Tarantula by Eduardo Halfon, translated by Daniel Hahn, is published by Hamish Hamilton (£10.99).

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 “As a vast, solid phalanx, the generations come on; they have the same features, and their pattern is new in the world. All wear the same expression, but it is this which they do not detect in each other. It is the one life which ponders in the philosophers, which drudges in the labourers, which basks in the poets, which dilates in the love of the women. –

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Notebooks”

“The best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group.”

Henry James 1879 biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne

‘Is imagination so fanciful that it can invent a memory and then transform it into something we understand as true?’

Eduardo Halfon

“First of all, art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of fantasy, feelings, and moods: art is not the expression of merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet; art is not assigned the goal of primarily awakening in the reader good feelings. Like science, art cognises life. Both art and science have the same subject: life, reality. But sciences analyse, art synthesises; science is abstract, art is concrete; science turns to the mind of man, art to his sensual [i.e., sensory] nature. Science cognises life with the help of concepts, art with the aid of images in the form of living, sensual contemplation.”

Aleksandr Voronsky

Eduardo Halfon is part of a new generation of Latin American writers who, to paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton, have seen further than most because they have stood on the shoulders of giants. These giants are well-known. In a recent interview, Halfon was asked about his earliest influences. “Mostly North American writers, and most of them in the short story tradition. Maybe that’s why I constantly go back to that genre. I’m essentially a short story writer. That’s where I feel most comfortable, or least uncomfortable. My technique or approach in constructing a short story is very much based on the North American tradition, much more so than the Latin American one. I feel much closer to Hemingway and Carver and Cheever, for example, than I do to Borges and Cortázar and García Márquez.[1]

Halfon and others are still paying their debt to these greats, but they are also now striking out on a new road. As Halfon succinctly put it, “ My house, then, is built on two pillars. But a writer must begin by destroying one’s house.

Like their earlier counterparts, these writers have to deal with their respective countries’ violent political pasts.  In Halfon’s case, the past is the genocidal campaign by the Guatemalan ruling elite against its Mayan and working-class population. Although Halfon clearly is influenced by Guatemala’s great writers such as Miguel Angel Asturias, Augusto Monterroso and modern day writers such  Francisco Goldman and David Unger his work is “intensely autobiographical, migratory and steeped in memory” Halfon’s focus on migration, memory and identity can be read as testimony to the real material dislocations produced by imperialism and capitalist restructuring throughout Latin America.

It is worth noting that every single Guatemalan writer or poet of note has been forced into exile due to the distinct possibility of being murdered by their respective dictators. Halfon noted this in an interview in 2015, “For the past century, Guatemalan writers have been writing and dying in exile. Miguel Ángel Asturias, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967, wrote his books about Guatemala while living in exile, in South America and Europe. He died in Paris and is buried at Père Lachaise. The great short-story writer Augusto Monterroso, after being detained by the military forces of dictator Jorge Ubico, was forced to leave the country in 1944. He fled first to Chile, then to Mexico, where he lived the rest of his life, and where he wrote most of his stories, and where he’s now buried. Luis Cardoza y Aragón, arguably Guatemala’s most important poet of the last century, suffered a similar fate —he was also forced into exile in Mexico in the 1930s, where he wrote his poetry and where he, too, died. Guatemala’s greatest playwright, Carlos Solórzano, fled the country in 1939—first to Germany, then to Mexico—and never returned. The writer Mario Payeras, a guerrilla commander in the 1970s, also wrote while exiled in Mexico, where he suddenly and mysteriously died (his remains were buried in a cemetery in the southwest of the country, but have since vanished). One of the most important Guatemalan novels of the last few decades, El Tiempo Principia en Xibalbá (Time Commences in Xibalbá), was written by the indigenous writer Luis de Lión, who in 1984 was kidnapped by military forces, tortured for twenty days, and then disappeared. His murder wasn’t confirmed until fifteen years later, in 1999, when his name and number appeared in the now infamous “Military Diary”, a haunting military document that secretly listed the fate of all the Guatemalans disappeared by the military forces between August 1983 and March 1985. Luis de Lión, born José Luís de León Díaz, is number 135. His novel was published posthumously, that most extreme of exiles.”[2]

Halfon’s recurring motifs of displacement, cross-border families, and fragmented memory are not merely personal or cultural; they are literary expressions of material processes driven by the global capitalist system. Halfon is not a Marxist, but he clearly uses these literary expressions in much the same way that the great American writer Phillip Roth did in his work to uncover the past and prepare for future struggles. How else would you understand Roth’s extraordinary prescient novel The Plot Against America?

Halfon does not explicitly examine the growth of Fascism in Guatemala. Rather, evocations in his stories are an indirect examination of the expansion of informal, precarious labour, the restructuring of national economies through neoliberal “adjustment,” and the integration of millions into transnational labour markets, all of which create the objective conditions for mass migration and social struggles.

According to the International Labour Organisation, more than 2.1 billion of the world’s 3.6 billion workers now labour in the informal economy. Platform and casual work are central mechanisms of modern labour casualisation These processes force families to fragment, livelihoods to be uprooted, and memories to be reconstituted around loss, survival and mobility, the precise themes of Halfon’s fiction. It has been said of Halfon’s collective work that it seems to flow into a single ongoing novel.

Chris Power points out that Halfon’s “ other recurring themes include Guatemalan history, the Holocaust, questions of Jewish identity, and the nature of violence. The books recycle stories, such as Eduardo’s grandfather’s experience of Auschwitz and subsequent emigration to Guatemala; the family’s relocation to the States; and Eduardo’s own career as a writer. When a novel’s narrator and its author share a name and identity, it naturally prompts questions about what is true and what is invented. But Halfon’s primary concern seems not to be with establishing facts, as a memoirist might, but to rappel as deeply as possible into those crevasses where meaning and truth disappear.”[3]

Before discussing other things, it is worth commenting on the translations of Halfon’s books, which merit a book in themselves. Eduardo Halfon’s fiction—works such as The Polish Boxer, Monastery, and The Lost Boy—explore memory, migration, identity and the tangled legacies of war and displacement. It is important to study the translations seriously and treat them not as incidental “products” but as historical-cultural documents.

For instance, Halfon’s The Polish Boxer was worked on by an international group of five translators who worked in concert with each other to deliver a very good manuscript.  These translators understand how translations shape how working people around the world encounter cultures and struggles not their own. Translation determines which voices reach mass audiences and under what political framing.

Halfon and his translators stand on the shoulders of the groundbreaking translator Gregory Rabassa. His translations helped define an international readership’s image of Latin American culture and politics. Understanding these processes exposes the cultural market’s role in commodifying exile, migration, and anti‑imperialist themes and creates a basis for challenging who benefits and who is represented.

Gregory Rabassa’s work, most famously his English translations of Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar and Clarice Lispector, offers a model for studying translation as both a literary and political activity. It is important to learn from Rabassa methodically. The reader should combine a close technical study of his translations with an analysis of the publishing, class and cultural forces that shape which books circulate internationally.

As Rabassa once wrote, “The translator, we should know, is a writer too. As a matter of fact, he could be called the ideal writer because all he has to do is write; plot, theme, characters, and all other essentials have already been provided, so he can sit down and write his ass off.”[4]

Eduardo Halfon’s new book is elliptical, memory-driven and obsessed with names, absence and family traces. Still, it is also a powerful entry point for understanding how imperialism and transnational capital shape private lives. Reading Halfon alongside the history of the United Fruit Company (later Chiquita) provides the reader with a powerful understanding of the Guatemalan civil war, fought from 1960 to 1996, which was triggered by the United States at the behest of the United Fruit Company.

The US oligarchy was the largest landowner in the Central American republic. The United Fruit, in collaboration with the US government, sanctioned and organised alongside the Guatemalan ruling elite and its military, systematic kidnappings and murders that were part of the government’s counter-insurgency campaign saw death squads murder hundreds of thousands of political opponents and Mayan people.

The United Fruit Company was not a benign employer but a transnational corporation whose profits depended on control of land, labour, and transport. In Guatemala and across Central America, UFCO backed oligarchic politics, shaped infrastructure for export agriculture, and collaborated with US state power to secure its property and markets. The company’s role in creating the “banana republic” form, where export interests dominated politics and security, helped produce recurrent repression, dispossession and intervention that set the context for the civil war and ongoing violence.

US imperialism’s hand in Guatemala (1954 coup against Árbenz, long-term support for military regimes and counterinsurgency) turned economic disputes over land and labour into matters of geopolitical strategy. The Guatemalan state served as a repressive instrument of the dominant class. In Guatemala, this meant the security forces acting to defend plantation and export interests against labour organising and land reform.

The successor firms to United Fruit have continued the pattern of corporate power shaping violence and act with impunity. Contemporary cases, such as Chiquita’s payments to Colombian paramilitaries and the company’s light legal consequences, illustrate how transnationals use force and collusion to secure profits and suppress labour, often with the tacit protection of governments.

Eduardo Halfon’s fiction, memory-driven, autobiographical and formally inventive, provides a vital entry point into understanding how class, imperialism and genocide shape subjective experience. To study Halfon in relation to the Guatemalan civil war means reading literature as historical testimony: to connect aesthetic form and private memory with the social forces that produced mass murder, displacement and the long-term campaign of state terror.

Understanding Halfon together with the historical record helps expose the continuing rule of the oligarchy, judicial impunity and US influence, factors central to contemporary struggles over land, indigenous rights and militarisation.

Halfon rarely offers direct economic history; instead, his stories register the aftershocks: absences, silences, disrupted families, migrations and the odd conjunctions of identity that result from capitalist domination. Where Halfon evokes a vanished aunt, a rented house, a childhood street, those private traces map onto structures of class power: plantations that displaced communities, export economies that enclosed common land, and states that protected corporate assets rather than popular needs.

To read Halfon politically is to read the gaps as social symptoms: the inability to name perpetrators, the sense of illegible history, the recurring motif of “not knowing” where a relative went or why a place changed. These are not merely aesthetic devices but the subjective remnant of forced migrations, economic coercion and political terror produced by export capitalism and imperialist intervention.

Like most Guatemalan writers, Halfon learned to write as if his life depended on it. For most readers of his books, it must be hard to understand that writers like Halfon are in constant fear of assassination because of what they write and uncover. A prime example of this is Francisco Goldman. His book The Art of Political Murder nearly got him killed.

In an interview with the Guardian, Halfon recounts feeling paranoid about being followed. My understanding of the political situation in Guatemala is that Halfon is not paranoid. Given Guatemala’s track record of killing writers and journalists who get in their way, it is a real threat, not just paranoia.

It is worth quoting in length from Halfon’s Guardian article. Halfon believes that many things in Guatemala are not spoken or written about.

“ Just after I published my first novel in Guatemala, in 2003, I had a beer with the Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya, who was living there at the time. We met at an old bar called El Establo. As soon as he saw me walk in, he raised his bottle of beer, congratulated me, smiled a crazy man’s smile, and then warned me to leave the country as soon as possible.

Guatemalan writers, and Guatemalans in general, have lived for almost a century now in a climate of fear. If anyone dared to speak out, they either disappeared into exile or disappeared literally. This fear is still prevalent, woven deep into the subconscious of the Guatemalan people, who, over time, have been taught to be silent. To not speak out. To not say or write words that might kill you.

The first consequence of this, of course, is overall silence. Certain things in Guatemala are not spoken or written about. The indigenous genocide in the 1980s. The extreme racism. The overwhelming number of women being murdered. The impossibility of land reform and redistribution of wealth. The close ties between the government and the drug cartels. Although these are all subjects that almost define the country itself, they are discussed and commented on only in whispers or from the outside. But a second and perhaps more dangerous consequence of a culture of silence is a type of self-censorship: when speaking or writing, one mustn’t say anything that puts oneself or one’s family in peril. The censoring becomes automatic, unconscious. Because the danger is very real. Although the days of dictators are now gone, the military is still powerful, and political and military murders are all too common.

It was at a bookstore called Sophos. I was browsing some books on the table when an elderly man came over and introduced himself. He was dressed in a coat and tie. He said he had read my novel and talked for a few minutes about his impressions. He then shook my hand again and, still holding on to it, said it had been a pleasure to meet me, that I should take care, be careful. I asked him carefully about what. He just smiled politely and went on his way. I considered it strange, but didn’t give it much thought. Maybe he was just being nice? Maybe I misinterpreted his greeting (usted cuídese, you take care)? Anyway, I had almost forgotten about it until several weeks later, when I received a phone call. The voice on the phone said I didn’t know him, but that he was calling as a friend to warn me about my enemies.”[5]

Suppose you make the effort to read Halfon’s work; it is a joy. His work opens questions about the culture of migration, the commodification of memory, and the role of literature in representing displacement.

“It is unquestionably true that the need for art is not created by economic conditions. But neither is the need for food created by economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics. It is very true that one cannot always go by the principles of Marxism in deciding whether to reject or to accept a work of art. A work of art should, in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art. But the beauty of Marxism is that it alone can explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period of history; in other words, who it was who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why.”

Notes

1.   The Purest Form of Writing, the Most Intimate Form of Reading-Eduardo Halfon, in conversation with his translators Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn, with Avinoam Patt, massreview.org/sites/default/files/10_60.3Halfom/index.pdf

The UN Historical Clarification Commission, “Guatemala: Memory of Silence”) and forensic anthropology studies on exhumations.

The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi? Francisco Goldman Atlantic Books Paperback – 1 Feb. 2010-

 Art as the Cognition of Life: Selected Writings 1911-1936 Paperback – 1 Jan. 1998by Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky (Author), Frederick S. Choate (Translator) 

5.   Mastermind, by David Unger -AKASHIC BOOKS Paperback – 19 May 2016

About The Author

 Eduardo Halfón (born 1971) is a Guatemalan novelist and essayist whose compact, often autobiographical works probe memory, identity, migration, and Jewishness in Latin America and the United States. His books — including titles translated into English such as The Polish Boxer, Monastery, and The Book of Owners — use fragmented narrative, irony and personal testimony to interrogate how individual life is shaped by history, displacement and cultural inheritance. His latest book is Tarantula.

[1] Origin Stories-www.guernicamag.com/origin-stories/

[2] Better not say too much: Eduardo Halfon on literature, paranoia and leaving Guatemala-Guardian.com.2015

[3] Tarantula by Eduardo Halfon-observer.co.uk/culture/books/article/paperback-of-the-week-tarantula-by-eduardo-halfon

[4] Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason: Translation and its Dyscontents

[5] Better not say too much: Eduardo Halfon on literature, paranoia and leaving Guatemala-Guardian.com.2015

The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin’s Greatest Enemy by Josh Ireland. Published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, 2026.

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It is hard to imagine why a writer who has not published a single work on the workers’ movement and had no previous connection to a revolutionary organisation would accept the complex task of writing a biography of Leon Trotsky.

One clue as to why Josh Ireland would accept the daunting challenge can be found on his acknowledgement page. Apart from Isaac Deutcher, Ireland thanked several right-wing historians and writers, including Stephen Kotkin. Recently, the politically loathsome Kotkin wrote:

“Why should anyone care about Leon Trotsky in this day and age? A Marxist revolutionary who opposed but ultimately joined forces with Vladimir Lenin, he fought his entire life against markets and private property, parliaments and the rule of law, defending the Soviet state even as he denounced its leader, Joseph Stalin. That utopia imploded in ignominy decades ago.[1]

Kotkin’s love of Stalin notwithstanding, one reason for these right-wingers’ ire at Trotsky’s popularity lies in a recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov. A significant number, 62 per cent of Americans aged 18–29, say they hold a “favourable view” of socialism, and 34 per cent say the same of communism.

These statistics and others caused the rapid right-wing Cato Institute and one of its attack dogs, Michael Chapman, to vomit up this unhinged comment: “This is shocking given that communism is responsible for 100 million deaths worldwide and is rooted in socialism, the same philosophy that spawned both Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s National Socialism. To favour socialism is to flirt with tyranny. Therefore, libertarians must educate more Americans to recognise the socialist actions of big government and fight against them. As Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom, “the rise of fascism and Marxism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.” He also noted that both Mussolini and Hitler started as socialists.”[2]

Ireland’s ideological friend, Kotkin, who wrote a multi-volume biography of Joseph Stalin, has received widespread attention in both bourgeois and academic circles. From a Marxist standpoint, Kotkin’s work and Ireland’s work, for that matter, must be judged not as neutral scholarship but as political interventions. Kotkin’s method and conclusions, like Ireland’s, distort class relations, which serve the ruling-class and petit-bourgeois ideological needs.

Ireland adopts a historiographical posture that substitutes personality-centred narration and postmodern relativism for a class analysis of social forces. This method raises the fundamental question: which social classes and material relations produced Stalinism and made the bureaucratic caste politically dominant? By treating Stalin as the decisive, almost autonomous actor—rather than a product and amplifier of objective social transformations and bureaucratic interests Ireland reproduces a bourgeois individualised account of history that obscures the social foundations of political power. His book contains factual distortions and a very selective use of sources.

Ireland’s The Death of Trotsky joins a very crowded market of books that adopt a journalistic tone or are popular history treatments, such as Allan Todd’s Trotsky: The Passionate Revolutionary.[3] Ireland’s book from the very start treats  Leon Trotsky’s murder in Mexico in 1940 in the manner of an individual crime story rather than a political episode which was the product of social forces, state power, in the form of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

One of Ireland’s more monstrous claims is that Stalinism was historically inevitable and that Trotsky would have acted in the same way had he defeated Stalin. Ireland’s is a teleological and ahistorical argument that collapses political struggle into fatalism. The rise of the bureaucracy was conditioned by objective isolation and by social forces inside the USSR; it was not the only possible outcome. I would offer a Marxist counterfactual viewpoint, based on the program and documented alternatives of the Left Opposition, which reveals genuine strategic alternatives that were politically feasible yet suppressed by the bureaucracy.[4]

One of the hallmarks of a serious historian is examining all the most important documents or books relevant to the subject matter. This extensive search entails copious reading and attending to the most significant archival research. However, on the latter, it is perhaps extraordinary, though not entirely fatal, that Ireland only visited two archives.

Ireland’s book examines a limited amount of standard facts, such as the GPU (Stalin’s secret police), conducting a prolonged campaign of infiltration, frame-ups and political preparation that culminated in the May 24, 1940, raid led by David Alfaro Siqueiros and the successful August 20–21 assassination by Ramón Mercader.

These stand-out facts are available almost anywhere on the internet. What troubles me greatly is that Ireland and a host of other historians writing about the assassination of Leon Trotsky refuse, point-blank, to either look at or mention the copious amounts of detailed information, including a major ongoing investigation called Security and the Fourth International, available on the World Socialist Website. Writers from the International Committee of the Fourth International and the WSWS have reviewed the facts of the case. Much of the work is groundbreaking and contains information about the assassination that no one else has uncovered. (See, for example, the ICFI’s investigation and David North’s “Trotsky’s Last Year”.[5] The ICFI/WSWS lectures and reports on the GPU plot and its methods, and Eric London’s Agents, The FBI and GPU Infiltration of the Trotskyist Movement. Ireland is either a lazy historian or is ideologically driven to ignore sources from a left-wing perspective that would counter his right-wing narrative.

As the great historian E.H Carr would always say, study the historian before you study the history. In Ireland’s case, this is put on a plate when he made the following comments: “Some writers are frauds, a good number are competent, a select few are geniuses, but all of them are procrastinators. I was a procrastinator long before I was a writer; I think it was my talent for procrastination that made me believe I might have what it took to become one. And now that I am, theoretically, paid to put words on a page, procrastination still occupies the bigger part of my day. My most productive form of procrastination is looking at old photos, specifically of the men and women I’m writing about, even more specifically, the clothes that they wear. Some of this is similar to the pleasure one gets from scrolling through a chic person’s Instagram account or a well-styled lookbook: it’s nice to see interesting people wearing interesting clothes! But I also see it as a valuable avenue of historical and psychological enquiry.

The aesthetic choices people make are as revealing of their personality and predilections as other sources, such as diaries or letters. When we dress, we make a series of choices. Even when we think we’re not making a choice – perhaps because we dress conventionally, according to the fashions or conventions of our time or place; or because we tell ourselves that we don’t care about what we wear – we are showing people something about how we view the world and how we want to engage with it.[6] This quote tells a lot about how Ireland sees the world.

The struggle between Trotsky and Stalin was one of the most important political events of the 20th century and still has a contemporary resonance. Ireland presents this struggle as a personal one. However, the conflict between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin was not merely a personal rivalry. It was a political-ideological struggle rooted in concrete class interests and the social transformations set in motion by the October Revolution, the Civil War, and the New Economic Policy (NEP). Read dialectically, the confrontation expressed opposing responses to the objective problems of building proletarian power amid economic backwardness, bureaucratic growth and international capitalist restoration.

Josh Ireland’s book, like other contributions from the milieu of post‑Soviet revisionism, must be assessed not as isolated quarrels over biography but as political products of a social and ideological conjuncture. From a Marxist, materialist standpoint, the central question is: what class interests and social forces underlie attempts to belittle Trotsky and erase the political alternatives he represented?

Definite social forces produce the post‑Soviet revisionism and the diminishment of Trotsky’s role. Ireland’s work serves bourgeois material interests and distorts the concrete historical record.

Leon Trotsky is not merely a biographical subject; his work and most importantly, the Theory of Permanent Revolution, his critique of bureaucratic degeneration, and the founding program of the Fourth International, represent an alternative political program to both capitalist restoration and Stalinist bureaucracy. Attempts to reduce Trotsky to a marginal, unreliable, or merely rhetorical figure are not neutral scholarly disputes. They are political operations that, intentionally or not, assist bourgeois ideological currents by obscuring revolutionary perspectives and legitimating the outcomes of Stalinism and post‑Soviet capitalism.

Josh Ireland’s writings participate in the post‑Soviet critique and reproduce its tendencies—then they must be read as part of that broader ideological current. Whether the aim is to reduce Trotsky to a marginal figure, to treat his writings as unreliable, or to portray Stalinist outcomes as inevitable, these propositions are political positions rooted in the shifting balance of class forces since 1991: the restoration of capitalist power in the former USSR, the triumph of market ideology, and the need among sections of the intelligentsia to reconcile with the new order.

The revival of post‑Soviet falsification is not an abstract scholarly quarrel; it corresponds to real political danger today—weakening the capacity of workers to recognise the need for independent organisation and a revolutionary program.

[1] The moral squalor stemming from communist conviction-www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/02/20/leon-trotsky-soviet-communism/

[2] Young Americans Like Socialism Too Much—That’s a Problem Libertarians Must Fix-https://www.cato.org/blog/young-americans-socialism-too-much-thats-problem-libertarians-must-fix

[3] See-keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2026/02/trotsky-passionate-revolutionary-by.html

[4] Was There An Alternative -Vadim Rogovin-Mehring Books 2021

[5] Trotsky’s Last Year-1-6 http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/20/anni-a20.html

[6] On Trotsky & Procrastination-www.williamcrabtree.co.uk/blogs/news

Voices of Thunder: Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century Naomi Baker, Reaktion Books, £16.99

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 “The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.”

Rosa Luxemburg

Naomi Baker’s new book is to be commended as she has rescued a significant number of radical Women of the seventeenth century from what E.P. Thompson once called the “enormous condescension of posterity”.[1] History and Historians in general have not been kind to women who were radicalised during the English Revolution. There is a dearth of material on women’s struggle. No major biography exists of two of the most important Leveller women, Katherine Chidley and Elizabeth Lilburne.

Baker is a senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Manchester. Her new book is well written and is a meticulous examination of women who not only had to battle against their male counterparts but also had to struggle against the violent attacks of the English aristocracy and sections of the bourgeoisie who refused to accept their democratic right to protest against social inequality and tyranny.

Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century is set within the context of the long political crisis of the 17th century, which saw commercial expansion, the rise of towns and manufacturers, a crisis of monarchy and landed privilege, and produced an explosive alignment of forces. As Frederick Engels shows,

“When Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the rising middle-class of the towns constituted its revolutionary element. It had conquered a recognised position within medieval feudal organisation, but this position, too, had become too narrow for its expansive power. The development of the middle-class, the bourgeoisie, became incompatible with the maintenance of the feudal system; the feudal system, therefore, had to fall.”[2]

As Engel correctly states, the seventeenth century was a period of social and economic upheaval in which religious dissent fused with emerging political and social currents. The decomposition of feudalism led to the emergence of new classes and struggles. The rapid growth of sects like the Quakers and Ranters, which fueled peasant and urban uprisings, was bound up with transformations in production and class alignments.

Women such as Anne Hutchinson, Margaret Fell,  Lady Anne Conway, Katherine Chidley, and the many unnamed women who participated in sects (Quakers, Ranters, Levellers’ sympathisers, and radical Baptists) played vital roles in contesting clerical and state authority, defending popular religious autonomy, and advancing early arguments for conscience, equality and popular rights. Their struggles are best understood as part of the bourgeois revolutions and the awakening of radical thought, which began with the Reformation and culminated in the 1640 English bourgeois revolution.

Religious sects took full advantage of the world turned upside down, undertaking radical pamphleteering and mass mobilisation. This created political spaces where women, both poor and rich, could express themselves as radicals, preachers, writers, and organisers. Baker believes there was no single “school”; women appeared across all economic, political, and social tendencies, but upon reading the book, it seems a significant number were protesting against social inequality. As Christopher Hill observed, the English Revolution helped many women both to establish their own independence and to visualise a total escape for the poorer classes. It was the poorer classes that suffered the greatest degradation regularly through jail, torture, war and disease.

Margaret Fell was a Quaker who combined religious dissent with organisational work within meetings and through pamphlets, arguing for spiritual equality in ways that had political consequences. The Levellers included women like Katherine Chidley, who wrote, “Have we not an equal interest with the men of this Nation, in those liberties and securities contained in the Petition of Right, and the other good laws of the land? Are any of our lives, limbs, liberties or goods to be taken from us more than from men, but by due process of law and conviction of twelve sworn men of the neighbourhood”?[3]

Leveller women like Chidley supported petitions, military grievances, and political club activity; they pressed for legal changes and denounced arbitrary power. Ranters and some Diggers, though numerically smaller, pushed the limits of acceptable discourse, challenging sexual, familial, and proprietary norms. Large numbers of women-led relief networks, parochial committees and protests against price rises and conscription-like abuses, linking economic suffering to political demands.

These activities were expressions of class interests formed by material necessity: survival, defence of household livelihoods, resistance to arbitrary levies and enclosures. For many women, the fight for social and political equality would be their first involvement in politics. It can be said without contradiction that women like Katherine Chidley and Elizabeth Lilburne laid the basis for future struggles of working-class women, such as the suffragettes.

The phenomenon of radical religious women in the seventeenth century — sectarians, prophetic preachers, petitioners and organisers among Quakers, Ranters, Baptists and other sects should be grasped scientifically by placing it in the framework of historical materialism. These women did not act in a vacuum: their ideas, forms of organisation and modes of struggle were rooted in shifting modes of production, class relations and state power.

Marxism begins from the premise that the economic base shapes the ideological superstructure. Religious movements did not float free of material life; they arose from and reflect concrete social relations. As Karl Marx maintained, there is a dialectical relationship between the economic base and the ideological superstructure writing in the book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy he makes the following point  “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.”[4]

Acts carried out by female radicals should be analysed dialectically: the religious idiom contained egalitarian content (an attack on hierarchical priesthood, the struggle for spiritual equality developed into political militancy, but it also carried conservative potential that confined it to moral appeals without linking it to collective economic struggle.

Naomi Baker’s” interest in seventeenth-century radical religious women is commendable, but the struggle of these women should be treated as a social phenomenon rooted in material conditions. Individual biographies and religious language matter, but only within a historical‑materialist account that connects ideas to class relations, production, and the state.

Radical women who expressed religious language or organised through faith-based networks must be analysed in relation to the continuity of such traditions. Are the struggles of these women grounded just in the defence of household subsistence, wages, or communal relief, or do they articulate wider class demands? Seventeenth-century women were moved from religious protest to political action; their modern counterparts must be evaluated by whether their struggles advance class action or merely moral protest.

There is a Contemporary relevance to this book. For a Marxist, the emancipation of women is inseparable from the socialist revolution. Historically, religious radicalism only played a progressive role when it politicised oppressed layers and helped forge independent class organisations. But it becomes reactionary when it replaced class struggle with appeals to conscience, charity, or bourgeois courts. Thus, comparing Naomi Baker’s seventeenth-century radical women with today’s radicals is useful only to the extent that it helps activists draw lessons for the upcoming socialist revolution.

[1]  E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 12.

[2] Socialism: Utopian and Scientific- Friedrich Engels, 1880

[3] Women’s Petition (1649)-From J. O’Faolain and L Martines, Not in God’s Image (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), pp. 266-267.

[4] A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Uncle Tom’s Children-Richard Wright-301 pages, Vintage Paperback, January 1, 1938

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Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children is a collection of essays that brutally exposes what it was like to live in the United States as a Black worker in the early 20th century.

Born in 1908, Richard Wright is by far one of the most important working-class writers of the 20th century. His major works, Black Boy, Native Son, and his essays are not merely literary achievements; they are social documents that analyse how material conditions, class relations, and racial domination shape consciousness and behaviour. Wright’s development from a Southern sharecropper’s son to a writer who engaged with Communist and socialist circles in the 1930s exemplifies the dialectical relation between objective social conditions and subjective formation: economic precarity, social exclusion and how the violence of Jim Crow produced a political sensibility that sought collective, systemic remedies rather than individualised responses.

Wright’s method is fundamentally Marxist in orientation, even if he did not always fully self-identify as an orthodox Marxist. This is evident in his attitude toward Leon Trotsky. Wright was strongly attracted to Marxist analysis and to anti‑Stalinist critiques. Many intellectuals of Wright’s generation viewed Trotsky, who combined a searching analysis of the Soviet degeneration with a firm commitment to working‑class internationalism, as a compelling theoretical and moral reference. Trotsky’s dialectical materialist method and his insistence that the proletariat must be politically independent of bourgeois and bureaucratic forces resonated with anti‑racist writers who refused to subordinate the struggle of Black people to existing parties and state apparatuses.

Wright was not a Trotskyist in the doctrinal sense of an allegiance to the Fourth International; rather, his attraction to Trotskyist ideas was of the intellectual and moral kind: Trotsky’s critique of Stalinism, his emphasis on world revolution, and his analysis of how class relations shape consciousness offered resources for Wright’s own attempts to understand the racial question within world capitalism.

His characters in Uncle Tom’s Children show that racism is not a metaphysical or cultural “essence” but a social relation rooted in property, labour markets and the political organisation of capitalist society. Bigger Thomas in Native Son is comprehensible not as an expression of immutable racial pathology, but as the product of exclusion, proletarianization, and the social powerlessness imposed by capitalist and racial rule. Wright adopts a materialist conception of history to understand the social, economic, and political problems facing both black and white populations. The black working class holds that ideas and racial ideologies arise from and reflect class structures and economic imperatives, not the other way around.

Like many intellectuals and workers, Wright’s formative years and his political maturation occurred amid the Great Depression, the growth of industrial labour militancy, the rise of the Communist movement in the United States, and the international polarisations of the 1930s and 1940s. These were years in which the boundaries between cultural expression and political struggle blurred: literature became a form of social investigation and a weapon for political education.

Wright’s involvement with left-wing circles, his brushes with Communist Party orthodoxy, and his eventual break illustrate the complex interplay among revolutionary aspiration, the bureaucratic limitations of existing organisations, and the need for a revolutionary strategy rooted in the working class. His later travels and expatriation in Paris also reflect the international character of his struggle.

Richard Wright’s literature—from Black Boy to Native Son—remains an essential starting point for any serious discussion of race, class and the social psychology of oppression in the United States. Wright wrote as a proletarian intellectual: his fiction and essays insist that the oppression of Black people is rooted not in a metaphysical “racial DNA” but in specific social relations—segregated labour markets, violent property relations and the structural violence of capitalism.

Wright’s work traces how poverty, wage labour, discrimination and the threat of racial violence shape individual psychology and mass politics. In Native Son, Bigger Thomas’s crimes are not metaphysical expressions of an immutable racial pathology; they are the social consequences of exclusion, desperate material conditions and systemic dehumanisation. Wright’s political development—his engagement with communist and socialist circles in the 1930s—further grounded his view that the fight against racism must be situated within the struggle against capitalism and private property.

It is a testament to his political foresight and integrity that his books are still widely read today and remain relevant. Wright’s insistence that liberation requires systemic change remains crucial as workers today confront mass poverty, racist policing, mass incarceration and an economy reorganised around austerity and profit. The ruling class weaponises racism to prevent working-class unity; Wright’s work shows the political cost of accepting explanations that dissociate race from class and capitalism.

Wright’s political insights have even greater resonance in today’s debates, such as the controversy surrounding the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which presented a racialist view of historical developments. The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) critiqued the 1619 Project. Extensive documentation of this struggle can be found on the World Socialist Website.[1]

The SEP argued that the 1619 Project substituted racialist narratives for class analysis and treated racism as an immutable feature of American “DNA” rather than a historically specific product of capitalist development. Wright was not mentioned in the 1619 Project. For good reason, his materialist orientation not only cuts across the 1619 Project’s racialist interpretation of history, but also offers an antidote: it compels us to analyse how slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, migration, and proletarianization transformed social relations and created class potentialities for solidarity, unionism, and revolutionary politics.

To summarise from the standpoint of contemporary political life, Wright’s life and work underscore the necessity of connecting literary and intellectual inquiry to an independent working-class political struggle. Richard Wright remains a living challenge to the politics of identity that divorces race from class. His materialist, proletarian humanism points the way: the liberation of Black people is bound to the emancipation of the working class as a whole. Only through a united, politically independent working‑class struggle can the social relations that produce racism be abolished. Richard Wright’s legacy is both cultural and political: he challenges fatalism, rejects racial essentialism, and insists that emancipation requires transforming the social relations of production. His work remains a vital resource as a class-based alternative to capitalism.

[1] The New York Timesâ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History

David North; Thomas Mackaman-Mehring Books

Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir, Paperback by Norm MacDonald – 1 Jan. 1900, Random House

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The only time having a cult following is beneficial is when you are actually in a cult…However, being a stand-up comedian with a cult following means that most folks hate your guts.

—Norm Macdonald

“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others”.

Groucho Marx

“ I am humorous, but the law bids me write seriously. I am audacious, but the law commands that my style be modest. [. . . .] The universal modesty of the mind is reason, that universal liberality of thought which reacts to each thing according to the latter’s essential nature.”

Karl Marx

 “To live outside the law, you must be honest”. 

Bob Dylan

By any stretch of the imagination, Norm Macdonald’s Based on a True Story is not exactly a factual memoir. In fact, I would say there is hardly any factual basis for it, but it is a very funny read. As David Letterman said, “I have read Based on a True Story, and I believe it to be largely bullshit, but it is very, very, very funny!” It is not entirely made up of bullshit, but it is sprinkled with a few truths; however, most events do not hold much water.

Norm Macdonald (1959–2021) was one of the most important voices in late-20th and early-21st-century North American comedy: deadpan delivery, an appetite for subversion, and a tendency to take jokes into uncomfortable territory. For the reader studying Macdonald is not merely cultural nostalgia but an opportunity to sharpen critical tools: to examine how humour reflects class relations, ideological currents, individual psychology and the shifting political landscape of the ruling class and its institutions. It is fair to say that Macdonald stood on the shoulders of a long list of great American comics, including Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin, to name but a few.

My introduction to Norm Macdonald was through the superb American Comedy The Middle.[1] I was unaware of his history on Saturday Night Live (SNL) or his groundbreaking stand-up comedy. When Macdonald was told he had a cult following, he replied in the book, “I quickly developed a cult following. That sounds pretty good, but the truth is it’s the last thing you want to develop. The only time having a cult following is a great thing is when you are actually in a cult. Then you get to be a cult leader, and life is milk and honey… everyone thinks you are God… you get to lie down with all the ladies from the cult… In a short matter of time, you become drunk with power and begin to lie down with the men, also, not because you want to, but just because you can. Yes, being a cult leader with a cult following is fine work if you can find it. However, being a stand-up comedian with a cult following means that most folks hate your guts.”[2]

Macdonald’s character in The Middle was Uncle Rusty. It is extremely difficult to determine Rusty’s social type. Certainly, he was, in the past, a worker, but he was a bit of a grifter and, at times, represented small-business conservatism, also exhibiting working-class insecurity. Macdonald’s work on The Middle is a masterful example of comedy, both in form and content. His comic timing, silences, and persona were a joy to watch.

Macdonald’s comedy exemplifies the tensions of a semi-petty-bourgeois cultural milieu whose ironic detachment both reflects and reproduces social atomisation. His recurring themes are scepticism of elites and a delight in subverting norms, but often a retreat into cleverness and anecdote. He offers a case study in how cultural forms can register genuine grievances without pointing to collective, class-based solutions.

The Middle sitcom captures the rhythms of precarious, small-town life under late capitalism: juggling low wages, shrinking public services, stalled upward mobility and the cultural weight of respectability politics. The Middle” (the ABC sitcom) and a character like “Uncle Rusty” function, in cultural terms, as a compact social text: they reflect and reproduce the values, anxieties and ideological compromises of a broad layer of American life — the suburban, small town and petty bourgeois milieu often called “middle America.”

Rusty and Macdonald, for that matter, were rebels without a cause. He certainly had an anti-authoritarian air. Rather than adhering to a strict ideology, his comedy and public persona focused on refusing to pander to audiences or authority figures, such as when he mocked the idea of “violent terrorists” respecting velvet ropes during the January 6th Capitol riot.

Through his character Uncle Rusty, Macdonald critiques cultural conservatism and populist resentment: he typically combines sharp jabs of humour aimed at elites with an affirmation of traditional family values, localism, and personal responsibility. This mixture can predispose audiences to see social problems as moral or personal failures rather than systemic contradictions. However, by framing Rusty’s flaws as quirks and resolving them within the family, the show channels potential political anger into private reconciliation and comic relief. This is a common function of mainstream sitcoms in stabilising social relations. At times, the character can expose managerial stupidity or precarity, offering openings for critique. The decisive question is whether those openings are developed into a class explanation or left as individual anecdotes; the show mostly expresses the latter.

As capitalism intensifies precarity, sitcoms like The Middle shape millions of impressions about who is to blame and what can be done. Understanding the show’s pedagogy helps organisers convert diffuse resentment into class consciousness by exposing the gap between individual coping and collective action.

Comedy is not a neutral amusement; it is a social form rooted in class relations and the material conditions that produce ideas, tastes and collective sensibilities. From a Marxist standpoint, comedy must be analysed as part of cultural production: its forms, audiences and effects are shaped by the economic base and the class forces that struggle within a given historical epoch. Historically, comedic forms reflect shifts in class power.

Carnival, farce and satire in pre-capitalist and early-capitalist societies allowed subordinate classes to mock elites—ritualised inversions that temporarily loosened hierarchy. Under capitalist commodity relations, new comic genres emerged (burlesque, stand-up, situation comedy), shaped by urbanisation, wage-labour rhythms, mass media, and the commodification of leisure. The avant-garde and revolutionary epochs produced satire and grotesque comedy that targeted bureaucrats, profiteers, and false consciousness; conversely, periods of reaction saw comedy co-opted to reinforce nationalist, patriarchal, and consumerist norms.

Today, comedy circulates globally through streaming platforms and social media, shaped by corporate algorithms and advertising imperatives. Many comedians occupy precarious economic positions while addressing issues—inequality, racism, surveillance—that concern working people. This contradiction produces both sharp, politically conscious satire and commodified “safe” humour that normalises neoliberal individualism.

The book has an overall tone of melancholy, of sadness, which Norm carried throughout his life. But he also carried an antidote to that in a sharp, rebellious comedy. Both the book and the TV series The Middle are worth reading and watching. Macdonald was a fine exponent of his craft.

[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Middle_(TV_series)

[2] Based on a True Story, Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald 

Trotsky, The Passionate Revolutionary by Allan Todd Pen & Sword History Hardcover – 18 July 2022

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I do not measure the historical process by the yardstick of one’s personal fate. ‘… I know no personal tragedy…In prison, with a book or a pen in hand, I experienced the same sense of deep satisfaction that I did at the mass meetings of the revolution.’

Leon Trotsky

Allan Todd wrote Trotsky: The Passionate Revolutionary (2022) to provide a more comprehensive, humanised, and nuanced portrait of Leon Trotsky, moving beyond the one-dimensional, often heavily biased, or overly academic portrayals in existing literature. Todd aimed to capture the intense, multi-faceted “passions” that drove Trotsky, including his revolutionary, intellectual, and romantic sides.

Alan Todd’s epithet “the passionate revolutionary” points to an honest and inspiring aspect of Trotsky. But passion must be understood dialectically as passion informed by scientific Marxism: programmatic rigour, historical analysis, and an international perspective. For workers studying revolutionary Marxism today, Trotsky’s life offers both an example of moral and intellectual courage and a method. His writings are responses to material realities. He sought to measure leaders and programs by their relation to class interests.

Todd rejects an overtly political or academic examination of Leon Trotsky’s life as a professional revolutionary. Instead, he explores Trotsky as a complete human being, covering not only his political and military roles (the 1905/1917 revolutions, the Red Army) but also his love of literature, personal life, and his relationships with his family and companions.

The book examines Trotsky’s intellectual and literary side and his “passionate” personal relationships—including his relationship with Frida Kahlo and his long-term partner, Natalya Sedova—which are often overlooked in standard, purely political biographies. The book documents his “Passionate” Activism and how it fueled his revolutionary work, his ability to organise the Red Army, and his role as a leading opponent of Stalin.

As a teacher rather than a historian, Todd tends not to evaluate Trotsky from a political perspective. I have always believed that as a historian, you should orient research toward questions that matter politically, especially when you write a biography of such a political man as Trotsky. Since Trotsky remains politically contentious, many recent books are overtly polemical. There has been a massive revival of anti‑Trotsky falsifications in the post‑Soviet period. Todd’s book offers little more than a superficial or unsystematic rebuttal. While he does not recycle all the political slanders aimed at Trotsky, the author does not engage deeply with Trotsky’s primary texts, and it would appear that no archives have been consulted.

Having said that, Alan Todd’s portrait of Leon Trotsky as “the passionate revolutionary” does capture a truth, but that truth must be grasped in scientific, historical terms. Trotsky was not merely an energetic personality but a theorist and strategist whose ideas arose from concrete social struggles and the objective crises of early 20th-century capitalism. To understand Todd’s emphasis on passion correctly requires placing Trotsky’s life and ideas within the materialist conception of history, the dialectical method, and the programmatic legacy of the Fourth International.

Trotsky’s “passion” was inseparable from his commitment to revolutionary Marxism: the theory of permanent revolution, the insistence on the international character of socialist transformation, and the principled critique of bureaucratic degeneration. Trotsky’s writings and interventions on the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, on the organisation and strategy of the Red Army, and on the tasks of the working class under conditions of isolation, are not romantic gestures but scientific responses to concrete class relations and world-historical contradictions. His method treated political programs as the working out of objective social contradictions, not as personal rhetoric.

Trotsky lived through the decisive turning points of the capitalist and imperialist crisis: World War I, revolution, civil war, the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet state, and the rise of fascism. His theory of permanent revolution emerged from an analysis of how capitalist development and the world market shaped class alliances in backward countries; it insisted that the fate of socialist gains could not be separated from the international movement of the proletariat.

Equally important was Trotsky’s struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy. He understood Stalinism not as an aberrant personality cult but as the political expression of objective isolation and the defeat of working-class movements internationally.

This scientific content is often obscured by bourgeois or post‑Soviet revisionism that reduces Trotsky to caricature. Todd’s uncritical use of the historian Robert Service, who is one of the leading attack dogs of the Post-Soviet School of falsification, is problematic, to say the least.

Robert Service is a contemporary British historian best known for biographies of Soviet leaders, most notably his works on Stalin and Trotsky, and for a widely read history of world communism. For anyone committed to a scientific, materialist study of history, Service’s work must be examined critically: it is essential to understand both what he contributes (archival work and narrative synthesis for a broad audience) and where he fails, both methodologically and politically.

Historiography shapes political consciousness. Service’s approach illustrates how ostensibly scholarly writing can function as ideological weaponry either to rehabilitate bureaucratic regimes, as in his treatment of Stalin, or to discredit revolutionary leadership, as in his treatment of Trotsky.

David North writes: Trotsky: A Biography is a crude and offensive book, produced without respect for the most minimal standards of scholarship. Service’s “research,” if one wishes to call it that, has been conducted in bad faith. His Trotsky is not history but rather an exercise in character assassination. Service is not content to distort and falsify Trotsky’s political deeds and ideas. Frequently descending to the level of a grocery store tabloid, Service attempts to splatter filth on Trotsky’s personal life. Among his favourite devices is to refer to “rumours” about Trotsky’s intimate relations, without even bothering to identify the rumour’s source, let alone substantiate its credibility.

Trotsky once declared, as he defended himself against the slanders of Stalin’s regime: “There is not a stain on my revolutionary honour.” Service, however, portrays Trotsky as an individual without any honour. He attempts to discredit Trotsky not only as a revolutionary politician, but also as a man. Service’s Trotsky is a heartless and vain individual who used associates for his own egotistical purposes, a faithless husband who callously abandoned his wife, and a father who was coldly indifferent to his children and even responsible for their deaths. “People did not have to wait long before discovering how vain and self-centred he was,” Service writes of Trotsky in a typical passage. Service’s biography is loaded with such petty insults. Trotsky was “volatile and untrustworthy.” “He was an arrogant individual” who “egocentrically assumed that his opinions, if expressed in vivid language, would win him victory.” “His self-absorption was extreme. As a husband, he treated his first wife shabbily. He ignored the needs of his children, especially when his political interests intervened.”[1]

Although Todd does not go as far as Service in his hatred of Trotsky, the book contains numerous lies, misunderstandings, and outright political opposition to Trotsky’s politics and behaviour. The first thing that strikes you about Todd is that he has never been in or around a revolutionary party or movement. Otherwise, he would not have dared to print that Trotsky suffered from “Intellectual Overconfidence”. Despite recognising “the power of the written word”, he spends some time arguing that this was his primary political weakness. He suggests that Trotsky overestimated the extent to which “clarity of ideas” would prevail within the Bolshevik Party.

As noted at the beginning of this article, Todd fails to situate Trotsky and his struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy within its broader social and political context. As I said, it is vitally important to study Trotsky’s writings as responses to material realities, measure leaders and programs by their relation to class interests, and organise political independence rooted in the international unity of the working class. Otherwise, you understand nothing about the political conflicts inside and outside of the Bolshevik Party during and after its rise to power. Certainly, he understands nothing of the objective basis that played a crucial role in Trotsky’s fall from power. If Todd believes that words are not as important as actions, why did Stalin have Trotsky murdered?

The assertion that Trotsky failed to identify Stalin as a serious threat early on is not only laughable but a lie. Trotsky did not simply “fail to see” Stalin as a threat in the sense of being blind to the danger. Rather, he identified early the growth of bureaucracy and the risks to the revolution. Still, he misjudged how quickly and effectively that social layer could consolidate power through control of the Party apparatus. That combination of correct diagnosis and political miscalculation shaped the tragic outcome.

Todd’s lack of political insight and historical knowledge leads him to assert that Trotsky’s so-called inability to build alliances was merely personal. While Trotsky’s difficulties in building long-lasting political alliances were real and consequential, they stemmed from objective class and institutional conditions within the Soviet state, from the social rise of a bureaucracy, and from the international isolation of the revolution, not from any perceived personal failings.

To sum up, it would appear that the central thesis of Todd’s work is that Trotsky was a “literary” figure and that had the revolution not intervened, he would have remained so. Todd’s attempt at counterfactuals falls flat on its arse. Leon Trotsky was far more than a “literary figure.” While his gifts as a writer and polemicist were extraordinary, his historical role flowed from objective class struggles and particular material conditions. The October Revolution both revealed and required Trotsky’s capacities as organiser, military leader, strategist and theorist. Reducing him to an aesthetic talent divorced from politics misunderstands how theory, leadership, and social forces interpenetrate under capitalism and revolution.

AUTHOR: Allan Todd was a teacher, exam workshop leader, and senior examiner in 20th-century/Modern World History for over 25 years. He also lectured in Modern European and World History for the Extra-Mural Boards of Cambridge University and the University of East Anglia, and has written numerous GCSE, A Level, and IB History textbooks and revision guides, including Revolutions, 1789-1917.

[1] In The Service of Historical Falsification A Review of Robert Service’s Trotsky: A Biography Socialistdemocracy.org/Reviews/ReviewTrotskyABiography.html

What The Rich Don’t Tell The Poor: Conversations with Guatemalan Oligarchs Roman Krznaric-Paperback – 16 Feb. 2022

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Krznaric’s book is a fascinating and valuable insight into the modern Guatemalan oligarchy. He examines the inner life of the oligarchy and how it has maintained its power and privilege for over three centuries. It is a groundbreaking work of political and sociological analysis based on wide-ranging personal interviews.

What The Rich Don’t Tell The Poor was written in 2006 and stems from Krznaric’s 2003 PhD thesis, The World View of the Oligarch in Guatemalan Politics.[1] However, due to political and literary differences with publishers, the book was not published in its original form until 2022. As Krznaric writes in the 2022 preface, although the book is ten years old and much has changed in Guatemala in the intervening years, the oligarchy remains in complete control of Guatemala’s political and economic life.

Guatemala is well known for its extreme wealth inequalities, which have been caused by centuries of economic and political domination by an oligarchy comprising around fifty families of European descent.  In this case, the term “oligarchs” usually refers to a small group of influential families (often called “las familias”) that have maintained economic and political dominance since colonial times. As of 2022, approximately 245 individuals in Guatemala held an accumulated wealth of US$30 billion. The oligarchs dominate crucial sectors of the Guatemalan economy, including export agriculture (sugar, coffee, bananas), finance and banking, construction materials (cement), and consumer goods. Families such as the Herrera Family: Owners of Ingenio Pantaleón, the largest sugar production estate in the country, with significant interests in banking (e.g., Banco Agromercantil), the Castillo Family: A historically substantial family involved in the production of beer and other industries and the Novella Family: Major players in the cement industry for generations. These families and others make Guatemala one of the most unequal countries on the planet.

As Krznaric relates:  “Getting the oligarchs to speak openly was a challenge. Using all I knew about ethnographic and oral history interviewing techniques, I tried to be courteous rather than confrontational – a strategy that created an atmosphere which felt relaxed, unthreatening and conversational. I quickly learned that accusing them of violating human rights or exploiting workers made them clam up. However, encouraging them to share stories about their lives and experiences lowered their guard and led them to reveal much more about themselves. Rather than offering critical comments on the spot during the interviews, I found that I could defer my critiques until I was writing about them and interpreting what they said, as I do in What The Rich Don’t Tell The Poor.”[2]

Global context: Global Oligarchy and local oligarchy

The global charity Oxfam has recently released several reports that document what every worker knows: an accelerating concentration of wealth and power in the hands of an oligarchy whose fortunes have exploded even as mass poverty, precarious work and state austerity deepen. The charity’s data shows that billionaire wealth surged to a record $18.3 trillion in 2025, and that the wealthiest handful of individuals now own more than the wealth of billions of people.  The number of global billionaires recently increased by 30% to approximately 2,750 individuals, who together control more wealth than the planet’s poorest 4.6 billion people.

As Krznarics correctly states in the book, Guatemala’s oligarchy functions as an extension of global imperialist interests. Multinational agribusiness, mining and energy firms rely on local oligarchs to secure land, labour, and concessions. Yankee capitalism has historically backed Guatemalan oligarchs and their militarisation of Guatemalan life and carried out numerous coups to protect these interests, from the 1954 CIA overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz to more recent economic and political interventions. The oligarchs’ rule requires a combination of legal-clientelist institutions and outright coercion. They co-opt political parties, control key state ministries, and use the judiciary to neutralise opponents. When that fails, repression and violence are employed against organisers, Indigenous communities and trade-union militants.

The struggles of the Guatemalan working class against the oligarchs are not documented in the book. But these struggles are not isolated: the working class has challenged the supply chains and profit zones of global capital. Resistance to extractivism (mining and hydroelectric dams), land grabs for agro-exports, and labour discipline in maquilas strike at imperialist accumulation. International solidarity can disrupt investments, cut off supply-chain legitimacy and expose the complicity of multinational corporations and imperialist states. The global working class has an interest in supporting these struggles because they weaken the power of an oligarchy that helps sustain the world capitalist order and its wars.

Summary

Roman Krznaric’s book is a vital piece of journalism and provides essential insight into the world of the Guatemalan oligarchs. Krznaric’s suggestions for countering these oligarchs have profound weaknesses.  While addressing the moral and psychological gaps between wealthy elites and the poor, he argues that, to reduce inequality, workers and youth should challenge the oligarchs to change habits, broaden empathy, cultivate longer time horizons, and reframe public narratives so that disadvantaged people can adopt attitudes and strategies associated with success.

Krznaric’s approach is fundamentally an appeal to moral persuasion. He asks the wealthy to change hearts and minds — to exercise empathy, mentor, and open networks — relying on their voluntary moral action rather than on structural compulsion. He treats inequality partly as a deficit of habits and imagination among low-income people that can be remedied by teaching the “right” psychology and practices. These elements make the argument attractive to readers who prefer non-confrontational, reformist routes: it promises measurable improvements through persuasion, education and moral example, without directly challenging property relations or class power.

As Marxists point out, inequality is rooted in property relations, the extraction of surplus value and state power. Teaching better habits or eliciting elite empathy cannot change the class relations that produce mass poverty. Moral appeals to elites presuppose goodwill and avoid building an independent working class  

[1] The World View of the Oligarch in Guatemalan Politics.A thesis submitted for the degree of PhD in the Government Department of the University of Essex, Colchester, UK 2003

[2] Want to Challenge the Elite? Then first Understand What Makes Them Tick. frompoverty.oxfam.org.uk/want-to-challenge-the-elite-then-first-understand-what-makes-them-tick/

The Holocaust: An Unfinished History by Dan Stone (Penguin). £12.99

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The Holocaust: An Unfinished History by Dan Stone is a useful if limited account of how and why the Nazi’s perpetrated the murder of six million jews. Reading Stone’s book while a genocide takes place in Gaza and Trump’s fascist government carries out state-sponsored murders is a brutal reminder that fascism is on the rise again and did not end with the Nazi’s Holocaust.

Stone is the director of the Royal Holloway’s Holocaust Research Institute in London.  He is the author of over 20 books, including Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and The Liberation of the Camps. The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (2023), Concentration Camps: A Short History (2017), and Histories of the Holocaust (2010).

Stone’s book has a subtitle called ‘The Unfinished History,’ which probably alludes to the number of books on or about the Holocaust, which is approaching 40,000. But as the Marxist writer David North says:

“Here we encounter a terrible problem: For all that has been said and written about the Holocaust, it remains a strangely obscure event. A vast amount of empirical data about the Holocaust has indeed been collected. We possess detailed information about how the Nazis organised and executed their “Final Solution,” the murder of six million European Jews. And yet the issues that are central to an understanding of the Holocaust—its historical origins, political causes and, finally, its place in the history of the twentieth century—have, with very few exceptions, been dealt with poorly. This is, really, an intolerable state of affairs. The one basic question raised by the Holocaust, “Why did it happen?” is precisely that to which it is most difficult to obtain an answer.”[1]

It must be said that Stone gives a good go at answering North’s question. Stone’s book provides a “brisk, compelling and scholarly” account that seeks to supplement the vast historiography already in place. Stone argues against the historiography that the Holocaust was exclusively a German project, highlighting the extensive collaboration and independent murders from other European nations like Romania and France.

While accepting the idea that the Holocaust was an “industrial genocide” taking place at the main concentration camps, Stone supplements this analysis with other shocking facts that millions were killed elsewhere and by different methods, too. The “Holocaust by bullets” was responsible for 1.5 million Jewish deaths between late 1941 and the spring of 1942. In late 1944, as the Russian army advanced westwards towards Germany, the Nazis evacuated the camps. They forced the 750,000 or so surviving Jewish inmates onto “death marches”, sometimes over vast distances in the winter. This claimed another 250,000 victims, often shot by SS guards when they collapsed and could no longer walk.  

Ideology

Stone’s examination of Nazi ideology is to be welcomed. He argues that for too long, Nazi ideology has been downplayed. Stone is critical of the post-war tendency to deny any political coherence to the Nazis’ ideas. He believes that Nazi ideology represented a radicalisation of ruling class ideas of nationalism, imperialism and race. 

He says that the Nazis didn’t have a developed programme for genocide worked out in advance. But he says we need to take seriously their ideological motivation, which always harboured a genocidal potential capable of being unleashed under certain circumstances. 

While Stone does not accept the right-wing theory that the Holocaust is such a terrible event that it defies a rational explanation, he pays little attention to the historian’s ability to comprehend the forces that drive the social—or, more precisely, the antisocial—activity of man. In other words, Stone tends to downplay Marxist historians’ attempt to use historical science and political theory to understand the Holocaust.

Although Stone uses a large number of historians to examine Nazi ideology, he mostly ignores any Marxist-based historiography. A simple reading of the writings of Leon Trotsky or Abraham Leon, to name just two Marxists, would give a historian a far deeper insight into the rise of fascism and of Nazi Ideology.[2]

Stone’s use of Ernst Bloch is problematic to say the least. Bloch was not a classical Marxist. Bloch (1885–1977) occupies a complex position in Marxist thought. He is best known for his attempt to retrieve utopian hope as an element of Marxist theory—most famously in The Principle of Hope—insisting that human longing and anticipatory consciousness matter for politics. From the standpoint of classical Marxism and the continuity of the Fourth International, Bloch’s contribution must be assessed dialectically: what in his work advances the materialist understanding of history, and what tendencies lead away from the independent revolutionary politics of the working class?

Bloch insisted that utopian impulses—aspirations, anticipations, images of a better world—are not mere illusions but social phenomena rooted in objective contradictions. He sought to recuperate the emotional and imaginative dimensions of social life that orthodox economic or “vulgar” readings of Marxism can marginalise. This emphasis corresponds to Marxism’s insistence that human consciousness is shaped by social being; yet classical Marxism places primary explanatory weight on the development of the productive forces and class relations as the motive forces of history. Bloch’s insistence on hope supplements but must not displace the materialist analysis of how objective conditions—production, class struggle, political institutions—generate revolutionary possibilities. To say that Bloch was “unusually” the only Marxist to take fascism seriously is not only wrong but is a political lie.

Another writer missing from Stone’s work is Konrad Heiden.[3] Heiden’s biography of Hitler is worth reading. Heiden’s insight into Hitler’s anti-Semitism is worth an extensive examination.

According to Heiden, “Hitler hated the whole great sphere of human existence which is devoted to the regular transference of energy into product, and he hated the men who had let themselves be caught and crushed in this process of production. All his life, the workers were for him a picture of horror, a dismal, gruesome mass … everything which he later said from the speaker’s platform to flatter the manual worker was pure lies.

Heiden explains Hitler’s demonic obsession with the Jews. In Mein Kampf, Hitler explained how his conversion to anti-Semitism flowed from his encounters with the labour movement. It was among the workers that Hitler first came into contact with Jews. He then discovered, to his amazement, that many Jews played prominent roles in the labour movement. “The great light dawned on him,” wrote Heiden. “Suddenly, the ‘Jewish question’ became clear. … The labour movement did not repel him because Jews led it[4]The Jews repelled him because they led the labour movement. Heiden concluded, “It was not Rothschild, the capitalist, but Karl Marx, the Socialist, who kindled Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitism. ”Stone has profited intellectually from a careful study of Heiden’s biography of Hitler.

Given that Stone has conducted extensive historiographical work, he has written 20 books on or about the Holocaust; his conclusions on how to fight modern-day genocide and the rise of fascism are troubling, to say the least. He writes, “The fact is that Holocaust education goes out of the window if people feel their life chances are narrowing; nothing in the end can stop people from supporting these dark forces in times of crisis.”

This is extraordinarily fatalistic. The goal is not merely to “know” the Holocaust as an isolated tragedy, but to understand its roots in class, imperialism and political defeat—and to transform that understanding into organised political action to build the international socialist movement that can prevent future barbarism. From a Marxist standpoint, Stone’s empirical and historiographical contributions are necessary but not sufficient. Marxism begins with the materialist method: social phenomena, including ideologies and mass crimes, are rooted in concrete material relations—class structures, property relations, state formation and the competitive dynamics of imperialism. The destruction of mass working-class political organisations left the proletariat unable to interpose itself as an independent social force; this political vacuum was decisive.

[1] The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html

[2]wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Struggle_Against_Fascism_in_Germany

[3]wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Heiden

[4] Konrad Heiden, Der Führer, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1944)

What in Me is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost By Orlando Reade, Jonathan Cape, 272pp, £22

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Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.

John Milton

“Innocence, Once Lost, Can Never Be Regained. Darkness, Once Gazed Upon, Can Never Be Lost.”

John Milton

“Milton, for example, who wrote Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. In contrast, the writer who delivers hackwork for his publisher is a productive worker. Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature. Later on, he sold the product for £5 and, to that extent, became a dealer in a commodity.”

Karl Marx -Economic Works of Karl Marx 1861-1864

What in Me is Dark is a fascinating account of how John Milton’s Paradise Lost influenced a whole coterie of radical and not-so-radical people, ranging from the former Trotskyist C L R James, the black nationalist Malcom X, to the right-wing fanatic Jordan Peterson.

In the book’s introduction, Reade attempts to situate Milton and his Paradise Lost within the context of the English bourgeois revolution. In a recent interview with the British Socialist Workers Party, Reade was asked, “What was John Milton’s relationship with the English Revolution?”

Reade answered, “By the end of the 1630s, Milton believed that the Church of England bishops were a threat to the liberty of protestant English people. This was the bedrock of his radical politics. Religious freedom was very closely connected to the idea of freedom to be a poet. Poets needed to be free, as Milton said in Paradise Lost, he was justifying the ways of god to man. He wrote the poem after the utter defeat of his political cause.”[1]

Reade is not a radical and has a perfunctory understanding of the English Bourgeois revolution. Describing Oliver Cromwell as “ruthless” and the revolution itself as a “failed Revolution”. The SWP did not challenge Reade’s lightness of touch regarding the bourgeois revolution, nor did they ask why Reade ignored the writings of Christopher Hill, whose book on Milton is extremely valuable in understanding the defeat of the revolution and how and why the monarchy was restored so easily without a shot being fired.[2]

A former SWP member, John Rees, offers a better summation of Milton’s importance to the English Revolution: “When the monarchy was restored in 1660, Milton was imprisoned. He narrowly escaped execution and lived to write his deep poetic meditation on the human experience of revolutionary change, Paradise Lost. The essential purpose of this great epic was a meditation on why, if the revolutionary cause was good, it had not triumphed. His prism for viewing this question was the original fall of man, the story of Adam and Eve. Milton concluded that greater enlightenment, education, and culture must make human beings fit to receive the divine providence of revolution. Even in defeat, Milton looked forward to the rebirth of hope. His own role in hastening that day, he wrote, was to “sing unchanged”.[3]

Interpretations of Milton matter because they inform political vocabularies: Milton’s critique of censorship (Areopagitica) and his republican prose can be marshalled for democratic struggles, while other readings can be used to justify hierarchies or cultural conservatism. John Rees’s interpretation should be assessed to see whether it advances working‑class political independence or adapts Milton to reformist or managerial politics. My understanding of Rees’s politics would side with the latter interpretation.

What in Me is Dark is Reade’s first book and emerged from his experiences as a doctoral student at Princeton and as a teacher at a New Jersey prison for five years. Reade is now a professor at Northeastern University, London. His BA and PhD were in English Literature, and he holds an MA in Renaissance Studies.

Paradise Lost has been read and written about by a huge literary and political glitterati, including Blake, Wordsworth, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot, all of whom feature in Reade’s book. Reade chooses twelve figures who, in one way or another, have been influenced and moved by a reading of Paradise Lost.

Hannah Arendt

As Nicholas McDowell perceptively points out, “What in Me is Dark mixes psychological speculation of this kind with analysis of the poem’s reception, for which documentary evidence is fragmentary and inconsistent. Some of Reade’s speculations are more convincing than others – the chapter on Hannah Arendt and her relationship with Heidegger strains to make the connection with Milton – but the weight of allusion and reference built up over the course of the book is compelling.”[4]

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was a prominent 20th-century political thinker best known for The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem (the “banality of evil”), and The Human Condition. Her distinctions between the public and private, her emphasis on the autonomy of political action, and her analyses of totalitarianism have shaped liberal and conservative debates about politics, rights and mass society.

However, from a classical Marxist viewpoint, Arendt’s ideas must be examined and criticised as products of a particular class milieu and intellectual trajectory, rather than as neutral philosophical truths. Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann focused attention on the bureaucratic and thoughtless character of mass crimes. While agreeing with Arendt’s exposure of bureaucratic complicity, it should be

noted that her moralising explanations detach such crimes from the concrete class politics and state interests that produce them. The tendency to universalise responsibility into moral categories can obscure how ruling classes organise mechanisms of repression to defend property and empire.

The reactionary Jordan Peterson

Reade tends to treat Peterson as an eccentric public intellectual. While Peterson presents himself as an independent intellectual, his role in contemporary politics is class‑based and reactionary. He functions as a mass media conduit for far‑right ideas—individualist ideology, anti‑Marxist polemics and cultural reaction—that buttress the interests of capitalist elites and help demobilise working‑class resistance. Understanding Peterson politically requires analysing the material forces he serves, not treating him as an eccentric public intellectual.

Peterson’s prominence exacerbates two strategic dangers for readers. First, he deepens fragmentation: identity and culture wars obscure objective class interests, making cross‑sector solidarity more difficult. Second, he aids the rise of authoritarian forces that will escalate repression against strikes, refugees, immigrants and left parties.

Peterson treats Milton as a repository of psychological archetypes and moral lessons about responsibility, suffering and the hero’s journey. This emphasises individual moral psychology and universal, trans-historical meanings. Peterson’s psychological universalism obscures the poem’s social roots and repurposes Milton as support for contemporary individualist and conservative politics.

C. L. R. James

Reade calls  James “an enabling thinker”. In an interview with Marina Scholtz he writes “It’s all about movement. There’s something about the dialectical tradition, which is all about not remaining stuck in contraries or conflicts, but always trying to find a way to overcome those conflicts. I felt energised when I finished writing about him, which I didn’t feel when I finished writing about Malcolm X, even though he’s my favourite reader of Paradise Lost, and the reader who I think is the most important in the book.”[5]

Reade is correct when he cites James as having a dialectical understanding of Milton. This was more pronounced in his early classical Marxist days than in later life. C. L. R. James reads Milton politically and artistically, and his use of the Marxist method situates Paradise Lost in the social and historical conflicts of the English Revolution and the rise of capitalism.

For James, literary works are not “timeless”: they reflect and refract class conflict and political projects. James’s method shows how culture becomes terrain for struggle over ideas, identity, and historical memory—an approach relevant to present-day battles over curriculum, historical narrative, and class consciousness.

C. L. R. James reads John Milton not primarily as a solitary religious genius but as a political and historical actor whose epic must be understood in the context of the English Revolution and the crisis of seventeenth‑century bourgeois society. For James, literature is social and dialectical: form and drama express fundamental social forces and political conflicts.

James’s understanding is that Paradise Lost is inseparable from Milton’s republican commitments, his experience in the Commonwealth, and the later Restoration defeat of the English Revolution. Milton’s theology and poetic choices, James argues, reflect attempts to reconcile liberty, authority and social hierarchy after revolutionary failure. Satan and the politics of sympathy: James confronts the Romantic tendency to valorise Satan as the proto‑revolutionary hero. He treats Satan’s eloquence and charisma as a political technique—an ideological appeal that can conceal class content. Rather than uncritically celebrating Satan as a liberator, he insists on situating Satan’s rhetoric within material and historical relations.

In another part of Scholtz’s interview with Reade, she asks him How did you first come across Malcolm X’s relationship to Paradise Lost?

Reade replied, “I found out about Malcolm X’s reading of Paradise Lost in quite a strange way. When I was at Princeton, I was in a Spinoza reading group, where we would meet every week to discuss a tiny chunk of Spinoza’s Ethics. Lots of philosophers and historians of philosophy would turn up and spend two or three hours poring over a single paragraph, which was sometimes a bit too much for me because I couldn’t always go there with them. Once, we were talking about Spinoza when a noise outside the philosophy building turned out to be a Black Lives Matter protest. We ended the session and left, and some participants joined the protest. I remember one of the philosophers telling me that Malcolm X had loved Spinoza. I read his autobiography because I was really curious about this fact. While in prison, he taught himself everything about the world and consumed Western history and philosophy. Before he read Paradise Lost, he read Spinoza. Malcolm X is an incredibly original reader. He wants to turn a lot of his reading upside down because he’s figuring out that the world he’s been educated into is not as it seemed, and that historians have whitened everything. So he wants to reverse that process of whitening, and often that involves coming up with quite surprising interpretations. So he’s really interested in Spinoza, because he thinks that he’s a black Jew. When he comes to Paradise Lost, he comes up with his own very original interpretation of it.”[6]

The juxtaposition of Malcolm X and John Milton’s Paradise Lost opens a rich field for inquiry. Reade’s critical study of Malcom X’s relationship with Milton shows how literary and political texts mediate ideas people live by — and how those ideas can either advance or frustrate political understanding of the need for revolutionary transformations.

Reade examines Malcolm X’s life and political evolution, which was the byproduct of a Black working-class experience in the US and internationally. His conversion in prison, the Nation of Islam period, his break with NOI, and his turn towards the working class internationalism (that ultimately led to his assassination) are essential in understanding his fascination with Milton and other literary figures.

It is easy to understand why Malcolm X saw Milton’s Satan as a complex figure — rhetorically heroic yet politically reactionary when read historically. Malcolm’s early rhetorical militancy drew on the image of a proud, self‑defending people.

Reade’s book shows that studying Paradise Lost is not an ivory-tower exercise. In a limited way, Reade’s approach to Paradise Lost is as a historically situated cultural text. He clearly admires Milton’s craft. He interrogates the social forces his epic both expresses and seeks to resolve. A Marxist would combine literary insight with the dialectical method. John Milton’s Paradise Lost should be viewed as a reflection of revolutionary struggle, interpreting the fall of the angels as a failed uprising against an absolute monarch. Ultimately, while Milton was not a Marxist, his focus on radical change, liberty, and the questioning of authority provides rich ground for a materialist and revolutionary analysis. 

[1] Paradise Lost inspired generations of radicals-https://socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/paradise-lost-inspired-generations-of-radicals/

[2] Milton and the English Revolution by Christopher Hill-Verso

[3] John Milton: poetic genius who was at the heart of revolution-https://socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/john-milton-poetic-genius-who-was-at-the-heart-of-revolution/

[4] Awake, Arise, or Be Forever Fallen What in Me is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost-literaryreview.co.uk/awake-arise-or-be-forever-fallen

[5] The Many Readers of Paradise Lost: Orlando Reade in Conversation thelondonmagazine.org/interview-orlando-reade-in-conversation-by-marina-scholtz/

[6] The Many Readers of Paradise Lost: Orlando Reade in Conversation thelondonmagazine.org/interview-orlando-reade-in-conversation-by-marina-scholtz/

No Questions Asked: How football joined the crypto con by Martin Calladine Finch & Reese‏ Jan.2024

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There are many aspects contained in this book that should disturb any reader. The primary issue is that many leading British and European football clubs are falling over each other to do business with Crypto companies that, in reality, either don’t exist or are little more than scammers and fraudsters.

Like many football fans (I have supported Arsenal all my life), I did not pay too much attention to products being flogged to football clubs, which, overnight, have become virtually worthless and have cost investors and football fans billions.

Football clubs deep involvement in Crypto marks a qualitative turning point in the financialisation of every aspect of the game. Financialisation, therefore, must be understood as both a symptom and a strategy of capitalist decline. When profitable real investment opportunities narrow, capital seeks profit in credit, speculation and the privatisation of social assets. This produces recurring crises, debt deflation/inflation cycles, and a growing parasitic layer of finance that extracts from wages, pensions and public budgets.2

As Calladine points out. “What’s concerning about these deals is that the cryptocurrency market, and the businesses and products based on it, aren’t substantially different or better regulated than they were when it destroyed tens of billions of pounds worth of investments in the crash of 2022. If prices crater or the companies go under – whether due to fraud or simple business failure – fans will have no protection. Despite this, clubs show no signs of doing any greater due diligence than before, let alone facing up to their responsibilities as global endorsers and amplifiers of these schemes.”[1]

The collaboration between professional football and cryptocurrency is not a “neutral technological development”. It is part of the ongoing process of capitalism to extract profit from every corner of social life—turning clubs, players and fans into assets for speculative circuits.

The failed European Super League, stadium renamings, and corporate sponsorship are expressions of the fact that football and sport in general are already subordinated to the logic of profit and global finance.[2] Cryptocurrency is seen as a new revenue stream and leverage point for investors and hedge funds. Is it really any accident that Hedge funds are buying up so many football clubs throughout the world?

With costs such as sky-high wage bills, it is little surprising that clubs turn to crypto, which offers quick inflows of capital, new monetisation channels (fan tokens, NFTs, club-branded coins), and opportunities for private equity and Wall Street to monetise fandom.

Beneath the hype of Crypto lies the fact that, rather than solving clubs’ financial problems, they exacerbate them. Crypto does not suspend the laws of capitalist accumulation. According to the Bank for International Settlements, highly leveraged actors are increasingly dominating the global financial system, and opaque markets can spread shocks across the world economy (BIS warning on financial risks). Crypto markets—volatile, lightly regulated, and deeply tied to speculative sentiment—fit precisely into that description. When football clubs hitch their finances to such markets, they import systemic instability into their operations and the lives of workers and local communities.

Calladine’s book, while helpful in describing the increasing use of Crypto to offset clubs’ financial problems, does not really tackle the root cause: capitalism’s search for new profit avenues amid stagnating real accumulation. Traditional revenue streams—broadcasting, ticketing, merchandising—are capped. Owners and financiers, therefore, turn to novel financial instruments: crypto-backed loans, fan-token sales, and fractionalised ownership. This mirrors the broader turn to non-bank financial institutions and leverage to absorb sovereign and corporate debt described by the BIS.

What are the implications for workers and fans, stadium staff, coaches, players below superstar level, and local suppliers? The risks can be devastating. A sudden crypto crash or a speculative run can produce abrupt revenue shortfalls, leading to wage cuts, layoffs or bankruptcies. History shows that sport’s commercialisation produces precarious, low-paid labour while enriching owners and financiers. Fans are turned into micro-investors and consumers, pressured to buy tokens or NFTs to access basic participation, while clubs cede control to distant capital interests. Speculators can even manipulate events for profit—as in past instances where market incentives helped produce criminal acts or reckless decisions—exposing football to the worst pathologies of financial markets.

This is not merely a question of inadequate regulation. The deeper problem is the private ownership of social institutions and the subordinate role of sporting life to capital accumulation. The Super League fiasco demonstrated how billionaire owners and banks seek to reorganise football as a closed, guaranteed-income franchise system—concentrating wealth at the top at the expense of the mass of clubs and supporters. Crypto initiatives are a continuation of that dynamic: financialising fan loyalty, securitising culture, and insulating profits from democratic accountability.

Workers and fans must develop independent class responses. Immediate demands include public disclosure of clubs’ financial links with crypto and hedge funds; protections for workers’ wages and pensions against speculative shocks; and legal safeguards preventing clubs from mortgaging community assets to opaque financial instruments. Politically, the working class must assert control over social wealth—bringing sports clubs, stadiums and media into democratic, public or cooperatively controlled ownership under workers’ and supporters’ oversight. 

In conclusion, cryptocurrency in football is not a harmless innovation but a step further in the financialisation of everyday life. It concentrates wealth, multiplies instability and will ruin the lives of football fans and workers alike.

[1] The Great Crypto Con: why is football falling back in love with the blockchain?-sportingintelligence832.substack.com/p/the-great-crypto-con-why-is-football

[2] Billionaires’ European Super League proposal shelved amid mass opposition from football fans-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/24/supe-a24.html