the New Left, between E.P. Thompson and the advocates of ‘theory’. Thompson ripped into the other speakers, Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson. The atmosphere, as Sophie Scott-Brown describes in her excellent 2017 biography of Samuel, was already bad. The Ruskin student collective organising the conference wasn’t keen on the theoretical preoccupations of many academics in the History Workshop editorial collective; some members had already suggested forming a breakaway workshop to get back to the study of labour history. After Thompson’s blow-up, the final plenary session was quietly cancelled. Samuel, who probably took this decision, was essentially a Thompsonian: he defended a focus on ‘real life experience’ and empirical work, which he suggested could ‘do more for our theoretical understanding of ideology and consciousness than any number of further “interpellations” on the theme of “relative autonomy”. (A dig at Althusserians.) Samuel pointed out that, like ‘any other intellectual artefact’, theory isn’t timeless but ‘has its material and ideological conditions of existence’. But he wasn’t entirely a sceptic, arguing that good history required a ‘theoretically informed’ understanding of language, and that socialism required a serious analysis of ‘bourgeois ideology’.[5]

The dispute between E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall was not merely an academic quarrel about sources or style. It expresses two antagonistic tendencies in the British left: Thompson’s historical‑materialist, class‑formation method, which locates class consciousness in concrete economic relations, struggles and political experience, and Hall’s culturalist turn, which relocates political explanation in culture, identity and “articulations” of meaning.

Contemporary relevance

Samuel’s method of reconstructing working-class experience: oral histories, rank-and-file reportage, and cultural memory are weapons against ideological amnesia. Culture can strengthen class identity, but without a program that explains how capital reproduces itself, and without organisation to transform class interests into political power, cultural mobilisation risks becoming either reformist co‑optation or nostalgic particularism. The dialectic here is crucial: cultural consciousness both expresses and shapes class struggle, but it is itself transformed by objective changes in production and by political leadership.

From the standpoint of classical Marxism, Raphael Samuel’s recovery of popular memory is an essential resource—but it must be subordinated to a revolutionary program. Marxist historiography does not merely collect fragments of working‑class life; it explains how those fragments arise from class relations and how they can be mobilised for socialist transformation. This rejects both bourgeois culturalism, which divorces culture from economics, and reformist populism, which equates cultural recognition with systemic change.

[1] Ladders last a long time-www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n10/florence-sutcliffe-braithwaite/ladders-last-a-long-time

[2] Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014): A political career dedicated to opposing Marxism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/05/hall-m05.html

[3] “These the times … this the man”: an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html

[4] Why Raphael Samuel Matters-https://jacobin.com/2024/05/raphael-samuel-workshop-of-the-world

[5] Ladders last a long time-www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n10/florence-sutcliffe-braithwaite/ladders-last-a-long-time 

On the surface of things, Caleb Maupin and Gerry Healy represent historically two very different political tendencies. Still, a serious study of both would reveal similar class tendencies. Despite Maupin and Healy occupying very different places in the history of the left, they share a common dynamic: both exhibited expressions of petty-bourgeois accommodation to capitalism and both substituted nationalist or sectarian shortcuts for the independent mobilisation of the international working class.

A Marxist myself, it does loathe me to mention both in the same breath, but the contrast is important. Healy was a historically prominent Trotskyist who, in practice, degenerated; Maupin is a contemporary promoter of “patriotic” or national-populist socialism. Both in the end show the objective danger posed by petty-bourgeois radicalism and political opportunism in periods of capitalist crisis.

Gerry Healy was a central figure in mid-20th-century Trotskyism. An organiser who, in earlier decades, defended the Fourth International against Pabloite liquidationists. But the record of the 1970s–1980s shows a political, organisational and moral degeneration along with an increasing turn to opportunist relations with bourgeois nationalist forces, theoretical confusions that substituted Hegelian mystification for Marxist historical materialism, and organisational practices that isolated and bureaucratized the WRP. The International Committee of the Fourth International undertook a systematic Marxist analysis of this degeneration, culminating in Healy’s expulsion in 1985. The document explained that personal abuses and scandals were rooted in a deeper political betrayal: the abandonment of Trotskyist program, dialectical method, and international proletarian strategy.[1]

Whether Maupin knew about this history or even cares is open for conjecture. His book contains no direct quotes from books or documents from that period, and there is no bibliography or footnotes. There appears to be no consultation of the most important biography of Healy, by David North.[2]

For North Gerry Healy’s life must be understood not as the product of individual psychology alone, but as the interaction of his political capacities with the shifting material conditions and class struggles of his era. From a Marxist and dialectical perspective, North argues that Healy’s later trajectory cannot be reduced to personal vice alone. Instead, it reflected objective pressures and incorrect political responses. Also, a turn toward nationalist and opportunist relations with bourgeois regimes, the subordination of programmatic tasks to short‑term organisational growth, and a growing separation of theory from the historical materialist method. These tendencies were epitomised in Healy’s ideological retreat, most notably in his distortion of dialectical materialism in his writings and practices, which North critiqued, and in his unprincipled alliances that compromised Trotskyist independence.

Maupin, despite pretending to defend the Fourth International or Leon Trotsky, repeats numerous old slanders, such as the claim that Leon Trotsky collaborated with capitalist governments against the Soviet Union. Maupin Writes

“Trotsky held onto the notion of the USSR as a “workers’ state” that needed to have the “parasitical Stalinist bureaucracy” removed. Trotsky was perhaps holding out for the “political revolution” he called for that would install him in Stalin’s position. Several Soviet leaders were convicted of allegedly conspiring with Trotsky, as well as Germany and Japan, to make this happen. Investigating evidence of these charges—routinely dismissed by Western historians as fabrications from Stalin—has been the focus of Dr Grover Furr of Montclair State University. Furr maintains that Trotsky was indeed guilty of such a conspiracy, and the response to Furr’s work has generally been limited to finger-pointing and ridicule, rather than serious analysis of the evidence Furr presents.”[3]

Furr’s work attempts to rehabilitate Stalin and to cast Trotsky as an unreliable or dishonest historian. Variants of this argument range from minimising the scale of Stalinist repression to asserting that many well-established facts about the Moscow Trials, show trials, and mass terror are fabrications or grossly exaggerated. Politically, this disgusting apologist serves to blur the essential distinction that Marxists must draw between the proletarian revolution (and its leadership in 1917–23) and the bureaucratic counter-revolution that produced Stalinism. Furr’s books are published by the TKP, which is the sister party of the Stalinist Greek Communist Party (KKE). This pseudo-historian reproduces all the old Stalinist lies of the 1930s.

It must be said that even after a hard study of Maupin’s book, it is difficult to understand what exactly Maupin defends in Healy. That is, until one gets to the end of the book. Maupin, throughout his political career, has defended every bourgeois nationalist dictator on the planet. His hero, like Healy at the end, is Colonel Gaddafi. Maupin defends Healy’s treacherous collaboration with the bourgeois nationalist.

Despite Healy’s capitulation to Pabloite opportunism and his despicable personal conduct in his treatment of female cadres, Maupin sees Healy doing very little wrong. If he did bad things, this was not the result of a political betrayal or adaptation to hostile class forces. Still, individual misconduct and organisational corruption do not take place in a vacuum. They are rooted in political orientations and class alignments. Healy’s petty-bourgeois turn eroded links with the working class and led to the surrender of programmatic principles in pursuit of short-term gains.

According to the analysis made in the document How the WRP Betrayed Trotskyism:” The Party was divided into an ‘Upstairs’—a coterie of exalted individuals around Healy—and a ‘Downstairs’ occupied by hundreds of rank and file members who were denied any role in the decision-making process and took orders. This created within the Party a whole series of destructive political relations. The leadership grew increasingly impervious to the real relations between the Party and the workers amid class struggle.

Contact between the Centre and the WRP branches assumed a purely administrative character, not unlike that between a local business franchise and the head office. Healy himself became a remote figure whom most members did not even know—and he knew very little about them. His trips to Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi and Tripoli were undoubtedly far more frequent than his visits to Glasgow, Sheffield, Manchester and Cardiff.

Healy’s high-flying diplomacy and his sudden access to vast material resources, based largely on his opportunist utilisation of Vanessa Redgrave as the WRP’s calling card in the Middle East, had a corrosive effect on the Party’s political line and its relation to the working class. Whatever its original intention, it became part of a process through which the WRP became the political captive of alien class forces.

At the very point when it was most in need of a course correction, the “success” of its work in the Middle East, which from the beginning lacked a basic proletarian reference point, made it less and less dependent upon the penetration of the working class in Britain and internationally. The close and intimate connection with the British and international working class that the WRP had developed over decades of struggle for Trotskyist principles was steadily undermined. The isolation from the working class grew in direct proportion to the abandonment of these principles.[4]

Caleb Maupin: A petty‑bourgeois nationalist

Caleb Maupin, while identifying completely with WRP’s historical love affair with bourgeois nationalism, is hostile to genuine Trotskyist internationalism. His contemporary politics, a public promotion of “patriotic socialism,” alliances with nationalist currents, and accommodation to reactionary forces constitute a modern variant of the same petty-bourgeois opportunistic tendencies as the Workers Revolutionary Party.

Maupin, like Healy, sought alliances with national-bourgeois forces and capitulated to non-proletarian class forces. Maupin purposely fuses socialist language with nationalist, conspiratorial, or reactionary currents (the so-called “red‑brown” tendency), repudiating the internationalist, working-class orientation that is the essence of Marxism.

It is therefore clear why Maupin is so enamoured with Healy and the so-called “cult of Personality”; his  Red‑brown movement adores the cult of personality, opportunist sectarianism, and the dilution of theory into sectarian or conspiratorial rhetoric.

Aidan Beaty-A Class Brother

Maupin spends a considerable amount of space in his short 81-page polemic attacking Aidan Beaty’s hack work on Healy.[5] Beaty is a petit‑bourgeois academic and a Pseudo-Left. His book on Healy was not just a private dispute but a politically signalled intervention in the larger struggle over the legacy and continuity of Trotskyism and the Fourth International.

As David North points out, “ Professor Aidan Beatty’s The Party is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism is a malicious piece of political hack work posturing as a biography. The book discredits its author and fails to meet the standards expected of a scholarly work. The book is nothing of the sort. Beatty has produced a crude diatribe against Trotskyism and its historic efforts to construct a revolutionary party rooted in Marxist theory and based on the working class.”[6]

Maupin and Beaty, it must be said, share similar class backgrounds. Red‑brown populists like Maupin and sensationalist academics like Beatty serve to disorient workers and youth. The former does so by offering nationalist, authoritarian or conspiratorial alternatives; the latter by discrediting Trotskyist organisational forms and the necessity of a revolutionary party without providing a constructive program for the working class.

Maupin’s defence of Gerry Healy barely rises above A-level standard biographical history. And even that is being generous. While not entirely a hack job, it lifts no dead dogs in Healy’s political memory. However, Maupin’s book does raise concrete political issues: how a writer or historian treats theory and the written record. Maupin’s book contains barely 81 pages, of which only 50 were given over to a defence of Healy.

There is not a single quote or reference to Healy’s work. There is no examination of other work or archives mined, and no study of internal documents. A systematic study of Books, pamphlets, press archives, and internal documents is the material basis by which a writer transmits ideas to the general reader, and  Maupin does none of that.

The political crisis of the WRP in the 1970s–1980s was not an abstract intellectual dispute but the product of objective pressures: crisis in recruitment, the lure of external funds and nationalist alliances, and the isolation of a leadership that increasingly substituted personal discretion for collective Marxist leadership. In these conditions, practices around written materials — what was printed in party publications, what internal documents were circulated, and how theory was annotated or hidden — became instruments of political control rather than tools of education and criticism. Any half-decent writer or historian would have to make something of this history. Did Maupin know that Healy, like many revolutionaries, made substantial markings in books from his prodigious library?

“Marking” books can take many forms: literal physical annotation (underlining, marginal notes, censorship stamps), classification as “approved” or “banned” within a party press/bookshop, editorial rewriting, or the selective destruction/withholding of documents. Under Healy’s apparatus, these practices were embedded in a wider method: concentrating control over publications and the paper, using the press as an instrument of leadership rather than as a forum for workers’ study and democratic debate.

What a writer deliberately leaves out of a book is not merely a cultural injury; it destroys readers’ ability to educate themselves, develop independent working-class perspectives, and engage in collective theoretical struggle.

The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and its sections produced a sustained investigation of the degeneration of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) under Gerry Healy. That record documents concrete, physical, and administrative methods used by the leadership to mark, censor, conceal, and control books, archives, and internal documents — measures deployed to defend an increasingly opportunist, petty-bourgeois leadership against internal dissent and international oversight.

One of the worst crimes committed by the leadership of the WRP was the removal and sale (or attempted sale) of the movement archives. But for the intervention of the ICFI, the WRP leadership would have sold off much of the movement’s archives and documents to the highest bidder. It is still a mystery where most of this archive ended up.

As recently as 2025, Vanessa Redgrave, one of Healy’s closest supporters, attempted to sell off Healy’s vast library. She was turned down by the British Socialist Workers Party, who, in the end, got the books for free and sold them in their shop to the highest bidder. Maupin’s silence on these matters of historical importance is deafening.

.

[1] www.wsws.org/en/special/library/how-the-wrp-betrayed-trotskyism/book.html

[2] Gerry Healy and His Place in the History of the Fourth International Paperback – 1 Dec. 1991 Mehring Books

[3] Book Excerpt: “Why Demonize Gerry Healy in 2024?” http://www.cpiusa.org/news/book-excerpt-why-demonize-gerry-healy-in-2024

[4] www.wsws.org/en/special/library/how-the-wrp-betrayed-trotskyism/book.html

[5] The Party is Always Right The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism by Aidan Beatty

[6] Biography as demonology: Aidan Beatty’s The Party is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/18/nizy-s18.html

“As a general proposition: Social advances and changes of periods are brought about by virtue of the progress of women towards liberty, and the decadences of the social order are brought about by virtue of the decrease of liberty of women.

Charles Fourier on “the progress of women”

Women’s freedom is the sign of social freedom.

 ―Rosa Luxemburg

“Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”

― Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935

This new book, Breaking Our Chains—Women, Marxism and the Path to Liberation, written by Sarah Bates, Judy Cox and Sally Campbell, is a feminist-Marxist polemic or, as the authors state, a manifesto that examines women’s oppression as a historically specific phenomenon rooted in class society.

The authors present a materialist conception of history, which insists that the emancipation of women cannot be separated from the struggle to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a socialist society. This article situates the book within classical Marxist theory, traces its historical-material logic, assesses its contemporary relevance, and contrasts its outlook with reformist and bourgeois feminist tendencies.

As Judy Cox states, “ it is important to stand with all those who want to fight back against sexism. But strategies do matter. I remember being told that we were all equal now and we didn’t need to worry about sexism anymore. We were told that the key was a few women winning individual success who would then “feminise” or “humanise” the boardroom.

These ideas have proved to be disastrously wrong. Lots of people are attracted to Marxism, but they think it needs adding to or building on to explain women’s oppression properly. I am absolutely for developing Marxism to address new ways of thinking about the world. But actually, I think Marxism, when it is properly understood, can explain the world and point to effective strategies for change. So, I welcome any engagement with Marxism, but I think Marxism is the theory of women’s liberation. We see women’s liberation as inextricably linked to the overthrow of capitalism.[1]

At the book’s heart is the application of the dialectical materialist method. The authors trace how social reproduction, the sexual division of labour, property relations and the state interpenetrate to produce gender hierarchies. Classical Marxism views ideas about gender not as timeless truths but as expressions of concrete class relations and material interests. The authors therefore locate patriarchy’s deepest roots in private property, commodity production and the wage system—showing how ideological forms (sexism, “tradition”, cultural myths) mediate and naturalise material inequalities.

Collectively, the authors situate women’s oppression within several distinct formations: precapitalist patriarchies, the rise of capitalist private property, and the modern wage-labour system. Historically specific institutions like household labour, unequal access to independent means of production, and the monetary valuation of labour have shaped the content and limits of women’s social power. The book charts how reformist struggles (suffrage, workplace protections, social-welfare reforms) have won partial gains but have been repeatedly constrained or reversed because they do not alter underlying class relations.

Marxism treats the question of women’s oppression not as a moral add-on but as an integral moment of class society. The materialist conception of history shows that family structures, gender relations and the legal status of women are rooted in modes of production: how people make their living shapes social relations, property, law and ideology.

As Frederick Engels argued, “We must admit that so total a reversal of the position of the sexes can come to pass only because the sexes have been placed in a false position from the beginning. If the reign of the wife over the husband, as inevitably brought about by the factory system, is inhuman, the pristine rule of the husband over the wife must have been inhuman too.”[2]

The book is not just an examination of past liberation movements and struggles; it also has contemporary relevance. Today, intensified economic poverty, neoliberal austerity, the casualisation of labour, and the rollback of public services have further commodified and privatised social reproduction. The book explains why these trends disproportionately impact women: cuts in social care and public provision shift unpaid labour back into households; precarious employment deepens women’s dependency and vulnerability. It therefore argues that feminism divorced from class struggle can be absorbed as a market-friendly ideology or reduced to identity-based bargaining within capitalism.

The authors are correct in their insistence that real emancipation requires linking demands around wages, workplace democracy, social provision, childcare, reproductive rights and an end to militarism to a program to abolish wage labour and capitalist property—i.e., to socialist transformation. All women’s organisations must be rooted in the working class, not subordinated to bourgeois parties or union bureaucracies that manage capital’s interests. That perspective distinguishes genuine Marxist-feminism from reformist “management-of-inequality” approaches and the bourgeois “lean-in” model that leaves hierarchical structures intact.

To sum up, Breaking Our Chains provides a necessary corrective to bourgeois and reformist versions of feminism by grounding the fight for women’s liberation in Marxist historical materialism. Its central lesson: the liberation of women requires the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist social relations and the building of working-class political independence and international organisation. Women’s liberation is not attainable as a partial reform of capitalism. It requires the collective political mobilisation of the working class to overturn the property relations that underlie gender oppression and to build democratic, social institutions that free labour from private, unpaid burdens.  For students and activists seeking a theoretical and practical guide, the book underscores that only by combining rigorous theory, mass organisation and revolutionary strategy can genuine, lasting emancipation be achieved.

One major criticism of both the authors and the Socialist Workers Party that they belong to is that, despite the occasional publication of books that adopt a classical Marxist standpoint with references and quotes from Marxist revolutionaries Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and Russian revolutionaries Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, they usually offer a platform for the flotsam and jetsam of pseudo-left politics. The group is thoroughly convinced of capitalism’s power and longevity and is hostile to the working class and to genuine socialism. The SWP’s sole purpose is to oppose the independent political mobilisation of the working class on a revolutionary and internationalist programme. 

[1] Breaking Our Chains: Smashing sexism and the system-socialistworker.co.uk/womens-liberation/breaking-our-chains-smashing-sexism-and-the-system/

[2] The Condition of the Working Class in England. Friedrich Engels 1845