Pip: A novel about an obedient artificial companion who asks for nothing, accepts her own obsolescence, and ultimately gets shelved — freerein61 would like a word about who that actually sounds like.
Mara: This episode follows that argument through Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun — the technology, the inequality it maps, and the social vision the novel can't quite reach. Let's start with what the book gets right, and what it quietly leaves out.
Klara and the Sun: AI, Inequality, and the Limits of Resignation
Pip: Ishiguro builds a world where children can be genetically "lifted," adults have been "substituted" by machines, and an Artificial Friend named Klara is purchased, used, and eventually discarded. The question the post puts on the table is why a novel so sensitive to all of this stops short of asking who owns any of it.
Mara: The post gives Ishiguro real credit before pressing that case. Here's the line: "He is intensely sensitive to human vulnerability and to the fear of abandonment, ageing, loneliness and loss. Klara's observations of the people around her expose the insecurity underlying apparently comfortable lives."
Pip: So the sensitivity is genuine — and that's precisely what makes the limitation worth naming. Noticing insecurity is not the same as tracing where it comes from.
Mara: Right, and the post connects this to an earlier Ishiguro novel. In Never Let Me Go, cloned human beings are raised so their organs can be harvested, and they offer almost no collective resistance. The post reads that extraordinary passivity as deliberate — and as revealing. The phrase is that his characters "suffer history rather than make it."
Pip: Which means social relations that were built start to look like weather — something you endure, not something anyone constructed or could dismantle.
Mara: That's the post's central diagnosis. "Alienation becomes loneliness, inequality becomes personal misfortune, and social oppression becomes a condition to be endured rather than transformed." Capitalism disappears as a historically specific system at the moment its consequences fill the frame.
Pip: Klara herself is the sharpest version of that argument. Patient, devoted, no wages, no demands, accepts her own disposal — she is, the post says, the ideal employee contemporary capitalism imagines, "intelligent, adaptable, and endlessly productive, but with no demands of her own."
Mara: And the post is careful to separate the technology from the social arrangement. A machine does not require the dismissal of the worker. The consequences — redundancy, wage pressure, insecurity — arise from private ownership of the productive forces, not from automation itself. Under different social relations, the post argues, "substitution" could mean shortening the working day rather than rendering workers disposable.
Pip: The tragedy, as the post frames it, is not that the machines exist. It's that the machines belong to someone.
Mara: Which is why the post ends where it does — not asking whether Klara is human, but asking whether humanity will let private profit keep dictating what the technology is for. That's a question Klara's quiet self-sacrifice cannot answer.
Pip: The resignation is the point. A culture that experiences capitalism as permanent will keep presenting its contradictions as existential weather — and that's a tendency worth watching well beyond this one novel.
Mara: The thread running through all of this is what happens when genuine social anxiety stops short of social analysis — when the diagnosis is sharp and the prescription is silence.
Pip: Next time, we'll see whether that silence holds, or whether something in the culture is starting to push back.
Klara and the Sun is a particularly revealing cultural response to the present. A story about artificial intelligence, technological unemployment, biological privilege, and a society divided between those who benefit from scientific development and those rendered increasingly superfluous inevitably raises some of humanity’s most important questions. Yet the work approaches these questions indirectly. Social catastrophe is registered as atmosphere, anxiety and personal melancholy rather than understood as the product of definite social relations.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s original novel presents a genuinely disturbing world. Children from affluent families can be genetically “lifted”, providing advantages unavailable to others. Artificial Friends are manufactured as commodities, purchased as companions and ultimately discarded. Adults have undergone “substitution”, a euphemism for technological displacement. Beneath the quiet domestic surface lies a society increasingly divided between privileged layers able to purchase the benefits of scientific progress and a population whose labour is no longer required by those who own and control the productive forces.
Ishiguro’s achievement should not simply be dismissed. He is intensely sensitive to human vulnerability and to the fear of abandonment, ageing, loneliness and loss. Klara’s observations of the people around her expose the insecurity underlying apparently comfortable lives. The story asks serious questions about what constitutes humanity and whether technology can replicate affection, loyalty, memory, and personality. But this sensitivity is inseparable from a profound resignation before existing society.
The same limitation was already apparent in Never Let Me Go. A society raises cloned human beings so that their organs can eventually be harvested, yet the victims offer virtually no collective resistance to the system responsible for their fate. The extraordinary passivity is clearly deliberate, but it also reveals the boundaries of Ishiguro’s social vision. His characters suffer history rather than make it. Social relations produced through historical development consequently acquire the appearance of permanent existential conditions. Alienation becomes loneliness, inequality becomes personal misfortune, and social oppression becomes a condition to be endured rather than transformed.
This is one of the characteristic intellectual problems confronting contemporary culture. Many writers and artists are genuinely disturbed by inequality, technological disruption, environmental catastrophe, authoritarianism, and war, yet see no social force capable of fundamentally reorganising society. Capitalism therefore disappears as a historically specific system at precisely the point when its consequences dominate the artistic imagination.
Klara and the Sun therefore raise the decisive questions it cannot adequately answer. Who owns the Artificial Friends? Who controls the technology responsible for “lifting”? Why should a scientific development capable of increasing human capacities become a privilege available primarily to prosperous families? What happens to those workers who have been “substituted”? Above all, why should increasing productivity produce unemployment, insecurity and social disintegration rather than greater leisure, prosperity and cultural development?
These questions change Klara’s significance. Under different social relations, automation and artificial intelligence could progressively liberate humanity from dangerous, exhausting and monotonous labour. Artificial intelligence could drive major advances in medicine, scientific research, education, engineering, and artistic production. Rising productivity could make a radical shortening of the working week possible and an enormous expansion of time available for education, cultural activity, and human development.
Under capitalism, however, technological development confronts the worker antagonistically because the productive forces remain privately owned. Corporations do not primarily introduce labour-saving technology to liberate human beings from unnecessary labour. They introduce it because technological innovation can reduce labour costs, increase productivity, and strengthen profitability. The extraordinary potential of artificial intelligence therefore collides directly with the social relations in which it is developed.
Consequently, Klara is deeply unsettling as a figure. She is obedient, endlessly patient and entirely devoted to those who purchase her. She demands no wages, possesses no independent economic interests, never organises, never strikes and ultimately accepts her own dispensability. She resembles, in exaggerated form, the ideal employee contemporary capitalism imagines: intelligent, adaptable, and endlessly productive, but with no demands of her own.
The idealisation of Klara’s self-sacrifice therefore contains implications that the story never seriously confronts. She becomes morally admirable partly because she desires virtually nothing for herself. What appears as a touching meditation on loyalty and selflessness can consequently be read as something far more disturbing. Klara is the worker who asks for nothing and can ultimately be put aside when her usefulness has ended.
The fundamental question raised by artificial intelligence is therefore not whether machines will eventually acquire souls, emotions or consciousness. Nor is it primarily whether artificial intelligence can imitate human creativity convincingly enough to replace a novelist, actor, illustrator or musician. The decisive social question is who owns this technology, who determines its purposes, and which social class benefits from the enormous increases in productivity that technological development makes possible.
It would therefore be a serious mistake to identify technological development itself as the source of unemployment. A machine does not demand the dismissal of the worker. An algorithm does not require dividends. Artificial intelligence has no inherent social requirement to impoverish the population whose accumulated intellectual and physical labour ultimately made its creation possible. Those consequences arise from the capitalist organisation of production.
In a rationally organised society, increasing productivity would mean progressively reducing the labour required of every individual while raising living standards. Under capitalism, the same development confronts workers as redundancy, wage pressure and insecurity. The contradiction lies not between humanity and technology but between the increasingly social character of production and the private ownership of the productive forces.
This is precisely the historical dimension largely absent from Klara and the Sun. The weakness cannot be overcome merely by adding more explicit political dialogue to the story or putting revolutionary declarations in Klara’s mouth. The deeper problem concerns the conception of society underlying the work. A culture that experiences capitalism as effectively permanent will inevitably present its contradictions as existential tragedies. Unemployment becomes displacement, inequality becomes loneliness, technological development becomes destiny and political reaction becomes an unexplained eruption of irrational behaviour.
What disappears is the working class as a conscious historical force. This absence has enormous artistic consequences. Without an understanding of social contradiction in its living historical form, conflict retreats increasingly into individual psychology. Characters remember, grieve, endure and reconcile themselves to circumstances that appear beyond human control. Society may be profoundly diseased, but nothing emerges from within that society capable of overcoming the conditions producing the disease.
That is why the resignation embodied in Klara and the Sun matters. Its world is technologically extraordinary but politically paralysed. Humanity has developed machines capable of reproducing increasingly complex intellectual functions, altered biological capacities, and eliminating enormous quantities of necessary labour. Yet, society remains trapped in inequality, competition, and private ownership. The contradiction between the productive forces and existing social relations could hardly be more sharply posed.
The alternative is therefore not less technology but different social relations. Artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation must stop functioning primarily as instruments through which a small corporate and financial oligarchy enriches itself at the population’s expense. Instead, the immense productive capacities accumulated through generations of collective human labour must be placed under social ownership and democratic control.
Under such conditions, “substitution” would acquire an entirely different meaning. Automation would no longer mean workers become disposable because their labour no longer produces sufficient profit. Instead, it could mean shortening the working day, eliminating degrading labour, and making the benefits of technological progress universally available. What capitalism experiences as the terrifying possibility of human beings becoming unnecessary to production could become an unprecedented expansion of human freedom.
This is the future that Klara and the Sun struggles to imagine. Ishiguro senses something profoundly wrong with contemporary society but experiences its contradictions predominantly as moral and psychological conditions. The result is a work characteristic of an important tendency within contemporary culture: technologically fascinated, socially anxious, genuinely humane in certain respects, but ultimately resigned before the existing order.
Great art does not require artists to append political programmes to their work. Balzac and Tolstoy were not great because they possessed politically correct opinions, nor can Brecht’s importance be reduced to the slogans associated with his politics. What distinguished the greatest artists was their capacity, however contradictory their personal outlooks, to look beneath social appearances and reveal something about society’s movement itself.
That is the challenge confronting serious artistic production in the age of artificial intelligence. The tragedy is not that humanity has developed machines capable of replacing increasing quantities of human labour. The tragedy is that humanity’s accumulated technological achievements remain subordinated to social relations that transform abundance into insecurity, rising productivity into unemployment and potentially liberating technologies into instruments of exploitation.
The question Klara and the Sun pose is therefore far greater than whether Klara herself is human. It is whether humanity will continue to let private profit dictate technological development or consciously reorganise economic life so these remarkable productive powers serve society as a whole. Klara’s unquestioning self-sacrifice offers no solution to that contradiction. The working class does.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. Klara and the Sun. London: Faber & Faber
World Socialist Website
Beams, Nick. “AI development and the contradictions of capitalism.” World Socialist Web Site, 14 February 2026. A particularly useful Marxist treatment of AI as a productive force whose possibilities come into conflict with capitalist private ownership and the profit system. [wsws.org]
Hall, Tom. “How workers can fight the wave of AI layoffs.” World Socialist Web Site, 10 May 2026. Examines corporate deployment of AI in connection with layoffs and argues that the central issue is social control of the new technologies. [wsws.org]
Reed, Kevin. “Artificial intelligence and the film and television writers’ strike.” World Socialist Web Site, 10 May 2023. Especially relevant to the review because it documents the conflict over AI during the Writers Guild of America strike, including the WGA’s demands concerning AI-written material and the training of AI systems on writers’ work. [wsws.org]
Not bad, Keith. I am impressed you squeezed in almost all the issues of interest to the chattering class over a speech by Cofnas on how DEI has influenced education. From addressing the ” immense ” wealth distribution to racism to the rising power of the right. And of course our Arday. Now Cofnas has achieved his 15 minutes of fame because he finally exposed this fraud. In my opinion, that is what he was. It’s not worth debating. In fact, I suggest there is potential PHD for a PhD in explaining why Cofnas gained traction where others before him failed to expose both the man and the system that promoted him. Remember, I liked your post.
Your article suggests that, at last, people are prepared (or brave enough) to say we need a diversity of views that are expressed and debated, instead of cancelling those that contradict the current accepted views. I liked your opinion that, in this case, university administrators should not promote cancellations, since that would imply they hold the correct view. But how can our protesters outside the venue feel satisfied?
Robert street
Reply
Thanks. I think your last sentence is actually the most interesting part of your response. The protesters outside the venue get satisfaction by protesting and making their case, not necessarily by stopping the meeting.
If Cofnas is wrong, argue against him. If someone’s academic reputation is inflated, demonstrate it with evidence. Protesters have every right to say a speaker should never have been invited and to oppose them as forcefully as they wish. But once we move from criticism and protest to insisting that university administrators prevent people from hearing certain arguments, we create a much bigger problem: who decides what may legitimately be discussed?
My objection is not to protest—quite the opposite. Protest, disagreement and argument are essential parts of democratic intellectual life. My objection is to replacing political and intellectual argument with administrative prohibition. Once university management is granted the authority to determine which opinions are acceptable, there is no reason to suppose that this power will always be exercised against people whose views we dislike. The same machinery can just as readily be turned against radical, socialist, anti-war or otherwise unpopular opinions.
So the protesters should have their say, Cofnas should have his, and the audience should be treated as adults capable of reaching its own judgement. The answer to objectionable ideas is not to ask administrators to make them disappear, but to expose their weaknesses publicly.
Paul Mason’s new book, Reds: A Global History of Communism, claims to equip a new generation to understand communism’s origins, its appeal to millions, and its descent into disastrous bureaucratic regimes. This is no antiquarian exercise: Mason presents the book as a political intervention for a generation asking whether capitalism can be replaced by something better. His answer is unequivocal: “not like this”.
That declared purpose makes one aspect of Reds: A Global History of Communism especially revealing: Leon Trotsky’s absence from its public-facing genealogy of communism. This point must be made carefully. No evidence currently available shows who chose the figures on the book’s cover or in its promotional material, let alone that Paul Mason personally instructed his publisher to exclude Trotsky. Any such claim would go beyond the evidence. However, the omission still has political significance worth examining. The question is not what a designer or marketing department had in mind, but why Leon Trotsky—and, above all, the historical movement associated with his name—poses such profound difficulties for any narrative that presents twentieth-century communism as a broadly continuous movement from revolutionary aspirations to totalitarian dictatorship.
What happens when we restore Leon Trotsky to his proper place in this history? The supposedly self-evident progression from the Russian Revolution to Stalinism immediately becomes a matter of political dispute. We must reckon with the Left Opposition and the struggle over the nationalist doctrine of “socialism in one country”. We must also explain the political extermination of the generation associated with the October Revolution, the Moscow Trials and the Great Terror, the formation of the Fourth International, and, ultimately, Trotsky’s assassination in 1940. Above all, we must address the historical claim made by Leon Trotsky and the movement he founded: Stalinism was not the inevitable fulfilment of Marxism and Bolshevism, but a bureaucratic reaction against the international socialist programme on which the October Revolution was based. That is no minor historiographical disagreement. It goes to the heart of Reds: A Global History of Communism.
From revolution to “totalitarian nightmare”
The book’s declared scope could scarcely be broader. Paul Mason deliberately begins in antiquity rather than in 1917, tracing communal and egalitarian movements through ancient and medieval society, the French Revolution, nineteenth-century anti-capitalist movements, and twentieth-century revolutionary upheavals. He says the book examines how Vladimir Lenin’s movement defeated its ideological rivals because, “for a time”, it seemed to work, before turning to what Paul Mason describes as the transformation of the twentieth-century communist experiment into a “totalitarian nightmare”.
The American promotional description is scarcely less explicit. It promises to trace communism’s development from a political idea to a mass movement and, ultimately, to totalitarian regimes. The story acknowledges the genuine heroism of workers and peasants resisting exploitation, but ultimately foregrounds repression, famine, and authoritarian rule. At a time when capitalism appears increasingly unstable and communist ideas may therefore attract renewed interest, the book is marketed as a warning against the resurgence of an “authoritarian left” and as an appeal for an anti-capitalism grounded in “universal human values”.
There is nothing objectionable in documenting the immense crimes committed by Stalinist and Maoist regimes. Marxists have no political interest in concealing them. Indeed, the strongest Marxist indictment of Stalinism was written while the liberal intelligentsia and substantial sections of the bourgeois political establishment were accommodating themselves to the Soviet bureaucracy. The issue is therefore not whether Stalinist repression should be exposed. It is how Stalinism itself is explained.
Did the bureaucratic dictatorship headed by Joseph Stalin arise organically from Marxism and the October Revolution? Was Stalinism essentially Leninism carried through to its logical conclusion? Or did a bureaucratic caste emerge under historically specific conditions of economic backwardness, revolutionary isolation, exhaustion and international defeat, eventually destroying the Marxist leadership through which the working class had taken power? Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition make it impossible to evade this question.
The historical problem of Trotsky
Leon Trotsky matters not because socialists require an alternative personality cult with which to counter that surrounding Joseph Stalin. Nor can the historical argument be reduced to the claim that everything done under Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky was democratic and everything done afterwards was bureaucratic. Such an account would collapse under serious historical examination. The Bolsheviks confronted civil war, foreign military intervention, famine and the economic disintegration of an already backward society. During that struggle, their government employed coercive measures that remain the subject of legitimate historical and political controversy.
But this makes the subsequent conflict within the Soviet state even more important. For whatever judgement one reaches concerning Bolshevik policies during the Civil War, the Soviet Union of the late 1930s was not simply the political regime of 1917 grown older. An immense transformation had taken place. Bureaucracy had gutted the revolutionary party. Oppositionists had been expelled, imprisoned and killed. Many of the best-known figures associated with the October insurrection were accused of fantastic conspiracies, subjected to show trials and executed. The revolutionary history of the Soviet Union itself was systematically rewritten. The fundamental question therefore becomes: what social and political processes produced this transformation?
Leon Trotsky’s answer was developed over years of political struggle and reached its most systematic expression in The Revolution Betrayed. Russia’s backwardness, compounded by economic devastation and, above all, the Soviet state’s isolation after revolutions failed elsewhere, created conditions in which an administrative bureaucracy gained an increasingly privileged social position. That bureaucracy did not openly abandon the property relations established by October. Instead, it progressively monopolised political power while transforming Marxism into an ideological justification for its own interests.
The “socialism in one country” programme gave this bureaucracy its nationalist outlook. Against it, Leon Trotsky defended the conception that animated the October Revolution itself: that victory in Russia could not be seen as a nationally self-sufficient socialist development, but as the opening stage of the international socialist revolution. This political conflict cannot be removed from the history of communism without fundamentally changing that history’s meaning.
Why the omission matters
That brings us back to the cover and promotional presentation surrounding Reds: A Global History of Communism. The argument should not be reduced to alleging an editorial conspiracy for which there is no evidence. Covers are marketing objects, and the personalities selected for them may reflect numerous editorial, aesthetic and commercial considerations. But historical representation is never entirely innocent, especially when the book is presented not merely as a history of communism but as an intervention in contemporary arguments over whether capitalism can and should be transcended.
Trotsky’s absence therefore matters less for explaining why someone left him off the cover than for asking what happens to history once he disappears. Trotsky does not fit easily into a straightforward genealogy in which revolutionary communism develops progressively into Stalinist dictatorship. His presence immediately introduces another history: the Left Opposition’s struggle against the emerging Soviet bureaucracy, the conflict between permanent revolution and “socialism in one country”, the expulsion and persecution of oppositionists, the Moscow Trials, the founding of the Fourth International, and Trotsky’s eventual assassination in 1940. The road from October to Stalin suddenly ceases to appear inevitable.
Put Trotsky back into the picture and Stalinism itself becomes a historical problem requiring explanation. If Stalin merely completed what Lenin and the Bolsheviks had begun, why was it necessary to politically suppress the Left Opposition and eventually destroy so much of the generation associated with the October Revolution? Why did Stalinism have to rewrite the history of 1917, erase political opponents from the revolutionary record and transform “socialism in one country” into communist orthodoxy? Whatever conclusions one reaches about these questions, their existence disrupts any seamless identification of Bolshevism with Stalinism.
This is precisely why the representation matters. Trotsky’s significance does not lie in portraying him as an infallible democratic alternative to Stalin. Rather, it lies in the historical fact that Stalinism faced an organised opposition that claimed the legacy of revolutionary Marxism and socialist internationalism. The dispute, then, was not between communism and its liberal critics, but within the revolutionary movement itself, over the meaning and future of October.
The missing face consequently represents something much larger than a publishing decision. It symbolises a missing historical possibility. Restore Trotsky and the Left Opposition to the picture, and twentieth-century communism no longer appears as a single road running inexorably from revolution to dictatorship. It becomes a history of competing programmes, social forces and political struggles whose outcome was fought over, not predetermined. That is the history a new generation contemplating alternatives to capitalism.
Trotsky complicates the picture.
Return Leon Trotsky to the centre of twentieth-century communist history, and the reader encounters not one communist tradition marching inexorably towards dictatorship, but an enormous, ferocious struggle over what communism was to become. Instead of a simple chronological sequence ending in the gulag, one encounters competing programmes, different social interests and irreconcilable international strategies.
Joseph Stalin then ceases to appear merely as the next name in a succession beginning with Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. The Stalinist bureaucracy’s decision to destroy the political tendency represented by Leon Trotsky requires explanation. Why was the Left Opposition suppressed? Why did “socialism in one country” have to defeat the internationalist perspective of permanent revolution? Why did so many leaders associated with October disappear into prisons, executions and exile? Why was the historical record of 1917 itself repeatedly falsified?
Whatever one’s ultimate judgement of Leon Trotsky’s answers, these questions cannot be dismissed without impoverishing history. This is especially true because Paul Mason presents Reds: A Global History of Communism as having an explicitly contemporary purpose. His own description links the history of the twentieth-century communist experience with present political questions surrounding China, Russia, the crisis of Western democracy, climate change and what he calls new forms of “techno-egalitarianism”. Paul Mason says that, as China and Russia challenge the democracies and a new “authoritarian left” attempts to displace social democracy, liberalism and anarchism, his book should be understood not only as history but as “a political intervention”. The history is therefore inseparable from the politics.
From revolutionary politics to radical social democracy
This gives Paul Mason’s own political evolution particular significance. He approaches Marxism neither as a conventional Cold War liberal nor as a conservative historian who has always regarded socialism with hostility. He travelled politically from the revolutionary left towards what he has described as radical social democracy. He now frames the central contemporary political division increasingly as democracy versus authoritarianism, while supporting the defence of the Western democratic order against Russia and China.
The institutional evolution accompanying this change is noteworthy. The promotional material for an October 2026 appearance identifies Paul Mason as a writer, broadcaster and “political strategist”, and as an adjunct fellow at the Council on Geostrategy. This does not prove anyone dictated the contents of Reds: A Global History of Communism, nor is such an argument necessary. The point is political rather than conspiratorial. The framework through which Paul Mason now examines the twentieth century has shifted profoundly from that of revolutionary Marxism.
That helps explain the extraordinary contemporary burden this history bears. The book is concerned not simply with why communist regimes emerged, developed bureaucratic dictatorships and ultimately collapsed or transformed themselves. Its lessons directly address the political choices people face today. Paul Mason acknowledges that Western democracies are stagnating, that an impending climate disaster requires radical economic solutions, and that millions elsewhere may see China’s authoritarian, state-led model as a viable alternative. Under these conditions, he says the history of communism must warn a new generation against repeating the twentieth century.
But this formulation itself raises the decisive question: What exactly would count as repeating the twentieth century? Would it mean overthrowing capitalism, building a revolutionary workers’ party, or establishing working-class political power? Or would it mean repeating Stalinism’s nationalist and bureaucratic repudiation of socialist internationalism? These are not remotely the same propositions.
Ethics against historical materialism
Paul Mason’s answer increasingly rests upon an ethical conception of socialism. The alternative to authoritarianism must be grounded in democracy and universal human values. The attraction is obvious. Against dictatorship, democracy; against brutality, humanity; against lies, truth. But moral categories cannot substitute for an analysis of the social forces that created the historical phenomena under discussion.
Marxism does not oppose democracy or human emancipation. Its distinctive contribution is to ask under what material conditions democracy exists, what classes exercise power, what social relationships sustain political institutions, and why political forms change. Without that approach, Stalin becomes primarily the representative of a disastrous political idea rather than the head of a definite bureaucratic social formation emerging under historically identifiable circumstances.
There is a further difficulty. If communism can be traced backwards through millennia as an essentially timeless desire for equality and communal existence, it becomes possible to detach it from the specific contradictions of capitalist society that produced modern Marxism. Paul Mason explicitly argues that the desire to live without hierarchy and property is deeply rooted in human nature and begins his story in antiquity rather than in 1917.
At first, this sounds like an extraordinarily generous concession to communism. Instead of communist aspirations being unnatural, they become almost universal. But the price is considerable. Communism ceases to be understood primarily as the political programme associated with a historically specific class relationship generated by capitalism itself and instead becomes an ancient human aspiration that repeatedly assumes different forms.
The specificity of Marxism is thereby weakened. Marx did not derive communism from an abstract human desire for fairness. His critique began with definite material relations of production and with the contradictions of capitalist development. The modern working class occupied a unique position not because workers were morally purer than everybody else, but because capitalist production created a social class compelled to sell its labour power while simultaneously concentrating it within increasingly socialised processes of production. Once communism is removed from that material framework, its recurrent defeats can take on the appearance of an eternal human tragedy: noble aspirations repeatedly descending into coercion when someone tries to implement them.
International revolution or socialism in one country
Here the struggle between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin assumes its full significance. Its leaders did not conceive the October Revolution as the beginning of a self-contained Russian road to socialism. Russia’s enormous economic backwardness made such a conception particularly implausible. The Bolsheviks understood their seizure of power as part of an international revolutionary crisis generated by the First World War. They expected the Russian Revolution to spark revolutionary struggles abroad, especially in Europe.
The isolation of the Soviet state was therefore not a minor complication. It transformed the conditions under which the revolutionary government had to develop. Defeats in revolutionary struggles elsewhere strengthened conservative pressures within Soviet society. After years of war, famine, civil conflict, and economic collapse, the working class that had provided the revolution’s social base was exhausted. Administrative layers acquired increasing power. Political life within the revolutionary party deteriorated.
Joseph Stalin’s emergence must be placed within this process. The resulting conflict was not simply a contest between two ambitious politicians. Behind it were opposed political programmes. The theory of “socialism in one country” rationalised an increasingly nationalist orientation in which preservation of the Soviet bureaucracy’s position became paramount. Leon Trotsky’s conception of permanent revolution insisted that the fate of the Soviet workers’ state remained inseparably connected to the development of world revolution.
These competing strategic perspectives had international consequences. They shaped controversies over the Chinese Revolution, the rise of fascism in Germany, the Popular Front and the Spanish Civil War. Anyone attempting a global history of communism must therefore confront Trotskyism not simply as another branch of the communist family tree but as an organised Marxist challenge to the political foundations of Stalinism.
The strongest objection
Paul Mason’s defenders could reasonably answer that none of this proves Leon Trotsky represented an immaculate democratic socialism. It does not. They could point to the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising, the Red Terror, restrictions on opposition parties, and Leon Trotsky’s advocacy during the enormously difficult Civil War period for measures involving the militarisation of labour. These questions have generated an immense historical literature, and any serious appraisal of Bolshevism must confront them.
Indeed, the argument becomes stronger for doing so. The Marxist case against Stalinism should not depend upon constructing a sanitised picture of Soviet Russia before 1924. The revolution took place under catastrophic conditions. Its government made decisions that deserve examination and criticism. The historical debate concerns whether these measures sufficiently explain everything subsequently associated with Stalinism or whether a qualitatively different bureaucratic-political reaction developed under the pressure of isolation and defeat.
The mere existence of authoritarian measures before Joseph Stalin proves neither historical continuity nor historical inevitability. To establish that Stalinism was the necessary product of Bolshevism, one must explain why an organised opposition emerged against the bureaucracy, why the bureaucracy politically suppressed that opposition, why it had to outlaw its programme, and why so much of the revolutionary generation had eventually to be physically destroyed. Those events cannot simultaneously be treated as irrelevant and held up as evidence of an inevitable straight line from October to Stalin.
Stalin did not simply “continue” October.
This is where much conventional anti-communist historiography runs into a contradiction. If Joseph Stalin was carrying Vladimir Lenin’s project to its logical conclusion, why did his regime’s consolidation involve such extraordinary destruction of the personnel and traditions associated with the revolution? The answer cannot be that every victim was a principled socialist opponent of Stalinism. They plainly were not. Nor should we romanticise the period’s factions and political manoeuvres. But the scale of the attack upon the old Bolshevik generation remains historically significant. A regime confident that it represented a seamless continuation of October would scarcely have needed continually to rewrite October’s history.
Leon Trotsky was particularly intolerable because his political and literary activity preserved another record of the revolution and another conception of its historical significance. He participated directly in the events of 1905 and 1917, headed the Petrograd Soviet in 1917, and later became the Stalinist regime’s most prominent international opponent. The fight over historical memory was consequently inseparable from the political struggle over the future.
The Fourth International and the continuity question
This issue becomes still more acute with the founding of the Fourth International in 1938. For Leon Trotsky, Hitler’s rise, without effective resistance from the enormously powerful German workers’ movement, was decisive evidence of the Stalinised Communist International’s bankruptcy. He concluded that the Third International could no longer be politically regenerated and that a new revolutionary international had to be constructed.
One can agree or disagree with that conclusion. What cannot reasonably be done is to write the political history of communism as though it does not fundamentally complicate the identification of Stalinism with Marxism. The Fourth International asserted the opposite precisely: that defending Marxism now required an irreconcilable struggle against Stalinism. This is why the question of historical continuity matters. If Stalinism was communism, then organisations fighting Stalinism from the standpoint of international socialist revolution become anomalous or inconvenient footnotes. If Stalinism represented a bureaucratic degeneration of a workers’ state and a political betrayal of revolutionary internationalism, those same movements acquire central historical importance. A global history of communism must take a position on that question, whether explicitly or implicitly.
Why Trotsky breaks the picture
We can therefore return one final time to the question raised at the beginning: why does Leon Trotsky’s absence from the cover and promotional genealogy matter? Not because book-cover design constitutes historiography. It does not.
Not because we have evidence of Paul Mason sitting with his publisher and demanding, “Leave Trotsky out.” We do not. It matters because Trotsky disrupts the picture being presented. Put him back at the centre of the twentieth-century story, and “communism” no longer appears to move inexorably towards totalitarianism. Instead, there is revolutionary communism and Stalinism; internationalism and “socialism in one country”; the October Revolution and a bureaucracy that ultimately exterminated much of the generation that led it.
The Communist International emerged in the early revolutionary years, later becoming the Stalinised Comintern, with the bureaucracy and the Left Opposition fighting it. Suddenly, there was no single road. There was a crossroads. And if there was a crossroads, Stalinism cannot simply be declared the inevitable destination without reconstructing the struggle over which road to take. That is ultimately what makes Leon Trotsky so inconvenient to histories that seek to present Stalinism as the definitive historical judgement on revolutionary Marxism.
What is at stake
Paul Mason is certainly right about one thing: this history matters profoundly today. Capitalism confronts younger generations with widening social inequality, geopolitical conflict, environmental crisis, deteriorating public services and widespread insecurity. In describing Reds: A Global History of Communism, Paul Mason points to stagnant Western democracies, the climate crisis, and renewed arguments over alternatives to the existing social order. He explicitly says that his political purpose is to answer a generation asking whether capitalism can be replaced: “not like this”.
But the historical question remains: what did “this” mean? Did it mean the working class’s conquest of political power, revolutionary internationalism, or Marxism? Or did it mean the bureaucratic suppression of workers’ democracy, the nationalist rejection of international socialist revolution, and the destruction of the revolutionary movement that opposed those policies? These alternatives cannot be conflated without predetermining the conclusion.
The answer to the crimes of Stalinism is not to minimise them, still less to apologise for them. It is to understand their origins. And doing so requires recovering the history of those Marxists who fought the Soviet bureaucracy when doing so meant expulsion, persecution, imprisonment and ultimately death.
Leon Trotsky’s historical significance does not depend on portraying him as an infallible leader or an alternative secular saint. It rests on something far more important: Stalinism faced a Marxist opposition that challenged it in the name of international socialist revolution and sought to explain its emergence materially. This changes the historical equation. If Stalinism was already inevitably contained within Marxism and October, Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition become difficult facts to accommodate. Their struggle must either be marginalised or reduced to an unsuccessful contest for power within an essentially authoritarian movement.
But if Stalinism arose from the isolation and degeneration of the Russian Revolution, the defeats of the international working class, and the growth of a privileged bureaucratic caste, then Leon Trotsky belongs not at the margins of twentieth-century communist history but at its very centre. That is why his absence from the public image surrounding *Reds: A Global History of Communism* is so striking. The issue is not simply a missing face on a jacket; it is the missing historical alternative that face represents.
Mason wants to tell a new generation weighing whether capitalism can be replaced: not like this. But before that generation accepts his warning, it deserves to know that history offers another warning—one made not in retrospect by converts to liberalism or defenders of the existing order, but from within the revolutionary Marxist movement itself.
It warned that nationalism would destroy socialist internationalism; bureaucratic privilege would suffocate workers’ democracy; subordinating the international working class to supposedly progressive bourgeois forces would bring catastrophic defeats; and Stalinism threatened not to fulfil the programme of October, but to destroy it. The bureaucracy tried to settle that political argument through repression. It murdered revolutionaries, erased people from photographs, rewrote the history of 1917, and ultimately sent an assassin after Leon Trotsky himself. But it could not erase the historical question he represented.
The history that cannot be erased
For a new generation once again questioning whether capitalism represents the final form of human society, the conflict between Trotsky and Stalinism is anything but an academic dispute. It concerns whether the catastrophe that overwhelmed the twentieth-century communist movement was the inevitable product of socialist revolution or the outcome of its isolation, bureaucratic degeneration, and the defeat of the internationalist perspective on which October was based.
This is why the answer to Stalinism cannot be a retreat into an ethically improved capitalism, supplemented by appeals to democracy and “universal human values”. The immense inequality, militarism, political reaction and social insecurity driving workers and young people towards anti-capitalist conclusions are not historical misunderstandings. They arise from capitalism itself. To invoke Stalinism as the final warning against revolutionary politics is therefore to evade the very social contradictions producing renewed interest in socialism.
Nor does answering Mason require concealing the conflicts and repressions of the early Soviet state or turning Trotsky into an infallible revolutionary saint. It requires something more serious: restoring the political alternatives that were actually fought over. The Left Opposition showed that Stalinism faced opposition from within the Marxist movement, in the name of workers’ democracy, socialist internationalism, and world revolution.
That is precisely what breaks the comforting historical equation in which Marx leads inevitably to Lenin, Lenin to Stalin and Stalin ultimately to the gulag. History offered alternatives, and political struggle defeated them rather than historical inevitability disproving them. Any genuinely global history of communism must confront that struggle. Trotsky may be absent from the public picture surrounding Reds: A Global History of Communism. You cannot easily remove the historical struggle he represents. And for a generation searching once again for a way beyond capitalism, recovering that suppressed history is not merely about understanding the past. It is part of preparing for future struggles.
Selected bibliography
Avrich, Paul. Kronstadt 1921. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.
Broué, Pierre. Trotsky. Paris: Fayard, 1988.
Carr, E. H. The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923. 3 vols. London: Macmillan, 1950–53.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin: A Political Biography. London: Oxford University Press, 1949.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921. London: Oxford University Press, 1954.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921–1929. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929–1940. London: Oxford University Press, 1963.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Russian Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Getty, J. Arch. Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Lewin, Moshe. Lenin’s Last Struggle. London: Faber and Faber, 1969.
Mason, Paul. Reds: A Global History of Communism. London: Apollo, 2026. The UK hardback was published on 27 August 2026. [waterstones.com], [politicos.co.uk]
Rabinowitch, Alexander. The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976.
Rogovin, Vadim Z. Was There an Alternative? Trotskyism: A Look Back Through the Years. Oak Park, MI: Mehring Books.
Service, Robert. Trotsky: A Biography. London: Macmillan, 2009.
Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution. 1930.
Trotsky, Leon. The History of the Russian Revolution. 3 vols. 1932.
Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? 1937.
Trotsky, Leon. The Stalin School of Falsification. 1937.
Trotsky, Leon. The Third International After Lenin. 1936.
Something has always felt comforting about the conventional British treatment of Oswald Mosley. According to the mythology, fascism was fundamentally foreign to Britain, an unpleasant continental import that could never take root in a country supposedly distinguished by pragmatism, parliamentary traditions and ingrained national moderation. Mosley consequently appears as an eccentric, a political adventurer who temporarily wandered outside the respectable boundaries of British politics before history consigned him to irrelevance.
Stephen Dorril’s Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism provides ample material to demolish this complacent interpretation. Dorril traces Mosley from conventional parliamentary politics into the New Party, the creation of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932, his relationships with European fascism, his antisemitism and his later attempts at political rehabilitation. The book’s documentary strength rests above all on Dorril’s reconstruction of the extensive network surrounding Mosley, including political and aristocratic figures, secret agents, Nazi contacts, adventurers and outright crooks. This evidence matters beyond the biography of a particularly repellent politician. Properly understood, Mosley’s career illuminates the social and political forces that could produce fascism within British capitalism itself.
Mosley did not emerge from the political margins. Born into privilege, he entered Parliament as a Conservative, moved toward Labour, served in Ramsay MacDonald’s government, then broke with the party and established the New Party. His journey towards fascism therefore proceeded through the institutions of respectable bourgeois politics. His authoritarian turn was not an inexplicable psychological conversion but developed amid the enormous contradictions of the interwar period: the decline of British economic supremacy, mass unemployment, the Depression, the crisis of parliamentary government and, above all, the spectre haunting the European ruling classes since the Russian Revolution, the possibility of socialist revolution.
Fascism has consequently to be understood as a class phenomenon rather than simply an ideology of nationalism, racism and dictatorship. Leon Trotsky developed the essential Marxist analysis during Hitler’s rise to power. Fascism mobilised the desperation of the petty bourgeoisie, ruined small proprietors, disillusioned veterans and other socially dislocated layers and directed their anger away from capitalism and towards the organised working class.
But the social layers mobilised by fascism must not be confused with the class interests that fascism ultimately served. The petty bourgeoisie supplied the mass movement and its street fighters; fascist dictatorship defended capitalist property and destroyed the independent political and industrial organisations of the proletariat. The petty bourgeoisie was the battering ram, but it ultimately protected capital’s interests.
Dorril shows how readily Mosley’s supposedly marginal movement intersected with elements of respectable British society. Around the BUF appeared wealthy sympathisers, aristocrats, businesspeople, military men, and political figures alongside thugs, adventurers, and political eccentrics. This mixture of drawing room and street corner was not incidental to fascism but central to its social function.
None of this means that the British ruling class collectively supported Mosley. It plainly did not, and it had little immediate need to. British capitalism retained an empire, established parliamentary institutions and, crucially, the services of Labour and the trade-union bureaucracy in containing working-class opposition within the framework of parliamentary reform.
That explains Mosley’s failure far better than appeals to a supposedly tolerant British national character. Fascism remained comparatively weak not because British capitalism was organically democratic, but because the ruling class had not exhausted the traditional mechanisms through which it maintained political authority.
This is what makes Blackshirt more than a biography. Behind Mosley stands a larger historical warning. Fascism was no foreign contamination of an otherwise healthy British political tradition. Mosley emerged from the contradictions of British capitalism itself. The decisive question his history poses, therefore, is not whether Britain was somehow immune to fascism, but under what conditions parts of its ruling class might have concluded that parliamentary methods were no longer sufficient to defend the existing social order.
From parliamentary politician to fascist
Mosley’s trajectory was no personal aberration. It expressed the crisis of British capitalism and, inseparably, the bankruptcy of Labour reformism. He passed through both Conservative and Labour politics before breaking with established parliamentarianism. Dorril’s account makes clear that Mosley’s fascism cannot be reduced to personal ambition or psychological instability. His movement towards authoritarianism occurred amid profound international convulsions: the aftermath of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the decline of British imperial predominance, mass unemployment and the international economic crisis.
Dorril’s biography therefore inadvertently poses a larger historical question. What is fascism? Here, Leon Trotsky’s Marxist analysis during Hitler’s rise remains indispensable. Fascism cannot be understood primarily as extreme intolerance, political violence or the appearance of charismatic dictators. Such descriptions concern its symptoms rather than its class content. As David North stressed in a 2025 discussion of fascism’s historical development, fascism emerged after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent wave of working-class radicalisation. It mobilised sections of the petty bourgeoisie, demoralised workers, and lumpen elements against the organised working class to defend bourgeois interests. In the North interview, the Italian experience is characterised as a movement aimed at suppressing a radicalising working class. [wsws.org]
This framework is necessary for understanding Dorril’s extraordinary cast of characters. Around the respectable politicians and aristocrats appear adventurers, spies, fanatics and swindlers. The publisher’s description of Dorril’s research itself emphasises precisely this collection of political figures, secret agents, Nazi spies, crooks and other marginal characters surrounding Mosley. But this social composition should not obscure fascism’s fundamental class function.
The ruined petty bourgeoisie can provide fascism with its mass constituency and street fighters. It can supply the resentment, desperation and nationalism that fascist leaders transform into political reaction. Once fascism becomes a serious contender for power, however, these forces become an instrument for defending capitalist property against the organised working class. The petty bourgeoisie is the battering ram. Capital is the social force whose interests are ultimately defended.
Fascism and the British establishment
Mosley’s failure did not prove British immunity to fascism; it only showed that authoritarian rule had not become necessary. Dorril’s evidence does not demonstrate that the entire British ruling class supported Mosley. It did not, and his connections within the establishment do not prove a unified conspiracy. The historically important question is why parts of British ruling circles were willing to tolerate, finance, or sympathise with authoritarian political alternatives at all.
Mosley left conventional parliamentary politics before embracing fascism. His trajectory therefore places fascism within British political history rather than outside it. Some argue that a supposedly innate British attachment to democracy cannot explain its comparative weakness. Britain developed under different conditions from Germany and Italy. The ruling class retained parliamentary and reformist mechanisms that could contain working-class opposition without resorting to a fascist dictatorship. The decisive question, therefore, was not whether the bourgeoisie had collectively converted to fascism, but whether it needed it. As long as parliament, Labour reformism and the trade-union bureaucracy could preserve capitalist stability, authoritarian alternatives remained unnecessary. But unnecessary did not mean impossible. Mosley’s failure showed not that British capitalism was immune to fascism, but that its ruling class had not exhausted the political mechanisms it could use to defend its power.
This is precisely why Dorril’s portrait so damages the mythology of Britain’s supposedly instinctive democratic moderation. Mosley did not inhabit a sealed political underworld disconnected from respectable society. His career intersected repeatedly with Britain’s political and social establishment. Dorril devotes considerable attention to these connections, including Lord Rothermere, and to Mosley’s relations with German and Italian fascism and British intelligence. These are central themes in Blackshirt, not incidental details.
The point is not that the entire British ruling class became fascist or supported Mosley. It plainly did not. Nor does the existence of contacts between fascists and members of the establishment demonstrate some unified conspiracy. Such an interpretation would substitute intrigue for an analysis of class relationships.
The historically important point is different. Within British ruling circles, forces were prepared to investigate, finance, tolerate, or sympathise with authoritarian political alternatives when traditional parliamentary methods appeared increasingly inadequate to the capitalist crisis. Dorril’s reconstruction of the milieu surrounding Mosley, including political and aristocratic figures alongside secret agents, Nazi contacts and adventurers, makes it impossible to separate British fascism from the society that produced it.
This places Mosley squarely within British history rather than outside it. He had, after all, travelled through conventional parliamentary politics before establishing the British Union of Fascists in 1932. His evolution demonstrated that parliamentary politics and fascism were not two hermetically sealed universes. Amid profound social crisis, politicians who had operated within the traditional system increasingly looked to authoritarian methods.
The weakness of British fascism therefore requires a historical explanation rather than one based upon national psychology. No peculiar democratic instinct supposedly embedded in the British character made fascism impossible. Britain developed under objective conditions different from those prevailing in Germany and Italy.
This distinction is fundamental. The British ruling class still had powerful parliamentary and political mechanisms to contain social opposition. Mosley founded the BUF, but British capitalism did not face the same combination of circumstances that produced fascist rule elsewhere. That difference tells us nothing about an inherent British devotion to liberty. It shows that ruling classes use political forms appropriate to the circumstances they face.
Germany’s experience demonstrates the opposite side of this process. David North has emphasised that fascism emerged historically as a movement directed against a radicalising working class and mobilised petty-bourgeois and other socially disoriented layers to smash workers’ organisations in the interests of the bourgeoisie. The decisive question was therefore never whether an entire capitalist class suddenly underwent an ideological conversion to fascism. The question was whether mounting social and political crisis made authoritarian methods necessary to defend the existing order.
From this standpoint, Mosley’s failure offers no vindication of British exceptionalism. Indeed, Dorril’s evidence points the other way. British fascism matters partly because it shows how quickly supposedly marginal authoritarian politics could find points of contact within respectable society. The appropriate conclusion is consequently more unsettling than the traditional celebration of British moderation. Parliamentary democracy persisted not because British capitalism was constitutionally incapable of fascism, but because circumstances had not compelled the ruling class to abandon its existing mechanisms of rule. Mosley was not foreign to British capitalism. He represented one of the political possibilities that its crisis generated.
Why Mosley failed
The weakness of British fascism, compared with Italian Fascism or German National Socialism, must itself be explained historically. Britain had emerged weakened from the First World War and suffered severely during the Depression. Yet British imperialism retained enormous global resources, while its parliamentary structures and traditional parties remained far more politically resilient. Most importantly, Labourism and the trade-union bureaucracy continued to exercise enormous authority over the working class.
The British bourgeoisie did not face circumstances identical to those confronting German capitalism. Germany had suffered military defeat, revolution, Versailles, hyperinflation, intense class conflict, and, subsequently, the catastrophic effects of the Depression. Above all, it possessed a working class with immensely powerful mass organisations. The question posed in Germany was therefore not whether resistance to Hitler existed. It was why that resistance was politically paralysed. Peter Schwarz’s lecture on the rise of fascism in Germany approaches the catastrophe precisely as a problem of political leadership and the collapse of the Communist International, rather than deriving Hitler’s victory from some alleged defect in the German population. [wsws.org]
This was Trotsky’s central concern during Hitler’s rise. Against the Stalinist policy that characterised Social Democracy as “social fascism”, Trotsky demanded a workers’ united front. Communist and Social Democratic workers should act together against the fascist threat while the revolutionary party preserved complete political independence and continued its struggle against reformist leadership. That strategy was the antithesis of the later Popular Front. A united front represented common working-class action against fascism without abandoning political independence. A Popular Front politically subordinated the workers’ movement to alliances with bourgeois parties in the name of defending democracy. This distinction had immense historical consequences.
Cable Street and the working class
Here, the Battle of Cable Street in October 1936 assumes its broader significance. Cable Street has often been absorbed into another reassuring national mythology: ordinary Britons, united by traditional decency, supposedly proved fascism could not flourish on British soil. Such an interpretation removes the event from the class conflict that produced it. Mosley’s attempt to march through London’s East End encountered mass opposition from workers, Jewish residents and anti-fascists. The central historical lesson is not that British institutions automatically protected democracy but that large numbers of people mobilised to prevent a fascist provocation.
Nor should we obscure the role of Communist workers. Whatever the politically disastrous consequences of the Stalinist Popular Front orientation, Communist Party members became important participants in anti-fascist mobilisation at Cable Street. This distinction matters enormously. The militancy and courage of Communist workers cannot be identified uncritically with the policies dictated by the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Indeed, the tragedy of the Communist movement during these years lay in the repeated contradiction between its working-class members’ revolutionary aspirations and the increasingly counter-revolutionary demands of Soviet foreign policy. Cable Street therefore cannot be reduced to either a liberal celebration of British tolerance or the accomplishments of any particular bureaucracy. Its greatest significance lay in independent mass mobilisation.
Fascism and the crisis of leadership
Here, the British and German experiences illuminate one another, despite profound differences in their historical circumstances. Hitler’s victory did not demonstrate fascism’s irresistible strength, let alone the political backwardness of the German working class. Germany had one of the world’s most powerful and highly organised workers’ movements. The catastrophe of 1933 resulted not from an absence of working-class opposition to fascism, but from a crisis of political leadership that prevented this immense social force from being mobilised against Hitler.
Social Democracy and Stalinism had different but complementary historical responsibilities. The Social Democratic leadership subordinated the working class to the bourgeois state and presented defence of the Weimar constitutional order as the means of resisting Hitler. The Stalinist Communist Party, meanwhile, rejected the united-front policy advocated by Trotsky and divided Communist from Social Democratic workers through the disastrous theory of “social fascism”. The consequence was not an absence of working-class opposition to fascism, but the prevention of its unified political mobilisation.
The German catastrophe consequently sharpens one of the most important implications of Dorril’s history. Appeals to the existing capitalist state cannot finally eradicate the danger of fascism because fascism does not originate outside capitalist society. It emerges from its contradictions. Parliamentary democracy is a historically specific form of capitalist rule, not an institution that stands impartially above conflicting social classes. Under relatively stable conditions, elections, parliament, collective bargaining, reformist parties, and the trade-union apparatus can mediate class antagonisms. Concessions can be made and social opposition contained without challenging capitalist property. But these political forms are neither permanent nor inviolable. When economic and social crisis becomes sufficiently acute, especially when the working class appears to threaten capitalist property and political power, sections of the bourgeoisie can turn to increasingly authoritarian alternatives. Nothing about this process was peculiarly German. What was distinctive, however, were the historical conditions that gave it its catastrophic German form.
This is why Mosley’s connections within the British elite matter far more than historical gossip. Dorril’s extensive reconstruction of the political, aristocratic and intelligence milieu surrounding Mosley demonstrates that British fascism did not exist in complete isolation from respectable society. His study explores Mosley’s connections with Nazi Germany, British political figures and intelligence circles and the broader network surrounding the British Union of Fascists.
This does not establish that the British ruling class collectively embraced fascism. It did not. The more important conclusion is that elements within established society could contemplate, tolerate or sympathise with authoritarian political alternatives. That alone punctures the mythology that parliamentary democracy expressed some timeless quality of the British national character.
Dorril’s great strength lies in the accumulation of evidence. He reconstructs the world around Mosley in extraordinary detail, tracing connections among parliamentary politics, aristocratic society, fascist organisations, intelligence circles, and the political underworld. In doing so, he exposes how porous the boundary between supposedly respectable Britain and its fascist fringe actually was. Yet description alone cannot explain the phenomenon it uncovers. The decisive question is not simply who supported, financed, or associated with Mosley, but what contradictions within British capitalism created a political space where fascism could emerge at all.
That requires an analysis of class. It requires explaining fascism not fundamentally through Mosley’s personality, British eccentricity, antisemitic prejudice or political conspiracy, important as these elements are, but through the contradictions of capitalist society and the struggle between classes. Dorril provides extraordinarily valuable raw material for such an analysis. Marxism supplies the historical framework that allows its deeper significance to emerge. Mosley then stops appearing as an inexplicable British deviation. He becomes something considerably more disturbing: evidence that authoritarian reaction was one of the possibilities generated within British capitalism itself.
The contemporary warning
This is also where Dorril’s book acquires renewed relevance. Historical analogies must be employed carefully. Contemporary politics cannot simply be mapped onto the 1930s, and the specific relations of class forces that produced Mussolini and Hitler cannot simply be reproduced eighty or ninety years later. Nevertheless, the social foundations upon which fascist movements can grow have not disappeared.
Capitalist crisis, extreme inequality, imperialist war, the destruction of living standards and the insecurity of the middle classes create conditions in which nationalism and authoritarianism can again be cultivated against immigrants, minorities and, ultimately, the working class. At the same time, fascism’s victory is by no means predetermined.
This is an important element in David North’s treatment of the question. His 2025 discussion stresses not merely the danger of fascism but also its link to the historical failures of revolutionary leadership and the need to attack the capitalist foundations on which fascism develops. [wsws.org]
The conclusion points in a fundamentally different direction from liberal anti-fascism. If fascism arises ultimately from capitalist crisis, it cannot be eradicated through an alliance with supposedly democratic representatives of the same capitalist order. Defending democratic rights cannot depend on subordinating the working class to bourgeois parties, state institutions, or trade-union bureaucracies. The working class’s political independence therefore becomes decisive.
That is the lasting distinction between the united-front strategy Trotsky fought for and every variety of Popular Front politics. Workers belonging to different organisations may have to fight jointly against fascist attacks. But common action must strengthen, rather than dissolve, the working class’s political independence.
Dorril’s achievement
Blackshirt remains an enormously valuable work because its accumulation of evidence makes any sentimental rehabilitation of Mosley extraordinarily difficult. According to the book’s published description, Dorril made extensive use of archival material and interviews, including one with Mosley’s widow, Diana Mosley; the resulting study investigates Mosley’s financing, Nazi connections, and the milieu that helped his movement.
Yet that material becomes far more significant when interpreted through the history of class struggle. Mosley was neither a freak nor an inexplicable deviation from an otherwise democratic British capitalism. He arose from its political institutions, responded to its crisis and found support among elements of its established society. Britain did not avoid a fascist government because the British ruling class possessed an inherent commitment to democracy. Nor did Mosley fail because fascism was somehow incompatible with the British temperament. Different objective circumstances prevailed. The ruling class retained alternative mechanisms of political rule. Labourism and the trade-union bureaucracy still had enough authority to keep the working class within parliamentarism. When Mosley tried to take his movement to the streets, he met determined opposition from below.
Dorril’s book therefore teaches us that the deepest lesson concerns not Mosley’s personality but the society that produced him. Fascism becomes possible when capitalist crisis drives threatened ruling elites towards authoritarian solutions and mobilises socially desperate layers against the working class. Its ultimate strength, however, depends on the working class’s political condition and leadership.
That is what connects Germany in 1933 with Cable Street in 1936 while simultaneously explaining their profoundly different outcomes. The struggle against fascism is consequently inseparable from the struggle against the social order that continually reproduces the conditions of reaction. Mosley’s blackshirts emerged from British capitalism, not from outside it. The enduring answer lies neither in faith in parliament nor in alliances with the supposedly progressive wing of the ruling class, but in the conscious, international, and politically independent mobilisation of the working class against capitalism itself.
Bibliography
Dorril, Stephen. Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism. London: Viking, 2006. The 2007 Penguin edition contains 717 pages and includes bibliographical references.
Eatwell, Roger. Fascism: A History. London: Chatto & Windus, 1995.
Linehan, Thomas. British Fascism, 1918–39: Parties, Ideology and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.
Mosley, Oswald. My Life. London: Nelson, 1968.
North, David. “An Interview with David North on Fascism, Trump and the Lessons of History.” World Socialist Web Site, 16 April 2025. North discusses fascism historically as a movement that mobilises the petty bourgeoisie and other disoriented social layers against the workers’ movement, in the bourgeoisie’s interests. [wsws.org]
Renton, Dave. Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000.
Schwarz, Peter. “The Rise of Fascism in Germany and the Collapse of the Communist International.” World Socialist Web Site, 11 October 2005. [wsws.org]
Thurlow, Richard. Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to the National Front. London: I.B. Tauris, 1998.
Trotsky, Leon. The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971.
Trotsky, Leon. “What Is National Socialism?” 1933, in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany.
The announcement that Nathan Cofnas, the self-described “race realist” whose writings have provoked widespread controversy, is to speak at Oriel College, University of Oxford, has become the focus of a political confrontation whose significance extends far beyond another dispute over freedom of speech on a university campus. Cofnas is scheduled to speak on 17 November at a meeting organised by the recently established Oxon Universities’ Reform Society, entitled An Evening with Nathan Cofnas: Is DEI Undermining Higher Education? Stand Up To Racism Oxfordshire has announced a protest outside the college and launched an open letter calling on Oriel College and the University of Oxford to refuse to host the meeting and support the society’s disaffiliation.
The controversy raises fundamental questions about the growth of the nationalist right, efforts to rehabilitate racialist views of society, the crisis of identity politics and, no less importantly, the defence of democratic rights. There must be uncompromising political opposition to attempts to explain social inequality through racial hierarchy or biological determinism. But that opposition must be distinguished from calls for university administrators to suppress meetings and decide which political views students may hear. The campaign to cancel the Cofnas meeting risks replacing administrative prohibition with political struggle.
It invites the authorities of one of Britain’s wealthiest and most prestigious universities to define the limits of legitimate political discourse. This perspective does not strengthen the struggle against reaction; it weakens it by shifting political responsibility away from students and workers and onto institutions whose role is not to emancipate society, but to administer a significant part of the existing social order. The racialist right must be confronted and defeated politically, intellectually and socially—not granted the status of persecuted dissidents through administrative bans.
Cofnas is an American philosopher and postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University who studied at Oxford, Cambridge, and Columbia. He has described himself as a “race realist” and is known for arguing that genetic differences contribute to average racial differences in intelligence. Overheard at Oxford reports that mainstream scientific critics reject his hereditarian position and that the Cambridge branch of the University and College Union has described his work as “race pseudo-science”.
The political significance of these arguments extends beyond the immediate academic controversies. Historically, biological explanations of racial inequality have served a clear ideological purpose: they recast conditions shaped by history and social relations as supposedly natural—and therefore more or less immutable—differences between human populations. As a result, inequalities in wealth, educational achievement, and social position no longer need to be explained by poverty, inherited wealth, unequal access to education, the organisation of employment, or society’s class structure. Instead, they can be attributed, wholly or partly, to supposedly inherited differences between populations. This helps explain why biological determinism and eugenic doctrines have historically been so valuable to defenders of hierarchy.
They made existing inequality appear scientifically inevitable. Contemporary hereditarian arguments arise in a different historical context, and their proponents often distance themselves from earlier racial ideologies. Still, attempts to explain racialised social inequality biologically must face the most rigorous scientific, historical and political scrutiny.
The immediate backdrop to the Oxford meeting is the bitter controversy surrounding the late Cambridge sociologist Arday. Cofnas publicly accused him of plagiarising his doctoral thesis. Arday denied plagiarism but acknowledged mistakes in his doctoral work. Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded his doctorate, concluded that his degree should stand. Cambridge University later announced an investigation, citing what it described as new information about his qualifications and honorary appointments. Arday resigned and died later in August. The controversy cannot simply be dismissed as an invented allegation: Africa News reported that The Times had separately examined Arday’s thesis and identified passages it characterised as “identical or near-identical” to another researcher’s work. Questions were also raised about claims concerning his sporting and charitable activities.
But legitimate questions about academic standards could not justify turning an investigation into an escalating campaign of public denunciation that destroyed an individual. After Arday’s death, his family said a “campaign of misinformation” had become “too much for Jason” and that he had experienced a “campaign of sustained abuse”. The response to his death reflected widespread anger.
A Press Association report said that more than 30,000 people attended a vigil in Trafalgar Square, where Diane Abbott called the campaign against Arday “vicious” and “bitter”. By contrast, Lord Woolley described his death as a “public execution” and a “lynching”. These statements undoubtedly reflected genuine outrage. But the political framework through which much of the controversy has been interpreted—one that treats racial identity as the fundamental explanation for the conflict—obscures the deeper social and class processes at work.
The Arday affair exposes the profound contradictions of the diversity politics that has come to dominate universities, corporations and substantial sections of official political life. Within this framework, social progress is increasingly measured by the racial and gender composition of those occupying positions of prestige. Who becomes a professor, university administrator, corporate director, or senior politician becomes the principal measure of equality. But diversifying an elite does not abolish inequality. A university can celebrate the racial diversity of its senior leadership while students confront debt and academic employees experience insecure employment. Corporations can diversify their boardrooms without altering the relationship between shareholders and workers. Government institutions can promote representatives from different ethnic backgrounds while presiding over policies that increase poverty and social inequality. The composition of privileged layers can change considerably without transforming the social relationships upon which privilege itself rests.
The political right has learned to exploit precisely this contradiction. Reaction accepts the racial framework of liberal identity politics but reverses its direction. Where official diversity programmes attribute significance to the representation of minorities, the right declares that these same minorities have received unfair advantages. Where identity politics speaks of historical oppression, reaction increasingly portrays white people as the victims of institutional discrimination. Where liberalism invokes “lived experience”, its opponents appropriate the same terminology for themselves.
The statement issued by the Oxon Universities’ Reform Society regarding Cofnas demonstrates this process with almost parodic clarity. It claimed that he had been “repeatedly victimised with stigmatising language and structural apartheid by those with institutional power and privilege” and presented allowing space for his “lived experiences” as a means of rebalancing representation at Oxford. The rhetorical inversion is deliberate. The right has discovered that identity categories can be detached from progressive intentions and redeployed as instruments of reaction.
The development of the Oxon Universities’ Reform Society must itself be taken seriously. Registered with the University of Oxford in August, its announced programme has included Andrew Rosindell, Jim Allister, Neema Parvini and Cofnas. Its emergence points to a conscious effort to establish nationalist-right ideas among university students. We cannot counter this with the complacent assumption that reactionary politics will collapse merely because its arguments seem offensive to prevailing academic conventions.
The right seeks to capitalise upon a deepening alienation from institutions whose rhetoric of inclusivity increasingly conflicts with lived experiences of economic insecurity. Young people are continually assured that society is becoming more inclusive and progressive, even as secure employment, affordable housing, and financial independence become increasingly difficult to obtain. Reaction takes this social anger and provides it with a false target. Migrants, minorities, multiculturalism, “wokeness” and DEI become the explanation for contradictions rooted in capitalist society itself.
The international dimensions of the controversy surrounding Cofnas underscore the seriousness of these developments. Ghent University suspended Cofnas in August after his public statements about the Arday affair. The Press Association later reported that US ambassador Bill White pressured the university to reinstate him. More detailed reporting by Overheard at Oxford says the university replaced the original suspension with a three-month measure under which Cofnas works remotely, cannot teach, and must restrict his research to the subjects covered by his appointment, while an investigation continues. These details make clear the need to treat claims of simple “reinstatement” cautiously. Still, the reported involvement of an American ambassador shows that what might initially appear to be an internal university controversy has already intersected with wider political conflicts over academic freedom, DEI, and right-wing politics.
Under these circumstances, Stand Up To Racism Oxfordshire’s demand that university authorities prevent the meeting is politically misguided. There is every justification for demonstrating against racism, exposing its scientific pretensions and challenging the programme of the nationalist right. But protesting a political meeting and asking the authorities to prohibit it are fundamentally different political acts. The first constitutes the exercise of democratic rights by students and workers. The second transfers political power to an administrative apparatus and asks it to determine the boundaries of permissible political discourse. Once the principle is established that university management should decide which political organisations can meet and which political opinions students are permitted to hear, no progressive mechanism guarantees that such powers will always be exercised in a way that respects the right.
The defence of freedom of speech must therefore be separated from political agreement with the ideas being expressed. Cofnas has the right to advance his arguments, and students and workers possess the equally essential right to condemn and oppose them. Those rights are not contradictory. Political freedom depends upon both. A mass political demonstration against racism represents the active exercise of democratic rights. In contrast, administrative cancellation removes the political issue from students and workers and hands it to the university bureaucracy. Suppression also supplies the right with its preferred mythology. Movements that seek to portray themselves as persecuted outsiders challenging an intolerant liberal establishment benefit enormously whenever their opponents attempt to prevent them from speaking. They can then present arguments that ought to be subjected to ruthless criticism as forbidden truths that powerful institutions supposedly fear.
More fundamentally, the growth of racial politics cannot be understood apart from the social conditions that make reaction possible. Britain is characterised by immense private wealth alongside declining public provision and profound economic insecurity. Millions struggle with housing costs, deteriorating services and uncertainty about their future. Under such circumstances, nationalist politics offers an explanation deliberately calculated to conceal society’s structure. Migrants become responsible for housing shortages, refugees for overstretched services, multiculturalism for social fragmentation and diversity policies for declining opportunities. Each such argument directs social anger horizontally toward another section of the population instead of vertically toward concentrations of wealth and economic power.
This is why the struggle against racism cannot ultimately be separated from the struggle against capitalism. Marxism does not deny racial discrimination or minimise its consequences. It explains racial oppression historically and socially rather than treating race as the fundamental organising principle of human society. Workers do not stop sharing common material interests because they have different skin colours, religions, or national origins. On the contrary, ruling classes have repeatedly exploited such differences precisely because workers share interests that transcend national and racial divisions. When workers are persuaded to understand each other principally as members of competing racial communities, their capacity for common political action is undermined.
The answer to racialism is therefore not an alternative system of racial politics with more progressive objectives. Black workers and white workers, British-born workers and migrants, Christian, Muslim, Jewish and non-religious workers cannot emancipate themselves through competition for privileges within the existing social structure. Their common interests lie in transforming that structure. The great historical strength of socialist internationalism is its insistence that humanity can overcome racial and national antagonisms only by attacking their material foundations and uniting working people across the divisions cultivated by the ruling class.
The 17 November meeting should therefore become an occasion for political clarification rather than administrative censorship. Students and academics should expose the history and scientific weaknesses of racial determinism. Workers and young people should oppose attempts to blame migrants and minorities for the social crisis. They should challenge the nationalist programme associated with Reform UK and reject efforts to turn legitimate anger over deteriorating living standards into hostility towards vulnerable sections of society. At the same time, they should oppose attempts to hand university authorities powers to suppress political organisations. A movement genuinely capable of confronting reaction requires confidence in political argument and mass mobilisation, not reliance upon administrative prohibition.
This dispute ultimately concerns something much greater than whether Nathan Cofnas speaks for ninety minutes in an Oxford lecture theatre. The return of racialist ideas is one manifestation of a broader political crisis produced by staggering inequality, declining confidence in established institutions and the absence of a mass socialist alternative through which social opposition can find progressive expression. Reaction grows by exploiting this vacuum. It transforms class antagonism into nationalism, economic insecurity into hostility towards migrants and social inequality into competition between racial groups. Its arguments acquire influence not because racial pseudoscience has suddenly become intellectually convincing, but because conditions of profound social crisis create opportunities for forces that divert anger away from capitalism.
Fighting this danger requires a fundamentally different orientation. Students and workers must oppose racism without surrendering democratic rights, defend migrants and minorities without accepting the fragmentation of society into competing racial constituencies, and confront the nationalist right without placing themselves politically under the authority of the institutions of the existing order. Above all, they must recognise that the fundamental social division is not between white and black, native-born and migrant, or one nationality and another, but between the working class, whose collective labour sustains society, and the capitalist class that controls its productive resources and appropriates its wealth.
Racial pseudoscience will not be defeated by persuading Oriel College to lock the doors of a lecture theatre. Nor will administrative rulings from university authorities halt the growth of the nationalist right. We must defeat these forces in open political struggle by exposing the social interests they serve and removing the conditions on which they feed. That demands building an independent socialist movement that unites workers and young people across every racial and national division in opposition to inequality, nationalism, and the capitalist system itself.
Written in exile when its author was barely 21 and published only in Swedish during his lifetime, Berlin Shuffle is a portrait of the human wreckage German capitalism produced in the year the Great Depression began. Its English appearance, nearly nine decades later, is a significant literary event. It also arrives at a moment when the social conditions it depicts mass impoverishment, a political establishment indifferent to low-income people, and the far right’s cultivation of resentment are again visible across Europe and the United States.
Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz (1915–1942) is now best known for The Passenger (Der Reisende), written a few weeks after the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom and rediscovered in an archive eight decades later. Philip Boehm’s 2021 English translation became an international bestseller. Berlin Shuffle, the English title for Boschwitz’s debut Menschen neben dem Leben (literally “People Beside Life”), was first published in German in 2019. Boehm’s translation appeared in the US in December 2025 and in Britain in January 2026.
The novel follows a handful of Berlin down-and-outs over a single day in 1929, ending in a drunken eruption of violence in a dance hall on the city’s edge. It contains no Nazis and barely mentions politics. Yet, as several reviewers have noted, it captures with uncanny clarity the social atmosphere from which fascism drew its shock troops. That achievement, and its limits, deserve careful examination.
A life shaped by war, fascism and exile
Boschwitz was born in Berlin on 19 April 1915. His father, Salomon Boschwitz, a Jewish factory owner who had converted to Christianity, served in the Imperial Army and died weeks after his son’s birth. His mother, Martha, came from a patrician family in Lübeck.
In 1935, the year of the Nuremberg race laws, Boschwitz’s uncle, the lawyer Alexander Wolgast, was murdered in the street after criticising the Nazi legislation. That same year, Ulrich received call-up papers for the Wehrmacht and fled to Scandinavia with his mother. In Norway he wrote Menschen neben dem Leben, which appeared in Stockholm in 1937 as Människor utanför, under the pseudonym John Grane. Its modest success allowed him to study at the Sorbonne.
The next years were an odyssey through Luxembourg, France and Belgium before mother and son reached England in 1939. On the outbreak of war, the British government interned them as “enemy aliens,” indifferent to the fact that they were refugees from Hitler. In July 1940, Boschwitz was deported to Australia aboard the HMT Dunera, notorious for the brutal treatment of its passengers. During the voyage, a guard threw overboard the only draft of his third novel.
He spent two years in camps at Hay and Tatura, revising The Passenger and beginning another novel. Released in 1942, he sailed for Britain. On 29 October 1942, his ship, the MV Abosso, was torpedoed by the German submarine U-575. Boschwitz was among the 362 who died. He was 27, and his manuscripts went down with him.
His life thus traced, in compressed form, the fate of a generation: born into the imperialist slaughter of 1914–18, driven out by fascism, and then treated as suspect by the “democratic” powers that claimed to be fighting it.
One day among the “people beside life”
The novel’s German title is more precise than its English one. Boschwitz’s characters live beside life: pushed to the margins of a society that has no use for them. The action unfolds over one day in 1929. Philip Boehm’s introduction rightly draws attention to its “cinematic structure”, cutting between figures who drift across the city before converging at night on a cheap dance hall and bar, the Jolly Huntsman.
At the centre is Fundholz, a beggar who had a respectable life only a decade earlier, and his companion Tönnchen, an obese, childlike man damaged by a tragedy in his youth. Fundholz shepherds him with exasperation and tenderness. The pair begin the novel in a damp cellar room and spend much of the day avoiding the police, who see any poor man as a potential vagrant.
Around them circle others. Grissmann, an unemployed former streetcar conductor sacked years earlier over 20 missing marks, is consumed by humiliation and a craving for power. Max Sonnenberg, blinded in the war, bullies his young wife, Elsi. Minchen Linder, a mistress to older men, and her boyfriend Wilhelm Winter, a petty criminal and pimp, round out the night’s company. A widow, Frau Fliebusch, wanders the streets refusing to believe that her husband died in the war more than ten years before.
Over drink and dancing, Elsi turns to Grissmann. Jealousy and schnapps do the rest: a quarrel between Grissmann and Sonnenberg ends in catastrophe and a collective frenzy. The Guardian’s reviewer called the conclusion fittingly explosive, while describing the whole as funny and light on its feet despite its grim material.
Boschwitz is unsentimental. His men treat women with contempt, and David Herman, reviewing for the Jewish Chronicle, identifies misogyny as perhaps the book’s dominant theme. Nor does he idealise poverty. Hunger makes people cunning and cruel; solidarity, where it exists, is fragile and grudging. Yet the novel is also full of grotesque comedy, and its shabby figures move through a Berlin of trams, the U-Bahn, cinemas and taxis, the bright surface of Weimar modernity that excludes them.
Berlin, 1929: the year everything broke
The choice of 1929 is not incidental. The brief “stabilisation” of the mid-1920s, financed by American loans, was ending. After the Wall Street Crash in October, lenders recalled those loans, and German unemployment climbed from around 1.3 million in mid-1929 to more than 6 million in 1932, nearly a third of the workforce.
The political consequences were swift. The Nazi Party won just 2.6 per cent of the vote in the 1928 Reichstag election. By September 1930 it took 18.3 per cent, and by July 1932, 37.3 per cent, making it the largest party. Its electoral base lay above all in the ruined middle classes. Still, it also recruited heavily among the declassed, the long-term unemployed and embittered war veterans: precisely the milieu Boschwitz describes.
1929 was also the year of the Blutmai. On 1 May, Berlin’s Social Democratic (SPD) police chief, Karl Zörgiebel, enforced a ban on May Day demonstrations. Over three days, police killed 33 people, most of them uninvolved residents of working-class districts, and arrested more than 1,200. The massacre deepened the gulf between the two mass workers’ parties, the SPD and the Communist Party (KPD).
That split proved fatal. The SPD leadership tied the working class to defending a bankrupt bourgeois republic. The Stalinised KPD, following the Comintern’s ultra-left “Third Period” line, denounced Social Democrats as “social fascists” and rejected a united front against the Nazis. From exile, Leon Trotsky repeatedly warned from 1930 that this policy was leading to catastrophe and called for a workers’ united front to smash the fascist gangs before they took power.
Trotsky’s analysis also illuminates Boschwitz’s characters. In his September 1930 article on the German elections, he explained how the crisis drove the petty bourgeoisie and the declassed toward fascism when the workers’ parties offered no revolutionary way out. Writing after Hitler’s victory, he observed that “a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois”. Fundholz, Grissmann and Sonnenberg are not petty bourgeois in the strict sense; several have fallen out of the working class or the lower middle class altogether. But their rage, impotence and contempt for those weaker than themselves are the raw material that fascism organised.
Achievement and limits
Boschwitz’s greatest strength is his eye. He renders the physical texture of poverty- the damp walls, the hunger that never quite lets up, the calculations over a few pfennig- with a concreteness that recalls the drawings of George Grosz and the paintings of Otto Dix. The Jewish Chronicle review compares the atmosphere to Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera and Max Beckmann’s work. Lawrence De Maria, in the Washington Independent Review of Books, writes that the author recreates Berlin’s squalor so completely that the reader can almost taste it.
The novel also shows a psychological acuity remarkable for such a young writer. Grissmann’s self-pity curdling into a desire for revenge, Sonnenberg’s tyranny over the one person weaker than himself, the crowd’s readiness to be swept up in violence: these are drawn without moralising. Kirkus found the book’s main strength in showing, in everyday terms, the atmosphere in which a fascist government could arise.
But the limits are real and should be stated. The novel views society largely from below and from the side, among those already expelled from production. The organised working class, millions strong in Berlin, the city of “Red Wedding,” of strikes, mass parties and mass demonstrations, is almost absent. As Herman notes, there are passing references to Hindenburg and Ludendorff but little sense of the rising far right. Low-income people appear as victims of fate and of one another, not as members of a class capable of changing their conditions.
This is not simply the author’s personal failing. Boschwitz wrote in 1936–37, after the German working class had gone down to defeat without a fight, betrayed by the leaderships of both the SPD and the KPD. The novel’s pervasive pessimism, its sense of people trapped and turning on each other, reflects that historic defeat. It also helps explain why the book is so compelling: it captures what happens when society’s most oppressed layers see no progressive way out.
The reception has been almost uniformly enthusiastic. The Financial Times called it a cautionary tale for our times; The Times found its parallels with the present surprising. Publishers Weekly praised its insight into a country’s descent into madness. Several reviewers, while admiring, have also admitted that they found its characters hard to like and its outlook bleak.
A warning from 1929
Publishers and critics have presented Berlin Shuffle as a “warning” to our own time. The description is apt, but the warning needs to be made concrete. The novel shows how capitalist crisis grinds people down until resentment, rather than solidarity, becomes the dominant social emotion. It does not show, because history had not yet shown its author, that this outcome was not inevitable.
The parallels today are hard to miss. In February 2025, the far-right Alternative for Germany won 20.8 per cent of the vote, doubling its share and becoming the second-largest party in the Bundestag, while the SPD fell to 16.4 per cent, its worst result ever. Across Europe and in the United States, governments impose austerity on the working class while pouring resources into militarism, and scapegoat migrants and refugees for the consequences.
Boschwitz himself was such a refugee, interned and deported by a British government that saw a German Jew as an enemy alien. He died at 27 in the Atlantic, cutting short exceptional promise.
Berlin Shuffle is not a political novel in the narrow sense, and it offers no answers. But as a document of the social decay that preceded fascism, written by a young man who lived through it, it deserves a wide readership. Philip Boehm’s translation has been widely praised [7][8]. The lesson the novel cannot draw, and that readers today most need to draw for themselves, is that only independent, united working-class political mobilisation can block the road to fascism.
Notes
Pushkin Press, Berlin Shuffle, book page (UK hardback, 15 January 2026).
Harvard Book Store, Berlin Shuffle listing, collecting review extracts from the Guardian, Financial Times, The Times and Kirkus Reviews.
Wikipedia, “Blutmai”, drawing on Chris Bowlby, “Blutmai 1929: Police, Parties and Proletarians in a Berlin Confrontation,” Historical Journal 29:1 (1986).
Leon Trotsky, “What Is National Socialism?”, 10 June 1933; French text, Qu’est-ce que le national-socialisme ?, Marxists Internet Archive. English quotation from the standard Pathfinder translation in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany.
Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander. Berlin Shuffle. Translated by Philip Boehm. London: Pushkin Press, 2026. ISBN 9781782279143.
Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander. Berlin Shuffle: A Novel. Translated by Philip Boehm. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2025. ISBN 9781250869494.
Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander. Menschen neben dem Leben. Edited by Peter Graf. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2019.
Grane, John [Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz]. Människor utanför. Stockholm, 1937.
Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander. The Passenger. Translated by Philip Boehm. London: Pushkin Press, 2021; New York: Metropolitan Books, 2021.
Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander. Der Reisende. Edited by Peter Graf. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2018.
Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander, and Jonathan Freedland. King Winter’s Birthday. Illustrated by Emily Sutton. London: Pushkin Press, 2024.
The Passenger: A Jewish businessman’s flight across Nazi Germany in November 1938
“Perhaps their idea is to undress us carefully before killing us, so that our clothes won’t be bloodstained and our banknotes ruined. Murder is carried out economically these days.”
Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz wrote The Passenger at extraordinary speed in the immediate aftermath of the November 1938 pogrom known as Kristallnacht. He was 23 years old, himself an exile from Nazi Germany. The novel appeared in English before the war, first in the United States as The Man Who Took Trains and subsequently in Britain as The Fugitive, before largely disappearing from view.
Boschwitz did not live to see Nazi Germany’s destruction. Interned by the British as an “enemy alien” after the outbreak of war, he was deported to Australia in 1940. After gaining permission to return to Britain in 1942, he boarded the MV Abosso. On 29 October, the ship was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine U-575. Boschwitz, aged only 27, was among those killed.
The novel itself survived. Boschwitz revised it while interned in Australia, and editors used instructions he left in correspondence with his mother to edit the rediscovered German typescript. Philip Boehm translates the modern English version.
The book’s recovery is important. Its significance lies not simply in having been written “at the time”, though that immediacy matters enormously. It records with unusual psychological intensity the experience of an assimilated Jewish businessman discovering, almost from one hour to the next, that the social order in which he has invested his identity, property and confidence has turned against him. That experience is also a political lesson.
A man without a place
The novel opens in Berlin in November 1938. Otto Silbermann is a prosperous Jewish businessman, a First World War veteran and, in his own estimation, a thoroughly respectable German citizen. As the violence of Kristallnacht engulfs the country, Nazi stormtroopers arrive at his home, and Silbermann escapes through the back door. He begins boarding trains, desperately seeking some route out of Germany.
What follows is a kind of nightmare picaresque. Silbermann can neither stay safely where he is nor escape. Public spaces have become dangerous and former relationships uncertain. He therefore travels ceaselessly across Germany. The railway carriage, with its anonymity, constant movement, and temporary suspension between departure and arrival, becomes almost the only place where he can exist.
Boschwitz turns this movement without progress into the novel’s organising principle. Silbermann is always going somewhere but never escaping. Each journey offers the possibility of deliverance before returning him to essentially the same situation. The result is a claustrophobia that works all the more effectively because the protagonist spends so much of the novel physically in motion.
The people he encounters form the book’s social heart. Nazis, opportunists, functionaries, fellow victims and apparently respectable citizens pass through the railway compartments. Some embrace the regime; others accommodate themselves to it. Silbermann’s appearance enables him temporarily to conceal the identity that Nazi racial ideology has made decisive. Contemporary descriptions of the novel emphasise precisely this contradiction: a man who considers himself German and can outwardly “pass” as such discovers that neither patriotism nor appearance provides security.
The absurdity of the racial categories does not diminish their power. That is part of Boschwitz’s point. Backed by state institutions, a fiction becomes a material force governing where Silbermann can sleep, travel, work, and ultimately whether he can continue to exist in his own country.
Property and its illusions
Boschwitz is unsparing toward Silbermann, and this is one of the novel’s greatest strengths. Silbermann is not constructed as a conventional heroic figure. He is a prosperous businessman who sees himself as an established member of German society. His wealth, military service, marriage and social standing have encouraged the belief that he somehow occupies a more secure position than Jews who appear more obviously exposed to persecution. The events of November 1938 destroy these assumptions one after another.
Especially important is his relationship with Becker, his non-Jewish business associate and former wartime comrade. The relationship demonstrates how political persecution creates opportunities for private enrichment. Personal loyalty, commercial partnership, and patriotic comradeship therefore prove far weaker than the new realities the regime creates.
Here Boschwitz touches on one of the darkest features of the persecution of German Jews: dispossession occurs not simply through spectacular public violence but through ordinary economic relationships. The destruction of legal and social protection produces beneficiaries. People who yesterday dealt with Jewish neighbours as business partners or customers discover opportunities in their vulnerability.
Silbermann’s attachment to the money he carries therefore takes on greater symbolic importance. It is the portable remnant of his former existence. He has spent his adult life in a society that supposedly confers independence and social status through property. Now he discovers that possession without enforceable rights provides remarkably little protection.
This is what gives the novel’s treatment of bourgeois respectability its particular force. Silbermann has trusted the categories through which established society understood itself: property, citizenship, military service, respectable marriage, commerce and obedience to law. Under fascism these protections collapse because the state itself has become the instrument of persecution.
His journey therefore records more than the destruction of an individual. It dramatises the destruction of an illusion: that accumulated property and social respectability can provide security independently of the political and social order upon which property rights themselves depend.
Big business, fascism and the defeat of the working class
The catastrophe that overtakes Silbermann cannot be understood solely through the history of antisemitism. It unfolded within the crisis of German capitalism and after the destruction of a workers’ movement that had once constituted the most formidable organised social opposition to the German right.
The relationship between Adolf Hitler and German big business before 1933 has been the subject of an extensive historiographical dispute. The crude proposition that German industrialists acted as a single bloc, financed the Nazi movement from its inception and appointed Hitler as their instrument does not withstand scrutiny. Henry Ashby Turner Jr., one of the historians most closely associated with challenging this interpretation, emphasised both the unevenness of business support and the problems with some of the evidence traditionally used to demonstrate extensive industrial financing of the Nazis before they assumed power. [jstor.org]
But rejecting a conspiracy theory of Hitler’s rise is not the same thing as denying the profound convergence that developed between important sections of German capital and the Nazi dictatorship. By February 1933, after Hitler had already become chancellor, leading industrialists met Hitler and Hermann Göring at a gathering intended to raise money for the Nazi election campaign. Under the Third Reich, major German businesses would subsequently participate in and profit from forced labour, the “Aryanisation” of Jewish businesses and the exploitation of occupied Europe.
More immediately, the new regime moved quickly against working-class organisations. Following the Reichstag fire, the government used emergency powers to suspend fundamental civil liberties and incarcerate political opponents. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records that the regime rapidly dismantled democratic freedoms and transformed Germany into a dictatorship. The regime destroyed independent trade unionism almost immediately. On 2 May 1933, SA detachments occupied union offices throughout Germany and forced the unions to dissolve. Union buildings and records were seized, leaders were attacked or imprisoned, and the Nazi-controlled German Labour Front replaced the independent organisations of labour.
This sequence is fundamentally significant. National Socialism did not merely persecute Jews while leaving the existing configuration of class organisations intact. Consolidating power required destroying the institutions through which millions of German workers had previously organised politically and industrially. Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists and other political opponents were among the early targets of Nazi repression.
From a Marxist standpoint, this relationship between capitalist crisis, political reaction, and the smashing of working-class organisation is indispensable to understanding fascism. It also supplies a social background that necessarily lies outside Silbermann’s immediate field of vision. His tragedy takes place after a historic political defeat.
That fact gives meaning to Boschwitz’s focus on businesspeople, officials, and frightened middle-class members. Silbermann searches desperately for individual protection because the collective social and political forces that might have opposed the regime have already been crushed. By November 1938, the possibility of answering Nazi violence through the powerful mass organisations that had characterised working-class life during the Weimar Republic has been eliminated.
The historical irony is devastating. Silbermann has trusted precisely those institutions of bourgeois society that now offer him no defence: property, law, respectable commerce, military service and citizenship. His former business associate can exploit his vulnerability because persecution has altered the balance of power between them. The state no longer stands above their commercial relationship as the impartial guarantor Silbermann once imagined.
His endless railway journey therefore carries a deeper social meaning. Silbermann’s individual security is destroyed in a society where the organised power of the working class has already been broken, and significant sections of economic privilege have accommodated themselves to, collaborated with, or benefited from the new dictatorship. That does not mean that every capitalist supported Hitler or that Nazism can be explained as nothing more than a conspiracy of industrialists. The historical record is considerably more complex. It does mean that the persecution portrayed by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz developed within a dictatorship whose consolidation entailed both the destruction of organised labour and, subsequently, extensive collaboration with German industry.
That broader historical framework makes The Passenger still more devastating. Boschwitz shows the catastrophe through the consciousness of one frightened bourgeois individual. History shows the social defeats that made his isolation possible.
Fascism and the “democracies”
Silbermann is certainly alienated, frightened and increasingly disoriented, but he has not accidentally wandered into a meaningless Kafkaesque universe. He has been placed in an historically specific situation. The Nazi state has deprived Jews of elementary rights and unleashed organised persecution against them.
In his discussion of the novel, André Aciman stresses the terrifying position of someone trapped as Germany becomes impossible to inhabit. At the same time, other countries refuse to admit him. His account describes a Germany where Silbermann discovers that escape has become effectively impossible: “Germany won’t let you out, and other countries don’t want to let you in.”
The international dimension is crucial. Persecution creates the refugee, but borders can transform persecution into entrapment. Silbermann becomes a man who desperately needs to leave one territory without a guaranteed right to enter another.
Boschwitz understood that condition personally. His family left Germany after the Nuremberg Laws in 1935. He subsequently lived outside Germany before reaching Britain in 1939, where the war transformed him from a refugee from Hitler into an “enemy alien” in the eyes of the British authorities. He was ultimately transported to Australia.
This is a bitter historical irony. A young German writer driven into exile by the Nazi regime was interned by the country in which he had sought refuge and transported halfway around the world, only to die aboard the ship carrying him back.
Strengths and limitations
As fiction, The Passenger has the strengths and some weaknesses of a novel written with extraordinary urgency. Boschwitz reportedly produced it in approximately four weeks after Kristallnacht. That urgency survives in the work’s construction. Its movement is rapid and anxious, its recurring trains reproducing Silbermann’s inability to find safety or repose.
The railway compartment is Boschwitz’s most effective artistic device. It brings Silbermann into temporary proximity with strangers whose political attitudes he must continually assess while concealing the fact upon which his survival now depends. Conversation becomes dangerous because the most banal exchange can expose him.
This also explains the recurrence of similar situations. Structurally, the novel can feel repetitive, but the repetition has an artistic function. Silbermann cannot escape the same fundamental problem. Each departure promises a geographical solution to what is ultimately a political catastrophe.
The novel’s perspective nevertheless has limits. Its central social world is that of businesspeople and middle-class members. The reader experiences fascism principally through a bourgeois Jewish protagonist whose assumptions about citizenship, property and assimilation are being violently demolished.
That restriction is historically revealing in itself. Silbermann understands that his former life has ceased to exist long before he can adequately explain why it has disappeared. Boschwitz therefore captures, with remarkable immediacy, the consciousness of a man experiencing a historical catastrophe faster than he can comprehend.
André Aciman’s preface emphasises the novel’s psychological and sociological power, describing it as both an account of Jewish existence immediately before the war and an extraordinarily penetrating portrait of its protagonist. That emphasis is valuable, provided Silbermann’s specific circumstances don’t dissolve into a timeless parable of displacement. Silbermann is not simply modern man lost in an absurd universe. He is a Jewish citizen being destroyed by a definite political regime.
A book to read
The Passenger deserves the wide readership its rediscovery has brought it. Its revived edition achieved substantial international success, including translation into more than 20 languages. Yet its importance ultimately has little to do with the remarkable history of its disappearance and recovery.
Its enduring power comes from the immediacy with which Boschwitz captures the moment when ordinary social existence becomes impossible. Silbermann begins with many of the assumptions of the respectable bourgeois citizen. He possesses property, has served his country, conducts business and regards himself as thoroughly German. He discovers that none of these things protects him once political power decides he no longer belongs.
The horror of The Passenger lies in the incremental character of this discovery. Silbermann has no secure place from which to stand outside events and comprehend them as a whole. Instead, he passes from train to train, conversation to conversation, and humiliation to humiliation, still trying to behave according to the rules of a society whose rules have ceased to protect him.
That gives Boschwitz’s novel a significance beyond its considerable documentary value. Written by a 23-year-old refugee before the full catastrophe of European Jewry had unfolded, it records the atmosphere of persecution with an immediacy unavailable to retrospective historical fiction. Boschwitz did not know what would follow. He did understand that a decisive boundary had already been crossed.
His protagonist’s movement across Germany therefore becomes an image of terrifying simplicity: a man remains physically inside the country he regards as his own while discovering that, politically and socially, there is no longer any place in it where he is permitted to belong. That is what makes The Passenger so disturbing. That is why it remains a book worth reading.
[1]The Passenger, by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, translated by Philip Boehm, with an introduction by André Aciman (Pushkin Press Classics)
A new English version of Thomas Mann’s first great novel arrives as the social order it anatomised once again shows every sign of exhaustion. The book deserves the widest possible readership, not as a period piece about a vanished merchant patriciate, but as a work that grasped, more profoundly than its author fully understood, the historical fate of a class.
Oxford University Press has published a new translation of The Buddenbrooks in its World’s Classics series, by veteran translator Mike Mitchell, with an introduction, chronology, and explanatory notes by Ritchie Robertson, formerly Schwarz-Taylor Professor of German at Oxford. The edition runs to 656 pages. Mitchell taught at the universities of Reading and Stirling before becoming a full-time literary translator. Robertson retired in 2021 as Schwarz-Taylor Professor and is now an Emeritus Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford.
A fresh, carefully annotated edition is welcome because Buddenbrooks holds a distinctive place in European literature. Mann began writing the novel in 1897, when he was 22, and completed it in 1900; it was published the following year. Drawing deeply on his family’s history and the commercial society of Lübeck where he grew up, he transformed autobiographical material into a panoramic account of the dissolution of an entire social world. When he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, the Academy’s citation singled out his “great novel Buddenbrooks”.
What makes the novel enduring is precisely the distance separating the scale of its ostensible subject from that of its real achievement. The title promises a family history, and Mann certainly supplies one in extraordinary detail: marriages and divorces, births and deaths, business transactions and inheritances, illnesses, meals, houses, clothes, religious observances, musical enthusiasms and the minute rituals by which established families reassure themselves of their permanence. Yet behind this accumulation of apparently private incidents another history steadily makes itself felt.
The Buddenbrooks’ tragedy takes place during the transformation of nineteenth-century German society. The novel follows four generations of a wealthy North German merchant family between 1835 and 1877, a period encompassing enormous economic, social and political change. The family fortune, its commercial reputation, and civic standing initially seem almost natural. Business, family and public authority reinforce one another. Yet what one generation experiences as permanence becomes an increasingly burdensome inheritance for another.
This is where Buddenbrooks becomes considerably more than a chronicle of familial decadence. Arthur Schopenhauer profoundly influenced Mann, and the novel’s treatment of exhaustion, death and individual release bears the unmistakable imprint of that encounter. Oxford University Press describes decline in the novel as a “psychological process”, in which growing artistic sensitivity weakens the ruthless commercial instincts tied to the family’s earlier prosperity.
But the novel’s greatness lies partly in its realism, which goes beyond this explanation. What Mann interprets philosophically as exhaustion and degeneration also emerges objectively as historical transformation. The Buddenbrooks have not simply grown too sensitive for business. The world that made their particular form of bourgeois authority possible is itself changing around them. Their inner disintegration reflects an external movement they cannot comprehend or control.
Few novels depict, with comparable force, how a ruling social layer experiences historical decline as personal misfortune. The erosion of social confidence appears first not in political programmes or economic statistics but in marriages, nervous illnesses, failed commercial ventures, aesthetic longings and doubts about the future. This contradiction between Mann’s philosophical conception of decline and the richer conclusions his own realism forces on him gives Buddenbrooks its lasting significance. He set out to describe a family’s decline. In doing so, he produced something far greater: the artistic anatomy of a social world passing away.
Four generations
The novel, whose German subtitle, Verfall einer Familie, means “Decline of a Family”, opens in 1835 with a housewarming dinner in a grand house on Mengstrasse. Old Johann Buddenbrook, a prosperous grain merchant with the rationalism and robust self-confidence of the Enlightenment bourgeoisie, has bought the property from a bankrupt rival. It closes in 1877 in an altogether different world: the house has been sold, the firm liquidated, the male line extinguished, and what remains of the family reduced largely to a circle of grieving women. Across these four generations Mann charts not simply the disappearance of a dynasty, but the gradual erosion of the material security and moral certainty upon which its authority rests.
Each generation inherits its predecessor’s achievements but proves progressively less capable of inhabiting the social role that comes with them. In the patriarch Johann, business appears natural and uncomplicated. Commerce is his element, prosperity the confirmation of rational calculation and worldly competence. His son, the Consul, retains the commercial ethic but overlays it with a distinctly different sensibility. Pietism enters a world previously dominated by Enlightenment common sense. The family chronicle records business calculations, births, marriages, and deaths and commends them to God. The firm is no longer merely an enterprise. It has become a moral obligation, an inheritance whose preservation increasingly assumes the character of a duty.
With the Consul’s children this contradiction becomes sharper. Antonie internalises the family’s conception of itself perhaps more completely than anyone. Her personal happiness is repeatedly subordinated to the name and the firm’s commercial interests. The firm encourages her to marry Grünlich because it seems advantageous. When he proves to be a fortune-hunter and goes bankrupt, the collapse brutally exposes the economic considerations underlying the supposedly private institution of marriage. Antonie’s second marriage, to the Munich hop merchant Permaneder, likewise fails. Yet she remains devoted to the Buddenbrook name, clinging with almost comic determination to the prestige of a family whose material foundations are steadily weakening.
Christian represents another form of dissolution. Unable to accept the discipline expected of a Buddenbrook, he drifts through business, theatre, clubs, and hypochondria. Christian largely refuses what Thomas experiences as an unbearable duty. The brothers therefore respond in opposite ways to the same inheritance.
Thomas attempts to preserve it through sheer force of personality. He assumes control of the firm, enters public life, and becomes a senator, seemingly embodying the family’s continued success. Yet the more precarious his confidence becomes, the more meticulously he performs the outward signs of bourgeois authority. Dress, manners, public bearing and commercial reputation acquire enormous importance precisely because the inner certainty that once sustained them is disappearing. What came naturally to Johann must consciously be acted by Thomas.
With Thomas’s son Hanno, even the performance becomes impossible. Frail, introspective and artistically gifted, he feels no vocation for commerce and finds his deepest emotional refuge in music. The qualities earlier generations regarded as incidental to existence have moved to its centre. The family has moved from Johann’s uncomplicated identification with commerce to Hanno’s near-total estrangement from it.
Mann gives this historical and psychological trajectory its most economical expression in the family book. Hanno draws a double line beneath his own name. When asked why, he explains that he thought nothing more would come.
The gesture is innocent, but its significance is devastating. A succession that has organised four generations’ lives stops. The child, meant to guarantee the family’s future, instinctively recognises that there is none. The line beneath his name becomes a line beneath the Buddenbrooks themselves.
A family and a class
The years the novel spans, 1835 to 1877, saw German capitalism shift from the fragmented commercial world of the post-Napoleonic states to the unified, rapidly industrialising empire proclaimed in 1871.
The Buddenbrooks belong to the old Hanseatic patriciate: merchants whose economic status is inseparable from civic office, inherited reputation and a code of honour in which the firm appears almost as a sacred trust handed from father to son. Family, property, business and public standing are different aspects of a single social existence.
Their rivals, the Hagenströms, represent something new. Coarser in Mann’s presentation, less burdened by inherited tradition and altogether less embarrassed by speculation, they rise as the Buddenbrooks sink, and it is Hagenström who finally acquires the house on Mengstrasse. Mann treats them with undisguised distaste, but the logic of his own novel shows that their victory is not simply a matter of superior or inferior character. The competition between the two families expresses, within the narrow confines of a provincial mercantile city, the displacement of one historical form of bourgeois life by another.
The book’s handling of 1848 is especially revealing. When a crowd of workers gathers outside the building where the city’s assembly sits during the revolutionary upheavals, the Consul goes out to address them. The worker Carl Smolt, asked what the crowd wants, replies that they want a republic. Told that Lübeck already possesses one, he answers that in that case they want another.
The scene reads largely as comedy, and the crowd eventually disperses, yet beneath the patricians’ condescension Mann registers something more serious: the masses’ momentary intrusion into a political world that had long regarded government as its natural possession. The Consul’s aristocratic father-in-law, Lebrecht Kröger, dies that same evening, almost as though the lower orders’ appearance on the stage of history has proved fatal to him.
Friedrich Engels famously praised Honoré de Balzac because the royalist novelist’s realism compelled him to portray the aristocracy’s historical decline, for which he nevertheless felt considerable sympathy. Something similar can be said of the young Mann. He possessed no sympathy for socialism, and his attachment to the old Lübeck patriciate was profound. Yet his artistic honesty compelled him to portray the decline of his own social world with a truthfulness that repeatedly cuts across his nostalgia.
The Hungarian Marxist critic Georg Lukács, who wrote extensively about Mann, recognised the broader importance of this achievement. Buddenbrooks endures not simply as a record of a dying family’s peculiarities, but because Mann, in the tradition of the greatest bourgeois realism, embodies historical processes in fully realised individual lives. The historical movement is never imposed upon the characters from outside. It emerges through their marriages, inheritances, illnesses, commercial decisions, aspirations and disappointments. The Buddenbrooks’ decline is therefore simultaneously private and social.
For Lukács, realism’s greatness lay precisely in its capacity to penetrate immediate appearances and disclose the forces shaping individual existence. The greatest writers could consequently reveal truths that exceeded, and sometimes contradicted, their own consciously held political or philosophical opinions. Balzac remained Lukács’s classical example: a political conservative whose fidelity to social reality produced an extraordinarily penetrating picture of bourgeois society. Something comparable occurs in Mann. His philosophical categories emphasise degeneration, nervous exhaustion and the conflict between artistic sensitivity and practical life, yet the social world he creates refuses to remain confined within them.
Johann, Tony, Thomas and Hanno are not merely stages in a biological process of family decay. Each expresses a different relationship to a changing bourgeois order. What appears secure and natural to Johann becomes a duty that demands enormous self-discipline from Thomas and, finally, becomes impossible for Hanno. The changing personalities of the Buddenbrooks thus register a historical transformation.
This is why Mann’s realism is more powerful than any simple theory of hereditary degeneration. He does not merely tell the reader that a class is declining. He lets that decline be experienced from within, as inherited certainties cease to match social reality. The family drama thereby acquires historical significance: the fate of the Buddenbrooks becomes inseparable from the fate of the world that produced them.
Decline turned inward
Mann’s own theoretical explanation of the family’s collapse lies elsewhere. Under the powerful influence of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and contemporary ideas of degeneration, he presents decline partly as a biological and psychological process. Schopenhauer’s influence on the young Mann and the novel’s conception of decadence is well established.
With each generation, the Buddenbrooks become more nervous, reflective, and aesthetically sensitive, and apparently less capable of the ruthless commercial activity on which the family fortune was built. In this scheme, sensibility and art become symptoms of a life force running down.
Thomas Buddenbrook is the central figure in this process, and Mann’s portrait of him is one of the novel’s greatest achievements. He holds himself together increasingly by force of will, changing his clothes several times a day and maintaining the elaborate appearance of bourgeois respectability, even as the inner conviction that once sustained his class slowly drains away.
A disastrous speculation on a harvest bought before it is gathered and later destroyed marks the moment Thomas tries to act according to more aggressive commercial principles and fails. Increasingly, the confidence required by the role he performs becomes impossible to sustain.
In one of the novel’s most celebrated episodes, Thomas encounters Schopenhauer and experiences a brief and intoxicating philosophical liberation from his own frightened individuality. Mann later acknowledged how profoundly his personal encounter with Schopenhauer informed the episode. Yet Thomas soon returns to the routines of existence from which philosophy has only momentarily released him. He eventually collapses after leaving the dentist and dies.
Hanno’s world, meanwhile, is music, above all Wagner’s. Mann’s account of the boy’s piano improvisations, and the extraordinary chapter devoted to a single day in his grim, authoritarian school, belong among the novel’s finest passages. The institutional world into which the sensitive child is forced seems increasingly incapable of producing anything but conformity, fear, and submission.
Yet Mann’s limited outlook also becomes evident here. Interpreting the decline of a social class primarily as a fatal opposition between “life” and “spirit”, between commercial vitality and artistic sensitivity, translates an objective social and historical development into the language of psychology and metaphysics.
Significantly, Oxford’s description of the new edition itself identifies the novel’s concern with decline “as a psychological process” in which artistic sensibility weakens the business instincts responsible for the family’s prosperity. It is certainly a psychological process. But it is not only that. The Buddenbrooks are not destroyed because successive generations become excessively sensitive. Their psychological transformation takes place within a changing social world. The conditions that had sustained the authority of a patriciate of merchant-senators are themselves being transformed by the development of capitalism.
The contradiction is essential to the novel’s greatness. Mann’s philosophy tends to mystify what his realism reveals. “Decline” enters his characters’ consciousness as fatigue, illness, aestheticism, and loss of will; in the novel’s objective movement it takes another form: the disappearance of the economic and social conditions on which Buddenbrook authority rested.
Their tragedy therefore cannot be reduced either to biology or to economics. Its artistic power arises precisely because Mann makes the intimate life of the bourgeois family the medium through which historical change becomes emotionally perceptible. Marriage, illness, inheritance, sexuality, childhood, business and art become forms through which an entire social layer experiences, without completely understanding, the erosion of its historical confidence. Thomas Buddenbrook’s inward crisis is therefore the subjective reflection of an objective transformation. Mann’s genius as a realist lets the reader perceive this even when his philosophical assumptions point elsewhere.
The new edition
English-language readers have chiefly encountered Mann’s novel through two earlier translations: H. T. Lowe-Porter’s version, first published in 1924, and John E. Woods’s later translation. Mitchell therefore enters a field in which the novel already possesses a substantial English-language history.
He comes well equipped. Mike Mitchell taught at the universities of Reading and Stirling before becoming a full-time translator and has translated more than 100 works of fiction and non-fiction from German and French. His translation of Herbert Rosendorfer’s Letters Back from Ancient China received the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 1998.
The decision to call the novel The Buddenbrooks, rather than the now-familiar Buddenbrooks, gives the English title a slightly different cadence, natural enough in English, if at the expense of some of the stark, almost ledger-like quality of the German family name standing alone.
One particularly intriguing feature is the inclusion of an “Appendix: Permaneder in Standard English”. Permaneder’s Bavarian speech, incomprehensible and comic to the Lübeck family, serves an important artistic purpose because language throughout the novel marks differences of region, class and generation. The inclusion of a standard-English appendix at least indicates that this translation values preserving that linguistic distance, rather than letting the social distinctions embedded in Mann’s dialogue disappear.
Ritchie Robertson, meanwhile, is exceptionally well placed to provide the supporting scholarly material. He retired in 2021 as Schwarz-Taylor Professor of German at the University of Oxford and is an Emeritus Fellow of Queen’s College. His publications span Kafka, Goethe, the Enlightenment, and German political tragedy.
The edition includes an introduction, a note on the translation, a select bibliography, a chronology, the Permaneder appendix, and explanatory notes. Such annotation is particularly useful for a novel whose texture depends so heavily upon the institutions, religious assumptions, linguistic peculiarities and commercial practices of nineteenth-century North German society.
From Lübeck to exile
The contradictions visible in Buddenbrooks would take increasingly political form in Mann’s later work. During the First World War he wrote Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, defending a conception of German “culture” against Western liberal “civilisation”. During the subsequent crisis of German society, his position changed profoundly. Confronted with the upheavals that followed the First World War and, eventually, the rise of fascism, Mann moved toward defending parliamentary democracy and opposing Nazism.
The old merchant patriciate Mann chronicled belonged to an earlier stage in the development of German capitalism. Its world cannot simply be identified with the vastly more powerful industrial and financial interests of twentieth-century Germany. But the historical development connecting the two forms part of the larger story Mann had inadvertently begun to tell: the transformation of the German bourgeoisie from the locally rooted mercantile order represented by the Buddenbrooks into the industrial capitalist society of the unified Reich and, eventually, into the monopoly capitalism thrown into catastrophic political crisis during the Weimar Republic.
Forced into exile after the Nazi seizure of power, Mann became an increasingly outspoken opponent of Hitler. The political trajectory from cultural conservative to defender of democratic and humanist values was shaped by the convulsions of the bourgeois order whose contradictions his first great novel had already begun to register.
A novel for the present
Read today, Buddenbrooks speaks with renewed force. Mann’s social world has disappeared. Today’s financial oligarchy is separated from the nineteenth-century merchant patriciate by immense transformations in productive forces, corporate organisation, finance and the world market. But the social relations underlying inheritance, private wealth, competition and the accumulation of property have not disappeared.
Perhaps this is why the psychology of Mann’s characters remains so recognisable. Private wealth presents itself as solidity, permanence, merit, and family achievement, even as economic processes continually transform its social foundations, processes its individual beneficiaries neither control nor fully understand. Thomas Buddenbrook believes that he is defending something permanent. In reality, everything around him is changing. The novel’s final pages provide no way forward. Mann could see decline but not the social force capable of overcoming the order to which his characters belonged. The working class consequently appears only fleetingly, most memorably in the episode of 1848.
The contemporary reader need not share that historical limitation. The value of Buddenbrooks lies precisely in Mann’s uncompromising portrayal of a social order that has begun to lose confidence in its own permanence, an exhaustion embodied in the conviction, quoted by Oxford from Mitchell’s translation, that “all this could not last much longer”.
Mann could depict the exhaustion of a class but not the social force capable of transcending the order to which it belonged. More than a century later, that historical limitation does not diminish the novel’s achievement. It helps define it. Buddenbrooks remains extraordinarily alive because Mann’s realism penetrated beyond his own philosophical explanations to reveal how a social order experiences the erosion of its historical confidence in the most intimate realms of human existence: marriage, inheritance, childhood, illness, ambition, art and death.
That contradiction is ultimately responsible for the novel’s enduring power. Mann understood the Buddenbrooks’ decline through Schopenhauer, decadence and the supposedly antagonistic claims of life and art. But the work he actually created goes far beyond those categories. The novelist sees more than the philosopher. Mann’s metaphysics describes the family’s fate as degeneration; Mann’s realism reveals history.
This new edition is therefore a welcome addition. Mike Mitchell’s translation gives another generation of English-language readers a chance to encounter one of the great European novels of the bourgeois age. At the same time, Ritchie Robertson’s accompanying scholarly material situates the work in the intellectual and cultural world from which it emerged. Readers coming to the Buddenbrooks for the first time have an attractive new point of entry. Those who already know the family through earlier translations have ample reason to return.
Select bibliography
Primary texts
Mann, Thomas. The Buddenbrooks. Translated by Mike Mitchell. Edited with an introduction and notes by Ritchie Robertson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2026. 656 pp.
Mann, Thomas. Buddenbrooks. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924.
Mann, Thomas. Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. Translated by Walter D. Morris. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983.
Mann, Thomas. Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Translated by John E. Woods. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. 2 vols. Translated and edited by Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman and Christopher Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Thomas Mann and Buddenbrooks
Bahr, Ehrhard, ed. A Companion to the Works of Thomas Mann. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. It contains a substantial chapter by Herbert Lehnert on Mann’s beginnings and Buddenbrooks. [cambridge.org]
Hayman, Ronald. Thomas Mann: A Biography. London: Bloomsbury, 1995.
Kurzke, Hermann. Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art: A Biography. Translated by Leslie Willson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.
Ridley, Hugh. The Problematic Bourgeois: Twentieth-Century Criticism on Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994. Particularly useful for the critical history surrounding the novel and the problem of the bourgeoisie in Mann’s work. [archive.org], [thefreelibrary.com]
Robertson, Ritchie. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Realism, bourgeois society and Marxist criticism
Engels, Friedrich. Letter to Margaret Harkness, April 1888. In Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 48. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2001.
Lukács, Georg. Essays on Thomas Mann. Translated by Stanley Mitchell. London: Merlin Press, 1964.
Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. Translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. London: Merlin Press, 1962.
Lukács, Georg. Studies in European Realism. London: Hillway Publishing, 1950.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. London: Penguin/New Left Review, 1976.
German history and the bourgeoisie
Blackbourn, David. The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780–1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Blackbourn, David, and Geoff Eley. The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Evans, Richard J. The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914. London: Allen Lane, 2016.
Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. The German Empire, 1871–1918. Translated by Kim Traynor. Leamington Spa: Berg, 1985.
Editorial rationale
This bibliography keeps the new Mitchell edition at the centre, while Lukács, Marx and Engels provide the theoretical basis for your discussion of realism, class and historical transformation. Ridley and the broader Mann scholarship cover the literary-critical debate, while Blackbourn, Eley and Wehler supply the historical background to the transformation of the German bourgeoisie.
The struggle against antisemitism is a question of burning political importance. Across Europe, parties descended from or modelled on fascism are in government or on the threshold. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland polls as a major party. In Britain, far-right street mobilisations draw crowds unseen since the 1930s, while Reform UK sets the agenda in official politics.
At the same time, the charge of antisemitism has been turned into an instrument of state repression. It is wielded not against the heirs of Hitler and Mosley but against workers, students and Jewish opponents of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza. Any serious history of the fight against antisemitism must therefore answer definite questions. Who fought it? With what methods? On what class basis? And with what results?
This collection of essays, published by the Wiener Holocaust Library, poses the right question in its title. Its answers, however, are shaped by its producers’ institutional and political commitments.[1]
The book and its sponsors
The volume grew out of the Library’s exhibition Fighting Antisemitism from Dreyfus to Today, shown in London from March to September 2022 and later taken to Parliament. Barbara Warnock, the Library’s senior curator, and Toby Simpson, its director, edited it, and it launched in November 2022.
Its essays trace the individuals and organisations that have countered antisemitism since the Dreyfus Affair. They cover the campaign to free Dreyfus, Alfred Wiener’s anti-Nazi work in Germany and the Netherlands, the 43 Group’s post-war anti-fascist direct action, and the Library’s own monitoring work. A final section examines what the publisher calls the differing forms of antisemitism in Britain in recent decades.
The Wiener Library deserves credit. Founded by Wiener in Amsterdam in 1933 and moved to London in 1939, its archive is an irreplaceable record of the Nazi regime and its crimes. The exhibition catalogue drew on photographs from the Community Security Trust (CST) archives and credited the CST’s head of policy, Dave Rich, among others.
That partnership, and the choice of foreword writer, signal where the book will land. Julia Neuberger, senior rabbi of West London Synagogue and a crossbench peer, was among the most prominent establishment voices in the campaign against Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. That is the political lens through which a century of history is ultimately read.
Dreyfus: the decisive role of the socialist movement
The book rightly opens with the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894, a Jewish artillery officer was framed for espionage by the French General Staff and shipped to Devil’s Island. The affair became the axis around which the Third Republic’s political forces polarised: the army, the Catholic Church, and Édouard Drumont’s antisemitic leagues on one side; republicans, intellectuals, and, decisively, the socialist workers’ movement on the other.
Appeals to the authorities’ good faith did not free Dreyfus. Zola’s J’accuse in January 1898 was an act of political war on the military caste. The turning point came when Jean Jaurès overcame the Guesdist wing of French socialism, which had dismissed the case as a quarrel between bourgeois factions, and brought the organised working class into the fight against clerical-militarist reaction.
This is the period’s first lesson, and it is the one a history organised around “methods” of countering antisemitism tends to blur. Antisemitism in France was the banner of a social coalition seeking to overturn the republic and crush the workers’ movement. The working class pushed it back by intervening as an independent force.
Weimar: the limits of rebuttal
Alfred Wiener, the Library’s founder, stands at the centre of the story. A decorated veteran of the First World War, Wiener worked for the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith (Centralverein). He monitored the Nazi press, exposed its forgeries and published counter-propaganda. Around 1930, the Büro Wilhelmstrasse issued Anti-Anti, a handbook of facts for those responding to antisemitic lies.
The courage and diligence of this work are unquestioned. But its strategy rested on the assumption that Nazism could be defeated by information, by the law and by the institutions of the Weimar Republic. Every one of those props gave way. The Nazis were not a misunderstanding to be corrected with better facts. Amid economic collapse, German finance capital and the Junker landowners chose them as the instrument to smash Europe’s most powerful workers’ movement.
United action by Social Democratic and Communist workers offered the only realistic means of stopping Hitler’s advance. But both sides sabotaged such unity: the SPD leadership subordinated the working class to the bourgeois state and its institutions, and the Stalinist line denounced Social Democracy as “social fascism” and rejected a genuine united front. From exile, Leon Trotsky repeatedly warned of the catastrophic consequences of this political paralysis and fought to mobilise the working class in a united front against fascism. Hitler did not conquer power through an irresistible popular mandate in January 1933. Hindenburg installed him as chancellor, backed by powerful sections of Germany’s ruling elite.
A history of anti-antisemitism that does not place this betrayal at the centre cannot explain why the Centralverein’s devoted labours ended in catastrophe. The Library’s archive of rebuttal pamphlets is, in the end, a monument to the limits of enlightenment in the face of a social crisis.
Britain: Cable Street and the 43 Group
The British chapters tell a story whose lessons point in the same direction. On 4 October 1936, tens of thousands of East End workers—Jewish garment workers, Irish dockers, Communist and Independent Labour Party members—blocked Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts at Cable Street. The police, who had been sent to clear a path for the fascists, were driven back.
Anglo-Jewry’s official leadership played no part in this victory. The Board of Deputies and the Jewish Chronicle urged Jews to stay away and leave matters to the authorities. The Communist Party leadership had first planned to send its members to a solidarity rally elsewhere in Spain, and changed course only under pressure from the ranks.
The same pattern recurred after 1945. When Mosley sought to revive his movement, Jewish veterans formed the 43 Group. They broke up fascist meetings, infiltrated fascist organisations and fought them in the streets, again over the objections of the community establishment, which preferred quiet lobbying of the state.
The volume’s attention to the 43 Group is welcome. Their lesson, however, is not about the merits of “direct action” as a technique. It is that fascism was confronted successfully only when working people mobilised independently of—and often against—the police, the courts, and the official leaderships who counselled reliance on them.
Recent decades: Neuberger and the campaign against Corbyn
When the book reaches contemporary Britain, the gap between its historical material and its politics becomes a chasm. The “differing forms of antisemitism” of recent decades are, above all, the terrain of the campaign waged between 2015 and 2020 against Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party.
Neuberger was a leading figure in that campaign. In 2016 she told Newsnight that Labour had a “very particular problem” with antisemitism on the hard left. In June 2018 she urged Jews to resign from the party and said she hoped the issue would stop Labour from being elected. Her 2019 book stopped short of calling Corbyn an antisemite but said he had “behaved like an antisemite”. In the 2019 election, she endorsed the Chief Rabbi’s unprecedented intervention against him.
Her central criterion is that criticism of Israel becomes antisemitic when its tone would not be used of other countries. This tests subjective impression, not objective content. It mirrors the logic of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) “working definition”, whose Israel-related examples Labour was forced to adopt in full in 2018 after a campaign in which the three main Jewish newspapers ran an identical front page against Corbyn.
The campaign was political. The Labour right, the Conservative press and the Israeli state set out to destroy a leader who, whatever his limitations, had attracted hundreds of thousands of young people with left-wing rhetoric. Corbyn’s own response was capitulation: he accepted the IHRA definition, suspended allies and offered apology after apology. The 2022 Forde Report, commissioned by Labour itself, found that the antisemitism issue had been used as a factional weapon. None of this alters the existence of real antisemitism, which socialists oppose without compromise. But a history that presents this episode as a chapter in the fight against racism adopts the state’s vantage point.
After 2022: Gaza and the weaponisation of antisemitism
The book closes in 2022. Events since October 2023 have exposed the consequences of the political framework it endorses. Israel’s assault on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice found in January 2024 raised plausible claims under the Genocide Convention, has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and reduced the territory to rubble.
Throughout, governments in Britain and Europe have used the equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism to criminalise opposition. Mass demonstrations in London, in which Jewish contingents marched prominently, were branded “hate marches” by a Conservative home secretary. The Starmer government proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation in July 2025, and hundreds of people, many of them pensioners, were arrested for holding placards. In Germany, appeals to Israel’s security as a reason of state have been used to ban protests and cancel Jewish and Palestinian speakers.
The effect is doubly reactionary. It shields a state committing mass atrocities by identifying all Jews with its crimes, the very conflation that real antisemites exploit. And it diverts attention from the genuine and growing danger posed by the far right, which combines hostility to Muslims and migrants with the old conspiracy theories about Jews and finds a friendly hearing in official politics.
Conclusion: the lessons the book does not draw
Read against the grain, the material this volume assembles supports conclusions very different from those of its sponsors. Modern antisemitism has never been simply an irrational prejudice to be corrected by education and monitoring. It has been a tool of reaction, mobilised during periods of capitalist crisis to divert social anger from the ruling class onto a scapegoat and to split the working class.
The working class, Jewish and non-Jewish, has beaten it back only when it intervened independently: in the Dreyfusard movement, on the barricades of Cable Street, and in the streets against Mosley after the war. Where reliance fell on the state, the courts, and bourgeois liberalism, as in Weimar Germany, the outcome was catastrophe. Trotsky, writing in 1938, warned that the further advance of world reaction would bring the physical extermination of the Jews. He insisted that only the socialist transformation of society could secure their future.
The Zionist project offered a different answer: a nation-state built on the dispossession of another people. That answer has produced a state now carrying out atrocities in the name of Jews everywhere, which in turn feeds the antisemitism it claims to combat.
The Wiener Library archives will remain an indispensable resource. But the fight against antisemitism today requires a political perspective this book does not provide. That perspective is the international unity of the working class against capitalism, war and every form of racism, including the racism directed against Palestinians.
Warnock, Barbara, and Toby Simpson, eds. Anti-Antisemitism: Countering Anti-Jewish Racism in Western Europe, 1890–2022. Foreword by Julia Neuberger. London: The Wiener Holocaust Library, 2022.
Books and documents
Equality and Human Rights Commission. Investigation into Antisemitism in the Labour Party. London: EHRC, October 2020.
Forde, Martin. The Forde Report. London: The Labour Party, July 2022.
International Court of Justice. Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), Order on Provisional Measures, 26 January 2024.
International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. “Working Definition of Antisemitism.” Adopted 26 May 2016.
Neuberger, Julia. Antisemitism: What It Is. What It Isn’t. Why It Matters. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2019.
Sonabend, Daniel. We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post-War Britain. London: Verso, 2019.
Trotsky, Leon. “Appeal to American Jews Menaced by Fascism and Anti-Semitism.” December 1938.
Trotsky, Leon. The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971.
The Wiener Holocaust Library. Fighting Antisemitism from Dreyfus to Today. Exhibition catalogue. London, 2022.
Zola, Émile. “J’accuse…!” L’Aurore, 13 January 1898.
Press and online sources
“Jewish Peer Attacks Labour for Having a ‘Very Particular Problem’ with Antisemitism.” Jewish Chronicle, 28 April 2016. Link
“Senior Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger Urges Jews to Leave Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.” Jewish Chronicle, 22 June 2018. Link
“Rabbi Julia Neuberger Rails Against Labour Antisemitism.” Jewish Chronicle, 30 May 2019. Link
“Senior Rabbi Julia Neuberger Talks Antisemitism in the UK.” Amanpour and Company, PBS, 27 November 2019. Link
The Wiener Holocaust Library. “Book Launch: Anti-Antisemitism.” Event listing, 15 November 2022. Link
The Wiener Holocaust Library. Fighting Antisemitism from Dreyfus to Today. Online exhibition. Link
[1]Anti-Antisemitism: Countering Anti-Jewish Racism in Western Europe, 1890–2022, edited by Barbara Warnock and Toby Simpson, with a foreword by Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger. The Wiener Holocaust Library, 2022.
Simon Schama’s defence of Israel and the campaign to criminalise opposition to genocide
Simon Schama’s recent intervention in defence of Israel is presented as a contribution to historical understanding. In reality, it belongs to a broader political campaign whose purpose is to delegitimise mass opposition to the genocide in Gaza by conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. The significance of such arguments lies not in their historical accuracy, but in their political function. At a moment when millions of people around the world are expressing opposition to war, ethnic cleansing and imperialist violence, intellectuals associated with the political establishment are increasingly being mobilised to provide moral and historical justification for repression.[1]
The campaign’s central mechanism is straightforward. Criticism of the Israeli state is equated with hostility to Jewish people. Opposition to Zionism is portrayed as a modern form of antisemitism. Protest against the destruction of Gaza becomes evidence of sympathy for forces allegedly seeking the destruction of Jews. Through this process, the unique moral authority associated with the Holocaust is transferred to the contemporary Israeli state, allowing criticism of its actions to be denounced as a revival of humanity’s greatest historical crime.
This conflation is not an intellectual mistake or conceptual confusion. It is a deliberate political operation. Its target is not the racist right, which continues to flourish across Europe, the United States and elsewhere. Rather, it is directed against anti-war demonstrators, socialist organisations, students, academics and workers who oppose genocide and imperialist war.
The narrative’s omission of the far right is especially revealing. Many of Israel’s most enthusiastic supporters are found among political forces with long histories of xenophobia, racism and authoritarian nationalism. Across Europe and North America, right-wing nationalist movements have increasingly presented Israel as a model of ethnic exclusivity, militarised borders and state violence against a subject population. These forces are rarely accused of antisemitism when they support Israel because they are politically useful allies. The contradiction exposes the dishonesty of claims that support for Israel constitutes the defining measure of opposition to antisemitism.
At the centre of Schama’s argument lies a familiar liberal-Zionist distinction between Israel’s allegedly noble foundations and the unfortunate excesses of its current government. Schama portrays Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich as departures from a fundamentally democratic and humane project. The implication is that Israel has somehow lost its way.
This narrative cannot withstand historical examination. The catastrophe now unfolding in Gaza did not emerge from a temporary deviation from Israel’s founding principles. It grew out of the state’s historical foundations. The Nakba of 1948, during which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes, was not an accidental by-product of state formation. It was the decisive event that established the state. The subordination and displacement of the indigenous Palestinian population were not peripheral episodes but central components of the Zionist project as it developed in practice.
For decades, Israel has functioned as a strategic ally of the major imperialist powers in the Middle East. Its military, economic and diplomatic position has been inseparable from its role within broader geopolitical calculations pursued by Britain and, increasingly after the Second World War, the United States. To describe the destruction of Gaza merely as the consequence of an extremist government is therefore to obscure the deeper historical and political forces that have shaped the state from the beginning.
Mario Kessler on Antisemitism
The German historian Mario Kessler has made an important contribution to understanding antisemitism by examining it through the history of the socialist movement. His work is particularly valuable because it challenges the widespread assumption that antisemitism and anti-Zionism are fundamentally the same thing. Instead, Kessler demonstrates that some of the strongest and most principled opponents of antisemitism were found within the revolutionary socialist tradition, many of whom were also critics of Zionism.
Kessler approaches antisemitism not simply as a prejudice but as a social and political phenomenon rooted in specific historical conditions. Drawing on Marxist scholarship, he shows how antisemitism often emerged during periods of economic and political crisis, when ruling elites and reactionary movements sought to channel social discontent away from the existing social order and towards a minority group. Jews were portrayed as responsible for social problems that were, in reality, products of capitalism itself.
One of Kessler’s key themes is the distinction between antisemitism and criticism of Zionism. He traces debates within the labour movement from the late nineteenth century onward, showing that many Jewish socialists rejected the Zionist project while remaining uncompromising opponents of antisemitism. For figures such as Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and many members of the Jewish labour movement, the solution to Jewish oppression lay not in creating a separate nation-state but in the international struggle for socialism and democratic equality.
Kessler’s work also highlights the twentieth century’s tragedy. The rise of fascism and the Holocaust devastated the European Jewish population and transformed political attitudes towards Zionism. Yet he argues that understanding this catastrophe requires serious historical analysis rather than political myth-making. The history of antisemitism, in his view, cannot be reduced to support for or opposition to Israel.
Kessler is particularly relevant today because he insists on historical precision. He rejects attempts to use accusations of antisemitism as a weapon against all critics of Israeli policy, while equally opposing genuine antisemitism in all its forms. His work reminds us that the socialist movement developed both a powerful critique of antisemitism and a tradition of internationalism that sought solidarity between peoples rather than separation through competing nationalisms. For readers interested in the relationship between antisemitism, socialism and Zionism, Kessler provides an important historical bridge between nineteenth-century Marxism and contemporary political debates.
The effort to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism also requires the systematic suppression of an alternative political tradition, namely that of revolutionary socialist internationalism. The historical record is clear. The socialist movement, not Zionism, produced the most consistent and principled struggle against antisemitism. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, socialist organisations opposed antisemitism not as an isolated prejudice but as a reactionary ideology rooted in the contradictions of class society.
David North’s The Logic of Zionism and the Fate of Palestine
David North’s The Logic of Zionism and the Fate of Palestine is less a conventional history book than a collection of political and historical essays that examine the origins of Zionism, the Palestinian question, and imperialism’s role in the Middle East. Written from a Trotskyist and international socialist standpoint, the book challenges both the mainstream defence of Zionism and the various nationalist perspectives that dominate discussion of the conflict.
One of the book’s strengths is its placement of Zionism in a broader historical context. North argues that Zionism emerged as a response to the oppression of European Jews, but that it developed as a nationalist movement whose fate became closely bound up with the interests of the major imperialist powers. Rather than treating Israel as simply the fulfilment of Jewish self-determination, he examines how the state was formed, its relationship to the displacement of the Palestinian population and its strategic role in the Middle East.
A recurring theme is the distinction between Judaism and Zionism. North insists that opposition to Zionism is not the same thing as antisemitism and points to the long history of socialist opposition to both antisemitism and Jewish nationalism. The book draws heavily on the writings of Marx, Engels, August Bebel, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and, above all, Leon Trotsky. These figures argued that antisemitism was rooted in the crises and contradictions of capitalist society and could not be overcome through the creation of a separate national state.
Particularly interesting are the sections dealing with Trotsky’s analysis of the Jewish question in the 1930s. Trotsky recognised the terrible danger facing European Jewry under fascism while maintaining that Zionism offered no lasting solution. North argues that subsequent events, including the continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, have confirmed many of Trotsky’s warnings.
The book also connects the Palestinian struggle to broader questions of war, imperialism, and class politics. Rather than advocating either Israeli or Palestinian nationalism, North advances socialist internationalism, arguing that a genuine democratic solution requires workers’ political unity throughout the region.
Whether one agrees with its conclusions or not, The Logic of Zionism and the Fate of Palestine is an important statement of the Trotskyist position on one of the most contested questions of modern history. It combines historical analysis, political polemic and theoretical argument in a way that encourages readers to think beyond the narrow framework through which the conflict is usually presented.
August Bebel and the Socialist Struggle Against Antisemitism
August Bebel (1840-1913), the co-founder and leading figure of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), played a decisive role in establishing the Marxist movement as the most consistent opponent of antisemitism in late nineteenth-century Europe. At a time when antisemitic agitation was gaining influence among sections of the middle classes and even among workers affected by economic crisis, Bebel insisted that hostility to Jews was not a form of social protest but a reactionary diversion from the struggle against capitalism.
Bebel is best known for describing antisemitism as “the socialism of fools.” By this he meant that antisemitic demagogues sought to exploit genuine popular grievances while directing anger away from the capitalist system and towards a vulnerable minority. Rather than identifying exploitation as a consequence of the social relations of capitalism, antisemites attributed poverty, unemployment and financial crises to the alleged conspiracies of Jewish individuals. In doing so, they transformed social discontent into racial hatred and protected the existing economic order.
For Bebel and the Marxist movement, antisemitism was not simply a prejudice or moral failing. It was a political weapon used by ruling elites and reactionary forces to divide the working class. Antisemitic campaigns encouraged workers to blame Jewish neighbours instead of the capitalist class as a whole. This undermined workers’ unity across national, religious, and ethnic lines, which Marxists regarded as essential to socialist struggle.
Bebel’s opposition to antisemitism anticipated later Marxist analyses developed by figures such as Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. His insistence that workers reject all forms of racial and religious chauvinism became a foundational principle of socialist internationalism. At a time when many liberal politicians accommodated antisemitic sentiment, Bebel and the SPD publicly opposed it, making the socialist movement the principal political force combating antisemitism in Germany.
His intervention remains historically significant because it demonstrated that the fight against antisemitism is inseparable from the struggle for working-class unity and social equality. For Bebel, the liberation of Jewish people could not be achieved through exclusion, nationalism, or scapegoating, but only through workers’ common struggle against capitalism itself.
No figure understood this process more profoundly than Leon Trotsky. Writing as fascism rose, Trotsky warned that capitalism’s crisis threatened catastrophe for European Jewry. The destruction of democratic institutions, the growth of fascist movements and the degeneration of bourgeois society pointed toward unprecedented crimes. At the same time, Trotsky rejected Zionism’s claim to provide a solution to the Jewish question through the creation of a national state in Palestine. He argued that the historical problem confronting Jewish people could not be resolved through a nationalist project, but only through the international struggle against capitalism itself.
Subsequent history tragically confirmed both aspects of Trotsky’s analysis. The Holocaust exposed the barbarism to which capitalism in crisis could descend. Yet the establishment of Israel did not eliminate antisemitism. Nor did it resolve the underlying contradictions that had produced it. Instead, new forms of oppression and conflict emerged, above all through the dispossession and subjugation of the Palestinian people.
This history poses an insurmountable challenge to Schama’s argument. The political tendency that most consistently analysed antisemitism, fought it and predicted the catastrophe confronting European Jewry was also the tendency that opposed Zionism. The existence of that tradition refutes the claim that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic.
Indeed, the current attempt to identify opposition to Zionism with hatred of Jews requires the erasure of a century of socialist political experience. Most crucially, the conflation of Judaism with the Israeli state does not protect Jewish people. It places them in greater danger. Antisemitism has historically functioned by attributing the crimes, failures and contradictions of society to Jews as a collective. Zionist ideology, particularly in its contemporary forms, insists that Israel acts in the name of Jews everywhere and that Jewish identity is inextricably bound to the state. This claim reproduces, from a different starting point, precisely the framework upon which antisemitism has traditionally depended.
When the actions of the Israeli state are identified with Jews as a whole, the distinction between a government and a people is consciously blurred. The responsibility for state crimes is transferred to an entire global community. This does not undermine antisemitism. It creates conditions in which antisemitic narratives can flourish.
The defence of Jewish people against antisemitism therefore cannot be entrusted to the Israeli state, nor to the imperialist governments that provide it with diplomatic cover, financial support and military assistance. Genuine opposition to antisemitism requires a fundamentally different political perspective.
That perspective begins with rejecting all forms of nationalism and ethnic exclusivity. It insists on the unity of Jewish, Arab, and international workers based on common class interests. It recognises that war, racism, authoritarianism and genocide arise not from ancient hatreds but from the crisis of the capitalist system itself.
The growing effort to criminalise anti-Zionist sentiment and suppress opposition to genocide is part of a broader assault on democratic rights. Governments that support Israel’s actions in Gaza increasingly resort to censorship, police repression and legal intimidation because they confront widening popular opposition. The attack on Palestine solidarity movements is one aspect of a wider turn toward authoritarian forms of rule in conditions of mounting social inequality, geopolitical conflict and economic instability.
Viewed in this context, Schama’s essay is not primarily a contribution to historical debate. It is a political intervention on behalf of the existing order. Its purpose is to provide intellectual legitimacy for the suppression of opposition to imperialist violence and to shield the Israeli state from scrutiny by presenting criticism as prejudice.
Defending historical truth requires rejecting this falsification. Antisemitism is a real and deadly form of reaction whose history culminated in some of the greatest crimes of the twentieth century. But it cannot be fought through support for a state carrying out mass violence against an oppressed people. Nor can opposition to genocide be silenced by accusations designed to delegitimise political dissent.
The struggle against antisemitism and the struggle against Zionism are not mutually exclusive. Historically, some of the most principled opponents of antisemitism understood this. Their perspective remains indispensable today. The defence of democratic rights, the opposition to genocide and the fight against antisemitism all require the same political foundation: the independent mobilisation of the international working class against capitalism, imperialism and war.
Bibliography
Bebel, August. Mass and Class: Selected Writings. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1980.
Kessler, Mario. Antisemitism, Zionism and Socialism: Studies in the History of Jewish Labour and Political Movements. Berlin: Metropol Verlag, various editions.
Lenin, V. I. “Anti-Jewish Pogroms.” In Collected Works, Vol. 29. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
North, David. The Logic of Zionism and the Fate of Palestine: Historical and Political Essays. Detroit: Mehring Books, 2011.
North, David. “Socialist Internationalism and the Struggle Against Zionism and Imperialism.” International Youth and Students for Social Equality Lecture, 2023.
Trotsky, Leon. “Thermidor and Antisemitism” (1937).
Trotsky, Leon. “On the Jewish Question” (1934-1940), in Writings of Leon Trotsky.
Weiss, Clara. “Mario Kessler on Marxism, Antisemitism and Zionism.” World Socialist Web Site, 3 July 2025.
Pappe, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006.
Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Said, Edward. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.
[1] Jew-Hatred: Jewish Quarterly 265 by Simon Schama, 13 Oct. 2026, 96 pages
_poster.jpg)
