President Volodymyr Zelensky, Office of the President of Ukraine, 11 Bankova St., Kyiv, 01220, Ukraine
Cc: Ministry of Justice of Ukraine; Pervomaisk City and District Court, Mykolaiv; Ukrainian Embassy, United Kingdom
Subject: Protest against the 15-year sentence of Bogdan Syrotiuk and demand for his immediate release
Dear President Zelensky,
I am writing to protest, in the strongest possible terms, the August 10, 2026 verdict of the Pervomaisk City and District Court sentencing Bogdan Syrotiuk to fifteen years’ imprisonment on charges of “high treason” under martial law.
The prosecution’s case rested entirely on Mr Syrotiuk’s political writings — articles published on the World Socialist Web Site and his correspondence with its editors — as well as his role as a leader of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists, a small Trotskyist youth organisation. A 65-page linguistic analysis prepared by Yuri Irkhin, one of Ukraine’s leading criminologists, examined these materials and found no language supporting Russian aggression against Ukraine. The court has not addressed or refuted this finding. Indeed, the articles cited in the verdict explicitly oppose both the Russian invasion and the policies of the Putin government.
Whatever one’s view of Mr Syrotiuk’s political positions, the prosecution and conviction of an individual for writing and publishing political commentary is incompatible with fundamental standards of freedom of expression. Ukraine is bound to uphold these standards under its own Constitution and under the European Convention on Human Rights. The European Court of Human Rights has already accepted Mr Syrotiuk’s case for review, underscoring the seriousness of the violations involved.
I am further alarmed by credible reports that Mr Syrotiuk has been denied adequate medical care during his detention, despite repeated assurances from the prison administration. A fifteen-year sentence under the documented conditions of Ukraine’s penitentiary system poses a grave and immediate threat to his health and life.
I therefore call on the Ukrainian authorities to:
Overturn the verdict against Bogdan Syrotiuk and order his immediate release;
Ensure he receives all necessary medical treatment without further delay;
End the prosecution of individuals for the peaceful expression of political views, in accordance with Ukraine’s international human rights obligations.
Jennifer Evans and Sara Read’s Maladies and Medicine: Exploring Health and Healing, 1540–1740 (Pen & Sword, 2017) appears, at first glance, as a concise social history of illness in early modern England. However, when viewed within a wider context of social reproduction and class formation of that era, the book reveals more: it offers insights into how bodies were regulated, how suffering was accepted as natural, and how the rise of capitalism transformed the conditions in which ordinary people lived, worked, and died.
Evans and Read do not aim to write a comprehensive history of class or the shift to capitalism. Instead, they use an empirical, descriptive approach organised around specific ailments rather than overarching arguments. The evidence they compile—such as casebooks, diaries, court records, household remedies, and cheap almanacks—provides valuable insights into how sickness operated within a society experiencing significant change. Their book inadvertently but effectively captures the medical aspect of the gradual decline of feudalism and the emergence of capitalist social relations.
The Humoral Body as a Social Body
The authors focus on the humoral body, viewed as a delicate balance of hot, cold, wet, and dry forces, constantly threatened by diet, weather, labour, and morality. This concept extends beyond medicine into a social worldview, making sense in a setting where most people lived on the brink of subsistence, faced endemic malnutrition, endured physically demanding work, and where environmental factors were linked to social class. Evans and Read interpret humoralism as a belief system, while a materialist perspective considers it a form of ideology.
Humoralism reframed structural suffering as personal imbalance, attributing disease to personal regimen, moral failure, or the mysterious flow of fluids rather than factors like enclosure, dispossession, or wage labour. This served an ideological purpose by naturalising the suffering created by the rise of capitalism.
The Medical Hierarchy and the Restructuring of Social Reproduction
The book’s strength lies in its detailed portrayal of the layered medical economy. It highlights university-trained physicians at the top, whose Latin education and guild privileges attracted wealthy clients. Below them, apothecaries and surgeons handled manual, often bloody treatments. Further down was a large informal sector of unlicensed healers—many women—whose inherited household knowledge served most of the population. Evans and Read describe this hierarchy, but within early modern social reproduction, it indicates a deeper underlying process.
Women were excluded from formal medical authority not just due to prejudice but as part of a broader process of knowledge enclosure. As capitalist relations grew, household and community-based care—largely performed by women—became subordinate to professional monopolies. This shift in the medical field reflected similar changes in reproductive labour, such as midwifery, childcare, food preparation, and sickness management, which became battlegrounds between traditional communal practices and emerging market influences. The ‘informal economy” of healing was not merely an outdated relic; it was the leftover of a pre-capitalist social reproduction system actively being dismantled by the new economic order.
Disease, Poverty, and the Making of a Proletariat
Evans and Read briefly mention that factors like poverty, overwork, and malnutrition influenced who became ill and who received treatment. However, they do not link these issues to the class relations of early modern England, which a materialist analysis would require. Between 1540 and 1740, England experienced significant social and economic changes, including the enclosure of common land, the dispossession of peasants, the rise of wage labour, increasing urban poverty, and the emergence of a landless proletariat.
These processes not only created new economic relationships but also established new physical conditions. “Bad diet” and “corrupt air” were not simply random misfortunes; they reflected the lived reality of class identity. The illnesses listed by Evans and Read—such as plague, smallpox, gout, toothache, and madness—were unevenly distributed based on property ownership and labour roles. The ailing body was inherently a body defined by class. Later, Engels would describe this as “social murder”: the deliberate, systemic creation of disease and early death through societal organisation. Evans and Read’s era can be seen as the groundwork for this concept—the period during which the foundations for social murder were established.
What the Book Offers—and What It Cannot Provide
As a compendium of lived experience, Maladies and Medicine is invaluable. Its prose is clear, its sources rich, and its case studies vivid. It allows the reader to encounter sickness in something close to its own terms.
But as an explanation of why early modern medicine took the form it did, the book is incomplete. It catalogues belief and practice but does not analyse the social relations that produced them. It describes the medical hierarchy but does not explain its connection to the restructuring of social reproduction. It notes poverty but does not treat it as a structural determinant of disease.
Where the book falls short is in its reluctance to press this material toward a fuller social explanation. Poverty, overwork, malnutrition, and environmental degradation appear in the narrative, but only as background conditions rather than as structuring forces. The authors note that “bad diet” and “corrupt air” shaped who fell ill and who could be treated. Still, they do not connect these phenomena to the concrete class relations of early modern England—the dispossession of the peasantry, the growth of wage labour, and the emergence. The text discusses how a landless proletariat lives on the brink of subsistence. It emphasises that the authors’ limitations are more about the academic division of labour than about their failure. The history of medicine is often viewed separately from class struggle, ignoring the interconnectedness of bodies and social structures. Maladies and Medicine offers a solid empirical base for a Marxist perspective on early modern social reproduction, illustrating how the shift to capitalism impacted not just work and courts but also kitchens, sickrooms, and individual bodies. It successfully recovers and documents these aspects but leaves broader explanatory questions about societal forces open for others.
Michael Crowley’s “Remember Me to My Comrades: Letters and Diaries of the International Brigade” (Barnthorn, £16.99) honours the approximately 2,500 British volunteers who fought in Spain from 1936 to 1938. It offers valuable insights as a recovery project, gathering letters, diaries, and memoirs from workers whose voices are often overlooked in official histories. However, as an analysis of the political forces influencing their fate—and ultimately betraying the Spanish Revolution—it is somewhat evasive, bordering on distortion.
Crowley observes that both the volunteers and the Comintern organisation that recruited them consistently framed Spain as a conflict against fascism rather than a civil war. It is undisputed that young workers like Kenneth Bradbury—from Oldham, who was already leading a Young Communist League branch at seventeen and died at Teruel in January 1938—saw their fight as part of a broader struggle against fascism internationally. However, Crowley declines to examine how the Stalinist leadership actually manipulated this understanding and systematically distorted it.
The book notes, almost as an aside, that between half and two-thirds of the battalion were members of the Communist Party or the YCL. Crowley views this as a mere sociological fact rather than a basis for in-depth political analysis. In fact, this detail is crucial to understanding Spain’s tragedy. These workers were mobilised not to advance the revolution, but to defend the Popular Front—an anti-revolutionary strategy enforced by Moscow that placed the working class under the control of the liberal bourgeoisie, even as workers had shown their potential to seize power.
In July 1936, workers in Barcelona and much of Catalonia successfully stopped the military uprising, took control of factories, collectivised land, and began building structures for workers’ self-management. Spain created exactly the situation Stalin feared most: an independent socialist revolution happening outside Soviet control. Stalin’s main aim in Spain was not to defeat Franco but to prevent a second October — a workers’ government revealing the conservative, nationalist nature of his own regime. His foreign policy relied on alliances with ‘democratic” bourgeois powers; a socialist revolution in Spain would have destroyed that approach.
Trotsky’s analysis here is crucial. Writing in the moment, he emphasised that Spain was more than just a civil war or a fight against fascism; it was a proletarian revolution. The workers demonstrated extraordinary heroism, yet heroism alone couldn’t replace the need for revolutionary leadership. Trotsky contended that the Popular Front was the main barrier to victory because it compelled the working class to defend a bourgeois system incapable of overcoming fascism. He noted that Franco didn’t defeat the Spanish proletariat, but by its own leadership.
The Popular Front was more than a tactical alliance; it was a strategic constraint aimed at dismantling the revolutionary momentum generated by the working class. Following directives from Moscow, the Communist Party targeted not only Franco but also the POUM and the anarchist militias, whose soldiers’ bravery in July had been crucial. The NKVD set up secret prisons, infiltrated the Republican police, and was involved in the disappearance of Andrés Nin. The May Days of 1937, when Communist-controlled forces attacked the Barcelona workers, marked a turning point. Ultimately, the revolution was halted by the Popular Front government, operating under Stalinist influence, rather than Franco. Crowley does not develop this analysis in detail.
The strongest material in the book — the letters and diaries — exposes the reality Crowley’s narrative avoids. Peter Kerrigan’s account of the retreat toward Gandesa, men going days without water, their shoes cut to pieces on the rocks, “many… literally barefoot as well as being in rags,” and Walter Gregory’s description of finding George Stockdale dying on the Ebro, a machine‑gun bullet having “cut a dreadful groove in his skull leaving his brain exposed,” speak with a clarity no editorial framing can soften. These passages reveal the human cost of the Comintern’s strategy. They indict the leadership more effectively than Crowley ever attempts.
Crowley dedicates a chapter to Harry Pollitt, celebrating his recruitment efforts and visits that boosted morale, while overlooking a crucial fact: this leadership, following Moscow’s directives, played a key role in suppressing the revolutionary alternative to Popular Frontism in Spain, most notably during the May Days of 1937. The chapter also covers George Orwell, whom the original review dismisses as undeserving of attention. This is actually the opposite of the truth. Despite Orwell’s later political changes, Homage to Catalonia is one of the few well-known accounts describing what truly happened to the POUM militias and Barcelona’s workers under the Stalinist-controlled security forces — a stark reality Crowley, like many others commemorating the event, deliberately avoids.
Crowley cannot explain why the Communist Party ostracised Orwell because doing so would mean admitting the Party’s role in suppressing the revolution. The CPGB’s hatred for Orwell was rooted in politics, not literature or personal reasons. Orwell had seen the crime the Party needed to hide: the outlawing of POUM, arrests and disappearances of its members, and the attack on the Barcelona working class by forces claiming to oppose Franco. Homage to Catalonia challenged the Popular Front’s narrative—that Spain’s conflict was merely between democracy and fascism—and exposed the Communist Party as the tool Moscow used to crush revolutionary hopes that arose in July 1936. As a result, Orwell was slandered, censored, and labelled as “objectively fascist.” Crowley’s reluctance to address this hostility reflects the same sanitising tendency that pervades the entire book.
Another crucial omission is decisive: the International Brigades were not purely expressions of independent working-class internationalism. Instead, they served as tools of the Popular Front strategy, aimed at channelling genuine anti-fascist sentiment into defending the bourgeois republic and diverting from the revolutionary potential that emerged in July 1936. While the volunteers’ anti-fascism was sincere, the Brigades’ primary purpose was to prevent revolution. Trotsky understood this well: their heroism was misdirected by leaders who prioritised maintaining bourgeois order over defeating Franco. Crowley fails to acknowledge this contradiction because doing so would force him to confront the political role of Stalinism, which he chooses to avoid.
Crowley notes that men who faced death at the front were unlikely to be intimidated by a foreman upon returning. This highlights the revolutionary potential among these workers — a potential that was wasted in Spain and again during the Second World War, as the fight against fascism and the necessary programme to defeat it was fought globally. The courage shown here is genuine and worth remembering. However, a history that separates this bravery from the bureaucratic betrayal that led to the fall of the Spanish Revolution ultimately results in a moving story of martyrdom rather than an analysis of why the Spanish working class was defeated.
Sources and Bibliography
Primary Sources
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia. London: Secker & Warburg, 1938. First‑hand account of the POUM militias, the May Days, and Stalinist repression in Barcelona.
Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution (1931–39). New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973. Collection of Trotsky’s writings on Spain, including analyses of the Popular Front, the POUM, and Stalin’s foreign policy.
Andrés Nin, Selected Writings. Various editions. Documents the POUM’s political positions before his disappearance at the hands of the NKVD.
International Brigades Letters and Diaries (various collections). Including materials reproduced in Crowley’s Remember Me to My Comrades.
Peter Kerrigan, The International Brigade: Spain 1936–1939. Memoir of a CPGB cadre and Brigade commissar.
Walter Gregory, The Shallow Grave: A Memoir of the Spanish Civil War. London: Faber & Faber, 1986. Eyewitness testimony from a British volunteer.
Soviet and Comintern Documents
Comintern Archives, RGASPI (Russian State Archive of Social and Political History). Includes directives to the Spanish Communist Party, reports on the POUM, and NKVD operations.
NKVD Reports on Spain (1936–1938), published in various scholarly editions. Documentation of arrests, interrogations, and the disappearance of Andrés Nin.
Trotskyist Analyses
Pierre Broué, The Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006. The most comprehensive Trotskyist history of the revolution and its suppression.
Felix Morrow, Revolution and Counter‑Revolution in Spain. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974. A contemporary Trotskyist analysis written during the war.
Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. A monumental study documenting Stalinist repression and the destruction of the revolution.
Marxist and Critical Histories
Paul Preston, The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge. London: HarperCollins, 2006. Standard academic account; useful for chronology, though politically limited.
Helen Graham, The Spanish Republic at War, 1936–1939. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Important for institutional and social history of the Republic.
Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006. Conventional narrative history; valuable for military detail.
Franz Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit. London: Faber & Faber, 1937. Early eyewitness account sympathetic to the revolution.
Anarchist and POUM Sources
Abel Paz, Durruti in the Spanish Revolution. Oakland: AK Press, 2007. Biography of the anarchist leader; essential for understanding CNT‑FAI rank‑and‑file militancy.
Julián Casanova, Anarchism, the Republic and Civil War in Spain. London: Routledge, 2010. Scholarly treatment of anarchist politics and social base.
Wilebaldo Solano, The Spanish Revolution: The POUM and the Struggle for Power. POUM perspective on the revolution and its suppression.
Studies of Stalinism and the Popular Front
E.H. Carr, The Comintern and the Spanish Civil War. London: Macmillan, 1984. Detailed study of Soviet policy and Comintern strategy.
Ronald Radosh, Mary Habeck & Grigory Sevostianov, Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War. Yale University Press, 2001. Uses Soviet archival material to document NKVD operations and Stalinist intervention.
Stanley Payne, The Collapse of the Spanish Republic. Yale University Press, 2006. Conservative but useful for institutional analysis of the Popular Front.
Biographies and Memoirs Relevant to Stalinist Policy
Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast. Oxford University Press, 1963. Trotsky’s biography; includes analysis of Trotsky’s writings on Spain.
Alexander Orlov, The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes. Memoir of the NKVD officer in Spain; controversial but revealing.
For Contextualising Orwell and the CPGB
John Newsinger, Orwell’s Politics. London: Macmillan, 1999. Explores Orwell’s anti‑Stalinism and the CPGB’s hostility toward him.
Christopher Hill, The CPGB and the Popular Front. Essays on the British Communist Party’s alignment with Moscow’s line.
Archival Collections
Marxists Internet Archive (MIA): Trotsky’s writings on Spain, POUM documents, CNT manifestos, and contemporary analyses.
Tamiment Library (NYU) International Brigades papers, CPUSA materials, and Comintern correspondence.
The upcoming acquisition of a significant stake in Liverpool FC by a consortium led by Amit Bhatia, backed by Jeff Bezos and Eduardo Saverin, signals a new phase in turning football into a domain for the global financial elite. Reports suggest the group is nearing a stake exceeding 30 per cent, valuing the club at approximately £4.4 billion ($5.9–6 billion). An announcement is likely soon.
This development is part of a larger trend where all aspects of social life—such as sport, culture, media, and technology—are increasingly controlled and reshaped by a small group of billionaires. Their wealth comes from exploiting workers worldwide. Football, originally a sport for the working class, is now being integrated into the same financial and technological systems that govern logistics, surveillance, AI, and global finance.
A New Phase in the Oligarchic Capture of Football
Liverpool’s potential new investors hail from the most privileged echelons of global capitalism. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, amassed his enormous wealth through the ruthless exploitation of hundreds of thousands of workers, who faced poverty wages, constant surveillance by algorithms, and dangerous productivity targets. His fortune grew significantly during the pandemic, as Amazon employees endured hazardous working conditions. Bezos is not simply a “sports investor”; he exemplifies American financial capitalism at its most predatory. Eduardo Saverin, co-founder of Facebook, renounced his US citizenship to dodge taxes and moved to Singapore. His wealth originates from a social media empire built on surveillance, data extraction, and the promotion of reactionary content through algorithms.
Amit Bhatia, son-in-law of steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, belongs to a global elite whose wealth relies on exploiting workers across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. His abrupt divestment from Queens Park Rangers on the day Liverpool’s bid emerged highlights the financial manoeuvring — regulatory arbitrage and share shuffling — typical of Today’s oligarchy. The inclusion of these figures in Liverpool’s ownership signifies a significant shift. While under Fenway Sports Group (FSG), Liverpool was primarily considered a financial asset. John Henry played a key role in proposing the 2021 European Super League, aiming to replace the competitive league system with a closed cartel that would secure ongoing revenue for the wealthiest clubs. This plan, backed by JPMorgan Chase, was ultimately stopped by widespread fan resistance.
Now the club is being passed from one set of billionaires to another — but this time to individuals whose wealth is measured not in billions but in hundreds of billions.
Football as a Financial Instrument
Liverpool’s valuation at £4.4 billion highlights the sport’s dramatic transformation. Originally founded in 1892 by working-class individuals, the club now has a value that could support the NHS for months. The financialization of football emphasises club worth based on anticipated future revenues, global branding, and digital engagement rather than sporting success. In Marxist terms, football has become part of fictitious capital — claims on future value instead of current output. Clubs are traded like tech stocks, with valuations serving as speculative tools. Their ownership resembles that of a multinational. The Bezos–Saverin–Bhatia consortium is not investing in football as a sport. Instead, they view it as: a content source for Amazon’s media empire, a data collection point for feeding Amazon’s AI systems, a global brand asset integrated into Amazon’s retail and advertising networks, and a financial tool for the portfolios of the world’s wealthiest individuals.
The Conflict‑of‑Interest Question: A Window into the System
A key aspect of the deal is the unresolved question of whether an investor holding a stake in the Premier League broadcaster Amazon Prime Video can also own part of a Premier League club. This is primarily a political issue, not a technical one. The Premier League’s Owners’ and Directors’ Test does not impose significant restrictions on such cross-ownership. In reality, the capitalist system enforces regulations only when they do not conflict with the interests of the ruling class. When billionaires are involved, these rules are often treated as mere “guidelines.”
If the deal goes through unchallenged, it establishes a precedent: broadcasters might own clubs, clubs could control broadcasters, and a few oligarchs could vertically integrate the complete ecosystem. These same individuals would own the product, distribution channels, and ways of consumption. This represents the Americanization of football — not culturally, but in its structure.
Liverpool’s Sporting Transition: Irrelevant to Capital
Liverpool secured the Premier League title in 2025 but is currently going through a transition phase. Manager Arne Slot has left, Mohamed Salah has departed, and Michael Edwards has exited FSG. Despite significant spending, the club finished fifth last season. From the consortium’s perspective, these developments are mainly relevant for their impact on the asset’s valuation. At this level, a football club functions more as an investment vehicle than a sporting entity, serving purposes like capital appreciation, brand leverage, and generating broadcast and commercial income from a global fanbase.
Speculation that Bezos and Saverin might aim for full control is plausible. For wealthy individuals like them, holding a minority stake is not an end goal but a strategic foothold.
The Broader Pattern: The Oligarchy Consolidates Its Power
The shift to Liverpool reflects a wider trend. By 2026, Bezos has invested billions in AI companies, grown Blue Origin’s aerospace activities, and co-led a $12 billion funding round for Prometheus, an industrial AI firm now valued at $41 billion. The same elite pushing humanity toward global conflict — as the WSWS detailed during the 2026 World Cup — is also consolidating control over all aspects of social life.
The 2026 World Cup showcased glaring signs of capitalist excess: generating $15 billion in revenue, with dynamic ticket prices soaring to over $10,000, luxury hospitality packages costing more than an average worker’s yearly income, and the trophy transported in a Louis Vuitton trunk. Football is increasingly being marketed as a luxury item for the wealthy and a global advertising tool for corporations. The Bezos group’s interest in Liverpool aligns with these trends, representing the broader process of expropriating everything the working class has built by a parasitic financial elite.
The Marxist Perspective: Expropriate the Oligarchy
The banners at Anfield during the 2021 Super League revolt — “Created by the poor, stolen by the rich” — summed up the situation well. But the real solution isn’t better regulation, fan representation, or a “50+1” rule. These measures leave the core capitalist ownership model untouched. Football can’t be truly democratised under capitalism because the logic of capital is all-encompassing. Every reform risks new forms of exploitation. The only genuine solution is to expropriate the oligarchs, transform football clubs into democratic entities run by players, workers, and supporters, and replace capitalism with a socialist society where sport, like healthcare, education, and housing, is a public good instead of a means for billionaire profit.
William Cheatham’s story—a Bolton weaver, army veteran, and Peterloo Massacre victim—significantly enhances our understanding of history. It reintroduces a working-class figure whose experience highlights key societal dynamics of that era. Cheatham was not merely a passive victim of government violence; he was a politically aware worker who travelled to Manchester to advocate for parliamentary reform. He survived a sabre attack by a yeomanry cavalryman over a mile from St Peter’s Field and dedicated years to seeking justice via courts and Parliament. His failure was not random but rooted in structural factors.
Cheatham’s story reflects a common pattern among contemporary radicals and modern Marxist historians: rather than remorse or reform following Peterloo, the British ruling class engaged in repression, intimidation, and history rewriting. The significance of Cheatham’s case lies not in its novelty but in its clarity, exemplifying the capitalist state’s response to working-class activism.
The current depiction of Cheatham’s story — linking it to ongoing debates about democracy, protest rights, and challenging entrenched power — illustrates a liberal viewpoint that obscures the class implications of Peterloo. The aim is not merely to restore Cheatham’s biography but to uncover its deeper significance beyond the ideological stories that have historically tried to soften Peterloo.
Peterloo and the Machinery of Bourgeois Repression
The aftermath of Peterloo is a revealing episode in British history. The ruling class responded with a consistent strategy: Medical denial and coercion. Waterloo veteran John Lees died from his injuries three weeks later, while James Lees, wounded by two sabre cuts, was denied treatment unless he disavowed political meetings. Judicial obstruction was evident when Margaret Goodwin’s civil case against neighbour Thomas Shelmerdine was dismissed without thorough review. Weavers injured in the incident, who sued Hugh Hornby Birley and others, were told their attackers acted “justifiably.” The radical Manchester Observer, which exposed the massacre, faced prosecution and harassment, leading to its destruction. Additionally, Manchester’s official plaque labelled Peterloo a “dispersal” for decades, deliberately omitting any mention of the dead.
Cheatham’s case belongs squarely within this pattern. He identified his attacker, Edward Meagher. He pursued him through the courts. He secured a parliamentary hearing. He gathered witnesses. And he lost. The state closed ranks. The yeomanry were protected. The working-class victim was defeated.
This is not a story about the failure of individual courage or the imperfections of early nineteenth-century justice. It is a demonstration of the structural function of the capitalist state: to defend the interests and agents of the ruling class against the political demands of the working class.
Liberal Heritage and the Sanitisation of Class Struggle
Today’s portrayal of Cheatham’s story—via genealogy sites, BBC heritage media, and the rhetoric of “democracy”—is inherently political. It continues a long tradition of liberal co-optation of Peterloo. The founding of the Manchester Guardian in 1821 exemplifies this trend. Created by cotton manufacturer John Edward Taylor after the Manchester Observer was destroyed, the Guardian aimed to divert working-class democratic fervour into bourgeois reform efforts. Its promise to “warmly advocate the cause of Reform” was quickly seen as a tactic to capture and disarm working-class radicalism. George Condy’s 1836 description of the Guardian as the “foul prostitute and dirty parasite of the worst portion of the mill-owners” was not mere hyperbole; it reflected class analysis.
The 2019 bicentenary commemorations continued this tradition. The Guardian positioned itself as Peterloo’s successor. Manchester City Council unveiled Jeremy Deller’s memorial quietly, concerned about the political consequences of an open memorial. Even Labour’s language — referencing Peterloo as a moral foundation for parliamentary reform — echoed the same liberal framing that Engels critiqued in 1846. The liberal approach to history reinterprets Peterloo as a heritage event instead of a clash between classes. It shifts focus from working-class agency to sentimental stories of “ordinary people.” It replaces discussions of rights with themes of class struggle. Additionally, it depicts the capitalist state as misguided rather than inherently violent. Cheatham’s account, viewed through this lens, becomes a sombre reflection on the slow advancement of democracy rather than a lesson about the futility of justice within bourgeois institutions.
Engels and the Historical Logic of Cheatham’s Defeat
Cheatham’s story notably confirms Engels’s analysis of the era. In The Condition of the Working Class in England and his 1846 letters, Engels argued that the core dynamic of early 19th-century politics was that the “essentially democratic movement of the working classes was more or less made subservient to the liberal movement of the bourgeoisie.”
Engels pointed out that the working class had yet to fully understand the crucial difference between liberalism and democracy — specifically, the distinction between the emancipation of the middle classes and that of the working classes. Cheatham’s extensive efforts over a decade to seek justice through courts, magistrates, and Parliament serve as a condensed example of this broader historical process. He believed that the bourgeois state’s institutions could ensure justice, thinking evidence, testimony, and parliamentary appeals could challenge class power. His defeat was not personal but structural, reflecting the unavoidable outcome of a political system meant to safeguard the interests of the ruling class.
Cheatham’s story is therefore not a tragedy of failed reform. It is a lesson in the necessity of working-class independence from bourgeois institutions.
Memory, Class, and the Struggle Over Peterloo
The dispute over Peterloo’s memory is a battleground of class conflict. The ruling class has consistently tried to tame the event—turning it from a massacre into a mere ‘dispersal,” from a clash of classes into a symbol of democracy, and from a call to action into a heritage tour. In contrast, working-class remembrance has always challenged this distortion. John Wrigley, interviewed fifty years after Peterloo, expressed the true significance of the event: “Never forget, lad! Let it sink in your blood. Stand up and fight for human rights — the rights of poor folk!”
This is not the language of liberal reform; it is the language of class struggle. Cheatham’s story belongs to the political tradition of working-class struggle, which his biography underscores. Reclaiming Cheatham’s biography is valuable, but only if its significance is pulled from liberal narratives and restored to the tradition of working-class political activism.
Conclusion: What Cheatham Teaches Us
Cheatham’s story reveals little about the “enduring questions of democracy’ and instead highlights the persistent reality of class power. It vividly illustrates how the capitalist state reacts when working people seek accountability from its armed forces, showing why the working class cannot depend on courts, magistrates, or Parliament for justice. The story supports Engels’s analysis of the era and uncovers the ideological role of liberal historical narratives. Its significance lies not in sentiment but in political clarity, reminding us that Peterloo was not merely a reform tragedy but a clash between the working class and the capitalist state—an ongoing conflict with vital lessons.
Bibliography and Sources
Primary Sources
Engels, Friedrich.The Condition of the Working Class in England. Leipzig, 1845. Foundational Marxist analysis of early industrial capitalism; Engels’ discussion of the political subordination of the working class to bourgeois liberalism is directly relevant to Peterloo.
Engels, Friedrich.The Principles of Communism. 1847. Contains Engels’ reflections on the development of working-class political consciousness.
Hunt, Henry.The Trial of Henry Hunt and Others for the Peterloo Massacre. London, 1820. Contemporary documentation of the legal aftermath and the state’s efforts to justify repression.
Manchester Observer (1819–1821). Radical newspaper that exposed the massacre; its destruction by state repression is central to understanding the political climate.
Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 1819–1825. Includes petitions, debates, and references to cases brought by Peterloo victims, including Cheatham’s parliamentary appeal.
Wrigley, John. Interview in The Manchester Guardian, 1869. Contains the famous working-class testimony: “Never forget, lad! Let it sink in your blood…”
Contemporary Radical Accounts
Carlile, Richard.Account of the Manchester Massacre. London, 1819. Eyewitness testimony and radical analysis of the event.
Knight, Henry.The Political and Social Condition of Manchester. Manchester, 1820. Radical critique of the magistracy and yeomanry.
Modern Scholarship on Peterloo
Read, Donald.Peterloo: The Massacre and Its Background. Manchester University Press, 1958. Classic scholarly account; still valuable for its archival depth.
Poole, Robert.Peterloo: The English Uprising. Oxford University Press, 2019. The most comprehensive modern study; essential for contextualising Cheatham’s experience.
Poole, Robert. “The Manchester Observer and the Making of Peterloo.” Manchester Region History Review 23 (2012). Detailed analysis of the radical press and state repression.
Bush, M. L.The Casualties of Peterloo. Carnegie Publishing, 2005. Systematic catalogue of victims; provides context for Cheatham’s injuries and legal struggle.
Bush, M. L. “The Aftermath of Peterloo.” Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society 103 (2007). Examines the judicial and political consequences of the massacre.
Thompson, E. P.The Making of the English Working Class. Victor Gollancz, 1963. Essential Marxist historiography; situates Peterloo within the broader formation of working-class consciousness.
Hammond, J. L. & Hammond, Barbara.The Town Labourer 1760–1832. Longmans, Green & Co., 1917. Classic social history of early industrial workers; includes discussion of political radicalism.
Marxist Analyses and Socialist Scholarship
Bond, Paul. “200 Years Since the Peterloo Massacre.” World Socialist Web Site, 16 August 2019. Detailed Marxist analysis of the massacre, its aftermath, and the liberal appropriation of its memory.
North, David.The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century. Mehring Books, 2014. Provides theoretical context on state violence and bourgeois democracy.
Trotsky, Leon.History of the Russian Revolution. 1930. Not directly about Peterloo, but foundational for understanding the Marxist theory of the state and class repression.
Marx, Karl.The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 1852. Essential for understanding how bourgeois institutions function to suppress working-class political agency.
Historiography of the Liberal Press and the Guardian
Ayerst, David.The Guardian: Biography of a Newspaper. Cornell University Press, 1971. Includes detailed discussion of the paper’s founding in the aftermath of Peterloo.
Williams, Raymond.Keywords. Oxford University Press, 1976. Useful for analysing the ideological language of “reform,” “democracy,” and “rights.”
Jones, Aled. “Press, Politics and Society: The Guardian and Liberalism.” Journal of British Studies 32 (1993). Scholarly analysis of the Guardian’s political role in the nineteenth century.
State Violence, Class Repression, and Political Theory
Hobsbawm, Eric.The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962. Situates Peterloo within the broader revolutionary and counter-revolutionary dynamics of the period.
Hobsbawm, Eric.Labouring Men. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964. Essays on working-class politics and state repression.
Linebaugh, Peter & Rediker, Marcus.The Many-Headed Hydra. Beacon Press, 2000. Explores the long history of proletarian resistance and state violence.
Stedman Jones, Gareth.Languages of Class. Cambridge University Press, 1983. Important for understanding how political discourse shapes class consciousness.
Genealogy, Heritage Media, and Liberal Memory Culture
Samuel, Raphael.Theatres of Memory. Verso, 1994. Foundational critique of heritage culture and liberal historical memory.
Porter, Bernard.The Absent-Minded Imperialists. Oxford University Press, 2004. Useful for analysing the ideological framing of British history in contemporary media.
Olusoga, David.Black and British: A Forgotten History. Macmillan, 2016. Representative of the contemporary BBC mode of identity-centred historical narrative.
Archival and Local History Resources
Greater Manchester Archives and Local Studies holds extensive Peterloo-related material, including casualty lists, magistrates’ papers, and local press.
National Archives (Kew) HO 42 and HO 44 series contain Home Office correspondence on Peterloo and subsequent prosecutions.
Bolton Archives Potentially relevant for Cheatham’s background, military service, and local radical networks.
Optional: Further Reading for Marxist Context
Lukács, Georg.History and Class Consciousness. 1923. Theoretical grounding for understanding how events like Peterloo shape proletarian consciousness.
Anderson, Perry.Arguments Within English Marxism. Verso, 1980. Useful for situating Thompson, Hobsbawm, and the Marxist historiographical tradition.
Although ‘Maids, Wives, Widows’ is well-researched and detailed, it has a significant flaw that exemplifies a common issue in modern social history. Read’s work offers “a social history without society” — not just a rhetorical critique but an accurate critique of its core problem. This flaw is not due to poor archival research or storytelling- none of which are contained in the book but results from a conceptual approach. The book’s main categories, based on legal marital statuses, are treated as social categories, leading to a descriptive account of women’s daily lives that overlooks the social structures shaping those lives. This critique is expanded here, situating it within Marxist social history, feminist theory, and studies of early modern England. It argues that the methodological choices reflect a broader trend in contemporary social history: favouring thematic descriptions over structural explanations, which diminishes the importance of class as the primary influence on lived experiences.
The Taxonomic Fallacy: Legal Status as Social Category
Maids, Wives, Widows incorrectly treat marital status—such as maid, wife, or widow—as a single, cohesive subject of historical analysis. These labels are legal classifications established by common law and church courts, designed to categorise for legal purposes, rather than capturing the complex lived experiences of women in early modern England. Viewing “wife” solely as a social category results in the taxonomic fallacy: the false assumption that legal definitions perfectly align with social realities.
This fallacy has serious implications. The wife of a yeoman farmer facing enclosure, the wife of a London merchant from Atlantic trade wealth, and the wife of a landless labourer who lost her smallholding generations ago all share the same legal label. However, their social realities differed greatly. Their access to food, labour, property, and political power was determined by their class, not marital status. As E.P. Thompson pointed out, “class is not a thing, but a relationship” (Thompson, 1963). In early modern England, these relationships were rooted in property, labour, and exploitation, not solely in marriage categories. By framing the narrative around legal status, the book neglects the societal structures that shaped whether a wife ate well, poorly, or at all. Moving from legal labels to daily life—like “what wives wore” or “what wives ate”—limits the potential for social explanations.
The Civil War as Methodological Stress Test
The book’s approach to the Civil War era highlights a fundamental methodological weakness. The emergence of women in public and political spheres during the 1640s and 1650s should not be seen as a mere exception to domestic life but as a consequence of a revolutionary crisis. During this period, the usual social controls—the monarchy, the church, and parish hierarchies—were temporarily challenged. Women participated by preaching, petitioning Parliament, and supporting groups like the Levellers and Diggers, not because they inherently held political potential, but because the class struggle intensified and involved previously marginalised groups. As Hill (1972) and Reay (1998) illustrate, the radical movements of the 1640s were driven by grievances from small producers, artisans, and labourers whose economic stability was threatened by the rise of state and oligarchic power.
The Leveller women who petitioned in 1649 did so explicitly as wives of imprisoned radicals, connecting their call for their husbands’ release to the larger democratic goals of the movement. Their political stance cannot be fully explained through a focus on “women’s experience” or “the domestic sphere.” Instead, it must be understood within the context of the revolutionary crisis facing the English state and the class tensions it provoked.
The Missing Element: A Theory of Social Determination
The detailed descriptions of women’s clothing, eating habits, and experiences in the book do not replace the need for a social theory that explains how societal forces shape these facts. Without such a framework, everyday life seems like a collection of isolated details, disconnected from the broader social structures that give them historical context. Important questions are left unaddressed: Why did labouring women have different diets than merchant women? Why did some women earn wages while others managed servants? Why was maternal mortality closely linked to social class? Why did some women participate in political movements while others were confined to household chores?
These questions are not just additional; they are essential for understanding daily life historically. As Joan Scott (1986) pointed out, gender is a meaningful analytical category only when viewed as part of a relational system intertwined with economic and political frameworks. A history that considers gender in isolation, separate from class, fails to account for the development of women’s lives.
The Marxist Tradition: Family, Gender, and the Mode of Production
The Marxist view has consistently argued that family, gender roles, and domestic life are not independent spheres but are shaped by the mode of production and underlying class relations. Engels’ book, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” (1884), explicitly states that the monogamous family and women’s legal subjugation emerged alongside private property and class society. Furthermore, the specific ways in which women are oppressed have changed throughout history, corresponding to shifts in the economic foundation.
Early modern England was a society in flux, marked by the rise of agrarian capitalism, expanding Atlantic trade, strengthening state authority, and new types of wage labour. These changes altered family dynamics, gender roles, and domestic life. Viewing “women’s experience” over two centuries as a uniform narrative distinguished only by marital status overlooks the complex forces shaping those experiences.
The critique of Maids, Wives, Widows—that it provides “a social history without society”—extends beyond a single book, representing a wider methodological shift in contemporary historiography. Its dependence on legal categories as social indicators, a focus on descriptive cataloguing, and neglect of structural factors shaping daily life illustrate a tendency Raphael Samuel pinpointed in late social history: replacing thematic description with comprehensive historical explanation.
Samuel’s work, particularly Theatres of Memory, provides a compelling perspective for understanding this shift. He emphasises that history is a “social form of knowledge” and argues that historians should pay attention to the lived experiences of everyday people. This does not mean abandoning structure; rather, Samuel’s early Marxist views—seen in works like The Lost World of Communism, Village Life and Labour, and his essays for New Left Review—are based on the belief that lived experience is influenced by class relations, economic systems, and the mode of production.
Samuel’s insights suggest that ‘Maids, Wives, Widows’ exemplifies a type of social history that has lost touch with social context. It documents women’s lives but fails to explain them; it details daily routines but does not connect them to the power, exploitation, and class structures that influence these routines. This highlights the shortcomings of a historiography that has forgotten its Marxist roots.
Raphael Samuel and the Problem of Social Description
Samuel’s work is often misunderstood as merely celebrating the fragmentary, anecdotal, and everyday aspects of life. His interest in memory, folklore, and popular traditions has led some historians to view him as a champion of descriptive social history. However, this is a significant misinterpretation. Samuel’s detailed observations were always rooted in a structural analysis of class, labour, and social relations. In “Village Life and Labour,” he emphasised that “the texture of daily life is inseparable from the organisation of labour” (Samuel, 1975). His thorough descriptions of rural customs, domestic routines, and communal activities were never just for their own sake; they offered insights into the social relations of production that shaped those customs. The “everyday” was not simply a thematic focus but a space where class relations were experienced, challenged, and maintained.
This is precisely what is missing from Maids, Wives, Widows. The book offers a wealth of detail—what women wore, what they ate, how they died—but it lacks the structural analysis that would make those details historically intelligible. It treats daily life as an autonomous sphere, detached from the economic and political forces that shaped it. In doing so, it reproduces what Samuel warned against: a social history that mistakes description for explanation.
The Taxonomic Fallacy and the Erasure of Class
Samuel’s Marxist beliefs were rooted in the idea that class is a relationship, not just a category. Writing social history without addressing class is like ignoring society itself. Maids, Wives, Widows makes this mistake by viewing marital status—maid, wife, widow—as a single object of study. These categories are legal constructs created by the common law and church courts, reflecting the state’s classification needs rather than the actual experiences of women in early modern England. Samuel would have recognised this immediately. In his essay “Class and Community,” he argued that legal and administrative labels often obscure the true social relations that influence experiences (Samuel, 1969). Viewing “wife” as a single social category ignores important distinctions such as property, labour, exploitation, and access to resources.
The wives of a yeoman farmer facing enclosure, a London merchant benefiting from Atlantic trade, and a landless labourer all shared the same legal label. However, they lived in vastly different worlds of need and opportunity. Their daily experiences cannot be fully grasped solely by their marital status but must be understood through their class.
The Civil War: A Test Case for Marxist Method
Samuel’s analysis of popular politics during the English Revolution highlighted the importance of class struggle in shaping political actions. In “The Lost World of Communism” and his essays on the Levellers, he suggested that revolutionary periods expose the fundamental societal structures by disrupting them. The rise of women participating publicly in the 1640s and 1650s was not merely a vibrant episode of “female agency.” Instead, it resulted from a revolutionary crisis where the monarchy, church, and parish authorities were temporarily set aside. Women preached, petitioned, and organised not because early modern womanhood inherently included political elements, but because the intensifying class struggle drew new social layers into political engagement.
The Leveller women who petitioned in 1649 did so explicitly as the wives of imprisoned radicals, linking their demands to the broader democratic movement. Samuel would argue that their political actions cannot be understood through a framework based solely on “women’s experience.” Instead, it requires one centred on the dynamics of revolutionary crisis and the class forces it unleashed. The categories “Maids, Wives, Widows” are insufficient because their method cannot capture this. A history focused on legal classifications and domestic routines can only describe political action, not explain it.
Marxist Historiography and the Question of Social Determination
Samuel’s early Marxist approach was based on the belief that the mode of production influences daily life. This was not an economic reduction but a dialectical view of how social relations shape experience. Following Engels, who in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State argued that property relations and class structure historically determine family and gender roles, Samuel emphasised these connections. During early modern England, key changes such as agrarian capitalism, Atlantic trade, state development, and the rise of wage labour significantly altered family, gender, and domestic relations. Viewing “women’s experience” over two centuries as a single continuum, merely differentiated by marital status, overlooks the powerful forces shaping those experiences. Samuel’s method—detailed description grounded in structural analysis—corrects this perspective. Maids, Wives, Widows provides vivid descriptions without the structural framework.
Antiquarianism vs Social History: Samuel’s Warning
Samuel consistently cautioned against the trend towards antiquarianism in social history, which involves gathering facts, anecdotes, and curiosities without connecting them to broader social forces. Antiquarianism is about cataloguing, while social history seeks to explain. “Maids, Wives, Widows” serves as a catalogue, offering valuable primary-source material but lacking a theoretical framework to give those materials deeper meaning. It describes how women spent their days but does not explore who influenced or controlled that behaviour—essentially, it overlooks questions of power, exploitation, and class. These are the questions that differentiate social history from mere cataloguing. Samuel recognised this distinction, but modern social history has since forgotten it.
Conclusion
Integrating Raphael Samuel’s insights with a Marxist critique of Maids, Wives, Widows reveals a broader historiographical problem: the retreat from social determination, the erasure of class, and the substitution of descriptive catalogue for historical explanation. Samuel’s work offers both a model and a warning. His descriptive richness was always anchored in structural analysis. His attention to lived experience was always grounded in class relations. His Marxism was not a theoretical overlay but the foundation of his method.
Maids, Wives, Widows is not just a critique of a single book but highlights a shift in modern social history methodologies. The errors such as the taxonomic fallacy, ignoring class, lack of social context, and reliance on mere description are symptoms of a wider historiographical trend. A social history that ignores society itself is incomplete; it just catalogues facts without interpretation. Reclaiming social history’s explanatory power requires returning to the Marxist understanding that daily life is influenced primarily by the mode of production and class relations, not just legal or thematic categories. Only through this perspective can the experiences of early modern women—and all historical figures—be fully understood in their historical complexity.
Apology Statement
I want to offer a sincere apology to Pen and Sword Publishers, and especially to Dr Sara Read, for the long delay in producing this review. The book has been in my hands far longer than I intended, and I regret not giving it the timely attention it deserved. I am particularly grateful to Sara Read for taking the time to send a personal note wishing me happy reading; her courtesy makes my delay all the more embarrassing. I will do my best to prevent this from happening again.
Sources and Bibliography
I. Marxist Historiography & Theory
Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Classic Marxist analysis linking the emergence of the monogamous family to private property and class society. Essential for grounding gender relations in the mode of production.
Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. I. Foundational for understanding class relations, exploitation, and the economic structures shaping daily life.
Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. A key text on how political crises reveal underlying class structures—useful for interpreting the English Civil War.
Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Gollancz, 1963. Seminal work demonstrating class as a historical relationship rather than a static category.
Thompson, E.P. “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd.” Past & Present 50 (1971): 76–136. Shows how popular economic structures and collective expectations shape action.
Hobsbawm, Eric. Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964. Marxist social history with emphasis on class formation and labour relations.
II. Raphael Samuel & the History Workshop Tradition
Samuel, Raphael. Village Life and Labour. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. Demonstrates Samuel’s method: rich description anchored in structural analysis of labour and class.
Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory. London: Verso, 1994. Often misread as anti-theoretical; in fact, a meditation on how lived experience intersects with social structure.
Samuel, Raphael. “Class and Community.” New Left Review 1/45 (1967). Crucial for understanding Samuel’s critique of administrative categories and his insistence on class as lived relationship.
Samuel, Raphael. The Lost World of Communism. London: Verso, 1986. Shows Samuel’s continued commitment to Marxist analysis even in his later work.
Joyce, Patrick. “The End of Social History?” Social History 20, no. 1 (1995): 73–91. A key text for situating Samuel within debates about the fragmentation of social history.
Rose, Sonya. “Cultural Analysis and Moral Discourses: The Legacy of Raphael Samuel.” History Workshop Journal 62 (2006): 1–15. Explores Samuel’s influence and the tension between cultural history and Marxist social history.
III. Women, Gender, and Early Modern England
Mendelson, Sara & Crawford, Patricia. Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. The most comprehensive social history of early modern women; essential for contextual detail.
Sharpe, J.A. Early Modern England: A Social History 1550–1760. London: Arnold, 1987. Provides structural context for gender, household, and labour.
Wiesner-Hanks, Merry. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Useful for comparative context and theoretical framing.
Scott, Joan. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): 1053–1075. Foundational for understanding gender as a relational and structural category, not a descriptive one.
Foyster, Elizabeth. Manhood in Early Modern England. London: Routledge, 1999. Helps situate gender relations within broader social structures.
IV. The English Revolution, Radical Movements, and Women’s Political Action
Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1972. Essential Marxist interpretation of the Civil War and radical movements.
Hill, Christopher. The English Revolution 1640. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1940. Classic Marxist framing of the Civil War as a bourgeois revolution.
Underdown, David. Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603–1660. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. Shows how popular politics intersected with class and gender.
Reay, Barry. Popular Cultures in England, 1550–1750. London: Routledge, 1998. Useful for understanding plebeian culture and political mobilisation.
Stoyle, Mark. Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Provides structural context for the breakdown of social order during the Civil War.
Purkiss, Diane. The English Civil War: A People’s History. London: HarperCollins, 2006. Includes women’s voices but can be contrasted with Marxist interpretations.
The Leveller Women’s Petition (May 1649). Primary source demonstrating women’s political action grounded in class struggle and movement solidarity.
V. Social Structure, Class, and Daily Life in Early Modern England
Wrightson, Keith. Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. A structural account of economic life—excellent for grounding class analysis.
Wrightson, Keith & Levine, David. Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700. New York: Academic Press, 1979. A model of microhistory with structural analysis.
Laslett, Peter. The World We Have Lost. London: Methuen, 1965. Classic on household structure; useful but must be read critically from a Marxist perspective.
Amussen, Susan. An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. One of the few works explicitly linking gender and class.
VI. Methodology, Social Determination, and Historiographical Debate
Burke, Peter. What is Cultural History? Cambridge: Polity, 2004. Useful for situating the drift away from structural analysis.
Joyce, Patrick. Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Illustrates the shift toward culturalism that Samuel resisted.
Callinicos, Alex. Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory. Leiden: Brill, 2004. A rigorous Marxist defence of structural explanation.
VII. Primary Sources (Early Modern England)
The Records of the Old Bailey (online). For women’s labour, crime, and social position.
Parish Registers (various counties). For demographic and household reconstruction.
State Papers Domestic (SP 16–29). For petitions, proclamations, and administrative categories.
Pip: A fortified brothel, a mob of apprentices, and a monarchy that was both the house's best customer and its most vocal critic — freerein61 has found the perfect early Stuart scandal to illuminate something much larger.
Mara: This episode follows one post through the siege of Holland's Leaguer in 1631, using it to map the class tensions, gendered labour, and ideological contradictions that were quietly building toward the English Revolution. Let's start with the brothel itself — and what it reveals about who early Stuart England was really for.
A Brothel, a Mob, and a Monarchy: Holland's Leaguer
Pip: The question the post is really asking isn't "what happened at Holland's Leaguer?" — it's "why did this particular collision happen here, and what does it tell us about a society heading toward civil war?"
Mara: The post frames it precisely: Holland's Leaguer "functioned as a hub within the growing capitalist economy, where displaced women sold their labour to elite men, and where the monarchy engaged in activities it publicly denounced."
Pip: So the drawbridge wasn't just keeping out apprentices — it was keeping the contradiction out of view. The Crown periodically ordered the brothel closed while reportedly counting King James I and Buckingham among its most valued patrons.
Mara: The post locates the brothel in the Liberty of the Clink, a jurisdiction deliberately structured so that theatres, taverns, and brothels could be taxed and enjoyed by elites without threatening the City's moral image. Vice wasn't tolerated despite the law — it was managed through the law.
Pip: Which makes the apprentices' attack on Shrove Tuesday less a moral crusade and more a pressure valve the system had already designed for them.
Mara: That's the post's sharpest structural point. The apprentices were bound by indenture, denied wages, subject to arbitrary masters — conditions the post describes as closer to coerced labour than free wage work. Shrove Tuesday let that anger out, provided it aimed at safe targets: sex workers and brothels, not merchants or magistrates.
Mara: The post draws on Christopher Hill's reading of apprentices as a transitional class — economically indispensable, politically subordinate, increasingly aware of the gap between the two. Brian Manning sharpens that by insisting on their active political agency, not just reactive disorder.
Pip: And Barry Reay reframes the women of Holland's Leaguer entirely — not morally fallen but economically displaced, driven to London by enclosure and falling rural wages, barred from guilds, surviving on the margins of a labour market that systematically undervalued them.
Mara: Buchanan Sharp ties it together: the authorities tolerated Shrove Tuesday riots precisely because horizontal violence — exploited group against exploited group — substituted for any vertical challenge to those actually holding power.
Pip: When Charles I finally sent soldiers to close the place in December 1631, Bess Holland raised the drawbridge and her workers dumped chamber pots on the troops. The post notes the closure had no effect — Holland simply moved, because the economic conditions that produced the brothel stayed exactly the same.
Mara: The post ends by tracing how quickly the siege became a cultural commodity — ballads, Nicholas Goodman's pamphlet, Shackerley Marmion's play — all repackaging class tension as local colour. Spectacle, the post argues, is how class society processes scandal without resolving it.
Pip: A brothel siege turned into a comedy for the same audience that used the brothel. That's not irony — that's the system working exactly as intended.
Mara: And the apprentices who attacked Holland's Leaguer in 1631 were, a decade later, part of the crowds that expelled Charles I from London — which is where the deeper stakes of this story keep pointing.
Pip: Holland's Leaguer is a very specific place, but the contradictions it housed — elite hypocrisy, gendered labour exploitation, managed popular anger — aren't.
Mara: Those contradictions didn't resolve in 1631. They compounded. Next time, we'll see where that pressure went.
On Shrove Tuesday, February 22, 1631, a group of London apprentices crossed the Thames in a rush toward a fortified estate in Southwark. Their goal was Holland’s Leaguer, London’s most exclusive brothel, operated for nearly thirty years by the fierce Bess Holland. Though the house withstood the attack—its drawbridge remained intact, and the moat proved effective—the event is more than just a colourful tale. It offers a vivid glimpse into early Stuart class society, highlighting moments where the tensions around labour, gender, government authority, and elite hypocrisy were temporarily laid bare.
Viewing Holland’s Leaguer solely as bawdy London folklore overlooks its deeper importance. It functioned as a hub within the growing capitalist economy, where displaced women sold their labour to elite men, and where the monarchy engaged in activities it publicly denounced. Additionally, it was a place where the frustration of exploited youth was diverted from its real cause. On a small scale, the siege of Holland’s Leaguer exemplifies the social tensions that eventually led to civil war a decade later.
The Liberty of the Clink: A State‑Sanctioned Economy of Vice
Holland’s Leaguer was located within the Liberty of the Clink, an area intentionally separated from the City’s jurisdiction. Bankside’s theatres, bear-baiting pits, taverns, and brothels thrived not due to lax enforcement but because the law was purposefully structured to overlook those activities in that zone. The Clink functioned as a device for managing contradictions: it was a district where “vice” could be isolated, taxed, and enjoyed by the elites without threatening the City’s moral image.
This setup wasn’t hypocrisy in a simple sense; it was built into the system. The Crown and the aristocracy needed places where their desires could be fulfilled without threatening the appearance of moral authority. Since theatres and brothels were highly profitable, socially significant, and deeply rooted in elite culture, they couldn’t be abolished. Instead, they were physically separated—moved across the river, out of sight but still accessible.
Holland’s Leaguer itself was a capitalist enterprise avant la lettre. Its exclusivity — fine linen, modern sanitation, controlled access — mirrored the emerging logic of commodification. Sex was not merely sold; it was curated. The clientele included wealthy courtiers, foreign visitors, and, by later report, King James I and his favourite, Buckingham. The same monarchy that periodically ordered the brothel’s closure was among its most valued patrons.
This episode reveals the first contradiction: a ruling class that criminalised people with low incomes for the very desires it enjoyed openly, and that regarded the women working in such houses as disposable labour rather than as individuals entitled to legal protection.
The apprentices who attacked Holland’s Leaguer were not moral crusaders. They were young workers bound by indenture, denied wages, poorly fed, and subject to the arbitrary authority of masters who controlled nearly every hour of their lives. Their conditions were closer to coerced labour than to the free wage work celebrated in English political mythology.
Shrove Tuesday served as a safety valve: a single day when the built-up frustration of youthful repression could be released. Importantly, violence was allowed — often encouraged — provided it was aimed at safe targets. Places like brothels, theatres, and taverns were considered acceptable outlets for anger; in contrast, merchants, guildmasters, and the government were absent. This exemplifies a typical class society dynamic where horizontal violence among exploited groups replaces confrontation with those in power. The apprentices targeted visible victims—sex workers, who also suffered displacement—instead of challenging the property systems causing suffering for both groups.
The apprentices were still in the process of forming a distinct class. Their common living situations, collective grievances, and occasional street violence helped develop a proto-political identity. While not revolutionary yet, they were becoming less willing to accept their assigned roles. A decade later, they would join the crowds that expelled Charles I from London. The 1631 riot wasn’t a revolutionary act, but it served as a rehearsal for one.
Sex Workers and the Gendered Labour Regime of Early‑Modern London
The women of Holland’s Leaguer were unfairly portrayed as morally ‘fallen’ by Puritan pamphlets. In fact, they were victims of a swiftly changing labour market caused by enclosure, falling rural wages, and the loss of traditional rights, which drove many to London. There, women encountered obstacles to joining guilds and often had to settle for jobs like domestic service, laundry, nursing, hawking, or fringe piecework. Sex work was not a moral failing but a survival strategy—an economic necessity to cope with a city that systematically undervalued female labour.
Brothels such as Holland’s Leaguer were not anomalies but integral parts of early-modern capitalism: venues where gendered labour exploitation was focused, commodified, and controlled for elite audiences. The apprentices’ assault on the brothel was therefore not a clash between virtue and vice but between two exploited groups, with their conflict aligning with the interests of the ruling class.
Holland’s Leaguer and the Historiography of Proto‑Proletarian Consciousness
The 1631 destruction of Holland’s Leaguer is more than just a striking event in London’s social past. It is central to a significant historiographical debate about when and how the English working classes started to develop a shared political awareness. Scholars like Christopher Hill, Brian Manning, Barry Reay, and Buchanan Sharp present perspectives that interpret the siege not as a mere rumour but as a key moment in the gradual emergence of a proto-proletariat in early Stuart England.
Hill: Apprentices as a Semi‑Proletarian Class
Hill’s work remains foundational. In The World Turned Upside Down and The Century of Revolution, he argued that apprentices were a transitional class: economically indispensable, politically subordinate, and increasingly aware of the contradiction. Their periodic riots were not random explosions of youthful disorder but expressions of a class whose labour was expanding while its rights remained static.
Hill would see the attack on Holland’s Leaguer as a classic example of this dynamic. Apprentices acted collectively, outside the control of their masters, in a way that revealed both their grievances and their potential political agency. The riot was misdirected — aimed at sex workers rather than merchants or magistrates — but it demonstrated a capacity for mobilisation that would become decisive in the 1640s.
Manning: Popular Agency and the Coming Revolution
Brian Manning sharpened Hill’s insight by insisting on the political agency of “the middling and poorer sort.” For Manning, apprentices were not merely reactive; they were active participants in shaping the revolutionary crisis. Their street actions were early rehearsals for the mass demonstrations that would force Charles I out of London.
Manning’s emphasis on popular mobilisation helps us see Holland’s Leaguer as part of a continuum. The same social layer that attacked the brothel in 1631 would, a decade later, besiege Lambeth Palace, disrupt royal processions, and form the backbone of London’s revolutionary crowds. The riot was not revolutionary, but it belonged to the same repertoire of collective action.
Reay: Gender, Sexuality and Displaced Labour
Barry Reay’s work on sexuality and popular culture adds a crucial dimension. Reay shows that sex work in early‑modern London was not a moral aberration but a structural response to economic displacement. Women entered the trade because enclosure, falling wages and exclusion from guild labour left them few alternatives.
Reay’s analysis reframes Holland’s Leaguer as a site where two exploited groups — apprentices and sex workers — collided. Their antagonism was not natural but manufactured. Both were victims of early‑capitalist transformation; both were denied legal protection; both were indispensable to the functioning of London’s economy. Their conflict served the interests of the ruling class by preventing solidarity between exploited layers.
Sharpe: Ritualised Disorder and Social Control
Buchanan Sharp’s work on Shrove Tuesday riots shows how the authorities tolerated certain forms of disorder as a mechanism of social control. Apprentices were permitted to vent their frustrations so long as they targeted “safe” objects: brothels, theatres, taverns. Sharp’s analysis explains why the attack on Holland’s Leaguer was indulged while attacks on merchants or magistrates were not.
The riot thus reveals a key feature of early‑Stuart governance: the state managed popular anger by directing it sideways—horizontal violence substituted for vertical challenge.
A Microcosm of Class Formation
These historians collectively depict Holland’s Leaguer as a small-scale reflection of early Stuart social dynamics: Hill highlights apprentices as a semi-proletariat; Manning emphasises popular agency and political activism; Reay discusses gendered labour and economic shifts; and Sharpe considers ritualised disorder as a form of social control. The destruction of the brothel was significant; it revealed the tensions within early-modern capitalism—such as labour exploitation, gendered insecurity, elite hypocrisy, and misplaced popular rage. This event is not just part of London’s bawdy folklore but also a precursor to the English Revolution.
The State Intervenes: Coercion as the Final Arbiter
When Charles I ultimately commanded the closure of Holland’s Leaguer in December 1631, he relied on military force rather than moral persuasion. Soldiers, not magistrates, were dispatched to enforce his order. Bess Holland responded with resistance, raising the drawbridge to cause the first soldiers to fall into the moat, and her brothel workers dumped chamber pots over the troops below.
The siege endured for almost a month, serving as a display of state authority amid waning power. The Personal Rule had alienated many social groups, while financial measures eroded the monarchy’s legitimacy. Religious policies also sparked widespread discontent. In this climate, shutting down a brothel became a symbolic act—showing the King’s attempt to assert control in a society that was slipping beyond his reach.
The closure had no effect; Holland just moved. The economic factors behind brothels—poverty, gendered labour markets, and elite demand—stayed the same. The state only suppressed a symptom without addressing the root cause.
From Scandal to Spectacle: Commodifying the Crisis
In just a few weeks, Holland’s Leaguer shifted from a site of conflict to a cultural commodity. Ballads spread widely, and Nicholas Goodman’s pamphlet cast the siege as moral theatre. Shackerley Marmion’s play turned the event into entertainment aimed at the same social groups that had patronised the brothel. This swift shift to commodification is deliberate; it reflects how class society processes scandal: exploitative labour becomes entertainment, state violence turns into farce, and class tensions are repackaged as local colour. The ideological role is evident: spectacle masks underlying social structures. The social issues—gendered exploitation, elite hypocrisy, misplaced popular anger—that created Holland’s Leaguer are hidden behind storytelling and theatricality.
Holland’s Leaguer and the Coming Revolution
Viewing Holland’s Leaguer through a Marxist perspective, it serves as a microcosm of early-Stuart England’s impending crisis. The monarchy relies on coercion instead of consent. The working class becomes less willing to accept its social role. The ruling elite’s hypocrisy weakens its ideological authority. The cultural realm commodifies crises instead of resolving them. The destruction of the brothel exposes a society where class tensions intensify, ideological conflicts deepen, and social controls begin to weaken. The apprentices’ riot, while not revolutionary, hints at the instability that would eventually lead to civil war, regicide, and the temporary fall of the monarchy.
Conclusion: A Case Study in Class Society
Holland’s Leaguer should be remembered not just as a colourful episode in London’s bawdy history but as an example of how early-modern class society organised, controlled, profited from, and ultimately abandoned its poorest and most vulnerable labourers. It shows how public anger was directed at the wrong targets, how gendered labour was commodified for elite amusement, and how the state only intervened when elite interests were at risk. Its contradictions—economic, social, ideological—provide a revealing glimpse into the world that led to the English Revolution. Beneath the chaos of riot and siege, deeper systems of exploitation and resistance were at work, which within a decade would threaten the monarchy’s very foundation.
Marmion, Shackerley. Holland’s Leaguer: A Comedy. London, 1632.
Contemporary ballads on Holland’s Leaguer (British Library, Roxburghe Collection).
City of London Court Records, Shrove Tuesday disturbances (Guildhall Library Manuscripts).
The Liberty of the Clink administrative records (Southwark Local Studies Archive).
Secondary Sources
Christopher Hill
Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714. London: Routledge, 1961.
Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1972.
Hill, Christopher. Society and Puritanism in Pre‑Revolutionary England. London: Secker & Warburg, 1964.
Brian Manning
Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution. London: Bookmarks, 1991.
Manning, Brian. Revolution and Counter‑Revolution in England, 1658–1660. London: Bookmarks, 2003.
Manning, Brian. The Far Left in the English Revolution. London: Bookmarks, 1971.
Barry Reay
Reay, Barry. Popular Cultures in England, 1550–1750. London: Longman, 1998.
Reay, Barry. The Last Rising of the Apprentices: London 1661. Stroud: Sutton, 1999.
Reay, Barry. Sexuality in Early Modern England. London: Routledge, 1998.
Buchanan Sharp
Sharp, Buchanan. In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586–1660. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
Sharp, Buchanan. “Rituals of Riot: Popular Violence in Early Modern England.” Past & Present 130 (1991): 90–122.
Sharp, Buchanan. The English Riots of 1641. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Early‑Modern London, Sex Work, and Urban Labour
Griffiths, Paul. Lost Londons: Change, Crime and Control in the Capital City, 1550–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Griffiths, Paul. “The Structure of Prostitution in Elizabethan London.” Continuity and Change 8, no. 1 (1993): 39–63.
Ingram, Martin. Carnal Knowledge: Regulating Sex in England, 1470–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Archer, Ian. The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Shoemaker, Robert. The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth‑Century England. London: Hambledon, 2004.
Stallybrass, Peter. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.
Theatres, Liberties, and the Bankside Economy
Dillon, Janette. Theatre, Court and City, 1595–1610: Drama and Social Space in London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Egan, Gabriel. The Struggle for Shakespeare’s South Bank. London: Shakespeare’s Globe, 2019.
The English Revolution and Popular Politics
Underdown, David. Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Kishlansky, Mark. A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603–1714. London: Penguin, 1996.
Fletcher, Anthony, and Peter Roberts (eds.). Religion, Politics and Society in Sixteenth‑Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Further Reading
Shoemaker, Robert. Gender in English Society, 1650–1850. London: Longman, 1998.
Capp, Bernard. The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet, 1578–1653. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Slack, Paul. Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Longman, 1988.
Wrightson, Keith. Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain. London: Penguin, 2000.
Beier, A.L. Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640. London: Methuen, 1985.
Archival and Digital Resources
British Library, Early English Books Online (EEBO).
London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Apprentice Registers.
Pip: Cambridge University has, once again, demonstrated its unerring instinct for self-preservation — freerein61's latest piece on A Trumpet of Sedition makes sure we notice exactly what that costs.
Mara: The episode covers one major case: the compelled resignation of Professor Jason Arday from Cambridge, and what it reveals about universities, identity politics, the far right, and class power. Let's start with the affair itself and the crisis it exposes.
The Jason Arday Affair: Universities, Identity, and Class
Pip: The central tension here is a familiar one dressed in new clothes — an institution celebrates a symbolic appointment, then abandons the symbol the moment defending it becomes expensive. The question the post forces is: what does that pattern actually tell us about how universities work?
Mara: The post is direct about the political logic driving the attack. Nathan Cofnas launched it, and his writing is rooted in scientific racism and eugenics. The post quotes Christopher Rufo, who ran the parallel campaign against Harvard's Claudine Gay, describing plagiarism accusations as a "weapon of war."
Pip: So the tool is plagiarism, but the project is something larger — remaking the ideological landscape of institutions that the far right sees as hostile territory.
Mara: Exactly, and the post draws the Harvard parallel in detail. In both cases a symbolic figure elevated through identity-politics discourse was targeted. Initial ideological attacks failed. Plagiarism allegations followed. The institution defended, then capitulated. The post calls this pattern deliberate — a coordinated effort to suppress intellectual activity and shift universities toward authoritarian and nationalist agendas.
Pip: Cambridge's first move was to condemn the campaign against Arday as a "vile" one — which sounds principled until you read what came next.
Mara: The post is precise on this. Cambridge's initial defence was not principle; it was institutional reflex. The post argues elite universities operate by three priorities: protecting prestige, avoiding political exposure that threatens donors or government relationships, and projecting moral leadership without structural reform. Once defending Arday cost more than celebrating him, Cambridge withdrew.
Pip: Identity politics as institutional branding — which is a fine strategy right up until the brand becomes a liability.
Mara: The post pushes further than that critique. It argues identity politics functions as a mechanism of class rule: deflecting demands for real redistribution into symbolic representation, containing calls for equality within manageable gestures, and fragmenting the working class along racialised lines. Arday was Cambridge's "youngest ever black professor" — the framing was about branding, not structural change.
Mara: Working-class students, regardless of race, remain excluded by cost. Academic staff face casualisation and low pay. The university's social role, the post argues, has not shifted.
Pip: Symbolic elevation, the post notes, also produces symbolic vulnerability — institutions that promote people on PR logic cannot mount a class-based defence when the far right attacks, because they do not operate on class principles.
Mara: The post's conclusion is that defending democratic rights on campus requires independent working-class mobilisation — not reliance on administrations that have repeatedly sacrificed individuals to protect financial interests. The fight against racism, it argues, is inseparable from the fight against capitalism, because racism is a structural feature used to divide workers, not an anomaly to be managed by diversity initiatives.
Pip: The cycle the post describes — institutions need identity politics for legitimacy, the far right weaponises the symbols, institutions sacrifice the individuals — keeps turning precisely because the underlying class conflict stays unresolved.
Mara: Which is where the post lands: the university cannot be transformed by diversity initiatives alone. That requires dismantling the conditions that shape what universities are for in the first place.
Pip: The deeper question, then, isn't really about Cambridge or Harvard — it's about what any institution built to serve capital can actually defend when defending it becomes costly.
Mara: The Arday case sits at the intersection of everything the post maps — far-right strategy, liberal fragility, and the limits of symbolic politics as a substitute for class solidarity.
Pip: Next time, we'll see what else is coming through on the trumpet. Stay tuned.
The compelled resignation of Professor Jason Arday from the University of Cambridge is more than just an academic scandal or a British equivalent of the Claudine Gay controversy at Harvard. It vividly illustrates the political, ideological, and social conflicts tearing apart bourgeois institutions in advanced capitalist nations. The attack on Arday, driven by far-right extremists and enabled by a cowardly university administration, exposes the failure of identity politics, the rising confidence of reactionary forces, and the inability of liberal institutions to uphold their own principles. This event highlights the ongoing crisis of the university under capitalism and emphasises the urgent need for independent, socialist intervention by the working class.
The far‑right offensive and the political logic of the attack
Nathan Cofnas launched the attack on Arday, with writings rooted in scientific racism and eugenics. Cofnas’s claim that, under a true meritocracy, black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions” is more of a political statement than an academic argument. It reflects the worldview of a social segment that the right-wing radicalisation of some parts of the petty bourgeoisie and ruling class has empowered.
Cofnas’s use of plagiarism-detection tools was motivated more by political motives than academic rigour. It reflects a strategy described as a “weapon of war” by Christopher Rufo, who spearheaded the campaign against Claudine Gay. The far right has recognised that accusations of plagiarism can be highly damaging: they are sensational, difficult to disprove publicly, and can harm reputations over time. This method serves as a contemporary adaptation of McCarthyite tactics, tailored to the modern bureaucratic and media environment.
The situation with Harvard is precisely analogous. In both instances, a symbolic figure promoted through identity-politics discourse was targeted. Initial ideological critiques did not succeed in removing the individual. Subsequently, plagiarism allegations were used as the key weapon. The institution initially defended the individual but eventually capitulated due to political pressure. This pattern is deliberate, representing a coordinated effort by far-right groups to undermine universities, suppress intellectual activity, and alter the ideological landscape to support authoritarian and nationalist agendas.
The university as a bourgeois institution: prestige without principle
Cambridge’s first response to Arday—condemning the attack as a “vile campaign”—was not a matter of principle. It was a defensive impulse rooted in protecting the institution’s own interests. Elite universities are guided by three main goals: safeguarding their prestige, which underpins their financial and political influence; avoiding political issues that could jeopardise relationships with donors, government support, or the media; and projecting moral leadership without implementing any meaningful structural reforms that could threaten their social role.
Once defending Arday politically outweighed the benefits of celebrating him as a diversity milestone, Cambridge withdrew. A similar pattern occurred at Harvard: Gay was a useful symbol—Harvard’s “first Black president”—until she became a liability, after which the symbolism was abandoned. This behaviour does not stem from hypocrisy but reflects the logic of institutions whose main goal is preserving elite privilege. Universities are not advocates for democratic rights; they serve the ruling class, and their focus on “diversity” is secondary to their allegiance to capital.
Identity politics as a mechanism of class rule
The Arday affair highlights a key contradiction in identity politics. Rather than being a genuine movement for social equality, identity politics serves as a political tool used by the ruling class to manage racial and social tensions without changing the fundamental class hierarchy. Its main functions include deflection—allowing institutions to appear progressive while keeping wealth and power distribution the same; containment—redirecting calls for equality into symbolic acts instead of real change; and fragmentation—splitting the working class into racialised groups, weakening solidarity and hiding shared material interests.
Arday’s appointment was highlighted in explicitly racial terms—as Cambridge’s “youngest ever black professor.” However, this celebration was more about branding than a real commitment to racial equality. Cambridge remains largely an institution filled with the children of the British elite. Youth from the working class, regardless of race, are excluded from higher education due to cost. Academic staff face casual employment, excessive workloads, and low pay. Overall, the university’s social role has not shifted.
Identity politics elevates individuals as symbols while leaving the social reality untouched. But symbolic elevation produces symbolic vulnerability. When the far right attacks these individuals, the institutions that elevated them cannot mount a class‑based defence—because they do not operate on class principles. They operate on PR.
The far right and the crisis of liberalism
The far-right attacks on academia go beyond a mere cultural issue. They stem from the larger crisis in liberal capitalism. With social inequality at extreme levels, democratic institutions weakening, and geopolitical tensions rising, parts of the ruling class are inclined to adopt authoritarian approaches. The far right offers ideological support for these approaches by criticising universities, scholars, and democratic principles.
The campaigns targeting Gay and Arday reflect a broader trend: attacks on “critical race theory” across the United States, efforts to purge universities of left-leaning faculty, and campaigns against trans rights, LGBTQ+ students, and progressive curricula. They also include demonising student protests against war, genocide, and austerity. These initiatives serve two main purposes: mobilising reactionary segments of the petty bourgeoisie and intimidating institutions that might oppose authoritarian policies. The universities’ surrender highlights the fragility of liberalism in confronting this offensive.
The working class and the defence of democratic rights
The working class has no real stake in this intra-elite conflict, whether on the far right’s campaign against Arday or other factions. The far-right’s reactionary stance must be resisted. However, the identity-politics framework that elevated Arday as a symbol is a tool of the ruling class. It causes division among workers, replaces demands for redistribution with representation, and leads opposition into the dead end of bourgeois liberalism. Defending democratic rights on campus cannot rely on university administrations, which have repeatedly shown they will sacrifice individuals and principles to protect their financial interests.
A working-class perspective entails defending academic freedom and opposing politically motivated purges. It calls for unity among workers against racialised frameworks that hide common material interests. Universities should be transformed into institutions that serve social needs rather than corporate or state power. It also emphasises independent mobilisation of students, academic staff, and broader worker groups. The fight against racism is inseparable from the fight against capitalism, as racism is not an anomaly but a structural aspect of capitalist societies, used to divide workers and legitimise exploitation.
The deeper historical contradiction
The Arday and Gay cases highlight a core instability in elite liberal institutions: they depend on identity politics for legitimacy. This approach creates symbolic figures that attract the far right, which then weaponises these symbols to attack the institution. In response, the institution sacrifices individuals to defend itself. This recurring cycle persists because the fundamental class conflict remains unresolved. The university cannot be fundamentally changed by diversity initiatives alone; true transformation requires dismantling the capitalist system that informs its operations.
Conclusion: Toward a socialist transformation of the university
The Arday incident serves as a warning, highlighting the rise in confidence among the far right, the timidity of liberal institutions, and the failure of identity politics. It exposes the fragility of intellectual life within capitalism and emphasises the need for socialist intervention. The working class must defend democratic rights, not merely as a supplement to liberalism but as part of a larger effort to rebuild society based on equality, rational planning, and human needs. The university should be revitalised as a centre for critical thinking, scientific research, and cultural progress—rather than becoming a tool for the ruling class’s branding or a battleground for reactionary forces. Only through organised, independent action by the working class can the university be restored to fulfil its true historical purpose.
Sources and Bibliography
I. Primary Sources: Statements, Writings, and Documents
Cofnas, Nathan. Various blog posts and essays on “race realism” and meritocracy, 2018–2024. (Includes statements on racial hierarchy and academic meritocracy.)
Rufo, Christopher. Public statements and social‑media posts on DEI, Claudine Gay, and “plagiarism as a weapon of war”, 2023–2024.
Harvard University. Official statements regarding Claudine Gay’s presidency and resignation, December 2023 – January 2024.
University of Cambridge. Press releases and public statements regarding Jason Arday and responses to plagiarism allegations, 2024.
Good Law Project. Public commentary on the Arday case and Cambridge’s handling of the allegations, 2024.
St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. Statement on the termination of Noah Carl’s fellowship, 2019.
II. Secondary Sources: Journalism, Investigations, and Analysis
The Guardian. Coverage of the Jason Arday case, Cambridge’s response, and broader debates on academic integrity and DEI, 2024.
The New York Times. Reporting on Claudine Gay, plagiarism allegations, and the political campaign surrounding her resignation, 2023–2024.
The Washington Post. Analysis of the far‑right network targeting universities and DEI initiatives, 2023–2024.
Times Higher Education. Articles on academic labour conditions, casualisation, and the political pressures on universities, 2020–2024.
BBC News. Coverage of the Arday case and Cambridge’s initial defence, 2024.
Chronicle of Higher Education. Reporting on plagiarism controversies, DEI politics, and far‑right interventions in academia, 2023–2024.
III. Scholarly Works on Identity Politics, Universities, and Class
Identity Politics and Its Critique
Reed, Adolph. Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene. New Press, 2000.
Reed, Adolph & Karn, Walter Benn Michaels. “The Trouble with Disparity.”Nonsite, 2021.
Michaels, Walter Benn. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. Metropolitan Books, 2006.
Fraser, Nancy. The Old Is Dying, and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond. Verso, 2019.
Universities under Capitalism
Collini, Stefan. Speaking of Universities. Verso, 2017.
Newfield, Christopher. The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.
Bousquet, Marc. How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. NYU Press, 2008.
Giroux, Henry A. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Haymarket Books, 2014.
Academic Labour and Casualisation
UCU (University and College Union). Reports on casualisation, pay erosion, and working conditions in UK higher education, 2018–2024.
Berg, Maggie. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. University of Toronto Press, 2016.
IV. Historical and Theoretical Works on the Far Right, McCarthyism, and Ideological Struggle
Far‑Right Movements and Ideology
Mudde, Cas. The Far Right Today. Polity Press, 2019.
Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich: A New History. Pan Macmillan, 2001. (For historical context on scientific racism and eugenics.)
Camus, Renaud & the “Great Replacement” discourse. (Primary texts for understanding contemporary far‑right racial ideology.)
McCarthyism and Academic Purges
Schrecker, Ellen. No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. Oxford University Press, 1986.
Robin, Corey. Fear: The History of a Political Idea. Oxford University Press, 2004. (Useful for understanding political intimidation in intellectual life.)
Marxist Theory and Class Analysis
Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. I–III. (Foundational analysis of class, exploitation, and capitalist social relations.)
Lenin, V.I. State and Revolution. (On the role of the state and institutions under capitalism.)
Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed. (On bureaucracy, class power, and institutional degeneration.)
Trotsky, Leon. In Defence of Marxism. (On political method and class analysis.)
International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). Various statements on identity politics, the far right, and the crisis of capitalism, 2015–2024.
V. Contextual Sources: Cambridge, Harvard, and Elite Institutions
Cambridge University Equality & Diversity Office. Reports on diversity initiatives and representation, 2015–2024.
Harvard Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion. DEI frameworks and institutional mission statements, 2018–2024.
Sutton Trust. Reports on social mobility, elite universities, and class stratification in UK higher education, 2010–2024.
OECD. Education at a Glance (annual reports). (Data on access, inequality, and funding structures.)
VI. Additional Sources on Plagiarism, Academic Integrity, and Media Dynamics
Bretag, Tracey. “Challenges in Addressing Plagiarism in Higher Education.”Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 2019.
Posner, Richard. The Little Book of Plagiarism. Pantheon, 2007.
Marwick, Alice. Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online. Data & Society Research Institute, 2017. (On far‑right media ecosystems.)
Phillips, Whitney. The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists. Data & Society, 2018.
A Trumpet of Sedition 